Roman sea power was based on galleys powered by oars and having only an auxiliary sail. They fought by ramming one another and then by engaging in hand-to-hand combat with swords and spears. But well before the end of the “Dark Ages,” Europeans had invented true sailing ships and armed them with cannons.
32
That gun powder was not invented in the West is immaterial. What matters is that within a decade of the arrival of gunpowder from China, church bell manufacturers all over Europe were casting effective cannons that were adopted by every army and navy, transforming the nature of war.
33
In contrast, the Chinese cast only a few, ineffective cannons, mostly being content to use gunpowder in fireworks.
34
These are only a few of the important technological innovations achieved during the “Dark Ages.” What is clear is that so much important technological progress occurred during this era that classical Greece and Rome had been left far behind. In fact, even though they did not yet possess gunpowder, the crusader knights who marched off to the Holy Land in 1097 would have made short work of the Roman legions.
Inventing Capitalism
H
ISTORIANS OF THE RISE
of Western civilization agree that the development of capitalism was of immense importance—even Karl Marx (1818–1883) supports this view, writing that “[capitalism has] created more massive and more colossal productive forces than all the preceding generations together.”
35
Although many sociologists still echo Max Weber’s (1864–1920) claim that capitalism originated in the Protestant Reformation, capitalism actually originated in the “depths” of the “Dark Ages.” Beginning in about the ninth century, many of the large, prosperous, and growing monastic estates developed into well-organized and stable firms involved in complex commercial activities that generated a sophisticated banking system within a developing free market, thereby achieving capitalism in all its glory.
36
Many secular capitalist firms were soon founded, especially in major Italian city-states, and capitalism began to spread rapidly. By the thirteenth century, there were 173 major Italian banks having hundreds of branches all over western Europe—even in England and Ireland.
37
Because capitalism had originated within the great religious orders, Christian theologians were prompted to rethink traditional doctrines opposed to profits and interest.
St. Albertus Magnus (1206–1280) proposed that the “just price” to charge for something is not what it cost, but what “goods are worth according to the estimation of the market at the time of sale.”
38
That is, a price is just if that’s what uncoerced buyers are willing to pay. Echoing his teacher, but using many more words, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) began his analysis of just prices by posing the question, “Whether a man may lawfully sell a thing for more than it is worth?”
39
He answered by first quoting St. Augustine (354–430) that it is natural and lawful for “you to wish to buy cheap, and sell dear.” Next, Aquinas excluded fraud from legitimate transactions. Finally, he recognized that worth is not really an objective value—“the just price of things is not absolutely definite”—but is a function of the buyer’s desire for the thing purchased and the seller’s willingness or reluctance to sell, so long as the buyer was not misled, or under duress. To be just, a price had to be the same for all potential buyers at a given moment, thus barring price discrimination.
As to interest on loans, Aquinas was unusually confusing. In some writings he condemned all interest as the sin of usury, while in other passages he accepted that lenders deserve compensation, although he was fuzzy as to how much and why.
40
However, prompted by the realities of a rapidly expanding commercial economy, many of Aquinas’s contemporaries, especially the Canonists, were not so cautious, but began “discovering” many exceptions wherein interest charges were not usurious.
41
For example, if a productive property such as an estate is given as security for a loan, the lender may take all of the production during the period of the loan and not deduct it from the amount owed.
42
Many other exclusions involved the “costs” to the lender of not having the money available for other commercial opportunities such as buying goods for resale or acquiring new fields. Since these alternative opportunities for profit are entirely licit, it is licit to compensate a lender for having to forgo them.
43
Thus, while the “sin of usury” remained on the books, so to speak, “usury” had become essentially an empty term.
Thus, by no later than the thirteenth century, the leading Christian theologians had fully debated the primary aspects of emerging capitalism—profits, property rights, credit, lending, and the like. As Lester K. Little summed up: “In each case they came up with generally favorable, approving views, in sharp contrast to the attitudes that had prevailed for six or seven centuries right up to the previous generation.”
44
Capitalism was fully and finally freed from all fetters of faith.
45
It was a remarkable shift. These were, after all, theologians who had separated themselves from the world. Most of them had taken vows of poverty. Most of their predecessors had held merchants and commercial activities in contempt. Had asceticism truly prevailed in the religious orders, it seems most unlikely that Christian disdain for and opposition to commerce would have mellowed, let alone have been radically transformed. This theological revolution was the result of direct experience with worldly imperatives. For all their genuine acts of charity, monastic administrators were not about to give all their wealth to the poor or to sell their products at cost. It was the active participation of the great houses in free markets that caused monastic theologians to reconsider the morality of commerce. Nothing of the sort took place among Islamic theologians, with the result that capitalism could not develop, which had obvious consequences for Muslim economic progress.
Moral Progress
A
LL CLASSICAL SOCIETIES WERE
slave societies—both Plato and Aristotle were slave-owners, as were most free residents of Greek city-states. In fact, all known societies above the very primitive level have been slave societies—even many of the Northwest American Indian tribes had slaves long before Columbus’s voyage.
46
Amid this universal slavery, only one civilization ever rejected human bondage: Christendom. And it did it twice!
Elsewhere I have told the story of how slavery reappeared and then was prohibited in the Western Hemisphere.
47
But the very first time slavery was eliminated anywhere in the world was not during the “Renaissance” or the “Enlightenment,” but during the “Dark Ages.” And it was accomplished by clever church leaders who first extended the sacraments to all slaves, reserving only ordination into the priesthood. Initially, the implications of the Christianization of slaves went unnoticed, but soon the clergy began to argue that no true Christian (or Jew) should be enslaved.
48
Since slaves were Christians, priests began to urge owners to free their slaves as an “infinitely commendable act” that helped ensure their own salvation.
49
Many manumissions were recorded in surviving wills. Soon there was another factor: intermarriage. Despite being against the law in most of Europe, there is considerable evidence of mixed unions by the seventh century, usually involving free men and female slaves. The most celebrated of these unions took place in 649 when Clovis II, King of the Franks, married his British slave Bathilda. When Clovis died in 657, Bathilda ruled as regent until her eldest son came of age. Bathilda used her position to mount a campaign to halt the slave trade and to redeem those in slavery. Upon her death, the church acknowledged Bathilda as a saint.
At the end of the eighth century Charlemagne opposed slavery, while the pope and many other powerful and effective clerical voices echoed St. Bathilda. As the ninth century dawned, Bishop Agobard of Lyons thundered: “All men are brothers, all invoke one same Father, God: the slave and the master, the poor man and the rich man, the ignorant and the learned, the weak and the strong.... [N]one has been raised above the other... there is no... slave or free, but in all things and always there is only Christ.”
50
Soon, no one “doubted that slavery in itself was against divine law.”
51
Indeed, during the eleventh century both St. Wulfstan and St. Anselm successfully campaigned to remove the last vestiges of slavery in Christendom.
52
Progress in High Culture
E
VEN IF
V
OLTAIRE
, G
IBBON,
and other proponents of the “Enlightenment” could be excused for being oblivious to engineering achievements and to innovations in agriculture or warfare, surely they must be judged severely for ignoring or dismissing the remarkable achievements in “high culture” accomplished by medieval Europeans: in music, art, literature, education, and science.
Music:
The Romans and Greeks sang and played monophonic music: a single musical line sounded by all voices or instruments. It was medieval musicians who developed polyphony, the simultaneous sounding of two or more musical lines, hence harmonies. Just when this occurred is unknown, but “it was an established practice when it was described in
Musica enchiriadis,
” published around 900.
53
And, in about the tenth century, an adequate system of musical notation was invented and popularized so that music could be accurately performed by musicians who had never heard it.
Art:
Unfortunately, the remarkable artistic era that emerged in eleventh century Europe is known as “Romanesque,” despite the fact that it was quite different from anything done by the Romans. This name was imposed by nineteenth century professors who “knew” that Europe only recovered from the “Dark Ages” by
going back
to Roman culture. Hence this could only have been an era of poor imitations of things Roman. In fact, Romanesque architecture, sculpture, and painting were original and powerful in ways that “even the late Roman artists would never have understood.”
54
Then, in the twelfth century, the Romanesque period was followed by the even more powerful Gothic era. It seems astonishing, but Gothic architecture and painting were scorned by critics during the ‘‘Enlightenment’’ for not conforming to “the standards of classical Greece and Rome: ‘May he who invented it be cursed.’ ”
55
These same critics mistakenly thought the style originated with the “barbarous” Goths, hence the name, and, as anyone who has seen one of Europe’s great Gothic cathedrals knows, the artistic judgment of these critics was no better than their history, to say nothing of their disregard for the architectural inventions, including the flying buttress, that made it possible for the first time to build very tall buildings with thin walls and large windows, thus prompting major achievements in stained glass. It also was thirteenth-century artists in northern Europe who were the first to use oil paint and to put their work on stretched canvass rather than on wood or plaster. This “allowed the painter to take his time, to use brushes of amazing delicacy, to achieve effects... which seemed close to miracles.”
56
Anyone who thinks that great painting began with the Italian “Renaissance” should examine the work of the Van Eycks. So much, then, for notions that the millennium following the collapse of Rome was an artistic blank or worse.
Literature:
Gibbon wrote
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
in English, not Latin. Voltaire wrote exclusively in French, Cervantes in Spanish, and Machiavelli and Da Vinci in Italian. This was possible only because these languages had been given literary form by medieval giants such as Dante, Chaucer, the nameless authors of the
chansons de geste,
and the monks who, beginning in the ninth century, devoted themselves to writing lives of saints—“the first known pages of French literature... belong to this genre.”
57
Thus was vernacular prose formulated and popularized. So much for “Dark Age” illiteracy and ignorance.
Education:
The university was something new under the sun—an institution devoted exclusively to “higher learning.” This Christian invention was quite unlike Chinese academies for training Mandarins or a Zen master’s school. The new universities were not primarily concerned with imparting the received wisdom. Rather, just as is the case today, faculty gained fame and invitations to join faculties elsewhere by innovation. Consequently, during the “Dark Ages” university professors—now known as the Scholastics—gave their primary attention to the pursuit of knowledge.
58
And they achieved many remarkable results, as will be outlined in chapter 16. The world’s first two universities were founded by Catholic scholars in Paris and Bologna in about 1160. Forty years later came Oxford and Cambridge and by the end of the thirteenth century another twenty universities had been founded all across Europe, enrolling thousands of students.
Science:
For generations, historians claimed that a “Scientific Revolution” began in the sixteenth century when Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model of the solar system. But recently, specialists in the history of science have concluded that what occurred was an evolution, not a revolution.
59
Just as Copernicus simply took the next implicit step in the cosmology of his day, so too the flowering of science in that era was the culmination of the gradual progress that had been made over previous centuries. This evolution will be properly traced in chapter 16.