MIDDLE AGES. – A term in the historiography of European civilization denoting the centuries that elapsed between antiquity and the modern age.
I. HISTORY
OUTLINE:
I. The value of the term
II. Chronological limits of the Middle Ages
III. Characterization of the Middle Ages
IV. Romano-Germanic relations
V. The role of the Church and the Papacy
VI. The Empire
VII. Monasticism
VIII. The Church’s struggles for freedom
IX. The Church’s expansion
X. Church and Empire
XI. Culture
XII. New spirit and new horizons
XIII. Art.I. THE VALUE OF THE TERM
The term is consecrated by a centuries-old tradition to denote the period in the historical development of Romano-European civilization that lies between antiquity and the modern age. Already in the Renaissance there emerged an awareness of the break between classical civilization and its renewal, separated by an intermediate age marked by the fall of the Roman Empire and of all ancient civilization, by the decline of letters and the arts, and by the invasions of barbarian peoples. Thus, between the glories of Greco-Roman civilization and those of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages were judged not only as an age of transition but also as one of barbarism, ignorance, and darkness. This negative judgment was rejected by nineteenth-century historicism, which saw the Middle Ages as an age rich in spiritual and economic activity of the highest value, an age of arduous yet precious constructive labor, fundamental to the development of civilization. The idea that the term “Middle Ages” might be used to denote transitional and dark ages in the course of other civilizations (Egyptian, Japanese, etc.) must therefore be rejected; such usage, determined by superficial and misleading analogies, is altogether inadvisable because of the errors and misunderstandings it entails.II. CHRONOLOGICAL LIMITS OF THE MIDDLE AGES
The chronological limits of the Romano-European Middle Ages remain a subject of debate among scholars of so-called periodization, dictated by religious, political, or economic presuppositions. The German scholar Christoph Keller (Cellarius), who is said to have first published a Historia Medii Aevi in 1688, placed it between the age of Constantine and the Turkish conquest of Constantinople (313–1453), combining two dates of differing significance, one religious and one political. In other schemes of periodization, none of which have absolute value, the beginning is variously marked by the end of the Roman emperors at Ravenna (476), the descent of the Lombards into Italy (568—signifying the political fragmentation of the peninsula), or the triumph of Islam in the Mediterranean (c. 700); for the end of the period, the usual dates are the descent of Charles VIII into Italy (1494), the discovery of America (1492), the religious revolution of Luther (1517), or the Peace of Cambrai (1529).Modern studies, however, have shown that it is impossible to admit a solution of continuity between the Middle Ages and the ages that precede and follow II. For Fustel de Coulanges, there is continuity between the imperial age and that of the Romano-barbarian monarchies; for Dopsch, the barbarian invasions did not interrupt the historical process of Germanic civilization between Caesar and Charlemagne; for Pirenne, it was only in the eighth century that a Mediterranean economic revolution occurred, which would have truly constituted the Middle Ages, namely the age of natural economy without outlets. Thus, links between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, previously ignored, are now recognized, whether in the religious character of the Renaissance or in certain medieval aspects of Renaissance thought; likewise, the Catholic “Reformation” and the Lutheran “pseudo-Reformation” show vital connections with the Middle Ages.
III. CHARACTERIZATION OF THE MIDDLE AGES
The problem of continuity is closely tied to the more serious issue of the Middle Ages possessing clear and distinctive characteristics. For while the study of the period reveals seemingly opposing and even contradictory aspects, as well as successive ages with their own traits—the age of Romano-barbarian monarchies, the Carolingian Empire, feudalism, the communes, and national monarchies—it nonetheless seems beyond doubt that the medieval age as a whole has a unifying character: the close union in it between Roman civilization and Christian religion, upon which the new faith rests and which gives rise to a profound fracture in the Romania of the eighth century. At Byzantium, Rome stands in opposition; Hellenism resists Latinity; alongside the Slavo-Byzantine world, the Latin-Germanic world emerges, in which the Romano-Italian traditions of language, writing, letters, the arts, law, and economics persist with great strength.IV. ROMANO-GERMANIC RELATIONS
In this Romanized environment live the Germanic peoples mingled with the Roman populations: they mix but do not merge. Certainly, the barbarian invasions of the fifth century were of great importance: many Roman cultural centers were destroyed; the provincial peoples were deprived of the ability to rise again by their own strength from the chaos in which the Empire found itself, thus preventing the formation of a united community of Roman and Romanized peoples. After the invasions, Romans and Germans coexist, tolerating one another, each people preserving its own laws and customs; they are bound together by the Roman economic system, into which the Germans enter without destroying or transforming II. On the relations between the two races in the Middle Ages, two opposing conceptions contend. The Germanists affirm that, faced with the decay of Roman civilization, only the Germanic ethnic elements could bring the fresh and vigorous vitality to which is owed whatever is alive and new in medieval civilization. The Romanists oppose this, denying Germanization: the Roman populations would have preserved their traditions of life and civilization; the invasions would not have brought about Germanization but only barbarization, a return to the conditions of peoples no longer the Germanic tribes admired by Caesar and Tacitus, but merely the remnants of the long struggles that for centuries had devastated northern lands and had survived the single onslaught of invasion. Today, a more balanced judgment tends to prevail: the influence of Germanicism would vary by region—strong in areas with little or superficial Romanization, less perceptible and even negligible in areas of deep Romanization.Moreover, it is difficult, if not impossible, to assess ethnic contributions in a new civilization as original as the medieval one: ethnic difference gradually fades into a mere distinction of social classes; by the eighth century, in Italy as in Gaul, there are no longer victors and vanquished, only proprietors. Indeed, the Roman system of landholding endures: the Middle Ages, like antiquity, remain the domain of landed and military aristocracies over masses of colonists, serfs, and small proprietors.
V. THE ROLE OF THE CHURCH AND THE PAPACY
In the levelling of peoples and classes, a perceptible role was played by the Catholic Church through its center, the Papacy, and the spread of its provinces. Crushed by the Arian Germanic monarchies, the various Churches of the West, instead of turning to Constantinople, turned to the Apostolic See of Rome, whose superiority offered refuge and defense. Thus, Romanitas and Catholicism came to correspond perfectly, distinguishing themselves both from Byzantine Romania and from Arian barbarism: a new Roman unity formed in the West—the community of all peoples who venerate in the Pope of Rome their teacher of faith and moral leader. The apostolic tradition had already made the Roman See the guardian of the purest orthodoxy: as the holder of spiritual powers, it asserted itself as an inexhaustible source of new life, animating and comforting populations deprived of the juridical guidance of the emperors.This western Latin Romania undergoes great transformations between the 7th and 8th centuries. Old imperial provinces such as Africa, Spain, Sicily and Sardinia are overwhelmed by the Islamic wave; moreover, the Arian Churches of Italy, Spain, and Gaul disappear; the missionary work begun by the Roman See under the impetus of Gregory the Great brings new Germanic masses of the faithful to the Church; new episcopal provinces arise beyond the Rhine and the Danube, united to Rome by nothing more than the oath of loyalty which the bishops render to the pope.
Medieval - The towers known as Garisenda and degli Asinelli (12th century) - Bologna.
Thus a new Christian world emerges in which countries of Roman traditions and countries of Germanic traditions are associated: a religious empire, a Res publica christiana, heir and continuer of the Res publica romana, prefiguration of the future Europe divided politically but united morally. The Roman Papacy dominates it with its magisterium and its spiritual powers, but then the insufficiency of public powers, the imperial concessions received from Constantine to Justinian — right of property, fiscal immunity, privilege of forum — lead it to exercise a preeminent political function within European society. To strengthen this concurring function, the Pope supports the formation of the temporal State in Rome, sustained by the patrimonial wealth of the Roman Church, by the moral and religious prestige of the popes, by their social and humanitarian activity. The hierocratic government that thus arises in Rome (to which the false “Donation of Constantine,” composed between 750 and 760, will give particular juridical foundation) becomes the basis and guarantee of the Catholic jurisdictional system and finds the impetus to extend its authority over all the countries that obey its bishops.
VI. THE EMPIRE
In the shadow of this Roman religious universalism, the Christian Roman Empire of Charlemagne is constituted at the end of the 8th century. Indeed, the Romano-barbaric political organizations that had attempted to reconcile Roman juridical conceptions with Germanic individualism have fallen: everywhere their inability to organize internally and defend externally has been noted.All the Roman and Germanic countries of the West enter into the great territorial complex created by the Franks by force of arms: Charlemagne seeks to justify his conquests by affirming a civilizing religious mission. The Carolingian Empire, despite the coronation in Rome on Christmas Day 800, has only external and vague Roman traits; it is instead, as it were, the lay expression of the papal Christian universalism.
The problem of the relations between the two powers, civil and religious, which had already been discussed in the post-Constantinian age, now reappears. The dualistic principle of Gelasius I is once again affirmed: Church and Empire are the two aspects of the same political reality, because religious life and civil life are the two modes of being of social life. Yet above this dualism the Church asserts the supreme necessity of the ordinatio ad unum: the otherworldly ideal, the supreme purpose of life and society, leads the apparent dualism to substantial unity; the Church, after the disappearance of Charlemagne and the inability of his successors to preserve the program, claims to dominate the Empire, which must be reduced to purely ministerial functions, since authority descends from the pope, the vicar of Christ, to princes and kings. The unity that the Empire allowed to slip away was gathered up by the Papacy, and under Nicholas I there was a prefiguration of Christendom as the 11th century was to realize II.
Charlemagne, for his part, opposes clearly caesaropapist pretensions, in line with the Byzantine Justinianic tradition, but his successors are unable to maintain this program in the face of the Papacy: Nicholas I proclaims the papal mission as the highest defense of peace and justice, and the pseudo-Isidorian decretals of the mid-9th century are then adduced as proof of the antiquity of such a conception of primacy.
The Carolingian Empire collapsed after having lasted less than a century (800–888), without having succeeded in resolving the problem of the political organization of the Christian world and that of social order. The plurality of peoples associated within it had corresponded to a plurality of national laws. The administrative organization of counties and marches of Merovingian origin had not been able to consolidate the structure of so vast a State. Order and social discipline are consequently entrusted to the formation and development of those personal bonds between powerful and weak upon which, in the 9th century, the feudal system is built. From the Frankish zone where it first develops, this system spreads to all the countries of Western Europe, taking on there attitudes and hues in conformity with local tendencies and needs. The feudal organization, however, if in appearance it is a state disintegration, in reality it is a systematization and coordination of the fundamental social cells for the future political and economic formation of Europe; it is also a school of social discipline: observance of duties, inviolability of sworn commitments, loyalty in the execution of freely assumed contracts.
As the Carolingian Empire shatters, its territories are regrouped into agglomerations that take their cue from descendants of the great Emperor; France, Germany, Italy, Burgundy form dynastic units that foreshadow the national monarchies of the subsequent age. Feudal life, with its dense development of authority and power in these dynasties, preserves their juridical value. From the 10th century, the European Christian world presents the two characteristics that it will retain for several centuries: political disintegration, religious-moral unity through the work of the Catholic Church. The Empire indeed revived under the German Otto I in 962, but it now embraced only the Germanic, Italian, and — after 1032 — Burgundian lands. The German emperors vainly aspired to resume the unifying mission of Christian society according to the Carolingian tradition.
Feudal disintegration, territorial monarchies, and the Romano-Germanic Empire constitute serious obstacles to the religious universalism defended by the Roman Church. Against these dangers, in the 11th century the Church begins its most tenacious struggle. It fights for its freedom, for its independence from political organizations, from feudalization that muzzles it, from the Germanic conception of the Church as a private domain that destroys hierarchical bonds. The Church now disposes of a great force: monasticism in a phase of renewal, for it too seeks to escape the bonds of feudal society.
VII. MONASTICISM
Monasticism, which arose in the Roman age as an assertion of absolute evangelical spiritualization against the superficiality of the Christianity of the masses converted, preserves in Latin monasticism, in the forms of Italian Benedictinism, all its fresh originality.It performs a work of capital importance within the Catholic-Roman system: it not only serves the elevation of those who aspire to the sublimation of their own spirit, but through prayers and penances it attends to the formation of that treasury of graces which must be the foundation of the eternal salvation of the community. A mystical function but in a certain way already social: to this is added the other task of acting within European society through cultural, economic, and welfare activities. In this way, monasticism represents the deep penetration of faith among the masses, where episcopal organization could only undertake a predominantly external disciplinary action (see MONACHESIMO). The new Benedictine congregations that arose from the 10th century onward, first the Cluniacs, then the Carthusians, and subsequently the Cistercians, represent new attempts to preserve the faith’s interpretation of the master’s rule while adapting to the spiritual and material needs of European society. Thus St. Francis and St. Dominic would not hesitate to break, in appearance, the old rigid frameworks of ecclesiastical tradition, consecrating in new rules the Christian program of an exemplary social preaching, in which all the impulses of Europe’s younger generations resound.