question archive One of the most important sources of information for historians of the ancient world is archaeology, as has been discussed previously
One of the most important sources of information for historians of the ancient world is archaeology, as has been discussed previously
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One of the most important sources of information for historians of the ancient world is archaeology, as has been discussed previously. However, archaeology as an academic discipline has not always been as informative as it is now. In fact, there was a time when “archaeology” did not exist as an academic discipline, and indeed the concept of “academic disciplines” at all is a relatively new concept.
Its story basically begins shortly before 476 CE. Before that time, the Roman empire had come to dominate the entirety of the Mediterranean basin, and a not insignificant part of more
northerly Europe; essentially, everything to the south of the
1 and
2 rivers. As they
had built their empire, the Romans had taken a fairly tolerant, hands-off approach to the rule of their subjects; typically, their policy had been to leave them alone in matters of religion, language, custom, et cetera. Local self-rule was very much the guiding principle of their empire, with the capital trying to employ a light touch on most matters. But one of the interesting consequences of the Roman conquest had been the gradual spread throughout Western Europe of
the Roman language, which was Latin 3. The Romans had not demanded that their subjects learn
this language, though they had refused to speak anything else to them, nor allowed Western
Europeans to speak anything else to them. Self-interest had meant that over time, those ruled by Rome had found it less in their interest to continue to speak their own languages and speak to their overlords (as well as merchants and traders who had followed the army) through
interpreters; instead, they themselves learned 3, and it helped as they gradually transformed
from those beaten by the Romans until they became Romans themselves.
As the empire grew and encompassed large numbers of people with vastly different backgrounds and history, conflicts within the empire became practically inevitable. This was especially acute in matters of commerce and business, because of the wide variation in local laws and customs. Such squabbles tended to put barriers in the way of trade, which the Romans – who were very much a mercantile people, as well as a military one – did not appreciate and would not tolerate. As time went on, more and more often Rome found it necessary to step in and assert imperial control when these trade squabbles arose, and that took the form of drafting their own laws to supersede local ones. The Romans never fully did away with local laws, and there were still variations of what was legal and illegal across the empire: if the Romans had passed no law about a particular thing, then local custom store controlled. But when the Romans passed a law about something, it was to be followed under all circumstances, even if local law might disagree (at which point the local law would be put aside). By the mid-fifth century of the common era, some 1600 years ago, the Roman law code had gotten be pretty extensive, with laws that touched practically every area of international relations and commerce. These laws controlled all Roman subjects, and therefore bound pretty much the entirety of central and southern Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa. This had greatly facilitated trade, as did Roman attention to 4, marshaling their vast resources and considerable engineering aptitude towards
the creation of bridges, roads, tunnels, and the like. This tended to keep goods and services moving.
However, in the fifth century CE significant disturbances beset the empire, which began to be shaken seriously by internal strife and external invasions. Because of these, the Roman empire in the west had begun to fall apart, and imperial control of western Europe was finally broken completely in the year 476 CE. This breakup had largely been occasioned by people usually referred to as Germanics (id est, speakers of languages related to modern-day German). These
had come from the north of the
1 and
2 line, where the empire had not extended.
Such people had always menaced the empire, having frequently been driven into violence due to the utter poverty of the region. The reason for this poverty was that Northern Europe before the 700s was heavily forested, and had few broad, flat plains into which crops could be sown. The seemingly simple solution to this would have been to cut down the forests and plant crops into
the reclaimed land, a process known as 5. This, however, proved beyond the capacity
of both the Germanics and even the Romans, due to technological and logistical reasons.
Essentially, the technological limitations involved the inability to use the horse for such things as pulling up stumps. This was because the Germanics and Romans did not yet have the 6, and instead attempted to attach horses to loads using a device which had been made
for oxen. This had the unfortunate tendency of choking the unfortunate animals. Ultimately, this
6 would come to Europe by way of the Chinese in the 700s. But even if the appropriate harness had yet been invented before the 400s, the wet, cold, thick soil would have
proved too hard on the hooves of horses, since the 7 (also invented by the Chinese) did
not come along, again, until the 700s. Moreover, the moldboard 8 (essentially a blade to
break up the thick soil of Northern Europe) did not come along until the 300s.
The dire poverty of the region caused to Romans to decide not to conquer it; instead, they left the Germanics unconquered, and were occasionally harassed by them, often in the form of raids of Roman imperial territory for food and luxury goods. Yet as time progressed, the empire was proving more and more vulnerable to sustained Germanic attacks. This was due in part to the fact
that the Romans had long ago ceased to raise soldiers by means of 9, or obligatory
military service, and instead relied on volunteer recruits. Since citizens no longer had the
obligation to serve, many chose not to do so, which diminished the manpower reserves available. This made the soldiers who did serve demand more money, of which the Romans always had a finite amount, due to the fact that in that period all money was made of precious metals, which are not limitless. In turn, the Romans also had a limited pool of men whom they could afford to pay. Additionally, at the same time as the Germanics were proving troublesome, the empire was threatened from the east by the Parthians, a small but powerful empire encompassing most of modern-day Iran. Since the Parthians were within striking distance of the wealthiest and most populated parts of the empire in the east, the army was diverted to protect these areas; in fact,
even the capital was moved to the east in 324, to 10 in what is now Turkey. This
left the west susceptible to Germanic attacks, and eventually settlement, which was basically
completed by 476.
By 476 all of Western Europe had finally been separated from Roman control: areas which are now France, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Spain, Portugal, western North Africa, all had been severed, and in fact, even Italy and the city of Rome itself had fallen away for a time. To be sure, the “Roman Empire” existed even after 476: it persisted in the Greek-speaking east and in fact would until comparatively recently; in fact, there was a Roman empire until 1453, when 10, which was the last outpost of it, finally fell to a series
of Turkish invasions. So for most of the Middle Ages and until only a couple of decades before Columbus headed to America, there was a “Roman Empire”, although most scholars refer to this remnant as either the “Eastern Roman Empire” or the Byzantine Empire (after Byzantium, the
former name of 10). But Western Europe was now no longer under one single
imperial control; it was now instead broken into several smaller domains, political units which
are best described as kingdoms, each one of whom separate and completely independent from the others.
The breakup of Roman imperial control would have a number of profound consequences, but one of the most significant one was linguistic. At first, the newcomers who had managed to achieve the breakup of the empire were definitely the minority in the countries they had won for themselves; they essentially became a heavily-armed and powerful upper-class, but while they may have had the most political power, they were far and away not the majority of the population. The majority of their populations were Rome’s old subjects, who spoke 3. Unlike the case with the Romans earlier, increasingly what happened is that, rather than try to persuade their subjects to use their own language, the newcomers began to adopt that of their
subjects. Thus, rather than try and get the 3 -speaking Romans to speak their own Germanic
dialect, the newcomers attempted to pick up the speech of their subjects.
Of course, the language that they were learning was itself starting to change, and in the centuries to come would change even further. In part, this is to be expected: it is just the nature of languages to change and mutate, which every spoken language does every day. Sometimes those changes are fairly innocuous, and sometimes they are fairly profound: in the case of English, for example, this is readily apparent in the introduction and proliferation of new slang terms, which are being invented all the time. Furthermore, sometimes there will be a change to English based on the prevalence of error, as is the case when grammatical rules are broken frequently enough that at some point the error gets accepted as standard. And this is despite the fact that in modern times, there are central authorities which are bestowed with the ability to determine the “correctness” of language: bodies like the Modern Language Association, the Academic Française, and the Real Academia Española basically determine proper usage for American English, French, and Spanish, respectively.
The Romans did not have this sort of institution: there was no agency which determined the
correctness of 3, or any grammatical rule book like the MLA manual or the Oxford Manual
of Style to determine correctness. For the entire history of Rome, Romans concerned with this
sort of thing either mimicked Romans who had had a reputation for correctness of speech and writing (like the Roman orator Cicero, or the stateman-general Julius Caesar), or they simply attempted to speak like Rome’s magistrates or emperors and their circle of associates. Essentially everyone wanted to speak like the heads of state, and so the way the heads of state spoke would simply become proper 3. But in the 400s and 500s there was no head of the Roman state
in the west, because the Roman imperial control had ceased to exist there. Therefore, 3
had begun to change in the absence of any proper authority on the way it was to be spoken.
Different areas saw their version of 3 change in ways different from it was spoken in other
areas; the influx of invaders from outside and their occasional influence on the evolving
language contributed to the acceleration of change. So it was that in the Iberian peninsula, the
expected changes in 3 combined with the influence of the Vandalic German dialect on its
pronunciation (and, later on, the influence of Arabic,) meant the what was spoken in Spain gradually began to evolve into an entirely different language, one which would not have been understood by someone who spoke Classical 3, and this different language eventually became the ancestor of what is now known as Spanish. In Roman Gaul, the invaders were a
Germanic people called the Franks, who more than most tried very hard to learn proper 3,
but their pronunciation was so terrible that even by the seventh century, people were speaking a
version of the language which would have been unintelligible to ancient Romans. A new language was emerging, a hybrid which of course evolved into French. Likewise, the same was true in Italy and Romania (and in the 1200s, Portugal split off from Spain and their own language evolved). The long and short of it was that really by the year 840 of the common era, or some 1200 years ago, one could wander across the entire breadth of what Rome’s former empire and
speak perfect 1, but could find hardly anyone who could actually understand it.
Moreover, the breakup of the Western Empire had also helped bring about a 500-year period of economic depression and stagnation lasting until close to 1000 of the common era. There were a
number of reasons for this, including a severe shortage of 11 in Europe. 11, like
gold, had been used to make coins in the ancient world: as the economics of this period had
become more sophisticated, coined money had come to replace 12, or direct swap of one
good for another. Since gold has historically always been considered much more valuable than
11 (usually – but not always – at a ratio of 16 to 1), coins made from the latter had essentially served as the “small bills” of the ancient world. Yet as the centuries wore on, the Roman empire began to run out of this metal: the known mines had been mined until exhaustion;
coins were sometimes hoarded and later lost, or were on ships at sea that sank; 11
tarnishes, and will eventually decay completely; and by the second century of the common era,
the Romans had been introduced to 13, a fabric ultimately from China which the Romans
enjoyed very much. Indeed, the Romans simply could not get enough of it, but the Chinese
typically did not sell 13 by the ton; basically, they would sell it in much smaller quantities,
the sort of thing for which a 11 coin was more appropriate. The Romans therefore handed
11 over to merchants in small quantities at a time, but over time those small quantities
became massive – quantities which ultimately left the empire. By the end of the fourth century, for all the reasons just discussed, the Romans found that they were running out of it. This would
ultimately cause enormous economic problems: it was practically impossible to find 11
coins to buy small things, and it was simply not feasible to use high-value gold coins for every
transaction (one would not buy a single loaf of bread not with a gold coin worth twenty loaves, for example, and buying twenty of them at a time would not be a sensible expenditure, since they were perishable and would likely go bad before they could be consumed).
In much of Europe, therefore, the pre-monetary 12 economy began to return, and since in many cases what was exchanged were things like crops and meats, which often did not travel very well for long distances, long-distance trade begin to suffer all throughout the territories of Rome’s former empire. Furthermore, the 4 - the roads, bridges, and marketplaces once maintained by the Roman government – had deteriorated, and local rulers had neither the resources nor the expertise to repair and maintain them. Finally, new legal barriers to what trade still did exist arose, as each kingdom had its own laws governing trade.
Of course, Western Europeans had not forgotten a time when Roman rule had meant a common language, a common law, and open trade. In fact, there had been a brief return to the latter two of
these in the 500s: an emperor from 10 was able to wage a series of wars that briefly
reunited some parts of the old Roman empire in the 530s and 540s. His name was
14,
and his armies conquered most of northern Africa, part of Spain, and Italy, and brought them
back under “Roman” control. What 14 came to discover in the process was that
after the 60 years outside of Imperial control, many of his new subjects had forgotten Roman
law. Therefore, he ordered a compilation of all laws that were currently binding in the empire, going all the way back to Rome’s earliest days, to be rendered into one compilation, and established this as the final word on Roman law. This text, whose proper name is the Corpus Iuris Civilis, is usually referred to as 14’s code.
14’s (mostly) reunited empire would be short-lived: although imperial authority
from 10 would retain control over southern Italy and Sicily for the next several hundred
years, before long the rest of the western territories either seceded or were seized by invaders,
and broke from Roman authority. However, enough copies of 14’s code had been
made and brought to Western Europe (and to Italy especially that) it was still available in some
monasteries, about which more directly.
In the meantime: one unifying element which had existed in Rome’s empire before 476 and persisted even after the breakup of the Western Empire had been a common religion, that of Christianity. This religion had spread throughout the empire, despite the empire’s attempt to suppress it and persecute its followers, and despite serious fissures that began to emerge in Christian communities themselves in the 300s. These divisions were caused in part by the bitterness of the persecutions, when many Christians had abjured their faith in the face of torture and death and now wanted to return to their religion; a serious rift emerged between those who wanted to accept them back and others who did not. Partly, these divisions involved deep-seated differences among some believers about things like the nature of God, the nature of Jesus, the nature of Mary, and other things that seem pretty abstract now but were very important then. This was especially true because Christianity believed that its followers should not just speak the right things and behave correctly, but that they have moral thoughts, too: thinking impure thoughts was a sin, and still is regarded as such in the Roman Catholic Church, even if these thoughts do not result in action. It became very important for Christians to know what to believe, lest they sin in their thoughts, and agreement in thought soon became very important. Therefore,
early Christianity desired its best to attain 15 (Greek for “right opinion”), or a
uniformity in doctrine and belief. Variation from this was the sort of thing that was discouraged,
and in fact there was quite a bit of concern about it: the whole idea was to bring about one united Christian community, practicing on universally-acknowledged faith. Indeed, what Christians wanted was for Christianity to be both catholic (a word used here as an adjective, which comes
from a Greek word meaning “universal” or “all-encompassing”) and included everyone who all spoke, acted, and thought in a righteous matter.
15, a church which
An 15 Christian sought guidance for what was righteous in the Bible, but there were some situations about which the Bible says little or nothing. For such thorny issues, the Christian community gradually came to establish rules: for the average person, all questions of faith should go to his or her priest; if priests were not confident of the answer, they would consult a religious
figure known as a bishop (which ultimately comes from the Greek word episkopos, which means “overseer”), who were set up over larger areas of the empire; and the bishop, in turn, could ask the archbishop (“high overseer”) who looked after church matters in larger areas of the Empire. Archbishops, in turn, would defer to the wisdom of the so-called Partiarchs (“ruling fathers”), bishops of the major cities: Alexandria in Egypt, Antioch in modern Turkey, Rome, and the new
city of 10. At any rate: all these patriarchs were all essentially equal, and usually
agreed about Church matters.
Yet not all Christians agreed with this structure, nor with what the Patriarchs determined was the
proper belief. Despite the best effort to ensure 15, there was a certain level of
variation amongst believers in Christianity, which the church believed was dangerous, both to
Church unity and possibly even to the soul of those who believed these “incorrect” things: such beliefs might jeopardize their own eternal salvation. The church took it upon itself to try and
stamp out these departures from
15, departures which they called
16 (from a
Greek word meaning “choice”, in this instance clearly signaling the wrong one). Thus, when the Christian community discovered these, they tried to convince those who believed these “wrong”
things to change their mind and accept 15, and to become fully a part of the
integrated Catholic common Church. Those who did not after repeated urgings, however, would
be 17, which means they would be shut off from all the other proper churchgoers
who were supposed to have nothing to do with them, both in religious matters and in everyday
life, lest his or her 16 spread virally from one person to another. Being 17
meant – at least at first – that the unfortunate was taking the risk that he or she would not receive
a final blessing and might go to hell upon death. Even worse than someone who believed
16 was someone who purposefully led other people into heresy. Such a person was considered worse because they not only endangered their own souls, but endangered both their
own souls and souls of others. And so over time, the typical fate of proponents of 16 was
not only to be removed from the society of proper church goers, but – especially once
Christianity became so commonplace that practically everyone was Christian, as became the case by about the fifth century or so – it was decided that, unless he were to give up his or her 16, the thing to be done was to remove him from life: better to execute them before they
corrupt others.
The point of all of this was that the Church was very concerned that all people believed the right things as determined by the Patriarchs (and, later, the Pope, the Bishop of Rome who became the head of the Church in Western Europe). And this concern was all the more pronounced because in the West, many believers did not have something to help guide their belief like Christians in the East did: in the west, Christians and those who were thinking of converting did not have a Bible that they could read, because outside of the very wealthy and educated, Romans in the
West spoke and read only 3. As the Bible was still in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, it was
inaccessible to many westerners and indeed sometimes even to their priests and bishops, because
while the very high church officials like archbishops could almost always read Greek, at the local level a priest might not necessarily have been able to do that. Even more than to the average
believer, it was very important that priests were 15 (lest they become inadvertent
leaders of 16), and it was determined that the best way to ensure 15
amongst the priests was to get them to be able to read the Bible. The logical way to do that was
to render the Bible into a language that they could read. Therefore, it was determined that the
Bible would be translated into 3, which was done in the fourth century by a very learned
and important priest named Hieronymus, although most people know him by the Anglicized
sized version of his name, which is the name 18 This man was so well educated that he
could not only read Greek and 3, but could even read Hebrew and Aramaic, and by means
of these linguistic abilities he could consult the original sources of both the so-called Old
Testament and the New Testament, and render them into appropriate 3.
18’s
efforts resulted in a Bible in a language spoken by nearly everyone in Western Europe, and was
thus the “common tongue”. In 3, the adjective vulgus means “common” (it is the root word
of the word vulgar, which nowadays means coarse or crude; this is a holdover from a period in
England when the word “common” was an insult); therefore, a Bible in the “common tongue” was described as the Vulgate Bible. Now that nearly everyone could read the Bible (completed
ca 405 CE), it was much easier for both priests and worshippers to be
15.
Yet by the 600s and 700s, 3 was no longer the common tongue, and this made reading the
Bible difficult. Of course, the obvious solution for this difficulty would be to do what 18
himself had done, which is find someone who still knew 3 (and there were still people who did) and have that person translate the Bible into whatever the local common language was. However, there was a substantial barrier to this commonsense solution, which is that after 18’s death he had become canonized: in other words, the Church had come to
recognize him as a saint. The thing about saints is that what they do, what they say, what they write, et cetera becomes sacrosanct, which means they had become holy relics because of the saint’s association with it. One thing that all Christians knew full well is that one did not tamper with holy relics, which is what the Vulgate Bible had now become. More specifically, it was recognized that it was not just the physical book that he wrote that was sacrosanct; it was all the words, and thus every copy of it was sacrosanct. Since it was considered a sacrilege – basically, a terrible sin – to tamper with relics, and since one way that one “tampered” with words was to translate them into another language (because things always get lost in translation), it was considered a sacrilege to translate the Bible. In sum, once the Bible had been put into 3, it was deemed a sin to put it in some other language, and in fact, this would become the rule for the entire Middle Ages. For over a thousand years after the Vulgate Bible had been completely rendered, it would and could not be translated into secular languages by believers. This only change in the 1500s.
The consequences of this linguistic change and the sacrosanctity of the Bible become obvious right away: the Church still wanted 15, which meant understanding the Bible, something that very few people could do anymore. A solution to this problem came in the way the clergy were selected.
All throughout the late Empire and early Middle Ages, there had always been come people who not only wanted to practice Christianity, but wanted to devote their entire lives to it. One type of such a person wanted, not just to devote himself to the religion, but to the church and to the entire community of the faithful. Those persons ended up becoming priests. In the early years, being a priest was not particularly difficult to do, nor did it require an enormous effort: often, becoming a priest simply meant signaling a willingness to undertake the responsibilities (or not refusing the position if elected), nor did it require enormous personal sacrifice, like celibacy. In fact, priestly celibacy did not become firmly part of Roman Catholic doctrine until 1123. A priest
was expected to give up any other occupation, and early on priests who were chosen were usually wealthy enough to sustain themselves without working for this reason. Wealthy people were often chosen to be priests for another reason, which is that wealth tended to mean
education, and education tended to mean the ability to read Greek; before 18, a wealthy
person would have been far more likely to have read the Bible, then still in Greek, and thus
avoided believing and spreading 16. By 405, it became easier for uneducated men to become priests thanks to the Vulgate Bible, which opened the door for more priests from poor backgrounds as long as tithes from the congregation could provide their support. Priests were active members of the Catholic community, then and now; they conducted mass, heard confession and assigned penance, performed marriages and baptisms, and delivered last rites. Priests were therefore very busy men, as even in a small congregation there was always a mass to lead, marriage to perform, confession to hear, baptism to conduct, and last rites to deliver. Priests were also, as can be seen, very public men.
Yet by the 600s, it was no longer sufficient simply to ordain anyone who was willing to
undertake the task. Now, priests had to be thoroughly familiar with meant being able to read the Bible which was – and had to be – in
15 thought, which
3. Before ordination, a
priest therefore had to learn this language. The problem was that learning it would have been somewhat different to learning a foreign language at a college now, because these new students
of 3 did not have an asset that modern students learning a new language have at their
disposal: modern languages still have people who can speak them. So, someone burning to learn
Italian can always go to Italy or find an Italian emigré who still speaks Italian and have conversations and try out his Italian, be corrected, and pick up more. As was discussed, in the
centuries after 476, fewer and fewer people spoke 3 until it gradually stopped being spoken
as a native language altogether, except by those who had learned it as what is called a liturgical
language; that is, a language only used in religious ceremonies. Since learning it conversationally by speaking to somebody who already knew it was pretty much impossible, the only way new
priests could really learn 3 was by reading it and translating. And what that meant in turn
was that in order to be able to become proficient in 3, one had to have lots of books in that
language, and on a variety of subjects, to be able – for lack of better term – to have practice.
New priests were not the only people learning the language if the Romans. In addition to priests, there were other Christians in the late Empire and Early Middle Ages who wanted to devote their lives to Christianity, but not in so public a way: such men wanted to give up the secular world and spend the rest of their lives in comparatively quiet contemplation of Christianity, which they believed they could not do as busy priests. Such men wanted to withdraw from society, and since priests were very much a part of it, those who wanted to have a life of more of a sort of very intensely personal Christian relationship decided the priesthood was not for them. Instead, such
men become 19. It should be observed that these and priests are not the same thing: priests
are ordained, whereas 19 usually are not. This means that priests can perform miracles, such as absolving sins, turning the Eucharist into the blood and body of Jesus through
transubstantiation, and other sacraments. 19, by contrast, were just very religious men (and
women, although usually one refers to a female 19 as a nun). Usually, being a 19
meant retiring to a monastery, which was a building set up for them (the equivalent for nuns was
an abbey) where they could essentially retire from everyday life and spend their days and nights in deep prayer and contemplation of the mystery and majesty of the Christian religion. On the
other hand, 19 definitely felt that they wanted to serve the church, especially since they had a lot of free time on their hands; they just did not want to serve as priests. Instead, they were of
service in other ways, and one of the ways that 19 found that they could serve the church
was by preserving various books, which was crucially important in an era when the printing
press did not exist, and books had to be copied by hand. Just like priests,
3 in order to make accurate copies, so they, too, learned the language.
19 had to know
What this essentially meant is that knowledge of at least how to read Roman texts persisted into the Middle Ages. This turned out to be very important when commerce began to recover, as it did towards the end of the 900s. The reason for this is in part the fact that the population and the wealth of Europe was increasing, due in no small part to the high agricultural yields in northern Europe: by the 700s, farming became much better due to the availability of horses, occasioned
by the emergence in Europe of such technologies as the
6 and the
7. With
the help of these technologies, horses were able to participate in 4 the forests of Northern
Europe, and then could draw the moldboard 8. Moreover, in the late 980s a very extensive
vein of 11 was discovered in the Harz mountains in what is now Germany. Since Germany
had never been part of Rome’s empire, the Roman miners had never found it; and since the
Germanic people who then ran the area did not have access to Roman mining techniques, they could not themselves have extracted the metal anywhere near as efficiently as the Romans might have done. But by the 980s Roman mining techniques were now known in Germany – thanks in
no small part to the 19 who preserved the texts detailing how to do it – and upon its
discovery, the metal was extracted in mass quantities. This, in turn, allowed for
11 to
return to circulation for small local transactions, and gradually helped boost long-distance trade, especially between what is now Germany and the northern parts of what is now Italy. Since typically it was the Germans who traveled to Italy, rather than vice- versa, these northern Italian towns – like Florence, Verona, Genoa, and importantly Bologna – began to see a great increase in commercial activity, and eventually in size: Germans, who had 11 and wanted Italian goods like wine, olive oil, fine cloth, expert metalwork, and the like – would travel to these northern Italian towns to get them. On the other hand, Italians from south of Italy would travel to the north with their goods, since it was known that buyers and were was there, and these travelling Italians would set their wares out for sale in the northern Italian marketplaces where exchanges could take place. In addition to selling their own goods, northern Italians could also make wealth by catering to this sort of commerce: they would set up warehouses, inns, brothels, restaurants, and other businesses characterized as belonging to what is now referred to as the “service industry”.
Yet as all sorts of goods from all sorts of places began to flood into northern Italian marketplaces, some turned out to be was vastly inferior in quality to others, and there was nothing even remotely resembling quality control for the goods that were put out for sale. Since this raised the potential for doubt as to the excellence of what could be bought, and correspondingly endangered the reputations of these towns, this lack of quality control swiftly came to be recognized as a problem. To combat this, a series of steps were taken to introduce limitations on precisely who was allowed to sell certain kinds of products, especially those products which were made by hand (for example, clothing, as opposed to olive oil). The way this usually worked is that all the artisans who made particular commodities banded together in a sort of syndicate, and the government in Italian towns made it a requirement to get this syndicate’s
permission to sell anything that the syndicate’s artisans made. Hence, if a weaver wanted to sell something made of cloth, or if a metalsmith wanted to sell something made out of metal, he was soon required to submit his work for inspection to all the other weavers or metalsmiths of the town to see if their merchandise was of sufficient quality; those whose work was found subpar were prohibited from making the sale. This association of artisans whose inspection and permission was required if another artisan wished to put a particular good up for sale came to be
referred to as a
20. A
20’s approval meant that the artisan who had it could apply
for membership (should they relocate to the town), and membership became increasingly important for sales.
Soon, the 20 developed even further quality controls; in addition to putting its approval on
artisans who were already “practicing”, so to speak, the 20 also insisted on making sure that
future artisans would receive training so that their products would be of sufficient quality from
the very beginning. Presently, an entire system developed along these lines: if a young person
wanted to enter into a trade overseen by a put himself up for what was called an
20, his first step (and it was always men) was to
21. The novice, who usually started around
15 years of age, would contract to be the employee and student of a 20 member, usually
referred to as a “master”. In exchange for food, lodging, and clothing, the new 21
would spend seven years working for the master, who received unpaid labor in exchange for the
lodging and the instruction. After seven years as an 21, the novice attained the
status of “journeyman”. A “journeyman”, sometimes referred to as a “bachelor”, was permitted
to travel (make a journey) away from his original master to learn from other masters, and could
even set up as a low-level member of the 20 itself, usually making minor products. After a
few years at this status, the journeyman or bachelor would ideally have accumulated enough
extra knowledge and expertise that he could apply for full membership in the 20. This
would involve the creation of a work to be judged by all the other masters of his craft to see if he
was worthy of admission; thus, the bachelor would submit his “ 22”, to be judged worthy or not. Once he was deemed worthy, he could join the 20 as a full member.
This development helped solve problems of quality control, but the northern Italian towns had other pressing difficulties. Another one was public health. It is not hard to imagine how hundreds of people from all over Italy and Germany (and, later, all of Europe) converging on these towns could lead to all manner of diseases; thus, healers became increasingly important in these towns. During the Middle Ages, healing had traditionally been done by people who just happen to have a knack for it. That had also largely been true in the ancient world, but in the ancient world these healers – especially in Greek territories – were sometimes literate men and philosophers, who regarded healing as much as an intellectual, scientific endeavor as much as a practical service. Such men had written down books of symptoms and treatment, and the existence of these books
– which had often been translated into 3 – were remembered; indeed, some 19 had
read and recopied them. But the average healer had not read these texts, and simply practiced
medicine because they had demonstrated skill, or claimed to have demonstrated it. As can be imagined, quality control for these men was also completely lacking. As was the case with the
artisans, healers also began to organize into 20 as well, but their qualifications for joining
had to be different: it is, after all, difficult to submit a “ 22” of healing. Instead, a
different criterion for being admitted into the 20 of healers had to be found.
Ultimately, it was decided that admission would be determined, not by creation of a
22, but by the demonstration of knowledge in a written examination. Since it came to be known that ancient Roman medical texts could be found in various monasteries, the test of knowledge would be require demonstration of familiarity with these texts. Of course, such
familiarity was difficult to acquire if one could not read 3. It was thus decided that those
who would practice the healing arts would first demonstrate their commitment by mastering that
language, so that the Roman texts could be read in the original. This would weed out the stupid
and the lazy, it was reasoned, and the reading of treatment from faulty translations. Therefore, the
3 would prevent potentially fatal errors in
20 of healers – who now referred to
themselves as “physicians”, from the Greek food phusis, meaning “state of the body” – required that aspiring members would be first learn 3, and many of them did so by appealing to
19 to teach them. 3 would ever after remain heavily influential on medicine, a
language from which many medical terms continue to be derived.
These
3-trained physicians, and the physicians’
20, attempted to solve a particular
problem (namely, raising the trustworthiness of physicians by only letting qualified persons practice), and as can be guessed, trust in medicine was very important in these towns. Another difficulty to trade was solved in a similar way to the solution employed by medicine. As the Romans had discovered centuries earlier, it was very important for commerce to have common rules governing trade. Unfortunately, since the decline of the Western Empire there was no one European trade law any more: rather, all the nations of Europe were separate and had their own laws. Since it came to be recognized that this sort of legal chaos tends to be a barrier to trade, essentially what happened was that it was agreed that a common set of laws would need to be adopted by practically everyone in Italy, at least when it came to commerce. It was decided that
the old Roman law would govern trade, and as it happened, 14’s code still existed –
having been written down in 3 in the 500s, it was still used in some monasteries as 3
practice - so it was decided to revive Roman law and use it to govern international trade and
commerce.
Of course, very few people who were conducting trade could actually read 3, and even if
they could read it, many of them did not have a legal mindset. What the merchants came to
understand was that they wanted lawyers. It was decided that, like the physicians, would-be
lawyers would have to know
3, so as to read
14’s code in the original. Lawyers
needing to understand 3soon became the custom even outside of Italy, which meant that even lawyers from different parts of Europe could speak to each other in an admittedly dead
language that both now understood. Like the physicians, lawyers also soon formed a and to be admitted to it, one had to take an examination on knowledge of
20,
14’s code.
To become a lawyer, like to become a physician, required knowledge of explains why most legal terms even now are in that language.
3, and this
Of course, the demand for lawyers and physicians meant that it soon became a desirable career choice for many young men – and early on, it was decided that only men would be eligible for
either career. But both occupations required knowledge of 3, a language not spoken
commonly for almost five hundred years by this point and only really known to the clergy and
19. The Italian cities were able to persuade some
19 (and former
19 who had
decided to leave their monasteries) to come to these commercial cities and teach would-be
physicians and would-be lawyers how to read 3. Those who had learned would then go on
to ply their trade, but in the process had learned another one: now, 3-trained physicians and
lawyers found they could be paid for passing on what they had learned, both in medicine or law,
as well as their knowledge of 3 itself. Such men soon began to teach as well as practice,
offering lessons whenever and wherever they could find a collection of pupils who paid for
instruction. Word soon spread that these northern Italian cities had not only goods and merchants, physicians and lawyers, but also teachers, and those who wanted to become physicians and lawyers therefore travelled to northern Italy from all over Europe to learn (often taking their skills back home with them). While in northern Italy, it was often the case that students would have to rent lodgings, and those from the same areas tended to congregate together; in some notable cases, governments of other countries actually purchased a house where all people from their kingdom could stay while they learned the discipline, and even paid the fees for their instruction.
As was the case with all of these other trades, teachers soon found that there were plenty of
people who claimed to know medicine, the law, and 3, who were paid for the instruction
they offered but ending up teaching nothing. Potential learners were therefore nervous about this,
and here, too, there was a need for quality control. Furthermore, learners were put off by the haphazard days, times, and places where instruction could be obtained. To protect the new teaching enterprise, legitimate teachers modelled themselves after the other trades and formed a
20. Students who first started were known as novices (although later just called students, from the 3 for “learners”). Once they had completed a course of study, they were said to
have taken the next step (or “
23”, from the
3 for “step”) and were known as
bachelors, just like weavers or metalworkers would have been. Students addressed their teachers
as 24, or “knowledgeable teachers”, and like in other 20, such teachers were already
masters (of law or medicine). A system soon developed whereby a student could receive further
instruction, and it was decided by the 24 that all those who received this further set of
instruction were qualified to become a Master of the Art. With this title, many of the masters
went elsewhere and set up their own schools; those who continued to stay would sometimes
teach, and would sometimes study even more until all the
now become their equal, and they, too, were know addressed as
24 decided that the learner had
24. According to their
concept of education, each step that was taken was a step further into the depth of knowledge,
with the more “steps down” taken, the more knowledgeable one was. Thus, each of these steps was referred to a “step down”, which in 3 is degradus; from this word one gets the modern word “ 25”.
In addition to this metaphorical structure for learning, actual structures or buildings were soon purchased, which were typically buildings clustered around a courtyard (or campus, from the 3 for “field”); in some of these buildings there was instruction, in some both students and teachers could live, and there were even places where meals could be eaten. In these places, students who learned the same subject – law or medicine, though others were later added – were said to be “bound together” (or collegare), hence all learners and teachers of a subject were said to be that subject’s “college”. Multiple colleges of students using the same buildings were said to
be places where all of knowledge was gathered, hence “gathering”).
26, from the
3 for
The first recognized 26 in Europe is commonly held to be that of Bologna, which claims
to have been opened in 1088; soon, others would be founded in other cities, usually commercial
hubs, like at the ox ford on the Thames just northwest of London (which became Oxford), Paris, Salamanca in Spain, and others. At first, there were very few kinds of 25 that one could get at them: in addition to law and medicine, which were most often sought by would be lawyers
and physicians (from the habit of the most educated physician being referred to as
24,
that word soon became synonymous with physician), there were also ones sought by people who wanted to teach, and teach subjects other than law or medicine. At first, the blanket term of
“philosophy” was applied to all such other 24, whether the “philosophy” in question was
what would now be called “science”, or “history”, or “literature”. Whatever the subject that was
learned, all
26 required the learning of
3; indeed, classes were conducted in 3,
which meant that students could take instruction at any 26, if they had started at another
one, (and, if they acquired sufficient training, could teach at any, as well). There were a number
of consequences of this fact, but one was that the curriculum of influenced by the Greek and Roman past from the beginning.
26 was heavily
