This is the old story: whenever one sets out to discuss collapse, one ends up by talking about continuity.
—G. W. Bowersock
In the 1969 book Civilisation, companion to the BBC television series of the same name, Kenneth Clark had a topic called "By the Skin of Our Teeth." Its premise was that western civilization was lucky to be alive. The "Dark Ages," as some have called the early Middle Ages, truly had been dark; just barely had the smoldering embers of the west’s classical heritage survived to illuminate the world another day. But for the labors of a few monastic scribes, carefully copying the great works, who knows what sort of cultural backwater Europe would be now?
This theme is a hardy perennial, more recently on display in Thomas Cahill’s best-selling book How the Irish Saved Civilization, in which Irish scribes were singled out for special praise. Clark and Cahill have in essence looked back to Saint Jerome’s despairing question—"What is safe if Rome perishes?"—and deemed it a very good one.
In the previous topic we found reason to consider Jerome’s question alarmist. Namely: barbarians are people, too. Unlike Conan the Barbarian—whose professed aim in life was "to defeat the enemy, see him run before you, and hear the lamentations of the women"— most real-life barbarians are eager to settle down and savor the fruits of civilization: to defeat the enemy, tax him, visit his doctors, marry his daughters.
Another reason to deem Jerome a bit melodramatic is that, as historians have come to realize, the term "Dark Ages" is misleading. Even in the early Middle Ages, and especially in the later, there was creativity and vibrance.
Still, it is true that the early Middle Ages must have seemed fairly dim at the time. There was indeed a collapse in the Roman vicinity. Roads that once carried goods safely to market fell into disrepair and were beset by outlaws. Towns contracted, and farmlands were reclaimed by the wild. Mines were abandoned, and metal production dropped. Reliable coinage, especially gold, grew scarce, and people found themselves in a nearly "moneyless" economy, bartering goods or paying with their labors. Population continued to drop. The scope of government vacillated; barbarian kingdoms grew and shrank, and sometimes their "kings" had little real power anyway.
So even if barbarians aren’t deeply barbaric, and even if the "Dark Ages" weren’t pitch black, things did look dicey in Europe for a time. Any basic tendency of cultural evolution to carry society to higher and higher levels of complexity was not vividly apparent. So those of us who believe in such a tendency must say a few more words about the "Dark Ages." What firm dynamics of history made their end just a matter of time? Why does reconstruction reliably follow collapse and disarray?
The question is not confined to the most famous dark ages, the European ones. Chinese cohesion suffered a big setback in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., as barbarians poured in from the north. And the barbarian onslaughts at the end of the second millennium B.C. had wreaked havoc from the western Mediterranean to the Middle East. In the New World, there’s the famous Mayan collapse, among others. And so on—a lengthy menu of regression to choose from.
In asking why collapses in general tend not to prove fatal, we’ll focus mainly on Europe’s Middle Ages. They are the best-documented example of major collapse and recovery and the most famous. They’re also the most widely cited challenge to directional views of history. After all, if civilization really did survive by the skin of its teeth, then it must be pretty fragile.
There is one other reason to focus on Europe. In the "skin of our teeth" view of history, it isn’t just civilization in the generic sense that was lucky to survive. Kenneth Clark might concede that, even without the monks, Europe would eventually have made leaps economically, technologically, politically. Clark’s concern is more with western civilization. Would its distinctive emphases—on political liberty, for example—have survived if the barbarians had permanently broken the link with classical Greece, the cradle of western freedom and democracy?
This is a subtler question, with a more tentative answer. But as we’ll see, there is reason to believe that many historians overplay the role of the peculiar "heritage" of the west in shaping its modern form, and underplay the role of universal forces of history, as played out amid the quirks of medieval history.
KEEP KEEPING YOUR EYE ON THE MEMES
The first step toward appreciating the inexorability of the west’s resurgence in the later Middle Ages is to drain the early Middle Ages of the melodrama given them by the "skin of our teeth" view of history. And the first step in this melodrama reduction is to repeat the mantra from the last topic: Keep your eye on the memes. In deciding whether a culture has collapsed in the first place, ask not what has happened to a particular people or a particular land; cultures can hop from person to person and place to place, leaving ruin behind yet staying healthy themselves. Well before the sacking of Rome, the Roman Empire’s headquarters had been officially moved to Constantinople. There, in the eastern empire, in Byzantium, much of classical culture remained alive and well—in books, in minds, in practice—until Europe’s "Dark Ages" had passed.
This is a common story with "collapses." Empty Mayan ruins are standard imagery in accounts of "lost civilizations." Seldom noted is that the Mayan collapse afflicted only part of Mayan civilization. To the north, whole cities survived, and kept Mayan culture, including its precious script, intact.
Similarly, the famous collapse of Indus valley civilization in south Asia during the second millennium B.C. is often depicted as an overnight vanishing. But people lived on and regrouped and retained key technologies—their advanced system of standardized weights, and possibly their script; one of the area’s modern-day scripts may well be a descendant of the original, the family resemblance blurred by millennia of evolution.
The second great antidote to melodrama is to remember that political maps aren’t always a good guide to social complexity. True, the Roman Empire had been a state-level society, a "civilization"; and, true, much of western Europe, including modern-day France and England, had technically been part of the empire, paying taxes and possessing elements of civilization—some roads, shiny coins, a few bureaucrats. But roads and coins don’t turn a simple society into a complex one overnight. Marvin Harris has written that "transalpine Europe did not lapse back into the ‘Dark Ages,’ never having gotten out of them in the first place." This may be an exaggeration, but not a huge one.
Of course, the rustics of transalpine Europe, if not themselves fully "civilized," had grown dependent on Roman governance, so pulling this rug out from under them was an interesting experiment in cultural evolution. What would they do? Go into free fall and finally land somewhere near the Shoshone, scurrying around in mall bands and digging up roots?
No. They not only held on to their agricultural technology; as if landing in a safety net, they fell back onto the remnants of their indigenous political system, the chiefdom—or, at least, a reasonable facsimile of it. As various cultural evolutionists have noted, European feudalism, though distinctive, had much in common with chiefdoms as observed from Polynesia to the Americas to pre-Roman Europe.
Under feudalism, peasants—serfs—got land to farm, but they also had to do some farming for the local chief—or, as he was called in Europe, their "lord." In return, the chief provided them not just with their land, but with public services; he offered military defense (no small thing during the Middle Ages) and administered justice (such as it was). Serfs are often depicted as virtual slaves, and they certainly weren’t free in the modern sense. But, more than the slaves of the Roman Empire, they could expect protection and even some minimal respect in exchange for their subservience. "Serfs, obey your temporal lords with fear and trembling," one French cleric advised. "Lords, treat your serfs according to justice and equity."
The principle of mutual obligation—and of payment in services rendered, not in cash— extended upward. The local chief was himself subordinate to a higher chief; though lord over his serfs, he was a vassal to a higher lord. As a vassal, he had to serve as his lord’s soldier, often on horseback in shining armor. This obligation was his payment for the land on which his serfs worked, and for the defense of that land by the larger army to which he belonged.
Though the details of feudalism differed from time to time and place to place (the above is a schematic simplification),^ its upshot was indeed broadly reminiscent of the classic chiefdom. There was a cluster of local units—manors, sometimes distinct villages—each of which had its own boss. And one of these bosses ranked above the other bosses (was lord to these vassals), so the units constituted a larger, supravillage polity with centralized leadership. A key purpose of this hierarchy was the swift mobilization of men for war, but the lords also, like chiefs, orchestrated the local production of tools and other crafts.
With a classic, simple chiefdom, the story would end there: a bunch of villages with local chiefs, one of whom was paramount. With feudalism, the story often went much further. The paramount chief—the lord among lords—might himself be vassal to another lord, who in turn might be vassal to a still higher lord—all the way up to the ultimate lord, the king. It was as if several chiefdoms in a region formed a superchiefdom, and several of these superchiefdoms in turn constituted a super-superchiefdom. Sometimes the hierarchy went ten levels deep.
THE FRACTAL BEAUTY OF FEUDALISM
"Feudal" is today a pejorative term, but feudalism was in some ways well suited to a time of instability. Like the classic chiefdom, it kept food on the table without relying on a sound currency or on trade with distant peoples. It also kept warriors at the ready. This was especially impressive because, with the ascendancy of armored cavalry (due largely to the coming of the stirrup), equipping warriors got expensive. It was almost as if, today, no soldier could safely set foot on the battlefield without his own personal tank. The solution to this financial challenge—giving knights lordship over chunks of property they could subdivide for the use of peasants—worked well enough. And making each lord a governor of his immediate subordinates (not just peasants, but any other vassals) made for a decentralized government—a handy thing in a time of poor roads, low literacy rates, and other barriers to distant administration.
Perhaps most important, feudalism’s nested structure, its long chain of mutual obligation, gave the system a kind of resilience. Each link in the chain was a simple and direct nonzero-sum relationship; a lord and his vassal both benefited from the deal, and had consecrated this interdependence with ornate oaths of devotion. So if for any reason the bonds at the highest level broke, the lower levels of the hierarchy tended to stay intact out of mutual self-interest. When kingdoms collapsed, they broke up into regional or local polities, not into anarchy. Moreover, because larger units were structurally identical to the smaller units constituting them—mathematicians call this a "fractal," or "self-similar," structure—subsequent reassembly could proceed readily.
Consider the Franks, in modern-day France and Germany. Of all the barbarian "kingdoms" that emerged with the fall of the western Roman Empire, the Frankish kingdom had proved the most vibrant. In A.D. 800, after aggressive expansion, its leader, Charlemagne, was declared by the pope to be emperor of a newborn Roman Empire. But the empire’s coherence depended on Charlemagne’s savvy and charisma (which in turn seems to have rested partly on his much-remarked-upon height, impressive enough to compensate for his also-remarked-upon squeaky voice). So his death in 814 boded ill for the continued unity of the empire. All the more so because his demise roughly coincided with the Viking onslaught from Scandinavia.
On paper, it might have looked as if the Vikings would establish an immediate rapport with residents of northwestern Europe. The Vikings were a Germanic people stigmatized as barbarians, and the residents of northwestern Europe were a largely Germanic people whose not-so-distant ancestors had been stigmatized as barbarians. But of course, the Vikings were not the sort to discuss their self-esteem problems, and, anyway, the northwestern Europeans had now reached a higher social station; to them the Vikings, in their wild-eyed savagery, seemed like members of a lower species, notwithstanding their ethnic affinity. (Just goes to show: it’s all in the memes.)
In any event, the Franks now faced double trouble—hordes of pillaging Vikings on the one hand, and, on the other, the crumbling of Carolingian leadership as Charlemagne’s heir evinced their various shortcomings. Yet feudalism’s links basically held. In northern France, counts—the second-to-highest ranking lords in the land—ceased to feel obligation to the highest ranking lord, the king. But they mostly retained the loyalty of their own vassals and set about expanding their domains by allying with or conquering other counts (thus fusing "counties"). So no sooner had the kingdom fragmented into building blocks than the blocks began to reassemble themselves. In other regions, disintegration proceeded further, below the level of counts, so the polities were smaller. Still, feudalism’s fractal structure meant that polities of any size had the same basic structure, the same ingredients for internal cohesion, and the same potential for subsequent reassembly.
As a result, whether the Vikings confronted large military organizations or small ones, they always confronted organizations. And in the end the organizations—or at least the organization—won. Even where the Vikings were triumphant, they tended to melt into the fabric of feudalism rather than tear it apart. Like so many barbarians, they discovered that using existing social structures could be more profitable than destroying them, and less hazardous to your health.
Though European feudalism was peculiarly resilient, human society in general is good at regrouping under duress. When centralized authority has collapsed, true anarchy has seldom ensued. Political and economic reconstitution at some level is typically immediate. Sometimes the result is sufficiently reminiscent of the Middle Ages that scholars note its "feudal" elements. But regardless of how "feudal" the recoveries, they typically rest on the same basic cement that kept Europe orderly in the early Middle Ages: the human instinct for non-zero-sum relationship. People are good at finding zones of mutual self-interest and striking deals of mutual obligation. Greeks, during their own "dark ages," were a good example. After the collapse of the Mycenaean state at the end of the second millennium B.C., they regrouped into what appear to have been chiefdoms, which then evolved into the city-states that would make Greece famous.
Spontaneous renaissance was also visible in northern China in the fourth century A.D., when government dissolved under barbarian onslaught. Facing chaos, families clustered together in large camps, built fortresses, and agreed to submit to a common leader. Leaders of the camps conferred and agreed to do the same. Presto! Instant political structure, complete with improvised legal codes, economic self-sufficiency, and military might. The Chinese consecrated these bonds of mutual obligation by drawing on their spiritual heritage, Confucianism, whereas the Europeans sealed feudal bonds with Christian ceremony. But the same thing was happening in both places: human nature was ensuring that when structure collapsed, a safety net would materialize. And religion was adapting itself to this mandate, the mandate of non-zero-sumness.
THE WORLD MAKES BACKUP COPIES
By the beginning of the eleventh century, the Viking threat had subsided. Europe had weathered the storm. But it had done much more than that. It had gradually accumulated cultural capital and was now poised for a great leap forward.
This cultural capital, this precious stock of memes, had little to do with Europe’s "classical heritage." In How the Irish Saved Civilization,Cahill gasps at what might have been lost in the barbarian invasions. "Had the destruction been complete—had every library been disassembled and every book burned—we might have lost Homer and Virgil and all of classical poetry, Herodotus and Tacitus and all of classical history, Demosthenes and Cicero and all of classical oratory, Plato and Aristotle and all of Greek philosophy, and Plotinus and Porphyry and all the subsequent commentary."
Well, them’s the breaks. But what people of the early Middle Ages most needed wasn’t a good stiff dose of Demosthenes. They needed mundane things, such as a harness that wouldn’t press on a horse’s windpipe. This new device, in use by A.D. 800, tripled the weight a horse could pull, and thus relieved European farmer from dependence on slow and lazy oxen, easing both transport and agriculture. Combined with other key advances—the heavy plow and later the nailed iron horseshoe—the harness drove an expansion of cultivated land.
These sorts of memes—nuts and bolts, practical technologies—are more durable than those generated by, say, Sophocles, most of whose plays were lost forever. There are several reasons. One is gut-level utility; literature is nice, but putting food on the table is nicer. A related reason is the ease with which practical technologies cross cultural and linguistic borders. Medieval Europeans didn’t speak Greek, much less read it, so copies of Antigone would not have been in great demand even among unusually literary peasants. An iron horseshoe, on the other hand, speaks the universal language of utility.
The final reason that practical memes are o durable is that if they die they can be reincarnated. No one will ever write one of Sophocles’ lost plays. But if the conceiver of the horseshoe had perished right after his or her epiphany, someone else would have stumbled onto the idea eventually.
The point isn’t that any one useful idea is, strictly speaking, certain to spread, or certain to be reborn if extinguished. The point is that, the more useful the idea, the more likely both spreading and rebirth are. And as the spread of useful ideas raises the world’s population, and raises intellectual synergy via improved communication and transport, these likelihoods grow all the more, until finally they do approach certainty. Increasingly, societies resemble large, thick brains, their neurons spreading incremental innovation rapidly and reliably, spurring further innovation.
Today this vast interconnectedness, on a global scale, is obvious. But even in the early Middle Ages, all of Eurasia and northern Africa had begun to constitute a single data-processing system. A slow system, yes, especially when trade would fall off after political dislocation—but a big system. The iron horseshoe and the windpipe-friendly harness seem to have been invented in Asia and then to have leapt from person to person to person—maybe hitching a ride with nomads for a time—all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.
One key to the resilience of this giant multicultural brain is its multiculturalness. No one culture is in charge, so no one culture controls the memes (though some try in vain). This decentralization makes epic social setbacks of reliably limited duration; the system is "fault-tolerant," as computer engineers say. While Europe fell into its slough of despond, Byzantium and southern China stayed standing, India had ups and downs, and the newborn Islamic civilization flourished. These cultures performed two key services: inventing neat new things that would eventually spread into Europe (the spinning wheel probably arose somewhere in the Orient); and conserving useful old things that were now scarce in Europe (the astrolabe, a Greek invention, came to Europe via Islam, as did Ptolemy’s astronomy—which, though ultimately wrong, worked for navigational purposes). To an observer in Italy or France in A.D. 650, it might have seemed as if there was what we would now call a "total system failure"—as if the whole world’s hard drive had crashed. But from a global perspective there was no cause for alarm, because the world makes backup copies. Useful memes replicate themselves en masse, insuring the planet against regional crashes.
Given this indomitability of technological evolution, it follows that cultural evolution more broadly—growth in the degree and scope of social complexity, and of non-zero-sumness—is similarly hard to stop. If, that is, this social evolution depends fundamentally on technological evolution, and not on the chance preservation of particular works of literature or poetry or philosophy. In the European Middle Ages, as we’ll now see, that seems to have been the case. Even stereotypically "western" features, such as the blossoming of personal liberty after centuries of serfdom, are in essence byproducts of technology.
AN ENERGY REVOLUTION
The revolution in agricultural technology—plow, harness, horse-shoe—slowly but surely raised Europe’s population, making its social brain larger. The result was more and more indigenous innovation—or, often, indigenous refinement of foreign innovations. As usual in cultural evolution (and for that matter in biological evolution), the most important innovations were of three kinds: energy technologies, information technologies, and materials technologies.
Horses aside, medieval Europe’s key energy technology was the waterwheel. It had existed since Roman times, but the Romans used it rarely, and only to mill grain. Europeans improved the wheel and expanded its use: preparing malt for beer, crushing ore, pumping a blast furnace’s bellows, forging iron, driving saws. Perhaps most important, by the eleventh century, mills were used to full cloth. This textile technology spread across Europe over the next two centuries, and finally provoked French fullers to violently protest the water-wheel’s job-killing potential. This, a pre-Luddite Luddite protest, was an early harbinger of the industrial revolution, a sign that energy technologies were raising productivity. In the twelfth century Europeans invented the vertical windmill—perhaps having heard of the horizontal variety already used in the east—and it won favor on the plains of northern Europe, where waterwheels had a habit of freezing up in winter.
The textile business also profited from a new loom, perhaps descended from the Chinese silk loom, but now powered by pedals that freed the weaver’s hands for subtler work. By the eleventh century, Flanders had started specializing in wool fabrics, and by the twelfth there were silk and cotton centers in Italy. Cotton was ginned with a device picked up from Arabs, who had picked it up from Indians.
Increasingly, making goods wasn’t just wintertime work for farm families, but a calling in itself. In an Arthurian romance composed in the twelfth century, a character looks upon a town and sees: "This man is making helmets, this one mailed coats; another makes saddles, and another shields. One man manufactures bridles, another spurs. Some polish sword blades, others full cloth, and some are dyers. Some prick the fabrics and others clip them, and these here are melting gold and silver. They make rich and lovely pieces: cups, drinking vessels, and bowls, and jewels worked in with enamels; also rings, belts, and pins."
Pins indeed. The description hints at Adam Smith’s famous analysis of the division of labor in a pin factory. Compare this town with the essentially agrarian Europe of a half-millennium earlier, when the division of labor, as summarized by one economic historian, was as follows: There were those who prayed, those who fought, and those who labored in the fields.
CAPITALISM MAKES THE WORLD SAFE FOR ITSELF
The difference between these two Europes lies not just in manufacturing technologies. One could in principle have pecialized in polishing word blades, or dying cloth, two millennia earlier. Why did almost no one do so, and why even during the heyday of imperial Rome does division of labor seem to have been modest compared to the towns of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries? And why was late medieval regional specialization also sharp?
The answer has to do with the fact that, as we’ve seen, Adam Smith’s "invisible hand" depends on an invisible brain. And invisible brains depend on information technology. Not just conspicuous information technologies, like the abacus (though its "rediscovery" around A.D. 1,000, after centuries of European neglect, did help) or writing (though the growing literacy of the Middle Ages helped, too) or money (though the revival of currency was vital). At least as crucial was information technology in a subtler sense: what you might call information metatechnologies—social algorithms guiding the use of such information technologies as money. In particular, what made the later Middle Ages a bridge between ancient times and the industrial revolution was the rudimentary metatechnology of capitalism.
Today we take for granted that the people who start a business and the people who provide the money for it are often not the same people. We have stock markets, limited partnerships, bank loans, and various other ways of turning John’s profits into Mary’s seed money. But this basic idea—efficiently converting savings into investment—had to be invented, and at the time the western Roman Empire fell apart, Europe’s machinery for capital formation had been crude. The Middle Ages changed that.
In southern Europe the contratto di commenda, in use by the tenth century, allowed investors large and small to underwrite a ship’s trading expedition. They were guaranteed in writing a share of "the capital and the profit which God shall have granted." The commenda was just one of many medieval tools for linking savings to investment. (By the fourteenth century, Venetian bankers had realized that they could lend out a fraction of their deposits, since depositer were unlikely to all withdraw their cash at once. The rest is European banking history.) All such instruments had this in common: they were distinct steps toward modern capitalism. Europe had long had markets for goods and services. Now it had markets for capital. It also had new ancillary metatechnologies of capitalism, such as insurance and double-entry bookkeeping.
All to the good. But does this really answer the question of why the economic complexity of the late Middle Ages had been so slow in coming? If the missing ingredients were the various metatechnologies of capitalism, then the question becomes: Why had they taken so long to evolve? After all, once you’ve got coins and writing, all that stands between you and capitalism is a little imagination. In principle, there could have been stock exchanges—which finally showed up in the seventeenth century A.D.—in the seventh century B.C., when the Lydians started coining money. Why did nearly two millennia pass before European capitalism got off the ground?
Maybe part of the answer lies in where exactly it did finally get off the ground: not in Byzantium, where ancient government and social structure endured, but in the west, where central rule collapsed, and tumult came and went and came, and authority was often dispersed. The average ancient ruling class, after all, would have blanched at full-fledged capitalism. For ordinary people to have potent ways of turning savings into investment meant a loss of leverage for aristocrats. What ships and grand buildings to build, and what to do with them—more and more of these decisions would now be made diffusely, by diverse investors and entrepreneurs, not centrally by the government and the entrenched elite. What’s more, the fruits of investment would now be hard to monopolize.
This points to a general problem faced by ruling classes. To stay strong, a society must adopt new technologies. In particular, it must reap the non-zero-sum fruits they offer. Yet new technologies often redistribute power within societies. (They often do this precisely because they raise non-zero-sumness—because they expand the number of people who profit from the system and so wield power within it.) And if there is one opinion common to ruling classes everywhere, it is that power is not in urgent need of redistributing. Hence the Hobson’s choice for the governing elite: accept valuable technologies that may erode your power, or resist them so well that you may find yourself with nothing to govern. Maybe it was western Europe’s freedom from ancient elites that helped hasten the coming of capitalism.
To be sure, western Europe in the Middle Ages, like ancient Rome, had elites who disliked big power shifts. The instinct of feudal lords was to exploit the emerging class of merchants with tolls at bridges and feudal bounds. But it didn’t take merchants long to sense their common interest. They united into guilds and demanded the freedoms necessary for commerce: not just freedom from outrageous tolls, but freedom to buy or sell property, freedom to enter into contracts—and freedom to decide what other freedoms they needed. Increasingly, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, towns won the right of self-government, complete with their own courts and tax collection. What’s more, feudal lords soon realized that local prosperity was good for them, and that prosperity required a bit of this freedom. Some started not just granting charter of self-governance to towns, but founding towns in order to grant the charters.
Why were these ruling elites more open to change than Rome’s ruling elites? One reason, some historians say, was the decentralized nature of feudalism. Feudal lords often had the leeway to rewrite the rules in their territory, and they also had the incentive—competition with neighboring lords. As savvy lords tried to foster more prosperity than their neighbors, the many fractal units of feudalism became, in effect, laboratories for non-zero-sumness, competing with each other to raise productivity. This creative tension is what forced rural aristocrats to strike their dangerous bargain with capitalism: fostering the power of the merchant class as an asset in external competition, thus empowering upstart urbanites who might then turn around and challenge aristocratic dominance.
Municipal governance wasn’t democratic in a modern sense (and it later became even less so, albeit temporarily). It was government "of the merchants, for the merchants, and by the merchants," as one historian put it. Still, compared to the stultifying class structure beyond the town walls—and compared to aristocratic Roman cities, where merchants might be tolerated but were hardly revered—towns were radically egalitarian. One backward twelfth-century nobleman deplored life in Italian towns, where society granted "honorable positions to young people of inferior station, and even to worker of the vile mechanical arts, whom other peoples bar like the plague from the more respectable and honorable circles." Within the towns, a different view prevailed. One urbanite wrote that "the countryside produces good animals and bad men."
The tension between the urban, more liberal future and the rural, oppressive past would take centuries to work itself out. Freedoms would wax and wane within city walls, and political struggles between the commercial and landed classes would go back and forth. But the good guys won in the end, and in the meantime the displays of inchoate capitalism’s might were impressive.
Merchants in various German cities formed the Hanseatic League to subdue pirates, build lighthouses, and otherwise lubricate their livelihood. The league wound up defeating the king of Denmark in war and controlling maritime trade routes. In Italy, cities that had fast become city-states—complete with fighting among themselves—felt their freedoms threatened by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I. (One early clue: Frederick took an advocate of urban independence, burned him to death, and scattered his ashes in the Tiber River.) The cities put aside their differences, formed the Lombard League, and fought Frederick until he gave in: they would pay lip service to his supremacy but be free to govern themselves.
Commerce changed rural living, too. Some serfs migrated to towns. ("Town air makes one free" was a German saying.) Others became less serflike, as a money economy came to the countryside; rather than working for their land, they paid rent for it, and some turned a profit by filling urban stomachs. Slavery had faded during the Middle Ages, and now serfdom, the next worst thing to slavery, was fading, too.
The winning of freedom by medieval towns, the quelling of pirates by the Hanseatic League, and the humiliation of Frederick I by the Lombard League (albeit with papal assistance) were all early examples of a process that would continue for centuries and continues today: capitalism making the world safe for itself. The power of this information metatechnology would time and again prove irresistible.
This pattern in turn fits into a broader and older pattern: non-zero-sum technologies making the world safe for themselves. The clay tokens that evolved into writing in Mesopotamia flourished because they lubricated economic exchange. Writing then persisted largely because it did the same, if at first in a roundabout, bureaucratic way. Both memes—tokens and then writing—empowered their host societies, fueling their own proliferation. The same is true of currencies—first de facto currencies, like Aztec cocoa beans, and then de jure currencies, like coins. They brought social synergy, and the resulting momentum carried them far and wide.
The metatechnology of capitalism then combined currency and writing to unleash unprecedented social power. Nothing so demonstrates this fact as the sudden shifts of political power from country to city during the High Middle Ages. Basically, a low-tech means of realizing positive sums—feudalism, geared to an age of little money, sparse literacy, and broken-down roads—gave way to a high-tech means, radically changing the power structure.
The medieval historian Joseph Strayer once noted "an interesting problem in the history of civilization. If there is steady progress anywhere, it is in the field of technology, and yet this kind of progress seems to have little connection with the stability of society. . . ." But, when you think about it, there is no reason to expect steady technological evolution to translate into the smooth evolution of social structures. Technology, time and again, has changed the balance of power within society. And people tend not to surrender power gracefully.
Marx saw this—that politics has an economic and ultimately a material basis, and that the evolution of technology therefore brings unsettling change. He just had some ill-fated ideas about the details of the process, and its direction.
FREEDOM AND OTHER EFFICIENT TECHNOLOGIES
When medieval burghers carved out some breathing room for themselves, winning the right of self-governance, they were not spurred by the writings of Demosthenes, nor trying to revive their classical western heritage. They were just indulging their instincts for self-interest and collaboration, and embracing a productive information metatechnology: freedom. Freedom to buy and sell, to make contracts, to use one’s savings as one sees fit—and the freedom of towns, more broadly, to define and fine-tune these freedoms—all these were fruitful algorithms of governance; they were the political technology that best energized the ascendant economic technology, capitalism.
If the monks who copied Greek classics deserve any credit at all for this expansion of freedom, it is not for copying the classics but rather for nurturing literacy generally. Contracts and records are a capitalist tool, so literacy was as well; notary became a thriving vocation during the Middle Ages. But literacy itself, unlike the Greek classics, was never in danger of disappearing. It was alive and well in the nearby Byzantine and Islamic worlds (and the faraway Indian and Chinese and American worlds), and would surely have engulfed Europe sooner or later, with or without Irish monks.
Nor did Demosthenes’ paeans to democracy have much to do with the momentous evolution of national representative democracy. Here, too, the basic story is capitalism making the world safe for itself.
As some historians have noted, the Magna Carta, though rightly regarded as a milestone in democracy’s history, looms too large in the popular mind. Issued by King John in 1215 under pressure from his barons, it guaranteed them the right to be consulted about taxation. But this was not so new. The English monarchy had consulted councils of nobles on major decisions for centuries. (And if that tradition was grounded in England’s "heritage," the heritage was more likely from quasi-democratic Germanic tribes than from Greek orator or Roman law.) The bigger development was the expanding realm of representation over the following century, as the king’s council, the parliament, came to include burgesses, representatives of the towns. As markets distributed economic power more broadly across British society, political power followed. That’s how the world works.
Today the legacy of this early concession to capitalism’s emerging power is Britain’s House of Commons, created in the fourteenth century for burgesses (and also for the knights who administered counties). And the legacy of capitalism’s growing power since then is the fact that the other House, the House of Lords, is today nearly powerless.
The Greek and Roman writings that championed freedom and democracy are wonderful things. The freedom and democracy that dawned on western Europe are also wonderful things. But in the end there is no good reason to attribute the latter to the former.
Indeed, we might just as well attribute the blossoming of freedom and democracy in Europe to the corruption and tyranny of the later Roman Empire. This desertion of Rome’s earlier ideals may well have hastened the empire’s collapse, bringing the fluidity that allowed the competitive experimentation which fostered capitalism. (Perhaps analogously, it is only after the famous Mayan collapse that archaeologists find evidence in Mayan culture of a "mercantile pragmatism," featuring the mass production of pottery, rising living standards for commoners, and the apparent demise of a theocratic elite in favor of a merchant class.)
The story of the Middle Ages is the story of new technologies of non-zero-sumness restructuring society in their image. Their upshot ran counter to, and ultimately prevailed over, the generic ambitions of ancient imperial regimes. Once the synergistic power of these technologies crystallized in the form of capitalism, they would allow the entire populace—including descendants of slaves and serfs—to play complex non-zero-sum games with people they would never meet. The bounty would not fall evenly across the populace, but it would fall more evenly than bounty in that part of the world was accustomed to falling. Political power would be more widely diffused than any ancient imperial government had been prepared to contemplate.
This basic drama—the aggrandizing instincts of powerful people versus the decentralizing tendencies of technology, especially information technology—would play out again and again. By that I don’t just mean that free markets would clash recurrently with old regimes, and would win and finally permeate the world (though that seems to be one story line of the past half-millennium). I mean that new information technologies in general—not just money and writing—very often decentralize power, and this fact is not graciously conceded by the power that be. Hence a certain amount of history’s turbulence, including some in the current era.
