Global Middle Ages part 2

 In my previous post I discussed the idea of the Global Middle Ages, a fairly new aspect of the study of medieval history, taken up in part to counter the white nationalists who want to see the Middle Ages as a model for a contained, all-white, all-Christian society, because in fact the Middle Ages wasn't like that.  Today I want to continue that discussion.

As well as interacting with people outside of western Europe, especially through trade, medieval people recognized a large range of diversity at home.  For one thing, they were not all Christian.  Christians and Muslims lived side by side, sometimes amicably, sometimes not, all around the Mediterranean.  There were Jews in most medieval cities, making the loans that ensured commercial development when Christian lenders wouldn't.

And Christianity itself had enormous variation, from differences like Scandinavians sometimes drinking beer instead of wine for the Eucharist, to outright heresy.  Even if there was general agreement on theology and liturgy, churchmen and secular rulers always differed on who ought to be in charge.  The Holy Roman emperors spent much of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at war with the popes.  And there were always doubters.

Skin color was not as big a concern in a primarily Caucasian population as it is in modern Western countries, but there were always what we would call "brown" people in the mix.  Outright Blacks were rare, to the extent that a mating between a White and a Black was imagined to produce someone spotted black and white, like a cow.  A Black person was intriguing.

But there is more to trying to make the Middle Ages global that recognizing that it was not a uniformly white, Christian era.  Recently scholars have also tried looking again at the chronology that western historians take for granted.  First there was antiquity, the story goes, then around 500 the Middle Ages begin, to end around 1500, leading to the "early modern" period, then the French Revolution and American Revolution (we adopted our Constitution in 1789, same year as the French Revolution), and we're into Modern.

You can see where this is going.  Modern is good!  Like us!  The early modern period was preparing for us!  The Middle Ages were that time in the middle, after antiquity (from which we can get Greek democracy, Roman law, and early Christianity), before modernity sets in, a dull middle period "best forgotten."  Pretty clear why medievalists aren't happy with this.

Historians (of whatever place and time) need to avoid teleology, that is looking at the past as only interesting if it leads to what we like in the present.  So one might look at the English Parliament as an example of representative democracy, which is good, and leave out the tidbit that it originally only met if called by the king (kings of course being bad).

Looking at the Middle Ages, or for that matter any historical period, teleologically, as leading to us, ignores all the different modernities of different modern countries.  Global studies helps shake us out of that.  While Columbus and Martin Luther, on either side of the year 1500, were obviously crucial to Europe, with new continents to conquer and the rise of Protestantism, 1500 is a pretty meaningless date for most of Asia and Africa.  For that matter, though South America quickly felt the impact of Columbus, North America really did not for another century.

The planet is too big and has too many different cultures to be able to study the whole thing properly.  But by not taking our historical periods and our dates as obvious and absolute (even "the year 1500" is predicated on being able to date the birth of a Jewish boy who grew up to be considered a trouble maker), we can make fewer assumptions about what was important about our ancestors (both biological and institutional).

History done right helps human understanding.  The Middle Ages (as we're stuck calling it) was full of people both like and very unlike us.  Thus we can practice understanding people by starting with medieval people, before branching out to those with very different histories.

Yes, many medieval institutions led to ours, including representative democracy and the legal profession and banking and universities.  Many of the other things that concerned them have no modern analogues.  We'll understand these ancestors better if we don't start with the assumption that they were the embodiment of what the white nationalists today would like to be.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval culture, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Global Middle Ages

 Recently medievalists have begun talking about what is called "the global Middle Ages," that is extending their study beyond western Europe to what was going on in the rest of the world in the same period of roughly 500 to 1500.  It was also intended to make it clear that Europe's Middle Ages could not be taken as some sort of model for white Christian nationalism:  isolated, uniform in religion and skin color, dismissive of outsiders.

The earliest versions of trying to make medieval history global were somewhat awkward.  "First let's talk about Charlemagne.  Now let's talk about Great Zimbabwe in Africa.  Now let's have a brief interlude on imperial China, followed by the Aztecs."  This clearly didn't advance understanding very far.  Nor did attempts to compare institutions in different places that had essentially no contact with each other (though at least this approach didn't treat different cultures as a series of self-contained, unrelated units).  For example, for a while it was common to try to make comparisons between Japanese "feudalism" and that of medieval Europe, an attempt made problematic from the beginning by creating a rigid and a-historical model of "European feudalism," to which Japanese institutions, defined as second-class, could be compared.

More recently there has begun to be more emphasis on interactions between western Europeans and peoples beyond their borders.  There was always interaction with Byzantium, the Greek Roman Empire, centered in what is now Turkey.  Although Latin Christendom and Greek Orthodoxy have declared each other heretics since the eleventh century, learning and ideas and a great deal of trade went back and forth.

The Muslims who predominated in much of the Mediterranean basin from the seventh century on were a constant presence.  Sometimes, as in the Spanish peninsula and southern Italy (especially Sicily), Christians and Muslims got along at least part of the time.  In other cases, especially the Crusades, there were fierce religious wars, which the Europeans almost always lost.  The Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem of the twelfth century was marked by congenial Muslim-Christian interactions in between the fighting.

Eastern Europe was certainly known to the West.  The kingdom of Hungary, the grand duchy of Lithuania, and the Rus kingdom centered at Kiev all sent their princesses to marry western monarchs.  The West knew at least something about sub-Saharan Africa, as occasional elephants were brought to Europe (a medieval picture of one appears below), and the pope wrote to the Christians of Ethiopia (though it is unknown if they ever wrote back).

 Europeans were certainly aware of Asia.  Their silk came from China along the Silk Roads, and their spices came from Southeast Asia, brought to the Mediterranean by Arabic traders.  The arrival of the Mongols in the thirteenth century, a horde that came from Mongolia in central Asia (as you probably already guessed), certainly got everyone's attention.  Marco Polo is famous for his own trip to China, where he lived for many years during the time Mongol rule stretched from Europe to east Asia.  (That's Marco shown below.)

The one area with which Europe really did not have contact was the Americas.  Vikings reached what is now the Canadian Maritimes around the year 1000, but there was no lasting contact or influence, despite what some Scandinavian-Americans may tell you.  Still, that they arrived there at all is an indication that medieval Europe was not sealed off from the rest of the world.

There's lots more to be said about the idea of a global Middle Ages.  I'll continue the discussion next time.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval culture, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.