The whole idea of medieval era as the dark ages is also profoundly uninformed.
The term originally refers to the idea that it's an age of ignorance by Renaissance scholars essentially having a massive Classical Antiquity appreciation binge. This gets amplified by Protestants as an attack on Catholicism. Some more modern people get even more zealously anti-religious and view it as something pushing back the industrial revolution and other things back by 1500 years or so. This especially gets intertwined with things like unilinear cultural evolution models [1], where the Middle Ages end up getting classified as going backwards in culture. Most of these beliefs are basically complete and total hogwash in terms of actual evidence.
Archaeology can trace a rough outline of the economic history of Europe. We see a peak of economic activity in the first and second centuries AD, a decline in third century, which stabilizes somewhat in the fourth and fifth century, before plunging. It hits its nadir in the eighth century, and then starts recovering, surpassing its pre-collapse highs sometime between 1000-1300, depending on which metric you're looking at. If you want to refer to the time from ~500-1000 as a "Dark Ages" on the basis of poor document preservation and general economic collapse, that's actually a reasonable, grounded definition.
But if you're trying to use the term to indicate a loss of knowledge somehow, well, it just doesn't work. Even during the absolute worst depths of the post-Roman collapse, you would still be speaking Roman, learning from Roman textbooks (if you're fortunate enough to be learning), practicing Roman religion, obeying Roman laws. And there's a decent chance you might be doing that despite your village never having once been part of the Roman Empire.
[1] Or, more simply, Civilization-style tech trees.
If the Roman (pagan) material dared to suggest something different than accepted church teaching, it wasn't copied or preserved.
Hell, that's why the capture of libraries in Spain in the 15th century was still important to the renaissance. Muslim scholars preserved a bunch of Greek and Roman material that had COMPLETELY disappeared during the European dark ages.
this really isnt true.
The loss of so much literature in the Western Roman Empire has to be understood in the context of the overall collapse in literacy there, which was due to late-antiquity political factors and not religious ones, and then resource starvation in scriptoria.
1) ius primae noctis was a thing (it wasn’t)
2) witch hunting was a medieval thing (very late medieval thing, maybe, but mostly it was in 15-17th century)
3) flat earth as a widespread belief for wise men (it wasn’t, and both Columbus and the Council of Salamanca knew that)
We’re willing to believe that for about 1000 years Europe collectively abandoned reason, while before and after it was there. Sure, sounds logic.
That is to say, it wasn’t a law but not even an accepted custom. Raping is something else, unfortunately I’m sure that happend. So are power dynamics and sex, but it wasn’t connected to the first night.
There is a document from Maur, Canton Zurich, Switzerland, stating: "...soll der Bräutigam den Meyer in der Hochzeitsnacht bei seiner Frau liegen lassen oder fünf Schillinge und vier Pfennige bezahlen" (Rough translation: "...the groom should let the Meier [administrative manager] lie with his wife during the wedding night, or he shall pay five Shilling and four pence").
The document is from 1543, but it states in the very beginning that these rules are "von alters her" (rough translation: "since an old age").
Source: (University of Zurich, Faculty of Law) https://www.ius.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:00000000-1e72-6fc8-0000-00003...
It surely wasn't widespread or normal, as rennaissance and early modern porn fantasies would want us to believe. But it surely happened.
I think this is the right conclusion, given the available evidence:
"....the so-called right was simply the ability of the powerful to subject the less powerful to their will. Rape might be a better term to apply since husbands and families had to resort to subterfuge to thwart the desires of the powerful.?
Source: Vern L. Bullough (1991) Jus primae noctis or droit du seigneur. The Journal of Sex Research. Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 163-166 - https://www.jstor.org/stable/3812958
I’m not sure what to make of the document you shared: does it mean that in 1543 near Zurich this right was still being upheld? Because in Italy there are plenty of documents and popular stories in which “in the past we were subject to this horrible practice by an evil Lord”, but no contemporary source. In these cases it is likely a local legend to emphasise the improvements of living in a city and not under a lord.
I can only see the preview of the article you linked, but it mentions the culagium (a tax on marriage, fundamentally), and it has been speculated that its name had an influence on the later perception of jpn: culagium sounds very much as “culus”, which means “ass” in Latin.
For another explanation and a reference, see https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2omu3t/was_p...
I don't know.
I am just saying:
(1) there are rennaissance and early modern authors who want to make us believe this was common and usual and happening widely during the 'dark ages' (likely from a mixture of anti-medieval sentiment and pornographic fantasy, but I am speculating).
(2) there are 20th Century and contemporary authors, who want to make us believe this was just a renaissance invention with no basis in fact whatsoever.
(3) given the available sources (like some religious texts, like the 1543 document I linked, like a very few other sources) and what we know about power dynamics and the 'justice system' (lol) in the European Middle Ages (there were very few limits on what a lord could do to local peasants without repercussions), probably neither is true.
(4) It likely happened, and it likely happened not just thrice over 1000 years. But it also wasn't something happening everywhere and all the time, and as a codified law. It wasn't "part of the package" of being a lord, with everyone just shrugging, saying "that's the way things are and ought to be".
(5) the idea of a culturally-homogeneous medieval Europe is laughable, before printing and modern-ish communication networks, customs were very likely more varied than they were in early modern times. The only (exaggeration!) trans-european force were the Catholic (which back then had a meaning of 'universal') church, and gold coins being accepted everywhere. So, except a few ways of trading goods and a standardized-ish Latin mass there were very few things true for all of the european Middle Ages.
(6) lords surely raped the peasant girls on their lands, and usually without any negative effect on the lord. That is the right way of putting it: rape. Even if there was (there very likely wasn't) such a 'law of the first night', it would still have been the same: rape.
These are my points, and they seem well supported by our current historical knowledge. For anything more specific, ask not just a historian, but a historian specializing in sexual relations in pre-modern Europe. I am not.
The starting point was "many people believe jus primae noctis was a thing, but it wasn't", which roughly meant "it was not a codified law and/or a widespread accepted custom". I never commented on raping (or the connection between power dynamics and sex, which I think also existed), this was just referring to "jus primae noctis", which literally refers to the (codified) right of a local lord to (potentially) have sex with every bride in the first night of marriage, legally. This was not common, accepted or normal in any region of Europe as far as I know (and who would accept this, in any case? There would be rebellions everywhere, everyone had a daughter or a wife!); however, a sizable amount of people think this was indeed the case.
I think we're agreeing on this?
I'm sure some (or many) lords convinced/threatened their pheasants to have sex, or directly raped them, probably with little repercussions, but that seems not limited nor peculiar to medieval times.
(2) the very idea of ipn is a wrong framing. The proper name for non-consensual sex is rape, no matter the time, culture, legal framework or absence thereof.
No further points, this is going nowhere. We are in agreement.
To nitpick, I am like the current authors (by "contemporary" I meant "medieval", btw): it was not a codified right, and that's really the crux of the issue.
If you want to point out that the concept is morally wrong, I think everyone in the world agrees it is, but it's not a very helpful point when talking about the legality and existence of a practice in its historical context.
If we change the name to "legalized rape" maybe it's easier to see this: my first post reads like "legalized rape was never a widespread and accepted custom".
We can talk about the futility of the word "legalized" if we're considering the morality of it (in that legal rape is still rape, and wrong and abhorrent), but in the context of historical practice this is... irrelevant? Rape still existed, unfortunately, and it was likely not always pursued/punished (and even worse, not necessarily for the lack of an indipendent judge: sometimes rape was "fixed" by marrying the girl, which was... a thing until the last century in Italy, and I imagine there were even cases where the raped girl was also disowned by the legitimate husband)
Now, - having abandoned the ipn concept - you are getting too broad with your claims.
very few legal systems allowed for the prosecution of rape within marriage before the 1970s - legalized rape was a common thing.
But I have to do some work now, so I likely won't answer any further.
Have a nice day (if you are in Italy) or a good night (if you are on the other side of the globe).
I’m only, exclusively referring to the non existence of a feudal right to have sex with the wives of other people. You seem to agree that this was not a thing, anything else is a conversation topic you introduced, giving (or having) the impression I was reflecting on that, or implying anything about it. I wasn’t, as your topics had nothing to do with widespread misconceptions about the dark ages.
Have a good day you too.
They were right, he just happened to run into a giant continent instead of dying.
In this model reaching china by sailing west is impossible because the sphere of water is absolutely enormous and all the possible emerged land is already known so there can not be any antipodal land you could find to restock on food.
Source? It’s literally in the Talmud, and many other histories. https://www.sefaria.org/Ketubot.3b.1?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=...
Also, that one source mentions it (I have no idea what that says, when it is from, what is the context etc. - I’m also no historian myself so an English translation would not necessarily help) it doesn’t mean it’s true, otherwise we would have to believe that Pegasus existed… or the myth of Salamanca’s council.
Update: ah, I found the English translation. Indeed, by reading it like this I see what you mean, but I have no idea when, where and in what context it’s been written, whether it talks about a widespread thing, etc.
For more context: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2omu3t/was_p....
My sources are, unfortunately, in Italian only :)
Btw. nice trivia about cats and plague: Venetians caught cats from the mainland and took them to their islands to catch mice and rats that they knew were responsible for the plague. Therefore it was prohibited to feed the cats but there was a special rain water collector for the cats to have enough drinking water next to each Venetian rain water cistern.
Eh. The Middle Ages were hardly darker than the eras preceding them, and the contrast with the Renaissance is much less stark than what the Renaissance people would have you believe. And the era spanned almost a millennium and most of Europe, and it's incredibly simplistic to sum up such a big chunk of spacetime with any single adjective. There's very little similarity between, say, 7th century Scotland, 11th century Spain, and 15th century Venice.
If anything, you could call "dark" the centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire until the early middle ages. And obviously only from a fairly narrow Western-Europe-centric viewpoint.
I am not a historian tho