I’ve spent the last year researching the late Roman Empire and specifically its collapse and the emergence of Western civilization in the Early Middle Ages. As you can see in the video below, Europe has more or less become Europe by 1000 AD while the map was completely different in 476 AD.
The Romans didn’t civilize Western Europe. Rome itself had become ruins, a cow pasture and a religious city which attracted pilgrims to see the tombs of the dead by this period. When civilization began to flare up again, the Roman Empire was distant memory. Medieval cities didn’t look anything like Roman cities even when they were built on Roman sites.
“Rome itself had become ruins, a cow pasture and a religious city which attracted pilgrims to see the tombs of the dead by this period.”
Rome was surrounded by malarial swamps, St. Ignatius Loyola died of malaria in Rome.
This is a pretty brief discussion of urbanization during Middle Ages. By the modern era, Italy had a far greater proportion of its population living in its cities than Northern Europe: we fail to understand, because of England character as a nation of so many towns and cities, and such a small rural population, the rural population being expropriated and reduced to wage slavery (with agricultural laborers low wages being supplement by parish assistance, sort of the way Walmart’s low wages are supplemented with snap, welfare, and wic – that’s your Southern English heritage from Sam Walton), that we fail to remember it wasn’t always so: Merrie Olde England after the plague was a kind of pastoral paradise where the young men and maids married quite young: Lady Margaret Beaufort married off at 12, gave birth Henry VII at age 13. But her husband died of the plague before the child was born. The USA is wealthy because German farmers, starting Pennsylvania, made American agriculture successful. Alexander Hamilton’s scheme to bring skilled European artisans was the other ingredient. Wealthy New England families made their money because the British allowed them to sell Turkish Opium in China, that’s how they endowed those fancy Ivy League Universities, they did not actually contribute to the development of America in a substantial way, any more than they contributed anything substantial after the initial stages of the American Revolution or the War of 1812. Americans aren’t like the English are today because Americans have had a living rural culture that was dominant for a very long time. Even a densely populated state like the Netherlands retains an important “peasant culture” – and is the so-called “peasant culture” of the USA that makes it a tolerable place to live, as opposed to an insufferable place. Just remember the plain facts: GIs in England felt a profound sense of alienation, but when they entered Germany, they were taken aback at how it seemed “like home.” There’s a reason Americans love the Sound of Music! It’s the scenery, the land, the big family. The American Revolution wasn’t fought so America could “have the rights of Englishmen” – imagine saying that in the 1790s, the reactions you’d get!
This is a very brief, large text synopsis of some facts about cities in medieval Europe.
https://web.stanford.edu/~yamins/uploads/2/4/9/2/24920889/rise_of_urban_europe.pdf
A lot of Americans don’t understand that “the Common Law” was not made for the Common people – New England had a theocratic government with a tithingman assigned to every ten households – Justices of the Peace could whip you without trial. Why do you think everything was settled by duels? Jefferson didn’t found the public schools with the Northwest Ordinance, Horace Mann set up our schoolmarm system with the fig leaf of Bible readings. Orestes Brownson understood what he was up to, and wrote strongly against the public school system, even before his conversion to Catholicism.
Thomas Jefferson stole all the Glebe Lands for his Virginia cronies after Patrick Henry died: the Virginia population was thenceforth largely unchurched, and this why Kentucky was still subject to endemic post Civil War violence, even in 1900! Governor Goebel was shot in 1900.
“In the last days of the nineteenth century, Kentucky was the most violent state in the union. New York reported a few more murders, but that’s mainly because in some parts of Kentucky such records were not kept. Kentuckians fought, dueled, and killed all the time, over family grudges, property, railroads, turnpikes, insults, and especially politics. And, in politics, there was no tougher fighter than William Goebel, who killed and was killed, becoming the only American governor ever to die in office from an assassin’s bullet.”
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/julyaugust/feature/the-late-governor-goebel
And of course they forced the Wathen family out of the distillery business.
“Lombe wished to figure out how the Piedmontese spun strong yarn from silkworm silk. Divulging such secrets was illegal, so Lombe sneaked into a workshop after dark, sketching the spinning machines by candlelight. In 1717, he took those sketches to Derby in the heart of England.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48533696
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lombe
https://share.google/aimode/tFVM0hql4Te6goF9w
Now Europe has gone back to the early Middle Ages……. Riots by left-wing students, joined by Muslims, are destroying cities.
Christianity destroyed Rome
Roman technology survived in Byzantium.
There are subtle influences from Rome that linger for centuries.
Edison visited the Roman baths in England and was so fascinated by Roman Concrete that he returned to America and started the mass production of cement. If not for the Roman influence on Edison we might not live in a world structured on concrete, it’s everywhere.
Europe 1000 AD? What about Europe NOW? France is burning, and this is surely a gift to the nationalists in the run-up to the 2027 elections. Expect serious unrest if National Rally wins!
I wish I could say that I was interested in the rioting in France, but it is nothing new. The French have been rioting since I started this website. Remember the Yellow Jackets?