The Dark Ages...how dark were they, really?발음듣기
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The Dark Ages...how dark were they, really?
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Possibly the most egregious Eurocentrism in all of history, which is really saying something.발음듣기
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(lively music) Right? So what you'll quickly find is that your worst year was someone else's best year. So, too, with history.발음듣기
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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 about the Byzantines and the beginning of the Modern Age.발음듣기
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It's sometimes called the Dark Ages because it was so purportedly unenlightened, but was the age really so dark?발음듣기
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If you like cities and great poetry, then the Dark Ages were indeed pretty dark in Europe, but if, like me, your 2 favorite things are not dying from wars and not dying from anything else, then the Dark Ages actually weren't that bad, at least until the plague came in the 14th century.발음듣기
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Meanwhile, outside of Europe, the Dark Ages were truly an age of enlightenment, but we'll get boring Europe out of the way first.발음듣기
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Medieval Europe had less trade, fewer cities, and less cultural output than the original Roman Empire.발음듣기
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London and Paris were fetted firetraps with none of the planning or sewage management of places 5,000 years older, like Mohenjo Daro, in the Indus Valley Civilization, let alone Rome.발음듣기
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But with fewer powerful governments, wars were at least smaller, which is one reason why Europeans living in Medieval times, ugh, thought bubble, I knew you were gonna do that!발음듣기
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Anyway, people in Medieval times lived slightly longer, life expectancy was 30, than Europeans during the Roman Empire, when life expectancy was 28.발음듣기
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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 excange for pledging loyalty to the lords.발음듣기
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The lords were also vassals to more important lords, with the most important of all being the king.발음듣기
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Below the knights were peasants, who did the actual work on the land in exchange for protection from bandits and other threats.발음듣기
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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.발음듣기
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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.발음듣기
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Thanks, thought bubble, one more point that's really interesting from a world history perspective.발음듣기
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This devolution from empire to localism has happened in lots of places at lots of different times.발음듣기
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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.발음듣기
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We hear a lot about this in Chinese history and also in contemporary Afghanistan, but instead of being called feudal lords, these land lords are called warlords. Eurocentrism striking again.발음듣기
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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.발음듣기
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While there's something to that, the Middle Ages also saw theologians like Thomas Aquinas, who was quite an important philospher, and women like Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote all this important liturgical music and also basically invented the genre of the morality play.발음듣기
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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 Sasanian Empire, all in the space of about 100 years.발음듣기
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The Umayyad Dynasty then expanded the empire west to Spain, and then moved the capital to Damascus, because it was closer to the action empire-wise, but still technically, in Arabia.발음듣기
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That was really important to the Umayyads, because they'd established this hierarchy with the Arabs like them at the top, and, in fact, they tried to keep Arabs from fraternizing with non-Arab muslims throughout the empire.발음듣기
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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."발음듣기
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Pretty quickly, a majority of muslims weren't Arabs, which made it pretty easy for them to overthrow the Umayyads, which they did in 750 CE.발음듣기
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Computer: Abbasid (pronounced ah-BASS-sid) or Abbasid (pronounced AB-ba-sid) John: I'm right twice!발음듣기
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Right, so the Abbasids were from the Abbasi family, which hailed from one of the eastern, and therefore more Persian provinces of the Islamic Empire.발음듣기
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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.발음듣기
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(cavalry music) 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 non-Arab muslims into positions of power.발음듣기
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Under the Abbasids, the Dar al Islam took on a distinctly Persian cast that it never really lost.발음듣기
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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.발음듣기
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This meant that his control was much weaker, and by about 1,000 CE, 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.발음듣기
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This was partly because the Islamic Empire relied more and more on soldiers from the frontier.발음듣기
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In this case, the 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.발음듣기
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Actually, our resident historian points out that that strategy has worked, if you are the Mongols. more important than the Persian-style monarchy the Abassids set up, was their openness to foreignors and their ideas.발음듣기
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That tolerance and curiosity ushered in a golden age of Islamic learning centered in Baghdad.발음듣기
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The Abbasids oversaw an effervescence of culture unlike anything that had been seen since Hellenistic times.발음듣기
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Arabic replaced Greek, not only as the language of commerce and religion, but also of cultural, philosophy, medicine, and poetry were all written in Arabic, although Persian remained an important literary language.발음듣기
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Baghdad became the world center of scholarship, with its house of wisdom and immense library.발음듣기
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Muslim scholars translated the works of Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato, as well as scientific works by Hippocrates, Archimedes, and especially the physician Galen.발음듣기
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They translated and preserved Buddhist and Hindu manuscripts that might have otherwise been lost.발음듣기
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One Muslim scholar, Ibn Sina, wrote the Canon of Medicine, which became the standard medical textbook for centuries in both Europe and the Middle East.발음듣기
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And the Islamic Empire adopted mathematical concepts from India, such as the zero, a number so fascinating and beautiful, that we could write an entire episode about it, but instead, I'm just gonna right it a little love poem. Oh, zero, pretty little zero.발음듣기
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(harp music) An open letter to science and religion, but first let's see what's in the secret compartment today.발음듣기
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Dear science and religion, you're supposed to be so irreconcilable in everything, but not so much in the Abbasid Empire.발음듣기
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I mean Muslim mathematicians expanded math to such a degree that we now call the base 10 number system and the symbols we use to denote it Arabic numerals.발음듣기
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Religion was at least part of what pushed all that learning forward, like the great philosopher Ibn Rushd argued that the only path to religious enlightenment was through Aristotelian reasoning, and Muslim mathematicians and astronomers developed algebra partly so they could simplify Islamic inheritance law.발음듣기
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Plus, they made important strides in trigonometry to help people to understand where to turn when trying to turn toward Mecca.발음듣기
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You were working so well together, science and religion, but then, like Al and Tipper Gore, just couldn't last forever.발음듣기
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This is perhaps best exemplified by the great Mosque at Cordoba built by the Umayyad ruler, Abd al-Rahman I in 785 to 786 CE. That's right.발음듣기
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This building, still standing today and one of the most amazing mosques in the world was built in a year, whereas Medieval cathedrals took, like, a million years to finish.발음듣기
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Aqueducts in Cordoba brought drinkable water into the city and Muslim scholars took the lead in agricultural science, improving yields on all kinds of new crops, allowing Spanish lives to be longer and less hungry.발음듣기
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Everybody wanted to live in Spain, even the greatest Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, wanted to live in Spain, but sadly he was expelled, and ended up in Alexandria, Egypt.발음듣기
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There, he wrote his awesomely-titled defensive rationality, A Guide for the Perplexed. i'm translating the title, of course, because the original text was written in Arabic.발음듣기
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The Tang Dynasty made China's government more of a meritocracy, and ruled over 80 million people across 4 million square miles, and they might have conquered all of central Asia, had it not been for the Abbasids, whom they fought at the most important battle you've never heard of, the Battle of the Talas River.발음듣기
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This was like the Ali Frazier of the 8th century, and the Abbasids won, which ended up defining who had cultural influence where, with the Abbasids dominating to the west of the river, and China dominating to the east. the Tang also produced incredible art that was traded all throughout Asia.발음듣기
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Many of them were famous sculptures from the Tang Dynasty, featured figures who were distinctly not Chinese, which, again, demonstrates the diversity of the empire.발음듣기
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The Tang was also a golden age for Chinese poetry, with notables like Du Fu and Li Bai applying their craft, encouraged by the official government, and the Song Dynasty, which lasted from 960 to 1258 kicked even more ass.발음듣기
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By the 11th century, Chinese metalworkers were producing as much iron as Europe would be able to produce in the 18th century.발음듣기
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Some of this iron was put to use in new plows, which enabled agriculture to boom, thereby supporting population growth.발음듣기
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Porcelain was of such high quality that it was shipped throughout the world, which is why we now call it china.발음듣기
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There was so much trade going on that the Chinese ran out of metal for coins, leading to another innovation, paper money.발음듣기
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By the 11th century, the Chinese were writing down their recipe for a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal, that we now know as gunpowder.발음듣기
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That becomes kind of a big deal in history, paving the way, as it does, for modern warfare and arena rock pyrotechnics, and, oh, that's why.발음듣기
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