My Comments on:

  Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Dark Ages Redux?

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http://hnn.us/articles/40678.html


HNN, Early July, 2007

Andrew D. Todd

 a_d_todd@rowboats-sd-ca.com 

http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/



(My Responses)

(07/09/2007 11:57 AM)

The Dark Age is Really the End of a Death Cult

It is worth looking at Hans Georg Wunderlich,  _The Secret of Crete_ (Wohin der Stier Europa Trug), 1972 (English translation, 1974-75). Wunderlich, who was professor of geology and  paleontology at the  University of Stuttgart, analyzed the Minoan ruins from the point of view of a civil engineer, and found that all kinds of things did not make sense in terms of the conventional narrative. The builders used types of materials which were not suitable for the stated uses.  The fires which were supposed to have destroyed the buildings had not  produced the effects  on the stones which an actual fire would produce. And so on and so forth.  Wunderlich pointed out that Sir Arthur Evans had done a lot of "imaginative reconstruction" on the palace of Knossos, to the  point  that it was very largely a late Victorian artifact.   Wunderlich's conclusion was that the buildings were not habitations at all, but necropolises, of substantially the  same type as those found in Egypt at the time, and that they had simply fallen out of use after Greece had outgrown them, as a child outgrows dolls and similar  toys. As Wunderlich argues, the Greeks began cremating their dead and then telling stories about them ("let us  now  praise famous men"). Instead of playing undertaker's games with the decaying bodies of Heracles or Achilles, they told stories about the things Heracles and Achilles were  supposed to have  done. These stories, and the custom of reciting them, became a form of rhetorical education  which enabled Greece to break  out of a sterile near-eastern  death-cult. Eventually, a "second generation" of authors consolidated the stories into epics. Someone like Homer, or Geoffrey of Monmouth (Arthurian literature), or Snorri  Sturluson (Icelandic Sagas and Norse Mythology) could not produce a finished work unless he had grown up in an oral culture resonating with a couple of  hundred years worth of raw tales, in much the same way that it took a  hundred years of printing to produce a man like  William Shakespeare.

(07/10/2007 02:01 PM)

How Much of a Step Backwards Was The Volkswanderung?

Well, here's a doubtless uninformed speculation from a nonmedievalist. During the Volkswanderung,  the church seems to  have re-established itself in most areas within a hundred years or less, mostly because it had been achieving the voluntary conversion of barbarians at a  rate greater than  the barbarians could invade. That worked out to someone like St. Patrick going out and talking to the barbarians. I was looking through an encyclopedia of the saints, trying to find missionaries who had gotten  eaten during the Volkswanderung period, but they seem to be far and few between, far fewer than the martyrs of the secret church period in the first to third centuries.

For what it is worth, historians of the organization of the Roman Army in the imperial period are forced to rely heavily on archaeological evidence, for want of anything better. For practical purposes, the latter Roman Army seems to have been a nearly illiterate institution. I think there is one surviving chit which a recruiting sergeant got for delivering a draft  of men, and a hopelessly theoretical manual  written by the armchair general Vegetius at the time when the Western Roman  Empire was collapsing.

Take a look at Leslie Alcock's _Arthur's Britain: History and Archeology, AD 367-634_  (1971). A couple of things come across. First is the extremely fragmentary and conjectural character of the evidence. The second is the extremely meager character of Roman civilization as it existed  north of the  Alps.  These are related. It is not possible to say with any confidence whether a place-name  is Saxon or not  if the place was too small to figure in the Antonine  Itiniary. There  is apparently no surviving Roman-British  document comparable to the  Domesday book, which the historian could use as a base for determining what happened. What this would indicate, of course, is that the Roman administration never succeeded in taxing land  or income per se (too many chances to ambush tax gatherers), but was forced to collect taxes in customs  houses at ports, bridges, markets, etc. That is a well-known phenomena  in the third world today. The consequence, of course,  is  that no one buys anything which he can make at home, and trade is effectively confined to a narrow range of  luxury goods.

Most of what you  would probably recognize as Roman  Civilization was only found in the  Mediterranean Littoral. It continued there with  no great interruption, at least no more than had resulted from the periodic Roman civil wars. The Franks and the Goths, and the Vandals and the  Lombards and the Burgundians were  more or less rapidly assimilated, to the point of losing their German.
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Flavius  Vegetius  Renatus,  _The  military  institutions  of  the Romans_,  translated  from  the Latin by  Lieutenant  John  Clark, edited by Brig. Gen. Thomas R. Phillips, U.S.A., Harrisburg, Pa., The Military Service Publishing Company, 1944.,

G.  R.  Watson,  _The Roman  Soldier_,  Cornell  University  Press, Ithaca, New York, 1969.

Frank E. Adcock, _The Greek and Macedonian Art of War_,  University of California Press, Berkeley, 1967, orig. pub. 1957.

Frank E. Adcock, _The Roman art of War under the Republic_,  Martin Classical  Lectures,  Volume  VIII,  Harvard  University   Press,  Cambridge, Mass., 1940.

Bernard S. Bachrach, _Merovingian Military Organization, 481-751_, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press [1972]

Graham Webster, _The Roman Imperial Army  of the First and Second Centuries A.D._ 3rd ed., London : A &C Black, 1985.
[Klinghoffer said in effect that she expected to be taken as an expert on the Iron Age because she had watched a television progra. I replied: ]

(07/11/2007 01:25 PM)

Well, the view of the classicists seems to be that Robert Drews is rather forcing  his evidence.

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1994/94.01.09.html

Occam's Razor, as applied to prehistory or "eo-history" is that one should not postulate economic, technological, or social revolutions which do not turn up in unequivocal form later on. Now, the big long-term military change  in the middle east as a whole at the general time was the emergence of the horse archer. That is, train  your horse to the point that he relates to you  like a dog, ride on  his back, use your knees to tell him where you want to go, and  let him  worry about the details of  getting there. That leaves your hands free to handle a bow and arrow. From an archer's point of view,  fifty yards or so is point-blank range (the Asiatic composite bow can reach out to five hundred yards  in high trajectory). By 500 BC, Persian horse archers were very definitely in evidence.  The classic  horse archer tactic was to sort of swirl around the edges of enemy formations, popping in arrows. When  horse archers were systematically organized, the way the Mongols did, they could carry out deep envelopments, and annihilate whole armies.

I think what Robert Drews is trying to do is to anachronistically apply the Macedonian  "peltast revolution" of the fourth century BC to the Iron Age.  By the  fourth century, Greek warfare was conducted by "hoplites," what one might call  "foot-knights," heavily armored men  charging on foot in neat ranks with long spears,  but  no archery. A peltast was a kind of light  infantryman, with much the  same armament as a Roman legionary, who could move inside the  hoplite's turning circle, and get inside his defenses. In  the first place, this is dubious as applied to the Iron Age because there is no very credible evidence that peltasts could have defeated mobile archers. A mobile archer simply backs off to a safe distance and pops in arrows.   In the hands of an expert, a composite bow is approximately as good a weapon as a Winchester 45-70 rifle. Certainly, the Roman  performance in the Parthian Wars was broadly mediocre. To the extent that the Romans succeeded in Gaul and Germany, they did  so  mostly by a kind of  evolution of siege warfare,  building large numbers of  forts as they moved, so that it was very  difficult for an enemy to impose a decisive battle on open ground. The legions won their battles with the shovel, not the sword. Another point is that the population density and ecological conditions of Classic Greece were obviously rather different from those of Iron-Age Greece.
 (07/13/2007 01:58 PM)

One point to be  kept in mind is that the Eurasian barbarians had the use of  millions of square miles of grasslands and forests. In short, they had very considerable ecological-economic power. When they did not invade the civilized lands, they traded with them instead. Here is an old reading note about a book dealing with the cross-frontier trade at one place and time, China during the Ming Dynasty.

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Henry Serruys, Trade Relations: The Horse Fairs, (1400-1600), Sino-Mongol Relations During the Ming, Melanges Chinois et Buddiques, XVII, Institute Belge Des Hautes Etudes Chinoises, Brussels, 1975

    The Sino-Mongol trade was highly political in the sense that one key, player, the Chinese government viewed it only as a political enterprise. The Ming officials viewed trade as a means of buying off the threat of border raids by the Mongols. Conversely, cutting off of the trade could be a punishment for raids. On the other hand, the failure of the Chinese government to permit trade could be a cause of raids, as the nomads did need certain manufactures, which they had to get one way or another. On at least one occasion, the nomads made war as a means of forcing open the trade, and compelling the Chinese to set up a market.

   The trade was a mixture of official trade, consisting of the purchase of horses for the Chinese army, and unofficial trade conducted by merchants.

   In the original form the trade took the form of tribute missions. The representatives of a nomad ruler would bring a gift of horses to the capital. They would then be given a reciprocal gift, consisting of such things as silk clothing for their master. That was the theory, according to the Chinese.

   But in practice, things were somewhat different. The ambassador's entourage would contain a number of frankly professional merchants, and would take its time traveling to and from the capital. On the inbound trip, they would trade many of their goods to ordinary Chinese. Once at the capital, they would trade with merchants, who were supposed to be brought into the envoys' lodging to trade, a rule more honored in the breach that in the observance. Finally, on the outbound leg of their journey, they might trade, to the Chinese, some of the gifts they had been given by the emperor. Under the circumstances, the gifts, such as silk clothing, might beconsidered as a form of money. It will be seen that the tribute was really government to government trade, with a side operation going on that was not even governmental. Diplomacy was a mere pretext for trade, and, as the trade apparently grew exponentially due to comparative advantage, it was an increasingly flimsy pretext.

   Chinese officialdom was deeply concerned at the numbers of barbarian traders flowing through large sections of the empire. There was a pervasive distrust of the Mongols, who were feared to be spies, or worse. Officials wanted to isolate the Mongols, to prevent any unnecessary contact between them and Chinese. The horse fairs were a means of localizing trade at a few points on the frontier where it could be controlled. Most of the traders would stop at the fair site, where the Chinese government would buy horses, and only a handful of genuine envoys would go on to the capital.

   This desire to isolate barbarians from Chinese probably accounts for why the government discouraged proposals for continuous (weekly ar monthly), rather than annual markets. Continuous markets had been proposed as a means of limiting the disorder attendant on an annual market. One infers that the government found a risk of riot more acceptable than a situation in which contact with barbarians merged into daily life. A thousand barbarians stay in the market ground. One barbarian gets invited into someone's house to incalculable ends. There is nothing to stop his Chinese host selling him anything: weapons, even military intelligence.

   Officials tended to belittle the desire of ordinary Chinese to trade. This is reflected in the items traded. The Chinese officials insisted on trading in horses, which meant dealing with the mongol upper classes and were reluctant to conduct the trade along lines suited to the lower classes, which would have meant china buying sheep, goats, etc, in exchange for grain and beans. There was a prohibition on selling metals, farming implements, war materiel etc to the nomads, but it is probable that there was widespread evasion.

   Other items traded included skins of various kinds on the Mongol side, cloth, finished leather, and similar manufactures on the Chinese side.

   It seems that the price of mongol horses tended to be much lower than that of Chinese horses. Given that it was the Mongols who took the initiative in trade, and had recourse to violence to keep the trade flowing, this suggests that the price of horses was comparative advantage, rather than net payment either way. The Mongols would hardly have invaded china for the privilege of being taxed.




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