The Middle Ages Are No Panacea

Understandably frustrated by the social atomization and political distemper of our time, many Catholics are intrigued, if not enchanted, by the medieval era—and with good reason. For centuries, the Church dominated the West, saving souls and creating an incredible civilization. Monasteries and ecclesially-sponsored universities preserved and extended knowledge. Knights, guided by a pious sense of chivalry and bearing splendid armor and coats of arms, defended Christendom from the threat of Islam. Awe-inspiring churches and cathedrals dotted the landscape, the Catholic Faith imbuing the rhythms of daily life from peasant to monarch.

It’s understandable, then, that many Catholics would imagine returning to, or envision restoring, a medieval way of life in the 21st century. As former editor of Crisis (and then-Catholic) Michael Warren Davis remarked in his book The Reactionary Mind: “If we are ever to re-Christianize the West, the result will necessarily look like the Middle Ages.” But, speaking as someone deeply fascinated by this period of history, I must confess that the more I read of the medieval era, the less inclined I am to perceive the period as a panacea.

Of course, we were all taught in grade school about the “rougher edges” of medieval Europe. From the eighth through the 11th centuries, Vikings terrorized communities and monasteries from Ireland to what is now Russia. The Black Death in the mid-14th century wiped out at least a third of the European population, if not much more. It may not have been intellectually “dark,” as its critics claim, but it was often cold and uncomfortable, and the child mortality rate may have approached 50 percent. War, in turn, was a near-constant feature of medieval life.

Given these realities, promoters of the “medieval way”—which is usually accompanied by pro-monarchist affections—will focus their praise on more specific periods and locales in European history in which saintly monarchs governed the realm and political power was diffuse and decentralized, a localist’s dream. Catholic scholar Andrew Willard Jones, for example, has written at length on the virtues of the court of St. Louis IX of France (r. 1226-1270), which, in the estimation of many, is the pinnacle of what a rightly-ordered Catholic state can look like. In many respects, I think St. Louis’s champions are correct—the king’s court exemplified an impressive (and holy) synthesis of Church and polity. It also represents a slight chunk of the medieval era.

Indeed, as Michael Livingston argues in his excellent book Bloody Crowns: A New History of the Hundred Years War, only a few decades after the reign of St. Louis, France was embroiled in a more than century-long conflict with England, a war that involved not only England and France, but the Low Countries, Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, Scotland, and Wales. During that conflict, roughly 40-70 percent of the French population lived in or near conflict areas, peasants routinely having their crops and livestock seized or destroyed.

Mercenary companies, both French and English, roamed the French countryside, pillaging and killing. During sieges, of which there were many, civilians routinely starved to death. Both the English and the French would endure increasingly debilitating degrees of taxation.

Dynastic succession—lauded by many pro-monarchists as a better means of political transition than modern republics or democracies—was, in many respects, a cause of the war (as it was in many conflicts across this period) because a series of English kings believed themselves to have a legitimate claim to the French crown. Indeed, the struggles of dynastic succession, which saw various lords constantly switching their allegiances between French and English crowns, persuaded the French kings that a more centralized authority, localized in a divinely-sanctioned, absolute ruler, was necessary to overcome this instability.

“The one unquestionable fact that the Dapuhin and his allies could point to was that he was French,” writes Livingston, and “that being French was an identity beyond oaths or actions…. It was a patriotic sense of Frenchness that existed outside of class structures, rooted in ideas of land and language, in myth and history and culture.”

For us Catholics, we often correlate the Hundred Years War with the remarkable story of St. Joan of Arc, who was called by God and directed by various saints who encouraged her to rally her people against the English invaders. Even if God was having pity on the French people who had endured so many years of devastation—or perhaps, as some have speculated, God had greater things in mind for the nation in the centuries that followed—it is still admittedly a curious thing that He would pick sides between two Catholic kingdoms. Indeed, God’s support for St. Joan is especially interesting because patriotism for a national political entity was so central to that divine calling. “I am sent on behalf of God, the King of Heaven, to kick you all out of France, man by man,” St. Joan is reported to have said to the English.

Whatever God’s (still somewhat hidden) purposes for calling St. Joan, a long-term effect of her successes against the English—and her ability to rally and unite the French people—was the acceleration of the development of French national identity. Not long after St. Joan’s death in 1431, the French king persuaded the Estates General to place private military companies under the crown’s authority, which amounted to the first standing, professional army in France. Charles VI, in turn, sought to dismantle those ancient, diffused social systems and replace them with new models of authority centralized upon a divinely-authorized king. (He also succeeded in getting the verdict of heresy against Joan of Arc nullified.)

This, I submit, is one of the most curious aspects of the Middle Ages: that God would, in His calling of a medieval saint, (indirectly) accelerate the move toward European nation-states that possessed their own unique national identities and centralized polities, absorbing the hodgepodge of kingdoms, dukedoms, and noble holdings that had governed the decentralized early-medieval period. It would seem that whatever authentic goods the medieval era possessed—and I will gladly admit there were many—God was more than willing to facilitate the very historical circumstances that made that early-medieval landscape obsolete. That should give pause to any of us who, with halcyon eyes, look back to a supposedly idyllic medieval past. As God Himself declared: “My ways are not your ways” (Isaiah 55:8).