Reflections on the Middle Ages

Feudalism, which was the political system for most of the Middle Ages, provided advantages over the system which had prevailed in western and southern Europe during the Roman Empire. The imperial system had been centralized; power was distant, difficult to influence, and consolidated in the hands of a few people.

By contrast, feudalism was localized, so that one could meet face-to-face with those who managed the estates. Power was distributed among many estates, so that no one individual had much of it.

Impressively, feudalism created a structure with mutual obligations: the serfs, the common farmers at the bottom of the social structure, owed certain duties to their lords, but the lords also had certain responsibilities toward the serfs.

The economic system which paralleled feudalism was manorialism. Feudalism and manorialism are inseparable. Manorialism contained the economic analogues to feudalism’s political advantages of a decentralized, localized, flexible system in which the greater answered to the weaker as much as the serfs answered to their lords.

This was unlike the old Roman empire, in which those at the bottom owed a great deal to those at the top, but those at the top owed nothing to those beneath them. Historian Irma Simonton Black writes:

Since the distances from castle to castle were so great, each large estate had to be maintained separately, and the people living there relied on each other. Everyone, from the lowliest serf to the lord of the castle, had his own duties. They welcomed exciting diversions, like tournaments.

There was a diversity of Christian churches around the world: Coptic, Syriac, and others. In Europe, until 1054 A.D., “there was only one Christian church.” After that year, eastern Europe and western Europe each had its own type of church.

Almost every small town or village had its own church, and larger towns had several. Aside from churches, monasteries were major institutions for both learning and social services. “Monks, who dedicated their lives to God,” were responsible for copying by hand the manuscripts which preserved the literature and philosophy of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Because these monks were extremely familiar with texts by authors like Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, monasteries became the home to mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Monks had detailed discussions of these and other academic topics. During the centuries we call ‘the Middle Ages,’ monks developed more advanced forms of logic, mathematics, astronomy, and physics.

The monks, who “lived in peaceful monasteries,” were also responsible for helping the poor. People who had no food or clothing, and couldn’t otherwise earn any, received these things at monasteries. The monks “tended gardens and went about a wide variety of spiritual and temporal duties.” The monasteries additionally provided employment and a place to live for homeless individuals and families.

Not everyone who lived or worked in a monastery was a monk. Many ordinary people were employed there. They were given houses in which to live and fields in which to grow crops.

It is difficult to mark a precise beginning point or ending point for the Middle Ages. A convenient starting point is the fall of the western Roman Empire in 476 A.D.; an endpoint is much less clear.

The end of the Middle Ages is often thought to be the beginning of the Renaissance, but that is equally ambiguous. Some historians mark the end of the Middle Ages as the time when Petrarch’s career reached its height, around 1341. Others see the rise of the printing press, around 1453, or Islam’s destruction of the city of Constantinople at about the same time, as the endpoint of the Middle Ages.

The reason it’s difficult to find exact dates for the Middle Ages is because this “age” is not a real or concrete historical event. It is a “construct” - an idea made up by later generations. Like most types of generalizations, then, it is difficult to pin down, liable to exceptions, and subject to competing interpretations.

Life on the great estates and in the monasteries went on as it had for many centuries, but very gradually a few things began to change. By the end of the Middle Ages, a new and powerful middle class had appeared in the fast-growing towns: one example of the progress made toward modern times during this very important period.

The economic developments of the Middle Ages - the rise of a cash economy to replace bartering and payments “in kind,” the emergence of the middle class, and the organization of skilled craftsmen into guilds - as well as the technological innovations like the printing press arose from the creativity fostered by the spiritual atmosphere of the times. Irma Simonton Black writes:

Inside the abbeys, monasteries and convents of the Roman Catholic Church life was orderly and serene. Many religious establishments dotted the landscape of the Middle Ages, and the churchmen and churchwomen who inhabited them were directly subject to the great Holy Father, or Pope, in Rome. They lived by stringent rules which forbade fighting.

The monasteries brewed beer and made wine, selling some of it to nearby towns. Monks and nuns took vows of poverty, and most of them lived up to those vows. The monasteries, therefore, did not spend much money on luxuries, and could direct funds to create schools, build libraries, and help the poor.

Because most of the monks and nuns were also pacifists, the energy which might have been devoted to war was instead used for artistic and scientific progress. By the mid 800s, one monastic philosopher, Johannes Scotus Eriugena, was already directing doubt toward the old Ptolemaic view of the universe.

The Greek language was also kept alive in Medieval Europe, from Ireland to Saxony, among the monks. Although some historians felt that Greek learning had died out, it was in fact never disrupted: continuously from 476 A.D. onward, the texts of Plato and Aristotle were studied in their original language across Europe.

The Medieval synthesis was, then, a mixture of preserving and analyzing the classical Greco-Roman heritage on the one hand, and on the other hand advancing areas of study like physics and mathematics with new and original scholarship.

Roman learning was preserved in monasteries and abbeys. Monks copied books and kept brief accounts of important happenings. They wrote in Latin, the language of the scholars.

Monks often knew three or more languages: their native language along with Greek and Latin. “The monks also taught” in the schools of the monasteries. They helped “young people to read and write.” Although the schools started in the monasteries, they also soon were planted in larger towns, where they were called ‘cathedral schools’ because they were usually located in the central church of the region.

The word ‘catholic’ means universal: for centuries, there was only one type of church in any region of Europe. This is unlike the modern United States, where you can find many different types of church in each town: Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian, etc.

The word “catholic” means general or universal, and the Catholic Church was just that for all the Christians of the Middle Ages, for they all belonged to one church.

Most of Europe was over 90% Christian, or at least more than 90% of the people in the region called themselves ‘Christian.’ The remaining people were Jewish. Relations between Christians and Jews in medieval Europe were varying. In some places and times, the two groups coexisted and even cooperated in a peaceful and friendly manner. In other situations, anti-Jewish hatred arose among those who called themselves Christians.

Islam first appeared in southwestern Europe around 711 A.D., when Muslim armies invaded and laid waste to parts of Spain. Similar incursions and plundering would take place in France and Italy, but Islam would not become a fixed presence in Europe until long after the Middle Ages.

Because Christianity had become legal only after 300 A.D., the Middle Ages was the first time that history had a chance to attempt to organize a society around the teachings of Jesus. There was a tension between the new patterns of life found among the Jesus followers on the one hand, and on the other hand that tendency toward selfishness and violence which had made itself apparent in the five or six thousand years of history leading up to the Middle Ages.

The conduct of the military was shaped by the spiritual outlook of those who were serious followers of Jesus:

The knights, for instance, who were the trained fighters of the day, were taught by the Church to respect God and defend the Christian faith, to protect the poor and weak. It was the Pope who proclaimed the Truce of God, which forbade all fighting on Saturdays and Sundays.

The ideal of protecting the poor and the weak was a medieval innovation. Even if it wasn’t carried out uniformly, it was a new concept in human civilization. The weekend ceasefire likewise was a humane attempt to reduce casualties and offer a chance for a diplomatically negotiated solution.

Most, but not all, knights conducted themselves in attempt to honor the ethic of Jesus - admittedly a difficult thing for a military man to do, given that Jesus was a pacifist who neither engaged in combat nor carried a sword. There was, however, at least the new thought of trying to introduce some humane aspect into the conduct of war: avoid harming civilians, women, and children; protect the weak and the poor.

Although “knights would sometimes disregard the Church’s commands,” this new sense of honor was unique among the world’s cultures. Medieval Europe’s sense of honor was a millennium earlier than Japan’s bushido and peculiarly more humane.

This sense of honor fits more naturally into civilian life than into the military. The feudal lords “recognized the Church as a peaceful influence in their world.” There were occasions, naturally, when it was necessary to correct or reform the Church itself, when it strayed away from the selfless pacifism which Jesus introduced. But, “in general, the nobles were willing to support the Church with money and gifts.”

Medieval Europe was a mixture of economic, political, and spiritual thoughts, trying sincerely but perhaps imperfectly to make a concrete social reality corresponding to its distinctive ethics of selflessness, pacificism, individual liberty, and a respect for human life.

Saving History

Columba Stewart is the executive director of Minnesota’s Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. He’s also been working diligently to preserve papyri, parchments, and other ancient texts in various Islamic nations, where the terrorist group “Islamic State” (ISIS) has destroying artifacts and historical manuscripts.

The “Islamic State” attempts to obliterate large segments of human history, claiming vaguely that it is either blasphemous or idolatrous. Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Gordon Govier interviewed Stewart and wrote:

The swift ISIS takeover in Iraq meant there was little time to hide thousands of documents, he said. Many have been destroyed.

Zylstra and Govier also interviewed Major Corine Wegener (U.S. Army), who’s been on the ground in the Middle East, leading efforts to preserve not only manuscripts, but also paintings and sculpture: the objects which ISIS works to destroy.

Terrorists from the “Islamic State” adhere to the Muslim belief that artistic images are idolatrous and should be destroyed. Major Weger works with networks of individuals attempting to preserve humanist treasures:

“I tell people, look to yourself and your family first,” Wegener said. “If you are still a caretaker of your collection and you see the opportunity where it looks like things are bad, you have to make that judgment call.”

Although there have been individual Muslim scholars over the centuries who’ve allowed for the possibility that artistic images are permissible, and there have been Muslim artists who’ve created paintings or sculptures, the mainstream of Islam in the Middle East has studiously avoided images. Accepted Muslim artists have kept to nonrepresentational and abstract forms: calligraphy and architecture.

Muslim artists who create representational art, and their artworks, have been safer in other parts of the world.

Meanwhile, the “Islamic State” has been equally happy to smash classical Greek and Roman sculptures, Buddhist sculptures, or Hindu sculptures. Hellenistic artworks, created in the wake of Alexander the Great, have been destroyed in large numbers.

Major Wegener leads the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, which she coordinates with the Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield and the International Committee of the Blue Shield:

Most stories of saved artifacts won’t come out until the conflict is over, she said. When Islamic extremists were threatening Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012, a local library curator created a system for smuggling more than 275,000 pages of priceless manuscripts by donkey, bicycle, or boat to the south of the country.

Both ordinary private citizens and officers in the U.S. Army work to preserve centuries and millennia of human history from the terrorists of the “Islamic State.”

Your Language, Your Empire

Widespread imperial presence leads to the widespread adoption of the empire’s language for business and political purposes. The peak of an empire’s military and economic influence, however, regularly antedates the peak of the imperial language’s ubiquity.

Greek and Macedonian influence arguably reached its zenith sometime prior to 250 BC, but the Greek language would become most widespread a century or two later.

The Roman Empire arrived at its apogee well before 476 AD, but Latin usage, both written and spoken, continued to expand for several centuries afterward. More texts were composed, and more of them have survived, in Latin after 476 than before.

Visually, this phenomenon could be represented on a Cartesian plane. The horizontal axis shows time, and the vertical axis would represent intensity and geographical spread. Something approximating the familiar bell curve would map an empire’s political, military, and economic significance. A second curve, of similar shape, would mark the spread and use of that empire’s language. This second curve would be offset to the right, such that the peak of an empire’s geopolitical importance would occur temporally prior to the greatest spread and use of its language.

The spatial distribution, and frequency of use, of an empire’s language is still increasing when the empire itself is in decline.

The Spanish, French, and British empires were already in decline while the Spanish, French, and English were becoming increasingly widespread.

Aurelian Kills Followers of Jesus

During the years from 30 AD to 313 AD, the majority of the Jesus followers were located somewhere within the Roman Empire. The imperial government was bent on extinguishing the new belief, and persecuted the Jesus followers, arresting, jailing, beating, and killing them by the thousands and by the tens of thousands.

Why did the Roman officials feel so threatened by the Jesus followers? One reason, perhaps, is that they misunderstood this new group.

The words of Jesus included terms like ‘kingdom’ and ‘king’ and ‘judge’ and others which were prima facie political vocabulary. Jesus had used them, however, in a metaphorical sense. He claimed to have, e.g., a kingdom which was ‘not of this world.’ He was referring to an invisible and metaphysical kingdom.

Roman bureaucrats had no inclination or patience for parsing and interpreting the words of suspicious groups. The Jesus followers seemed like a potential political power movement, and should be eliminated.

Adding to the tension was the fact that the Jesus followers not only worshipped their own God, but that they refused to also worship the Roman gods. For the Romans, worship was not merely a personal preference, but rather a public civic gesture of national participation.

The importance of this civic religion to the Romans can be seen in the fact that they attributed sustained national defense to the Roman deities. The fact that many of the Romans didn’t believe in these gods and goddesses was not relevant to the fact that the Romans saw this communal practice as essential to the fabric of society.

The failure to honor the Roman deities was, in the eyes of the Romans, not a spiritual violation but rather a political one. The Roman officials didn’t care if you believed in their gods - because many of these officials themselves didn’t believe - but they cared greatly if you were willing to participate in communal festivities. Failure to thus participate was a rejection of the community. Historian Ernest Gottlieb Sihler writes:

This aloofness of the Christians, as we clearly see, was officially and by the foremost representative of Rome in that province branded as civil or political treason or sedition, treason in the underlying convictions, sedition in the practice of religious dissent and non-conformity with the rites of the commonwealth. When in 271 A.D. the Marcomanni had invaded northern Italy, the Emperor Aurelian sent orders to Rome to have the Sibylline books consulted, and the Senate subsequently recorded its official conviction, that the gods had aided the state in recognition of the sacrifices prescribed by the Sibylline records. Aurelian had inherited from his mother the cult of the Sun. To it at Rome he dedicated a huge temple with anniversary games and on one of his own coins antiquarians still read: “The Sun, Lord of the Roman Empire.”

Aurelian managed, according to most sources, to restore a level of stability to empire after it threatened to break into three separate empires in the mid 200s. He became emperor in 270 AD and solidified imperial unity.

The civic religion was part of Aurelian’s unification program. He instituted universal worship of the Roman sun god. Citizens were free to worship any of the other Roman deities alongside this sun god, but some acknowledgement of Sol Invictus was mandatory.

Aurelian’s effort to unify Roman society by means of civic religion intensified the already harsh persecution of Jesus followers.

Edmund Burke: Freedom, Prosperity, and Ethical Reflection

The thoughts and writings of Edmund Burke contain a complexity which prevents them from being simply categorized. While some historians want to dismiss him as a relativist, and other find him to be the founder of modern political conservatism, the reality is much more nuanced.

From the very beginning, Burke was not easily pigeonholed. His mother was an Irish Catholic, while his father was Anglican whose English family had settled in Ireland several generations earlier.

Burke cheered on the American Revolution of 1776, but despised the French Revolution of 1789, after his analysis found the two movements to be based on utterly different premises.

One of Burke’s theses was that tradition merits respect, and that those who respect it will find it advantageous. Burke did not want men to be slaves to tradition, but neither did he want them to cast it aside thoughtlessly - as he saw the leaders of the French Revolution do.

Burke predicted the outcome of the French Revolution, although he did not live to see it. He foresaw that, having demolished the monarchy, they revolutionaries would proceed to experiment with a series of various governmental forms, and to be satisfied with none of them.

Likewise, Burke criticized the British officials in India who did not stop to study or understand the traditions of the Hindus. They missed, Burke saw, a chance to decide judiciously which of them to keep.

In the course of reviewing William Byrne’s book about Burke, Daniel Foster writes:

A reform-minded, pragmatic British MP, he had expressed sympathy for the American Revolution, worked on behalf of the oppressed Catholics in Ireland, and stridently opposed the Crown’s imperial policies in India. So Thomas Paine, who’d assumed he had a natural ally in Burke, was perhaps understandably taken aback by Burke’s pique at the revolution in France in 1789, and his famed Reflections on the same. Similarly, though Burke was a Whig during most of his parliamentary career, he counted no less a figure than Samuel Johnson — who had called Whiggism “the negation of all principle” and japed that “the first Whig was the Devil” — as his good friend and admirer. Burke despised the programmatic fixity of “metaphysicians,” but wrote a treatise on aesthetics that influenced the young Immanuel Kant.

One way of understanding Burke’s hypothesis is that political liberty is dependent on personal self-discipline. Governments are tempted, or forced, to impose regulation on public and private life when citizens fail to conduct themselves rationally and ethically.

Burke was no anarchist, but he would agree with James Madison that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” From that axiom, Burke concludes that the closer men are, in their behavior, to angels, the less regulation the government will want or need to impose on them.

Burke encourages, then, a social and cultural structure which will save citizens from regulatory tyranny by encouraging appropriate behavior. Daniel Foster notes:

Ben Franklin wrote in 1787, a year of some moment, that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” In many ways, avoiding the latter consequence was the central preoccupation of the Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, a Franklin contemporary.

The French Revolution, because it sought to destroy not only the government, but also the social and cultural order, was doomed to end in tyranny. The destruction of social and cultural structure will leave a vacuum. That vacuum will necessitate, or tempt, a government to impose order.

Thus, a revolution initiated as quest for freedom ended in a government whose totalitarian tendencies were limited only by the technology of the time. Foster continues:

There is much going on here. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Burke saw the substitution of a cold and unmoored rationalism, novel in the worst sense of the word, for the body of mores and morals that had long held French civil life together.

Burke’s task, then, is to find a formula by which the traditional structures of society and culture can be reinforced so that the imposition of governmental regulations can be relaxed. A civilization with maximal socio-cultural edifice can enjoy minimal governmental intervention.

To this end, Burke encourages what he calls ‘prejudice.’ This word merits examination. Many readers in the early twenty-first century, shaped by several decades of debate about civil rights in the United States, have associated this word with injustice, racism, and other unpleasant phenomena. But in Burke’s day - he wrote this particular text in 1790 - the word had different connotations.

By ‘prejudice,’ Burke meant something along the lines of developing a moral instinct or refining and training one’s ethical judgment. By ‘prejudice,’ Burke meant bringing one’s education - one’s knowledge of tradition - to inform one’s judgment.

Between 1790 and 2015, the word ‘prejudice’ has changed its connotation significantly, and even its denotation somewhat. By ‘prejudice,’ Burke is asking the reader not to make decisions in a vacuum, not to make uninformed decisions, but rather to inform one’s decisions by the inherited wisdom of tradition. Daniel Foster phrases it this way:

Burke understands our moral faculty as an admixture of reason and sentiment. Healthy judgments of right and wrong come from an application of what he repeatedly calls “prejudices” — instincts, habits, virtues culturally inherited — aided by reason. White papers, economic models, and graduate seminars get you only so far. The rest requires the wisdom of “nations and … ages” (Burke’s words) that is all too often dismissed as (our words) “the conventional wisdom.”

Studying and internalizing one’s cultural heritage equips one to make ethical decisions. To discard, as the French Revolution did, social tradition creates a vacuum in which every decision must be made ex nihilo and ab initio. One is forced, morally speaking, to perpetually reinvent the wheel. If one must reinvent the wheel several times a day, then one will sometimes get it wrong.

Discarding all tradition, one throws the individual, stripped of all culture, intellectually naked and unequipped into a sea of moral dilemmas. Faced with the need to make decisions about what is permissible, what is obligatory, and what is forbidden - incest, prostitution, polygamy, slavery, defamation, libel, slander, greed, selfishness - the individual is forced to undertake a long and arduous moral inquiry, which at the least mires society in endless moral debate, and at worst creates endless pitfalls for making bad decisions.

By analogy, we do not ask a nurse or a physician to begin with a study of all known chemical elements when a solution is needed to sterilize medical instruments. We have already on hand a knowledge of which substances meet that need, and we have supplies of such substances. Likewise, we do not ask the individual to begin a thorough examination of all possible ethical axioms when faced with a practical decision in daily life. We have a supply of such things already on hand. Burke himself writes:

Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

Burke argues that many different aspects of civilization owe their strength to inherited cultural tradition. Literature, he argues, depends on its predecessors - even that literature which makes its claim that it is a sharp break from the past.

Business and economics, Burke asserts, is no mere application of algebraic rules, but rather also depends on a social heritage. A thriving commercial environment, which offers income and opportunity freely, fairly, and equally to all its citizens, is possible only on the foundation of a cultural tradition.

Thus the French Revolution not only, in its attempt to create more freedom, ended up destroying freedom, but also, in its attempt to create prosperity and opportunity, ended up destroying economic opportunity for the lower classes. Burke does not criticize the noble desires of the French Revolution, but rather points out that its methods will bring about the precise opposite of those desires. Burke writes:

If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing to owe to ancient manners, so do other interests which we value full as much as they are worth. Even commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our economical politicians, are themselves perhaps but creatures; are themselves but effects, which as first causes, we choose to worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished. They too may decay with their natural protecting principles.

Burke’s vision is, then, one which empowers the individual to make ethical choices, and which one creates commercial prosperity accessible to all classes. Burke’s vision, unlike the failed French Revolution, is based on the solid tradition of cultural heritage.

Any endeavor toward freedom, ethical maturity, and economic opportunity will not only fail, but bring about its opposite - tyranny, moral confusion, and poverty - if it is not based in the inherited traditions of civilization.

Rome: Imperial Instability

Perhaps one mystery about the Roman Empire is not why it fell, but why it ever stood in the first place. In contrast to the Roman Republic, the empire contained within its very structure, or lack thereof, the seeds of its own destruction.

This inherent instability was crystallized in the question of succession. Because the empire was structured around the empty pretense of continuing the republican form and procedure, no clear procedure for, or line of, succession was codified.

The result was a built-in motive for assassinations, and an increased likelihood of power struggles, if not civil wars, between competing pretenders to the throne.

That there was never a smooth transition of power, and that an emperor ever died a natural death, is something of a marvel in these circumstances.

The system did apparently work to a limited extent for the first five emperors, whom historians treat together as the Julio-Claudian Dynasty. Of these first five, one was indisputably assassinated: Caligula. Nero committed suicide in order to avoid assassination. Of the remaining three - Octavian, Tiberius, and Claudius - the evidence is ambiguous as to whether their deaths were natural or contrived.

Despite the dubious causes of death, the mechanisms, if improvised, for the transitions of power functioned relatively smoothly, up until the death of Nero in 68 A.D.

After Nero’s death, Rome lived through “the year of four emperors,” as it is routinely called, and problem of succession emerged as one of the clear weaknesses of the imperial government.

This tumultuous pattern of succession would continue for many years, interrupted occasionally by bits of stability. Historian Ernest Gottleib Sihler describes the situation among the emperors of the early third century:

Caracalla, the cruel elder son of Septimius Severus, perished through Macrinus, commander of the Imperial Guard, in 217 A.D. In the very next year this short-lived Emperor was in turn slain while fleeing from the unspeakable Elagabalus, priest of the Sun and incarnation of every possible form of sexual depravity. This monster in turn was killed by his own praetorians after the world had endured him for four years, in 222 A.D. A nobler youth succeeded, known in history as Alexander Severus, but he, too, was done to death by his own troops, on the Rhine, in 235 A.D.

That the empire functioned for nearly five centuries is perhaps due to the efficiency of the civil service. The bureaucrats at the middle and lower levels kept the system running.

The instability in the succession process was matched by instability caused by powerful tribes who threatened the borders of the empire. The whole of these two problems was more their sum.

The attacking tribes created a need for a loyal and devoted military to defend the empire. But given the ambiguity about the emperor’s claim to sovereignty, such dedication was more difficult to find, instill, or call forth.

Ultimately, the emperors could rely only on the raw assertion of power to back up their claims to sovereignty. As long as they maintained the appearance of republican government - the senate met regularly throughout the centuries of the empire, even though its true power was microscopic - there could be no talk of dynastic succession or divine right. The emperors would also not tolerate the thought of being in any way confirmed or elected by the senate.

While the senate did formally declare some of the emperors to be emperor, this was again merely a formality for the sake of appearance.

Over the centuries of the empire, as Christianity went from being a ruthlessly persecuted underground movement to a legally accepted and acknowledged part of Roman society, the cultural impact of belief also impacted the power structure.

Historians diverge on the question of how the new faith affected Roman civilization: did it strengthen it or weaken it? Professor Sihler writes:

After this the emperors, one and all, were simply military pretenders, creatures of their own legions. None of them succeeded in establishing a dynasty. Persians, Goths, Sarmatians, Franks, Alemanni, began to overrun the frontier provinces of the Empire, the integrity of which was more and more threatened by its vastness. At the same time the inner unity and loyalty of the subjects were felt by the Roman officials to be gravely impaired by the aloofness of the religious sect ever growing at the cost of the idolatrous nations - felt perhaps by some statesmen of Rome to be a state within the state - the Christian church, an element of disintegration.

On the one hand, as Sihler notes, the followers of Jesus were perhaps at times less inclined to invest themselves fully in imperial power struggles and political machinations. On the other hand, the early Christians were less likely to seek power and initiate self-aggrandizement campaigns.

Finally, after the reign of Constantine, Christianity was given a recognized and legal status, and under the subsequent Christian emperors, Rome’s older polytheistic paganism was tolerated alongside Christianity. By ushering in an era of religious toleration, Roman unity may have been threatened by religious diversity, but energy and resources were not wasted in efforts to suppress or exterminate any one faith.

The net impact of Christianity on Rome, then, is ambiguous, or at least disputable. In any case, it was overshadowed by succession problems and by threats from external nations, among other challenges faced by the empire.

Manzikert in Context

To understand why the Battle of Manzikert is a turning-point, one must see first what caused it, and second what it caused.

The Seljuq Turks were a migrating ethnic group from central Asia. Turks had lived in central Asia for centuries. After most of them embraced Islam, they set out for lands to conquer. The Seljuqs - also spelled ‘Seljuks’ - were but one migrating group of Turks. The Mongols were another. The Seljuqs and the Mongols were cousins.

As the Seljuq Muslims moved southwest from their Asian homeland, they eventually encountered the territory of the Byzantine Empire. It is helpful to remember that ‘Asia Minor’ and ‘Anatolia’ and ‘Turkey’ all refer to the same piece of land.

Over a period of years, the Islamic Seljuqs attacked the Byzantine Empire in a number of battles. They also attacked other sovereign territories as they made their way across large portions of southeast Asia.

The Seljuk leader, Alp-Arslan, led his Muslim soldiers not only against the Byzantine Empire, but also against Egypt, Armenia, and Georgia. Emperor Romanos Diogenes led the Byzantines in their attempt to defend themselves. Historian Avner Falk writes:

In 1071, the Seljuk Turks, led by Arp-Arslan (1029-1072), had fought a battle with the Byzantines at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia (now Malazgirt in eastern Turkey), defeating the “Eastern Roman Emperor” Romanos Diogenes, whom they captured, blinded, and exiled to an island in the Sea of Marmara, where he soon died. This battle was an important milestone in the Turkish settlement of Asia Minor. The warlike Seljuks went on to capture Egypt and Syria, including Palestine.

A more detailed telling of the events informs us that Alp-Arslan, whom Falk’s text perhaps misspells, captured the Emperor Romanos Diogenes, held him captive until massive sums were paid for his release, and then returned him to the Byzantines. During his brief stay in captivity, a coup in the palace meant that when Romanos Diogenes returned home, he was no longer emperor. Those who had taken power in his absence had him cruelly blinded.

While the Battle of Manzikert was significant, it was far from the only significant attack mounted by the Muslims. In a large context, the invasion of Anatolia by the Islamic Seljuqs was a continuation of the pattern begun by Islam’s invasion of Spain in 711 AD, and continued by Islamic invasions of France, Italy, and Mediterranean Islands like Malta, Sicily, Cyprus, Sardinia, and Corsica.

Manzikert was, therefore, not the beginning, but rather the continuation, of a long string of Muslim attacks.

Manzikert was also not the end of, but rather one in a series, of subsequent instance of Islamic aggression.

The Seljuqs continued to assault Byzantine territories in Asia Minor for decades and centuries, chipping away at Byzantine civilization, until the capital city Constantinople was savaged by Muslim invaders who largely destroyed the city in 1453 and thereby ended the Byzantine Empire.

At the same time, other Islamic forces continued their attacks on Italy and various portions of Europe. Avner Falk continues the narrative:

Some historians consider the Battle of Manzikert a major cause or origin of the Crusades. A few years later, the Seljuks created their “Sultanate of Rum”, the sultanate that ruled Anatolia in direct lineage from 1077 to 1307, with capitals at Iznik and Konya, and, at times, at Kayseri and Sivas. At its height, the sultanate of Rum stretched across central Turkey from the Mediterranean coast to the Black Sea. In the east, the sultanate absorbed other Turkish states and reached to Lake Van. Its westernmost limit was near Denizli and the gates of the Aegean basin.

After decades of enduring Islamic savagery, Europe had been attacked on many fronts: Spain, France, and Italy. It was clear that an invasion through Greece and the Balkans would be next. If the Seljuq Muslims consolidated their hold on all or most of Asia Minor, then that territory would become their launching pad for Islamic invasions deep into the heart of Europe.

Manzikert was one of many causes of the Crusades; it was not the only cause of the Crusades. The Crusades were a response to long pattern of unprovoked attacks.

Finally, to borrow an athletic metaphor, Europe decided that the best defense would be a good offense. Rather than brace for more attacks, it would be best to go to the source of the attacks, to stop the invaders before they reached Europe. The so-called ‘Crusades’ (they were not given that name until centuries after they ended) were an attempt to go into the Islamic world and there stop the armies of Muslim conquest headed for Europe.