Armarium Magnum

The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 06:41:00 +0000

Tom Holland, The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West , (Anchor, 2008) 512 pages,
Verdict?: 4/5 An elegant and eloquent overview of a neglected turning point.

When most people think of the Middle Ages they tend to have a Hollywood conception in mind - castles, knights, armour, damsels, monks etc - as well as the usual cliches about it being a "dark age", a time of ignorance and superstition and a period in which the Catholic Church reigned supreme. That latter cliche can range from a syrupy and pious romanticisation of the period as an "Age of Faith" to the more common conception of the Medieval Church as nothing more than an institution of dark oppression which kept "the people" ignorant and so ruled Europe as a vile theocracy that held everyone in an iron grip until the Reformation made everything okay again. Or something. It often comes as a surprise to people when I explain to them that most of the history of the Medieval Church was one of a weak and vulnerable institution struggling for survival and then struggling to free itself from secular domination. The caricatured Medieval Church of Protestant Sunday school lessons, countless Hollywood movies and the popular imagination (even the popular imagination of many modern Catholics) is based on the Church of the very end of the Middle Ages - a Church that ultimately won most of its battles to free itself from secular domination. The Church of the earlier centuries of that struggle was nothing like the one most people think they "know".

Tom Holland began his career as a novelist and it shows from the elegant flowing prose in his popularisations of history. His first non-fiction work was Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic (2003), which took Julius Caesar's crossing the River Rubicon with his army and triggering a war with the Senate as a key turning point in history. Two years later he released Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the Westwhich dealt with another turning point, the Battle of Thermopylae and the first clash between east and west in Europe. In both cases Holland took two reasonably well-known events and characters and used them to explore their wider contexts and cast some light on their significance for us today. In The Forge of Christendom he chooses a much more obscure event as his turning point, but still does an admirable job of expanding on its context, even if he may be less successful at convincing of its modern significance.

Henry IV and his Anti-pope Clement III

Henry IV Goes to Canossa

On January 27 1077 AD Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, King of the Romans and the Germans and Caesar of western Christendom, stood barefoot in the snow under the small castle of Canossa, wearing the hairshirt of a penitent. For three days he had waited outside the gate of the remote fortress, fasting and praying, while inside Pope Gregory VII and his ally Countess Matilda of Tuscany pondered whether to let him in. This confrontation formed the climax of a two year struggle over what became a key question: who has the right to appoint bishops and abbots and other religious office holders, the Church itself or secular rulers? In 1075 Pope Gregory had set down the Dictatus papae, a set of axioms regarding the powers of the Pope and the Church that were the culmination and effective manifesto of the Cluniac reform movement that had been slowing gaining influence for the last five decades or more. The Dictatus stated the key aims of the reform movement that had begun at the influential French Benedictine monastery of Cluny, but it was the fact that it stated that the Pope alone could appoint or depose churchmen and move or depose bishops that sparked the confrontation with the Holy Roman Emperor.

In a period in which bishoprics came with land and feudal duties and provided kings with political support, revenues and troops, the idea that a bishop could be appointed by a Pope alone was political anathema to a ruler like Henry IV. He had spent a decade and a half struggling to raise his power from that of a child regent dominated by the great lords of Germany to the supreme ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, more powerful even than his father. His ability to appoint favoured noblemen to powerful bishoprics and his capacity to sell Church appointments to the highest bidder as a source of revenue were key foundations to that hard-won power. The Church reformers' ideology was not a threat while it remained theoretical or when it was simply aimed at ensuring priests were reasonably literate and pious. But when the low-born but highly intelligent son of a village blacksmith, Hildebrand of Sovana, became Pope Gregory VII, the movement had effectively taken control of the Church and Gregory was ready for an ideological showdown. The Dictatus' condemnations of lay investiture of bishops and "simony" (the selling of benefices) were bad enough, but Gregory also stated "it is permitted for (the Pope) to depose Emperors". Not surprisingly, Henry struck back.

He sent Gregory an open letter declaring it was the Pope who was to be deposed. It opened with the sneering declaration "Henry, king not through usurpation but through the holy ordination of God, to Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk" and ended by thundering "I, Henry, king by the grace of God, with all of my Bishops, say to you, come down, come down, and be damned throughout the ages!" These were fighting words and a direct counter to Gregory's audacious new claims to authority. And they were hardly empty words - unlike Gregory, Henry IV had armies at his disposal and all involved knew that if push came to shove he could and would march on Italy and depose the Pope by military force.

The Coronation of Charlemagne, from a later Medieval illumination

The Weakness of the Early Medieval Popes

In past centuries, that would have been the end of the matter. Any previous Pope arrogant or mad enough to challenge the Holy Roman Emperor in this way would have been forced to quickly back down. This is because the Popes of the first centuries of Christianity were vulnerable and weak. While they had always maintained a claim to some form of ecclesiastical supremacy as successors of Saint Peter, in practice the Papa in Rome had become little more than the petty bishop of a shrunken city of relics and ruins with little influence beyond Rome's crumbling walls and often little more within them.

A few early Popes had successfully extended their influence into the rest of western Europe: notably Gregory the Great in the Seventh Century, who commissioned missionaries as far afield as Britain and the Rhineland to win back to the sphere of the Church territories lost to pagan barbarians. But in the following centuries the Papacy became the plaything of local politics and vulnerable to the ruthless Lombard dukes who came to dominate northern and central Italy and to the squabbling factions in Rome itself. In 799 AD the hapless Pope Leo III fell foul of the nobles of Rome and narrowly escaped having his eyes gouged out and his tongue removed. He was forcibly deposed and sent to live in a monastery, but escaped and fled to the Frankish kingdom to the north, where he appealed to the powerful king of the Franks called Charles, later known as Charlemagne. The Frankish king descended on Italy with an army and the hapless Pope in tow, exiled his opponents and restored Leo to the Papacy. In return, and apparently to Charlemagne's surprise and chagrin, on Christmas Day 800 AD the Pope crowned the Frankish king as Emperor of a new and restored Roman Empire in the west.

It is generally thought that this move was entirely Leo's idea, though Charlemagne was hardly going to object. This action established the Holy Roman Empire, with Charlemagne's various descendants taking the Imperial title right down to its final dissolution by Francis II in 1806. Essentially what Leo wanted was to secure his relationship with the Frankish kings as protectors of a vulnerable and politically weak Papacy. And the Popes did get the protection of the succession of Emperors, though the relationship entangled the Papacy and the Emperorship in a number of ways that were to have a profound effect on the history of Europe. There was a long precedent for this kind of Imperial protection/dominance of the Church: ever since the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity back in 312 AD the various Roman emperors had been patrons and protectors of the Church. And in the Byzantine Empire that tradition continued, with the Emperor often more religiously influential than any bishop or patriarch. But since 476 AD there had been no Roman Emperor in western Europe and Leo III was not really reviving an old political and religious dynamic but creating a new one.

Initially Charlemagne and his successors tried to make it clear that they were the senior partners in this odd new relationship with the Church and Papacy. Charlemagne's son Louis succeeded him to the title of Emperor, though Charlemagne pointedly crowned his son as co-Emperor and successor himself and did so in his Frankish Imperial capital without inviting or consulting the Pope. But Frankish laws of succession tended to divide up territory amongst multiple sons and so Louis' Empire was divided in three among Charlegmagne's grandsons, setting the scene for a series of internecine wars in which rivals to the Imperial title increasingly turned to a coronation by the Pope of the day for added legitimacy. So just as the Popes came to benefit from the protection and prestige of the new line of Emperors, so the Imperial successors and pretenders benefited from the blessing of the Popes.

A bare half-century on from the momentous Christmas Day of 800, and Leo's shade could have been well pleased. Only a Pope, it was now accepted, had the power to bestow an imperial crown. (Holland, p. 62)

But it was an uneasy relationship.


"The Beast and the Serpent" - From Beatus of Liebana's commentary

The Riders of the Apocalypse

Holland goes on to detail the centuries of turmoil and invasion that followed. The divided kingdoms of Charlemagne's descendants fractured and the Imperial title continued, though in diminished status, in the Ninth Century. But in 936 it passed to the Saxon king Otto I; ironically a descendant of the pagan tribes Charlemagne had converted by the sword in a series of bloody wars over a century earlier. The Europe of Otto and his dynasty, however, was one under constant attack from almost all sides. To the east and south Islam was overwhelming Africa, expanding in Spain and conquering the islands of the Mediterranean. From the east came a renewed threat from nomadic raiders, with the pagan Hungarians pushing into western Europe. And from the north the Vikings who had raided far up the rivers of Frankia in the previous century returned to devastate the North Sea coasts. Holland notes that these disasters and threats fed a religious fear of the coming of the End Times and the approach of the final apocalypse which he claims became more pronounced as the millennium - the year 1000 AD - approached.

Anyone who remembers the nonsense that attended the approach of the year 2000 will know some of the irrational fears that round numbered dates seem to hold for a certain type of people. And there is no doubt that Revelation 20:1-3 has some cryptic things to say about Satan being bound for "one thousand years" and then "set free for a short time" to wreak havoc in the last days before the return of Christ. But Holland's attempts to link many of the often quite disparate themes in his long book to a widespread fear of the year 1000 AD (or 1033 AD, a millennium after the Crucifixion) are not really very successful. The real focus in the book is on the pivotal events of 1077 and attempts to link them to millennial fervour feel rather strained. There is no doubt there were fears of the coming apocalypse in this time, but as Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages details, this was a mainstay of Medieval religious thought long before and long after 1000 AD and hardly unique or even particularly acute in the lead up to the end of the Tenth Century.

The later Tenth Century did turn out to be a turning point in many respects despite this. In 955 Otto I gained massive prestige by winning an against-all-odds victory against a massive invading Hungarian army at Lechfeld, ending the threat from the east and beginning a long process of the expansion of Christendom eastwards. In Spain the formerly powerful Caliphate of Córdoba went into a spiral of decline over several decades that would see its final collapse in 1031. Back in 911 the Viking chieftain Hrólfr ("Rollo" to the Franks) swore allegiance to King Charles III, founding the Duchy of Normandy and bring the Viking depredations of mainland western Europe to an end. And with all these turning points against western Europe's external threats came an increasing prosperity and an increasing expansion by western Christendom. Change was beginning to sweep through Europe.

The Consecration of the Abbey of Cluny

The "White Mantle of Churches"

Holland may overstate the significance of the year 1000, but it is clear that even the denizens of the early Eleventh Century could feel something was happening. Around 1027 the monk and chronicler Rodulfus Glaber wrote of a sense that things were transforming and changing for the better. "It was as if the whole world were shaking itself free," he wrote, "shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches." Certainly the new century saw new manifestations of piety among nobles and the common people. As the nobility took advantage of any periods of lesser central royal power, castle-building and a consolidation of feudal structures increased across Europe. These stronger fiefdoms also led to increased low-level warfare between the great lords, as they jockeyed for land and supremacy. But at the same time there was an increase in lay piety as peasants, increasingly stripped of former rights by the new power structures, turned to the Church for help.

One source of Church authority that was particularly revered was the new wave of austere monasticism that emanated from the abbey in which Glaber had been writing - great Benedictine abbey of Cluny. It had been founded in 910 by William I, Duke of Aquitaine, who granted a valley which had held his favourite hunting lodge as the basis for the new abbey to atone for a murder. Remarkably, the Duke stated that he did not want to appoint the abbey's abbots and made the institution wholly independent. Cluny established itself as entirely financially independent of the feudal system as well and went on to establish a network of daughter houses founded on the same principles of self-sufficiency, independence, piety, scholarship and, most of all, reform.

The great reform movement that swept through the Church in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries had Cluny and its network at its heart. The reformers railed against the idea of a Church subservient to secular power and intertwined with the lay structures of feudal fiefdoms. They championed the protection of the weak and the support of the poor and upheld the rights of peasants in the face of growing aristocratic power and increased internecine warfare. And, most of all, they condemned the investiture of abbots and bishops by secular lords and "simony": the sale of Church offices for profit by the nobility and kings up to and including the Holy Roman Emperor.

This was a direct threat to the power of kings, but the reformers had the support of the common people and for the first time in centuries the commoners began to flex their political muscle. The reformers strove to curtail the petty wars and depredations of robber barons and oppressive castellans, entering war-torn regions and declaring "the Truce of God". Nobles who attended their prayer rallies with a view to scorning the whole idea found themselves confronted by thousands of pious commoners and were shamed into taking oaths of peace on holy relics - oaths they later found hard to break.

But as the Cluniac reform movement gained influence and its zealots climbed higher in the hierarchy of the Church, it was only a matter of time before there was a ideological showdown. And that came when Henry IV tried to depose Gregory VII.

"Not Pope but False Monk"

When Henry IV sought to depose Gregory VII, as the "false monk", in 1076 he expected little real resistance. For the last several hundred years nobles had been used to appointing and deposing bishops and prelates at will and Emperors had deposed and replaced Popes many times before: Henry's own father had deposed no fewer than three Popes. But Gregory and his advisers were products of the Cluniac system and fired with the zeal of reform. The Pope countered Henry's declaration of his deposition by the audacious step of excommunicating the Emperor. In previous centuries his largely symbolic step may have had little impact, but in the reforming age of the Eleventh Century it swung the mood of the common people against Henry. Scenting blood, the ever fractious German nobles withdrew their support for the Emperor. A rebellion rekindled in Saxony and the princes of Germany met to elect a new Emperor and depose Henry (failing only because they could not agree on a successor).

Henry saw the tide was turning against him and he began to march on Italy to see the Pope. Thinking Henry was coming to depose Gregory by force, Countess Matilda of Tuscany gave him sanctuary in the castle of Canossa, but when the Emperor arrived it was in the hairshirt of a penitent, begging for the Pope to forgive him and lift his excommunication. This left Gregory with a difficult choice:

The king's manoeuvre had comprehensively outflanked him. As a result, he found himself confronted by an agonising dilemma. Absolve Henry, Gregory knew, and all the confidence that the German princes had placed in him would inevitably be betrayed. Refuse to show the humbled king mercy, however, and he would be betraying the duty that he owed to the Almighty himself. (Holland, p. 432)

In the end the devout religious man won out over the politician in Gregory and he relented, lifting his excommunication. The short-term political result was a disaster for the Pope. Henry turned on his rebel lords and defeated and killed the usurping king they had raised, then he returned to Italy in full military force in 1081 with the intention of finally deposing Gregory and installing his own Anti-pope. Ironically, Gregory was forced to turn to another secular power, the militant Norman lords of southern Italy, to help him. They rode north and rescued him, sacking and burning Rome itself in the process. The people turned against Gregory as a result of the Norman depredations and he was finally deposed and taken south by the booty-laden Normans, where he died in despair in Salerno in 1084. His bitter last words were said to have been "I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile."

The First European Revolution

This complex tale of the intrigues of, to most, long-forgotten Popes and Emperors in the "dark ages" may seem utterly irrelevant to many. But Holland does a good job of pointing to its significance and explaining why Gregory's struggle with Henry reshaped Europe and actually made it exceptional, laying the foundations for some aspects of later European dominance. Because while Gregory died thinking he had failed, his reforms were ultimately triumphant. The total dominance of secular powers over the Church was broken and never re-established. Later Popes waged ever more assertive battles for independence from secular politics and reached a pinnacle of influence in the Thirteenth Century under Innocent III before suffering a collapse of prestige in the Reformation. But never again was the Church and religion fully under the domination of any state:

Gregory himself did not live to witness his ultimate victory - the cause for which he fought was destined to establish itself as perhaps the defining characteristic of western civilisation. That the world can be divided into church and state, and that these twin realms should be distinct from each other: here are the presumptions that the eleventh century made 'fundamental to European society and culture, for the first time and permanently.' (Holland, p. 13)

He quotes R.I. Moore, whose book The First European Revolution: c. 970-1215 traces this remarkable development and who observes "it is not easy for Europe's children to remember that it might have been otherwise" (Moore, p. 12) and notes one of the reasons for some disquiet in the west at any influx of Muslim immigrants, however small or peaceful, is that "to a pious Muslim the notion that the political and religious spheres can be separated is a shocking one - as it was to many of Gregory's opponents." (p. 14)

Holland's book is a sprawling epic and could be one that the non-Medievalist would find hard to keep straight in their head. He begins with Henry and Gregory at Canossa but then takes a long sweep through several centuries of background and context before coming back to that climactic confrontation and its implications about 400 dense pages later. Those who can see what he is doing should be able to follow along, but more casual readers may find themselves wondering about the relevance of lengthy digressions into the trading networks of the Rus Vikings on the Volga or the intricate diplomacy of the Byzantine court. As noted above, the attempt to use the idea of the coming apocalypse as a unifying theme is under-baked in places, though on the whole he does manage to hold the whole thing together. What makes this book a joy to read is not simply the breadth of scholarship he manages to digest and lay out for the lay reader, but the fact that this novelist does it with a fiction-writer's elegance of phrase. Otto II does not simply ride south to Italy, his "great force of iron-sheathed loricati ... clattered southwards". And they do not simply find a land devastated by Saracen sea-raiders but rather "there, as the Saxons watered their horses, they found no vineyards, or villages, or fields, but only desolation - and over it all a stillness like that of a rifled grave. Terror, in southern Italy, came surest by the sea." (p. 103)

The best popular histories do not simply digest scholarship about the past for the general reader, they make it come vividly to life. Through the eloquence and elegance of his prose, Holland does that superbly.

Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that Show Jesus Never Existed at All by David Fitzgerald

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Fri, 27 May 2011 23:07:00 +0000

David Fitzgerald, Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All, (Lulu.com, 2010) 246 pages,
Verdict?: 0/5 A tragic waste of probably rather nice trees.

Barely a day goes by without being reminded that the internet is revolutionising publishing. Record companies are struggling to compete with artists who can release music direct to the public, e-publishing teens are making millions selling young adult novels via Kindle and we keep hearing predictions of the death of print newspapers. Part of this revolution is the fact that e-publishing and online "print-on-demand" self-publishing services like Lulu.com and Blurb mean that anyone can be a published author. The upside of this is that worthy writers of novels, short stories or poetry that have a market but are unlikely to get a traditional publisher can find their audience. Or someone writing a technical book on an obscure subject, such as how to dress and cook a swan or construct a Tudor ruffed collar, can do the same. The downside is that now all the cranks, lunatics, crackpot theorists or ranting loons who used to clutter the net with websites preaching their fringe theses have self-published books all over Amazon.com as well. I suppose you take the good with the bad.

One fringe idea that has helped keep the print-on-demand publishers ticking along is the Jesus Myth hypothesis - the idea that not only was Jesus not what Christianity claims, but that there was no historical Jesus at all and that the stories about him are purely mythical in origin. This is a thesis that has been hovering off on the fringe of New Testament scholarship for quite some time - Charles François Dupuis and Constantin-François Chassebœuf both proposed that Jesus never existed back in the Eighteenth Century, though it was first presented in any detail by the German historian Bruno Bauer in 1841.

Later Nineteenth Century ideas about the origin and development of religion, inspired and typified by Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, tried to find a single, overarching framework or template for all religions and the vogue for this idea lent itself to the theory that Christianity arose purely out of earlier religious traditions, with Jesus as a mythic "dying and rising god" figure representing rebirth, fertility and the cycle of the seasons. This formed the basis of some Jesus myth theories by several early Twentieth Century Jesus Mythers; most of whom were enthusiastic amateurs like American mathematician William Benjamin Smith (Ecce Deus: The Pre-Christian Jesus, 1894), Scottish MP J.M. Robertson ( A Short History of Christianity, 1902) and philosopher Arthur Drewes (The Christ Myth, 1909), along with a variety of Theosophists, esotericists and proto-New Age writers. However mainstream scholarship moved away from the assumptions and methodology of Frazer's anthropology of religion and the idea of Jesus as purely mythical never gained substantial traction. With the exception of John Allegro's eccentric hippy version of the thesis (The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, 1968), the idea reached an low ebb even amongst amateur theorists by the 1970s.

More recently, however, it has experienced something of a revival, partly on the back of the internet and cheaper and easier small publishing and online distribution. The new Jesus Mythers tend to fall into three broad categories. The first consists of theorists who do not quite claim there was no historical Jesus, but rather that he was not who most scholars believe he was - an early First Century preacher prophet. These are classic pseudo historical conspiracy theories that claim Jesus was "really" some other historical figure, such as Julius Caesar (Francesco Carrota, Was Jesus Caesar?, 2005) or the Emperor Titus (Joseph Atwill, Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus, 2005).

The second and far more popular category consists of New Age works reviving (and largely recycling) early Twentieth Century esoteric and Theosophist versions of the thesis, with heavy emphasis on pagan parallels with Christianity as "proof" Jesus simply evolved out of earlier pagan gods. British mystical writers Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy brought out a version of this thesis in 1999 with the publication of The Jesus Mysteries: Was the 'Original Jesus' a Pagan God? It was marketed squarely at the kind of reader who devoured Holy Blood Holy Grail and, not surprisingly, its sequel is mentioned in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. A more convoluted version of the same ideas has been presented in several books by a New Age writer who calls herself "Acharya S", but whose real name is Dorothy Murdock. Beginning with The Christ Conspiracy in 1999, Murdock has proven adept at harnessing the internet to propagate her ideas. She uses YouTube videos and an extensive website to sell her self-published books and has developed a cult-like following of almost fanatical disciples. Her "archaeoastronomical" thesis of Jesus as a solar deity got a boost from the notorious underground conspiracy "documentary" Zeitgeist, which somehow managed to link her thesis to conspiracies about 9/11, international banking and the media.

The final category of Myther theories are ones that tend to have been propagated by anti-theistic atheists or seized on by them as a way to attack traditional Christianity. Most popular amongst them is that of Canadian writer Earl Doherty, whose self-published book The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? (1999) developed out of his website of the same name. Unlike Freke, Gandy and Murdock, Doherty at least tries to use proper academic processes and approaches and his work is much more popular amongst atheists, freethinkers and humanists as a result. Doherty does not place the same emphasis on pagan parallels as the New Age proponents of the thesis, but argues for an Jewish proto-Christianity (several of them, in fact) that considered Jesus to be a purely mythic being who was born, lived and died in the sub-lunar circle of the heavens, not on earth. Several other amateurs and hobbyists, like Richard Carrier, R.G. Price, propose or support similar ideas, with several of them pushing this thesis at secptics' conventions, in atheist gatherings and on atheistic and humanist online fora.

Fitzgerald's False Dichotomy

Which brings us to David Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is an atheist activist who is on the board of the San Francisco Atheists and the founder of an atheist film festival. He has spent some time giving public lectures that are essentially summaries of his book, mainly to secularist organisations and conventions. His book has certainly received high praise from prominent atheists and Mythers. Robert M. Price, who is one of the two or three actual professional scholars who give the Myther thesis any credence, wrote a blurb which says it "summarizes a great number of key arguments with new power and original spin". American Atheist Press editor and biologist Frank Zindler says Fitzgerald "reveals himself to be the brightest new star in the firmament of scholars who deny historical reality to 'Jesus of Nazareth'". Atheist activist Richard Carrier declares authoritatively "All ten points (in the book) are succinct and correct". And fellow self-published author and Myther guru Earl Doherty goes so far as to say it is "possibly the best 'capsule summary' of the mythicist case I've ever encountered." But it seems such high praise from Myther luminaries does not count for much with publishers - like most Myther books, Nailed is self-published.

So is it as powerful as its blurbs declare? Well, actually, no. On the whole it is confused, lopsided and, in places, laughably amateurish. If this is the best "mythicism" can produce then it's small wonder the academy remains singularly unimpressed.

As its title suggests, the book is divided into ten "myths" about Jesus, which the author then proceeds to attempt to debunk and show that a historical Jesus never existed. The first - "The idea that Jesus was a myth is ridiculous" - is not really controversial. After all, no-one except a fundamentalist apologist would pretend that the evidence about Jesus is not ambiguous and often difficult to interpret with any certainty, and that includes the evidence for his existence. This, of course, merely means the idea he did not exist is simply valid, not that it's true. But from the start the attentive reader begins to notice something very odd about the way Fitzgerald frames the debate. He consistently depicts the topic as some kind of starkly Manichaean conflict between Christian apologists on one hand and "critics who have disputed Christian claims" on the other and in his first pages he mentions evangelicals, conservative Christians and popularist apologists like F.F. Bruce, R. Douglas Geivett and Josh McDowell in rapid succession. He notes that the vast majority of Biblical historians reject the idea that Jesus never existed, but counters that "the majority of Biblical historians have always been Christian preachers, so what else could be expect them to say?" (p. 16)

This is glib, but it is also too simplistic. Many scholars working in relevant fields may well be Christians (and a tiny few may even be "preachers" as he claims, though not many), but a great many are definitely not. Leading scholars like Bart Ehrman, Maurice Casey, Paula Fredriksen and Gerd Ludemann are all non-Christians. Then there are the Jewish scholars like Mark Nanos, Alan Segal, Jacob Neusner, Hyam Maccoby and Geza Vermes. Even those scholars who describe themselves as Christians often hold ideas about Jesus that few church-goers would recognise, let alone be comfortable with and which are nothing like the positions of people like Geivett and McDowell. Dale C. Allison, E P Sanders and John Dominic Crossan may all regard themselves as Christians, but I doubt Josh McDowell would agree, given their highly non-orthodox ideas about the historical Jesus.

So from the start Fitzgerald sets up an artificial dichotomy, with conservative apologists defending a traditional orthodox Jesus on one hand and brave "critics who (dispute) Christian claims" who don't believe in any Jesus at all on the other. And nothing in between. This is nonsense, because it ignores a vast middle ground of scholars - liberal Christian, Jewish, atheist and agnostic - who definitely "dispute Christian claims" but who also conclude that there was a human, Jewish, historical First Century preacher as the point of origin for the later stories of "Jesus Christ".

A Failed Argument from Silence

The false dichotomy established in the first chapter is continued in the second, entitled "Myth No. 2: Jesus was wildly famous - but there was no reason for contemporary historians to notice him ... " Fitzgerald insists that there are elements in the story of Jesus which should have been noticed by historians of the time and insists that there is no shortage of writers then who should have recorded some mention of them:

There were plenty writers, both Roman and Jewish, who had great interest in and much to say about (Jesus') region and its happenings .... We still have many of their writings today: volumes and volumes from scores of writers detailing humdrum events and lesser exploits of much more mundane figures in Roman Palestine, including several failed Messiahs. (Fitzgerald, p. 22)

Now, potentially, that is a pretty solid argument. If we did indeed have "scores of writers" from Jesus' time with such an interest in Jesus' region and who wrote about "failed Messiahs" then it would certainly be very strange that we have no contemporary mentions of Jesus. Unfortunately, as we will see, this is one of several places where Fitzgerald lets his overblown rhetoric run well ahead of what he can then actually substantiate.

But first, his opening words in the very next sentence are worth noting. It begins "If the Gospels were true ..." Here and throughout the book Fitzgerald gets himself into a constant confused tangle over which Jesus he is arguing against. He keeps saying he is arguing against the idea of any historical Jesus at all, yet at every turn it is the Jesus of a very conservative reading of the gospels that he talks about. He repeatedly thinks that if he can show that something is not consistent with the kind of Jesus argued for by an fundamentalist apologist preacher like Josh McDowell, he has disposed of the historical Jesus altogether. This does not follow at all. Most critical scholars have no time for the McDowell-style Jesus either, so the Jewish preacher they present as the historical Jesus behind the later gospel figure is left totally unscathed by Fitzgerald's naive arguments.

Thus Fitzgerald goes on to detail things in the gospels which he argues should have been noticed by writers of the time: the taxing of the whole Roman Empire, the massacre in Bethlehem by Herod the Great, Jesus' ministry generally, his miracles, his entry into Jerusalem, his trial and his execution. For anyone other than a fundamentalist, this argument has zero force. Critical scholars, including many Christian ones, would simply chuckle at the idea that things like the story of an Empire-wide census or the Massacre of the Innocents are historical, so arguing they did not happen counts for nothing much when it comes to arguing against the existence of a historical Jesus. Fitzgerald even seems to think that the fact the "Star of Bethlehem" and the darkness on Jesus' death are unattested and therefore most likely did not happen (which is true) is somehow a blow against the existence of a historical Jesus (which is not).

And it is hard to see why the other items on his list would be noted, noticed or even known to any far off Roman or Greek historians at all. Given that these historians make no mention of any other Jewish peasant preachers or miracle workers, it is hard to see why Fitzgerald thinks they should have done so with this one. As for things like his entry into Jerusalem, his trial and his crucifixion, it is equally difficult to see why they would be more than a one day wonder even locally. Why Fitzgerald thinks such minor events would be the talk of the whole Empire is a mystery.

In the quote above he claimed there were "scores of writers" with a burning interest in this region and, apparently, in the doings of Jewish Messianic claimants. He even claims these writers detail the "lesser exploits" of these Messiahs, but make no mention of Jesus. But he never tells us who these "scores of writers" with this interest in Jewish Messiahs are, which is very odd. As it happens, we have precisely one writer who mentions any figures who might be seen as "failed Messiahs", and that is the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. But far from talking about "lesser exploits" of these figures, what this single writer says about Jewish preachers, prophets and Messianic claimants in this period makes it quite clear that Jesus was actually pretty small fry as such figures go.

For example, a bandit-rebel who declared himself a Jewish king called Athronges not only gathered enough armed followers to tackle Roman troops but for a while he was able to inflict military defeats on them, until he was defeated circa 4 BC. An unnamed Samaritan prophet led a "great multitude"to the holy mountain of Gerizim, promising them a mystical revelation, around 36 AD. He and his followers were so numerous they had to be attacked by the Romans and dispersed using units of both infantry and cavalry. About ten years later a prophet called Theudas led "a great part of the people" into the desert, promising to miraculously part the River Jordan and had to be dealt with by Roman cavalry in the same way. And another unnamed Jewish prophet, this one from Egypt, led an estimated 30,000 men to Jerusalem, telling them its walls would miraculously fall so he could lead them into the city. Again, Roman troops had to be called out to deal with them, leaving hundreds dead and causing the prophet to run away.

It is very hard to see any of these fairly momentous events as "lesser exploits" compared to what even the gospels claim about Jesus. Even if we take their accounts at face value, a chanting crowd greeting his entrance to Jerusalem, a trial that no-one witnessed and a run-of-the-mill execution are hardly big news compared to mass movements that required the mobilisation of troops and pitched battles. Yet how many other historians so much as mention Athronges, the Samaritan, Theudas or the Egyptian? None. Apart from Josephus, no writer so much as gives them a sentence's worth of attention. So somehow Fitzgerald thinks these minor events in the Jesus story should be mentioned when far bigger, more significant events are not. He wildly misrepresents the evidence ("scores of writers") and his attempted argument from silence clearly fails dismally.

Next Fitzgerald goes into some detail about the writers and historians of the First Century who he claims "should" have mentioned a historical Jesus but did not. He lists eleven who are contemporaries of Jesus. Like many Mythers, he seems to think that the lack of any contemporary reference to Jesus is somehow a particularly telling point, since the few extra-Biblical references to Jesus are in writings dating almost a century after his time. This would come as no surprise to anyone actually familiar with the nature of ancient source material, however. There are few more famous ancient figures than the Carthaginian general Hannibal; even today most people at least know his name. He was one of the greatest and justifiably famous generals of ancient times. Yet, despite his fame then and now, we have precisely zero contemporary references to Hannibal. If we have no contemporary mentions of the man who almost destroyed the Roman Republic at the height of its power, the idea that we should expect any for an obscure peasant preacher in the backblocks of Galilee is patently absurd.

(Edit: In the discussion in the comments on this review here and elsewhere it was brought to my attention that we do have a tiny fragment of one contemporary account of Hannibal. P.Würzb.Inv. 1 is a papyrus fragment that seems to contain a few lines from Book IV of Sosylus' The Deeds of Hannibal. I was not aware of this when I wrote the paragraph above, so thanks to the commenter Evan for bringing it to my attention.

The point still stands however - if we have nothing more than a few lines from any contemporary work about Hannibal to expect to have surviving contemporary mentions of someone as unimportant and obscure as Jesus is still absurd. And there are many other very prominent people for whom we have no contemporary mentions: we have nothing of the sort for the Icenian warrior queen Boudicca or the Germanic warlord Arminius, for example. Arminius destroyed one tenth of the whole Roman army in one battle and led the only successful rebellion against the Empire in its history, yet we have nothing about him from the time or even from his lifetime. Fitzgerald's emphasis on the lack of contemporary references to a peasant who did not much is plainly ridiculous.)

Fitzgerald labours mightily to detail all the writers who he claims "should" have mentioned Jesus. But in every case his argument suffers from the same fatal flaw: given that none of these writers mention any other Jewish preachers, prophets and Messianic claimants, there is absolutely no reason to think they "should" have mentioned Jesus. As noted above, Athronges, the Sarmatian, Theudas and the Egyptian prophet were actually far more prominent and significant locally than Jesus was even according to the most naive, face value fundamentalist's reading of the gospels. Yet not one of them is mentioned by any of Fitzgerald's list of "should" writers either. Nor are any other comparable Jewish figures of the time, such as Hillel, Shammai, Choni HaMa'agel, John the Baptist or Gamaliel.

Yet Fitzgerald again claims that these writers do mention other figures similar to Jesus. "In many cases", he claims, "these same writers have much to say about other much less interesting messiahs - but not Jesus" (p.42) In "many cases"? Which cases? Fitzgerald does not say. And other messiahs are mentioned? Which ones, where and by who? Again, despite this being a key point that should potentially back up and substantiate his creaking argument, he never bothers to tell the reader. The reason is simple - what Fitzgerald is saying here is absolute nonsense. None of his writers mention any such figures for the same reason they do not mention Jesus: because these writers had no interest in any such Jewish preachers and prophets. As a result, despite all his bold claims and loud rhetoric, Fitzgerald's argument collapses in a heap.

Josephus and his Amazing Technicolour Interpolations

Despite Fitzgerald's unsubstantiated claims to the contrary, the only writer of the period who seems to have had any interest at all in people like Jesus was Yosef ben Matityahu or Flavius Josephus. This means that if Josephus did not mention Jesus while mentioning other such figures like Theudas and John the Baptist, people like Fitzgerald would actually be able to make a real argument from silence. The problem is that Josephus does mention Jesus - twice. So any Myther book or article has to spill a lot of ink trying to explain these highly inconvenient mentions away.

Getting rid of the first reference to Jesus, the one in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, Book XVIII.3.4 is made a little easier by the fact that at least some of it is not original to Josephus and was added by Christian scribes later. The textus receptus of the passage has Josephus saying things about Jesus that no Jewish non-Christian would say, such as "He was the Messiah" and "he appeared to them alive on the third day". So, not surprisingly, Fitzgerald takes the usual Myther tack and rejects the whole passage as a later addition and rejects the idea that Josephus mentioned Jesus here at all.

He does acknowledge the alternative idea, that Josephus' mention of Jesus was simply added to, but yet again he attributes this to "wishful apologists". This is a total distortion of the state of academic play on the question of this passage. As several surveys of the academic literature have shown, the majority of scholars now accept that there was an original mention of Jesus in Antiquities XVIII.3.4 and this includes the majority of Jewish and non-Christian scholars, not merely "wishful apologists". This is partly because once the more obvious interpolated phrases are removed, the passage reads precisely like what Josephus would be expected to write and also uses characteristic language found elsewhere in his works. But it is also because of the 1970 discovery of what seems to be a pre-interpolation version of Josephus' passage, uncovered by Jewish scholar Schlomo Pines of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Professor Pines found an Arabic paraphrase of the Tenth Century historian Agapius which quotes Josephus' passage, but not in the form we have it today. This version, which seems to draw on a copy of Josephus' original, uninterpolated text, says that Jesus was believed by his followers to have been the Messiah and to have risen from the dead, which means in the original Josephus was simply reporting early Christian beliefs about Jesus regarding his supposed status and resurrection. This is backed further by a Syriac version cited by Michael the Syrian which also has the passage saying "he was believed to be the Messiah". The evidence now stacks up heavily on the side of the partial authenticity of the passage, meaning there is a reference to Jesus as a historical person in precisely the writer we would expect to mention him. So how does Fitzgerald deal with the Arabic and Syriac evidence? Well, he doesn't. He is either ignorant of it or he conveniently ignores it.

Not content with ignoring inconvenient key counter-evidence, Fitzgerald is also happy to simply make things up. He talks about how the Second Century Christian apologist Origen does not mention the Antiquities XVII.3.4 reference to Jesus (which is true, but not surprising) and then claims "Origen even quotes from Antiquities of the Jews in order to prove the historical existence of John the Baptist, then adds that Josephus didn't believe in Jesus, and criticises him for failing to mention Jesus in that book!" (p. 53) Which might sound like a good argument to anyone who does not bother to check self-published authors' citations. But those who do will turn to Origen's Contra Celsum I.4 and find the following:

Now this writer [Josephus], although not believing in Jesus as the Messiah, in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, whereas he ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these calamities befalling the people, since they put to death Christ, who was a prophet, says nevertheless-being, although against his will, not far from the truth-that these disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just, who was "the brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah",--the Jews having put him to death, although he was a man most distinguished for his justice.

So Origen does not say Josephus "didn't believe in Jesus", just that he did not believe Jesus was the Messiah (which supports the Arabic and Syriac evidence on the pre-interpolation version of Antiquities XVII.3.4) And far from criticising Josephus "for failing to mention Jesus in that book", Origen actually quotes Josephus directly doing exactly that - the phrase "αδελφος Ιησου του λεγομενου Χριστου" (the brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah") is word for word the phrase used by Josephus in his other mention of Jesus, found at Antiquities XX.9.1. And he does not refer to and quote Josephus mentioning Jesus just in Contra Celsum I.4, but he also does so twice more: in Contra Celsum II:13 and in Commentarium in evangelium Matthaei X.17. It is hard to say if this nonsense claim of Fitzgerald's is mere incompetence or simply a lie. I will be charitable and put it down to another of this amateur's bungles.

Jesus, James and History

So Fitzgerald then turns to this second mention of Jesus by Josephus, the one that is actually mentioned and quoted by Origen as noted above, and attempts to make it disappear as well. Except the mention in Antiquities XX.9.1 is much trickier prospect for Myther theorists than the clearly edited mention in Antiquities XVII.3.4. The second mention is made in passing in a passage where Josephus is detailing an event of some significance and one which he, as a young man, would have witnessed himself.

In 62 AD, the 26 year old Josephus was in Jerusalem, having recently returned from an embassy to Rome. He was a young member of the aristocratic priestly elite which ruled Jerusalem and were effectively rulers of Judea, though with close Roman oversight and only with the backing of the Roman procurator in Caesarea. But in this year the procurator Porcius Festus died while in office and his replacement, Lucceius Albinus, was still on his way to Judea from Rome. This left the High Priest, Hanan ben Hanan (usually called Ananus), with a freer reign that usual. Ananus executed some Jews without Roman permission and, when this was brought to the attention of the Romans, Ananus was deposed.

This was a momentous event and one that the young Josephus, as a member of the same elite as the High Priest, would have remembered well. But what is significant is what he says in passing about the executions that that triggered the deposition of the High Priest:

Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so (the High Priest) assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Messiah, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.

This second reference to Jesus is difficult for Mythers to deal with. Dismissing it as another interpolation does not work, since a Christian interpolator in a later century is hardly going to invent something as significant as the deposition of the High Priest just to slip in this passing reference to Jesus which, unlike the interpolated elements in the Antiquities XVII.3.4 passage, makes no Christian claims about Jesus. Then there are the three citations of quotations of this passage by Origen mentioned above. Fitzgerald seems totally oblivious to these, but Origen was writing in the mid-Third Century AD, which shows this mention existed in Josephus then - ie while Christianity was still a small, illegal and persecuted sect and so much too early for any Christian doctoring of this text.

But Fitzgerald falls back on one of the several gambits Mythers use to get their argument off this awkward and pointy hook. He notes that Josephus tells us the successor of the deposed High Priest was one "Jesus, son of Damneus" and then triumphantly concludes that the "Jesus, who was called Messiah" is not a reference to Jesus of Nazareth at all, but actually a reference to this "Jesus, son of Damneus" instead.

While he declares this ingenious solution to his problem to be "the only (explanation) that makes sense" (p. 61), it is actually highly flawed. He claims, following fellow Myther Richard Carrier, that the words "who was called Messiah" were "tacked on" and that the Jesus mentioned as the brother of the executed James was this "Jesus, son of Damneus". But this does not explain why Josephus would identify one son (James) by reference to his brother and the other (Jesus) by reference to their father. Josephus does this nowhere else in his works. It also does not explain why when he does say "Jesus, son of Damneus" was made High Priest, he does not mention that this was the unidentified "Jesus" mentioned earlier and that the executed James was his brother, since that relevant detail would be worth noting.

More importantly, neither Carrier nor Fitzgerald explain why an interpolator would "tack on" this reference to their Jesus. The motive behind the clumsy interpolations in Antiquities XVII.3.4 is clear: the idea that Jesus was the Messiah and that he rose from the dead was disputed by non-Christians, especially by Jews, so to have the Jewish historian Josephus apparently attest to these Christian claims turned this passage that simply mentions Jesus into a powerful rhetorical tool in defence of these Christian claims. But simply adding "who was called Messiah" to this other text supports no Christian claim at all. If anyone prior to the Nineteenth Century was arguing Jesus did not exist, then it would make sense that such an interpolation might be needed, but that is a purely modern phenomenon. So Fitzgerald's contrived argument is not only clumsy, it is also supposing something for which there was no motive at all. Then, yet again, there is the fact that Origen quotes this passage three separate times with the "who was called Messiah" element in it. This was in the mid-Third Century and long before Christians were in any position to be "tacking on" anything to copies of Josephus.

"Jesus" or Yeshua was one of the most common names for Jewish men of the time. Josephus was very careful to differentiate between different individuals with the same common first names, especially where he mentions two in the same passage. So it is far more likely that he calls one Jesus "who was called Messiah" and the other "son of Damneus" for precisely this reason. The clumsy idea that Fitzgerald proposes is highly awkward in all respects; except, of course, as an ad hoc way of making a clear reference to Jesus go away and leave his thesis intact.

Irrelevance (with howlers)

The next four chapters in Fitzgerald's book are more examples of the author arguing against a fundamentalist version of Jesus rather than the historical Jewish preacher of critical non-Christian and liberal scholars. In them he marshals some fairly standard arguments that would be news to absolutely no-one except the most clueless of Biblical literalists or naive traditional Christians. He presents evidence that the gospels were not written by eye-witnesses, that they differ in their depictions of Jesus and that there are some historical and archaeological problems with taking them at face value. Yet again, Fitzgerald cannot seem to make up his mind if he is arguing against any historical Jesus at all or merely a traditionalist/fundamentalist version of him based on a face value reading of the Bible. These chapters are run of the mill stuff arguing against things that even many Christians do not believe and they do little or nothing to advance his argument about the existence of a historical Jesus. The gospels can indeed have been written by non-eye witnesses, can present wildly varying pictures of Jesus and can be riddled with historical and archaeological errors and a historical Jewish preacher could still have been the origin of the later stories. Much of this part of the book feels like mere padding.

Though there are some howlers in it that, yet again, shows that Fitzgerald is an amateur who really needed an informed editor. At one point he writes:

Matthew has Jesus making a pun where he tells Peter "upon this rock I will build my church" (Matt. 16:18). Though if this had happened in reality, Peter would have scratched his head and asked, "Say Jesus - what's a church?" since churches hadn't been invented yet, and wouldn't be developed until many decades later. (p. 70)

The word translated as "church" in most English editions is ἐκκλησίαν and it simply means "assembly, gathering, all of a given group", so it would be very odd for Peter to have "scratched his head" at what would have been a perfectly sensible and clear statement. Personally, I do not happen to believe Jesus said this at all and it seems this was something put in his mouth later by the writer of Matthew. But the naivete of Fitzgerald's English-based argument is indicative of his weak grasp of the material.

His comments elsewhere in these largely irrelevant chapters are similarly naive. He pauses in his brief chapter on archaeology and, in a weak attempt to make this chapter vaguely relevant to his main argument, writes:

At the risk of being redundant, we should remember that there has never been a trace of physical archaeological evidence for Jesus, despite centuries of infamous hoaxes such as the Shroud of Turin (p. 108)

Again, that the faithful have clung to pious hoaxes and that the gullible still fall for fake artefacts is not remotely relevant to Fitzgerald's thesis. And "there has never been a trace of physical archaeological evidence" for most people who have existed in human history, particularly if they were poor and lived in a backwater. For Fitzgerald to think that the lack of any such evidence for Jesus tells us something about whether he existed or not makes him about as clueless as the Shroud believers.

The Jesus of Paul

The epistles of Paul pose another problem for Mythers like Fitzgerald. Given that they are the earliest Christian documents we have, generally thought to have been written in the 50s AD, they are uncomfortably close to Jesus' lifetime for the Mythers and remarkably close as ancient source material goes. So the Mythers take solace in the fact that Paul does not actually say much about Jesus' life and preaching. They exaggerate this completely, claiming that Paul has nothing to say about any earthly Jesus:

Paul never talks about Jesus' death as though it actually happened to a real man from Galilee who lived on earth a few years before. Nor does hie give any details about the events of Jesus' life: not the places he travelled, not the miracles he performed, not the parables he told, not even the teachings or instructions he gave .... Paul never says anything about Jesus being an earthly teacher at all. (pp. 128-29)

This is, in fact, substantially nonsense. While Paul's main focus in his letters is answering questions on issues about his preaching of Jesus as a risen Messiah, he actually does talk about Jesus' earthly life and career at many points. He says he was born as a human, of a human mother and born a Jew (Galatians4:4). He repeats that he had a "human nature" and that he was a human descendant of King David (Romans1:3). Contrary to Fitzgerald's claim, he refers to teachings Jesus made during his earthly ministry on divorce (1Cor. 7:10), on preachers (1Cor. 9:14) and on the coming apocalypse (1Thess. 4:15). He mentions how he was executed by earthly rulers (1Cor. 2:8) and that he died and was buried (1Cor 15:3-4). And he says he had a earthly, physical brother called James who Paul himself had met (Galatians1:19).

Naturally, the Myther theorists that Fitzgerald is following with this idea that Paul believed in a purely heavenly, mystical Jesus have contrived ways to argue away these clear references to an earthly Jesus, but they require contortions, strained readings of the texts, suppositions and, inevitably, assumed interpolations for them to work. Fitzgerald makes a great deal out of the fact that a lot of the gospels' details are not found in Paul. This is partly because of Paul's theological focus on the risen Jesus, partly because of the incidental nature of the letters he was writing and the concerns they were addressing and partly because some of those gospel elements (eg the infancy narratives) are almost certainly are not historical and probably had yet to develop. But to pretend that Paul did not believe in an earthly Jesus at all requires some contorted hoop jumping of a most dubious and unconvincing nature.

The reference to Paul's meeting with "James, the brother of the Lord" is one that gives the proponents of this idea that Paul only believed in a heavenly, mystical Jesus the most grief. In Galatians 1, Paul is clearly trying to fend off the charge that he is somehow subordinate to those who were followers of Jesus before Paul's conversion. In his attempt to counter claims to this effect, he assures the assembly in Galatia that he did not get his "gospel" from the community in Jerusalem. Though he cannot deny that he did go to Jerusalem after his conversion and did meet Peter, so he quickly adds "I saw none of the other apostles - only James, the brother of the Lord."

There is a consistent tradition that Jesus had a brother called James and that this James became a leader in the Jesus Sect community in Jerusalem. As we have seen, Josephus mentions the execution of this same James, "brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah". So we have a confluence of evidence, both Christian and non-Christian, that Jesus had a brother called James who was a leader in Jerusalem and here we have Paul mentioning, in passing, meeting this very same James. This poses a thorny problem for the Mythers.

There are a variety of ingenious ways used by them to extract themselves from this awkward pickle, usually by claiming that "brother of the Lord" was not meant literally and that there was an (otherwise totally unattested) sub-group of Christian believers who were called "the brothers of the Lord". Fitzgerald does not resort to this hopelessly ad hoc piece of supposition, but instead falls back on the old Myther standby: supposing a textual interpolation:

Though Christians seize on the one and only verse (Gal. 1:19) that has Paul refer to James in passing as "the Brother of the Lord" it seems more likely that this was a marginal note inserted by a later scribe, whether by accident or deliberately. (p. 145)

He supports this bold claim by noting that "just a few verses later (Paul) disdainfully dismiss(es) James as though he was a nobody (Gal. 2:6)". What Paul does in Galatians 2:6 is talk about some people who he describes as "those who were held in high esteem" (ie the Jerusalem assembly generally) and says "they added nothing to my message". But he goes on to note "On the contrary, they recognized that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised,just as Peter had been to the circumcised." He then talks about how this mission to the gentiles was given to him by "James, Cephas (Peter) and John, those esteemed as pillars" and holds this up as a ringing endorsement of his authority. How Fitzgerald reads that as disdainfully dismissing James "as though he was a nobody" is a mystery. And how he could use this to posit an interpolation simply as a way of getting rid of an inconvenient piece of evidence and prop up his thesis even more so.

It is this kind of weak, supposition-laden argument, made up of ad hoc contrivances based on little more than wishful thinking that leaves the Myther position wide open to a savage application of Occam's Razor. An academic editor would simply laugh at any manuscript that contained an argument this weak on such a key point. But one of the joys of self-publishing is that you don't have to convince or impress anyone but yourself. Fitzgerald seems very impressed with Fitzgerald's arguments, not surprisingly.

In Conclusion

I have gone to the effort to write a long review of this book not because it is a worthy work - it most certainly is not. It is not even the best that the Mythers can do: there are other books which may be flawed but are nowhere near as weak, clumsy, confused or amateurish as this one (as much as I disagree with him, at least Earl Doherty's thesis is coherent and well-researched). I have chosen to go into some detail with this one because it strikes me as encapsulating most of what is hopelessly wrong about the Myther thesis and its manifestations online and in self-published books like this one. Like most pseudo history, these arguments for the non-existence of Jesus are flawed by the fact their writers begin with their conclusion. That is bad enough to start with, and there is no shortage of amateur hobbyist theorists who are too enamoured of their "amazing idea" to subject it to sufficient comprehensive self-criticism. But this is exacerbated in the Mythers' case by an ideologically-driven bias.

A major part of the problem with most manifestations of the Myther thesis is that its proponents desperately want it to be true because they want to undermine Christianity. And any historical analysis done with one eye on an emotionally-charged ideological agenda is usually heading for trouble from the start. Over and over again, Fitzgerald does what most of these Mythers do - plumps for an interpretation, explanation or excuse about the evidence simply because it preserves his thesis. Their biases against Christianity blind Mythers to the fact that they are not arriving at conclusions because they are the best or most parsimonious explanation of the evidence, but merely because it fits their agenda.

The overwhelming majority of scholars, Christian, non-Christian, atheist, agnostic or Jewish, accept there was a Jewish preacher as the point of origin for the Jesus story simply because that makes the most sense of all the evidence. The contorted and contrived lengths that Fitzgerald and his ilk have to resort to shows exactly how hard it is to sustain the idea that no such historical preacher existed. Personally, as an atheist amateur historian myself, I would have no problem at all embracing the idea that no historical Jesus existed if someone could come up with an argument for this that did not depend at every turn on strained readings, ad hoc explanations, imagined textual interpolations and fanciful suppositions. While the Myther thesis is being sustained by junk pulp pseudo scholarship like Fitzgerald's worthless little book, it will remain a curiosity on the fringes of scholarship good for little more than amusement. This book is crap.

(Note: Any Mythers who think I need to be educated on their thesis in the comments section, don't bother. I've been debating you guys online for nearly ten years now and I'm more than familiar with all the counter arguments and alternative readings and other contrivances you people use and so don't need the comments below to be cluttered up by them. Likewise, sneering comments or commentary by Mythers who I've bugged in online debates over the years will also be deleted. If you don't like that, then go whine on your own blogs. Have a lovely day.)

Stilicho: The Vandal Who Saved Rome by Ian Hughes

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:33:00 +0000

Ian Hughes, Stilicho: The Vandal Who Saved Rome, (Pen and Sword, 2010) 282 pages, Verdict?: 4/5 A detailed analysis of a neglected figure in a pivotal moment in history.

As a university student who undertook the rather odd enterprise of teaching himself extinct ancient Germanic languages, I was always on the lookout in second hand bookshops for books on Old English or, even better, Old Norse or Gothic. Most of the ones I found had been superannuated to gather dust in these shops by the widows of Classics scholars of the earlier decades of the Twentieth Century, which was the last time my alma mater had bothered teaching something as non-vocational as philology. On November 30 1992, in the period between handing in my Master's thesis and working out what the hell to do next, I found a musty copy of Rev. Joseph Bosworth's A Compendious Anglo-Saxon and English Dictionary, published by Gibbings and Company of 18 Bury Street, London, in 1901. Written back in 1838, it's worth keeping just for the Preface, in which the good reverend got rather excited:

Instead of continuing to associate with the Gothic tribes nothing but ignorance cruelty and barbarity, let us remember forever, - that we are indebted to them for our strong physical powers, our nervous language and our unrivalled freedom under our glorious constitution .... Disgusted by the effeminacy and vices of the Romans, they subdued the Empire and became its moral reformers. .... Jordanes the Goth calls the north of Europe "the Forge of Mankind" - I should rather call it the forge of those instruments that broke the fetters manufactured in the south. It was there those valiant nations were bred who left their native climes to destroy tyrants and liberate slaves and to teach men that, nature having made them equal, no reason could be assigned for their becoming dependent, but their mutal happiness. (Bosworth, p. iii)

The certainly don't write prefaces to dictionaries like that any more. By the time Rev. Joseph had gone on for another couple of pages about the swelling breast of the proud Englishman as he contemplates his good old Germanic "freedom" and how superior this was to the tame and mincing "Romanised" word "liberty" he was probably ready for Mrs. Bosworth to serve him a nice cup of tea and suggest a quiet lie down.

But Dr Bosworth was writing in a period where quite a few descendants of those "Gothic tribes" were shaking off centuries of idolisation of all things Roman and starting to romanticise the Germanic tribes much as the scholars of the Enlightenment idealised the Romans. Not long afterwards banker and amateur historian Thomas Hodgkin decided to write a history of the Germanic invaders of Rome. Antiquarian hobbyists didn't do things by halves in those days and between 1880 and 1899 eight whopping volumes of his magisterial Italy and her Invaders appeared, representing decades of detailed research and translation of source material and still worth reading despite some quaint asides a little like Rev. Bosworth's one above. In this and other works of the time Stilicho's part in the defence of the Empire is given as much detail as most other prominent generals of the later Empire but they all tend to agree on one thing: he was from one of those "Gothic tribes" himself, because he was a Vandal. Much was often made of his "martial skill" and his "determined vigour", all of which was thought to be due to his "northern blood" unsullied by the "effeminacy and vices of the Romans". Thankfully, once the Nazis took this kind of thing to its most vile extreme, no-one writes like that any more.

Ian Hughes certainly doesn't in his book on Flavius Stilicho, which is, as far as I can tell, the first book-length study of the man's life. He notes that we know very little of Stilicho's background and family other than that his father was a Vandal who had entered Roman military service and his mother was Roman. Hughes notes that it's his Vandalic father who has got the most attention from historians, with speculation about what having a Germanic "barbarian" for a father might tell us about his later character and actions. But he argues that it's Stilicho's mother who was probably more significant for how his career at least began:

Many nobles of barbarian origin were given high rank in the Roman army. However, there is no evidence either they or their descendants were appointed to powerful posts at a young age. This suggests that Stilicho's mother was of a sufficient status to help promote his career. (Hughes, p. 14)

Our first mention of the young Stilicho has him, in his early twenties, being dispatched on an embassy to the Persian Empire, which would certainly suggest he had family connections that made him already high up in the Imperial court. So as romantic as the image of him as a shaggy-haired son of a wolfskin-wearing Wodan worshipper might have been for people like Bosworth and Hodgkin, his father was almost certainly a Vandalic noble who had risen to high rank in the army and married well into an aristocratic family. Which means the young Stilicho would have been a Latin-speaking nobleman of the court with little in common with the tribesmen north of the Danube and west of the Rhine.

Stilicho, with his wife Serena and son Eucharius

Arms and Armour in the Later Roman Army

Hughes has already written a recent biography of another later Roman general, Belisarius, which came out in 2009 around the same time as a very similar book called The Gothic War by Torsten Cumberland Jacobson. Hughes' book, titled Belisarius: The Last Roman General, is by far the superior of the two. Most of what we know about Belisarius' Sixth Century campaigns in Justinian's wars against the kingdoms of the Vandals and the Ostrogoths in north Africa and Italy comes from the fawning hagiography of Procopius, who wildly exaggerates the odds against which Belisarius fought, presents his every victory (however minor) as the result of his personal genius and downplays his every setback and defeat as the result of treachery by jealous rivals and subordinates. Cumberland Jacobson's dull, plodding book simply takes all this at face value and is effectively a lumbering paraphrase of Procopius with a few (bad) maps and background comments. Hughes, to his credit, is much more sceptical of his sources and notes the many points where Procopius seems to be covering up his hero's mistakes and papering over severe divisions and flaws in the Eastern Roman military establishment.

It was not surprising to learn that Hughes is also an avid war-gamer, as he is one of the few historians of this period who demonstrates a genuine understanding of the tactics and strategy of the time and an appreciation of what a skilled, effective and well-equipped fighting force the later Roman Army was. He pauses in his analysis of Stilicho's career to devote two detailed chapters to the Roman and barbarian forces respectively, trashing most of the myths about the late Army in the process. Enthusiasts of the earlier Empire tend to have a misty-eyed devotion to the equipment of the "classic" Roman legionary of the later First Century AD, and regard the later army as a kind of degenerate, "barbarised" shadow of the older Army, with inferior equipment and training. Recent research has demonstrated, however, that the equipment of the later Army was highly effective and that the "classic" legionary gear so beloved by Classicists, Hollywood and fanboys was abandoned simply because it was no longer up to the job. When discussing the abandonment of the classic one-piece, spun bowl Roman helmet of earlier centuries for two-piece "ridge helms" and multi-piece "spangenhelms" Hughes notes that it is often claimed these later designs were inferior and were only adopted because they were cheaper and easier to manufacture:

These claims do not take into account the fact that the process of spinning iron can weaken it and lead to irregularities in the bowl. This may account for the need to reinforce earlier, one-piece bowls across the brow. .... The new methods produced bowls that did not need brow reinforcement and were of a more uniform thickness and quality, since they were easier to work and toughen than the one-piece skull. Although looking to modern eyes, with computer-driven accuracy, as if they are a step back, in production and quality they may actually have been an improvement on earlier helmets. (Hughes, p. 62)

Hughes also discusses the abandonment of the classic gladius short sword of the earlier legionary for the longer spatha. He attributes this to Germanic influence on the later army, claiming the spatha was a Germanic design. Personally, I think this is wrong - spathae had been used by cavalry units in the Roman army, well before there was any serious Germanic influence. They had been adapted originally from Gallic cavalry sword designs had been been used because a cavalryman needs a longer, slashing weapon. The short, stabbing gladius was abandoned by the infantry around the same time as they adopted the spear-like lancea rather than the classic two pilae javelins and dropped the rectangular, curved scutum shield in favour of round or oval shields. All these changes happened in the Third Century and seem to reflect a radical change in infantry tactics, probably as a result of having to face a newly aggressive Sassanian Persian Empire with its strong cavalry forces. The old equipment simply was not up to the task and so was rejected.

So rather than being a Germanic influence, the originally Gallic spatha was simply adopted by infantry from the cavalry as a weapon that gave them more reach in the looser and more flexible unit formations required by the new tactics. In fact, the influence seems to have gone the other way. When the gladius predominated in the Roman Army, we find it predominating the Germanic archaeological record as well. Once the spatha was adopted by the Romans, we find it being adopted by the Germanics also. It seems the Romans influenced the barbarians, not the other way around.

The Germanic barbarians, similarly, were very different to the small, weaker, fairly primitive tribes the Romans had fought and not quite managed to conquer in the First Century. Four hundred years of cross-border warfare with Rome, service in the Roman Army by many of their young men and a militarisation of their society generally had forged them into far larger tribal confederations and newer, bigger, more powerful tribes generally. While still less well-equipped and trained than the Romans, these tribes were able to field sizable forces. Their other attraction for an increasingly cash-strapped Western Empire was that, as warrior societies, the men of these tribes were pre-trained, ready to fight and happy to do so for a price. Paying them to fight for Rome as foederati was usually cheaper and far quicker than raising armies of reluctant civilian conscripts and then trying to whip them into a battle-ready force. Though, as Stilicho was to find, this often came with a variety of political consequences. The result of all these changes meant that the armies that Stilicho came to command looked far different to the Roman soldiers of four centuries earlier. And they faced a far tougher job.


Soldiers of the Late Roman Army - Early Fifth Century

The Turning Point

Choosing Stilicho's career as a his focus gives Hughes the opportunity to throw some light on what turned out to be a pivotal few decades in the history of the Roman Empire. When Stilicho was selected to be comes et magister utruisque militiae praesentalis, or supreme commander of the Western Empire's armed forces, in October 394 AD the Empire was relatively stable. The Eastern Emperor Theodosius had just defeated the rebel Western general Arbogast and ended the bid by the usurper Eugenius to the Western imperial throne. He installed his young son Honorius, then nine years old, as emperor of the West and needed a strong but trustworthy military commander to stabilise things during his son's minority. Stilicho was apparently the perfect choice given his loyalty, presumably some proven military ability in the recent campaign and - most importantly - his marriage to Serena, who was the niece and adopted daughter of Theodosius. This marriage made Stilicho part of the Imperial family, though not in the line of succession. Theodosius judged, correctly as it turned out, that this association would be close enough make Stilicho loyal to the young Honorius, but not to tempt him to seize power for himself.

Stilicho did not really need to. Theodosius died just months later, succeeded in the East by his seventeen year old son Arcadius. With both halves of the Empire under the rule of Emperors who were still minors, Stilicho declared that the dying Theodosius had asked him to be parens - effectively guardian of both boys and essentially ruler of both Empires. As Hughes notes, this appointment was only ever claimed by Stilcho and his propagandists, like the poet Claudian, and was never confirmed by anyone else. Not surprisingly, it was disputed in the East, particularly by the eastern preafectus praetorio Orientis Rufinus, under whose care Theodosius had placed the young Arcadius when he left to campaign in the west. This was the beginning of a political rivalry between Stilicho and Rufinus, who were the real powers behind the throne in the West and East respectively.

Hughes' analysis of Stilicho's career highlights exactly how bitter this rivalry between the Western and Eastern Empires was and how easily it could and did flare into full scale war. This is one element in this turning point that is often overlooked - not only did the Western Empire face barbarian incursions and rebel generals as well as Imperial usurpers in this period, but it did so alongside an Eastern partner that was often hostile if not actually at war with its Western equivalent. The two halves of the Empire ruled by brothers were supposed to work together, as Theodosius had envisaged. In effect, the rivalry between Stilicho and his eastern equivalents meant the two Empires increasingly drifted apart, with terrible consequences in the long run for the weaker Western half.

The other aspect of this turning point period that Hughes details very well is the role of Alaric. Once again, the romanticised Nineteenth Century image of Alaric makes him into a Germanic folk hero - the brave young warrior king of the Visigoths leading his wild, nomadic tribe across the Empire, bringing it to heel with his prowess in battle and finally sacking the Eternal City itself before prematurely dying. Thankfully Hughes cuts through the misty idealisation and depicts Alaric as what he actually was - another Roman general of Germanic descent whose main aim was higher rank in the Army for himself and money and land for his (mostly Gothic) troops and who was prepared to mutiny to achieve this. Stilicho consistently outmanoeuvred Alaric when he needed to, used him and his troops for his own ends when it was useful to do so and defeated him in battle on a succession of occasions.

Alaric's sack of Rome in 410 AD has tended to cast Stilicho in a bad light and a great deal of ink has been spilled over whether this would have happened if Stilicho had followed up his earlier defeats of Alaric back in 402 AD by destroying his army the way he later destroyed the invading army of another Gothic leader, Radagaisus. Hughes analyses the possible reasons Stilicho did not wipe out Alaric's defeated troops, which are mainly political, such as the idea he wanted to preserve Alaric's army now it had been cowed to use it against other, more serious threats. But Hughes pushes a more military explanation, arguing that the later Roman Army used more cautious tactics than its early Imperial equivalent, since it could not sustain huge casualties and replace them as easily as the earlier Army. Once Alaric had been brought to heel, Stilicho considered the job done and to attack him again would be to risk major losses to his already depleted military resources or, even worse, a wholesale defeat.

The boy emperor Honorius, by Jean-Paul Laurens, 1880

The Slide Towards Collapse

It has been traditional for historians to make a great deal of Alaric's sack of Rome as the key turning point and the marker of the final rush towards the collapse of the Western Empire. But if there was a real pivotal moment in the fall of Rome it was one that came four years earlier, with the double blow of the rebellion of the Roman troops in Britain and the crossing of the lower Rhine by a motley collection of barbarians: Asding Vandals, Siling Vandals, Alans and a grab-bag of Marcomanni, Quadi and Allemani who are generally referred to simply as "the Sueves". These events in mid to late 406 AD seemed reasonably minor in the scheme of things, but were to prove the real catalyst of the fall of Stilicho and the beginnings of the fall of the Empire.

In most treatments of this period the 406 invasion usually gets little more than a few lines and the consequences of the British rebellion often get ignored completely. Hughes' two chapters on these events are the most detailed and careful I have seen and he does an excellent job of teasing the sequence of what happened from the often scanty and confusing sources (as he notes, one source does not even agree with the others on what year the invasion occurred). Hughes' reconstruction of the nature of the invasion is interesting, particularly since he makes it clear that (i) the forces involved were initially fairly small, (ii) they were by no means united or even clear about their aims and (iii) the invasion was possibly not even reported to Stilicho until after the Frankish foederati on the frontier had been narrowly defeated by the invading barbarians. The idea that this was some vast horde that poured over the border, sweeping aside the corrupt late Roman army is one of several myths associated with this invasion:

Confusion over the course of events is equally prevalent. The renowned report that the Rhine was frozen is not upheld by any of our ancient sources. It would appear to be a theory proposed by Gibbon, possibly to account for the lack of a Roman defence at any bridges that should have been defended .... This has been repeated so often that it is now accepted as fact, rather than as theory.
(Hughes, p. 180)

Gibbon strikes again, it seems. What actually made this incursion significant was not its size or nature, but what happened next. The rebel troops in Britain had selected a certain Gratian as their leader, but he was soon deposed and replaced by the propitiously-named Flavius Claudius Constantius, or Constantine III. The new commander promptly declared himself Emperor and invaded Gaul. There he won the support of the local troops by inflicting crushing victories on the Saxons, who had taken advantage of the Vandal/Alan/Suevic invasion by doing some invading of their own. Bolstered by these new troops, Constantine advanced as far south as Lyon, where he set up his capital and began minting coins, while his commanders secured the roads to the passes over the Alps.

This new threat to the young Emperor Honorius made the barbarians, who had retreated back towards the Rhine in the face of Constantine's advance south, a secondary consideration for Stilicho. But the general's grip on power was weakening. His powerful political ally in the Senate, Symmachus, has died in 402 AD and new courtiers were beginning to get the ear of Honorius, who was now in his early twenties. Unable to risk leading armies against Constantine himself, Stilicho dispatched and expeditionary force over the Alps under Sarus, who fought an indecisive campaign. Constantine continued to consolidate his power in Gaul and into Spain and now Alaric began putting pressure on Stilicho and the Imperial government to grant him a huge amount in gold to pay for the up-keep of his army - the one Stilicho had failed to destroy in 402 AD. Opposition to Stilicho in the Senate and at court hardened, led by a powerful courtier and administrator Olympius. With the news of the death of the Eastern Emperor Arcadius, the new powers behind the throne made their move. Incited by Olympius, the army at Pavia mutinied, Stilicho's resented bucellarii - a personal bodyguard of Hunnic warriors - was ambushed while sleeping and destroyed and Stilicho was arrested and executed on Honorius' command.

The Vandal Who Saved Rome?

There is a trend in history books these days that says they have to have a catchy sub-title that will grab readers attention. "The Vandal Who Saved Rome" might well catch the eye of a casual browser in a bookshop, but it certainly is not very accurate. As noted above, it is very hard to accurately describe Stilicho as a "Vandal" in anything but the loosest sense. But "Who Saved Rome" is an even bigger stretch. Perhaps a generalissimo who was less loyal to the young emperor who eventually betrayed and killed him may have accelerated the end of the Empire, but Stilicho did not really "save Rome" at all. Personally, I would argue this was because Rome was already beyond saving. The inter-Imperial conflicts, usurpations, rebellions, mutinies and occasional invasions that punctuated Stilicho's career had been going on for a while and were accelerating. And the cash-strapped Western Empire became increasingly incapable of stemming their ill-effects.

After Stilicho's execution, the usurper Constantine was defeated, but the Western Empire never fully regained control in Gaul and Britain which slowly slipped from its grasp. The barbarians who crossed the Rhine in 406 AD had escaped undefeated thanks to the Romans' civil war and settled in Sapin, eventually crossing to Africa in 429 AD to take advantage of yet another inter-Roman conflict. And that sealed the fate of the Western Empire. With its richest province and the wheat supply of Italy in enemy hands, the end was by this stage inevitable.

The Western Empire did manage to stage one last hurrah, under another great magister militum, Flavious Aetius who managed to scrape a victory against Attila's Huns before the final collapse came. Apparently the life and career of Aetius is Hughes' next book, and if this one is any indication it will be a welcome addition to the analysis of this turbulent period.

Apologies

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 23:42:00 +0000

The Author battles a dreaded Jesus Myther

After a rather long hiatus, I'd like to apologise to those following this blog and other regulars for the last few months' radio silence. It was largely caused by a hard-drive crash that wiped out drafts of several reviews and an iPhone crash that wiped the notes I'd made while reading several other books (I do most of my reading while commuting, so I use my phone to jot notes). Yes, I have now bought a large external hard-drive and back up weekly. Hopefully my new review below will begin to make up for the long break.

The good news is that in the interim I have been reading and buying quite a few books, many of which are relevant to the focus of this blog. Christmas saw a number of newish books land in my stocking, and I am about to finish Ian Hughes' Stilicho: The Vandal Who Saved Rome. Despite its slightly silly sub-title (he wasn't and he didn't) it's a very solid and detailed account of a turning point in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

Yesterday I ordered Peter J, Leithart's Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom. It seems to be a book that is part history and part theology; both examining the history and myths around the much maligned Emperor Constantine and tackling the idea that his adoption of Christianity was ultimately a "bad thing" for that faith. Naturally, as a non-believer, I'll be looking at it purely from the historical angle, but it looks interesting.

Less interesting but perhaps more fun, is a slender self-published tome that hit my desk a couple of weeks ago. It glories in the title Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All and is by one David Fitzgerald. It's actually Fitzgerald's contribution to an odd little competition held by some of the usual suspects from the online "Jesus Never Existed" brigade. It came runner up last year, apparently, but thanks to the wonders of print-on-demand online publishing services ("helping kooks get into print for over five years!") befuddled clowns and frothing fanatics can now purchase it on Amazon etc and have their prejudices and misconceptions gently stroked. I suspect that review won't be kindly.

Finally, please take part in the Readers' Poll on the blog's left sidebar. It gives you a choice of a number of potential future reviews and articles on this blog. I will tend to read what I find in the book shops or what publishers and authors send me, but I want to use your responses to the poll as at least something of a guide.

My new year's resolution is to ensure I update this blog regularly, so hopefully 2011 will see a lot more activity hear.
Best regards,

Tim O'Neill
Sarcastic Bastard and Prick

The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:57:00 +0000

Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, (HarperOne, 2008) 336 pages. Verdict?: 4/5 A fascinating overview of a neglected area of history.

On January 7th, AD 781, around the time Charlemagne was in the process of converting the Saxons to Christianity by the sword and Islam first reached what is now Pakistan and Kashmir, a Chinese monk called Jinging oversaw the raising of a three metre tall stele of dark stone in the northern Chinese imperial city of Chang'an (now Xi'an). The inscription on the monument, carved in elegant Tang Dynasty calligraphy by one Lü Xiuyan, was entitled "Memorial of the Propagation in China of the Luminous Religion from Daqin" and it celebrated 150 years of the spread of this religion in northern China.

"Daqin" or "Da Qin" was the Chinese word for the Roman Empire, though here it probably refers to Syria. And the religion of Daqin was Christianity. The monk Jingjing's alternate name was Adam and the stele is a testament to a largely forgotten era in Christian history - one where Nestorian and Jacobite Christianity was practised across Asia, where place names known to us from the evening news about Iraq - Basra, Mosul, Kirkuk, Tikrit - were thriving Christian centres, where the monks of Nisibis (now in Turkey) and Jundishapur (now in Iran) made translations of Aristotle that were to find their way to Europe via Muslim Spain and where Chinese Christian priests ministered to Mongol khans. Philip Jenkins' fascinating book brings this forgotten world to life, jolts us out of a Eurocentric perspective on the rise and propagation of Christianity and poses some interesting questions about how and why religions die.

The Nestorian Christian stele from Chang'an

The Christianity that Time Forgot

About a year before Jingjing/Adam raised his monument in China, Bishop Timothy was made catholicos, or Pope, of the Nestorian Church in the Mesopotamian city of Seleucia, just south of modern Baghdad. His name is virtually unknown today, but at the time he was the most influential Christian in the world, far overshadowing the influence of Pope Adrian I in Rome (who was too busy trying to fend off the Lombards to have influence much beyond the walls of his city) and a powerful rival to the Orthodox Patriarch Paul IV in Constantinople (then mired in the iconoclast controversy). Catholicos Timothy was the spiritual and political head of one quarter of the Christians in the world, he had followers from Syria to Korea, laid claim to the leadership of the true successor to the original apostolic church and read his Bible in a descendent of Jesus' native tongue. Timothy's followers called themselves Nasraye or "Nazarenes"; a form of the earliest Aramaic name for the followers of Jesus. Jesus himself was called Yeshua and priests were called rabban, related to the Aramaic title of Jesus, rabboni, and the Hebrew rabbi.

At a time when England had just two metropolitans - York and Canterbury - Catholicos Timothy presided over no less than nineteen, with 85 bishoprics. He headed a church which operated in many languages, including Syraic, Persian, Turkish, Soghdian, Chinese and Tibetan. As Jenkins notes, Timothy's form of Christianity was both widespread and already venerable. When Saint Benedict was founding his first monastery in Italy, Nestorian bishops were ruling in Nishapur and Tus in Persia. When the first church was being founded in England, the Nestorians already had a metropolitan administering multiple bishoprics from Herat in Afghanistan:

Our common mental maps of Christian history omit a thousand years of that story, and several million miles of territory. No reasonable historian of modern Christianity would leave Europe out of the story, and omitting Asia from the medieval record is just as unconscionable. We can't understand Christian history without Asia - or, indeed, Asian history without Christianity. (Jenkins, p. 11)

Jenkins notes that we tend to think of Christianity as a religion which began in the Middle East and then spread west, via the Roman Empire, eventually finding some kind of natural home in Europe before expanding across the globe from there in the Modern Era. Whereas, in fact, it was not until around 1500, with the conversion of the last European pagans in the Baltic and the expulsion of the last major Muslim presence in Spain, that Europe became fully Christian. Co-incidentally, around the same time the last remnants of what had been a vibrant, continent-wide Asian Christianity were being extinguished - just in time for a newly expansionist European Christianity to forget it had ever existed.

Because clearly Christianity did not just expand westward from its Middle Eastern origin; it spread eastward as well and rather more rapidly. Antioch - the place where Christians got their name and an early centre of the primitive church - lay at the western end of the Silk Road. From Antioch to Athens is 800 miles, to Rome it is 1400 and it is over 2000 to London. But travelling in the opposite direction it is 600 miles from Antioch to Baghdad, less than 1000 to Tehran and 1850 miles to Samarkand, near the north-east border of the then Sassanian Persian Empire. As Jenkins points out "Jerusalem is actually closer to the seemingly exotic territories of central Asia than it is to France." (p. 53). Not surprisingly, Christianity spread there via the Persian Empire early and quickly thrived.

European Catholic missionaries debate with Nestorians in Central Asia

People of the Book

Jenkins is careful not to overstate the importance of Christianity in the east. In most places, unlike in Europe, it established itself as a minority faith alongside more dominant religions. Whereas the conversion of Europe always had the inertia and legacy of the conversion of the Roman Empire behind it, Nestorian and Jacobite Christianity never quite managed to convert a powerful political elite and reap the evangelical rewards of doing so, though Nestorianism came close with the Mongols. So while Nestorians were establishing missions in China as early as the 500s AD, their roots were shallow and in the mid-Ninth Century the fiercely Taoist emperor Wuzong banned and expelled all "foreign cults", including Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity. Christians were not to have a major presence in China again until the coming of the Mongols.

One interesting way that Christians in Asia had an enormous impact despite their minority status was in the area of scholarship. Byzantine crackdowns on "unorthodox" forms of Christianity saw many scholars flee to the relatively benign and receptive Persian Empire and the scholarly Christian centres of Nisibis and Jundishapur flourished under the sponsorship and protection of the Sassanian shahs:

The fame of Nisibis spread around the world, supplying a model for the pioneering Latin Christian scholar Cassiodorus in far-off Italy. It was at Nisibis that much of the ancient world's learning was kept alive and translated, making it available for later generations of Muslim scholars and for Europeans after them. Among other classical works, Nisibis preserved the writings of Aristotle and his commentators. (Jenkins, p. 77)

When debating those who try to claim that "Christian monks" actively "destroyed" or passively "neglected" ancient learning and that we only have these works thanks to the Muslims, I like to point out that the Muslims got them from "Christian monks" - Nestorians writing in monasteries on the Tigris and in Khūzestān. Anyone who has read Aristotle has these Syraic-speaking monks to thank.

The range and breadth of these scholars is illustrated by the bishop Severus, known as Seboukt of Nisibis. From his Jacobite monastery on the Euphrates, this mid-Seventh Century scholar wrote "extensively on cosmography, on the causes of eclipses and on geometry and arithmetic" (p. 78). He wrote a treatise on the operation of the astrolabe, wrote several commentaries on Aristotle and translated his Analytics. He was also aware of Indian scholarship and makes the first reference in the west to the remarkable Indian numerical system that used just nine signs - which we now know as Arabic numerals.

The book also makes some interesting points about eastern Christian Biblical scholarship. It notes that the Syraic Bible - the Peshitta - was a highly conservative translation. Jenkins observes that recently there has been a growing perception that the pre-Nicean church had a plethora of texts that were considered scriptural and that these included "many heterodox accounts of Jesus, which were suspect because of their mystical or even feminist leanings" (p. 88) The modern myth goes that this variety and freedom was only stamped out once Christianity was adopted by Constantine and these variant scriptures were savagely expunged from the canon.

As exotic and exciting as all that sounds, it is actually without foundation (despite what legions of The Da Vinci Code fans would like to believe). Apart from some quibbling around the edges, largely about the inclusion of some of the Catholic Epistles and Revelation, the Biblical canon was fairly solidly fixed by the Second Century and the four canonical gospels, in particular, were firmly established as the only canonical ones. This is evidenced by the Syraic Biblical tradition, which "rejected (the rival scriptures) because they knew they were late and tendentious" (p. 88) Interestingly, the Syraic Bible does omit several of the disputed epistles and Revelation, which were only included in the Western canon after much debate and with widespread misgivings.


Fourteenth Century Iranian manuscript - the monk Nestorius recognises the teenage Muhammad

Of particular interest to Jenkins is the other dominant faith in the east - Islam. Given that the latter part of his book describes the violent and oppressive turn in relations between eastern Christianity and Islam that consigned these Asian branches of the Church to the dustier corners of historical memory, Jenkins is judicious in his handling of the role of Muslims in his story. He is rightly dismissive of the post-9/11 modish fawning over Islam, painting it as a wholly tolerant and benevolent faith compared to the wicked and ignorant Christians of the time. Karen Armstrong's syrupy oversimplifications and the cartoonish pseudo history of the PBS documentary series Empires of Faith and Ridley Scott's laughable sermons in the movie Kingdom of Heaven get short shrift from Jenkins. "Even in the most optimistic view," he writes, "Armstrong's reference to Christians possessing 'full religious liberty' in Muslim Spain or elsewhere beggars belief." (p. 99)

But he also avoids the trap of going to the other extreme and painting Islam as an intrinsically violent faith spread by jihad and marked by intolerance and fanaticism. He notes that no-one in this period had any monopoly on massacres and oppression and all were happy to justify these largely political extremes by reference to their religion. He notes that while it is easy to find examples of violence and oppression in the Muslim conquest of Middle East and north Africa, they were actually less violent and oppressive than "the Normans who conquered England in 1066, the Germans who subjugated Prussia, or the English occupiers of Ireland." (p. 100)

Mongols and Muslims

One thing that offered a chance for Asian Christianity to move from influential minority faith to a position of dominance was the rise of the Mongol Empire. From the beginning, Christian Mongols played a prominent role in the empire of Genghis Khan, since the Keraits, Ongguds and Uyguyrs were all substantially Christianised and all were prominent in the new Mongol power. Kublai Khan was renowned for his tolerance of Christians and many of them rose to prominence in his court and administration. By the mid-Thirteenth Century many Asian Christians held out hopes that a Christianised Mongol Empire would crush Islam and unite with Christians in Europe. Such hopes filtered west and formed the kernel of the persistent and long-lived rumours of the legendary central Asian Christian king "Prester John", who hovered like a mirage over much late Crusading ideals as the possible saviour of the kingdoms of Outremer who would ride under banners of the cross from the east and sweep away the armies of Islam.

This idea was not entirely fantasy. Papal envoys to the Great Khans early in the century meant that both the Mongols and Europeans were well aware that they shared an enemy in Islam and several attempts were made to co-ordinate their wars against Muslim targets. King Louis IX of France met two envoys from the Persian Khan Güyükin Cyprus in 1248 and in 1287 a Mongol embassy made it all the way to Paris to meet King Philip the Fair, Gascony to meet King Edward I and finally back via Rome to meet the newly elected Pope Nicholas IV. In all of these cases the Mongol envoys were Nestorian Christians and the one who met the two kings and the pope was Rabban Bar Sauma, probably a Mongol and Turkic speaking Onggud whose journeys from Beijing to Paris read like the travels of Marco Polo in reverse. But the dream of an alliance was never fulfilled and when the Kerait Christian Mongol general Kitbuqa was crushed in battle by the Mamluk Egyptians at Ain Jalut the dream of the end of Islam faded as well.

The Death of Churches

Jenkins story then moves on to the end of this continent wide network of non-European churches. As he points out, some of them had already long since died. The churches of north Africa, which for centuries had been amongst the most vigorous and substantial Christian communities in the world, were effectively extinguished within a century of the Muslim conquest. But it was not until the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries that active persecution began to erode and finally all but destroy Asian Christianity. First resurgent Mamluks began savage persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, then newly vitalised Turks began doing so as the Ottoman Empire spread. Mongol khans who had been Christianised or friendly to Jacobites and Nestorians turned increasingly to Islam and in China a backlash against all things foreign sweep away Christianity along with Zoroastrian and Buddhist communities.

The last quarter of Jenkins' book contains many useful insights and a some food for thought regarding religion in the modern world. He makes excellent use of modern examples of repression of religion, the impact of massacres and ethnic cleansing, reactions to persecution and the dynamics of marginal religious survival to vividly illustrate the end of this 1000 year ago of Asian Christianity. His section on the "Lessons" that can be drawn from the story of the fall of Christianity in the east is particularly interesting. He notes that there is nothing in this story to give support to "the directions favoured by the far Right - namely as a deadly warning against the Islamic threat." (p. 242) But he does make some observations about how certain religious communities in his story managed to hasten their demise: lack of diversity, alliance with a single political grouping, dependence on a certain set of economic circumstances and ethnic insularity amongst them. He notes that the balancing act between totally accommodating the non-Christian or anti-Christian environment around them and resisting it utterly is a difficult one and going too far in either direction can be fatal to a church. As he sums it up "too little adaptation means irrelevance; too much leads to assimilation and, often, disappearance" (p. 245).

While I must say that, for a non-believer, the rather theological final chapters about how the rise and fall of religions is not due to "blind chance" but have a divine purpose (typically, a "mysterious" one) seemed a little gratuitous, Jenkins never pretends he is anything other than a Christian historian of Christianity and, to his credit, does a far better job of objective analysis than many non-Christian polemicists pretending to be historians (eg Charles Freeman and Richard Carrier, to name two repeat offenders). Overall Jenkins has written an elegant and intriguing history of a forgotten corner of history - and I find it is usually those corners that are the most interesting.

Hypatia and "Agora" Redux

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Sun, 30 May 2010 02:46:00 +0000

Redux

Well, it's been just over a year since I wrote my article on Alejandro Amenábar's film Agora and expressed my misgivings that it would perpetuate some Gibbonian myths about how Hypatia of Alexandria was some kind of martyr for science, how wicked Christians destroyed "the Great Library of Alexandria" in AD 391 and how her murder and the Library's destruction ushered in the Dark Ages. That article certainly attracted some attention and stirred up emotions - so far it's racked up 4,872 page views and attracted 125 comments, many highly hostile.

Of course, when I wrote that article the film had only been screened at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and so I was simply able to comment on what the director and star said about it in press releases and interviews and on what could be gleaned from trailers and a couple of brief clips. Inevitably, some of those who weren't happy with what I had to say pounced on this and claimed that I couldn't criticise the movie until I'd seen it, even though I made it very clear that I wasn't criticising the film per se and that I would withhold judgement on it as a whole until I'd seen it.

Agora has now been released in both the UK and US and so is attracting rather more attention. Since there is still no sign of when (or if) it will be released here in Australia, I decided to put aside my usual principles and download a copy from the internet so I could finally see it for myself.

The Good, the Bad and the Silly

To begin with, there's actually quite a bit to like about this movie. The cinematography is rich and engaging and the sets combine nicely with some judicious use of CGI to give us a vivid reconstruction of late Fourth and early Fifth Century Alexandria. At several points Amenábar pulls the camera out of the action, up into the sky for a bird's eye view of the city and then out into space to look down on the earth as a whole. A few critics have called these the "Google Earth shots", but personally I thought it worked well as a way of noting how petty and insignificant the violent political and religious squabbles at the centre of the story actually were. Amenábar has noted in interviews that he was originally inspired to make the movie by Carl Sagan's 1980s TV series Cosmos and these shots were a nice nod to Sagan's ability put our human concerns into a cosmic perspective (even if, as I detailed in my original article, Sagan also managed to bungle the history of Hypatia rather badly in that series).

I also thought Rachel Weisz and most of the rest of the cast did a very good job with a story and, at times, a script that had the potential to be highly unwieldy. The dialogue was often clunky, as it certainly can be in historical epics like this, but Weisz managed to make scenes where she expounds on the Ptolomaic cosmological model interesting and certainly captured the "self-possession and ease of manner" that Socrates Scholasticus says Hypatia was known for very nicely.

While the sets were impressively detailed, with Roman and Hellenic elements mixed with Egyptian motifs, the same can't be said for the costumes, which tended to be "generic ancient tunics and togas" rather than clothing of the specific period. Even less thought was given to the arms and armour of the Roman troops and the warring factions. It seems no-one can make a "Roman" film without equipping Roman soldiers in generic First Century AD helmets, swords and armour, regardless of what century the film is actually set in. So here the Romans wear what look like left-overs from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, with brassy-looking pseudo-First Century helmets, short gladius swords and, of course, leather lorica segmentata for armour. It would have been nice for nitpicky obsessives like me to finally see a movie set in the later Roman Period where the soldiers actually look like late Roman troops, but that was probably expecting too much.

The movie does do some playing around with the timeline of events and with the major characters in the story, but most of this can be excused on dramatic grounds. In the first half of the story the Prefect Orestes (Oscar Isaac) is depicted not just as one of Hypatia's students but also as the one who, according to the famous story, publicly declared his love for her and got rebuffed. It's said the historical Hypatia rejected him by presenting him with rags stained with her menstrual blood and said "This is what you're in love with". But because the film never bothers to make her neo-Platonist asceticism clear - exactly what her philosophical views might be is never explored except in the vaguest terms - this incident doesn't really make much cultural sense - she comes as a modern career academic "married to her job" rather than a disciple of the school of Plotinus.

We know that Synesius (Rupert Evans), who later became Bishop of Cyrene, was one of her students. And in the movie he comes back into the latter part of the story as well and tries to convince Hypatia to placate her enemies by converting to Christianity. Finally, a fictional slave, Davus (Max Minghella), is introduced to provide the third element in an unrequited love triangle with Orestes and Hypatia. All these changes to the historical accounts are fairly tolerable, but where the "history" in the story goes widly off the rails is when Amenábar and fellow screenplay writer Mateo Gil begin their hamfisted sermonising. Then things get silly.

The Library That Never Was

The screenplay includes sufficient elements and details from the actual historical story to indicate that Amenábar and Gil did enough homework to have been able to have depicted things as they actually happened. But this is a movie with a message and an agenda, so these elements get mixed around, downplayed, countered or simply distorted to suit Amenábar's objectives. More importantly, most of the elements that support the "message" the director is preaching are wholesale fictional inventions.

To begin with, "the Library of Alexandria" forms the focus of the first half of the film. Amenábar depicts this "Library of Alexandria" as forming the core of the Temple of Serapis - in the fact, the Temple itself seems almost an adjunct to it - and it is described as containing "all that remains of the wisdom of men". This is historically problematic on several fronts. To begin with, as I detailed in my article last year, there was no "Great Library of Alexandria" as such in the city at this time. The former Great Library had degraded and suffered several major losses of books over the centuries and the last clear reference to it that we know of dates all the way back to AD 135. We do know from several sources that the colonnades of the Serapeum did contain a collection of books at one time - possibly a remnant of the former Great Library's collection. But Ammianus Marcellinus, who seems to have visited Alexandria himself in the late 360s, refers to the "two priceless libraries" it had once housed in the past tense, indicating they were no longer there by his time. This fits with the descriptions we have in five sources about the sack and destruction of the Serapeum at the hands of the Christians in AD 391: none of them mention any library or books at all. This silence is made more significant by the fact that one of these sources was Eunapius of Antioch, who was not only a vehement anti-Christian but also a philosopher himself. If anyone had an incentive to at least mention this aspect of the destruction it was Eunapius, but he makes no mention of any library or any destruction of books.

So the idea that any "Library of Alexandria" or any library at all was destroyed by the Christian mob in AD 391 is simply without evidential foundation.

Amenábar's screenplay gives some indication that he is aware of at least some of this. The opening titles (in Spanish) do declare explicitly that in Hypatia's time "Alexandria .... possessed ... the (world's) largest known library" (poseia .... la biblioteca mas grande conocida) and a subtitle a few minutes later declares the site of Hypatia's lecture in the opening scene is "the Library of Alexandria" (Biblioteca de Alejandria). But later one of the characters mentions " ... the fire that destroyed the mother library ... ", though this is in a piece of background dialogue while Hypatia is saying something else - less attentive viewers may even miss it completely. Amenábar himself referred in one interview last year to the library in his film as "the second Library of Alexandria", so he clearly understands that the original Great Library no longer existed in AD 391. But he doesn't exactly go out of his way to make this clear to his audience. And he not only includes a library in the Serapeum, despite the evidence even this smaller library no longer existed at this point, but makes it the centre and focus of the whole complex.

Not surprisingly, it is also the focus of the scenes of the storming of the Serapeum by the Christian mob that form the climax of the first half of the film. The accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum make it clear that the mob did not just storm the temple, they burned it and then tore it to the ground, leaving little more than its foundations. But the movie doesn't depict this at all. Apart from toppling the great statue of Serapis and some other vandalism, the Christians leave the building intact and concentrate almost entirely on dragging the scrolls out of the library and burning them in the temple courtyards. At one point as they swarm through the gate someone can even be heard shouting "Burn the scrolls!", as though this was the whole point of the exercise So, oddly, Amenábar doesn't bother depicting what the mob did do and concentrates instead on something not even hinted at in the source material. He wants to keep the emphasis firmly on the idea of Christians as destroyers of ancient knowledge and reason. One reviewer, accepting this scene as wholly factual, calls it "the movie's most emotionally powerful moment" and says "it really makes you cry". She's blissfully unaware that the whole scene is almost entirely fiction.

Alexandrian Street Politics

The second act of the film concentrates on the disputes within the city that led to the murder of Hypatia. Again, Amenábar and Gil's screenplay indicate that they are aware of some of the complexities of the situation, but their movie's agenda means that it's almost always the Christians who are cast in the worst possible light. Socrates Scholasticus makes it clear that the political struggle for civic dominance between Bishop Cyril and the prefect Orestes had its origin in the Orestes torturing to death a follower of Cyril's, Hierax, who the Jewish community in the city accused of stirring up emnity against them. In response, Cyril threatened the Jews, ordering them to "desist from their molestation of the Christians" and the Jews reacted by setting an ambush for Christians in the Church of Alexander, killing a number of them. Cyril retaliated by setting his mob on the Jews and driving them (or at least some of them) out of the city.

Amenábar depicts some of this tit-for-tat series of threats and violence, but invents a scene where the Taliban-style Parabolani instigate the whole dispute by sneaking into the theatre where the Jews are holding a Sabbath celebration and stoning them. This is found nowhere in the sources but, once again, Amenábar introduces a fictional incident into the story to make the whole conflict with the Jews and the subsequent feud between Cyril and Orestes into the fault of Cyril's faction - a clear distortion of the reported facts.

He also distorts other incidents in the dispute. Again, Socrates Scholasticus reports that while Cyril made overtures of a negotiated settlement with the prefect, but "when Orestes refused to listen to friendly advances, Cyril extended toward him the book of gospels, believing that respect for religion would induce him to lay aside his resentment." (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History, VII, 13) Orestes, however, rejected the gesture and refused to be reconciled with the bishop. A garbled version of this incident appears in the movie, but - yet again - Amenábar adds a fictional scene where Cyril implicitly condemns Orestes, not for supporting the Jews, but for being influcenced by Hypatia: something not mentioned in the sources. In this scene, during a church service Cyril reads the passage in 1 Timothy 2 where Paul orders women to be modest, to submit to men and to be silent and condemns women teaching men. He then orders Orestes to kneel before the Bible he's just read from in acknowledgement that what Cyril has read is true and Orestes refuses. Amenábar changes the incident to put its focus on Hypatia, despite the fact this scene is almost totally invented.

The movie then moves from this fictional scene to Cyril ordering the Parabolani to respond by attacking Hypatia. So while it does make it clear that this was in retaliation for the torture and death of another of Cyril's followers by Orestes and due to the political struggle between the two rivals - which is factual - by inventing a scene where Cyril condemns Hypatia for being a woman who teaches men Amenábar sets up the idea that this was the also a reason Hypatia was targeted - which is not factual at all. But it serves his ideological purpose of implying that Hypatia's learning was a major issue, not simply the political faction fighting.

None of the factions come out of the movie looking particularly good, but these invented scenes do their best to cast Cyril and his followers as the instigators of the trouble and make them the clear villains in what was, on all sides, a rather grubby power struggle. It's very odd that Cyril and most of his Parabolani fanatics are swarthy types who, despite being native Alexandrians, speak with thick Middle Eastern accents. They also always wear black. The pagans and members of Orestes' faction, on the other hand, all speak with clipped upper-class English accents and tend to wear white. The implications here are less than subtle.

Fictional Science and Supposed Atheism

The final major invention by Amenábar which also suits his agenda is the rather fanciful idea that Hypatia was on the brink of not only proving heliocentrism when she was murdered but at establishing Keplerian elliptical planetary orbits into the bargain. The film makes reference to the fact that Aristarchus of Samos had come up with a heliocentric hypothesis in the 300s BC, and mentions a couple of reasons it was regarded as making "no sense at all" (though doesn't mention the primary one - the stellar parallax problem). But it invents a series of scenes depicting Hypatia pressing on with this idea despite these (then) not inconsiderable objections. The whole purpose of these sequences is to make the murder of Hypatia seem like more of a loss to learning at the hands of ignorant fundamentalists. Hypatia was certainly renowned for her learning, but there is actually no evidence she was any great innovator, let alone that she had any interest at all in Aristarchus' long-rejected hypothesis. Once again, it's Amenábar's invented elements that work to support his agenda of simplifying the story into one of "ignorance and fanaticism versus scholarship and inquiry".

The movie also heavily implies that Hypatia was entirely non-religious or even an atheist - something else not found in any of the source material. Confronted with the accusation that she is without any religion ("someone who, admittedly, believes in absolutely nothing") Hypatia replies, rather vaguely, "I believe in philosophy". Later Cyril describes here as "a woman who has declared, in public, her ungodliness". Yet again, Amenábar invents something that has no basis in any of the evidence that suits the sermon his movie is preaching.

Over and over again, elements are added to the story that are not in the source material: the destruction of the library, the stoning of the Jews in the theatre, Cyril condemning Hypatia's teaching because she is a woman, the heliocentric "breakthrough" and Hypatia's supposed irreligiousity. And each of these invented elements serves to emphasise the idea that she was a freethinking innovator who was murdered because her learning threatened fundamentalist bigots. The fact that Amenábar needs to rest this emphasis on things he has made up and mixed into the real story demonstrates how baseless this interpretation is.

Reactions

It may be baseless, but it's receiving a predictably enthusiastic reception by many critics and moviegoers. One IMDB reviewer certainly got the message, writing a glowing review entitled "Atheists of the all the world unite!" Another notes " Amenábar made a statement before the screening that if the Alexandria library had not been destroyed, we might have landed on Mars already." A third declares "I hope the film is appreciated and understood, and that we learn a little bit from its depiction of history so that we can't allow the destruction of art, history, knowledge, and the respect that allows civilizations to flourish." And these comments are typical. These viewers accepted all the invented pseudo historical additions to the story without question and happily swallowed the sermon they rest on.

Several blog posts and articles have attempted to counter these distortions of history (notably Father Robert Baron, decentfilms.com, Jeffrey Overstreet, and the Catherine of Siena Institute). All these writers are, however, Christians. While several of them have attempted to deflect the charge that they are biased by reference to my article of last year (one poster on artsandfaith.com notes that I am "an atheist, no less!"), I know from my encounters with true believers in The Da Vinci Code that their Christianity will mean these attempts will be generally rejected or ignored - people like to cling to myths that confirm their ideas.

Which means, rather ironically, this film exposes who are the true fundamentalists in this picture.

God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Rodney Stark

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Fri, 14 May 2010 10:33:00 +0000

Rodney Stark, God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, (HarperOne, 2009) 276 pages. Verdict?: 2/5 A few good correctives to modern myths, but badly marred by blatant bias, tendentious polemic and weak apologetics.

It is a bit of a cliché that we should study the past to understand the present. This is something high school history teachers tell children to explain why it is important to study something which seems, to a bored fourteen year old, totally irrelevant to them. Like many things said by high school history teachers, this one is only partly convincing and really only true to a limited extent. In deft hands, of course, some careful lessons about the present can be drawn from the past. Adrian Goldsworthy does this well in his epilogue to The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower and Harvard's Niall Ferguson has made a popular career as an author and TV presenter who can explain the present by examining the past. So long as we do not stretch analogies too far or indulge in simplistic historical determinism, our high school history teachers were correct up to a point.

But it is far more problematic when people start trying to examine the past through the distorting prism of the present. This has been a temptation that many historians and, more commonly, popularisers of history have fallen into over the years. It was particularly rife in the Enlightenment, when polemicists like Voltaire and historians like Gibbon portrayed idealised versions of the Romans and presented them, or the better ones at least, pretty much as versions of themselves, except in togas and minus the powdered wigs. This is why we have a prevalent view of the Romans as tolerant, urbane, rational people who were concerned with great buildings and science and why the common view of them ignores or forgets things like gladiator fights, mass crucifixions, bloody religious persecutions, the annihilation of rebels and the bizarre cluster of irrational superstitions that made up Roman religion.

The Victorians inherited these illusions of a past informed by fantasies of the present and elaborated on them. To them, for example, the Romans were stout, sensible, no-nonsense chaps who created an Empire for the common good of everyone and only crushed rebellions savagely when the lesser races forgot their place in the scheme of things, by Jove. Similarly, over in the new nation of Germany, there was a vogue for histories of the early Germanic tribes that leaned heavily on fantasies about some kind of mystical proto-national Germanic spirit which went on to inspire people as varied as Jacob Grimm, Richard Wagner and, unfortunately, Adolf Hitler. And in the Nineteenth Century the Crusades were seen as romantic adventures where brave chivalric gentlemen left their swooning ladies behind to go off to the hot countries and bash some civilisation into dusky chaps in robes - something Nineteenth Century Europeans were doing with gusto at the time.

The Nineteenth Century also saw the Arab world change its view of the Crusades. Where before they had, fairly reasonably, been seen as wars they had won, now Western-educated Arabs saw them as precursors to modern European imperialism and colonialism. This led to some oddities, such as taking the western, romantic view of Saladin as a paragon of gentlemanly chivalry and turning him into an Arab hero as well. That, in turn, saw modern despots like Saddam Hussein depicting themselves as latter day Saladins - which is richly ironic considering Saladin was actually a Kurd.

More recently the Crusades have generally been depicted as "a bad thing" in the West as well. Not only is the idea of a holy war in the name of Christianity unpalatable to modern western sensibilities, but many modern commentators accept without question the idea that the Muslim world harbours a centuries-long resentment about the Crusades, when in fact this resentment is less than 150 years old. Sir Steven Runciman's influential three volume history of the Crusades firmly cemented several recent ideas about these expeditions, eg that they were motivated by a desire for Papal power rather than genuine religious zeal, that they were land grabs by western lords and that the Crusaders were bumbling, incompetent military cretins. Given that he was a Byzantist, his prejudices and biases should have been clear, but these ideas remain firmly entrenched. They are generally accepted in the popular perception of the Crusades, along with the "fact" that most Crusaders were landless second sons looking for new territory and that the whole thing was motivated primarily by loot and the riches of the East.

All of these perceptions of the Crusades have been given a regular airing since 9/11 and, in particular, in commentary on the Iraq War and the "War on Terror". But if those recent events have created a distorting perspective for perceptions of the Crusades, Rodney Stark's counter to them distorts far more than it clarifies.

The Crusades as Defensive Wars? A Tenuous Thesis

Any book subtitled "A Case for the Crusades" is pretty clearly one written with an ideological agenda. And Stark makes his agenda very clear early in his book - 9/11 is mentioned as early as page 4, which leads into a summary of recent western breast-beating over the Crusades during the Iraq War and its roots in anti-Christian condemnations of them by Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Fuller and, of course, Gibbon (pp. 6-7). Having traced the origins of the idea that the Crusaders were nothing more than "greedy barbarians in armor", Stark states his counter-case:

To sum up the prevailing wisdom: during the Crusades, an expansionist, imperialistic Christendom brutalized, looted and colonized a tolerant and peaceful Islam.

Not so. As will be seen, the Crusades were precipitated by Islamic provocations: by centuries of bloody attempts to colonize the West and by sudden new attacks on Christian pilgrims and holy places. (Stark, p. 8)

He goes on:

[U]nlike most conventional Crusade historians, I shall not begin with the pope's appeal at Clermont, but with the rise of Islam and the onset of Muslim invasions of Christendom. That's when it all started - in the seventh century, when Islamic armies swept over the larger portion of what was then Christian territory: the Middle East, Egypt and all of North Africa, and then Spain and southern Italy as well as many major Mediterranean islands .... Nor shall I merely recount the crusader battles, for they are comprehensible only in the light of the superior culture and technology that made it possible for European knights to march more than twenty-five hundred miles, to suffer great losses along the way and then to rout far larger Muslim forces. (Stark, p. 9)

Or, to sum his thesis up in the plaintive cry of a nine year old caught fighting in a school playground: "But THEY started it!" This argument is not really radically new. I have been coming across it online regularly since 9/11, particularly from pro-Bush American bloggers and posters who have wanted to argue that Islam is an inherently violent, intolerant and expansionist faith that can only be stopped by some "shock and awe" and invasion and occupation by the God-fearing US military. It is not even a new thesis to be presented in book form - Robert Spencer's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) has been a best-seller amongst people with this mindset since its publication in 2005, and it makes exactly the same case. Essentially, the "THEY started it!" thesis argues that far from being an isolated, innovative and unprovoked assault on the world of Islam from Europe, the Crusades were in fact a courageous and entirely justified counter-strike against the terror of Islam by a besieged Christendom. In other words, an Eleventh Century equivalent to Bush's doctrine of "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here" or "defending the Homeland".

The problem is that this revisionist thesis, like all ideologically-driven attempts at the analysis of history, is every bit as skewed as the ideas it is trying to revise and correct.

"Christendom Strikes Back"

After a brief summary of the period from the death of Muhammad (AD 632) to the sack of Rome by Sicilian Muslims (AD 846) and the rapid Islamic conquests of Syria, Persia, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, Sicily and Spain in that period, Stark begins to set the scene for his account of the Crusades by detailing how "Christendom struck back". He starts with the defeat of Spanish Muslims by the Frankish warlord Charles Martel at Poitiers (or Tours, depending on which account you read) in AD 732 - which he re-elevates to the status of the turning of the Islamic tide and the beginning of a fight-back by "Christendom": He writes:

As would be expected, some more recent historians have been quick to claim that the Battle of Tours was of little or no significance. (p. 43)

Actually, current opinion remains divided on whether Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi's defeat by Charlemagne's grandfather represented a significant turning point in the westward expansion of Islam or simply the defeat of a reconnaissance-in-strength by what was little more than a large raiding party. Both interpretations have merit, though Stark plumps firmly for the former. More importantly, Stark champions the idea that the battle represented a tactical turning point, with Martel's stout Frankish infantry forming a new and decisive counter to the light cavalry tactics of the Muslim forces that had seen them conquer so much territory over the preceding century:

It is axiomatic in military science that cavalry cannot succeed against well-armed and well disciplined infantry formations unless they greatly outnumber them. The effective role of cavalry is to ride down infantry fleeing from the battlefield, once their lines have given way. But when determined infantry hold their ranks, standing shoulder to shoulder to present a wall of shields from which they project a thicket of long spears butted to the ground, cavalry charges are easily turned away. .... In this instance, the Muslim force consisted entirely of light cavalry .... Opposing them was an army "almost entirely composed of foot soldiers, wearing mail [armour] and carrying shields". It was a very uneven match. (p. 41-42)

This is all more or less true, but it is also one early example of Stark greatly over-simplifying the military and tactical situation - something he does throughout the book. To begin with, to pretend Spanish (or any) "Muslim" armies consisted of nothing but light cavalry is nonsense - they included infantry, archers and heavier cavalry troops as well. Secondly, to claim that this was the first time "Muslim" armies had met "determined infantry" executing the anti-cavalry tactics he describes is ridiculous. The Byzantine armies that Arab forces had (generally) defeated in the preceding century were based on precisely the stolid infantry, anti-cavalry tactics Stark describes here. Finally, the battle probably was not the simple "light cavalry breaking on disciplined infantry" affair Stark reduces it to. David Nicolle, a current leading military historian who is as well-versed in the equipment and tactics of the Islamic east as he is in that of the European west, writes:

The classic interpretation of Charles Martel's victory over a Muslim raiding force at Potiers maintains that the Christian Franks allowed their enemies to dash themselves to pieces against a stern but static defensive array. Yet this is probably quite wrong; for the evidence could equally well be interpreted as the Franks charging and overrunning the Muslim-Arab camp in an sudden and unexpected assault. (David Nicolle, Medieval Warfare Source Book: Volume One - Warfare in Western Christendom, p. 77)

Here, as in many other places in his book, Stark presents an oversimplified and tendentious interpretation that fits his thesis and ignores, downplays, or is blissfully unaware of more complex, recent or nuanced alternatives.

His tendency to oversimplify things to the point of distorting history continues in his account of the Spanish Reconquista by the Christian kingdoms of the north against the Muslim south. According to Stark's version, this was very simple - it was a concerted counter-attack by Christians against Muslims in defence of Christendom. He paints the success of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar - the "El Cid" of legend - in the 1090s as a turning point and holds him up as a paragon of Christian martial vigor against Muslims. He attributes this "turning of the tide" to the disunity and fractious politics of the silly Muslims:

Perhaps the single most remarkable feature of the Islamic territories was almost ceaseless internal conflict; intricate plots, assassinations and betrayals form a lethal soap opera .... Spain was a patchwork of constantly feuding Muslim regimes that often allied themselves with Christians against one another. (p. 47)

To anyone with even a passing knowledge of Medieval Spanish history, these statements are simply bizarre. This was not a "remarkable feature" of the "Islamic territories" at all - it was a common feature of all Spanish territories, Christian and Muslim alike. Like their Muslim neighbours, Christian Spanish rulers indulged in no less of a "lethal soap opera" of intrigues, internecine conflicts and assassinations. This is simply what Medieval rulers Europe-wide did. As for Muslims allying themselves with Christians against each other, Stark conveniently neglects to take full account of the fact that Christians did this as well. His hero, Rodrigo Díaz, spent six years in the service of Yusuf al-Mu'taman ibn Hud of Zaragoza and his successor. In this time he inflicted defeats on Sancho I of Aragón and Ramón Berenguer II, Count of Barcelona, capturing the latter in battle and holding him captive on behalf of his Muslim master. Stark refers to this in passing, but fails to note its significance: these endless wars were not, at this stage anyway, brave counter-strikes by Christians against a tide of Muslim advance, but simply the kind of constant low level jockying for power, dominance and land that marked this period all over Europe. Unlike Stark, Rodrigo Díaz and his contemporaries paid little heed to whether their lord of the moment went to Mass or attended the mosque. Once again, Stark edits out the more complex parts that do not support his thesis and presents an oversimplified, dumbed-down version instead.

Stripping the Arabs from Arabic Science

Oversimplifying things is one matter, wilfully distorting them out of pure, unadulterated bias is entirely another. In his next chapter - Western "ignorance" Versus Eastern "Culture" - Stark embarks on an absurd attempt at denigrating the idea that the Muslim world was greatly more advanced in learning than Europe in this period and tries to pump up an image of Europe as being superior. It is, without a doubt, the stupidest argument in his whole creaking thesis.

His argument consists almost entirely of pointing to the scholars in the East who were dhimmis rather than Muslims and trying, bizarrely, to claim this meant we cannot claim the undeniably more-advanced scholarship of the Islamic world in the Eleventh Century was "Muslim" - as though ideas have some kind of religious affiliation. He notes that much of the learning of the Islamic world was Greek in origin and that it had been preserved by Nestorian Christians working under Islamic masters. This is ridiculous. Leaving aside the fact that there were still many eastern scholars who were Muslims (because Stark certainly, and conveniently, leaves that aside), to claim that this means the Islamic world did not have a flourishing intellectual culture while the West remained almost totally ignorant of this (to them) lost Greek learning is absurd. It is like claiming that there was no Carolingian Renaissance because Alcuin, Peter of Pisa, Paul the Deacon, Theodulf of Orléans and Joseph Scottus were not Franks. Regardless of the ethnic or religious affiliations of some of the scholars that gave rise to the flowering of learning in this period, to pretend that this somehow means the east was not vastly more advanced than the west at this stage is simply stupid.

By the time I got to the part where Stark seriously tries to argue that the use of "Arabic" numerals in the east is not significant because they were actually originally "Hindu" (p. 59), this reader was about ready to throw Stark's idiotic book at the wall.

But it gets dumber. In a section entitled "Contrasts in Technology" Stark embarks on an even more ludicrous attempt at arguing that the east was technologically less advanced than Europe as well. While some of the evidence he draws on here is legitimate - Europeans did invent, refine and exploit some significant technology in this period - to stretch that fact into the idea that the "Muslim" world was technologically backward is simply stupefying. It also includes some statements which are not just totally wrong, but hilariously so. For example, when discussing the development of heavier armour in Medieval Europe, Stark claims that the mail hauberks of the Eleventh Century were somehow superior even to the elaborate plate armour of the later European Middle Ages:

These (plate) suits came later and only some knights of the heavy cavalry ever wore them, as they were dangerously impractical. Knights in plate-armor suits had to be lifted onto their saddles by booms; if they fell off they could not rise to their feet to fight on. (pp. 71-72)

Apart from the words "these suits came later", every single thing in these two sentences is totally and completely wrong. Plate harness was worn by knights, by their retainers and by everyone else who could possibly get their hands on it precisely because it was not "dangerously impractical" (were these knights morons?) but because it was incredibly effective. It was only abandoned when firearms and attendant infantry tactics reduced this effectiveness to make it not worth the expense - about 200-300 years later. The idea that armoured knights "had to be lifted onto their saddles by booms" is a Nineteenth Century myth, with its origin in a novel by Mark Twain. And far from being unable to rise from their feet if unhorsed, knights in full plate harness could run, jump and literally turn cartwheels in their armour, as modern re-enactors like to demonstrate to crowds today. This kind of elementary blunder would shame an undergraduate history student (who would probably be capable of the quick Google search required to show it is total garbage anyway), but it seems Stark did his research by reading Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or watching Olivier's 1944 movie of Henry V.

Stark ends this monumentally stupid and error-riddled chapter with another of his clumsy excursions into military history in which he paints the crossbow as some kind of unbeatable über-weapon and makes out that the Crusaders were militarily superior to their Muslim enemies in every respect. Again, this is garbage. In a survey of 48 Crusader versus Muslim battles I did a few years ago I found the Crusaders won 26 and the Muslims won 21. The two sides were actually very evenly matched. This is hardly surprising, since for most of the Crusades, both sides used similar weapons, similar armour and, once the Crusaders adopted the very light cavalry troops Stark dismisses, similar troop types and tactics.

Stark Gets It WRONG

Stark's next section attempts to dismiss the idea that the Crusades were "unprovoked" and catalogues the Muslim atrocities and attacks on pilgrims that he claims were the "real" reasons the Crusades were launched. What is notable to any objective observer here is actually how little material he has to work with and how far back he has to go (mostly to the Eighth and Ninth Centuries) to find it. Of course, there were periodic pogroms against Christians in the Islamic world and sometimes Christian pilgrims were harassed. But if we imagine a situation where there were Muslim enclaves in western Europe or large groups of (heavily armed) Islamic pilgrims regularly journeying to, say, central Eleventh Century France, do we really suppose we would not see much the same thing happening?

That aside, these incidents and things like the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009 were the exceptions, not the rule. In addition, they do not feature in the reasons the Crusaders themselves gave for their expeditions in anything but the most peripheral way.

This last point can be extended into a key criticism of Stark's wider thesis as well. If the Crusades were, as he tries to argue, simply a reaction to Muslim encroachment into the European "homeland", why is it we do not see this reflected in any of the enormous amount of material we have on the preaching of the First Crusade or any of the material we have on the motivations of the Crusaders? Did Pope Urban and the other instigators of the Crusades forget to mention this? And if this was the "true" motivation of the Crusaders, then launching a vastly expensive and highly dangerous 2500 mile long-distance military strike into Palestine, of all places, was an extremely weird way to carry it out. It is not like Jerusalem was the religious heartland of Islam (that was Arabia) or even its political centre (that was, if anything, Cairo) or even its intellectual centre (which was Baghdad).

If the real objective was to turn back the teeming tides of fanatical Muslim expansion from the gates of Europe, as Stark tries to make out, then the obvious target was far closer to home: in Spain. Stark even mentions, in passing, that one of Urban's papal predecessors, Alexander II, had already tried to stir the knights of Europe into joining the Spanish Christian kingdoms in attacking Muslim states in Spain back in 1063 , but the result was less than spectacular even by Stark's own fumbling admission:

The response was very modest. A small number of Frankish knights seem to have ventured into Spain and their participation may have helped recover more Muslim territory, but no significant battles were fought. (p. 46)

So we are supposed to believe that, in 1063, a Papal call to meet the the supposedly pressing need to defend a beleaguered Europe from Islamic expansion could only muster up "a small number of Frankish knights", despite a promise of remission of sins for those who embarked, yet just 32 years later it sparked a mass movement, armies in the hundreds of thousands and wars that lasted over 200 years in a land 2500 miles from home? This simply makes zero sense.

Stark is clearly wrong. Plenty of solid scholarly work has been done in the last 60 years on the real motivations behind the Crusading ideal - millennial ideas about the coming apocalypse, idealised visions of Jerusalem not as a place but a mystical concept, the increasing alignment of knighthood with religious ideals, the outward expansion of western Europeans in all directions etc - but there is no evidence that they were ever seen as defensive wars against enemies encroaching on Europe, as the Spanish example clearly demonstrates.

Motivations and Biases

Thankfully not everything in Stark's book is as bad as the biased nonsense that makes up most of its early chapters. In the remainder of the book, which actually dwindles into a heavily abbreviated Wikipedia-style summary of the Crusades' history that adds very little to his thesis, he does manage to correct a few common and pernicious myths about the Crusades and the motivations of the Crusaders. Modern westerners have a distinct difficulty with the idea that people could actually have been genuinely motivated by religious piety - especially the rather alien and distastefully bellicose piety of the Crusades - and cast around for other, more "likely" motivations that make more sense to them. One idea is that the "real" motivation for Pope Urban was not assistance for the Byzantine Empire in regaining the Holy Land, but a crafty attempt by him to win Jerusalem so as to undermine and dominate the Orthodox Church. So it was not about piety, they argue, but a Papal power grab. This popular idea has its origins in Carl Erdmann's influential Die Enstehung des Kreuzzugsgedanken (The Origin of the Idea of Crusade (1935), but it does not stand up to scrutiny. Actually, Urban was as surprised as anyone that his call led to a mass movement - he expected a few thousand knights to answer the call - and had no idea that the First Crusade would be abandoned by the Byzantine emperor and then go on, against all odds, to win the Holy Land on its own. This was certainly not something he planned in advance, though I doubt he would have been unhappy about it if he had lived to see the Crusade, contrary to all reasonable expectation, achieve that objective unassisted.

Stark also manages to debunk another common myth about the Crusades - that they were actually carried out to win copious loot from the rich Levant and that they were undertaken by landless second, third and fourth sons in a massive colonial land snatch. As meticulous recent research by Christopher Tyerman and Jonathan Riley-Smith has shown in great detail, going on Crusade was far more likely to bankrupt the Crusader and his family than win them riches. Despite this, as Tyerman has shown, the same families continued to send Crusaders east for several generations and to wear the ruinous cost of doing so. Clearly something other than riches was motivating these people. The idea of landless second sons heading east to carve out territories to settle may also fit with modern ideas of likely motivations, but it also does not fit the evidence. Apart from some notable exceptions - Bohemond and Tancred and their Normans spring to mind - most of the Crusaders did not go east to settle on new land at all. In fact, the ultimate failure of the Crusader States of Outremer was precisely due to this not happening. Instead of settling in the east, the overwhelming majority of Crusaders served their time in Outremer and then went home. The Crusader States were, from their beginning to their end, desperately short of military manpower for exactly this reason and ultimately collapsed as a result. This is partly because the "landless second, third and fourth sons" idea is also a myth. The men that the Crusades attracted were far from "landless" and the history of the Crusades is riddled with accounts of men who did their "pilgrimage in arms", killed their quota of infidel "paynims" and then had to head home because of the pressing need to get back to their European estates.

As odd and unpalatable as it may be to modern people, the primary motivation of Crusaders seems to have been religious piety. It was usually a form of piety that modern observers find bizarre and was often one informed by myth and a weird idealism that we find hard to reconcile with modern Christianity or with any modern ideas at all, but the evidence is overwhelming that it was genuine and highly motivating.

The few things that Stark manages to get right do not outweigh the fact that his central thesis is nonsense and that his whole argument is contrived, oversimplified and, in places, plain stupid and riddled with basic errors of fact. Stark is not a historian and in this book it really shows. He had some success with his first major book on the history of Christianity, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. At least in that book he stuck more or less to his discipline, sociology, and actually provided some useful insights for real historians from that perspective. In more recent years, however, he has moved from being a self-described agnostic to something he calls "an independent Christian" and his books have become more popularist and, in the process, have veered into pseudo historical apologetics. In The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success he presents a rather bungled and mangled version of the idea that Christianity led to the rise of western science. This is a case that can certainly be argued, and has been set out, with far more accuracy, clarity and finesse by James Hannam's God's Philosophers, as I detail in my review of that excellent book below. But Stark's hamfisted attempt at making this case in his book has left him wide open to attack from biased ideologues of the opposite stamp, most recently in the anti-theist polemicist Richard Carrier's chapter on the subject in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails. I hope to say more about why people like Carrier are no better than Stark in a future post, but the point remains that Stark may or may not be a good sociologist, but he is an appalling historian. And the last person you want producing popularisations of history.

In summary, this book is, despite a few valid points, largely tendentious crap. Its author is a poor researcher who starts with his ideologically-driven conclusion and then cherry picks the evidence to back it up. It is a polemical exercise in apologetics dressed up as a scholarly revision of myths and it deserves little but scorn. Avoid it if you can, or read it with its biases firmly in mind if you must. But take nothing it says at face value.

The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:43:00 +0000

Adrian Goldsworthy, The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009) 531 pages Verdict?: 4/5 A compelling contribution in a closely-contested field.

Those of us interested in the fall of the Roman Empire have had a surfeit of riches over the last five years. In 2005 we had both Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. Then last year we got James J. O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History (reviewed here) and Christopher Kelly's The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome. So just when we could be forgiven for thinking that no more good books on the subject are likely to appear for a while, Roman history heavyweight Adrian Goldsworthy enters the ring with a 500+ page tome that goes the distance with all of the above.

Goldsworthy's book not only draws on the work of the other scholars mentioned, particularly Ward-Perkins, but it is also a counter and response to them as well, and he has Peter Heather in his sights in particular. Heather's book was the first major narrative history of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire seen for many years. The story he tells has all the elements of a ripping yarn - wars, court intrigues, barbarian invasions, battles, plots, assassinations - and, as an unabashed Germanicist myself, I could not help but be compelled by his emphasis on the centrality of the barbarian invasions in the whole affair even while never quite being convinced by his argument. Because Heather's version of the story, simply put, says the Empire did not crumble from within but was crushed from without. According to Heather, the Empire in the late Fourth Century was essentially strong, the Army large and highly effective and things were generally stable. But then the arrival of the Huns triggered a cascade of events that sent large, highly-militarised Germanic peoples crashing into the borders of the Empire. The Eastern half coped largely by diverting these people westward and so the West was eventually overwhelmed and collapsed.

Goldsworthy, however, is having none of this. Noting both Bryan Ward-Perkins and Heather's recent books he writes:

Each of these books is extremely good in its own way, but both are restricted in what was possible to cover. Neither makes much effort to link the empire of the fourth century to the earlier empire. Yet this connection needs to be made if we are to understand more fully what the Roman Empire was like and discern why it did eventually fall. (Goldsworthy, p.21)

He then spends the best part of the first half of his book making precisely this connection and, in the process, calling into serious question the basis of Heather's argument: that the Empire of the Fourth Century was essentially stable, solid and secure.

The Calamitous Third Century or "Who's Emperor Now?"

One of the reasons Heather is able to present the Fourth Century as comparatively stable, solid and secure is that the Third Century was anything but. While Heather and Ward-Perkins both begin their accounts in the late Fourth Century, on the eve of the epoch-changing Battle of Adrianople, Goldsworthy takes his story all the way back to the death of Marcus Aurelius in AD 180. The accession of his feckless and, ultimately, disastrous son Commodus marked the end of the long period of peace and stability of the Antonine Dynasty and the beginning of almost one hundred years of civil war, usurpers, rebellions, fragmentation, and multiple emperors known as "the Crisis of the Third Century" or, more succinctly, "the Military Anarchy". Goldsworthy argues persuasively that what happened to the Western Empire in the Fifth Century can only be understood in the context of the turmoil of 200 years earlier.

And he tells the story of the turmoil well, while at the same time carefully laying the analytical foundations of the argument of the second half of his book. Things were already on a downward slide when Alexander Severus succeeded his bizarre, possibly insane and ultimately assassinated cousin Elagabalus in AD 222. But they went from bad to worse when he was challenged for the throne by Maximinus Thrax and then unceremoniously murdered in AD 235. What followed was pure chaos. In the next 20 years the Roman Empire was to have no less than 20 and possibly as many as 25 different emperors in rapid succession - often several at a time, which is why it is hard to pin down the actual number. In fact, this section of Goldsworthy's book becomes something of a bewildering succession of rising and falling emperors, with sometimes two or three succeeding to the purple only to be assassinated by the Praetorian Guard within a single paragraph.

By AD 258 the chaos had got to the point where the Roman Empire had broken into three independent pieces: the provinces of Gaul, Spain and Britain split from the Empire in the west while the provinces of Syria, Palestine and Egypt formed the "Palmyrene Kingdom" in the east, with the rump of Rome between the two. Aurelian managed to pull things back together during his five year reign before he too was assassinated. He was followed by no less than six more emperors in nine years before some measure of real stability was finally imposed by Diocletian.

As interesting as this rapid cavalcade of emperors, usurpers and assassinations is, Goldsworthy uses it to make pertinent points about the two centuries which followed and which led to the fall of the Empire. Firstly, he notes how barbarian invasions are a symptom of Roman weakness and instability, not a cause of it. Over and over again during the Third Century renewed bouts of Roman civil strife invited larger and deeper raids by barbarians over the Rhine and Danube. This culminated in the massive land and seaborne raids on the eastern Empire by large Gothic and Herulian warbands in the AD 260s that was only finally brought to an end by Claudius II Gothicus in AD 269. That this barbarian reaction to Roman weakness - the Empire was at the lowest ebb of the Third Century crisis at the time - is a clear prefigurement of the later barbarian incursions and settlements in the west in the Fifth Century is a point that Goldsworthy makes very clearly.

Secondly, he notes that the "reforms" which are often said to have stabilised the Empire and brought the "Military Anarchy" to an end actually weakened it in the long run. He points out that the Empire was and had always been a military dictatorship. Augustus had created it out of years of civil war by winning the struggle for military supremacy. But what he created was what Goldsworthy refers to as "a veiled monarchy". Though he was a military dictator who won control by force of arms, Augustus and his First and Second Century successors created a facade whereby they (and everyone else) pretended they ruled by consent, particularly by the consent of the Senate and the Senatorial class. In return, trusted Senators could receive relatively powerful (and rich) provincial governorships and other honours. The whole arrangement worked well and was in some ways inherently stable. The small number of Senators with any real power - ie ones who controlled rich provinces with large armies - could be carefully chosen and the remainder stayed in Rome where they could be carefully watched. The only major instability was the fact that while everyone was pretending that the emperors were not really kings, the whole idea of the succession to the throne-that-was-not-meant-to-be-a-throne was a murky one. Despite this, civil wars were rare in the first two centuries of the Empire and the whole system worked.

But when it broke down in the Third Century the veil was torn off and the Imperial system was exposed as the military dictatorship it had always been. So now it became clear that any Senator who could win the support of enough of the Army or, failing that, who could simply bribe the increasingly mercenary and predatory Praetorian Guard, could become emperor, albeit (in most cases) very briefly. All it took was a reverse in a foreign war against the resurgent Sassanid Persians or the increasingly bold Germanic barbarians and a usurper would appear or the Army or the Guard would mount an assassination and the whole process would repeat itself, seemingly on a shorter and shorter cycle of usurpation, civil war and anarchy.

This cycle became so intense that the primary goal of a Roman emperor was no longer wise rule and stability but mere survival. As the Third Century progressed changes were put in place - changes that were aimed solely at reducing the threat of usurpation. Senators were gradually excluded from military commands, since a Senator with a sizeable portion of the Army at his back was a usurper in waiting. But by giving more and more commands to the lower, equestrian order the emperors simply pushed the opportunity for usurpation down the Roman food chain and actually broadened the numbers of those who took it into their heads to jostle for the purple. The size, and therefore the garrisons, of the provinces were steadily reduced, since this left a governor of any given province with fewer troops with which to mount a challenge. But this in turn weakened the Empire militarily and strategically, since a governor no longer had the military force to deal with serious local threats himself. Incursions over the frontiers by barbarians increased in size and number and only the Emperor had the capacity to deal with them. Cities which had been unfortified for centuries began building walls for protection, both against barbarians and against the next cycle of civil wars.

So while these and similar changes - often called "reforms" - brought the Crisis to an end, Goldsworthy makes a strong case that in the longer run the Empire was weakened and that the seeds of the collapse of the Fifth Century were sown in the chaos of the Third.

The Fourth Century - Recovery?

Thus the greater stability of the Fourth Century, from the long reign of Diocletian onwards, is according to Goldsworthy, something of an illusion. The cycle of constant usurpation and assassination slowed, but it did not stop. The concentration of military power in the hands of the emperor meant civil wars were fewer, but the sheer size of the Empire meant there was always going to be a subordinate somewhere with sufficient troops to mount a challenge. Diocletian recognised that no emperor could protect himself by concentrating power in his hands and still rule a territory as large as Rome's effectively, so he created the tetrachy - four subordinate rulers to whom he could delegate authority and military power. While this seemed fine in theory, in practice the tetrarchs were soon at each others' throats and Diocletian had to come back from cultivating cabbages in retirement to restore order. Constantine solved that problem by eliminating his brother emperors and ruling alone, but his successors showed that it took a powerful and utterly ruthless individual to do this and before long the informal division of the Empire into eastern and western halves became increasingly formal and, eventually, permanent. By the end of the Fourth Century the Eastern and Western Empire were increasingly going their separate ways and this was always going to be bad news for the poorer and less populous West.

Goldsworthy is very cautious about making claims about things for which we have scanty evidence. Grandiose claims have been made about the economy of the later Roman Empire, for example. But he is careful to note that we simply do not have the data to draw any clear conclusions about the role of the economy in the collapse of the West because we simply do not have enough information. That said, it is clear that a divided Empire, however much more manageable it was in the short term, was always going to be less powerful and stable in the long run. And it was always likely that the less prosperous and less populated Western half was going to have the harder time bearing the burdens of a large army and expensive defences against external threats.

But Goldsworthy also makes it clear that the seeds of the final Fall were sown way back in the Third Century, took root in the supposed "recovery" of the less chaotic Fourth Century and bloomed into inevitable disaster in the calamitous Fifth Century. Because the reaction of the emperors of the Fourth Century to the upheaval of the previous era was to centre their rule around one thing: survival. The army was reorganised not simply to defend against invaders and to operate against the Persians, but also to do so without giving generals or provincial subordinates sufficient individual military power to mount a challenge for the purple. Likewise provinces became smaller not with a view to administrative efficiency (they vastly increased the local bureaucracies in fact), but to decrease the power of their administrators. So paranoid were Fourth Century emperors about usurpations that a mere hint of disloyalty could spark purges of whole families, informers and spies thrived on rumours and a good way to get rid of someone you disliked was to imply they had designs on the Imperial throne. Owning anything that so much as looked like Imperial regalia could get you killed, which led to some comical scenes where actual usurpers had to be robed in a cloak of patched-together purple military pennons or crowned with a lady's necklace because having the real items to hand would be too dangerous.

The other way the emperors insulated themselves from the threat of usurpation and assassination was by retreating physically. This not only meant emperors became increasingly remote figures in inaccessible courts, shielded by layers of courtiers, functionaries and court ceremonial and ritual, but also that by the early Fifth Century the Western Emperor had withdrawn to the well-defended but remote city of Ravenna and ran his dwindling Empire through powerful chamberlains and commanders-in-chief. It was only a matter of time before the Western Emperor increasingly became little more than a symbol and figurehead and the powers behind the throne became the real players.

Not with a Bang, But a Whimper

The final third of Goldsworthy's book tells the story of the end - the last 76 years of the Western Roman Empire when things began to unravel and then spiralled increasingly out of control until total collapse was inevitable. The narrative elements are familiar enough from other treatments of the story from Hodgkin to Heather - the irruption of the Vandals, Alans and Sueves over the frozen Rhine in the beginning of the century, the Visigoths and Burgundians going from settled federates to rebels to political players in their own right, the last desperate defence against Attila's raids, the abandonment of Britain and the loss of Africa and, finally, the deposition of little Romulus Augustulus. The strength of Goldsworthy's treatment lies in how he ties this accelerating spiral of loss of control to the trends that had their roots in the "Military Anarchy" of the Third Century.

With the Western Emperor now so insulated from potential usurpation that he was effectively politically marginalised, court functionaries and supreme commanders - the Magister Militae - battled for real power. That is, when they were not fending off the claims of a new wave of usurpers, who appeared to challenge for the dwindling power of a shrinking Western Empire. At several key points the West was too busy fighting civil wars to defend itself and all too often warbands of invaders - themselves usually fairly small - moved into territory unopposed. Some provinces were deliberately or effectively abandoned by the military, such as Britain and northern Gaul. In other cases warbands, such as that of Alaric, were preserved rather than crushed so as to use them as a cheap source of trained troops. Either way, the effect was slow but accelerating loss of territory which, once Africa was lost to a (small) band of Vandals, became impossible to reverse.

Goldsworthy also has some scorn for the idea that the later Western Roman Army was as large as some modern writers make out. He has little time for those who take the units listed in the famous Notitia Dignitatum at face value, arguing that this was simply an idealised listing of units that, by that stage, largely existed on paper. Here Goldsworthy the primarily military historian is worth paying some attention to:

At times, when reading descriptions by modern historians of warfare in this period, it is difficult to avoid the image of Hitler in his last days, planning grand offensives on a map with divisions that had long since ceased to exist. (Goldsworthy, pp. 289-90)

He notes that territories which, according to the Notitia, should have been garrisoned with powerful elite units of comitatenses, such as Spain, are crossed and recrossed by barbarian warbands seemingly at will. The internal struggles of the Western Empire took up what real troops remained, as effective as they were, and the paper units of the Notitia could not defend Britain or retake Africa.

In the end the distractions of civil war and usurpation meant that an already weaker and poorer Western Empire was nibbled at its edges and then from within by barbarians, who had always taken advantage of Roman weakness. Finally the loss of territory meant there was no money and no army to hold even what was left together. The emperorship became so debased that the last puppets who held the title were barely worth deposing. Even the once coveted supreme military title of magister utriusquae militiae became not worth keeping - the Burgundian prince Gundobad rose to this rank, but gave it up to pursue royal power amongst his tribe instead. When the last emperor, the teenager Romulus Augustulus, was finally deposed he was considered so worthless and harmless that he was not even seen as worth killing. He was given a pension and sent to live with his relatives in the country. The once great Empire of the Romans no longer existed because no-one saw it as worth maintaining.

This is an excellent book and one, even though it comes after a succession of excellent books on the subject, that will be hard to top for some time to come. Leaving aside the fact that it is a fine narrative history, Goldworthy brings an outsider's eye to the period, coming to it without the assumptions of a Late Antiquity specialist. But as more of a specialist in the beginnings of the Empire, he brings an interesting perspective to its end. This book is both a reply and, at the same time an equal counterweight to Peter Heather's equally excellent work and I would encourage anyone who read, enjoyed and was convinced by either one to read the other. I think they would profit from the exercise.

Were Chaucer and Gower Druids?

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:10:00 +0000

One of the nice things about using Blogger as the basis for this blog is that I can use Google Analytics to track my traffic, see which posts are the most popular, trace referring sites and list which Google key words brought visitors to what parts of my blog. So far it's clear that the most popular (or, at least, most visited) post so far has been "Agora" and Hypatia - Hollywood Strikes Again, with 1,908 page-views. This is followed by The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman, with 353 page-views, The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History by James J. O'Donnell with 293, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam with 255 and The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages by Chris Wickham with 235. By contrast the least clicked review was Four Books on Fourteenth Century England, with a paltry 37 page-views, though that was after a long posting hiatus.

What's rather more amusing is some of the stuff that people type into Google that leads them to this blog. Not surprisingly the keywords "Armarium Magnum" top the list of search terms (341 page-views). But second on the list is "gongfermours", with 17. For those of you who weren't among the 37 people who read that Four Books on Fourteenth Century England post, a "gongfermour" was a guy in Medieval England who had the unenviable job of cleaning out latrines and cesspits. Ian Mortimer mentions them in his book The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England and I mentioned them briefly in my review of it. This means that a whopping 17 of the 37 people who viewed that post went there because they were Googling English toilet cleaners of the Middle Ages. Why? Who knows ...

But the more amusing key word searches tend to be found towards the bottom of the list. I can see how "ostrogoth inheritance western europe" would bring you to my blog or even "streets magnum market description" (I think they were after information on the ice cream), but why "dominic sandbrook irish"? The one that tickled me the most however was "witch kind of animal a 350 magnum can kill" - who said gun nuts were illiterate? This is closely followed by the person who asked Google "why did geoffrey chaucer have such a weird beard?". But the top prize has to go to "were chaucer and gower druids?". In case that searcher ever comes back I think I can answer that: NO.

That anyone would think Chaucer was a druid is kooky enough, but the fact that they thought John Gower might have been one is bizarre. In fact, that someone who is into "druids" even knew who Gower was is very odd. Still, the depths of pseudo historical kookiness never cease to amaze me. Kooky Scottish loon, Gordon Strachan, got in the news this week as the "expert" whose claims form the basis for a new documentary called And Did Those Feet which claims, yes, that Jesus visited England. And, of course, studied with the druids. This is typical crappy Holy Blood Holy Grail-style bonkers pseudo history, but it's amazing to see how happily the media reports it as though it's much the same as any real research by a real historian. No wonder the general public's grasp of history is so whacko.

The story got a mention on the Dawkins.net Forum where, to their credit, most of the posters called shenanigans. One, however, tried to come to the defence of the "Jesus as Teenaged Backpaper in Glastonbury" theory, largely by talking up the "ground breaking research" of one Graham Phillips. A quick survey of Mr Phillips' literary output will quickly give anyone with the ghost of a clue an indication of how "ground breaking" his crap actually is. This led to a discussion of what elements a truly kooky theory needs to have:

Ah, but as the guys in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum make clear, any mushbrain theory has to involve (i) Templars (of course), (ii) Masons (same thing, according to the mushbrains), (iii) Druids (ditto), (iv) the Grail ("bloodline" and/or cup) and, preferably (v) the Ark of the Covenant. Mix in some Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, the Assassins, hidden messages in paintings, some "Symbology" (never mind that there is no such discipline - it's in The Da Vinci Code) and try to work in the Cathars, Montsegur, the Rosslyn Chapel and Rennes-le-Chateau if possible. An ancient Egyptian angle, preferably involving Akhenaten, is nice as well. Stir in some mysterious documents in obscure archives, vaguely referenced so no-one can check your facts (the Vatican Archives are great for dramatic effect), add a title with words like "Mystery" and "Hidden" and "Secret" and "Conspiracy", put a blurb by some other kook on the cover ("Even more sensational than my last ten books!" - Graham Phillips) and serve to an endless market of gullible clowns. A recipe for kook success.

This gave me an idea for next year's Armarium Magnum Essay Competition. Entrants will have to write a detailed summary of a Holy Blood/Graham Phillips-style kooky pseudo historical thesis that (i) combines as many of the usual elements as possible in a new way, (ii) could be seen as plausible by people with no critical analysis skills and (iii) is funny. That gives you all a whole year to start dreaming up whacko pseudo historical conspiracy theories and gives me plenty of time to think up a prize that is both desirable and appropriate.

Now I better go because there's an albino monk at the door who wants to talk to me about something or other.

The Armarium Magnum Essay Competition - The Winner!

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:12:00 +0000

We have a winner! As discussed below, when I ordered James Hannam's God's Philosophers from Amazon I somehow managed to end up with two copies. So I offered one as the prize in the inaugural and now (probably) annual "Armarium Magnum Essay Competition" with the book to be awarded to the best entry tackling the topic:

"Christianity caused the Dark Ages: Discuss"

So I am now pleased to announce that the winner for 2009 is Dr Graham Budd for the excellent discussion of the topic that I will now post for you all. Congratulations Graham - the book will soon be winging its way north hopefully in time for some Christmas reading.

The question of what caused what is one of the most compelling and yet hardest to answer in the study of history. Did the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand cause the First World War to break out? Did the wreck of the White Ship cause a 12^th century civil war in England – or even the English Reformation? What caused the Roman Republic to fail? The mere laying out of the facts does not always reveal the ineluctable thread of fate that made things be as they are.

Yet in the case of the Dark Ages, this vapour of uncertainty condenses into a drop of clarity. It is quite clear that the Dark Ages were brought into being by Christianity. On the other hand, what this means in terms of how history had evolved up to that point is trivial. Its relevance for subsequent history is, however, less clear.

The Dark Ages is a conveniently flexible time period that dates, everyone agrees, from some time after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. What this actually means is, however, uncertain. Did the Empire effectively fall in the third century, as Goldsworthy (in In the name of Rome) would have it? Or the sack of Rome in 410? Can we take the famous date in 476 as its start, when the last Emperor was deposed? Or the fall of the Kingdom of Soissons in 486? Or 610,when Heraclius de-latinised the East? Was it even the period of time after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire in 888 (rounded to 900), as Baronius wrote in 1602? And if its start date is doubtful, what of its even more extensible end? The coronation of Charlegmane in 800? The long series of Church reforms beginning in 1046 with Clement II? The awakening of the Renaissance at the end of the fourteenth century? The fall of Constantinople, the invention of the printing press, the death of England’s Richard III or the nailing of Luther’s Theses? Such confusion – it is possible, after all, to choose a start date after an end date from the above morass – simply signposts the difficulties surrounding the periodization of history. Which is why professional historians tend not to, of course.

The above confusion suggests conceptual confusion too, and indeed this is just what we find. Petrarch seems to have been one of the first to talk of an age of “darkness”, in which he regarded himself as still living. Here he longs for the coming radiant age when the present (1343) darkness will have been dispersed:

…Michi degere uitam

Impositum uaria rerum turbante procella.

At tibi fortassis, si - quod mens sperat et optat -

Es post me uictura diu, meliora supersunt

Secula: non omnes ueniet Letheus in annos

Iste sopor! Poterunt discussis forte tenebris

Ad purum priscumque iubar remeare nepotes.

(Africa IX, 451-7).

And yet Baronius, who wrote of the “Dark Age” itself (“saeculum obscurum”) as late as 1602, placed it in the 10^th century.

Such as it is, the “Dark Ages” emerged with these two Christian ecclesiastics, and it is in this sense alone that Christianity caused them to come into being. With such different datings, it is clear they are talking about different things. For Petrarch, a romantic (one can for once use the word in a literal sense) longing for the cultural achievements of the classical era made him think of the long epoch of impoverished latin as indeed an age of darkness. And for Baronius, he is bemoaning not the quality, but the quantity, of writing. In this latter sense, there are really two Dark Ages; the period of time from around the middle of the fifth century to around 800, and during the tenth century (or a single one punctuated by the Carolingian achievements). Yet these distinct (and yet, note, both literary) conceptions were to be conflated and heaved over into the religious realm – a move that both Baronius and Petrarch would have strenuously resisted. Indeed, it seems that Baronius wrote specifically to refute them – the Lutheran Magdeburg Centuries had painted the centuries from the 5^th onwards as an inexorably accumulating heap of ecclesiastical corruptions.

Of course, there are many ironies here. The 19^th century Romantic movement, disillusioned with its own age of progress, as Petrarch was with his, was to look back to his time as one free from care and the oppression of industrialization. And Baronius termed the “Dark Age” in a work responding to and refuting the calumnies heaped on the ages by his Protestant counterparts.

Let us be clear. The fall of the Roman empire was a long and drawn out death agony, revolving around economics and the rise of the German influence in the army; the attacks of the Persian Sassanids in the east, and a thousand other factors (or at least 210, in any case). After its second century peak, the Western Empire slipped jerkily into ruin, during which time Christianity had limited influence. Despite Gibbon’s concerns of the weakening of the martial spirit by the lily-livered Christians, no such case can be made sensibly today, and as we all know, the Eastern Empire lasted for another millennium. This is not to say, of course, that without Christianity things would have turned out “the same”. Of course the religion of the empire was a factor in the events, just like the make-up of the army, the spread of the Justinian plague, or any other of the features of the age. But when one asks the counter-factual question “if the empire had not been Christian, would it have survived?” one immediately sees that the answer to this question is extremely unlikely to be “yes” The Christianity of the empire was one factor among many other much more important features, of which, to be Marxist for a moment, the economic ones were probably at least as important as any others.

What, then, of subsequent events? Weren’t the “Dark Ages” a black nightmare for nightmare that took centuries to emerge from? Of clerical power and domination, cruel social and religious oppression, backwardness in thought and science and technology? Of ignorance and superstition, torture and witch hunts and burnings? And yet, influenced still by nineteenth century romanticism, don’t we paradoxically picture this medieval period as the ideal society, to which all fantasy novels tend, in some sense?

It is fair, I think, to see the early medieval period in the west as a post-collapse society; where survival became paramount over poetry. But as soon as the show was on the road again, ie when the Carolingians took over from the fratricidal Merovingians, a great burst of enthusiasm took hold. “If only there were many who would follow the illustrious desire of your intent," Alcuin wrote to Charlemagne, "perchance a new, nay, a more excellent Athens might be founded in Frankland ; for our Athens, being en-nobled with the mastership of Christ the Lord, would surpass all the wisdom of the studies of the Academy.” Under Charlemagne, the Europeans looked to the ancients for inspiration, but hoped to surpass them. Such hopes of a young culture recalls America or even modern day China, with its bustling forward-looking determination. These particular hopes were not to last, but they laid the ground for the high middle ages of 1100-1300, one of the most remarkable periods in European history. The fact that 9th century grammar was not up to Ciceronian standards is perhaps forgivable under the circumstances.

What is striking in these patterns of waxing and waning in European culture is how the fortunes of the papacy swing up and down exactly in rhythm. Papal temporal power began to grow significantly in the 8th century with the founding of the papal states, and the cooperation between the Carolingians and the papacy to oust the Lombards from Italy, and this relationship was famously cemented when Leo III crowned Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800. But this relationship was not to last, as Charlegmagne’s empire crumbled after his death; and not even the most robust defender of the Papacy can claim the 10th century as the height of its moral or temporal influence. But the papacy had (more or less) recovered its poise by the time of the election of Gregory VII in 1073 (albeit under rather dubious circumstances). As a vigorous Europe swung into a period of unprecedented expansion on all fronts, so too were the central authority and administrative effectiveness of the church expanding, culminating in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and the pontificate of Innocent III. And as Europe slipped out of the High middle ages into the crises of the 14th and 15th centuries – the familiar series of plagues, famines and wars – so too the papacy declined again, into the Babylonian captivity and the Great Schism.

From a structural point of view, then, the fortunes of the church, at least as measured at Rome, moved in step with the rest of Europe, and not in opposition to it. One should not make too much of this pattern – it says much about the relatively limited power of the Papacy even at its height that it was still prey to the same broad trends that affected the rest of European society, and it is hard to make the case that this co-evolution implies some dependency of society as a whole on the fortunes of Rome.

If one may judge that the fortunes of Rome are of less importance in the provinces than other religious features, one might consider the spread of monasticism in this era. Starting from the late tenth-century Cluniac reforms, which led to the foundation of the Cistercians in the late 11th century; and throughout the high middle ages, western monasticism flourished and differentiated in a remarkable fashion, spreading land reform and technology as it did so. Nor was the medieval church a bystander to the endemic feudal violence of the time: the peace and truce of God movements espoused by the Cluniacs and others were at least a partial attempt at non-violent resolution of conflicts.

What then, of ”progress” during this progress? In his 2006 Faraday Lecture, Ronald Numbers writes ” Largely I was bemoaning the fact that after years, decades, of research by historians in the history of science and religion, the same old myths that we have corrected time and time again continue to have a life of their own and to be widely known among the public. One of the biggest obstacles, I think, to improving the public understanding of science and religion in the present is to clear up the myths that still linger from the past.”

It is indeed extraordinary that the idea of the medieval church suppressing science is so entrenched that that it apparently does not need any evidence to support it; and naturally enough, the non-medieval Galileo is the only example seriously proposed.

This is not to say, of course, that science would not have eventually emerged without the presence of Christianity in the western world – one can apply counterfactuals here too. And perhaps it might be argued that certain features of the western mindset in the middle ages – their strong adherence to respect for past authors (which was not, however, as slavish as is popularly made out) , for example – were not entirely conducive to the development of an aggressive empirical method. But against this can be set the reasonable idea that the idea of ”free thought” is a convenient mirage that ignores the strong influence of both ideology and fads in practice in modern scientific practice.

Nor is it reasonable to draw a circle around a perhaps rather small group of natural philosophers – Abelard of Bath, Albert Magnus, Grosseteste etc etc, and claim that their ”enlightened” views necessarily typified that of the church as a whole, in the same way that one cannot take Caccini’s attack on Galileo from the pulpit in 1614 as representative either.

In the grand scheme of things, medieval natural philosophy undoubtedly played a smaller part in society than modern science does today – as the present climate change debate witnesses. But to condemn the middle ages for this lack is about as sensible to condemn them for their lack of knowledge of nuclear energy or oscilloscopes. No societies before the industrial revolution managed the knack of combining rapid economic growth and stability with rising populations and rising living standards, a set of circumstances that gave rise to the technological breakthroughs of today, which in their scope utterly dwarf the achievements of medieval societies (one thinks of the impact of electricity, or penicillin, for example). Yet even during this period of relatively glacial progress, medieval society in its way had some remarkable technical achievements, which perhaps can be summed up best by reference to the gothic cathedral; solar observatories as well as aesthetic and architectural triumphs.

The medieval world was not just an innovative one, it was a profoundly practical one – taking up other technologies as diverse as wheelbarrows and watermills that were known to the ancients, and lustily exploiting them to their full. Just as the requirements of modern day warfare have spawned many new technologies, so the requirements of due religious observance (from the right dates to the right buildings) gave rise to similar satellite achievements. What has also become increasingly obvious is that the roots of the scientific revolution – another dubious periodization of history – can clearly be traced well back into the preceding centuries. Galileo may have been the greatest scientist of his age; but his achievements in mechanics and the mathematical treatment of nature were clearly anticipated by medeivals such as Oresme and the Oxford Calculators; achievements that were known and taught all the way through to the 17th century. And so the argument that it was uniquely Christianity that suppressed the growth of science, even though modern science uniquely emerged within a christian society is again to present a profound and powerful counterfactual case: and one that is very hard to answer. If Christianity stopped science, why did modern science develop in Christendom?

Let me conclude. The whole idea of a dark age – with its implied anthesis of an age of light – is ambiguous, as it can refer to a lack of knowledge of, as well as within, a society. No-one can doubt that the period of time from about 500 to at least 800 was a period of turmoil and loss in Europe. But as christian society slowly re-established itself, drawing on the resources that had almost always been preserved by the monasteries, it made strenuous efforts not only to recover the past – the essentially backward-looking stance of all romantic movements – but also to surpass it. Perhaps Dorothy L. Sayers was not after all exaggerating when she wrote of ”That new-washed world of clear sun and glittering colour which we call the Middle Age (as though it were middle-aged) but which has perhaps a better right than the blown rose of the Renaissance to be called the Age of Re-birth". If any age can claim to lay claim to being the Age of Reason, the core of the middle ages, when church and society in the west were at their strongest, is surely it.

God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:47:00 +0000

James Hannam, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science

(Icon Books, 2009) 320 pages
Verdict?: A superb and long overdue popular treatment of Medieval science 5/5

My interest in Medieval science was substantially sparked by one book. Way back in 1991, when I was an impoverished and often starving post-graduate student at the University of Tasmania, I found a copy of Robert T. Gunther's Astrolabes of the World - 598 folio pages of meticulously catalogued Islamic, Medieval and Renaissance astrolabes with photos, diagrams, star lists and a wealth of other information. I found it, appropriately and not coincidentally, in Michael Sprod's Astrolabe Books - up the stairs in one of the beautiful old sandstone warehouses that line Salamanca Place on Hobart's waterfront. Unfortunately the book cost $200, which at that stage was the equivalent to what I lived on for a month. But Michael was used to selling books to poverty-stricken students, so I went without lunch, put down a deposit of $10 and came back weekly for several months to pay off as much as I could afford and eventually got to take it home, wrapped in brown paper in a way that only Hobart bookshops seem to bother with anymore. There are few pleasures greater than finally getting your hands on a book you've been wanting to own and read for a long time.

I had another experience of that particular pleasure when I received my copy (copies actually - see below) of James Hannam's God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science a couple of weeks ago. For years I've been toying with the idea of creating a website on Medieval science and technology to bring the recent research on the subject to a more general audience and to counter the biased myths about it being a Dark Age of irrational superstition. Thankfully I can now cross that off my to do list, because Hannam's superb book has done the job for me and in fine style.

The Christian Dark Age and Other Hysterical Myths

One of the occupational hazards of being an atheist and secular humanist who has the lack of common sense to hang around on atheist discussion boards is to encounter a staggering level of historical illiteracy. I like to console myself that many of the people on such boards have come to their atheism via the study of science and so, even if they are quite learned in things like geology and biology, usually have a grasp of history stunted at about high school level. I generally do this because the alternative is to admit that the average person's grasp of history and how history is studied is so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing.

So, alongside the regular airings of the hoary old myth that the Bible was collated at the Council of Nicea, the tedious internet-based "Jesus never existed!" nonsense or otherwise intelligent people spouting pseudo historical garbage that would make even Dan Brown snort in derision, the myth that the Catholic Church caused the Dark Ages and the Medieval Period was a scientific wasteland is regularly wheeled, creaking, into the sunlight for another trundle around the arena.

The myth goes that the Greeks and Romans were wise and rational types who loved science and were on the brink of doing all kinds of marvellous things (inventing full-scale steam engines is one example that is usually, rather fancifully, invoked) until Christianity came along, banned all learning and rational thought and ushered in the Dark Ages. Then an iron-fisted theocracy, backed by a Gestapo-style Inquisition, prevented any science or questioning inquiry from happening until Leonardo da Vinci invented intelligence and the wondrous Renaissance saved us all from Medieval darkness. The online manifestations of this curiously quaint but seemingly indefatigable idea range from the touchingly clumsy to the utterly hysterical, but it remains one of those things that "everybody knows" and permeates modern culture. A recent episode of Family Guy had Stewie and Brian enter a futuristic alternative world where, it was explained, things were so advanced because Christianity didn't destroy learning, usher in the Dark Ages and stifle science. The writers didn't see the need to explain what Stewie meant - they assumed everyone understood.

About once every 3-4 months on forums like RichardDawkins.net we get some discussion where someone invokes the old "Conflict Thesis" and gets in the usual ritual kicking of the Middle Ages as a benighted intellectual wasteland where humanity was shackled to superstition and oppressed by cackling minions of the Evil Old Catholic Church. The hoary standards are brought out on cue. Giordiano Bruno is presented as a wise and noble martyr for science instead of the irritating mystical New Age kook he actually was. Hypatia is presented as another such martyr and the mythical Christian destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria is spoken of in hushed tones, despite both these ideas being garbage. The Galileo Affair is ushered in as evidence of a brave scientist standing up to the unscientific obscurantism of the Church, despite that case being as much about science as it was about Scripture.

And, almost without fail, someone digs up a graphic (see below), which I have come to dub "THE STUPIDEST THING ON THE INTERNET EVER", and to flourish it triumphantly as though it is proof of something other than the fact that most people are utterly ignorant of history and unable to see that something called "Scientific Advancement" can't be measured, let alone plotted on a graph.

The Stupidest Thing on the Internet Ever
Behold its glorious idiocy!
(Courtesy of an drooling moron called Jim Walker. Take a bow Jim!)

It's not hard to kick this nonsense to pieces, especially since the people presenting it know next to nothing about history and have simply picked this bullshit up from other websites and popular books and collapse as soon as you hit them with some hard evidence. I love to totally stump them by asking them to present me with the name of one - just one - scientist burned, persecuted or oppressed for their science in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any. They usually try to crowbar Galileo back into the Middle Ages, which is amusing considering he was a contemporary of Descartes. When asked why they have failed to produce any such scientists given the Church was apparently so busily oppressing them, they often resort to claiming that the Evil Old Church did such a good job of oppression that everyone was too scared to practice science. By the time I produce a laundry list of Medieval scientists - like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa - and ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages without molestation from the Church, my opponents have usually run away to hide and scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong.

The Origin of the Myths

How the myths that led to the creation of "THE STUPIDEST THING ON THE INTERNET EVER" and its associated nonsense came about is well documented in several recent books on the the history of science, but Hannam wisely tackles it in the opening pages of his book, since it would be likely to form the basis for many general readers to be suspicious of the idea of a Medieval foundation for modern science. A festering melange of Enlightenment bigotry, Protestant papism-bashing, French anti-clericism and Classicist snobbery have all combined to make the Medieval period a by-word for backwardness, superstition and primitivism and the opposite of everything the average person associates with science and reason. Hannam sketches how polemicists like Thomas Huxley, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, all with their own anti-Christian axes to grind, managed to shape the still current idea that the Middle Ages was devoid of science and reason. And how it was not until real historians bothered to question the polemicists through the work of early pioneers in the field like Pierre Duhem, Lynn Thorndike and the author of my astrolabe book, Robert T. Gunther, that the distortions of the axe-grinders began to be corrected by proper, unbiased research. That work has now been completed by the current crop of modern historians of science like David C. Lindberg, Ronald Numbers and Edward Grant.

In the academic sphere at least the "Conflict Thesis" of a historical war between science and theology has been long since overturned. It is very odd that so many of my fellow atheists are clinging so desperately to a long-dead position that was only ever upheld by amateur Nineteenth Century polemicists and not the careful research of recent objective peer reviewed historians. This is strange behaviour for people who like to label themselves "rationalists". I'll leave others to ponder how "rational" it is.

Speaking of rationalism, the critical factor that the myths obscure is precisely how rational intellectual inquiry in the Middle Ages was. While dinosaurs like Charles Freeman continue to lumber along claiming that Christianity killed the use of reason, the fact is that thanks to Clement of Alexandria and Augustine's encouragement of the use of pagan philosophy and Boethius' translations of works of logic by Aristotle and others, reason and rational inquiry was one intellectual jewel that survived the catastrophic collapse of the Western Roman Empire and was preserved through the Dark Ages that resulted from that collapse. Edward Grant's superb God and Reason in the Middle Ages details this with characteristic vigor, but Hannam gives a good summary of this key element in his first four chapters.

What makes his version of the story more accessible than Grant's rather drier approach is the way he tells it though the lives of key people of the time - Gerbert of Aurillac, Anselm, Abelard, William of Conches, Adelard of Bath etc. Some reviewers of Hannam's book seem to have found this approach a little distracting, since the sheer volume of names and mini-biographies could make it feel like we are learning a small amount about a vast number of people. But given the breadth of Hannam's subject, this is fairly inevitable and the semi-biographical approach is certainly more accessible than a stodgy abstract analysis of the evolution of Medieval thought.

Hannam also gives an excellent precis of the Twelfth Century Renaissance which, contrary to popular perception and to "the Myth", was the real period in which ancient learning flooded back into western Europe. Far from being resisted by the Church, it was churchmen who sought this knowledge out amongst the Muslims and Jews of Spain and Sicily. And far from being resisted or banned by the Church, it was embraced and formed the basis of the syllabus in that other great Medieval contribution to the world: the universities that were starting to appear across Christendom.

God and ReasonThe enshrining of reason at the heart of inquiry and analysis in Medieval scholarship combined with the influx of "new" Greek and Arabic learning to stimulate a veritable explosion of intellectual activity in Europe from the Twelfth Century onwards. It was as though the sudden stimulus of new perspectives and new ways of looking at the world fell on the fertile soil of a Europe that was, for the first time in centuries, relatively peaceful, prosperous, outward-looking and genuinely curious.

This is not to say that more conservative and reactionary forces did not have misgivings about some of the new areas of inquiry, especially in relation to how philosophy and speculation about the natural world and the cosmos could have implications for accepted theology. Hannam is careful not to pretend that there was no resistance to the flowering of the new thinking and inquiry but - unlike the perpetuators of "the Myth" - he gives that resistance due consideration rather than pretending it was the whole story. In fact, the conservatives and reactionaries' efforts were usually rear-guard actions and were in almost every case totally unsuccessful in curtailing the inevitable flood of ideas that began to flow from the universities. Once it began, it was effectively unstoppable.

In fact, some of the efforts by the theologians to put some limits on what could and could not be accepted via the "new learning" actually had the effect of stimulating inquiry rather than constricting it. The "Condemnations of 1277" attempted to assert certain things that could not be stated as "philosophically true", particularly things that put limits on divine omnipotence. This had the interesting effect of making it clear that Aristotle had, actually, got some things badly wrong - something Thomas Aquinas emphasised in his famous and highly influential Summa Theologicae:

The condemnations and Thomas's Summa Theologicae had created a framework within which natural philosophers could safely pursue their studies. The framework .... laid down the the principle that Gad had decreed laws of nature but was not bound by them. Finally, it stated that Aristotle was sometimes wrong. The world was not 'eternal according to reason' and 'finite according to faith'. It was not eternal, full stop. And if Aristotle could be wrong about something that he regarded as completely certainly certain, that threw his whole philosophy into question. The way was clear for the natural philosophers of the Middle Ages to move decisively beyond the achievements of the Greeks.

(Hannam, pp. 104-105)

Which is precisely what they proceeded to do. Far from being a stagnant dark age, as the first half of the Medieval Period (500-1000 AD) certainly was, the period from 1000 to 1500 AD actually saw the most impressive flowering of scientific inquiry and discovery since the time of the ancient Greeks, by far eclipsing the Roman and Hellenic Eras in every respect. With Occam and Duns Scotus taking the critical approach to Aristotle further than Aquinas' more cautious approach, the way was open for the Medieval scientists of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries to question, examine and test the perspectives the translators of the Twelfth Century had given them, with remarkable effects:

(I)n the fourteenth century medieval thinkers began to notice that there was something seriously amiss with all aspects of Aristotle's natural philosophy, and not just those parts of it that directly contradicted the Christian faith. The time had come when medieval scholars could begin their own quest to advance knowledge .... striking out in new directions that neither the Greeks nor the Arabs ever explored. Their first breakthrough was to combine the two subjects of mathematics and physics in a way that had not been done before.

(Hannam, p. 174)

The story of that breakthrough and the remarkable Oxford scholars who achieved it and thus laid the foundations of true science - the "Merton Calculators" - probably deserves a book in itself, but Hannam's account certainly does them justice and forms a fascinating section of his work. The names of these pioneers of the scientific method - Thomas Bradwardine, Thomas Bradwardine, William Heytesbury, John Dumbleton and the delightfully named Richard Swineshead - deserve to be better known. Unfortunately, the obscuring shadow of "the Myth" means that they continue to be ignored or dismissed even in quite recent popular histories of science. Bradwardine's summary of the key insight these men uncovered is one of the great quotes of early science and deserves to be recognised as such:

(Mathematics) is the revealer of every genuine truth ... whoever then has the effrontery to pursue physics while neglecting mathematics should know from the start that he will never make his entry through the portals of wisdom.

(Quoted in Hannam, p. 176)

These men were not only the first to truly apply mathematics to physics but also developed logarithmic functions 300 years before John Napier and the Mean Speed Theorem 200 years before Galileo. The fact that Napier and Galileo are credited with discovering things that Medieval scholars had already developed is yet another indication of how "the Myth" has warped our perceptions of the history of science.

Similarly, the physics and astronomy of Jean Buridan and Nicholas Oresme were radical and profound, but generally unknown to the average reader. Buridan was one of the first to compare the movements of the cosmos to those of another Medieval innovation - the clock. The image of a clockwork universe which was to serve scientists well into our own era began in the Middle Ages. And Oresme's speculations about a rotating Earth shows that Medieval scholars were happy to contemplate what were (to them) fairly outlandish ideas to see if they might work - Oresme found that this particular idea actually worked quite well. These men are hardly the products of a "dark age" and their careers are conspicuously free of any of the Inquistitors and threats of burnings so fondly and luridly imagined by the fevered proponents of "the Myth".

Galileo,
Inevitably

As mentioned above, no manifestation of "the Myth" is complete without the Galileo Affair being raised. The proponents of the idea that the Church stifled science and reason in the Middle Ages have to wheel him out, because without him they actually have absolutely zero examples of the Church persecuting anyone for anything to do with inquiries into the natural world. The common conception that Galileo was persecuted for being right about heliocentrism is a total oversimplification of a complex business, and one that ignores the fact that Galileo's main problem was not simply that his ideas disagreed with scriptural interpretation but also with the science of the time. Contrary to the way the affair is usually depicted, the real sticking point was the fact that the scientific objections to heliocentrism at the time were still powerful enough to prevent its acceptance. Cardinal Bellarmine made it clear to Galileo in 1616 that if those scientific objections could be overcome then scripture could and would be reinterpreted. But while the objections still stood the Church, understandably, was hardly going to overturn several centuries of exegesis for the sake of a flawed theory. Galileo agreed to only teach heliocentrism as a theoretical calculating device, then promptly turned around and, in typical style, taught it as fact. Thus his prosecution by the Inquistion in 1633.

Hannam gives the context for all this in suitable detail in a section of the book that also explains how the Humanism of the "Renaissance" led a new wave of scholars to not only seek to completely idolise and emulate the ancients, but to turn their backs on the achievements of recent scholars like Duns Scotus, Bardwardine, Buridan and Orseme. Thus many of their discoveries and advances were either ignored and forgotten (only to be rediscovered independently later) or scorned but quietly appropriated. The case for Galileo using the work of Medieval scholars without acknowledgement is fairly damning. In their eagerness to dump Medieval "dialectic" and ape the Greeks and Romans - which made the "Renaissance" a curiously conservative and rather retrograde movement in many ways - genuine developments and advancements by Medieval scholars were discarded. That a thinker of the calibre of Duns Scotus could end up being known mainly as the etymology of the word "dunce" is deeply ironic.

As good as the final part of the book is and as worthy as a fairly detailed analysis of the realities of the Galileo Affair clearly is, I must say the last four or five chapters of Hannam's book did feel as though they had bitten off a bit more than they could chew. I know I was able to follow his argument quite easily, but I am very familiar with the material and with the argument he is making. I suspect that those for whom this depiction of the "Renaissance" and the idea of Galileo as nothing more than a persecuted martyr to genius might find it gallops at too rapid a pace to really carry them along. Myths, after all, have a very weighty inertia.

At least one reviewer seems to have found the weight of that inertia too hard to resist, though perhaps she had some other baggage weighing her down. Nina Power writing in New Humanist magazine certainly seems to have had some trouble ditching the idea of the Church persecuting Medieval scientists:

Just because persecution wasn’t as bad as it could have been, and just because some thinkers weren’t always the nicest of people doesn’t mean that interfering in their work and banning their ideas was justifiable then or is justifiable now.

Well, no-one said it was justifiable now and simply explaining how it came about then and why it was not as extensive or of the nature that most people assume is not "justifying" it anyway - it is correcting a pseudo historical misunderstanding. That said, Power does have something of a point when she notes "Hannam’s characterisation of (Renaissance) thinkers as “incorrigible reactionaries” who “almost managed to destroy 300 years of progress in natural philosophy” is at odds with his more careful depiction of those that came before." This is not, however, because that characterisation is wrong but because the length and scope of the book really do not give him room to do this fairly complex and, to many, radical idea justice.

My only criticisms of the book are really quibbles. The sketch of the "agrarian revolution" of the Dark Ages described in Chapter One, which saw technology like the horse-collar and the mouldboard plough adopted and water and wind power harnessed to greatly increase production in previously unproductive parts of Europe is generally sound. But it does place rather too much emphasis on two elements in Lynn White's thesis in his seminal Medieval Technology and Social Change - the importance of the stirrup and the significance of the horse collar. As important and ground-breaking as White's thesis was in 1962, more recent analysis has found some of his central ideas dubious. The idea that the stirrup was as significant for the rise of shock heavy cavalry as White claimed is now pretty much rejected by military historians and his claims about how this cavalry itself caused the beginnings of the feudal system were dubious to begin with. And the idea that Roman traction systems were as inefficient as White's sources make out has also been seriously questioned. Hannam seems to accept White's thesis wholesale, which is not really justified given it has been reassessed for over 40 years now.

On at rather more personal note, as a humanist and atheist myself, there is a rather snippy little aside on page 212 where Hannam sneers that "non-believers have further muddied the waters by hijacking the word 'humanist' to mean a softer version of 'atheist'." Sorry, but just as not all humanists are atheists (as Hannam himself well knows) so not all atheists are humanists (as anyone hanging around on some of the more vitriolically anti-theist sites and forums will quickly realise). So there is no "non-believer" plot to "hijack" the word "humanist". Those of us who are humanists are humanists - end of story. And "atheism" does not need any "softening" anyway.

That aside, this is a marvellous book and a brilliant, readable and accessible antidote to "the Myth". It should be on the Christmas wish-list of any Medievalist, science history buff or anyone who has a misguided friend who still thinks the nights in the Middle Ages were lit by burning scientists. But if you don't want to wait that long, keep in mind that I am still giving away a free copy as part of my Armarium Magnum Essay Competition. Entries close at the end of November.

The Amarium Magnum Essay Competition

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 08:42:00 +0000

Yesterday I received a package from Amazon.co.uk which I knew would be my copy of James Hannam's long-awaited God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. On opening the package, however, I found to my surprise not one but two copies of Hannam's book. It seems that in my feverish excitement at finally getting my hands on a copy I accidentally ordered two copies rather than one. Now, I certainly don't begrudge the vast sums of money James is probably making from his sky-rocketing sales and I'm happy to add a few more of my hard-earned dollars to the pit of cash in which I imagine he rolls around each day. But as nice as the book is (yes, a review is coming soon) I don't really need two copies on my already crowded shelves.

So I've decided to make the spare copy the prize in the inaugural Armarium Magnum Essay Competition. The winner will not only have their winning essay published here on the blog to the admiration of all, but will also get a copy of Hannam's fine hard-cover volume winging its way to them in the mail.

The topic if the competition's essays will be:

"Christianity caused the Dark Ages: Discuss"

Entries can be up to 7,000 words and should be submitted by e-mail to this address by November 30th, 2009. All readers of this blog are eligible, with the exception of those whose names are "James Hannam" and who recently wrote a book on Medieval science. Good luck.

Four Books on Fourteenth Century England

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 03:28:00 +0000

Dan Jones, Summer of Blood: The Peasants Revolt of 1381 (HarperPress, 2009) 288 pages
Verdict?: Excellent popular history 4/5

Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
(The Bodley Head, 2008) 341 pages
Verdict?: A novel guide to social history 4/5

Peter Ackroyd, Chaucer
(Vintage, 2005) 144 pages
Verdict?: An excellent brief biography 4/5

Peter Ackroyd, The Clerkenwell Tales
(Vintage, 2004) 224 pages
Verdict?: Diverting fictional time-travel 3.5/5

Some readers of this blog will already know that many moons ago I did a Masters Degree in Medieval literature, with a thesis on the Fourteenth Century English poet John Gower's Confessio Amantis. I chose Gower's poem partly because it was rarely studied (and I didn't think the academic world needed yet another thesis on Chaucer) but substantially because of the challenge of tackling a work which was almost universally, and wrongly, regarded as "dull". The thing that struck me about the Confessio was that, while it's been a neglected work for the last 200 years or so, for the 400 years before that it was a beloved best-seller. Given that the late Fourteenth Century was anything but "dull", I set out to find out about the social milieu that produced this poem and who its intended audience may have been.

In doing this I was following the path taken by the new historicist critic Paul Strohm in his book Social Chaucer - arguably one of the better and more illuminating recent ventures into the well-trodden field of Chaucerian analysis. Like Strohm, by analysing who Gower was, who he knew (he was a good friend of Chaucer and well-known to both Richard II and Henry IV for example) and where he lived, I could get a better grasp of his poetry, its audience and therefore Gower's intentions.

One of the insights this analysis gave me was an understanding of exactly how small Gower and Chaucer's world was. In the wake of the Black Death the population of London was just 40,000 people and, as anyone who has lived in a town that size would know, most residents would have know each other at least by sight. Social circles would have overlapped and spilled across class distinctions, alliances would have been close, resentments long-remembered and, when the opportunity arose, pay-back would have been up close and personal. In a city that you could cross at a leisurely stroll in about twenty minutes, peasants, beggars and apprentices lived cheek by jowl with aristocrats, burgers and civil servants and tensions could get high, especially when the weather got hot and the misrule of the mid-summer festivals spilled over into mayhem.

This is the world Dan Jones describes so ably in his first book Summer of Blood: The Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Jones is a journalist with an Honours Degree in History from Cambridge and, judging from interviews, a burning desire to tell the great stories of Medieval English history in a popular and accessible way. This is straight-forward, narrative popular history of the kind that generally spares the reader the mechanics of how Jones has sorted and assessed the evidence in favour of telling, as he puts it, "a cracking good story".

And a great yarn it is. While it's probably one that is familiar enough to most Medievalists, the market can certainly do with young popular writers of Jones' skill and energy bringing a story like this one to broader attention. As I mentioned in a previous post, his publishers have billed this book as "the first full popular account (of the Revolt) in a century", which is odd considering both Alastair Dunn and Mark O'Brien brought out books on the uprising just five years ago. But Jones' book is certainly more fast-paced than Dunn's and takes the reader along on a breakneck journey assuming a minimum of prior knowledge.

I picked up this book as someone with a pretty intimate knowledge of the world he describes and was struck by the vividness and detail with which he depicts it. The excellent street map of London which form the endpapers of the hard-cover edition was useful, but the author managed to give a real sense of the sights, sounds and smells of the Medieval city, which formed the backdrop to some of the most dramatic and bloody events of that tumultuous Corpus Christi week:

As the welcoming swell grew, with a resigned nod from the leaders of the Bridge Ward, under whose immediate jurisdiction London Bridge fell, the bridge's keeper let down the drawbridge, and the Kentishmen, seeing their path stretch before them, flooded into London. .... Straight ahead lay the close, dirty streets of England's capital, thick with excitable, drunken rascals and wealthy traders alike, the timid scuttling for cover and all the clergy of the city rushing to pray for peace in a time of chaos.
(Jones, p. 88)

The descriptions of the chaos that followed make for exciting reading: the destructive orgy of the sacking and burning of John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace on the Strand, the burning of documents and charters - symbols of the legalism and bureaucracy the rebels despised - in the Temple compound and the vengeful executions the mob carried out in Cheapside, where Milk Street, Wood Street and Bread Street came together. Jones has an eye for some of the curious details of the story, like the way the rebels sacking the Savoy made up for the fact that the hated John of Gaunt was not in the city by hoisting up a richly embroidered heraldic "jakke" of his and using it for target practice. Or the grim fate of thirty revellers who broke into Gaunt's wine cellar while the rebels rampaged through the palace above them, only to have the whole house burn and collapse above their heads, leaving them entombed in the wreckage to slowly die (but with plenty of wine).

Other reviewers have found this fluid and vivid narrative not quite their style. A few have commented that we are given little background information on the leaders of the rebellion: Wat Tyler, the Lollard priest John Ball and the shadowy Jack Straw. This is true, but the fact is that we know very little about any of them (some historians suspect Straw didn't exist at all) and personally I fail to see that there would have been much benefit to pause in the story to detail why that is so. Others found the "colour" of the narrative a bit lurid for their tastes, especially the emphasis on the bloodier details - eg the mitre nailed to the skull of Bishop Sudbury when his head was exposed on London Bridge. Perhaps those reviewers prefer their narrative history a dusty shade of beige, but to tell this story without those details would be to rob it of its life and its fairly shocking immediacy.

All in all Jones' book is precisely the kind of action-packed, fast-paced popular history that the field of Medieval Studies can do with. His passion for the subject is clear and his desire to tell stories worth telling is precisely what you would expect of a young writer who was a student of another historian with a flair for exciting popularisation, David Starkey. If his debut is anything to go by, Dan Jones is a writer to watch.

Another writer who is keen to transfer his passion for Medieval history to the general reader is Ian Mortimer, though in The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century he takes a rather more unconventional approach to that chosen by Jones. Mortimer prides himself on finding new and interesting ways to shed light on history. In 1415: Henry V’s Year of Glory he approached the reign of Henry by detailing a day-by-day account of his life in the year 1415, from New Year's Day to December 31st, giving a level of intimate detail and a distinct lack of selective evidence in the process. In one interview Mortimer details why he tries to find newer and more enlightening perspectives on history:

As I see it, the traditional pseudo-objective stance of the academic - the study of evidence whether on an empirical or a theoretical basis - is a very narrow slice of a very large historical pie. There are simply thousands of ways of writing history. .... As soon as one realises that one can adopt any one of an infinite number of approaches to the past, the limits are taken away from history.

It's clear even from the title that The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England is another attempt to find new ways into the past and, on the whole, a highly entertaining and successful one. Taking his format from travel guides like Lonely Planet and Rough Guides, Mortimer details the foreign country that is Fourteenth Century England with all the information needed by an intrepid time traveller. He has chapters on "What to Wear", "Where to Stay", "What to Eat and Drink" as well as information on the law, the landscape and how to get around. The result is amusing, sometimes surprising and highly entertaining and is full of information that you generally do not find even in narrative history, let alone in academic analysis. The text is interspersed with information boxes outlining useful snippets ("The Social Hierarchy" - handy if you want to know if a Franklin was superior to an Esquire or the other way around) and places to go ("Ten Places to See in London" - the Tower is recommended for Edward III's collection of lions and leopards in the royal menagerie).

Like Jones, Mortimer does not shy away from making his text as colourful as possible, though in his case the colour is generally shit brown rather than blood red:

(London's) inhabitants will draw your attention to how 'evil-smelling' this mud is just after it rains (as if you need telling). And yet these are not the worst of London's problems. The stench and obstruction of the animal dung, vegetable rubbish, fish remains and entrails of beasts present problems of public sanitation on a scale unmatched by any other town in England. With 40,000 permanent citizens and sometimes as many as 100,000 mouths to feed and bowels to evacuate, it is impossible with a city with no sewerage system to cope.
(Mortimer, p. 17)

The evacuation of bowels is a subject that features regularly in Mortimer's book, with details of Medieval toilets ranging from the "close stools" of the nobles, with their removable brass basins and velvet-covered seats to the description of the gloriously-named "gongfermours" (latrine-emptiers) of London taking their daily, and probably much-needed dip in the Thames just before sunset. He dispels several of the persistent myths about Medieval bathing and cleanliness - in other words, he makes it clear that such things existed, contrary to popular belief - and details some attitudes to hygiene that were rather different to ours. After explaining how spiritual cleanliness was supposed to give a holy person a literal sweet odour of sanctity he notes dryly "(i)n the modern world we have no equivalent to this form of cleanliness. Instead we have antibacterial wipes." (p. 194).

One temptation for someone taking this fairly whimsical approach to social history might be to concentrate entirely on the exotic and the bizarre. Certainly, a lot of the entertainment value of Mortimer's book comes from the more unusual or odd aspects of the Fourteenth Century world. His discussion of Medieval humour, for example, is illustrated with the anecdote of a retainer of Edward II who fell off his horse three times in rapid succession, sending the king into such fits of laughter that he awarded the man a year's salary as a present, indicating that Medieval Englishmen liked their humour broad and physical. Similarly, the section on food and cooking details some of the stranger items that made it to a noble's table, including seals, dolphins, porpoises, puffins and even beaver.

But Mortimer balances this in each section by going into similar detail about the more ordinary and mundane aspects of Medieval life. Each topic generally gives the perspective of the peasants, the middle classes and then the nobles, making it pretty clear that no peasants sat down to feast on whale meat with a side dish of beaver; more like beans and bacon. The guidebook format works better in some sections than others - few time-travelling tourists would need quite that much detail on Medieval English law - but on the whole the book is an entertaining romp. I suspect it will be particularly useful for historical fiction writers and would not be surprised if some of Mortimer's details begin turning up in some novels over the next few years.

One novelist who probably does not need Mortimer to do his homework for him is Peter Ackroyd. Judging from both his novel The Clerkenwell Tales and his short biography Chaucer, Fourteenth Century London is familiar ground for him already. The Clerkenwell Tales is a Chaucer-fan's delight: set in the poet's London and full of references to the characters, places and (to an extent) stories of The Canterbury Tales. The novel itself is a tight and fairly dark thriller, with plots within plots, murders and a terrorist group setting fires around the city. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a new character, each of whom has the same title as Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, even if only a few are the same people (eg Roger Ware, the Cook, appears in both the novel and Chaucer's poem).

One problem for the modern novelist writing historical fiction is getting the right tone to their dialogue. To have their characters speak too much like modern people can be jarring to some readers (though I prefer it myself - conveying everyday idiom using our everyday idiom, though minus anachronistic expressions). On the other hand, adopting a tone that is too overtly "historical" can result in silliness, forsoothness and general gadzookery. Ackroyd has a poet's ear for Middle English, however, and manages to have his characters speak as though they just stepped from the pages of Chaucer without sounding forced or outlandish:

'You have as much pity for poor men as pedlars have for cats, that would kill them for their skins if they could catch them.'
'Mea culpa.' The cleric's face was suffused with sweat.
'You are purse proud. Piss proud.'
'Mea culpa.'
'You are an ape in a man's hood.'
'Mea maxima culpa.'
'I will enshrine you in a hog's turd.'
(Ackroyd, p. 53-54)

Again, readers of Chaucer will constantly find snippets from his poetry in the dialogue (such as the "hog's turd" reference above) and other subtle and sly references in a story that is deftly handled and a setting that is as vivid as we would expect of this accomplished writer.

Ackroyd began his career as a fiction writer, though in recent years he has made his name as a biographer. Having read many biographies of Chaucer, from G.G. Coulton's quaintly Victorian Chaucer & His England to Donald R. Howard's sprawling and gossipy Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World, so I was not expecting Ackroyd's short (170 page) overview to give me much new insight. But the first volume in his "Brief Lives" series, Chaucer, shows that he has the kind of deft and judicious touch that a good biographer needs. Apart from the deceptively autobiographical sketches we get from Chaucer himself, which are slippery things to work with, most of the material from which a biographer can construct his life are terse, obscure and context-free entries in royal account books and a couple of legal records, which are even harder to work with.

One example is the puzzling reference to a Cecily Champain releasing Chaucer from all court actions tarn de raptu meo, "concerning my rape" - a note that has been raising the eyebrows of Chaucer scholars for several centuries. Many have gone down the path of reading "raptus" as abduction rather than rape and others have taken comfort in the fact that the poet was not convicted and painted Champain as a hysteric or an extortionist. Ackroyd cuts through the mystery rather deftly and makes a good case for Champain not only being Chaucer's younger mistress but also the mother of his son Lewis, to whom the Treatise on the Astrolabe was directed. In this and other such knotty problems, Ackroyd is judicious and reasonable and, like a good novelist, the story he tells feels complete rather than a patchwork of guesses. Certainly, coming to this book directly after reading the three above, I felt right at home in the London that Ackroyd describes, complete with the smell of roasting beaver and the sight of gongfermours bathing in the Thames as the sun goes down.

Hiatus

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 03:23:00 +0000

This is just a quick post to apologise for the long silence on this blog. I won't bore you with the personal detail, but let's just say it's largely been due to the Global Economic Crisis generally and some of its repercussions on my life in particular. I'll try to make up for it by reviewing not one, not two, not three but four books in my next post.

A Reply from Charles Freeman (of sorts)

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 05:42:00 +0000

Well, I did mention in my review of Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind (below) that he likes to respond to critics directly. Though I wasn't quite expecting a response by him within five days. Anyway, rather than reply in the "Comments" section of the review, I thought it was worth writing my reply as a separate post.

Charles writes:

Dear Tim,

I have been put onto your review through the grapevine. I won’t reply to it first because Closing came out in 2002, and was written in the two years before that so it is based on material mostly ten or more years old. I have written four more books since then. Secondly much of my thinking now will be in my Yale book on early Christianity - to 600 - which comes out in September and you will be able to review that.

Well, I'd be happy to review it (especially if Yale is good enough to send me a free copy), but I can't really see how the fact you have written some other books since then means you don't need to reply to a detailed review of this one. In one of your e-mails to James Hannam you noted that you've yet to see a comprehensive critique of your book. To write a comprehensive critique of it I would have to write something almost book length in itself, but my review weighs in at just under 5,000 words and, while far from comprehensive, it's the most detailed analysis of your arguments that I've seen so far. So simply noting that you've written some other books, which don't correct the flaws in this one that I can see, doesn't really absolve you of a proper reply to my analysis.

Nor does noting that you wrote it eight years ago, especially since you go on to say:

I have to say that despite extensive reading , I haven’t much changed my views.

Okay, so why point out that it was written some time ago and drew on works ten years or more old? If I had written a review of it eight or ten years ago I would have highlighted precisely the same strange omissions and critical flaws.

But now we get this rather strange cluster of comments:

The archaeological evidence for Christian destruction is now building up ( See Sauer’s book on The Archaeology of Religous Hatred, Tempus Books, 2003. Sauer is professor of Classical Archaeology at Edinburgh.His evidence ties in well with the literary evidence e.g. Martin of Deacon’s Life of Porphyry, which details P (the Bishop of Gaza’s) destruction, with imperial approval, of the pagan temple in Gaza.) Fergus Millar, surely a top name, has much on Theodosius’ activities against pagans and heretics in his A Greek Roman Empire, Power and Belief under Theodosius II, 408-450, University of California, 2006.

Sorry Charles, but I fail to see the relevance of any of this to anything I said in my review. Or to anything to do with reason and rational science and philosophy. Did I dispute that the post-Constantinian emperors and the Christians of the Fourth to Sixth Centuries did what they could to eliminate their pagan rivals? No, I didn't. More to the point, how does this "mounting evidence" of something no-one has ever disputed support your thesis? They destroyed temples and oppressed pagans? Yes, they did. And? What's that got to do with any supposed "closing of the western mind"?

As a humanist with a fondness for most aspects of the ancient and Medieval past, I'd certainly lament the destruction of pretty buildings. And the oppression of pagans by Christians is about the same as the oppression of Christians by pagans to me, since (i) I'm a non-believer and (ii) I avoid value judgements about the supposed sins of the distant past. But how "mounting evidence" that Christians closed down the irrational, superstituous cults of their religious rivals and no longer allowed painted priests to shake rattles and intone chants at incense-wreathed statues of Olympian gods somehow supports your thesis I really can't fathom. The fact that the Flamen Dialis in Rome could no longer wear his magical hat, no longer observed his strange taboos against touching raw meat or beans and no longer had to carefully guard against sleeping in a bed whose legs were smeared with clay (?!) may be sad if you're into that kind of thing, but I can't see what the death of such weird superstitions have to do with any argument about rationality.

Some people make a lot of Edward Grant but it is Grant who quotes (in his Science and Religion 400 BC - AD 1550, Johns Hopkins, 2004, p.145 ) the view that ‘Bede’s ‘ establishment of the port” is the only original formulation of nature to be made in the west for some eight centuries’.

And Grant is right (though he was quoting Duhem there). He makes similar remarks in several of his books about the centuries that he refers to as "Europe at its nadir". Again, my response is "Yes. And?" No-one is arguing there was no Dark Age in the west or that this "nadir" didn't see science, mathematics and philosophy collapse to the lowest imaginable level of sophistication. What is being disputed is your claim that this "nadir" was caused by a rejection of reason and the rational tradition. That claim - central to your thesis but very poorly and selectively supported - is complete garbage. From Justin Martyr to Clement to John of Damascus to Agustine, there was a tradition that argued for the preservation of that very tradition. So, despite the other traditon that you highlight at such length in your book, there was a strong western traditon of rationality that led Boethius to enshrine dialectic in general and Aristotle's books of logic in particular at the heart of what was to become the Medieval syllalbus. The "nadir" was caused by the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the collapse of civilisation in the west. Having wave after wave of Lombards, Avars and Vikings sweeping through your study tends to make reading Aristotle's Posterior Analytics a bit difficult. Especially if all copies have been lost for centuries.

So that means while Europe rode out the centuries long storm of invasion, collapse, disintergration, disruption and eventual recovery, there were always a few people keeping the seeds of the rebirth of the Twelfth Century nutured. The western mind did not "close" to that tradition. On the contrary it preserved it, both in the west and (something else ignored in your book) in the academies of Alexandria and Constantinople in the east.

My feeling is that since 2000, when I first started on this subject, the debate has come more my way than yours, but clearly debates will and should continue.

If those irrelevant examples are your idea of evidence that brings the debate your way then I can only conclude you simply don't understand why I find your thesis unconvincing.

2). You can download Richard Schlagel’s review of Closing in the Review of Metaphysics from Amazon. com. He is a Professor at George Washington University, who is well known as a historian of science and he has written extensively on this period.He liked it and it seems you must have missed it.

I don't think I said you didn't get any favourable reviews. And I can't download Schlagel's review actually - Amazon says it's due to "geographical restrictions", which I assume means it's only available to those in the US for copyright reasons.

3) I don’t know of any savagely condemnatory reviews from professional academics

Mark Edwards wrote a pithy and scathing review in History Today which was the kind of tartly barbed and succinct smack-down you'd expect from a don of Christ Church, Oxford. Professor Robert Markus of the University of Nottingham wasn't exactly complimentary in The Tablet. Professor Mary Beard of the Classics Department at Cambridge and Classics editor of the TLS took you to task for your romanticisation of the Greeks and Romans as rationalists. And while he's too gentlemanly to be "savage", David Lindberg's round dismissal of your thesis in the latest edition of his magisterial The Beginnings of Western Science carries the full weight of that great scholar's stature. They are some rather well-informed and fairly heavy duty scholars that have weighed your arguments and found them wanting. And for much the same reasons I have.

- there was a negative one from Bowersock in the Los Angeles Times

Yes, that one is worth reading as well.

I enjoy the rough and tumble of debate but must bring this one to a close especially as I am sure you will start it again when you have read the Yale book!

Good reading ,

Charles Freeman.

Well, I can't say I saw much evidence of any "debate" in this response, since you didn't manage to touch on a single one of my criticisms of your selective evidence, strange silences and weird (seeming) ignorance of whole areas of relevant material. But yes, I will be reviewing your new work and if it contains the same kind of sloppy/slippery pseudo argument as Closing you can be sure I'll have my flensing knives well-honed and ready.

Best regards from one amateur to another,

Tim O'Neill

The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:31:00 +0000

Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

(Pimlico 2003, Vintage 2002) 470 pages
Verdict?: Fundamentally flawed 2/5

At one point late in the process of working my way through Freeman's dense and exasperating book something struck me about the works he was using to support his argument, so I stopped reading and turned to his bibliography. It is a respectable 16 pages of excellent scholarly works on topics as wide-ranging as the origins of Christianity to ancient Greek astronomy and from Neo-platonism to the conversion of the Empire. But the books that were remarkable by their absence were precisely the ones I was looking for. Here was a weighty, closely-argued tome that was trying to explain the death of reason and its consequent absence in the early Middle Ages (at least, apparently, until the age of Aquinas in the Thirteenth Century) and yet nowhere in his bibliography could I find anything on early Medieval philosophy, Medieval science or Medieval thought generally. Given the excellent recent work done on the continuity between Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Late Antique and Medieval thinking by giants in the field like David C. Lindberg and the even more important (and relevant) work done on Medieval attitudes to reason by Edward Grant, this gaping hole in Freeman's bibliography was astounding.

But it did explain many things about the book itself, because Freeman's work is, like his bibliography, full of weird absences, strange gaps and unexplained holes. His writing is fluid and his argument is smooth, so it is hardly surprising that most of his readers are blissfully unaware of these odd lacunae. Indeed, Freeman carries even readers who are aware of what he is not telling us along so fluently that it required me to stop several times and say to myself "But hang on a minute, what about ... ?" And that's because I am fairly familiar with the material he covers already. So it is hardly surprising that non-specialist reviewers accept his thesis without so much as blinking and that most general readers have been even more readily convinced. At several key points in his argument I felt like someone watching a stage magician at work - you know what he is showing you is not the whole story, but the illusion is so smooth it's easy to blink and miss the deception.

Roman "Tolerance"

Several times before on this blog I've reviewed works that cover the beginning of the Dark Ages, though in this one the barbarians so central to writers like Wickham and O'Donnell (below) barely get a mention. The barbarism that Freeman laments is a specific one and it's certainly not the Goths and Vandals who are responsible for the vandalism:

The argument of this book is that the Greek intellectual tradition did not simply lose vigor and disappear. (Its survival and continued progress in the Arab world is testimony to that). Rather in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, it was destroyed by the political and religious forces which made up the highly authoritarian government of the late Roman empire.
(Freeman, "Introduction to the Pimlico Edition", xvii)

Consequently the bulk of his 450+ pages is a reasonable summary of the development of Classical natural philosophy, its basis in reason, how it fared in the Hellenistic and Roman periods and the rise and development of Christianity from a Jewish sect to an Imperial state religion. On the whole this summary of history is judicious enough and covers a broad range of topics and centuries in enough detail to avoid being glib and rapidly enough to avoid getting bogged down.

The points where his narrative jars for anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the subject matter is where Freeman skips around something that might not suit his picture of Classical and Roman thinking as generally free, untrammelled and superbly rational and later thinking as restricted, oppressed, constrained and (finally) strangled. Freeman makes ancient medicine sound as though it bordered on the rigour of its modern equivalent, for example. Yet it was as riddled with silliness, superstition, astrology, mysticism, false assumptions and quack cures as anything in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It was a highly irrational ancient taboo about corpses that prevented any genuine examination of human anatomy - with the exception of one short window in which human dissection was allowed in Ptolemaic Egypt, anatomical knowledge came from guesswork, observations of screaming patients during surgery and the dissection of apes, dogs and pigs. Not surprisingly, this rather irrational way of working did not exactly yield much useful information. And ironically, this taboo was overcome and true dissections were carried out again in the Middle Ages.

Similarly, Freeman makes much of the supposed religious tolerance of earlier Roman imperial authorities and contrasts this with the increasingly intolerant attitudes of Constantine and his successors to the purple:

(T)here clearly existed a wide range of spiritual possibilities, any one of which could be followed without any sense of impropriety and, even though there existed some degree of competition between the different movements for adherents, none excluded other beliefs.
(Freeman, p. 75)

This bucolic image is very pretty and highly appealing. And, as a marked rhetorical contrast to the later Imperial campaigns for religious orthodoxy that Freeman describes in detail, it works very neatly. Unfortunately, it's also total nonsense.

Despite what Freeman would like to pretend or have his readers believe, the intolerance of the post-Constantinian emperors of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries had deep Roman and Classical roots. The Romans were tolerant enough of various cults, but only so long as they met certain criteria. Obviously the worship of their version of the Olympian gods was fine and this cult formed the centre of their regime for centuries. And the gods of their conquered peoples were also acceptable so long as they conformed more or less to the Roman model of religion. So the worship of the Celtic god Grannos or Grannus as an equivalent of Apollo was acceptable and tolerated, but the Celtic practice of human sacrifice was not. This means toga-wearing priests of Grannos continued to present offerings to their god at Aquae Granni (now Aachen) in the wake of the Roman conquest of Gaul, but the British druids experienced something very different to Freeman's idealised Roman "tolerance" when Suetonius Paulinus and his troops descended on their cult centre on the island of Anglesey and massacred them and their families.

And the other examples of the intolerance of the Romans well before the villains of Freeman's version of the story are many and, to be frank, often pretty ugly. Contrary to his claim that any cult could be "followed without any sense of impropriety", various mystery religions, especially those of Isis and Cybele, were sneered at as sects for foreigners, the nouveau riche and freed slaves and, occasionally, restricted or expelled from Rome and other cities. Other cults were actively destroyed in hysterical fear campaigns that were clear precursors of the heresy scares and witch hunts of later periods. Bacchanalian sects were actively and brutally persecuted and eliminated by the Roman Senate in the Second Century BC in savage persecutions that prefigured the later persecution of Christians. And while Judaism officially enjoyed the status of religio licita by merit of its antiquity, the virulent anti-Semitism in the Roman Empire had a religious rather than a purely ethnic edge.

The persecution of Christians poses a particular problem for Freeman, since it's a part of his story that he cannot simply skip around as he does when ignoring the uglier, less-tolerant aspects of his supposedly highly tolerant Empire. He handles this by downplaying the persecutions as much as possible, emphasising that many of the later traditions about the persecutions were fanciful and framing them as reasonable responses to fairly legitimate concerns about a dissident element. Interestingly, he does not take a similar tack in his far longer, far more detailed and far more condemnatory account of later Christian oppression of pagans. As one of Freeman's more informed reviewers notes:

Rome in any case oppressed the Christians – a fact that is only mentioned here and there in the book, though measures of reprisal against the pagans after Constantine’s accession furnish a theme for several chapters. If it is a crime to raze a temple, it must surely be a greater crime to throw the congregation to the lions, and of the half-dozen philosophers who triumphed over the ashes of the martyrs in the first three Christian centuries, Porphyry was the only one to be punished by the burning of his books.
(Mark Edwards, History Today, Vol. 52, December 2002, p. 60)

The "tolerance" that Freeman presents seems tolerant only because Freeman does not bother to tell the whole story. This is a consistent failing throughout his book, particularly at the very points on which his broader thesis rests. This pattern is so consistent, in fact, that it begins to look very much like the work of someone who had fallen into the amateur's trap of assuming their own conclusion and only presenting the information that supports it.

A Cloud of Critics, Compilers and Commentators

Freeman's account of reason in the Classical world contains some similar omissions and curious elisions. In his detailed overview of ancient and Medieval science, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, David C. Lindberg moves from the significant contribution of the Classical Greek natural philosophers and mathematicians to a much briefer chapter entitled "Roman and Early Medieval Science". Over 26 pages Lindberg gives a reasonable summary of science and reason in the period from the early First Century BC to the age of the Venerable Bede (d. AD 735). And he is able to make the summary of eight centuries in such a short space because, to be blunt, not much happened in this period. With the notable exceptions of Ptolemy and Galen, this was a period of commentators and encyclopaedists and was certainly not a period of reason being fruitfully applied to the world in an unfettered and tolerant intellectual idyll, with remarkable and innovative results. If anything, the Roman era saw science increasingly become a slightly eccentric hobby and saw the thinkers of the previous age solidify into largely unquestioned or even unexamined "authorities".

This is not exactly remarkable and there are many periods of history where similar things have happened in certain areas of intellectual inquiry. But it does not really fit with Freeman's thesis. He needs the slow down and stagnation of the application of reason to the world to come much later - during and after the reigns of the villains of his story: the post-Constantinian emperors and their Christian cultural quislings. So he puts a brave front on this period and has his story glide on in smooth prose as though there is no problem at all:

This period has often been derided for its lack of intellectual energy. In the magnificently sardonic words of Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

"The name of Poet was all but forgotten, that of Orator usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators darkened the face of learning and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste."

Yet .... the quality of intellectual life remained high and in recent years scholars have shown increasing respect for the achievements of the Greeks under the Roman Empire.
(Freeman, p. 60)

This should be a crucial point in Freeman's argument, since his thesis actually substantially stands or falls on Gibbon's assessment (which is supported by Lindberg and other very recent historians of ancient and Medieval science and reason) being wrong. If he wants his argument that "the Greek intellectual tradition did not simply lose vigour and disappear .... it was destroyed" to be sustained, he needs to show that this perceived loss of vigour in the Roman period never, in fact, happened. And Freeman is more than capable of supporting points in his argument; often for whole chapters at a time with many quotes, examples and citations of modern authorities.

So it's very odd that here, at a point where you would expect some close and detailed argument, we get ... well, nothing much. He makes the point that recent scholars have "have shown increasing respect for the achievements of the Greeks under the Roman Empire", but that is the last we hear of these recent scholars. We never hear what this "increasing respect" is based on either. After meandering for a few pages describing the reigns and gardens of Hellenophile emperors like Nero and Hadrian, Freeman finally returns to the "achievements" he mentioned. But instead of a long list of overlooked advances and significant contributions that have not been appreciated, what we get is, well, Galen and Ptolemy. And the algebraist, Diophantus. But that is pretty much it.

This is not really really sufficient to disable Gibbon's claim of "a cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators" darkening the face of learning. As Lindberg's analysis illustrates, apart from Galen and Ptolemy, the landscape of Roman era science was made up almost entirely of popularisers and commentators like Varro, Lucretius, Pliny, Macrobius and Martianus Capella. And this tradition led directly into early Medieval successors like Cassiodorus, Isiodore and Bede. The fact is, the Greek intellectual tradition did "lose its vigour" and did so well before Freeman's villains even enter stage left.

Of course, most of Freeman's readers and reviewers are not familiar enough with the material to notice what he has done here and the flow of his narrative moves on so smoothly and engagingly that they do not actually get time to ponder it before he gets into the stuff he finds really juicy and which forms the bulk of his book.

Wicked Emperors and Fundamentalist Bishops

The next part of the work is a section which Freeman serves up with some relish. The central 200 or so pages of his book is a lengthy and (generally) accurate summary of the origins and rise of Christianity, the conversion first of the emperors and then of their Empire and the complex and (literally) Byzantine theological disputes that led the Emperors of the Eastern Empire to become increasingly dogmatic, hard-line and intolerant of dissent. Freeman argues that intolerance of contrary or even alternative ideas became built into the institution of Empire and, as such, was passed on to the post-Roman west, killing the tolerance and rationally-based inquiry of the former ages in the process.

If Freeman had never bothered with that argument and instead written a book about the intersection of Fourth to Sixth Century Christian theology with Imperial politics this central section would have stood alone nicely. Richard E. Rubenstein's When Jesus Became God already covers the same ground a little more engagingly and even-handedly and Judith Herrin's The Formation of Christendom is more far detailed and more perceptive, but the market could probably sustain another perspective on the same topic. But Freeman's account is entangled with his wider thesis and, as a result, it contains some oddities and some more of his strange gaps and silences.

One of the more peculiar elements in it is his constant emphasis on the idea that Arian Christology was somehow more widely accepted and more reasonable than its rival position and his depiction of what was to become orthodox Nicean Christology as imposed against broad resistance. This seems to fit with a general theme regarding Constantine as a bully and a machiavel (which is not, in itself, unreasonable), but to the point where it becomes highly strained.

Similarly, all indications that Constantine may have been motivated by any genuine religious zeal - however unsophisticated - is downplayed or ignored. It is highly odd that Freeman makes a great deal of the fact that Constantine did not get baptised when he converted and only received that sacrament on his deathbed. I can't think of any objective historian who notes this who does not then quickly also comment that this was common practice at the time and is not an indicator of any lack of conviction or piety. So the fact that Freeman completely fails to make this simple observation is not just odd, but slightly suspicious. I find it hard to believe someone who has researched the period as carefully as Freeman clearly has could be unaware that this was common practice, so it seems he did not bother to mention it because doing so casts Constantine in a light that suits his thesis. Once again, Freeman fails to prove himself an objective historian and veers off, despite his pretensions and protests to the contrary, into the territory of the polemicist.

Similarly we get strange omissions in his brief account of the murder of Hypatia of Alexandria. As I have discussed before, Hypatia's death was not a martyrdom for the sake of science, reason or paganism, but was actually a grubby tit-for-tat killing in the brutal arena of Alexandria's savage civic politics. But it suits Freeman's thesis to completely ignore these facts and simply present the astronomer and mathematician being torn apart by a mob of crazed Christian ascetics. He does not say that this vignette illustrates his thesis, but by only telling part of the story he does not actually have to - his careful editing of the details does the job for him.

God and Reason in the Middle Ages

These smaller omissions and skewing of the picture aside, the major flaw in this part of the book is related to the problems and gaps in the earlier section. Just as Freeman skims over the fact that the Greek intellectual tradition did lose its vigour long before the increasingly Christian and rigidly intolerant emperors of the Fourth to Sixth Centuries, he also ignores the fact that for every Church father, patriarch and bishop who denigrated reason, philosophy and learning in this period, there were others who defended them.

It certainly is not hard to find early Christian authorities who disparage natural philosophy, discourage the contemplation of science and scold the faithful for trusting reason over revelation and faith. And Freeman's work reads like a depressing roll call of Patristic fundamentalism and wilful ignorance. Of Tertullian he writes:

How could one have answered his most famous statement, 'The Son of God died, it must needs be certain because it is impossible'? Like many Latin Christians, he taunted the Greek philosophers: 'Wretched Aristotle who taught them [the heretics and philosophers] dialectic, that art of building up and demolishing ... self-stultifying since it is ever handling questions but never settling them ... what is there in common between Athens and Jerusalem?'
(Freeman, p. 279)

But what Freeman fails to mention is that Tertullian himself was trained in dialectic and that he used it in his own work. Here Tertullian is decrying not so much "dialectic", but its use by heretics. Of course, Tertullian was certainly no great fan of unfettered speculation and rational analysis over revelation and faith, but he was not quite the close-minded, anti-intellectual philistine Freeman depicts here either.

More importantly, Freeman gives a great deal of attention to sentiments like that of Tertullian while almost completely ignoring another, far greater and far more significant development that was emerging around the same time. Because while some Christians certainly were steadfastly turning their backs on reason and rejecting the legacy of the Classical Greek scientific tradition, others were doing precisely the opposite. And the key point here is that those who opposed the rejection of reason and Greek learning won the debate over those like Tertullian and John Chrysostom who would have preferred to abandon the Greek rational heritage completely. The fact that Freeman utterly fails to acknowledge this is telling, but it seems he has done so because it undermines his whole thesis.

Justin Martyr argued that reason and the learning of the Greek philosophers were not incompatible with the theology of a revealed religion as early as the Second Century AD and this idea, adapted from the Jewish scholar Philo, was taken up and amplified by Clement of Alexandria:

We shall not err in alleging that all things necessary and profitable for life came to us from God, and that philosophy more especially was given to the Greeks, as a covenant peculiar to them, being, as it were, a stepping stone to the philosophy which is according to Christ.
(Clement, Miscellanies, VI, 8)

This idea that reason and philosophy were stepping stones to the same truths revealed in Christianity became a consistent theme amongst a continuous strand of Patristic tradition - one which was diametrically opposed to that which advocated the rejection of "pagan learning". Even Origen called philosophy "the ancillary of Christianity", but the idea that the universe was the rational product of a rational God and so could be apprehended by the reason of the Greeks was argued most influentially by John of Damascus:

Nothing is more estimable than knowledge, for knowledge is the light of the rational soul. The opposite, which is ignorance, is darkness. Just as the absence of light is darkness, so is the absence of knowledge a darkness of the reason. Now, ignorance is proper to irrational beings, while knowledge is proper to those who are rational.
(John of Damascus, Writings, trans. Frederick H. Chase, p. 7)

Freeman does pay some scant and fleeting attention to this important alternative strand of Christian thought (pp. 143-44), but, remarkably, he seems to miss (or choose to ignore) its significance for the very subject he is discussing. After even quoting Augustine's famous and highly influential comment about making use of the knowledge of the pagans the way the Israelites carried off the gold of the Egyptians, he notes darkly, "In the west however, there continued to be a strong distrust of pagan philosophy." (p. 144). Bizarrely, Freeman depicts Augustine as an integral part of "a defensive tradition inherited from Paul, largely in terms of its enemies .... as Augustine was to put it 'heretics, Jews and pagans'" and goes on to describe a consequent "intense concentration on the other world at the expense of this one" and centuries where "there was no sign of any renaissance of independent thought" (pp. 331-32).

In fact, Augustine's championing Clement's idea of utilising pagan learning to rationally examine a rational universe was vastly influential in the west. Both Cassiodorus and Boethius made this central to their program of preserving Greek learning, which is why Boethius gave a priority to the translation of Aristotle's works on logic, since logic and dialectic were central to this way of examining all forms of truth. With the decline of literacy in Greek which began in the Third Century, Boethius realised that he needed to translate key works into Latin to preserve them for western scholars. The fact that he chose five of Aristotle's logical works as well as similar works and commentaries by Porphyry, Cicero and Marius Victorinus was enormously significant. As Edward Grant notes:

By his monumental achievement, Boethius guaranteed that logic, the most visible symbol of reason and rationality, remained alive at the lowest ebb of European civilisation between the fifth and tenth centuries .... As Jonathan Barnes has expressed it, 'Boethius' labours gave logic half a millennium of life: what logician could say as much as that for his work? what logician could desire to say more?'"
(Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages, p. 41)

So what does Freeman say about Boethius and his enshrining of reason at the very core of the Medieval scholarly curriculum? Absolutely nothing. Incredibly, Boethius does not even appear in his extensive 26 page index.

Of course the real reason for the centuries-long hiatus in intellectual development between the Fifth Century and the Tenth was the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the subsequent centuries of chaos, fragmentation, invasion and then slow recovery. By carefully avoiding key elements in the story, Freeman creates an illusion by which this hiatus was substantially caused by a rejection of reason by Christendom, where in fact reason was preserved so that as soon as the west emerged from that period of social, political and economic turmoil one of the first things its scholars did was go in search of the books of reason and inquiry that had been lost in the wreck.

And they found them amongst the Muslims of Spain and Sicily because Sixth Century Christians had taken them to Persia where they had been absorbed by Arabs who also embraced a concept parallel to that of Augustine's "gold of the Egyptians" argument. There was no "closing of the Western mind" at all. It is just that for several long centuries western minds had other things to think about, like surviving the next Avar or Viking incursion or getting through the next winter.

Polemics and Defensiveness

Freeman bills himself as "a freelance academic", which seems to be a slightly cute way of saying he is an amateur historian. He is certainly a lot more defensive than most professional academics. His introduction to the Pimlico edition of his book is a long apologia and defence against the idea he was attacking Christianity. He has posted not one but two lengthy comments along the same lines on Amazon.com, one of which (rather pretentiously) is actually a review of his own book! An unfavourable online review by James Hannam was met with two long e-mails explaining (not terribly successfully) what Hannam got wrong. And if all that was not enough, the foreword to his next book, AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State, contains yet another dismissal of criticisms of The Closing of the Western Mind.

In responding to one of his less enthusiastic Amazon.com critics Freeman notes, "I think Professor Taliaferro is being a bit harsh in calling my book polemical", but as I have shown, Freeman's curious omissions, glossing over of significant points and odd silences certainly leave his work wide open to that charge. A soberly objective account it certainly is not. Regardless of Freeman's intentions, however, others with polemical axes to grind have seized his book with relish.

A sampling of some of his fans on Amazon.com gives us the flavour of his work's reception:

"While it has been clear since Gibbon that the closing of the Western mind did not merely coincide with but was intimately bound up in the Christianisation of the Roman Empire, it is not trivially clear why this should be. With precision and erudition, Freeman investigates this question."

"This book argues that religion, in particular Christianity, led to the rejection of reason and plunged human civilization from the height of the Roman Empire into the Dark Ages for over 1,000 years."

"According to Freeman, because the Christian bishops at the time acquired political power as a result of church-state union, once the Roman Empire began to collapse its culture of free inquiry was crushed and replaced with 2 centuries of dogmatism and repression. More commonly known as The Dark Ages. "

"Previously I had not directly blamed Christianity for the Dark Ages even though there is a clear chronological correlation between the two. It had seemed to me that the Dark ages were more of a result of corruption of the Roman Empire. However, this book shows that the corruption originated with Christianity as instigated by Constantine.

The start of the Dark Ages can be dated to 415 when a mob of Christian monks murdered the mathematician Hypatia. There was no mathematics for a 1000 years until the time of Galileo (also a victim of Christianity). The bottom line is that we lost 1000 years of science. Imagine where we would be today if quantum mechanics had been developed 1000 years ago. "

And there are scores of others in the same vein, all drawing the same polemical and (in cases) slightly hysterical and totally erroneous conclusion from Freeman's book: the Dark Ages were not caused by the total collapse of the Roman Empire, they were caused by Constantine and the Church closing everyone's minds and killing rational inquiry. If this was not what Freeman was trying to argue then he needs to explain why it is consistently the conclusion so many of his readers have drawn.

Overall his book is very odd. For whole stretches, sometimes for several chapters at a time, it is sober, even-handed and well-judged. And it is always elegantly written and smooth to read. But where it jars is when he passes over something relevant that he leaves untouched or skips over a point that he notes too briefly and too lightly and then moves quickly back to his theme. Nonsensical errors - such as his ludicrous claim that Proclus made the last recorded astronomical observation for centuries and astronomy would not progress again for over 1100 years - are few, but his omissions and elisions serve to make it seem he has argued his case when he has not at all. Few of his reviewers and general readers have enough of a detailed grasp of the relevant material, however, to notice when he is quietly slipping the white rabbit into the top hat.

Good history books are meant to give us a better understanding of their subjects. This one ends up giving its readers a highly distorted impression and seems to be doing so deliberately. I'll let others decide if that is "polemics", but I can only conclude this is not a good history book.

General Addenda

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Thu, 28 May 2009 01:18:00 +0000

Hypatia: The Mythmaking Continues

Thanks to those who appreciated my article on Hypatia and the new movie Agora (below). The premiere of the film at Cannes got quite a bit of coverage, most of which dutifully parroted the film-maker's distortions of history, some of which decided to declare Hypatia "an atheist" and a bit of which added some tantilising details:

There is also no question as to what side the filmmakers are on. The Christians in "Agora" are more preoccupied with slaughtering than spirituality and the only truly principled character is Hypatia the atheist, who may have come close to proving that the Earth revolves around the sun 1,200 years before Johannes Kepler. She is the only one who never sacrifices her unwavering "faith," in reason and intellectual freedom, for personal gain.
(Film Review: Agora by Natasha Senjanovic, Hollywoodreporter.com)

At first I thought that snippet about Hypatia discovering heliocentrism might have been a fevered addition of the journalist's, but on reading some other synopses of the film it seems that the movie depicts her being murdered by the dreadful, Dark Age-inducing fundies just as she's on the brink of "a major discovery". Guess which one. I suppose that's one way to really rub in the whole "Dark Age that set human progress back by over 1000 years" thing, with the help of a truck load of "poetic licence" (also known as "making shit up").

And even the pre-release publicity is already working its magic on people's grasp of the history. Over at FriendlyAtheist.com they have not only swallowed the stuff about her being an atheist hook, line and sinker but have also begun to absorb other bits of the film and present them as real history:

Hypatia was a little-known but brilliant woman — a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, librarian… and atheist. When Christians tried to take over Alexandria, it was Hypatia who saved a number of rare books from their destructive hands. The Christian mob later labeled her a witch, stripped her, and set her on fire. She’s a hero and martyr for atheists if ever there was one.
(Rachel Weisz to Play Atheist in New Movie)

There's at least five errors of historical fact in those two sentences, not least of which is the cute bit about how Hypatia "saved a number of rare books from their destructive hands " - a detail that appears nowhere in any historical source and which seems to have been gleaned from, you guessed it, the trailer for the movie.

At the other end of the spectrum, it seems neo-pagans are also claiming Hypatia as their own. That has a bit more credibility than claiming she was an atheist, but they are also claiming her as a martyr for paganism, which is about as ahistorical:

[Agora], more than any other recent film set during the classical period, will be closely watched by modern Pagans (especially Hellenic reconstructionists). Many of whom consider Hypatia to be one of the primary martyrs of pre-Christian pagan religion.
(Hypatia Comes to the Screen, The Wild Hunt)

And the faithful are getting the message, judging by comments on another article about the movie on the same blog:

May the Queen of the Underworld continue to heap blessings upon the brave and beautiful Hypatia. May the injustice that took her from this world- and the monstrous spiritual imperialism which still exists, and which destroyed the progress of humankind- be taken swiftly away by the hand of Fate and given its just desserts ....

The thing about this story is you can't whitewash what happened to this Great Lady at the hands of Christians, because even the Christian telling of her martyrdom is gruesome and damning. Christian feather-ruffling by the naked truth is something that is too rarely done these days.

I'm beginning to wonder who is going to claim Hypatia as their own next. UFOlogists? Scientologists? Mormons?

New Arrivals

Thanks to the wonders of the internet and the global economy, my copy of Dan Jones' Summer of Blood: The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 arrived on my desk yesterday, less than week after ordering. Jones is a postgrad Medieval historian and journalist on a mission to revive interest in what he regards as a shamefully neglected period of history. The Uprising of 1381 is certainly a good place to start and if the glowing recommendation of David Starkey is anything to go by ("Bold. Surprising. Unputdownable"), it will be a good book to have by the fire with a glass of red at my weekend trip to the Blue Mountains in a couple of weeks. And yes, of course I'll be reviewing it here. Jones and his publishers are billing it as "the first full popular account (of the Revolt) in a century", which makes me wonder if Alastair Dunn's The Peasants' Revolt: England's Failed Revolution of 1381 or Mark O'Brien's When Adam Delved and Eve Span: A History of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 weren't "full" enough or simply weren't "popular", since both were published only five years ago. Still, another book on the subject isn't going to go astray.

Mini-Wishlist

Given my recent reviews of James O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire and Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000, I think I will have to add Adrian Goldsworthy How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower and Tom Holland Millennium: the End of the World and the Forging of Christendom to my review wishlist. Both Goldsworthy and O'Donnell cover similar ground; as do Holland and Wickham. It's great to see that, after years of neglect, there's a veritable plethora of accessible and scholarly books on the end of the Empire and the first half of the Middle Ages. Wickham has also recently reviewed Holland's book for History Today in an interesting article entitled "In the Medieval Moment", where he makes some judicious criticisms.

"Agora" and Hypatia - Hollywood Strikes Again

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Wed, 20 May 2009 06:01:00 +0000

Hollywood Hokum - Again

It looks like some pseudo historical myths about the history of science are about to get a new shot in the arm, thanks to the new movie Agora by Chilean director Alejandro Amenabar. Now normally I'd be delighted that someone was making a film set in the Fifth Century (at least, one that wasn't another fantasy about "King Arthur" anyway). After all, it's not like there's a shortage of remarkable stories to tell from that turbulent and interesting time. And normally I'd be even more delighted that they are actually bothering to make it look like the Fifth Century, rather than assuming because it's set in the Roman Empire everyone needs to be wearing togas, forward combed haircuts and lorica segmentata. And I would be especially delighted that they are not only doing both these things but also casting the delightful Rachel Weisz in the lead role, since she's an excellent actress and, let's face it, pretty cute.

So why am I not delighted? Because Amenabar has chosen to write and direct a film about the philosopher Hypatia and perpetuate some hoary Enlightenment myths by turning it into a morality tale about science vs fundamentalism.

As an atheist, I'm clearly no fan of fundamentalism - even the 1500 year old variety (though modern manifestations tend to be the ones to watch out for). And as an amateur historian of science I'm more than happy with the idea of a film that gets across the idea that, yes, there was a tradition of scientific thinking before Newton and Galileo. But Amenabar has taken the (actually, fascinating) story of what was going on in Alexandria in Hypatia's time and turned it into a cartoon, distorting history in the process. From the press release timed to coincide with the film's screening at Cannes this week:

Played by Oscar-winning British actress Weisz, Hypatia is persecuted in the film for her science that challenges the Christians' faith, as much as for her status as an influential woman.
From bloody clashes to public stonings and massacres, the city descends into inter-religious strife, and the victorious Christians turn their back on the rich scientific legacy of antiquity, defended by Hypatia.

So we are being served up the idea that Hypatia was persecuted and, I'll assume, killed because "her science ... challenges the Christians' faith". And why have a movie with one historical myth in it when you can have two:

"Agora" opens with the destruction of the second library of Alexandria by the Christians and Jews -- after the first, famous library which was destroyed by Julius Caesar.

At least he's done his homework enough to realise that the decline of the Great Library was a long, slow deterioration and not a single catastrophic event. But he still clings to Gibbon's myth that a Christian mob was somehow responsible. And rather niftily invents a "second library of Alexandria" so he can do so. Of course, there's an inevitable moral to all this:

The director also said he saw the film worked as a parable on the crisis of Western civilisation.

"Let's say the Roman Empire is the United States nowadays, and Alexandria is what Europe means now -- the old civilisation, the old cultural background.

"And the empire is in crisis, which affects all the provinces. We are talking about social crisis, economic of course, this year, and cultural.

"Something is not quite fitting in our society. We know that something is going to change -- we don't know exactly what or how, but we know that something is coming to an end."

Exactly how far or how closely he expects we can extend this analogy is unclear. If Europe is Alexandria and the US is Rome, who is Hypatia? And who are the murderous fundamentalists? I suspect the answer could be "Muslims". The LA Times article on the Cannes screening seemed to think so:

The film is at its most compelling when Amenabar shows the once-stable civilization of Alexandria being overwhelmed by fanaticism, perhaps because the bearded, black-robe clad Christian zealots who sack the library and take over the city bear an uncanny resemblance to the ayatollahs and Taliban of today.
(At Cannes: Alejandro Amenabar's provocative new historical thriller)

However far you want to take Amenabar's parable, the outlines are clear - Hypatia was a rationalist and a scientist, she was killed by fundamentalists who were threatened by knowledge and science and this ushered in a Dark Age.

Hypatia the Myth

Not that there is anything very new or original about this - Hypatia has long been pressed into service as a martyr for science by those with agendas that have nothing to do with the accurate presentation of history. As Maria Dzielska has detailed in her study of Hypatia in history and myth, Hypatia of Alexandria, virtually every age since her death that has heard her story has appropriated it and forced it to serve some polemical purpose.

Ask who Hypatia was and you will probably be told "She was that beautiful young pagan philosopher who was torn to pieces by monks (or, more generally, by Christians) in Alexandria in 415". This pat answer would be based not on ancient sources, but on a mass of belletristic and historical literature .... Most of these works represent Hypatia as an innocent victim of the fanaticism of nascent Christianity, and her murder as marking the banishment of freedom of inquiry along with the Greek gods.
(Dzielska, p. 1)

If you had asked me at the age of 15 that's certainly what I would have told you, since I had heard of Hypatia largely thanks to astronomer Carl Sagan's TV series and book Cosmos. I still have a soft spot both for Sagan and Cosmos, since - as with a lot of young people of the time - it awakened my love not only of science, but a humanist tradition of science and a historical perspective on the subject that made it far more accessible to me than dry formulae. But popularisations of any subject can create erroneous impressions even when the writer is very sure of his material. And while Sagan was usually on very solid ground with his science, his history could be distinctly shaky. Especially when he had a barrow or two to push.

The final chapter of the book of Cosmos is the one where Sagan pushes a few barrows. Generally, his aims are admirable - he notes the fragility of life and of civilisation, makes some calm and quietly sober condemnations of nuclear proliferation - highly relevant and sensible in the depths of Cold War 1980 - and makes a rational and humanistic plea for the maintenance of a long term view on the Earth, the environment and our intellectual heritage. In the process he tells the story of Hypatia as a cautionary parable; a tale that illustrates how fragile civilisation is and how easily it can fall to the powers of ignorance and irrationality.

After describing the glories of the Great Library of Alexandria, he introduces Hypatia as its "last scientist". He then notes that the Roman Empire was in crisis in her time and that "slavery had sapped ancient civilisation of its vitality"; which is an odd comment since the ancient world had always been based on slavery, making it hard to see why this institution would suddenly begin to "sap" it of "vitality" in the Fifth Century. He then he gets to the crux of his story:

Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril's parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.
(Sagan, p. 366)

I gather I was not the only impressionable reader who found this parable made a great impression. One reader of Dzielska's study, which debunks the version Sagan propagates, wrote a breathless review on Amazon.com that declared:

Hypatia was first brought to my attention by Carl Sagan in his television series Cosmos. She has often been represented as a pillar of wisdom in an age of growing dogma. Unlike with Socrates we know much less about her life and teachings. She is remembered precisely as a martyr who was sacrificed rather than executed by a literalist Christian mob inspired by "St" Cyril, apparently as she was regarded as a threat to Christendom and theology by certain regio-political figures.

That actually makes you wonder if they had read Dzielska's book at all.

While Sagan is the best known propagator of the idea that Hypatia was a martyr for science, he was simply following a venerable polemical tradition that has its origin in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

A rumor was spread among the Christians, that the daughter of Theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the prefect and the archbishop; and that obstacle was speedily removed. On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.

Like Gibbon, Sagan links the story of the murder of Hypatia with the idea that the Great Library of Alexandria was torched by another Christian mob. In fact, Sagan presents the two events as though they were subsequent, stating "[the Library's] last remnants were destroyed soon after Hypatia's death" (p. 366) and that "when the mob came .... to burn the Library down there was nobody to stop them." (p. 365)

In the hands of Sagan and others both the story of Hypatia's murder and the Library's destruction are a cautionary tale of what can happen if we let down our guards and allow mobs of fanatics to destroy the champions and repositories of reason.

The Great Library and its Myths

This is certainly a powerful parable. Unfortunately, it doesn't correspond very closely with actual history. To begin with, the Great Library of Alexandria no longer existed in Hypatia's time. Precisely when and how it had been destroyed is unclear, though a fire in Alexandria caused by Julius Caesar's troops in 48 BC is the most likely main culprit. More likely this and/or other fires were part of a long process of decline and degradation of the collection. Strangely, given that we know so little about it, the Great Library has long been a focus of some highly imaginative fantasies. The idea that it contained 500,000 o0r even 700,000 books is often repeated uncritically by many modern writers, even though comparison with the size other ancient libraries and estimates of the size of the building needed to house such a collection makes this highly unlikely. It is rather more probable that it was around less than a tenth of these numbers, though that would still make it the largest library in the ancient world by a wide margin.

The idea that the Great Library was still in existence in Hypatia's time and that it was, like her, destroyed by a Christian mob has been popularised by Gibbon, who never let history get in the way of a good swipe at Christianity. But what Gibbon was talking about was the temple known as the Serapeum, which was not the Great Library at all. It seems the Serapeum had contained a library at some point and this was a "daughter library" of the former Great Library. But the problem with Gibbon's version is that no account of the destruction of the Serapeum by the Bishop Theophilus in AD 391 makes any mention of a library or any books, only the destruction of pagan idols and cult objects:

At the solicitation of Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, the Emperor issued an order at this time for the demolition of the heathen temples in that city; commanding also that it should be put in execution under the direction of Theophilus. Seizing this opportunity, Theophilus exerted himself to the utmost to expose the pagan mysteries to contempt. And to begin with, he caused the Mithreum to be cleaned out, and exhibited to public view the tokens of its bloody mysteries. Then he destroyed the Serapeum, and the bloody rites of the Mithreum he publicly caricatured; the Serapeum also he showed full of extravagant superstitions, and he had the phalli of Priapus carried through the midst of the forum. Thus this disturbance having been terminated, the governor of Alexandria, and the commander-in-chief of the troops in Egypt, assisted Theophilus in demolishing the heathen temples.
(Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica, Bk V)

Even hostile, anti-Christian accounts of this event, like that of Eunapius of Sardis (who witnessed the demolition), do not mention any library or books being destroyed. And Ammianus Marcellinus, who seems to have visited Alexandria before 391, describes the Serapeum and mentions that it had once housed a library, indicating that by the time of its destruction it no longer did so. The fact is that, with no less than five independent accounts detailing this event, the destruction of the Serapeum is one of the best attested events in the whole of ancient history. Yet nothing in the evidence indicates the destruction of any library along with the temple complex.

Still, the myth of a Christian mob destroying the "Great Library of Alexandria" is too juicy for some to resist, so this myth remains a mainstay for arguments that "Christianity caused the Dark Ages" despite the fact it is completely without foundation. And it seems Amenabar couldn't resist it either - thus a scene early in the movie features an anxious Hypatia scrambling to rescue precious scrolls before a screaming mob bearing crosses bursts through a barred door to destroy what he's dubbed "the second library of Alexandria" (presumably he means the Serapeum). This seems to be at the beginning of the movie, apparently setting the stage for the conflicts between science and religion that will end in Hypatia's murder. Sagan, on the other hand, put the destruction of the Library after her murder. In fact, it seems no such destruction happened either in her lifetime or after it and the idea it did is simply part of the mythic parable.

The Hypatia of History
The real Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, who was famous for his edition of Euclid's Elements and his commentaries on Ptolemy, Euclid and Aratus. Her birth year is often given as AD 370, but Maria Dzielska argues this is 15-20 years too late and suggests AD 350 would be more accurate. That would make her 65 when she was killed and therefore someone who should perhaps be played by Helen Mirren rather than Rachel Weisz. But that would make the movie much harder to sell at the box office.

She grew up to become a renowned scholar in her own right. She seems to have assisted her father in his edition of Euclid and an edition of Ptolemy's Almagest, as well writing commentaries on the Arithmetica of Diophantus and the Conics of Apollonius. Like most natural philosophers of her time, she embraced the neo-Platonic ideas of Plotinus and so her teaching and ideas appealed to a broad range of people - pagans, Christians and Jews. There is some suggestion that Amenabar's film depicts her as an atheist, or at least as wholly irreligious, which is highly unlikely. Neo-Platonism embraced the idea of a perfect, ultimate source called "the One" or "the Good", which was, by Hypatia's time, fully identified with a monotheistic God in most respects.

She was admired by many and at least one of her most ardent students was the Bishop Synesius, who addressed several letters to her, calling her "mother, sister, teacher, and withal benefactress, and whatsoever is honoured in name and deed", saying she is "my most revered teacher" and describing her as she "who legitimately presides over the mysteries of philosophy" (R. H. Charles, The Letters of Synesius of Cyrene). The Christian chronicler quoted above, Socrates Scholasticus, also wrote of her admiringly:

There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in coming to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.
(Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, VII.15)

So if she was admired so widely and admired and respected by learned Christians, how did she come to die at the hands of a Christian mob? And, more importantly, did it have anything to do with her learning or love of science?

The answer lies in the politics of early Fifth Century Alexandria and the way that the power of Christian bishops was beginning to encroach on that of civil authorities in this period. The Patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril, had been a protégé of his uncle Theophilus and succeeded him to the bishopric in AD 412. Theophilus had already made the position of Bishop of Alexandria a powerful one and Cyril continued his policy of expanding the influence of the office, increasingly encroaching on the powers and privilages of the Prefect of the City. The Prefect at the time was another Christian, Orestes, who had taken up his post not long before Cyril became bishop.

Orestes and Cyril soon came into conflict over Cyril's hard-line actions against smaller Christian factions like the Novatians and his violence against Alexandria's large Jewish community. After an attack by the Jews on a Christian congregation and a retaliatory pogrom against Jewish synagogues led by Cyril, Orestes complained to the Emperor but was over-ruled. Tensions between the supporters of the Bishop and those of the Prefect then began to run high in a city that was known for mob rule and vicious political street violence.

Hypatia, whether by chance or choice, found herself in the middle of this power struggle between two Christian factions. She was well-known to Orestes (and probably to Cyril as well) as a prominen tparticipant in the civic life of the city and was perceived by Cyril's faction to be not only a political ally of Orestes but an obstacle to any reconciliation between the two men. The tensions spilled over when a group of monks from the remote monasteries of the desert - men known for their fanatical zeal and not renowned for their political sophistication - came into the city in force to support Cyril and began a riot that resulted in Orestes' entourage being pelted with rocks, with one stone hitting the Prefect in the head. Not one to stand for such insults, Orestes had the monk in question arrested and tortured, which led to the man's death.

Cyril tried to exploit the torture and death of the monk, making out that it was effectively a martyrdom by Orestes. This time, however, his appeals to the Imperial authorities were rejected. Angered, Cyril's followers (with or without his knowledge) took revenge by seizing Hypatia, as a political follower of Orestes, in the street and torturing her to death in vengeance.

The incident was generally regarded with horror and disgust by Christians, with Socrates Scholasticus making his feelings about it quite clear:

[Hypatia] fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles [oyster shells]. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them. This affair brought not the least opprobrium, not only upon Cyril, but also upon the whole Alexandrian church. And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort.
(Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, VII.15)

What is notable in all this is that nowhere in any of this is her science or learning mentioned, expect as the basis for the respect which she was accorded by pagans and Christians alike. Socrates Scholasticus finishes describing her achievements and the esteem with which she was held and then goes on to say "Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed". In other words, despite her learning and position, she fell victim to politics. There is no evidence at all that her murder had anything to do with her learning. The idea that she was some kind of martyr to science is totally absurd.

History vs the Myths. And Movies.

Unfortunately for those who cling to the discredited "conflict thesis" of science and religion perpetually at odds, the history of science actually has very few genuine martyrs at the hands of religious bigots. The fact that a mystic and kook like Giordano Bruno gets dressed up as a free-thinking scientist shows how thin on the ground such martyrs are, though usually those who like to invoke these martyrs can fall back on citing "scientists burned by the Medieval Inquistion", despite the fact this never actually happened. Most people know nothing about the Middle Ages, so this kind of vague hand-waving is usually pretty safe.

Unlike Giordano Bruno, Hypatia was a genuine scientist and, as a woman, was certainly remarkable for her time (though the fact that another female and pagan scientist, Aedisia, practised science in Alexandria unmolested and with high renown a generation later shows she was far from unique). But Hypatia was no martyr for science and science had absolutely zero to do with her murder. Exactly how much of the genuine, purely political background to her death Amenabar puts in his movie remains to be seen. It's hoped that, unlike Sagan and many others, the whole political background to the murder won't simply be ignored and her killing won't be painted as a purely anti-intellectual act of ignorant rage against her science and scholarship. But what is clear from his interviews and the film's pre-publicity is that he has chosen to frame the story in Gibbonian terms straight from the "conflict thesis" textbook - the destruction of the "Great Library", Hypatia victimised for her learning and her death as a grim harbinger of the beginning of the "Dark Ages".

And, as usual, bigots and anti-theistic zealots will ignore the evidence, the sources and rational analysis and believe Hollywood's appeal to their prejudices. It makes you wonder who the real enemies of reason actually are.

The Armarium Magnum Wish List - Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:29:00 +0000

The latest book on my wish-list is The Last Roman: Romulus Augustulus and the Decline of the West by journalist and Bread and Circuses blogger Adrian Murdoch. Adrian is a guy who keeps beating me to writing books I've been thinking about writing for years, having also trumped my plan to write something on the Battle of the Teutoburgerwald (see his Rome's Greatest Defeat: Massacre in the Teutoburg Forest) and now my intention of doing something on Romulus Augustulus. The fact that the last Emperor of Rome's father was Orestes, who had served at the court of Attila the Hun with Edika, the father of Romulus' nemesis Odovacar has always struck me as a tale worth telling. I gather Adrian tells it well and hope to review his book here soon.

In the meantime, I'm working my way through Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind, making copious notes in the process. In an exchange with James Hannam, Freeman (who seems curiously defensive when it comes to criticism) notes "I have yet to receive a review which deals comprehensively with [my arguments]". I'm not sure if a fully "comprehensive" analysis of his book will be possible, but I hope my review will come close. I may have to go back and do some re-reading of some the leading writers in the area of the development of Medieval thought and science and reason's place in the Medieval world before I write my review, because I can see where he's going with his thesis and it doesn't seem to be taking some key research into account.

Speaking of whom, James Hannam's book on this very subject, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science is due out in August. I will be reading it as soon as it is released and will be reviewing it here as soon as possible. Those interested in the topic of science in the Middle Ages can pre-order a copy here.

The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages by Chris Wickham

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:15:00 +0000

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

(Viking: 2009) 672 pages
Verdict?: Sprawling, interesting but diffuse 4/5.

Chichele Professor of Medieval History at Oxford Chris Wickham's new addition to the Penguin History of Europe series is published in the non-American English speaking world under the rather blander title The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000. Apart from sounding stodgier, this version of the subtitle is actually slightly misleading, because Wickham does not focus purely or even mainly on Europe at all. He gives almost equal footing in his 650+ page volume to all three of the civilisations that can be said to have inherited from Rome: western Europe, the Byzantine Empire and the Ummayad and 'Abbasid Caliphates. So apart from making the book sound a little more enticing (and perhaps slightly more exciting than it actually is), the American subtitle, "Illuminating the Dark Ages", is also rather more accurate.

The book follows and parallels Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 and tackles many of the same themes in much the same way. James J O'Donnell was heavily influenced by Wickham's analysis when writing his The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History, to the extent that he states in the chapter that introduces the third part of his book "I follow and explore [Wickham's] interpretation" (p. 405, n. 1). His praise is quite fulsome in his "Further Reading" section at the end of his study:

The reader with more patience for detail and less need for narrative should read Chris Wickham, Framing the Middle Ages (2005), a masterpiece of learning and judgement. A provost sometimes meets well-wishers who venture to doubt that humanists are engaged in what can truly be called research. I hand them Wickham's book.
(O'Donnell, p. 409)

This is high praise and, if the newer work is anything to go by, it seems well-deserved. Wickham is certainly very much a researcher and a careful practitioner of the difficult art of distilling useful conclusions from a broad swathe of disparate and often fragmentary points of data. Something of his method can be gleaned from the way he presents his conclusions: slowly, carefully, painstakingly and, as O'Donnell says, with rather more detail than narrative. I can see why O'Donnell admires Wickham and I share his admiration. True, Wickham is certainly no O'Donnell when it comes to telling a lively story. But when it comes to presenting a wide canvas picture of of a period in which it is all too easy to fall into generalisations rather than solid conclusions, Wickham is, as O'Donnell acknowledges, the master.

Continuity or Catastrophe? - Take 2

Given the temporal parameters of the book, AD 400-1000, it is inevitable that Wickham presents his take on the vexed question of the Fall of the Western Empire and plants a flag somewhere in the "continuity vs catastrophe" debate. The theme of "the inheritance of Rome" could seem to indicate an inclination towards the "continuity" side, but Wickham's view is long and so his position is nuanced.

In discussing the collapse and fragmentation of the Western Empire, Wickham acknowledges that the traditional catastrophist view of an ailing Empire falling to the overwhelming military strength of barbarian savages is clearly wrong and fully accepts that the "barbarians" were, in many important respects, actually very "Roman". But he notes:

This does not lessen the simple point that the Roman empire in the west was replaced by a set of independent kingdoms which did not make claims to imperial legitimacy ... it does force us to ask why each of these kingdoms could not have just reproduced the Roman state in miniature, maintaining structural continuities that could, in principle, have been reunited later, by Justinian, for example. For the fact is that most of them did not do so.
(Wickham, p. 95)

He goes on to note the archaeological evidence of decline; evidence of more localised exchange, simpler buildings and a corresponding simplification of judicial and fiscal systems. This is marked north of the Loire as early as the first half of the Fifth Century and across the northern Mediterranean as well by the Sixth Century. Of course, O'Donnell would attribute the latter to Justinian's wasteful and destructive wars of "reconquest" but Wickham takes a broader and far more economic perspective and attributes the changes substantially to two themes that will repeat themselves through his long book over and over again - taxes and land.

Death and Taxes. And Land.

In the amusing and slightly catty final chapter to his The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, Bryan Ward-Perkins notes ruefully that it is hard to get history students to study economic history at all, despite its vital importance to this period. "In Oxford, at least," he laments, "the word 'economy' is the kiss of death to an undergraduate history course" (Ward-Perkins, p. 179). Economic history is, however, front and centre in Wickham's work and the reader needs to pay close attention to his analysis, often over many pages or whole chapters. This is because land and taxes provide the key to understanding how and why we get from the Rome of the early Fifth Century - spanning from Britain to the Fertile Crescent with a network of political and economic structures - to the three worlds of the early Eleventh Century, Muslim, Byzantine and Feudal European, that Wickham details.

The story he tells is of three kinds of fragmentation playing out in three different ways. In the Byzantine world the Roman taxation structure survives, though it goes into a severe decline in the Ninth Century only to to recover, if in a slightly more localised form. In the process the Byzantine Empire undergoes a degree of the militarisation of the aristocracy and ruling strata that we see in the West, but without the same degree of political fragmentation and localisation of power. In the Muslim world the Arab conquerors inherit Roman and Persian taxation infrastructures intact and make good use of them. These taxes sustain army garrisons across the Caliphate and, to a large extent, keep the military and the civil administration fairly separate for most of our period. Fragmentation, when it comes, is along sectarian and ethnic-cultural lines and the largely tax-based systems survive it more or less intact.

Western Europe, however, is different. There the Roman tax system declined rapidly as the source of economic security and therefore power increasingly became the ownership of land:

As noted earlier, the 'barbarian' armies that took over provinces had different aims from the Roman armies that seized power for their generals in previous centuries. They wanted to settle back on the land, as their ancestors had done, before the generation or so of intermittent movement and conquest. .... Beginning in the Fifth Century, there was a steady trend away from supporting armies by public taxation and towards supporting them by rents from private landowning.
(Wickham, p. 102)

So the drift from a tax-based military system to a land-sustained one had begun long before the fall of Rome; probably driven by the Western Empire's relative poverty and a need to maintain a very large and expensive army. This drift escalated with the domination of the 'barbarian' rulers and their military elites, for whom land-ownership was a key aim. Wickham then details a process by which this trend began to escalate and dominate. Our records of the Ostrogothic and Visigothic kingdoms contain many references to disputes over land and records of citizens objecting to land being appropriated by Gothic lords and their private armed retinues, often by force. Theodoric the Great worked to restrain some of his powerful lords in this respect, but the trend was clear: those who had land had power and those who had power had the means to appropriate more land. As Wickham notes, by the late Merovingian Period this trend meant that the great counts of the now sprawling Frankish kingdom were the largest landowners in Europe since the height of the Empire.

But this trend also saw the breakdown of the Roman taxation system in Europe, in a way that it did not totally collapse in Byzantium or the Caliphate. With it went the networks and systems of collection and administration and so also the sinews of long-distance commerce. Production became increasingly localised, the shared knowledge of the engineering and construction of large scale buildings declined and Europe saw a simplification of its material culture generally. Traditionalists have seen this simply as "barbarism", attributed it to a "coarsening of the human spirit" and various other simplistic causes (corruption, the Church, "savagery") and lamented it as evidence of "a Dark Age". Wickham shows that it was simply, as with the parallel though differing changes in Byzantium and the Caliphate, a response to a series of economic and military changes.

One of the most marked of the changes in question is the militarisation of the aristocracy and the system of civil administration. Roman government and the Roman aristocracy had been fundamentally civilian. A Roman politician usually did his time in the army as part of the cursus honorum, but the civil administration was for the most part divorced from the military. This included the important networks of aristocratic patronage, generous private donations of time and money for the public good and sponsorship of the arts, architecture and religion. The military played its role in politics and this was an increasingly assertive role as time went on, but it never wholly dominated the aristocracy and civil administration.

Scholars of the Sword

With the shift from a tax-based military to a land-based one in the Fifth to Seventh Centuries, this changed completely. Now the aristocrats who owned the land derived power directly from the military retinues they could sustain from it. The military - the great land-owning lords who came together to form the martial strength of the kingdom - were also the aristocrats who ruled the kingdom itself. Rulership, land-ownership and military strength all became entwined. Aristocrats were still administrators and local rulers, with a dominant aristocrat to whom they paid varying degrees of due respect (eg the Frankish king/emperor or the local Anglo-Saxon overlord), but they were also warlords and leaders of an increasingly elite and aristocratic army. Whereas Roman aristocrats vied with each other in accomplishments in the arts or sponsorship of fine buildings, post-Roman aristocrats vied with each other in the appropriation of land to support their military power and the exercise of that power in the chess game of supremacy.

By the Carolingian Period the great counts of Frankia dominated and tightly administered a territory almost the size of the old Western Empire. And this was no gaggle of grunting barbarian warlords - these men were intelligent, literate, versed in law and politics and capable of ruling huge swathes of often widely separated units of land. But the game they played required them to be fluent in cavalry tactics and swordplay rather than Virgil and their textual literacy (which they clearly maintained, unlike most of their feudal successors) was turned to the administration of the Empire of Charlemagne and, to a lesser extent, contemplation of the afterlife.

This system of land-based civil and military power had great strengths, as the rise of the Franks and the coalescence of England shows. But it had attendant weaknesses. When the dominant aristocrat's power slipped, the chess game for supremacy became more intense and the localisation of power accelerated. Counts who could dominate large territories before now had to reward state service by gifts of land; something which eventually became buying loyalty. This process led to a corresponding fragmentation of power and an increasing localisation of dominance. By the end of Wickham's period we see this localisation taking on various forms but with consistent results: a militarisation of the landscape in the face of external threats (eg Vikings) and an increasing imposition of duties on the formerly autonomous peasantry to sustain local defence, castle-building and petty wars. The result was the "feudal revolution", which can be said to mark the real end of the "inheritance of Rome" and the beginning of a new world in Europe.

Wickham's thesis is strong and well supported and it strikes an interesting stance in the catastrophe vs continuity debate. There clearly was great continuity, but similarly great change as well. By contrasting the Caliphate, Byzantium and the (largely Frankish) West, he shows that these changes were driven by a nexus of economic and politico-military factors. The breadth of the scope of his book is therefore its key strength - it would be impossible to make his case and make it in any kind of detail without careful examination of the ways the "inheritance of Rome" played out elsewhere in this period or without tracing these dynamics over six long and tumultuous centuries.

Narrative and Detail

In a sense, however, this same breadth is also the book's weakness. Tracing these complex inter-relations of economics, political structures, administrative structures and external pressures over six hundred years in a book of over six hundred pages is a massive undertaking. And Wickham does it well, with a measured, methodical, careful pace, hedged with appropriate caveats and cautions about the nature of our sources and so on. But six hundred pages of detail-rich sentences and caution, presented at a methodical pace can make for hard work for the reader.

The Times Literary Supplement said of his earlier work "there is hardly a page of Framing the Early Middle Ages which a newcomer to the period would not find accessible, indeed warmly welcoming". The same claim could be made of this book - it is generally accessible - but the newcomer in question would definitely need some stamina and would need their wits about them as well. Wickham is an writer who can pile on detailed evidence for five, ten or fifteen pages at a stretch before finally turning back to delineate a (cautious) answer to a question he may have asked the reader to ponder three-quarters of a chapter earlier. Accessible, yes - but only for a newcomer who is prepared to work. I suspect that as a lecturer Wickham does not suffer slackers and crammers gladly.

Earlier I quoted O'Donnell describe Wickham's writing as suited to "the reader with more patience for detail and less need for narrative". He was not damning Wickham with faint praise. But the sheer scale of his undertaking means that Wickham has to skate past some very tantalising potential narrative to avoid missing some of the more important detail. Which led me to feel at times that there was the potential for about five other, very different and much more vivid books in Wickham's work. As good as his book is, it did seem a pity that he could not pause to give us more of some of the stories he touches on, such as the Ummayad vizier who ended up dying in an elaborate torture machine of his own devising or the Frankish princess accused of incest, sodomy and infanticide (of the baby born, rather improbably, as the result of incestuous sodomy, no less!) Coming after reading O'Donnell's rather American racy story-telling with its provocatively bold conclusions, Wickham's methodical caution came across as very English by contrast.

This is, however, a fine book and one which should stand as a foundational textbook for this period for some time to come. It might be nice if one day Mr Wickham could let his hair down a little and write something a bit more like the anecdotal vignettes with which he begins each chapter. I suspect he has some good narrative history in him as well, though I am grateful for the books he has written so far.

The Armarium Magnum Wish List - Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:37:00 +0000

In between reviews I will be periodically posting notices of books that I (i) am reading and intend to review in the future, (ii) have bought or have my eye on and will possibly review or (iii) simply sound good and may buy in the future. This periodic "Wish List" may or may not reflect what books actually do get reviewed, but should act as a heads up regarding interesting books that are out there.

As I've mentioned already, I'm in the process of completing Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 and will be reviewing it soon. This book encompasses far more than a history of post-Roman Europe and has detailed chapters on the Byzantine, Ummayad and 'Abbasid worlds well beyond Europe, which serve as a useful contrast to what was happening in Europe in the same periods. And sitting on my "to read next" shelf is Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason, which has been well-received in some quarters though is not highly regarded by historians of the Middle Ages, who feel Freeman is perpetuating some hoary myths. I'll reserve judgement until my upcoming review.

But high on my wish list at the moment is Misconceptions about the Middle Ages (Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture) edited by Stephen Harris and Bryon L. Grigsby. This collection of articles began life as a discussion between Medievalists on an online listserv about common misconceptions students have about the medieval period and developed into a series of articles hosted on the ORB online medieval resouce site. Routledge has now published the whole collection as a weighty tome. At $125, it's also a fairly expensive one, but I will be ordering a copy soon and posting a review. In the meantime, you can get a taste of the contents from this summary and table of contents from Medievalist.net, which includes links to the book's introduction and an interview with the editors.

Addendum to the O'Donnell Review

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 03:47:00 +0000

In my review of James J. O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire in my last entry below, I mentioned both Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. A reader has since brought O'Donnell's own review of both books in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review to my attention and I thought it was worth linking to here. O'Donnell makes a good summary of where he agrees and (more interestingly) where he disagrees with both scholars and his comments would be of interest to anyone with an eye on the question of "catastrophe vs continuity" regarding the fall of the Western Empire.

Thanks to "Flavius Aetius" for the heads up.

The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History by James J. O'Donnell

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:57:00 +0000

James J. O'Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History

(Ecco: 2008) 448 pages
Verdict?: Provocative, stimulating and entertaining 5/5.

It is rare for a book to give a well-worn topic a new perspective and rarer for one which does so to be as accessible and entertaining as this. Or as provocative. Following in the wake of other excellent recent books on the "Fall of the Roman Empire", notably Peter Heather's weighty The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, O'Donnell takes the reader on a lively and colourful tour of the world of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Centuries and the people who can give us an insight into the end of Classical civilisation and the beginning of the Middle Ages. In the process, he examines some old ideas from some new and sometimes controversial angles and seems to deliberately and rather gleefully couch things in ways that will raise some hackles. All that makes for a roller-coaster of a read on what could strike some as a fairly dusty subject.

The essence of O'Donnell's thesis, and his provocation, can be summed up in his book's subtitle: "The Emperor who brought it down, the barbarians who could have saved it". The idea that the Empire was brought down by a Roman Emperor (he's referring to Justinian I) and could have been "saved" by barbarians would strike traditionalist Classicists as both heretical and absurd, but the subtitle is a deliberate teaser for what is actually a nuanced and well-argued position, even if it is not always a wholly convincing one on every point.

Essentially, O'Donnell argues that the traditional date for the "Fall" - September 4th AD 476 - is only one of several dates which could be taken as the "end" of the Empire and gives good evidence that it was not seen as the "end" at the time as widely or as fully as modern writers tend to assume. He argues that in many respects, though clearly not all, the "Empire" continued in form, many functions and even in name under Odovacar, Theodoric the Great, the Visigothic kings and the Vandals. What destroyed this post-Imperial "Empire"-without-an-Emperor was Justinian's ill-considered attempts at reconquest, which plunged Italy into decades of destructive war, wrecked the surviving institutions of the Empire and left the west open to barbarians who were far less Romanised and civilised than the Goths and Vandals.

Continuity or Catastrophe?

The old Nineteenth Century idea of the barbarians who entered the Empire in the Fourth to Sixth Centuries as wolfskin-wearing savages from the primeval forests and the steppe has been abandoned long ago. Even the more "barbaric" of the invaders, such as the Angles, Saxons and Frisians who invaded Britain, were from frontier regions which had been heavily influenced by Rome for centuries. And the main players were more Romanised still - by 476 some of them had been living inside the Empire for almost a century and the Goths Theodoric led into Italy or the Vandals Gaiseric led across the Straits of Gibraltar were largely Christian, substantially Latin-speaking or at least bilingual or multilingual and armed, dressed and equipped more or less like the Romans they came to dominate. Theodoric' s men had been soldiers of the Empire for a generation, even if they were sometimes soldiers in various forms of revolt:

If there were any primeval forest dwellers in those communities, they were the ones their smarter, more acquisitive and more ambitious cousins left behind … by the time people like Theoderic’s followers find themselves in Italy, they were there not as barbarians but as Roman soldiers, bearers of the distinctive frontier culture of the north, to be sure, with styles of dress, religion, and speech that differentiated them from the settled southerners, but that made them nonetheless part of the same imperial community.
(O'Donnell, p. 121)

But here is where O'Donnell gets pointedly provocative. He deliberately emphasises this point to a high degree. When introducing Theodoric, for example, he writes of him as a young man from the edge of the Empire who was educated and raised at the Imperial court until the age of 18 and who then took up military roles in the Balkans pretty much like many of the other ambitious Roman soldiers and generals O'Donnell has already mentioned. He manages to describe the career of this canny Imperial player for about a dozen pages without once using words like "tribe" or "warband" or even "Goth". Of course, he knows precisely what he's doing and, at the end of this summary turns to the reader and draws attention to what he has just done and why. Doing this certainly does change the way the reader, who may have read other more traditional versions of Theodoric's story, looks at who he was and how he fitted in with the Imperial system.

And it is not like it is really unusual for a writer to do this about a "barbarian". Many traditional histories of the period write about people like the Emperor Zeno without so much as a hint that his original name was Tarasicodissa and that he was an Isaurian warrior from Armenia. Or that the Emperor Leo I was a member of the Bessian tribe of Thrace. The idea that these men were less "barbarians" than Theodoric and his men does not really make much sense, yet the traditional view means that Theodoric still gets presented as an "Ostrogoth" while Zeno and Leo rarely get presented in the same way.

The first section of the book, therefore, presents a vivid overview of the post-Imperial "Empire" viewed with this "continuity" perspective. It is important to note here, however, that O'Donnell is not plumping for some wholesale "continualist" position and arguing that "the Empire never fell" and that the whole business of the collapse of the Western Empire was a bloodless and pleasant transition from one type of ruler to another. He specifically points to Bryan Ward-Perkins' eloquent counter to that idea and cautions that, in some ways and some places at least, the end of the Empire was every bit as violent, bloody and destructive as the traditional picture would suggest. In Britain, northern Gaul and parts of inland Spain, in particular, this was very much the case from the mid-Fifth Century onwards.

That said, his emphasis on continuity is backed by good evidence. Under Odovacar, Theodoric, Gaiseric and others, traditional offices continued to be filled, poems written, elegant dinner parties attended, games held, ceremonial observed and so on, pretty much as if nothing much of note had happened in AD 476. One example of this is an inscription to Theodoric found by the Appian Way near Rome which begins:

Our Lord the most glorious and celebrated King Theodoric, victor in triumph, ever Augustus, born for the good of the state, guardian of freedom and propagator of the Roman name, who has tamed the nations ...
(O'Donnell, p. 145)

The noteworthy thing here is not simply the act of putting up a dedicatory inscription to commemorate some building work sponsored by a ruler or the traditional formulas being applied to an "Ostrogoth" rather than a Roman, but the use of the formula "ever Augustus" for the Gothic king. Clearly he is not being called an Emperor - he is specifically called "King" - but he has equally clearly slotted fairly neatly into the role of an Emperor nonetheless. And there are many similar examples of how, as O'Donnell argues it, the new rulers of Italy, Spain, Gaul and Africa were restructuring the Roman west in some ways but leaving things much as they were in most others.

In some respects, however, O'Donnell does push this too far. It is true that anyone who combs through the evidence of Ostrogothic Italy looking for elements that are uniquely "Gothic" or even Germanic usually comes up with very little. But O'Donnell de-emphasises the little that can be found to the point of it being virtually invisible in his narrative. As Romanised as the Goths in Theodoric's regime were, they still spoke at least some Gothic or spoke Gothic some of the time. They were still distinctive enough in dress and accoutrements to be identifiable as "Goths" (regardless of whether they actually had any Germanic ancestry at all). And they were still Arians while their Roman neighbours were Catholics.

O'Donnell goes so far as to argue that Theodoric constructed a purely ethnically Gothic identity and history for himself and his Amaling clan only towards the end of his life, when he was frustrated by increasing Eastern Imperial refusal to accept or accommodate his new world order in the west. He never presents any evidence for this interpretation however. All regimes certainly have a tendency to paint a romantic picture of their origins and to shape their image of themselves, but the idea that Theodoric's Germanic roots were largely a "construction" and only emerged at the end of his career does not seem to be based on any clear evidence that I know of. Indeed, Herwig Wolfram - the scholar who, literally, wrote the book on Germanic "ethnogenesis", the fluidity of Germanic tribal identity and the near total obscurity of any of the prehistory of the Germanic groups of this period - still attributes some aspects of Theodoric's reign to distinctively Germanic cultural elements. He pursued some wars against the Rugians, for example, that don't seem to have made much sense in terms of grand strategy but seem to have been driven more by the Germanic rules of blood feud than the chess game of post-Roman relations.

Overall, however, O'Donnell makes his case well enough - prior to Justinian's wars of reconquest things in the West were in battered shape in most places and in total collapse in many. But in Ostrogothic Italy, Vandal Africa and Visigothic Gaul and Spain, at least, the old structures either survived, were patched up or were rejigged and adapted to a new basis for the old civilisation. Not the Empire, of course, but close enough to it to raise an inscription to a Germanic king who had repaired a Roman road calling him "ever Augustus". Then along came Justinian ...

Enter Justinian

Justinian has generally not been treated kindly by many modern historians and O'Donnell is no exception. The picture he paints is fairly typical: Justinian and his uncle and predecessor Justin took the stable and prosperous Empire they inherited from Anastasius and, through a combination of pride, ideological fanaticism and religious intolerance, left it financially bankrupt, religiously polarised and militarily broken. He saw the Germanic rulers of the West simply as heretics and alien usurpers and struck out at them as enemies of Roman civilisation and, in the process, did far more to wreck what was left of that civilisation than the Romanised barbarians had ever done; leaving the West shattered and open to other, far more barbaric barbarians.

Again, there is a lot of merit to this view and overall O'Donnell substantiates it well and with a certain acidic vividness of language, such as when he says of Justinian "as a religious monarch [he] resembles Stalin and as a political monarch he favours Milosevic" or writes:

Hamlet would have made a terrible king. Justinian, intellectually arrogant, priggish, not as well educated as he thought he was and alternating between indecisiveness and rashness, shows us how Hamlet would have turned out.
(O'Donnell, p. 224)

In O'Donnell's view, Justinian failed on several fronts. Firstly, he was an arch-conservative and reactionary who saw all deviation from his views as dangerous dissent to be crushed. He championed the Chalcedonian position on the nature of Christ to a fanatical degree, alienating the Monophysites who made up the majority in his Empire. He also pursued a policy of crushing remnants of pagan culture, driving many intellectuals into exile in Persia, to the benefit of Persian and, later, Arabic intellectual culture. Secondly, he pursued policies against Persia and in the Balkans that were to have dire consequences for his successors. Finally, his policy in the West was quixotic, wrong-headed and wasteful and it ultimately destroyed the very things he thought he was trying to restore, "mistaking Rome for civilization and the opponents of Rome for opponents of civilization", he destroyed both.

Again, some of these views have dissenters - for example, Chris Wickham has recently argued in his The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 (to be reviewed here soon) that "[Justinian's] Italian war would have been less of a mess if Justinian had put more, not less, money into it" (Wickham, p. 94). The fact remains, however, that Justinian did spend an estimated 21.5 million solidi on the Italian campaign against the Goths and, with it, bought himself a fractured wasteland. And this is in the context of an Empire which, in a good year, brought in just 5 million solidi in tax revenue and consumed most of that in administration. His "victory" in Italy was ultimately a political and financial disaster for which his successors had to pay.

The Ruin of Rome

The final part of the book focuses on the man O'Donnell calls "the last consul of Rome" and who history knows as Pope Gregory the Great. Gregory is depicted vividly as a figure straddling the Roman past and the early Medieval future; a man living - quite literally - in the ruins of the world that Justinian's disastrous policies created. Here is a man who was a vastly wealthy landowner and a member of the old Senatorial class that was now, in the post-Justinian world, finally fading to nothingness. And Rome - long since abandoned as a capital and strangled of the status, the taxes and grain that once artificially inflated its population - has become a city of ruins and the scars of Justinian's wars, with its remnant population clustered around the churches on its outskirts, its centre abandoned and the Forum on its way to becoming a cow pasture. The grim apocalyptic world of Gregory is vividly depicted as both the mournful consequence of Justinian's wrong-headedness, a shadow of what might have been and a hint of new beginnings still some centuries off.

Vividness is the lasting impression O'Donnell's excellent work leaves the reader. Throughout the book he manages to not simply explain complexities such as the convoluted theological disputes of the period or motivations behind Gregory's Moralia on Job, but he succeeds brilliantly in bringing the period to life. Vignettes such as the Emperor appearing on his balcony over the Hippodrome to engage in dialogue with the powerful chariot racing factions of Constantinople or Theodoric's stately and dignified visit to Rome in AD 500, to be greeted with ceremonies and acclamations fit for an Emperor make the characters in O'Donnell's story live and illustrate his themes in a lively manner.

O'Donnell aids this by his conversational and almost chatty tone and some subtle humour. Many of his chapters' subtitles have amusing modern cultural references in them: "Northern Exposures" or "A Country for Old Men". And there are references to current affairs tucked into his descriptions of ancient events. Cosmas Indicopleustes' abortive attempt at establishing a Biblically-inspired flat earth geography is said to have been motivated by his belief that the universe is "intelligently designed". Justinian's doctrinaire and reactionary advisers are called his "neo-conservatives". And O'Donnell draws attention to Julian's campaigns in what is now Iraq, which began with quick victories and ended in disaster thanks to his lack of an "exit strategy.

Overall, the book is a thought-provoking, vivid and dazzling read. True, some of his provocative arguments are a little overstated and the sections of "what if" counterfactual history about Justinian's lost opportunities and their potential implications for our time are a bit high flown. But this is a solid, erudite and remarkable contribution to a topic which has been well-served by other excellent books in recent years. Highly recommended.

The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation by Arther Ferrill

noreply@blogger.com (Tim O'Neill) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:13:00 +0000

Arther Ferrill, Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation
(Thames & Hudson Ltd: 1986) 192 Pages

Verdict?: A failed thesis. 1/5

On the whole Ferrill's book is a useful resource as a summary of the major events in the collapse of the Western Empire, but the central thesis of Ferrill's work and his final conclusion are both very weak. Ferrill dismisses the longer term economic and administrative failings of the Western Empire, but does so without actually discussing them. He says that to see the later Empire "as a troubled giant .... a decaying Empire .... is to miss the point." (p.164) but he doesn't explain why. In fact, the long term problems of inflation, a declining population and a shrinking tax base, along with a widening gap between rich and poor in the West and a spiralling trend towards ruralisation of the population all combined and accelerated slowly over a long period between the reign of Diocletian and 476 AD.

What we conspicuously don't see in this period is any major military defeats of the Roman army by barbarian invaders. When the weakening, fragmenting and economically anaemic Western Empire is confronted by a military threat in this period it usually defeats it - at least for as long as the failing economy and collapsing administration is still able to organise armed resistance.

The fall of the West was an economic and administrative failing - battles and tactics had virtually nothing to do with it.

But Ferrill simply dismisses all this as "missing the point" without a word of explanation as to why all these highly significant factors are completely irrelevant. He simply tells us they are - end of story.

He writes:

"Many historians have argued .... that the fall of Rome was not primarily a military phenomenon. In fact, it was exactly that. After 410 the emperor in the West could no longer project military power to the frontiers."
(p. 164)

This is quite true, but what Ferrill skips lightly over is the reason for this - the depopulated and cash-strapped Western Empire, having fought five civil wars in the last century and wracked by political instability, was simply in no position to field the armies it needed to protect the border provinces. It's not as though outdated Roman armies were being tackled and beaten by superior barbarian forces. The armies weren't withdrawing after being routed on battlefields by overwhelming or tactically superior Germanic troops. The Empire simply couldn't maintain its centralised military infrastructure any more because it didn't have the manpower or the cash to do so.

Ferrill acknowledges that this so-called "military" collapse, strangely enough, didn't actually involved many battles or any major defeats, but he's not deterred:

"One need not produce a string of decisive battles in order to demonstrate a military collapse. The shrinkage of the imperial frontiers from 410 to 440 was directly as a result of military conquests by barbarian forces."
(p. 164)

Though these "military conquests by barbarian forces" occurred, strangely enough, without any decisive battles. The truth is the barbarians moved, usually without major opposition, into areas that the dwindling and economically starved Roman army had already abandoned or which it could no longer defend in strength. Their "invasions" - actually very small in number - were a symptom of the decline of the Roman army and the economic and administrative decline of the West, not its cause.

Ferrill asserts otherwise, with great boldness. But, again, he doesn't tell us why - he just tell us.

"To be sure, the loss of strategic resources, money, material and manpower compounded the mere loss of territory and made military defence of the rest of the Empire even more difficult. It is simply perverse, however, to argue that Rome's strategic problems in the 440s, 50s and 60s were primarily the result of financial and political difficulties or of long term trends such as depopulation."
(pp. 164-65)

Why is this quite reasonable and sensible conclusion "simply perverse"? Ferrill doesn't tell us, he just says it is.

He goes on to argue that any explanation of the fall of the West has to take into account the survival of the East - which is very true - and seems to believe that this is an argument against the "simply perverse" idea that systemic and economic problems were the real causes. In fact, the East always had a far greater population and a massive concentration of the whole Empire's wealth. The division of 395 made this disparity worse, giving the West more to defend and far less resources with which to do it. Further weakened by civil wars, local warlords and a string of weak or shortsighted rulers, it's actually amazing the West struggled on for as long as it did. So it's very clear why the East survived while the West fell.

Ferrill continually acknowledges key points in the real reasons for the fall of the West without acknowledging (or grasping) their significance. In discussing what the West did wrong while the East got right, he says the East "was better able to afford the heavy subsidies barbarian leaders demanded in the years after Adrianople" (p 166). But he fails to see why this is the case - because the East was far wealthier than the West. This was not a military factor, and it certainly had nothing to do with equipment, training or tactics - it is purely economic. The East was able to pay Attila off for years and then, when he became too much of a nuisance, refuse to pay him anymore. The Hunnic king then decided to make up for his lost revenue by attacking the West, since the more impoverished half of the Empire made an easier target than the still relatively rich and strong East.

Similarly, the East were able to pay off and deflect a succession of potential barbarian problems, usually getting them to afflict the increasingly weak and fragmented West. Ferrill briefly acknowledges the East's significant economic strength, but then ignores it to pursue his ghostly theory of military explanations.

Without giving any good reasons for setting aside significant and relevant factors in the decline of the West such as economics and depopulation, Ferrill blithely declares that they can, indeed, be set aside. But not before lumping them in with "race mixture .... lead poisoning and other fashionable theories" (p. 166), which is a pretty shoddy piece of rhetorical trickery.

He goes on to argue that the real reasons for the fall of the West was a deterioration of the Western Roman Army - not the decline in the infrastructure and recruitment which sustained the army, as I've argued above, but a decline in the tactics, training and quality of the troops.

For the decline in training he relies almost entirely on Vegetius' problematic manual and on a highly dubious report from Jordanes of a pre-battle speech by Attila about the quality of Roman troops. And for the decline in the quality of the troops he simply points to the "barbarisation" of the army and takes it as given that this meant the troops were therefore of low quality. Again, Hugh Elton shows the flaws in this idea. As he argues, the use of barbarian troops had been going on in the Roman army for centuries and continued in both the East and the West in this period. So why did this practice suddenly cause a decline in quality in the West in the Fifth Century?

Secondly, most of the barbarian troops used in the West weren't part of the regular units anyway - they were federate bands hired for specific campaigns or to defend particular territories. Their use and significance certainly did increase as the Fifth Century progressed, but largely for the very economic and administrative problems that Ferrill is so keen to dismiss. So, once again, we aren't seeing a "military explanation" - we're seeing the result of longer term, systemic economic and social weakness.

Ferrill's final sentence reads: "As the western army became barbarised, it lost its tactical superiority, and Rome fell to the onrush of barbarism". This is nonsense. There was no loss of "tactical superiority" - whenever the ailing Western Empire could field a decent sized army it won hands down. In fact the military history of the fall of the Western Empire is a string of Roman victories and barbarian defeats. It's the economic and administrative history of the West in this period which is the tale of woe and its the weaknesses here which robbed the Empire of its ability to field and maintain those armies and led, eventually, to its economic and administrative fragmentation and its eventual political collapse.