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Introduction to the Middle Ages
From: Hooker, Richard. “The Middle Ages.” World Civilizations. 1996. Web. August 1, 2004.
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/110/110SCHED.HTM
The European Middle Ages is commonly understood as a northward expansion of classical culture,
primarily through the means of Christianity. At best, the Middle Ages are regarded as an innovative and
energetic recreation of classical culture—a kind of preface to modernity. At worst, the period is regarded
as a cultural setback from the high point of classical culture in Greece and Rome, an often poor and
superstitious descendant of that culture. In the least friendly assessments of the European Middle Ages,
the period is a kind of holding pattern, a temporary bathroom break on the way to the revival of classical
culture in the fourteenth century.
In reality, however, this picture of the European Middle Ages is founded on several, deeply held fallacies
[falsehoods]. The first and foremost is that the European Middle Ages is a single thing that can clearly be
identified by the label. However, when you try to get people to define the start or end of the Middle Ages,
there's some problems. Did the Middle Ages start at the final sack of Rome? What about the continuation
of the Roman Empire in Constantinople until the conquest of that city by the Ottomans in 1453? Were the
Byzantines not a part of European culture? When does the "Renaissance" start? Do people wake up one
day and say, whew!, today the Middle Ages ended? What's the date? 1400? 1350? 1200? 1100?
Not only is the historical category of the Middle Ages a somewhat shaky fiction, the most enduring
fallacy about the Middle Ages, and European history in general until the close of the Middle Ages, is that
Europeans throughout this period and before are a single culture which we can safely call "European
culture." Of all the fallacies about the Middle Ages and before, this is the hardest one to shake. For there
really is no such thing as European culture, at least no such thing as a single entity, until the close of the
Middle Ages. European history until the 1300s or 1400s is largely characterized by two main historical
tendencies: constant disruption of populations and migration, and multiculturalism. For Europe is
throughout most of its history a massively and aggressively multicultural society. People with
dramatically different social organizations, languages, and religions are in constant flux all throughout
prehistoric and most of historic Europe. Constant migrations continually change the cultural face of
Europe bringing new languages, social hierarchies, and religions—these to be displaced by new peoples,
new languages, and new religions. This constant flux only settled in the Mediterranean region—hence
classical culture and its unique continuity.
Perhaps the best way to define the Middle Ages, or at least the best way that accounts for European
multiculturalism, is to define the Middle Ages as the period in which the tense and often disruptive
multiculturalism of Europe standardized into a clearly definable, single cultural entity. At the start of the
Middle Ages, there are European cultures. At the conclusion of the Middle Ages, it's possible to use the
term “European culture” with no plural. The Middle Ages, then, is about that transition.
At the start of the Middle Ages, Europe was a jigsaw puzzle of ethnic groups. These ethnic groups, with
the exception of the classical cultures [Greece & Rome], did not occupy any fixed territory or constitute
individual nations of any kind. They were in constant contact with one another and with the cultures in
the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and even further east. These ethnic groups were also in fairly constant
motion, displacing other ethnic groups and, in their turn, being displaced by other ethnic groups—
including cultural groups from Asia. The early history of the Middle Ages might be regarded as the period
in which this conflicting multiculturalism still largely characterizes the European experience; it differs,
however, in the introduction of a shared cultural practice: Christianity. The history, you might say, of
early medieval Europe is about the acquiring of a world view that all Europeans would eventually hold in
common, the Christian world view. For the glue that turned the multilingual, multicultural group of
peoples into a single people was this religion: it not only united Europe in a single religious world view, it
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also gave Europe a single [academic and religious] language: Latin. This early period, which saw the
same types of migrations and multiculturalism as the classical and prehistoric periods, is the story of the
introduction of a standard cultural form and its consequent social structure on the various peoples of
Europe.
The later Middle Ages can be understood as the period in which Europe as a continental culture was
defined. This is the period when the large-scale migrations of individual cultures and ethnic groups comes
to a halt; after the early Middle Ages, the constant disruption and displacement of European peoples
settles down. In the later Middle Ages, most conquests are not followed by massive migration into the
conquered territory. When the Normans invade England in 1066, they don't do so as a migrating
population but simply to seize control over the indigenous population. During this period, Europeans
begin to consider themselves as a more or less single culture that they can define against other cultures,
such as the Byzantines, the Islamic world, and Asia. Social structure and cultural practices are throughout
Europe becoming similar if not in some cases identical in this period and Europeans are recognizing this
fact. As a consequence, Europe is developing an educated class and the overall material of this education
is common throughout most of Europe. Among the educated, the universal language is Latin. In addition,
political institutions settle down into a more or less shared structure. From the church in Rome to
England, authority largely takes the same forms and is legitimated in largely the same way (there are, of
course, significant exceptions such as the Irish, the Byzantines, the Icelanders, and, later, the Russians, all
of whom are on the outer edges of European culture). This period is also marked by significant rewriting
of European history. In the late medieval histories of Europe concerning the classical period, the various
figures and stories of central and northern Europe from the classical period, such as the stories of Arthur
or Attila, are all recast to conform to the European social and religious practices of the time. In other
words, the experience of early European history is reimagined by Europeans to look like the European
experience in the late medieval period. The history of the classical world is also rewritten to the point
where it becomes unrecognizable. The history writing of high Middle Ages can be best understood as a
large-scale translation of pre-Christian European, Greek, and Roman history into medieval social,
religious, and political practices—this means, of course, that early European history starts looking a
whole lot like classical history which, in its turn, looks a whole lot like the contemporary experience in
late medieval Europe. As with everything else in this period, this rewriting of history was a powerful
force in standardizing European culture and identity.1
Finally and most importantly, the high Middle Ages was the period when most ethnic groups defined
themselves historically as the cultural and social descendants of the classical world. The technology
which began the standardization of the varied and distinct European cultures was Christianity; the myth
that would cement this standard identity was a myth of common origin in the cultures of Greece and
Rome (and mythical classical cultures such as Troy). Seen in this light, of course, the "rebirth" of classical
culture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is not really a departure from the Middle Ages but a
continuation of the late medieval process of standardization that was rooted in the myth that European
culture derives from the classical world. This is why, of course, it's impossible to date the so-called
Renaissance, for the rebirth of the classical world essentially begins with the start of the High Middle
Ages [roughly the late eleventh century onward, depending on the region].
And we share that myth of origin today; so thorough was the absorption of this myth that the European
Middle Ages has throughout the modern period been presented as culturally continuous with the classical
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The idea here is that as late medieval Europeans rediscover the classical world of Greece and Rome, they claim it
as their own by teaching, learning, and imagining the classical world in their own (late medieval) terms. This of
course is an incorrect view on a number of levels, not the least being that much of the middle ages can be
characterized by a radical departure from classical culture with the triumph of the “barbarian” tribal peoples—the
ancestors of these same medieval Europeans who now claim to be directly descended from Greece and Rome. In
doing this, however, Europe creates a sense of identity and values for itself that all Christian Europeans can share.
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world. We are the products of the late medieval insistence on the monocultural nature of Europe and the
continuity of Europe with the classical Mediterranean cultures. The lived reality, particularly in the early
Middle Ages, was far different.
The Middle Ages in this approach is understood as two different processes that are not divisable in terms
of time, since they happened to different degrees and at different times for the various cultural, ethnic and
national groups. The standard historical terms for these processes are "Early Middle Ages" and "Late (or
High) Middle Ages." The Early Middle Ages is characterized by a process in which the European
prehistoric and classical multiculturalism and migrations continues to characterize the European
experience with two significant changes: the introduction of writing and Christianity. The Late Middle
Ages is characterized by a process in which individual cultures or ethnic groups begin to define
themselves as part of a larger, homogenous European culture. This process is marked by a series of
historical trends in social structure, the structure of authority, religious experience and organization,
education, and culture. These processes occurred at different times for various ethnic groups and, for
some ethnic groups, this process was antithetical [opposed] to the process going on in the rest of Europe.
For instance, the Byzantines were the immediate inheritors of classical culture; in fact, the sack of Rome
was culturally a non-event in the eastern Roman Empire, which largely continued as it had before. The
period in which Europeans began to define themselves as a single culture with its origins in the classical
world, led those very same Europeans to regard themselves as culturally alien to the Byzantines—and the
Byzantines, whose empire had extended as far west as Venice, began to regard themselves as a
fundamentally different culture from that of the Europeans… 2
The Celts
While textbooks stress the descent of Europe from classical culture, the face of Europe throughout most
of the historical period was dominated by a single cultural group, a powerful, culturally diverse group of
peoples, the Celts. By the start of the Middle Ages, the Celts had been struck on two fronts by two very
powerful cultures, Rome in the south, and the Germans, who were derived from Celtic culture, from the
north. Through the period of classical Greece…to the first centuries CE, most of Europe was under the
shadow of this culture which, in its diverse forms, still represented a fairly unified culture.
This monolithic culture spread from Ireland to Asia Minor (the Galatians of the New Testament). The
Celts even sacked Rome in 390 BCE and successfully invaded and sacked several Greek cities in 280
BCE. Though the Celts were preliterate during most of the classical period, the Greeks and Romans
discuss them quite a bit, usually unfavorably.
From this great culture would arise the Germans (we think) and many of the cultural forms, ideas, and
values of medieval Europe. For not only did medieval Europe look back to the Celtic world as a golden
age of Europe, they also lived with social structures [warrior/tribal] and world views [pagan] that
ultimately owe their origin to the Celts as well as to the Romans and Greeks. The period of Celtic
dominance in Europe began to unravel in the first centuries CE, with the expansion of Rome, the
migrations of the Germans, and later the influx of an Asian immigrant population, the Huns. By the time
western Rome and the city itself fell to Gothic invaders [in 476], the Celts had been pushed west and
north, to England, Wales and Ireland and later to Scotland and the northern coast of France.
Society
The Celts are traditionally ignored in world history textbooks and courses, but the Celtic way of life,
Celtic institutions, and the Celtic world view were superimposed onto Germanic and classical culture. The
later monolithic European culture is greatly influenced by these early peoples.
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This fundamental difference becomes particularly evident during the Crusades, when Eastern and Western
Christendom come into contact with disastrous results.
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Most of what we know about Celtic life comes from Ireland—the largest and most extensive of the Celtic
populations, the Gauls in central and western Europe, we only know about through Roman sources—and
these sources are decidedly unfriendly to the Gauls.
We know that the early Celtic societies were organized around warfare—this structure would commonly
characterize cultures in the process of migration: the Celts, the Huns, and later the Germans. Although
classical Greek and Roman writers considered the Celts to be violently insane, warfare was not an
organized process of territorial conquest. Among the Celts, warfare seems to have mainly been a sport,
focussing on raids and hunting. In Ireland, the institution of the fianna involved young, aristocratic
warriors who left the tribal area for a time to conduct raids and to hunt. When the Celts came into contact
with the Romans, they changed their manner of warfare to a more organized defense against a larger
army. It was these groups that the classical writers encountered and considered insane. The Celtic method
of warfare was to stand in front of the opposing army and scream and beat their spears and swords against
their shields. They would then run headlong into the opposing army and screamed the entire way—this
often had the effect of scaring the opposing soldiers who then broke into a run; fighting a fleeing army is
relatively easy work. If the opposing army did not break ranks, the Celts would stop short of the army,
return to their original position, and start the process over again.
Celtic society was hierarchical and class-based. Tribes were led by kings but political organizations were
remarkably plastic. According to both Roman and Irish sources, Celtic society was divided into three
groups: a warrior aristocracy, an intellectual class that included druids, poets, and jurists, and everyone
else. [This structure is very similar to nearly all the later tribal peoples in Europe.]
Society was tribal and kinship-based; one's ethnic identity was largely derived from the larger tribal
group, called the tuath ("too-awth") in Irish (meaning "people") but ultimately based on the smallest
kinship organizational unit, the clan, called the cenedl (ke-na-dl), or "kindred," in Irish. The clan provided
identity and protection—disputes between individuals were always disputes between clans. Since it was
the duty of the clan to protect individuals, crimes against an individual would be prosecuted against an
entire clan. One of the prominent institutions among the Celts was the blood-feud in which murder or
insults against an individual would require the entire clan to violently exact retribution. The blood-feud
was in part avoided by the institution of professional mediators. At least in Ireland, a professional class of
jurists, called brithem, would mediate disputes and exact reparations on the offending clan. [These traits,
too, are seen in nearly all the later tribal peoples in Europe.]
Even though Celtic society centered around a warrior aristocracy, the position of women was fairly high
in Celtic society. In the earliest periods, women participated both in warfare and in kingship. While the
later Celts would adopt a strict patriarchal model, they still have a memory of women leaders and
warriors.
Celtic society was based almost entirely on pastoralism and the raising of cattle or sheep; there was some
agriculture in the Celtic world, but not much. The importance of cattle and the pastoral life created a
unique institution in Celtic, particularly Irish, life: the cattle-raid. The stealing of another group's cattle
was often the proving point of a group of young warriors; the greatest surviving Irish myth, the Táin Bó
Cualingne, or "The Cattle Raid of Cooley," centers around one such mythically-enhanced cattle-raid.
There was no urbanization [city life] of any kind among the Celts until the advent of Roman rule; in
Ireland, urbanization did not occur until the Danish and Norwegian invasions. Society was not based on
trade or commerce; what trade took place was largely in the form of barter. Celtic economy was probably
based on the economic principle of most tribal economies: reciprocity. In a reciprocal economy, goods
and other services are not exchanged for other goods, but they are given by individuals to individuals
based on mutual kinship relationships and obligations. (A family economy is typical of a reciprocal
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economy—parents and children give each other material goods and services not in trade but because they
are part of a family).
Religion
From the nineteenth century onwards, Celtic religion has enjoyed a fascination among modern Europeans
and European-derived cultures. In particular, the last few decades have seen a phenomenal growth not
only in interest in Celtic religion, but in religious practices in part derived from Celtic sources. For all this
interest, however, we know next to nothing about Celtic religion and practices. The only sources for
Celtic religious practices were written by Romans and Greeks, who considered the Celts little more than
animals, and by later Celtic writers in Ireland and Wales who were writing from a Christian perspective.
Simply put, although the Celts had a rich and pervasive religious culture, it has been permanently lost to
human memory.
We can make some general comments about Celtic religion based on the often-hostile accounts of
classical writers. The Celts were polytheistic; these gods were ultimately derived from more primitive,
Indo-European sources that gave rise to the polytheistic religions of Greece, Persia, and India.3 The
Romans in trying to explain these gods, however, linked them with Roman gods as did the Romanized
Gauls—so we really have no idea as to the Celtic character of these gods and their functions. We do know
that Celtic gods tended to come in threes; the Celtic logic of divinity almost always centered on triads.
This triadic logic no doubt had tremendous significance in the translation of Christianity into northern
European cultural models.
It is almost certain that the material world of the Celts was filled with divinity that was both advantageous
and harmful. Certain areas were considered more charged with divinity than others, especially pools,
lakes and small groves, which were the sites of the central ritual activities of Celtic life. The Celts were
non-urbanized and according to Roman sources, Celtic ritual involved no temples or building structures—
Celtic ritual life, then, was centered mainly on the natural environment.
Celtic ritual life centered on a special class, called the druides or "druids" by the Romans, presumably
from a Gaulish word. Although much has been written about druids and Celtic ritual practice, we know
next to nothing about either. Here's what we can gather. As a special group, the druids performed many of
the functions that we would consider "priestly" functions, including ritual and sacrifice, but they also
included functions that we would place under "education" and "law." These rituals and practices were
probably kept secret—a tradition common among early Indo-European peoples—which helps to explain
why the classical world knows nothing about them. The only thing that the classical sources attest is that
the druids performed "barbaric" or "horrid" rituals at lakes and groves; there was a fair amount of
consensus among the Greeks and Romans that these rituals involved human sacrifice. This may or may
not be true; there is some evidence of human sacrifice among the Celts, but it does not seem to have been
a common practice.
According to Julius Caesar, who gives the longest account of druids, the center of Celtic belief was the
passing of souls from one body to another. From an archaeological perspective, it is clear that the Celts
believed in an after-life, for material goods are buried with the dead.
The Gauls
The earliest Celts who were major players in the classical world were the Gauls, who controlled an area
extending from France to Switzerland. It was the Gauls who sacked Rome and later invaded Greece; it
was also the Gauls that migrated to Asia Minor to found their own, independent culture there, that of the
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The Celts, along with the Greeks, Persians, Indians, and Romans, were all Indo-European peoples and as such
shared a prehistoric background; thus the similarities in essential religious beliefs.
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Galatians. Through invasion and migration, they spread into Spain and later crossed the Alps into Italy
and permanently settled the area south of the Alps which the Romans then named, Cisalpine Gaul.
The Gauls were a tribal and agricultural society. They were ruled by kings, but individual kings reigned
only over small areas. Occasionally a single powerful king could gain the allegiance of several kings as a
kind of "over-king," but on the whole the Gauls throughout Europe were largely an ethnic continuity [ie,
shared a sense of identity] rather than a single nation.
Ethnic identity among the early Gauls was very fluid. Ethnic identity was first and foremost based on
small kinship groups, or clans—this fundamental ethnic identity often got collapsed into a larger identity,
that of tribes. The main political structures, that of kingship, organized themselves around this tribal
ethnic identity. For the most part, the Gauls did not seem to have a larger ethnic identity that united the
Gaulish world into a single cultural group—the "Gauls" as an ethnic group was largely invented by the
Romans and the Greeks and applied to all the diverse tribes spread across the face of northern Europe.
The Gauls did have a sense of territorial ethnicity; the Romans and Greeks tell us that there were sixteen
separate territorial nations of Gauls. These territorial groups were divided into a series of pagi, which
were military units composed of men who had voluntarily united as fellow soldiers.
The Gauls, however, were not the original Europeans. Beginning in an area around Switzerland, the Celts
spread westward and eastward displacing native Europeans in the process. These migrations begin around
500 BCE. The Gaulish invasion of Italy in 400 was part of this larger emigration. The Romans, however,
pushed them back by the third century BCE; native Europeans in the north, however, were not so lucky.
Two Celtic tribes, the Cimbri and the Teutones ("Teuton," an ethnic term for Germans, is derived from
the Celtic root for "people"), emigrated east and settled in territory in Germany. The center of Celtic
expansion, however, was Gaul, which lay north of the Alps in the region now within the borders of
France and Belgium and part of Spain.
The earliest account of the Gauls comes from Julius Caesar. In his history of his military expedition first
into Gaul and then as far north as Britain, Caesar described the tribal and regional divisions among the
Gauls, of which some seem to have been original European populations and not Celtic at all.
The Gaulish tribes or territories frequently built fortifications that served as the military and political
center of the region. These fortified centers took their names from the larger tribe—for instance, Paris
took its name from the tribe of Parisi and Chartres was originally named after the tribe, the Carnuti, which
had built it.
Gaulish society, like all of Celtic society, was rigidly divided into a class system…According to Julius
Caesar, the three classes of Gaulish society were the druides, equites, and plebs , all Roman words. The
druids were the educated among the Gauls and occupied the highest social position…The druids were
responsible for cultural and religious knowledge as well as the performance of rituals... However obscure
these religious functions might be, the druids were regarded as powerful over both society and the world
around them. The most powerful tool the druids had was the power of excommunication [outlawry]—
when a druid excommunicated a member of a tribe, it was tantamount to kicking that person out of the
society.
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