PARTA: LIFE IN A WARRIOR STATE
Sparta was a warrior society in ancient Greece that reached the height of its power after defeating rival city-state Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.). Spartan culture was centered on loyalty to the state and military service. At age 7, Spartan boys entered a rigorous state-sponsored education, military training and socialization program. Although Spartan women were not active in the military, they were educated and enjoyed more status and freedom than other Greek women. Because Spartan men were professional soldiers, all manual labor was done by a slave class, the Helots. Despite their military prowess, the Spartans’ dominance was short-lived and by 371 BCE, they descended into a long period of decline.
SPARTAN SOCIETY
Sparta, was an ancient Greek city-state located primarily in the present-day region of southern Greece called Laconia. They were the only city which did not have protective walls: "wall of men, instead of bricks" The population of Sparta consisted of three main groups: the Spartans, or Spartiates, who were full citizens; the Helots, or serfs/slaves; and the Perioeci, who were neither slaves nor citizens. The Perioeci, whose name means “dwellers-around,” worked as craftsmen and traders, and built weapons for the Spartans.
Did You Know? The word “spartan” means self-restrained, simple and frugal. The word laconic (Laconia), which means few words and concise, is derived from the Spartans, who prized action over words. This was opposed to the long winded Athenians who were always engaging in discussion.
All healthy male Spartan citizens participated in the compulsory state-sponsored education system, the Agoge, which emphasized obedience, endurance, courage and self-control. Spartan men devoted their lives to military service, and lived communally well into adulthood. A Spartan was taught that loyalty to the state came before everything else, including one’s family.
The Helots, whose name means “captives,” were fellow Greeks, who had been conquered by the Spartans and turned into slaves. The Spartans’ way of life would not have been possible without the Helots, who handled all the day-to-day tasks and unskilled labor required to keep society functioning: They were farmers, domestic servants, nurses and military attendants. Spartans, who were outnumbered by the Helots, often treated them brutally and oppressively in an effort to prevent uprisings. Spartans would humiliate the Helots by doing such things as forcing them to get deliberately drunk on wine and then make fools of themselves in public. (This practice was also intended to demonstrate to young people how an adult Spartan should never act, as self-control was a prized trait.) Methods of mistreatment could be far more extreme: Spartans were allowed to kill Helots for just about any reason.
THE SPARTAN MILITARY
Unlike such Greek city-states as Athens, a center for the arts, learning and philosophy, Sparta was centered on a warrior culture. Male Spartan citizens were allowed only one occupation: soldier. Indoctrination into this lifestyle began early. Spartan boys started their military training at age 7, when they left home and entered the 13 year indoctrination to become a Spartan warrior. The boys lived communally under severe conditions. They were subjected to continual physical training, competitions (which usually involved violence), given meager rations and expected to become skilled at stealing food, among other survival skills. If a boy was caught stealing, he was beaten, not for theft but for getting caught. The youths had to go barefoot, and were dressed only in a wool tunic both in summer and in winter. Boys also trained in pankration, a famous martial art that consisted of boxing and wrestling. Spartans were so adept in pankration that, when it was inducted in the Olympic Games, they were mostly forbidden to compete. Teenage boys who demonstrated the most leadership potential were selected for participation in the Crypteia, which acted as a secret police force whose primary goal was to terrorize the general Helot population and murder those who were troublemakers. At age 20, Spartan males became full-time soldiers, and remained on active duty until age 60.
Throughout their adult lives, the Spartiates continued to be subject to a training regime so strict that, as the historian Plutarch said, "... they were the only men in the world with whom war brought a respite in the training for war." Bravery was the ultimate virtue for the Spartans: Spartan mothers would give their sons their shield with the words "Return With it or carried on it!" that is to say, either victorious or dead, since in battle, the heavy hoplite shield would be the first thing a fleeing soldier would be tempted to abandon –- rhipsaspia, "dropping the shield", was a synonym for desertion in battle and there was no greater sin.
The Spartans’ constant military drilling and discipline made them skilled at the ancient Greek style of fighting in a phalanx formation. In the phalanx, the army worked as a unit in a close, deep formation, and made coordinated mass maneuvers. No one soldier was considered superior to another. Going into battle, a Spartan soldier, or hoplite, wore a bronze Corinthian helmet, breastplate armor which exaggerated their physique and leg guards called greaves. They carried a thirty pound round shield made of bronze and wood, called an Apsis, decorated with a large red letter lambda (Λ) (the symbol of Laconia), and an eight foot long spear called a dory. These were the main weapons of direct confrontations between two opposing armies: stamina and "pushing ability" were what counted. They also carried a short sword called a xiphos or an axe-like weapon called a kopis. A Spartan was once asked why their sword was shorter than that of the average Greek: “Because its closer to your heart.” Spartan warriors were famous for their long hair (the symbol of man who is free to choose his appearance), beards and crimson red cloaks. All of this made them stand out on the battlefield, much to the delight of every Spartan man as they struck fear into their enemies.
SPARTAN WOMEN AND MARRIAGE
Spartan women had a reputation for being independent-minded, and enjoyed more freedoms and power than their counterparts throughout ancient Greece. While they played no role in the military, female Spartans often received a formal education, although separate from boys and not at boarding schools. In part to attract mates, females engaged in athletic competitions, including javelin-throwing and wrestling, and also sang and danced competitively. As adults, Spartan women were allowed to speak openly, as well as own and manage property. Additionally, they were typically unencumbered by domestic responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning and making clothing, tasks which were handled by the helots. Marriage was important to Spartans, as the state put pressure on people to have male children who would grow up to become citizen-warriors, and replace those who died in battle. Men who delayed marriage were publically shamed, while those who fathered multiple sons could be rewarded.
HOW CIVILIZATION WAS SAVED FROM THE “DARK AGES”
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith; Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.” – Reinhold Niebuhr
Scholars keep pushing further back the designation “Dark Ages” and have now excluded from it the ninth and tenth centuries. The dubious distinction of Dark Ages, properly speaking, belongs to the sixth and seventh centuries (500 to 800 CE) which indeed were centuries of poor education, very little literary output and other a huge decrease in culture. Those were the centuries of cultural retrogression, the centuries of the Barbarian invasions in Italy and elsewhere which effectively wrecked Roman civilization as we knew it. Those invasions destroyed cities, churches, libraries, schools, institutions such as law, government, and just about anything that was Roman. It was in fact, the Church that stepped in the vacuum and maintained a bit of order within a crumbling continent. As Christopher Dawson aptly writes: “The Church had to undertake the task of introducing the Gospels and the morals of Christianity to peoples who regarded homicide as the most honorable occupation and vengeance as synonymous with justice.”
How was this accomplished? By the establishment of Western monasticism by St. Benedict in 529 AD. St. Benedict’s immediate intention was not to do great deeds for European civilization, but that was the result. At its height, the Benedictine order of monks boasted 37,000 monasteries throughout Europe. No wonder St. Benedict has been declared the patron saint of Europe. Besides praying and working out their salvation and preaching the gospel, what else did monks pursue in those monasteries? The life of prayer and communal living was one of rigorous schedules and self-sacrifice. Prayer was their work, and the prayers took up much of a monk's waking hours – Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, daily Mass, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. In between prayers, monks were allowed to sit in the cloister and work on their projects of writing, copying, or decorating books. These would have been assigned based on a monk's abilities and interests. The non-scholastic types were assigned to physical labor of varying degrees.
The main meal of the day took place around noon, often taken at a refectory table, and consisted of the most simple and bland foods i.e., poached fish, boiled oats. While they ate, scripture would be read from a pulpit above them. Since no other words were allowed to be spoken, monks developed communicative gestures. The arts and agriculture were two of their most significant accomplishments. They literally saved agriculture in Europe. Monks taught the local peasants how to cultivate the land, especially in Germany where they converted the wilderness into a cultivated country. Manual labor was an important part of their rule which proclaimed “ora et labora” (prayer and work). In England they owned one fifth of all its cultivable land. The monks would introduce crops, industries and production methods with which the people were not yet familiar: the rearing and breeding of cattle, horses, the brewing of beer, the raising of bees, production of honey and the cultivation of fruits. The corn trade in Sweden was established by the monks, in Parma it was cheese making, in Ireland salmon fisheries, and in many places vast vineyards which introduced wine making to replace the drinking of water that was usually polluted.
From the monasteries of Saint Laurent and Saint Martin, the monks redirected the waters to a filthy Paris. They taught people irrigation on the plains of Lombardy which has always been some of the richest and most productive lands in Europe. They constructed technologically sophisticated water-powered systems at monasteries which were hundreds of miles away from each other. The monasteries themselves were the most economically effective units that had ever existed in Europe. Water-power was used to crush wheat, sieve flour, make cloth, and tan hides for leather. Not even the Roman world had adopted mechanization for industrial use to such an extent. The monks were also known for their skills in metallurgy. They became the leading iron producers in the Champagne region of France. They quarried marble, did glass-work, forged metal plates and mined salt. They were skillful clock-makers. They built astronomical clocks. In short, monastic know-how spread throughout Europe, thus preventing a complete return to barbarism.
But there was one occupation of the monks which, perhaps more than any other, helped in the preservation of Western Civilization: that of the copying of ancient manuscripts. It began in the sixth century when a retired Roman senator by the name of Cassiodorus established a monastery at Vivarium in southern Italy and endowed it with a fine library wherein the copying of manuscripts took center stage. Thereafter, most monasteries included a so-called scriptoria as part of their libraries. The other place where the survival of manuscripts had priority were the schools associated with the medieval cathedrals. It was those schools of which lay the groundwork for the first University established at Bologna, Italy in the eleventh century. The Church had already made some outstanding original contributions in the field of philosophy but the preservation of books and documents from the Greek and Roman world became indispensable later on for the preserving of Western civilization. The best known of those scholars of the Dark Ages was Alcuin, a monk who worked closely with Charlemagne to restore study and scholarship in the whole of Europe. In describing the holdings of his library at York he mentions works by Aristotle, Cicero and Virgil.
There were monasteries, moreover, which specialized in other fields of knowledge besides literature. There were lectures in medicine by the monks of St. Benignus at Dijon, in painting and engraving at Saint Gall, and courses in Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. Some monks after learning all they could in their own monastery would then travel to other monastic schools. Their devotion to books was so extraordinary that they would travel far and wide in search of rare manuscripts. St. Benedict Biscop, in England, traveled widely on five sea voyages for that exact purpose. A monk of the time said it all: “Without study and without books, the life of a monk is nothing.” We would not be far off the mark in asserting that Western civilization’s admiration for the written word and the classics of the Greco-Roman world was the monk’s commitment to reading, writing, and education. This ensured the survival of Western civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire and the invasions of the Barbarians. They laid the foundations for European universities and became the bridge between antiquity and modernity.
As the Roman Empire fell, matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature — everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as the protectors through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed. Without this “Service of the Scribes”, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the “Mission of the Irish Monks”, who single-handedly maintained European civilization from within tall isolated stone towers in Ireland, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one — a world without books or knowledge…and our own world would never have come to be. Looking back from the great civilizations of twelfth-century France or seventeenth-century Florence, it is hard to believe that for quite a long time — almost a hundred years — western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.
The End of the World
For all the splendor of Rome, and the extent of Roman road, the entire empire hugged the Mediterranean like a child’s castle of sand, waiting to be swept into the sea. And as they turned to the center of their world, they turned their back on all that lay on the frontier, beyond the Roman wall. That Rome should ever fall was unthinkable to Romans: its foundations were unassailable, sturdily sunk in a storied past and steadily built on for eleven centuries. There was, of course, the Roman Prophecy of the Twelve Eagles, each eagle representing a century which would mark the end of the Empire. Eternal Rome, eleven centuries old, hardly foresaw its doom.
Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and morals; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of the military spirit were buried in the churches; a large portion of what remained of public and private wealth was consecrated to the demands of charity. What we can say with confidence is that Rome fell gradually and that Romans for many decades scarcely noticed what was happening.
What set the barbarians was not plunder but agriculture. For farmers, the safety net is the grain supply — more food than they need right at the moment. This ancient form of money in the bank has served as the basis for long life, long-term planning, and all the arts of civilization. But the complete formula which leads to economic success in the form of a store of grain triggers a population explosion, which quickly triggers the need to acquire new land to feed new mouths. Considered in this light, the Roman state in the West was destroyed by the same forces that had created it.
In 409 CE, faced with an increasingly undefended frontier, the emperor announced the impossible: henceforth, slaves would be permitted, even encouraged, to enlist in the legions, and for their service they would receive a bounty and their freedom. By this point, it was sometimes difficult to tell the Romans from the barbarians — at least along the frontier. There are, no doubt, lessons here. The only kinds of wealth worth speaking of at the fall of Rome were the fruits of the earth.
What Was Lost
In the end the Romans kept their lives, but sooner or later they or their children lost almost everything else: titles, property, way of life, learning — especially learning. A world in chaos is not a world in which books are copied and libraries maintained. It is not a world where learned men have the leisure to become more learned. The straight Roman road, solidly paved, now presented the likelihood of unwelcome invasions right to Rome’s doorstep. What died, when the barbarians burned the libraries and the books turned to dust, when the stones of the Forum and Coliseum were reassembled into rural outhouses? Western Civilization would not return for nearly 500 hundred years.
The Irish Monk
The golden age of Irish monastic scholarship spans the sixth through ninth centuries with flourishing of art, literature, calligraphy, manuscript preservation, and research that took place in the newly established monastic schools following the fifth-century arrival of Christianity in Ireland. During this same period, the collapse of the Roman Empire by such tribes as the Goths, Huns, Vandals, and Burgundians caused the Continent to experience a tremendous decline in learning and culture. Not only was the Irish church the brightest spot culturally in the West at this time, but many historians think that the great heritage of Western civilization, ranging from the Greco-Roman classics to Jewish and Christian works, would have been utterly vanquished were it not for the religious women and men of Ireland.
The golden age is best known for the medieval development of the Bible into an object of wealth and point of contact with God and the copying of Scripture became a monk’s favorite pastime. These so-called “Illuminated manuscripts” accompanied the sacred text of the original New Testaments with colorful and detailed graphic representations of the events being narrated and were bound in ornately tooled leather covers of precious metals, inlaid with jewels. Although Christianity furnished the basis that triggered the golden age, the growth of art and literature lay already embedded in the Celtic passion for people of learning. In Celtic mythology, the god of literature, Ogma, attracted humans with golden cords fastened to his tongue. Ancient Irish customs stipulated that the power of the poet should be respected above weaponry, and that the education of a prince in the skills of the mind was as important as his training in the art of warfare. The respect for the written word in no way diminished with the rise of Christianity; rather, the new religion transmitted the two priceless treasures of a written language and the legacy of Greco-Roman classical culture.
Scholars from Europe began immigrating to the island in the early sixth century to escape the “barbarian” invaders, and Ireland came to enjoy a reputation as a refuge where frightened academics could find all the customary comforts of civilization. In exchange for this wholehearted welcome, the immigrants brought a great wealth, their books and manuscripts, to their new home, which became the foundation of Irish monastic libraries. These teachers, eventually called humanists, imported Latin grammar into the Irish Gaelic language, thereby vitalizing a literary tradition in desperate need of renewal. An updating of the alphabet based on Latin script rendered writing easy and motivated educated people to transcribe their native lore and create new literary masterpieces. The result of this transformation of language resulted in a monumental supply of Irish literature which painted a portrait of an ancient pagan civilization unmatched elsewhere in the West. Not only was this recording of the oral tradition historically significant, but a further consequence was the rise of a new type of literature.
Eventually the imaginative spirit gripped the scribes, who were responsible for meticulously copying Christian and classical works but subconsciously absorbing their concepts and themes in the process, leading them to formulate their own tales enriched by their reading from these ancient sources.
For example, the traditional Irish voyages to seek Tir na n’Og, were added to aspects from Homer to yield the famous Christian epic The Voyage of St. Brendan. The touching poetry devised by monk-poets furnished modern historians with a unique vision of the lives of cloistered Irish monks encompassing their love of nature and animals, the mystical nature of their religious past, their communal discipline, and even their boredom.
In Ireland, learning found its mythological origin in Connla’s Well, a fountain in Tipperary over which grew nine hazel trees that simultaneously sprouted flowers and crimson nuts. Mastery of the fine arts and poetry gave substance to the flowers, while the nuts were filled with knowledge of all the sciences. Instituted upon this primordial foundation, the pagan schools required 15 years of study and were run by poets, and the druids. They migrated with their students from village to village while the druids usually remained in villages. They shared a common method of education: Teachings and folk tales were transmitted in fixed oral forms governed by patterns in style and repetitions of words and sentence structures that facilitated memorization by the local population. In addition a reciprocal relationship of compassion was fostered between teachers and students: Teachers corrected students without harshness and provided their physical sustenance (food and clothing), while students adopted a lifelong obligation to protect their teachers from poverty and support them in old age. This instructional method supplied the necessary motivation for students to master a dizzying array of disciplines, including grammar, law, genealogy, history, astronomy, geography, and mathematics.
St Patrick
First, a few misconceptions about Patrick:
Patrick isn't really a Saint with a capital S, having never been officially canonized by Rome. And Patrick couldn't have driven the snakes out of Ireland because there were never any snakes there to begin with. He wasn't even the first Christian to visit Ireland. Patrick isn't even Irish. He's from what's now Dumbarton, Scotland.
Patricius (his Roman name) was 16 years old in the year 405, when he was captured by Irish pirates in a raid and became a slave in what was still radically pagan Ireland. Ireland was an island of tribalism, an island of constant war, an island of slave traders only interested in violence and death. Their warriors were urged on by the infernal skirl of Uilleann pipes, they presented to the unaccustomed Roman legions all the terrors of hell itself. Here Patrick came as a virtual stranger to this country of warring factions. They worshipped multiple gods of the sky and the earth and the water, and so that was his first challenge: to convince the Irish that there was only one God and that his God really did love them.
Patrick came face to face with the chieftains and their druid priests. The showdown came on the morning of his first Easter in Ireland. Part of the pagan worship of fall to spring, from the beginning of the summer, was that a fire was lit, and first of all, the fire on the hill of Tara and no other lights at all in Ireland. Patrick -- in direct defiance of the king -- lit a forbidden fire. He was summoned before the king, and he explained that he wasn't a threat, because he was bringing the new light, the light of Christ, the Savior of the world to the Irish people…as a “gift.” Patrick was intimately familiar with the Irish clan system (his former master, had been a chieftain), and his strategy was to convert chiefs first, who would then convert their clans through their influence. Though he was not solely responsible for converting the island, Patrick was quite successful. He made missionary journeys all over Ireland, and it soon became known as one of Europe's Christian centers. This, of course, was very important to fifth-century Christians, for whom Ireland was the "ends of the earth."
Patrick's position as a foreigner in Ireland was not an easy one. His refusal to accept gifts from kings placed him outside the normal ties of kinship and legally he was without protection, and that he was on occasion beaten, robbed of all he had, and put in chains. A supposed prophecy by the druid priests gives an impression of how Patrick and other Christian missionaries were seen by the Irish:
Across the sea will come crazed in the head,
his cloak with hole for the head, his stick bent in the head.
He will chant impieties from a table in the front of his house;
And all his people will answer: "so be it, so be it”
Patrick was really a first — the first missionary to barbarians beyond the reach of Roman law. His bravery in the face of murderous Irish barbarians earned him their respect. He simply refused to show fear. The step he took was in its way as bold as Columbus, and a thousand times more humane. He wasn’t blind to his dangers, for even in his last years “every day I am ready to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved — whatever may come my way. But I am not afraid of any of these things, because of the promises of heaven; for I have put myself in the hands of God Almighty.” With the Irish — even with the kings — he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased. Patrick’s eternal gift to the Irish was his Christianity — the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history, a Christianity that completely dominated the Irish culture. Ireland, lacking the power and traditions of Rome, had been received into Christianity, which transformed Ireland into something new, something never seen before — a Christian culture, where slavery and human sacrifice became unthinkable, and warfare, though impossible for humans to completely eradicate, slowly began to fade. Patrick, the Roman, nevertheless understood that Christianity was not wedded to Roman custom, and it could not survive without Roman literacy.
And so the first Irish Christians also became the first Irish literates. Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed. The Irish of the late fifth and early sixth centuries soon found a solution, which they called the Green Martyrdom, opposing it to the conventional Red Martyrdom by murder and blood. The Green Martyrs were those who, leaving behind the comforts and pleasures of ordinary human society, became ascetics and retreated to the woods, or to a mountaintop, or to a lonely island — to one of the green spots outside of tribal jurisdictions — there to study the scriptures and commune with God.
Legend credits Patrick with teaching the Irish about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity by showing people their own shamrock, a three-leafed plant, using it to illustrate the Christian teaching of three persons in one God. This story first appears in writing in 1726, though it must be older. The shamrock has since become a central symbol for St Patrick's Day. In pagan Ireland, three was a significant number and the Irish had many triple deities, a fact that may have aided St Patrick in his efforts when he "held up a shamrock and spoke on the Christian Trinity". Some historians use this story as the basis for the visual concept of the triskele a traditional Irish symbol.
Patrick, who would eventually be called the "Apostle of Ireland", converted the majority of Celts and Irish from the druid religion to Christianity and established monasteries to oversee each new believing community. Pagan schools were transformed into monastic schools, retaining the same teaching techniques and quality of humaneness between masters and pupils. Christian equality as sisters and brothers before God in spite of class distinctions introduced an element of democracy into education. Although early medieval Ireland could by no means be identified as a democratic nation, the bishops established laws through which all people, women as well as men, could earn money to attend monastic schools regardless of the capacities of their families. One such law stipulated that a child whose parents could not afford the expenses of a school could pay one’s way by waiting on the children of the wealthy, who were obliged to accept such service and finance the child’s education. These laws fostered a demographic reversal from the pagan schools, such that most students at the monastic schools came from the lower and middle classes instead of the wealthy farmers and chieftains. Gathering out of doors, the teacher, who typically sat or stood on a knoll, alternated his reading, translating, and expounding from books in distinct memorable forms— which students would learn by rote—with questions that assisted students in understanding what they recited.
In addition to the monks and nuns, students at the monastic schools worked for varying lengths in the scriptoria proportional to their level of training. The beginner practiced with a metal-pointed stylus on long narrow tablets of wood coated with wax, which could be flattened clear and used repetitively. After the copying was completed, the student bound the tablets together with a pivot pin at one end so they could be opened and closed like a fan. The student then wound leather thongs around the tablets, leaving the ends of the cords dangling for use as a handle. Skilled scribes drew illuminated manuscripts as codices, which replaced the Roman and Greek scrolls. They made their reproductions on parchment and vellum. They copied, while seated with the writing material resting on the knees or, if engaged in elaborate illumination, standing next to a table, usually in freezing weather. There were no specific fonts used until the 1450s when wood served as the material for some large fonts called wood type. First, the manuscript was sent to the rubricator, who added (in red or other colors) the titles, headlines, the initials of chapters and sections, the notes and each first letter of the page (called an illuminated initial) was enlarged and decorative. If the book was to be illustrated – it was sent to the illuminator. For calligraphy, the pen was a quill made from the wing of a goose, swan, or crow. The inkstand was made from part of a cow’s horn, and the ink was composed of thick and time-defying liquid carbon—characters on the medieval manuscripts are still piercingly black today. The shape of the books is interesting to consider because the modern book, taller than wide, was determined by the dimensions of an average sheepskin, which could most economically be cut into double pages that yield our modern book shape when folded. Sometimes a thick book could require the hides of entire herd. An illuminated manuscript is not considered illuminated unless one or many illuminations contained gold leaf or was brushed with gold specks, a process known as burnishing. During this time period the price of gold had become so cheap that its inclusion in an illuminated manuscript accounted for only a tenth of the cost of production. Completed books were sheathed in leather, labeled, and hung on pegs on the walls of the monastery library. The more precious, such as the renowned Book of Kells and Lindisfarne Gospels, were encased in elegantly tooled leather covers and decorated, jewel-encrusted containers and became known as "display books." While Greece lay in ruins and Rome was being pillaged and plundered, the best of their accomplishments were preserved only in these Irish books. Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish warriors had once tied to their waists their enemies’ severed heads. Wherever they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the non-existent civilization of Europe.
But books too are perishable. Great libraries, like that of ancient Alexandria, were vulnerable to destruction, and with the destruction of books, the knowledge, thought, and poetry of whole cultures were subject to extinction. For a time, about all that stood between the preservation of European civilization or its descent into a true dark age was a hardy band of Irish monks who were dedicated to copying books and teaching people. Just as the Emerald Isle is on the edge of Europe, so the Irish have been on the edge of the progress and forward tug of history.
Thus began the contrast between the Romans, who were unable to save or salvage their once grand civilization, with the Irish monks, who changed the direction of history. It would become the task of the bishop — often the only man who still had books of any kind and, save for his scribes, the only man who could read and write — to “civilize” the King, to introduce to him some basic principles of justice and good government.
The Vikings
The early Vikings were a group of people who originated in modern-day Denmark and Norway. In the 700s, poor land in Scandinavia had forced many nobles and warriors to seek fertile land elsewhere. Some of these were younger sons, who stood to inherit nothing of their father's estate. Noblemen with little to lose began to gather together groups of warriors and go down the coast pillaging settlements. The first recorded Viking raid in Irish history occurred in AD 795 when Vikings, possibly from Norway, looted the island of Lambay. This was followed by a raid on the coast of Brega in 798, and raids on the coast of Connacht in 807. These early Viking raids were generally small in scale and quick. These early raids interrupted the golden age of Christian Irish culture and marked the beginning of two hundred years of intermittent warfare, with waves of Viking raiders plundering monasteries and towns throughout Ireland. Most of the early raiders came from the fjords of western Norway. They are believed to have sailed down the Atlantic coast of Scotland, and then over to Ireland, which the Roman legions had totally avoided. It was believed that Irish monks kept secret collections of gold and silver so they naturally became a target. Thus the monks built tall towers of stone with a single door more than 20 feet above the ground. A ladder would be lowered to allow them to leave these towers, but they also came in handy when Viking raiders approached. By simply pulling up the ladders they were essentially safe from the invaders as were their precious collections of illuminated manuscripts.
Eventually the Vikings gave up their attacks on these monks and set up communities, the first being the town of Duhblin. But on either side of Northern Britain lie the holy islands of Iona and Lindisfarne. Both were exposed to the marauding attacks of the Vikings at the close of the 8th Century. In fact, the attack on Lindisfarne in 793 AD, signaled the beginning of the Viking Age. Lindisfarne – which is only reached by low tide from a causeway, is known by the name of Holy Island. The coastline is dominated by low sandbanks – ideal landing places for the slim Viking dragon ships. The Vikings robbed the monastery of all the valuables they could get their hands on, but the pagan invaders ignored two important treasures– the beautiful, handwritten and illuminated bible “The Lindisfarne Gospels,”and the exquisite carved oak coffin containing the relics of St. Cuthbert. The Lindisfarne Gospels are today exhibited in the British Museum in London, while the relics of St. Cuthbert are kept in Durham Cathedral, where they were brought after the Viking raid.
But these events brought about the thinking that for something this bad to happen to arguably the holiest site in eighth century Britain, then the local community had to have done something very bad themselves in order to evoke the wrath of God. In 793 it seemed that discipline meted out by God had a new face, in fact it spoke a new language and favored a new form of transport and all of this scared the living daylights out of the monks. These Viking raiders fit the bill very well for anyone in the eighth century casting around for a hellish and bloody band of people - reportedly bringing the punishment of God down on the heads of wayward Christians. Hence the infamous prayer was born; "A furore Normanorum, libera nos Domine" (From the fury of the north-men, God deliver us.)
So the period known as the Dark Ages had begun, but not due to any lack of "intelligence." People in this time were every bit as intelligent as their Roman-era forebears and also just as smart as we are. But when the whole infrastructure of the Roman culture falls apart and the known world is ravaged on all sides from successive waves of invaders, there tend to be more important things to do than building aqueducts or translating Aristotle from the Greek. The time was characterized as a backward step, where art became "primitive" and architecture was "barbaric" or "gothic," and technology and innovation was stagnant. Life during the Dark Ages was generally not good: Women were treated miserably, plagues were feared and common, there were innumerable enemies to any given castle or town and the little knowledge about medicine and science that survived from Greece, Rome or Egypt was badly translated. That's without counting the actual problems that could arise from just daily life. It was common to decapitate a thief over some bread or to drown a woman accused of witchery. The way criminals were punished during the time varied from town to town, but it was mostly reserved to heavy torture, decapitation, or imprisonment in either the tallest tower (which was fairly common) or in a heavily-guarded dungeon. Towns were said to sacrifice people in order to remain free of disease and rumors of necromancers and demons abounded. Bandits and thieves stalked nearly every road waiting for the unsuspecting traveler to appear.
Superstition ruled Europe and the people of the Dark Ages even attributed the construction of the massive Roman ruins to a race of giants. Superstitions and rituals became commonplace, providing an illusion of predictability and power. People could not control fate, but perhaps by ritual, they could influence it. Perhaps this provided them with some peace of mind, if not total reassurance. To Dark Age peoples, the world was a perplexing place. Explanations were needed to satisfy the curiosity of enquiring minds, and these explanations are for the most part what we now call superstitions. Superstition is often founded in to provide explanations for natural phenomena and events which seem unexplainable. Poor harvests, bad weather, the untimely death of a loved one or cattle unable to give birth were all disturbing and needed an explanation…hence the birth of superstition.
Bless You: One of the first symptoms of the plague was sneezing. Although very few people survived the plague it was believed that blessing sneezers might help save them. People began covering their mouths and noses when they sneezed to avoid passing the plague on to others and also to stop their soul from escaping through their open mouths. Blessing sneezers also helped the soul find its way back into the sneezer’s body in case it had escaped.
Throwing salt over the left shoulder: Salt was very expensive during the Dark Ages and not everyone could afford it. It was thought to have medicinal qualities so spilt salt that couldn't been used as medicine was thrown over the left shoulder into the eyes of evil spirits lurking behind the thrower.
The number thirteen: Jesus was crucified on a Friday and the number of people at the Last Supper seated around the table came to thirteen. Judas, who betrayed Jesus, was the thirteenth guest making the number thirteen an unlucky number and starting the superstition of unlucky Friday the thirteenth. Fear of these events is called Triskaidekaphobia.
Walking under a ladder is bad luck: A leaning ladder, wall and ground form a triangle which is a symbol of the Holy Trinity. It was considered a sin and bad luck to break the holy triangle by walking through it.
Black cats: Black cats were thought to be demons in their earthly forms and almost always kept by witches. If a black cat crossed the path of someone then it cut that person off from their natural path towards God. So, black cats were avoided if seen.
Crossed fingers: Crossed fingers make the sign of the cross protecting the finger-crosser from bad luck and evil spirits.
Evil spirits lurk in Brussels sprouts: People claim we cut a cross in the bottom to help the sprouts cook better, but you don’t find them served like that in most restaurants. Without knowing it, you may be following a superstition dating back to the medieval times, when it was believed that evil spirits or tiny demons hid between the leaves of lettuces, sprouts and cabbage.
Knock on wood: It is one of mankind’s oldest and most enduring fears that if we talk about any good thing, something will happen to curse it. Lurking spirits or demons will jinx our success, or a jealous neighbor might curse us with the evil eye. The wood we used to touch would have been from one of the sacred trees – oak, ash or hawthorn – because the spirits of those trees were thought to have the power to protect us from the evil eye or demons.
The Evil Eye: Years ago, if you thought you had an evil eye but didn’t want to hurt anyone, you were advised to let your first glance in the morning fall on a tree or shrub that would consequently wither and die – a great excuse for your gardening failures. To protect yourself against someone ‘overlooking’ you with the evil eye, you could spit, cross your fingers, carry iron, wear a red thread, or, as they do in many parts of southern Europe today, wear a blue bead or the image of an open hand.
Hag-stones: Pebbles or small stones with a natural hole through them are frequently used as key rings or hung up near doors. Such stones were thought to have powerful protective properties. Keys were attached to holed-stones to guard the locks they fitted against robbers trying to break in, and to prevent evil spirits entering through the keyhole.
Mistletoe: From Saxon times, if mistletoe was hung over the door or above a hearth, it was a sacred oath that the host would not kill his guests, even if they were mortal enemies, and would defend them against attack for as long as they remained beneath the mistletoe. In Norse legend, mistletoe was dedicated to Frigga, also a goddess of love, so we kiss under the mistletoe, removing one berry for each kiss, till no berries remain and kissing must cease.
The Devil’s meat: the weekly feast dedicated to the Viking god Odin was a very lively and popular communal celebration in Britain and Scandinavia, and the church found it almost impossible to stop people enjoying it. In AD 732, in an attempt to wipe out the practice, Pope Gregory III instructed Boniface to forbid the highly-prized food that was at the heart of this ‘pagan’ festival – horsemeat. The church declared that horsemeat was the Devil’s meat, and anyone eating it was sacrificing to pagan gods. The belief grew up that those who ate this ‘heathen’ meat would be struck down by sickness or cursed with terrible misfortune. Perhaps this deep-seated superstition is one of the reasons most people still find the concept of eating horses hard to swallow.
Pass a newborn baby through a rind of cheese: In Medieval England, expectant mothers made a 'Groaning Cheese' - a large wheel of cheese that matured for nine months as the baby grew. When the 'groaning time' or birth came, the cheese would be shared out amongst the family - and when nothing but the outer rind was left, the baby would be passed through the wheel of cheese on Christening day to be blessed with a long and prosperous life.
TERMS TO DEFINE:
Dark Ages Vikings
St Cuthbert superstition
Monasticism codex
St. Benedict vellum
St Patrick parchment
Vespers gothic
Monk display book
Scriptorium missionary
Manuscript Benedictine Rules
Skellig Michael quill
Prophesy of the twelve eagles stylus
Humanists Holy Trinity
Gaelic rubricator
Voyage of St Brendan illuminator
Druids carbon ink
Uilleann pipes iron gall ink
Book of Kells red letter days
Lindisfarne Gospels pumice
Green Martyrdom Book of Hours
Triskele shamrock
A furore Normanorum, libera nos Domine
Illuminated manuscript rubric lettering
Gold leaf lapis lazuli
Necromancer cochineal
Sparta was a warrior society in ancient Greece that reached the height of its power after defeating rival city-state Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.). Spartan culture was centered on loyalty to the state and military service. At age 7, Spartan boys entered a rigorous state-sponsored education, military training and socialization program. Although Spartan women were not active in the military, they were educated and enjoyed more status and freedom than other Greek women. Because Spartan men were professional soldiers, all manual labor was done by a slave class, the Helots. Despite their military prowess, the Spartans’ dominance was short-lived and by 371 BCE, they descended into a long period of decline.
SPARTAN SOCIETY
Sparta, was an ancient Greek city-state located primarily in the present-day region of southern Greece called Laconia. They were the only city which did not have protective walls: "wall of men, instead of bricks" The population of Sparta consisted of three main groups: the Spartans, or Spartiates, who were full citizens; the Helots, or serfs/slaves; and the Perioeci, who were neither slaves nor citizens. The Perioeci, whose name means “dwellers-around,” worked as craftsmen and traders, and built weapons for the Spartans.
Did You Know? The word “spartan” means self-restrained, simple and frugal. The word laconic (Laconia), which means few words and concise, is derived from the Spartans, who prized action over words. This was opposed to the long winded Athenians who were always engaging in discussion.
All healthy male Spartan citizens participated in the compulsory state-sponsored education system, the Agoge, which emphasized obedience, endurance, courage and self-control. Spartan men devoted their lives to military service, and lived communally well into adulthood. A Spartan was taught that loyalty to the state came before everything else, including one’s family.
The Helots, whose name means “captives,” were fellow Greeks, who had been conquered by the Spartans and turned into slaves. The Spartans’ way of life would not have been possible without the Helots, who handled all the day-to-day tasks and unskilled labor required to keep society functioning: They were farmers, domestic servants, nurses and military attendants. Spartans, who were outnumbered by the Helots, often treated them brutally and oppressively in an effort to prevent uprisings. Spartans would humiliate the Helots by doing such things as forcing them to get deliberately drunk on wine and then make fools of themselves in public. (This practice was also intended to demonstrate to young people how an adult Spartan should never act, as self-control was a prized trait.) Methods of mistreatment could be far more extreme: Spartans were allowed to kill Helots for just about any reason.
THE SPARTAN MILITARY
Unlike such Greek city-states as Athens, a center for the arts, learning and philosophy, Sparta was centered on a warrior culture. Male Spartan citizens were allowed only one occupation: soldier. Indoctrination into this lifestyle began early. Spartan boys started their military training at age 7, when they left home and entered the 13 year indoctrination to become a Spartan warrior. The boys lived communally under severe conditions. They were subjected to continual physical training, competitions (which usually involved violence), given meager rations and expected to become skilled at stealing food, among other survival skills. If a boy was caught stealing, he was beaten, not for theft but for getting caught. The youths had to go barefoot, and were dressed only in a wool tunic both in summer and in winter. Boys also trained in pankration, a famous martial art that consisted of boxing and wrestling. Spartans were so adept in pankration that, when it was inducted in the Olympic Games, they were mostly forbidden to compete. Teenage boys who demonstrated the most leadership potential were selected for participation in the Crypteia, which acted as a secret police force whose primary goal was to terrorize the general Helot population and murder those who were troublemakers. At age 20, Spartan males became full-time soldiers, and remained on active duty until age 60.
Throughout their adult lives, the Spartiates continued to be subject to a training regime so strict that, as the historian Plutarch said, "... they were the only men in the world with whom war brought a respite in the training for war." Bravery was the ultimate virtue for the Spartans: Spartan mothers would give their sons their shield with the words "Return With it or carried on it!" that is to say, either victorious or dead, since in battle, the heavy hoplite shield would be the first thing a fleeing soldier would be tempted to abandon –- rhipsaspia, "dropping the shield", was a synonym for desertion in battle and there was no greater sin.
The Spartans’ constant military drilling and discipline made them skilled at the ancient Greek style of fighting in a phalanx formation. In the phalanx, the army worked as a unit in a close, deep formation, and made coordinated mass maneuvers. No one soldier was considered superior to another. Going into battle, a Spartan soldier, or hoplite, wore a bronze Corinthian helmet, breastplate armor which exaggerated their physique and leg guards called greaves. They carried a thirty pound round shield made of bronze and wood, called an Apsis, decorated with a large red letter lambda (Λ) (the symbol of Laconia), and an eight foot long spear called a dory. These were the main weapons of direct confrontations between two opposing armies: stamina and "pushing ability" were what counted. They also carried a short sword called a xiphos or an axe-like weapon called a kopis. A Spartan was once asked why their sword was shorter than that of the average Greek: “Because its closer to your heart.” Spartan warriors were famous for their long hair (the symbol of man who is free to choose his appearance), beards and crimson red cloaks. All of this made them stand out on the battlefield, much to the delight of every Spartan man as they struck fear into their enemies.
SPARTAN WOMEN AND MARRIAGE
Spartan women had a reputation for being independent-minded, and enjoyed more freedoms and power than their counterparts throughout ancient Greece. While they played no role in the military, female Spartans often received a formal education, although separate from boys and not at boarding schools. In part to attract mates, females engaged in athletic competitions, including javelin-throwing and wrestling, and also sang and danced competitively. As adults, Spartan women were allowed to speak openly, as well as own and manage property. Additionally, they were typically unencumbered by domestic responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning and making clothing, tasks which were handled by the helots. Marriage was important to Spartans, as the state put pressure on people to have male children who would grow up to become citizen-warriors, and replace those who died in battle. Men who delayed marriage were publically shamed, while those who fathered multiple sons could be rewarded.
HOW CIVILIZATION WAS SAVED FROM THE “DARK AGES”
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith; Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.” – Reinhold Niebuhr
Scholars keep pushing further back the designation “Dark Ages” and have now excluded from it the ninth and tenth centuries. The dubious distinction of Dark Ages, properly speaking, belongs to the sixth and seventh centuries (500 to 800 CE) which indeed were centuries of poor education, very little literary output and other a huge decrease in culture. Those were the centuries of cultural retrogression, the centuries of the Barbarian invasions in Italy and elsewhere which effectively wrecked Roman civilization as we knew it. Those invasions destroyed cities, churches, libraries, schools, institutions such as law, government, and just about anything that was Roman. It was in fact, the Church that stepped in the vacuum and maintained a bit of order within a crumbling continent. As Christopher Dawson aptly writes: “The Church had to undertake the task of introducing the Gospels and the morals of Christianity to peoples who regarded homicide as the most honorable occupation and vengeance as synonymous with justice.”
How was this accomplished? By the establishment of Western monasticism by St. Benedict in 529 AD. St. Benedict’s immediate intention was not to do great deeds for European civilization, but that was the result. At its height, the Benedictine order of monks boasted 37,000 monasteries throughout Europe. No wonder St. Benedict has been declared the patron saint of Europe. Besides praying and working out their salvation and preaching the gospel, what else did monks pursue in those monasteries? The life of prayer and communal living was one of rigorous schedules and self-sacrifice. Prayer was their work, and the prayers took up much of a monk's waking hours – Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, daily Mass, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. In between prayers, monks were allowed to sit in the cloister and work on their projects of writing, copying, or decorating books. These would have been assigned based on a monk's abilities and interests. The non-scholastic types were assigned to physical labor of varying degrees.
The main meal of the day took place around noon, often taken at a refectory table, and consisted of the most simple and bland foods i.e., poached fish, boiled oats. While they ate, scripture would be read from a pulpit above them. Since no other words were allowed to be spoken, monks developed communicative gestures. The arts and agriculture were two of their most significant accomplishments. They literally saved agriculture in Europe. Monks taught the local peasants how to cultivate the land, especially in Germany where they converted the wilderness into a cultivated country. Manual labor was an important part of their rule which proclaimed “ora et labora” (prayer and work). In England they owned one fifth of all its cultivable land. The monks would introduce crops, industries and production methods with which the people were not yet familiar: the rearing and breeding of cattle, horses, the brewing of beer, the raising of bees, production of honey and the cultivation of fruits. The corn trade in Sweden was established by the monks, in Parma it was cheese making, in Ireland salmon fisheries, and in many places vast vineyards which introduced wine making to replace the drinking of water that was usually polluted.
From the monasteries of Saint Laurent and Saint Martin, the monks redirected the waters to a filthy Paris. They taught people irrigation on the plains of Lombardy which has always been some of the richest and most productive lands in Europe. They constructed technologically sophisticated water-powered systems at monasteries which were hundreds of miles away from each other. The monasteries themselves were the most economically effective units that had ever existed in Europe. Water-power was used to crush wheat, sieve flour, make cloth, and tan hides for leather. Not even the Roman world had adopted mechanization for industrial use to such an extent. The monks were also known for their skills in metallurgy. They became the leading iron producers in the Champagne region of France. They quarried marble, did glass-work, forged metal plates and mined salt. They were skillful clock-makers. They built astronomical clocks. In short, monastic know-how spread throughout Europe, thus preventing a complete return to barbarism.
But there was one occupation of the monks which, perhaps more than any other, helped in the preservation of Western Civilization: that of the copying of ancient manuscripts. It began in the sixth century when a retired Roman senator by the name of Cassiodorus established a monastery at Vivarium in southern Italy and endowed it with a fine library wherein the copying of manuscripts took center stage. Thereafter, most monasteries included a so-called scriptoria as part of their libraries. The other place where the survival of manuscripts had priority were the schools associated with the medieval cathedrals. It was those schools of which lay the groundwork for the first University established at Bologna, Italy in the eleventh century. The Church had already made some outstanding original contributions in the field of philosophy but the preservation of books and documents from the Greek and Roman world became indispensable later on for the preserving of Western civilization. The best known of those scholars of the Dark Ages was Alcuin, a monk who worked closely with Charlemagne to restore study and scholarship in the whole of Europe. In describing the holdings of his library at York he mentions works by Aristotle, Cicero and Virgil.
There were monasteries, moreover, which specialized in other fields of knowledge besides literature. There were lectures in medicine by the monks of St. Benignus at Dijon, in painting and engraving at Saint Gall, and courses in Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. Some monks after learning all they could in their own monastery would then travel to other monastic schools. Their devotion to books was so extraordinary that they would travel far and wide in search of rare manuscripts. St. Benedict Biscop, in England, traveled widely on five sea voyages for that exact purpose. A monk of the time said it all: “Without study and without books, the life of a monk is nothing.” We would not be far off the mark in asserting that Western civilization’s admiration for the written word and the classics of the Greco-Roman world was the monk’s commitment to reading, writing, and education. This ensured the survival of Western civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire and the invasions of the Barbarians. They laid the foundations for European universities and became the bridge between antiquity and modernity.
As the Roman Empire fell, matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature — everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as the protectors through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed. Without this “Service of the Scribes”, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the “Mission of the Irish Monks”, who single-handedly maintained European civilization from within tall isolated stone towers in Ireland, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one — a world without books or knowledge…and our own world would never have come to be. Looking back from the great civilizations of twelfth-century France or seventeenth-century Florence, it is hard to believe that for quite a long time — almost a hundred years — western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.
The End of the World
For all the splendor of Rome, and the extent of Roman road, the entire empire hugged the Mediterranean like a child’s castle of sand, waiting to be swept into the sea. And as they turned to the center of their world, they turned their back on all that lay on the frontier, beyond the Roman wall. That Rome should ever fall was unthinkable to Romans: its foundations were unassailable, sturdily sunk in a storied past and steadily built on for eleven centuries. There was, of course, the Roman Prophecy of the Twelve Eagles, each eagle representing a century which would mark the end of the Empire. Eternal Rome, eleven centuries old, hardly foresaw its doom.
Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and morals; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of the military spirit were buried in the churches; a large portion of what remained of public and private wealth was consecrated to the demands of charity. What we can say with confidence is that Rome fell gradually and that Romans for many decades scarcely noticed what was happening.
What set the barbarians was not plunder but agriculture. For farmers, the safety net is the grain supply — more food than they need right at the moment. This ancient form of money in the bank has served as the basis for long life, long-term planning, and all the arts of civilization. But the complete formula which leads to economic success in the form of a store of grain triggers a population explosion, which quickly triggers the need to acquire new land to feed new mouths. Considered in this light, the Roman state in the West was destroyed by the same forces that had created it.
In 409 CE, faced with an increasingly undefended frontier, the emperor announced the impossible: henceforth, slaves would be permitted, even encouraged, to enlist in the legions, and for their service they would receive a bounty and their freedom. By this point, it was sometimes difficult to tell the Romans from the barbarians — at least along the frontier. There are, no doubt, lessons here. The only kinds of wealth worth speaking of at the fall of Rome were the fruits of the earth.
What Was Lost
In the end the Romans kept their lives, but sooner or later they or their children lost almost everything else: titles, property, way of life, learning — especially learning. A world in chaos is not a world in which books are copied and libraries maintained. It is not a world where learned men have the leisure to become more learned. The straight Roman road, solidly paved, now presented the likelihood of unwelcome invasions right to Rome’s doorstep. What died, when the barbarians burned the libraries and the books turned to dust, when the stones of the Forum and Coliseum were reassembled into rural outhouses? Western Civilization would not return for nearly 500 hundred years.
The Irish Monk
The golden age of Irish monastic scholarship spans the sixth through ninth centuries with flourishing of art, literature, calligraphy, manuscript preservation, and research that took place in the newly established monastic schools following the fifth-century arrival of Christianity in Ireland. During this same period, the collapse of the Roman Empire by such tribes as the Goths, Huns, Vandals, and Burgundians caused the Continent to experience a tremendous decline in learning and culture. Not only was the Irish church the brightest spot culturally in the West at this time, but many historians think that the great heritage of Western civilization, ranging from the Greco-Roman classics to Jewish and Christian works, would have been utterly vanquished were it not for the religious women and men of Ireland.
The golden age is best known for the medieval development of the Bible into an object of wealth and point of contact with God and the copying of Scripture became a monk’s favorite pastime. These so-called “Illuminated manuscripts” accompanied the sacred text of the original New Testaments with colorful and detailed graphic representations of the events being narrated and were bound in ornately tooled leather covers of precious metals, inlaid with jewels. Although Christianity furnished the basis that triggered the golden age, the growth of art and literature lay already embedded in the Celtic passion for people of learning. In Celtic mythology, the god of literature, Ogma, attracted humans with golden cords fastened to his tongue. Ancient Irish customs stipulated that the power of the poet should be respected above weaponry, and that the education of a prince in the skills of the mind was as important as his training in the art of warfare. The respect for the written word in no way diminished with the rise of Christianity; rather, the new religion transmitted the two priceless treasures of a written language and the legacy of Greco-Roman classical culture.
Scholars from Europe began immigrating to the island in the early sixth century to escape the “barbarian” invaders, and Ireland came to enjoy a reputation as a refuge where frightened academics could find all the customary comforts of civilization. In exchange for this wholehearted welcome, the immigrants brought a great wealth, their books and manuscripts, to their new home, which became the foundation of Irish monastic libraries. These teachers, eventually called humanists, imported Latin grammar into the Irish Gaelic language, thereby vitalizing a literary tradition in desperate need of renewal. An updating of the alphabet based on Latin script rendered writing easy and motivated educated people to transcribe their native lore and create new literary masterpieces. The result of this transformation of language resulted in a monumental supply of Irish literature which painted a portrait of an ancient pagan civilization unmatched elsewhere in the West. Not only was this recording of the oral tradition historically significant, but a further consequence was the rise of a new type of literature.
Eventually the imaginative spirit gripped the scribes, who were responsible for meticulously copying Christian and classical works but subconsciously absorbing their concepts and themes in the process, leading them to formulate their own tales enriched by their reading from these ancient sources.
For example, the traditional Irish voyages to seek Tir na n’Og, were added to aspects from Homer to yield the famous Christian epic The Voyage of St. Brendan. The touching poetry devised by monk-poets furnished modern historians with a unique vision of the lives of cloistered Irish monks encompassing their love of nature and animals, the mystical nature of their religious past, their communal discipline, and even their boredom.
In Ireland, learning found its mythological origin in Connla’s Well, a fountain in Tipperary over which grew nine hazel trees that simultaneously sprouted flowers and crimson nuts. Mastery of the fine arts and poetry gave substance to the flowers, while the nuts were filled with knowledge of all the sciences. Instituted upon this primordial foundation, the pagan schools required 15 years of study and were run by poets, and the druids. They migrated with their students from village to village while the druids usually remained in villages. They shared a common method of education: Teachings and folk tales were transmitted in fixed oral forms governed by patterns in style and repetitions of words and sentence structures that facilitated memorization by the local population. In addition a reciprocal relationship of compassion was fostered between teachers and students: Teachers corrected students without harshness and provided their physical sustenance (food and clothing), while students adopted a lifelong obligation to protect their teachers from poverty and support them in old age. This instructional method supplied the necessary motivation for students to master a dizzying array of disciplines, including grammar, law, genealogy, history, astronomy, geography, and mathematics.
St Patrick
First, a few misconceptions about Patrick:
Patrick isn't really a Saint with a capital S, having never been officially canonized by Rome. And Patrick couldn't have driven the snakes out of Ireland because there were never any snakes there to begin with. He wasn't even the first Christian to visit Ireland. Patrick isn't even Irish. He's from what's now Dumbarton, Scotland.
Patricius (his Roman name) was 16 years old in the year 405, when he was captured by Irish pirates in a raid and became a slave in what was still radically pagan Ireland. Ireland was an island of tribalism, an island of constant war, an island of slave traders only interested in violence and death. Their warriors were urged on by the infernal skirl of Uilleann pipes, they presented to the unaccustomed Roman legions all the terrors of hell itself. Here Patrick came as a virtual stranger to this country of warring factions. They worshipped multiple gods of the sky and the earth and the water, and so that was his first challenge: to convince the Irish that there was only one God and that his God really did love them.
Patrick came face to face with the chieftains and their druid priests. The showdown came on the morning of his first Easter in Ireland. Part of the pagan worship of fall to spring, from the beginning of the summer, was that a fire was lit, and first of all, the fire on the hill of Tara and no other lights at all in Ireland. Patrick -- in direct defiance of the king -- lit a forbidden fire. He was summoned before the king, and he explained that he wasn't a threat, because he was bringing the new light, the light of Christ, the Savior of the world to the Irish people…as a “gift.” Patrick was intimately familiar with the Irish clan system (his former master, had been a chieftain), and his strategy was to convert chiefs first, who would then convert their clans through their influence. Though he was not solely responsible for converting the island, Patrick was quite successful. He made missionary journeys all over Ireland, and it soon became known as one of Europe's Christian centers. This, of course, was very important to fifth-century Christians, for whom Ireland was the "ends of the earth."
Patrick's position as a foreigner in Ireland was not an easy one. His refusal to accept gifts from kings placed him outside the normal ties of kinship and legally he was without protection, and that he was on occasion beaten, robbed of all he had, and put in chains. A supposed prophecy by the druid priests gives an impression of how Patrick and other Christian missionaries were seen by the Irish:
Across the sea will come crazed in the head,
his cloak with hole for the head, his stick bent in the head.
He will chant impieties from a table in the front of his house;
And all his people will answer: "so be it, so be it”
Patrick was really a first — the first missionary to barbarians beyond the reach of Roman law. His bravery in the face of murderous Irish barbarians earned him their respect. He simply refused to show fear. The step he took was in its way as bold as Columbus, and a thousand times more humane. He wasn’t blind to his dangers, for even in his last years “every day I am ready to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved — whatever may come my way. But I am not afraid of any of these things, because of the promises of heaven; for I have put myself in the hands of God Almighty.” With the Irish — even with the kings — he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased. Patrick’s eternal gift to the Irish was his Christianity — the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history, a Christianity that completely dominated the Irish culture. Ireland, lacking the power and traditions of Rome, had been received into Christianity, which transformed Ireland into something new, something never seen before — a Christian culture, where slavery and human sacrifice became unthinkable, and warfare, though impossible for humans to completely eradicate, slowly began to fade. Patrick, the Roman, nevertheless understood that Christianity was not wedded to Roman custom, and it could not survive without Roman literacy.
And so the first Irish Christians also became the first Irish literates. Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed. The Irish of the late fifth and early sixth centuries soon found a solution, which they called the Green Martyrdom, opposing it to the conventional Red Martyrdom by murder and blood. The Green Martyrs were those who, leaving behind the comforts and pleasures of ordinary human society, became ascetics and retreated to the woods, or to a mountaintop, or to a lonely island — to one of the green spots outside of tribal jurisdictions — there to study the scriptures and commune with God.
Legend credits Patrick with teaching the Irish about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity by showing people their own shamrock, a three-leafed plant, using it to illustrate the Christian teaching of three persons in one God. This story first appears in writing in 1726, though it must be older. The shamrock has since become a central symbol for St Patrick's Day. In pagan Ireland, three was a significant number and the Irish had many triple deities, a fact that may have aided St Patrick in his efforts when he "held up a shamrock and spoke on the Christian Trinity". Some historians use this story as the basis for the visual concept of the triskele a traditional Irish symbol.
Patrick, who would eventually be called the "Apostle of Ireland", converted the majority of Celts and Irish from the druid religion to Christianity and established monasteries to oversee each new believing community. Pagan schools were transformed into monastic schools, retaining the same teaching techniques and quality of humaneness between masters and pupils. Christian equality as sisters and brothers before God in spite of class distinctions introduced an element of democracy into education. Although early medieval Ireland could by no means be identified as a democratic nation, the bishops established laws through which all people, women as well as men, could earn money to attend monastic schools regardless of the capacities of their families. One such law stipulated that a child whose parents could not afford the expenses of a school could pay one’s way by waiting on the children of the wealthy, who were obliged to accept such service and finance the child’s education. These laws fostered a demographic reversal from the pagan schools, such that most students at the monastic schools came from the lower and middle classes instead of the wealthy farmers and chieftains. Gathering out of doors, the teacher, who typically sat or stood on a knoll, alternated his reading, translating, and expounding from books in distinct memorable forms— which students would learn by rote—with questions that assisted students in understanding what they recited.
In addition to the monks and nuns, students at the monastic schools worked for varying lengths in the scriptoria proportional to their level of training. The beginner practiced with a metal-pointed stylus on long narrow tablets of wood coated with wax, which could be flattened clear and used repetitively. After the copying was completed, the student bound the tablets together with a pivot pin at one end so they could be opened and closed like a fan. The student then wound leather thongs around the tablets, leaving the ends of the cords dangling for use as a handle. Skilled scribes drew illuminated manuscripts as codices, which replaced the Roman and Greek scrolls. They made their reproductions on parchment and vellum. They copied, while seated with the writing material resting on the knees or, if engaged in elaborate illumination, standing next to a table, usually in freezing weather. There were no specific fonts used until the 1450s when wood served as the material for some large fonts called wood type. First, the manuscript was sent to the rubricator, who added (in red or other colors) the titles, headlines, the initials of chapters and sections, the notes and each first letter of the page (called an illuminated initial) was enlarged and decorative. If the book was to be illustrated – it was sent to the illuminator. For calligraphy, the pen was a quill made from the wing of a goose, swan, or crow. The inkstand was made from part of a cow’s horn, and the ink was composed of thick and time-defying liquid carbon—characters on the medieval manuscripts are still piercingly black today. The shape of the books is interesting to consider because the modern book, taller than wide, was determined by the dimensions of an average sheepskin, which could most economically be cut into double pages that yield our modern book shape when folded. Sometimes a thick book could require the hides of entire herd. An illuminated manuscript is not considered illuminated unless one or many illuminations contained gold leaf or was brushed with gold specks, a process known as burnishing. During this time period the price of gold had become so cheap that its inclusion in an illuminated manuscript accounted for only a tenth of the cost of production. Completed books were sheathed in leather, labeled, and hung on pegs on the walls of the monastery library. The more precious, such as the renowned Book of Kells and Lindisfarne Gospels, were encased in elegantly tooled leather covers and decorated, jewel-encrusted containers and became known as "display books." While Greece lay in ruins and Rome was being pillaged and plundered, the best of their accomplishments were preserved only in these Irish books. Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish warriors had once tied to their waists their enemies’ severed heads. Wherever they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the non-existent civilization of Europe.
But books too are perishable. Great libraries, like that of ancient Alexandria, were vulnerable to destruction, and with the destruction of books, the knowledge, thought, and poetry of whole cultures were subject to extinction. For a time, about all that stood between the preservation of European civilization or its descent into a true dark age was a hardy band of Irish monks who were dedicated to copying books and teaching people. Just as the Emerald Isle is on the edge of Europe, so the Irish have been on the edge of the progress and forward tug of history.
Thus began the contrast between the Romans, who were unable to save or salvage their once grand civilization, with the Irish monks, who changed the direction of history. It would become the task of the bishop — often the only man who still had books of any kind and, save for his scribes, the only man who could read and write — to “civilize” the King, to introduce to him some basic principles of justice and good government.
The Vikings
The early Vikings were a group of people who originated in modern-day Denmark and Norway. In the 700s, poor land in Scandinavia had forced many nobles and warriors to seek fertile land elsewhere. Some of these were younger sons, who stood to inherit nothing of their father's estate. Noblemen with little to lose began to gather together groups of warriors and go down the coast pillaging settlements. The first recorded Viking raid in Irish history occurred in AD 795 when Vikings, possibly from Norway, looted the island of Lambay. This was followed by a raid on the coast of Brega in 798, and raids on the coast of Connacht in 807. These early Viking raids were generally small in scale and quick. These early raids interrupted the golden age of Christian Irish culture and marked the beginning of two hundred years of intermittent warfare, with waves of Viking raiders plundering monasteries and towns throughout Ireland. Most of the early raiders came from the fjords of western Norway. They are believed to have sailed down the Atlantic coast of Scotland, and then over to Ireland, which the Roman legions had totally avoided. It was believed that Irish monks kept secret collections of gold and silver so they naturally became a target. Thus the monks built tall towers of stone with a single door more than 20 feet above the ground. A ladder would be lowered to allow them to leave these towers, but they also came in handy when Viking raiders approached. By simply pulling up the ladders they were essentially safe from the invaders as were their precious collections of illuminated manuscripts.
Eventually the Vikings gave up their attacks on these monks and set up communities, the first being the town of Duhblin. But on either side of Northern Britain lie the holy islands of Iona and Lindisfarne. Both were exposed to the marauding attacks of the Vikings at the close of the 8th Century. In fact, the attack on Lindisfarne in 793 AD, signaled the beginning of the Viking Age. Lindisfarne – which is only reached by low tide from a causeway, is known by the name of Holy Island. The coastline is dominated by low sandbanks – ideal landing places for the slim Viking dragon ships. The Vikings robbed the monastery of all the valuables they could get their hands on, but the pagan invaders ignored two important treasures– the beautiful, handwritten and illuminated bible “The Lindisfarne Gospels,”and the exquisite carved oak coffin containing the relics of St. Cuthbert. The Lindisfarne Gospels are today exhibited in the British Museum in London, while the relics of St. Cuthbert are kept in Durham Cathedral, where they were brought after the Viking raid.
But these events brought about the thinking that for something this bad to happen to arguably the holiest site in eighth century Britain, then the local community had to have done something very bad themselves in order to evoke the wrath of God. In 793 it seemed that discipline meted out by God had a new face, in fact it spoke a new language and favored a new form of transport and all of this scared the living daylights out of the monks. These Viking raiders fit the bill very well for anyone in the eighth century casting around for a hellish and bloody band of people - reportedly bringing the punishment of God down on the heads of wayward Christians. Hence the infamous prayer was born; "A furore Normanorum, libera nos Domine" (From the fury of the north-men, God deliver us.)
So the period known as the Dark Ages had begun, but not due to any lack of "intelligence." People in this time were every bit as intelligent as their Roman-era forebears and also just as smart as we are. But when the whole infrastructure of the Roman culture falls apart and the known world is ravaged on all sides from successive waves of invaders, there tend to be more important things to do than building aqueducts or translating Aristotle from the Greek. The time was characterized as a backward step, where art became "primitive" and architecture was "barbaric" or "gothic," and technology and innovation was stagnant. Life during the Dark Ages was generally not good: Women were treated miserably, plagues were feared and common, there were innumerable enemies to any given castle or town and the little knowledge about medicine and science that survived from Greece, Rome or Egypt was badly translated. That's without counting the actual problems that could arise from just daily life. It was common to decapitate a thief over some bread or to drown a woman accused of witchery. The way criminals were punished during the time varied from town to town, but it was mostly reserved to heavy torture, decapitation, or imprisonment in either the tallest tower (which was fairly common) or in a heavily-guarded dungeon. Towns were said to sacrifice people in order to remain free of disease and rumors of necromancers and demons abounded. Bandits and thieves stalked nearly every road waiting for the unsuspecting traveler to appear.
Superstition ruled Europe and the people of the Dark Ages even attributed the construction of the massive Roman ruins to a race of giants. Superstitions and rituals became commonplace, providing an illusion of predictability and power. People could not control fate, but perhaps by ritual, they could influence it. Perhaps this provided them with some peace of mind, if not total reassurance. To Dark Age peoples, the world was a perplexing place. Explanations were needed to satisfy the curiosity of enquiring minds, and these explanations are for the most part what we now call superstitions. Superstition is often founded in to provide explanations for natural phenomena and events which seem unexplainable. Poor harvests, bad weather, the untimely death of a loved one or cattle unable to give birth were all disturbing and needed an explanation…hence the birth of superstition.
Bless You: One of the first symptoms of the plague was sneezing. Although very few people survived the plague it was believed that blessing sneezers might help save them. People began covering their mouths and noses when they sneezed to avoid passing the plague on to others and also to stop their soul from escaping through their open mouths. Blessing sneezers also helped the soul find its way back into the sneezer’s body in case it had escaped.
Throwing salt over the left shoulder: Salt was very expensive during the Dark Ages and not everyone could afford it. It was thought to have medicinal qualities so spilt salt that couldn't been used as medicine was thrown over the left shoulder into the eyes of evil spirits lurking behind the thrower.
The number thirteen: Jesus was crucified on a Friday and the number of people at the Last Supper seated around the table came to thirteen. Judas, who betrayed Jesus, was the thirteenth guest making the number thirteen an unlucky number and starting the superstition of unlucky Friday the thirteenth. Fear of these events is called Triskaidekaphobia.
Walking under a ladder is bad luck: A leaning ladder, wall and ground form a triangle which is a symbol of the Holy Trinity. It was considered a sin and bad luck to break the holy triangle by walking through it.
Black cats: Black cats were thought to be demons in their earthly forms and almost always kept by witches. If a black cat crossed the path of someone then it cut that person off from their natural path towards God. So, black cats were avoided if seen.
Crossed fingers: Crossed fingers make the sign of the cross protecting the finger-crosser from bad luck and evil spirits.
Evil spirits lurk in Brussels sprouts: People claim we cut a cross in the bottom to help the sprouts cook better, but you don’t find them served like that in most restaurants. Without knowing it, you may be following a superstition dating back to the medieval times, when it was believed that evil spirits or tiny demons hid between the leaves of lettuces, sprouts and cabbage.
Knock on wood: It is one of mankind’s oldest and most enduring fears that if we talk about any good thing, something will happen to curse it. Lurking spirits or demons will jinx our success, or a jealous neighbor might curse us with the evil eye. The wood we used to touch would have been from one of the sacred trees – oak, ash or hawthorn – because the spirits of those trees were thought to have the power to protect us from the evil eye or demons.
The Evil Eye: Years ago, if you thought you had an evil eye but didn’t want to hurt anyone, you were advised to let your first glance in the morning fall on a tree or shrub that would consequently wither and die – a great excuse for your gardening failures. To protect yourself against someone ‘overlooking’ you with the evil eye, you could spit, cross your fingers, carry iron, wear a red thread, or, as they do in many parts of southern Europe today, wear a blue bead or the image of an open hand.
Hag-stones: Pebbles or small stones with a natural hole through them are frequently used as key rings or hung up near doors. Such stones were thought to have powerful protective properties. Keys were attached to holed-stones to guard the locks they fitted against robbers trying to break in, and to prevent evil spirits entering through the keyhole.
Mistletoe: From Saxon times, if mistletoe was hung over the door or above a hearth, it was a sacred oath that the host would not kill his guests, even if they were mortal enemies, and would defend them against attack for as long as they remained beneath the mistletoe. In Norse legend, mistletoe was dedicated to Frigga, also a goddess of love, so we kiss under the mistletoe, removing one berry for each kiss, till no berries remain and kissing must cease.
The Devil’s meat: the weekly feast dedicated to the Viking god Odin was a very lively and popular communal celebration in Britain and Scandinavia, and the church found it almost impossible to stop people enjoying it. In AD 732, in an attempt to wipe out the practice, Pope Gregory III instructed Boniface to forbid the highly-prized food that was at the heart of this ‘pagan’ festival – horsemeat. The church declared that horsemeat was the Devil’s meat, and anyone eating it was sacrificing to pagan gods. The belief grew up that those who ate this ‘heathen’ meat would be struck down by sickness or cursed with terrible misfortune. Perhaps this deep-seated superstition is one of the reasons most people still find the concept of eating horses hard to swallow.
Pass a newborn baby through a rind of cheese: In Medieval England, expectant mothers made a 'Groaning Cheese' - a large wheel of cheese that matured for nine months as the baby grew. When the 'groaning time' or birth came, the cheese would be shared out amongst the family - and when nothing but the outer rind was left, the baby would be passed through the wheel of cheese on Christening day to be blessed with a long and prosperous life.
TERMS TO DEFINE:
Dark Ages Vikings
St Cuthbert superstition
Monasticism codex
St. Benedict vellum
St Patrick parchment
Vespers gothic
Monk display book
Scriptorium missionary
Manuscript Benedictine Rules
Skellig Michael quill
Prophesy of the twelve eagles stylus
Humanists Holy Trinity
Gaelic rubricator
Voyage of St Brendan illuminator
Druids carbon ink
Uilleann pipes iron gall ink
Book of Kells red letter days
Lindisfarne Gospels pumice
Green Martyrdom Book of Hours
Triskele shamrock
A furore Normanorum, libera nos Domine
Illuminated manuscript rubric lettering
Gold leaf lapis lazuli
Necromancer cochineal