text | Song Wenjie's Universe
Editor | Song Wenjie's Universe
What we now call the Medieval Era spans almost a full millennium, starting with the demise of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD and ending with the beginning of the Renaissance in the early 15th century.
The Middle Ages literally means "between the ages," a term coined by later historians who viewed these "Middle Ages" as a dark age between the Light Age, the Classical Age, and the Renaissance.
Renaissance
Of course, those who lived in the Middle Ages did not think of themselves as living between anything, nor was this period a dark period.
On the contrary: The legacy of the Roman Empire is too deep and widespread to be lost entirely, and medieval architects, painters, poets, and musicians produced some of the most astonishing achievements in human history.
Roman Empire Ruins
Nonetheless, the concept of the Middle Ages persists, and it continues to provide a useful shorthand name for an era that was undeniably different in many ways.
The five centuries after the fall of Rome were particularly difficult: Western Europe experienced a significant decline in political stability, population decline, infrastructure decay, and knowledge of all kinds was lost.
The Fall of Rome
The basic engineering skills known in ancient times would not be recovered for nearly 1,000 years. Entire libraries were lost in fire or robbery.
The Great Library in Alexandria, Egypt, may have contained as many as 400,000 manuscripts in its glory days, a volume unrivaled in nearly 2,000 years.
For most of the Middle Ages, almost no one in Western Europe could read Ancient Greek ; therefore, even the manuscripts of philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle that had survived in the West could not be deciphered, and for all practical purposes, Latin translations did not begin to appear until later.
Although Greek-speaking scholars in the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world continued to cultivate Greek, the medieval world was also a dangerous place to be.
Plato
Reasons for the Church
Infant mortality was high, with most people who survived childhood dying before the age of 30. Diseases such as dysentery, typhus, and smallpox posed a constant threat, and plague was a recurring feature. Travelers traveled in groups wherever possible to protect themselves from wanderers and brigands. In many corners of the continent, the rule of law is little more than an abstract concept.
Many men and women have withdrawn from the secular world altogether and devoted themselves to the church. Self-satisfied monastic communities dotted the European countryside. By the beginning of the 14th century, there were approximately 500 monasteries in England alone.
Churches
Benedictines, Congregants, Dominicans, Franciscans, and other churches vary in their forms of worship and practice, but they are all committed to the principles of monasticism, a way of life based on vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
Monastic communities were major repositories of learning in the medieval world. Monks and nuns dedicated themselves to prayer and labor, preparing, collecting, and preserving a variety of manuscripts, including treatises on philosophy, medicine, law, astronomy, and mathematics—topics that had little or nothing to do with religion or theology.
The ability to teach
rights
New political entities emerged out of the vacuum left by the collapse of Rome. The most powerful of these was Charlemagne the ruler of the Franks . His kingdom extended into what is now France, western and central Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and northern Italy.
Charlemagne consolidated his power through a strategic alliance with the pope, and on Christmas Day 800 he was crowned "Monarch of the Roman Empire" by Pope Leo III in Rome.
Charlemagne
He ruled from Aix-la-Chapelle (now Aachen in western Germany), where he sought to follow the Roman model and re-implement strong centralization within his realm with a set of laws.
As part of this effort, he sought to standardize forms of Christian worship and in the process had a profound influence on the development of sacred music.
But Charlemagne's empire did not survive. By the end of the 9th century, his territory was divided into three parts, the Kingdom of France in the west, the Kingdom of Italy in the south, and the Kingdom of East Frank in the east.
Charlemagne's Empire
These states became the center of the Holy Roman Empire, a loose alliance of states that, as the 18th-century French philosopher Voltaire famously put it, was "neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire."
It was essentially a German entity that stretched into what is now northern Italy. The empire soon lost its cohesion as conflicts with the papal control of the territory around Rome and the authority to appoint senior church officials were weakened.
The emperor himself exercised only nominal power, being elected by a small group of princes. The empire had no fixed capital, but was governed by the hometown of the monarch of the day.
Charlemagne
For example, Charles IV ruled from Prague from 1355 to 1378, and many emperors were crowned at various locations in Aix-la-Chapelle, Rome, and Mainz.
The looseness of this alliance was a political liability, but it has proven to be a huge boon for the arts, including music. Each of the hundreds of principalities, principalities and kingdoms in central and southern Europe had its own painters, poets and musicians.
By the end of the Middle Ages, the courts were competing with, and in some respects even surpassing, the Church in the creation and consumption of new music.
As Germany divided, France and England began to become centralized nation-states under increasingly powerful monarchies.
Germany was divided
Here, too, art was practiced at the courts of kings and powerful nobles. The Duchy of Burgundy in eastern France was particularly friendly to painting, poetry, and music in the 14th and 15th centuries before it was incorporated into the Kingdom of France in 1477.
Medieval society was shaped by the feudal system, whose economic basis was autonomous property or estates. Peasants who worked the manorial lands swore allegiance to the manor lord, who might become vassals to a more powerful noble.
Medieval Manor
Farmers kept part of their harvest and gave the rest to the Lord. In this highly decentralized system, economic and legal authority resided in a nearby castle rather than in a distant court.
In the centuries after 1000, steady population growth and prosperity would eventually mean the demise of all feudalism. As agricultural productivity increased and trade began to expand, towns and cities replaced castles as central markets for goods and services.
A Medieval Town
A Highly Stylized Code of Conduct
Polite life revolves around a highly stylized code of conduct. In public, love could be expressed passionately, but only from a distance: the ideal knight paid homage to a lady of noble birth, dedicating himself to her service, praising her rich poetry and song—but never directly.
The purest conception of courtly love has always involved the torture of self-sufficiency. The object of desire is either a young girl or a married woman, but in either case the constraints of social convention make it impossible to achieve.
In this case, love takes on an abstract, almost religious quality. In fact, many of the poems and songs praising "my lady" can be understood as being directed either to the Virgin Mary or to a secular lady.
Medieval Court
The 1000th year proved to be a milestone in history, many feared that this millennium would bring the end of the world, instead it marked the beginning of a wave of energy and optimism.
The centuries of the late Middle Ages saw significant advances in technology, architecture, education, and art. The horizontal loom, more efficient than its predecessors, came into widespread use in the 11th century; magnetic compasses and windmills first appeared in the 12th century; paper had been common in Arab countries for centuries and was being mass-produced in Europe by the 13th century.
In the late 11th century, growing prosperity and confidence, coupled with rising religious fervor, inspired a series of military adventures to recapture the Holy Land from Muslim rule.
In 1095, Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade and successfully captured Jerusalem , albeit for a short time. Over the next 300 years, different Christian rulers would repeatedly try to replicate this feat, without success.
Although from a military perspective, the Crusades had the unexpected benefit of bringing the West into closer contact with Islamic culture. Over the centuries, Islamic culture has cultivated subjects such as philosophy, astronomy, mathematics (especially algebra), and medicine.
Islamic Culture
However, in the 14th century, Europe entered a period of crisis. Population growth combined with crop failure resulted in a devastating famine early in the century.
In 1337, a hybrid war between France and Britain was called the Hundred Years' War. In the middle of the century, the Black Death swept across Europe, killing up to a third of the population.
Beginning in 1378, advocates of the pope caused schisms in the church. However, these crises helped spark an intellectual and political ferment that spurred the Renaissance and Reformation as Europe recovered in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Popes in the Medieval Period
Perhaps of all the technical and artistic achievements of the Middle Ages, the most striking is Gothic architecture . This architectural style replaced the earlier Romanesque style due to its emphasis on height. Square, compact structures gave way to architecture of unprecedented size, elegance and lightness.
Notre Dame de Paris and Chartres Gothic cathedral were both built in the mid-12th century. By the end of the 13th century, a series of artists and writers appeared whose work seemed very forward-looking.
Notre Dame de Paris
In fact, they are often regarded as precursors to the Renaissance. Painters like Giotto . and sculptors like Giovanni Pisano.
1250–ca. Both Italians began to depict the human form in a new and fundamentally different way. These faces are more individual, more completely differentiated, more realistic - in short, more like the art of classical antiquity.
Similar insights into human nature also come from the poets Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). and Geoffrey Chaucer (1342-1400), who produced works of astonishing originality not in the international languages Latin, but in the native languages Italian and English.
Dante Alighieri
Beginning in the 12th century, the overall pace of learning gradually accelerated. The major centers of learning began to shift away from the churches and toward the emerging universities, many of which grew out of cathedral schools.
The earliest universities - most notably at Bologna and Paris, both founded in the mid-twelfth century - focused primarily on the study of theology, law, and medicine, but students in different fields often read works by the same authors.
The most important of these was Aristotle, whose works were becoming increasingly better known at this time (although not in the original Greek).
Aristotle
The faculty of the University of Paris included major religious believers such as St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and St. Bonaventure (Giovanni di Fidanza, 1221-1274), both of whom integrated theology and philosophy and used rational principles to prove faith.
By 1300, there were 23 universities scattered across Europe, including the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge in the UK.
The dominant way of thinking of the new university is called scholasticism. Its proponents insist that truth can be achieved through a combination of reason and faith. The academic curriculum is based on the study of established authorities such as Aristotle and St. Augustine.
Aristotle
Empirical observations are unreliable because the medieval mind was deeply suspicious of worldly appearances. After all, life on earth was considered temporary and clearly inferior to the higher truth of divine eternity.
Music is an important subject of study at the new university, but not musical performance. In the traditions of Pythagoras and the Quadruple Universe, music is understood as a mathematical discipline, more related to geometry and astronomy than to poetry or drama.
Aristotle
Reference: "Feudal Society"
