Monk and castle

The (anti)chronologist Gunnar Heinsohn has fans over at Unz. Without getting into that anonymous essayist's essays, Heinsohn does draw our attention to a "tenth century collapse".

Usually this gets blended with the Roman crisis of the third century and the disastrous sixth-to-seventh centuries, as THE DARK AGE - it is in the interest of blending them, to shorten the span, that Heinsohn writes. Prodding around the Internet I confirm that, yes, this tenth century was bad. But I am not here to defend nor to debate Heinsohn. (To disclose, I think he's a clown.)

I am here to evaluate why civil order collapsed again in the West over that tenth century. As to that, I found an essay by one Declan Mills (pdf): this offers a Robert Drews argument, that it came about due to an engineering revolution.

The Angevins in old Neustria, "West Francia" now named, had discovered the Castle.

The Castle hurled Francia back to the Iron Age of briga hillforts. Every band of ruffians near fertile land, upon construction of a castle, was now a laird. The man in Aachen or Paris holding the title of "king" was no longer able to exert his will.

Obviously this meant pure misery for all the Santo Pocos under the local Guapo. The system was unpopular but, luckily, in those days there existed a countervail: a shared religious establishment. I don't even mean the Roman Curia, for once - the Vatican was Theophylact and mostly rotten itself. The West now had the Benedictines. This meant a revolution in society. Barons who accepted a Benedictine role in social-services survived, whilst those barons who didn't were excommunicated as tyrants and faced peasant strikes.

LITERATURE 10/2: Razib speaks - The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century has a lot of citations of John Julius Norwich. If that doesn’t say something to you, basically there is a lot of personal biography. The title may seem to promise a deep structural understanding of what happened in the 10th century, but the book is mostly a detailed diplomatic history. People, battles, and treaties. There’s more structural/social stuff at the end. Save the best for last?