The Civilization of the Middle Ages

Norman Cantor comes close to the standard set by Michael Grant for semi-popular history. Like Grant, he's expert at moving between abstract synthesis and particular detail. His history lives and breathes, but it isn't just one damned thing after another. There are causes and effects, however obscurely recognized by ourselves and even moreso by the people of the time.

He starts in the Late Roman period and takes his own sweet time getting the period we normally think of as “the Middle Ages” (say between 800 and 1300). His account also extends well into the Renaissance, and this expansive view of the Middle Ages is extremely valuable for placing the currents and causes of the times into the larger context of Western history.

There were certain problems Western Europe inherited from the Roman Empire, like what to do about those damned Germans. But also how to put the Church and State into amicable relation to each other, and how to find justification for law.

One of the things I found most interesting about the book was its role as tour-guide to Medieval experiments in collective organization. The general topic of collective organization is a difficult and under-studied one. In business we have the niche discipline of “theory of the firm”. In economics there have been studies of cooperatives, collectives and partnerships and why they fail in competition with corporations (in their post-1850's modern sense). Sociologists, political scientists and–as in this case–historians have weighed in as well. But no one has tried to pull the study of modes of collective organization into its own field, and it deserves it as one of the most important aspects of human life.

Monasteries were the canonically successful form of collective organization during the Early Middle Ages, and as such get considerable attention. I had not been aware just how important they had been for supplying armed force to kings in the first five centuries or so after the fall of Rome. They also lead the colonization of lands left fallow by the post-Roman depopulation, and served as nuclei for further intellectual and social development.

As time passed and wealth increased they were supplanted by towns, baronies and finally nation-states, although which developed where was contingent on many things.

The perpetual state of political fragmentation in Germany, for example, meant that baronial or princely estates were the dominant political form, and the inability of the Holy Roman Emperor to impose his will on Germany meant that national institutions never strongly developed. In an example of the almost-casual insights the book provides, it follows from this that the German Church was never strongly curbed by the national government, which led to excesses and bad behaviours that made Germany the most fertile ground for the Lutheran Reformation.

Cantor is particularly good at illuminating causality without imputing intent, and there is a nice section at the end of the book that discusses the “paradoxes” of the Late Middle Ages–the period between 1300 and 1500 when the world was transitioning into the humanist, individualist separation of Church and State, and laying the foundations of what would ultimately become the modern world. There were a bunch of social and intellectual forces that one might expect would produce changes that never happened. The growth of republican thinking and no discernible effect on the autocratic state. The massive depopulation attendant on the Black Death didn't produce an outpouring of pious literature, but in Cantor's words, “entertainment and soft-core pornography” (Boccaccio's Decameron).

He also understands the limits of understanding: in covering the period between 1300 and 1500 he acknowledges it is difficult to pick out any over-arching principles. It was a time of innovation, exploration, growth, decay and change, but compared to the relatively orderly progression of events and ideas that dominated the preceding centuries it is hard to see what is driving it.

In summary: I've not encountered any single-volume history of such a long period except maybe Grant's “The Ancient Mediterranean”, and I don't ever expect to again.