Millennium

by Ian Mortimer

  The ways in which war affects a community depend on many factors but clearly the deployment of killing weapons is a key element. Although we think of the Middle Ages as a particularly bloody time, their wars were hugely inefficient as they were conducted by expensively equipped soldiers travelling on poor-quality roads or across dangerous seas. Those soldiers had to do their killing by hand. Only civilians finding themselves in the immediate vicinity of an army died from violence or war-related famine or disease. Commanders generally were wary of battles as they could not afford to risk losing troops on foreign soil. Small wonder that the numbers killed were relatively low. Sorokin measured the casualties of war slowly rising from 2.5 per cent of twelfth-century armies to 5.9 per cent in the sixteenth century. He noted a sudden jump in the seventeenth century to 15.7 per cent as the firearms revolution of the previous century was applied to deadly effect. The mortality level stayed roughly the same until the twentieth century, when it leaped again, to 38.9 per cent.6 There is a strong correlation between the expanding sizes of armies and the efficiency of the weapons of the time to wipe them out. Add to that the increased ability in the twentieth century to transport large armies, and by 1945 to deliver weapons of mass destruction by air to practically anywhere in the world, and there can be no doubt that the twentieth century was the one that saw the greatest change. The first two places in this category are thus relatively easy to assign.

  Using Sorokin’s estimates, it was the fourteenth century that saw the third highest increase in the deadliness of war. This was the century of Edward III’s longbows and English nationalism, not to mention the wars in Italy (which are not included in Sorokin’s figures). However, Sorokin’s four-nation sample is skewed towards England and France and thus to the Hundred Years War. Against the fourteenth century we might set the sixteenth: the reason why the seventeenth century was so deadly was because of the massive changes in armies and weaponry in the years just before 1600. The unmeasurable eleventh century should also be considered: the plethora of castles, the defensive force of feudal lords and the stabilising role of the Church across the whole continent added hugely to the safety of communities that were at risk of war with their neighbours, while Viking attacks also dropped off. Whereas the people in 1001 had had no option but to flee from an attacker, who might arrive without warning, in 1100 at least they had a refuge and a protector. That change is reflected in the significant population rise of the twelfth century. As for the nineteenth century, there is no doubt that the technology of weaponry changed hugely; however, most European nations’ wars were fought outside Europe and the continent itself enjoyed long periods of peace. Thus I would suggest that the third, fourth and fifth centuries of change, in order of meeting or threatening the security of society, were the eleventh, sixteenth and fourteenth.

  Generally speaking, civil wars are not included in the above reckoning. Sorokin did attempt to measure political unrest: he devised an index method whereby a disturbance was rated as to whether it was merely local or national, and how long it lasted, and then he plotted all the disturbances to see whether changes increased or decreased. However, his results are completely useless to us as they are heavily based on the availability of sources. Unsurprisingly, he found that the countries with the best documentation (England and France) were the most prone to disturbances and those with the poorest records (Ancient Greece and Rome) the most tranquil. However, it is worth noting that civil unrest of a class nature was rare before the Black Death. Civil wars in that early period were largely conducted for control of the throne. They were fought on home soil, by definition, and so they entailed fewer transport difficulties and less innovation. They also tended to be bitter, as there was no glory in being on the losing side of a civil war: it was not unusual for victorious commanders to massacre their defeated adversaries. Perhaps for that reason there have been relatively few full-scale civil wars in Europe since the seventeenth century, with the exception of separatist wars such as the Irish struggle for independence in the early twentieth century and the Yugoslav and Georgian wars in the 1990s. The most important exceptions for the last century were the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed, and the Spanish Civil War. While riots and civil disturbances are still common today, significant numbers of fatalities (in excess of 1 per cent of the population) are exceedingly rare in the West and do not come close to rivalling the horrors of international conflict. And when a civil war involved the whole of a nation, as happened in seventeenth-century England and twentieth-century Spain, the factors that made the seventeenth and twentieth centuries stand out for their international deadliness also applied to these conflicts.

  LAW AND ORDER

  Most nations have kept records of reported crime only since the late nineteenth century. In addition, these are unsuitable for our purposes as they vary in accordance to what is considered illegal. Some things that now are considered criminal were permitted at an earlier date and some things that were previously crimes (such as homosexual acts) are now legal. Crimes tend to be defined in relation to the changing values of society. However, there is one area of crime that is not relatively defined and for which we have some good statistics, namely homicide. And although we have no data for the early centuries, we can be reasonably confident that those years were not significantly less deadly than the fourteenth century.

  As mentioned in the sixteenth-century chapter, the homicide rate in the largely Protestant north of Europe declined by roughly 50 per cent every hundred years from the end of the fifteenth century until 1900. It remained low through the first half of the twentieth century and started to rise again in the 1960s. The sixteenth century saw the largest decrease in respect of the murder rate, followed by the seventeenth. The fifteenth saw both the third biggest decrease in the north and, at the same time, a significant increase in the homicide rate in Italy, a dichotomy that confuses the averages but gives rise to two changes at the same time. Fourth most significant on statistical grounds is the eighteenth century. We need to bear in mind the introduction of the systematic application of law in the twelfth century, for it must have had an effect on the homicide rate if only by removing some of the more ruthless killers from society. On qualitative grounds I suggest that it should be prioritised over the tiny fluctuations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and placed fifth.

  HEALTH

  In measuring changes in health, we are assessing two things: the relative propensity to fall sick and the relative ability to aid recovery. There is no doubt which century saw the most change with regard to the former: the Black Death takes all the grim prizes. Medical practitioners were incapable of preventing deaths; they could only advise people to flee from infection. But while the Black Death had the single biggest impact, life expectancy at birth was much the same before and after the event. In thirteenth-century France it fluctuated between 23 and 27 years, just as it did in the seventeenth century.7 In England life expectancy in the late thirteenth century was just over 25; in the late sixteenth, it fluctuated around 40 and then fell back to around 35 until the end of the eighteenth century.8 Although there is every reason to suppose that the cohort of people alive in 1348 saw their own life expectancy cut by up to a half, the outlook for people born before and after the Black Death was not so very different. Despite the plague recurring every eight or so years, and wiping out 10–20 per cent of a town or city each time, the higher standard of living and better nutrition enjoyed by the survivors compensated in part for this. As a consequence, health as measured by life expectancy at birth saw most change in the modern period.

  Country 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

  Sweden 37–3 36.5 43–3 54.0 70.3 79–75

  Italy 32 30 32 42.8 66.0 79–2

  France 27.9 33–9 39–8 47–4 66.5 79.15

  England 36.9 37.3 40.0 48.2 69.2 77–35

  Spain (28) 28 29.8 34–8 63.9 78.85

  Average (unweighted mean) 32.42 33.14 36.98 45–44 67.18 78.86

  Changes in the
mean – 0 years

  9 months 3 years

  10 months 8 years

  6 months 21 years

  9 months 11 years

  8 months

  Life expectancy at birth in five European countries9

  Clearly, the increase in life expectancy of 33 years over the course of the twentieth century was far in excess of anything that had been seen before. The nineteenth century is in second place on quantitative grounds. Changes in life expectancy were relatively small before 1800; thus the plague-ridden fourteenth century seems to merit third place in the centuries that saw changes in health. On qualitative grounds, fourth and fifth places should go to the seventeenth century, which saw the near-universal adoption of medical strategies and the end of Galenic medicine, and the sixteenth, which experienced the rediscovery of anatomy, the introduction of chemical remedies, and considerable advances in professional medical knowledge.10

  FREEDOM FROM IDEOLOGICAL PREJUDICE

  The four preceding needs, all of which are matters of life and death, can in some way or other be quantified. With the remainder, little or no quantification is possible. Ideological prejudices are especially hard to rate, even qualitatively, due to their number and variety. We have to bear in mind trends such as the eleventh-century discontinuation of slavery, the formal abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, and the passing of laws against religious minorities in the interim. We need to consider the humanitarianism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the gradual introduction of legislation to protect women and children. Specific minorities experienced periods of intolerance at different times. The Jews were thrown out of England in the thirteenth century, expelled from Spain in the seventeenth, and persecuted by Hitler with horrific vindictiveness in the twentieth. The persecution of ‘Egyptians’ (Gypsies) started with their expulsion from many European cities and states in the fifteenth century. In England, the Egyptians Act of 1530, which required them to be expelled from the country, was replaced by a second such Act in 1554, which required them to be hanged. Lastly we can hardly ignore the common prejudices against the poor, children and women.

  In trying to determine the greatest change in respect of all these things, let us consider discrimination on the grounds of race, religion, sex and class.

  • Racism in the medieval West was largely confined to intolerance towards those on the periphery of Christendom and Jews; there were periods of greater bitterness as a result of the Crusades, and more violent anti-Semitism, but on the whole these waxed and waned over the first five centuries. With the exploration of Africa, racism acquired a new dimension, which quickly gave rise to a fear of black men in the late sixteenth century. It was amplified by the reintroduction of slavery for sub-Saharan Africans. This racial prejudice does not seem significantly to have abated until the eighteenth century. It lessened further in the twentieth.

  • Religious discrimination rose and fell periodically in the Middle Ages – for example, with the Albigensian Crusade in the thirteenth century, Lollardy in the fourteenth and the Hussite Wars of the fifteenth. But it reached its apogee in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the torture and burning of heretics, and the Wars of Religion. It abated gradually in the eighteenth century, lessening further in the nineteenth, until it remained only a localised problem in the secularised West in the late twentieth century.

  • In the Middle Ages, sexual prejudices were largely secondary to those of class. A noblewoman, for example, was next in command in her household after her husband and thus far more important than all the other men. The ritualised humiliation of females, such as the gang-rapes of young women by up to half the town’s young men that regularly took place in cities such as Dijon in the fifteenth century, was directed by class prejudices as much as by misogynistic attitudes. However, while status might have distorted the sexism of the time, to the benefit of those of high rank and the detriment of those at the bottom of society, sexual prejudice still prevailed on a daily basis in most walks of life. As the Garden of Eden story demonstrates, it was implicit in the entire Christian belief system. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the subjugation of women started to be challenged by the growth of widespread female literacy and the publication of some proto-feminist tracts. At the same time, however, the witch craze increased the persecution of women, especially those of low status. The seventeenth century also saw the disempowerment of women due to the growing rigidity of gender roles: women were required to maintain a house while their husbands went to work. In northern Europe and America, puritanical views on sex led to women being subject to moral judgements and punishments for sexual transgression, including the death penalty in extreme cases. Their situation changed for the better in the eighteenth century, and hugely improved in the nineteenth as married women were allowed to own property and, in some countries, divorce their abusive husbands. But it was the twentieth century that saw the most significant improvements in the status of women.

  • Class prejudice fluctuated considerably in the early centuries, as countries first ceased to recognise slavery and then altered the conditions of serfdom. The rise of the towns in the thirteenth century gave many unfree peasants the opportunity to escape the bonds of their servitude. The depopulation caused by the Black Death placed a far greater value on the worth of labourers. The sixteenth century saw the impoverishment of the lower classes accentuate the differences between the haves and the have-nots. The real wealth of the ordinary working man in England greatly diminished at that time (as shown in the table below), and did not start to recover until the eighteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, attempts were made across the whole of the West to assert the equality of men of all classes. The drive to break down class barriers continued into the twentieth century

  1271–1300 1371–1400 1471–1500 1571–1600 1671–1700 1771–1800 1871–1900

  Average index value 51.5 74.7 98.5 51.2 49.9 56.1 113.1

  % change – 45% 32% -48% -2% 12% 102%

  Real wages index for building craftsmen in southern England (1451–75 = 100)11

  If we take all these shifts into consideration, there seems to have been a basic upward trend in the status of those at the very bottom of society throughout the millennium – from slavery to serfdom, then villeinage, and eventually free labouring – with the lower echelons of society benefiting from higher remuneration and political power in the twentieth century. This can be seen as a long, albeit uneven, decline in class prejudice. However, against this decline we have to set the significantly greater prejudice with regard to race, religion and gender noticeable from about 1500. It assumes the form of a bell-shaped graph – an arc of intolerance – rising steeply in the sixteenth century and reaching a shallow peak in the seventeenth before declining gradually in the eighteenth and rapidly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The financial hardship of the working class also follows this arc. Therefore, in terms of the impact of ideological prejudice, or the freedom from it, I rank the sixteenth century first (the steepest rise of the arc of intolerance), the nineteenth second (the steepest fall of the arc), and the eighteenth third, followed by the twentieth and seventeenth centuries.

  COMMUNITY SUPPORT

  When considering love, Maslow’s third requirement, we have to suppose that there has not been an enormous change through the centuries. Boy meets girl is one of the few constants over the millennium. There were some changes: in the Middle Ages, for example, the lack of money to keep a family prevented many men from marrying. At the same time, feudalism imposed restrictions on whom an unfree peasant could marry. Thus we might look at the decline of feudalism in the fourteenth century and the rise of peasant incomes in the fourteenth and fifteenth (as shown in the table in the previous section) as signs that men and women were able to find love more easily than their predecessors. However, it was not in a feudal lord’s interest to stop his unfree peasants from marrying and breeding, so we should not overstate the significance of this factor. While a few pe
ople at the bottom of society were unable to marry the person of their choice until about 1400, the same can be said for those of higher status too, as the marriages of wealthy people were generally arranged by their families. In terms of love, these were not necessarily bad marriages, or at least no worse than the marriages of those who married for love and found themselves falling out of love. The real problem lay in being shackled for life to a hateful or uncaring partner. Therefore, the most significant change in finding emotional fulfilment was undoubtedly the ability to divorce, which was a development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At least that way, if you made a mistake, your life was not completely blighted. As for same-sex romantic love, this was a capital offence throughout most of Christendom from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. The last men executed for sodomy in England, James Pratt and John Smith, were hanged in 1835; as with divorce, the centuries of greatest change were the nineteenth and twentieth.