The Middle Ages: Chapter 1

This self-awareness—which they were able to express thanks to the patronage they received from princes, popes, and noble families—was displayed with bravura in the poetry and letters they wrote to classical rhythms, and within palaces inspired by the buildings of ancient Rome.

Similarly, historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), in his Past and Present of 1843, advocated a new post-Christian ‘gospel of work’, inspired by what he perceived as the ethos of cooperation and labour in medieval monasteries.

The designer and social thinker William Morris (1834–96) sought to capture the qualities of craft labour in his emulation of medieval carving and painting.

For all these reasons the ‘Middle Ages’ form a point of reference from which we moderns fashion our identities and conduct our polemics.

Hence the many complexions it can assume: the ‘medieval’ has been associated in turn with socialism and arch-conservatism, with the cohesion of trades unions and the bombast of royal ceremony.

The late antique Roman Empire was a Christian polity.

Public spaces and practices, like aqueducts, hippodromes, temples, and gladiatorial games were transformed to fit a Christian society.

Court historian Procopius (c.490–c.560) lovingly describes edifices in Constantinople and in the Holy Land, building projects through which the imprint of the Christian Empire was felt.

Coins eased the collection of taxes by a cadre of administrators, officials who still carried Roman titles and who were paid by barbarian kings from the public purse.

This tract discussed and extolled the role of images in Christian worship, a polemic against the iconoclastic austerities which had recently been adopted by three successive Byzantine emperors.

The Ottonians reinforced their claims to ascendancy by arranging marriages with the Byzantine imperial family, and by promoting—as Charlemagne had done—enterprises of conquest, court art and architecture.

This period was to be remembered and re-created in later centuries in the traditions associated with Arthur, king of the Britons, who was revived in the 12th century, and would remain thereafter the epitome of a chivalrous Christian king.

The Life of St Columba (d. 597), written a century after his death by the monk Adomnán, describes the holy man at work from the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland, admonishing chieftains, prophesying the results of battles, exorcising demons, and confronting magicians with his own cures.

Christian ideas and practices were now disseminated to those who joined the European commonwealth as a package of religious teaching, liturgy, law, and letters.

This failure was exacerbated by the tendency of landlords to hoard foodstuffs and thus speculate.