From R.H.C.

Davis, A History of Medieval Europe

Part I – The Dark Ages

INTRODUCTION

The civilization that we call European is not spread evenly over the
continent of Europe, nor is it confined to Europe. Sometimes it has
expanded and sometimes it has contracted. Kinglake came to the end
of ’ wheel-going Europe ’ and started his exploration of ’ the
Splendour and the Havoc of the East ’ in the Moslem quarter of
Belgrade; that was in 1844. Farther east there are lands that have
once been European. The natives of Syria call modern Europeans,
their houses, transport, clothes, and sanitation ’franji’, because until
the modern age they had known no European colonists since the
crusaders or Franks. Even in Greece, Europeans are called Franks,
since Greece was conquered by crusaders in the thirteenth century.
On the southern shores of the Mediterranean, in Algeria, Tunisia, and
Tripolitania, Europeans are called ’Roumi’, because the previous
exponents of European civilization were Romans. European civilization
moves. Under the Greeks and the Romans it was based on the
Mediterranean. By the sixteenth century ir had shifted to the Atlantic
seaboard, to the Netherlands, England, France, and Spain. In one
sense, the history of medieval Europe is the history of this movement
of civilization, northwards from the Mediterranean.
The Roman Empire was Mediterranean and embraced all its shores. It
was not localised. Just as the second city of Greece was Alexandria, in
Egypt, so the Emperor Constantine founded a ’new Rome ’ at
Constantinople and called its people ’Romans ’. The Emperor
Diocletian had built his palace at Split on the Dalmatian coast; one of
the most famous schools of Roman law was at Beyrouth, in Syria, and
the third largest Roman amphitheatre in the world is still to be seen in
the Tunisian village of El Djem. Few of the great Romans of imperial
times were of Roman stock. The Emperor Trajan was a Spaniard;
Septimius
Severus was a native of Leptis Magna in Tripolitania. Most significant
of all was St. Paul; his parents were Jews, but he was a Roman citizen
because he had been born in the Greek city of Tarsus, which was on
the coast of Asia Minor and was capital of the Roman province of
Cilicia. He died at Rome, after he had undertaken missionary journeys
over the greater part of the eastern Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean was not only the centre of the Roman Empire ; it
was what made the Empire possible. The magnificence of Roman
roads is apt to make us think that Rome was primarily a land-power
and to make us forget that Rome could not defeat Carthage until she
was a sea-power. Rome depended on the sea. The corn for her bread
came from Sicily and Egypt, and an outbreak of piracy in the middle
sea could endanger her very existence.
Before the age of railways, motor-cars, and aeroplanes, all great
civilizations depended on water-transport. The earliest civilizations
grew up on rivers, where the hazards of navigation seemed less
terrifying than on sea. For civilization depends on cities where men
are spared the trouble of growing their own food and can devote their
lives to specialized trades or arts ; cities can only obtain their material
needs by trading ; trading requires transport; and transport is far
more difficult over land than over water. To transport goods overland
one needs roads and bridges, relays of horses and carts, and
stopping-places where both man and beast can find food and rest in
peace ; it requires stupendous organisation. To travel over water one
needs nothing more than a boat.
In a boat, one can sail down the Nile and into the Mediterranean, the
paradise of early sailors. It was neither too big nor too little. It was big
enough to contain the marvels of the world, the golden apples of the
Hesperides, the cave of Cumae and the pillars of Hercules; and yet it
was small enough for the fearful mariner never to be far from sight of
land. It invited exploration. The Greeks nosed their way along its
shores in search of new lands and new markets, founding cities as
they went, as at Cyrene on the African shore, or as at Naples (HAY
UNA PALABRA EN GRIEGO= the new city) in southern Italy where their
cities became known as Magna Graecia. In Spain they founded the
great market of
Emporion and the city of Hemeroskopeion (’the watch-tower of the
day ’). Nor were the Greeks alone. Phoenicians from Tyre had founded
Carthage, and Carthaginians founded Cadiz. Exploration and trading
went hand in hand. Trading led to cities and cities to civilization.
The Romans conquered the cities and the civilization, with the
Mediterranean. They made an Empire out of the economic unit that
existed already, and called the Mediterranean ’our sea’, mare
nostrum . They then set about defending it, for the sea was
vulnerable from the land. Any invader who marched overland and
conquered a portion of its shore, could build a fleet and disrupt the
economic unity on which the Empire depended. Fortunately, the
Mediterranean had natural defences on three sides. On the west and
on the south were the Atlantic and the Sahara, both equally
impassable. On the east, the Syrian desert formed a barrier against
the Persians except at its northern extremity which was defended by
the fortress of Nisibis. The weak frontier was on the north. If the
Romans had only had to defend Italy, they could have made the Alps
their frontier; but they had to defend the whole of the north
Mediterranean shore. To protect the shores of Greece and Dalmatia
they advanced to the Danube which they made a frontier against the
Goths. To protect their province on the Mediterranean coast of Gaul,
they advanced into northern Gaul; to secure northern Gaul they
occupied Britain and advanced eastwards to the Rhine. Augustus
decided that the advance should go no farther, and in consequence
the northern frontier of the Empire followed the lines of the Rhine and
Danube with only a small extension to the east in the region of the
Neckar. A longer frontier could not have been devised. To garrison it,
the Romans recruited Syrians, Armenians, Dalmatians, Spaniards, and
even German auxiliaries. The frontier was the military centre of the
Empire, for its purpose was not just the defence of Gaul or Illyricum,
but of the whole Mediterranean. The Romans knew that once a rival
power reached the shores of ’their’ sea, it could shatter their
economy and so bring an end to their Empire and their civilization.
The fact that Mediterranean civilization depended on the unity of
that sea made it vulnerable from within as well as from without. It was
essential to keep the Mediterranean peoples at peace with one
another. It was the triumph of the Romans that they discovered how
to do this with the least possible military effort. They knew that all the
Mediterranean peoples had a common interest in the commerce of
their sea, and they believed in men. They believed that all men had
by nature an instinctive knowledge of what was right and what was
wrong, and they believed that it was possible to frame laws in
accordance with the standard of nature. They distinguished between
custom which was of no more than local significance, and law which
appertained to justice and was consequently of universal significance.
They would have found the greatest difficulty in understanding the
way in which we now think it natural for different civilized states to
have different laws. Of course they did not expect all men to share
their law at once, but they did expect all civilised men to share it.
Roman law was aiming at absolute justice as ordained by nature, and
men whose reason was educated would recognize it naturally. For
centuries their confidence was justified; but Roman civilization was to
be shaken when barbarian invaders claimed that their own laws were
particular to themselves, since they were not founded on nature and
reason, but on the dictates of their own divine ancestors.
It always has been that different races find self-expression in their
religion as well as in their laws. But the Romans were convinced of the
common humanity of all men, and just as they postulated a jus
gentium, or law that was common to all peoples, so they postulated
that there must be a common religion. They thought that, just as
there were different languages with different words for the same
object, so the differences between the gods of different peoples were
differences only of names. They identified Zeus with Jupiter, Baal with
Saturn, and the Celtic Mapon with Apollo. Julius Caesar reported that
the Gauls paid most deference to Mercury, and after him to Apollo,
Jupiter, and Minerva, ’and about them their ideas correspond fairly
closely with those current among the rest of mankind’. The statement
shows a magnificent belief in the universal humanity of man, since it
implied that even barbarians knew by instinct something of the truth
discovered by civilized man. But the belief depended on pantheism.
There had to be many recognised gods it all the gods of the
barbarians were to be found equivalents in the Roman pantheon; and
any new gods had to be content to take their place alongside deities
that were already numerous. What could not be tolerated was a
religion that claimed to have a monopoly of truth -that claimed not
only that it was right, but that all other religions were wrong. Just as
the Roman Empire embraced all Mediterranean peoples and gave
them Latin names, so Roman religion embraced all gods and required
that they also should observe the pax Ramana.
The structure of the Roman Empire was based on the unity of the
Mediterranean, its peoples and its gods. In the following chapters we
will see how that unity was broken. It was first cracked by the claim of
the Christian Church to be the guardian of absolute truth, because
that claim made religious compromise impossible. It was further
cracked by the determination of barbarian invaders to prefer the law
of their ancestors to the law of reason, since that preference implied
the superiority of loyalty to one’s race over loyalty to the civilized
world. It was shattered when traders lost the freedom of the sea.
When that happened, the greater part of Europe reverted to an
agricultural economy in which there was no place for the cities that
made men civilized.