Europe from its Origins (audio only)

Here we summon up a lost world, the Graeco-Roman Christian society of the Near East, as it existed for almost a millennium prior to the Islamic Invasions of 636 AD. The evidence for this world lies all about us, in monumental ruins just as spectacular as those on the northern shores of the Mediterranean and on our library shelves. But our shared historical memory has no image of this world after the time of Cleopatra. Our forgetfulness renders the subsequent history of medieval Christendom unintelligible. This episode tries to fill in the void in our memory, to summon forth how a rich Graeco-Roman life was once lived in what have long since become Muslim societies. How Graeco-Roman society became a Muslim society is a long story, but it begins with a sudden conquest by a very different people, emanating from the wastes of central Arabia.

To conceive how the Mediterranean world of Antiquity transitioned to the new world of the European Middle Ages, the fate of the Graeco-Roman Near East first needs to be understood. We have long ago forgotten that the Near East and North Africa were once integral to Graeco-Roman society and civilization. Indeed, North Africa, Egypt and Syria were not peripheries, they were not alien add-ons to the Roman Empire, but lay at its very heart as a society and a polity. This reality, which we have lost sight of, was long remembered, was ‘known’, by Christendom through much of the Middle Ages.The passionate focus and strivings of the people of the Middle Ages, both in Europe and in the remains of the Roman Empire, to regain the lost half of their cultural realm cannot be understood unless we appreciate this. This episode describes the first phase of the Islamic conquest of the Roman Orient. It was a barbarian invasion like all the others, but with one crucial difference: these barbarians wanted the wealth and the power of the civilization that they had conquered, but not its culture, values and way of life: they had brought their own.

The ancient Mediterranean civilizational sphere is fractured, but Muslim assaults on Constantinople and on Francia fail. The enormous economic and cultural setback resulting from this. The Roman state imposes iconoclasm; causing resistance by the papacy, which turns to the Franks: ‘Latin Christendom’ as a separate entity is conceived.

After the calamity of the Islamic Invasions, what were the consequences? We know now, that the Mediterranean world would never be the same again, but at that time, and for centuries afterwards, people sustained the hope that what had befallen them could be reversed. Here we see in some detail the practical consequences of the loss of the core lands of the eastern Mediterranean. The Roman Empire, now enormously shrunken, managed to adapt and to hold its Nemesis at bay, for many further centuries. But economic, social and cultural decline were the inevitable results of such drastic surgery. That calamity affected the Roman Empire as much as it did the less developed and less urbanized Occident. If we can speak of a ‘Dark Age’, then this is when it began. The positive response in the Occident was as remarkable as the resistance and adaptation were in the East. A Frankish-Papal condominium emerged, uniting northern Italy - not with Constantinople - but with the now great kingdom of the Franks. Under the wing of the Carolingian kings, Christianity thrust its way into central Germania, a pagan and tribal heartland. The Franks thus initiated the expansion of Christendom eastwards, across the continent of Europe. Charlemagne marked the height of this process, forging a political and military coherence, as well as an economic, social and cultural revivification of the whole Occident, thereby laying the foundations for the European Middle Ages.

The later 800s saw the fragmentation of the Califate, creating two powerful rivals in Spain and in north Africa and Egypt. The Roman Empire of Constantinople began its long struggle to actively push back against its enemies. But in the Occident the weakening of the Califate brought no relief. The Emir of Córdoba became powerful enough to assume the title of Calif himself, while the Muslims of Africa turned decades of raiding into a full-scale conquest of Roman Sicily. And so began the darkest century and a half of the West’s history. Western Christendom was politically divided and helpless against the Norsemen who were raiding seasonally for what valuables they could seize and silver they could extort. In the east, in what is now Russia, they reached down as far as Baghdad. But in the west, they brought only devastation. Slowly Christendom began to find the means to resist, through local defense and the building of fortified strongpoints. But just as the Norse were beginning to be contained, out of the Asian steppe came a new horse horde, the Magyars who also lived from cruel predation and systematic devastation. The eastern Frankish kingdom, based now on Saxony, gathered the strength to defeat them, and in the process created a powerful kingship, which assumed the western imperial title, the alliance with the papacy and the authority of the Carolingians in northern Italy. Meanwhile southern and central Italy, as well as southern France, were under prolonged and ruthless assault from the Muslims of Sicily, Africa and Spain, mainly hunting for slaves. Finally, by the end of the 900s, these too were largely contained. Western Christendom emerged from these harrowing experiences as a society transformed, one that we recognize as medieval Europe.

Two centuries after the commencement of the great Islamic irruption into the civilized world, and of the inundation of steppe peoples into Hungary and the Balkans, the old Mediterranean world gradually recovered its poise and began to rebound. The Roman Empire of Constantinople underwent an all-round recovery and between 850 and 1050 was in full political, as well as cultural, expansion. It looked like the Empire as it had been under Justinian the Great would be reestablished. The resurrection of the Empire’s fortunes provided the framework and much of the impetus for the resuscitation of the West. In the Occident new shoots of growth and expansion appeared everywhere from the late 900s onwards. But this was on an entirely different political basis: whereas in east Rome there was a capital city and a central government, in the West there was thoroughgoing political fragmentation. Into this authority vacuum stepped the regional counts and dukes, and above them the still thinly-based western Emperors in Germany, and, ever more firmly, the Roman papacy. Here we attempt to capture some of the complexity of these processes, most of them moving in a positive, upward direction.

How did the Western tradition of civil society arise? Where do we look to find the deepest roots of constitutional government and the rule of law, for representative political institutions, for the first glimmers of a civic democracy? These primary characteristics of our modern society are universally assumed to be the very antithesis of a society of intensifying religious fervour, where secular power drains away into the hands of an ascendant theocratic hierarchy, where wide sections of the population enthusiastically undertake wars of religiously-inspired reconquest. But the paradox is that the roots and force of our modern civil institutions are to be found precisely in a period that also produced the Crusades, the medieval papacy, and saw the formation of the independence and power of the medieval Latin Christian church.    These things are, I suspect, intimately related. In this episode we observe their emergence and interaction, as a form of society engendering itself, as if on a rich laboratory growth medium.

Modern culture wars and the retrospective shaping of Europe’s past. The first half of this episode deals with the exaggerations and distortions which beset our common understandings of the past - among them the concepts of the ‘Dark Ages’, of ‘Byzantium’, of the Renaissance and its claimed causation by Islamic thought. The second part details some aspects of what has been termed ‘The 12th Century Renaissance’- economic and social change, the Cistercian monastic Order, the formation of the universities, the flourishing of Troubadour poetry and chivalric culture, and the emergence and spread of the ‘Gothic’ style.

During 12th and 13th centuries Europe consolidated itself, deepening and ramifying its cultural characteristics. It had the social mass and complexity to be, for the first time, a new and unique civilization, joining those already existing. Here we examine what were the realities of language at that time, the culturally forming and educating role of religion at all levels, the unifying pull of the Roman papacy, and finally the various forms of military-religious activity, especially the knights Templar and other Orders.

The Crusades have become a highly contested theme within Western culture, and a trigger for livid animosity outside it. This was not always the case. Putting aside the easy moralizing of contemporary attitudes, here we look at the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Crusades, and seek to understand how their various outcomes shaped important aspects of our world today, what they were like as they were happening, what the social and political context was within which they occurred. Their theatres were the Near East, Germany, Portugal, Turkey and above all the Roman Empire of Constantinople.

A few short years, so long ago. But the opening decades of the 1200s saw a wealth of spectacular and future-shaping events occur. We start with an account of the nature of the medieval polity, of “feudal” political relations; we see the new Latin principalities of the east Mediterranean as prototypes of the European approach to political society; we also see that slavery and serfdom, perennial in human societies, gradually became extinct in the home countries of medieval Europe. We see the rise of a culture of Liberties, embodied in charters. We trace the great French dynastic civil war that created ‘France’ and began the process of the creation of ‘England’, and which framed and gave rise to the Magna Carta. Finally, we see the definitive reconquest of the Iberian peninsula for Christendom, and end with the emergence of parliamentary political institutions as the European norm during the 1200s.

In the central 1200s Europe escaped a Mongol conquest – by the merest chance. The Baltic became (or was made to be) Christian during this period. The Mongol invasion created the pre-conditions for the later emergence of ‘Russia’. Christendom’s internal conflicts continued regardless: in Italy the Emperor fought a war to re-establish the Roman Empire … and failed, leaving in the debris the long-term bases for the emergence of ‘Germany’ and ‘Italy’; heresy arose for the first time as a whole social movement, particularly in the County of Toulouse, precipitating an internal Crusade, ending in a further expansion of the French crown’s reach. As the Empire fragmented, so too did France expand and consolidate. At the end of the century the Crusading movement in the Holy Land finally met its fate, and was definitively defeated with the fall of the city of Acre.

A major transformation in the religious, moral and artistic culture of Europe occurred during the Central Middle Ages, a shift in the whole tenor of Latin Christian civilization, its sensibility and values. The usual stress on the transformative effects of the Renaissance have obscured this fundamental cultural advance, whose effects are omnipresent in our culture today. In this episode we trace the outline of that great transformative shift.

After Acre fell in 1291, it was to be more than a hundred years before European princes would undertake another major Crusade. Why was this so? In this episode we see the emergence of Ottoman power in north-west Anatolia, sealing the permanent civilizational loss of Graeco-Roman Asia Minor to Christendom.Europe, in contrast, appeared to be powerful and united under papal leadership, as the Republic of Christendom. But within European society deep political changes were afoot that would lead to centuries of internal civil war and paralysis vis-à-vis the wider Mediterranean world.

The long secular rise of Christendom, unbroken since the 10th century, suffered severe setbacks during  the 14th. The society had reached a high level of wealth, for the elite; those working the land had a standard of life better than in some regions of the 3rd World today. There were major gains on the peripheries: in Spain the last major invasion from Morocco was successfully repulsed; in the east pagan Lithuania opted to join the European cultural realm.But internally the society was fracturing on several levels, as new ways of thinking and new forms of claims to authority collided with one another. Civil war was the result, and from it spewed forth chaos. While this almost paralysed Christendom, the Roman Empire at Constantinople was entering its final years, as the Ottoman Turks emerged as an enormous military power and transplanted their centre to continental Europe.

In the later 1300s the Turks were able to grow in power and tighten their stranglehold on Constantinople because Latin Christendom was caught in a descending vortex of factional inner conflict. The 100 Years War spawned new methods of warfare – the mercenary Companies. These became a source of systemic instability. The period saw a long truce in the 100 Years War, unleashing the Companies into Spain and northern Italy. But none of the three kingdoms in Iberia – Castile, Aragon and Portugal – could achieve outright hegemony in the peninsula. The papacy at Avignon systematized its hold on the ecclesiastical structure of Latin Christendom and extracted from all over Europe the coin to fund its wars in central Italy, in order to reassert its authority over the Papal States and make a return to Rome feasible. In the process, it drew sustained criticism from Italy and from some intellectuals. Papal war in central Italy was partially successful, but the return of the pope in 1378 proved a disaster. A botched papal election led to two anti-popes claiming exclusive authority. Immediately warfare broke out and the entire Latin church descended into a 40-year Schism. The Great Schism was a watershed in European religious sensibility, for the standing scandal it represented corroded social reverence for the office of the papacy and opened the way for individual university doctors to mount frontal assaults on the whole edifice of medieval religious assumptions. The result, in Bohemia, was a terrible religious civil war, a harbinger of the long-term future.

Part 1 – In 1400 Europe was religiously split and at war with itself in various regions. Constantinople would soon have fallen to the Turks besieging it had not Timur erupted from Samarkand and destroyed both Sultan Bayezid and his army. Meanwhile, during the period of respite, in the West exasperation with the Schism led to the Council of Constance, which finally healed it. But the Council’s action also triggered an enormous religious millenarian revolution in Bohemia, called the Hussite Wars. The second Council at Basel entered into the direct conflict with the newly restored Roman papacy. The participation of the eastern Emperor and the entire hierarchy of the eastern church at the alternative Council convened by the pope at Florence outflanked the one at Basel, and also brought about a formal union of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Meanwhile, in France a ruthless and triangular struggle was underway to seize power, between the Armagnacs, the dukes of Burgundy and the kings of England.

Part 2 – In 1453 the Turks took Constantinople. This event finally ended the last remnant of the Roman Empire. It also shook Europe, challenged accepted beliefs about divine Providence and destroyed ancient certainties about the natural order of the world. 1453 was also the year in which the Valois monarchy won the 100 Years War, crystallizing for the future two distinct political ‘communities of identity’ – that of an England and that of a France. Such enormous endings and new beginnings, happening simultaneously, provide a threshold historical moment which is a convenient point at which to end the series.