Saying 'No' to Internationalism

Still not a dark age as far as technology and social change. Indeed even with the disasters, the black death was probably the best thing to happen to Europe at the time. It broke the back of feudalism and the control of the church and led to the enlightenment. In any case the black death was well into the late medieval period, not the earlier middle ages which contain the "dark ages".

sponsoredwalk wrote: »

Reasons for the Decline of Feudalism
The reasons for the decline of Feudalism during the Medieval period of the Middle Ages included:

• The Crusades and travel during the Middle Ages opened new trade options to England
• England started to move from land based economy to a money based economy
• The Black Death - this reduced the population of England by one third. Labour became a valuable commodity
• The Peasants Revolt - Peasants realised their worth and demanded changes. Charters were granted but ignored by nobles
• More trade saw the growth of more towns
• Peasants moved away from the country into towns they were eventually allowed to buy their freedom
• Land was rented and the rights of lords over labour decreased
• The Feudal Levy was unpopular and as time went by Nobles preferred to pay the King rather than to fight and raise troops
• Armed men were paid a wage and Medieval warfare was financed by taxes and loans
• Nobles became weaker - the Kings took back their lands and power
• A centralised government was established

link

The death of nearly half of the continent was only one aspect of the end of Feudalism

It was one of the biggest by far. Your quote in brown is talking about England, which while it mirrored changes in Europe as an island it had a different set of influences. Even so a goodly proportion of that list was down to the population shifting in the face of successive plagues.

& I can't subscribe to the idea that it was a good thing.

It was a personal tragedy for millions, but for the progress of humanity it was a very good thing.

If it takes the death of nearly half the continent to convince us of the foolishness of religion it's a sad moment in humanity,
because physics, biology, psychology, astronomy & chemistry do it so much better

I think you're being way too subjective. You can say that now because its the 21st century and with all the received knowledge that entails at your disposal. If you had been alive in the 10 century there's an overwhelming chance you would have been huddled in the church pew, decrying the new as ungodly and in thrall to the clergy. It would have taken a real kick in the breeches to get you to think "eh hang on?"

If you're referring to the dark ages as strictly the time in which the church promoted it's interests & held the majority of power over people's lives
most of that still stands

No I'm referring to the early medieval period after the fall of the western Roman empire. Broadly speaking from the 5th century to the first millennium. The time usually described as the dark ages.

and definitely the black death stuff, i.e. around the time of Giovanni Boccaccio as that's when it was @ it's worst.

Again the series of plagues(not just bubonic plague either) that struck europe wave after wave year after year was later than the period commonly referred to as the dark ages. Giovanni bocaccio was an early rennaissance writer of the 14th century. Different time entirely. Like comparing us to 18th century.

I do agree that it led to a lot of religious questioning/contempt.

In a big way yea.

Broad strokes hed, broad strokes. Some seem to think the dark ages was the 15th century so....

amacachi wrote: »

I don't think you're giving people enough credit tbh. The Dark Ages were damn dark, the tiny progress from when Jesus was supposedly around until near the Renaissance is evidence enough.

Well then you also need to read up more on that period. You're saying there was tiny progress from the first century AD until the Renaissance? Not even from the fall of Rome until the Renaissance? Eh no. Quite a bit happened in that latter period.

The first universities as we would recognise them today. The first degrees handed out. The first mechanical clocks(12th century, maybe before). Music annotation was invented and improved. Major innovations and output in agriculture. EG The heavy plough and horse collars to till fields more efficently(6th century). Spurs(11th) Horseshoes(9th), Preservation of beer with hops(9th) artesian wells which require no pumps (12th).No famines for a very long period of time.

While roman law was lost for a time, the birth of modern law was well on the way by the 9th century(Merchant law/Germanic law/Breton law/anglo saxon law). Monumental architecture in the mass building of huge cathedrals and the science behind doing so. Before the crusades kicked off Europe had a generally peaceful time. They were pretty much united under one religious doctrine.

The births of the nation states as we think of them today. The Byzantines continued to grow in many aspects of science law and culture. The carolingian Renaissance under Charlemagne was in full flow in the 9th century. Science and philosophy grew steadily in this time period. The Muslim influence added greatly to it. While the Chinese invented paper, Europe took to it with gusto and built paper mills that outputted it in large volume. Other stuff? The blast furnace(12th) Tidal mills(9th), glass mirrors, Astronomical compass, the horizontal loom, grindstones, distilation of alcohol. Its not a short list.

Most of the world seemed to manage it as well, the amount of things "invented" in Europe in the last few centuries was made in China millennia ago and they managed to forget all about them. :pac:

Hardly milennia ago. Movable metal type? About 100 years before gutenburg. And his was a more innovative way to do it and changes the world. Gunpowder? the first accurate reference in China is in the 8th century. Europe gets it by the 13th. Again europe does more with it(for good and ill).

amacachi wrote: »

Of course there was progress, and over that kind of timeframe you'll be able to find thousands of improvements and "inventions", but that isn't the point. For the amount of time covered there was quite little improvement in a lot of areas thanks to, mainly, the church. They had no problem with improving food growing techniques or building techniques, but how many great buildings went up that weren't for the Church?

Quite a number. The most obvious being castles and other fortifications and the towns that sprung up around them. The design of housing across all classes changed the great hall style being an obvious one. A helluva of modern great cities in Europe were founded in the dark ages.

Until their power started to dilute there was miniscule progress in maths and science for centuries,

Wrong again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_Middle_Ages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology

and little in the way of social change.

There were huge social changes in the middle ages. The nation state being the kickoff point for much of it. Higher urbanisation following the initial move to the country following Romes fall. The first factories as we would recognise them. A newly emerging merchant class. Military changes , better nutrition. The nation states alone stand as a huge social change.

I'm sure you'll find some bits and pieces of mathematical discoveries in those years but it wasn't til later that it really started, and when they rediscovered and reused systems and rules developed by the Greeks and Byzantines a thousand or more years earlier, which were held back once again by the Church of the time and/or state.

Eh Byzantium was at the same time. It emerged with a new Greek identity out of the eastern Roman empire. It wasn't "a thousand or more years earlier". Greek and Roman thought was of course reused as every culture reuses the past. It was also improved upon when the flood of the older greek texts came in from Islamic lands and the latin texts made there way across Europe. That lot was going on by the 9th century.

Yes, the universities started, for whom? For the people in the Church and whoever owned everything else. The universities were more of a hobby for rich kids before they inherited businesses and land than anything else.

Which is how one could describe universities up to 100 years ago or even less. Very few college kids reading this today had college going great great grandparents. So that point is moot. Historically universities, even anything beyond basic schooling was up until very recently the preserve of the elite and very rarely otherwise.

Everytime I read or hear about scientific (mathematical) discoveries from 1000 AD onwards it tends to be stuff based on Ptolemy and the other lads whose work was pretty much left alone for almost a millennium.

Certainly that was the case up to the retaking of Andalus and the subsequent translations from the Greek and Arabic books(though it had been happening before that), but by the high middle ages scientific and mathematical progress was rapidly gaining ground.

Way to miss my point. I wasn't claiming that China invented absolutely everything.

I didnt suggest you were. I pointed out your millennium level errors in the timelines.

sponsoredwalk wrote:

Basically I'm just using the older classification, I guess I've just got it from older books
So we can restate the "dark" ages as "middle" ages & still come up with a pretty grim period in humanity compared to today.

But if you read your professor Wiki, you'll see that it wasnt the stagnant dark ages you originally posited and that there was much progress in that time. Of coures you can call it a grim period compared to today. You could say the same of urbanisation in the early part of the industrial revolution. Pretty much any time was a grim period when compared to the western world today.

All my links point to humanity still in it's infancy (I don't claim we're exactly responsible adults) and almost powerless with respect to authoritarian rule & nature.
It ay not be the scholarly classification, i.e. a term to describe the lack of documentation of the period, but it is the common meaning when the word is used &
as I've shown through all those links it's not without reason.

Maybe you should actually read what you quote?

No, I'm not really speaking subjectively/anachronistically from a 21st century perspective I was trying to speak from the perspective's of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Vesalius, Galileo, Newton etc... in that their work has historically done so much to advance humanity and show people the virtue of reason.

And they didnt spring out of the thin air. Reason was alive and well in many a medieval mind. Our own John Scottus alone is a good read on that front.

You can argue for the lasting effect of people making cathedrals from before the gothic period & how that advanced humanity but it wasn't until
Newton that the serious concepts of center of mass etc... were adequately defined/understood so that buildings could be made with serious precision.
I'm sure we can go down the list & tick off the boxes like this.

So chartres cathedral and others weren't serious precision? Taller and more airy than anything Rome had come up with and they were no slouches and didnt have Newtonian mechanics to help. Neither did the Greeks. Or the Arabs. The great pyramid at 4000 odd years old varies by barely an inch across its entire base. It's sides vary about the same. Considering it's still the most massive stone building ever made, thats pretty high precision.

My point here is that nobody needed to die for humanity to acquire this knowledge (except in the case of Vesalius lol! )
and especially not 30-60% of the European population. Seeing as you mention parts outside of Europe,
did Muslim countries need mass death to come up with their mathematical and scientific advances?

No but it was the large scale social change and mobility that stemed from that depopulation that allowed more and more people to think. To explore to take advantage of that thinking. Look at the Islamic world that didnt suffer nearly the same losses. They stayed a feudal state for far longer. China a country with great advancements who when Europeans marched into it in the 18th and 19th century was still a late medieval state in many ways. Ditto with Russia in many ways until Peter the great.

The only good thing I can see behind this mass depopulation is that
a) workers became more valuable
b) people questioned the validity of religious beliefs

Which led to social mobility, the birth of modern banking, the birth of the middle classes, the birth of industry, the death of slavery(though that had started in Europe before).

This mass death causing people to "live for the moment" didn't exactly advance humanity, it was just something we as a species had to deal with.

It was little to do with living for the moment.

I think it's obvious that people aren't questioning the churches validity today because of the bubonic plague &
that most atheists would profess a scientific viewpoint to have contributed
to their worldview.

Not today they don't, but like I pointed out those very same ardent atheists of today would not be so in the 10th century. They would simply not have come to the same conclusions. After all the vast majority of people back then didnt. Even the well educated ones.

Had we come to many of our scientific conclusions 500 years ago who knows where we'd be now...?

Scientific conclusions require (among other things,) a particular social climate to be effective as far as moving things forward. The Chinese had amazing discoveries under their belts. As did the Indians. Both were ahead of Europe and the Islamic world in so many ways. Closer to home the Greeks had amazing scientific knowledge for the time and on a practical level. They had accurate sun dials, gears and even steam engines of a sort. Yet even they didnt come up to enlightenment or even renassiance europe.

IMHO No heavily feudal or slave built society would have landed on the moon. They have a glass ceiling to their endeavours, even if those endeavours can be impressive. And that glass ceiling was smashed to pieces in the wake of the plagues and subsequent depopulation. That was my point.