Gone Medieval - Why the Early Middle Ages Matter

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

What do the terms 'medieval' and 'early medieval' truly mean? When did these periods begin and end? Why is it inaccurate - even offensive - to refer to them as the 'Dark Ages'? Dr. Eleanor Janega and Matt Lewis put their heads together to demystify the terminology used to define different historical periods and clarify some common misconceptions.Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega and Matt Lewis. Edited by Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.

Pop quiz. How do you define the Middle Ages? I mean, yeah, it's the time period that we cover on this show. But when I say something is medieval, what exactly does that mean? Because it does have a meaning, I assure you. And beyond that, if I told you that something happened during the early medieval period, would you necessarily know what I meant? All of these terms and the way that we came up with them are a part of what we historians refer

to as periodization. That's when we try to come up with terms to distinguish different time periods, in theory, to make it easier to talk and write about them. But the thing about being a historian is that you can sometimes forget that you're throwing out technical terms left, right and center, without necessarily knowing if you've brought your audience with you. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I've managed to negotiate my fabulous co-host Matt Lewis's release from the Gone Medieval Dungeon so that we can

chat about what makes something medieval. More than that, we're also going to talk about what makes something early medieval. And we'll explain to you why you should never, ever describe something as the Dark Ages, unless you are specifically trying to make me very angry indeed. Matt, my love, thank you so much for coming over on a Tuesday. Thank you. And having a conversation about one of the more you might say nerdy aspects of medieval history, but actually this is bedrock stuff, isn't it? Absolutely. I mean, I enjoy an excuse to get out of the gone medieval dungeon on a nutter Friday. So coming over here on Tuesday and coming over here to talk about nerdy stuff, I'm definitely here for that. Okay, so when we say nerdy stuff, right, there's this big term that historians use, which is periodization.

And periodization sounds a little more daunting than it actually is. I mean, what it is is a super handy term that historians use to say, look, guys, we've got an era. It's a period, right? And obviously, that's something that we use for the medieval period. Because it's not like the Middle Ages are an actual fact written in stone. It's something that historians create it. And I think periodization is one of those things that is instantly difficult as soon as you do it,

Because we will talk about the medieval period in what is a very Western Europe centric way. It takes zero account of China, Japan, Africa, the Americas. It has no resemblance to what is happening there. It's a handy label to put on stuff from where we're sitting looking outwards. So it's instantly problematic because a Japanese person will not recognize the early medieval period as a thing. It means nothing. But the difficulty is if you don't do that somewhere and put those lines in the sand somewhere, then history is just one massive blob that becomes utterly indecipherable.

So it's a way of tackling it. It's instantly imperfect. But kind of what is the option? Yeah, exactly. You know, and this is the difficulty with the humanities in general, is that we are doing our best to parse all of human history. And so we come up with technical ways of attempting to account for this. But, you know, a lovely way I've heard this.

put is that it's sort of like you're putting a bucket into the ocean. And you can look into that bucket and you can see what you can see in there and make generalities about the ocean as a whole. But that doesn't mean that that is what's going on in all of the ocean all of the time. Right. And that's kind of what periodization helps us do. And it helps us particularly talk to each other as historians and hopefully then explain what our problem is to ordinary people as well. Because if we don't have terms, If we don't have ways of catching things, then, as you say, it's just this blob, right? I think it's a bit like watching Star Wars, isn't it? You know, the original Star Wars trilogy, episodes one, two and three,

if that was just six odd hours of cinema, it would mean nothing. Someone has made a decision to split that into three different stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and something happens, there is some evolution within those stories, and then someone has decided, right, I'm going to end a new hope here, and then we're going to start the Empire Strikes Back. That's all that historians are doing. could have edited those films differently, those beginning and endings could have been in a different place, the focus could have been different. Someone has to make a choice to make it

digestible. I love this and I'm immediately stealing it. As well, I'm explaining the both of an evil period and periodization because also, you know, one of the things that happens with Star Wars is when you see the first Star Wars film, there's also contextualization at the beginning, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. And it hints at all these things that have happened that you, don't get to see, confusingly, until the 90s, when the new ones come out, right? And that's sort of what happens with the Middle Ages as well. Because when we say Middle Ages, I think everyone is just so used to hearing this as a term medieval, Middle Ages, but they don't necessarily sit down and think about the brass tacks of what that means. And for us historians, it makes perfect sense

because we're saying, oh, it's in the middle of something. And it's like, well, what are those middle things? It's ancient history, which, to be honest, is most of it, right? It's thousands of thousands of years. It's ancient history. And it is European-centric, right? Because we say, okay, and then the Middle Ages starts after the fall, I'm saying, in air quotes, of Rome in 476, and then there's the Middle Ages, and then there's the modern era. Modern era, that's kind of a tricky one, because when do things become modern, that is really up in the air for anyone to kind of debate. But for our purposes, like the new Star Wars, I guess, are Rome, right? So, you know, like, episode one and all that, that's your Rome. And then you've got Star Wars,

Empire Strikes back, and Return of the Jedi. Everyone knows Empire in the middle is the best film. I mean, that is true. Yeah. The middle bit is always the best bit. It's true. Oh my gosh. You know what? All my friends who are 12th century historians are all like cheering cheering right now. You've just fed right into their hands, Matt. I aim to please. So I read Dan Jones's Power and Thrones, and he talks in the beginning of that about this idea of the Middle Ages coming out of John Fox writing his history and thinking about there's everything that happened ages and ages ago up to when Christ was alive. And that's a set of history. And when Christ is alive, obviously everything was great at the early church, absolutely fine. And then he

wants to talk, because he's a Protestant in the mid-16th century, he wants to talk about now is much better. Everything is getting better. So the modern era, we have Protestantism. So then The Middle Ages instantly becomes this pejorative term for everything in between what was good and what is good. It's kind of the midden heap in the middle where you can just sling all of the rubbish, the superstition of the Catholic Church, the rise of the Pope, all of the things that Protestants didn't like and were rebelling against. So almost in its creation, the idea of this middle age, which is neither antique nor modern, is immediately pejorative, immediately puts down that entire era. And then you move to get forward to the age of enlightenment, you've got 16th and 17th century philosophers kind of latching onto this and saying, well, now we're in the age of thinking about things. Not like the medieval period where they had faith. They were superstitious and they just believed stuff.

We're much more enlightened than that. And we want to connect with the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers who knew kind of the same stuff that we knew that they all forgot in the middle ages, that pit in the middle. So they're trying to reach across that era to reconnect with what they think was better. And in all of these situations, Middle Ages becomes the dumping ground for everything that was bad. Because again, to the age of enlightenment, it's the age of faith, it's the age of the church, it's the age of the power of Catholicism and all of that kind of thing, that they are pushing against too. And that hasn't changed. The amount of people you will see describe something today as medieval, when they mean bad, violent, thoughtless,

there are politicians today who talk about medieval attitudes to things. And it's because we still have this idea in our heads, that it's a pejorative term. It's a rubbish era in which nothing good happened. Absolutely. And it is political. Like, as you say, there's the Enlightenment era philosophers who really push for this. And then there's also a really big commercial campaign to sell some Italian art in the early medieval period. So we kind of take this for granted now. But, you know, when we look at churches from the high to late medieval period and we describe them as Gothic, That was a very specific pejorative term invented by Italians to try to differentiate between medieval buildings, which they saw as being Germanic, hence Gothic.

And for them, this was part and parcel with symptomatic problems of the Middle Ages where they're like, why are these Germans getting to control the Holy Roman Empire when everyone knows it should be Italians? And everybody knows Italian things are good. So even if you were going to talk about outrageously cool things like Gothic architecture, there's this attempt to make that seem bad. And anytime you see that, it is political. Anytime you see that, someone's trying to tell you something, like whether it's selling you the concept of Protestantism or sell you a statue by Michelangelo, there is some thought going into that, which is trying to rubbish about a thousand years of history.

And that's ridiculous. You know, anyone who knows anything about the medieval period or takes the time to look at it, you know, the idea that they didn't have Plato or Aristotle, all they have is Plato and Aristotle. I'm constantly reading what medieval people think about Aristotle. It never ends. But if you just don't bother to look at it because it's rubbish and it's bad and you don't need to, then it lets you just kind of off the hook. You know, you don't have to improve your Latin. That's great. You know, you don't have to get into a real sticky mess of contradictory, interesting people and you can just say,

I don't need it. And it then makes you also feel very smart as a modern person because you're not like that. I guess it's always attractive to look down when we look back, isn't it? To think things were worse back then and to measure everything by our own ideas of progress. Because I think there are measures by which you can paint the millennium of the medieval period

as a time when there wasn't huge technological progress. The printing press comes along and revolutionizes stuff. we're in the age of computer and information and everything now, it's hard to see those big seismic shifts, but that doesn't mean that everything stayed the same, and it doesn't mean that people weren't developing and having ideas and creating things. You know, clocks are a medieval invention.

The church clock. Yeah. I mean, how about this? The three-field system, which no one thinks is particularly sexy, but it revolutionizes farming, which means that people have way, way more food to eat, which means you can sustain a higher population, which means that more people can move into cities and they can make art.

And all of this comes from just figuring out that that field needs a break really quickly. And that's a piece of tech, you know? Yeah, yeah. And looking back today, we would say the world is a very different place from what it was 50 years ago, 100 years ago, unrecognizable from 200 years ago. I imagine people in the 15th century were sitting there thinking almost exactly the same. How did people possibly live 200 years ago? Things must have been so much worse than they are.

We've moved on so far. things have changed so much. You know, the pace of change is definitely speeding up more recently, but that's not to say that people at the end of the medieval period lived exactly the same way as the people at the beginning and thought the same things that they had thought a thousand years earlier. Oh, and absolutely, we see that all the time as historians. Literally, you will just kind of see it in the way that they write, you know, scripts change completely over this thousand years. So a document that you find from 570 is going to look completely different from one, say, in 1485. You're going to have to know a completely different way of writing in order to read these things.

Certainly, we see sizes of cities change. We see the places where people live change. You know, the Romans couldn't figure out how to farm extensively in Germany because the soil was too heavy. Medieval people figure that out, and suddenly you've got a lot more people living in places where they simply. did not in the ancient period. You know, you have population change, demographic change, and also changes in ideas. So what we see in terms of philosophy can be completely different as well. So there's all sorts of very, very interesting intellectual changes. And as a result of this, historians, we break the medieval period down further. Right? So you've got the medieval period,

which goes from 476 to, you know, if you've seen Protestants, you've gone too far, right? So, I mean, an easy way of doing it is saying, I don't know, the 16th century, the 1500s, I guess that's the end. But we don't have a real clear division on that. And that's a long time. Like over 1,000 years of history is a very long time. So we then break that down into three other chunks. And these are terms that you might hear thrown around as well. So you've got the early medieval period, which is kind of the fifth to the 10th century.

you've got the high medieval period, which is about 1,000 to 1,300, and the late medieval period, which is about 1,300 to, I mean, I guess the 1500s. And then that helps us more particularly, it's the same thing as the problems with the Middle Ages. Is this perfect? No, it isn't. Right? There are big changes and holdovers in all of those things. I'll tell you what, the way that people are living in 1350 is way, way different from the way they're living in 750. That's certainly the case. Yeah, absolutely. If we focus on the early medieval period

and we can definitely come back to the other ones in a future podcast and hopefully dig into those a little bit more. But if we think about the early medieval period, I guess the big question is, when do we start it? What kicks off the early medieval period? When did everyone wake up in the morning and go? Tear off the calendar and say,

yes, we're early medieval now. Yeah, and they were so hyped. I mean, what we say is the early medieval period begins in 476. with the so-called fall of the Roman Empire. And this is one of those things where, you know, no one at the time would have told you that that had happened. This is, again, one of those things that looking back,

we say, ah, there it is. Rome has fallen. And what we have pinned that to is the deposition of the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, by Odoacer, who is agatha. But this kind of belies, I mean, that would be a really simple way of looking at things. You know, oh, a barbarian.

quote unquote comes in and he topples the emperor. But this belies a really much more complex situation. The Western Roman emperor didn't really have very much power at all at this point. Everything was going on over in Constantinople. The Western Roman emperors had for some time largely just been puppets of Eastern Rome. They'd say, yeah, I like this guy. He's not going to cause too much trouble. We're going to put him in. Most of the so-called barbarians were highly Roman. You know, they'd been working in the Roman Empire. They had been generals in the Roman army. They didn't want to take over Rome in order to collapse it.

They wanted to take over Rome in order to control it. They were like, yeah, baby, I want those sweet, sweet tax credits, you know. So this makes it seem like there was some big rupture that changes things irreparably. But at the time, that's just not how it goes down. No, because, I mean, you can talk about 476 as that moment when the last Western Roman Emperor is deposed, but you could be talking about the sack of Rome a bit earlier, or the other sack of Rome a bit even earlier. To contemporaries, it would have been a gradual process of the decline in the power and authority and apparent indestructibility of the Roman Empire,

but it wouldn't have been the flick of a switch. And as you're saying, contemporaries would have frowned at us probably and thought, but the Roman Empire is still there. It's in Constantinople. It's lost a bit of it in Rome. You know, it might have lost its birthplace. But the empire, still exists. So why are you saying the Roman Empire is over it? There's no big change there. In Constantinople, we are Rome. We are the Roman Empire. Oh, absolutely. And then you even get the return of an emperor in the West with Charlemagne in the year 800. So you've only actually got a couple of centuries without a Western emperor. So it's not just the fact that the Western Roman Empire doesn't have an emperor anymore, a leader anymore. It's kind of from a long way further forward,

looking back and seeing that as a moment of significant cultural rupture that had a big long buildup and a big long tail, but we're just going to hang things on 476. It's one of these things where, I don't know, it's kind of Victorian, isn't it, to say, oh, yeah, you can definitively do this. You can say that there is a date where these things happen, but we all know that's not how culture shakes out. And I mean, indeed, culturally, at the time, if you say, oh, the fall of Rome, they weren't even living in Rome at the time. The emperors were living in Ravenna at this point. So everybody's idea of there being like a grand coliseum and, you know, all of these things happening. That's not.

how Rome was acting at the time. And indeed, like, this idea of Romanness never goes away in the medieval period. And we see instead a series of kingdoms crop up that medievalists refer to as the Roman successor states. And this is a really, really big deal. Because what ends up happening is a lot of the Germanic peoples, you know, the Goths, come in and they take over areas that had been Roman. And one of these very big, famous ones, is the Austrogothic king Theodoric. And he reigns as the regent of the Visigoths, and he kind of comes into power about 493. And he has this wonderful quote about it, which he says, a poor Roman plays the goth and a rich goth the Roman, which is incredibly excellent, right? For him, the thing is, the minute you get

money, if you are Gothic, you say, look at me, I'm Roman, I've got a toga. You know, like, I'm speaking Latin and I'm doing all of these things. But Romans themselves, they kind of liked this new influx of culture. They were like, oh, look, I've got a mustache. I'm doing some new things. You know, this is a new and interesting way of looking at the world and relating to it. So there are all these big kind of cultural trade-offs. And indeed, Theodoric never calls himself the emperor.

But as the region of the Visigoths, he eventually controls a bunch of land that stretches from the Atlantic to the Adrienne. That's not nothing, certainly. And he is smart enough that he employs all of these people who had formerly been working with Rome and who were Roman. So very famously, he's got a secretary called Cassiodorus, who is one of his big advisors. And we have absolutely oodles of his communication with other leaders. We see them taking pains to emphasize how this is just a new way of doing Rome. And we're just kind of responding to the pressure. of the time. No one there would say, oh, this is a totally new thing. It just doesn't work that way. Yeah, I think we always have to think that people living day to day are, if they're seeing anything, they're seeing the evolution, not the revolution in a lot of these moments. We seem to have this idea that we'll hang it on 476. So on the 17th of January 476, everyone went to bed in a toga and got up in jerkins and hose and whatever else. And we're like, oh, we've changed. I mean, it just doesn't happen, does it? There is still this effort to be

the new Rome and that continues for the rest of the medieval well beyond the medieval period the holy Roman empire will exist for centuries beyond the end of the medieval period so there is always that notion that idea that desire to get back to Rome all through the medieval period and beyond so there isn't quite that rupture that people like to see I guess I want to drop the D word now so I'm going to give people a minute to wonder oh he's going to do it he's doing it I need people a moment to see if they know what the D word is in gone medieval terms. And I was wondering whether you might have worn your shorts for this. And for anyone who doesn't know, just Google Eleanor Yarniger and the Dark Ages.

So we get this kind of pejorative term for this period within a period that has a pejorative term. So this is like pejorative squared when we get to the Dark Ages. Why do we talk about that and why shouldn't we? Okay. So Dark Ages as a term is a really, really misunderstood one. Because for a while historians were using it, and as the short say, Matt, for us, the term Dark Ages refers to a lack of sources, not intellectual decline. And we get that term from a modern era cardinal and church historian, Caesar Baroneus.

And he coined this term, Seculum Obscureum. But hilariously, he was referring to the 10th and 11th centuries because it's like we just don't have as many sources as we had had under the Carolingians, like in the 9th century. And that's kind of weird. So he wasn't talking about, oh, there's a period of scientific malaise or this is particularly politically bad. This is a really difficult time. What he's saying is we get to this sort of tipping point and we just didn't keep as many

texts from them, right? Because something that I will get thrown back at me when I say, dark ages doesn't mean bad times. It means we don't have any sources. people will say, aha, well then why are there no sources? As though this is some kind of gotcha. And I have heard it said specifically either because people didn't know how to write anymore, question mark, or a big one, the church quote, was burning books? Which is just like, well, neither of those things are true.

And what it comes down to, you know, and when we use the term dark edges, we've now gone a bit past what Caesar Baroneus meant and we tend to mean early Middle Ages. And I don't know if you've heard this, Matt, but the fifth century is a really long time ago. What? I know. And it's just really difficult to keep things around. There are fires constantly in the ancient and medieval world. You know, you've got everything lit up by fire and things burn down. Libraries, houses, church buildings, these things just burn.

So that's really, really difficult. Another thing that's difficult is when you look at these guys, as you say, they've got so much reverence for Rome. So if you're having like a big clean out of stuff, the things you get rid of are your own things because you're like, eh, who cares about, you know, my Bible from 20 years ago? What I want to keep is it's Aristotle tracked. And so the things that get passed down are these things that are older because they're seen as more important. They don't have the same way of thinking about the historical record as us. So eventually over hundreds upon hundreds of years, even a millennia or so, you just lose stuff. And,

It makes it more difficult to see what is going on there. But then, unfortunately, the Enlightenment happens. Unfortunately, people become enlightened. We don't want that. And at this point in time, oh, God. I'll tell you who wasn't enlightened. And I will wrestle him is Voltaire, right? And he's really, really responsible for perpetuating this idea that the Middle Ages is bad.

And what he says is the Middle Ages is the era of faith. And now in the modern period, we are in the age of reason. So any time that anyone was religious, things were bad. And now that's kind of hilarious because I'm like, I'm sorry, you're saying that the Romans were not religious. The guys who asked their magic chickens before they went out to battle, whether or not that wasn't religion. No, no, okay, just checking. I'm just checking in on that one, right? But what he kind of means is that people were Christian more particularly.

And so this is kind of positing this dichotomy, wherein medieval people are particularly bad at this. point in time. But again, that doesn't even really track with the early medieval experience because a lot of Europeans aren't Christian yet. So like explain why you're mad at them. I don't understand. We obviously need to concede that when the Roman Empire largely collapses, particularly in the West, you lose that huge administration machine that is producing documents, is writing things down, is quantifying stuff across the empire in order to be able to rule it. So we lose some of that. You also have to say that the success of the Vikings in a culture that doesn't really write things down, they use runes and they will occasionally write odd things, but they don't write chronicles in the way that we would like to see them written.

You get later sagas and all of that sort of stuff. But they're not cataloging the administrative machine of the way the Vikings are working. And as they expand to the east and the south and the west and everywhere else, think of the things they could have told us, but they just, writing it down wasn't culturally important. to them. And that doesn't mean that they're wrong. It means it's annoying for us because we don't have that stuff. It would have been great if they'd bothered to write it down all that time on the boats. You'd have thought someone could have kept a little travel log. So we are missing lots of the sources that we might see in the Roman period and that grow throughout the medieval

period, the monk chroniclers and then the citizen chroniclers and all of those kinds of things that come later. But even allowing for stuff like that, thinking of it as the Dark Ages can be misleading. By the end of the 7th century and into the 8th century, you've got Bede, sat there writing absolute masterpieces that 1,200 years later are still important pieces of work that survive to us today. And as you say, that's despite the fact that so much material has been lost through fire or destruction or theft or whatever else causes you to lose an ancient manuscript. And you put against that the quality of the jewelry that are found in Anglo-Saxon graveyards and stuff like that. You It's absolutely astonishing. How you can say this is in any way a cultural or intellectual

backward age, dark age, is beyond me. It just doesn't stack up to the evidence. And I think the archaeology is coming in to sort of compensate for the lack of the written sources in some places as well. As historians, the thing that we work with is texts, right? To be a historian is to say, oh, I don't know what were people writing. I'm going to analyze these things. To me, an archaeologist is to go find the cool stuff that's buried and then analyze that and we use each other's work and we're cribbing off each other's notes and we're, attempting to create a context that explains the past. But just because a culture doesn't write things down, doesn't mean they're stupid.

And that's an incredibly important point. You can have societies that do incredible stuff just through oral transmission. And that is completely valid, and it doesn't mean that anyone is more stupid. It just means that things are being done in a different way. And it is really easy for us as a society that privileges literacy and uses literacy for very many things. And hey, I love being literate. I think it's great. Really a huge fan of it.

But do I think that makes me somehow smarter than the average person in the 8th century? No, I do not. And indeed, we do see people, especially in the early Middle Ages, eventually really begin to privilege that again, right? Because you have all these incredible things happen. like the Carolingian Renaissance, which happens under Charlemagne, wherein everyone gets together and they're like, find as many bits of ancient texts as you can get and make as many copies as you can.

And also, this is the way that we're going to write. They come up with a new script called Carolingian minuscule that makes it really clear and easy to read everything. And suddenly you've got more Plato circulating. You've got more Aristotle circulating. So much so that during the Renaissance, when people went back in time and they said, I want to find the most pristine copy of Aristotle possible,

and I want to write like those people did. They're actually going back to 8th century and 9th century documents that were created under Charlemagne, and they make this new script called Humanist, which is just Carolyn Jean minuscule again, right? Because it was actually things done during the medieval period, the early medieval period, that allow us to know more about the past. So these are people who get it,

and they're doing their best in circumstances that are, kind of trying. You know, I'm sure that I wouldn't have the time to think on the level that they did if I was still having like to do all of my own crops. You know, like, come on. It's incredible stuff that they get done. Yeah. Put that in your pipe and smoke at Volta. And I think again, you can stack against it stuff like, you know, we did a really interesting episode on the podcast a while ago on Justinian. Byzantine emperor. So we have been quite Western European focused. You move a little bit further east. You've got the Byzantine Empire absolutely thriving in cultural terms, full of architecture and art that is beyond anything we build today.

And you look at Justinian, who puts together this kind of law code that becomes a template for all of Europe, almost ever since. So he's around in the mid-sixth century, and he writes a law code that spreads across Europe and is the basis for lots of the law codes across Europe still. You know, Napoleon will look at Justinian's law code and go, I'll have some of that. It's hugely influential. These aren't people who aren't thinking. These are people who are thinking, 1500 years ago that we haven't bettered today? Well, absolutely not. I mean, I think Justinian is really important to bring up here,

and Constantinople is really important to bring up, because we said it in a sort of throwaway manner. Rome didn't collapse because Constantinople was still there. And I would challenge anyone to get in a time machine and go to Constantinople in the 6th century and tell me Rome had fallen. And I think a really great example of this is actually a kind of violent one,

which is the Nika riots. in 532, where in several chariot teams, because there's four major chariot teams that everybody loves and follows in Constantinople, basically some members of the Greens and the Blues, the two largest factions get in trouble for something and they're meant to be hanged and then they escape. It's all very convoluted, right? There are huge riots as a result of this because everybody wants their boys to survive. And the resulting riots go on for days. Justinian and Theodora are almost captured by rioters. Theodora stands her ground and chides all of the nobles for, you know, wanting to make a break for it. But in the ashes of this, something like 10,000 people

are dead and huge parts of Constantinople are burnt down. And so why do I bring this up? As an example for why this is Roman, you're like, Eleanor, that's quite violent and doesn't sound great. My point is you've got 10,000 people around the shop that you can kill like in this city. You have so many people who are fans of chariot racing, that they are ready to just go to war over it. Tell me this isn't Roman. You've got a huge urban center. You've got people going to the chariot races. That's Rome, baby. I don't know what to tell you. And then alongside that cultural thriving still happening in Eastern Europe, you move slightly further east. And during this period, you've got the rise of Islam, which will lead to huge scientific, philosophical, medical advances in the spread of

of information in a way that wasn't happening in Christian Europe too. So there is a huge flourishing there that Europe will come to see as a threat. But if you're not a European Christian, what's going on in the Near East is incredibly exciting and vibrant and colorful and a new thinking is happening right there. You know, they are going back to lots of Greek texts and all of that kind of thing, but they are propagating it in a way that isn't happening anywhere else. And again, you see that cultural thriving that will spread across North Africa, make its way up into the Iberian Peninsula, create Al-Andalus, where you can still go and see lots of Arabic-influenced architecture today. And lots of the information that comes into Europe

later on will come from those worlds where they've been doing this stuff for a few hundred years. Just the Christians in Europe weren't particularly interested in it. Absolutely. You know, when we eventually get more of the classical texts back in Europe, they're often translated out of Arabic and then into Latin, often in Spain, what we would now call spade. And that is such an interesting period, you know, the rise of Islam and this expansion first under Muhammad, then you get the Rashidun Caliphate, which kind of expands things into Egypt and Libya and Persia. Then you get the Umiad Caliphate and they got over into Algeria and Morocco and Hispania and into Pakistan, right? So it's this huge cultural and religious

movement. And I think that it is so interested to think about Al-Andalus and how things go down on the Iberian Peninsula. Because what had been happening on the Iberian Peninsula previously, we actually know a lot about because the Visigoths were over in Spain. And they had created a nice little successor state to Rome that was so centralized and so well-administrated that when you get the expansion of Islam, you can topple it because it's got a central government. And you can just kind of come in and knock it over and then, hey, Spain is yours, right? Because there was a flourishing state there. That was just like, oh, well, we'll take all of the best of Rome. Thank you very much. But we are doing Christian things and we do happen to be visigothic,

but we usually kind of speak the Spanish form of Latin, and that's what's going on over here. And the umia just kind of come in and topple that over and then you get this new thing again. So you see all of these bright and interesting cultures that are coexisting not necessarily peacefully, but that are certainly thriving at this time. And that's ignoring the fact that we could then spread further into the world of, you know, China is one of the most significant powers in the world during this period, but would not recognize the notion of an early medieval period. There is stuff going on in Japan where they've had emperors for centuries.

We'll have emperors for centuries more. There's a bit of fracturing around society and all of that sort of stuff. But they wouldn't define it in the way that we do into a medieval period and then subdivide that. The early medieval period bears no relation to their histories. Absolutely none at all. And you tend to find that when we are looking at Japan or we are looking at China and any of these incredible cultures that are, again, highly literate. So we have got sources for days over there. What we tend to see is that people separate them into dynasties.

And you just talk about, you know, the Tang dynasty. happening. You don't say, oh, it's the early medieval period. And for us, we kind of have to do that with Europe because so many different things are happening in so many different places. So we can't just say, oh, hey, guys, remember that one family that was ruling because it isn't one contiguous imperial whole. That doesn't make it worse. It just makes it different. You know, it's absolutely fine to be English or Bavarian, right? It doesn't matter if it isn't under exactly the same hierarchy. But I suppose what starts happening in Europe is a kind of continued expansion of Christianity which makes us talk about it as a cultural whole. Because one of the things that's

happening here is the increasing Christianization of the European continent. Yeah, I was thinking a bit about is early medieval a useful term. We all use it. Is it actually useful? Does it mean anything can we pack anything significant into that? And I think I came up with kind of two things. So there is not quite the completion of Christianisation, because we'll still have lots of pagans up in the Baltics and all of that kind of thing. But you've got Denmark becomes Christian in the 10th century. That is a significant shift.

Iceland and Greenland will follow. And even Hungary around the millennium are becoming Christianised. Norway follows shortly after in the 11th century. So you have got that kind of watershed moment where Christianity is reaching the parts. it's never previously been able to reach. And alongside that, I think there is this period in the aftermath of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire of the fracturing of states into lots and lots of smaller things that then begin to come back together into larger states.

So Charlemagne will create an empire, but then that will fracture again and what will somehow will end up with, you know, what is now France and Germany and England. And I think all of those states are then quite keen to create their own mythology about the inevitability that they should exist. They were always going to exist. And they lean into the kind of the badness of division into smaller states because they want to reinforce the idea that if we think about England, because I would.

But once England becomes England, there is a couple of times when it looks like it's fracturing back into something like the heptarchy again. And you get this frantic effort at the centre to say, that's really, really bad. You need to stay as one. And there is no real reason. There's no proof that's bad.

what it means is I don't want to give up my control of this whole area, so I'm going to tell you that what happened then was terrible. All of these fighting warlords, and now you've just got one great benevolent king who is looking after all of you. Why would you want to look backwards? And I think you get some of that in the Frankish kingdoms as well. You know, they're keen to talk about their own inevitability, and this idea that they should exist props them up a little bit. I think we can drop into that early medieval period, this idea that everything was fracturing and coming

back together. And by the time we get to the end of the early medieval period, we've probably got a map of Europe at least that looks recognizable today. Yeah, absolutely, because you begin to have constituent parts that crop up. So, for example, you get the formation of the Holy Roman Empire in the early medieval period. Now, that isn't Charlemagne's empire. The Carolingian Empire, you know, it kind of sets a basis that people eye very greedily and they would like to get back to. It's a very nice empire you have over there, Charlemagne. Shame if someone was to come and take it. Shame if all of your sons were idiots and ruined this.

But you do have the rise of the Atonians in the German lands. And they are very consciously looking at what Charlemagne did and very consciously looking at what happened in Rome. And they managed to pull together a nice little empire. You know, they have a lot of the German lands. They cram Bohemia in the 9th century. You get down into the Etienne. Italian city states and you create something that we can recognize as the Holy Roman Empire. And you can

kind of, you know, if you want to ignore Czech people, which everybody does, it kind of resembles a little bit of something like Germany. And you have the Franks have kind of coalesced into something that is, yeah, that's French shaped. Yeah, sure. And there is an idea of England that has arisen at this time. You have people who are referring to themselves as angles. And so these, these things kind of let you know that you've got to the end of the early medieval period. But it also shows you that early medieval people were quite keen to create large entities based on what their ideas of how governing works and should work are about. Yeah, they're not big on devolution. Which I guess brings us, if we pinning our beginning date around 476, when are we going to pin our

end date? When does the early medieval period end? And they tear the calendar off and say, right, we're high medieval now. I guess that we tend to say traditionally about the year 1000. This is probably one of those historian things. You know, oh, it's just so neat. Look, oh, and then it's the year 1000. It's a nice round number. If you doesn't like a lovely round number. And everything's changed. But there are certain things that I would say are very different around there. For example, you've got these states that have come into being. You have architectures changing up a little bit, which is interesting. You have more large Romanesque buildings being built.

A big thing that you have is cities again. Everyone's like, remember cities. And not only do you have big cities again, but you have big cities in places where the Romans could never have cities. You know, like you've got huge cities that are developing in the German lands and the lowlands. Certainly you have in England more than just Londinian, imagine. I look forward to those days once again when there's more than just London. The other thing that I think is really important to talk about with this too is also you have

the formation of the church as a legal entity. Because there is this tendency that when you look at the Middle Ages, everyone goes, ah, the church, and it was very powerful, and it was this legal thing. And I'm like, well, baby, not in the early medieval period. The early medieval period was mostly, well, in the first place, you couldn't even get Christians

to agree on what Christianity was. Like, for a long time, the Aryan heresy, which is now a heresy, which basically, long story short, the Aryan heresy is thinking that the Trinity has kind of like a running order where God is biggest, and then your boy, JC and then the Holy Spirit. And that eventually loses out to what we think of as generalized Christianity now. But long-runned competition there. No one could really agree on that. You do have

the Pope in Rome going, hey, guys, I'm the Pope. It's me, the Bishop of Rome. I'm the Pope. I'm a really important guy. And everyone's like, you sure are. What an important guy. You know, but like the Pope in 752 can't tell someone in London what to do. Like, I mean, you might use it to be like, uh, I'm very fancy, I met the Pope, but it's not going to control whether you live or die. And if you go over to Constantinople, everyone's like, yeah, I don't care about him. We've got a patriarch. Yeah, this is the patriarch of Constantinople, and I

might call together the Patriarch of Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Alexandria to have a little confat. You know, famously, Charlemagne gets crowned by the Pope as emperor, but it's because they had to rescue the Pope because he was getting beaten down in the street in Rome

because people didn't like him. These aren't important guys in the way that they become in the high medieval period. And certainly by the year 1000, like them writing for hundreds of years being like, I am the Pope and I am very important, like has finally taken hold. And by the year 1000,

everyone goes, oh, that's the Pope. He's very important. And that's something that most Western Europeans can agree on. Whereas, tell you what, in 832,

they wouldn't all agree on that. Yeah, I think the rise of the Pope is incredibly significant kind of through the 11th century. And there is a lot of argument now about how apocalyptic people felt about the year 1000 as well. You know, are they thinking, you know, we've survived Y1K, we didn't all fall foul to some apocalyptic computer bug. You do get bits in the Bible that

suggests that Christchurch is going to reign for a thousand years. So when you get to the year a thousand, there's some monks in France are thinking, this could be a bit squeaky. I mean, it's probably not on everyone's mind. You know, not everyone was calendaring dates in those terms. You're talking in Regnal years of kings. Who knows if it's the year 1,000? But there is a small school of thought that that was going to be the end of Christ's reign. So it's fairly significant. You wake up on the 1st January 1001 and go, oh, we did it, we made it. It's not quite as bad as I thought it was going to be. So we'll start a whole new era around here.

I find it harder, I think, to hang the end of the early medieval period than I do the beginning. Because I think a hugely, entirely anglocentric view is to look at 1066. But we're often guilty of that. You sweep away the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England, replace it with the Norman kingdom, and that begins a new period in history because it begins a new period for England. that's an incredibly empire way of viewing history. But I think you can almost make an argument for stretching it towards the preaching of the First Crusade in 1095, which I think is a defining moment in the power of the Pope to put himself in charge of Europe

and to harness all of Christendom and to gather them together and point them somewhere else. That I think is a defining moment and it changes the focus of Christian Europe. They're not no longer talking about, you know, what date shall we have Easter on and who's the most important archbishop in England and whatever else. They're thinking there is an existential threat to the East that we can focus on. I mean, they're never very good at it because Christians love fighting Christians. It's a far less distance to travel to just go and bash your neighbor than to go all the way to hot, sweaty Jerusalem and do some fighting over there.

But there is an idea in kind of 1095 that you can kind of gather together all of Christian Europe under the Pope in a way that you hadn't ever been able to do before. You can almost make an argument for a cutoff point there. So I find the end of the early medieval period much harder to pin down than the beginning of it. Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think that the Crusades is a really big deal there because we have a unified idea of Christendom. And certainly also we have a kind of confused Eastern Rome when confronted with this. Because when the crusaders show up, everyone in Constantinople is like, what the hell is this?

You've got this new sort of fracturing where they're like, I'm not really sure I see myself. reflected in these guys who have showed up. Whereas before, you know, I think around 650, everyone would go, yeah, yeah, sure, that's a Christian. You know, so you have these new identities and ways of looking at religion that have coalesced. And I do think that that is sort of the high medieval period encapsulated on this idea of Christendom, these flourishing things. And I mean, I think that is as good a cutoff point as we can sort of get. But the point is, you know, You know, this is messy. You know, when we want to make and use terms like this, it's supposed to make it easier to have a conversation about it. It's supposed to make it easier to write about it or

flag these things up. And anytime you want to make something easier, what it's doing is obscuring the fact that it is a mess down there. You know, so we come up with terms like early medieval to just make it a little bit easier on everyone else, where, you know, it's like a swan gliding over the water. Below, you know, our feet are paddling furiously, attempting to say, oh, I don't know, is it high or early? It's difficult to say. It's like monks running away from Vikings on the seashores under the water.

But on top, we'll just call it the early medieval period and it will sound absolutely lovely. Isn't it gorgeous? It's like the dawn, the early morning, the birds are singing, all of that kind of stuff. I mean, it'd be great to hear from listeners as well what they think about this. Is early medieval period a useful way of talking about history? When should we think it begins?

When should we think it ends? Does it matter how precise we are? Is it a huge issue that we're massively Eurocentric when we talk about this form of periodization? Is there a better option? I don't know. The answer to any of those questions. It would great to hear what listeners think. I'll tell you one thing, Matt.

There's a worst term, which is dark ages. because if you use it, I will come to your house. In shorts. And I will arm wrestle you. That's the Eleanorianica promise. Okay. So, you know, I suppose a threat of arm wrestling is as good a place as any to leave this. It's been an absolute joy.

I can see my guard is coming to return me to myself. I'll be back on Friday. Goodbye. Bye. Matt, thank you so much for coming on and geeking out with me. This has been a delight as always. Thanks so much to Matt once again for joining me. and thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

If you are interested in the early Middle Ages, why not check out our episodes on Charlemagne, iconoclasm, or The Venerable Beat? Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com

forward slash subscription. There are some fabulous films that we've made for you to enjoy, including my podcast. recent celebration of medieval winter alongside the wonderful Matt Lewis. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all your friends and family that you've Gone Medieval. Otherwise, Matt Lewis will be back on Friday for more medieval action,

and I'll see you as always next Tuesday. Until next time.