260. The River of Consciousness

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The River of Consciousness

by Oliver Sacks
Alfred A. Knopf, published 2017

My book club -- we might as well re-brand ourselves The Oliver Sacks Book Club -- is reading Sacks's final book, a collection of essays he completed as he knew he was dying.

I'm only a few pages into the second essay, "Speed," and he has already referenced H.G. Wells, Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and William James.

The reference to William James, yet again, made me think how differently I would have structured my education if I had it to do over again... he did just talk about The Time Machine. He also has described, which is just as important, what a curious (in both senses of the word) child he was. "Me too!" as we are all saying these days.

If I was reading the Communist Manifesto and Samuel Eliot Morison's fourteen volume history of the U.S. Navy in World War Two, at fourteen, there's no reason I couldn't have been reading Classical philosophy and history. I would have loved Livy. 

St Augustus would have been hard going, but that's still true today. The same for Scholastic philosophy, but if I dipped into it while reading Pirenne, I might have been able to get something -- I'm imagining I would be college age by this point. And so on, century by century, building on my foundation until I finally reached the intellectual explosions of the 19th and then the 20th centuries some time in my late twenties.

At that point I would be be in a state similar to that of a person who has just completed reading In Search of Lost Time for the first time. I would have a solid foundation for moving forward -- or going back and starting over at points of interest along the way. (Or expanding to other cultures.)

Even so, I'm not sure that The Brothers K, for example, would have been as significant for me at that age and before I had read much from the 20th century. That, like Proust, might be something I would need to reread at a later date. Still, working from the ground up like this, would have paid off in the end. But could any young person have the patience for putting off the thought of his own time for so long?

p32 Here he is quoting H.G. Wells, ...now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get only one 1000th part of the sensations that we get in a given time, and consequently live 1000 times as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter-growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations... the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls...

This is close to the perception of the encephalitis patients in Awakenings.

p35 Here Sacks is talking about the experience of time of people in traumatic accidents, and how things seem to take place in slow motion. Since this is an area of experience and interest for me, I have to add that our "perception" of the event is as contrived -- mostly after the fact -- as our perception of what we see is contrived. This is all the more true as in most of these cases the perceiver is unconscious at times. The details and the sequence of my truck accident are probably correct, but I also know I was unconscious at two points in the sequence. My mind had plenty of time to organize the inputs into a sort of PowerPoint presentation which is what I remember.

The Other Road: Freud as Neurologist

p96 At a higher level, Freud regarded memory and motive as inseparable. Recollection could have no force, no meaning, unless it was allied with motive. The two had always to be coupled together, and in... [Freud's] Project [for a Scientific Psychology], as Pribram and Gill emphasize, "both memory and motive are psi processes based on selective facilitation . . . memories {being} the retrospective aspect of these facilitations; motives the prospective aspects." [Footnote: The inseparability of memory and motive, Freud pointed out, opened the possibility of understanding certain illusions of memory based on intentionality: the illusion that one has written to a person, for instance, when one has not but intended to, or that one has run the bath when one has merely intended to do so. We do not have such illusions unless there has been a preceding intention.]

This is very interesting to me just now as I'm having to deal with a person -- let's call her "CP" -- who seems to have become un-tethered from reality. She either is repeatedly lying about things that have happened, or she honestly believes the things she says. It is impossible to know which is the case, but I tend to think it is the latter.

Peeking ahead in this book, I've noticed that the next essay is on the "fallibility of memory," a topic I'm looking forward to, as, from what I've read of memory, it is quite pliable and subject to revision. If you remember the last time you remembered something, rather than the original event itself, then if you combine thinking (or dreaming) alternative scenarios with an intention (motive) for preferring that alternate scenario, you could end up honestly believing what you want to believe. The film  Memento played with a variation on this idea.]

...Nothing was more central to the formation of identity than the power of memory, nothing more guaranteed one's continuity as an individual. But memories shift, and no one was more sensitive than Freud to the reconstructive potential of memory, to the fact that memories are continually worked over and revised and that their essence, indeed, is recategorization.

If a person were to, innocently enough (though due to dominant character traits), screw up in a fairly life changing way, it would be almost irresistible to re-imagine the situation is a way that was kinder to that person's self-esteem. But here's the interesting question: Would this tactic become a tendency? Having saved the person's self-image once, would they be more likely to re-imagine any future difficult situation and to invent supporting events to go along with the re-imagined ones? Could the person slip into an almost dream-like state where it was actually impossible to distinguish dream from reality; memory for wish?

p99 ...Thus for [Gerald] Edelman, [who is continuing to work on this aspect of neurology] every perception is a creation and every memory a re-creation or recategorization.

The Fallibility of Memory

As I expected, this is a continuation of the previous essay. I'll jump to where he returns to my point. Here he's talking about plagiarism and cryptomnesias and what in Coleridge's case turned into "literary kleptomania,"

p113 ...as Holmes [his biographer] explores in the second volume of this biography, where he sees the most flagrant of Coleridge's plagiarisms as occurring at a devastatingly difficult period of his life, when he had been abandoned by Wordsworth, was disabled by profound anxiety and intellectual self-doubt, and was more deeply addicted to opium than ever. At this time, Holmes writes, "his German authors gave him support and comfort: in a metaphor he often used himself, he twined round them like ivy round an oak."

p114 Earlier... Coleridge had found another extraordinary affinity, with the German writer Jean Paul Richter -- an affinity which led him to translate Richter's writings and then to take off from them, elaborating them in his own way, conversing and communing in his notebooks with Richter. At times, the voices of the two men became so intermingled as to be hardly distinguishable from each other.
...

p115 Freud was fascinated by the slippages and errors of memory that occur in the course of daily life and their relation to emotion, especially unconscious emotion... [this leads to] accounts of having been sexually seduced or abused in childhood... he started to wonder whether such recollections have been distorted by fantasy and whether some... might be total fabulations, constructed unconsciously, but so convincingly that the patients themselves believed in them absolutely. The stories that patients told, and had told to themselves... could have a very powerful effect on their lives, and it seemed to Freud that their psychological reality might be the same whether they came from actual experience or from fantasy.

p116 [The case of Binjamin Wilkomirski who wrote a memoir, Fragments, about his childhood as a Jew in a concentration camp... only he was not a Jew and had not been in a concentration camp,] ...it seemed... that Wilkomirski had not intended to deceive his readers... He had, for many years, been engaged in an enterprise of his own -- basically the romantic reinvention of his own childhood, apparently in reaction to his abandonment by his mother at the age of seven.

p117 Apparently, Wilkomirski's primary intention was to deceive himself. When he was confronted with the actual historical reality, his reaction was one of bewilderment and confusion. He was totally lost, by this point, in his own fiction.
...

p120 There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true... depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way... and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. Our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves -- the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory...

I'm a little surprised he doesn't go into how the memory process is now believed to happen in the brain. How an older memory is physically replaced by the new one. Still, this was most of what I was hoping for.

Mishearings

p125 ... While mishearings may seem to be of little special interest, they can cast an unexpected light on the nature of perception -- the perception of speech, in particular. What is extraordinary, first, is that they present themselves as clearly articulated words or phrases, not as jumbles of sound. One mishears rather than just fails to hear.

That hasn't been my experience. My hearing of voices is not getting any better, but I'm not aware of experiencing what Sacks is talking about here. What I do experience is not being able to make out something a person is saying at the volume they are speaking. (Sounds in general show no indication of being muted or a problem.) What I find most annoying is that I experience this same difficulty in dreams. 

259. Gothic France

Link to Chronology

Link to Table of Contents

French civilization

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War


Book Seven
The Hegemony of the Papacy and of France in the Thirteenth Century

Chapter III
France

1. France and European Politics

There follows a fairly lengthy description of how Louis VIII came to incorporate Languedoc/Midi/Provence/
County of Toulouse (am I forgetting a term?) into the area of France he controlled using the Crusade against the Cathars as his justification. By the end of 1226 this bloody process was complete.

This was followed by the Regency and then reign of St Louis (Louis IX, 1226-1270). St Louis managed to settle accounts with Henry III of England in the Treaty of Albeville (1259), and with Jaime II of Aragon in the Treaty of Corbeil (1258). St Louis then died while pursuing a disastrous policy of Crusades (1248-1254, and 1270). St Louis's final Crusade was also linked to the competition between Charles of Anjou and Pedro of Aragon for control of Sicily (see Battle of Benevento in 1266, "the Sicilian Vespers" in 1282. All of which ended in 1285 with there being two Kingdoms of Sicily, one on either side of the Strait of Messina, one belonging to the house of Aragon and the other to the Angevin dynasty).

p345 ...Since the Treaty of Corbeil the Pyrenees had delimited political rights as definitively as they divided the adjacent countries. One may ask why Philip the Bold [successor to St Louis] should have resolved once more to unsettle so satisfactory an arrangement and to meddle in Spanish affairs. No danger threatened him from beyond the mountains, and there was no question of claiming any rights or protecting any interests. The dynastic problems which had occasioned his intervention in Navarre and Castile since 1275 were merely pretexts. He made use of these pretexts because he wanted to make war: the sort of war that in the days of Louis XIV was described as a war of magnificence, and which we should call a war of hegemony. Having the power, he made use of it to enforce his will, with no other object in view than the glory of his crown. This, I believe, was the first war of pure political ambition to be recorded by the history of Europe... [I think he means since the fall of Rome. Actually, I'm not sure what he means. This reminds me of Athens's war against Syracuse and the recent U.S. war against Iraq.] After the Sicilian Vespers the Pope, having excommunicated the King of Aragon, offered his kingdom, which was a fief of the Church, to the King of France, for one of his sons. Philip's choice fell on Charles de Valois, and he crossed the Pyrenees in order to win for him the throne of Pedro II. He did not succeed... for he died during the campaign.

p346 What St Louis had achieved was completely ruined. His son, at his death, left France involved in the affairs of Italy and Spain, while England... was on the point of once more taking up arms against her... Yet if the position of France was not so stable as it had been twenty years earlier, it was more brilliant... In the Europe of the 13th century France had no rival...

Here is a great video that covers the conflict between France and England through Crecy. I think it was the legacy of the Battle of Crecy that trained the English to expect their afterthought army to always discover a genius commander and to overcome against all odds. What is amazing is how often this actually happened -- until the 20th century, when they had to pretend it was still happening. Though, to be fair, even in 1914 their BEF army was probably qualitatively superior to any other army of the nations engaged... it was just too small -- in an age of national, conscripted armies -- to be decisive. Maybe the English only excel when they are fighting the French.

2. French Civilization

A love note to France in which she is revealed to be the new Attica.

p347 ...France, in the 13th century, had the good fortune to be superior to the rest of Europe both as a State and as a society...

If we observe the general state of European civilization after the Carolingian period, we see that nearly all of its essential characteristics made their appearance in France earlier than elsewhere, and also that it was in France that they achieved their most perfect expression. This applies to religion as well as to secular life. The Order of Cluny, the Order of the Cistercians, and the Order of the Premonstrants had their birth in France; the Order of Chivalry was a French creation, and it was from France that the Crusades obtained their most numerous and most enthusiastic recruits. it was in France, too, at the beginning of the 12th century, that Gothic art suddenly rose as from the soil and imposed its supremacy on the world, and in France the first chansons de geste made their appearance... That so many eminent personalities should have existed in one country, that the basin of the Seine, from the 10th century onwards, should have been the scene of so many achievements and so many innovations, means that there must have existed there, as in Greece, in the Attica of the 5th century, an environment which was peculiarly favorable to the manifestations of human energy. And it is a fact that the two great social forces which operated... to constitute a new Europe -- the monastic and the feudal system -- were nowhere so active and so predominant as in Northern France... Hence the extraordinary enthusiasm of the Frenchmen of the North for the Crusades: that is, for the completest imaginable manifestation of a society which was dominated at once by the religious and the military spirit... [the creation of a "literature in the vulgar tongue" is also mentioned.]

p348 Thus the ascendancy of French civilization long antedated the ascendancy of the French monarchy... It would be perfectly accurate to say that both civilization and politics had a feudal character when they first made their appearance in France... [The founders of the great monasteries in Burgundy, Flanders, and Champagne, as well as the heroes of the chansons de geste,] ... were feudal barons, and the virtues which the chansons extolled were courage, fidelity and piety... During the course of the 12th century this feudal civilization embellished and purified itself. The life of the court, with its refined and conventional manners, which the Middle Ages very exactly describe as "courteous manners," was first developed, not in the entourage of the king... but in the princely residences. It was there that the rules and the ceremonial of chivalry were established, there that the sentiment of honor had its birth; there the worship of womanhood first made its appearance; and there a literature developed to which Rome and Brittany contributed motives... while the various lyric forms of the langue d'oc made their way into the langue d'oil... At the close of the 11th century ["this blossoming of feudal life"] made its appearance in England, with the companions of the Conqueror... French was the language spoken in Jerusalem, Antioch, and Saint-Jean d'Acre. From that time until our own days French as been the international language of Europeans in the basin of the Eastern Mediterranean. [Again, like classical Greek.]
...

p350 The comparison [between the use of the French language and the spread of French culture at this time, with the similar position of Greece in the final centuries BCE] is all the more exact inasmuch as, in the case of France as in that of Greece, it applies to art as well as to manners and literature. We have only to consider the conquest of Europe by Gothic architecture, for this epithet of "Gothic," which it owes to the disdain of the Italian humanists, was applied, as we know, to an essentially French creation. The invention of the pointed arch, at the beginning of the 12th century, somewhere on the confines of Normandy and the Ile de France, had the effect, in a few years... of completely transforming the fundamental structure and the style of architectural monuments.... from this transformation was born the one great school of architecture which the history of art can place on an equality with Greek architecture... The cathedrals of France may be inferior to those of other countries in respect of size, imaginative decoration, and luxuriance or resplendent materials, but in their harmony and their majesty they are incomparable: they are the Parthenons of Gothic.

I love the way he structured this argument.

p351 ...All the knowledge of the Middle Ages, if we make some exception in the case of law and medicine, was ecclesiastical... It was essentially universal and international. And yet its central point, its focus, was in France; or to be exact, in Paris. The two cardinal sciences of the epoch... theology and philosophy -- seem to have chosen, from the 12th century onwards, to make their home on the banks of the Seine. It was there that the scholastic method was evolved, which until he Renaissance dominated human thought as completely as the Gothic style had dominated art... From Abelard to Gerson there was not a single thinker of any mark who did not either teach or study in Paris. The University, which had been created in the reign of Philip Augustus by the amalgamation of the masters and scholars of the various schools of Paris, exercised its irresistible and unexampled power of attraction to the very limits of the Catholic world... And the universal ascendancy exercised by Paris was matched... by the cosmopolitanism of the masters who taught in the University. They came not only from France, but also from Germany (Albertus Magnus), the Low Countries (Sugar of Brabant), Scotland (Duns Scotus), and Italy (Thomas Aquinas)... just as Rome was the headquarters of the government of the Church, Paris was the seat of its theological and philosophical activities...

He then argues that this scholastic development took place in Paris, and not in the courts of the feudal magnates, because Paris was the seat of the royal court which was not interested in the "mystical foundations of the Church" that were favored by the princes.

p353 The influence of French civilization in the 12th and 13th centuries was not everywhere felt with equal intensity... Elsewhere [than England and the Crusader communities of the East] it was introduced as a borrowed thing; it was imitated... But everywhere this influence was communicated only to the upper classes of society; to the nobles, in lay circles, and to the students and scholars among the clergy. In this respect it may be compared with the influence of the Renaissance in the 15th century; like the latter, it affected only the social aristocracy, or the aristocracy of intellect and learning... The France of the Middle Ages had not so far developed her economic life that she was able to propagate her influence by means of commerce and industry. In this domain she was far behind Italy and Flanders. Nevertheless, in Flanders... the influence of French civilization affected even the bourgeoisie. The patricians of the great Flemish cities of the 12th century were more than half French; even employing French as their administrative language, and in business.

258. Medieval Europe Chonology

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Chronology

400s- Formation of great domains begins
590-604 - Papacy of Gregory the Great
596-655 - Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons
650- Trade ends in Western Mediterranean; Aristocracy dominates Merovingian kings
700?-1000? Europe isolated, almost no trade
726 - Iconoclasm in the Eastern Church
732 - Battle of Poiters - Charles Martel (c. 686-741)
751 - Pippin the Short first Carolingian king (751 – 768)
754 - Franks defeat Lombards and create Papal State
788 - Islamic conquest of Spain complete
793 - Viking raids begin Britain
827 - Islamic conquest of Sardinia
878 - Danelaw in northeast of England
800s - Peak of Great Domains
896 - Hungarian state formed following Magyar conquest
902 - Islamic conquest of Sicily complete
911 - French king gives Vikings (Normans) Normandy for peace.
950-1250 - Medieval Warm Period
962 - Otto restores Empire
999 - Start of Norman influence in Italy
1005 - Rise of Pisa as naval power
1016 - Pisa conquers Sardinia
1030 - Approx. end to Viking age in Scandinavia
1054 - Split of Roman and Greek Christendom
1059 - Pope now elected by Cardinals
1066 - Norman conquest of England
1075 - Pope Gregory III removes power of investiture from Emperor
1076 - Synod of Worms (Emperor removes Pope) starts War of Investitures
1091 - Normans take last of Sicily
1096-1099 - 1st Crusade. Jerusalem captured 1099
1128 - Bruges city charter
1136 - Pisa at peak of power
1144-1155 - 2nd Crusade
1150 - Decree of Gratianus (Catholic Dogma)
1176 - Imperial defeat at Legnano
1180-1240 - Caesar von Heisterbach
1187 - Saladin recaptures Jerusalem
1187-1192 - 3rd Crusade
1189 - Hohenstaufen Henri VI King of Sicily
1195 - Castile defeated in Battle of Alarcos
1198 - Peak of Norman power in Italy?
1200s- Weakening of Great Domains begins
1202-1263 - Thomas de Cantipre
1202-1204 - 4th Crusade - against Constantinople
1209 - Champagne fairs at their peak, to 1285
1208-1235 - Crusade against Albigenses (Cathars)
1212 - Islamic forces in Spain defeated Battle of Navos de Tolosa
1213-1276 - Jayme II of Aragon
1212 - Children's Crusade
1214 - Battle of Bouvines - settles affairs among most European parties
1217-1221 - 5th Crusade
1221 - Saint Martin's Cathedral in Ypres (tomb of Jansenius -1638)
1222 - Concordat of Worms, Emperor agrees to give up investitures
1223 - Mongols conquers from Don to Volga
1228-1229 - 6th Crusade

1233 - Institution of Pontifical Inquisition
1234 - Mongols capture Moscow

1236 - Aragon captures Valencia; Castile Captures Cordova and Seville

1240 - Mongols capture Kiev

1248-1254 - 7th Crusade
1260-1328 - Meister Eckhardt
1270 - 8th Crusade
1271-1272 - 9th Crusade
1273-1291 - Rudolf of Hapsburg
1274 - Summa of St Thomas
1274 - Battle of Marchfield - Germans and Hungarians defeat Czechs
1280 - General popular revolt in Flemish cities
1283 - Slavic Prussians exterminated and replaced by Germans
1284 - Decline of Pisa
1285-1314 - Philip (IV) the Fair - House of Capet
1294-1303 - Pope Boniface VIII
1296 - Battle of Dunbar, English Edward I defeats Scots Baliol
1297 - St Louis canonized
1298 - Scots defeated by English at Falkirk
1300 - Rough start date of "Little Ice Age" to 1850
1301 - English Parliament decides in favor of King and against Pope 1302 - French States-General decides in favor of King vs Pope
1302 - Battle of the Golden Spurs, Flemish cities defeat French army
1305-1314 - Clement V elected Pope, moves to Avignon (to 1378)
1312-1377 - Edward III - King England - House Plantagenet
1315 - Battle of Morgahten - Swiss defeat Leopold of Austria
132?-1384 - John Wycliffe
1324-1328 - Class warfare in Flanders
1324 - Defensor pacis by Marsilius of Padua
1328 - Battle of Cassel
1333-1370 Charles IV of Bohemia
1337-1453 - Hundred Years' War
1348 - University of Prague
1346 - Battle of Crecy - English victory
1347-1558 - Calais in English hands
1347-1355 - Truce in Hundred Years' War 
1348-1351 - Black Death
1350-1354 - Jean II - King of France - House of Valois
1356 - Battle of Poitiers - English victory
1358 - Jacquerie in France
1360 - Peace of Bretigny - Hundred Years' War
1360-1424 - John Ziska
1363-1404 - Philip the Bold Duke of Burgundy House Valois
1364-1380 - Charles V - King of France - House of Valois
1364 - University of Cracow
1369-1415 - Jan Hus
1373-1417 - The Great Schism
1377 - Deaths of both Charles V and Edward III result in Regencies
1377-1399 - Richard II House Plantagenet
1380-1434 - Procopius
1381 - Wat Tyler's Rebellion, England
1382 - Battle of Roosebeke

1386 - Battle of Sempach - confirms Swiss independence.
1389 - Battle of Kossovo - Turks defeat Serbs
1394 - Publication of Practica della Mercatura
1394-1460 - Henry (the Navigator) of Portugal
1399-1413 - Henry V House Lancaster
1400 - Guilds in power in most cities

1402 - Battle of Angora - Tamerlane defeats Turks
1405 - Death of Tamerlane
1404-1419 - Jean the Fearless Duke of Burgundy House Valois
1410 - Battle of Tannenberg - Poland defeats Teutonic Knights
1414-1418 - Council of Constance
1414-1434 - Taborites
1414-1620 - Utraquists
1415 - Battle of Agincourt
1415 - Florentine statute suppresses serfdom
1419-1467 - Philip the Good Duke of Burgundy House Valois
1421-1451 - Murad II Turkish sultan
1431-1449 - Council of Basle
1433-1437 - Sigismond (House of Luxembourg) H.R. Emperor
1434 - Battle of Lipan
1437 - Albert of Austria (House of Habsburg) inherits Bohemia and Hungary
1444 - Battle of Varna - Turks regain control of Balkans
1450 - Battle of Formigny
1450 - Rise of Antwerp and the capitalist parvenus in Northern Europe
1453 - Battle of Castillon - End of Hundred Years' War
1453 - Constantinople falls to Turks
1457-1509 - Henry VII of England
1462-1505 - Ivan III (the Great)
1466-1536 - Erasmus
1469-1527 - Machiavelli
1469 - Marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon
1477 - Marriage of Maximillian of Habsburg with Marie of Burgundy
1478-1535 - Thomas More
1480 - Spanish Inquisition to keep an eye on converts to Christianity
1483-1540 - Guiccardini
1487 - Malleus Maleficarum published at Strasbourg
1492 - Spanish conquest of Granada & expulsion of Jews
1492-1502 - Columbus sails to America and returns to Europe 
1509- - John Calvin
1512-1520 - Selim I
1513 - Europeans sight the Pacific from Panama
1516-1556  - Charles V King of Spain
1517 - Ninety-five Theses published by Martin Luther at Wittenberg
1519-1556 - Charles V King of Austria
1519-1527 - Cortez conquers Mexico
1520 - First "bill" against heresy in Low Countries
1520-1556 - Soliman II
1521 - Edict of Worms
1521-1523 - Pope Adrian VI, last ultramontaine Pope
1522 - Turks take Rhodes
1523 - First Protestant martyrs burned alive in Brussels
1525 - Imperial victory at Battle of Pavia
1525 - Battle of Frankenhausen, ends peasant uprising in Germany
1526 - Battle of Mohacz - Turks defeat Christians
1526 - Crowns of Bohemia and Hungary to Ferdinand of Habsburg
1526-1536 - Start of Republic of Geneva
1527 - Sack of Rome by imperial army
1529 - Peace of Cambrai
1529 - Turks at walls of Vienna
1530-1535 - Anabaptist uprising in Holland
1530 - Condemnation of Thomas More
1531-1541 - Pizarro conquers Peru
1531 - Bourse constructed at Antwerp -- Mediterranean Levant trade begins to falter 
1534 - "act of Supremacy" makes the king the head of the Church of England
1536 - "Articles of Religion" defines dogma of Church of England
1536 - Institution Christienne by Calvin
1542 - Pope Paul III revives the Inquisition
1544 - Peace of Crespy
1547 - Battle of Muhlberg, Imperial troops defeat Lutheran princes
1545 - Council of Trent
1550 - American silver flowing to Spain
1550 - Population of France around 18 million
1551, 1562 - English laws relating to the employment of the poor
1552 - Treaty of Chambord
1555 - Diet of Augsburg gives German princes control of local Churches
1556 - Truce of Vaucelles
1575, 1596 - Bankruptcies of Philip II
1601 - Act for the relief of the poor, in England
1604 - First English Inclosure Acts -- continue into 20th century

257. Teutonic Knights and Prussia

Link to Table of Contents

Germany under weak Emperors

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

Book Seven
The Hegemony of the Papacy and of France in the Thirteenth Century

Chapter II

The Papacy, Italy, and Germany

3. Germany

p320 ...at the moment when in France the king was beginning to impose his power upon his great vassals, in Germany he was becoming subordinate to them... Frederick II in 1231, merely recognized in law what already existed in fact... by recognizing... [the princes] as the lords of their estates (domini terrae), and by renouncing the right to build fortresses on their domains or to appoint judges, or to mint money, or to regulate trade and circulation. Henceforth Germany was merely a federation of individual sovereigns whom the Emperor left to their own devices... 

p321 ...[After the death of William of Holland in 1256] The national ideal was so completely alien to the German princes, and the monarchy seemed to them of such secondary importance, that their one thought was to sell it on the most favorable terms. Some allowed themselves to be bought by Alfonso of Castile, others by Richard of Cornwall, and in 1257 both princes received the crown, as though it had been a parcel of merchandise. Seven princes had taken part in this double election. This was the origin of the College of Electors, which henceforth exercised the right of electing the king of the Romans? [He couldn't name them? I believe they were: Archbishop of Cologne, Archbishop of Mainz, Archbishop of Trier, Count Palatine of the Rhine, Duke of Saxony, Margrave of Brandenburg and King of Bohemia.

Following the death of both of these individuals, the Electors in 1273] ...gave the crown to Rudolf of Habsburg, whose talents, as mediocre as his fortune, were not such as to cause them any disquietude. The period of the "great interregnum" which had begun with the nomination of Henry Raspon [1246?] was at last ended.
...

p324 ... The kingdom of Burgundy... detached itself... from the Imperial bloc... Marseilles and Lyon had never felt that they belonged to the Empire, nor did the Counts of Provence, Dauphine and Franche Comte ever trouble their heads about the nomenal suzerainty which it excercised over them. Thus, the old frontier, drawn on the map at a period of economic stagnation, was erased... by the friction of a more intensive civilization and more complex interests...

p325 ...As the princes of the [Imperial] frontier forgot the Emperor they turned toward the kings of France... 

While in the West Germany was gradually crumbling under the influence of a civilization superior to her own, in the East she was expanding largely at the cost of the Barbarians... The fact is that this great effort of expansion, which was afterwards to exert so essential an influence over the destinies of the German people, owned nothing to the Emperors. It was accomplished without their participation... the princes on the banks of the Lower Elbe, and above all Henry the Lion, and the Margrave of Brandenberg, Albert the Bear (1170), energetically furthered the Germanization of the Wendish lands along the Baltic shore. There was no question here of a purely political conquest, but rather of a veritable work of colonization, thanks to which... the Germans took the place of the Slavs in the countries which they had abandoned at the time of the great invasions of the 4th century... Thanks to... a surplus population and the spirit of enterprise. As the raids of the Duke of Saxony's and the Margrave of Brandenberg's knights drove back the Slavs and massacred them, the colonists... took possession of the regions thus cleared... Along the rivers the cities were founded which furnish the peasants with the necessary supplies and served as markets for the surrounding countryside: Brandenburg, Stendal, Spandau, Tangermunde, Berlin, and Frankfort-on-the-Oder.
...

p328 ...The paganism which had disappeared... between the Elbe and the Oder still persisted throughout the plain that extends from the shores of the Baltic between the Elbe and the Niemen. Its inhabitants, the Prussians, a people of Slavic origin, resisted the attempts at their conversion... At the beginning of the 13th century the Polish Duke of Mazovia summoned the knights of the Teutonic Order to undertake the conversion of these obstinate heathen... The poor Prussians with their bows and their wicker shields, could not resist the heavily-armed knights who came to conquer with the sword a new land for Catholicism, but not a new people. For there was no question of converting the Prussians. They were treated as the enemies of Christ and the Pope, though they knew nothing of either... this Holy War was a war of extermination. It ended only in 1283, when there was no more pagans to massacre. As the Teutonic Knights advanced they organized the country. Fortresses... marked the stages of the conquest, and there too, as between the Elbe and the Oder, Germanization was the consequence of war. Nothing was left of the Prussians but the name, which was now borne by the invaders. The knights retained lordship of the country, which they received as a fief from Pope Gregory IX in 1234. 

p329 While the Germans were thus colonizing the great plain to the south of the Baltic, they were also swarming along the shores of this sea... Here the movement started from Lubeck... In 1201 a bishopric was established at Riga, and there Bishop Albert of Bienne created the Order of the Brothers of the Sword, whose mission was to fight the pagans of Livonia and Esthonia... in the north Dorpat, captured from the Russians by the Brothers of the Sword, became, like Riga, the seat of a bishopric.

p331 [Discussing the trade of the Baltic] ... These economic relations were the origin of the Hansa: that is to say, the confederation not of the merchants alone, but of the cities of which they were burgesses, from Riga to Cologne... Lubeck, in the middle... became the headquarters of the Hansa as early as the middle of the 13th century. The commercial interest of all the members of the League were sufficiently homogeneous to ensure the maintenance of a good understanding between them... thanks to the Hansa, German navigation retained its preponderance in the two northern seas until the middle of the 15th century.

The contrast with the competition to the death of the Northern Italian maritime cities is striking. I suppose this is because the Hansa were mostly trading among themselves rather than competing for the same trade (with the Near East).

Pirenne tries to argue for the importance of geography -- lack of solid geographical features to separate competing populations -- as the reason for the vicious nature of warfare on the east border of Europe (defined in Carolingian terms). I'm not sure I buy this. This was clearly (he asserts) based more on ethnicity or religion. The lack of major geographical features did play a role in making the area more subject to attack, but it didn't determine how that attack would manifest.

He then goes on to note that there was no intellectual culture in this region, because they had,

...no energy to spare for anything but work and warfare. In the Margraves of Brandenberg and the Teutonic Knights of the 13th century, in the petty nobles who employed the knights and fought for them, were emerging the first characteristics of what was one day to be known as the Prussian spirit.

It's worth noting here that, at the time he wrote this, Pirenne was being held captive by "the Prussian spirit" in a dull town in this very region of Europe.

256. Italy, cities & Hohenstaufen

Link to Table of Contents

Medieval communes

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War


Book Seven
The Hegemony of the Papacy and of France in the Thirteenth Century


Chapter II

The Papacy, Italy, and Germany

1. Italy

p305 ...Municipal life became as preponderant in Lombardy and Tuscany as it had been in antiquity, but while its material conditions were almost unchanged, its spirit was different. The Roman municipality had enjoyed only a local autonomy, subordinated to the formidable power of the State. [This was only true after Rome had conquered the peninsula.] The Italian city of the Middle Ages -- at least in the north and the center of the peninsula -- was a republic. 

p306 From the 11th century onwards the mercantile and industrial class which was in process of formation took advantage... of the conflict between the pope and the Emperor to rebel against the bishops, and to wrest from them the administration of the cities. The first Italian communes were sworn by the "patarenes" [Footnote: The name of Patarious seems to be a mere corruption of Catharus.] in the midst of the turmoil of the War of Investitures: a time of mystical exaltation. Their origin was purely revolutionary, and from the time of their birth they contracted a habit of violence that was to characterize them to the end. By force or by agreement, the commune imposed itself, in each city, on the mass of the population, and its elective consuls, like the sheriffs of the Belgian cities, exercised both the judical and the administrative power. But as the bourgeoisie developed the social contrasts in its ranks were accentuated, and parties were formed in support of various conflicting interests... The party of the grandi were composed of the urban nobility, with whom were associated a good many enriched merchants; the party of the piccoli comprised the corporations or guilds of artisans of every kind, whose numbers multiplied as prosperity increased. The absence of a princely power, above the parties and capable of moderating their quarrels, gave the conflicts between the two groups, arising from questions of taxation and the organization of municipal power, a bitterness and severity unequaled elsewhere. From the middle of the 12th century civil war became a chronic epidemic. The grandi had the best of it; the piccoli were pitilessly massacred; if they surrendered they were driven out of the city; their houses or palaces were destroyed, and while waiting for the moment when they could avenge themselves they lived on the adjacent countryside, pillaging and harassing their compatriots. 

As a general thing these exiles found protection and allies in a neighboring city. For while there was permanent warfare in the heart of the bourgeoisies, the mutual relations of the cities were also generally warlike. Constituting as they did so many independent economic centers, each of them thought only of itself, doing its utmost to force the peasants and population of the surrounding countryside to furnish its food supply... Thus the clash of interests was as violent outside the city as within it. Trade and industry were developed by means of battles... Each city imagined that its prosperity depended on the ruin of its rivals...

I'm skipping again the discussion of the interplay of the cities with the Hohenstaufens which lead to another battle of Guelf and Ghibelline -- differently defined in Italy to make things even more confusing.

And this state of city vs city sounds so much like Greece and early Rome. The main difference being the absence of kings.

p308 ...From the second half of the 12th century attempts were made to render... [the municipal government] independent of civil conflicts by confiding it to a podesta. The podesta was... a temporary prince elected by the commune, and in order to guarantee his impartiality and his independence of the parties it usually chose him from an alien commune... Almost always the podestas were obliged... to rely on the support of one of the hostile factions. In certain cities they succeeded, as early as the 13th century, in possessing themselves, either by cunning or by violence... of the supreme authority, and in founding the first of those tyrannies which were to play so considerable a part during the epoch of the Renaissance. I need only mention the Scaligers of Verona and the Visconti of Milan.

The political and social ferment of the Italian cities naturally influenced their religious life. There were simultaneous outbreaks of mysticism and heresy, which provided fresh aliment for the fever that consumed them. St Francisco of Assisi was the son of a merchant, and the Order of Franciscans found its true field of action in the bourgeoisies. Moreover, there were swarms of Cathars, Brothers of the Free Spirit, and Waldenses...

It can hardly be doubted that they would have recruited the majority of their adherents among the workers engaged in production for export. As in Flanders. this trade was already highly developed in the Italy of the 13th century, and as in Flanders, it resulted in the formation of a veritable working-class proletariat. The weavers of Florence, the great cloth-producing center of Southern Europe, differed as widely as the weavers of Gand, Ypres or Douai from the usual type of urban artisan. Far from working on their own account, they were mere wage-earners, employed by the merchants. The nascent capitalism of the age subjected them to its influence, and its power, like its influence, increased in proportion as the merchants developed the export trade. By the first half of the 13th century the Florentine cloths were exported to all parts of the Orient [Near East?], and the merchants of the city were importing their wool from England. Such an active manufacture naturally presupposes a considerable degree of capitalistic development. The fortunes accumulated by the trade in merchandise were still further increased by financial transactions. In the course of the 13th century the money-changers (bankers) of Siena and Florence found their way into all parts of Western Europe, where they were known as Lombards... in England, the Low Countries, and France they advanced larger and larger sums to the cities, princes, and kings, and were employed as collectors, treasurers, and guardians of money... On the disappearance of... [the Sienese company of Bonsignori, in 1298] Florence became the chief money-market and banking center of Europe, and so remained until the 15th century... We know that it was in the form of Florentine florins, minted from 1252 onwards, and presently imitated by Venice (ducats), and then in France, that gold coins, abandoned since the Merovingian epoch, once more made their appearance in international trade, providing the instrument of exchange which had become indispensable to its progress...

p310 The social position of the Italian bankers and merchants brought them so closely into touch with the nobility that they were often confounded with it. This process took place all the more rapidly, inasmuch as the Italian nobility, instead of residing in the country... had its dwelling-houses in the city. By the end of the 12th century the nobles were already beginning to interest themselves in commercial operations, while the merchants... were often ennobled... under the influence of capital the line of demarcation between the juridical classes, which elsewhere remained so clearly drawn, in Italy grew fainter, almost to the point of disappearance, during the course of the 13th century. An aristocracy was formed for which social position was of greater importance than blood, while individual worth overcame the prejudice of birth. 

Just like when the Medieval nobility was first forming.

He then goes into the Papal States which were a dead zone between Sicily in the south and these developing cities in the north.

p312 The Kingdom of Sicily, in the south of the peninsula, was another world. While it was as wealthy as Northern Italy, and while its life was feverish and exuberant, it was politically apathetic... In the 13th century (1275) it was estimated that the inhabitants numbered 1,200,000, a population greater than that of England... There is more than one point of similarity between the Frederick II [Hohenstaufen] of the 13th century and the Frederick II [the Great, Hohenzollern] of the 18th century, and this is easily explained, if we reflect that they could both do anything they liked with the people whom they governed... In the Europe of the 13th century the Kingdom of Sicily was something unique, with its expert and despotic constitution, borrowed from the Byzantine and Musulman worlds... Not until the modern era did the European States achieve so complete an administrative system...

2. Frederick II

p313 ...Lying, cruelty and perjury were his favorite weapons; in a later age they would be the favorite weapons of a Sforza or a Visconti, and to make the analogy more complete, he had their love of art and their respect for learning. He has been called the first modern man to ascend the throne, but this is not true unless we understand by a modern man "the pure despot who will stop for nothing in the search for power."

p314 This Frederick, whom the Popes were later to describe as the Beast of the Apocalypse, the servant of Satan, the prophet of the Antichrist, began his career under the auspices of Innocent III, and as an instrument of the Church... 
...

p315 ...His treatment of the Church was inspired, not by a principle, but solely by his personal interests. Provided the Church did not hinder the realization of his policy he was ready to make it every concession... In reality the Popes made war against him for temporal rather than religious reasons. The quarrel... reveals itself... as a quarrel between two Italian powers...
...

p319 [After his death] As for the Kingdom of Sicily, the Pope hastened to retrieve it forever from that "generation of vipers," the Hohenstaufens. He decided to give it to France.

255. Europe goes Crusading and all we get is Istanbul

Link to Table of Contents

The final result of the Pope's Crusades

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

Sorry for the delay. It's been a little crazy around here.

Book Seven
The Hegemony of the Papacy and of France in the Thirteenth Century

Chapter I
The Papacy and the Church


2. The Papal Policy

p298 It is often said that the 13th century was a theocracy. But we must define the term. If by theocracy we mean a state of affairs in which the Church enjoys an incomparable prestige and in which no one can escape from its moral ascendancy, the 13th century was undoubtedly a theocracy. But it was not a theocracy if theocracy consists in confiding to the Church itself the guidance and government of political interests. [Footnote: Theoretically the Popes aimed at theocracy, although they never actually achieved it, but it was acknowledged that they possessed... a rudimentary power of supreme arbitration, which... often excited opposition, though not quite open conflict.]

p299 [About the Fourth Crusade] ...Innocent III... still inspired by Christian idealism, made preparations for a new expedition [after the Third Crusade achieved nothing] with the intention of attacking Egypt... This time... the kings had had their fill of crusading... The princes of the Low Countries, Champagne, and Blois, set out on the Crusade; but the Venetians, the owners of the fleet, who had not been paid in full for their services (these expeditions were becoming more costly, and the nobles were ruined), persuaded the Crusaders to attack Zara, a Christian city which incommoded their trade in the Adriatic. The Pope excommunicated them, but in vain... The Pope was opposed... [to the plan to attack Constantinople] However, his opposition was ignored... On May 16th [1203, after seizing Constantinople] Baldwin, who had the largest number of soldiers, was elected Emperor and crowned by a Papal legate. Innocent III had suddenly reversed his policy. His confidential agent, the Venetian Tomaso Morosini, was created Patriarch of Constantinople. However, it was not really the Church that profited by this expedition, but mainly Venice, who founded a magnificent colonial empire in the ancient Byzantine provinces.

p301 ...in history nothing is improvised, and here once more we can see how untrue it is that little causes lead to great results. Here the events were on a small scale, and so were their results. The Westerners could enter Constantinople by assault, but they could not keep it... In 1261 Michael Palaeologus, with the help of the Genoese, who were jealous of the Venetians, recaptured Constantinople and restored the Empire. Of the union of the Greek and Roman Churches not a trace was left... The Empire was weaker than it had been [since it was unable to reclaim the lost islands from Venice], less capable of resisting the Turks. This was the practical result of the Crusade!

p303 ...Europe had no need of Syria and Jerusalem. She took them in a fit of enthusiasm and had not the strength to retain them. Their retention would have involved a permanent crusade, and the transformation of all Europe into a military order. This was impossible. Moreover, the agricultural civilization which had made the levy en masse possible was gradually disappearing, so that each successive Crusade was recruited with greater difficulty. The urban populations, and the rural populations who maintained them, could no longer be uprooted. The knights were ruining themselves, and they had to be paid... In the Christian sense of the word, in the sense understood and intended by the Popes, the Crusade had failed, and with it, the pontifical policy. It was shattered against the realities of a Europe whose conditions of political and social life had evolved while the papacy had remained faithful to its ideals... Taking it all in all, the universal policy had been as unsuccessful in the spiritual sphere, with the Popes, as with the Emperors in the temporal sphere.

And yet, the resulting rise of the cities and of the bourgeoisie also lead in time to the global spread of the Roman Church (and the Protestant faiths) in the baggage of colonialism and empire.

History really is just "Good luck. Bad luck. Who knows?" writ large.