They were “dark ages”, obscurantists, gloomy, without joy and entertainment? It depends on your point of view: the High Middle Ages, which goes from the fall of Rome to the year 1000, he saw the people closing in around the towns of Curtense (which were often monasteries), which implied an economy and therefore daily life linked to the horizon of the village. But also later, while in some European regions (Central-northern Italy, When, Germany) they flourished Urban municipalities and continental trade took off, the rural population, that is, almost the entire population, he lived in holy peace, practically self-governing according to forms of local direct democracy since national states did not yet exist (with the exception of France and England from the thirteenth century onwards, and not without enormous resistance).
I feudal lords, once the corvée has been collected (the equivalent, but much less expensive, of our very high taxes), they let the subject live peacefully, without even forcing them to wage the war that they had to wage instead. Right, serfs were nailed down for life, as the name says, to the land of birth, but although for us contemporaries of Ryan Air it is incomprehensible, Living like this they didn't even conceive of the idea of ​​going to seek their fortune elsewhere, also because outside the confines of one's own little world there were no maps, roads and highways, but uncontaminated spaces often made up of endless woods where it was objectively difficult to expect to survive easily, unless you are equipped and armed merchants. The famous ones witches they burned them in the sixteenth century, which according to the schemes is no longer "Middle Ages", but full Renaissance (at least in Italy).
And the crusades, with the crusades as we put it? Every era has its own: today we consider inferior and bomb those who do not submit to the god of the global market and liberal democracy, At that time, and for equally political reasons, we left in the name of the Cross towards a Jerusalem under the heel, otherwise tolerant, of an Islam with which they had and would continue to have relationships, business, exchanges of all kinds.
Religion was indeed a primary and all-encompassing fact (and here we could open a long parenthesis on the differences between Christianity and paganisms, with the latter having to be greatly re-evaluated also from a current perspective), but whoever was impious towards divinity and popular customs met a bad end even before the ugly and bad Middle Ages: think of Socrates, or to the same Christians who refused to take the oath and military service to the Roman emperors.
L’he himself said Aristotelian-Thomist, gone down in history as the absolute pinnacle of intellectual authoritarianism, it reigned supreme, but the intellectual debates in the universities that arose right then, they were there and they were ferocious, and we owe to that era the dispute between nominalists and realists which laid the foundations of Humanism and Rationalism modern. Firenze, in Dante's time, was known as the most homosexual city d'Europe, and despite the “sodomy” (biblical name, not a dirty word in itself) was formally prohibited, there was wide tolerance.
If anything, the most hateful example of sexophobic and moralistic repression came at the end of the fifteenth century with Girolamo Savonarola, coexisting with the jovial and pleasure-loving liberality of the Medici which at a certain point the grim friar even got the better of, only to be struck down by another defamed excellent who goes by the name of Pope Alessandro Borgia.
Right, there were no human and liberal rights. There was no material abundance that began its journey with the privatization of vast civic uses (enclosures) and with industrialization. But then "medieval" becomes the entire human history up to at least the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, given that, to say just one big thing about the female condition, the regime of maximum oppression that today makes us roll our eyes in horror was perhaps in the highly rational and highly admired ancient Greece, in which women were segregated in the gynaeceum and considered little more than means for reproduction. What do we do, let's throw all of humanity down the toilet before the guillotine and industrialism?
Studying wouldn't hurt, every now and again. It would be discovered that the stigma with which the Middle Ages has been branded for eternity derives from a clearly identifiable and explainable cultural operation: the scientific discredit to which the eighteenth-century Enlightenment subjected the "middle age" to justify, making it historically credible, the elimination of the still existing social residues of that now distant past, especially in the French context where the nobility, which had abdicated its original role to transform itself into a court of parasites, deserved to be swept away, even more than the monarchy (which in fact remained firm in other nations).
Note for predictable right-thinkers of the obvious: we did not intend to sing the idyll of the good old days here, just show how easy it is, too easy labels that have entered into common sense are often based on prejudices that always have a clear ideological origin. Contextualizable e justifiable, albeit in retrospect, but still ideological. And to be able to see better, there is no other method than looking at things against the light, trying to know the other side of the coin. That, trust me, is invariably found.
(by Alessio Mannino)