FIVE:  HOW DO CIVILIZATIONS DIE?

As far as Europe is concerned, by the fifth century the Roman administration begins to collapse. First of all the Roman Empire is divided into two parts and then eventually into three or four parts. All of which is symptomatic of the dying of civilization. Like most people, civilizations do not generally die overnight. They tend to disintegrate slowly, though there are a few cases in history in which an end to a civilization has come abruptly. Specifically I am thinking of the Minoan civilization, the civilization of the ancient Cretans which literally disappeared one tragic early spring day about 1500 B.C.E. About a hundred years ago, Sir Arthur Evans theorized that the civilization was destroyed by a major earthquake. More recently, archaeologists have tended to argue that the Minoans fell to a series of invasions. I believe that both might have combined, that a major earthquake (such as the eruption of Thera) might have destroyed their merchant fleet and weakened the civilization, and the invaders went on to finish the job, just as looters today tend to swarm into disaster areas. The ancient Cretans had no fortifications. They apparently didn't even have a military--or priestly--class. They lived peaceful lives on their island which was naturally protected by the surrounding Mediterranean Sea, wine-dark, according to Homer. All we know is that there was an unusually high civilization, did a great deal of trading with other Mediterranean cultures, and within a hundred years there was nothing, except for remnants of that civilization. Apparently there were fires all over the island. We assume the disaster happened in early spring because of the smoke markings on the ruins. There is a certain kind of strong wind which happens only in March.

The end of Crete is one of the rare instances where a major civilization collapsed suddenly. Most civilizations which we are studying in the context of the World Thought and Culture courses, went through a period of ascendancy and a plateau of a golden age, followed by gradual disintegration, so that people who actually lived in those days might not even be aware of the fact that they were in the process of living in a declining culture. The institutions which we will be identifying with the Middle Ages have their roots in the Roman world and also in the world of the Germanic peoples, the so-called barbarians who were by the fourth century first leaking and then pouring across the Roman borders even though they were not necessarily considered hostile at the time. When we use the term "barbarian invasions" we tend to think about events such as the sacking of Rome by the Vandals. Actually, what happened more frequently was the peaceful convergence and mingling of the two peoples, the Roman and the German, along the borders of the empire. The Romans would actually hire the battle-hardened Germans as soldiers, and intermarriage became fairly common. The merging of those two cultures, and then eventually the ascendancy of the so called barbarian elements, took place gradually. Many of the forts in the north were literally held by Germans who considered themselves to be Roman in political affiliation though culturally they came from a non-Greco/Roman background.

When we think of the Middle Ages, we think of the Christian Church, and the Church had of course grown out of a classical background, both Greek and Roman. Pretty soon we will talk about the difference between the two great branches of Christianity--the Byzantine/Greek and the Roman/Latin. The origin of this two-pronged fork lies in the ancient world. The medieval socio-economic and political system emerged directly from the disintegration of the Roman Empire.

Let me stop here for a moment. Imagine what would happen if someone dropped a nuclear device on portions of the U.S., disrupting government, communication, and transportation. How would people manage? How would we survive during a time in which all of the customary ways of governing, of making a living, and of simply getting food or keeping warm would no longer exist?

How would you adapt? What would be the first thing you'd do? People would literally form small, nuclear communities. Who would be likely to be able to help in a situation such as this? Natural leaders might be helpful in this, but who else would be? Those who grow food, farmers. This is exactly what began to happen around the fifth century in Europe. The governmental system had become very fragmented. Individuals who held small parcels of land would go to those who held larger pieces of land and offer them their land in return for protection. The Latin word domus was used, which means lord. It is out of this tendency of the small independent farmer and land owner to look for an umbrella of protection under more powerful landowners that there developed what came to be known as the feudal political and manorial economic system of Medieval times. The two terms, feudalism and manorialism, are like two sides of one coin. Feudalism will be the political system manorialism the economic system of central Europe. Those system was less important in Italy because in Italy some of the old cities remained intact. Trade did not come to  a halt, and interconnectedness between communities was still more prevalent.

On the other hand, in the areas of central Europe most of the fighting between the barbarians and the Romans had taken place. It is there that the feudal and manorial systems develop most strongly. They spread up into England, though Around the fourth to sixth centuries there is a general movement away from free citizenship, particularly in the country, to what is technically known as serfdom. This is not the same as slavery. Slavery is even lower. But, serfdom meant that individuals were no longer free to leave their homes or communities. They were literally bound to the soil. At the same time they were protected by the ones who were stronger to whom they had given their allegiance. The manorial system then became the economic system. It also became in a sense the legal system of what would be called the non-noble or common class. Among the ancient Romans their were two classes of people: the patricians who were the equivalent of our nobility and the plebeians who were the common people. Both of them had political power in ancient Rome, at least initially. By the time of some of the later emperors there is military dictatorship, and the lower classes become more and more disenfranchised. It was a process of as Marx put it, the richer getting richer and the poor getting poorer, though it wasn't a matter of money as much as a matter of power and political influence.

It did have something to do with property, however. The patricians became the medieval lords though by the early Middle Ages they were not at all drawn from Roman stock. Some of them were Germanic. As far as the Germanic peoples were concerned there were many different tribes. Particularly notorious were the Vandals. Even today we have the term "vandalism" which denotes the wanton destruction of some of the artifacts of civilization. Destruction for the fun of it. This is based on what the actual Vandals did when they went into cities and sacked them. They would steal what they could, and destroy what they could not take with them.

The other peoples who were quite important were the Goths and the Franks Three sets of Germanic tribes went into England. The word England comes from the term Angles, the name for one of the Teutonic tribes. Others were the Saxons and the Jutes, northern Germanic tribes who moved into England and pushed an original Celtic population until they literally fell off into the Atlantic ocean and ended up in places such as Ireland and Scotland. This also happened during that period of major population movements. As a matter of fact, when you look at Europe during the period of around the fourth and fifth or sixth century what you see is an incessant shifting of populations. We still don't exactly know the cause of all of this migrating. The technical term for this period is the German word Völkerwanderung. This translates into "migration of peoples" or movement of peoples. It is actually used in English texts, because we do not have a good English equivalent.

An Asiatic people known as the Huns had started to push southwest and descend on neighboring populations. In general, the migration was from north to south and from east to west. This may well have been the reason for the Goths and the Franks and all the others to start pouring into the Roman Empire because they really didn't have any place to go. Eventually the Huns would make it all the way into central Europe as well, and the modern nation Hungary still bears their name. Quite a few of them seem to have settled in that general area and among other things gave Hungary a non-Indo-European language.

There are primarily two families of European languages, the so called Romance languages and the so called Germanic languages. Both of them are what we call Indo-European languages. They follow certain basic grammatical and syntactic structures which are similar. They are descendants of languages such as Latin or Greek or Old High German or Celtic, and so forth. Like Finnish and Basque, the Hungarian language is different. It may even be related to the language of the Gypsies and the language of the inhabitants of the pre-Aryan Indus Valley.

AD 500-AD 1650] [ONE] [TWO] [THREE] [FOUR] [FIVE] [SIX] [SEVEN] [EIGHT] [Untitled]

Posted 28 August 2000
Last revised: 00-09-08
Text and images copyright © Ingrid Shafer 2000