The Medieval Mind

and the Renaissance

–
Conquest, Colonization and
Cultural Change of Europe

MGS 4
History of Music Assigment
Semester 2, 2008

Opinions and research by: Lyndi Green (Beyers)

Student no: 205008356
Lecturer: Rudi Bower

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Chronology

3. The Medieval Mind

4. The Dark Ages

5. The Renaissance

6. Conquest, colonization and cultural

change

7. Medieval and Modern colonialism

8. Conclusion

9. References
Introduction

Europe is both a region and an idea. The societies and cultures that
have existed in this western extremity of the European land-mass have
always been highly diverse (Bartlett. 1994: 11). Certain features were
seen throughout the Middle Ages: Europe was made up of peasant
communities, making a living from farming, hunting and gathering.
Everywhere a small elite group of aristocrats fed itself off the labours
of these peasants. Culturally, this society was a mix of Roman, with
Latin as its learned language and a small skeleton of roads and cities,
with the presence of a biblical religion under the law of the military
aristocrats.

No period of history anywhere can be called static or stagnant, but the

amount of growth and social contact in early medieval Europe was
much less than that in the years after 1000 AD. From the eleventh
century a period of intense creativity began within western Europe. The
invasions of earlier decades by Vikings, Magyar and Saracen had
ended. From the eleventh until the slump in growth of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries are known as the High Middle Ages, a time of
economic growth, territorial expansion and dynamic cultural and social
change (Painter. 1953: 23). By the year 1300 Europe was well settled,
productive and culturally blossoming. In Flanders thousands of looms
were producing textiles to export; in northern Italy banking empires
were selling credit, insurance and investment; in northern France
intellectual life was sophisticated and political power extremely
effective and developed. According to Bartlett (1994: 12) recruiting
agents traveled in the overpopulated parts of Europe collecting
emigrants; wagons full of new settlers crossed the continent; busy
ports sent off ships full of colonists to distant destinations; bands of
knights fought wars to conquer new lordships.

The question which I shall address in the writing and research of this
paper is, what was it like to live in a time of illiteracy, darkness,
disease and conquest?

Chronology

AD 410 Visigoths sack Rome

AD 476 Fall of Rome, end of Western Roman Empire
AD 800 Charlemagne crowned in St. Peter’s, Rome
AD 1100 200 years of crusades begin
AD 1215 Medieval papacy reaches culmination
AD 1218-1224 Genghis Khan extends empire in west
AD 1247 Robin Hood dies
AD 1347 First Black Death pandemic
AD 1400 First stirrings of Rennaissance
AD 1433 Prince Henry the Navigator flourishes
AD 1453 Constantinople falls
AD 1477 Chaucer’s ‘Cantebury Tales’
AD 1486 Bartholomeu Dias rounds the tip of Africa
AD 1484 Pied Piper murders 130 German children
AD 1492 Christopher Columbus discovers the Bahamas
AD 1495 Vatigan revels with naked prostitues. First syphilis outbreak
ravages Naples
AD 1498 Rise of Humanism
AD 1500 Michelangelo’s ‘Madonna and Child’
AD 1501 Over 1000 printing shops now in Europe
AD 1502 All books challenging papal authority ordered burned
AD 1503 Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”
AD 1507 Martin Luther ordained a Catholic priest
AD 1509 Beginnings of slave trade in America
AD 1512 Michelangelo completes Sistine Chapel ceiling
AD 1513 Machiavelli’s ‘Il principe’
AD 1514 Copernicus postulates the solar system in ‘De hypothesibus…
commentariolus’
AD 1519 Magellan leaves to sail around the world
AD 1520 German gunsmith invents the rifle
AD 1522 The sea voyage of circumnavigating the world ends, vindicating
Copernicus
AD 1524 Peasants revolt in Germany
AD 1527 Second sack of Rome; end of Rennaissance
AD 1528 Plague sweeps England

(Painter 1953; iv)

The Medieval Mind

The six hundred years between approximately AD 400 to AD 1000 are

known as the Dark Ages. Very little in known about this dim era.
Intellectual life had vanished from Europe. Even Charlemagne, the first
Holy Roman emperor and the greatest of all medieval rulers, was
illiterate. Throughout the Middle Ages (some seven centuries), literacy
was scorned. Most of what is known about this period is unlovely. After
the fragments have been fitted together what emerges is a collage of
constant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange
myths and an a dwindling mindlessness.
Europe had been in trouble since the Roman Empire disappeared in the
fifth century. Ever since the time of the historian Tacitus, in the first
century AD, the border of the Danube and the Rhine had been
vulnerable to attack by Huns. Huns were ignorant of agriculture but
expert archers, trained to kill. These warriors from Mongolia had turned
war into their industry. Under the weight of relentless attacks by Huns
and then Gothic allies, the Danube-Rhine line was slowly broken down.
Armies slaughtered wealthy men, raped women, destroyed priceless
pieces of sculpture, and melted down works of art for their precious
metals. In the years that followed, Goths, Alans, Burgundians,
Thuringians, Frisians, Gepidae, Suevi, Alemanni, Angles, Saxons, Jutes,
Lombards, Heruli, Quadi and Magyars joined in ravaging what was left
of civilation. The ethnic cultures settled in its conquered lands and
darkness descended upon the devastated, unstable continent.
Contamine (1984; 20) put it aptly: Darkness would not lift until forty
medieval generations had suffered, lived and passed on.

The Dark Ages

The Dark Ages was stark. Famines and plague, culminating in the Black
Death and its recurring pandemics, repeatedly thinned the population.
Rickets afflicted the survivors. Extraordinary climatic changes brought
storms and floods which turned into major disasters because the
empire’s drainage system was no longer functioning. Among the lost
arts was bricklaying; in all of Germany, England, Holland and
Scandanavia, almost no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were built
for ten centuries. Abduction for ransom was an acceptable means of
livelihood for skilled but landless knights. People huddled closely
together in communal homes. They married fellow villagers and were
so isolated that local dialects were often unrecognisable to men living
only a few miles away. The level of everyday violence was shocking.
Despite the bloodthirstiness, perhaps acquired from the Huns, Goths,
Franks and Saxons, all were devout Christians. The Church had
replaced imperial Rome. Missionaries found teaching pagans the
lessons of Jesus a hopeless task. Death was the penalty for hundreds of
crimes. ‘Soldiers of Christ’ (Bartlett, 1994) swung their swords freely.
Many people who shared the same faith, died for their interpretation of
it. Over three thousand Christians died at the hands of fellow Christians
– more than all the victims in the three centuries of Roman
persecutions. The Church became the wealthiest landowner on the
continent, and the life of every European, from baptism through
marriage to burial, was governed by popes, cardinals, prelates,
monsignors, archbishops, bishops, and village priests. The clergy, it
was believed, would also cast votes to determine where each soul
would spend the afterlife.

Was the medieval world a civilization, like Rome before it, or to the
modern centuries which followed it? If by civilization one means society
which has reached a relatively high level of cultural and technological
development, the answer is no. Romans had reached peaks of artistic
and intellectual achievement; their city had become the capital of the
Roman Catholic Church. The Medieval age accomplished none of these.
Trade on the Mediterranean was filled with Muslim pirates, blocking
vital sea routes. Agriculture and transport were inefficient; the
population was never fed properly. Manchester (1996; 52) states that
this society may have been diverse and colourful, but it was also
anarchic, formless, and appallingly unjust and that this was the worst
of times for the imaginative, the cerebral and the unfortunate, but the
strong, the shrewd, the handsome, the beautiful, and the lucky, all
flourished. This was a time of warfare and most noblemen had risen by
proving themselves in battle. Titles included: duke (a military
commander); earl; count or comte (a companion of a great personage);
baron (warrior); margrave; and marquess, or marquis. (Beer. 1924;
125) On the lowest rung of the aristocratic ladder, was the knight.
(Contamine (1984) states that the word knight originally meant a farm
worker of free birth). By the eleventh century knights were cavalrymen
living in mansions, each with his noble seal. All were bound by oath to
serve a duke, earl, count, baron, or marquis who, in turn, honoured him
with gifts: horses, falcons and weapons.

The most elusive, yet most significant pieces of the medieval mind
were invisible and silent. An example was the medieval man’s total
lack of ego. Each of the great soaring medieval cathedrals required
three or four centuries to complete. The church of Canterbury took
twenty-three generations to build; Chatres, eighteen generations. Yet
we know nothing of the architects or builders. They were glorifying
God. To them their identity in this life was irrelevant. Noblemen had
surnames, the rest – nearly 60 million Europeans – were known as
Hans, Jacques, Sal, Carlos, Will, or Will’s wife, Will’s son, or Will’s
daughter. There was no need for a name beyond One-Eye, or Roussie
(Redhead), or Bionda (Blondie). Each hamlet was inbred, isolated,
unaware of the world beyond the closest creek, mill, or tall tree scarred
by lightning. In the later ages when identities became necessary, their
descendants would either adopt the surname of the local lord, or take
the name of an honest occupation (eg. Miller, Taylor, Smith). The result
of this lack of selfhood was a total indifference to privacy. In
summertime peasants walked about naked.

The medieval mind had no sense of time. Life revolved around the
passing of the seasons, religious holidays, harvest time, and local
fetes. Generations followed one another in a meaningless blur. Popes,
emperors, and kings died and were succeeded by new popes,
emperors and kings; wars were fought; communities suffered and then
recovered from natural disasters.

At the same time European cities began producing an educated class.

A powerful spirit was rising. It was against society and especially the
church, yet some of its greatest figures were devout Catholics. In Italy
the movement was known as the Rinascimento. The French combined
the word renaitre, ‘revive’ with the word naissance, ‘birth’, to form the
word Renaissance – rebirth. (Beer. 1924; 52)

The Renaissance

An exact date for the beginning of the Renaissance is difficult, but

scholars believed it had began by the early 1400s. Dante, Petrarch,
Boccaccio, Saint Francis of Assisi, and painter Giotto de Bondone were
the forerunners of this awakening, although they were already dead by
the 1400s. The most influencial Renaissance men were writers,
scholars, philosophers, educators, statesmen, and independent
theologians.

Throughout the Dark Ages the only significant inventions were the
waterwheel in the 800s and the windmills in the late 1100s. No new
ideas had appeared, no new land outside Europe had been explored.
Everything was as it had been for as long as the oldest European could
remember. The Church was unquestioned, the afterlife a certainty; all
knowledge was already known. And nothing would ever change.

What was the world like when ruled by such men? A traveller into the
past would look in vain for the sprawling urban complexes which have
dominated the continent since the Industrial Revolution transformed it
some two hundred years ago. Walking from the forest and following a
dirt path, a stranger would find the dirty walls and turrets of a town’s
defenses. Behind them would be the roofs of parish churches, and,
overshadowing them all, the massive steeple of the local cathedral.
Land within the walls of the town was extremely valuable. The smaller
the boundary wall, the safer and cheaper the wall was. The streets
were as narrow as the width of a man’s shoulder’s. There was no
paving; shops opened onto the streets, which were filthy; excrement
and urine were simply thrown out the windows. Sunlight rarely reached
the ground level, because the second story of each building jutted out
over the first, the third over the second, and the fourth and fifth stories
over the lower ones. At the top, at a height approaching that of the
great wall, neighbours across the way, could shake hands with each
other from their windows. Rain rarely fell on pedestrians or little air or
light.

In the early 1500s one could hike through the woods for days walking
through a village of any size. Between 80 and 90 percent of the
population lived in villages of fewer than a hundred people, fifteen or
twenty miles apart, surrounded by endless forest. Families slept in their
small, cramped hamlets, with little privacy, and they worked in the
fields and pastures between their huts and the great forest. Knights
lived differently – they played backgammon, chess or checkers in their
manor houses. Hunting, hawking, and falconry were their outdoor
pleasures. Gluttony was at excess at tables spread in the halls of the
mighty. The everyday dinner of a man of rank could be fifteen to
twenty dishes.

People then were small. The average man stood a few inches over five
feet (1,55m) and weighed about 135 pounds (61kg). Life expectancy
was short; half the people in Europe died, usually from disease, before
their thirtieth birthday. Clothing was a kind of uniform, telling of your
rank and status. Lepers were required to wear grey coats and red hats,
prostitutes wore scarlet skirts, public penitents wore white robes,
released heretics carried crosses sewn on both sides of their chests –
you were expected to pray as you passed them. The rest of society
belonged to one of the three great classes: the nobility, the clergy, and
the commons. Establishing one’s social identity was important. Each
man knew his place, believed it had been foreordained in heaven, and
was aware that what he wore must reflect it.

Sixteenth-century men did not believe that criminals could be reformed

or corrected, and so there were no reformatories or prisons. Maiming
and lashing were the punishments, as well as the rope. Offenders to
the church became pilgrims and were ordered to shave their heads,
abandon their families, fast constantly (meat only once a day), and set
out barefoot for a far destination. Journey’s end varied from offender to
offender. Rome was popular. Some were sent all the way to Jerusalem.
The general rule was the longer the distance, the greater the
forgiveness. Although they called themselves Christians, medieval
Europeans were ignorant of the Gospels. The Bible was in a language
they could not read. The mumbled words at Mass were meaningless to
them. They believed in sorcery, witchcraft, hobgoblins, werewolves,
amulets, and black magic, and were thus indistinguishable from
pagans. Everyone knew – and every child was taught – that the air all
around them was crowded with invisible, soulless spirits, some
harmless, but most of them evil, dangerous, long-lived, and hard to kill.
(Manchester. 1996; 150)

Travel was slow, expensive, uncomfortable and dangerous. It was

slowest for those who rode coaches, faster for walkers, and fastest for
horsemen. According to Beer (1924; 203) honest travelers carried well-
honed daggers, knowing they might have to kill an attacker and hoping
they would have the stomach for it. Females could marry legally when
they reached their twelfth birthday, males at fourteen. Even before she
had reached her teens, a girl knew that unless she married before she
was twenty-one, society would consider her useless, fir only for
nunnery, or, in England, the spinning wheel (a ‘spinster’).

In the age of Faith, as Will Durant called the medieval era, the secret of
the church’s hold on the masses was its ability to inspire absolute
terror, spreading of the universal belief that whoever wore the crown
could determine how each individual would spend his afterlife (either in
eternal bliss or shrieking in the flames of hell). Life on earth was
miserable, nasty and short, so only the stupid would anger the Church
and Pope.

But the darkness of the medieval night was to be pierced by a

lightbeam of learning – by literature, and by people who could read and
understand it. Until the late fifteenth century most books and almost
all education had been controlled by the Church. The invention of
printing became an instrument that could spread ideas. Medieval
Europe’s contributions to the world of literature was small: Petrach’s
De viris illustribus, Boccaccio’s Decameron. Medieval universities
presented three disciplines: theology, law and medicine. Courses
offering the art – grammer, logic, rheutoric, dialectics – were seen as
inferior.

Conquest, Colonization and cultural change

During the 900’s, Western Europe could be attacked in three ways: by
sea from the north, by sea from the south and by land from the east. In
the 10th Century it was attacked in all three ways. Viking and Saracen
raiders and bands of Magyar horsemen found the rich churches of the
West easy prey. These vulnerable borders began to expand to become
more protected in later centuries. This was the great age of the
Crusades. According to Contamine (1984; 35) conquest and settlement
was also occurring and required determined and selfish leaders, and
top of this list were the ancient Scandanavian dynasties. By the late
Middle ages eighty percent of Europe’s kings and queens were Franks.

Contamine adds that the medieval aristocracy was primarily a military

aristocracy and the men who participated in its spread were trained
fighters. The spread of the Frankish aristocracy needed military
technology – armaments, fortifications and methods of waging war.
Within the central parts of north-western Europe there were three main
characteristics of warfare in the period 950 – 1350: heavy cavalry
(knights), archers (especially crossbowmen), and a new fortification –
the castle, as well as siegecraft.

Heavy cavalry
Heavy calvary was divided into defensive and offensive uniforms:
Defensive uniforms consisted in a conical helmet, a coat of mail and a
large shield. Offensive uniforms consisted of a spear, sword, mace or
club, and a heavy war-horse. Horses had to hold the weight of a fully
armed man and to face combat, and were specially bred and trained.
They were bigger and stronger than the ordinary aristocratic riding
horse and they tended to be used only in combat.

Bowmen
Medieval bows were of three kinds: the shortbow, the longbow and the
crossbow. The shortbow was about 90cm long and was drawn back to
the chest. In term of range and penetration it could not compare with
the longbow. This was about 1,8 metres long and was drawn to the ear.
The missile weapon that was of most importance in Europe at this time
was the crossbow. Crossbows are recorded in northern France in the
10th century, but only used generally after the late 11th century.
Crossbows were effective because, although they had a slow rate of
fire, they had a deep penetrating power. They were able to penetrate
easily through a human skull.

Castles
According to Contamine (1984; 192), the castles in Europe in the 10th
to 12th centuries had two distinguishing features – they were small and
they were high. They were not places of refuge for whole communities,
but used as a defense by a small army, this making them small and
high. The height gave them both inaccessibility and dominance of their
surroundings. Inside a castle, a army was hard to get at but could also
control everything within sight. Stone castles were built in the 10th
century but remained rare until the 12th. These stone buildings were
very different from the earlier earth mounds and wooden towers, and
they took far longer to build. Stone castles of the 13th century had tall
walls and rings of concentric walls, with elaborate gatehouses and
could not be stormed or burned. At this time there was also an
evolution of siege machines and siege techniques. The giant catapults
and bows of the 12th and 13th centuries were replaced by an artillery
weapon using counterweights, the trebuchet.

Contamine concludes by stating that the main features of military

technology in the period 950 – 1350 was an emphasis on heavy
cavalry, firepower (especially crossbowmen), castles at first of earth
and wood, later of stone, and the improvement of siege machines.

Medieval and modern colonialism

The expansion of Europe in the Middle Ages has many similarities to
post-medieval colonization. One characteristic that differs between
then and now, is in modern expansion it took place because of the
greed for raw materials and markets; in the Middle Ages the reasons
were different. According to Bartlett (1994; 306) when Anglo-Normans
settled in Ireland or Germans in Pomerania or Castilians in Andalusia,
they were reproducing units similar to those in their homelands. The
towns, churches and estates they established were replications of the
social framework they knew from back home. This didn’t result in a
creation of dependent colonies, but the spread of the cultural and
social forms found in Latin Christian Europe. The new lands were
closely combined with the old. By 1300 the descendants of men from
France ruled in Ireland and Greece. We can see an outward movement
of people and power yet it was not balanced by movement inward.
Medieval colonization was a process of replication, not differentiation.
Bartlett goes on to say that it was thus the knightly-clerical-mercantile
consortium, not the use of kingly power, that orchestrated the most
characteristic expansion of the 11th and 12th centuries. Contemporaries
of this time wrote how armies of the First Crusade were ‘without lord,
without prince’ and how they ‘fought without king, without emperor’
(Beer, 1924). The warrior aristocrats and urban merchants of Latin
Christendom combined forces to produce new policies and new
settlements. Early monastic rule and knightly values resulted in the
military orders; from a peasant market, came the modern town; from
priesthood and the guild, developed the university.

The world of the early Middle Ages was one of diversity of rich local
cultures and societies. As the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries came to
pass, uniformity took the place of this diversity (Boissonnade. 1927;
123). The western town and the new religious orders were to be
copied. The alphabet emerged from the commercial towns of modern
Europe. By the 14th century, England, France, Germany, Scandinavia
and northern Italy had cultural similarities and harmony that kept them
together. On the edges of these centers (the fringe zones) however,
there was conflict between languages, cultures and religions.

Conclusion
Conquest, colonization, Christianization: they became the techniques
of settling in a new land, the ability to maintain cultural identity. The
birth of the Rennaissance broke the power of the medieval mind.
Nationalism, huminism, rising literacy and new countries being
discovered (and the resulting cultural influences) challenged blind,
irrational ideas of the early church and monarchs. Europe was no
longer the world, and the world was no longer the center of the
universe.

Which brings me back to my question on life in the Dark Ages. My

conclusion is that after having had a glimpse into Medieval life, I have
no doubt that a modern lady like myself may not have lived past my
tenth birthday. If by sheer luck I escaped childbirth, childhood diseases
like measles (that are easily curable today), food poisoning and the
like, I would surely have perished being married off at the age of
twelve, or by being taken by the raiding Hunns as a trophy.

References

Bartlett, R. 1994. The Making of Europe. Penguin books, Middlesex

England.
Beer, M. 1924. Social struggles in the Middle Ages. Bantam books,
London.
Boissonnade, P. 1927. Life and work in the Middle Ages. Simon &
Schuster, New York.
Contamine, P. 1984. War in the Middle Ages. Oxford publishing, Oxford.
Manchester, W. 1996. A world lit only by Fire. Macmillan General Books,
London.
Painter, S. 1953. A History of the Middle Ages, 284 – 1500. Universal
Press, New York.