Afrocentric history...anything to this?

[TragicMonkey]

Come on, TM, a number of things have been mentioned that were invented in the Dark Ages. The three-field crop rotation was very important to sustain population growth. But yes, a lot of Roman technology got lost and was reinvented only later. That's just a simple fact.

Then why is everyone jumping on me to prove that the medievals achieved nothing?

********. Radical Afrocentrism is distortion of history and obvious facts.

I didn't say otherwise. I was pointing out the motivation for it might be the incredible condescension towards certain peoples in history, and dismissal of them because they weren't glittering movie stars of civilizations.

Bad analogy. Nobody before had landed on the moon or had had vaccinations. However, the predecessors of the Medieval Europeans - the Romans - had had quite some technology that was subsequently lost for centuries.

My point was that it's unfair to judge one set of people by the terms of another. Pouring scorn upon the medievals for not having fancy concrete is just as ridiculous as mocking the ancient Greeks for not having steam power.

 

[One Tenth]

Then why is everyone jumping on me to prove that the medievals achieved nothing?

No one is doing that.

 

[Delvo]

Bad analogy. Nobody before had landed on the moon or had had vaccinations. However, the predecessors of the Medieval Europeans - the Romans - had had quite some technology that was subsequently lost for centuries.

And they're not alone. Polynesians and possibly also Australians once had bows and arrows, but quit using them, the Australians around Cape York once had boomerangs but quit using them, and Japan at one point quit using guns, all for unrelated reasons.

Then why is everyone jumping on me to prove that the medievals achieved nothing?...

Pouring scorn upon the medievals for not having fancy concrete is just as ridiculous as mocking the ancient Greeks for not having steam power.

Where is either of those happening? I don't see them happening.

 

[Fnord]

Great Zimbabwe^WP is a ruined city that was once the capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe, which existed from 1100 to 1450 AD during the country's Late Iron Age.

But what have they done since then?

 

[Skwinty]

Great Zimbabwe^WP is a ruined city that was once the capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe, which existed from 1100 to 1450 AD during the country's Late Iron Age.

But what have they done since then?

We used to go to Rhodesia to see the Zimbabwe ruins, now we go to Zimbabwe to see the Rhodesian ruins.

 

[Skwinty]

When the whites left Rhodesia after independence, they mostly came to South Africa.

We called them "Whenwe's" because they were so fond of saying "When we were in Rhodesia"

Now we call them "Soweto's" because we want to know " So where to now?"

 

[Pacal]

Regarding Medieval works. THere were large scle constructions like Offa's dyke in England between England and Wales. So large scale infastructures were in fact built during th Middle ages.

Concerning Ethiopia and the Italians. Flippant dismissal of the Italians doesn't wash. The army was large and well equiped and well trained. The Ethiopians still defeated it at Adowa in 1896.

As for mechanical devices; the book The Medieval Machine, by Jean Gimpel, Penguin books, London, 1976, goes into detail about the development of Medieval technique including the invention and development of the mechanical clock, the difussion if not invention of spectacles, mechanical saws, and the vast diffusion of the water wheel. (Invented in Rome but apparently only used in a limited fashon at least as compared to the later middle ages. Also the medieval people were the first to use a overhead rather than underhanded spout.

As for the rediscovery of Euclid inabling the building of large scale cathedrals; I have my doubts. Charlemange was able to build some large scale structures at Aix -el-Chappelle in the 9th century some of which still stand today. Further Euclid was not translated into Latin until the early 12th century. Before that it would have been Arabic or Greek making it virtually unavaiklable to paractically any one in medieval western Europe. After large scale cathedral building had already started in Europe. I also am not awe of the Architects of these building being graduates of Medieval Universities or institutions teaching Euclid. the great majority seem to have been apprenticed to others in the building trade to learn how to do things. THe gothic style for example with its flying buttresses seems to have developed in the ile de France area after a period of experimentation.

 

[Pacal]

It's only after the Hundred Years War that the French kings had effective control over his territory. Before that war, he was little more than the Count of Paris. And they were always in want of money, they had barely enough to keep up the court (as were all Medieval kings).

Well that is just plain exaggerated. I would not call Philip Augustus as lacking in authority over France. After all this is the King who conquered Normandy and managed to exert great authority over most of his vassals. The late Capetian Kings were able to exert greater and greater authority over their kingdom, eventually converting over half of France into direct Royal domain by 1300 C.E., and much of the rest into appandages at pleasure for royal princes. During this time period a great many of the French nobility would have bloody well liked the King to be just the Count of Paris.

In 1300 the French King was Phillip the Fair. Yes he had signifigant financial problems, related to the vast growth of the Royal bureaucracy, the need to pay for troops etc. Which is the main reason why he acted to supress the Templar order by seizing its members and property through out France on a particular day and then stage managing show trials. What this shows is the reach and power of the French King in France in c. 1300. Oh and this is the French King who arranged for Boniface VIII to be kidnapped and then arranged for the papacy to be moved to Avigon, nicely next to the French Kingdom at the time in order to make the Papacy eaasier to manipulate. Some Count of Paris.

Yes some royal vassals were more independent than others for example you are quite right about the Count of Flanders being largely independent of the French kingdom. This was partly due to the fact that the Count was also a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor and the County of Flanders was a border principality. The other example is Gascony which was held by the King of England as Duke of Aquitaine. Here the status of the Duke as a fellow King helped to seriously limit the French King's authority in Gascony to praticaly non existant. Another Example would be Britainy. However in the rest of the Kingdom (c. 3/4ths the French Kings authority was either uncontested (the Royal domain) or quite substantial.

See The Capetian Kings of France, by Robert Fawtier, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1960.

 

[ddt]

Well that is just plain exaggerated. <snip>

I humbly stand corrected.

Yes some royal vassals were more independent than others for example you are quite right about the Count of Flanders being largely independent of the French kingdom. This was partly due to the fact that the Count was also a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor and the County of Flanders was a border principality.

Nitpick: the County of Flanders was fully French, Imperial Flanders was a separate fiefdom.

And of course there would be Burgundy - indeed originally given to a younger brother of the king, and later an enemy of the king.

 

[novice skeptic]

Out of Africa. We were all "black" at one point. However, much longer ago...

Hasn't recent archaeological evidence put that in doubt?

 

[novice skeptic]

I also heard at various times claims that Plato, Aristotle, Aesop and Jesus were black. Or that ALL of ancient Greeks were black.

The one that I liked was that Napoleon saw the statue of the Sphinx and personally shot the nose off to hide the fact that it was African.

 

[gumboot]

The Renaissance people were free of the rules of the Church, which had no interest in finding out anything new, as everything that anyone needed to know was in the Book!
With access to different Books, and interpretations of those, then the thinkers were able to get the human progress started again.

Renaissance Europe was substantially more religiously repressive than Medieval Europe. There's a widespread myth about how much "better" things were when the Renaissance arrived, but it's mostly a fabrication invented by the people of the Renaissance to make themselves feel better about how miserable their lives were.

As a single obvious example; witch hunts. The classic medieval recreational activity. except it wasn't. Witch hunts were almost exclusively Renaissance. In fact, in the early Medieval period even believing in witches was prohibited, and anyone who presumed to burn a witch would find themself sentenced to death.

As late as the late 14th Century the Milan Inquisition found itself at a loss when two women confessed to practicing magic - they couldn't be punished for confessing to something that didn't exist.

It wasn't until the very, very late 15th Century that the church even accepted that witches existed, let alone decided to persecute them.

 

[gumboot]

A lot of Roman engineering stuff was lost and only much later rediscovered. For instance, the Romans had very good concrete, and that hasn't been rediscovered until the late 19th Century.

This might be true, but Medieval European Engineers still managed to construct stuff that surpassed what the Romans built. The most magnificent Roman temples can't hold a candle in terms of engineering to the great Cathedrals of Medieval Europe. Romans didn't invent the flying buttress or the pointed arch.

As for concrete, it's not entirely true that they didn't have it in Medieval Europe, they just had different uses, and the reason Medieval "concrete" (mortar) was inferior was, ironically, probably because of Medieval technological superiority.

Both Roman and Medieval mortar or concrete was made from lime. The primary difference is that Roman mortar was hydraulic - it could harden in water which meant a) you could build bridges with it and b) it was less likely to be damaged by rain.

The crucial thing is that hydraulic mortar is a result of inferior lime. A lime with more impurities is hydraulic. As the lime becomes more pure it becomes less hydraulic.

As a result, Roman use of hydraulic mortar is probably a result of inferior lime kiln technology.

 

[gumboot]

We lost a great deal of engineering knowledge, for example, both in terms of how to build roads (the old Roman roads were much better than anything that the medievals could build -- the medievals couldn't do the large-scale infrastructure)

Well that's just not true. The Medievals didn't need large-scale infrastructure because they didn't have empires. The only reason Roman Roads got built was so Rome could move its legions to outlying provinces quickly.

Not only did Medievals not have that same need, but Roman roads already existed along the main arterial routes.

Had any medieval Lord wanted to build a Roman-quality road, it would have taken a Medieval engineer about five minutes to reverse engineer the copious Roman examples lying around the place and build their own.

 

[gumboot]

But nevertheless, these Roman emperors and generals still managed to build roads, and Charlemagne didn't. The roads that Charlemagne did build were not nearly as good or as durable as the ones he inherited from the Romans.

Sounds to me like a loss of roadbuilding capacity.

In 1336, when Edward III made a journey with his court from London to York, he averaged over 55 miles per day - substantially faster than was achieved on Roman roads. The average expected distance a traveler would cover per day on an English road was 20 miles - comparable with a Roman Legion at a forced march.

The idea that Roman Roads were these amazing highways and Medieval Roads were awful muddy tracks just isn't true.

 

[gumboot]

I guess you don't.

Historic changes don't happen overnight; the Renaissance was one of the effects of the increased exposure to classical learning that had been preserved by the Byzantines and Arabs while western Europe suffered through the Dark Ages.

If you need a timeline, here's one that might be simple enough for you to understand.

* AD 375 -- Roman empire divided between Rome and Byzantium
* AD 476 -- Rome falls; much of Roman cultural heritage lost
* AD 500-1000 Western Europe stumbles through Dark ages
* AD 1000 Dark Ages End, High Middle Ages begin
* AD 1100-1300 Crusades; first significant cultural contact between Arabs and Western Europe
* AD 1100 First redevelopment of Roman technology (Romanesque architecture)
* AD 1300 High Middle Ages end, Late Middle Ages begin
* AD 1300-1450 Byzantine empire collapses; Byzantine scholars flee to Western Europe
* AD 1400-1600 Renaissance

The 12th Century is when Romanesque architecture came to an end and was replaced by Gothic Architecture. In fact buildings that were constructed over a long period into the 12th Century often illustrate the changing architectural style because the style of the building changes. Starting dates for Romanesque Architecture range from the 500s to the 900s.

 

[ddt]

This might be true, but Medieval European Engineers still managed to construct stuff that surpassed what the Romans built. The most magnificent Roman temples can't hold a candle in terms of engineering to the great Cathedrals of Medieval Europe. Romans didn't invent the flying buttress or the pointed arch.

But they did have domes. The Pantheon wasn't superseded in size until the Florence Duomo, 1436, which is already Renaissance. Note also that the architectural innovations you mention are Late Middle Ages.

The crucial thing is that hydraulic mortar is a result of inferior lime. A lime with more impurities is hydraulic. As the lime becomes more pure it becomes less hydraulic.

As a result, Roman use of hydraulic mortar is probably a result of inferior lime kiln technology.

This is strange reasoning. You'd think that adding impurities is very simple technology, and that Middle-agers could simply make lime with more impurities if they wanted to. Yet the knowledge that thus, you could actually make concrete - a building material on its own - instead of just mortar to bind stones or bricks, was lost.

 

[ddt]

Renaissance Europe was substantially more religiously repressive than Medieval Europe. There's a widespread myth about how much "better" things were when the Renaissance arrived, but it's mostly a fabrication invented by the people of the Renaissance to make themselves feel better about how miserable their lives were.

Could you tell the Cathars about this religious tolerance in the Middle Ages? And the Hussites? And the Saxons whom Charlemagne so dearly wanted to christianize? And the Prussians?

It's a bit of a one-sided picture you paint by only focusing on witch hunts.

 

[gumboot]

The reason why Gothic cathedrals took so long was very simple: a lack of money. Let alone they'd have money to build a road to the next city, which was a competitor.

That was part of it. But people often misunderstand the building of Cathedrals too. They were constantly added to as time went on - it wasn't something you built and left alone. So if we take Canterbury Cathedral, for example, it was started in 1070 and "finished" in 1834, but it was consecrated in 1070 and the Diocese was created in 1072. The "finished" date is actually the date that the most recent major alteration was completed.

Also, I think people often forget how large these Cathedrals are, and how small Roman buildings actually were.

Canterbury Cathedral is a very early medieval Cathedral, built in the 11th Century, and it's not particularly big. However it still absolutely dwarfs the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek - one of the largest known Roman Temples built at the height of Roman power.

Even the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek - which was a single one-off abnormally large Temple and by a long way the largest Temple ever built by the Romans, is only a little over half the length of the Cathedral of Canterbury, and would have been a fraction of the height.

Consider even the Colosseum; a huge structure but essentially just a giant wall rather than a building, and by far the tallest structure in Ancient Rome. Even so, the ceiling height of the nave in the 13th Century Beavais Cathedral is the same height as the top of the outer wall of the Colosseum.

 

[geni]

In 1336, when Edward III made a journey with his court from London to York, he averaged over 55 miles per day - substantially faster than was achieved on Roman roads. The average expected distance a traveler would cover per day on an English road was 20 miles - comparable with a Roman Legion at a forced march.

The idea that Roman Roads were these amazing highways and Medieval Roads were awful muddy tracks just isn't true.

Isn't the roman figure for its legions who would be on foot? I assume Edward III would have been on horseback.