The Mental Floss History Of The World Part 15

Monks: UP UP

Monasteries, which had existed since the days of the early Egyptians, were originally collectives of hermits who didn't want to be alone but who didn't want much to do with the outside world, either.

But in the Not-So-Dark Ages, they played an entirely different, and virtually indispensable, role, particularly in Europe. Monasteries became repositories and preservers of the learning of the Cla.s.sical Age. They were virtually the only providers of education.

They also provided health care and social welfare programs, and even encouraged agricultural innovations by experimenting with new farming methods. And they became launching pads for missionaries, who spread the Christian religion throughout the "barbarian" lands.

Medieval monasteries were given an organizational boost in the mid-sixth century when an Italian monk named Benedict came up with a set of operating regulations for monks. The Benedictine Rule covered virtually every area of life, from what should be eaten and how many hours one should sleep (not many), to how often to pray (a lot!) and how to prevent impure thoughts (this involved bleeding).

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE VATICAN...

One of the other things monks did was set a good example, at least in comparison to what sometimes was going on at church headquarters in Rome.Take the case of popes Formosus and Stephen VI. An Italian, Formosus was born around 816. He became archbishop of Bulgaria, but ran afoul of Pope John VIII because of political differences and was excommunicated. He was eventually pardoned, and in 891 became pope. While pontiff, Formosus had a bitter feud with a powerful family led by a guy called Guido of Spoleto. (We are not making this up.)When Formosus died at the advanced age of eighty, in April 896, he was replaced as pope by a guy named Boniface VI. But Boniface either died of gout or was deposed (it's not clear) after two weeks in the papacy. Stephen VI, who was an ally of the Spoletos, replaced Boniface.Stephen VI may well have been the craziest pontiff in the long history of the Church. He was so vindictive that in January 897 he ordered the decomposing body of Formosus exhumed, dressed up in papal vestments, propped up in a chair, and put on trial for perjury and other crimes.The late pope was found guilty. His body was stripped of its robes. The three fingers on his right hand with which he used to bless people were cut off. Then the body was thrown in a grave in a cemetery for transients. Then it was removed and thrown in the Tiber River. A sympathetic monk retrieved it, and Formosus was eventually re-interred with appropriate papal pomp.As for Stephen, he was soon thrown into prison after an insurrection. While in jail, friends of the late Formosus managed to sneak in and strangle him.

CREATURE PREACHER.

In 565, the Irish monk and missionary St. Columba reported seeing an unknown creature in a Scottish lake. It was history's first recorded sighting of the Loch Ness Monster.

So important was the role of the monastery in this period that in 1964, Pope Paul VI named Benedict the patron saint of Europe (which was not a bad turn of events for him, considering the monks at his first monastery had tried to poison him because his rules were so strict).

Although monks took a vow of poverty, along with ones of obedience and chast.i.ty, monasteries could actually be comparatively comfortable. Wealthy n.o.bles found it convenient to dump second sons into them, where they wouldn't be likely to cause a fuss when the eldest son inherited everything. Convents, which often were located near monasteries, likewise drew a fair share of unmarriageable daughters from rich families.

The result was that monasteries often received handsome contributions. By the turn of the millennium, in fact, much of the wealth of Europe was concentrated in monasteries. By the end of the thirteenth century, however, the influence of monasteries had declined, as secular inst.i.tutions took over many of the roles the monasteries had earlier played.

Vikings: UP, DOWN, ALL OVER THE PLACE UP, DOWN, ALL OVER THE PLACE

Not everyone who lived in the Scandinavian countries during the eighth through eleventh centuries was a Viking. In fact, the word Viking Viking was actually a verb, which loosely translates to "go voyaging" or "go raiding." The Viking part of the population, in fact, usually did its "Viking-ing" as a sideline: They'd farm in the spring and early fall, and then pillage and plunder in the summer and late fall. Winters, they'd party. was actually a verb, which loosely translates to "go voyaging" or "go raiding." The Viking part of the population, in fact, usually did its "Viking-ing" as a sideline: They'd farm in the spring and early fall, and then pillage and plunder in the summer and late fall. Winters, they'd party.

Even though it wasn't their full-time job, Vikings struck absolute terror in the hearts of most inhabitants of Western Europe. Their use of swift narrow-hulled ships with true keels and shallow drafts meant that they could penetrate upriver, so their raids often came without warning. Since they weren't Christians, they saw no reason to declare churches and monasteries off-limits to ravaging. This struck the pre-Crusade Europeans as really really barbaric-and the Vikings as sound business, since that's where Europeans kept a lot of the stuff they had that was worth stealing. barbaric-and the Vikings as sound business, since that's where Europeans kept a lot of the stuff they had that was worth stealing.

BARE-NAKED BERSERKERS.

When the going got tough among the Vikings of yore, the tough got...well, certifiably nuts. As in berserk berserk, which has been translated as either "bare of shirt" or "bear-skinned." Both descriptions may have been applicable to a group of Viking warriors who became known as "Berserkers." These guys often went into battle without armor, and sometimes even without clothes, but also so pumped with murderous rage that they were said to take on the spirit of a bear or wolf and to have superhuman strength-a trait noted by some folklorists as the origin of the werewolf legend.Berserkers were the Vikings' shock troops, so caught up in the battle that they were impervious to pain and often kept fighting after receiving really nasty wounds. How they got that way is something of a mystery. Some historians attribute their rage to a pre-fight ritual, others to a hallucinogen mixed with mead, and still others to psychedelic mushrooms.Like Frankenstein's monster, however, the Berserkers eventually got out of hand. Off the battlefield, they were portrayed in Norse sagas as murdering, raping brutes who often terrorized their own villages. Sometimes they would challenge rich countrymen to duels, and then claim their lands-and their widows-after slaying them. In 1015, Berserkers were outlawed, and by 1123, "going berserk" could result in being banished for three years.

Mostly, however, Viking society was pretty egalitarian for the time, especially in areas such as the legal system, government and the status of women. What's more, Vikings actually bathed fairly regularly, which couldn't be said of most other Europeans.

Starting in about the mid-eighth century, Vikings raided the British Isles and what is now France on a fairly regular basis. They also pushed as far south and east as North Africa and the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. At one point they controlled much of what is now Great Britain and Ireland.

They also moved west, although voyages in this direction were more for land than booty. They leapfrogged from the British Isles to the Shetlands to the Faroe Islands, arriving in Iceland toward the end of the ninth century. Toward the end of the tenth century, a murderous Viking chief named Eric the Red was kicked out of Iceland and led a group of Vikings to a settlement in what became known as Greenland.

ALONG CAME POLY.

As intrepid seafarers as the Vikings were, they paled in comparison to the Polynesians. Probably originating from what is now New Guinea, by 1000 CE, the Polynesians had settled on every large inhabitable island in the Pacific Ocean, by sailing thousands of miles across open water in small craft, which they steered by the stars. They carried with them crops such as yams and taro, which became staples in the islands.

Around the year 1000, Eric's son, "Leif the Lucky," landed somewhere around what is now Labrador, in northeastern Canada. Mistaking some seasonal berries for grapes, he called the place Vinland. Subsequent expeditions took a stab at settling the place, but the locals weren't friendly, supply lines home were long, and the area wasn't br.i.m.m.i.n.g with easily exploitable natural resources. By 1020, the Vikings had bagged their incursion into the New World.

And by the middle of the eleventh century, the Vikings were pretty much out of the picture: some had been Christianized, some absorbed into the local populations where they had once plundered, and an increasingly powerful Danish empire absorbed the freelance fighters into a more governable fighting force.

By the way: Except possibly during some religious ceremonies, the Vikings didn't wear helmets with horns on them. Think about it. Would you want to go into hand-to-hand combat wearing a helmet with two ready-made handles for your foe to grab? The horned-helmet thing was popularized by nineteenth-century romanticists who probably rarely engaged in hand-to-hand combat.

The Mayans: We're Not Exactly Sure Why, but DEFINITELY DOWN

Unlike the Roman or Byzantine empires, the Maya had never been collectively under a single overreaching governmental structure. Instead, they were subjects of a collection of individual kingdoms that shared common cultural traits.

MAYA BORROW YOUR CALENDAR?.

Although the Maya have become famous for having developed an incredibly accurate calendar, they should be thrice as famous: They actually developed three calendars.One was the "Long Count," which started when they believed this version of the world began, on August 13, 3114 BCE. The Long Count calendar is slated to end on December 21, 2012. More on that in a bit.The Tzolkin calendar was based on thirteen twenty-day periods called kals, kals, which represented the time it took to prepare a cornfield or plant and harvest it. (The Maya might have used twenty as a base rather than ten because they counted fingers and toes, rather than just fingers, in setting up their counting system. Really.) which represented the time it took to prepare a cornfield or plant and harvest it. (The Maya might have used twenty as a base rather than ten because they counted fingers and toes, rather than just fingers, in setting up their counting system. Really.)Since neither of these calendars squared with the time the Maya knew it took for the earth to complete its yearly cycle around the sun, they came up with the Haab calendar, which was eighteen months of twenty days each, plus a five-day period called the uayeb uayeb tacked on at the end. tacked on at the end.The calendars were used for different things: the Long Count for historical purposes, the Tzolkin for religious and farming purposes, and the Haab for civil functions. All of them were coordinated with each other and were amazingly accurate.Incidentally, various alarmists and people with not enough to worry about often cite the date December 21, 2012, the end of the Long Count calendar, as the date of the end of the world. Most Mayan scholars disagree as to whether that was what the Mayans were predicting, but it's still a great fact for terrorizing any of your more gullible friends.

By 750, what we will refer to anyway as the Mayan Empire had reached what probably was its peak population of about thirteen million. It also was at the top of a steep slide-most of the civilization disappeared into the jungle within a few hundred years. It began going downhill in the cities of the southern lowlands, in what is now Guatemala. New construction halted in mid-building. Entire metropolises were abandoned, with their buildings left intact and seemingly inhabitable.

It was a gradual, but inexorable, process, and its causes remain a subject of debate among archaeologists. One theory is the Maya succ.u.mbed to "agricultural exhaustion," meaning that repeated burning and clearing of jungle to plant more corn simply wore out the soil. Other theories include peasant uprisings, unsustainable population increases, earthquakes, epidemics, extensive malnutrition, and a climactic change that triggered a horrific drought. Actually, many factors may have combined to tip over what had become a teetering civilization. It's quite possible, for example, that a drought caused a famine that caused civic unrest.

Although the collapse of the cities in the southern part of the empire marked the decline of Mayan civilization, cities in the north-in what are now the Mexican states of Campeche, Yucatan, and Quintana Roo-continued to exist, if not flourish.

The northern cities were possibly sustained by an infusion of culture from invaders from Central Mexico, called the Toltecs, who were moving on up, culturally speaking, at the beginning of the millennium. By the time Spanish invaders got there at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the glories of the Mayan Empire were distant memories.

Justinian: UP, Until His Plans Were Plagued UP, Until His Plans Were Plagued

Justinian I was one of the most important figures of the Not-So-Dark Ages, and might have been even more important if so many people hadn't come down sick during his reign.

A peasant born in Illyria, on what is now the Balkan Peninsula, Justinian was lucky enough to have an uncle in Constantinople who was a big-shot military commander and, later, Byzantine emperor. Uncle Justin took his nephew under his wing, and Justinian succeeded him as emperor when Justin died in 527.

One of the first, and most important, things Justinian did as boss was order the collection and revision of all Roman law. When finally completed in 534, the Corpus Juris Civilis Corpus Juris Civilis (more popularly, "the Justinian Code") codified both civil and ecclesiastical law for the empire, and became a source of laws for many nations and cultures in succeeding centuries. (more popularly, "the Justinian Code") codified both civil and ecclesiastical law for the empire, and became a source of laws for many nations and cultures in succeeding centuries.

Of course it wasn't all beer and skittles for Justinian. In 532, a riot broke out in Constantinople, led by (get this) chariot-racing fan clubs called the "Blues" and the "Greens," shouting "Nika!" ("Conquer!") The fracas had Justinian and his court ready to flee the capital, only to be talked into staying to fight by Justinian's wife, Theodora.

Justinian dispatched a trusted general named Belisarius to restore order. Belisarius, who was just back from fighting the Persians and had a seasoned army at the ready, accomplished this by trapping the rioters inside the Hippodrome and ma.s.sacring about thirty thousand of them. Efficient, if not quite merciful.

The Nika Revolt and its aftermath cemented Justinian's hold on the throne, and he began formulating big plans for a comeback for the Old Roman Empire. His armies retook North Africa and most of the Italian peninsula, including the city of Rome from various Germanic tribes.

FROM HOOKER TO HOLY HELPER.

It seems only fitting that if Justinian the peasant could become an emperor, Theodora the prost.i.tute could become his empress. The daughter of a bear trainer, Theodora grew up around entertainers at what was the Constantinople version of The Ed Sullivan Show The Ed Sullivan Show: the Hippodrome, where horse races, stage productions, and vaudeville-type performances were held.Theodora became an actress in lowbrow productions and picked up money on the side as a prost.i.tute. She eventually embraced a variation of Christianity called Monophysitism, gave up show business, and became a wool-spinner.Somewhere along the way, she caught the eye of the emperor-in-waiting Justinian and became his mistress, and then his wife. When Justinian became emperor, Theodora became the de facto co-ruler, although her status as such was never formalized.As a leader, Theodora was generally credited with helping her hubby build or rebuild a lot of cool things in Constantinople, including twenty-five churches. She's also credited with many reforms that benefited women, including expanding the rights of divorced women, protecting and sheltering ex-prost.i.tutes, and ending the legal killing of women who committed adultery.

But the emperor's plans were derailed by the onset of bubonic plague.

It's highly possible the plague originated in North Africa and migrated to the Byzantine Empire on the backs of flea-infested rats, who hitched rides on the ma.s.sive grain shipments that helped keep the empire fed. However it happened, the disease reached its peak in 542, killing as many as five thousand people per day in Constantinople alone. By the time it was over, historians estimate the plague killed as many as twenty-five million people, or one third the population of Eastern Europe.

It was the first known pandemic (i.e., a disease occurring over a widespread geographic area and affecting a large proportion of the people therein). Justinian's goal of reviving the Roman Empire was stopped in its tracks. (And as a dubious consolation prize for the emperor, the pandemic would forever be referred to as the "Plague of Justinian.") The plague's long-term effects were just as important. The depopulation of Eastern Europe made it more difficult for the area to withstand the armed Islamic onslaught that came in the middle of the next century.

Sects: UP UP

There's nothing like the subject of religion to start an argument (except for maybe politics or baseball), so it may be unsurprising that two of the world's major religions experienced severe sectual tension during this era.

In the case of Islam, the religion was barely out of its infancy when trouble started. After the death of Muhammad in 632, a committee of prominent Muslim leaders decided that his successor to the caliphate-that is, their secular leader-should be a fellow named Abu Bakr, who was one of the Prophet's fathers-in-law. (Muhammad had a number of wives.) But followers of Muhammad's son-in-law and cousin Ali Ibn Abi Talib claimed that Muhammad had designated Ali to succeed him. Ali eventually became caliph in 656, after the guy then in charge was a.s.sa.s.sinated. A powerful family called the Umayyads, however, revolted and established their own caliphate. Ali was a.s.sa.s.sinated in 661 and succeeded by his son. But when Ali's grandson, Hussein Ibn Ali, and his entire force were wiped out at the Battle of Karbala in 680, the Umayyads basically took over, and their branch of Islam eventually became known as Sunni.

But the "Shi'a Ali," or "followers of Ali," refused to recognize anyone who wasn't a lineal descendant of the Prophet. They came up with their own leader, and their own t.i.tle for him-imam-and eventually became known as Shi'ites.

The Umayyad dynasty remained in control of things until 750, when they were overthrown by the Abbasids. By 1000 CE, the Islamic Empire had spread so far so fast that secular control by just one group proved impossible. While Islam would continue to expand and remain united in areas such as language, customs, and culture, political control would be fragmented.

Speaking of fragmented, the Christian religion had also endured its share of sects and experienced its share of divisions in its youth. But its first big split had its roots in the formal breakup of the Roman Empire into East and West in 330. Differences began to pop up between the branches of the Church in each empire. In 726, for example, the Byzantine emperor Leo III issued an edict of iconoclasm, which banned the veneration of religious images. This angered the pope, who condemned Leo's action.

In 787, a Church council restored the veneration of icons, but another Byzantine emperor, Theopolius, restored the ban in 832. By the turn of the millennium, the East and West were fighting over theological issues such as whether the Holy Spirit came from just the Father or from both the Father and the Son, and more earthly issues such as whether priests could get married and whether the pope was really the head of the whole church.

BET YOU DON'T HAVE ONE OF THESE In 802, the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid sent the Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne an albino elephant as a gift. The Europeans thought it was pretty cool. The elephant did too, and managed to last through eight Western European winters before dying in 810.

In 1054, Eastern patriarch Michael Cerularius and Western pope Leo XI excommunicated each other. Despite at least two attempts to reconcile, the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic branches of Christianity would remain divorced.

s.e.x: DOWN (At Least for Roman Catholics) DOWN (At Least for Roman Catholics)

The Roman Catholic Church dominated the rules and mores concerning s.e.x in Europe during the Not-So-Dark Ages. Jesus Christ had been fairly quiet on the subject, at least judging by the New Testament, and early Christian theologians had mixed opinions. But by the sixth century, the Church had come up with some pretty strict rules when it came to s.e.x. What they basically amounted to was "Don't Do It." All s.e.x outside marriage was considered a sin, and so was most s.e.x inside marriage. The act was prohibited on Sundays, fast days, feast days, during menstruation or pregnancy, while a woman was breast-feeding, and for at least seven weeks after she gave birth. Married couples were also not supposed to go at it during the daytime or while completely naked. Sort of makes you wonder how Europe repopulated itself after all those plagues.

DREAM DATES.

Medieval people had to worry about not having s.e.x not only while they were awake, but when they were asleep, too. That's because there was a widespread belief in incubi and succubi. These were demons (male and female, respectively) who visited sleeping people and had s.e.x with them. It was thought that repeated visits could cause ill health, and even death.

SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE...

Representative Government

By 930 CE, Norwegian immigrants had been hanging out in Iceland for about sixty years, and it was starting to get crowded. The Irish monks who had been there when the Norwegians showed up had long since departed, but as more people arrived from what is now Norway, rivalries and disputes began to arise between the various chieftains who led the island's extended families.

So the bosses got together and decided to form a central authority. They called it the Althing, Althing, or "a.s.sembly of All Things". They decided to hold it in a field about twenty-seven miles east of what would someday be the country's capital city. The way it worked was the clan leaders got together once a year to decide on laws and adjudicate them. Then all of the island's free men could make themselves heard on certain matters. The or "a.s.sembly of All Things". They decided to hold it in a field about twenty-seven miles east of what would someday be the country's capital city. The way it worked was the clan leaders got together once a year to decide on laws and adjudicate them. Then all of the island's free men could make themselves heard on certain matters. The Althing Althing became the main social event of the year, with parties, fairs, and the equivalent of trade shows occurring around it. became the main social event of the year, with parties, fairs, and the equivalent of trade shows occurring around it.