How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (13 page)

It is true that Roman cities and towns declined greatly in number and size after the fall of Rome. The population of the city of Rome dropped from about five hundred thousand in the year 400 to about fifty thousand in 600. Of 372 Roman cities in Italy listed by Pliny, a third disappeared soon after the fall.
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Many towns and cities in Gaul and Britain “became like ghost towns, with small populations,” according to Roger Osborne in
Civilization.
¹⁵
All told, most of the empire’s estimated 2,000 “cities” (mostly towns) suffered this fate.
¹⁶

But these changes did not mean that the West had slid into backwardness. The truth is that most Roman cities no longer served any purpose. They had been funded by the state and existed only for governing: for collecting taxes, administering local rule, and quartering troops. As Osborne noted, “they were centres of consumption, not production, and had no autonomous reason for existence.”
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In contrast, the towns that arose or survived in post-Roman Europe were centers of trade and manufacturing—as were the many towns in the “barbarian” North, which continued to flourish. The towns and cities of this new era tended not to be large, because there were no state subsidies to pay for daily distributions of free food and entertainment for idle masses. Those people “now were not fed at all unless they made shift to feed themselves,” as the historian A. R. Bridbury put it.
¹⁸

Surely this was a major change. Just as surely, it was not decay.

With the demise of the fabulously rich Roman elite, the luxury trade bringing exotic food, jewels, and cloth from distant sources may have declined. But proponents of the Dark Ages myth propose that
all
forms of trade soon disappeared: in Van Doren’s words, “the roads were empty of travelers and freight.”
¹⁹
But it wasn’t so—there was far more European trade
after
the fall. For one thing, although the Romans transported a lot of goods, it wasn’t really trade but merely “a traffic in rent and tribute,” in Robin Williams-McClanahan’s apt phrase.
²⁰
Coins and precious metals, food, slaves, and luxury goods flowed to Rome; little came back except tax collectors and soldiers. As Bridbury explained, Roman trade “did not generate income, it simply impoverished those from whom it was extorted.”
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Second, long before the fall of Rome the “barbarian” areas had established very active, dense, long-distance trade networks,
²²
and these not only survived but soon were extended south and westward. Post-Roman Europe sustained busy trade networks dealing in practical things such as iron tools and weapons, pottery, glassware, and woolens. Most of these items were well within the means of ordinary people, and some of the goods traveled several thousand miles.
²³

“Everyone” knows that the fall of Rome soon resulted in an age of illiteracy. No doubt most people in the post-Roman world were unable to read or write. But this was nothing new: literacy was probably below 5 percent during the days of the empire as well.
²⁴
It also is true that after the fall, fewer people wrote in Latin or Greek—since they did not speak them either. Meanwhile, many of the “barbarian” tongues already were,
or soon became, written languages. For example, written Gothic dates from the fourth century and Old English from about the fifth.

As for the average person’s standard of living, it is true that the state no longer subsidized food or made daily free distributions of bread, olive oil, and wine. But studies based on isotopic analysis of skeletons have found that people in the so-called Dark Ages ate very well, getting lots of meat, and as a result they grew larger than people had during the days of the empire.
²⁵

Finally, the Germanic North had already been “Romanized,” even though it lay outside the empire. The historian Alfons Dopsch demonstrated that by the end of the first century the Germanic societies “had acquired most of the attributes of a fully articulated economic civilisation, including the use of coinage and the dependence on trade.”
²⁶
Moreover, when the Goths and Franks and other Germanic peoples took up residence in the empire, or later in what had been parts of the empire, they quickly assimilated. Thus it is that nowhere in modern Europe does anyone speak Frankish or Gothic. Instead, millions speak French, Spanish, and Italian—the Romance languages, which are, of course, merely “low” forms of Latin. This shift occurred very early.

What
did
decline during the so-called Dark Ages were literary pursuits. Manchester expressed the common theme: “Intellectual life had vanished from Europe.”
²⁷
In fact, little writing on any subject survives. As a result, echoing generations of scholars, the famous nineteenth-century artist Howard Pyle could complain, “Few records remain to us of that dreadful period in our world’s history, and we only know of it through broken and disjointed fragments.”
²⁸
Although some writing from that era may have been lost, it appears that far less was written for several centuries after the fall of Rome than before or since.

Why? In large part because the wealthy leisure class inherent in the parasitical nature of the imperial system had fallen away. Under the empire, the immense wealth drained from the provinces had sustained the idle rich in Rome. When this flow of tribute disappeared, so did the leisure class. There ended up being far fewer persons who did not need to work for their livings and who had the leisure to devote themselves to writing and other “nonproductive” enterprises. It was a few centuries before the reappearance of persons free to produce artistic and literary works.

For generations of scholars, that alone was sufficient to call an era
“dark,” even if it was abundant in new technology—which these scholars probably would not have noticed in any event.

The Geography of Disunity

The map of medieval Europe’s independent political units looks remarkably like a map of primitive cultures occupying this same area in 3000 BC.
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That is because the geography proved inimical to unification. Europe was, in E. L. Jones’s words, “a scatter of regions of high arable potential set in a continent of wastes and forests.”
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Unlike China or India, it “was not one large plain but a multitude of fertile valleys surrounded by mountains and dense forests, each often serving as the core area of an independent state. Only a few sizable plains, such as those surrounding Paris and London, could easily sustain larger political units; the rest of the political units that developed were tiny—
statelets
is the appropriate term. We lack sufficient information to count the states and statelets of the early post-Roman period, but as late as the fourteenth century there were more than a thousand independent units spread across Europe.
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Even today there are more than thirty.

Europe’s geographic barriers created not only many political units but cultural and linguistic diversity too, which also impeded efforts at unification. It should be remembered that Rome was able to impose its rule on far less than half of Europe—only the area southwest of the Rhine and the Danube Rivers. Even in Britain, Hadrian’s Wall separated the Roman area from that of the northern tribes. Within the empire, the Mediterranean substituted for a great plain facilitating central control from Rome. That is, Rome was essentially a waterfront empire encircling the great inland sea, and most Roman travel and trade was by boat. It is doubtful that the Romans could have controlled either Spain or the Levant had the legions been required to invade and supply themselves entirely by land. And once Rome fell, both areas splintered back into many small units.

Unlike Rome, however, most of Europe did not depend on the Mediterranean for waterborne tradeways. It had an immense advantage over Asia and Africa because of what Jones called “an abnormally high ratio of navigable routeways to surface area, which was a function of a long indented coastline and many navigable rivers.”
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Migrations and Disunity

Our knowledge of the migrations of various groups into and across Europe is a confused mess. Most of the groups left no written accounts of their movements; the Roman reports are often wrong and almost always biased; modern archaeology has challenged a lot of what we thought we knew.

For example, every British schoolchild knows about the invasion of the Angles and Saxons, two related Germanic peoples who arrived in England during the fifth century and took over, as demonstrated by the fact that their language (Old English) soon dominated. In fact, the word
England
means “land of the Angles.” The Anglo-Saxons’ arrival in England and their rise to power is carefully attested by the Venerable Bede (672–735) in his esteemed
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
.

But archaeologists now challenge the claim that a substantial Anglo-Saxon migration took place.
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As archaeology professor Peter S. Wells has documented, isotope studies of skeletons in what everyone has regarded as Anglo-Saxon cemeteries show “consistently that the individuals, whom earlier investigators would have interpreted as immigrants from the continent, were in fact local people.” Anthropologists now believe that the famous migrations “rarely, if ever, involved the large numbers that many accounts indicate, especially in western and northern Europe.” Instead, it now is believed that “small groups of elites, often with bands of their loyal warriors, sometimes moved from one region to another and quickly asserted their power over the peoples into whose land they moved.”
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That is, after the arrival of elite groups of Angles and Saxons, most people in England
became
Anglo-Saxons—or at least their descendants soon did.
³⁵

Obviously there were various “barbarian” groups on the borders of the Roman Empire. Obviously, too, many of these groups were large enough to pose a serious threat to Roman areas. And clearly some of them did enter the empire in large numbers as Roman rule faltered—the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, for example. But in the post-Roman period, it is difficult to know whether large groups, or only elites, were involved in migrations. During the fifth century, did great Frankish migrations occur into northern Gaul, or did Frankish warrior elites simply carve out many small kingdoms populated by locals? Whatever the case, cultural diversity increased dramatically, which increased disunity.

The proliferation of European political units had several important consequences. First, it tended to make for weak rulers. Second, it offered people some opportunity to depart for a setting more desirable in terms of liberty or opportunity.
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Finally, it provided for creative competition.

Technological Progress

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Dark Ages myth is that it was imposed on what was actually “one of the great innovative eras of mankind,” in Jean Gimpel’s words. During this period technology was developed and put into use “on a scale no civilization had previously known.”
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It was during the supposed Dark Ages that Europe took the great technological and intellectual leaps forward that put it ahead of the rest of the world.
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The illustrious French historian Georges Duby pointed out that this was an era “of sustained growth” in the West, while in the surviving Eastern Empire it “was one of decay.”
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The Agricultural Revolution

Long before the fall of Rome, the “barbarians” beyond the Rhine had invented a plow with an iron blade that was so much more effective than the one the Romans used that it resulted in a population explosion.
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In several generations the Goths and others needed to expand their territories—with the results recounted in chapter 3. Soon after the fall of Rome, this plow was made even more effective as part of a revolution in farming methods.

Farmers in the Roman Empire depended on the scratch plow, which was nothing but a set of digging sticks arranged in rows. Scratch plows do not turn the soil but are simply dragged over the surface, leaving undisturbed soil between shallow furrows. This is not effective even for the dry, thin soils of southern Europe, and it is very unsatisfactory for the heavy, damp soils further north. The Germanic tribes rectified this problem by devising a plow with a heavy share (blade) that would dig a deep furrow. They added a second share at an angle to cut off the slice of turf being turned over by the first share. Then they created a moldboard to fully turn over the slice of turf. Finally, wheels were added to help move the plow from one field to another and to allow plowing at different depths. The fully developed heavy plow is known to have existed by the fifth century.
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With this new plow, land that the Romans could not farm at all became productive. Even on thinner soil, crop yields were nearly doubled by improved plowing alone. Shortly thereafter the harrow was invented, an implement consisting of a frame and teeth that is dragged over a plowed field to further break up the clods.
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The post-Roman era also brought greatly increased speed. Neither the Romans nor anyone else knew how to harness horses effectively for pulling. Horses were usually harnessed the same way as were oxen, which put the pressure on the horse’s neck, with the result that a horse could pull only light loads without its strangling. Then, perhaps in the ninth century, a rigid, well-padded horse collar appeared in Scandinavia (possibly brought from China). It placed the weight of pulling on the horse’s shoulders instead of neck, enabling a horse to pull even more weight than an ox could. Since horses could also pull such a load much faster than oxen, farmers using horses could plow more than twice as much land in a day. In addition, harnesses were modified so that two-horse teams could be placed in columns to increase pulling power. Farmers quickly made the switch to horses, whose productivity had already improved thanks to the earlier invention of iron horseshoes nailed to the hoof, probably made in Gaul during the fifth century. Horseshoes not only protected the hoof from wear and tear but also improved the horse’s traction.