04. The Dark Ages...How Dark Were They, Really? Part 1.
Hi there my name's John Green, this is Crash Course World History and today we're going to talk about the Dark Ages, possibly the most egregious Eurocentrism in all of history, which is really saying something. (We're Europe! The Prime Meridian Runs Through us; We're in the Middle of Every Map; and We Get To Be a Continent Even Though Were Not a Continent.) But let's begin today with a pop quiz: What was the best year of your life, and what was the worst year? Mr. Green, Mr. Green: Best 1994, Worst 1990.
Oh, me from the past. It gets so much better, and also so much worse.
For worst year I'm gonna go with 2001; best year 2006. Alright now it's your turn, dear pupils: share your best and worst years in comments during the intro. [music intro]
Right, so what you will quickly find is that your worst year was someone else's best year. So, too, with history. The period between 600 and 1450 CE is often called the Middle Ages in Europe because it came between the Roman Empire - assuming you forget the Byzantines - and the beginning of the Modern Age. And it's sometimes called the Dark Ages, because it was purportedly unenlightened. But was the age so dark? Depends on what you find depressing. If you like cities and great poetry, then the Dark Ages were indeed pretty dark in Europe. But if like me your two favorite things are Not Dying From Wars and not dying from anything else, the Dark Ages actually weren't that bad - at least until the plague came in the 14th century. And meanwhile, outside of Europe, the Dark Ages were truly an Age of Enlightenment.But we'll get boring Europe out of the way first. Let's go to the Thought Bubble. Medieval Europe had less trade, fewer cities, and less cultural output than the Original Roman Empire.
London and Paris were fetid firetraps with none of the planning of sewage management of places 5,000 years older like Mohenjo Daro in the Indus Valley Civilization, let alone Rome.
But with fewer powerful governments, wars were at least smaller, which is one reason why Europeans living in Medieval Times - Uhh THOUGHT BUBBLE I KNEW YOU WERE GOING TO DO THAT.
Anyway, people in Medieval Times lived slightly longer - life expectancy was 30 - than Europeans during the Roman Empire - when life expectancy was 28.
Instead of centralized governments, Europe in the middle ages had feudalism, a political system based on reciprocal relationships between lords, who owned lots of land, and vassals, who protected the land and got to dress up as knights in exchange for pledging loyalty to the lords.
The lords were also vassals to more important lords, with the most important of all being the king. Below the knights were peasants who did the actual work on the land in exchange for protection from bandits and other threats.
Feudalism was also an economic system, with the peasants working the land and keeping some of their production to feed themselves while giving the rest to the landowner whose land they worked.
The small scale, local nature of the feudal system was perfect for a time and place where the threats to peoples' safety were also small scale and local. But of course, this system reinforces the status quo - there's little freedom and absolutely no social mobility: Peasants could never work their way up to lords, and they almost never left their villages. Thanks, Thought Bubble.
One more point that's very interesting from a world history perspective: this devolution from empire to localism has happened in lots of places at lots of different times. And in times of extreme political stress, like after the fall of the Han dynasty in China, power tends to flow into the hands of local lords who can protect the peasants better than the state can.
We hear about this a lot in Chinese history and also in contemporary Afghanistan, but instead of being called feudal lords, these landlords are called warlords. Eurocentrism striking again.
The other reason the Dark Ages are called Dark is because Europe was dominated by superstition and by boring religious debates about like how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. And while there's something to that, the Middle Ages also saw theologians like Thomas Aquinas, who was quite an important philosopher, And women like Hildegard of Bilgen, who wrote all this important liturgical music and also basically invented the genre of the morality play. All that noted, things were certainly brighter in the Islamic world, or Dar al Islam. So when we last left the Muslims, they had expanded out of their homeland in Arabia and conquered the rich Egyptian provinces of the Byzantines and the entire Sassanian empire, all in the space of about 100 years.
The Umayyad Dynasty then expanded the empire west to Spain and moved the capital to Damascus, because it was closer to the action, empire-wise but still in Arabia. That was really important to the Umayyads because they'd established this hierarchy in the empire with Arabs like themselves at the top and in fact they tried to keep Arabs from fraternizing with non-Arab muslims throughout the Empire. This of course annoyed the non-Arab Muslims, who were like, “I don't know if you're reading the same Quran we are, but this one says that we're all supposed to be equal.” And pretty quickly the majority of Muslims weren't Arabs, which made it pretty easy for them to overthrow the Umayyads, which they did in 750 CE. Their replacements, the Abb(ah)sids, Abb(uh)sids? Hold On... D'ahh, I'm right twice! Right, so the Abbasids were from the Abb(ah)si or the Abb(uh)-see family which hailed from the Eastern and therefore more Persian provinces of the Islamic Empire. The Abbasids took over in 750 and no one could fully defeat them - until 1258, when they were conquered by - wait for It - the Mongols.
The Abbasids kept the idea of a hereditary monarchy, but they moved the capital of the empire to Baghdad, and they were much more welcoming of other non-Arab Muslims into positions of power.
And under the Abbasids, the Dar al Islam took on a distinctly Persian cast that it never really lost.
The Caliph now styled himself as a king of kings, just like the Achaemenids had, and pretty soon the caliph's rule was a lot more indirect, just like the original Persians'. This meant that his control was much weaker, and by about 1000CE , the Islamic Caliphate which looks so incredibly impressive on a map had really descended into a series of smaller kingdoms, each paying lip-service to the caliph in Baghdad.
This was partly because the Islamic Empire relied more and more on soldiers from the frontier, in this case Turks, and also slaves pressed into military service, in order to be the backbone of their army, a strategy that has been tried over and over again and has worked exactly zero times. Which you should remember if you ever become an emperor. Actually our resident historian points out that that strategy has worked - if you are the Mongols.
