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Comment by nexthash | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of misguided beliefs about the Medieval period arising from a popular Gothic/Romantic revival in the 19th century. The period became known by another name - "the Dark Ages" - and was seen as dark, mysterious, and primitive. That completely got wrong what the Medieval period really was - the transition from Roman imperial rule to early-modern European states, and a small industrial revolution in technology including agriculture and navigation.

The popular view of all-powerful, romantic nobility and dumb peasants also comes from this mischaracterization. In reality, the period's instability after the Roman empire fell really made kings and nobles more akin to local warlords playing at Roman customs, and there were exceptions to the rule like prosperous city-republics. Peasant life was also sophisticated, rational, and complex, completely attuned to local weather and crop cycles. A good blog series goes into detail about this here:

https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

The important thing to realize is that no matter how difficult it was, how long ago it occurred, and how foreign the customs were for a certain period, people are still people. They have emotions, worries, good days, and struggles. If you take things in perspective and empathize with the people that preceded you on this world, history will lose a lot of its mystery.

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And to go along with that, the Renaissance was actually an incredibly violent and turbulent time.

https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-tel...

is a good post about that, and the Dark Ages myth. There's a lot of propaganda from this time period that people still believe today because it was used to justify a lot of the European nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Yep, the 30 years war was one of the bloodiest. most devastating conflicts in human history, and had more political twists and turns than a George RR Martin novel.

It might have killed over 8 million people.

Yet if it didn't you would've probably still lived under some Habsburg king.

As a Spaniard, it wouldn't do worse than the Borbon dinasty.

The atrocities and genocides that Europeans brought to the world for centuries should be focused on deeply. Context: I am European and disgusted with the way we treat our impact on the world.

I think among the most striking examples here aside from the obvious one (Holocaust), is Belgium, because it just seems to slip under a lot of people's radar. Belgium has an evil, brutal and vile history, especially in relation to its colonialism and the included human rights violations which in my opinion are massive compared to the country's size and geopolitical abilities.

Belgian citizens are oblivious, but at least slowly "waking up" as the BBC calls it [1]. To be clear, it's the system and leadership that I struggle with. Not the citizens.

To this day, Belgian schools do not in any way teach that Belgium is solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide in the early 90s. It was the sick Belgians who separated fake ethnic groups in Rwanda in the first place, depending on how ethnically white the shape of your skull appeared. And later they used these synthetic groups for political purposes and control.

The Belgian government/leadership has a long history of inhuman behavior, violence and murder that goes nearly completely ignored within Europe and it sort of rubs me the wrong way. Guy Verhofstadt said 'I beg your pardon' once in Rwanda, and that was basically it. 800,000+ are dead and Belgium says 'sorry' once. What?

Belgium isn't about chocolate, it's a country which is completely fine with not teaching its citizens about the common practice of chopping off children's arms for not meeting labor goals for the day. When Belgians travel to places like Rwanda they are dumbfounded by the realities of their own history.

And those people want to tell China something about human rights, yelling from some tower in Brussels. It's breathtaking.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53017188

Hopefully, they can preach by example. They need to recognize their bad actions, compensate the affected parties, educate their people, AND call on other governments perpetuating crimes against humanity.

I have the same experience. Growing up in Greek schools, we learn early about our 'great ancestors', but every depiction is with rose coloured glasses.

We are not taught about the atrocities of our ancestors and how the Greece the 'mother of all cultures' was infact filled with traitors and slavery, especially Athens.

Our 'great' past is ,beat, almost literally into our heads. We named one of the worst warlords in history 'Great' and instead of talking about the slavery and death he brought, we call it 'liberation of the barbarians', with 'barbarians' meaning all who are not greeks (::winky face::).

When it came to the Romans, we were still the winners because conquered them with our culture.

The worst of all is that this becomes so ingrown, even in young people, that for many it becomes a corner-store of their identity; any critical discussion is met with attacks because it literally shakes the foundation of their world.

> fake ethnic groups in Rwanda

There were two distinct tribes in Rwanda, the Tutsi and the Hutus. It's quite common for some Africans to identify by tribe.

There is a great/depressing book by a UN general who was in Rwanda at the time. [0]

> human rights violations

To be pedantic, there were no human rights violations as there was really no legal concept of human rights at all. The what-is-now Chinese were slaughtering each other long before any White Man set foot in the place.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shake-Hands-Devil-Failure-Humanity/...

No, exactly these tribes were invented (as culturally/ racially distinct) by the colonial rulers, first German, then Belgian. Interestingly this is part of the German wikipedia article, but not the English speaking one: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruanda#Ethnische_Zusammensetzu...

Edit: It is mentioned a bit in the article about the Hamite theory (a racist theory that formed the academic legitimization for many colonial decisions in Africa): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamites

The topic has its own English Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Hutu,_Tutsi_and_Twa

and it's also mentioned in the articles on the two tribes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutu#Origins

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutsi#Origins_and_classificati...

> To this day, Belgian schools do not in any way teach that Belgium is solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide in the early 90s. It was the sick Belgians who separated fake ethnic groups in Rwanda in the first place, depending on how ethnically white the shape of your skull appeared.

Not only is this factually untrue - perhaps Belgians highlighted ethnic divisions between the two Bantu peoples, but they did not create them - how about you leave the peoples of Rwanda some agency? Nobody made them commit genocide. They are their own people, with their own culture, attitudes, beliefs, and minds. Sometimes they do good things and sometimes they do bad things. In the 1990s they committed a genocide, as many if not most other peoples in history have.

They did this for their own reasons, not because genius Belgians manipulated them into it. They did it because they're people just like you or me. Pretending that Belgians are uniquely awful and responsible for the actions of other people is just a different kind of paternal superiority.

I'm pretty sure putting a stamp in their passports and encouraging discrimination against those with the wrong one didn't help.

Inequality and discrimination have long term consequences.

> perhaps Belgians highlighted ethnic divisions between the two Bantu peoples

Basically, Belgians decided that one group was superior and cooperated with them. The other group was deemed inferior and treated rather badly. A lot of resentment followed. The groups were pre-existent, the level of resentment was not.

The genocide did not happened out of nowhere, the two groups hated each other ever since and committed small scale atrocities against each other after. Which created situation that was easy to be exploited in Rwandan internal power struggles.

So, it is combination of factors. The culture, attitudes and beliefs that caused genocide were the one growing from colonial system. The minds and decisions were Rwandans.

> Belgian schools do not in any way teach that Belgium is solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide

Making the cackhanded pre-1970s Belgian administration "solely" responsible for the 1993 genocide is an exceptionally unorthodox (i.e. stupid) hot take, so it's no wonder that no school is teaching it.

That's comparable to claiming the the US, British and French are "solely" responsible for the Holocaust because they forced Germany to sign the Versailles treaty. Yes it might have played a role, but it's clearly ridiculous.

Belgium might not be solely responsible but to say its role is just marginal is also preposterous. Dividing people arbitrarily into two groups explicitly to do divide-and-rule is what ended up with the genocide. They're not responsible only insofar as not realising the true ramifications of the evil deeds they did.

It would be preposterous, if anyone were saying it.

In the report I read, the division already existed. The Belgium speed up the process and caused the division to radicalize.

In my opinion, you're denying the people of Rwanda their agency when you frame it like this.

As a Belgian, I felt inclined to comment. And give a bit of the perspective on it from here.

It's true that the Belgian colonial history slips under many people's radar, and I agree that it should be discussed more. Too few people know that more people died under Belgian colonialism than e.g. in the holocaust. (I guess that people historically were less bothered by the deaths of so called "primitive bush people" than "educated white europeans")

> Belgian schools do not in any way teach that Belgium is solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide

I disagree with this claim. Colonial history was taught in my school and iirc it's part of the obligatory high school curriculum. That being said, this was not the case some decades back, and awareness is definitely not on par with e.g. Germany. For example, there exists a "Leopold II street" not too far from me. Imagine having "Adolf Hitler street" as the main street trough a German town. Especially among the older generation there are still people of the "we also did a lot of good in the congo" opinion.

I feel that a lot of belgians kind of feel disconnected from the colonial atrocities. The colonies were a long way from belgium, and few people were involved or even knew about what happened there, far from actually going there. What further complicates the matter is that the during the initial (and most cruel) colonial period, the colony was not actually property of Belgium, but of the belgian king. Hence the government and some people feel like they had little to do with it. These reasons do not justify the ignorance, but do in some part explain it.

On a similar note, you claim that Belgium is "solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide", but said genocide occurred over 30 years after the Belgians had left. I'm certainly no expert on the matter, it's possible that this is an indirect result of the colonial administration, but I find the "solely" a bit reductionist. Neighbouring tribes were killing opposing tribes before the europeans arrived. (Although I'm sure the colonizers exacerbated this to play divida et concera). I'm not saying the belgians are not to blame, just saying that this is a nuanced discussion.

> To be clear, it's the system and leadership that I struggle with. Not the citizens.

This is indeed an important distinction to make. I feel that making sweeping claims like "Belgium has an evil, brutal and vile history" will cause people to feel attacked. It's counterproductive and will make people deny your real points. "I am Belgian and did not commit crimes so I guess his broader statements are false too"

> Belgium isn't about chocolate, it's a country which is completely fine with not teaching its citizens about the common practice of chopping off children's

I disagree. Belgium _is_ about chocolate. But it's also about a lot of different things. The history _is_ taught. But a country is not defined by the bloody pages in it's history book. Just like germany is not defined by the nazi's or americans are not defined by their genocide of the natives. I feel the past is too complicated to allow general statements about "country X" is good and "country Y" is bad.

> And those people want to tell China something about human rights, yelling from some tower in Brussels. It's breathtaking.

In contrary, the crimes of our forefathers just only fuel us to fight harder for our fellow humans.

If a private enterprise commits atrocities in its pursuit of greed, the compatriots of the CEO usually have fairy little agency in or even knowledge of the matter, even if that CEO also held some public office.

It would be wise to point at the real perpetrators such as Leopold II and other financiers and executors involved rather than 'Belgians'.

I 100% agree with you. As a Polish-American, Leopold II is what I lean on when someone tries to pretend Europe has clean hands from atrocities... which I've personally met here in the US. They seem to act like the US invented atrocities.

But I disagree with you on the other spectrum. Mostly how the argument is presented. "If only those nasty Europeans never existed, the world would be at peace". Yea, no. Every civilization, whether Asian, Persian, African, Pacific Islands, pre-European native Americans and everyone else I missed were perfectly cool with destroying some other tribe/clan/city. Hell, Hawaiians were a very warrior centric culture before Cook arrived.

We suck as humans. Doesn't matter where you were born, you suck because you're a human. No one's hands are clean. Pointing at one culture as the cause of the world's problems doesn't solve much and just spins the wheels of hate and war some more. And hey, dont get me wrong, when Merkel has negative things to say about how Poland and the US conducts themselves, the first thing I always think of, "Really chancellor kraut?". It is laughable when Brussels or Berlin or London or DC wants to take the moral high road. However, at some point we have to cut our losses and just quit being douches to each other or we are forever doomed to repeat the bad parts to history.

> No one's hands are clean.

My hands are clean. I washed them.

On a more serious note tho, I particularly don't like the mixing of people and time. For example: There is no point in accusing German people for the war crimes of WWII when they were born decades later.

It does make a bit more sense when you look at current (war) crimes of your country (or collective in general) tho, but the extent to which you are to blame is probably still very very low (but not zero) and gets lower the bigger the collective is, if you have (close to) no political power.

I highly recommend some history of imperial China and its expansion in the SEA region. ("the lords of the rim"[1], or perhaps anything from James C Scott[2]). Read this together with Jacques Ellul "Betrayal of the West"[3] for a radically different view that will probably have your head spinning.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Rim-Sterling-Seagrave/dp/039914...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#The_Art_of_Not_...

[3] https://archive.org/details/BetrayalOfTheWest

As a non-white, non-European, it blows my mind how many Europeans believe that they invented ethnic conflict.

I'm glad someone has said this. Looking at the West from my corner of the world these days, it feels like all the evil in this world was invented in Europe and propagated throughout the world via imperialism.

I've had heated debates with friends just trying to explain that people are people, and they do mean things to each other. Sometimes. Often, actually.

It's called "noble savage" stereotype. The type of condescending that feels like anti-racism, but is actually just another form of racism.

(Similar to other types of condescension-masquerading-as-respect, such as "women are too pure to debate politics".)

The funny thing is that the person who expressed this usually strongly believes it is genuine respect, and will get outraged if you suggest otherwise. Like, is there a higher compliment than to be treated like a child? But at the same time, we do not consider children competent, and we feel comfortable making the important decisions for them.

And dont forget the Dutroux Affair among many many other cases of pedos and covering up for pedos throught Belgium.

What they did to the Congo is sickening.

This is exactly what Michael D Higgins, the Irish president accused European historians of. He calls it a feigned amnesia over colonialism [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/11/irish-presiden...

Actually in the article he is criticising the whitewashing of BRITISH imperialism specifically, not European colonialism in general. Other countries are a lot more aware/self-reflective of their deeds while Britain still hangs on its 'noble' empire where the sun never sets.

>The atrocities and genocides that Europeans brought to the world for centuries should be focused on deeply. Context: I am European and disgusted with the way we treat our impact on the world.

Well, depends on the Europeans. Some of us Europeans have been victims, rather than perpetators of colonialism for example...

> To this day, Belgian schools do not in any way teach that Belgium is solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide in the early 90s.

I don’t want to minimize the atrocities of the Belgian Congo. But the Belgians are not and can never be held “solely responsible” for the Rwandan genocide. The agency, and the moral responsibility, for that genocide rests primarily in the hands that gripped those machetes and used them to gruesomely murder and dismember their neighbors, and those hands were not Belgian.

Everyone who has ever committed an atrocity had some historic excuse for it. The lesson of the 20th century is that no historical excuse or context provides a justification for mass murder. Belgians have committed horrible atrocities in the past, but that doesn’t justify or somehow transfer the blame for the atrocities committed by the descendants of their victims against each other.

I broadly agree with you, but think there’s a danger there of going too far in reducing culture and belief systems to simple “customs”.

Bret Devereaux, for one, constantly reiterates on his (awesome) blog you linked that people in the past really did often act, relate, and believe very differently than we do.

Anachronism is a trap just as much as romanticism, only from the opposite extreme.

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

-L.P. Hartley

Try watching old movies, something from before WW2. The scripts and the acting aren't just different because of tech, but because the people are different. The similarities, usually in the vices and not the virtues, are eye opening too.

Now that 'drift' from our reality continues all the way into the past, sometimes with violent changes, sometimes more slowly.

The later Medieval period was one of great economic and population expansion. However, the rise of famine due to too many people to feed without any increase in agricultural production was a big problem in Northern Europe (1315-1317. Of course the arrival of the bubonic plague would then push the population levels further down. Parts of Europe did indeed enter a "Dark Ages" after the fall of the Roman Empire. England was hit particularly hard after the Roman withdrawal , as was the Italian Peninsula after the Gothic Wars, the arrival of the first bubonic plague, and the worsening of the general climate during this time period (560s CE)

>That completely got wrong what the Medieval period really was - the transition from Roman imperial rule to early-modern European states, and a small industrial revolution in technology including agriculture and navigation.

The Dark Ages are from ~500AD to ~900AD and as a term were first used in the 14th century. I don't know how else you would describe a period in which population was reduced to less than a quarter of what it had been at the peak of the Pax Romana.

I don't know why you are down voted, what you are saying is factually correct and the comment you responded to was wrong about the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages preceded the Medieval Period.

I always thought that the Dark Ages /was/ the middle ages and that dark referred (at least initially) to the lack of records.

Wikipedia agrees but I am certainly no expert in this:

The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Early Middle Ages or Middle Ages, that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.[1][2]

Petrarch, who conceived the idea of a European "Dark Age". From Cycle of Famous Men and Women, Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla, c. 1450 The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records).

>The Dark Ages are from ~500AD to ~900AD and as a term were first used in the 14th century.

Petrarch, the 14th C dude you're referencing, believed in a two age history demarcated by the fall of Rome and that he was living in dark, post-Roman world. The three age history of light-dark-light that would give us the term middle ages/medieval wouldn't come til the 15th C with Bruni when he tacked a modern age onto Petrarch's scheme.

From what I've read, Petrarch did hope for some sort of Roman revival - so arguably, he can be seen as a spiritual successor to the three age approach...

It’s important to emphasize that feudalism is fundamentally a transactional system. What the nobility had to offer peasants was safety. In the absence of the Roman imperial system, binding yourself to a local lord who could raise men at arms and a small castle to protect you and your family is a rational decision. I wouldn’t go so far as saying that feudalism is good, but it’s at least understandable when viewed that way.

Of course late feudalism became extra intolerable once kings stopped protecting peasants and started pulling them into new wars instead.

I don’t see how democracy is much different, to be quite honest. The same structures get set up (the state, instead of a Lord, provides security ... over time the state drags the “citizens” into new wars all the same). I suppose the difference is that in a democracy you at least have an illusion of influence on the state, whereas in a Feudalistic society everyone was quite honest about how the peasants had no or only limited influence at best.

This is ignoring all of the details. Feudal peasants were much closer to slaves than to citizens in a democracy. They had a duty to produce certain amounts of resources for the lord - often not a percentage like a tax, but a minimum amount due. In many places at many times, they were bound to the land - they were not allowed to move away from the village where they lived, definitely not to a different Lord's lands. As you also note, they had no power to influence decision making, and even if they did rise up, they were violently put down, by neighboring lords if they somehow were successful against their own.

Not to mention, (modern) states offer much more than military security. They offer healthcare, food, care for the disabled, infrastructure, education, and many other services. And, especially in smaller nations or at local levels (think town, not US state), there is quite a lot of real democratic power, certainly incomparable to the realities of serfdom.

Look, I’m not making an argument in favor of serfdom (far from it). I’m pointing out that many current iterations of democracy have become quite corrupt, so much so that the difference between it and feudalism is one measured on the margins (your details). Every couple days an article gets upvoted on this website that describes how the economies in (western) democracies have metastasized to the point where it’s participants are just cogs, working for a massive corporate enterprise that explicitly does not care about them, voting in elections about a government that quite often does the opposite of what is in their expressed interests, and/or are stuck in an infinite loop of debt-enabled credentialism.

Okay yeah that’s not de jure feudalism. Inching closer and closer to de facto, though.

Edit: to say this again, because apparently it’s needed. I am not in favor of feudalism.

But still lightyears off. You are dramatizing our priviledged existence. Billions (literal) would offer their firstborn son to be "cogs" working a "massive corporate enterprise". What you are describing is the good part of modern life, I suggest you don't look at the bad parts if this already disturbs your soul.

I didn't take your comments as being in favor of feudalism, I took it as being a bit too cynical of modern states. The clarifications in your new comment make it clearer that you are more talking about a direction, not saying we already live in neo-feudalism, and I agree with you completely that it is something we're inching towards.

Thanks, and yes I should’ve been more clear about my intent. I am a defender of democracy, and what I said should’ve been better placed in the context of what I actually mean. Namely, the decay of competency and the corruption we see in many democracies will drift to a point where the situations of their citizens start to mimic or echo a version of feudalism.

> This is ignoring all of the details. Feudal peasants were much closer to slaves than to citizens in a democracy.

I disagree. We overestimate the freedom we have and underestimate theirs.

For example they had much more free time than we do today. We on the other hand are still "free" to choose where to work (as long as we aren't in poverty, which is unfortunately untrue for too many, with no prospect of future change), but the workplace is as undemocratic as it gets.

Forget our (tech) golden workplaces. Most people spend 2/3 of their lives in authoritarian workplaces that they can't leave because they need their shit job to survive.

Where is the practical difference with being a serf?

Even in the west, most of us don't live a democracy, except for the minority of their time.

If you’ve left your town without your landlords permission, you enjoy a freedom that medieval peasants didn’t have. If your apartment changed hands without you suddenly becoming someone’s property, you’ve enjoyed a freedom peasants didn’t have. If you’ve been involved in a legal process that wasn’t adjudicated by your land lord then you’ve enjoyed a freedom peasants didn’t have.

I can’t believe I need to explain this, but democracy is nothing like feudalism.

Do you think I’m making an argument in favor of feudalism? I’m sorry that pointing out that our current structures of government aren’t exactly performing at their presumed capacity is a troubling idea.

You’re getting downvoted because our current system of government, no matter how flawed, is very different from feudalism. The comparison is poor for all the reasons I listed and more.

There are better ways to critique our current system without such hamfisted comparisons.

Actually, most parts of medieval society were astoundingly mobile. Not everyone was tenant or serf, many, as in the trades and crafts, workers of all kind and everyone involved in moving goods, were often travelling and surprisingly mobile, as were the ruling class. Mind that this was before settled living became the standard model. (Which happened in continental Europe only in the 18th century.)

In fact you aren't allowed to leave the country if the state doesn't allow it. You equate two concepts together because the words are similar (lord and landlord) but that's childish. It's obvious a lord back in the is much closet to a governments then a landlord.

You’re not the literal and legal property of your government. The comparison is still not apt.

You were also not the literal and legal property of your lord. It wasn't slavery.

Most serfs weren’t slaves[0], true. But in many areas serfs were legally bound to the land that they occupied. If that land changed hands, so did the serfs legally. That’s no slavery, but it’s also far worse than being a freeman.

In all areas they had fewer rights and more obligations than freemen; there’s a reason why being reduced to serfdom was often done out of economic need, and why freedom often had to be bought.

0 - Some types of serfs were literally slaves and could be traded as such. See Russian Kholops.

A small castle was also an ideal location from which to terrorize and pillage the surrounding countryside, so not too unlike transacting safety for your store from the local mob.

Bit of both, I’m sure.

I would also bet that if the peasants had a sufficiently thorough history, they would probably hate first peasants to have entered into serfdom for protection. While that might have seemed like a good idea right after the fall of Rome, it probably looked less good a few centuries later.

Exactly, it was a protection racket. And like all protection brackets some people romanticize them (I've come across this view multiple time in my home town, Belfast, where paramilitaries have offered this "service" to small businesses).

Also it's worth pointing out that literacy rates across Europe plummeted as the Roman empire fell apart. I read that even Charlemagne "struggled with his letters".

Charlemagne struggled with writing the incredibly arcane Merovingian script [1]. That's the very reason he came up with the Carolingian script [2] the very print script you're reading this message with is descended from and the reason why he implemented school reforms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merovingian_script

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule

Ah well that's interesting, thanks.

Yup. To the point that guilds in the late Middle Ages started recruiting their own militias to protect their trade from "nobility" (i.e. thugs with castles).

Would that be similar to buying security software to keep the hackers out?

Historian here. That's a generalization. Manor lords did not "terrorize and pillage" the surrounding countryside.

Have you read the article? I can tell you it's a correct summary of an established views on medieval society, such as it is.

A common misconception is to view medieval serfs, free peasants and wage laborers as "oppressed masses" from a modern perspective, colored with romantic glasses from 19th century tales such as Robin Hood or Ivan Hoe. That's just incorrect.

Sure, there were plenty of peasant revolts (Jacquerie - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquerie) against the nobility. Both those were generally not against the foundations of the societal system from which manor lords derived their authority, but rather prompted by the precarious living conditions these groups found themselves in.

People didn't revolt because they felt "oppressed or terrorized", they would revolt when they got too hungry or felt unprotected.

The Jacquerie happened against the backdrop of the 100 years war. Warbands consisting of unemployed English, German and Spanish mercenaries roamed the French countryside. French nobility was pretty much powerless to do anything at the time. That's what prompted the lower classes, who felt unprotected, to engage in a violent uprising.

Most of the times, the legal framework which governed the relationship with a manor lord wasn't questioned since that's what provided a sense of stability and order.

Also, the "medieval age" spans 1.000 years if you use commonly accepted termini ab quo / ad quem (476 - 1453). But manorialism itself extended well into the pre-modern age up to the French Revolution and, depending on where you lived, well into the 19th century (Russia, serfdom was abolished in 1861). It certainly wasn't a catch all system: there were many variations and adaptations.

Isn't that a little bit like saying the mob doesn't terrorize people when they know what's good for them?

No.

Because the same argument could be made about literally any authority. Whether it's an autocratic rule, a modern democratic state, a feudal lord or a mob boss.

What makes all the difference is how "good" gets defined. You, I and the next person will likely have differing opinions on that. And I'm pretty sure that the medieval precariat and nobility will have an entirely different perspective on that as well.

Medieval times weren't lawless times either. The legal framework at the time was based on customary laws which eventually evolved and coalesced into the formal legal systems we know today. Common Law as it first originated in England is rooted in such customary laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customary_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manorial_court

As far as "terror" is concerned: the notion of "human rights" is quite modern and only started to become widespread during the late 18th century. Torture, corporal and capital punishment were par for the course in severe criminal cases.

These weren't times where one enjoyed the same freedoms as one does today either. But that doesn't mean people were constantly and randomly subjected to horrible fates at the slightest perceived transgression either.

Moreover, rather inhumane methods of asserting and delivering justice rooted in Frankish, Germanic, Saxon or Nordic traditions were rooted out rather early. Trial by ordeal was abolished by the Church in the early 13th century, for instance.

As I said, we're discussing over 1.000 years of history. And depending on the time and location, you'd be more or less at risk of finding yourself at the tentative mercy of authority such as it ruled.

Why would you terrorize your own workforce and pillage your own assets ?

Feudalism was largely rooted in the Late Roman fiscal system that incentivized industrialized agriculture with large estates and self-sufficient villas in Gaul and Britain. When imperial authority failed they became political forces, and the regional military forces started acting out as peace-breaker and eventually became sovereign polities (the so-called barbarian kingdoms).

Nowadays historians have become increasingly suspicious of Late Roman land-owners, as there are quite a few known cases of families switching from seemingly Latin names to seemingly Germanic ones.

The Medieval castle's just a villa with a military streak. The purpose isn't as much pillaging the direct surroundings as it is to protect your assets from the next land-owner over.

Peasant did not bound himself to castle. Peasant was bound to castle by whoever ruled the place and decided to assign this or that person to administer the land.

Peasants did not had all that much say in that choice.

I didn’t say they bound themselves to a castle, I said they bound themselves to someone who could raise a castle.

And I’m sure the first peasants had some choice. Later ones ... not so much.

At least in Poland, in the later centuries, it was pretty much slavery. Escaped peasants were hunted across the country. The punishments for escape were severe, and sometimes included mutilations which precluded the escapees from running but didn't hurt their farming abilities.

Peasants weren't exactly property like for example in the US, but in practice were bought and sold with the land (number of people living on a land was a large part of valuation) and could be mistreated or killed with no legal recourse.

Not saying that peasants in Poland-Lithuania were in an enviable position, but this line of comparison is advanced by some popular non-historians: I'd say, to get some "cool" surface analogies to the US. Slavery would be more if there were an option of taking or leaving your peasants with property as you like. It's hard to imagine for the nobility to ignore the manpower in valuation. And there was still some actual slavery in Lithuania (small scale) and Russia, and also if you'd be kidnapped by Tatars and sold somewhere in the Ottoman Empire. The latter was a fairly common thing in some parts of the country.

Peasants, as opposed to slaves, were integrated into the civil society, although on very disadvantageous terms. Even on private land, they had their own judicial "councils" (look up 'sąd dominialny'), of course entirely on the mercy of the lord in practice. (There was also the state/crown land with marginally better conditions.)

All this didn't stray qualitatively from the broad Eastern European baseline. A Russian, Prussian or Hungarian noble wouldn't get punished for killing his peasant either, unless he'd seriously screw up his relations with the local regime. A French one pre-1789 would have to play his cards right. PLC got much flak in the period for peasant oppression because 1. it often didn't have raw political power to distract from it 2. there was the perceived hypocrisy in its political system, very loud about liberty, equality etc.

Great comment, thanks!

> I didn’t say they bound themselves to a castle, I said they bound themselves to someone who could raise a castle.

Except as I told, they did not made that choice. People who could raise the castle decided by themselves where they want castles. Castles were military and administrative buildings for actual powers.

You get to rule that land in exchange for set days of military service for king and in exchange of ensuring taxes are collected. Peasants opinions were not important.

> And I’m sure the first peasants had some choice. Later ones ... not so much.

Why are you sure?

Safety from...other nobility.

> What the nobility had to offer peasants was safety.

I believe the main offering was pain. Submission was a good way to avoid it, and peasants were not stupid enough to pass on it.

On the other hand, our definition makes it look like the relation was consensual, and a good deal for everyone involved.

> What the nobility had to offer peasants was safety.

The purpose of the article, as I read it, is to identify that this claim was written into history by the nobility.

You seem a bit confused about the ages.

The dark ages is not a synonym for the medieval era. It's a sub-division of the medieval era - one of three.

The dark ages is a period after the fall of Rome. It's named for the fact that very little written output was produced during this time. It ran about 500-1000AD.

The high middle ages came after, and there was a lot more writing going on during this period. This was about 1000-1250AD. When people think 'medieval', this is usually what they think, if not the late medieval period (the third sub-division).

Then came the Renaissance, then the modern period.

The dark ages actually were pretty dark, mysterious, and primitive, as evidenced by the very low intellectual and cultural output during these years, low populations, low levels of social organization, and so on. Generally, the good parts and achievements of the medieval period that you're gesturing at were during the high and late parts.

None of this is true... politics mainly happened at the local level because the imperial Roman empire was destroyed, but that only changed development and innovation. Have you ever read Beowulf? It is one of the most highly developed pieces of Old English poetry, at 3000 lines, and was written in this time period. Silver mining increased, and many technological innovations like iron plows emerged. Beautiful cathedrals were constructed in the Romanesque style, and learning continued in monastical schools all over Europe.

There was international trade and military activity ranging from Scandinavian societies raiding into Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as the Crusades starting up near the end of this period. The Christian church of the Roman empire, otherwise known as the Roman Catholic Church, was alive and well, becoming one of the most powerful institutions for the next several hundred centuries. "Dark Ages" is an antiquated term - think transition, not Camelot (although the legend did originate in this period). It is often called the "Early Middle Ages" these days.

> the next several hundred centuries.

No kidding! As documented in the Hyperion Series, by Dan Simmons, I suppose.

I didn't say that literally nothing was written during that period. So pointing to one poem doesn't really affect the argument.

Same for achievements like silver mining or iron plows. Obviously many individual things happened.

It's a statistical trend where this period is lower than both those before and after.

Here's a chart if you like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:European_Output_of_Manusc...

> The dark ages is not a synonym for the medieval era.

Actually, it originally was. The "Dark Ages" was coined during the late Middle Ages/early Renaissance to refer to the entire period following the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of "modern" knowledge. It's only recently (20th century) that the term is shrunk back to refer to the Early Medieval period.

> It's named for the fact that very little written output was produced during this time. It ran about 500-1000AD.

There's your problem. The drought of manuscripts runs from about 500-800; the Carolingian Renaissance (and Albert the Great's concomitant reforms) brings back the manuscript production.

Indeed, and the Carolignian Empire, at its height, had united almost all of Western Europe again and led directly to France and the HRE as successor states. If you look at the conquest and governmental structures in the Carolignian Emprie, you'd have a very hard time arguing that they were undeveloped, locked in a "dark age".

Just because the boundaries are fuzzy doesn't necessarily invalidate the concept of a 'dark age'.

If you don't like the term, we could call it "the age where total population, urbanization levels, manuscript production, trade volume, lead pollution, [placeholder for other convenient or inconvenient metric] in Europe[1] stayed far below peak Roman levels" - but that's kind of a mouthful...

[1] 'western' Europe in particular, but some of the effects are visible at continental scale, or even globally

Well, not that wrong, as the "transition from Roman imperial rule" (in the Western part of the empire) was followed by huge decline in government, standards of living, safety, and so on, that lasted many centuries.

(There's a recent trend to downplay this, as there was a trend to overplay how dark the dark ages where in the past. But if one can see through the temporal trends in the historical discipline, they can also see that those times were bad, and the numbers and facts support this).

"The Dark Ages" is not a synonym for The Middle Ages. It refers to the period of 5th-10th century, when Europe experienced its biggest cultural stagnation.

It's not to say that the rest of The Middle Ages was particularly innovative, but The Dark Ages were the The Middle Ages of The Middle Ages.

>there were exceptions to the rule like prosperous city-republics.

This seemed to start because of the "compromise" status of Venice and Rome after Charlemagne's conquest of Italy; after that the floodgates opened and other cities tried to get away with it. A thousand years later, the kings have finally been kicked out (mostly).

So I appreciate what you're saying but the "people are people" argument... has limits.

One of the most interesting things I find about ancient history is just how _alien_ the culture must've been. The problem with a lot of historical texts is no one thinks to write down what to them is mundane or ordinary and it doesn't take long until the mundane becomes almost incomprehensible.

Thing is, you don't need to go back thousands of years to see this. Even 100 years ago you find totally different attitudes (eg the willingness to be conscripted and to volunteer to go to war).

Go back a little further and you find the culture shock to Victorian England with Pacific cultures.

My point is it can be a bit of a trap to take too much for granted in terms of a human baseline.

Willingness to be conscripted? Different styles of dress? Different approaches to life? Sure it would be a culture shock and strange, but the culture as a whole would not be alien. If we had a day just to shadow/hang around in the company of these people (you can still travel to areas where people practice indigenous lifestyles, for example) we would find them to be not much different than us.

Despite their strange practices, this is what is normal to them, and they aren't any less human whether in the form of perfection or fallibility. They worry about the future, love their families, have wants and ambitions, get angry sometimes, and have their biases. We would find them to be comically relatable to your life, just in a different form.

Sure, but I think that’s the point being made here. They are humans, but they are different in very appreciable ways. Though we would ultimately share many similarities, as all of humanity has throughout history, there would undoubtedly be major cultural differences.

Ancient Sparta is exemplary on this point

I had the sense in my education that dubbing it the Dark Ages was a way of diverting attention away from it. This large block of time was the period of the Crusades, Reformation, antipopes, etc. No shortage of interesting happenings during this period, but the education system does not want to touch that with a 10-foot pole, nor the leadership. It's too close to the topic of religious strife and atrocities. This might become less true as Christianity gets less ubiquitous. Nationalism might be another reason that it's cast aside.

The #1 misguided belief among the general population is how the Reinassance came to be. And that misguided belief has been driven by revisionism.

We are happy to talk about Ancient Greece, but when it comes to talking about the influence of the Umayyad Caliphate in Europe, then people quickly become aggressive and start saying "no, no, no, we don't talk about this here".

Why? because the Islamic civilization were our rivals and acknowledging that we owe them our modern lifestyle is highly taboo, especially among people with Conservative views.

You mean the influence where they sacked Constantinople in 1453 after centuries of attempts, destroying the Christian Byzantine empire and sending huge numbers of Byzantine writers and intellectuals fleeing to settle in Europe?

1453? Who is talking about 1453 here?

I am talking about the 12th century.

♦♦♦

The bibliography used to kickstart the Reinassance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th...

♦♦♦

Paper, and by extension, scalable libraries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper#Paper_in_Euro...

> The oldest known paper document in Europe is the Mozarab Missal of Silos from the 11th century, probably using paper made in the Islamic part of the Iberian Peninsula.

No paper = Books made out of parchements = Prohibitively expensive books = No libraries = No scholars

♦♦♦

"Our" modern higher education system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ijazah

> George Makdisi, professor of oriental studies, theorized that the ijazah was the origin of the university academic degree as well as the doctorate.

No universities = No doctorates = No advisors = No science

♦♦♦

"Our" modern astronomy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonsine_tables

> The Alfonsine tables were the most popular astronomical tables in Europe and updated versions were regularly produced for three hundred years. Nicolaus Copernicus, known as the father of modern astronomy, bought a copy while at the University of Cracow.

No astronomic data = No modern astronomy = No laws of gravity and motion = No physics

♦♦♦

"Our" philosophy that is tolerant to science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Early_Scholastic...

> This period saw the beginning of the 'rediscovery' of many Greek works which had been lost to the Latin West. As early as the 10th century, scholars in Spain had begun to gather translated texts and, in the latter half of that century, began transmitting them to the rest of Europe.

No tolerance to science = Scientists harassed by the church = Science becomes impossible to conduct.

♦♦♦

"Our" understanding of optics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snell%27s_law

> The law eventually named after Snell was first accurately described by the Persian scientist Ibn Sahl at the Baghdad court in 984. In the manuscript On Burning Mirrors and Lenses, Sahl used the law to derive lens shapes that focus light with no geometric aberrations. The law was rediscovered by Thomas Harriot in 1602.

No optics = No astronomy = No age of exploration

No optics = No microscopes = No biology = No modern medicine

♦♦♦

... And the list goes on, and on, and on. The Reinassance is the legacy of the Islamic civilization. It is overwhelmingly clear. Your school teachers lied to you, and their teachers lied to them.

Don't believe me? Take a look here: https://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/extrema.php

The first doctoral advisors were Islamic. Every known scientist is somehow a student of them. Follow the chain of doctoral advisors and learn the unavoidable truth.

Enjoy your new, more historically accurate perspective on the world. Downvote all you want, eventually your descendants will learn the truth in school one day anyways, when we are done undoing the revisionism.

The Renaissance undoubtedly owes a lot to medieval Islamic scholars. But to say that it's the "legacy of the Islamic world" implies a degree of continuity that just isn't true. The thinkers of the Renaissance didn't view themselves as inheritors of the Islamic scholarly tradition, and many saw the Muslim world as what we might call "scary foreigners" today; it does nobody any good to whitewash that.

The very fact that thinkers of the Renaissance thought that is itself a form of whitewashing. The very books that sparked the Renaissance were kept alive by the Islamic empires. The Renaissance thinkers, in order to advance their Christianity, wanted to ignore the Islamic contributions to their culture. In certain cases, like the Mozarabs and the Moors, Islamic architecture and customs deeply influenced what later became Catholic states. While the OP may be overly forceful, the repudiation of Islamic empires from the Middle Ages onward is a massive disservice to history. Let's not forget that the Ottomans were on the German side of WWI, the same state that traced its lineage through the Byzantines back to the ancient Islamic caliphates themselves.

Yeah, I don't believe you.

In general, if you want people believing you, try not to use throwaway accounts and pre-typed copy-pasted answers, but instead engage in dialogue.

It is your choice to trust whatever you want to trust. But if you have intellectual curiosity, you'll eventually arrive to a similar conclusion.

Have you ever asked yourself "how was paper adopted in europe?", "where do universities come from?", "what was needed in order to be a scientist in the middle ages?", if you haven't, try to find an answer to those questions.

There's a eurocentric answer to those questions, and a non-eurocentric answer. The eurocentric answer either ignores or downplays the importance of all the influence coming from the Islamic civilization through the Iberian peninsula and Italic peninsula.

I mean if we look at the time period... everybody did this to everyone. European states had bloody dynastic and religious wars. The intrigues of city-states on the Italian peninsula created one of the most treacherous political environments of all time, inspiring Machiavelli to write his renowned book on power. In the half-century prior, England invaded France and ravaged for a hundred years, and Europeans regularly attacked Islamic empires in the Middle East.

It was bloody all around, because there wasn't a whole lot of stability. But this didn't stop these different cultures from exchanging knowledge and goods as well, as Islamic empires, Italian merchants, and other players all had high levels of development and innovations that were quickly copied. I'm sure the sacking of Constantinople did lead to an influx of knowledge into Western Europe, but it was all these different factors that led to the appearance of the Renaissance.

Of course, I'd never suggest a single-cause explanation. And as someone else pointed out, there were lots of advances happening before 1453 as well. I think the sack of Constantiople really threw gas on the coals though.

It was an exceptional event. Most wars in that era were nobles fighting over thrones; the Islamic invasions were a bit more intense than that in that they were from a totally separate religio-cultural tradition and would overturn the entire power structure and ultimately even push peasants to convert.

In a war between kings of the same religion, the priests/imams and lower nobles (i.e. intellectual and writer classes) could potentially stay in their posts even as the front line moved over them. Not so true when it's an entirely different religion.

I think “Islamic Invasions” is a bit too broad of a term. You are referencing the Ottoman Turks specifically.

The funny thing is that Ottomans saw this whole event through a very different lens. They didn’t call themselves the Ottomans or Turks. They, along with their predecessors The Sultanate of Rum (Rome), and the Seljuks, considered themselves the continuation of the Roman Empire.

After the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II crowned himself the Caesar of the Roman Empire.

Turks waged a war of expansion to reclaim the Roman Empire for themselves. The religion was just a side effect.

This isn't really true.

They claimed these titles because they intended to or did conquer Roman territory, and it was a prestigious title.

See https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/59352/did-the-se... for a reasonable discussion.

That's a great discussion, thanks for the link.

Yeah I guess the calling it a cultural continuation of Rome is wrong.

It's kind of hard to describe this in words because "culture" implies so many things like language, customs, and religion. The "Turkish Rome" didn't really inherit any of those traits.

However, while this probably originated just as a manufactured claim, a casus belli for the Roman lands, over time it seems to have still evolved into something a bit more. Owning Constantinople didn't make people Roman in terms of culture, but it did make them an empire. Sulatane of Rum existed next to Rome for many years and seems to have considered itself a "better Rome than existing Rome".

Makes me think of a parallel with the Holy Roman Empire, which similarly clung on to the title, but not the culture of Rome.

"After the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II crowned himself the Caesar of the Roman Empire."

Well yes, that's how feudal systems work. If you take over a country, you get to have its titles. This is how e.g. an English king could conquer Scotland and crown himself king of Scotland. It doesn't mean he always identified as Scottish.

The language "reclaim the Roman empire" is really a stretch since it implies that the Ottomans had some sort of self-image as the natural heirs to Rome before they took Constantinople. Is there any evidence for this?

Why would they need to conquer Constantinople to do this, given that the Byzantines weren't trying to conquer, y'know, actual Rome?

I'm not saying you're wrong. People come up with lots of rationales for wars. And claiming historical right is a popular one, but that goes alongside other motivations as well.

My outside-view assumption would be that this is modern-day politically-motivated interpretation. These days, progressives rules the universities and the history departments. Therefore, they want to advance progressive goals. The see Muslims as a victim class, which means they don't want Islam to be seen in a negative light. Therefore, they would want to avoid historical interpretations wherein Muslims are conquering for self-understood religious reasons like ISIS did so recently. So I think they'd come up with something like, "Oh no, the Ottomans just wanted to reclaim their Rome."

Any time you read history you need to take into account the incentives faced by the people writing it.

In any case, when I refer to Islamic invasions I'm referring to the whole string of them going back to the Abbasid Caliphate - the conquest of Egypt, Arabia, Persia, all of north Africa, Spain, India, etc etc motivated by a self-declared doctrine of holy war (itself used for political ends by individual rulers, of course). I see Constantinople 1453 as just one small episode in this 1400-year story.

The Byzantines (I prefer to call them the ERE, but I'll call them the Byzantines as it's more recognized in lay discourse) had been under threat for a long time, and if the Turks hadn't sacked Istanbul/Constantinople, some other polity would have. Western Europeans sacked Istanbul/Constantinople in 1204 and ruled it as part of the Latin Empire until 1261, when it was retaken. The Byzantines ran into trouble with the Bulgarian kingdoms and the Kievan Rus constantly, along with their Islamic neighbors. If it wasn't the Turks it would have probably been the Bulgars or the Rus.

Just calling them "Byzantine" itself is a fun piece of revisionism that the West has adopted. The Byzantines saw themselves as Roman, called themselves Roman, and viewed themselves as a continuation of the Roman Empire. It was Western ambitions in Jerusalem and through the Western Catholic Church that caused this distinction to be so heavily emphasized by the West.

Did you forget that the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, which did more damage to the Byzantine Empire than the Ottoman conquest in 1453?

And basically immediately after this event, traders from Europe were interacting heavily with traders from the Islamic World. The focus on these military campaigns (Constantinople + Vienna being the big ones) is based on modern narratives around "the clash of civilizations", not actual history.

You are quite right. A lot of people underestimate the international connections a specific local place had at some time in history, this is the case with Europe as well. After the Roman Empire fell, its knowledge, writings, and customs were somewhat preserved in Western Europe, but their real preservation and translation occurred in the Byzantine Empire and Islamic world. Then in the 15th century the lifestyle, innovations, and preserved writings from these places and others as far as China gained traction in Europe again. This helped kick-start the Renaissance.

I'm being a little pedantic, but this is a little misleading:

> After the Roman Empire fell, its knowledge, writings, and customs were somewhat preserved in Western Europe, but their real preservation and translation occurred in the Byzantine Empire

This is, of course, because the 'Byzantine' Empire was the Roman Empire, and continued to operate as such for almost a millennia after its loss of territories in the West, some of which it regained and lost again during that time.

> and Islamic world.

Many, many texts were lost and destroyed during the very violent Muslim conquests. It wasn't until much later that mostly ex-Roman and ex-Persian subjects began reviving learning from what had survived.

> hen in the 15th century the lifestyle, innovations, and preserved writings from these places and others as far as China gained traction in Europe again.

An important factor in this was the threatened, and then eventual, destruction of the Roman capital, Constantinople. Learned scholars fled as refugees to the west, bringing their books with them. Without the Turks destroying what was left of the Roman Empire, there might have been no Renaissance.

Are you sure that people are denying what you think? I've never encountered a view contrary to what you're describing; the Islamic roots of algebra in particular are pretty well-known in my experience.

We owe a lot of our modern lifestyle to lots of repugnant things that happened in the past that enabled progress for sure.

Indeed, it's almost a meme at this point how many people on r/AskHistorians ask the same questions about the Roman Empire repeatedly yet it gets a fraction of the questions (or interest) in the Islamic empires. The entire Middle Ages and Renaissance were sharply defined by the Western response to the Islamic empires of the region, from the Reconquista to the Crusades.

Don't forget the rise of the Carolingian dynasty is driven in part by their wars against the Muslims.

Yup! The Muslims left a huge mark on everything in that time period.

They were the torchbearers of knowledge during that period of time. After the Siege of Baghdad and the Reconquista, that torch was passed to us.

Not only is Charles Martel (and to a lesser extent, his father who seemed to be a nobody before taking over Francia) one of histories absolute badasses, but the Carolingian Renaissance basically created the Catholic Church as we know it (and as we think about it in history) and brought writing back to the mainstream in Europe which eventually allowed what we know as the Renaissance to even take off.

It’s a shame that outside of historical circles and the well read nobody knows who Charlemagne is, or they know he was a person but have no idea what he did. To me the “Dark Ages” are just as, if not more, fascinating that the Imperial era of Rome. I also do think that (Dark Ages) is a good term if applied a little earlier to right after the fall of Rome until the rise of Charlemagne.

> It’s a shame that outside of historical circles and the well read nobody knows who Charlemagne is

Except for all the French, and neighbouring French-speaking countries... (and probably other European countries, but I wasn't exposed to their education system).

I'm on the other side of Germany (Czechia) and everybody knows who Charlemagne is, it's basic education here, you learn it in 6th grade. It's not that positive figure here though, Czech people didn't submit willingly to his empire.

Maybe it’s just an American thing, then.

Charlemagne (or Karel de Grote as we call him in Dutch) is a pretty big deal in our history. We've learned about him in primary school and again, somewhat more in depth, in secondary school.

Of course not everyone knows what he did. Most people aren't all that interested in history. You could say the same thing about most historical figures. As a quick guess Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Hitler are the most obvious of a pretty short list of counterexamples that are so well-known that almost everybody has at least some idea of what they did. Even that is going to be pretty limited: I suppose a lot of people here in Belgium are aware of Caesar because he came here to conquer, and provides the oldest written sources of our regions. But not a lot of people are aware of his role in the end of the Roman Republic.

I’d also argue that, in America at least, most people don’t know much about Napoleon either other than he was some guy who existed and was French.

All children in France know Charlemagne for his beard and mustache, and the fact that this asshole invented the schools they have to sit in to learn about him.

>and to a lesser extent, his father who seemed to be a nobody before taking over Francia

Pepin of Heristal was the most powerful man of Austrasia, from one of the most powerful families in the Frankish world (descended from Rhenan Frankish royalty). His ancestry includes extremely prestigious bishops and lords.

There's nothing about him that screams "nobody".

Transition? It was 1000 years. Roman Empire colapsed. 1000 years later powerful states with new political structures emerged.

A sobering thought: when you consider that this is true for people we have come to demonize as well. Hitler, Vlad the Impaler, Genghis Khan ect ect they were all human with emotions, worries, good days and struggles. The only thing that separates us from them is what we think about what they did. A lot of people can’t process the idea of the worst criminals being people just like them or consider that deep down they are not moral, good or anything special and they themselves are capable of the same evil if placed in the correct circumstances.

I think you are forgetting that sociopathy, in particular the inability to feel empathy, is a real thing.

They are without empathy, remorse and able to manipulate people duplicating their behaviours and choices. This is both normal and extremist. People are still vulnerable to it today.

With BLM I found myself thinking a lot about this question. Should we be understanding of slave owners and put them into hisorical context? Is it fair to hold people in the past to the morals of today? Where should the balance be struck?

I think the answer is that both things are true. Killing, abusing and enslaving people was always wrong. But the cognitive basis for those acts can be more mundane than pure evil.

I think as a society we experience a larger version of the free will problem. Our future path is tightly bound to our history and culture. We do not have complete free will. Breaking away an asserting agency can be be both an opportunity and a risk. Nelson Mandela broke with history but so did Hitler and Stalin. We shouldn't assume that we are the former.

> Is it fair to hold people in the past to the morals of today?

It's impossible, so it doesn't matter if it's fair: we’re not transporting reward or punishment back to people in the past.

Our decisions about who from the past we hold up as role models, and how, isn't about fairness to people in the past, it's about fairness to people in the present.

> Nelson Mandela broke with history but so did Hitler and Stalin.

What do you mean by that? What does breaking with history means?

All three were subjectively sure they are righteous and in the right.

Honestly the entire article is crap. And not even close to hacker news. Good write up btw on your part.

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