Ghulf Genes

Plagues: The Other Invaders

The Other Great Institution: The HRE

Nestorius and the Eastward Spread

Basileia tōn Rhōmaiōn

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Basileia tōn Rhōmaiōn

Sooner or later in a series on the Middle Ages, the prospect of looking a little more closely at the Byzantine Empire approaches, causing a certain dread. That time, alas, has now come. The fact of such a realm goes back to Emperor Diocletian who, in 295, split the Roman Empire into a Pars Occidentalis and a Pars Orientalis, and the Byzantine was the latter—but, while indeed its capital became the ancient Byzantium, rapidly renamed Constantinople, during that empire’s life it was never referred to as the “Byzantine.” The first such label came in the sixteenth century; and the general usage, “Byzantine Empire” dates to yesterday, you might say, the nineteenth century. The people of the actual empire called it “Empire of the Romans” but they spoke Greek. For them it was Basileia tōn Rhōmaiōn. Such is the nature of human usage—making me wonder what the Far Future will call the United States ...

The dating of the Byzantine is usually from 330 when Constantine completed his transfer of the Roman empire’s capital to Byzantium. I prefer 324, when he began this work—because it gives us a clean 1130 years for the realm’s duration. It ended in 1453 with the Ottoman capture of Constantinople. The realm was ruled by 16 dynasties. There were 92 dynastic rulers and 10 emperors who did not manage to form dynasties. Each ruler served an average of 11 years. How to give this vast stretch of time some shape in a short post?

My approach here will be concentrate on broad patterns and leave historical patterns unexplored: too many dynasties, too many rulers. And the usual method, thus singling out the most famous figures, obscures the general pattern—namely the manner in which the longer-lasting part of the Roman empire, the oriental part, was gradually dismembered over time. Do not, therefore, expect history here. Let’s call it a natural process of cultural transformation.

Let me begin with a tabulation which shows how little of that Rhōmaiōn was actually present in that Basileia. The first three dynasties, to be sure, retained their Roman character — minimally because business was transacted in Latin. But we must note that the only genuine Westerner among the early dynasties was Theodosius; he was born in Spain. Constantine was born in Serbia and Valentinian in Croatia. The birthplaces of all dynastic founders, including the first three, are shown in the following table and indicate that the Roman character of that realm faded rather rapidly.

Concerning this table, note first that under Leo I of the fourth, the Leonid, dynasty, Greek was adopted for all legislation and for doing business generally. Leo was also the first such emperor crowned by the Patriarch of Constantinople. Note that the geographical origins of dynastic founders are evenly divided between countries we would call Balkan—and Turkey. The only other Western line that ruled a part of the Byzantine much later was the Hainaut, Baldwin I being the first. The Hainauts came from Flanders, but this family only ruled the so-called Latin Empire, which was roughly one half of a split Byzantine realm. That split came after the Western conquest of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. The crusades had, by that time, also degenerated into wars with predominantly commercial aims—which, in the case of the Fourth, was to secure Constantinople for Venerian influence. The other half of the temporarily split realm was ruled by the Empire of Nicea under the Laskarid Dynasty. Michael Palaiologos, the last ruler of Nicea, and re-conqueror of Constantinople, was also the founder of the last dynasty to rule what little was left of the Byzantine—by then an empire only in name.

One could say, pushing a thousand years into a thimble, that a remnant of the Roman empire, its Pars Orientalis, rapidly turned Greek. It was ruled by Balkan and then by Turkish families until Turkey itself fell to the Persians, Arabs and then Arabs converted to Islam until only a few Greek territories were left to rule. Thereafter two Greek dynasties hung on to the bitter end until the Ottomans finished what the Persians had begun and the Seljuk Sultanate had continued. This much looking West. The Byzantine empire was also dismembered in part by Slavic and Bulgarian invasions from the North and its Mediterranean holdings, mostly islands, fell under Norman attack. A part of the dismemberment may also be assigned to a general decentralization that pervaded the spirit of the Middle Ages; we call that feudalism, the independent rule of local lords. The bottom line here is that while the Western part of Rome fell to the barbarians, the eastern part was eventually overrun by a new civilization, the Islamic. The Ottoman would also keep expanding northward until it reached almost to the gates of Vienna.

The seven maps I show, from a Wikipedia animated map found here, shows the territorial disintegration of the Basileia tōn Rhōmaiōn, with occasional attempts at recovery—but the trend is clear enough. The first image, for 550, shows the Byzantine at its greatest extension, after Justinian’s reconquest of Italy, the north coast of Africa, a slice of Spain, and the Mediterranean islands. The last, for 1400, shows what’s left of the empire 53 years before the Ottoman’s finally captured Constantinople.

From a certain time-perspective, the usual human ways of seeing things blur away into naturalistic patterns which tend to mirror nature much more closely than genuinely human behavior, even when the naturalistic changes are largely human-made. But for those who think that dynasties and personalities make a real difference—and they certainly do at the human perspective and time-scale—I will close out this post with a rather lengthy timeline in which I show largely dynasties over time and only here and there mark the presence of non-dynastic rulers and events. The color-shading is intended to show a kind of fading as we progress in time—and as the Empire becomes ever less coherent and more and more localized.

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Middle Ages Posts:

Plagues: The Other Invaders

The Other Great Institution: The HRE

Nestorius and the Eastward Spread

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Nestorius and the Eastward Spread

Roughly coinciding with the partition of the Roman Empire in 293, a new dynasty began to rule Persia (beginning in 224). The Sassanids, named after an early family member called Sasan, ruled Persia until 642 when the Muslims defeated the Sassanids in the Battle of Nahavand; some five years later the last Sassanid emperor died in flight from Persia’s Muslim invaders; the Muslims completed their conquest of Persia in 651.

Lest the Sassanids produce a blank, it might be well to put them in context. The first Persian Empire was the Achaemenid (550-330 BC); they had a war with Greece and got beaten in the Battle of Marathon (490 BC). The next was the Parthian (247 BC - 224 AD), the longest-lived. The Sassanids came next (224-642). Five other dynasties ruled after the Sassanids; the last of those, the Pahlavi, ended in 1979 with the expulsion of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, whom we know as the Shah of Iran.

While in full control of Persia, the Sassanids were not only expansionary—acquiring territory from the Byzantine Empire—they were also expansionary in a commercial sense. They developed trade relations with the Sui and then the Tang Dynasty and had significant influence and trade relations with India’s ruling dynasties as well, reaching well into South India. The map shows the extent of the Sassanid rule at its greatest extent. The Striped areas represent regions the Byzantine empire lost to the Persians.

The Sassanid history is useful background for my subject today, namely the eastward spread of Christianity. In this period already, Christianity reached all the way to China, deep into India, and regions in between, as shown in the following map. The version of Christianity that reached these lands, however, was loosely of the Nestorian variety—called that, in fact, until recent times when the term “Church of the East” has come to be applied, a part of Eastern Christianity, but, at this time not yet the Eastern Orthodox Church. That split did not take place until 1054. The Sassanids’ defeat by Muslims is also an early introduction to the event that would eventually formally end the Middle Ages, the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet in 1453.

What I’m after here is the grand pattern. It might be described as follows. Early Christianity was closely tied to major, meaning imperial, rulers. Of these we’ve already met the Byzantine emperors and Charlemagne and his successors. Associated with the first is Orthodox Christianity, with the second Catholicism. But there was also a third empire which also functioned as a protector of religion. It was the Sassanid Dynasty. And it became the protector of Nestorian Christianity.

In early Christianity, the most prominent centers were Rome, Alexandria in Egypt, and Antioch in Syria (but in a region that is now Turkey). With the rise of the Byzantine empire, Constantinople also became such a center, second only to Rome. Constantinople and Rome would later part in what is known as the Great Schism (1054), Within the Byzantine Empire itself, tensions grew between Antioch and Constantinople. During the later Sassanid period, thus by 651, Antioch came firmly under the sway of the Persians. And it is in Antioch that two versions of Eastern Christianity flourished, Nestorianism and Monophysitism, the latter a theological view originating in Alexandria. And it is these two that spread Christianity into the East. The common saying, “Follow the money,” may here be applied to Christianity by saying: “Follow the ruler.” The Sassanids came to occupy both Antioch and Alexandria.

Nestorius (386-450) was a monk born in north-western Syria, now part of Turkey, in a town today called Kharamanmaraş. He was a pious sort and travelled to Antioch, some 157 miles away, to be educated in theology. He became a dedicated and ascetic monk there, famed for his preaching. On a trip to Antioch, the Byzantine Emperor, Theodosius II, met Nestorius and was evidently much impressed. Later he named Nestorius as the Patriarch of Constantinople. Nestorius travelled the 647 miles to the north to take his new office in 428. In the map that I show, the southernmost circle was the location of Antioch, corresponding to today’s city of Hatay in Turkey.

The rise of the Nestorian heresy, and its presence in Christianity’s eastward spread, may best be summarized as follows:

· Antioch adhered to a slightly different theological view on the nature of Christ than did Rome and Constantinople. Alexandria held yet another view.

· In his somewhat zealous actions to rid the church of heresies, Nestorius came in conflict with Rome as well as Alexandria. The clergy of Constantinople, furthermore, viewed Nestorius as an unwelcome intruder who suddenly had the top religious office in that city.

· In that conflict Theodosius ultimately sided with Cyril of Alexandria. He deposed Nestorius in 431, stripped him of all his titles, and sent him back to Antioch.

· Eastern Christianity, in Antioch, being under Sassanid protection, became separated from Western Christianity (which then still included Constantinople). It embraced the Nestorian and the Monophysite theologies (of which more below). Eastern Christianity spread to the East following the inroads created by the Sassanid political and trade relations developed with China and with India. The secular world paved the way you might say.

The theological battles all revolved about the nature of Christ, arising from the seemingly dual natures present in Christ as God and man at one and the same time. The earliest of these was Arianism. In that heresy Christ was thought to be God, but subordinate to God the Father. To give a radically simple view of these controversies—and to show what the battles turned around—I present the following table. It highlights four views of Jesus held by four major schools. Those who held them all debated about Christ’s person, substance (or essence), and nature:

Name	Person “Prosopon”	Substance “Hypostasis”	Nature “Physis”
Dyophysitism	One	Two	Two
Monophysitism	One	One	One
Miaphysitism	One	One	Two in a Single Nature
Chalcedonianism	One	One	Two in Unity

Dyophysitism (literally “Two Natures”) was the view of the Nestorians. Monophysitism (“One Nature”) was the Alexandrian position. Miaphysitism (“Single Nature”) is the Eastern Orthodox position; it is indistinguishable from the next, the Chalcedonian view, except perhaps by wording, in that it asserts, despite the “singleness” of that nature, that that nature is both human and divine. Chalcedonianism (named after the Council of Chalcedon, 451) is the position of Western Christianity in which Christ unity is asserted at the level of essence or substance; hence it is also referred to as the Hypostatic Union; Christ has two natures (“physes”), but they are in total unity; that unity, however, is beyond human understanding.

These battles over words or concepts, which have (to the theologically blind) absolutely no bearing on fundamental faith and practice, illustrate clearly that early theologians might well have been fighting turf battles in the name of theology. There was and is no way really to settle these disputes in any genuine sense.

Much as theology rotated madly over a single word (or even the use of a letter), so also the Nestorian controversy arose over one such word used to describe Mary, the mother of Jesus. That word was Theotokos, meaning God-bearer. Nestorius, in line with his own studies, preferred Christotokos, Christ-bearer, to avoid the possible scandal of viewing a human being giving birth to God. It was a spark that lit a fire in the vast confusions between faith and power that, alas, forever mark our dwelling place in this dimension.

Much as Arius essentially “lent his name” to a heresy, so also Nestorius may not have personally signed up to Nestorianism or Dyophysitism. But what he thought is not unambiguously clear. After his return to Antioch, he was exiled to Egypt and died there in the desert, to his last days certain of having been misunderstood.

Why didn’t Christianity entirely convert the Eastern cultures as it did the Western? Was it that it taught two distinct if barely separable heresies? Such might be the view of an orthodox zealot. Christianity spread its seeds to the entire world, except the still undiscovered Americas, but the soil was quite radically different in Asia. The culture of the west, in those days, was not quite as suited to those lands as it was in Western Europe where a great civilization had recently died.

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Image credits:

Sassanid realm

Asian expansion of Christianity

Middle Ages Posts:

Plagues: The Other Invaders

The Other Great Institution: The HRE

Friday, April 18, 2014

The Other Great Institution: The HRE

Present consensus appears to be that the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) extended in time from the coronation of Otto I, Duke of Saxony, as Emperor of the Romans, in 962, to the dissolution of the HRE by Francis II, emperor of Austria, in 1806, after his defeat in the Battle of Austerlitz by Napoleon. In this view the Carolingian empire is labeled as a “forerunner.”

I prefer another version I found in the 1956 Encyclopedia Britannica, “Empire.” That version sees the HRE as beginning with Charlemagne, whose coronation took place in 800. The HRE is there seen in large part as an institution that existed in parallel with the papacy for 1007 years and was seen, by the popes, as the secular counterpart to the sacred rule of the Church.

Another way to put that is to say that the HRE was an ideal, expressed as an institution, an institution that only gave this ideal a very modest embodiment. For secular rulers the title of emperor was either a well-deserved honorific the reality of which they more or less already possessed, or a title that gave them titular rights to influence realms they did not really control. In a practical sense it was a tool by which the papacy could motivate rulers to defend an often threatened papacy.

In any case Voltaire’s famous quip, calling the HRE “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire” is quite accurate. In that sense the HRE much resembles every other projected idealization that humanity has tried but has not quite succeeded in making real.

To illustrate this. The Carolingian was a genuine empire only while Charles I ruled it. Thereafter it fell apart physically. And the realm that came into being with the election of Otto I might be labeled the United States of Germany. Otto controlled some but not all German duchies—and, at his elevation, became King of Italy. The Emperor’s powers were always quite limited; the states that made up the later HRE had quite real sovereignty of their own—much more so than the states of the USA. But the Emperor had moral suasion, so long as he was firmly on the job, which was not always the case. After 911 the Office itself became elective, the electors being kings and dukes.

I present above a complete list of Holy Roman Emperors treating HRE as a singular phenomenon. I’ve marked the periods in which no Holy Roman Emperor ruled at all. The major dynasties that held this office are marked in different colors. Most worthy of note is that the longest period without an Emperor (37 years) came between what was left of the disintegrating Carolingian legacy and the coronation of a Germanic Emperor Otto. That gap would seem to justify the dualistic view—but only if we viewed the HRE as a genuine, coherent political-military power, which it was not.

Worth noting further is that the other gaps that appear do so at times when one dynastic power waned before a new one managed to take hold. The sway of these dynasties also ensured that the electors continued to stick with a successful house while its power lasted. And other emperors that surfaced briefly were often selected for practical reasons. Two such were Louis the Blind, ruler of Provence, right next door to Italy in France, and Berengar of Friuli, a region just north of Venice and Trieste. I show an inset map of Friuli, showing how small Berngar’s real base was in actuality—but well-placed to hold off the Magyars. Both men, indeed, were honored with the title in attempts to recruit and to incentivize them to fight Magyar invasions from the East. When you cannot endow people with real authority, sometimes a title is useful.

Another way to view the HRE is using a lens from the future—how the major nations of Europe were formed. Charlemagne actually controlled the future France, Germany, Austria, and half of Italy. The empire under his grandchildren was split in three parts (see map) at the Treaty of Verdun in 843, with the future border between France and Germany already set as the Rhine (in the earlier Oaths of Strasbourg, 842). Until the Ottonian dynasty took over, Holy Roman Emperors came from the green and orange regions, thus from France or Italy. Thereafter fragmentation and weakness in the West—Norman invasions and Magyar incursions—shifted stability to Germany, specifically the ruling power of Saxony, as shown in the next map.

The solid black lines above indicate the extent of Otto’s realm in 972, thus ten years after his coronation. The HRE still controls significant elements of France. The following series of maps next shows the evolution of the HRE over time, the marked areas shown overlapping modern boundaries.

Note the successive changes, particularly in the west and south, as French power gradually works its way all the way to the Rhine, as the Nordic emperors lose Italy, and the Holy Roman Empire becomes, eventually, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The thought also occurs, staring at these maps, that the slowly shrinking extent of the HRE represents the inverse of Europe’s gradually establishing coherent and stable nation states—with the HRE remaining, well past the date of its dissolution, a realm of competing duchies and principalities. The actual formation of a coherent German state had to await Bismarck and the year 1871—which takes us way, way past the end of the Middle Ages.

Two closing notes. The careful reader of the table will note that dates of some individuals overlap. The explanation is that such individuals co-ruled with their predecessor—having been elected while the predecessor still held power and, while doing so, could ensure his own succession.

The French-German divide was first symbolically marked when two grandsons of Charlemagne, Charles the Bald who ruled West Francia and Louis the German, ruler of East Francia, pledged allegiance against their brother, Lothair who, ruling Middle Francia, which also included the papal states, claimed overall dominion over them. He was, after all, the Holy Roman Emperor. (For the layout of their realms, see the second map shown in this post.) The documents were prepared in Old French and Old German, and each brother swore in his own language. Medieval Latin was also used to record the oath, perhaps to make them official. The oatha were sworn in Strasbourg in 842 and they set the Rhine as the border between the two brothers’ respective claims to dominance. Prophetic, that, although much sand had to run through the clocks before it was realized.

This famous event reminded me of a visit once to Strasbourg. I was stationed near there as a soldier of the U.S. Army. I went to see a popular movie one evening. Two teenage girls in front of me, waiting in line, had a lively dialogue, one speaking German, the other French. At one point they switched languages quite spontaneously, quite unaware of the fact that they were doing so. What comes around goes around. I bet that it’s still happening…
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Image credits:

Timeline of HRE: dates and names largely from Encyclopedia Britannica.
Map of Friuli: Google Maps.
Three-fold division of Carolingian Empire: Robert Sewel (link).
Otto's Realm in 972: Wikipedia (link).
Images of HRE over time: Wikipedia (link).

Middle Ages Posts:

From Attila to Osman
Plagues: The Other Invaders

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Plagues: The Other Invaders

Pandemics were a major aspect of life in the Middle Ages. They left in their train regions and cities sometimes robbed of half of more of all their people. We might also call these plagues invasions, analogous to those by Turkic hordes, the subject of the last post in this series. Most plagues also appeared travelling from East to West from as far away as China following the Silk Road. I use the plural in my title because two major pandemics marked the Middle Ages—541-750 and 1346-1353—but these were trailed by others. The plural is also appropriate in that the cause of these mass die-offs was a bacterium called Yerisinia pestis which, like the barbarians themselves, was (and still is) divided into different tribes. We have the tribes Bubonic, Septicemic, Pneumonic, Pharyngeal, Meningial, and the miscellaneous “Other,” the smaller tribes. The majors are associated with (1) lymph glands (and bulbous swellings), (2) circulation problems, (3) lung failure, (4) a kind of tonsillitis, and (5) meningitis (brain and spinal column). The “Other” category affects the skin and people may recover; they may also recover from the pharyngeal version of the plague.

The premature deaths caused in the Middle Ages by Y. pestis far outnumber the deaths caused by either Germanic, Turkic, or Ugric invaders, but such is the nature of history, focused as it tends to be on political and military power, that we learn about the Other Invaders in more or less footnote fashion: they “contributed” to trouble rather than, as in actuality, being the most potent problems society had had to face and on a scale no barbarian war band could even dream of imposing. With that in mind, let me here present a picture of the Plagues—and what they meant in the context of the rise of Western Culture.

My first and summary graphic provides a broad view. It simply shows the medieval centuries in which either pandemics or major outbreaks devastated the European and Near-Eastern lands. We see here that in the eleven centuries of the medieval period, five centuries were marked by plagues—at the beginning and at the end. The white space in the center first inaugurates and then unveils the High Middle Ages, the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Next I present a timeline:

The shaded area is that of the Middle Ages (476-1453). I start this list in BC times because plagues were not a unique medieval phenomenon, of course. They devastated regions all over the world. I include the Plague of Athens which may well have been a pandemic; Pericles died of that plague. It coincided with the Peloponnesian war and we hear something about it from Thucydides. That plague (traditionally thought to have been bubonic) killed a third of the people of Athens and then spread from Athens to the entire Mediterranean region. The Antonine Plague, associated with Emperor Antoninus Pius and the Plague of Cyprian, named after St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, who wrote about it, are assigned to smallpox, but the cause is not unambiguously known. In Cyprian’s time Claudius II ruled Rome —and also had the easier job of dealing with the Alamanni and the Goths; he, however, succumbed to the plague; it took his life in 270. At the plague’s peak, 250-266, it was said to be taking 5,000 people a day in Rome (Wikipedia). Such numbers, however, are at best cloudy. If the peak was 17 years in duration, that rate would yield a total population loss of 31 million in a city alone that had an estimated population of 1 million in 200 AD. Such, however, is the historical reporting—there is little under it beyond scattered statements of contemporary witnesses.

The Plague of Justinian is reported narrowly(541-542), meaning its effect on Constantinople alone, as well as widely (541-750), as a pandemic that extended over most of the Mediterranean basin. Here again we meet that same number: 5,000 dying daily in Constantinople; the City then had roughly a population of roughly 450,000. Another and more reasonable estimate is that the city lost 40 percent of its population or 90,000. Spreading from Constantinople, the disease is said to have reduced the population of the imperial realm by 25 percent overall. The map shows its extent:

It is worth noting that Y. pestis kills two in three of those infected in the span of about four days. One of those infected had been Emperor Justinian himself, but he had survived. This plague began six years into the Gothic War (which was launched in 535); the war ended in 554; the plague lasted until 750, although it had ended in Constantinople much earlier. The pandemic indubitably affected Justinian’s efforts to restore the Western Empire—by weakening that effort—so that the Lombards soon claimed again what Justinian’s general, Belisarius, had managed to return to Byzantium.

The greatest calamity to visit the Medieval World was the Black Death. It lasted for eight years and covered all of Europe (see the following map). It killed an estimated 75 million and half of each European population that it touched. My source for that is a Reuters story (link), which, however, fails to give a reference to its source which, in the story, is “according to some estimates.” I’ve looked all over and find 200 million deaths as the highest estimate (BBC). Take your choice. The plague came from Asia and speculation has it that it was carried by black rats in ships infested by rat fleas. I show the image of such a flea here; it is huge compared to the disease that it carries. Y. pestis is the dark mass inside it made up of millions of bacteria. If the carriers were rats, it would explain episodic outbreaks of the plague in the centuries that followed, well into the times of the Renaissance; I did not track the disease beyond that period.

Please note, on this map, that the coloration does not indicate the intensity of the pandemic by depth of color. The colors mark chronological spread.

A note on the eventual conquest of Y. pestis. It took until 1897 to test an effective plague vaccine. It was tried and found to be effective by Waldemar Haffekin, a Russian bacteriologist who, working in India, discovered the method. Haffekin, whose name does not sound Russian, came from a Russian Jewish family. Streptomycin, the first of several antibiotics that came to be used later, dates to 1943.

The consequences of the plagues can only be summed up by making some gestures. I’ll focus on the Black Death, the better-documented of the two great pandemics. Depopulation was a significant issue—but, paradoxically, it helped in a way by reducing the number who had to be fed. During the reign of Yerisinia, the Little Ice Age was marching forward in time and would reach its peak about a century later. The Great Famine (1315-1317), due to extremely rainy weather, short summers, and exhaustion of arable land with the technology of the time had come before the plague. Depopulation weakened the feudal system in that labor shortages appeared and paid labor, versus owned labor, became more common. Serf labor was tied to the soil—so long as the serf wanted to work it. When serfs died, they could not be replaced, as in Roman times, by buying new ones. You had to pay someone. The religious consciousness of Europe was decisively weakened. Why did God permit this massive and clearly random dying—not least of its clergy? The Church lost standing. A sense of cynicism, largely absent before, rose to pave the ways toward the Renaissance. In yet other segments of the population the plague intensified the religious feeling and drove it to extremes, witness the heretical Flaggelant movement which combined extreme religious forms with hostility to Church authority; the movement predated the Black Death but culminated at its peak. Jewish persecutions flared up as the mob-mind sought someone to blame. And so on to the Renaissance and beyond, both to its cure and modernity. The Black Death was a game changer.

Another observation that doing this brief research suggested to Brigitte, and I concurr, is how the human mind, by and large, always has its attention focused on the survivors, and even more narrowly, on what humans can control. The Hitlers of the world are long remembered, the Dr. Haffekins of the world are rapidly forgotten. Some of the greatest and most influential events, those caused by Mother Nature, are rapidly forgotten again. As soon as it is over, the last disaster, mass shooting, or whatever, we’re back to guessing who’ll run for president two or three years from now.

Y. pestis is almost gone today—although still some 200 people die of it annualy, here and there. But is the “invisible Goth,” in a larger sense, still at the door of modern humanity? Waiting? I have looked back and noted—sparing the details, not least medieval art showing the infected—what it could do. Now a look forward. A good while back now, probably in the year of its publication, 1994, Brigitte bought a copy of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. It is a massive book by Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize Winner for Explanatory Journalism. That quite excellent work provides a rather dark projection of the future—certainly as dark as the picture I’ve presented looking back. And just this morning, knowing what I’m working on, Brigitte handed me a brief article in today’s New York Times titled, “Zombies in the Garden, Killing Themselves Slowly.” Should such a protein manage major inroads, we may be facing the Great Famine again. The story reports on a protein that takes over crop plants and causes them to do its will. It rides on tiny insects, leaf hoppers, and causes what one biologist in the story, Saskia A. Hogenhout, calls “a living death for the plant.” Should such a protein manage major inroads, we may be facing the Great Famine again. The Goth is still there. Vigilance is still advised. If we’re not careful, the Middle Ages may dawn once again and, in the future, some other scribe will have to rise to the challenge of sorting its chaos…

Image credits:

Plague of Justinian: University of California, Irvine (link)

Image of flea carrying Y. pestis: Wikipedia (link)

Black Death map: Wikipedia (link)

Middle Ages Posts:

Saturday, April 12, 2014

From Attila to Osman: Sorting the Nomads

Attila the Hun ushered in the Middle Ages and that period ended when another Turkic tribe, the Ottomans, captured Constantinople. I began this series with Attila; then, going in a circle roughly south, west, north, and east again, I’ve once more reached the region where Attila had had his base, thus Danubian basin, also the Carpathian basin, anciently Pannonia; these days that area is Hungary. In the last post on matters secular, concerning Charlemagne, I noted that he conquered a peoples called the Avars who were living there then. Who were these folk? Where did they come from? Is Avar another name for the Hungarians, the Magyars? And where, come to think of it, do those two names come from? Well, lets sort them all out, from A to O.

Let me first summarize this history as broadly as possible. In the period just before and a little after the Middle Ages, several major nomadic invasions of Western Europe took place mostly by Turkic-speaking peoples who had originated, or came directly from Mongolia moving to the west. These were Huns, Avars, Magyars, the Mongols of Genghis Khan, and finally the Osmanli, another Turkic group, whose name, mangled by the westerners, gave us the Ottomans. Of these only the majority of the Magyars, roughly seven of ten tribes, spoke Ugric rather than Turkic; the other three joined with them were of Turkic origin.

The map shows the prevalence today of the Turkic language. Most of the invasions we’re talking about were from the blue regions in the center of the map, usually to the West but rarely ever managing to get much past Hungary and the Balkans. To be sure, invading salients did, temporarily, penetrate deeper, but they were rarely more than extensive raids.

The invaders were nomadic, herding peoples. They lacked the institutional structures and habits that characterized those they attacked; the latter were agricultural peoples centered on towns and cities and accustomed for centuries to a highly organized—or, in the darkest times, reorganizing—realms with more or less stable borders. The Turkic invasions therefore represent the gradual absorption of a major segment of the Eurasian population into what might be called civilization—although the nomadic life-style is still more or less alive, if dying, in Mongolia and other fringe regions in that part of the world.

Some part, anyway, of the invasions recounted here, most particularly those of Genghis Khan, have been traced back to climate change, that change noted to have taken place in the near-deserts of northern Eurasia where tree-ring studies show a rain-rich period; it may have lifted population numbers (see this article in the National Geographic, link). At the same time, the invaders’ failure to completely overrun the much more humid and rainy reaches of Western Europe also owed something to water. Evidently the famed bow of the nomads was a composite made of horn, bamboo, and animal sinew bound together with animal glue. The glue deteriorated when becoming moist or in high humidity. I have this tidbit from Wikipedia (link).

My focus here will be on Hungary. That land, certainly its eastern extent, the Puszta or Great Hungarian Plain, most resembles the lands all of these invaders called home: great dry flatlands. Arriving in the Puszta, they felt at home again and usually set up their Western Headquarters. The Ottomans also, at their western-most extent, occupied that part of Hungary for 173 years. I’ve covered Attila in my first posting in this series (see link below). Therefore I will begin with the Avars. The timeline I’m providing here will guide us. Note that I have shaded the portion of this history that fall into the Middle Ages. The Ottoman’s held on to Hungary until the seventeenth century—but their empire lasted until the early twentieth. They left behind the relatively small region of Turkey—as the Hungarians still hold a much smaller central region of what had been the Greater Hungary (Nagy Magyarország, as I was taught in grade school).

The Avars. Much like Attila’s Huns before them, the Avars came from the region of the Pontic-Caspian steppe, thus roughly today’s Kazakhstan and Russia. (The Pontic here refers to the ancient name of the Black Sea, Pontus Euxinus, hospitable sea.) Much like the Huns before them, the Avars moved west under the pressure of a successfully expanding Turkish nation (let’s call it) known as the Göktürk Khaganate (derived from khagan or ruler). As the Avars came, they displaced the Germanic Gepids who, in turn had been allies of Attila, who, in his turn, had displaced the Goths who’d occupied Pannonia before his time. Endless this chain of human action to overcome and to be in turn displaced. The two images I show are the origins of the Avars and then the realm they had established for themselves when, colliding with Charlemagne, they were conquered in turn and the region of Pannonia became quite depopulated.

They were enabled to enter by the Byzantine Empire because that empire was always willing to grant lands to potential mercenaries on their borders. Furthermore, the Avars were seeking rich pastural lands, which the Puszta provided. The map shows them at their largest extent. By Charlemagne’s time they had been pushed back so that the Danube had become their border, but their intrigues with Bavaria eventually led to their own downfall.

The name of these people derives from the concept of “superiority,” “elevation,” “height.” Thus they thought of themselves as rulers. History, indeed life itself, teaches that such aspirations, taken too literally, are of brief duration.

The Magyars. Let me sort out the name first. The word Magyar comes from Hungarian. In other languages Hungarian has a Turkic etymology, deriving from onogur, which simply means ten tribes; others talk of ten arrows. The O got changed into a U; in German the word is Ungar to this day. The leading H first appears in Medieval Latin. As for the Hungarians own name for themselves, it appears to have at one time been the name of a leading family spelled Megyer.

As noted earlier, ten tribes formed the Magyar group that inherited the Land of the Avars; of these three were Turkic-speaking tribes, the Kavars. As any Hungarian can tell you, and I am one, communicating with the world is a major challenge, even with those who belong to the Finn-Ugric language group. Hence it does not surprise me that a Turkic name came to be attached to the Magyars very early.

The Hungarians originated in a small triangle formed in northern Russia by the Pechora river (it flows into the Arctic) and the Urals to the west of it. By the ninth century, parts of these peoples had come much further south. They were neighbors of the Pechenegs, another Turkic aggregation which then dominated the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. Under pressure they moved west and became mercenaries to the Byzantine empire in that realm’s efforts to hold off Bulgar incursions from the north. From there they moved into the Carpathian basin under Árpád, their overlord. They overcame the scattered peoples still left in depopulated Pannonia; the Hungarian tribes settled to the west, the Kavars to the east of the Tisza river which forms the western border of the Great Plains. Árpád defeated the German armies sent to block his advance (907).

From that time forward, the Magyars, behaving in accustomed nomadic/Hunnish style, launched numerous raids into Europe to acquire loot and slaves. They reached as far north as Denmark (915), as far West as Aquitaine in France (913, 934, 954), as far southwest as Spain (942), as far South as Italy (922, 947), and in all of these cases making their way through the German states. These forays were always both brief and not terribly destructive. They came to an end, finally, when Otto I—he who re-founded the Holy Roman Empire—defeated them decisively in the battle of Lechfeld (near Augsburg in Bavaria) in 955. Thereafter the Hungarians settled down—their own territories still intact, and began a process of aligning themselves to the European system by diplomacy and the acceptance of a feudal culture.

Those Carolingians, we might say here. Charlemagne dealt with the Avars. His very distant relative, Otto I, stopped the Magyars. In 975, Árpád’s grandson, Géza, accepted Catholicism after creating order from the chaos Otto’s victory had caused and Hungary entered the HRE by submitting to Otto II. The maps show the origin of the Ugric-speaking peoples (above), the extent of Hungary’s sway, and the raids launched by the Magyars on Western Europe between 908-955 (below). Note here the similar shape of the Magyar and Avar kingdoms.

The Mongols. Although the name of Genghis Khan still reverberates in the European collective memory as persistently as does Hitler’s, most of the great terror wrought in the world by that rather
formidable conqueror was felt in the far and central east of Eurasia. Genghis Kahn came close to capturing Constantinople and overran a piece of the Byzantine Empire, but as for Europe, they only ravaged two counties, those where Brigitte and I were born, Poland and Hungary. I can show this using two maps. The first shows the major salients of Genghis Khan’s incursions, of which the only arrow that touches Europe is the one to the bottom left.

The second map shows the extent of the Mongol Empire created by Genghis Khan and his successor, Kublai Khan. Note that the Poland and Hungary were battle-grounds but were not incorporated into the Mongol Empire. Both countries were overrun and devastated, but the war lasted about a year. Suddenly the Mongol armies retreated.

By the time these armies entered Hungary and Poland in 1241, Genghis Khan had already been dead for fifteen years, the Mongols then under this son, Ögedei Khan. That ruler, however, died in the Spring of 1242. The general commanding the forces in Europe, Batu Khan, aspired to election as rule of the empire. Hence he immediately set out to return to Karakorum in Mongolia to be a participant in the process of naming a successor. The distance from, say, Budapest to Karakorum using modern roads is 4,650 miles. Batu had a ways to go—and catching a flight was not then an option.

Where the Mongols touched Europe, they were overwhelming. But the experience of defeat taught the Hungarians and Poles a lesson. In both realms fortified centers, like castles, were only present in border regions. Once the Mongols got past these, they had a free hand. After Batu Khan’s withdrawal, a castle-building boom began. And both realms had just time enough to fortify. The Mongols returned again in the 1280s; Kublai Khan had since ascended to the Mongol throne. Each Mongol attack was promptly and decisively defeated, and the Mongols would not again return. Technology, we might say. Technology.

The Ottomans. Let me bring this post to a close by at least mentioning the Ottomans. They were the last of the Turkic invaders. For them a partial conquest of Hungary was on the point of their extreme extension. They came from the south, some seventy-four years after capturing Constantinople and thus officially ending the Middle Ages. I’ll say no more than that because I want to speak much more extensively of the Ottomans in a later post toward the end of this series. The little more that I would say here is that the Ottomans, while certainly from the same roots, both geographically as well culturally, as the earlier invaders, had learned many lessons from the successes and failures of their predecessors. They built an empire that later coincided with that of the Byzantine. And they held on to it to just about the time that Brigitte and I were born.
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Images from Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica:

Turkic Languages
Pontic-Caspian Steppe
Avar Domain
Urals
Hungarian Domain
Hungarian Raids
Mongol Routes of Invasion
Mongol Empire*

*This map used to be on Wikipedia but has, since my earlier posting, been removed.

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