FrankTrollman wrote:TNAMP wrote:As for access to food, this is an era of plentiful land and relatively prosperous independent farmers.
Did you honestly just claim that an era where the grain yield ratio was often as low as
two was an era of "prosperous independent farmers?" Seriously? That's what you're going with?
Look: being an independent farmer is fucking terrible. Large scale farms and division of labor are fucking sweet, and subsistence agriculture is one of the worst ways of life humanity has ever had inflicted on it. Even if you owned your own land to work as an independent farmer rather than being a
serf, that was still terrible.
I have no idea why people keep trying to slight of hand in the idea that "self sufficient communities" is a good thing instead of a terrible thing, but it's not. It's bad. Having a relatively small percentage of the population do all the farming while everyone else moves to the cities and works for wages is totally awesome, which is why we do it now. The alternative, where everyone has to till the soil themselves because the economy has collapsed and they can't buy food in markets, is called living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
-Username17
The only problem is that before the transition in the model of city economies, people didn't go to the cities to earn wages. They went to the cities because latifundias and members of the lower class controlled almost all of the arable land and used slaves to work the fields. You went to the city because you had no choice and in the city there was nowhere near enough work to go around, because the city had yet to become a true center of production for surrounding regions. Instead it was primarily a power center where tax money could flow in (and go out in the form of grain and oil rations, gladiatorial games, as well as patronage) and power could flow out. This is what I've been trying to point out, a post extractive city model, aka the one we live in now, is freaking great. But you need to make that transition before the city actually becomes a truly productive entity for the lower classes.
To see this in practice today, take a look at Lagos or Addis Abeba during the monarchy or really any African capitol city. Its not a productive place. People flow there because there's no jobs and the city is where you have a chance of getting some food as well as maybe getting linked into a patronage system. The local elites go there because that's where the tax revenue goes. So, much like in the Roman empire, the money is extracted from the economy, goes to the city and is consumed by the elite, with little to none being invested in the economy of the lower classes. This is what an extractive city looks like and why its not a good entity to have.
As for agricultural yields, the 1.5-2 ratio starts improving a bit post 800 CE, in large part thanks to a warming climate as well as the development of plows and tools designed to work with the wetter, heavier soil of northern europe, nothing perfect but far from the crushing poverty of farms in the high medieval ages. Plus, this was a relatively good time concerning the access of forests and wilder lands. Grain wasn't the end all and be all of diets, especially in the more forested regions of Germany and northern Europe. This was a time when hunting was still a viable way of supporting your diet, before the collapse of forests and the imposition of noble claims to the forests and harsh poaching laws. This is in part why the plagues of the empire finally died out by about 740, people were better fed and eating a more varied diet.
AncientHistory wrote:What the fuck article are you reading? Population levels might have been relatively stable at different periods, but politically the Middle Ages as a whole were tumultuous, empires rose and fell, entire populations moved.
There was some movement, but it seems a lot larger because we're talking about a period of 500 years. Compared to the 20th century, or the final centuries of the empire, the middle ages were quite calm. Empires rose and fell, but over the course of decades and centuries, and by the 600's there wasn't really anymore of the mass transfers of ethnic groups in western Europe, with even Eastern Europe settling down post the transfer of the steppe Bulgars. Were talking about a time where Political evolution was moving steadily, but fairly slowly. Even when empires were expanding, only a small part of Europe was ever actually seeing any action at one time. This is before the real division of Europe into the lands of petty lords, so you don't really see the endemic warfare that would come with the High middle ages.
Except for the Normans in France. And Southern Italy. And the Arabic raids on the coasts - remember the Emirate of Bari? Yeah. William the Conqueror. The Crusades, since we're in this thread. Etcetera. Do you actually research any of your bullshit?
Answered above, and yes, I actually do, considering its one of my jobs to do so. The Normans we're a brief period of violence followed by centuries of stability, the Arabic raids on the coasts weren't that frequent, the crusades were brief periods of violence, ect. The only real long term period of violence you mentioned was William the Conqueror and even then that was a period of calm with occasional political crises that really only involved the nobility until the final clash with the Normans and Norsemen. Seriously, this is a time when armies consisted of a few thousand at most with little campaigning at all. Warfare just didn't really impact people in the way it would in the high medieval period or during the mass campaigns of the Roman empire.
What the entire fuck? The decline of long distance trade just made some items completely unavailable until new trade routes were established. And if you were a little farming community up in the mountains of Italy and you couldn't get any fucking salt from the lagoons, you were proper fucked. You don't see "investment" of the sort you're talking about until maybe the late end of the early middle ages, with stuff like the Ottonian Empire.
Guess what, if you were in Italy during the late empire you wouldn't have a fucking farming community to begin with because there was such little land available. And, even if there was, you wouldn't have been able to afford salt because grain prices were artificially low thanks to the slave run plantations. Investment means that local lords actually had an interest in ensuring the wealth of their communities because they couldn't rely on state level taxation for their wealth. In the empire, if the empire did well, a noble did well. Here, if you wanted to do well you needed to make sure your community was producing more food, and if you wanted goods, you needed to ensure that your region was producing them. The Frankish empires, for example, were a boom period of actual expansion of production at a local level, with lower classes on a larger scale having access to the economy in a way they didn't in the Roman cities.
The establishment of multinational trade markets in the late Middle Ages is what allowed the development of specialist economies - like the Dutch. The closest parallel you have in the early Middle Ages is the Byzantine Empire and , and they basically acted as a gateway to the east for trade goods like spices, silk, tea, muslin, etc., and they sure as hell didn't retard the development of Europe by sucking up all the capital.
The Dutch were able to create their trade industries because they weren't being crowded out by the traditional economic centers around the Mediterranean. Plus, they also were able to actually create an industry to begin with because they were independent of the state, allowing them to concentrate on investing within their own economy. Plus, most of their trade was local to begin with, with their main consumers being Northern France and the kingdoms of Great Britain. There was still multi national trade, just not the sort of complete cross empire stuff the Roman's had, which actually harmed their economy.
And the Byzantines were a gateway to trade, but only because the Italians were forcing them to open up. The Byzantines themselves despised merchants and in large part this is why they were basically owned by the Italians by the 1200's. They were content to extract tax resources and live large, without any interest in actually expanding their economy.
In short, for me this all comes down to the city and its role within an economy. If the city is primarily a capitol extracting entity, as it was in the Roman and Byzantine empires, an economy can't really expand without conquest. If, however, you rebuild the economy at a local level and let it expand from there, the city slowly develops into a productive entity, setting the framework for what we have now.
