Hadrian's Wall and Free Trade

Of the many civil engineering feats performed by the Romans, Hadrian’s Wall is one of the most famous: it stretches over seventy miles across the island of Great Britain, from east to west, from one coast to another.

Traditionally, historians reckoned that these walls were constructed to deter an invading army. The Romans had stopped their northward expansion at this point because of the fierceness of the Scots.

Recent reconsiderations of Hadrian’s wall, however, have raised the notion that the wall would not have been an effective barrier to a large military force, especially because it has gates at intervals along its length. The numbers of Roman soldiers stationed along the wall also would not have been sufficient for the purposes of repelling a large-scale attack.

If not strategic defense, what, then, was the purpose of the wall? Historian Andrew Curry asks:

If the walls weren’t under constant threat, what were they for?

Although scholars are diligent in their efforts to be objective, they are nonetheless affected in many and subtle ways by their time and by their location as they study events in other times and other locations.

Perhaps those who hypothesized about Hadrian’s Wall were retrojecting geopolitical patterns from their own era onto the earlier Roman era. Andrew Curry writes:

Ever since British antiquarians organized the first scientific excavations along Hadrian’s Wall in the 1890s, historians and archaeologists have assumed Rome’s walls were military fortifications, designed to fend off barbarian armies and hostile invaders.

The wall seems to constitute a sealed border, Romans to the south, Scots to the north. Why, then, the gates? Why no evidence of massive battles along the wall?

The wall was of a physical size and shape that a large invading army could easily scale it with ladders or ropes, and doing so in large numbers, would easily be able to overwhelm the few soldiers stationed there.

For decades arguments focused on tactical details: Did soldiers stand along the wall to rain spears and arrows down on invaders or sally forth to engage the enemy in the field? The trenches of WWI — and the deadly back-and-forth battling of WWII — did little to change the prevailing view of the ancient frontier as a fixed barrier separating Rome from hordes of hostile barbarians.

Perhaps Hadrian’s Wall was less like the ‘Iron Curtain’ border between East and West Germany during the Cold War, and more like the wall which divided East and West Berlin. The former was in anticipation of large-scale military formations and attacks, the latter was designed to prevent individual defectors or smugglers, or those in very small groups.

These same questions can be raised about other Roman borders, like the Limes fortifications and walls between the Rhine and the Danube in central Europe. Historians face divergent paradigms in thinking about the Roman frontiers.

Archaeologists studying the frontiers in the 1970s and ’80s later found that the Iron Curtain dividing Europe had shadowed their view of the distant past. “We had in Germany this massive border, which seemed impenetrable,” says C. Sebastian Sommer, chief archaeologist at the Bavarian State Preservation Office. “The idea was here and there, friend and foe.”

How were the relations across the border at the frontier? Were the Scots north of England, or the Germanic tribes northeast of Gaul, regarded as enemies simpliciter?

Or was there mutually beneficial trade between local farmers and villages on both sides of the borders? It is known that the Romans sometimes hired mercenaries from among those on the other side of the border. This would indicate that the border had more the character of an administrative structure than of a sworn blood feud.

Today a new generation of archaeologists is taking another look. The dramatic, unbroken line of Hadrian’s Wall may be a red herring, a 73-mile exception that proves an entirely different rule. In Europe the Romans took advantage of the natural barriers created by the Rhine and Danube Rivers, patrolling their waters with a strong river navy. In North Africa and the eastern provinces of Syria, Judea, and Arabia, the desert itself created a natural frontier.

The Roman border guard may have been more about monitoring roads and commerce than about confrontations between massive armies.

Taxes and tariffs were an important source of income for the imperial government, a purpose for which it would gladly spend the money needed to keep soldiers stationed along the border. Was their main purpose perhaps tax collection?

Military bases were often ad hoc installations set up to watch rivers and other key supply routes. The Latin word for frontier, limes (LEE-mess), originally meant a patrolled road or path. We still use the term: Our “limits” comes from limites, the plural of limes.

Perhaps the detachments who served along the border were more like customs officials than a strategic defense. The Romans would want to keep an eye on the people and merchandise which entered and left their empire.

Artifacts show that there was substantial trade across the borders of the empire. Roman products are found deep into Germanic territory; Germanic products, like amber from the shores of the Baltic, are found deep in Roman territory.

Outposts on rivers like the Rhine and Danube or in the deserts on Rome’s eastern and southern flanks often resemble police or border patrol stations. They would have been useless against an invading army but highly effective for soldiers nabbing smugglers, chasing small groups of bandits, or perhaps collecting customs fees. The thinly manned walls in England and Germany were similar. “The lines were there for practical purposes,” says Benjamin Isaac, a historian at Tel Aviv University. “They were the equivalent of modern barbed wire — to keep individuals or small groups out.”

In the empire’s later centuries, there was a need for workers in the Roman provinces, and slave or servants were imported from outside imperial borders. But the bureaucrats of the empire would want to know who, and how many, and from where these servants came.

Both observing and controlling the flow of people and goods across the borders would be important to Roman economic policy.

Isaac argues that the frontiers resembled certain modern installations more than thick-walled medieval fortresses: “Look at what Israel’s building to wall off the West Bank. It’s not meant to keep out the Iranian army, it’s made to stop people from exploding themselves on buses in Tel Aviv.” Warding off terrorists may not have motivated the Romans, but there were plenty of other factors — as there are today. “What the United States is planning between itself and Mexico is substantial,” says Isaac, “and that’s just to keep out people who want to sweep the streets in New York.”

The outposts along the borders may have had as goals, in addition to monitoring and regulating trade, expanding trade. A permanent and official presence at the outer limits of the empire may have been meant to encourage traders from deep inside Germanic or Scottish territory to bring their wares for trading.

Roman coins have been found, e.g., on the Scottish island of North Uist, almost unimaginably far north of Hadrian’s Wall.

More archaeologists are endorsing that view. “Isaac’s analysis has come to dominate the field,” says David Breeze, author of the recent Frontiers of Imperial Rome. “Built frontiers aren’t necessarily about stopping armies but about controlling the movement of people.” The Roman frontier, in other words, is better seen not as an impervious barrier sealing Fortress Rome off from the world but as one tool the Romans used to extend influence deep into barbaricum, their term for everything outside the empire, through trade and occasional raids.

In Denmark and Sweden, archeologists have found Roman coins. Although we must exercise caution in drawing conclusions from the these finds - we don’t know how or why those coins came to be in those locations - these finds indicate at least the probability of widespread Roman trade beyond the borders of the empire.

Might we conjecture that a Roman merchant would venture past the lines which marked the edge of the empire? Profit would be a powerful motive for such travels. Likewise, Germanic and Scottish traders, we can say with certainty, entered and left the empire on a regular basis to peddle their wares.

Roman Walls

The Roman Empire, having risen around 27 B.C. from the remains of the Roman Republic, expanded and reached its largest size in the middle of the second century, around 150 A.D., give or take a few decades. Having occupied such a large area of land, it needed to defend and hold that land.

The momentum of expansion dwindled and was redesigned into the momentum of defense. The Roman military had formerly focused on conquering new land and transforming such land into integrated provinces of the Empire. Now, the military was more interested in ensuring that competing powers - like the Germanic tribes, the Scots, and the Irish - did not expand into Roman land.

In addition to stationing garrisons along the border, the Romans, ever the good engineers, undertook another amazing building project: a series of walls which would eventually stretch for hundreds of miles along selected segments of the empire’s borders.

The empire sprawled across Africa, Asia, and Europe, and included islands like Great Britain. The borders totaled thousands of miles. Historian Andrew Curry describes how

A stunning network of walls, rivers, desert forts, and mountain watchtowers marks Rome’s limits. At its peak in the second century A.D., the empire sent soldiers to patrol a front that stretched from the Irish Sea to the Black Sea as well as across North Africa.

As a percentage of the total imperial border, the walls were a small fraction, built where strategists figured they were most needed. The engineering precision is impressive. In one case, a 31-mile stretch of wall is almost perfectly straight, deviating merely 36 inches. The design of the wall is precise and crisply geometrical. The exact shape of the wall varies: Hadrian’s Wall between England and Scotland is a different structure than the Limes wall in Germany.

Why did the Romans build the walls? To protect a regime besieged by barbarians, or simply to establish the physical edge of the empire?

The walls were only a small part of the border system. More often, there were watchtowers spaced at intervals. How porous were these borders? Certainly, local Germanic and Celtic tribesmen in central Europe were used to trading with each other, and if a Roman border ran between two small settlements, that would have meant little to them, and little to the Roman military men stationed there. The borders were most likely surveilled for the purposes of watching for major military movements.

But such imperial thinking was foreign to the original Roman Republic, a governmental structure dating from around 509 B.C., and designed to administering a city-state and a few agricultural lands surrounding it. The Republic’s success in expanding would also be its downfall.

From around 500 B.C., Rome expanded continually for six centuries, transforming itself from a small Italian city-state in a rough neighborhood into the largest empire Europe would ever know.

The Republic was not capable of effectively governing this large territory. The Empire replaced it.

The emperor Trajan was an eager heir to this tradition of aggression. Between 101 and 117, he fought wars of conquest in present-day Romania, Armenia, Iran, and Iraq, and he brutally suppressed Jewish revolts. Roman coins commemorated his triumphs and conquests.

Trajan left a gigantic empire to his successor. Had Trajan lived longer, he might have learned that the empire was perhaps too big to be thoroughly organized and successfully defended.

The military requirements - defending borders in England, across central Europe, into southwestern Asia, and across northern Africa - were enormous. Too big, in fact. The regular Roman army was supplemented at first by domestic mercenaries, then by foreign mercenaries. But this help was often actually another problem.

When he died in 117, his territory stretched from the Persian Gulf to Scotland. He bequeathed the empire to his adopted son — a 41-year-old Spanish senator, self-styled poet, and amateur architect named Publius Aelius Hadrianus. Faced with more territory than Rome could afford to control and under pressure from politicians and generals to follow in the footsteps of his adoptive father, the newly minted emperor — better known as Hadrian — blinked. “The first decision he made was to abandon the new provinces and cut his losses,” says biographer Anthony Birley. “Hadrian was wise to realize his predecessor had bitten off more than he could chew.”

The Romans had ventured northeast of the line on which the Limes wall would eventually be built. The earliest walls had actually been built as far back as the reign of Octavian-Augustus, who suffered a humiliating defeat in 9 A.D. at the hands of the Germanic tribes.

Under Hadrian's rule, they would pull back a few miles to more defensible positions.

But under Hadrian and his successor, the Limes boundary line, roughly the southwest border of Germany, would reach its full structural development of walls, watchtowers, and forts.

The new emperor’s policies ran up against an army accustomed to attacking and fighting on open ground. Worse, they cut at the core of Rome’s self-image. How could an empire destined to rule the world accept that some territory was out of reach?

As it turned out, the Roman Empire had not only stopped its expansion, but it was preparing to shrink. The Germanic tribes in Europe, and the Scots in Great Britain, became bolder and more familiar with Roman military practices. Knowledge of the Romans allowed the tribes to strategize ways to outmaneuver and outfight the Romans.

The Limes marked the highpoint of the empire, but at the same time marked the beginning of the end.

Spanish Scholastics and Modern Political Liberty

Scholasticism, and the thought of the Middle Ages generally, manifests itself under close examination as seminal. Medieval thinkers laid a foundation for observational, empirical, natural sciences by asserting that mathematical laws apply consistently across the physical universe; the medieval axiom that the world can be rationally understood encouraged scientific research.

Thomas Bradwardine has become, perhaps, one of the more famous examples of the way in which medieval thought formed a basis for modern thought. He articulated, in the early 1300s, mathematical formulations of the mean speed theorem, as well as proofs for it. Together with his colleagues, the “Oxford Calculators” of Merton College, Bradwardine opened the door to the use of exponential calculations in physics.

But not only did the Middle Ages make modern mathematics and physics possible, it also was foundational for the social sciences.

Thomist concepts, crystalized by scholastics in the High Middle Ages, allowed later thinkers, like Juan de Mariana, to precisely formulate questions about economics and political science, and to articulate answers to those questions.

“The prehistory,” writes Historian Jesús Huerta de Soto,

of economics can be found in the works of the Spanish scholastics written in what is known as the "Spanish Golden Century," which ran from the mid-sixteenth century through the seventeenth century.

The work of these post-medieval thinkers, ushering in the era, not only of modern political science and economics, but also of Lockean notions of liberty, was made possible by the Aristotelian and Thomist conceptual framework of previous centuries. “Who were these Spanish intellectual forerunners,” asks Jesús Huerta de Soto,

of economics? Most of them were scholastics teaching morals and theology at the University of Salamanca, in the medieval Spanish city located 150 miles northwest of Madrid, close to the border of Spain with Portugal.

Juan de Mariana studied and lectured on the texts of Thomas Aquinas, and authored detailed history books. He thus combined both an abstract conceptual framework with the concrete and specific content which would inhabit that framework.

These scholastics, mainly Dominicans and Jesuits, articulated the subjectivist, dynamic, and libertarian tradition on which, two-hundred-and-fifty years later, Carl Menger and his followers would place so much importance. Perhaps the most libertarian of all the scholastics, particularly in his later works, was the Jesuit Father Juan de Mariana.

Nearly a century before John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Juan de Mariana articulated concepts which are now widely viewed as Lockean. Even as Bradwardine may deserve credit for discoveries assigned to Galileo, so Juan de Mariana may deserve credit for notions of political liberty assigned to Locke.

Before Locke?

Nearly a century before John Locke articulated the principles which have become associated with his name, and which have made possible modern civilization, a Spanish scholastic named Juan de Mariana seems to have anticipated Locke and given relatively precise expression of those same principles.

The view that the legitimacy of a government is based on the consent of the governed is a view now associated with Locke. Yet, as historian Jesús Huerta de Soto notes, this Spanish scholastic, enjoying the freedom of thought which Spain experienced after the occupying Muslim armies were repelled from the area in 1492, expresses Lockean ideas at a time long prior to Locke:

Although Father Mariana wrote many books, the first one with a libertarian content was De rege et regis institutione (On the king and the royal institution), published in 1598, in which he set forth his famous defense of tyrannicide. According to Mariana, any individual citizen can justly assassinate a king who imposes taxes without the consent of the people, seizes the property of individuals and squanders it, or prevents a meeting of a democratic parliament. The doctrines contained in this book were apparently used to justify the assassination of the French tyrant kings Henry III and Henry IV, and the book was burned in Paris by the executioner as a result of a decree issued by the Parliament of Paris on July 4, 1610.

The logic of Juan de Mariana clearly antedates and foreshadows Locke, who in turn influenced the Declaration of Independence. Could it be that the “Spirit of ‘76” owes as much, or more, to a Spanish late scholastic than to an middle-class English political philosopher?

Charles the Hammer: the Carolingians Save Gaul

The decade of the 750s marked a turning point in history. Between 751 and 754, the Merovingian dynasty came to an end.

Centuries earlier, the family had brought an end to the chaotic condition of Gaul, which arose when the Romans withdrew from the region, leaving a power vacuum in their wake. The Merovingians were Franks, meaning they came originally from Franconia, an area in what is now northern Bavaria.

After the collapse of the Roman domestic administration, and after realizing that the native inhabitants of Gaul were unable to institute a functioning government, a number of Frankish noble families migrated westward into to the area and created an internal structure for the region.

Gaul would eventually be renamed ‘France’ because the Franks had built the civilization there.

Childeric I officially became king of this territory around 457 A.D., and his son Clovis I succeeded him on the throne in 481. Thus began the Merovingian dynasty.

In addition to stabilizing a governmental structure, the Merovingians had a powerful cultural influence. By introducing the ideas of Jesus, they brought an end in the region to the practice of human sacrifice. They began minting the territory’s own coins, rather than relying on a mixture of coins from neighboring or defunct governments. They codified and organized the legal system.

Many of the ordinary inhabitants spoke a native Gaulish or Celtic dialect, or a version of Roman Latin. The nobility and educated classes spoke Frankish.

How, then, did this Merovingian dynasty, which began so auspiciously, collapse three centuries later?

As the throne was handed down from generation to generation, the Merovingian kings began to rely more and more on the major domo, the “mayor of the palace” or the highest official of the household, to coordinate the routine operations of the kingdom.

The major domo was the chief steward and managed the kingdom for the king. As generations passed, this individual did practically all the work of the kings; the Merovingian monarchs did less and less, until they became the idle rich and did nearly nothing. While they held the office of the king, another family, the Carolingians, occupied the role of major domo generation after generation.

Eventually, the Carolingians ruled the region and controlled the Frankish kingdom. They did everything except possess the title of king.

So those who were called kings did none of the real work of a king, while those who were not called kings did all the work of a king.

This situation came to its extreme in the case of Charles the Hammer.

In 711 A.D., Islamic armies invaded and occupied Spain. They destroyed, equally, Jewish synagogues and Christian churches. The Spanish women were raped, the children sold into slavery, and many of the men executed. The Spaniards who remained in the region under the rule of the occupying Muslim armies were subjected to strict and humiliating rules.

On the other side of the Pyrenees, the mountain range which separates Spain from France, the inhabitants of the Frankish kingdom heard reports of how the Islamic armies ruthlessly subjugated Spain. It was, then, with terror that the Franks learned that a massive army of Muslims was marching over the Pyrenees with the intent of invading and occupying France.

True to form, the Merovingian rulers were useless, and could organize no defense of Gaul. The major domo at that time was, however, a man known as Charles “the Hammer” Martel. The year was 732 A.D.

Charles Martel organized Frankish troops. With brilliant tactics, he was able to repel the Islamic invasion force, even though it outnumbered by the Franks by several thousand. Charles the Hammer became the hero not only of Gaul, but of all of central Europe and the British isles.

What had already been known was now more obvious: the Merovingians did nothing to merit retaining the title of king, and the Carolingians were, and had for some time been, the actual kings, even if they lacked that title.

Charles the Hammer had a son named Pepin the Short. After Charles died 741 A.D., Pepin began to agitate for the Carolingians to be recognized as the actual dynasty of the Franks. Historian Thomas Woods writes:

The Carolingians had profited from the decline of the Merovingians. They held what eventually became the hereditary position of mayor of the palace, similar to the role of prime minister. Far more skilled and sophisticated than the kings themselves, the Carolingian mayors of the palace performed more and more of the day-to-day governance of the kingdom of the Franks. By the mid-eighth century, the Carolingians, increasingly in possession of the power exercised by kings, sought to acquire the title of king. Pepin the Short, the mayor of the palace in 751, wrote to Pope Zachary I to inquire whether it was good that a man with no power was called king, while a man with power was deprived of that title. The pope, understanding full well what Pepin was driving at, replied that that was not a good situation, and that the names of things should correspond to reality. Thus did the pope, on the basis of his acknowledged spiritual authority, give his blessing to a change of dynasty in the kingdom of the Franks. The last Merovingian king quietly retired to a monastery.

An examination of the events surrounding the Merovingians and the Carolingians brings linguistic trends to light. The leaders spoke in Frankish, but rarely wrote in that language. The Gauls spoke in either Celtic or the decayed Latin which would become French, but also wrote little in that language. Much, even most, of the writing was done in Latin, which was also still sometimes spoken, but which was also beginning to give way to the vernacular.

The name Clovis, for example, is a Latinized rendering of the Frankish name Chlodowig or Chlodowech. This Frankish name, in turn, is rendered into French and English as Louis (or Lewis), and also became Ludwig in modern German.

Charles the Hammer was known in Latin as Carolus and in Frankish as Karl; his grandson, Charles the Great, is often known by his Latinized name, Charlemagne, and during his own lifetime was known as Karl der Große.

These names show us the historical development of nations: modern-day France still bears the name of the Germanic Franks who stepped in to preserve civilization in the wake of the Roman Empire’s collapse.

The Eleventh Century - Good News, Bad News

Central European cities like Speyer, Aachen, Bamberg, and Goslar contain evidence of the Middle Ages. Significant pieces of architecture are silent witnesses to events of a thousand years ago.

Historians distinguish the early Middle Ages, beginning around 500 A.D and lasting until around 1000 A.D., to the high Middle Ages. But such distinctions are at best vague and ambiguous, and should not be taken too seriously.

The eleventh century (1000 A.D. to 1099 A.D.) was a significant time, because it began with the turn of the millennium. Just as “Y2K” attracted large-scale public attention as the year 1999 drew to a close, the year 1000 was celebrated.

The century began with Islamic attacks on various parts of Europe: Muslims soldiers had occupied Spain for over 200 years, and in 1011, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Islamic invasion of Spain, they organize a pogrom in Cordoba, killing large numbers of Jews: peaceful and innocent men, women, and children.

Another pogrom was conducted in Grenada in 1066, and coastal raids by Muslim ships continued to attack various coastal towns in Italy and southern France. Islam threatened Europe’s security.

In response, military expeditions were directed to the source of this military aggression: the Muslim lands of the Middle East. Largely unsuccessful, these missions managed to achieve, at best, a mere pause in the Muslim attacks on Europe. These campaigns were called the ‘Crusades’ and are still staple in the both history classes and romantic fiction.

The First Crusade was planned in 1095 and began in 1096. 330,000 people set out for Jerusalem, but only 40,000 arrived there. They were not prepared for the military skill of the Islamic armies.

In central Europe, away from the Mediterranean coast which took the brunt of the attacks, life was more peaceful. Culture and civilization could flourish. Brilliant thinkers like Hildegard of Bingen could work on projects as diverse as musical compositions and the chemistry of medicinal herbs.

Cloisters and monasteries were home to intellectual development. Housing the philosophical texts of the past, from the Greco-Roman heritage of significant thinkers, they were the incubators of the intellectual future, laying the foundations of what would become modern mathematics, chemistry, and physics.

Life in the eleventh century was difficult. The average lifespan was 35 years. But the numbers mislead: the average life expectancy was much older. If a person survived childhood, she or he had a reasonable chance of living past the age of 50.

Schools were continuously improving. The educational momentum had started two centuries earlier with emperor Karl the Great - known as ‘Charlemagne’ - and had continued during the reigns of Heinrich I (ruled 919 A.D. to 936 A.D.) and Otto the Great (ruled 962 A.D. to 973 A.D.).

Literacy was on the rise, students learned Latin grammar, and literature became major occupation.

The word ‘Germany’ was not often used at that time to denote what we think of as the country of Germany. There were many small independent Germanic kingdoms, held together by the emperor in a defensive coalition called the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ (which wasn’t holy, and wasn’t Roman).

The empire also included a few kingdoms which weren’t Germanic. So the word ‘German’ referred more to culture and language than to a unified political nation. The empire was Germanic, the emperors were almost all Germans, but non-Germanic kingdoms were included.

People would have thought of themselves as Saxons or Hessians or Prussians or Franconians - all regions within the boundaries of modern Germany. They rarely thought of themselves as Germans.

Six Germans became pope between 996 A.D. and 1085 A.D., which is significant because the popes not only had religious importance, but also contributed to cultural and political trends.

The German emperors had influence not only in Germanic regions, but also inside France and Italy. The eleventh century was a high point in cultural development and civilization.

One man who might be a good symbol for this era is Heinrich III - in many history books known as ‘Henry III’ - who began his career as a highly educated Germanic king. Historian Hanns Leo Mikoletzky writes:

Henry was the son of the emperor Conrad II and Gisela of Swabia. He was more thoroughly trained for his office than almost any other crown prince before or after. With the emperor’s approval, Gisela had taken charge of his upbringing, and she saw to it that he was educated by a number of tutors and acquired an interest in literature.

An emperor who promoted the intellectual work of the universities, and a spiritual man who valued prayer and peace, his reign began in 1039 with every prospect of being a cultural high point in European history - and in some ways, it was. But by the time he died in 1056, the empire was weakened. His would be the last strong reign for many decades.

The eleventh century was a high point, but it also marked the beginning of a time when Europe languished without the help of Frankish or Saxon ruler.

Inventing the University

Prior to the appearance of the university as we now know it, there were centuries and even millennia of educational institutions. Formalized, institutionalized, and structured schools have been found by archeologists in, e.g., the city of Ur dating from around 2000 B.C.

But the university did not arise until around 1088 A.D. - three thousand years later. What was the difference between a university and the schools which had existed up to that point? Historian Thomas E. Woods explains:

In order to identify a particular medieval school as a university, we look for certain characteristic features. A university possessed a core of required texts, on which professors would lecture while adding their own insights. A university was also characterized by well-defined academic programs lasting a more or less fixed number of years, as well as by the granting of degrees. The granting of a degree, since it entitled the recipient to be called master, amounted to admitting new people to the teaching guild, just as a master craftsman was admitted to the guild of his own profession. Although the universities often struggled with outside authorities for self-government, they generally attained it, as well as legal recognition as corporations.

Thus it was that, while there were many schools which were centuries older than the universities, it was not until Bologna’s school emerged as the first clear university in 1088 A.D. that the conceptual difference became clear. It is probable that Bologna was functioning as a university some time prior to 1088, but the documentation is scant, and the very notion of the university hadn’t been precisely articulated yet.

There are many schools which predate Bologna’s university, some of which contend that they should be recognized ahead of Bologna. But the school of al-Qarawiyyin in Morocco, although it expanded beyond being a mere madrasa, was not a university until long after Bologna’s emergence. Located in the city of Fes, this school is also transliterated as ‘al-Karaouine’ or ‘al-Karueein’ and it was not until centuries after Bologna’s founding that al-Qarawiyyin added certain essential curricula such as mathematics or languages. Although some writers want to claim Morocco as the home of the world’s first university, such assertions lack any evidence, given the definition of university.

One fundamental aspect of the university was that it took the trivium and the quadrivium as foundational and essential, but not as limiting. The trivium consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The quadrivium included arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

Not to be left out of the competition, the Byzantine Empire asserts that its Magnaura University is a couple of centuries older than Bologna. In fact, however, the narrative of the Magnaura has been conflated with the University of Constantinople. While both institutions were admirable centers of learning, the Magnaura, founded around 855 A.D., was a palace school, and lacked the breadth and structure to be a university. The “University of Constantinople” was founded in 425 A.D. as a school, not a university, and lacked the structure and degree-granting privileges of a university until much later in its history.

The al-Azhar University, in Egypt, certainly predates Bologna, but as a strictly Sunni institution, its intellectual explorations were limited, and only centuries after its founding around 972 A.D. did it add the full range of faculties found in a university.

Another defining characteristic of a university is debate. Exemplified by in Paris in the 1200s and in Erfurt in the 1400s, the original form of this academic exercise require a student to prepare and present argumentation to support a thesis chosen by the professors, and then required the student to organize and deliver argumentation against the same thesis - a good student was expected to deliver plausible and persuasive arguments for and against any randomly chosen proposition.

By contrast, schools like Iran’s Nizamiyya, founded around 1065 A.D., while offering a range of subjects, lacked intellectual independence of a true university.

The seven subjects of the trivium and quadrivium were called ‘the liberal arts’ long before the university appeared in 1088. They were so called because they were the skills a citizen would need to be part of public life. During the era of the Roman Republic, ending around 27 B.C., citizens had opportunities to vote and speak publicly on political matters. The “liberal arts” ensured that their their balloting and opinions were informed and well articulated.

From this ancient Roman heritage, the university inherited some amount of civic awareness, and a mission to inform those who would take part in the public life.

Thomas Woods explains how, while the university received parts of its form and parts of its content from Greco-Roman Classicism, it represented simultaneously something new:

The university was an utterly new phenomenon in European history. Nothing like had existed in ancient Greece or Rome. The institution the we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study, examinations, and degrees, as well as the distinction between undergraduate and graduate study, comes to us directly from the medieval world. The Church developed the university system because, according to historian Lowrie Daly, it was “the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge.”

The universities existed on the border of independence and dependence. While self-governing, and recognized as legal corporations, they sometimes needed external support, which came either from local nobility or from the church. With such support came, occasionally, the intimation that the university should honor its patrons by respecting them in lectures: a nod to the local duke or earl or baron, or a kind word about the church.

Yet the universities largely retained their intellectual independence. Bologna, during its first centuries, was explicit that it was run by laymen, not ordained church officials. This left the universities free to examine sacred texts as they saw fit.

Such intellectual exploration was the impetus for the invention of the university. After all, palace schools and cathedral schools and monasteries were educating enough people in the basics of mathematics and writing. But the desire for academic investigation of text drove people to design the university. The addition of professional schools - e.g., law and medicine - would come later.

Thomas Woods describes the gradual emergence of the universities.

We cannot give exact dates for the appearance of universities at Paris and Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge, since they evolved over a period of time - the former beginning as cathedral schools and the latter as informal gatherings of masters and students. But we may safely say that they began taking form during the latter half of the twelfth century.

Such a desire for scholarly creativity in independent thought could not have been the driving force behind the original founding of al-Qarawiyyin 859 A.D. - it was clearly bound by Sunni sensibilities.

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the university was that it came into conflict with the church at different times and different places over its first few centuries.

Such conflicts - signs of intellectual independence - were based on scholarly study of text. Often, professors were more attuned to nuances in sacred scripture than church officials.

Gender and Society

Civilizations in different places and different times have created social structures around the concrete manifestations of gender. In various cultures, humans have organized diverse traditions around the same phenomenon.

The phenomenon of gender may be subdivided into several sub-phenomena, some of which are physical, and some of which are psychological.

First, each cell in the human body can be identified by gender. In every cell of man’s body, the genetic material is peculiarly male. In every cell of a woman’s body, each cell is clearly and exclusively female.

Second, bone structure is determined by gender. For this reason, paleoanthropologists can determine the gender of human remains given no more than a few bones from a skeleton. Given a fingerbone, an anklebone, and a rib, it is possible to discover the gender of the individual.

Third, brain structures are divided into male or female: given a brain, a neurologist can examine it and learn the gender of the individual from whom it came.

The three physical factors outlined above show us the raw data of gender: yet each culture or society will develop different structures around this common evidence.

Such concrete physical manifestations remain constant, consistent, and universal across time and space, from culture to culture, but the social constructs around them vary.

Alleged “gender reassignment” therapies and surgeries cannot change these specific gender manifestations. They are unavoidable.

Beyond physical data, there are psychological manifestations of gender.

Across all cultures, civilizations, and societies, it is a constant that men commit the majority of violent crimes - and not merely a majority, but an overwhelming majority.

Arson, assault, murder, kidnapping, and other manifestations of physical violence are clearly correlated with the male gender.

A second psychological trait of gender is a preference for certain learning styles. It is possible to offer a presentation tailored to favor one gender or the other.

For example, an algebra lesson can be designed so that it more effectively facilitates learning among girls, or among boys, or equally for both genders. An individual’s psychological style of learning is determined, in part, by her or his gender.

The task of the historian or anthropologist or sociologist is, then, to examine how different societies respond to the universal facts of gender, or how different cultures create very different institutions and traditions around the same phenomena.

Historical Romanticism - Romanticist History

While Romanticism is primarily introduced in schools as an artistic style in painting, poetry, and music, its political implications are also significant. What is a Romanticist political view?

One answer can be given in a single name: Rousseau. While Rousseau sought a sense of freedom, he based it on extreme subjectivism, arguing that science and art did more to harm morals than to strengthen them. He saw humans as born with a good nature, but corrupted by society.

To improve both humans and human society, then, Rousseau argued that we should free them from the formative influences of culture and tradition. That meant shielding them from a variety of influences, including disciplines as seemingly disparate as algebra and religion.

For Rousseau, however, those were not as different as they might seem: both were a discipline of the mind, requiring analytical thinking.

Knowing that his program would not be easily implemented, he warned that some people, not understanding what was truly good for them, might resist his reshaping of society. They would, he stated, need to be forced to be free.

Equally paradoxically, while demanding the end to establish institutional religion as it was known, Rousseau created his own religion, and argued that anyone who failed to embrace it should be put to death.

Rousseau’s militant irrationalism was eerily predictive of the massive bloodshed which would constitute the French Revolution.

In such a system, the individual was trammeled by a mass movement which was undertaken, ironically, for the cause of liberating the individual. Rousseau had no patience for economics, and was not interested in giving the kind of freedom which allowed the simple baker or tailor or carpenter to make goods in his workplace and sell them as he saw fit. Rousseau was interested in mass movements, and among Rousseau’s followers, this turned into visions of nations and ethnic groups. Allen Guelzo writes:

The bourgeoisie, therefore, was nothing more than what Goethe called “the gawping public.” What Rousseau hoped to be ruled by was a mysterious “general will” emerging from “the people” as a tribal mass, not by the checks and balances of individuals and their representatives. Nations, as culturally defined organisms rather than assemblies of free and equal citizens, became the object of Romantic ardor.

Rousseau, and the Romanticist politics he engendered, ignore or shun the concepts which had been carefully formulated by a previous generation of thinkers. Locke had crystalized notions like the legitimacy of a government being based upon the consent of the governed, and the idea of majority rule. Rousseau was not interested in a republic in which citizens could freely elect representatives.

Also rejected by Rousseau was any effort to analyze human nature, and from that understanding, to form a notion of how society might be structured, given that humans are what they are. Rousseau seems to reject the notion that “being human” has any clear meaning or definition, and seems rather to think that it can be or mean whatever he wants. Allen Guelzo continues:

Authoritarian notions of society and polities built on Blut und Eisen feed their souls on a Romantic rejection of democratic universalism and natural law. In that sense, Romanticism’s darkest legacy is the one that stained the 20th century with fascism and socialism.

Sadly, those very concepts which Rousseau rejects are the ones which place a limit on the power and authority of government. While Rousseau thought he was building a future with some type of freedom, he was in fact paving the way for tyrannies and dictatorships.

Defining Romanticism

A dutiful student will hopefully develop some intuitive understanding of Romanticism as exemplified in poetry by Goethe, Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, and as exemplified in music by Beethoven and Wagner, and as exemplified in the visual arts by Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner, and Eugene Delacroix.

Yet this same student might be forgiven for being confused if told about Romantic Astronomy, Romantic Chemistry, Romantic History, Romantic Linguistics, or Romantic Politics.

Romanticism is more than an artistic style for painting, music, and poetry. In fact, Romanticism had a major impact on political revolutions and on the science of historical linguistics. But what exactly is Romanticism?

Both Romanticism and its intellectual grandchild, post-modernism, can be characterized as the privileging of emotion over reason. While that characterization is helpful, it is also merely the beginning of an exploration of how one might construct a reasonably useful and accurate definition of the word ‘Romanticism’ - as Professor Allen Guelzo of Gettysburg College writes,

In 1836, Alfred de Musset created two fictional blockheads, Dupuis and Cotonet, and allowed them to make themselves ridiculous in the pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes, trying to define “Romanticism.” At first, they “thought that romanticism meant imitating the Germans.” Then, in 1830–31, they were sure it meant writing historical novels about “Charlemagne, Francis I, or Henry IV.” Then it occurred to them that “romanticism might be a system of philosophy and political economy.” But on further reflection, it seemed more likely to have “consisted in not shaving, and in wearing waistcoats with long, stiffly starched lapels.” In despair, they finally wondered, “Is it anything, or is it only a fine-sounding word?”

The poem Erlkönig, written by Goethe in 1782, exemplifies a calmly calculated text designed to give the impression of an agitated spontaneous outpouring. Its strict form - rhyme and meter - are used in a way to suggest an emotional power which seeks to break the bonds of strict formalism. Thus Romanticism - for the Erlköig poem was paradigmatic for Romanticism - contains this internal tension within itself.

Historians influenced by Romanticism tended to produce narratives in which ambiguous individuals were recast as clear heroes or clear villains, and the power of the narrative was regarded as more important than its attention to actual data points of recorded events. Romanticist history texts are often suspiciously devoid of specifics.

Scientific linguistics, under the influence of Romanticism, saw itself not as simply cataloguing and analyzing the historical development of languages, but rather as somehow tapping into the essential nature of ethnic groups by revealing their roots and sources. Thus it was that when the Grimm brothers began to collect their famous tales, originally for the purpose of documenting regionalisms in the German language and for preserving the various forms which narratives took in different localities, their project slowly morphed into a one of Romantic nationalism. They, and others, began to see these tales as revealing a psychological core of the peoples of central Europe.

Romantic history and Romantic linguistics gave way to Romantic nationalism: history and linguistics were used to fuel a vision of what it meant to be “truly Polish” or “truly French” or to belong to any nation - a nation defined as an ethnic group. Romantic history gave a narrative to each nation.

Romantic nationalism in turn fuel revolutionary movements against monarchies. A grand shift took place: what gave identity to the state was not its hereditary dynasty, but collective identity of the nation. In Germany and Italy, this took the form of a question for unity, as dozens of small kingdoms and republic united to form modern nation-states.

In Russia, the Romantic nationalist drive took the form of Slavophilia, as the Russians looked less toward Europe and more to their own heritage for identity. In England, the citizens began to identify with the nation instead of with the monarchy. In France, a series of revolutions left citizens with no predictable political identity, but a culturally national one.

Although Romanticism’s impact on the observational and empirical sciences was not obvious, it was nonetheless significant. In contrast to Newtonian optics, Goethe’s theory of colors sought to show that the phenomena of color were internal to the human mind, not an external reality about wavelengths; this was an attempt to put a the physics of light on a subjective rather than an objective footing.

Likewise, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, exemplified the Romantic understanding of science; Shelley was not a scientist herself, but as a Romantic saw science as a “promethean” opportunity for man to exercise a grand control over nature. Allen Guelzo continues:

Defining Romanticism has not gotten any easier since 1836, but neither has our sense of its importance diminished. Isaiah Berlin thought Romanticism was “the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West”; Kenneth Clark believed that it introduced an entirely new sensibility into European art. But what it certainly was, at the very least, was a revolt against the Enlightenment — against the bourgeois capitalism the Enlightenment had turned into the stuff of heroism, against natural law and natural rights, and against the balance and predictability that Newtonian science had imparted to the 18th-century world. It clothed itself, as so many revolts do, in the costume of what it deemed an unjustly despised past — Hugo’s medieval Paris, Ossian’s epics, the Grimm brothers’ German fairy tales — but its real grasp was for the future, a future that would glorify the politics of race and blood, the philosophy of Dionysian passion, and the aesthetic of the mysterious.

The effects of Romanticism are clearly seen in the twenty-first century: in, for example, what is variously called ‘the politics of identity’ or ‘identity politics’ (notice how many times the word ‘identity’ appeared in some of the paragraphs above). This is the notion that one votes, or should vote, based primarily upon one’s identity as old or young, as African-American or Asian-American, as male or female, as English-speaker or Spanish-speaker, and not based upon those things which are common to all humans, not based upon reasoning about the universal human condition and human nature.

In the religious trends of North America and Europe in the twenty-first century we also detect the impact of Romanticism, in the form of postmodernism, as people do not base their religious understanding on the formulated statements of religious institutions, nor on the careful analysis of text. Rather, they base their religious feelings, not understandings, on experiences and emotions. So it is to the postmodern individual that a question like “are you Presbyterian or Methodist?” has become both meaningless and uninteresting.

Romanticism - whatever it was - has had a lasting impact on civilization. It paved the way for Hitler’s National Socialism (note the ‘national’) and gave permission to postmodern man to ignore reason and follow his passion.

It would be too simple to call Romanticism good or evil. It gave us both Beethoven and Dachau. It gave us Mary Shelley and politicized racism. Whatever it is, it’s important.

The Essence of Western Civilization

Naming civilizations is a complex task. If we use the term 'European culture', we must immediately point out that the roots of the civilization are found in the Ancient Near East, and its modern domain includes the Americans, Australia, and is spreading into parts of Asia and Africa.

If we use the term 'Western Civilization', we note that there is nothing on the compass which indicates societal trends: Senegal is west of Portugal, but it is not more "western" than Portugal. The term probably arose when Europe saw itself as the western end of the known world, and saw China as the eastern end. Even if we ignore that the Americas would be found further west, and that Japan was further east, the geographical designation, while handy and, at least at that point in time, intuitive, is not to be taken literally.

Finally, the term 'Judeo-Christian tradition', while accurately identifying the source of much of Western Civilization's values and world views, ignores the fact that now Hindus and Sikhs, atheists and Buddhists, and followers of many other belief systems are now part of this Judeo-Christian tradition. The prophet Muhammad consciously and deliberately placed himself and his ideas among the outgrowths of this tradition.

While these names for civilization have the defects noted, they have been and probably will continue to be in widespread use in textbooks and classrooms. A more accurate name would reflect the two key features of Western Civilization: its discovery of, and emphasis on, the individual - and its discovery of, and emphasis on, freedom.

French scholar Jacques Ellul examines this notion of personal liberty:

Let me return to my main argument. It was the West that established the splendid interplay of freedom, reason, self-control, and coherent behavior. It thus produced a type of human being that is unique in history, true western man. (I repeat: the type belongs neither to nature nor to the animal world; it is a deliberate construct achieved through effort.) I am bound to say that I regard this type as superior to anything I have seen or known elsewhere. A value judgment, a personal and subjective preference? Of course. But I am not ready on that account to turn my back on the construction and on the victory and affirmation it represents. Why? Because the issue is freedom itself, and because I see no other satisfactory model that can replace what the West has produced.

Perhaps a concrete example of Ellul's formulation would be George Washington. While exerting himself maximally to obtain a degree of freedom previously unknown in world history, he imposed upon himself a moral and behavioral code more rigorous than the personal codes of those against whom he fought. Freedom does not, in Ellul's framework, imply anarchy. Quite the opposite: in order to retain liberty, individuals and societies must exhibit reason, self-control, and coherent behavior.

One peculiarly human feature which distinguishes us from plants and animals is the ability to say 'no' to one's self: the habit of identifying a desire or drive or impulse and then denying it. Self-control, or self-denial, is an essential ingredient for political liberty. Those who use liberty as an excuse for license will lose that liberty. Societies will eventually invite authoritarianism, even at the cost of society's liberties, to quell anarchy.

While such self-control is required for enduring liberty, it is also a feature which aspiring despots seek to exploit. Tyrants attempt, and sometimes succeed, in persuading citizens that this virtue of self-denial should be extended beyond what is actually necessary to maintain liberty. Samuel Adams wrote insightfully:

Subordination is necessary to promote the purposes of government; the grand design of which is, that men might enjoy a greater share of the blessings resulting from that social nature, and those rational powers, with which indulgent Heaven has endow’d us, than they could in the state of nature: But there is a degree of subordination, which will for ever be abhorrent to the generous mind; when it is extended to the very borders, if not within the bounds of slavery: A subordination, which is so far from conducing “to the welfare and happiness of the whole”, that it necessarily involves the idea of that worst of all the evils of this life, a tyranny: An abject servility, which instead of “being essential to our existence as a people,“ disgraces the human nature, and sinks it to that of the most despicable brute.

Thus it is that, when despotic governments seek to regulate and tax, they are not only reducing or ultimately eliminating liberty; they are striking at the very foundations of civilization itself.

Being Poor: Poverty and Society

Comparing societies around the world and throughout time, a number of distinctions emerge. One of them is this: in some societies, wealth and poverty are viewed as permanent conditions. In such societies, it is assumed that people who are poor will always be poor, and people who are rich will always be rich. Similarly, the wealthy in such societies accumulate influence, power, control, and alleged authority, forming plutocracies. Hence the proverb, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."

But in other types of societies, the permanency and inevitability of one's social class has been dismantled. The possibility of a transition from poverty to wealth, or from affluence to impoverishment, exists in principle for each individual. The concept of social mobility frees humans from a sense of irrevocable fate, even as it introduces a sense of risk for those who possess material wealth.

Paradoxically, in exactly those societies in which the poor have a chance at escaping poverty, there is a heightened awareness of social class. In societies with the possibility of social mobility, one is more aware of one's status as rich or poor, precisely because it is variable, and because one must take care about it. By contrast, in those societies which view poverty or wealth as an inevitable lot, the poor and the wealthy take their situations for granted and are less aware of them.

This can be seen to some extent in the comparison of Moses and Hammurabi. The Babylonian king Hammurabi presided over a society which was largely fixed: those born into the upper class would remain there, and those born into the lower class could not even conceptualize that their condition could ever change. Yet Moses represents a different worldview: a conceptual framework in which slaves could escape slavery, form their own society, and live as autonomous and free in their own land.

French scholar Jacques Ellul notes a corresponding difference in concepts of deity: a distant god who irrevocably assigns humans to their fates, or a God who creates humans with the ability to make meaningful and consequential choices about their lives:

Similarly, and as part of the same process, the West brought about the division of societies and the world into rich and poor. Please note, however: I am not saying that there had not been rich and poor earlier and in other parts of the world. The point is, rather, that everything used to be so organized that wealth and poverty were stable states, determined (for example) by the traditional, accepted hierarchy, and that this arrangement was regarded as due to destiny or an unchangeable divine will. The West did two things: it destroyed the hierarchic structures and it did away with the idea of destiny. It thus showed the poor that their state was not something inevitable. This is something Marx is often credited with having done, but only because people are ignorant. It was Christianity that did away with the idea of destiny and fate.

Ellul further notes that there is a detectable difference in history between those who merely use the word 'Christian' to cloak their own selfish desires with the mantle of respectability, and those on the other hand who sincerely engage in the concepts taught by Jesus. In blunt terms, 'fake' Christianity has been used to justify efforts to keep the poor 'in their place,' while true followers of Jesus have been about the work of helping the oppressed find escape from their misery.

Doubtless there have been Christians who used the notion of "God's will" to determine the order of the world and the distribution of wealth and wretchedness. But that is a deviation from true Christian thought (as Stalin was a deviation from Marx), and in any event it could not suppress the self-assertion of freedom itself. Marx made the Christian line of thought his own and reasserted the authentic message; he is unthinkable without the Christian infrastructure. He is utterly representative of the West in everything he wrote.

In addition to highlighting Marx's Christian antecedents, Ellul points out that the entire spectrum of different types of revolutions are founded on the assertion, by Jesus, that humans were not governed by arbitrary fortune. There is irony in the fact that many of these revolutions, some successful and some not, cast themselves as explicitly anti-Christian, while operating in fact on premises articulated by Jesus.

Once Christianity had destroyed the idea of destiny or fate, the poor realized that they were poor, and they realized that their condition was not inevitable. Then the social organisms that had made it possible to gloss over this fact were challenged and undermined from within.

This notion of a revolution, which has brought benefits to people when well-executed and brought misery to them when poorly conceived, is a product of Western Civilization. Through a long train of events, the Hebrews conceptualized freedom as no other society had previously done, the Greeks systematized such freedom and designed societal institutions to realize it, the Romans actualized and put those institutions into practice, and European culture developed a worldview and artistic traditions to ensconce this notion of freedom.

To be sure, all of this was done impurely. As James Madison noted, men are not angels. European culture has been guilty of exploitation. Yet it was the only culture to articulate liberty. Thus any critique directed at European culture is a critique based on European values. If we point out that Western Civilization has been at times unjust, it is only by a Western standard of justice that this claim makes sense. Ellul writes:

Against all this background we can see why the whole idea of revolution is a western idea. Before the development of western thought, and apart from it, no revolution ever took place. Without the individual and freedom and the contradictory extremes to which freedom leads, a society cannot engender a revolution. Nowhere in the world — and I speak as one with a knowledge of history — has there ever been a revolution, not even in China, until the western message penetrated that part of the world. Present-day revolutions, whether in China or among the American Indians, are the direct, immediate, unmistakable fruit of the western genius. The entire world has been pupil to the West that it now rejects.

When the charge is leveled, that in some instance, representatives of Western Civilization were guilty of torture, all are outraged, and none more so than the inhabitants of Western Civilization. Those in other civilizations are less surprised when any hierarchy - East or West - uses torture. In fact, in those civilizations, torture is blithely assumed to be one of the proper tools a government may use when carrying out justice.

Only those exposed to, and influenced by, Western Civilization are outraged at torture. Any critique of the West, based on the fact that in some instances, representatives of the West may have used torture, is a critique which can be carried out only by accepting the values of the West.

The same is true if the West is criticized because it, in some cases, may have failed to offer freedom of speech or political liberty. Such critiques, true as they are, are based only on values found exclusively and solely in the West.

The Peculiar Values of the West

What are we studying, when we study human civilization? Although seemingly simple, this question eludes easy answers. If we speak of Western Civilization, we note first that the earth is a sphere, and any one point on a parallel - on a line of longitude - is to the east and to the west of every other point on that line; both Senegal and Sierra Leone are to the west of Spain, Portugal, and the rest of continental Europe; Africa is to the west of Australia. There is certainly nothing a priori about the direction west on the magnetic compass that gives it cultural or societal priority over the other three.

If, instead, we speak of the European Culture, we encounter similar difficulties in analyzing this definition. The roots of such culture lie outside of Europe - neither Moses nor Hammurabi, neither Jesus nor Cyrus ever set foot in Europe. Even the initial sparks of intellectual brilliance which we associate with the archaic Greeks were often located outside of Europe - Homer, Thales, and a handful of pre-Socratic philosophers lived in Asia Minor, not in Europe. In the twenty-first century, we find this culture's peculiar values - the value of each human life, personal freedom and individual liberty, due process, etc. - all around the globe. The Americas, Australia, parts of Asia and Africa - it is not limited to Europe.

A third attempt at defining civilization's progress is to use the phrase "Judeo-Christian tradition," which is as problematic as the first two. The characteristic values of this tradition, which have significant elements in common with European Culture's values, are however now embraced by a wide range of people who are neither Jews nor Christians. A diverse spectrum of people now embrace these values: people with other religions like Hindus and Buddhists, people with no religion like atheists and agnostics, and people with unusual religions like Unitarians and Scientology followers.

Whatever we call it, and however we define it, this Western Civilization has introduced its peculiar values to the rest of the world - values which dictate that every person is entitled to humane treatment, even in prison; that a society should work to ensure personal freedom and individual liberty for each citizen; that every human life is valuable, precious, and should be respected and its dignity acknowledged. Ironically, Western Civilization has spread these values, at times, by violating them.

It was precisely because India had been dominated by the British that Gandhi learned to see such domination as wrong. While committing sins against the Indians, the British had also exposed them to a great train of thought - from the Magna Carta of 1215 to the Bill of Rights of 1689 to Wilberforce's principled abolitionism in the early 1800's. Gandhi accused the English of violating their own principles in their treatment of the Indians - he did not accuse them of violating Indian principles. Indeed, prior to the arrival of the British, and of the Portuguese before them, the Indians had been treated worse at the hands of their own leaders and thought nothing of it.

The native inhabitants of South Africa learned their slogans - "home rule" and "majority rule" and "integration" - from their uninvited European colonizers. Their desire for freedom, and their expression of such desire, was learned from the very powers which violated their freedoms. Anti-colonialism, the force directing itself against the West, is a product of the West. Jacques Ellul writes:

This is a point we must be quite clear on. If the world is everywhere rising up and accusing the West, if movements of liberation are everywhere under way, what accounts for this? Its sole source is the proclamation of freedom that the West has broadcast to the world. The West, and the West alone is responsible for the movement that has led to the desire for freedom and to the accusations now turned back upon the West.

Consider the outrage which emerges when it is suggested that an American soldier has in some way violated the rights of a citizen - whether a citizen of the United States or of any other nation. Among the most diverse political gatherings, consensus quickly emerges: an American soldier should never humiliate or maltreat anyone. We need not here get sidetracked into a detailed discussion of the precise definition of 'torture' - by unanimous consent, Americans, civilian or military, should not commit even less severe forms of abuse.

But this outrage is peculiar to Western Civilization. In other parts of the world, torture is not only permitted, it is positively demanded by law and custom. Public torture is considered, in parts of Asia and Africa, to be an appropriate part of legal justice. While Europeans are shocked, appalled, dismayed, ashamed, etc., at discovering that one of their own might be guilty of committing torture, other civilizations are not shocked: torture is expected among them. Americans are shocked if there are unproven rumors of torture at Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib. No resident of the Middle East is shocked to learn that governments there routinely flog, beat, or brand their prisoners; no pretense is made of hiding or denying such activities - indeed, they are advertised as part of the justice system there.

Today men point the finger of outrage at slavery and torture. Where did that kind of indignation originate? What civilization or culture cried out that slavery was unacceptable and torture scandalous? Not Islam, or Buddhism, or Confucius, or Zen, or the religions and moral codes of Africa and India! The West alone has defended the inalienable rights of the human person, the dignity of the individual, the man who is alone with everyone against him. But the West did not practice what it preached? The extent of the West's fidelity is indeed debatable: the whole European world has certainly not lived up to its own ideal all the time, but to say that it has never lived up to it would be completely false.

There is deeper significance to the oft-told tale of Marco Polo's meeting Kublai Khan than merely entertaining children with an odd scrap of world history. Polo's arrival in China, around 1275, was an intersection of individualism and collectivism. The Italian explorer marveled at the Chinese culture, and the Chinese probably marveled at him, not merely because of strange clothing, language, food, or customs. Polo came from a culture which acknowledged and validated the individual and the individual's freedom. To be sure, the West's acknowledgement was then, and is not, not perfect, but it was an identifiable principle which was unfamiliar to the east Asians.

It is this confirmation of individuality, and the equal value of each individual as a member of the human race, which motivates the opposition to torture. Only a society which clearly conceptualizes the individual as such can see torture as a violation of the individual. If the collective whole is seen as an undifferentiated mass of humanity, then any one thread in that cloth can be treated arbitrarily without hesitation. If individuals are merely the indistinguishable atoms of a social body, each can be treated capriciously without remorse.

In any case, that is not the point. The point is that the West originated values and goals that spread throughout the world (partly through conquest) and inspired man to demand his freedom, to take his stand in the face of society and affirm his value as an individual. I shall not be presumptuous enough to try to "define" the freedom of the individual. But there is no need that I should: we know well enough, without verbalizing it or defining it, what that freedom means. Look at the way societies have developed. We can legitimately say that all of them have moved from monolithic structures toward more flexible ones in which old bonds are broken; from a stage in which individuals are not distinguished from one another toward true individuation of the members; from an "original community" toward a sum-total of distinct and separated men and women; from a complete absence of freedom and independence toward a progressive assertion of this freedom and an affirmation of the self that brings with it an exigency for liberty and independence.

Western Civilization has, in fact, earn rebukes from other cultures; it has at times sinned against them and violated their rights. But Western Civilization taught the world how to deliver such rebukes - it taught the vocabulary of rights and freedoms, of the dignity of each individual human life. The rest of the world did not have the conceptual apparatus to critique the West until the West enunciated principles of liberty and individualism. While the West is not xenophobic, it did, however, originate the practice of self-critique.

This characterization of the West is significant in the light of educational trends at the end of the twentieth century, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century: a large number of schools, colleges, and university have conformed, or have been conformed, to a programmatic defamation of Western Civilization. Students are taught to be dismissive of the cultural products of the West. If they are taught about the literature and history of West, it is only in the form of a critique.

Admittedly, the West is not perfect. But whatever crimes it may have committed, it is also true that it generated within itself a series of concepts - liberty, rights, freedom, individuality - and formulated these concepts clearly. Distinguished by these concepts, the West shared them with the rest of the world. Sometimes it transmitted these values accidentally, or even in the course of committing oppressions, but it is nonetheless the source of these singular societal principles. To be dismissive of Western Civilization is to be dismissive of human dignity. To critique the West for its sins - a critique which it deserves - is to embrace and use the principles of the West.

Western Civilization, Love It or Hate It

Since perhaps the middle of the twentieth century, Western Civilization has been controversial. Since long before that, the term has been somewhat ambiguous: 'western' is a geographical denotation, but also a relative one. Given that Dakar, and all of Senegal, is west of Portugal, it is not clear that Western Civilization is in the west. Given that Jerusalem, Babylon, and all of Mesopotamia is east of Europe, it is not clear how these cradles of Western Civilization are in any sense in the West.

It is equally problematic to refer to this heritage as 'European culture' or the 'Judeo-Christian tradition' - it is certainly not limited to Europe, as it is found in North and South America and in Australia; it does not find its origin in Europe, as neither Hammurabi nor Moses, neither Jesus nor Cyrus ever set foot in Europe. While this heritage finds its roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is also the case that many deists, agnostics, and atheists have embraced the values of this heritage, as have adherents to belief systems like scientology and other lesser-known sects and religions.

However ambiguous its name may be, there is no ambiguity about the hatred directed toward it. It has become not only fashionable, but in some situations required, to speak dismissively of the West: students are encouraged to study literature by ignoring Shakespeare and Chaucer and praising Frantz Fanon. Michelangelo and Mozart, Bach and Dürer are ignored precisely because they were traditionally studied. Although the allegedly academic authorities who encourage this repudiation of the West are often ignorant of the cultures of Asia and Africa, they embrace the a priori assumption that such cultures are superior to the West simply because they are not the West.

Whether we label it irony, or label it merely self-contradiction, those whose hatred of the West is most vocal are also usually those who most loudly proclaim their adherence to the values which are peculiar to the western heritage. Wherever they are found in the world, movements such as the abolition of slavery or the legal equality of women trace their roots to the West.

When Moses revised Hammurabi's standards and proclaimed that it is equally wrong for a husband or a wife to commit adultery, and when he expressed the notion that slaves were humans with rights and that slavery should eventually come to an end, seeds were sown that grew in 1215 A.D., when the Magna Carta endorsed women's rights to self-determination, and in 1869, when women began voting in Wyoming, long before the nineteenth amendment was superfluously ratified. These seeds also grew when the abolitionist movement grew so strong in the mid-1700's in North America that the emancipation of slaves became inevitable.

The West is the unique source of individual liberty and personal freedom; that is its nature. That other cultures offer a critique of the West is the result of their having embraced the West's gift of critical thought. That academics in the West critique the West is the result of their embracing the West's gift of intellectual freedom. Much of this was expressed by the French thinker Jacques Ellul in his book The Betrayal of the West. He writes:

Let me repeat: I am not criticizing or rejecting other civilizations and societies; I have deep admiration for the institutions of the Bantu and other peoples (the Chinese among them) and for the inventions and poetry and architecture of the Arabs. I do not claim at all that the West is superior. In fact, I think it absurd to lay claim to superiority of any kind in these matters. What criterion would you apply? What scale of values would you use? I would add that the greatest fault of the West since the seventeenth century has been precisely its belief in its own unqualified superiority in all areas.

The adversaries of the West allege that the West is guilty of a sense of superiority vis-a-vis other cultures. While there certainly have been a few chauvinists among the thinkers of the West, in general the West has demonstrated a friendly curiosity about the rest of the world.

By contrast, the most deeply-seated sense of superiority is to be found precisely among those who denounce the West; they confidently proclaim it inferior to any other world culture, despite their ignorance of other cultures. It was during the allegedly xenophobic heyday of Western Civilization that university students in large numbers eagerly studied Sanskrit, Nubian, and Ge'ez (the ancient language of Ethiopia). Now that multi-culturalism, a misnomer because it omits the serious study of any culture and embraces simply the denunciation of one culture, has influenced the university, one is hard-pressed to find any opportunity to study such languages.

The West's unique ability to examine itself critically has led to reform movements and revolutions of various kinds. But this same ability, carried to an irrational extreme, yields merely a bizarre form of cultural self-hatred.

The thing, then, that I am protesting against is the silly attitude of western intellectuals in hating their own world and then illogically exalting all other civilizations. Ask yourself this question: If the Chinese have done away with binding the feet of women, and if the Moroccans, Turks, and Algerians have begun to liberate their women, whence did the impulse to these moves come from? From the West, and nowhere else! Who invented the "rights of man"? The same holds for the elimination of exploitation. Where did the move to socialism originate? In Europe, and in Europe alone. The Chinese, like the Algerians, are inspired by western thinking as they move toward socialism. Marx was not Chinese, nor was Robespierre an Arab. How easily the intellectuals forget this! The whole of the modern world, for better or for worse, is following a western model; no one imposed it on others, they have adopted it themselves, and enthusiastically.

When areas of the world were colonies of the West, and desired to throw off the yoke of colonization, that desire was seen as just only through the lens of western values, and the impetus to anti-colonial revolution came exclusively from western thinkers. People suffered for long centuries under non-western despots, with no explicit way to formulate their desire for freedom, and with no way to organize that desire. Once exposed to western thought, they were able to articulate and act upon a value system which included liberty. Paradoxically, they obtained that value system from the very colonists whom they overthrew.

The West is not perfect; the West committed its share of crimes and sins against humanity. But the West has bestowed unique gifts, not only upon its own, but upon the entire planet.

A Change in Dynasties

One of the turning-points in world history is the emergence of the Carolingian Dynasty among the Franks in Gaul. This event would lead, in turn, to the establishment of Charlemagne's empire, which would be reinvented as the empire of Otto the Great, and finally as the Holy Roman Empire. All of these would play a crucial role in defending Europe, which would be under period attack for centuries.

Einhard, the biographer who recorded Charlemagne's life, gives us an account of the emergence of the Carolingian Dynasty. Orthography deserves attention in this matter, for two reasons: first, because these events took place in a bilingual environment; chronicles were discussed and recorded in both Frankish and Latin. Second, because the notion of fixed orthography had not yet emerged; spelling was understood to be fluid, and most words had more than one acceptable spelling.

Einhard himself is also recorded as Eginhard and Einhart. Charlemagne is also known Charles the Great and Carolus Magnus; during his life, he was known as Karl.

But the narrative begins much earlier. Long before Charlemagne was born, the Carolingian Dynasty earned respect in the person of Charles "the Hammer" Martel, who defended Gaul, and most of Europe, from an invasion force of thousands of Islamic soldiers. The Muslims had invaded and occupied Spain in 711 A.D., and had periodically conducted raids over the Pyrenees into Gaul. At this time, Gaul was beginning to become known as France, because the Germanic tribe known as the Franks had been stabilizing the area for over two centuries; the area had been a power vacuum in the decades after the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D., and the Franks helped to restore civil order after a period of chaos.

Having secured their occupation of Spain, the Muslims wanted France. After a few year of raiding over the Pyrenees mountain range, they attempted a full-scale invasion. Historian Eleanor Shipley Duckett writes:

Ever since their arrival in Spain from Africa in 711, the Muslims had raided Frankish territory, threatening Gaul and on one occasion (725) reaching Burgundy and sacking Autun. In 732 Abd ar-Rahman, the governor of Cordoba, marched into Bordeaux and defeated Eudes. The Muslims then proceeded north across Aquitaine to the city of Poitiers. Eudes appealed to Charles for assistance, and Charles’s cavalry managed to turn back the Muslim onslaught at the Battle of Tours. The battle itself may have been only a series of small engagements, but after it there were no more great Muslim invasions of Frankish territory.

The forces of Charles "the Hammer" were outnumbered by the attacking Muslims, making his victory a tactical masterpiece, and making him an instant hero in Europe. After the victory, Charles Martel pointed out that the Merovingian Dynasty, in the person of Hilderich III, had done little or nothing to contribute to the defense of France, despite the fact that the Merovingians were the reigning monarchs of Gaul. Accusing the Merovingians of negligence, Charles Martel claimed the throne for himself and his family. The pope issued an opinion supporting Charles the Hammer. Einhard himself wrote:

The Merovingian Dynasty, from whom the Franks used to choose their kings, ruled according to the general opinion, up until the time of Hilderich. Hilderich was deposed by order of the Roman pope Stephan, shorn, and sent into a cloister. Although the dynasty, by all appearances, died out with him, it had already long since lost its significance and had henceforth only the empty royal title.

Clovis (Chlodowech or Chlodwig) was the first Frankish, and first Merovingian, king of Gaul, ruling until his death 511. Hilderich III was the last, having ruled from 742 to 751. Pope Zacharias, in office from 741 to 752, had already prior to his death in early 752 ordered the deposing of Hilderich. Pope Stephan, in office from 752 to 757, was chosen in March 752 as successor, and traveled in person to Gaul in order to anoint Pippin. Pippin the Short was the son of Charles Martel and the father of Charlemagne. As long as the Merovingians, having lost any real authority or power, remained on the throne as nomical rulers, the real activity of ruling fell to the major domo, the chief of staff, who happened to be Charles Martel. Einhard continues:

The major domo had real power and authority in the kingdom, the so-called chief of staff, who stood at the top of the government. Nothing was left to the king except to content himself with the title and to sit on the throne flowing hair on his head and an uncut beard and to play the ruler. He was allowed to hear ambassadors, who came from everywhere, and to dismiss them with words which seemed to be his own, but which one had in reality written for him and often had forced upon him.

So when Hilderich was deposed, he in reality had no power to lose anyway. His long hair and beard were symbols of royal power, but they had become empty symbols. When Carolingians ascended to the throne, they ruled in reality, having already long ruled behind the scenes.

Notes Toward a Philosophy of History

Thoughts about the Philosophy of History do not belong to the study of History, but rather to Meta-Historical thought, or perhaps even to Meta-Meta-History. Conducted with more rigor than will here be shown, they would belong to Philosophy. (The Philosophy of History should not be confused with the History of Philosophy!)

One possible point of departure for a Philosophy of History is human nature. Among the many traits belonging to humans are a set of needs and wants, a set of flaws and imperfections, and a set of strengths and virtues.

Human needs and wants include food, clothing, water, and shelter; humans also want someone to care for them and care about them; they have a desire to know and be known, a desire for a sense of meaning in their lives, and a desire for some form of happiness and joy.

Sadly but realistically, human nature is inherently flawed. Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that in the state of nature, meaning if humans lived out their innate qualities, their lives would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." As evidence, one might mention that nobody needs to be taught how to lie, how to be selfish, or how to be overly aggressive in a moment of anger. It comes quite naturally.

By contrast, there are also some constructive elements in human nature. Humans naturally love - nobody needs to be taught to feel affection for someone else. Humans are creative and inventive. Humans are sometimes even noble.

Human nature is, in short, a mixed picture. The result of this is, however, that human flaws prevent people from getting those things which they need or want.

To this end, society attempts, sometimes successfully, to develop correctives for the imperfections found in human nature. There are many such ventured remedies, but most of them may be grouped under three headings: art, philosophy, and religion. (G.W.F. Hegel wrote something vaguely related about those three.)

In art, society attempts to bring the individual into contact with beauty. (In this context, many writers will capitalize the word Beauty.) True beauty can inspire humans and can bring joy to them. If a society can successfully connect the individual with art, it might be a partial corrective to the intrinsic flaws in human nature. But a society's attempts can also fail in this regard, either by failing to bring the individual into contact, or by bringing him into contact with something which is not true beauty.

Philosophy attempts to bring the individual into contact with truth. (Again, many will capitalize the 'T' here.) Using the powers of human thought and reasoning, philosophy attempts to find realities which are in some sense foundational or deep. Because there are many different schools of philosophy, some of which would reject the use of the words 'foundational' or 'truth', it is a complex and murky enterprise. If successful, however, philosophy can give the individual some grasp of reality and his position in it. But philosophy can also fail, yielding nothing fruitful, and perhaps something harmful.

Religion attempts to bring the individual into contact with God, who cares for and about the individual, and who offers a sense of meaning and joy to the individual - all this despite the realities of living in a flawed world. Successful religion, which allows the individual to receive a sense of unconditional positive regard writ on a cosmically large scale, can indeed be a corrective to the innate corruptions found in human nature. But unsuccessful religion can bring harm rather than benefit, instilling in the individual a sense of needing to somehow accumulate enough merit to earn God's favor. Successful religion yields peace which instills qualities like helpfulness, cooperativeness, and contribution into the individual. Unsuccessful religion instills selfishness and aggressiveness, and yields war.

History, then, is the concrete playing out of the above. History is the specific unfolding of the better parts and the worse parts of human nature - the imago dei and the original sin - in particular times, places, and people. History would end, or rather would go on infinitely, in a cosmic stalemate between good and evil thus described, were it not for an intervention. History contains one more, one new, element.

Society's efforts - by means of art, philosophy, and religion - , however noble, remain limited because they are, finally, human products, and subject to the flaws and limits of their human creators. History reveals intervention by a force beyond, or above, humans. Art, philosophy, and religion attempt to bring humans into contact with something better. But as human products, art, philosophy, and religion are as flawed as the humans who created them. The intervention occurs when beauty, truth, and God bring themselves into contact with humans.

As the old proverb says, "If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill." Francis Bacon, who probably coined this phrase, was indicating that it is important to identify the agency in an action - who's actually doing something? The proverb is often quoted as "If the mountain won't come to Muhammad, then Muhammad will go to the mountain."

History records an intervention - ab alio - which finally tips the scale in the grand stalemate. In this intervention, agency is not with the humans. It is for this reason that History is temporally finite. The correctives, ultimately powered and empowered ab alio, change the course of History. When truth, beauty, and God are agents - and not objects of study - the course of History takes a decisive turn toward its eventual end. Which then gives meaning to the phrases "the end of History" and "after History" - phrases on which philosophers have long meditated.

Medieval Travelers: Finding Safe Routes

Just as many people anticipated with dread the year 2000, wondering if a world-wide computer crash would devastate human civilization - or speculated even more wildly about the end of the world - so also the round number of the year 1000 caused concern among the superstitious. Although almost of Europe had been exposed to Christianity by that year, enough pre-Christian influence remained to fuel irrational superstitions. While we may laugh at the idea that a mere round number like 1000 would cause the end of the world, similar fears arose a millennium later, among people with the technology of the modern world.

Such fears were not only irrational and superstitious, but even contradicted by the obvious empirical evidence available to the eyes of most Europeans. Not only was the world not going to end in the year 1000, but things were actually getting better for Europe in that year. After approximately three hundred years of attacks, the aggressors were beginning to back off. It had started in the year 711, when Muslim armies had invaded Spain. They would kept the Spanish under their occupational forces for several centuries. Having solidified its hold on Spain, Islam turned its armies toward France. Muslim armies made not one but numerous attempts, marching over the Pyrenees to invade Gaul, as France was then called. Each time, the Franks, the Germanic tribe which protected France, made heroic defenses. In the year 732, Charles "the Hammer" Martel made the most famous such defense, defending not only France, but all Europe, at the battles of Tours and Poitiers. Finding no success with a land invasion, Islam attempted a sea route, sending raiding parties and small invasion groups along the southern coast of France. There they established occasional footholds, occupying seaside towns and the surrounding farmlands, sometimes for years at a stretch. The inhabitants of southern Gaul lived in terror of the Muslims, who could appear at any time, burning towns and fields to the ground, slaughtering some inhabitants, and taking others as slaves.

The town of Fraxinetum was a base for Islamic pirates and raiders. Around 889 A.D., Muslims invaded the area and established an occupational headquarters. From this base, Islamic soldiers were able to move inland northward, terrorizing villages and confiscating supplies. They also moved east and west along the coast, raiding ports to commandeer supplies from the locals. Muslim pirates based from Fraxinetum kept the waters of the northwest Mediterranean insecure for nearly a century. Finally, the Franks reclaimed their land and pushed the invaders out, and in 973 A.D., reclaimed Fraxinetum. No longer inhibited by the occupational forces, the passes between Italy and France were open and safe again, and travel and commerce could resume.

But by the year 1000, this danger was fading. Southern France was becoming more secure, and Islamic attacks less frequent. Southern Italy, which had likewise been occupied by Muslim armies, was liberated, and its inhabitants once more safe. Muslims no longer had occupational forces on Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily, and their attacks on those islands became less frequent. Historian Marjorie Rowling writes:

AD 1000 was a date much dreaded in Christian Europe as the year of doom. Yet by then the savage attacks of Moslem, Norse and Magyar upon her were beginning to lessen, though only the Magyars - by the German victory at Lechfeld (955) - had been finally staved. Byzantine sea-power had also revived and Fraxinetum, the Moslem pirate stronghold in Provence, had been destroyed in (975). The Moslems had lost ground also in Spain and on the Mediterranean, while the sea-power and trade of Venice, Naples and Amalfi had increased.

Feeling more secure, Europeans began attempts to reconnect with the broader world. Having been on the defensive for three centuries, connections to India and other parts of the East had been weakened or lost entirely. Europe looked for ways to reconnect with the East, but land routes were not safe: they led through Islamic territories. The Spanish and Portuguese would begin looking to the sea. The first voyages to the Canaries and southward along Africa's west coast were promising. There were no Muslim pirates in these waters. They discovered new trading partners, and new routes to old trading partners. Although it would take another century or two before the great voyages of Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama, the age of exploration had begun.

The land route between Europe and India was not safe. But Europe sought to renew its trading relationship with India, and discovered the sea routes around Africa's southern tip - the Cape of Good Hope - to make that connection.

Mary Magdalene: Legend and Myth

Over the centuries and millennia, the individual known to us as Mary from Magdala has attracted attention and speculation. Who was she? What did she do? In response to these questions, myths and legends arose. Myths are narratives designed to explain. Legends are semi-historical or partially verifiable narratives which have existed long enough to be perceived as part of cultural heritage. About this Mary Magdalene we have lots of myth and legend.

But who and what was she really? Some historians regard the quest for fact - the search for what is really or actually the case - as simplistic and naive. But such tired skepticism about historical knowledge is receding, and researchers are once more willing to ask about what happened.

The intense interest in Mary of Magdala arises in part exactly because of the lack of certain details about her life. The ambiguities make her fascinating. This is nowhere more evident than in popular culture. From medieval passion plays to popular stage musicals of the twentieth century - like Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell - she has been the focus speculative narrative. Darrell Bock writes:

Mary Magdalene has always possessed a certain mystique. In the 1960s she was often the key figure in musicals about Jesus. Interest in her has not waned and reflects a curiosity that has belonged to her almost from the beginning. Part of the reason for such interest is that there are actually so little data about her. One element of a story like Mary's is that where there is very little information, there is a desire to round out the picture. Proving or disproving what is speculated about her is hard to do.

Naturally, readers are interested in the more flamboyant questions about her life: was she married? was she a prostitute? had she been possessed by demons for some segment of time? But sober historians begin with the mundane, knowing that the mundane, when carefully examined, can sometimes become rather exotic or interesting.

Magdala, where she lived, identified her. So Mary Magdalene was Mary from Magdala. Magdala is probably modern-day Migdal, located near the Sea of Galilee in Israel. Jesus' main ministry took place in the Sea of Galilee area.

Mary's named is derived from either her place of birth or place of residence - or both - which simply happens to be in the region in which Jesus did some of His major work. So an accident of geography places her on the stage of world history. Had she been born in Egypt or Syria - or in India or America - we would probably have never heard of her. As to the allegation that she was a prostitute,

none of the texts we have surveyed referred to Mary Magdalene as a prostitute. The idea is popular in some sections of the church and in the culture at large. So where did this tradition come from?

The first mention of Mary as a prostitute comes from a homily (or sermon) delivered by Pope Gregory the Great in A.D. 591. In all likelihood, this notion resulted from confusion concerning passages in the gospels of Luke and John.

The notion that Mary Magdalene may have been a prostitute appears over 500 years after her death, and over 500 years of the first written texts describing her. The late date of the allegation alone makes it unlikely to be true, and the fact that the allegation seems to have arisen from a conflation of unrelated texts greatly increases the probability that the charge is not true.

At the other end of the spectrum of speculation is the notion that somehow Mary Magdalene and Jesus were secretly married, and even had children together. This legend appears only centuries after the events, and appears to be a conflation of medieval courtly love and the post-modern embrace of pure narrative in place of historical data-driven narrative. Professor Paul Maier, of Harvard University and Switzerland's Basel University, writes:

In sober fact, Jesus never wed anyone, but for years sensationalizing scholars and their novelistic popularizers have played the role of doting mothers trying to marry of an eligible son. Now, if there were even one spark of evidence from antiquity that Jesus even may have gotten married, then as a historian, I would have to weigh this evidence against the total absence of such information either in Scripture or the early church traditions. But there is no such spark - not a scintilla of evidence - anywhere in historical sources. Even where one might expect to find such claims in the bizarre, second-century, apocryphal gospels - which the Jesus Seminar and other radical voices are trying so desperately to rehabilitate - there is no reference that Jesus ever got married.

Evidence from across the spectrum - from the most orthodox and canonical texts to the iconoclastic and unchristian texts - contains zero evidence that Mary Magdalene ever married anyone. The desire to see her in a romantic relationship has overridden reason in the case of those who manufacture such narratives. It is a tribute to the power of human imagination, and to the mystique surrounding Mary of Magdala, that otherwise rational scholars have been tempted to generate utterly unfounded speculation, and generate speculation which actually contradictions the little solid data and evidence we have about this Mary, in order to satisfy the psychological desire to see her in a satisfying romantic relationship. It is a warning to future historians about the need to calm logic and strict reasoning.

Coffee and Jihad

Both in cliche and in reality, a visit to Berlin or to Vienna includes pleasant afternoons in a cafe or in a Konditorei - a cafe which also serves excellent pastries and cakes. An entire subculture and set of rites is organized around the consumption of coffee.

How did it come to be that we associate coffee with - and that coffee is such an integral part of - life in these European capital cities?

The answer lies in events which are almost four centuries removed from the present. Berlin was at that time the capital city, not of Germany, but of the kingdom of Brandenburg. Germany as a unified nation-state would not be formed until 1871, when a number of such kingdoms merged to form it. Brandenburg was ruled from 1640 to 1688 by Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg. He was called 'elector' because he was one of the kings who together chose the Holy Roman Emperor. As the leader of that group of kings, he was called the 'Great Elector' and was known as Friedrich Wilhelm. The Holy Roman Empire, as the old joke tells us, was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. It was a Central European Defensive Coalition. The Emperor had no autocratic power, but rather had the task of forging a consensus between the kings. These kingdoms in the Empire usually behaved independently of each other, uniting usually only for the purposes of mutual defense. That came to pass in the 1680's, for example, when the Islamic armies attempted to conquer Hungary and Austria, with the goal of establishing a caliphate - a Muslim military dictatorship - and imposing Islam on Eastern Europe.

The Holy Roman Emperor himself lived in Vienna - or Wien as the city is more commonly known - and summoned to his aid the armies of the empire when the Muslims surrounded the city. Historian Uwe Oster writes:

Berlin was not yet the capital of Germany but only the residence of the electors of Brandenburg. The Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire resided in Vienna. The city on the Danube River was in great danger. Once again, the Turks were standing before her gates. But after the Battle of Kahlenberg in 1683, the had to break off their siege, and the West remained Christian. During the hasty retreat of the Turks, they left behind not only weapons, expensive carpets, and silverware, but also sacks and sacks of coffee beans. So if more coffee is drunk today in Germany and Austria than anywhere else in the world, then we have to thank the hasty retreat of their one-time Turkish enemies for this delicious treat.

And so it was that not only were the Christians of Europe saved from mass murder and from the forcible imposition of Islam, but coffee - previously a rarity - became common and cherished beverage in Eastern Europe. The consumption of coffee is nearly universal in Europe, and cafe culture of Austria, the Czech Republic, and Germany is a pastime unto itself.