The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 09

by Unknown

THE DARK AGE

It has been observed again and again that the sweep of history is a continuous stream, and that all attempts to divide it into epochs are more or less arbitrary. Nevertheless, one cannot escape the tendency to classify, and memory is greatly aided by such arbitrary divisions. The largest and perhaps the most uniformly accepted of such arbitrary parcelling out of history is the classification into ancient, mediæval, and modern. Everyone is aware that the general historian usually regards ancient history as closing either with the later decades of the fourth century, when the northern barbarians began their invasions, or, perhaps more generally, with the precise date 476, when the last emperor of old Rome was dethroned. The ensuing epoch, comprising a period of about a thousand years, is known as the mediæval period; which epoch is usually considered as closing with the discovery of the New World in 1492. The earlier centuries of this epoch are usually spoken of as constituting the dark age.

Such a division is arbitrary, but not altogether illogical. It has been urged that Rome itself did not know it had fallen in the year 476; and that the Roman Empire—even the Roman Republic, in the phrasing of the time—went on, as the minds of contemporaries conceived it, uninterruptedly for many centuries after the date which we of later time fix for the quietus of Roman imperial life. But few things are better established than the fact that a clear conception of history demands a certain opportunity for the observation of events in perspective. In other words a contemporary judgment is rarely, if ever, the best judgment regarding any epoch. In the multiplicity of details that are thrust necessarily upon the attention of the contemporary observer, large proportions are lost, and a confused mass of little things makes the picture as unintelligible as is the large canvas of the painter when viewed at too short a focus. With the historical view, as with the painting, one must recede to a certain distance before gaining a measurably true conception. And so looking back through the vista of centuries one is able to observe very clearly that the time of the alleged fall of the Western Roman Empire was a time of real crisis in the sweep of historical events. The erection of the one focal date is, to be sure, a quite unjustifiable marking of boundary lines, unless it be regarded in the same way in which one thinks of the parallels of latitude and longitude on the globe. It is a convenient milestone, nothing more. But the epoch which it marks, if not to be limited to the confines of a single year, is none the less a true epoch; as no one can doubt who will consider the history of Rome in the aggregate during the first, second, and third centuries of the Christian era, and then will consider the history of the same city during the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. Obviously, a vast change has come over the spirit of civilisation in this time; the later centuries, contrasted with the earlier ones, may well be considered a dark age.

We have already shown that during its period the eastern division of the later Roman Empire was the seat of a culture which found expression in the production of an elaborate literature. But the West during this period was under quite different auspices. Rome had ceased to be important as a centre of civilisation; its chief citizens had removed to the city of Constantinople. Here in the West the half-civilised Herulians and Ostrogoths held almost undisputed sway from 476 till about the middle of the sixth century. Then for a century the Eastern Empire reasserted control over Rome and the legions of Narses and Longinus upheld the authority of the Byzantine emperors. But in 568 the Lombards under Alboin swept down into Italy and their supremacy was hardly disputed until the Carlovingians took a hand in Italian affairs, with the result that in 774 Charlemagne, capturing Desiderius in Pavia, assumed the title of king of the Lombards and virtually ended the Lombard kingdom.

In 781 Charlemagne crowned his son Pepin king of Italy, and in the memorable year 800 Charlemagne was himself crowned emperor of the West, reviving the title and a semblance of the glory of the old Imperium. Charlemagne’s successors retained nominal control over the empire, and disputed with the popes the real control of Italy. This warfare between the papal monarch and the emperors was a salient feature of the later centuries of the epoch. The power of the church had increased slowly and insidiously until in the ninth and tenth centuries the bishop of Rome aspired to real kingship over Italy,—even over the entire empire.

The five hundred years of Italian history outlined in this period contrast strangely (as has been said) in their world historical meaning with the half millennium of empire that preceded it, or with the other half millennium within which were comprised the events of the Roman commonwealth. Those earlier periods, as we glance back over them in perspective, bristle with great events; whereas this later epoch shows a bare plane of mediocrity, if not of decline. Yet we must not think of these later centuries as representing a time of relapse into actual barbarism. It was rather an epoch when the decadent civilisation was struggling against complete overthrow on the one hand, while the new civilisation was striving to make itself felt,—striving as yet ineffectually as regards the higher culture, yet none the less preparing the way for the future germination of a new life in the old empire.

There is no more fascinating effort open to the historian than to glance back through the mists of the centuries and attempt to penetrate the gloom of this dark age, and visualise its social conditions. At best such an attempt at reconstructing the distant past can be but partially successful. If it be true that “we view the world through our own eyes, each of us, and make from within us the things we see,” as Thackeray tells us regarding our contemporary environment, vastly more distorted must our image be of any past events. Where the monuments, art treasures, and the literature of a great civilisation have been preserved to us, as in the case of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and Greece, and Rome, we have aids and accessories for the reconstruction of the picture that enable us to view our rehabilitation with a certain confidence. But where these mementoes of the past are lost or altogether lacking, the picture must, indeed, be a vague and uncertain one,—the foggy tracery of the impressionist as contrasted with the firm outlines of a Michelangelo.

And such are the disadvantages that beset the task of reconstructing the image of Italy, or indeed of any other part of Europe, in the so-called dark age. It was a time when the wealth of the later empire had been transferred to the East. Western Europe was poverty-stricken; and this practical fact, perhaps more than any other one cause, operated to prevent the construction of such monuments of architecture and of art as the earlier centuries achieved. We have seen illustrated again and again that the seat of the greatest civilisation is almost sure to be the commercial and monetary centre of the world; and we shall see the same thing illustrated again with renewed force at a later day in Italy, when the gold of the Florentine tradesmen, the Medici, stimulates the art development of the later Renaissance. But in these post-imperial times Italy has no wealth in commerce, as compared with the new centre of the empire in Constantinople. Such Romans as remain in Italy are too poor to build palaces and amphitheatres comparable to those of their predecessors. They have enough to do to guard themselves against the invaders from the north. At best they can hardly repair the structures that the earlier civilisation has left them. We read that in Venice it was at one time made a legal offence, punishable with a fine of one thousand florins, to suggest any draft on the public treasury for repairing state buildings. According to the familiar tradition, the doge who finally had the temerity to violate the restriction, came before the council with the thousand florins in his hand when making the suggestion. This story illustrates the financial stress under which the Italian cities laboured even at a comparatively late period of the Middle Ages.

But it would be a very great mistake to suppose that the lapse in the material civilisation which undoubtedly took place in the later day of imperial Rome coincided with an entire change in the social conditions of the people. No trait in human nature is more fixed and more insistent than the tendency to cling to the ways of our forbears. Conservatism is the dominant motive of the mass of humanity. What our fathers thought and believed, we for the most part think and believe. The average man inherits his religion and his politics much as he inherits the colour of his eyes; and has scarcely more likelihood of changing one than the other. In the sweep of the centuries, ideas and customs do change, to be sure; but the changes, in so far as they pertain to long-standing principles or customs, are always slow and gradual.

Geologists of the nineteenth century demonstrated, after long study and much argument, that there are no cataclysmic vaults in the sweep of the geological and biological ages. The lesson thus taught regarding nature at large is one which the sociologist might apply to his own would-be science with advantage. In particular this lesson should be called to the attention of the student of history who would have us believe that there was a sudden and catastrophic change in the mentality of the people of Italy in the fifth century A.D. No one who appreciates the true character of human progress will be disposed to believe, in the absence of confirmatory evidence, that the Italian of the sixth century differed very greatly in his desires and aspirations from his grandparent who lived while Rome was yet nominally governed by an Italian emperor. The successive hordes of barbarians that swept down from the north took booty wherever they could find it, and impoverished the country, but for the most part they were not imbued with the spirit of wanton destruction. We may well believe that they looked rather with awestruck admiration akin to reverence upon the wonderful monuments of a civilisation so different from anything they had previously witnessed. We know that relatively civilised nations of the north sacked Rome in the sixteenth century more disastrously than it was sacked by their alleged barbaric precursors of the earlier millennium. Moreover, these invaders from the north were not omnipresent. They came and went at relatively long intervals, and there were some territories that they did not greatly molest. And the history of invasions everywhere goes to show that after the moment of initial conquest the barbaric vanquisher becomes, in matters of custom and thought, a follower rather than a leader of the vanquished.

In the present case there can be no doubt that this rule held true. The nations of the north were gifted with potentialities that were rapidly developed through imitation of the southern civilisation. Long before the so-called dark ages ended, there began to be centres of civilisation in the north, and here and there a man of real genius—a Roger Bacon or an Abelard—appeared to prove the rapid forward sweep of the culture movement, since the highest genius never towers far above the culture level of its time. But this could not have come to pass if the invader from the north had entered Italy as an all-devastating eliminator of previous civilisations. He came to conquer, but he remained to learn the arts of civilisation.

In a word, then, we shall gain a truer picture of the state of Italy in the so-called dark age if we think of it as differing not so greatly in the ideals of its material civilisation from the Italy of the Roman Empire. There is no great architecture, no great art, no great literature; but we cannot believe that there were absolutely no aspirations towards these antique ideals. When we recall how much that was known to be produced in the earlier day has been utterly lost, we need not doubt that there were some productions even in the field of literature, of which we now have no knowledge, that we would gladly reclaim from oblivion. The cacoethes scribendi is too dominant an impulse to be quite absent from any generation; surely, human nature did not change so utterly in the dark age as to rout this impulse from the human mind. What chiefly did occur, apparently, was the direction of the literary impulse into an unfortunate channel—the channel of ecclesiasticism. This carried it to a maelstrom from which the would-be producer of literature was not able to disengage himself for many generations. A startling evidence of this is found in the fact that as Robinson[1] points out, there was no literary layman of renown from Boetius (d. 524 or 525 A.D.) to Dante (1265-1321 A.D.).

Let us think, then, of the dark age as a time when Italy was impoverished; a time when its material civilisation retrogressed; a time when the stress of new conditions thrust some of the old ideals into the background; but also as a time when the mixture of races was taking place that was to give new strength and fibre to a senescent people; and to make possible the resuscitation of the old ideals, the rehabilitation of the old material civilisation, the regeneration of the race.