In Robert Irwin’s superb novel Wonders Will Never Cease you will come across a character’s theory that the years between AD600-900 were mostly a fabrication, ordered by the German king Otto III, who wanted to make sure he was the Holy Roman Emperor when the year 1000 came along. I liked this idea so much that I entertained it for perhaps longer than was wise; so I was relieved and also a little sad that, in Johannes Fried’s extraordinary history of (mostly) Europe from the death of Boethius to the end of the 15th century – about a thousand years – there was plenty going on between 600 and 900. (But from his portrait of Otto III, you may conclude that he would have tried such jiggery-pokery if he could.)
Charlemagne features as a key figure of the time and he is close to Fried’s project as a historian: to relocate the birth of the age of reason from the Renaissance to the middle ages. So his book, translated by Peter Lewis, begins with Boethius and his death in prison at the hands of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric. Boethius translated parts of Aristotle’s Organon into Latin, “an introduction to a mode of thinking that was subject to learnable rules and therefore susceptible to scrutiny and correction ... It wasn’t emperors and kings that made Europe great, but the categorical mode of thinking inspired by this translation”.
When chronicling Charlemagne’s rule, Fried pays particular attention to his interest in founding libraries and other centres of learning, some of which evolved into universities that are still around today. Alfred the Great is also singled out for praise in this regard, and Fried notes that when Europe was being plagued by Vikings, Alfred was apparently the only ruler who bothered to find out what made these marauders tick.
Fried also cites Muslim-ruled Andalucía as a major influence on the development of European thought, with Muslim scholars and visiting European ones translating ancient Greek authors, as well as their exegetes such as Averroës and Avicenna. I experienced a mild frisson of Ukip-baiting as I contemplated the proposition that European civilisation as we know it can be at least in part accounted for by a Francophone pan-Europeanism and an expansionist Islam.
It is not all about learning, though. The middle ages may have been more enlightened than we have come to believe, but there were still plenty of examples of mass credulity out there. During the Black Death, travelling mendicants would go from town to town, scourging themselves with nail-studded whips; people would wash their eyes in their blood in the hope of curing or inoculating themselves against the disease. We’re more than 800 years after Boethius, and things don’t seem to have changed much. It is – here Fried borrows the historian RI Moore’s phrase – “a persecuting society”, with almost arbitrary rules determining heresy, and a relish for inflicting the punishments.
“Monumental” is an overused word for historical works, but it may be applicable here. The book has the ambition, scope and, above all, plausibility. There is an enormous amount of ground covered in nearly 600 pages, and with an impressive narrative fluency; but I am no expert on the history itself. When I came across Count Ramon Berenguer IV I ruefully reflected that I was also unfamiliar with Counts I-III.
You may wonder what the point is of learning about all this but, apart from spotting alarming modern parallels, there is a joy in learning for its own sake. On practically every page something extraordinary is going on. One instance: a decisive battle in the crusade against the Cathars was lost because a commander, Peter II of Aragon (Berenguer IV’s grandson), was “supposedly exhausted by a night of love-making”. That’s one of the more benign examples. Despite the focus on reason, we are never too far from cruelty, or folklore.
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