Five Things "Everybody Knows" About the Greeks

One thing's for certain — any historical fact that "everybody knows" probably stands little more than a 50/50 chance of being true. This applies to any period, but classical Greek culture has more than its fair share of popular fallacies. Here are five of the most common.

1. The Greeks were a calm, logical people, whose central tenet was "Nothing in excess".

Well, yes, that saying occupied a special place in Greek culture. And yes, the Greeks did create philosophy and logic — at least as far as the west is concerned.* But that doesn't mean it was their nature. After all, why place so much importance on a rule that comes naturally to you?

The Greeks could be logical, rational and measured seekers after balance and proportion. They could also be turbulent, violent, jealous, contentious drunkards. Yes, Greek culture involved a lot of drunkenness. Perhaps, if you're academically inclined, you've attended a symposium. Well, a symposium wasn't originally a staid, intellectual exercise, but a party designed for hard drinking and (hopefully) sex at the end. Alcohol played a big part in Greek life: getting drunk was a sacred rite, and they described it as "the lesser madness that prevents the greater."

They were hot-blooded and quarrelsome, and extremely competitive, whether it was athletes at Olympia or cities contending to give a more splendid gift to the gods than anyone else. The Greeks took everything to excess — including philosophy and logic.

2. The Greeks were too otherworldly to develop technology — they were only interested in pure thought.

One of the facts often advanced to support this is that the Greeks (specifically Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century AD) invented a working steam engine, but apparently didn't see any use for it. In fact, the reason Hero's steam engine remained nothing more than a curiosity wasn't any lack of practicality, but the simple fact that the Greeks didn't possess the metallurgy to create a heavy-duty version that wouldn't explode.**

The Greeks certainly made use of their inventions where they could, though often in a haphazard way. Archimedes is best known for jumping out of his bath naked after thinking up the principle that's named after him, but this wasn't an exercise in pure theoretical physics. It was actually his solution to the problem of proving to his king whether or not an object was pure gold or a fake. In fact, Archimedes's biggest breakthrough was actually an irrigation machine that was still in use into the 20th century.

Perhaps the most remarkable known piece of Greek technology is the Antikythera device (a fragment pictured above), a simple analogue computer created sometime around the 2nd century BC. Though fairly small (but small is good in computing) it was perhaps comparable to Babbage's difference engine — but the Greeks actually made and used their computer.

3. Greek buildings and sculptures were all gleaming white marble.

Of course they were, we've all seen them — in pictures, if not in life. And statues from the Renaissance to the Victorian era have paid homage to the iconic look.

In fact, the image is simply an accident of antiquity. By the time the great classical sculptures and temples were being rediscovered in the Renaissance, many of them were two thousand years old, and had been either weathered or buried in the earth. Both processes have a tendency to erode the paint from marble.

The classical Greeks would have found the idea of leaving marble bare very strange indeed. Buildings were painted in bright, eye-catching colours — reds, blues, golds — while marble statues were actually painted to look lifelike. It might seem odd to us, but remember none of these things were intended to look ancient, as the more recent equivalents were. They were contemporary and functional, and the Greeks wanted buildings they could use, and statues that actually looked like people.

4. All Greek women were invisible nobodies.

What's certain is that Greek culture as a whole wouldn't win any prizes for empowering women. However, the demeaning of women was by no means consistent throughout Greece or throughout the ancient period. It's known, for instance, that women could win fame as poets — notably Sappho (right), Erinna and Corinna, though there were others — and ironically it's been later scholars who've challenged whether some of their works "could have been written by women". The Greeks never doubted it.

In many cities, notably Athens, respectable women were indeed sequestered, although the limited evidence available suggests that a married woman was far from powerless within her home. Unrespectable women, on the other hand, were far more visible. A successful hetaira (courtesan) could become very much a part of high society, and some, such as Aspasia, mistress of the great Athenian leader Pericles, were extremely influential.

Not all women were left uneducated, either, especially by the time of the 4th century BC. It's recorded that Plato's Academy included at least two female students, and this wasn't by any means unique. As Greek culture developed into its later period, women could be politically powerful or highly regarded academically, such as Hypatia of Alexandria.

5. The Greeks considered everyone else as "barbarians".

Strictly speaking, this is completely true — for the simple reason that barbaros, the word's origin, was nothing more than the Greek word for a foreigner. It did involve a degree of condescension — the word allegedly derived from the perception that foreign speech sounded like "bar-bar-bar"*** — but it wasn't necessarily a term of abuse. Some "barbarians", such as the Persian king Cyrus the Great, were routinely held up by the Greeks as models of virtue.

The Greeks definitely considered their culture the best in the world, but it would be wrong to think of them as racist in the modern sense. Greece was a cultural entity, rather than either a geographical or racial one. The definition of a Greek was someone who spoke Greek, worshipped the Olympian gods and lived in a city-state. It wasn't irrelevant where your ancestors had come from, but it wasn't all important either.

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There are many other misconceptions about the Greeks, both from those who ignore their failings and from those who ignore their virtues, not to mention those who've simply learnt their history from Hollywood. They were a turbulent, contradictory people, who created great beauty and committed atrocities. They certainly don't offer a model of how we should live, but perhaps what they do offer is a model of how we can search for a way to live. Even if — as the Greeks did more often than not — we end up getting it wrong.

 

* Globally, the Greeks and the Chinese were about neck and neck. Of course, there are many cultures that might well have developed sophisticated philosophy, but didn't leave records we can read to confirm it.

** Other inventions by Hero include a vending machine and a programmable self-driving cart.

*** There's a widespread myth that it's actually a Roman word derived from the Latin barbus, meaning beard. The Romans adopted the word from Greek, and were far more responsible for giving it its current meaning. The Greeks used it long before, and a) the Greek word for beard is completely unrelated, and b) many Greek men wore beards and (quite rightly) considered them refined and dignified.

What Is Civilisation?

If you write secondary world fantasy, the chances are that you'll be creating civilisations for your stories. It's possible, of course, to write exclusively about nomadic hunter-gatherers, but most fantasy involves civilised nations and cities.

So what is civilisation? We all know it when we see it — or do we? Most of us (and this certainly includes me) talk about customs and behaviour we approve of as "civilised" and those we disapprove of as "uncivilised". It's even possible, the way the word's generally used, to argue that those nomadic hunter-gatherers might be more "civilised" than us.

That's not what the word means, though. It's nothing to do with how a society treats its people, whether it's spiritually aligned with its environment, or even whether people are polite to one another. Fundamentally, a civilisation is a society that has cities.

It's a lot more complex than that, of course. Perhaps the best way to define what civilisation is would be to define what factors cause its development.

Food Surplus & Specialisation

The first stage to a civilisation developing is, quite simply, that a society produces more food than it needs. It's simple, when you think about it. If it takes every man, woman and child's work simply to prevent the community from starving, that's all they're going to do. They'll get other things done in what little spare time they have, whether that's making clothes or repairing tools, and they may even have just enough energy left to make music or tell tales in the evening, but no more.

If there's a food surplus, though, everything's different. The person who's best at mending tools will start mending everyone's tools, and they'll have enough spare food to give to this person in return. The same for the person who's best at making clothes. Then again, if you have more food than you need for now, you'll need somewhere to keep it, and specialists will start making pots and other containers.

Before you know it, you'll be realising there are all kinds of other services you don't know how you lived without. Perhaps, eventually, you might even start giving someone food so they can concentrate on making the music or telling the stories.

Merchants and Traders

So you've started swapping your spare food for services your neighbours can offer, but you still have some left. What else can you do with it?

Well, the chances are your area won't produce everything you could possibly want. Perhaps another region has different food you'd like to try. Perhaps it produces some material that makes better clothes. Perhaps it's a little in advance of you and has wonderful manufactured goods to sell.

Trade seems to go back a very long way — there's evidence of it in Palaeolithic times, long before civilisation — but certainly the food surplus and the growth of specialisation gives it a new impetus. Before long, you're relying on all kinds of imported products, and producing many other goods besides food to export.

Towns and Organisation

It's all a bit of a mess, though. Specialist craftworkers are scattered through countless villages; merchants have to make long journeys just to gather up their merchandise, and outside traders have to do the same to find buyers.

Sooner or later, centres begin to grow up. These may be the most prosperous villages, and the specialists will gradually gather there, while these places can conveniently act as trading centres, with produce brought in and merchants doing their deals in a fixed place.

Eventually, these growing towns will cease to take part at all in food production, and must rely on being fed by the villages that still do produce the food. This takes organisation, as does having such a large number of people living in close proximity, not to mention the foreigners coming in to exchange goods. Someone has to run all this, and usually this results in the emergence of a king and the people he relies on for support. Not always, though: for instance, some ancient cities — such as Mohenjo-daro on the Indus (above) — seem to have been ruled by merchant oligarchies.

Going to War

Warfare, in a very general sense, may predate civilisation, and it's possible its motivation could have been as a substitute for the Palaeolithic tribal hunts, which had become impractical when large prey like the mammoth died out. War certainly gives the same opportunities — communal strategy, action and comradeship, together with the chance for young men to show individual feats of skill and courage.

Early warfare, though, was probably small-scale raiding, and it took organised civilisation to initiate wars of conquest or ideology. In many cases, the ruling classes would be specialists in war, although it doesn't seem to have been a universal practice. Some civilisations — like Mohenjo-daro again — seem to have relied on commercial influence rather than force of arms, while there's evidence of others, such as the Olmec, using ritual games rather than war to settle disputes.

Still, the growth of warfare is usually part of the growth of a civilisation. Whether it relied on a specialist military class, or whether the citizen body was militarised, the city or kingdom would have prepared for war.

Religion, Ritual and Monuments

A fundamental requirement of any stable society is that most of its members must get something out of it. Not everyone, necessarily — if it's a slave-based economy, for instance — but if the majority of the population don't feel invested in the system, it's unlikely to last.

This can often be achieved through religious rituals. Like war, religion is older than civilisation, but it seems to have been when it was brought into organised cities that it developed codes and hierarchies. Where before you might have made a personal offering to the guardian spirits of a place, you now took part in communal ceremonies that both affirmed that you were part of something greater and taught you what you place was in that greater whole.

Not all communal rituals are overtly religious, although often religion lies behind them. The Athenian theatre was a crucial ritual to bring the city together, and a whole range of sports have been important in forging a sense of unity and cultural identity. As they still are, of course.

Monuments tend to fulfil the same kind of need, whether they're religious or political in nature (or both, of course). The real cultural of significance of the great monuments, from Stonehenge (left) to the Pyramids, is that they'd be impossible without a massive level of organisation. It's not only the logistics, but also the ability to take vast numbers of workers — slave or free — out of food production and feed them while they're building.

The size and permanence of many of these monuments may be a statement by rulers or priests, but they're also a source of national pride, a statement by the whole civilisation of their importance.

The Rise and Fall of Civilisation

Most of us think of history in chunks. We learn that the "end of the Roman period" was 476 AD (or 410 in Britain) and that mean that Roman civilisation vanished and was replaced by something unrelated. And it can seem even more like that when we have only archaeological snapshots here and there, as in the pre-Columbian Americas, or the early Middle East.

Now, I'm not saying that civilisations never disappear completely, but what usually happens is that they go into a decline and then mutate into something different. A civilisation, as we've seen, is only as good as what it offers most of its people. If it's no longer offering the prosperity and communal pride it did before, the people are going to look elsewhere for their model.

This certainly happened to Roman civilisation. The empire had been in decline for a very long time before the 5th century, and it would have been completely unrecognisable to Augustus, who founded it. Economic recession was making the cities gradually less viable, resulting in more and more "Romans" (a largely meaningless term by then, since few had any connection with Italy) moving to the country, either to own estates or to work on them.

This change in lifestyle gathered pace, until the cities, if not entirely abandoned, became peripheral to the culture. At the same time, other peoples and their cultures — the so-called barbarians — were looking far more attractive. In any case, by now many people were subjects of barbarian warlords, so they gradually began to learn the new languages, wear new types of clothes, convert to the new religions.

By the time the cities were growing again and civilisation was back, the descendants of the "Romans" were identifying themselves as "English", "Franks" or a whole variety of other peoples. Their cultures looked different, but they hadn't arisen out of nothing, and much of what was useful from Roman civilisation had slipped seamlessly into the new order.

There's a Catch?

It's not actually quite as simple as I've made it seem. You wouldn't really expect it to be, would you, when we're talking about human beings?

In reality, civilisation doesn't always behave the way we'd expect. It's always been assumed, for example, that the first cities developed as centres for an agricultural hinterland, yet the earliest walled city known (the oldest phase of Jericho, around 9400 BC) dates from before agriculture had fully developed. This was the Mesolithic era, a transitional phase when hunting was mutating into herding and gathering into growing. Perhaps Jericho's importance was actually as a centre for trading hides. Or maybe it was a stock town, if herding had developed enough.

Jericho is the earliest city to have been found, but there's circumstantial evidence that the fertile plain that's today the Sahara Desert may have also been developing towards civilisation at a similar time. Of course, any remains that might have been left would be buried deep under the sands, and it can't be automatically assumed that getting on the road to civilisation will always result in the finished product.

In any case, can we always recognise civilisation from the remains? Stone buildings are pretty difficult to dispute, but more perishable materials such as brick, wood or earth can serve contemporary needs just as well, and are no less "civilised". The culture that built Stonehenge, for instance, undoubtedly had the social organisation and the food surplus to undertake the venture, but as far as we know they built no cities. Were they simply a different kind of cities that have left no trace? Or did that particular society use the building-blocks of civilisation in a radically different way?

Perhaps most intriguing of all, there's evidence of places — in central France, for instance — where at periods of the Palaeolithic era, long before agriculture or cities, societies not only seemed to have had specialisation and trade, but to have had them on an almost industrial scale. Was this a lost civilisation, long before any civilisation should have existed? Or was it a culture that had some of the conditions of civilisation but never developed civilisation itself? It's doubtful that we'll ever know, but it's intriguing to speculate.

Still, in spite of the exceptions, the rule still more or less stands. If you want to create a convincing civilisation for your secondary world, the chances are it'll have had these preconditions — food surplus, specialisation, trade — and will have developed at least most of the typical characteristics — cities, social organisation, hierarchy, warfare, religion, social rituals and monuments.

And, from there on, each one will be unique. That's the joy of history.

Nation or Tribe?

A hundred years ago, it all seemed very simple.  Europe had always had civilised nations, and the this description was grudgingly extended to a few other cultures — China, India, the Middle East — where it couldn't sensibly be denied.  Everywhere else, especially sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Columbian America, had primitive tribes, and that was that.

This view of the world has been largely eroded among historians and lay-people informed enough to seek out the better kind of historical documentary*, but it's still a common enough belief, and it's alive and well in the worlds fantasy writers create.  You have your civilised, sophisticated nations menaced by your primitive tribes. Nations have cities, tribes have settlements; natives have kings (if they're not republics), tribes have chiefs; nations have laws, tribes have customs; nations have religions, tribes have superstitious rituals.

But that's a gross oversimplification, caused partly by cultural bias and partly by misunderstanding about what's genuinely necessary for civilisation.

History is written by the winners, and so is the definition of civilisation.  From Rome to the Conquistadors to the colonial powers of the 19th and 20th centuries, conquerors have essentially said "The definition of civilisation is anything exactly like us.  These people aren't like us, so they can't be civilised."

Except that they also ignore or make excuses for all evidence to the contrary.  A good example of this is the ruins of Great Zimbabwe (right) in the modern country of the same name.  Until relatively recently, it was generally accepted that this must have been an Arabic outpost.  There was absolutely no evidence to support the idea, except that "Africans couldn't build structures like this, therefore it couldn't have been African in origin."

Which, of course, is nonsense.  There were highly developed ancient civilisations from the upper Nile to West Africa, not to mention the Egyptians, who were at least as much an African civilisation as a Mediterranean one.  It's become increasingly clear that the civilisation who built Great Zimbabwe spread widely through south-eastern Africa, including a major Indian Ocean trading port, and was completely local in origin.

This process of marginalising other cultures has been repeated throughout the world, sometimes cynically and deliberately, sometimes from genuine lack of understanding about what is and isn't necessary for a society to be called a civilisation.

Fundamentally (and linguistically) civilisation means a society that's at least partly urbanised, and urbanisation has to start with a food surplus.  A society that can afford to feed people not directly involved in food-production can begin producing specialists: artisans, traders, artists, soldiers, priests, nobility, royalty.  Urban life also requires a level of organisation impossible under "tribal chiefs" or "tribal elders".

There have to be centres of concentrated population, but these don't have to look exactly like a modern city, or even the modern concept of an ancient city.  There's a tendency to put an undue emphasis on stone or brick buildings, for the simple reason that they leave the most obvious remains.  The traces left by wooden or mud structures are hard to detect, but these can actually be just as effective building techniques for their time and place and don't in any way indicate a "lower" level of society.

The way history has always been taught, for example, says that the "barbarian"** peoples of Gaul, Britain and Germany had no cities before the Romans "civilised" them, partly because the Romans said they didn't and partly because no impressive stone buildings have been found.  What they did have were "hill-forts" like Maiden Castle (left) in Dorset.  These are often thought of as purely defensive structures, but Maiden Castle, for instance, was an area of around 47 acres, surrounded by a palisade and earthworks containing within it homes, workshops and numerous other specialist buildings.  It's believed to have been the seat of a powerful ruler who dominated the countryside all around.

In other words, a king in his city.

In much the same way, our comparisons of social institutions between traditionally civilised and traditionally uncivilised societies tend to be skewed by our preconceptions.  Many cultures, for instance, believe that disease is caused by spirits or demons, and it's easy to smile at the naivety.  Consider, though: they believe the cause of disease is invisible entities invading the body.  So do we.  They use the words spirt and demon, we use the words virus and bacteria, but they're all just labels put on things most of us have never actually seen.

Of course, I'm not implying these cultures have a sophisticated microbiology of their spirits and demons, and I'd certainly rather be in the hands of a modern hospital than of a shaman.  Then again, I wouldn't be that thrilled about being treated by a western doctor from the 1950s, either.  The point is that the assumptions we make about the relative value of beliefs are rarely disinterested.

Or take military forces.  The Zulus who faced the British army in South Africa are often characterised as just a horde of warriors — of course, what else could African natives be?  In fact, the Zulus had one of the best organised and disciplined armies in history, which developed out of a highly sophisticated civilisation.  It just didn't look like a European civilisation or a European army.

Human civilisation is far more common than is often assumed.  It's found all over Asia and Africa, and not just in the admitted-by-necessity areas.  The Cambodian city of Angkor***, which flourished during the European middle ages, is now believed to have been as extensive as modern New York City, while pottery dating evidence suggests that civilisation may have arisen in West Africa even earlier than in its traditional cradle, the Middle East.

The Americas were full of civilisation.  Everyone knows about the Aztecs, Maya and Incas, who are allowed the status of bizarre, barbaric civilisation, but they were the tip of the iceberg.  There was a swathe of civilised cultures from Bolivia up to the Mississippi, rising and falling, interacting and replacing one another.  The Mississippi culture, whose capital was in roughly the same location as St Louis, was one that took sophisticated archaeological techniques to find because it built in wood and earth rather than stone, but it had every hallmark of civilisation.

It wasn't the only one north of the Rio Grande.  It's no accident that many of the Native peoples refer to themselves as nations.  Many, such as the Iroquois, were anything but primitive in their organisation.  I've also read that the east coast of what became the USA was not only heavily populated before the smallpox epidemic devastated it, but its people left many intact towns and villages, which the settlers merely moved into.  I haven't been able to confirm this from an authoritative source, but I'd be intrigued to know more about it.

There are societies, of course, who fit the description of "tribes", and this isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Cultural success, like evolutionary success, can involve either adapting the environment to your needs or adapting yourself to the environment.  Many peoples have had no need for civilisation, because they're perfectly adapted to live in their surroundings.

Still, next time you're tempted to dismiss a culture as primitive because it's nothing like your own, try walking around and looking at it from all angles.  You might be surprised how civilised it really is.

 

* I can heartily recommend the BBC series Lost Kingdoms of Africa, Lost Kingdoms of South America and Lost Kingdoms of Central America.

** The word barbarian is simply the anglicised version of the Greek word for foreigner, which didn't necessarily imply lack of civilisation.  The Romans used it rather liberally considering that they, according to the original meaning, were barbarians themselves.

*** The best-known part of the city, the stunning temple of Angkor Wat, was only its centrepiece, like the Vatican within Rome.

Middle Ages? What Middle Ages?

There seems to be fixed idea that, at least until very recently, most fantasy has been set in a mediaeval-type setting. This is almost an article of faith to many people in the face of all evidence, and shows that they have very little understanding of what mediaeval* really means.

Some fantasy is certainly based on mediaeval Europe, from William Morris to George R. R. Martin, but it's only one of many models that traditional fantasy authors have used (though it's undeniable that most have been centred on Europe or the Middle East).

Tolkien is often cited as an author who uses a mediaeval model, but in fact there's very little mediaeval, as usually understood, in Lord of the Rings. The Shire is an idealised version of 19th century England without guns; Rohan is early Anglo-Saxon; the Dwarves are ancient Norse; Gondor has a distinctly Babylonian feel, although I suspect Tolkien was going for Solomon's Israel; and some of the other cultures, such as Lorien, have no real-world model.

Similarly, most of the pulp fantasy of the 30s and 40s, such as the Conan stories, tend to be set in a mashed-up imagining of the classical world and the pre-classical Middle East. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser's environment, on the other hand, had a lot in common with the Renaissance Mediterranean. And so on. Some mediaeval influence was there, but it was only one type of setting among many.

The problem seems to be that it's often assumed any time before gunpowder is mediaeval, but really the term only refers to a few hundred years (for part of which gunpowder was in use) on one of the world's smallest continents. To give some sense of perspective, besides Europe, civilisation has existed (before modern colonisation) in Asia, Africa, North America and South America**, and the earliest known civilisation (i.e. people living in a city) was over 11,000 years ago in the town later known as Jericho.

In reality, the Middle Ages (also known as the mediaeval period) didn't exist. It was a sneering term coined in the Renaissance to dismiss western Europe between the fallen of the classical world (good) and the birth of the new age (nearly as good). In the same way, the sometimes exquisite art and architecture of the period was described as Gothic, implying it was the work of barbarians.

The period the Renaissance scholars thus consigned to the scrapheap actually covers many different cultures, over both its timespan and its geographical distribution, although there are certain generalisations that can be made.

There isn't even any clear agreement as to when it started or finished. To some extent, of course, all historical periods are just convenient places for historians to start and finish their books. Some periods have more obvious beginnings and ends, but it's rare to have such a significant change that people living at the time would notice it.

My own view, with all possible disclaimers in place, is that the Middle Ages (to the extent that they existed at all) started in 732 AD*** and finished in 1453. On a Tuesday. At teatime.

Everyone knows that the Roman Empire fell in the 5th century. Except that it didn't. The Roman Empire had been changing and evolving throughout its lifetime, most obviously after the reforms of Diocletian (right) in the late 3rd century, and by this time it consisted mainly of barbarian warlords controlling their own territories and paying nominal fealty to the emperor. When the last western emperor was deposed in 476, they just carried on the same way, except that they paid even more nominal fealty to the eastern emperor in Constantinople, where the Roman Empire continued till the 15th century.

For the most part, the barbarian warlords were proud of being part of the empire — they fought the legions internally, as when the Emperor Honorius double-crossed the Visigoths and they besieged Rome, but they'd no wish to tear it down. Well, except for the Huns, but they were a rival empire, not a ravening horde.

Nothing substantially changed. Civilisation and culture had been declining through the later part of the imperium and continued to do so, but western Europe didn't really move on to anything new till the Frankish leader Charles Martel (below) smashed the Moors at the Battle of Poitiers in 732.

There are two reasons why this was crucial. For one thing, although Charles was never actually king of the Franks, his son was crowned and his grandson became Charles the Great — Charlemagne. By the time the Carolingian dynasty had played out, only a few generations later, the map of Europe had changed, the first signs of our modern nations were stirring, and the concept of empire had been updated.

The second reason was the reason why Charles Martel had won the battle: a radical new type of fighting-man he'd copied from the Byzantine Empire, called the knight.

Aristocrats in older civilisations are sometimes described as knights, but this is retrospective. The knight as we know him first arose in Persia, due to the introduction of stirrups, which made heavy cavalry possible for the first time. Unfortunately, the equipment and, in particular, the great war-horses were expensive to keep up. The Persians solved the problem by imposing crippling taxes on the cities, with the result that, when the Arabs invaded, the cities opened their gates and went over to a more reasonable enemy.

The Byzantines, learning from this, came up with a new idea: to give each knight a parcel of land and let him pay his own way. It was this concept Charles adopted, and so the feudal system was born.

The feudal system was, if anything was, the central institution of the Middle Ages, and any fantasy setting that doesn't have it can't be described as mediaeval. In reality, it was two separate but complementary systems. One was a contract the king made with his nobles and knights, whereby he granted them land and they undertook to fight for him when called on. In fact, many knights were more interested in running their estates, and it became increasingly common during the period for knights to pay money in lieu of service, which the king would use to hire mercenaries.

The other, which had existed since the later Roman period, was manorial serfdom. Serfs were distinct from slaves in that, though they weren't free to leave or refuse to work, they belonged to a manor, not to a person. They had rights, too, although that varied considerably from kingdom to kingdom. English serfs tended to have most rights. The feudal system wasn't used in England till after 1066, and many of the people's ancestral rights were restored a few decades later. Serfs in other kingdoms were usually a lot worse off, but the lord of the manor didn't legally have power of life or death over them. Though the question was whether anybody bothered with the law.

And what about the end of the Middle Ages? 1453 was the year that Constantinople, the last remnant of the Roman Empire, fell to the Turks. The immediate significance was that many scholars and artists fled to the west, fuelling the already growing Renaissance in learning and the arts.

In fact, the Renaissance wasn't a sudden development, and the Middle Ages weren't quite as bleak a period for learning as they're often painted, although certainly a low point. Knowledge had been seeping in, especially from the Islamic world, at that time the most culturally advanced civilisation in the west. Art certainly took a huge step forward in the Renaissance, but it's been suggested that the biggest academic change was that they started following Plato instead of Aristotle.

Besides the Renaissance, though, the mid-15th century marks a point where most of the characteristics of the age that followed were already being established. Gunpowder had come to stay and was making the transition from field guns to hand guns, rendering knights obsolete. Gutenberg was setting up his printing press in Mainz, and the voyages of discovery were well under way, with the Portuguese venturing down the African coast en route to India, leading the Spanish eventually to try another direction.

Social mobility was growing, too, as was religious dissent. Neither were anything like as absent from the Middle Ages as is often assumed, but both increased immensely after the Black Death. The mediaeval Church was either divided or powerless for much of the period, and there'd been radical preachers from at least the 12th century saying essentially the same as Luther did four hundred years later. By the 15th century, religious movements led by Wycliffe, Ball, Huss and many others became bigger and better organised. Luther was just the most successful of these.

There had been towns and cities throughout the Middle Ages, and industries had flourished there. It wasn't easy to escape from serfdom, except by going into the Church, but those who did had the chance of getting rich. Again, after the Black Death the feudal restraints became untenable, due to the shortage of manpower making labour a marketable commodity. The powers that be fought a long rearguard action against change, but it was becoming inevitable.

The Middle Ages were a long and varied period, even leaving out everything that was happening outside western Europe, and almost everything changed in their course. The armour worn by knights, for instance, went from ring-mail sewn onto leather to the familiar suits of plate armour (which were not too heavy to manoeuvre in), driven by changing weapon technology.

At any given time, none of the typical mediaeval institution were present everywhere, and some areas — Scandinavia, for instance — were barely affected till very late in the period.

So, if you want to create a fantasy setting "based on the mediaeval period", by all means do — you'll be in good company — but decide what you actually mean by that, and do plenty of research on the specific country and era that interests you. On the other hand, if all you want is for your hero to wield a sword or use a bow and arrow, you have an entire world and eleven thousand years of civilisation to choose your model.

 

* The original and most accurate spelling of the word is mediaeval, but medieval is now common and acceptable. Seeing the word (as I all too often have) spelt midevil makes me want to stick my head in a bucket of water and scream. Please don't make me do that.

** Pre-settlement Australia can't really be described as civilised, though that doesn't make its cultures any less rich and fascinating.

*** Yes, I use BC and AD, which have served perfectly well for the past 1500 years. Get over it.

The Lottery of History?

In a couple of months, the Scottish people hold a referendum to decide whether they want to continue being a part of the United Kingdom or revert to being an independent country. I'm not going to discuss the pros and cons of the arguments here. That's for the people of Scotland to decide, which doesn't include me.

It strikes me, though, that an event like this throws up a whole slew of opinions about what history really says. Does it show that Scotland is a discrete nation and should never be anything else, invoking national heroes like Robert Bruce (left)? Or does it show that the absorption of Scotland (and Wales) into a united Britain was part of an inevitable process that began with the unification of small kingdoms like Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria? Both are plausible interpretations.

It's essentially the same dispute (though I trust a lot less violent) as the war that broke up Yugoslavia (and the current conflict in Ukraine, for that matter). There, some believed in the ideal of a single nation for all southern Slavs. Others considered that the constituent parts had a historical right to self-determination. Both sides were convinced that history was on their side.

History isn't what happened, it's what we believe happened — or, as Sellar and Yeatman put it, it's what you remember. On the whole, what we remember is what fits with the world as it is now, or even with the world as we'd like it to be, but the reality is that many events that seem inevitable now happened largely by chance.

Take Portugal, for instance. We're used to the map of Europe that shows Spain taking up most of the Iberian Peninsula, with Portugal along the coast. That's just how it is — they have different languages, after all.

At the beginning of the 15th century, Iberia was divided into a number of kingdoms, principally Aragon in the east, Castile in the middle and Portugal in the west. To the north lay the small kingdom of Navarre, while the remains of Moorish Al-Andalus hung on in the south. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabella of Castile (right) effectively united their kingdoms, although they continued to rule separately in name till both were dead. The new kingdom of Spain absorbed both Navarre and Al-Andalus, and in 1580 Phillip II of Spain also acquired Portugal by marriage. The peninsula was united.

In some ways, there was no more reason why Portugal should remain independent of Spain (effectively Castile) than that Aragon should. Portugal had been a separate kingdom for centuries — so had Aragon. Portugal had its own language — so did Aragon (Catalan). On the other hand, in the last 150 years of its independence, Portugal had become a unique world power. It led the voyages of discovery to Africa, India and the unknown islands of the Atlantic, and established new trade routes which Spain, England and the Netherlands largely followed. Maybe that was what made Portugal reassert its identity and seize its independence again in 1640.

Spain and Portugal have a great deal in common in terms of history, culture and heritage, but you'd think two very different countries like France and Germany were always going to be separate. Maybe they were, but it wasn't as simple as you might think, and it's never been entirely settled where the border lies.

Both had essentially been part of the Frankish kingdom. The Franks were a Germanic people (the modern descendent of their language is Dutch) who conquered large swathes of western Europe. When their greatest king Charlemagne (left) died, his empire stretched from the Atlantic to the Elbe, and the North Sea to Rome. He left the lot to his son Louis, but Louis was unfortunate enough to have three surviving sons. It was a continuing curse of the Franks that every surviving king's son expected an inheritance. Sometimes this was settled by the venerable institution of fratricide, but at times the kingdom had to be divided.

At the Treaty of Verdun in 843, three of Louis's sons carved the empire up between them. Charles had the western portion, which formed the basis of France, although it didn't include the whole modern nation. Louis* got the east, which included a good deal of present-day Germany and Austria. The eldest son, Lothair, however, received a kingdom that included northern Italy, Switzerland, the Rhineland, Alsace-Lorraine and the Low Countries. An insanely impractical realm, even though it contained the empire's two capitals (Aachen and Rome) and the most important trade artery in western Europe (the Rhine).

During these struggles, Charles and Louis had made an alliance against Lothair, binding themselves by oaths at Strasbourg. They made the oaths in the traditional way to each other's armies, which meant they were in that army's vernacular, and some unknown scribe of blessed memory copied them down verbatim. As a consequence, Louis's oath to Charles's army is the earliest surviving text in Old French (a development of Gaulish Latin) while Charles's oath to Louis's army is likewise the earliest surviving text in Old High German.

OK, that seems to be arguing against what I'm saying. Although it took centuries for France to coalesce into a nation and longer for Germany, the Partition of Verdun essentially created to two countries we know today, and it seems a natural division, given the linguistic difference. To some extent that's true, but it could easily have happened otherwise. What if they'd chosen to divide on a north-south basis, instead of east-west? What if Louis only had one surviving son? What if the Franks had a sane law of succession? France and Germany might never have existed separately.

There's another twist in this tale, though. Remember Lothair, with his bizarre Middle Kingdom? He too divided his lands between his three surviving sons** and much of it fell apart into small provinces whose fealty was batted between French and German kings***. This included the Rhineland, Alsace and Lorraine, which remained the leading bones of contention between France and Germany right down to Hitler's territorial claims in the 1930s. That was all Lothair's fault.

The existence of many present-day nations is by no means inevitable. It was far from certain, for instance, that the American colonies would stick together once the euphoria of winning their freedom had settled down. Several alternative suggestions had considerable backing, including a loose federation (perhaps a little like the modern European Union) and an arrangement with several smaller unions. It seems unthinkable now, but the Federalists like Washington (right) won because they were better organised, not because they had wider support.

The situation is perhaps seen at its most extreme in Africa, where most modern nations (with a few notable exceptions) are purely the result of the Berlin Conference in 1885, where European politicians drew random lines over the map of Africa. Most of the larger nations and a good many of the smaller ones have no internal reason to exist and are struggling, with varying degrees of success, to maintain an identity as modern nations against the forces of history, not with it.

So what does any of this prove? Well, perhaps that the weight of history does play an important role in determining national identities, but it's not always obvious which way history is pushing. Perhaps no nation has a destiny to exist or to have the borders it does, and it should depend entirely which solution suits most people best at the time. Or perhaps a sense of national identity should come into it.

One thing is certain, though. Whatever you might think history determines as inevitable, someone is going to believe the exact opposite just as fervently. Until we learn to respect that fact, the same wars and conflicts are going to carry on.

 

* The Carolingian dynasty apparently only knew four or five male names. It can get very confusing.

** Louis, Lothair and Charles. Of course.

*** For most of the following thousand years, the King of the Germans went under the guise of Holy Roman Emperor, but the title did exist.

The Coincidences of War

A hundred years ago this Saturday, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand (left) was visiting Sarajevo in Bosnia. He was heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of which Bosnia was a part, although there was a strong movement in favour of joining Serbia. A group of young Serbian nationalists attempted to assassinate Franz Ferdinand, but the attempt was a failure. One of them, however, Gavrilo Princip, later found the Archduke's car again by sheer chance, when the driver first took a wrong turning and then stalled the engine. Princip took his opportunity and shot dead both Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie.

Rightly or wrongly, Austria believed that Serbia had been directly involved in the assassination and declared war. Austria's ally Germany entered the war but, somewhat irrelevantly, promptly invaded Belgium. Since Belgium's independence was assured by treaty, an alliance including the UK, France, Italy and Russia declared war on Germany. Within six weeks of the assassination, all Europe was at war, and remained so for more than four years, gradually encompassing the rest of the world.

Or arguably, for the next hundred years. The War to End All Wars led, as Sellar & Yeatman put it, to the Peace to End All Peace, the Treaty of Versailles, whose provisions not only led directly to the Second World War, but also to conflicts that are still being played out in many parts of the world, notably the Middle East. Some historians talk not about the First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War etc., but the Great Twentieth Century War.

It might seem an odd way for a world war to begin, but there've been stranger flashpoints for wars. In 1739, a Royal Navy captain called Jenkins was captured by the Spanish and had his ear cut off. An outraged Britain declared what became known as the War of Jenkins' Ear. In 1618, the Defenestration of Prague (right) — the throwing of three imperial representatives out of an upper-storey window — sparked of the Thirty Years War, which lasted till 1648 (not a given — the Hundred Years War lasted 116 years). And, of course, the most famous war that may or may not have actually happened was started by the abduction of the Queen of Sparta. Jonathan Swift satirised absurd reasons for war in Gulliver's Travels, in which a vicious conflict is fought over whether an egg should be opened at the big or little end.

The majority of fantasy novels involve war in one way or another, but their causes are usually rather banal: a bastion of civilisation is threatened by barbarians, a tyrannical warrior-king wants a bigger empire, two dynasties claim the same throne, an Evil Overlord wants to rule the world simply because he's Evil… and so on.

As anyone who's studied history knows, the most common reason by far for wars is the desire for economic advantage. A country might want to control important trade-routes, dominate the markets in a particular area, or just have access to the rich resources of the conquered lands. The last was especially true of European expansionism from the 15th century onwards, in Asia, Africa and the Americas.

The rise and fall of the Roman Empire provides an excellent example. In general, the Romans invaded far-flung lands because either they controlled vital trade-routes, or they possessed mineral wealth (that was certainly true of Britain, in particular its tin resources) or because it provided fertile lands to back up the populist policy of handing out free bread to everyone in Rome.  And, a few centuries later, the barbarian tribes who smashed their way into the empire did so because they wanted to share in its wealth. Not, as is common in fantasy, because civilisation was morally abhorrent to them. Most of them liked what they saw.

Of course, there are many other reasons why countries and peoples go to war: ideological and religious, security, revenge against old enemies, or just plain love of conquest and glory. Still, scratch the surface and you'll probably find economics. Alexander the Great (left) is usually portrayed as conquering for the sake of conquest, but the fact remains that the Persian Empire was not only incredibly rich, but also controlled the routes by which fabulous spices and fabrics came from the mysterious east. The Crusaders, nominally motivated by religious zeal, were after the same trade routes, as well as the riches of a civilisation beside which western Europe was a beggar at the gate.

The Second World War was certainly to a large extent an ideological war, with one side pursuing a concept of racial destiny, while other fought for independence and democracy. Still, part of what lay behind Hitler's expansionism was the idea of lebensraum, room for living, the historical German desire to annexe and move into the rich lands around them. The US-Japan part of the war, by contrast, was almost entirely a battle for economic control of the Pacific.

Economics rarely seem to make it into fantasy wars. Of course, we're not privy to Sauron's counsels, for instance, so it's possible that his aim in neutralising Minas Tirith was to take control of the Anduin, the most important artery for moving goods around western Middle Earth; but somehow I doubt it. Though there is a hint that Saruman's conquest of the Shire was partly motivated by a desire to control the supply of pipeweed.

Things don't seem to have got any more realistic in the modern, grittier style of fantasy, where war seems to happen simply because it's what you do when you're a powerful king or lord. You do, of course, but there are normally reasons for it.

There's a problem with war, though. (Well, there are a lot of problems, of course, but I'm talking about one in particular.) Wars aren't fought by the people who actually get rich from the trade or the resources, they're fought by ordinary joes who would usually far rather stay at home raising their crops or working in an office. Even if they're conscripted, they need to be given a reason to fight well.

The Trojan War (if it happened) was probably fought over control of the sea-route between the Aegean and the Black Sea; but that's not what you tell your soldiers. You tell them The filthy barbarians stole my wife — yours might be next, if we don't put a stop to it. The War of Jenkins' Ear was all part of the competition for control of the seas that had been going on between Britain and Spain since the days of Drake and the Armada; but the people doing the fighting would have been told of the outrageous way the Spaniards treated their prisoners.

And, if all else fails, you just spread stories about how generally barbaric and subhuman the enemy is. This was certainly true in the First World War, where "everyone knew" about the sickening atrocities the German soldiers committed (and, presumably, they "knew" the same about the Allies). Curiously, that seemed to be far less true in the Second World War. My parents, who were both in their teens when the war broke out, recalled that most people regarded the enemy as "the Nazis" rather than "the Germans". Perhaps there was already enough moral cause to make inventing one unnecessary.

The First World War can be interpreted in many ways. The historian A.J.P. Taylor argued that it was cause by railways timetables (which makes sense to anyone who commutes by train) by which he meant that deployment by rail, the state of the art method at the time, was already predetermined and was triggered regardless of the cause of war. Taylor drew a chilling lesson from that with regards to preparations in the Cold War.

Nevertheless, in hindsight war had been inevitable for a long time. The Great Powers of Europe were jockeying for position, and that meant primarily their ability to economically exploit the rest of the world, especially Africa and Asia. The logic of great economic and military powers demanded that they should fight it out between them, and only needed Gavrilo Princip's starting pistol. Franz Ferdinand was in the wrong place at the wrong time.