Middle-Age Crisis: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science | Hacker News Reader

Middle-Age Crisis: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science

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31 pointsdiodorus15 comments

It is Washington Irving, not the Gershwins, who is responsible for the "Columbus set out to prove the world was round" myth.

I think a lot of problems come because a lot of our “understanding” of the Middle Ages came though Protestant polemics and French Enlightenment authors. Both groups were very interested in portraying the Middle Ages in the worst possible light.

Recently, a lot of historians are going through the process of actually examining primary sources such as letters, bills of sale, church birth and death records, and a much more different view of the Middle Ages is coming to light.

That's literally what the article says! I suggest reading it, it's fairly short ;)

How similar (~similarly historically biased) is the story of bronze-age-collapse Dark Ages though?

That one is based primarily on the even flimsier evidence of "fewer texts and large human settlements recovered by archaelogists => less literacy and commerce => less culture => dark ages"! Horror! Boo!

How about "people got fed up with the rigid social system and corruption and slavery and massacres, and once a cause materialized (natural disasters, famine), gladly revolted en-masse and destroyed the ruling class, their BS palatial "economy", temples, palaces, scribes, clerks, priests and everything they stood for… including writing"? "Mysterious Sea Peoples" followed by "Dark Ages" my ass.

Obviously the Bronze Age Collapse is not nearly so historically attested, and there's a lot we don't know. But your proposed series of events is not plausible. Temples, palaces, scribes, etc. are the sequelae of a highly productive economy with a lot of surplus. They disappear when the surplus disappears, which is not good for the common people either. People don't usually revolt in order to intentionally destroy their own standard of living.

Likewise, there was in fact a "Dark Age" between antiquity and the Renaissance. It's the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the high Middle Ages proper, around 500-900 (whereas the high Middle Ages are more 1000-1400). This Dark Age is marked by the collapse of population centers, long-distance trade, economic activity and standards of living in general, just like after the Bronze Age Collapse. And neither of these have much to do with the Europe of the High Middle Ages, which was a thriving civilization with plenty of surplus and thus effort to spare on science, the arts, etc. (albeit not yet as rich as classical civilization).

> They disappear when the surplus disappears, which is not good for the common people either.

I contest that. The disappearance of this "surplus" (and if you follow history, you know where such surplus typically went – not the common people) was a blessing for all but the palatial elite.

It took over 10 generations for people to forget the horrors of the Bronze Age, with its "economy surplus", and agree to come together again to form centralized societies. That is no co-incidence. You underestimate human intelligence if you believe "the Sea Peoples came and made a boo boo and everyone had no choice but to go dark for 400 years".

> The disappearance of this "surplus" (and if you follow history, you know where such surplus typically went – not the common people) was a blessing for all but the palatial elite.

Really? You have the peasants producing a surplus that goes to fund the palace elite and the military. Then the surplus disappears. And what happens next? The peasants plus the military kill all the palace elite, and live happily ever after? Or the military takes everything that's not nailed down from the peasants, and the peasants starve? I'd say human nature (of the military) favors the second, and that sure isn't "a blessing for all but the palatial elite".

> You underestimate human intelligence if you believe "the Sea Peoples came and made a boo boo and everyone had no choice but to go dark for 400 years".

Yeah... um... I'd like to see your actual archaeological evidence for your claim here. All you've said so far is wishful thinking.

I mean, no, this is just bullshit.

Surplus is what enables complex economies and trade. It also means you have governments trying to take over places, but this comes with surplus because without surplus everyone is too poor to even try.

The life of the peasants in a simple no-surplus economy is brutal and boring and precarious. Getting ruled by kings and emperors, in exchange for getting to participate in the high-end economies they come alongside, is almost always a very good deal.

offtopic: Article mentions people laughing at Columbus. What I have read before is that they laughed because he simply calculated the Earth circumference wrong: if his goal was really finding a way to India, then he would need much bigger ships and much more supplies just to not run out of food on the way. He was just lucky that America is so close to Europe :)

> America is so close to Europe

s/America/the Caribbean/

He never managed to set foot on either continent.

Not true

http://columbuslandfall.com/ccnav/v4.shtml

You are correct. The Portuguese wouldn’t fund his voyage because they knew his numbers were way too off for the circumference of the earth.

Some say that he knew full well that his numbers were wrong, but used them anyways to justify the voyage because explaining how and why he suspected there was a continent west of the Atlantic would be too complicated.

(Supposedly sailors suspected about the Americas for a long time due to things flowing in with currents, but had no concrete proof.)

Is it surprising? Most people in my circles wouldn’t be surprised. I’m pretty disconnected from popular thought, though.

Often I have to explain to people that no, people in medieval age didn't die when they were 25, that life expectancy is just an average, and thus it averages out people that lived normal lives (ie: plenty of people died in their 90s, as do people today) and people that died really, really fast (childbirth, child accidents and wars are particularly good at skewing the data).

Another one is trying to explain that people knew Earth was round for a looooong time.

Also explaining that no, Greeks didn't really believe Atlantis existed... our earliest record of Atlantis was Plato mentioning the myth... so even to ancient Greeks, Atlantis was a myth already.

Nope, not surprising at all, just a short and lazy re-fluffing of a point that's been beaten into the ground. I'm pretty sure my teachers debunked the "people in 1492 thought the world was flat" thing in my junior high science classes in 1989-1990. The book under review sounds like an interesting read, though.

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