Shedding Light on Dark Ages

The Dark Ages (The History Channel )

In an effort to lend holiday cheer to my mid-November seasonal emotional low, I decided to watch the documentary on the Dark Ages that I got for myself over a year ago. Nothing like contemplation of structural chaos, barbarian hoards, plague, Viking invasions, corruption of religious institutions, poverty, feudal system exploitations, wars, rumors of wars, pestilence, crusades, and Jihad to make one thankful for their relatively mundane hardships. And to think that ALL of the above is so closely associated with religion and Christianity in particular, makes it all so ironic.

I often tell my students that one should never attempt to understand an ideology by looking at the worst manifestations of what claims to be it. Crusaders were, for all intents and purposes, baptized Vikings really. March an army like Constantine's through the waters of baptism and what you have are not Christian Holy Warriors so much as wet pagans. And someone like Charlemagne could feel himself perfectly at ease establishing libraries for the collection of Christian texts while massacring those who expressed a desire to read texts from their own pagan perspectives.

The following comes from The Wars of Charlemagne by Charlemagne's biographer, Einhard:

"As to the Saxon war, no war ever undertaken by the Franks was waged with such persistence and bitterness, or cost so much labor, because the Saxons, like almost all Germans, were a ferocious folk, given over to devil-worship, hostile to our Faith, and they did not consider it dishonorable to transgress and violate all law---be it human or divine. Then, too, special circumstances caused a breach of the peace daily. Accordingly, war was begun against the Saxons and was waged furiously for thirty-three consecutive years [772-804 A.D.] on the whole to the disadvantage of the Saxons. Much earlier surely it would have terminated but for the perfidy of the Saxons. It is hard to tell how often they were conquered, humbly submitted to the King and promised to do what was commanded, gave the required hostages and received the royal officers. Sometimes they were so abased that they promised to renounce "devil-worship" and adopt Christianity. Nevertheless, they were as prone to repudiate these terms as to accept them. It was actually impossible to tell which came easier for them to do. Hardly a year passed from the beginning of the war without such changes on their part.

The King, however, pressed them with unvarying purpose despite great difficulties and either took the field against them himself, or sent his counts against them with a host to wreak vengeance and exact due satisfaction. The war that had lasted so many years at last terminated when the Saxons gave way to the terms proffered by the King; namely, the renunciation of their native religious cults and devil-worship, the acceptance of the Christian sacraments, and union with the Franks into one people."

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/einhard-wars1.html

It was only as the monks began to actually read and study the origins of their faith that they realized that a culture that told its young men that they had to kill people to be pious and heroic and worthy of respect could hardly regard itself as Christian that the "trouble" began. The PEACE OF GOD movement (a movement to get knights to commit themselves to not harming the innocent civilians) and the TRUCE OF GOD movement (a movement to get knights to restrict their fighting on Holy Days and Holy weeks) began to impact religious consciousness. It was difficult to affirm that some people were too precious to God to kill and not begin to apply the logic to other knights who were, ... well ... people too. It was difficult to affirm that some time was too sacred to profane with war without considering the possibility that all time was too sacred for the same.

It was at this point in time that the notion of a sacred Holy war against ISLAM came into being. There, with the church's permission, one could kill everyone anytime and a perfect solution to the Christian-Viking dilemma was found. One could prove their Beowulf-like manhood in battle and at the same time regard such a fight, if it led to death, as martyrdom. You get your testosterone fix and heaven for free. Sigh.

Anyway, the boys and I will be moving into this period in our World History class so this was a perfect movie for the day all around.

Question for Comment: Has your life had its "Dark Ages"? How did you pull out of them? Or how were you pulled out of them?