Town Mouse
Over the summer, the Mouse family braved the threat of coronavirus – possibly the least scary plague ever – and went to Tuscany.
While there, I visited Arezzo and once again had cause to reflect on the beauty, practicality and revolutionary nature of the medieval city-state.
At the back of the 14th-century Basilica de San Francesco, we saw the movie-like fresco Legends of the True Cross by Piero della Francesca, a stunning bit of late-medieval art.
These Italian cities not only produced such brilliant art and architecture, but also were self-governing and predated modern nationalism with all its arbitrary borders and wars.
This city and others like it, built between 1,000 and 500 years ago, elevate you somehow; they make you feel like a citizen, even though you’re a tourist. They are civilised.
When I praise the Middle Ages to my friend Mr Vole and other worldly friends, they laugh at me. They’ve been duped by Puritan and Enlightenment propaganda which characterised those 500 years of peace and equality as an age governed by superstition. No one could read or write, everyone died at 35 and we all lived in pigsties – or so they think. Thanks to Edward Gibbon, we call them the Dark Ages.
These calumnious caricatures are recycled by people who ought to know better. A new book, The Light Age: A Medieval Journey of Discovery, shows that the medievals were scientifically highly sophisticated. The author, Seb Falk, a Cambridge academic, says the myth began in the 16th century, when theologian William Camden wrote that the Middle Ages were ‘overcaste with dark clouds’.
Others perpetuated this lazy portrait, including Gibbon and Carl Sagan. More recently, TV presenter Dan Snow tweeted that the Middle Ages lacked ‘the most basic understanding of scientific method’ and embraced ‘quackery’. Meanwhile, he said, everyone got dysentery.
Feeling superior to the Middle Ages is a simple strategy for us to feel good about our own dismal, violent, ugly, moronic age.
Falk’s book demonstrates the immense breadth and open-mindedness of medieval scientific enquiry. This is the age that invented clocks, astrolabes, universities, modern musical notation and innovative calendars. Islamic astronomy, he said, enjoyed enormous prestige among Christians.
During the Middle Ages, we developed sophisticated economic systems that sought to avoid exploiting the poor through a ban on usury. David Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, shows that medieval Europe more or less completely banned slavery because it was abhorrent to Christian ethics.
It returned in the 17th century, when even the peace-loving Quakers became slave-owners. Graeber also shows that once you got past the age of one or two, you had a good chance of getting to or exceeding your three score years and ten.
The medievals developed the idea of the commune, the Italian word for city-state. If I had to build my ideal town today, it would be medieval in spirit. As in central Arezzo, there would be no cars and electric scooters would be banned.
Life would be lived on the streets, where we would sit all day drinking coffee and beer and doing nothing in particular. People would shout from their balconies and, every week, a public meeting would be held in the main square. A new mayor would be elected annually to prevent creeping corruption, and work would be organised around a system of guilds to keep quality high and prices reasonable.
We would have laws against undercutting to prevent monopolistic vehicles like Amazon from emerging. And, rather than being an Italian, you would identify as a Florentine, a Pisan or a Roman.
Colourful flags would hang from the balconies, and in every church you’d find awe-inspiring frescoes. An education in grammar, rhetoric and logic could be got for free at the monastery. The poor and lame would be well looked-after by the charities of the city.
There’d be no chain stores. Instead, a collection of small business run by their owners would sell musical instruments, cakes, fine cloths, wooden furniture, beer, wine, locks, bread, cured meats, cheeses, medicines, wool, olive oil and leather goods.
After lunch, everything would close and we’d have a nap. Work would resume at around four and go on till six, after which we’d get together for chatting, dancing and drinking.
Yes, I am aware that the Middle Ages was also the time of the bonkers practice of indulgences – probably the central factor in the era’s undoing. The idea that you could pay money to go to heaven, or that your sins would be forgiven if you died in a crusade, was clearly very weird. No wonder it was condemned by the reformers like Luther and Calvin.
But for a Town Mouse with a firm belief in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, the contemplation of beauty, lots of days off and a dignified life for all, medieval Europe was the ideal nest.