[OSSR]The Crusades Campaign Sourcebook

[Lago PARANOIA]

So. How much of the mythology surrounding Children's Crusade was true and how much of it was fictional? 'cause, like, how it started, how it happened, and how Innocent III (one of the biggest POS in history) treated the aftermath reads like a bad O'Henry or Twain satire.

[Ancient History]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_crusade

Results foggy, try again.

Long story short, at the beginning of the 13th century Europe was still not a fun place to be, to the degree that wandering bands of children was an acceptable roll on the Random Encounter table. Some of these kids may or may not have been trying to march to the Holy Land, some of them definitely were sold as slaves. The stories were probably based on two mass migrations brought on by child seers, which just goes to show the immortal wisdom of P. T. Barnum.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Yes, I read the link, and the wikipedia's take is mostly: 'greatly exaggerated, it was mostly an army of thieves and whores who got whitewashed into being children for propaganda'. However, this is also the same wikipedia that, back when Psychic Robot and tzor were trying to stick up for Catholicism, used them as sources for the whole 'contrary to popular belief, science and ecumenicalism flourished in the so-called Dark Ages'.

I just simply don't find wikipedia credible when talking about pre-modern Christianity. The website goes out of its way to NPOV the more unsavory aspects of the religion.

[tussock]

The wikipedia zeitgeist seems to be that hanging shit on medieval Christianity was a lot of people's hobby back in the 18th-19th century, in light of how you could finally do it without getting murdered by the church.

Those people got the idea that because so much knowledge had been gained from ancient sources during the renaissance, there must have been a driving force to hold down knowledge after the end of western Rome. That coincided with the origins of medieval Christianity fairly well, so they figured correlation was good enough and ran with it. The Dark Ages were named and the Church was to blame for them. Rome was awesome and we should all copy it.

But, modern studies of actual evidence say that was just bullshit. Blasphemy was a crime, which hurt some of the early proto-science folk because they kept noticing that religion was factually incorrect and trying to tell people. But other than that fairly small effect, knowledge and technology had grown constantly through medieval European history.

There was no Dark Ages. The Germanic system of government took over from the massively corrupt and bloody Roman one. The Peace of Rome (/imperial) became the Peace of Rome (/Christian), neither being particularly peaceful. Mines got deeper, mills got bigger, armies adapted to new material availability, banking and trade systems grew that could cross to the far east, and bought science and technology back with them. Farms developed two field, then three field rotations, populations grew dramatically and then collapsed, repeatedly. People recorded eclipses and comets and new stars, knowledge discovered as far away as China trickled in constantly through the trade routes. Canal systems, locks, dykes, drainage, everything improved, though often in ways that weren't sustainable at the first attempt. But they kept at it.

Yes, the Middle East was rich in many ways compared to Europe, so was North Africa, so was China and Persia and lots of other places. None of that had much to do with the Church. Yes the medieval church was a horrible institution, they did bad things, they actively held back certain types of knowledge, encouraged certain wars, but the nobility was much worse for all those things and had a lot more say over people's lives.



Now, common science and rapid social development couldn't happen until everyone could write. That couldn't happen until people discovered how to make cheap writing tools, which was a result of the demands of the popular mobile printing presses, which came out of teaching everyone to read, which needed the big fixed printing presses, which needed metallurgy developed in China and notation systems from India, which came out of massive government programs of science and industry funding paid for in part by their highly profitable and easily taxable exports to Europe.

And it took a thousand years to get there because over 90% of everyone had to do nothing but produce food, and most of everyone else was busy trying to murder each other over who had the rights to tax the poor.

---

Oh, right, crusades sourcebook thread. I think an interesting thing about the crusaders is they needed to steal all that silver from Palestine because they didn't have enough left to manage their own systems of government. They kept sending all their silver to China to pay for the pepper and silk, selling slaves to recover some was being stamped out by the church, and their silver mines kept reaching the limits of their ability to pump out the water. Europe was ruined, almost no coinage left, all they had was a form of government that was also an army, so they went and looted Jerusalem with it.

[Username17]

Tussock, that rambling diatribe hurt my brain. The Dark Ages revisionists are still heterodox crazy people. The Dark Ages were real. The Roman period was better than what came after it, and everybody knows that. Fuck, the people living at the time knew it too. They were still using Roman bridges they didn't know how to build that were made out of concretes that they didn't know how to mix.

Europe was the worst place on Earth for a thousand years. And anyone who claims that this didn't have anything to do with the early Christian church's pro book burning agenda is either a liar or a fool.

-Username17

[souran]

On the product as an RPG suppliment the most interesting things is that the designers were so attached to the "1 person must play the medic" conciet that even in a historical context they decided that full cleric casting wast he price to be paid for having a game where people fight deadly battles more than one time per day.

As a historical piece it seems odd to me because by 1994, after the first gulf war, the crusades and emphasizing with the crusaders was really out of fashion in academic circles and popular writting. This would eventually swing a little bit back toward the middle as well but for when this was written it would have felt obsolete from the day it came off the presses, presenting a very pre-coldwar view of the history of the crusades.

Also: The "Mighty Fortress" campaign sourcebook, although focusing quite a bit on england, is actually the sourcebook for all of europe during the reformation and the wars surrounding it. So the "Mighty Fortress" is a reference to the 30 years war of the german states and Martin Luther.

[tussock]

The Roman period was better than what came after it, and everybody knows that.

Roman apologetics are ridiculous, Frank, they burnt plenty of books. They won their wars by virtue of sending thousands of professional soldiers against hundreds of civilians, over and over and over again. They enslaved everyone they could reach (on foot, thus the roads), took all of their wealth, all of their surplus production, piled it up in one spot, and then slaughtered each other over who got to call themselves a God for sitting in the big chair on top of it all.

That's not better than the early middle ages. Yes, people lost limecrete and a couple lead alloys, while they gained the heavy plow, the stirrup and horse collar, improved steel and furnaces, better armour and weapons, a far more sophisticated and responsive (though much smaller) military, much better boats, more land production, higher populations, more free men, more land owners, more water wheels and windmills and other flood control and navigation aids.

The Normans of the 11th century were superior, culturally, militarily, technologically, to 5th century Romans, because the Dark ages didn't hold anything back. It's just bullshit. Sure, they didn't build as many aqueducts, because they didn't stick everyone in one giant city, they didn't need them. It's a shitty life, but it's better than Rome.


I mean, just for basics, the Huns kicked the Goths ass, so the Goths kicked the Romans ass while running away. That's two steps of ass-kicking Rome was behind the times before the "Dark ages" even got started.

[Username17]

That's not better than the early middle ages.

Yes. It is. I will raise you "The Aqueduct" against everything post-empire Europe developed before 1300, and you still can't match that. Clean fucking water and food security beats the early middle ages. The entire early middle ages. Every time, every place, all of it.

Rome had potable running water and a functioning sewage system, which wouldn't again be a feature of European cities until the establishment of the water works in the 17th century. The middle ages were disgusting, filthy, disease ridden times. And comparing them favorably to Roman times is laughable and absurd.

-Username17

[Solmyr]

[*] HR4: A Mighty Fortress It's about the Elizabethan era. I don't actually understand what the Mighty Fortress tagline is about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mighty_F ... Is_Our_God

[Lago PARANOIA]

Yes, people lost limecrete and a couple lead alloys, while they gained the heavy plow, the stirrup and horse collar, improved steel and furnaces, better armour and weapons, a far more sophisticated and responsive (though much smaller) military, much better boats, more land production, higher populations, more free men, more land owners, more water wheels and windmills and other flood control and navigation aids.

Most of this is just aristocratic flotsam.

And why? For all of those advances in agriculture, the Middle Ages were still ridiculously awful in actual food production and security. We've seen the crop and grain yields and they're mind-meltingly pathetic to what they were and what they would be. Your logic makes about as much sense as saying that (conjecturally) because the World Fair toured in pre-communist China every year and even gave away the inventions to the peasants for a song that the country is suddenly in the Atomic Age.

[Username17]

[*] HR4: A Mighty Fortress It's about the Elizabethan era. I don't actually understand what the Mighty Fortress tagline is about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mighty_F ... Is_Our_God

I understand that would be what is usually talked about if someone said "A Mighty Fortress." But the specific book talks about the period from 1550 to 1650 and is focused on swashbuckling with Francis Drake and the Three Musketeers.

-Username17

[Laertes]

One of the puzzling differences between antiquity and the early Middle Ages was the colossal drop off in population, which led to the collapse of infrastructure and the urban economy and reversion to a more primitive subsistence-based way of life. The plague doubtless acounts for much of it, as did the constant civil wars and other events of the Third Century Crisis which wrecked the Roman trading network, but the fact remains that the population of Europe decreased by as much as 90% even while the Germans were busy coming in. Blaming this on the collapse of the Roman infrastructure or the rampaging tribes misses the point: the population crashed in areas controlled by the Eastern Empire too, and one can scarcely accuse the Byzantines of not knowing engineering or of forgetting Roman techniques.

So it's not as though the Europeans forgot how to build aqueducts. It's more that they simply didn't consider having engineering knowledge to be worth it any more, given the high cost of keeping such knowledge in circulation and the change in government from being dominated by civic assemblies to being dominated by a military caste. The fact that that military caste tended to hold their lands for only a generation or three meant that investment in infrastructure was never worth it and people got used to living in extremely primitive conditions, even when there were engineers around who totally could build a sewerage or road system if somebody had paid them to do it.

Yeah, the middle ages fucking sucked, but that's more to do with government or the lack thereof than it is to do with people being uneducated hicks.

Re crop yields: I've never seen the Roman figures. What sort of seed return and land yields did they get?

[Username17]

Re crop yields: I've never seen the Roman figures. What sort of seed return and land yields did they get?

Cicero apparently claims a seed return of about 10:1 (I obviously haven't read the original Latin to check this claim). That's about three times what people were getting in the Dark Ages.

-Username17

[Laertes]

The highest reliable medieval yields could get up to about 4:1 to 5:1. I've heard some learned scholars opine that that's actually the best you can get with hand tools, draught animals and dung fertilisers, so that 10:1 looks a little suspect to me. On the other hand, I appreciate that we have basically fuck all in the way of other documentation, so I'm inclined to give Cicero a pass there. (Modern agrichemistry can get a 40-80:1 yield, I am told, so 10:1 is seriously impressive.)

Historically, the Romans imported a lot of their food from the most fertile areas in the Empire anyway, so it might simply have been a matter of having the luxury to only grow in the best soils and climates rather than being forced to grow locally.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I've heard some learned scholars opine that that's actually the best you can get with hand tools, draught animals and dung fertilisers, so that 10:1 looks a little suspect to me.

You know what that sounds like to me? This sounds like it's time to invoke the terrible, ineffable power of SCIENCE!

http://epapers.uwsp.edu/thesis/2007/Martinez.pdf
AN EVALUATION OF THE PRODUCTIVITY OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN ‘THREE SISTERS’ AGRICULTURE SYSTEM IN NORTHERN WISCONSIN

Replication of pre-Industrial Native American farming techniques for the 'Three Sisters' method of crop production gives an mean yield/plant of 3-3.5, so 9-10.5. Scroll to page 59. For a bullshit bonus, they also did a bean monoculture using the same methods. Note that while the mean yield was numerically about the same as corn/beans/squash, the calories/acre were higher with the Three Sisters.

Before you mention that the experimenters cheated with their fancypants GMO and chi-chi fertilizes, read pages 14-18. The researchers painstakingly tried to replicate traditional Wampanoag techniques; the only real differences was that they used hand-watering instead of rainfall and that they tilled the soil beforehand. No fertilizer was used, no modern tools were used, etc.

Also:

Statistical analysis of the yield data showed that yield/plant was not significantly greater for corn, squash or beans when grown together in the Three Sisters System versus conventional monoculture row cropping. On the contrary, squash yield/plant at site A
and bean yield/plant at site B were significantly higher in monoculture treatments than in Three Sisters treatments.

When calories/acre were compared, however, the Three Sisters produced more calories/acre than monoculture corn, beans or squash at both sites A and B. While each individual plant was not more productive in the Three Sisters systems than in monoculture systems, it was possible to produce a greater variety of foods in a small area.

Note: When you use the phrase 'power of science' as a direct object, you have to emphasize it in some way. Union rules.

[TheNotoriousAMP]

Frank, I respect immensely your knowledge of RPG's, game structure, how to sell them, ect. On the other hand, please don't speak about history because it 's almost painful to read.

The later stages of the Roman Empire fucking sucked. Actually, the early stages of the empire sucked too. It was based around an obsolete economic system overly reliant upon large estate landholders and slavery to sustain itself. And, to top it off, the city as an institution remained an extractive one, not a productive one as we encounter now. For all of the empire's triumphs in engineering, the "dark ages" were actually one of a much needed economic revolution which set the basis for the modern system we have now.

For example, the Dark Ages and the collapse of the traditional urban aristocracy for a landed rural one set the stage for transformation of cities into productive centers, dominated by what we could call a proto bourgeosie. This kind of change is what allows cultures to flourish. Otherwise, you have what happened to the Byzantines, where cities remained places where the nobles lived and tax money flowed into. The end result of this tends to be stagnation, with an eventual complete take over of the economy by others. Case in point, the Italian city states transformed themselves. Byzantine cities remained extractive. By the 1200's the Byzantine economy was completely dominated by Italian merchants and exports.

Okay, so lets address this book burning binge you're on. The collapse of a lot of research post the fall of Roman empire and the fact that the Islamic states surpassed Europe has more to do with the collapse of the knowledge of Greek in the west. The roman's actually invented relatively little, what they instead did was take greek knowledge and perfect it. However, they actually never really tried translating it. Unfortunately, they instead just learned how to speak Greek and read it. Only problem is, when the empire was divided and the west got divided into ethnic states, the diffusion of knowledge ground to a halt and knowledge of greek collapsed. You simply didn't have Greeks coming into the west so people were stuck with a bunch of stuff they couldn't read. Meanwhile, the Byzantines spoke greek and the Islamic states had access to a great deal of formerly Greek territories, direct contact and inter marriage with a Greek state AND also happened to have access to Indian scientific thought too. What fucked the Islamic states was the fact that though they did have an expiramentive culture, they also had a sword hanging over their head. Thanks to the revealing of the Koran, there was a general rule that certain things reach a peak and are completed. For example, the Koran is finished in 632 and thus the world's knowledge has been reached. You can explore what the Greeks created, but there is nothing new past 632. In fact, they often believed the Greeks had completed their studies and thus were overly respectful of their boundaries.

So yeah, keep the book burning shit in Hollywood and crappy historical fiction novels where it belongs. "Sorcery" in Acts refers to pagan texts, not scientific ones. For example, the "burning of the library of Alexandria" is something that's blamed on everyone who concurs the city by the people who came before them. Caesar, Aurelian, the copts and muslims in turn were accused of it as they took the city and more than likely its just something that happened during the rampages that occurred after sieges. Barring theological texts, "Book Burning" by religions and not by accident during sieges is very much a modern creation.

In reality, monasteries were the places in Europe that were at the core of the protection of knowledge and the reproduction of such. With the collapse of literacy following the collapse of the urban nobility, monks became the core center of those who could read. They actually preserved a lot of texts and more importantly, especially in the fields of herbal medicine, were responsible for several developments and expansions. Including, for example, herbal abortifacents.

Secondly, Europe had a problem that the Islamic world did not, which was that it was less centrally controlled and was dominated by ethnic states in ways the Slave soldier empires that successively rode out of the steppes and into Iran and Turkey did not. You just did not have as much communication, nor did you have the central pool of resources to fund research and sponsor people.

Finally, the Dark ages as a concept is mostly one developped during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods and is actually a sociological tool to allow the populations to redefine themselves and allow social groups to firmly place themselves at the forefront of development. "we're not like those backwards people, we are cultured!". In reality, there have been several waves of renaissance and all together, living in 1000's era Europe wasn't that bad. You had relatively weak lords so the peasantry was relatively free. Large meat consumption thanks to low population density and relatively secure food supplies.

What a lot of people think of when they think of mud and famine was actually 1200's and 1300's era Europe, where the population had exploded, which coincided with an increase in the power of independent lords. This was a shitty time to live in because the system was near breaking point and peasants had less and less land to rely on. Plus, you had a shocking wave of global cooling that hit, crushing agricultural yields. Same wave that hit Europe in the 1600's. That being said, even during this time you see the buildings of the institutions that would one day allow Europe to surpass the rest of the world in technological and intellectual research (a place which it still is not matched, there is a reason why elite foreign students are sent to western universities and then return), the university system. This college of academics was a revolutionary idea and was founded upon the desire for theological discussion and interpretation sponsored by the church.

The enlightenment was even worse, because we see the real birth of secularism, which means that people now need to blame everything on religion as a way of defending themselves and defending their new movements. The decline and fall of the Roman empire is public enemy number one here, as Gibbons basically looked to using Christianity as a scapegoat for the empire's core structural problems and through that sought to further his argument for modern secularism. Its not history in a sense of recording the past, its history more in the Tea Party sense of "our founding fathers agreed with us". Its really intellectually lazy.

I think the best way to sum all this up is in taking a look at the Galileo affair. The usual myth is "Galileo challenged the bible, thus he was locked up". This falls into the comfortable myth of the church burning all books which is why shit was fucked up. In reality, Galileo was funded and supported by the church up to the point where he tried to claim what he found was fact without having it supported by scientific studies. That and he was also a bit of an asshole, but that was more a supporting problem. The church was fine with Galileo publishing his findings if he presented them as hypothetical models of thought which were to be further explored. The problem was that he was trying to advocate them as scientific fact without them being proven by scientific analysis.

What actually fucked Galileo was the fact that he had challenged Aristotelian views on matter and through this 1- challenged the transubstantiation of the eucharist, which was kind of a big deal and 2- pissed off most leading academics at the time, who were big into Aristotelian thought. Heliocentrism was killed by court intrigue and politics, as well as Galileo being an ass AND the fact that he wanted to push a controversial theory as fact without backing it up, making it really hard to defend him from the more fanatical side of the church. Religion played a role, as it always does, but more importantly he was caught in the crossfire of influential social groups and his own causticity. In short, much like the Crusades, Inquisition, Jihad, and basically any "religious action" religion is more an excuse used by powerful social groups to justify actions needed to further themselves.


In short: the dark ages were a time of transition and transformation, with the city changing in role, science painfully shifting in language and a general transition in ethnic groups and politics which formed the basis for the modern world in which we live in today. It was, in general, a less wealthy on the whole time than the late roman empire, but the average citizen was actually better off. The church, while playing a role in scientific stagnation, was also crucial in preserving and expanding certain regions of knowledge and was far from the demonic boogeyman later social groups tried to present it as, mostly as a political tool.

Short Short Short version: you're wrong. Very, very, very wrong.

[Voss]

I've heard some learned scholars opine that that's actually the best you can get with hand tools, draught animals and dung fertilisers, so that 10:1 looks a little suspect to me.

You know what that sounds like to me? This sounds like it's time to invoke the terrible, ineffable power of SCIENCE!

Well, it would be if you weren't suddenly invoking different plants, climate, environment and tool base. What the Wampanoag did with crops in Northern Wisconsin in the 15th? 16th? 17th? centuries (you don't really say) is pretty damned irrelevant in every single respect to medieval Europe or the Roman period.

You might as well be comparing rice farming in China to Incan mining techniques.

[Ancient History]

What the fuck are you on about, TNAMP? The decline of the Roman Empire in the West and the early Middle Ages was marked by depopulation of cities, erosion of trade, continuous raids and invasions, and political rearrangement. People were not "better off" by any means, and technological diffusion was extraordinarily low. "The Dark Ages" may well be a sobriquet that came out of the Italian Renaissance, but it wasn't like the Middle Ages were much to fucking talk about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography

[OgreBattle]

Tussock, that rambling diatribe hurt my brain. The Dark Ages revisionists are still heterodox crazy people. The Dark Ages were real. The Roman period was better than what came after it, and everybody knows that. Fuck, the people living at the time knew it too. They were still using Roman bridges they didn't know how to build that were made out of concretes that they didn't know how to mix.

Europe was the worst place on Earth for a thousand years. And anyone who claims that this didn't have anything to do with the early Christian church's pro book burning agenda is either a liar or a fool.

-Username17

Would you say this person is a rambling liar, or well informed?
http://www.quora.com/Middle-Ages/Were-t ... m-ONeill-1

On the 'scientific dark age' myth:
http://www.quora.com/History-of-Science ... m-ONeill-1

This guy pretty much answers every medieval/dark age question on a personal mission to reveal that it wasn't that dark. I got the impression that he knows what he's talking about, or am I being duped?

[Username17]

TNAMP, stop posting bizarre rambling screeds of bullshit, OK? Look, the plural of anecdote is not data. Some monastery or another preserving books is great and all, but it honestly doesn't mean shit in light of overall trends.

The big killers have historically been disease, famine, lack of access to water, and lack of access to shelter. The very bottom of the hierarchy of needs has been the driving force of how much things sucked or not for almost the entirety of human existence (and still is for people in a lot of the world).

So if food security, potable water access, and sanitation got worse, then nothing else matters. Nothing. Because food, water, and cleanliness are so much more important than every other thing in the whole fucking universe that you can't even see shit like political representation and judicial barbarism from the top of Mount Water Access Is Important. There are fucking clouds in the way.

It's not important whether a Roman slave or a Croatian serf got better access to self actualization. It happens to be the Roman slave, but that's not important, because the Roman slave got to take fucking baths and shit into a sewer with running water. And that's so much more important than anything else we could possibly be talking about that there's no meaningful discussion to be had.

Look, I understand that you're a Catholic and you want to think well of your chosen faction, but you are embarrassing yourself. Claiming that the 10th century wasn't an incredibly shitty time to be European is just laughable. You literally had to eat right next to your own shit.

-Username17

[Laertes]

Joseph Tainter claimed that archeological examinations of skeletons post the Roman collapse reveal a generally improved level of individual nutrition. I have no idea if this is true or not or what sort of axe Tainter is trying to grind, but I feel it may be germane to this discussion.

Edited because I got Tainter's name wrong.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Well, it would be if you weren't suddenly invoking different plants, climate, environment and tool base. What the Wampanoag did with crops in Northern Wisconsin in the 15th? 16th? 17th? centuries (you don't really say) is pretty damned irrelevant in every single respect to medieval Europe or the Roman period.

Different how? You can't just say that I'm throwing up things that are different and leave it at that. Hell, without doing that I could just say 'you damn right it's different; the Wampanoag definitely had a worse tool base, which just made Medieval Europe suck even more!' Same deal with crops. Show how it's different and in what direction and you'll have something.

And at any rate, environment is a non-starter. Climate is just unfalsifiable. We're not only talking centuries ago but people couldn't even quantify things like rainfall and temperature variation. You can use that as an objection if it makes you feel better, just be aware that there's no real way to prove your objection as true or false. You're on less shaky ground with environment, but things still melt into the fog of ages. Why? Because soil texture can vary wildly within a small geographic region. Hell, in the experiment I linked soil texture at Site A is 58% sand, 14% silt and 28% clay and Site B is 38% sand, 38% silt and 24% clay. How representative is that of where people planted crops in Medieval Europe and what was the extent of the differences? Fuck if I know. But you don't know either.

[TiaC]

I've heard some learned scholars opine that that's actually the best you can get with hand tools, draught animals and dung fertilisers, so that 10:1 looks a little suspect to me.

You know what that sounds like to me? This sounds like it's time to invoke the terrible, ineffable power of SCIENCE!

Well, it would be if you weren't suddenly invoking different plants, climate, environment and tool base. What the Wampanoag did with crops in Northern Wisconsin in the 15th? 16th? 17th? centuries (you don't really say) is pretty damned irrelevant in every single respect to medieval Europe or the Roman period.

You might as well be comparing rice farming in China to Incan mining techniques.

This paper has a lot of data. It looks like around 8:1 was the most supported.

[Username17]

Would you say this person is a rambling liar, or well informed?
http://www.quora.com/Middle-Ages/Were-t ... m-ONeill-1

On the 'scientific dark age' myth:
http://www.quora.com/History-of-Science ... m-ONeill-1

This guy pretty much answers every medieval/dark age question on a personal mission to reveal that it wasn't that dark. I got the impression that he knows what he's talking about, or am I being duped?

I'm not going to log in to their stupid system, so it's incredibly fucking irritating to read that page. But from what I can tell, he doesn't actually dispute the fact that the Dark Ages were incredibly shitty. He concedes that long distance trade collapsed, the factories stopped producing high quality goods, and what things people had were rough and locally produced. That's terrible. He also concedes that hot topics of monk discussion were "cutting edge" math problems that were considered trivial five hundred years earlier and are of course even more trivial today. That's terrible too.

His central claim is that in various times and places during the Dark Ages, various things were developed to improve productivity and/or quality of life in various ways. I don't think anyone is disputing that, so it seems an odd hill to defend.

One thing that I do take issue with is his unstated and undefended premise that economic self sufficiency is a positive social good. That's actually a really weird claim for an academic in the 21st century to make. I'm pretty sure he buys his food in a grocery store and gets his shoes off a shelf. Specialization and trade are pretty awesome in general, and they are pretty awesome for him in particular. So for him to preface the fact that communities became more self sufficient with the word "But" as if it were a mitigating factor to the horrors of lost productivity rather than itself being a horror inflicted upon the people of the time is just very strange.

Joseph Tinter claimed that archeological examinations of skeletons post AD 476 reveal a generally improved level of individual nutrition. I have no idea if this is true or not or what sort of axe Tinter is trying to grind, but I feel it may be germane to this discussion.

I don't know who that is, but the stuff I've read points to rates of disease in Roman skeletons as pretty low. One thing to keep in mind is preservation bias. As the percentage of bones increases, the rates of disease decrease. Diseased, funky bones are simply more likely to be treated exceptionally, which causes them to be more available to future generations of archaeologists. So the farther back in time you go, the more you over estimate diseases in bones. The ravages of time are simply proportionately crueler to "ordinary" skeletons than they are to "exceptional" skeletons.

But in those places where we have really a lot of Roman skeletons to look at (and there are more than a few), their disease rates are pretty low.

-Username17

[TheNotoriousAMP]

What the fuck are you on about, TNAMP? The decline of the Roman Empire in the West and the early Middle Ages was marked by depopulation of cities, erosion of trade, continuous raids and invasions, and political rearrangement. People were not "better off" by any means, and technological diffusion was extraordinarily low. "The Dark Ages" may well be a sobriquet that came out of the Italian Renaissance, but it wasn't like the Middle Ages were much to fucking talk about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography

The depopulation of cities is at the core of why people were better off during the dark ages. The only reason the Italian cities of the Roman empire were so big to begin with was because of the fact that most farming land in Italy and many other of the more settled regions were owned and controlled by large plantation style farms, with the core labor being provided through slavery. This pushed large masses of the peasantry into the cities because they simply could not find work/own land, resulting in cities in which large parts of the population only lived thanks to the grain ration given by the state and the patronage of wealthier residents who used the populace as the core of their power bases.

If you actually read the wikipedia article you sent me, you'd notice that the dark ages were a time of relative stability, with the core crises coming during the steady collapse of the roman empire. Aka, the massive bloodshed thanks to the shifting of ethnic groups and the entry of the germanic and hunnic tribes into the European population, the urban and trade driven plagues of the late empire, ect. By comparison, the dark ages lacked the urban density needed to really fuel plagues and, more importantly, the reduced level of cross continental trade resulted in less passing on of the diseases that erupted.

Secondly, on the matter of trade and politics. The idea of a dark ages full of raids and violence is not very true. For the most part, its an era of relative calm, by this point the ethnic invasions of the late empire were done and the populations had settled. There was of course the entry of the maygars into the equation, but compared to the huns and goths, it was relatively minor. Plus, and here's the biggie, local trade is good when forming the foundation of an economy.

The decline of long distance trade makes building local economies more desirable. (Frank, this applies to self sufficiency). This is why the plantation system fucked the empire, you had certain regions which produced a ton and, thanks to internal stability, this meant that the wealthy in other regions and the city could just consume their products while the population got their ration from the state. Instead, with the temporary collapse of trade, you get more investment and expansion of local farms and centers, with cities going from consumers of faraway goods to centers of production for nearby regions. The cloth manufacturers of the netherlands, for example. In a fully developped economy like our own, yeah trade is good, but, as can be seenh in many developping countries in Africa for example, globalization wipes out the local economy, and with local elites and the wealthy being able to buy foreign goods while relying on the political system to sustain them, there's no incentive to improve the economy at the lower classes level.

TNAMP, stop posting bizarre rambling screeds of bullshit, OK? Look, the plural of anecdote is not data. Some monastery or another preserving books is great and all, but it honestly doesn't mean shit in light of overall trends.

The big killers have historically been disease, famine, lack of access to water, and lack of access to shelter. The very bottom of the hierarchy of needs has been the driving force of how much things sucked or not for almost the entirety of human existence (and still is for people in a lot of the world).

So if food security, potable water access, and sanitation got worse, then nothing else matters. Nothing. Because food, water, and cleanliness are so much more important than every other thing in the whole fucking universe that you can't even see shit like political representation and judicial barbarism from the top of Mount Water Access Is Important. There are fucking clouds in the way.

It's not important whether a Roman slave or a Croatian serf got better access to self actualization. It happens to be the Roman slave, but that's not important, because the Roman slave got to take fucking baths and shit into a sewer with running water. And that's so much more important than anything else we could possibly be talking about that there's no meaningful discussion to be had.

Look, I understand that you're a Catholic and you want to think well of your chosen faction, but you are embarrassing yourself. Claiming that the 10th century wasn't an incredibly shitty time to be European is just laughable. You literally had to eat right next to your own shit.

-Username17

I was actually mostly talking as a hyistorian who cares about history, the catholic stuff is a relatively minor driver. It just annoys me to see common misconceptions presented as fact. Read the above post for economic matters. As for nutrition, water and sanitation:

Population density and yeoman farmers. I will not dispute that the high medieval ages were a fucking shitty place to live. That's the time when food is uber scarce, the system is at a demographic breaking point, you have no land, no money and plagues are becoming waaay more common.

That being said, in the dark ages as we're talking about (500-1100), none of this is coming into play. For example, bathhouses were actually centers of disease, because guess what? Putting a ton of people in the same, non treated, water tends to result in sanitary problems. There's a reason why people thought baths gave you diseases, its the type of old wive's tale that gets imprinted into a society over time after traumatic events. Water is less important when more people live in the countryside and thus don't need acquifers since they live by water anyway, Europe is fairly wet so there's no real areas besides spain where you won't have access to running water. As for access to food, this is an era of plentiful land and relatively prosperous independent farmers. The good farmland was no longer as concentrated in the hands of wealthy plantation owners so more food was being accessed by more people. Plus, this is after the deforestation of the empire and before the collapse of the European forests during the high medieval period, so there's plentiful access to game, as well as grazing land, meaning that protein was far more common on people's plates than in later times. Lets even ignore science and religion for the moment, its a bit more charged and quite frankly, you'll be better served by reading some recent histories on the topic, on a pure level of quality of life, local economies, disease, nutrition and access to economic advancement, the Dark ages are a golden time compared the the high medieval and late empire periods.