For someone known only for his snarky
tongue, Voltaire has had a lasting effect on civilization. One of
those is one small thing he said, but that has reverberated
throughout history; in essence, he called the period lasting from
roughly the fall of Rome to the Renaissance (roughly the fifth
through fourteenth centuries) as the "Dark Ages", as he
believed that no advances occurred during that time. As any decent
historian will tell you, Voltaire was wrong.
There are basically three ways to look
at this. The first is that the medieval era was full of
infrastructure building. Although there was little in the way of
exploration, as Europeans stayed close to home, Europe in general was
building up. Understand one thing about Europe that is different than
other areas; there is a lack of arable land compared to other areas,
mostly due to the mountains that virtually cover the continent, and
also because of, ironically, the water. All of that coastline makes
farming difficult due to the presence of windborne salt, and swamps
slow progress down. In essence, you had to find and exploit land in
order to survive.
With a growing population, every acre
of land had to be exploited, and that encourages building towns every
few miles in order to better be able farm the area. You will also
have roads between those towns to better facilitate shipping grain
long distances. As the roads and rivers become more important for
trade, you need to protect them, requiring standard armies. You also
need the administration and skilled smiths to support the armies,
farmers, and other niceties of building up a society. In short, as
any decent gamer will tell you, that's a lot of infrastructure to
build, especially when you realize that almost none of it has really
changed; we've paved over the roads and computerized it, but I think
a valid argument can be made that a bureaucrat from the Eighth
Century would be at home in the Twelfth and in the Twenty-First.
The second is that there was a lot of
societal change. Again, more of a firming up, but there were a lot of
wars fought for honor and resources. As these wars were fought,
nobles started realizing that alliances were good things, as were
rules in combat; after all, if both sides were aware that there were
limits, and that as long as those limits were worked within, the odds
of you surviving that battle increased. Thus generals that killed
everyone were looked down on, and those that could win a battle
without shedding blood were considered more heroic. There was still
bloodshed, but if you gained a reputation for slaughter odds are good
that people would gang up on you.
You also had a lot of different schools
of thought, developing into the schisms and what not of Christianity.
The Catholic put some of these schools down, but at the same time
they let most survive, even adopting some of them into the fold. In
essence, as long as the school of thought played within the rules,
odds are it would be adopted rather than killed.
You also had people start realizing
that they had a lot more power than they thought they did. Not only
did nobles start asking for more responsibility and therefore power,
but so did merchants and guilds. Even the peasants started stretching
their muscles; a number of rules and regs regarding peasants started
going by the historical wayside, such as the right of the first night
and being able to move freely from town to town. In essence, people
were moving more and more towards more democratic forms.
So far, we have a lot of infrastructure
building as well as advancements in the way people are thinking. All
of this required a lot fundamental changes in society over a
relatively short period. But, there is one area I'm leaving alone for
its own entry...
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