Early Middle Ages Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Ancient Cities Weren’t All Just Abandoned

There seems to be a widespread misconception that, after 476 AD, civilization just disappeared from the Mediterranean world and all the cities of the ancient world were totally abandoned. That’s not what really happened. In fact, all the most famous cities of the classical world survived after the so-called “fall of Rome.” People didn’t just leave or die out and leave all the cities completely barren.

Cities like Athens, Sparta, Alexandria, and Rome have long, fascinating post-antique histories and are even still populated even today. In this article, we will explore what really happened to these cities after the so-called “fall of Rome” and the “end of antiquity.” The true history is actually a lot more interesting than the popular narrative about civilization just totally collapsing.

How Much Were Gold Coins Really Worth During the Middle Ages?

In modern fantasy games set in worlds based loosely on medieval Europe, gold coins are portrayed as the normal medium of everyday exchange. In Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, players collect generic “gold coins” and use these coins to buy just about everything, including supplies for their quests and drinks at the local tavern. Trading in “gold pieces” is also a common trope in many fantasy novels.

People in Europe during the Middle Ages really did use gold coins, but gold coins were much rarer and much more valuable than they are often portrayed in modern fantasy games and novels. Daily commerce in Europe during the Middle Ages was conducted not with gold coins, but rather with silver and bronze coins. In fact, most ordinary people during the Middle Ages probably rarely even saw gold coins.

Carl Sagan Was Really Bad at History

Carl Sagan’s thirteen-episode documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which originally aired on PBS in 1980, is the most watched PBS documentary series in history. The miniseries, which is, broadly speaking, about the history and importance of science, has had a massive influence on both our culture as a whole and on individual people’s lives. Many people say that watching Cosmos growing up was what inspired them to go into STEM.

Unfortunately, while Carl Sagan may have been a brilliant scientist and a great science popularizer, he was an unbelievably terrible historian and, in the show, he gets a boatload of facts about history blatantly wrong. Because Sagan was a scientist with an established reputation, though, many people have assumed that everything he says in the miniseries must be correct and, as a result, these misconceptions have spread and become embedded in popular culture.

Perhaps the most influentially wrong segment in the whole series is a twenty-two-and-a-half-minute segment in the last episode about the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria and the murder of the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia. In this one segment, Sagan manages to promote what seems like roughly half of all the misconceptions about the ancient world that I have ever debunked.

I wrote an article in August 2018 debunking misconceptions about Hypatia and another article in July 2019 debunking misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria. In both of those articles, I have noted that many of the misconceptions I debunk originated from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, but, in those articles, I did not address Carl Sagan’s PBS miniseries directly.

I have therefore decided to undertake the ambitious task of going through the entire segment about Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria and correcting all the inaccuracies I come across. This should give you some impression of how historically accurate Carl Sagan’s documentary really is.

Did Christians Really Burn Sappho’s Poetry?

Sappho of Lesbos (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) was the most praised and highly regarded of all Greek lyric poets in antiquity. She was known as the “tenth Muse” and some ancient authors regarded her work as on par with that of Homer (the putative author of the Iliad and the Odyssey and most revered of all ancient Greek poets) himself. She produced an enormous body of poems, but, sadly, extremely little of her work has survived to the present day.

In the third century BCE, the Greek scholars working at the Great Library of Alexandria produced a standard text for all of Sappho’s poems that was divided into at least eight “books” or rolls of papyrus. Many scholars believe that the collection probably contained nine books for the nine Muses. Today, though, less than seven hundred lines of Sappho’s poetry are extant. Only one of her poems, Fragment 1 (known as the “Ode to Aphrodite”), has survived to the present day totally complete with no lacunae or parts missing. A few other poems have survived to the present day nearly complete, including Fragment 16 (the “Anaktoria Poem”), Fragment 31 (“Phainetai Moi”), Fragment 58 (the “Tithonos Poem”), and the “Brothers Poem.”

The most common explanation that people give for why so little of Sappho’s poetry has survived to the present day is that (supposedly) Christian authorities in late antiquity or the Middle Ages had all the collections of her poems rounded up and burned, because they were disgusted and horrified by how openly she describes her erotic desire for other women. This makes for a good story with clear villains. Unfortunately, it is probably not true. In reality, as I shall explain in this post, we have no evidence to support the idea that Christians went around burning Sappho’s poems. The real reasons why so little of her poetry has survived are far more complicated—and actually far more interesting.

Just How Pagan Is Christmas Really?

The Christmas season is upon us and, if there’s one thing I know I’m going to get for Christmas, it’s spurious claims about modern Christmas traditions supposedly having ancient “pagan” origins. Most of my readers are probably already familiar with the sorts of claims I am referring to; it is popularly believed that Christmas is really an ancient “pagan” holiday that was hijacked by early Christians and that modern, twenty-first-century, secular American Christmas traditions are actually of ancient “pagan” origin.

Well, I’m here to tell you that, although there was a time when Christmas did indeed incorporate some pre-Christian traditions, virtually none of the traditions associated with Christmas in the United States today are actually of ancient pre-Christian origin. In fact, virtually all of the Christmas traditions that you usually hear people going around claiming are “pagan” are actually traditions that only arose within the past two hundred years or so, within a Christian cultural context.

The Long, Strange, Fascinating History of Santa Claus

Have you ever wondered where the story of Santa Claus comes from, why he is said to bring presents to children at Christmas, why he is said to live at the North Pole, or why he is said to have a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer? Well, as it turns out, the history of Santa Claus is an incredibly long, twisted, and strange one.

It involves a building project by a Byzantine emperor, a story about a father preparing to sell his own daughters into prostitution, a hoard of stolen human bones reputed to have magical properties, armies of Crusading knights, Protestant zealots, the author of “Rip Van Winkle” and “Sleepy Hollow,” a poem you probably read as a child but didn’t realize how influential it was, a “Nast”-y nineteenth-century political cartoonist, and Coca-Cola.

This may seem like a bizarre assortment incredibly disparate things, but I promise you, everything I just mentioned is actually vital to the development of Santa Claus as we know him today. Let’s go all the way back to the beginning of it all in late antiquity and embark on this odyssey together to discover the origins of Santa Claus!

The Truth about the Archimedes Palimpsest

If you have an interest in ancient science or mathematics, chances are you have probably heard at some point about the Archimedes Palimpsest. According to the narrative that New Atheist writers and media outlets keep pushing, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (lived c. 287 – c. 212 BC) wrote groundbreaking mathematical treatises that were millennia ahead of their time.

Then, according to the standard narrative being pushed, in the thirteenth century AD, ignorant, obscurantist Christians who did not care about science or mathematics erased the text of the manuscript containing the last known copies of several of Archimedes’s treatises and reused the parchment to make a prayer book. Now—or so the story goes—Archimedes’s previously lost groundbreaking works are being recovered through the brilliancy of modern secular technology.

Unfortunately, this narrative that I have just outlined is deeply, deeply misrepresentative and based on an extremely selective presentation of the evidence. If the media would tell the full story of the Archimedes Palimpsest, we would be getting a very different narrative—a narrative not about how religion is inherently dangerous and destructive, but rather a far more complex narrative in which religious individuals are neither inherently evil nor inherently good but simply human beings capable of both good and evil.

When Was Jesus Really Born?

Most people assume that Jesus of Nazareth was born on 25 December 1 AD. Superficially speaking, this assumption makes a great deal of sense. After all, Christians today celebrate Jesus’s birth every year on December 25th and our modern Anno Domini dating system, which is ostensibly based on the year when Jesus was born, begins with the year 1 AD.

Unfortunately, things are never quite so simple. The truth is, we genuinely have very little idea when Jesus was born. There is no mention of the exact date of Jesus’s birth anywhere in any of the earliest surviving Christian writings and it was not until around the fourth century AD that December 25th was settled on as the day on which Christians would celebrate Jesus’s birth. Even the year of Jesus’s birth is uncertain; all we can say is that he was probably born sometime between c. 10 BC and c. 4 AD.

Why Most So-Called “Medieval Torture Devices” Are Fake

We’ve all heard of so-called “medieval torture devices.” You can find tons of clickbait-y articles online and videos on YouTube and so forth talking about the most gruesome of these alleged devices. For instance, here is a YouTube video from BuzzFeed titled “5 Of The Most Gruesome Medieval Torture Devices.” It lists the “scold’s bridle,” the “rack,” the “iron maiden,” the “pear of anguish,” and the “brazen bull.”

Unfortunately for those who love reading about gruesome torture devices, most of the so-called “medieval torture devices” you hear about never existed at all during the Middle Ages. In fact, of the five devices listed in the aforementioned video, only the rack actually existed during the Middle Ages and, even then, it seems to have been rarely ever used.

Many alleged “medieval torture devices” were actually made up by hoaxers, showmen, and con artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These hoaxers would display these phony instruments of torture for commercial gain, telling people they were real medieval torture devices and charging people to see them.

Other supposed “medieval torture devices” were made up more recently. For instance, the notorious “Spanish tickler” (not mentioned in the video linked above) was only made up in 2005 as a hoax article on Wikipedia. Meanwhile, other supposed “medieval torture devices” are real torture devices, but they didn’t exist during the Middle Ages. Let’s go through in alphabetical order and debunk supposed medieval torture devices one-by-one.

Why Are Babies in Medieval Paintings So Creepy?

I have recently discovered that there seems to be something of a widespread notion that babies in medieval paintings look “creepy.” I have never personally thought that babies in medieval paintings look particularly “creepy,” but this seems to be a notion that a lot of other people have.

Even if you’re like me and you don’t think that medieval babies necessarily look “creepy,” there is no denying that babies in a lot of medieval paintings don’t exactly look like real-life babies. Instead, for the most part, they look like tiny middle-aged men. The reason why they are portrayed this way is actually extremely fascinating and has to do with the way people in the Middle Ages thought about the purpose of art.