The biggest question of them all: how do we get from A to M?

 

How do we get from one to the other: the Roman world (represented by the Piazza Amerina mosaics, c.300 AD) and the Medieval one (represented by the Tres Riches Heures de Duc de Berry, c.1414)? Well, we're trying our best to find out.

So, imagine this. You’re a student and you’ve been invited to a toga party by the university’s Classics society at the plush suburban house of the society’s (super-rich, ultra-posh) president. The party has gone on into the small hours of the morning. The food and wine have been of the highest standard, going by student party fare obviously, and you’re getting quite sloshed. There’s both civilised conversation, joke cracking and poetry recital (in Latin and Ancient Greek obviously) going on, as well as all the debauchery you’d expect of an Ancient Rome-themed student party. People are disappearing up to the bathrooms to do a bit of tactical vomiting, and others are disappearing into the bedrooms to get up to, well … use your imagination! Topless drunk people in loincloths are also whacking stuffed toy lions, tigers and bears and each other with foam swords in the garden while others cheer. Life feels pretty good. Someone gives you a cake baked in the shape of a stuffed dormouse and says “you’re in for the adventure of a lifetime… you’ll have travelled to a new era.” You say “why the hell not.” You feel drowsy and lie on a couch for a bit.

After what feels like an hour you become a bit more conscious and see that there’s an argument going on. Apparently, some popular people had a fight for who was going to be emperor of the party, and so now there are four. Then the door bursts open. Some gate crashers have come from the Christian union. Then a bunch of Goths appear outside. Some drunk partygoers in Roman legionary outfits start chucking dogfood at them for no good reason, and then they get into a fight and the Goths force their way inside. You start thinking “this party is getting a bit too much. Its almost four in the morning, I think I might as well head home.”

You have very little recollection of what happens next except some flashes. You passed a nightclub where some local hooligans were trying to get in, while Toto’s “Africa” was blaring on the DJ set inside. You saw a bunch of people running down the street as some tough-looking East Asian men on motorcycles were blazing down the road. You can see a guy in a Wales rugby shirt pulling a sword from a stone and shouting “take that Saxon invaders!” at some England rugby fans. And then after that you passed an Italian restaurant that had been hired out by the university’s German society and philosophy society, where everyone seemed to be having a good civilised time, until some guys in legionary outfits showed up and everything apparently went downhill from there pretty quickly. You pass a club called plague, only to then have another short blackout. Then the next thing you remember is seeing some students dressed as monks chanting a super-charismatic guy dressed as a pope making a speech in a deserted marketplace.

After another temporary blackout your remember being on a street with a gyro shop and a kebab shop with lots of people queuing up outside. All a sudden a vast crowd of people in loose-fitting clothes shouting “Allahu Akbar” or was it more likely “Aloha snack bar” (you were so drunk you couldn’t tell) appeared and burst through to help themselves to everything those outlets had to offer. Everyone else in dismay shouted “what! No spicy meat!” These people then ran over to the French delicatessen, apparently closed, but were then chased back by a fearsome man wielding a stale baguette shouting “mon dieu.”

Then the next thing you remember, and probably you’re longest and most vivid memory is what happened at dawn, at approximately 8:00 am. Having half regained sobriety, you stood in what appeared like another toga party all except without as much debauchery. You saw a guy dressed as a pope plonk a crown on another guy’s head and say “behold your new Roman Emperor.” You could hear Latin, French and German being spoken. There also appeared to be a lot of people dressed as monks, and a lot of people in fake chainmail with swords and round shields. Lots of really learned and insightful discussions seemed to be happening. You thought “this is a civilised affair, I really want this to last.” But then in forty minutes time you heard some people screaming “that’s for me” and some other people saying “eh, I think that’s mine, back off”, and some other people still saying “please say sorry” and then a massive punch up began. Then the door bursts open and some people from the Scandinavian society come in blaring Norwegian death metal and Abba at full volume and swilling back schnapps and Absolut Vodka. You decide you’re out of that house party.

After 9:00 you have very little recollection of what happened, except seeing some angry people running amok in the streets shouting in Hungarian, then some time later seeing some people shouting “the end of the world is nigh”, then sixty minutes or so later a man who appeared to have an arrow in his eye (had you just gatecrashed the archery society and caused an accident) and then more than half an hour later some people in cheap St George outfits heading down to the local weatherspoons called “The Jerusalem Tavern.”

When you fully regain sobriety and stop having blackouts, its midday. You’re standing in what appears to be a Theme Park. You wearing a jester’s outfit and there’s a horrible taste in your mouth. You can see a massive Gothic cathedral-shaped attraction that’s still under construction. There’s a massive moated castle with a rollercoaster looping round it. You can see people sitting in some stands watching a joust between two knights in shining armour, munching on chicken legs and suckling pigs while quaffing ale and cider. You can see minstrels in tights with feared hats playing the lute and serenading some girls dressed in colourful gowns and funny hats. You walk down an avenue of quaint timber-framed wattle and daub houses and see some monks burning a dummy heretic and chanting in Latin while people cheer. You then head down to a market place and see people selling Egyptian cotton clothes, Indian spices and fake walrus ivory chess sets while drinking what appears to be champagne. As you wander around further still you can see elegantly dressed, perfumed barons and filthy, smelly peasants alike grumbling about the king’s new taxes and clamouring for a PARLIAMENT. You head down to the alchemists’ shop to get rid of what lingers of your hangover, and by this point you say to yourself “I’ve gone from Ancient Rome to the Middle Ages.

Its at that point you look at your phone and see its absolutely flooded with texts. You can see ones that present you with all kinds of weird data about things like pollen levels, global temperatures, population decline and growth, manuscript production, charter production, quality of pottery, aggregate surviving coins and shipwrecks at different times, all of which bewilder you. You then check your facebook, twitter and Instagram and see you’ve been making all kinds of statuses in which you say these weird esoteric phrases like “de-urbanisation,” “declining state capacity”, “end of casual literacy”, “militarisation of the aristocracy”, “drying up of trade networks,” “failure of the patronage system”, “decline of public justice”, “agricultural and demographic growth”, “settlement nucleation”, “change in family structure”, “monastic reform”, “the emergence of popular Christianity”, “millenarianism”, “growing armed retinues and private violence”, “crisis and collapse of royal power” etc. All except these same statuses have been made more than once at different times and its hard to make sense of how they all fit together. And in size 36 font capital letters and posted at all kinds of different points throughout the morning, posts, tweets and statuses about this thing called “the emergence of feudalism.” And each one of them has angry commenters saying “none of this happened, you’re just being misled by the sources.” For the posts about “feudalism”, the numbers of angry commenters exceed all others. And at around 10:00 in the morning, you appear to have started a massive flame war between dozens of people with mortarboards in their profile pics who either say “this is a feudal revolution. This is the moment when everything changes and the ancient becomes the medieval. The X that marks the spot. Can’t you see that you dingus?” And others who say “shut up with your stupid fantasies.

This, my friends, is a rough analogy for everything that goes on in European history between 200 and 1200. What you can see before, during and after your hazy drunken flashbacks represents what is immediately visible in the sources and what lingers in the popular imagination. The texts, facebook posts and tweets, meanwhile, represent the discussions among academics about what was really going on beneath the surface level changes, what was really driving it all and when were the real big changes actually taking place. This, in sum, is an analogy for the whole of late antiquity and the early middle ages (plus the first half of the high middle ages) and for the great big defining problem that confronts everyone who works on those periods. How did we get from the ancient Roman world to the classic medieval one made familiar to us by modern novelists, painters, composers, film-makers and video games designers. And just like when you fully regain consciousness after a drunken night out as a student, you know that something big has happened, but you can’t quite piece it all together. The historian of the early middle ages is in a very similar position. Which is really what makes this period so fascinating and exciting to study anyway!