THE “OLD WORLD”

In this half of World Civilization, we are going to look at how the world evolved
after 1500, how it became “modern.”

And, because so much of what we learn about in the ancient world is rooted in the
Greco-Roman past, I actually want to begin our story in the West, to look at how
western civilization began to transform and evolve in the period after c.1500. Then
we can swing back and take a look at the East and at what happens when East
meets West.

But before we begin that task, there are a few things we need to remember from the
first half of World or Western Civilization. For example, we need to know what is
meant by the term “Western Civilization” (and how that is different from non-
western civilization).

So, what is Western Civilization?

The geography of Western Civilization seems easy on the surface (of the globe—
ha ha!)—One can look at a map or globe and determine what is Eastern and what
is Western. But, what distinguishes Eastern from Western civilization is more than
geography. As you can see, some places we might think of as Eastern (or at the
very least outside of the West) belong to Western Civilization (South Africa,
Australia).

The Western World

So, if Western Civilization exists in what we might think of geographically as the

East, what makes Western Civilization “western?”

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Loosely, Western Civilization is western because of where it began. One can
define Western Civilization as the culture/world view that developed in
Europe, especially western Europe (England, France, Spain, Germany, Italy),
from the fall of the Roman Empire to the present day. It didn’t stay there,
though. As people fanned out across the globe and as countries colonized, they
took that western world view with them to far flung places like the Americas
(Canada, United States, Mexico), Australia, and even parts of Africa. Thus,
Western Civilization came to exist outside of the geographic west.

So, the question really is, what is that culture/world view that developed in Europe
and then spread (what ideas does a place or people need to subscribe to in order to
be considered “western”)? What are the characteristics of Western Civilization
that make places western as opposed to something else?

This is a loaded question and one on which there seems to be little consensus
these days. Also, sweeping changes in Europe (brought on in part by the recent and
continuing massive waves of African and Middle Eastern migrants entering
Europe), the United States, and elsewhere are beginning to rewrite what it means to
be western.

For our purposes, though, we are going to identify 6 characteristics that

traditionally have marked a place or country as belonging to Western
Civilization:

1) Judeo-Christian religious traditions.

2) “Free” Government (democratic government and political traditions that
include the public voice).
3) “Free” Society (ideas of natural rights—such as we see in the Declaration
of Independence or the Magna Carta; the abolition of slavery and serfdom).
4) Advanced Technology.
5) Secular (non-religious) education (in the Greco-Roman tradition with
emphasis on critical thinking and logic).
6) An interest in the world/globalization.

Some of these characteristics began as long ago as the Roman Empire.

Christianity, for example, became the official religion of Rome during the reign
of Emperor Theodosius (AD 379-395). The Romans also admired and emulated
Greek education and philosophy and strove to use state of the art technology
(especially with regard to warfare). But, generally, it took hundreds of years for

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Western Civilization to form and the present shape of Western Civilization is very,
very different from what it looked like even in 1500. Transformations making
Europe and its descendants (like the United States) modern came slowly, often
painfully.

Thus, to understand the magnitude of events and ideas shaping the world from
1500 on, you really need to know the outlines of the “Old World,” the shape of
Europe before the Renaissance and Reformation transformed countries, societies,
and Western Civilization itself. (Only then can we get a feel for what changed and
how and why). And that’s what we are going to talk about today, the Old World,
the West before the modern era.

So, the “Old World”—Let’s begin with some characteristics:

The Old World was DECENTRALIZED.

What does that mean, decentralized?

➢ No one center of authority anymore—kings/governments can’t wield
effective power over their subjects anymore.

Now, by 1500, really in some places as early as 1100, kings, especially in

England and France, had begun to reclaim some of their authority and begun
to recentralize, but more than a few places, like Germany and Italy, were
still struggling with decentralized, disunified states.

How did Europe get decentralized?

➢ Well that’s an easy story—Rome conquered most of Europe, incorporating
the continent into a vast and far flung empire. By the end of the Punic Wars
in 146, Rome was master of Spain, Corsica, Sardinia, Greece, Macedonia,
Sicily, part of North Africa, and much of Asia Minor. From there, the
Romans stretched up into France, east across Europe, west to Britain, down
into Egypt, and even into places like modern day Jordan and the Levant. By
117 A.D., Rome was the master of the world (at least the Mediterranean
world).

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As we saw in the characteristics of Western Civilization, Rome influenced
the places it conquered with its ideas, philosophies, language, and culture.
Also, obviously, it controlled those places, imposing government rule over
all of these places. But, by the early 400s, Rome couldn’t really continue
to administer and rule all of the land that it had conquered in better,
more prosperous times. In fact, the Romans couldn’t even effectively defend
its old capital city, Rome, anymore. In 410, a Visigoth named Alaric sacked
the city of Rome, prompting the Roman Senate in the West to send word to
all those western provinces (like Gaul/France; Spain, England, Germany)
that “you are on your own.” In other words, no Roman armies would be
coming to their defense, no Roman emperor would be running the show, no
Roman Senate would be collecting taxes or enforcing laws. By 476 A.D.,
the Roman Empire in the West had “fallen,” the last Roman emperor,
Romulus Augustulus having abdicated.

Thus, all of those places in the western half of the Roman Empire that had
been ruled by Rome, protected by Rome, united by Rome, suddenly found
themselves alone in a very brutal world. And, eventually these places and
peoples found themselves being attacked and conquered by Germanic
barbarians or a little later by Vikings and they had no legions to protect
them. There was no one to signal for help.

And so what happened throughout Europe is that little kingdoms, very small
at first, began to form and kings offered land to nobles in exchange for
military service and loyalty.

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 Does anyone remember what that arrangement was called?
Feudalism.

We are not going to go into the ins and outs of the feudal system in this
class, but basically what happened is that the power of kings bled down into
the noble classes because without an Army kings are powerless and in order
to get an army, the kings had to have the loyalty of the great lords. So,
power became diffused throughout these kingdoms and the kingdoms
themselves became very decentralized.

Now, a lot of things happen when a king or government can’t effectively control
the kingdom.

And that brings us to a second characteristic of the Old World: POVERTY:

➢ With decentralization come a bunch of pitfalls like civil war—if weak kings
can’t control their strong lords and barons, those barons might just try to
become kings themselves. And, sometimes even family members of the
king decide they could do a better job and try to take over. And so there can
be real chaos and political trouble if a government is too weak.

And anytime you have political unrest, you almost always find an inability
to enforce the law. Life becomes a free for all—roads aren’t safe, travel
isn’t safe, life isn’t safe.

And if the roads aren’t safe, people aren’t going to try to trade anymore.
The best that they can hope for is to produce enough food to survive
themselves—subsistence agriculture. So, Europe very quickly after the fall
of Rome became very, very poor.

And that poverty led to another characteristic of the Old World: IGNORANCE:

➢ People who are only interested in survival no longer have time to worry
with things like book-learning. They have to worry about eking out a
living from the land and protecting what they have from thieves and
invaders.

Thus, all throughout Western Europe soon after the fall of Rome people
became illiterate (couldn’t read or write) and they lost touch with all of those

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 Greco-Roman works, including texts on medicine.

Life became pretty grim for a time in the Old World. People died young,
they lost the understanding of diseases and of nature. They simply forgot
how the world worked. They became superstitious and fearful and they
became something else…

What do people turn to when they are afraid or sad or when troubles hit?
➢ Religion.

The Old World was: RELIGIOUS:

➢ The Roman Empire collapsed in 476 A.D., but one of its institutions, the
Roman Catholic Church, survived—even became stronger because with
the decentralization of kingdoms, the Catholic Church was the only
universal institution left, the only thing drawing people in all parts of Europe
together.

In many instances, the Roman Catholic Church served as more than a

religion. The Church provided real and tangible services: food to the
hungry, lodging to the weary, orphanages for the parentless, and hope for the
hopeless.

And the more desperate people became in the Middle Ages, the more
they turned to the Catholic Church. People didn’t understand why they
were dying young—they thought of many diseases as punishments from
God. And they knew that this life would be short, so they turned to the
comfort of Catholic reasoning—that this life was a drop in the bucket, that
the life worth preparing for was the next one, heaven.

You would be poor now, but you weren’t going to live that long and then, if
you were a good Christian, a good Catholic, you were going to go to
paradise forever.

Because of this, for a long while Europeans turned their eyes away from
this world and looked toward the eternal. They shunned education—all
you needed to know was the way to salvation. They shunned science and
technology—again, the church would give you all you needed to know.

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 And, another thing, I really do mean THE CHURCH—people believed in
the Catholic Church—anything else was considered a heresy and would get
you into trouble not only in this world but in the next.

Another characteristic of the Old World was that it was INSULAR (like islands
they were closed off to things, places, and ideas beyond their own daily
experiences):

➢ People didn’t venture out much beyond their birthplaces and even kingdoms
didn’t really stretch out that much. It was not a global world. People didn’t
even really consider themselves citizens of a kingdom, but more often
simply identified themselves with their own village or shire. Things were
very localized. People knew their place.

There were some cracks in this Old World even before the date at which our
class begins. England and France had begun to recentralize as kings there were
able to reassert control over their kingdoms. This renewed centralization provided
a new measure of safety and security which in turn resulted in the restoration of
trade and a renewed economy. So, decentralization and poverty were beginning to
dissipate—at least for some people.

And with new wealth, people began to rediscover a need for literacy—it’s very
difficult to keep track of accounts if you can’t read or write. And new literacy
meant a rediscovery of education. And the rediscovery of education led to
renewed interest in the Greco-Roman past.

And, if you took the first half of World or Western Civilization you probably
learned about the Renaissance—the rebirth of Greco-Roman traditions in Europe,
starting in Italy and then spreading to Northern Europe. So, ignorance began to
fade.

And, with more wealth, luxury, and education, people became less interested in the
next life. They wanted to enjoy this one. So, there was a fading interest in religion
as well.

But, though these changes began before 1500, it would take years, centuries to
realize the full effect. People change slowly. Civilizations change even more
slowly. It takes generations for real changes to take place. Think about
segregation. You have Brown versus the Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas in
1954, but we still have pockets of segregation in America today. And, the Great

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Depression was a long time ago, but people of that generation (and sometimes their
kids) still save things like scraps of tinfoil.

So, the rest of this class is really going to be looking at how the Old World,
beginning in the West, splits apart to give birth to a new world. In the West, that is
going to be a civilization characterized as global as global, free, advanced,
wealthy, tolerant, and educated. In the east, it’s going to be a bit different and less
homogenous.