Europe vs rest of world in the Middle Ages

The Renaissance also starts within the Middle Ages. In the most popular taxonomies, the Middle Ages is followed by Modern Age (Early Modern).

 

theological

He wrote "theleologic" but he ment "teleologic". That is to explain/justify something through its purpose, consequences, results.

 

Originally posted by Dream208 Decebal   Last post before I sleep (nearly 3 am here...). From what I've been taught in school, they measure GDP or income in the past by purchase power. Usually something like how much rice could an average farmer's wage purchase, and what is the total tax compare to total production.   But I could be wrong... as I mentioned above, I recite everything from my head -_______-lll

 

Originally posted by Maharbbal 2) My second point was the 1st Industrial Revolution (i. e. 1750-1850) is the REAL ending of the Middle Ages as the 15th-16th c. were different quantitatively but not really qualitatively from the Medieval times.

Depends on your point of view.

 

If your concern is technology you are right. If it's economics more generally it has something to do with the beginnings of the joint stock corporations. If it's political institutions, then the middle ages end with the emergence of the nation state. If it's religion then they end with the reformation. If it's art, they end with the emergence of the landscape and the still life as important subjects in their own right. If it's music it is to do with the dominance of harmony over polyphony.

 

And so on. All these things happened at different times.

 

A lot depends on what you consider to be hall marks of an advanced civilization.

 

Is it economic, geographic, philosophy, individual freedoms, communal responsibilities.

 

A hypothetical case.

An agrarian society where the individual rights are respected but the individual responsibilities are are accepted.  Maybe the technological level would not be so great but in this society the people matter more.  Literature, science (and this is not an oxymoron), philosophy etc are pursued.  It is not  Utopia.  People still have problems, human beings somehow seem to always have problems no matter what the society/country etc they belong to.  I would consider this an advanced civilization.  The brain and heart are both engaged.

 

I always thought it made much greater sense to compare megalith Medieval powers like Tang and Song China with other megalith states in their roughly equal time-frame, like the Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphates, or the Gupta, Chalukya, or Chola Empires of Medieval India, but what the heck, let's compare China with Europe for a bit. Are you guys excluding the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium here (which really held it's zenith of power at different points in time, like the reign of Emperors Justinian or Basil II)? If so, then I'd have to say one European region that you could begin to compare with in Western Europe to China was that of Medieval France, which compared with the city-states of Medieval Italy, was the rivaling center in regards to most of Western Europe's population during the Middle Ages. The Frankish Empire of the Carolingian Dynasty without a doubt had its merits (look at achievements such as the building of the Aachen Cathedral or the military conquests of Charlemagne), but in many respects, let's not get ahead of ourselves and disenfranchise the Chinaman here (lol). You could easily say in terms of building projects the completion of the Grand Canal during the short-lived Sui Dynasty before the Tang, still today the longest man-made canal in the world, and it goes without saying one of the largest employments of manual labor in history. In terms of conquest you could point to such examples as the Sui invading Korea with a massive naval force (although it turned to be a complete failure), while the Tang pushed deep into Central Asia and kept hegemony over Indo-China and for the meantime Nan Yue (Vietnam).

 

In terms of the size of central administration in government, as well as central administrative cohesiveness, sophistication, and ability of the state to bolster and support commercial/economic prosperity and thus strength of the state itself, Tang and Song China clearly have the upper hand in most regards. Of course, it's all about comparing different time periods within China and France, as France became much more nationalized during the Hundred Years War with England and reached new heights during the later Valois Dynasty. However, take for example the administration and central cohesiveness of France under the first ruler of the Capetian Dynasty, Hugh Capet, who was crowned King of France in 987 AD after pretty much ruling anyway in everything but title while the previous Carolingian King Lothair was seated upon the throne. In his plot of private land, including towns and estates that exceeded no more than 400 square miles (roughly 640 kilometers squared), centered between Paris and Orleans, he pretty much lacked any real stranglehold of power beyond this point. In this age before the rise of powerful Absolutism over the various nobles, if he, the King, even dared venture beyond this plot of land, he risked being kidnapped and held for ransom, or simply murdered along the wayside by competitors to the throne or foreign enemies who would have desired to see him fall. Take for example the plot by the Bishop of Laon and Odo I of Blois in 993 to have Hugh Capet delivered right into the hands of Otto III, fourth ruler of the Ottonian Dynasty whose realms were near to the east. The most intriguing thing about the whole affair is that neither the Bishop or Odo were ever punished for this, displaying the measure of central power eminating from Paris and the hand of the King. Each fiefdom beyond his measure of control were nearly autonimous and pretty much did what they pleased, with many different codes of law, a dozen different languages spoken at the time, and 150 different forms of currency within the whole realm of what is considered modern-day France alone! New developments of towns and further urbanization were discouraged by local lords who maintained the affairs of their fiefs like a hawk would when circling over a dead carcass and calculating any other predators that might be around to challenge it. They could treat their peasants however they liked, and it wasn't until the late Middle Ages and Renaissance periods when peasants began to flee in droves to work as laboring craftsmen and the like in newly-established towns, depriving the local lords of their agrarian base, and then forced to pay these peasants actual salaries and wages for the first time to encourage them to stay away from migrating to new towns and growing cities, the very step away from feudalism. However, during the early and middle eras of the Medieval Period, commercialization was greatly hindered by the nobles themselves, which hindered growth of towns in the first place. Nobles could tax and tariff any goods they wanted that traveled through their lots, and god forbid you were a merchant who had to travel your caravan over a bridge or worse yet, attempting to smuggle goods that were proclaimed as illegal and unlawful in status in that specific lord's fief. Often lords would harass traveling merchants and force them to pay enormous sums of bribery in order to get shipments through, choking the very commercial networks of Europe with this slow, grievous trade process that was unheard of during times of the earlier, road-network-obsessed, highly-centralized, and highly standardized Roman Empire.

 

Now that I've painted a pretty picture of Medieval France (which besides Italy and to some extent their greatest rival of England was the hallmark of medieval Western European power and achievement during the Middle Ages), let's fly through time and space halfway around the globe of Medieval earth to land smack dab in the middle of Tang and Song China, the big bad mother ****ers of the East. In Tang as well as Song era China, central power within the Imperial Court centered at Chang'an, Kaifeng, and then Hangzhou was firmly established and remained as firm establishments of central order and governance. Beyond the large economic and political hubs of the capital cities listed, the entire empire was divied up into large administrative provinces as well as outlying commanderies in the conquered border regions of the extended empire. Although aristocratic families and military generals in the local regions held a great deal of sway over internal affairs (and added to corruption at certain points), the central, provincial, and local governments were all efficiently run by the state's highly-competitive Imperial Exam system, perfected during the Tang period to crank out new virtual hordes every 3 years of learned gentry-scholar officials (the shi). On an average given day of the week, a young Confucian student of the Tang and Song periods would cram nearly 200 new writing characters into their arsenal of learned writing in order to pass these local, regional, and central-state exams at their nearest testing facilities. This was aided greatly by the widespread use and production of block-printing of books by the Tang Dynasty, and somewhat enhanced by the later Song Dynasty invention of removeable type using metal sheets and heated clay characters to print written material. The Imperial Archives of the capital were no doubt enormous in volume and size, but then again, no major city was complete without an array of bookstores and a public library. It was the fashion of the day for the gentry-scholar bureaucrats to have within their nearly-Roman-villa-laid-out style of homes to include a large study room filled with various scrolls and books, along with a peaceful garden space in the central courtyard to relax while discussing poetry, painting, local politics, or familial matters from time to time. In Tang China, although Confucianism remains the hallmark of the Imperial Exams and largely the voice of the elite shi, old ideologies like Daoism see a surge in new popularity, mixed with the ever-steadily-growing influence of Indian-originated Buddhism on the Eastern world, seen through the many towering 10-to-15 story-tall pagodas of the Tang and Song periods dedicated to Buddhism, as well as serving for places to store records or to act as high points of light beacons for incoming ships at harbor and port. Although the Chinese had sailed "junk" ships into the Indian Ocean before, maritime trade during the Tang Dynasty boomed alongside the already well-established land-route of the Silk Road. The Chinese of the age of Tang as well as Song sailed far from home and called to ports in Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Persia, Arabia, and East Africa. If the Tang were those who paved the way for large-scale maritime trade, the Song Dynasty reinforced this idea triple-fold, escorting large merchant fleets with a boasting array of naval vessels and crafts in great prestige to ensure Chinese interests abroad would be respected as well as feared. Hindu and Arab writers of the Medieval period comment on the great qualities of Chinese ship-building technology, as Abbasid Arabs and Chola Indians no doubt saw Chinese naval prowess as equals. In terms of commercial power, there was hardly a comparison to the enormous state-run monopolies on porcelain, silk, salt, iron-ore mining, and iron-foundries churning out thousands of tons of iron and steel per year in Tang and Song China. Add to this the free enterprises over commodities that the state did not hold monopolies over but that of which the mass market of medieval Chinese consumerism gobbled up on a daily basis. Simply staggering to the mind to concieve of this amount of production in a pre-Industrial-Revolution society.

 

In sum, European accomplishments in the fields of technology, state-building, and creation of a proto-modern-economic system during the Middle Ages were wide and many, but similar achievements in the East are to be noted, which the Chinese not only built upon, but largely perfected.

 

Eric