I’ll throw in Thucydides as well for presenting a similar challenge.

Dr. Beier talks about the dangers of holding up Machiavelli as an exemplar to be emulated, and it mentions instances of ostensibly classically-educated figures using Machiavellian ideas approvingly:

So, is Machiavelli’s project and/or life consonant with classical education in a way that qualifies him to serve as an exemplum? No. While popular views may be without nuance, they capture his project. While his corpus admits many readings, an interpretation of that part of his work in The Prince and The Discourses which bears on classical education and is within the range of plausible interpretations is as follows: With revolutionary intent, Machiavelli boldly but wrongly redefines excellence (virtù) to include attributes like cruelty, violence, and victory rather than the excellences of the cardinal virtues as understood by Aristotle and Cicero.

In histories of political philosophy, Machiavelli is sometimes called the “first modern” political thinker, who refocuses the aim of politics away from virtue and the common good, onto raw power. The Prince is famous for its amoral advice to rulers, discussing when and how to have opponents killed, and how to subdue a populace without any apparent concern for right or wrong. Only results matter for Machiavelli, and it's easy to draw a line from The Prince to modern appeals to revolutionary violence and “might makes right.”

I noticed a similar tendency pop up last winter during the bizarre three-week episode when it seemed like the U.S. was about to annex Greenland. In defense of the claim that the U.S. should just do what was necessary, I saw more than a few instances of supporters of annexation unironcally quote Thucydides’ famous line from the Melian Dialogue, where the Athenians justify their assault on the small neutral island of Melos with, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

Apparently, Thucydides and Machiavelli represent the amoral realist strain within classical education and the Great Books tradition. I expect that more than a few teachers and students have encountered this notion, especially given the way both authors are often taught.

Especially for a new or young teacher, one of the easiest ways to teach a seminar discussion (which of course, is what we are always told we should be doing constantly with great works) on the The Prince or the Melian Dialogue is to walk students through the text, and then say, “so who has the best arguments? The Athenians or the Melians? Is Machiavelli right when he says that it’s better to be feared than loved?” The format of pitching such texts as having open-ended questions for debate implies that the hard-nosed position might be valid.

I myself wrestled with this tension as a young teacher, and wasn’t entirely sure of what to make of Machiavelli and the Melian Dialogue’s place alongside the usual canon of virtue-ethics in political philosophy. However, after years of teaching both the Peloponnesian War and the Renaissance, and having advised a senior thesis or two on Machiavelli, I think I have largely resolved this tension to my satisfaction. I now believe that classical educators can teach both Thucydides and Machiavelli faithfully and accurately, and without accidentally turning their students into power-seeking nihilists.

The problem is one of context. Let’s start with Thucydides.

Thucydides

While it’s understandable to think of Thucydides as a hard-nosed realist, I am firmly convinced that Thucydides is instead something of a tragic playwright. Thucydides does not present the Melian Dialogue with a shrug of the shoulders as if to say “who’s right? It’s hard to say…what do you think?” Thucydides wants us to realize that the Melians were foolish and naive in resisting Athens, but he also does not want us to endorse the Athenian belief that being an imperial power means doing whatever you can get away with.

The Melian Dialogue is an open-ended seminar, but a tragedy. Melos is besieged, sacked, destroyed, and the Athenians enslave the women, kill the men, and send out new colonists to the island. Melos clearly chose badly in hoping vainly for help from the gods and from Spartan. But the very next act in the work is the Sicilian campaign, and the imperial hubris and folly of the Athenians finding out that the strong can end up completely wrecking themselves. The Athenians quickly find themselves lacking the protections of justice and diplomacy that the Melians had warned them not to throw away.

Throughout the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians’ constantly shoot themselves in the foot and are their own worst enemy. Sparta’s final victory over Athens is almost an anti-climax, coming after plague, missed diplomatic opportunities, Alcibiades, Sicily, revolution, more Alcibiades, and the execution of Athens’ own victorious generals after the battle of Arginusae. Thucydides’ give you the glory of Pericles’ funeral oration, and in the very next paragraph moves directly into the plague narration. He never invokes the gods directly, but it’s hard not to read the whole movement as a hubristic lesson on the part of Providence or fate playing nemesis to Pericles’ grand vision of Athenian greatness.

Elsewhere, throughout the work, Thucydides shows himself to be a cynic in the best sense. He believes humans are selfish and self-interested, but understands how this can work to the benefit of a community. The Melian Dialogue should always be read alongside the Mytilenean Debate, in which an Athenian named Diodotus successfully persuades the Athenians to spare the rebellious city of Mytilene from destruction, not because the Mytilenian’s don’t deserve punishment (they do), but because it will not be in Athens’ true self-interest, as it will alienate allies and harden future rebels into desperation.

There is also Thucydides’ absolutely devastating passage on the Corcyrean Revolution and the factional strife that ripped Greece apart during the war. Thucydides’ entire treatment of stasis is one that I have long planned to write on at length. You cannot read and understand it and come away thinking that Thucydides is not deeply concerned with morality. But he realizes that idealism and high-minded principles alone will be shredded in the tempest of factionalism and civil strife, and instead writes from an even deeper well of cynicism to show that those who threw away morality for the sake of fear or power were even more short-sighted.

Thucydides does not want you to agree with the Athenian position during the Melian Dialogue, and the fact that so many today have quoted Thucydides as if he was endorsing it, is at least a dark irony that Thucydides himself would appreciate, and probably be completely unsurprised by.

Machiavelli

Likewise, Machiavelli. If Machiavelli is only read as a political philosopher, in an abstract debate alongside Plato, Cicero, and Locke, then he can be very dangerous indeed. Alongside Aristotle and Livy, Machiavelli sounds positively bleak, and looks like the herald of every amoral attempt to break a few eggs in order to make an omelet for the greater good. Perhaps Machiavelli would then appreciate the irony of someone claiming it was worth it to go back in time and kill him before he could publish The Prince. It’d be for the greater good after all.

Machiavelli can be dangerous to read as a pure philosopher, but he is a brilliant thinker, and becomes much more legible when placed inside the context of his own life. This is not a call for historicism or an attempt to neuter the implications of his ideas. But background context sheds light on the problem Machiavelli was trying to address, and it does in fact help neuter attempts to hold him up as an amoral exemplar.

I am indebted to the Renaissance scholar and expert Ada Palmer for her excellent essay series on Machiavelli and the Italian Wars. Much of my understanding of this period, and the way in which I now teach the Renaissance and Machiavelli, is owed to her.

Machiavelli’s career played out within the general tumult of Renaissance city-state politics, and the larger Italian Wars which pulled in almost every major power in Europe in the late 15th and early 16th century. The full chronology of the Italian Wars is dizzyingly complicated, and I have not yet really attempted to fully get my head around them.

What is clear though, is that the Holy Roman Empire, France, and Spain, all wanted to assert hegemony over Northern Italy, and constantly intervened and picked sides in the internal disputes of Italian politics, which were already incredibly complicated to begin with. Florence, Milan, Naples, Venice, and the Papacy were only the most powerful Italian players in a cutthroat game of high-stakes diplomacy and war which reads like something out of Hellenistic Greece or the late Roman Republic. For that matter, you could also say it resembles board games such as Diplomacy, or the dirty-dealing politics of Shakespeare, I Claudius, or Game of Thrones.

In fact, even the infamy of Game of Thrones can’t really top the cartoonishly evil villainy of the Borgia family, which included Alexander VI, and his son Cesare. Rumor had it that there was a betting pool in Rome for which Cardinal would next show up dead in the Tiber under Alexander VI, and Cesare literally went around murdering people while wearing black clothes and a mask (to cover up the ravages of syphilis). Cesare Borgia broke every rule in the traditional handbooks of princely behavior when it came to murder and betrayal, and Palmer describes Machiavelli following Borgia’s entourage as a diplomat, and taking notes in an attempt to understand his apparent success.

In particular, Palmer describes Machiavelli witnessing how Borgia pacified the rebellious province of Romagna, which had sunk into banditry and violence. Borgia sent a trusted mercenary captain to Romagna with orders to brutalize and terrorize the province into submission, after which Borgia had the captain cut in half and left on display in the town square:

Cesare needed to bring order. He appointed a mercenary captain named Remirro de Orco, one of his more loyal men, and commanded that he bring peace to the area as efficiently as possible by using maximum brutality. Following Cesare’s order, Remirro carried out numerous executions, using methods gruesome even for the Renaissance, and speedily crushed the region under the iron heel of peace. No one looted. No one dared. After peace was achieved, Cesare inspected the region and confirmed that it was indeed stable, arguably even more prosperous than it had been before his conquests, but that the people were fired with bitterness and rage. The next morning, Cesare had departed, and Remirro de Orco was found in the town square of Cesena, having been sliced in half, with his gore-spewing entrails strewn across the decorative pavement. No one doubted it was Cesare’s doing, but to Machaivelli’s astonishment, the effect of this unthinkable betrayal was instant and lasting peace. The people were satisfied, even grateful, that Cesare had taken revenge upon the brutal oppressor, and the new, gentler vassal he left in place to rule the region was readily obeyed. They did not blame Cesare for the atrocities loyal Remirro had carried out at his express order – instead they thanked him for avenging them. Cesare was loved.

This is the background against which Machiavelli wrote The Prince, in which he included the story of Remirro de Orco. Northern Italy had descended into a cauldron of violence, with powerful kingdoms on all sides, and even the Papacy itself serving as an agent of war (war which was, if less nefarious, only amplified by Pope Julius II, who succeeded Alexander VI). This was an environment where utter ruthlessness was paramount, and where the niceties of civilizing norms could only be considered after existential survival. Machiavelli is not the author you consult when constructing a political regime in a vacuum. Machiavelli is the author you want when you are in a knife-fight in a geopolitical phone booth. Machiavelli can still be very useful as a political thinker in non-existential political struggles, but he should be used with care.

I’ve used two rather different examples for students while attempting to explain Machiavelli. The first is that of Vice President Dick Cheney on 9/11, who had to give an order to potentially shoot down any hijacked airliners about to impact an American city. In abstract philosophical terms, this order may well have been evil, but it’s hard not to also see it as necessary.

The second example, somewhat out of left field, is to appeal to the Byzantine political tradition, which viewed most warfare as a necessary evil even at its best. Early Christianity could adopt radical pacifism on the part of the individual, but Christian Roman emperors still had to defend the frontier with violence. Western Latin Christianity adopted a more legalistic approach using Just War Theory, but the East always retained a more tragic and sin-laden view of politics. Even “legitimate wars” of self-defense still involved violence and death, and Byzantine soldiers were sometimes barred from receiving communion after killing in war for up to three years. The Byzantine approach to necessary evil in politics was essentially, “sometimes you have to shoot down the airliner, after which you should probably go to a monastery and repent for the rest of your life.”

To return to Ada Palmer, her overarching point is that Machiavelli must be understood as a figure trying to understand both why the old tradition of handbooks given to princes extolling loyalty and virtuous behavior had so clearly failed, and two, how to protect Florence itself. Indeed, Palmer’s larger frame narrative for introducing Machiavelli is S.P.Q.F. - riffing on the old Senatus Populusque Romanus, but for Florence. Palmer movingly explains just how personally devoted Machiavelli was to Florence.

While Machiavelli did develop a new approach to political philosophy, he did so out of extremely traditional, and even ancient loyalties. He was a patriot for his city-state, and cared about Florence above all else. This was why Machiavelli refused to betray his own city when he was exiled, and why he was even willing to sacrifice his republicanism for the sake of knuckling under to the Medici family. And that does reveal an underlying telos and governing purpose to his seemingly amoral politics.

Also, while Machiavelli is most famous for writing The Prince, he spent much more time on The Discourses, and seems to have identified closely with Livy and the civic republican tradition. Machiavelli even believed rather anachronistically that a citizen-militia patterned on a Greek polis or Roman res publica would prove better than the professional mercenaries of the Renaissance (this failed miserably). I’ve always found it hard to imagine a genuinely amoral monster also loving the most morally earnest and civic-minded of Rome’s historians.

Finally, while I don’t think this will be a new and earth-shattering revelation to many, the famous letter to Vettori also textures the flavor of Machiavelli’s humanism:

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the an­cient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.

If read allegorically, the mud and mire of politics suggest something sordid and necessary, but which are worn in order to be ultimately shed for something better and higher.

To return to the original ClassicalED piece from Dr. Beier, I share the author’s concerns about how Machiavelli (and in my experience, Thucydides) are sometimes invoked, especially within ostensibly classically educated circles. I think Machiavelli should and can be taught very profitably (wise as serpents after all…), but that the dangers of doing so can be circumscribed by keeping him firmly tied to his place and day. More broadly, I think classical education can sometimes stand for a little more historical context alongside its traditional worthy emphasis on great books and texts.

Although, as a history teacher…of course I’d say that.

Thank you for reading. This was an attempt to get a quicker article out, and has less sourcing of links and footnotes and a little less polish than I normally aim for. I hope to write more on classical education and history soon.

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• The winds of Aeolus and how the Greeks are their own worst enemy.

• The Laestrygonians and the gradual stripping away of civilization, gods, and humanity from Odysseus.

• Pigs and human appetites, Hermes makes another appearance, and why Odysseus and Circe go to bed together.

• The underworld, Tiresias, and Odysseus’ meeting with his Mother.

• The parade of female and male heroic cameos. And why Achilles goes away happy rather than sad.

• Odysseus doesn’t tell his crew everything about the Sirens and Scylla.

• What the Sirens really offer Odysseus.

• Why the Gods put Odysseus to sleep on the island of Helios.

• Odysseus is saved from Charybdis by hanging on to a fig tree.

And more.

Cover image: Odysseus and the Sirens, from an ancient Greek vase at the British Museum (Wikimedia Commons).

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Under the leadership of the head farmer, the village grows even more, and is able to tackle larger problems of organization and collective action, such as digging irrigation ditches and building roads and bridges. Generations later, the head farmer is remembered as a founding king who led not through force, but by persuading everyone to follow him willingly. You can see something like the outlines of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson’s notions of the social contract emerging here. In response to a problem, people rally round a leader, investing them with responsibility to act on behalf of the common good.

The social contract method of state formation is largely a happy one, and forms the basis of myths and legends for heroic figures (many states and cities in the ancient world have legends of heroes who save their people from monsters or invaders, and so become king). But it is not the only theory of state formation, and it may not be the most common either.

Let’s go back to our first bandit raids, and imagine a different, much more unpleasant outcome. This time, the villagers fail to successfully band together, or they are simply routed by the bandits, who kill some of the farmers and scatter the rest, before helping themselves to plunder. The bandits then return several weeks later, and carry off even more food, livestock, and villagers. Ultimately, the village may simply collapse and be destroyed, with the survivors captured or fleeing (some of them may in turn become bandits themselves). The raiders then move on to the next village in the valley.

Alternatively, a group of bandits might raid the town, defeat the villagers, and then take over, establishing themselves as a group of thugs in town, taking whatever they want, and roughing up anyone who gets too defiant. Eventually, however, the bandits realize that if they plunder too heavily, the village will collapse. They oppress the farmers and leave them with little to live on, but they don’t destroy everything.

One day, another group of hunter-gatherer bandits appears in the valley, and threatens the town. The local chief and his thugs won’t tolerate anyone else stealing from the peasants they’re already bullying, and so they march out and defeat or fend off the new group of interlopers. Returning to the village, there’s a strange sort of respect between the peasants and the thugs, as they begin to see slightly more eye-to-eye. Tentatively, the peasants begin to negotiate with the thugs, offering to grudgingly pay them in regular amounts of produce in return for better treatment.

The next time there’s a property dispute between peasants over whose farmland belongs to which family, the bandit chieftain resolves the dispute, not because he particularly cares about who’s in the right, but because he wants the farmers to get along and work efficiently. In an extreme case, he doesn’t mind killing a farmer or two himself, but he will preserve his monopoly on violence and forbid the farmers fighting each other. When the farmers point out that the annual river flooding is washing away some of their fields, and that it’s hard to cross the river to trade with the next village over, the chieftain organizes the farmers into work parties to dig ditches and build bridges. He might even put some of his own men to work. His most trusted lieutenants go round to each farm at harvest time, collecting grain and livestock.

The villagers still aren’t happy about this, but at least they know how much will be taken, and can plan accordingly ahead of time. When it gets hard to keep track of all the plunder, and when the bandit chieftain starts to wonder if some of his own men are stealing from him under the table, the village priest takes a break from looking at the stars to suggest that the chieftain should have his men make marks on clay tablets to count and record the grain revenue. Some of the cleverer boys in the village, who are good at counting, are put to work making notations and recording each transaction between the farmers and the bandit’s men. They develop a simple system of crude pictures to represent men, grain, various animals, and common finished goods such as pots and textiles. Marks are pressed into soft clay tablets using the ends of reeds, cut at an angle. To ensure that farmers have paid what they owe, and that the bandit’s men can’t extort the farmers by collecting extra, the farmers are issued with a copy of the clay tablet they can keep as proof of payment; just like a modern receipt. In a small village where everyone knew each other, such receipts would have been less important, but as villages grew into cities, and as kings ruled over larger and larger populations, permanent record-keeping became an important part of royal administration. The village priest may have also gotten the idea in the first place from traveling merchants who used records to keep track of goods.

If you squint, you’ll begin to see all the outlines of a government taking shape. The stationary bandit and his men are not benevolent rulers who care for their subjects, but they have defended the village against outside threats, have resolved disputes and dispensed justice, and have begun building public infrastructure (ditches, bridges, roads). In return, they are collecting and recording regular tribute from the peasants for their own use, in a process which looks suspiciously like taxation.

As time goes on, the bandit chief takes a wife from the village, and his son rules after him, but now as a chief with one foot in each community. Generations later, the first bandit has been turned into a legendary kingly figure, with statues and monuments, and a hagiographic halo around his legacy which ignores or softens much of his early brutality. Many thinkers and historians throughout history have described this sort of process, and you can see other periods in history where roving bandits settled down and ruled over peasant communities (something similar happened in some places during the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and with medieval Vikings). The particular phrase “stationary-bandit thesis” comes from the work of the economist and political scientist Mancur Olson.

Notice how there is very little charity or genuine goodwill in the stationary-bandit thesis; everything turns on self-interest. Life is probably better in the social-contract state where the village voluntarily joins together around a chosen leader, but a village where a thug realizes that order and prosperity are in his own self-interest is also one that can grow and become better off over time. And frankly, over time, life in the social-contract state also starts to resemble that of the stationary-bandit state, as rulers are forced by circumstances to compel obedience, require taxation, and wield a monopoly on organized violence.

Life would certainly be better if people trusted each other out of kindness, and a world of genuine virtue would be freer and happier than one where people only do the right thing because they think there’s something in it for themselves. But any system which inherently depends on virtue and selflessness is one that can be easily taken advantage of by those who are selfish and unscrupulous. Many of the best forms of social organization that humans have devised work instead by turning selfishness to productive ends (“I’ll be better off if I respect other people’s property and follow the law”). We are supposed to obey the rules of the road and follow speed limits, but most of us don’t drive the speed limit because we’re obeying some platonic form of justice. And yet, out of our self-interested desire to avoid a speeding ticket, we enable thousands of other drivers to share the road with us.

Many of the world’s greatest religions have helped turn selfish-virtue (“I won’t hit you if you won’t hit me”) into positive charity and goodwill (“love thy neighbor,” “do unto others as you would have others do unto you”). This extra layer of an intrinsic exhortation to do good, on top of merely a self-interested one, is one of the most important principles that can make a civilization genuinely flourish, and not just survive.

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In a small agricultural village, where the supply of fermented grains was limited or seasonal, one could drink to excess during festival events and feast-days, and then sober up on a daily ration of weak beer or wine for most of the year. Literature and historical sources are full of examples of civilians and soldiers losing their self-control at a moment’s notice in the presence of alcohol, as well as ship captains knowing above all else that their sailors needed their daily grog. Wellington’s excellent army, which won the Peninsular War and stood fast against Napoleon at Waterloo, was nevertheless described by the Duke as the scum of the earth, and full of men who “enlisted for drink.”

A world where individuals were limited to finite quantities of weaker alcohol, or soldiers and sailors had their spirits strictly rationed, was a stable equilibrium of a sort. The advent of ubiquitous hard liquor in the 17th and 18th centuries, however, created the greatest alcoholic crisis in history. Expanding urban populations and cheaper methods of distilling grain created larger markets for hard liquor, which exploded into a full-fledged social epidemic at least as bad as modern drug crazes. Dickensian England and the industrial cities of the 19th century produced some of the most atrocious squalor and human misery in history.

In North America, back-country farmers unable to easily transport grain to market, turned to distilling corn and rye. Thus was born bourbon, moonshine, and an indelible American tradition as old as the Whiskey Rebellion. As Ken Burns’ miniseries vividly illustrated, American alcohol consumption before Prohibition was incredible. Drinking peaked around 1830, when the average American adult was downing the equivalent of 1.7 bottles of 80-proof liquor each week. That is an average, which therefore includes women and teetotallers in the total. Somewhat encouragingly, alcohol consumption had already declined considerably by the start of Prohibition, thanks to a century-long campaign of social and religious reform of manners. By 1911-1915, average consumption was down to around 2.5 gallons per adult per year (though that is still the amount of pure ethanol alcohol, not 80-proof).

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Today, alcohol still ruins lives, and requires strong social and institutional guardrails around its use. However, if anything, it is today even cheaper and more ubiquitous. An individual today could buy the 1830s weekly average amount of alcohol for less than two hours minimum wage labor. By and large, society has developed levels of self-control and moderation around the responsible use of alcohol that simply weren’t the case for much of history, in no small part because such temperance wasn’t necessary outside of aristocratic circles which explicitly had to develop such norms. Athenian drinking symposiums were supposed to demonstrate self-mastery, and the most famous piece of satire in Petronius’ Satyricon is an incredibly decadent dinner party at the house of Trimalchio, a former slave-turned-fantastically-wealthy gourmand.

This is of a piece with the “two steps forward, one step back” process of historical change, where new social innovations or paradigms often have unforeseen consequences which take time to address or ameliorate. After WW II, Americans continued to develop norms and regulations around drinking and driving, as well as automobile safety in general. Child safety in cars before the 1990s looks today like something out of the Wild West.

More recently and obviously, the widespread adoption of the smartphone created, in less than two decades, a world where several billion devices equipped with unfettered internet access were dropped into the hands of most of the globe’s population. The backlash around giving internet devices to children has increased quickly, with authors such as Jonathan Haidt leading calls for regulating or at least responsibly monitoring their use. It’s quite possible that a social stratification is already emerging between those who can create boundaries and levers around the use of smart devices, and those who doomscroll endlessly.

We see similar trends emerging with diet, food, and fitness, where for much of human history, pale skin and a little more weight on the bones were signs of beauty and status, because they implied a sedentary (affluent) life indoors. For much of history, a thin frame and tanned skin suggested manual labor in the fields, whereas today, these traits suggest a life of enough freedom and self-control to escape the world of cubicles and fluorescent lights. After WW II, a century of blue-collar industrial labor gave way to widespread middle-class office work, and with it, the stereotypical sitcom baby-boomer who arrived home at the end of the day eager to slouch down into the couch. This escape from manual labor to indolence has already given way to a new generation of millennials and zoomers eager to flex status by showcasing healthy diets and exercise. We may have forgotten what Al Bundy’s world looked like to a generation only recently escaped from steel mills and assembly lines.

The implications for all of the above also apply to the emergent world of AI.

The Printing Press and AI

As a teacher, one of the dominant AI metaphors I’ve been using for myself is that of a monk in a monastery or university in the late 15th century, coming to grips with the printing press and pondering its implications. The medieval world enabled a smaller number of scholars to read and debate carefully, in intellectually guarded environments that allowed for more nuance and productive disagreement. The printing press spilled literate culture out beyond the walls of the monastery and university, and fostered an intellectual environment that disseminated information rapidly, and was coarser, louder, and less nuanced. Luther’s gifts as a writer and polemicist were perfectly suited to the world of single-page broadsheets. The printing press increased the scope and participation of public debate, while probably also lowering its quality. The 16th century also witnessed fake news, propaganda, and moral panics. The Malleus Maleficarum, which was a manual for understanding demonology and spotting occult practice, was condemned by the “experts” within the university and church magisterium, but became a popular best-seller and helped contribute to the greatest period of witch burning in European history. Many printing presses also only survived as profitable enterprises by printing scurrilous propaganda, conspiracy theories, ribald songs, and erotic literature. The internet is not so new after all.

But the printing press also created the conditions for the King James Bible, and accelerated the growth of literacy, Europe’s burgeoning commercial economy, and the scientific revolution. It is unquestionably one of the great inventions of all time, and has unleashed tremendous human flourishing.

The printing press was also, once sufficiently well-established, functionally inevitable in its spread and adoption. If a new technological practice or social innovation offers enough apparent utility, or a competitive advantage that can be used against rivals, then its adoption will be very hard to check. The later Industrial Revolution overthrew the old aristocratic order of Europe in no small part because it offered fiscal, commercial, technological, and military advantages that everyone else had to copy, or else succumb to.

In regard to AI, my position is not a fatalistic one in that we should numbly submit to the future and open the spigots wide. But it does mean that efforts to wall ourselves off or turn back the clock will most likely fail. What remains is how to accommodate ourselves to the change, and build durable institutions and norms that can survive and even flourish. AI will tear its way through parts of society, and some lost lives are probably “baked in” in the sense that AI is unavoidable. What remains to us is to learn how to use it responsibly, and to develop norms and practices around self-control and self-mastery. As with the alcoholic peasant, we must all develop temperance.

However, alongside the inevitable costs, there is real cause for optimism, as AI shows great promise in some domains, although I am not particularly well equipped to discuss coding, engineering, or biotech. If nothing else, the historical record actually shows that humans can be quite adept at (eventually) developing healthy norms and guardrails against the downside of new innovations. I am personally somewhat suspicious and cynical about the uses of public policy and regulation here, and think that, as with the decline in drinking before Prohibition, agency and moral accountability lie in the hands of citizens, parents, and individuals. In any case, as a teacher, I can do the most good at the local level within my own Tocquevillian community.

I think it is already apparent that AI can be a powerful tool when used well, especially for those who want to genuinely learn a new domain or knowledge-base. Perhaps paradoxically, it rewards those who already know much to begin with, and those who know how to ask good questions and stress-test their own assumptions. The full implications of the knowledge, entrepreneurship, and creativity that AI could unleash are enormous. Historically, small numbers of very talented individuals have often created extraordinary new works of art, philosophy, and technology. If AI helps educate or empower another Gutenberg, Carnegie, or Musk, it could radically transform parts of our world.

AI and Education

(For what it’s worth, all the views expressed here are my own. At an institutional level, our faculty are thinking through this issue cautiously, which I believe is prudent).

There are a host of problems and challenges to be worked out in terms of education and the classroom. I personally do not think most school systems are well prepared, and higher education seems even less so. The old 19th and 20th century models of a broad-based and broadly-educated society with common standards, norms, and values were already eroding, and AI will accelerate this process.

In regard to education, the core dynamic I have already observed is that AI is a force-multiplier for those who are self-motivated and want to use it well, and a crutch for those who want to use it to check boxes and complete rote work. This detonates precisely the carrot-and-stick approach teachers have used in school systems over the last century, where we insist on rules, procedures, and standards which are mostly designed to chivy along the average student and force them (often against their will) to actually learn something. An athlete may know intellectually that running sprints and doing individual drills are good for them, but they benefit from having a coach exhorting them past their own quitting point. Similarly, a good teacher in the classroom will often hear, sometimes even years later, “you know, I didn’t want to learn that at the time but…”.

Even in schools with AI bans, much of the normal reinforcement done through homework will become effectively optional. Setting aside the problem of writing for the moment, AIs can already explain documents, answer questions, and solve math problems. This will especially tempt just those students who work more slowly and need more time outside of class to master content. Teachers are going to have to start thinking even more about helping students develop willpower, internal motivation, and accountability.

I expect some school systems will implement AI chatbots badly, and that the illusion of personalized tutoring will, with skewed incentives, quickly turn into another top-down bureaucracy obsessed with collecting and measuring “data.” Anthropic has released a Claude for teachers, and a lot of the pitch for the program is integration with the existing alphabet-soup of education standards, dashboards, and platforms. This could be useful in streamlining workflow and automating a lot of the busywork that teachers complain of, but it is not a revolution in learning.

Good schools (and especially small ones) with strong personal teaching, could use AI well in some cases. When properly aligned, AIs are very good at quizzing and stress-testing for weaknesses in understanding, and they may prove very useful at helping tutor struggling students who don’t get as much attention from teachers as would be ideal. A motivated student who does in fact want to reinforce a concept or get caught up on missed material can use AI effectively on their own. Students have told me about studying for tests by uploading my study guides into GPT, along with added notes for context, and having the model quiz them on terms and concepts.

Above all, those who want to learn a great deal with AI will be able to do so. This will select partially for intelligence, but even more for willpower and genuine curiosity over rule-following and grade-seeking. This will challenge some old stereotypes about what constitutes the best type of student.

Currently, as I see it, the teaching of writing remains a major unresolved challenge. Students simply need a great deal of practice to become good at writing, and writing is an incredibly helpful tool in thinking. A great deal of my own writing here on Substack is at least half-motivated by the desire to pursue a question, and I often find I don’t really understand a topic until I get at least halfway through writing about it. In both writing and teaching, you learn a tremendous amount by doing. I am also viscerally opposed to having something else write for me, because I grew up in a world without AI, and am very jealous of my own authorial voice. But the next generation of students may not feel this norm anywhere near so strongly.

To the extent that we continue to let students write on their own, outside of class, we are creating an inevitable moral hazard. And to the extent that cheating with AI becomes a norm, it will start damaging the relationship between students and teachers in ways that extend far beyond the grade book.

However, in thinking through this problem, one thought has recently occurred to me about the process of composition in the pre-modern world. A huge amount of my writing process involves trial and error, and the constant cutting and revision of content, in a way that writers before modern word processors didn’t have easy access to, aside from erasable wax tablets. The practice of writing out multiple drafts by hand on scarce papyrus or parchment was time consuming and expensive.

My emerging hunch is that, because ancient authors often dictated their writing to scribes, clerks, and slaves, they must have had a different mental approach to composition. Our ability to endlessly write, erase, and organize thoughts on the fly might actually be a recent innovation.

In fact, from what I understand about classical rhetoric, ancient training in writing seems to have involved many formal exercises and standardized typologies, which students practiced over and over again as a form of mental muscle memory. The Progymnasmata (mentioned by classical authors and then further codified in the Late Roman and Byzantine Empire) involved standard writing exercises which escalated in difficulty and complexity, and which students could be assigned to write on as practice (“write a fable based on a dialogue, choose to write either an encomium or vituperation on Julius Caesar, etc.”). The Progymnasmata’s exercises were shorter than academic essays, and concerned more with the organization of logic and argument than our modern focus on research and empirical prose. Practicing these exercises over and over again functioned like the set plays and drills taught in sports, and made it easier for students to compose arguments on the spot, especially for the purposes of spoken oration.

There is revived interest in the Progymnasmata in some schools, and our own faculty at my school is taking an interest in it, though this predates the specific challenges of AI. It’s possible that the “progym” may help rebuild mental muscles for argumentation and coherent thought, which can be practiced quickly in the classroom, and scaled up for larger compositions.

The Progymnasmata may also serve as training for a revival of rhetoric, if not as stiff and formal as the old Ciceronian conventions. If AI makes apparent cognition and knowledge abundant, then we may see a revival of in-person communication, social skills, and charisma as highly valued goods. These are things that classical education can teach well, whereas much of modern education (even sometimes in classical schools) owes more to the Industrial Revolution’s need for mechanistic rule-following and problem solving, which are the skills most easily automated by AI.

The future may belong once more to the philosophers and rhetoricians.

Predictions:

Our history department has recently had some discussions about the future and AI. What follows is an edited version of a few predictions I made for my own use. As always with future forecasting, I fully expect over half of these to look hilariously wrong in two decades.

Knowledge, Cognition, Education:

• Knowledge (or the seeming generation of knowledge) will become ever more present and instantly available, increasing the importance of human memory as a filter, reliability-check, and creative lever. This cognitive muscle will need active training, because the temptation to offload memory and knowledge to AI will be strong.

• Those who know more already, will be able to use their knowledge better. It will theoretically be easier to learn new things, and learn them quickly. This will disproportionately reward those with high agency, willpower, and delayed gratification.

• Literacy and long-form reading have already been in decline for some time, and they will continue to do so. Cultivating deliberate habits of old-fashioned reading may need to become trendy and influential, similar to today’s physical exercise workout culture (somewhat performative and deliberately manufactured).

• If American education institutions of the last two centuries have, broadly speaking, sought to cultivate an education model fit for a mass democratic society where most people are broadly well educated (this applies to the golden age of American public schools, as well as classical schools with an interest in civics), AI may make upholding these egalitarian ideals very difficult.

On the Wider Societal Impact of AI:

• If written knowledge and communication become indistinguishable from AI-generated output, in-person communication, verbal skills, rhetoric, and charisma may become extremely valuable. Live attractions, physical travel, and human services may become scarce and desired resources in a world where anyone can artificially create a facsimile of the same experience. People will want “the real thing.”

• All the temptations of the last two decades of digital life may be magnified enormously by algorithms which can instantly produce content tailored to whatever the user desires. This could become terrifyingly powerful to individuals unable to resist it.

• Personal AIs could become extremely useful and dangerous at the same time. A personal AI properly configured could offer useful feedback and coaching in social skills, financial responsibility, and personal accountability. It could also reinforce personal delusion, grievance, and victimhood, and cocoon individuals in a web of unreality. Some people will use AI to overcome social isolation and loneliness. Others will be trapped and lost to society. It will not always be easy to predict which individuals will be “safe” to use AI.

• AI may do very strange things to the economy and social life. In theory, very small institutions with only a few people could become as valuable and influential as traditional large corporations. Digital solutions and services could be much more narrowly and specifically tailored to particular groups and institutions. The fragmentation of political and social life from the mid-20th-century high point of social cohesion will continue. The new cultures that replace it will look very strange.

• People with eclectic or disparate interests may be able to live very well, combining their interests creatively outside legacy institutions.

Economic Growth and Large Institutions:

• AI may become a powerful example of Jevons Paradox, where gains in efficiency lower cost to the point where they increase total consumption. While AI can write code much faster than a human, the demand for human programming and direction of AI code-writing may actually rise. Relatedly, after an initial bottleneck in the coming decade, the supply of computation and electricity may become extraordinarily cheap, leading to ubiquity on a scale that is currently very hard to fathom. Imagine telling someone in the late 19th century that oil would soon increase exponentially in demand, and fall in price.

• AI may be a huge leveler against mass bureaucratic institutions. Traditional large institutions use complexity as a gatekeeper, as byzantine rules require special expertise and authority to navigate. AIs, however, can instantly find information and navigate complex red tape far faster than humans. However, large institutions may respond to this threat by using their own AIs to make things even more complex. The future may involve a lot of “my AI talks to the hospital’s AI.”

• Personal AIs may become as de facto necessary for public life as the cell phone. It may be very hard for those who don’t want to use AI to opt out.

• The ability of AI to generate news, images, and video will further erode trust in digital information. Paradoxically, some news organizations may return to older standards of reliability and evidence, as institutions may benefit from cultivating a reputation for not using AI. Imagine a service such as the BBC having an incentive to return to field reporting across the globe, because they have the institutional resources for old-fashioned investigation, and can “prove” that they aren’t constantly generating fake content.

• Because AIs are trained on existing data, especially writing, the written knowledge of the last two hundred years may become extremely important in forming how LLMs are trained to “think” about the world. The Anglo-American world of the last few centuries may generate much of the linguistic and philosophical worldview that sits “underneath” AI (this seems currently underappreciated to me).

• Human writing now, before AIs fully proliferate, may have an outsized impact on the future imagination of LLMs and human thought, similar to the way historical explosions of literature and art (Homer, classical Greece, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, etc) became extremely important harmonizers and shapers of future thought. Culture and art that become “locked in” right before a period of dissemination often have significant lasting influence.

Final takeaways:

• Memory, willpower, agency, temperance, and trustworthiness will become more important.

• The future may become less egalitarian, even as everyone has more access to opportunity.

• The training and education given to ancient elites may prove very well-suited to a world with AI.

• AI raises the moral stakes for individuals who will use it well or badly according to their own virtue.

Putting it all together:

If I were a late medieval monk trying to come to grips with the future, and could pay the equivalent of $20 a month to rent a printing press, I would do it.

• The sacking of the Cicones and why Odysseus can’t control his men.

• The Lotus Eaters and memory.

• The Cyclops’ community as an anti-polis.

• How Odyssues knew to bring the wine.

• Zeus, Xenia, and the Cyclops asking “who are you.”

• Nobody.

• Homer’s incredibly evocative and gruesome depictions of violence.

• Why Odysseus had to reveal himself to Polyphemus.

• Polyphemus’ name.

• And more.

Cover image: Odysseus and the Sirens, from an ancient Greek vase at the British Museum (Wikimedia Commons).

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• The otherworldly wealth and status of Phaeacia.

• How Odysseus can navigate female spaces, and is often recognized by women sooner than men.

• The meaning of Odysseus weeping as he hears himself being sung about.

• The Phaeacian’s athletic contests, and why Odysseus is insulted at the idea of being a merchant.

• The meaning of the story of Hephaestus chaining Aphrodite and Ares, and why it foreshadows Odysseus’ homecoming.

• Why the role of Poseidon is even more important to the whole poem than we realized.

• How Odysseus plays the room perfectly, and primes his audience for the reveal of his identity.

And more besides. Don’t forget to tip your bard.

Cover image: Odysseus and the Sirens, from an ancient Greek vase at the British Museum (Wikimedia Commons).

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We are all shaped by the thoughts and ideas of thinkers, leaders, and writers who came before us. When trying to introduce history and “the past creates the present” to students, I point out that we all have ideas and insights that shape how we view the world whose origin we can’t explain. A conversational remark in passing, a thought half-remembered from a book, or a concept incompletely-explained in a video may lodge itself in our consciousness and over time become a lode-bearing pillar of our mental construct of reality. And the chain of causation for where those ideas came from can redound back a surprisingly long way, which is why almost everyone’s view of the fall of the Roman Empire is still shaped to some degree by Edward Gibbon, even when the vast majority of individuals today have never heard of him.

If we are what we eat, and are supposed to be conscious about the nourishment that fuels our bodies, we are often not so careful about interrogating the provenance of the ideas that program our assumptions and shape our perception of reality. We are all walking around with a horde of long dead philosophers echoing in our heads, telling us what to think and how to act, and even the most educated of us have never heard of half of them. We are slaves to dead tyrants who order us around, and much of the task of education (especially history) is learning who they are and where they came from, so that we can decide what to do with them.

And yet, the vividity of this image also shows the problems of studying ideas in history, and of over-prescribing clear textbook definitions. Because, as when you ask a student to repeat the main themes of a lesson, you will quickly find out that most of us, even those who have done the reading, have a very muddled sense of an idea and how to apply it. Ideas are half-understood, partially or incompletely appropriated, recombined with other unintended ideas, and repurposed for new ends. Above all, ideas have to be lived out, and anyone with a few years of adult maturation will understand how the ideas that shape our lives will over time grow, shrink, bend, reform, fade, and renew themselves.

The role of ideas in history is therefore superficially easy to talk about, but even easier to get wrong. Ideas are simple to isolate in books and printed texts, but are also easily dug up and lifted out of context. And the people most likely to read, write, and talk about them after the fact, are people who tend to value and talk about ideas themselves, opening the door to accidental exaggeration of their influence. Most of all, ideas are easy to abstract away from lived reality and turn into symbols that can be fought over without recourse to the complicated messy reality from which they came.

All of which brings me to the American Founding.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that cynicism pays to idealism

The American Founding is most often talked about and argued about in the realm of ideas and ideals. Take some John Locke, pen it with Thomas Jefferson, and trumpet a creedal nation that anyone can belong to. This narrative is simple to understand, easy to teach, and good for national unity and assimilation. Life, liberty, and the pursuit.

As a result, when the American founding is critiqued, it is also generally attacked along these grounds. There’s actually a fairly lengthy history here that extends back much further than contemporary culture-war fights.

The most obvious and in fact, most common method of critiquing such a high-minded and idealistic project, is simply to claim that the Founders were hypocrites. This is the greatest vulnerability of almost any movement or project based on ideals or lofty principles, and, given the foibles of human nature and the ability to cherry pick whatever one wants from sources, the easiest to undermine. Nobody is perfect, and any suitably important adherent of a movement can be tarred as being representative, fairly or not. Everyone knows the frustration of having the bad example of one’s side get constantly trotted out by opponents, who conveniently use it to avoid dealing with the strongest and best claims on offer.

This theme unites many of the most common criticisms of the American founding, beginning at least with the early Progressive era in the late 19th and early 20th century. In his day, Charles Beard was one of the foremost historians in America, and his “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States” (1913) argued that the Founders’ lofty democratic ideals fell short in reality, while the American founding was instead led by a small elite class of individuals pursuing their economic self-interest. This line of attack can and has been applied in almost any direction one likes, and is clearly echoed in Marxist, feminist, racial, and Native American historiographies. Similar arguments can be found on the reactionary right today by authors such as Curtis Yarvin, who argues that the American founders were simply rebels and the first leftists, merely looking for any argument at hand in order to justify breaking away from the crown. This is another cynical form of the “Founders as hypocrites” argument, and much less novel than its adherents seem to think it is.

Perhaps one could say that these critiques are not really about the role of ideas in history, but rather the negation of ideas, since it is claimed that the principles of the founding were not truly real, but were instead a smokescreen for petty interest. And yet the charge of hypocrisy only carries any real sting if the idea itself actually matters. After all, if the baseline of human political communities throughout history has always entailed self-interested elites manipulating the public weal for their own benefit, then the Founding Fathers are nothing special. The salience of every major claim made about injustice in America, from Frederick Douglass, to Howard Zinn, to the 1619 Project, can only deliver special weight if the original principle at stake actually means something, as Frederick Douglass himself understood. The principles of the American founding must first have been real, and lived out for at least some people, in order for others to ask that those principles be extended to them.

Elsewhere, mostly on the American right, the ideas and ideals of the founding are treated straightforwardly with importance even when they come in for critique. The post-liberals in particular take aim at the Lockean social contract and the Enlightenment, and the best-known of these today is probably Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. In these arguments, Enlightenment modernity’s pursuit for individualism and unconstrained freedom created a runaway train of self-fulfillment and desire which has no limiting principle. There is a robust and very old tradition of classical political philosophy, going back at least to Plato and Aristotle which takes virtue, civic order, and moral responsibility very seriously. Plato’s suspicion of democracies as individuals simply pursuing their base appetites has echoes today in complaints about rampant consumerism and materialism.

More recently on the political right, the notion of America as a propositional set of ideals has opened itself up to a nativist backlash which claims that a country can’t simply be a set of ideas, but must reflect a founding culture or ethnicity. It is not an accident that this argument has resurfaced over the last decade as America has become increasingly diverse and multicultural. I think opponents of this argument ought to take it more seriously than they often do, rather than trying to condemn it out of hand or simply wish it away. In a remarkably short period of time, I have seen topics of race and identity that were once taboo in mainstream discourse become much less so. And as any teacher can tell you, often the fastest way to get teenage boys interested in a topic is to tell them that, under any circumstances, they must not speak or think about it.

I think the desire for a colorblind America is a very noble one, and reflects an admirable achievement that, in historical terms, is hard to accomplish. In the 20th century, America became a global superpower in part by fostering incredibly intense national unity, and successfully assimilating huge numbers of immigrants (the proportion of foreign-born American residents only recently surpassed early 20th century levels). Our project of assimilation was so successful that we now think of the Irish, Italians, and Poles as being the same as any other Americans, which would have staggered many Americans in 1900.

But this very past success, when coupled with a great deal of self-doubt on the part of America’s elites today about the founding and what it represents (that hypocrisy again), now makes the American project harder to defend in the face of claims that America was settled by particular groups of people from specific ethnicities and cultures, with implicit (and increasingly explicit) assumptions that losing those ethnicities and cultures will erode what it means to be American. The old mainstream 20th century triumphalist narrative about the American founding became, by virtue of its very success, to be a somewhat abstracted idea.

This might reflect why the celebration of America’s 250th birthday has fallen a bit flat; indeed, flatter than I’d hoped for. I rather miss the mid-20th century’s mass outpourings of patriotic feeling, small-town parades, and more innocent enthusiasm for the country. Probably, this sentiment is still going strong in much of the country, whereas online and elite discourse is skewed negative. Online, it seems that many of the cynical critiques command the most attention.

Aside from being too “online,” I think the first major problem with most of these critiques is that they aren’t cynical enough.

The cynical case for the American founding

If we start with a cynical reading of human nature and human history, we shall rarely be surprised. Idealism and principle are so often and so easily overridden or rationalized away by the desire for power and self-interest, and the high and mighty seem to always conveniently claim that their power and status just so happens to be for the best. Cincinnatus figures are few and far between compared to nobles, kings, and emperors claiming they are the only ones worthy to rule. And some of the best, clearest, and most lucid statements to this effect come from the American Founding Fathers themselves.

If you were to travel back in time and tell the Founders that rapacious and power-hungry elites seek to abuse their position and aggrandize themselves under the cloak of high-minded principle, the Founders would have wondered why you were interrupting their reading of Polybius, Cicero, and Gibbon to tell them something they already knew. James Madison compiled a personal encyclopedia of research on almost every known historical republic and confederacy, along with detailed notes on how and why they failed, which he then used both in drafting the Constitution, and in writing the Federalist Papers, which contain some of the very best expositions ever written on the dangers of self-interest, ambition, and faction. To tell James Madison to beware of hypocritical self-interest and corruption is to think one can better the phrase, “if men were angels, no government would be necessary” (Federalist 51).

And Madison represents the restrained and genteel Virginian side of the Founding, though it’s worth noting that even the most optimistic and pro-Enlightenment of the Founders, Jefferson himself, assumed that the tree of liberty would need to be watered by the blood of patriots every couple of generations. In the North, where we find the ostensible radicals, we also have the dour John Adams, who was, if anything, even more pessimistic about human nature. Thucydides himself could hardly out-cynic a puritan schooled in the Calvinist doctrines of total depravity. They were such kindred spirits, that Adams told his son to “read Thucydides,” and wrote to Jefferson that, when reading Thucydides and Tacitus, he (Adams) felt as if he were merely reading a history of his own day.

And between North and South, there is the energetic and precocious New Yorker, Hamilton, who in Federalist 6 said that to assume that the states wouldn’t have cause for dissension would be to “forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious,” and that this would “disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.”

Growing up in and around classical schools, and reading the publications and periodicals my father left lying around the house that treated with political philosophy and history, I heard repeated over and over again the point that the American founders believed that human nature was fallible, and that unchecked power was corrosive, dangerous, and for most of history, the norm. Cincinnatus figures are indeed so rare that King George thought it unthinkable that George Washington would simply give up power and go home after the Revolutionary War.

This is the genesis of, and still sits half-remembered, underneath all our middle school history lessons on checks and balances and the Bill of Rights, and why it is good to hold liberty as something precious, even if imperfectly grasped or ordered. There is of course a hugely optimistic and idealistic streak in American history, but arguably much of this exuberantly upbeat naivete comes in part from the successful conditions created by this initial hard-nosed cynicism about human nature. In teaching, parenting, entrepreneurship, and in the founding of a country, eudaimonia is often the fruitful consequence of clear boundaries and realistic expectations, and one of the best positive virtues to pair with cynicism about human self-interest and misguided intentions, is genuine gratitude for when humans succeed in spite of themselves.

A contract across the generations back to Albion’s seed

Readers who know which long dead philosopher is pulling the puppet strings in my head will of course realize here that I am channeling Edmund Burke. Even if one is not a Burkean conservative in terms of policy prescriptions or in opposition to the French Revolution, Burke’s eloquence on society as a contract between generations is worth dwelling on for anyone interested in history. And it can also help untangle the messy nature of ideas within history and their transmission, and resolve the second major problem with many of the current critiques of American history. There is an Aristotelian mean between the two extremes of treating ideas as abstract principles divorced from context, and historicized words and actions that have no meaning or utility outside of their unique time and place.

In “How Magna Carta became a Big Deal” I talked about how understanding the Great Charter’s evolution across English history requires understanding how England itself changed from the days of Feudalism to the Stuarts. While the original 1215 agreement was a one-off treaty between Bad King John and his barons, and mostly concerned with narrow feudal privileges, the gradual expansion during the Late Middle Ages of English free-holders, a rising middle class, and the growing power and influence of London and other commercial cities, all created a new and larger segment of society that was not part of the feudal nobility, but also not part of the unfree class of serfdom tied to the land. As they rose through society and gained wealth and influence, these Englishmen naturally interpreted this new status through familiar categories, and began to see themselves as not just “freemen” in the old feudal sense, but Free Men, alongside the other political stakeholders of English society. This was accelerated through the growth of Parliament and the actions of kings who sought to bolster their position by extending favor and privileges to the growing middle, seeking aid in their political struggles against nobles and foreign rivals. One of the underappreciated consequences of Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy was that it incidentally gave Parliament authority in religious matters, which would later come back to bite the Stuarts (rather biting off the head of Charles I himself).

Magna Carta became the touchstone for many of these political prerogatives and privileges, because medieval kings frequently re-issued and re-affirmed the Great Charter, as a way of building support by showing their respect for rights and a settlement that, each time it was validated, became more and more binding. Once an action has been repeated twice, it quickly becomes a precedent, and starts gaining the weight and authority of tradition.

This is why Magna Carta could be repurposed by Parliament in its fights with the Stuarts, and why the early colonists who settled America in the 1600s brought with them specific notions of political liberties, royal authority, and ancient custom, which they then clung to with all the anxiety of an exile clinging to an old identity. The story of Magna Carta, and its transmission to America cannot be told as an intellectual “13th century version of Lockean liberty,” but it also cannot be handwaved away as a 13th century feudal document that was only later contorted and twisted out of its original purpose. The vital story of a tradition and its transmission over time is the missing link.

There is, frankly, a very similar issue with Locke himself, who was a more novel philosopher as a metaphysician and epistemologist than as a political theorist. Those who would deride Locke as the source of modern evils in contemporary politics have not sufficiently grappled with the fact that Locke was a popular explainer of existing ideas and traditions, and not their originator. If the post-liberals want to unwind the modern world, they will not be able to simply travel back in time to 1688 and strangle liberalism in its crib. Locke didn’t invent the modern world, but instead explained (and thereby accelerated) a society that was already coming into being, thanks to commercial cities, growing literacy, and the accompanying wealth and influence that always learns how to harness power. Even back in the middle ages, the “free air” of cities made liberated serfs free, and free to choose their destiny.

Both of those phenomena were at work on the other side of the Atlantic, where the conditions of the modern world became even more pronounced. Not only were the colonists transplants from their Old World, uprooted and put down in new soil with the opportunity to grow in new directions, but the conditions of their migration self-selected for a number of what would become distinctly American traits. The New World was sought out by people who were disproportionately bold, willing to take risks and endure hardship, and not prone to obedience. They were also, especially in the North, intensely sincere and motivated by belief and ideas. Puritan education especially helped form a people that by the time of the Revolution were more literate and more obsessed with books and ideas than the average European. Even the commercialism of American merchants and Southern planters promoted a legalistic streak that cared deeply about contracts and rights. Above all, as Winthrop’s famous “Shining City on a Hill” sermon indicated, the first Americans saw the New World as a place set apart. Many of the very conditions which linked Americans to the Old World, nudged them towards innovation in the New.

But they still spoke English, and were formed by the norms, habits, customs, literature, and ideas of the world that they left. Rather than arguing once more over critical race theory or Lockean liberalism, more people today ought to read books like David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, which mapped the cultural topography of the four folkways that settled early America, and the different regions of England from which they came.1 Down to this day, identifiable regional traits in New England, the Mid-Atlantic seaboard, and the deep and coastal south, can be legibly traced back to different English folk-cultures. The borderer culture that used to be called Scots-Irish, and which produced Andrew Jackson, Texas settlers, and a disproportionate number of the greatest soldiers in the American military, originally hailed from the violent and lawless border regions of England and Scotland. Meanwhile, the planter class that produced the Southern Aristocracy were drawn from the Anglo-Saxon West country and cavalier nobility, while the Quaker Midland culture followed William Penn to Pennsylvania and Delaware. And of course, East-Anglian Puritan culture brought its religion and place names (such as Boston) to Massachusetts and Connecticut. Even Winthrop’s Shining City on A Hill speech with its references to a New Jerusalem was an existing Puritan trope in East Anglia.

If anyone doubts that the original stock and its cultural package of traits and literary, religious, and moral imagination mattered to the founding of America, they are invited to imagine for themselves the counterfactual of an America founded by almost any other nation or culture. We need not jump to a non-Western example; just imagine if America had been settled by Russian immigrants and their traditions of centralized government, czarism, and Byzantine literature and philosophy. The American story would look quite different.

Crucially, however, the folkway traditions that the colonists transplanted to America, became structures which outlived the initial population groups, and which succeeding waves of settlers then grafted themselves on to. The 17th century waves of migrants were not very large, mostly in the tens of thousands, but today, veritable hosts of Americans participate in these folkways without having a drop of actual blood in them. One of the strongest and clearest links Fischer demonstrates in Albion’s Seed is the persistent legacy of Puritan education traditions in New England. To this day, Massachusetts and Connecticut have some of the best school systems in America, along with the accompanying habits and norms that support educational rigor (and an intolerant streak of Yankee Puritanical busy-body moralism), even as many of their inhabitants are now themselves “old stock” immigrants from Ireland, Italy, or Poland. The traditional weakness of public schools in the Deep South on the other hand, can also be explained by longstanding border cultural traditions that cared more about outdoor life, early marriages, and violence.

There is perhaps no better proof that these cultural folkways need not be purely ethnic than the fact that the greatest champion of the borderer folkway today, who is known to hang a portrait of Andrew Jackson in his office, is a New York real estate magnate of half-German, half-Scottish descent.

Old ideas in a New World

The recombining of old things in new ways was furthered by the written inheritance of Antiquity, itself transmitted and reshaped through the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The Founders’ reliance upon Polybius’ discussion of the Roman constitution and the cyclical nature of regimes is well documented. Jefferson himself claimed in a letter to Henry Lee in 1825 that the Declaration of Independence wasn’t intended to be anything new, but was instead a well-established thing of common sense, relying upon “harmonizing sentiments of the day,” which ran all the way back to Aristotle and Cicero:

“this was the object of the Declaration of Independance. not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; [. . .] terms so plain and firm, as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independant stand we [. . .] compelled to take. neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the american mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. all it’s authority rests then on the harmonising sentiments of the day, whether expressed, in conversns in letters, printed essays or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney Etc. the historical documents which you mention as in your possession, ought all to be found, and I am persuaded you will find, to be corroborative of the facts and principles advanced in that Declaration.”

Ironically, Madison’s framing of the constitution was in some ways a newer and more radical innovation, even as it rested just as firmly upon a wealth of research and classic political philosophy. Madison’s federal system has worked so well (even after centralizing changes brought about by the Civil War and New Deal eras) that its original daring is easy to overlook. Prior to 1789, republican governments did not generally rule nations. Republics were almost always regimes devised for civic bodies, which is to say, individual city-states. Aristotle and Polybius generally described mixed regimes as urbanized bodies and their hinterlands, and the Roman Republic’s great success in building a civic order was destroyed as a consequence of becoming an empire. The entire medieval, Renaissance, and early modern experience with republican forms of governance, especially in Italy and Germany, was one of city-states, and the most that one could possibly find in terms of exceptions was Switzerland and the Netherlands. Madison went further in proposing a res publica for an entire nation that was larger and more fragmented than most European kingdoms. He went even further in Federalist 10, arguing that a federal republic would be a virtue for the American system, as regionalism would promote fragmented political interests, and help check the normal bane of city-state regimes, which was close and intimately violent factional civic strife of the kind that Thucydides wrote about during the Peloponnesian War, and which plagued Italian city-states in the middle ages and renaissance. Despite the Civil War and our contemporary mass-media-fueled culture war, Madison was prescient in his prediction, and federalism remains one of the great latent strengths of the American system today.

Civilization is an inheritance

The two extremes of a deracinated creedal nation of ideas, and the nativist backlash which imagines an Anglo-Saxon founding stock for the country, are opposite poles which incite the fears and resentment in each other, precisely as they push each other away from the real center. So long as they are introduced and inculcated into the American order and the institutions and liberties which grew out of 17th century England, Americans need not be of pure English descent. This was already proved a hundred years ago by Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrants, and I believe I frequently see the exact same process of assimilation at work when I observe male students of South Asian descent argue at lunch about their fantasy football teams, and vent their frustrations at the ownership group of the Dallas Mavericks, before being redirected back on topic to the history of Western Civilization.

Ironically, both wings in this divide suffer from anxiety and fear precisely where they should be most confident. The nativists who think that the Anglo-American tradition of liberty is exceptional, ought to really double down on that exceptionalism and the strength of the institutions it produced. And the universal creedalists ought to recognize that America has attracted and assimilated the globe’s huddled masses precisely because of that same exceptional founding.

Magna Carta served as a touchstone to ground the rise of the English middle class and graft them into the existing social order of late feudal England. And then Magna Carta, the Common Law, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible were carried across the Atlantic and served again as touchstones for a new order in America. Into the mix again was thrown, at the Founding, elements of Enlightenment and classical philosophy, such as when Madison repurposed the civic republicanism of the ancient and medieval city-state, and daringly proposed a federal system which could serve for a whole nation.

Cultures are not static, and they are far less blood-bound than racial ideologues ever claimed. The Roman Empire assimilated non-citizens and non-Italians into its civic order for centuries, and did this so well that the orator Fronto could train Marcus Aurelius in rhetoric despite his Libyan ancestry, and Justinian could promulgate the greatest Roman work of law from a Greek capitol. Almost certainly, the ability to assimilate outsiders and take on new identities stretches back to the earliest hunter-gatherer clans incorporating outsiders, and continues to echo in every pop-culture story of a rag-tag band of misfits overcoming their differences and learning to become a family of friends.

Culture, language, and norms all matter, but civilization has always been an inheritance that can adopt heirs into the story that it tells itself. Churchill intuited this brilliantly by linking the Anglo world together based not on blood, nor on ideals, but by the story of the English-speaking peoples.

Americans are clearly no longer just a group descended from 17th century Englishmen. However, those English origins still matter a great deal, and the subsequent story cannot be understood without remembering its beginning. A story handed down, a narrative of “this is who we are, and how we relate to the world,” is an idea that can be retold and repurposed for a very long time, and can outlast any pet theory about the cyclical rise to power and decadent ruin of civilizations.

But we do need to keep telling it.

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Several comments expressed interest in what books I used or would recommend in order to understand the Thirty Years War, and I had already been thinking about a follow-up post comparing and contrasting a pair of books in particular. So here’s how I tried to understand the Thirty Years War.

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I came out of college with a very rough sense of the conflict, and cobbled together a bit more of an understanding in my early years as a teacher (there’s nothing like the pressure of having to teach something in order to make you learn it yourself). At some point I ended up reading a few of the Eric Flint 1632 series of alternate history, which I’ve written about before. These what-if novels follow the premise of a small West Virginian coal mining town being transplanted to Thuringia in the middle of the Thirty Years War, and as ridiculous as the premise is, the series is a fantastic meditation on what technologies and institutions helped create the modern world (it turns out that the average American public high school in the late 1990’s probably had enough knowledge to basically start the Industrial Revolution). The series quickly separates from the original historical timeline, as the “up-timers” from West Virginia start changing events, but the books are well-written, have memorable characters, and give you a visceral sense of the flavor of the mid-17th century.

A few years ago, I decided I really wanted to focus on learning the Thirty Years War once and for all, and I ended up choosing two separate histories to go through. I’ve now read/listened to C.V. Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War (1938) and Peter Wilson’s Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War (2009), and I’ve made it through both books twice.

But before I go into each of the two histories, there was another angle to the conflict that I studied, mostly in passing, which ended up making an enormous difference in studying the Thirty Years War. In a few separate sessions over the last year and a half, I used ChatGPT to help teach me the geography of Germany and central Europe. This alone was the easiest and highest-value lever I found, even though I wasn’t really thinking about the Thirty Years War specifically, but in the moment was merely exercising personal curiosity. One thread in particular a few months ago that started with “what is the significance of Wroclaw?” turned into a hugely beneficial discussion of Germany’s regions. It’s also a good example of how I used GPT as a tutor to stress-test my understanding.

Geography unlocks the conflict

German geography is a nightmare. It’s one big landmass, and there aren’t peninsulas or dramatic coastlines to use as major reference points. Instead of central nodes, there are instead a myriad dispersed locations in the form of rivers, mountains, forests, and cities and regions. Many times I’ve read military history accounts and been bewildered by the locations and routes of armies moving across medieval and early modern Germany (how does Mecklenburg connect to Pomerania connect to Saxony connect to Silesia?). The geography of the region goes a long way to explaining how the Holy Roman Empire’s political and social structure was so fractured and convoluted. But it also reveals how different medieval Germany was from the later nation-state that was built out of Prussian militarism and 19th century nationalism.

Germany doesn’t have one capital region in the way that France, England, or Russia are dominated by a ruling city and its immediate environs. Instead, Germany is more like America in that it has multiple interlocking zones, each with their own regional geography and culture. Politically, feudalism made this even more complicated, because territories often became linked due to inheritance and dynastic rights, rather than pure topographic logic. The Palatinate contained lands along the middle Rhine, and separately in Eastern Germany (although this was called the Upper Palatinate). Saxony is something of a moving target in terms of what time period you’re focusing on. Brandenburg is in Northeast Germany, but acquired the separate holding along the Polish coast known as ducal Prussia, which later came to subsume Brandenburg proper (and then the rest of Germany in the 19th century).

And then you have the cities, which are their own category, and have their own confusing identities and political allegiances. There are two Frankfurts, one on the Main and one on the Oder. Many cities were ruled as Bishoprics, reflecting traditions running back to the late Roman Empire and Early middle ages when bishops were de facto city magistrates in the absence of other strong political institutions. Over time however, many growing towns purchased their freedom from feudal lords and became Imperial Free Cities. In Northern Germany and the Baltic, this led to the golden age of the Hanseatic League of mercantile city-states. German cities became huge centers of commerce for Germany’s considerable natural resources and trade routes which connected the rest of Europe. There’s an entire tradition of medieval and early modern civic urbanism across Northern Europe that was just as dynamic as Greek poleis culture or Italian republicanism, but which is often invisible to modern audiences because of the legacy of the absolute monarchies and later nationalism.

It turns out that the key to unlocking this bewildering array of geographic regions and polities is Germany’s rivers, which both explain how different parts of Germany are connected, and give you a mental anchor to memorize around. This is also the key to teaching geography to students; reducing the absolute number of items to memorize, and scaffolding around key zones and concepts. Once I started working off the river network, things started clicking. GPT was significantly useful here for explaining the rivers, and then helping quiz me to test my understanding.

Germany is an L, shaped by the Rhine and Danube rivers, which both originate in South-Western Germany, along the Alps and Black Forest. This is roughly the province of Swabia. The Rhine flows North, ultimately out through the Netherlands, and, like Egypt’s Nile, has the confusing property of possessing upper (in the South) and lower (in the North) zones, but which also have a network of tributaries flowing from France and Central Germany. The Rhine region is incredibly dense, with trade cities, bishoprics, and small-but-wealthy principalities that constantly look towards Switzerland in the South, France in the center, and the Netherlands or Saxony in the North. This is where provinces and cities such as Alsace-Lorraine, the Franche-Comté, Heidelberg, Strasbourg, Mainz, and Cologne are found. The famous Spanish road sent men and money up from Genoa and Milan across the Alps, near Lake Constance in Switzerland, and into the upper Rhine region, for the long trek down (North) to the Spanish Netherlands.

The Danube flows East, through Southern Germany and Austria, and on through Eastern Europe towards the Black Sea. Once you remember the network of the Danube, you can understand how Bavaria (Regensburg) is linked to Austria (Vienna), which is linked to Hungary (Budapest) and Transylvania. Famous cities such as Munich, Augsburg, Innsbruck, and Salzburg connect to the Danube through tributaries. The Tyrol region of Austria links down to Venice and the Adriatic.

East of the Rhine, Germany is cut by three riverine corridors around the Weser, Elbe, and Oder, all flowing South to North, and linking central Germany to the North Sea and Baltic coasts. The Weser gives you Thuringia, Westphalia, Hannover and Bremen. The Elbe is extremely important, running from Bohemia and Prague up through Dresden, Saxony and then Hamburg. The Oder connects Silesia, Breslau/Wroclaw, Frankfurt on the Oder, and Pomerania on the Baltic coast. There’s a hybrid zone of provinces (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia) in this region that shifts back and forth between German, Czech, Polish, and Austrian influence over time (this is the area Hitler used to escalate his early land-grabs in the runnup to WW II).

There are famous mountains and forest regions of Germany, but the rivers are the skeleton key, and explain why Germany has been so hard to unify going all the way back to the Germanic tribes described by Tacitus. Germany’s rivers make corridors, but they don’t link together as a unifying force in the same way that the Nile or Mississippi do. They provide trade flows from the South to the North, but they can be dominated by high castles atop hills and ridges at a thousand places, giving rise to medieval robber barons and political veto power against centralized authorities. And while the Rhine is the most famous German river, its tributaries and fractured local communities have made incursions and meddling from France a tradition dating back to Caesar’s famous Rhine crossing. This probably helps explain the oddity of Charlemagne being the Frankish founder of the Holy Roman Empire, as well as Napoleon causing its dissolution.

I still wouldn’t call myself comfortable with German geography, as there are still a host of smaller rivers and principalities, but once you can start mentally grouping the country into regions and riverine zones, you can at least start tracking different names and interests when historical accounts keep throwing a dizzying array of place-names at you. Although I still don’t think I understand the swing role of figures such as Amalie-Elizabeth of Hesse-Kassel in the war.

Anyway, on to the two main books I used to help me understand the Thirty Years War, and what they demonstrate about how historical writing has changed over the last century.

Wedgwood and Wilson

C.V. Wedgwood (Dame Cicely Veronica) was an English historian who specialized in 16th and 17th century England. Wedgwood published her most famous work, The Thirty Years War in 1938, when she was only 28 years old. This was astonishing accomplishment given the scope, depth, and maturity of the work, which has the poise and confident analysis of a far older and maturer historian. Wedgwood’s prose and command of historical irony is brilliant.

Reading Wedgwood, you are repeatedly reminded how literary the best historical writing was nearly a century ago. Wedgwood reminds me of sterling prose-historians such as Samuel Eliot Morison, T.R. Fehrenbach, and of course, Barbara Tuchman. Very frequently, Wedgwood’s use of irony is Gibbonesque in building up a theme, character, or event, and then in one final clause, twisting the knife:

“The underlying cause of the demand for a voice in politics was thus not so much the principle of liberty as the desire for efficient government. Theories of right and wrong, of divine ordination or the innate equality of men, formed the rallying cries, the symbols for which men died with profound sincerity, a king of England by the axe no less than an Austrian peasant on the wheel. But success or failure in the end depended on the efficiency of the administrative machine. Few men are so disinterested as to prefer to live in discomfort under a government which they hold to be right rather than in comfort under one which they hold to be wrong. Representative government in Bohemia failed because it was signally worse managed than the despotism it replaced, and the Stewarts fell not because Divine Right was unsound but because their government was incompetent.”1

Wedgwood’s prose skill is matched by her ability to develop a character and portray historical figures with depths of insight, grace, and tragedy. She clearly enjoys her subjects, even when deriding them and pointing out their hubris and reckless folly, as in Frederick of the Palatinate and his hopelessly overmatched advisor, Christian of Anhalt. She is at her very best when painting the life, morality, earnest faith, and hubristic zeal of characters such as Ferdinand II, who truly convinced himself that Austria’s dynastic interests were one and the same as those of the Catholic Church, and that his recatholicization program in Austria and Bohemia was a divine vocation. This zeal drove him to issue the Edict of Restitution, which radicalized moderate Protestants and opened the door to Gustavus Adolphus’ invasion, prolonging the war and causing another two decades of suffering and misery.

Here’s how Wedgwood compares Ferdinand II with his son, Ferdinand III:

“The King of Hungary had inherited his father’s good nature but without his lightness of heart. He had inherited also much of his father’s charm. Less garrulous, he was more dignified and not less gracious, and his ability to converse easily in seven languages gave him power to undertake much of his own diplomacy. In appearance he favoured his mother’s family and had the melancholy dark eyes, brown hair and strong features of the Wittelsbach…He was quiet, thoughtful, rather melancholy. Unlike his father he was economical to the point of meanness. As a boy, his reserve had made him appear dull-witted, but as he became surer of himself he gave the impression instead of being a profound thinker. Profounder indeed than he was, for when all is said, he was only a decent, imaginative, worried intellectual. He had neither the intense faith in his mission nor the trust in his God which bore up his father; he had not the singleness of purpose which gave the old Emperor a touch of greatness. He was too clever to be happy, not clever enough to be successful. Ferdinand II was either very shrewd or very lucky; Ferdinand III was neither.2

You can tell that Wedgwood came from a milieu where great literature was still widely read and emulated as a model of capturing the human condition. In the last analysis, Wedgwood lays the blame most chiefly on Maximilian of Bavaria and John George of Saxony, as the two supporting characters on either side who chose personal gain when they could have urged compromise and helped stabilize the empire. Ferdinand, Gustavus, and Richelieu were men of destiny driven by their positions and ambitions, and could hardly do other than obey their nature and position. But Maximilian and John George had a choice, and made the wrong one. Wedgwood’s history is Shakespearean.

Peter Wilson’s Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War is an entirely different book, though it is also a remarkable accomplishment. Wilson is a veteran historian of Germany and central Europe, specializing on the Holy Roman Empire, and his expertise shows. As he remarks in his preface:

“The history of the Thirty Years War is rich in specialist studies, but poor in general accounts. Few authors provide more than short overviews intended for students. It is easy to see why. To cover all aspects would require knowledge of at least fourteen European languages, while there are sufficient archival records to occupy many lifetimes of research.”3

He then moves on, without telling you just how many of those languages he knows and how many archives he’s familiar with. But the unspoken implication remains, and Wilson proceeds to deliver. The book is over a thousand pages, and covers the constitutional structure of Germany, the military and economic institutions of the war, and provides solid overviews of every major country involved, including a lengthy chapter on 17th century Denmark, Sweden, and Poland-Lithuania. Wilson does not focus only on events in Germany, but briefly covers the Dutch revolt and progress of the Eighty Years’ War, gives you the long decline of Spain across the first half of the 17th century, as well as colonial events in the Atlantic and Caribbean. This is very much a book that’s aware of today’s global and international early modern historiography.

The end result is a book that is relentlessly thorough and methodical, though not very exciting. It is at least clearly written (mostly), and reflects an emphasis on methodology, archival research, context, and caution about bias and limited perspective.

I sometimes wonder if older histories were sometimes more imaginative and better written in part because they had fewer (but also literary) sources to work with. For instance, Wedgwood and Wilson both give you a competent overview of Albrecht von Wallenstein, but when Wedgwood introduces Wallenstein, she uses portraits:

“He was not a popular man; tall, thin, forbidding, his face in the unexpressive portraits which have survived is not prepossessing. No great master painted him and the limners who attempted his saturnine features agree only in a few particulars. The irregular features, the high cheek-bones and prominent nose, the heavy jowl, the thick, out-jutting underlip—these are present more or less in all pictures. Later portraits exploited the dramatic possibilities of that strangely unsympathetic face, for when Wallenstein became great there was no detail of his conduct or appearance that did not become common property—his ungovernable temper, his disregard of human life, his unsteady nerves, his immutable chastity, his faith in astrology…In his pale, dry face the equally vivid colour of his lips may perhaps not have been nature’s work alone. But stripped of the character he later created, what was Wallenstein in 1623 but an unscrupulous and able careerist?4”

Elsewhere, Wedgwood describes Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar’s “low forehead, hard, unimaginative eyes and mean, egoistic mouth.”5 Wilson, in contrast, gives you a solidly-workable character sketch and biography of Wallenstein, and then discusses the “Wallenstein problem” in contemporary scholarship, which includes Freidrich Schiller’s trilogy of plays on the man, as well as German and Czech nationalist historians attempting to turn Wallenstein into a hero.6

After the battle of Rocroi, Wedgwood eulogizes Spain and the Tercios as “the end of the Spanish army. They had not lost their reputation at Rocroy, as the Swedes had done at Nördlingen, but they had died to keep it…the gravestone of the Spanish army; almost, one might say, the gravestone of Spanish greatness.”7 Wilson blandly tells you that Rocroi owes its exaggerated fame to French propaganda and Condé’s self-promotion, which ultimately helped ensure Rocroi’s place in later military staff college syllabi.8 Wilson gives a similar treatment to Gustavus Adolphus, though without completely attempting to handwave away his real skill and charisma.

Wilson’s overall argument is that the war was not inevitable, and not even primarily religious. Instead, the empire had done a relatively effective job brokering compromises in the past, and that contingent events conspired to break the conflict open. However, despite his claim that religion was not the main driver of the conflict, Wilson is suspicious of militants and zealots, and his ending analysis has a wan and not-very-original warning about the dangers of extremism.

Wilson is probably at his best as an expert on the constitutional order of the Holy Roman Empire, which makes sense given that he’s also written one of the most widely regarded histories of the Holy Roman Empire and medieval Germany (I tried to listen it almost a decade ago, and only made it about halfway, as it’s even more dense, and organized on structural themes rather than as a narrative). Wilson can sympathetically explain just how and why the HRE was such a convoluted edifice of political estates and jurisdictions, and he cites an 18th century German lawyer who attempted to explain the Imperial constitution, only to give up after publishing a hundred volumes.9 For Wilson, the lumbering mess of estates, diets, courts (the Reichskammergericht imperial chamber court is about as easy to understand as it is to spell), and the empire’s deliberate habit of moving slowly and leaving ambiguity in important decisions, were all features, rather than bugs, because they allowed room for negotiation, deliberation, and compromise across Germany’s three-hundred some-odd principalities. For Wilson, this enabled the Holy Roman Empire to successfully navigate conflicts over time and avoid fracturing, while allowing emperors to retain considerable authority and influence through the majesty of their office and person. You can see why later 19th and 20th century historians, who assumed that efficient state-formation was the proper development in capital-H History, thought the empire was an outdated dinosaur, and why Wilson thinks they’re wrong to do so.

The point about 19th century historians is one that comes up again and again in Wilson’s book, which is another one of its most useful features. Part of the reason the book simply isn’t as enlivening to read as Wedgwood, is that Wilson is explicitly aware of what came before, and constantly refers to previous historiographic interpretations, before pivoting to a new one. The book also often wants to emphasize distance rather than familiarity, and Wilson has the slightly annoying habit of not updating names to modern English sometimes. John George of Saxony becomes “Johann Georg.”

Though my sample here is limited, my strong impression is that many good histories from the last few decades are now able to draw on a wide variety of archival sources and data, that, while not ignoring older literary sources, don’t solely rely on them. While there’s obviously a culture-war angle here about historical revisionism and activist scholarship, the controversial examples probably get all the attention, and obscure a whole bunch of boring-but-useful trends that are a net positive for historical understanding. I’ve seen this with historians such as Peter Heather (Fall of Rome), Warren Treadgold and Anthony Kaldellis (Byzantine History), Chris Wickham (Middle Ages) and Peter Marshall (English Reformation).

Often, this means drawing on seemingly anodyne and dull information such as land and tax records, parish registries, wills, commerce data, and climate and environmental science. One of the most vivid examples to me was reading Peter Marshall on the English Reformation and pre-Reformation fears of clerical corruption, which Marshall was able to cross-check by surveying the actual number of reported complaints levied against parish priests by the laity (not as many as you’d think based on the accounts of both protestant reformers, and elite humanists such as Thomas More and Erasmus). This type of archival investigation pops up frequently in good historical writing, and isn’t inherently ideologically motivated. I know some folks in classical education and conservative spaces sometimes have an understandable suspicion of new historical scholarship, but a reflexively hostile attitude may not always be the best approach.

Wilson is able to draw on wide amounts of such research and bring it to bear on everything from the population levels of Castile, to Swedish military conscription, and how exactly the Habsburg program of recatholicization in Bohemia and Austria worked, in terms of whether protestant nobles converted or emigrated away. One of Wilson’s strongest overall chapters is on the economic and demographic effects of the war, looking at tax records, census data, and lots of previously overlooked civilian letters and diaries.10 It turns out that plague was probably the number one cause of mortality in the whole war, and that some percentage of the worst accounts of atrocities and even cannibalism often end up being second and third-hand rumors which may have grown some in the telling. The war’s destruction was also often concentrated along key communication routes and corridors, which were naturally more visible to travelers and spectators, helping somewhat exaggerate the image of devastation in popular accounts. That doesn’t at all mean that the war wasn’t a catastrophe, just that some of the very worst estimates from scholars a century ago were probably overblown. Even modern low-end estimates of a 15% all-cause mortality in Germany would be higher than that of the Soviet Union during WW II.11

So then, I used GPT for the geography, Wilson for the institutions and political topography, and Wedgwood for the Shakespearean tragedy. I shall give Wedgwood the last word (but with Wilson clearing his throat and muttering about the reliability of third-hand accounts), describing the death of Ferdinand II in 1637:

He had a tranquil death-bed, propped up among his pillows, fortified by the comforts of the Church, smiling from time to time peacefully at his wife and younger daughter watching by him. In eighteen years of struggle he had never lost confidence in his mission, or in God and at the end he could say ‘Nunc dimittis’ with full contentment, for he had indeed achieved a large measure of his ambition. He had not altogether won back Germany from the heretic, but at the Peace of Prague he had asserted the right of the Church to all she had held in 1624, and this, with the purification of Austria and Bohemia, was a gain of which he might justifiably be proud. At Linz that very year, the sight of the converted people flocking into the churches had moved him to tears of thankfulness. For the rest, he had reunited the Austrian dynasty within itself, grafted it by the marriage of his son to the Spanish tree, successfully reformed the administration of his own lands, destroyed the League and the Union and united most of the ruling princes, whether they would or no, beneath his controlling sceptre. It was an achievement which, seen in the light of his political morality, he might present at the judgement seat of God with a certain modest satisfaction. No qualm of doubt seems to have troubled the calm with which he prepared for his last account. On February 15th at nine in the morning his body and soul parted one from the other, the one to moulder in the vaults of Graz, the other to receive the reward for which he had laboured so long.12

And then she twists the knife:

His political achievement had cost dear for what it was, too dear had he ever stopped to reckon the cost. On paper, imperial authority might be paramount in Germany; in fact the soldiers alone ruled. The soldiers, not the generals; Baner frankly admitted that he had not the slightest control over his men, and tales were told of the sack of Kempten by the imperialists, of Landsberg by the Swedes, of Calw by the Bavarians, which froze the blood. The imperialists had slaughtered children in the cellars, thrown the women out of the upper windows of the houses and boiled a housewife in her own cauldron. The Swedes had sprinkled gunpowder on their prisoners and set fire to their clothes, the Bavarians under Werth had shut the citizens into Calw, fired the walls, trained guns on the gates and shot at the people as they tried to escape the flames. The stories were exaggerations but based on the increasing and now general barbarity of the war. In sober fact, civilian prisoners were led off in halters to die of exposure by the wayside, children kidnapped and held to ransom, priests tied under the wagons to crawl on all fours like dogs until they dropped, burghers and peasants imprisoned, starved and tortured for their concealed wealth to the uttermost of human endurance with the uttermost of human ingenuity.

Wedgwood goes on like this for several more pages, describing the devastation of central Germany, the masses of fugitives, and the multiplication of rats in deserted cellars which “devoured the grain which the soldiers left, and ruined the harvests.” And then:

The fugitives who fled from the south after Nördlingen died of plague, hunger and exhaustion in the refugee camp at Frankfort or the overcrowded hospitals of Saxony…at Strasbourg they lay thick in the streets through the frosts of winter, so that by day the citizens stepped over their bodies, and by night lay awake listening to the groans of the sick and starving until the magistrates forcibly drove them out, thirty thousand of them. The Jesuits here and there fought manfully against the overwhelming distress; after the burning and desertion of Eichstätt they sought out the children who were hiding in the cellars, killing and eating the rats, and carried them off to care for and educate them; at Hagenau they managed to feed the poor out of their stores until the French troops raided their granary and took charge of the grain for the army.

…At Calw the pastor saw a woman gnawing the raw flesh of a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens were also feeding. In Alsace the bodies of criminals were torn from the gallows and devoured; in the whole Rhineland they watched the graveyards against marauders who sold the flesh of the newly buried for food; at Zweibrücken a woman confessed to having eaten her child. Acorns, goats’ skins, grass, were all cooked in Alsace; cats, dogs, and rats were sold in the market at Worms. In Fulda and Coburg and near Frankfort and the great refugee camp, men went in terror of being killed and eaten by those maddened by hunger. Near Worms hands and feet were found half cooked in a gipsies’ cauldron. Not far from Wertheim human bones were discovered in a pit, fresh, fleshless, sucked to the marrow.13

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However, we might be able to resolve these two conflicting narratives by suggesting that many historical changes bring real improvements or advantages to a civilization, but that these innovations often have real downsides and negative tradeoffs. There is frequently a “two steps forward, one step back” process in the history of civilization, and understanding it will help explain how and why the first cities and large-scale states developed.

In short, sedentary farming and the development of kingdoms and states were positive developments in the long run, and often very miserable to live through.

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Farming vs. Hunting and Gathering

Let’s start by going back to our first farmers, and contrasting them with the hunter-gatherers who came before them. Today, we tend to romanticize farming as traditional and “natural,” in contrast with life in industrial cities or post-modern homes full of digital technology. Farming in our minds represents a simpler time, and you can find plenty of people who claim to wish to return to it, or wonder if we were better off as farmers.

And yet, life as a Neolithic farmer may have been worse in many ways than life as a hunter-gatherer. Hunter-gatherers had protein-rich diets with lots of meat and nuts, were able to rest for long periods of time in between hunts, and could easily pack up and move at a moment’s notice. Farming, by contrast, is very hard work. Farmers work from sunup to sundown for much of the year, and rarely take a day off (animals need milking and feeding no matter what). Farming involves hours and hours of laborious and repetitive back-breaking tasks such as plowing, sowing, weeding, and harvesting. Animals need constant tending and care, and the fixed and permanent nature of farming means that farms are always at risk of predation from animals or bandits.

And the results of agriculture are not always spectacular, especially for many pre-modern farmers. Most farmers focused on one or two staple crops, usually grains such as wheat, rice, barley, or maize (corn). While hunter-gatherers ate freshly killed meat and wild plants, farmers mostly ate…bread. A huge percentage of the calories consumed by pre-modern farmers came from grains (bread, porridges, rice, cornmeal, etc), with only small amounts of dairy and meat. One advantage of living near coasts and bodies of water was access to fish as another source of protein. Fruit and vegetables were available, but only when in season, and usually only grown locally.

We can see the results of this change in the skeletal record. Across the globe, farmers were shorter and smaller than most hunter-gatherers, and often nutritionally-deficient. They developed dental problems from cavities caused by the sugars in grains, and often their teeth wore down from tiny bits of stone that chipped off from stone mills. They also suffered from arthritis and had skeletal deformities from doing the same repetitive tasks and motions over and over again for decades.

And they were sicker. Staying in one place near other humans, and living alongside domesticated animals, helped diseases evolve and spread quickly. Many of the worst diseases in history, such as bird and swine flus, cowpox, and (via fleas) bubonic plague, have spread due to close contact with animals. During winter, many farmers brought their livestock indoors, often into family homes for warmth, and concentrated dwellings of humans and animals also produced large amounts of manure and waste material which could infect drinking water. Hunter-gatherers could avoid diseased communities simply by walking away and staying isolated; but farmers were stuck in one place. Farming and civilization brought plagues and pandemics, which were made even worse by the cramped conditions of cities with no indoor plumbing. If you’ve ever seen a movie where someone walks through a medieval village and has a chamber pot dumped on them from a window…. Also, animals in cities produced huge amounts of manure. In old Western movies, when a character gets thrown out of a saloon in the mud on the street next to where all the horses are tied up, they aren’t just landing in mud.

So why did farming even take hold in the first place? Some anthropologists in the mid 20th century argued that hunter-gatherers actually had it better, and that farming was a step in the wrong direction. This played into old tropes about “noble savages” who were more virtuous and in touch with nature, and untainted by the evils of civilization. As we have seen already with hunter-gatherers, this is most likely a myth; the skeletal remains of hunter-gatherers show shockingly high rates of violent death. But it’s quite possible that many hunter-gatherers thought themselves better off than farmers, and often raided farms for food, animals, and captives.

Therein we have a clue. Hunter-gatherers may have raided farmers, because life as a hunter-gatherer was inherently feast-or-famine. If you didn’t kill a deer that day, you didn’t eat, or at least hoped that the women in your tribe had gathered a few nuts and roots for dinner. Hunter-gatherers had low population levels and frequently fought each other precisely because it was so easy to overhunt a given area and kill off most of the readily available wild game. It’s possible that aggression and violence in hunter-gatherer societies helped keep population levels low, allowing game animals to replenish during times of over-crowding. The carrying-capacity of the land simply wasn’t very good for supporting a large population.

Farming, by contrast, didn’t produce a varied or interesting diet, but it did produce a fairly reliable one. Your back might ache, and your teeth might wear down, and you’d be sick of porridge, but you wouldn’t starve during the winter. Agriculture produces far more calories per acre than wild game, and can sustain a far larger population in a given area. Assuming families can care for the sick, young, and elderly, sedentary life is also less difficult than constantly moving about as a nomad. It’s hard to walk ten miles a day with a broken leg. Grain as a harvested product is also relatively easy to sort, weigh, measure, and barter with, encouraging trade and specialization. Of course, permanent farms and easily countable grain harvests also encourage taxation.

Ultimately, hunter-gatherers may have eaten better (most of the time), and been bigger, stronger, and more naturally warlike. And farmers were smaller, weaker, and sicker. But farmers didn’t have to follow the game around everywhere, and could build in one place. As we saw with Gobekli Tepe, some permanent settlements predated mass sedentary agriculture, but sedentary agriculture undoubtedly accelerated the development and growth of permanent settlements.

There were also far more farmers, and as we saw with specialization and our hypothetical Neolithic farming village, they could work together. This not only helped farmers living in individual communities, but it also encouraged further development in trade, and eventually, specialization within entire communities and regions. As with farming itself, trade and interdependence between communities had real advantages, as well as potential tradeoffs and risks.

Comparative Advantage, Trade, and Civilizational Collapse

We saw that our Neolithic farmers could improve their lives by specializing in tasks they were good at or enjoyed, and trading with each other for what they needed. But it turns out that an individual doesn’t even have to be the absolute best in a given field to benefit, as the 19th century British economist David Ricardo noticed. Ricardo studied trade between Britain and Portugal (looking at how Britain produced cloth, while Portugal produced wine) and found that even if one country could make multiple products, they were better off focusing on the thing they did best, and trading with another country. He dubbed this the law of comparative advantage, and even proved it mathematically.

There are downsides and risks to trade and specialization, of course. If a person or country isn’t self-sufficient in making and producing everything they need, then a market crash or collapse in trade could lead to ruin. You can imagine a naysayer in our hypothetical village objecting to the idea of a communal mill, pointing out that if the mill broke or the donkey died, the whole village would suffer. Or that if everyone in the village switched to making dyes for wool to trade with another town several miles over, the village would become dependent on outsiders, and vulnerable.

And quite a few times in history, these vulnerabilities do help precipitate crashes. It’s quite likely that a breakdown in the bronze trade around 1200 BC played a role in the Bronze Age Collapse, which proved catastrophic for civilizations across the Mediterranean and Near East. In many places, the resulting civilizational collapse was worse than the fall of the Western Roman Empire. We tend to remember the warnings of imminent collapse which came true, and conveniently forget all the ones that didn’t. Still, if they repeat themselves enough, the naysayers will eventually have a point.

However, the quest for self-sufficiency above all else is probably more idealistic and less realistic than many might think. No one person can actually grow and make all the things they need to survive. Even in the classic days of Westward expansion when rugged and self-reliant pioneers tamed the wilderness, railroads and factories supplied critical materials that made the taming possible. The Plains Indians could never have been defeated without gunpowder weapons made by specialist gunsmiths, and American farm wives on the frontier coveted the first Sears, Roebucks catalogs, which enabled them to order finished goods from factories back East.

In recent years, Americans have argued a great deal about the merits of offshoring jobs to other countries, and whether this has hollowed out communities at home. For both doctrinaire free-traders and protectionists, this debate is probably more complicated and not as simple as any one side in it would like to admit. It’s probably also a very old one, echoing all the way back to pre-farming hunter-gatherers arguing over whether to specialize in making fish-hooks to trade with other clans for mammoth meat.

Two steps forward, one step back

Sedentary civilization, then, may have been a case of “two steps forward, one step back.” Many aspects of life were worse than what came before, but the tradeoff was, in the long run, positive. And over time, humans found ways to mitigate and improve the worst features of sedentary life. Later farmers found ways to work land that Neolithic farmers couldn’t, and as trade networks and specialization developed, farmers found ways to supplement their diet, purchase finished goods from far away, and hedge against downside risks such as crop failures. By 1800 AD, life as a farmer was as physically demanding as it had been six thousand years before, but it was much better in many other ways and had a far better standard of living.

This feature of historical change, where a new innovation or way of living is initially worse than what came before, is one that we’ll see repeated over and over again. Life in large cities was even more disease-prone than farming, and added extremely high levels of crime. Cities were also targets of invasion and sieges, and supported the infrastructure needed to make governments and tyrannical kings. Hunter-gatherers may have periodically fought each other over hunting grounds in very small skirmishes, but cities and kingdoms could wage large-scale warfare and slaughter whole populations.

However, cities also produced the trade and surplus wealth necessary to support the arts and sciences, and foster institutions of high culture and leisure. Astronomy predated cities and kingdoms, but we remember civilizations such as the Babylonians for building tall temples for star-gazing and recording eclipses and the movements of the planets. Even today, cities produce some of the worst crime, as well as the best museums and opera houses.

During the Industrial Revolution, millions of farmers moved from the countryside to the new manufacturing cities springing up in Britain, Germany, and America, to work in factories. Life as a manufacturing worker in the Industrial era was extremely difficult by our standards, with ten-to-twelve hour workdays, six days a week, often in dangerous conditions, and for low wages. Workers lived in cramped tenement or row houses in filthy cities full of pollution, disease, and crime. These conditions were shocking, and led to many welfare reforms and regulations which, along with rapidly increasing wealth and standards of living, eventually created the huge suburban communities most of us live in today, which are fantastically wealthy and pleasant places to live in, measured against any historical period.

The 16th and 17th centuries experienced something similar with the printing press, which made the Bible available to all who could read, and helped jump-start the Scientific Revolution. It also produced a huge amount of scurrilous content, propaganda and fake news, and even made witch-burnings more common through the publication of manuals on how to supposedly find and identify witches. Digital technology, the internet, and artificial intelligence, will undoubtedly lead to new evils and miseries which humans will have to eventually learn to fix. There is some comfort in remembering that cleaning up our messes is actually a very old human accomplishment.

The Atrahasis Myth and the Creation of Humans

Ancient civilizations were not unaware of the tradeoffs that came with new ways of living. We have already encountered the story of the Fall in Genesis, where access to knowledge brought with it a loss of innocence. Genesis goes on to firmly define the invention of farming and labor as a consequence of the Fall, after Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden.

The Sumerians had another creation story, which was recorded in later Babylonian texts around 1700 BC. In the Myth of Atrahasis, the Sumerian gods under Enlil (the god of wind and storm, and somewhat similar to Zeus in Greek mythology) are put to work on the earth. They dig canals and irrigation ditches, and carve out the very beds of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Finally, in frustration, they go on strike, destroy their tools, and surround Enlil’s temple. To appease the gods and free them from their labor, Enki, the god of knowledge, proposes that man be created to take the gods’ place in toil. The gods create humans by killing one of their own, a minor god named Geshtu-e (also sometimes named Ilawela). They mix Geshtu-e’s blood with clay, and then give the clay to Belit-ili, the womb-goddess. The womb-goddess fashions the clay into fourteen brick-shaped pieces (seven male and seven female), which are born as humans after nine months. Geshtu-e, the god who was sacrificed, is specifically described as having intelligence.

In Sumerian myth, humans were born out of divine sacrifice, and possessed knowledge. Upon these bloody bricks was civilization founded.

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Even after teaching it for many years, the Thirty Years War is notoriously complex, both at a superficial level, and at a much deeper one. There are several levels of “good enough, but not really accurate” narratives about the war, and the deeper you go, the more each one starts to break down.

It doesn’t help that the Thirty Years War is a huge and foundational event in the formation of Modern Europe, which means that its legacy has been fought over and contested by each wave of historiography. Almost every historical school and ideological movement in the last four centuries has a narrative for the Thirty Years War, and making sense of them all is just as complicated and multifaceted as the original conflict.

Before the war, Germany was one of the richest and most developed regions of Europe, with an extraordinary medieval network of towns and trade networks that had grown up throughout the Middle Ages, and a convoluted constitutional system that defies explanation (then or now), but which actually worked better than is generally credited. But the Thirty Years War devastated large parts of the country so badly that, in German cultural memory, the 17th century is nearly as dark as the 20th.

It’s the war that tore Germany apart, and laid the seeds for later German national history, with all its accompanying baggage. But it also played a pivotal role in the nationalist histories of Germany, France, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands. For the Enlightenment, it was the war that delegitimized Christendom and allowed science and reason to supplant religion. American religious freedom, pluralism, and toleration, have long been contrasted with the devastation of Europe’s wars of religion.

For military historians, the Thirty Years War has been the war that crystallized the military revolution and the rise of the fiscal-military state. International Relations theorists still describe the modern world as Westphalian, referring to the Peace of Westphalia that ended the war and established a system of sovereign states as the default international order. Catholic and Protestant historiographies naturally championed their respective sides, and all the major figures of the war have long been cast as heroes or villains according to whoever held the pen. The history of the Thirty Years War has been fought over and contested almost as much as the war itself.

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Stripping all that away, you can maybe say that the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) began as a civil war between Catholic Southern and Northern Protestant Germany, which then spilled out across Europe, becoming a great power conflict pulling in almost every major continental power. However, the initial confessional lines of the conflict quickly become muddied, and lose their salience. And then, so does everything else.

Even the basic “German civil war” frame breaks down once you recall that the Bohemians, who started the war by defenestrating imperial Catholic officials, were predominantly Czech instead of German. And that Bohemia wasn’t part of Germany, even though it was one of the most important electoral provinces in the Holy Roman Empire.

The famous middle period of the war involves the French Catholic Cardinal Richelieu subsidizing Gustavus Adolphus, the Lutheran king of Sweden, in his invasion of Germany against the Catholic Habsburgs in Austria. Even more confusingly, the final third of the war becomes more of a direct contest between Spain and France, but fought primarily along the Rhine, for control over the famous Spanish Road, which doesn’t run from Spain, but from Italy up to the Spanish Netherlands, which is actually modern Belgium.

The Peace of Westphalia didn’t just end the Thirty Years War. It also ended the 80 Years War, which was Spain’s attempt to regain the Netherlands from the Dutch. Because the richest and mightiest empire in Europe, which dug literal mountains of gold and silver up out of the ground in the New World, exhausted itself financially and declared bankruptcy multiple times while trying and failing to reconquer a tiny waterlogged nation of freebooters, merchants, and Calvinists, who happened to invent many of the major modern tools of central banking and debt-financing. Good Dutch debt defeated bad Spanish debt.

As you go down another level, the war becomes even more confusing. The French supported Gustavus Adolphus in Sweden against the Austrian Habsburgs, but not against Maximilian of Bavaria, who was Catholic and fielded the best imperial army in Germany, but who also secretly wanted to be allies with France and wanted the Spanish Habsburgs out of Germany, but who also needed Austrian Habsburg backing to become one of the seven electors of the Empire. Despite being one of the most important and wealthy provinces in Germany (Ferdinand of Austria owed Maximilian over 15 million florins at one point), Bavaria was not originally an electoral province, while Bohemia was.

Then there was John George, Elector of Saxony, who was Lutheran, but feared the Calvinists even more than the Catholics. John George initially supported the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II in Bohemia against the Calvinists, before allying with the Swedish Lutherans against the Habsburgs, only to regret his decision, all while vainly attempting to uphold something called “the party of the German Liberties,” which, the more you read about it, sounds like a very real German constitutional tradition that could, in another timeline, have rivaled Magna Carta. But it didn’t. Instead, modern Germany was hammered into shape by Prussia, Napoleon, and Destruction. Or maybe it was hammered out of shape.

There is also an entire period of the war known as the Danish Intervention, which featured the King of Denmark invading Germany on behalf of the Protestants, only to lose twice. This makes the Danish role seem like a footnote in the conflict to modern audiences, yet the Danes at the start of the war were seen as one of the great powers of Europe, and King Christian IV of Denmark remains one of Denmark’s most famous and popular sovereigns down to this day.

Also, the war which was ostensibly the greatest and last of the Catholic vs. Protestant wars of religion featured the Papacy refusing to fully back the Habsburgs and Jesuits, and choosing instead to scrape the Habsburgs and French against each other in order to maintain Papal independence and autonomy. Meanwhile, the Habsburgs and the Jesuits represented the heights of the Counter-Reformation’s attempt to reform Catholicism and roll back Protestantism, which they achieved in Bohemia and Austria, leading to one of the most successful re-Catholicization programs anywhere.

The Papacy wasn’t the only power playing both sides. Across the channel, James I of England (James VI when he was in Scotland) married his daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V of the Palatinate and diplomatically supported the Protestant cause, but also pursued the “Spanish Match” for his son Charles, courting an alliance with the Habsburgs that ultimately failed. In perhaps an early version of having no friends or enemies, but only interests, England was willing to simultaneously support the Protestants in Germany, while at the same time balancing the Spanish against the Dutch, who were fast becoming commercial rivals with London. All of this happened within living memory of England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, and would go on to be within living memory of the Glorious Revolution, in which the English invited in a Dutch king. During the Thirty Years War itself, English and Scottish mercenaries were heavily represented in Protestant and Swedish armies, taking military lessons back to England just in time for the English Civil War. English Puritans would succeed in regicide where German Calvinists had failed.

If you want a further bizarre irony that seems to crown the absurdity of the whole conflict, one of the final sticking points that took the longest to solve at the Peace of Westphalia was the problem of raising enough money by all parties in order to demobilize the massive armies that had ravaged central Europe for a generation. This was one of Sweden’s biggest demands at the conference: getting the Catholic parties to agree to pay Sweden to demobilize its own army in Germany, because the Swedes couldn’t pay for it themselves. This was a real problem, because 17th century armies were notoriously underpaid and poorly supplied, and constantly resorted to looting and plundering the civilian populace and threatening mutiny against their own officers in the face of chronic pay arrears. The Thirty Years War ended with the armies that every major dynasty had assembled at great cost and destruction, needing to be bought off by their own erstwhile masters. The bill came due.

And the butcher’s bill was enormous. In keeping with the horrific nature of the war, the cost was most steeply paid by the civilian populace, and not the armies or rulers which orchestrated and then lost control of the conflict. By later standards, decisive battles and sieges were comparatively rare given the scale of misery. Instead, year after year saw widespread devastation as armies passed over and through central Europe, repeatedly plundering enemy (and friendly) territories. Armies often moved simply because they had exhausted a locale and needed to keep feeding themselves upon the life of the countryside elsewhere. Several years saw bad weather and poor harvests, and many good harvests trampled and cut down by passing troops, who spent far more of their time foraging, scrounging, and pillaging than they did actually fighting. When they weren’t mutinying against their officers for lack of food and pay.

Some of the worst atrocities you will ever read about happened during the Thirty Years War, mostly directed at peasants and townsfolk suspected of hiding food and valuables (such as their daughters). In their wake, the soldiers brought starvation and disease, leading to (contested) reports of cannibalism, as well as wave after wave of bubonic plague. In the aftermath of the war, no estimate of the death toll was too high, leading 18th and 19th century accounts to claim that the population of Germany dropped by over half. Modern estimates are closer to a quarter or third.

Armies on the move started, as in the late Roman Empire, to resemble miniature communities unto themselves. Women were forcibly (or voluntarily) taken as camp followers, and their children, along with ever-present orphans, were raised in the ranks. At the onset of peace, soldiers complained of knowing no other life to return to. Continuing the upside-down nature of the conflict, it was plausible for some late-war armies to have more women and children in them than soldiers, and camp followers could be just as ruthless in extorting and torturing peasants.

Soldiers increasingly became a social class unto themselves, distinguished not by allegiance, confession, or even nationality. Gustavus Adolphus’ famous proto-national Swedish army was, for the latter half of the war, composed mostly of German mercenaries. Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar’s “Bernhardine” army of Germans fought for the Swedes and then the French. Protestants and Catholics could be found in all armies, as generals couldn’t afford to be picky. Surrendering soldiers frequently switched sides and enlisted alongside their captors, who couldn’t afford to imprison them even if they didn’t need the manpower.

Even the old neat and tidy teleological arguments about “inevitable” developments in war start to fall away. Musket volleys and linear tactics are remembered as superior innovations on the road to modern professional armies, and yet a major driver in the Dutch and Swedish innovations in tactics came from necessity, and classical Roman authors such as Vegetius. Throughout the war, generals still prized and paid their pikemen well, who were seen as the most disciplined and veteran units. The Thirty Years War supposedly sounded the death knell of the Spanish tercio as a lumbering old behemoth past its prime, just like the Spanish Empire. Yet throughout the war, Spanish armies were highly feared, and even at Rocroi, where Spanish military glory finally broke, the tercios were not tactically defeated, but fought on while the rest of their army died around them.

At least all can agree that, by the 1600s, the days of the old medieval armored knight were long gone. Except they weren’t, as cavalry units still heavily recruited from the nobility fancied themselves the decisive arm, and the heaviest cavalry rode into battle wearing the final evolution of articulated plate armor. Of course, even the heavy cuirassiers and reiters now carried pistols. One of the strangest true anachronisms in history is that for the last 150 years of their existence, “knights in shining armor” fought with guns. Meanwhile, in Poland, some of the deadliest lancers in history were still a half-century away from the greatest cavalry charge of all time.

The longer you stare at it, the more the Thirty Years War becomes a roiling cauldron that bubbled over and melted down almost everything it touched, even as it also simultaneously helped build the modern nation-state, international law and politics, and laid the foundations for the Enlightenment. Much of the 18th century’s obsession with reason and science was already prevalent in the elaborate theories of order and discipline needed to form armies, build geometric fortifications, and bureaucratize state administration in the 17th.

However, burgeoning rationalism simultaneously coexisted with a fervent belief in the divine and supernatural, contrary to what later philosophes might claim about “medieval superstition.” The 17th century was also an age of astrology, witchcraft trials, and biblical prophecy. Many of the Protestant figures around Frederick V of the Palatinate, who accepted the Bohemian crown, believed that the defeat of the Habsburgs was foretold in the Book of Daniel. After Frederick’s defeat, Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion King of the North, became the biblically-foretold champion. Meanwhile, the Habsburg court of Rudolf II was by no means the only European court where astronomy and astrology were both consulted. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler both used horoscopes, and Newton himself had a background in alchemy. Wallenstein, the famous mercenary general who became so indispensable to the Habsburgs that they finally had no other choice but to kill him, was both a master organizer and logistician, as well as a supremely credulous believer in astrology. It turns out that a deep faith in a cosmic order, hierarchy, and the supernatural, is actually much closer to 18th century deism and faith in triumphant rationalism than the Enlightenment cared to admit. Across the Atlantic, Harvard Fellow Cotton Mather sincerely believed that his investigation of witchcraft at Salem would yield empirical (scientific) findings about demonic powers.

Cynics might congratulate themselves in seeing through religious piety and spiritualism as an opiate for the masses while hard-nosed kings and ministers played realpolitik, but it was actually the armies of all sides that lost first their confessional identities, and then (contrary to 19th century nationalist historiographies) even their national ones. Meanwhile, the private records and lives of almost all the major political leaders of the Thirty Years War show extraordinary levels of personal piety and spiritual zeal. Ferdinand II of Austria heard two masses every morning, and frequently woke in the middle of the night to pray by his bedside. Maximilian of Bavaria founded the Catholic League, bankrolled the imperial cause, and dedicated himself to the Virgin Mary in a vow written in his own blood. John George of Saxony was usually drunk, but he was always a devout Lutheran. Frederick V was a faithful Calvinist, and his advisor Christian of Anhalt (who was only just bright enough to be catastrophic to his own cause) fervently believed in the millennial end-times prophecies which aligned the Habsburgs with the Book of Revelation. Gustavus Adolphus’ utterly reckless bravery was motivated by his ironclad faith that he was an instrument of God’s will. Even the arch-machiavellian Richelieu had an intense personal devotion, and seems to have been genuinely convinced that separate kingdoms were part of the divinely appointed cosmic order, which meant that France had a role to play in checking Habsburg universalism. Somehow, Richelieu seems at the same time to both hearken back to Augustine’s vision of politics in City of God, and forward to the modern world of nation-states and national interest.

The more you stare at the Thirty Years War, the more human it seems in its ability to reflect back human frailty and myopia, and inhuman in the horrors and misery it produced. Like a fire, the Thirty Years War consumed everything it touched, and like a fire, it is easy to lose yourself in contemplation as you stare at it. Narratives and interpretations flicker in the light, constantly changing and going up in smoke. It is the end of the Middle Ages, even after the Middle Ages were supposedly over, and the beginning of the Modern world, before the Modern world supposedly came into being.

I think I still don’t understand the Thirty Years War.

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A good reason to look at Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk before moving on to the traditional Sumerian city-states that tend to dominate discussion of the first civilizations, is because of what Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk appear to not have. As far as we can tell, Gobekli Tepe, Catalhoyuk, and many other very early settlements and villages were examples of complex human societies with many people, sophisticated buildings and artwork, as well as rudimentary trade and industry…but without an overbearing political class of kings or warriors.

This is interesting and appears to go against our traditional myths and legends about early history, which are full of stories of kings founding cities, kingdoms, and peoples. Most famously, take the story of Romulus and the founding of Rome. In legendary Roman history, Romulus picked a spot, built his walls (killed his brother), and then opened the gates of the city, because he needed people to actually rule over. Greek myths are full of legendary heroes who found cities and become the fathers of great nations.

This is a little odd if you pause to think about it for a moment; why would someone declare a kingdom with nobody in it, and why would people voluntarily choose to come and put themselves into submission under a king? This narrative also presupposes that peoples needed kings and rulers in the first place, as if nobody could live together without a king to give them order and laws. What if this is perhaps a bit of kingly propaganda?

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Bottom-up…

There certainly are settlements and cities in history laid out by rulers from scratch (sometimes, as in Alexandria or Constantinople, named after a founder) who directed where buildings, streets, and city walls would go, often in precise grid patterns and following geometric or mathematical rules. Many modern cities also fit this pattern. Take a look at an aerial picture of Chicago or Los Angeles sometime, and you’ll see streets which run along for miles in a straight line. It takes power to tell people to line up.

But there are also many (probably more actually) settlements which existed first, and only then were taken over by a ruler or king. You can often tell if a settlement grew up organically by whether or not buildings and streets were laid out rationally, according to a predetermined plan, or haphazardly, by people who just built wherever was convenient at the time. This is partly why so many old European cities today have charming narrow streets that twist and wind down medieval neighborhoods. If you live in a rural area, you may drive along farm roads originally picked out by horses or cattle trying to find the easiest route to market. Such roads tend to follow the natural curves and elevations of the landscape, as opposed to industrial highways and railways, which often cut through nature in straight lines.

Many things in life are self-organizing, emerging from the bottom up as humans and animals figure out on their own what works best in a given environment. Markets are one of the most extraordinary versions of this, managing to coordinate incredible amounts of information across huge networks, all by something as simple as price signals.

Every day, humans make billions of small (and large) decisions which are unplanned, and often not very rational (which restaurant for dinner? Which product on Amazon? What show on Netflix?). No person, committee, or even supercomputer could begin to categorize all this information and predict where something will need to be in a warehouse six months from now, in order to satisfy your passing whim when you make an impulse-purchase. Yet attaching prices to goods and services filters out how much people desire or need things in an astoundingly complex operatic ballet which is all around us, and mostly taken for granted. This is the genius of Adam Smith’s famous invisible hand, and the “knowledge problem” that Friedrich Hayek diagnosed as the core weakness of totalitarian states and central planning. To say that Communism failed because it couldn’t predict which laundry detergent you’d prefer is both making trite of the thing, and also profoundly true.

Many more things in life are organized this way than we often realize (we have rules of the road, but nobody tries to direct thousands of cars on the highway all at once). American life in particular is famous for this sort of bottom-up social living, where small groups of people identify common problems and find solutions all on their own. The Puritan colonists had no British army to help them against the Indians, so they formed militias and elected their own officers. In addition to its tradition of entrepreneurship and innovation, American history is full of self-organized associations that took on charitable works and social causes, such as fighting poverty, slavery, drunkenness, and forms of discrimination.

This sort of emergent order within societies probably played a bigger role in early history than we realize precisely because it’s not very visible to us. One feature of small organic communities is precisely that they are difficult for outsiders to understand, with lots of unwritten rules, conventions, and traditions which are closely held, or even secret. When it comes to archaeology, most of what survives from early history tends to be grand structures and monuments built by kings and Pharaohs who wanted to be remembered. If a small village ran its own affairs through an informal network of farmers working together and meeting in someone’s house, much less would remain for archaeologists to find. It’s quite likely that entire societies with complex forms of organization and problem-solving in early history, are almost invisible to us in the archaeological record.

So, one rule of thumb when thinking about very early history is that there was probably far more bottom-up informal organization of society than we can easily observe.

…Vs. Top-Down

Once we understand the role of bottom-up emergent order within society, we can better appreciate and understand how and why top-down rule from above plays an important role in history as well.

There are challenges that can be more easily solved from the top, with a clearly-defined leader who can identify a problem, come up with a plan, organize resources, and direct people towards a solution. Crises and emergencies are situations where top-down leaders shine; if there’s a fire in a crowded theater, you don’t want to call a vote or form a committee to discuss the problem. Humans naturally respond to and rally round decisive and confident leadership in a chaotic or dangerous situation. Businesses have CEOs, armies have generals, modern nations have presidents, and ancient kingdoms had kings, who all fulfill this role to varying degrees.

Top-down leaders can often solve problems at scale, directing large numbers of people towards one central solution that isn’t clearly obvious from the ground-level of society. Sometimes when systems or institutions get stuck or break down, firm leadership from the top is necessary to break through the logjam and get things moving again. Many of the greatest buildings, monuments, and works of art, from paintings to movies, are the product of a single person with an overarching vision. Although there are some notable exceptions, committees often ruin more works of art by making too many suggestions or changes that hamper or dilute a single artistic vision.

There are downsides to top-down leadership, however. Because bottom-up emergent-order associations are diffused and decentralized, the damage that any individual “node” in a system can do is often limited. Top-down leadership is like fire; its very power can make it wildly dangerous. Incompetent or tyrannical leaders are the greatest man-made dangers in history.

In early human history, top-down leaders who became the first kings were very much a double-edged sword. They helped create the first cities and civilizations, unlocking many other developments which we consider essential achievements of the human story. Our very word “civilization,” implying the highest, best, and most refined of human activities, is fundamentally tied to the invention of cities. We have marveled at the Egyptian Pyramids, built as tombs for the Pharaohs, for over forty-five hundred years. The world is in many ways richer for the achievements of kings and emperors, the greatest of whom were compared to gods and hailed with plaudits and titles. And their achievements make us strangely quick to excuse or ignore their downsides. Alexander was responsible for the deaths of millions, yet we almost universally call him, “the Great.”

Kings helped jump-start civilization, but they often did so by coercion and violence; issuing orders and collecting taxes by force, and limiting freedom of action. And kings could wage war on a larger scale, leading hundreds and soon thousands of men into battles against other peoples. Just as the Industrial Revolution and nationalism helped make World War I massively more lethal than previous wars, developments in state-building and top-down rule often strengthened a government’s monopoly on violence. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest known surviving epic poem, and recounts the heroic deeds of Gilgamesh, Sumerian king of Uruk. Gilgamesh is a great hero, who slays monsters and defies the gods themselves. Yet the poem also opens with a dark passage describing how Gilgamesh oppresses the people of Uruk, taking their daughters for himself, and sending their sons off to war. The prologue of the poem specifically emphasizes how Gilgamesh built the mighty walls and temples of Uruk, which remained visible monuments long after his rule.

Even as the first kings played an important role in the creation of civilization, their rule was not always popular. In fact, many individuals in the first cities and kingdoms may have been worse off than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Even permanent sedentary farming itself wasn’t an obvious improvement. The old textbook narrative of “primitive hunter-gatherers giving way to cities and kingdoms” can give us a false sense of progress and seeming improvement. There’s a natural assumption that each stage of historical development must be “better” than the one which came before it. But very often, the earliest stages of major historical changes have real downsides and trade-offs.

Which we shall talk about next time.

Coming in two weeks: two steps forward, one step back.

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Ahah! “sed contra!” say the academics…

Magna Carta, some modern scholars observe, is not a timeless statement of universal English liberties, and it does not presage the modern liberal world. Magna Carta was an unoriginal treaty signed between a king under duress and his own rebelling nobility, who were only thinking narrowly of their feudal prerogatives, and who quite happily went back to oppressing their own peasants as soon as the document was signed. Magna Carta was only much later dressed up as something far beyond its original intention. 19th century proto-academic nationalist myth-making once again punctured by modern scholarship.

There is a better story between these two poles.

Bad King John

In 1214, John (1199-1216), son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and younger brother to the late Richard the Lionheart, committed the gravest sin of all English monarchs: being beaten by the French. At the Battle of Bouvines, John’s forces and his Flemish and German allies faced off against a French army led by King Philip II (known as “Augustus,” and one of the great French kings). The allies lost Bouvines decisively, and with it, John lost the County of Anjou and any chance of reclaiming Normandy, along with the rest of the Angevin Empire built by his father, Henry II. In the aftermath of his defeat, his subjects took to calling him John Lackland and even “Softsword.” (Edit: as pointed out in the comments, John was not actually at Bouvines personally, but was campaigning in support of the allied army and was forced to retreat after the defeat).

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It was in this context that John desperately resorted to raising money any way he could. I will always approve of the Disney animated Robin Hood’s depiction of Prince John gleefully celebrating over his gold (“Taxes Taxes Taxes!”), but in reality, John was in the exact opposite situation of rolling in wealth. What’s more, despite the image of the Sheriff of Nottingham squeezing peasants for every last coin, John wasn’t trying to tax everyone in the realm. John was primarily trying to raise money from his barons for the very good reason that, as great feudal magnates and landowners, the baronial class actually possessed most of England’s liquid wealth

However, getting at that wealth wasn’t easy, as collectively the barons had even more real power than the crown. Far from our stereotype of kings ruling grandly in majesty and power, most high medieval kings were something like informal constitutional monarchs. Most of our iconic images of kings sitting imperiously on thrones while courtiers scurry to fulfill the sovereign’s every whim reflect the absolute monarchs of the Renaissance and early modern period; more Henry VIII and Louis XIV than Henry II or Richard the Lionheart.

During the High Middle Ages, the messy patchwork of customs and traditions that we call feudalism revolved around the nominal idea that kings gave land to their nobles and vassals, who in turn dispensed the land to their followers, on down to local manorial estates. And the entire point of “the nobles live off the rents of the land and owe service to the king in return,” implied that the nobility enjoyed the profits of the land, not the king. Under the logic of primitive feudalism established by the Normans, this was fine, as the main thing a king needed was manpower and loyalty he could call upon every campaign season. The king’s actual household, with his own family, advisers, and retainers, was provided for by his own demesne (personal domain).

In theory, when a king went to war, built a castle, or endowed a monastery, the money came at his own personal expense; he was the sovereign after all. The logic of extending taxation across the realm for what we would call public goods only developed slowly, gradually increasing during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period, and also rising in conjunction with the ability of kings to assert power over their own nobles. Most feudal kings were reliant upon their direct rents and revenues from crown lands, and then whatever else they could pry from nobles and merchants through tolls, fines, and various feudal customs. John’s father, Henry II (1154-1189) had built a cunning proto-state system of institutions which helped unify his patchwork Angevin empire, and had managed to effectively monetize much of it, not only through direct rents and tolls, but also fines and legal transactions connected to his expansion of royal justice (courts, royal writs, etc).

It was this system that John leaned on in order to raise money. One of the most pressing points with the nobility was John’s expansion of inheritance taxes for a lord upon attaining his father’s possessions. These payments were known as reliefs, and they were one of the largest complaints that motivated the barons to rise up in rebellion, and compel John to negotiate at Runnymede. Enter Magna Carta.

Feudal Reliefs, Royal Justice…and Fish-weirs

The raw text of Magna Carta is in fact a litany of very specific demands and compromises between barons and king, and there is very little that might be treated as universal or philosophical. The document asserts that the liberties spelled out apply to “all free men of our kingdom…for us and our heirs for ever,” but much of the document is narrowly focused on the rights of the nobles, and the barons in question probably didn’t think much about extending the same privileges down to their own serfs.

Most pressing to the barons were the provisions relating to feudal payments and royal levies. Feudal reliefs were capped at 100 pounds for the heir of a baron, and 100 shillings for a knight. Other provisions spelled out rules on guardianship for underage heirs, and the king’s role in approving important marriages. The first fifteen or so provisions in the document deal with these baronial concerns, and were presumably seen as the most important.

That said, contrasting Magna Carta as either a high-minded promulgation on liberty, or a narrow feudal treaty of petty concerns, can obscure the importance of the rest of the document. When I have taught Magna Carta, the richest discussions with students flow from all the text’s other provisions. Many of these provisions seem technical and specific, but are good examples of rule-making.

Some taxing powers (provisions 12, 14), especially scutage (a tradition whereby knights could pay a fee in lieu of feudal service for a campaign) required general consent under Magna Carta, and required the king to summon noble representatives to assemble before signing off on new taxes. This only applied to the nobility, but one can easily see how, over the next century, the same principle would be extended to the creation of Parliament.

Provisions 17-20 prescribe the manner and location of court cases, helping regularize royal justice as an institution, and preventing obvious abuses such as the king holding court overseas, and convicting in absentia nobles who couldn’t reasonably travel to court. Provision 17 states that “ordinary lawsuits shall not follow the royal court around, but shall be held in a fixed place,” while 18 helps regularize and confirm the practice of circuit judges visiting the counties at regular times in the year to hear cases (this was one of the central pieces of Henry II’s contributions to Common Law).

Other provisions on courts, fines, and convictions also reflect the early Norman custom of trials by jury, and something suspiciously close to due process. Provision 39 states:

“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”

Similarly, (provisions 28-31) there are boring-but-revealing limitations placed on royal officials and the king not to expropriate goods or property, or commandeer horses and transportation, without payment or permission. The king cannot even take wood for the building of a castle without local permission, which also hints at how important and valuable a resource timber was in the pre-modern world.

There are other broader provisions in Magna Carta which might seem extraneous or incidental, but which actually reflect prudent policy-crafting that was responsive to the actual concerns of the day. It has always looked to me as if the fingerprints of Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury and former bishop of London, who actually composed the document, had a not-so-subtle hand in its shaping.

The document goes out of its way to acknowledge and protect the “ancient liberties and free customs” of London and other boroughs, as well as the rights and privileges of merchants and free travel. Provision 35 standardizes weights and measures for transactions, including for textiles:

“There shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn (the London quarter), throughout the kingdom. There shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth, russet, and haberject, namely two ells within the selvedges. Weights are to be standardized similarly.”

It turns out that selvedges are the hemmed boundaries on either side of fabric, to prevent fraying and tearing. Standard weights and measures are another one of those boring-but-important developments that often presage future economic and commercial growth. In the 14th century and beyond, much of England’s commercial and royal power would be built upon the all-important wool trade. By contrast, as James C. Scott observed in Seeing like a State, pre-Revolutionary France had a bewildering array of non-standardized customary measuring systems across its provinces, which were then all wiped away and replaced by the metric system during the Revolution.

Finally, Magna Carta also ordered the removal of fish-weirs from the Thames and other rivers (for the sake of riverine traffic), as well as “disafforesting” royal forests (common English words such as “forest” and even “a farm” were originally legal terms). Provision 48 declares that “All evil customs relating to forests and warrens, foresters, warreners, sheriffs and their servants, or river-banks and their wardens, are at once to be investigated in every county by twelve sworn knights of the county.” There is something oddly charming about an ostensibly timeless and universal document like Magna Carta making a point to comment on fish-weirs in the Thames and curbing “evil customs” in forests.

The Stuarts

So far, our modern nitpicking academics have the upper hand in emphasizing that Magna Carta wasn’t very Great. Frequently, the story here jumps ahead to the 17th century, when the charter makes its remarkable resurgence as a potent weapon in the hands of Parliament against the Stuarts. Originally Scottish, the House of Stuart inherited the crown following the death of Elizabeth I, and King Charles I (1625-1649) attempted to follow in the footsteps of his father, James I (1603-1625) in promoting absolutism. The Stuarts were also Anglican, and increasingly at odds with the growing Puritan influence in Parliament. Charles was not a particularly deft ruler, and he ultimately tried to avoid summoning Parliament at all during the eleven years of his so-called Personal Rule. In the face of the king’s enormities, Parliament increasingly found both its voice, and a venerable old principle to stand on. In 1628, Sir Edward Coke famously declared that absolute monarchy was impossible under rule of law, because “Magna Carta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign.” Ultimately, the English Civil War (1642-1649) would lead to Oliver Cromwell, the victory of Parliament, and the beheading of Charles. Magna Carta’s symbolic role in the 17th century fight between Crown and Parliament would echo all the way across the Atlantic.

However, jumping immediately to the 17th century history of Magna Carta risks treating it, as it has often been portrayed, as a piece of contrived antiquarianism; a convenient and dusty old document dredged up by a combative Parliament looking for any weapon at hand to use against the crown. While it is true that Magna Carta had fallen out of relative favor and attention during the 15th and 16th centuries, there is more to Magna Carta’s history. Two important themes need mention.

Precedent

The first and most important thing to note is that Magna Carta failed spectacularly. Neither the rebelling barons nor King John had much faith in the treaty, and John wanted to get out from under it as quickly as possible. Within a year John had secured the support of Pope Innocent III, who condemned Magna Carta and excommunicated the barons, and the Baronial War continued, this time with active French intervention supporting the rebels. Far from reigning peacefully under sovereign law, John died the following year, while on campaign, of dysentery.

Fighting continued through 1217, when a regency council headed by William Marshall, one of the most powerful men in the realm, and who Stephen Langton once called “the greatest knight who ever lived,” succeeded in putting John’s nine-year old son Henry III on the throne.1 In the negotiations ending the war, it was agreed that Henry III (with William Marshall and the other leading nobles of the realm standing closely over his shoulder) would himself sign and reissue Magna Carta. Herein lies the turn.

Magna Carta represented a compromise that both sides could live with and support as a sign of good faith. It probably matters a great deal that the document originally failed, as nobody could claim it as a political victory. Instead, both sides could later revisit the document without losing face. And once it became a point of mutual safety, it could become load-bearing.

Henry III reissued the charter again in 1225 in exchange for support for new taxes, and Edward I Longshanks (also known as “The Hammer of the Scots”) reissued the document in 1297. In fact, it is one of the four surviving copies of the 1297 edition of Magna Carta which is on display in the National Archives in Washington DC. Magna Carta would be reissued again by subsequent kings, and frequently referenced in parliamentary proceedings and legal cases. Although it fell out of favor during the reign of the Tudors, who were inclined towards rapid centralization of the monarchy, Magna Carta had established enough of a precedent during the Medieval period that its 17th century revival by Edward Coke and others was not merely a manufactured appeal to a bygone feudal age. Each time the charter was reissued and the precedent affirmed, it was driven deeper into the constitutional soil of England.

Reconsidering the actual provisions of the charter in light of how their meaning changed over time, the document starts to look a little different. One can easily imagine that both the barons and John assumed that the charter’s limitations harmed the king and helped the barons, but in making royal power less arbitrary and whimsical, they ultimately helped enshrine the common law tradition and royal courts as legitimate. In the long run, the growth of royal justice would do more to erode the legal authority of the nobility as much as any army could, but without giving the crown free rein for absolute despotism. In this regard, the story in France was much the opposite. In the late 17th century, while France basked in the splendor of the Sun King, Louis XIV, England’s Glorious Revolution completed the transition to a constitutional monarchy.

While Magna Carta didn’t invent Parliament, it did help regularize the notion that new taxes should require consent, which ultimately became one of Parliament’s most closely-held rights. However, easier (limited) regular taxation also frequently proved beneficial for the crown. In the Late Middle Ages, the practice of scutage (payment in lieu of feudal service) increasingly turned into a form of regular revenue, which kings often used for other purposes. More efficient monetization of the government enabled England, smaller and poorer, to punch above its weight militarily against France during the Hundred Years War. One of the reasons the English relied so heavily on longbows during the war was that yeoman archers were far cheaper to recruit and pay, and more versatile than expensive feudal chivalric knights. Many of the “gentlemen in England now-abed” on St. Crispin’s Day had paid the scutage taxes which funded Henry V’s band of brothers at Agincourt.

Over time, the slow-but-steady growth of royal courts and justice would prove to be one of the most important avenues for the development of English governing institutions. Along with parliamentary consent for taxation, royal justice and the common law tradition would help England develop a set of national institutions that were more clearly circumscribed than in France, and yet stronger within their proper bounds.

When a weaker party has extracted a concession from a stronger party, in part by granting the underlying legitimacy of the stronger party to do something, that power becomes an agreed-upon practice that both parties now have an interest in affirming. And as the practice becomes an accepted tradition, it can often grow far beyond its original intentions.

Free Men

Here we pick up the second important theme in the story of Magna Carta. The original 1215 charter never imagined a universal class of “free men” to whom the document could apply, and this was still true two centuries later. Magna Carta’s provisions did not change substantially over time. But the English population did.

While much of the charter’s provisions were the narrow concerns of the nobles, the broader category of “free men” to which the whole document addressed itself, was by no means universal, but it was already in 1215, fairly broad. A very large minority of England’s population was already legally free, and not directly tied to the land through serfdom or villeinage.2 The general trend across most of Europe throughout the Middle Ages was for serfdom to decline, and England was on the front of this curve. The Black Death in particular accelerated the growth of a free peasantry, because a dramatically reduced yeoman-peasant population could command higher wages when negotiating with their former feudal overlords. By 1500, English serfdom was almost entirely abolished.

In addition to nobles and free peasants, most towns and cities enjoyed greater rights and liberties. Even in the days of serfdom, a peasant who escaped to a town for a year and a day was declared free. Cities in the Middle Ages were often small islands of free-status outside of the normal feudal system, and in many places, town air was free air. By the late middle ages and early modern period however, these islands were growing, as the population, wealth, and influence of towns and cities increased dramatically.

The growth of Parliament in England closely followed the growth of cities such as London. Even in Magna Carta, as we saw above, London earned special mention and had its “ancient rights and liberties” acknowledged. One of the great successes of the growth of the English state was its ability to monetize its growing commercial base, even if this required giving Parliament greater voice, and eventually, real power. In 1215, King John had gone to his barons for revenue from feudal reliefs, but in the 17th century Charles Stuart found he couldn’t even rule without Parliament granting him new taxes, no matter what imaginative legal tricks with “ship money” he might resort to.

By the early modern period, the population base of England had changed dramatically, and had real commercial, financial, legal, and political power. And the population knew it. A right long given and taken for granted can fall into neglect. But a new right, hard-won through effort and most importantly, through new social status, will be prized jealously. And touching that right risks setting off a response disproportionate to the threat itself, because attacking that right touches the accompanying sense of achieved security and status. As Englishmen gained freedom and the beginnings of representation, they could legitimately say that they, too, now counted under Magna Carta. And “counting” under Magna Carta meant that one could claim a sense of equal status, even alongside their nominal social betters.

Magna Carta did not intentionally create the modern world of English political liberties, parliamentary representation, and self-government. Magna Carta unintentionally created a precedent, and then a touchstone around which the strongly defined but carefully bounded nascent English state could grow. Eventually, Magna Carta also became the measuring stick by which the rising classes of a whole nation could look at themselves and say, “I too belong, and have standing. What was once mostly just for nobles now belongs to me as well.” Magna Carta became a tangible expression of the social contract affirming that the yeoman peasantry and urban townsmen also counted.

Magna Carta’s role in English constitutional history therefore was not intentional, but it was also not artificial. A relatively minor contract in a minor kingdom had grown with that kingdom into being a very Great Contract. The Great Charter is, in fact, a Big Deal.

To return to the 17th century one last time, we should note what else happened during the 1600s, both before and after the English Civil War. Just eight years before Sir Edward Coke declared that Magna Carta had no sovereign, the colony of Plymouth, Massachusetts was founded. Throughout the rest of the 17th century, English colonies sprang up in the New World, all seeded by settlers steeped in the political fights of the day. The relatives of the Puritans who won the English Civil War ended up in New England, and many of the defeated Cavaliers who fought for King Charles went to Virginia and the Carolinas. They took with them the political attitudes and memories of the day, and held onto those memories as cultural touchstones of the home they had left, but to which they still claimed to belong.

One cannot therefore understand the American founding, or the American temperament towards liberty and taxes, without understanding how the Crown and Parliament fights of the 17th century became part of the ancestral memory of the new colonies. And when, after a century of salutary neglect, Crown and Parliament returned suddenly and unexpectedly to the colonies, the very attitudes which had once defined the political fights of the 17th century found new life in the 18th.

When the Massachusetts Assembly declared that the Stamp Act was “against the Magna Carta and the natural rights of Englishmen, and therefore, according to Lord Coke, null and void,” there was perhaps an anxious desire to assert that, in the very act of driving the colonies apart from Great Britain, the Americans were still part of England in the way that most mattered.

That they still counted under Magna Carta.

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If, as with other roles, this person continues on as village priest, shaman, or medicine-healer, this can become another form of specialization, and one passed down from generation to generation, accruing knowledge and expertise. This person can help resolve disputes between quarreling farmers, and they can sacralize important events and festivals. In times of danger or hardship, they can mediate with gods and spiritual entities. Eventually, simple shrines are turned into permanent temples, serviced by dedicated priests.

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There’s probably an advantage in having someone in the village whose job isn’t to work, but simply to look at and think about things. Over time, they may notice and remember more, and pick up on small things that others miss. Passing those forms of knowledge and experience on to the next generation also creates a compounding effect over time. In premodern agricultural life, simply being old was a valuable asset. Old farmers had simply been around longer, and were more likely to remember how the village had dealt with a rare problem such as a flood, drought, or pestilence. Across cultures, the elderly have traditionally been treated reverently as sources of wisdom. Today, in a world which we think of as fast-changing, we often denigrate the elderly as being out of touch, but it’s still common for social scientists to occasionally stumble on old truths that our grandmothers knew.

As our priests and medicine-healers passed their knowledge on, they may have eventually found ways to record that knowledge and preserve it. Even before writing as we know it, the ability to leave markings, images, and symbols on stone or wood, would have been very useful. A piece of knowledge once discovered, but then not passed on, is lost as surely as if it had never been learned in the first place. If an event such as an eclipse or a once-in-a-century flood took place, which nobody living remembered, oral folk history or written records would be of enormous value. The ability to record information is therefore not unreasonably associated with magic. Many different religious mythologies credit various gods with the invention of writing and record-keeping, and passing on the secret to mankind. And our greatest religious traditions are associated with sacred books.

There’s another specialization in particular where record-keeping would be of great value, and often associated with priestly classes. For that, let’s bring in the village insomniac.

Imagine someone in a village (or likely a hunter-gatherer even earlier) who has trouble sleeping. Night after night they lay down and look up at the stars, counting sheep (or woolly mammoths). With no artificial light pollution, the sky on a clear night is a thing to behold, with many many more stars than you can see in a brightly lit city. Imagine our insomniac watching the stars every night, and tracking their movements. You can watch stars move yourself, just by picking a star’s position, and checking in on it twenty minutes later. And if you do this for years, you’ll realize that the stars return to fixed positions at certain times of the year.

Imagine if, one year, winter ends early, and the village decides it’s time to start the spring planting. But the village insomniac tells them, “wait, it’s not spring yet, the stars aren’t in the right place.” If a late-winter freeze returns the next week, the village insomniac will suddenly look prophetic. Much later, priests in Egypt reliably predicted when the Nile river would start to flood, by watching for the rise of Sirius, the Dog Star, every August.

The positions of stars and phases of the moon helped humans create the first calendars. Our word “month” still refers to the moon, although today we use solar months instead of lunar ones. Some traditional and religious calendars still use lunar months, including the Islamic calendar, and the Hebrew and Christian observation of the Passover and Easter. For ancient peoples, celestial observations became incredibly important practices, in a way which most humans today completely ignore. We casually mark the changing of the seasons and lengthening and shortening of the days, but the seasonal rhythm of our lives changes much less. For pre-modern peoples, who needed to know when animals would migrate and when they should plant and harvest crops, astronomy was extremely valuable. The coming of winter was literally of life and death importance.

It was ancient astronomers who identified and recorded the Summer and Winter solstices, and the Spring and Autumn equinoxes. The Egyptians and Babylonians identified 360 days in the year, based on the movement of the Sun, which is still echoed on the number of degrees inscribed on our compasses.

If anyone ever tells you that aliens built monuments such as Stonehenge, or that we don’t know why early humans built such monuments, you should scoff at them. Stonehenge is a very large complex in Southern Britain, made up of huge stone monoliths, some of which were hauled from over a hundred miles away. The monoliths are all laid out in a circle, with a central “aisle” which is perfectly aligned with sunrise on the exact day of the Summer Solstice, and sunset on the day of the Winter Solstice. The perimeter stones helped priests track the passage of the sun in between the Spring and Fall equinoxes. Stonehenge is a calendar.

Astronomical record-keeping was of tremendous importance to ancient peoples, and huge amounts of religious practice revolved around astronomy. Eclipses were especially important, because when heavenly bodies are also divinities, the Moon devouring the Sun is not a passing amusement. Imagine a priest-astronomer telling an incredulous population that, next month, the Sun would disappear, and then being proved correct. You might then be inclined to offer whatever sacrifices he recommended.

Babylonian and Assyrian astronomers tracked the heavens (notice how we still traditionally associate the night sky with “heaven”), and eventually identified and correctly recorded the Saros cycle, a 223-month (18 years) rotation of the Sun and Moon, with predictable solar and lunar eclipses. One reason Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian astronomy was so good, was that the priests in each case could refer to a very large number of observations taken by previous generations of astronomers, sometimes stretching back over a thousand years.

The Babylonians and Assyrians believed that eclipses were bad omens, and that they portended evil on the reign of any king who lived through one, since Kings, as living embodiments of gods and divine rule, were associated with the Sun. To protect a king from an eclipse, the Babylonians and Assyrians instituted substitute rulers, which involved selecting an unimportant person, investing them with all the ceremonial trappings of office, including a queen, and having them rule during the eclipse, while the temporarily de-throned rightful king hid out of sight. After the eclipse the substitute king and queen were ritually killed, shedding their curse, and the rightful king resumed his throne. Thus ancient near eastern priest-astronomers protected the kingdom, and demonstrated why accurately predicting a coming eclipse was so important. Doubtless they made sure everyone knew who to thank.

It’s also probably not an accident that ancient priest-astronomers worked out of temples, often very large and tall ones, which could give a better vantage-point for nighttime observations. Temples were also relatively safe places, and good repositories of records for future generations. The skills needed for astronomy and divining the will of the gods therefore required much patience, literacy, care and precision, geometry, and math. Many of the earliest philosophers were astronomers, and we still associate astronomy with wisdom and knowledge, even if astronomy doesn’t often seem as important today. The Bible uses the term “Magi” (as in, “magic”) for the three wise men who predicted the birth of a king based on the movement of stars.

Today, of course, astronomers use enormous telescopes to try to unwind the secrets of the cosmos. This often includes attempting to “look back” in time to the origins of the universe.

Not so different, really, from their ancient insomniac forebears.

Coming in two weeks; bottom-up vs. top-down state-formation.

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Living in one place permanently meant that humans could build. For nomadic peoples, permanent structures are a waste of time and effort. But if you’re living in one place, not only is it nicer to have a fixed structure, but you can improve it over the years. A farmer might start out with a simple structure made from sticks or earth, and gradually move on to stouter timber, stone, or even bricks (often, in the ancient Near East, made of baked mud mixed with straw). The ability to gradually improve a structure with time and care, and then pass it on to children as an inheritance, led to compounding gains and improvements in quality over the years. Farmers could also build storehouses, granaries, and structures for livestock (fences, barns, etc). They could divert streams and sources of water, creating simple irrigation systems for their fields (this practice would be dramatically expanded by kings). Farmers could build tools and workshops, and spend time increasing their complexity and quality. Nomads were obviously limited in what they could haul and carry from place to place, but sedentary farmers could gradually accumulate a wide array of equipment better suited to individual tasks and jobs.

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Let’s try a thought-experiment by imagining an amalgamation of a stereotypical ancient farming village in the Near East:

Suppose a group of hunter-gatherers have gradually, over generations, settled in a given area, and started working the land. To simplify the experiment, let’s imagine each family starts out trying to farm and raise the same animals.

But of course, life as a farmer doesn’t just require plowing, sowing, harvesting, and milking the cows and feeding the chickens. Every farmer has to build his own house, fix his roof, dig ditches, make fences, and make and maintain a great many tools. Inside the home, women have to cook, clean, bake, preserve food, make clothes, and care for children. A great deal of a woman’s daily labor often went into grinding grain to make bread, and producing textiles to make clothes.

There will be some universal tasks that every farmer has to spend time on, but naturally, as in most things, some people tend to gravitate towards certain tasks either because they’re naturally more talented, or because they enjoy them more. Often, we do something because we like it, and then get better at it because we like it. And of course, the more time you spend on something, the better you’ll get at it. You become more confident and faster at the task, and you’ll begin to find many small ways to improve at it. This can also become negatively self-reinforcing for many students who convince themselves that they aren’t good at a given subject or activity.

Imagine a farmer leaning on his fence one day, chatting with his neighbor, and complaining about his metal tools, which lose their edge quickly, and are heavy and bulky. His neighbor on the other hand, happens to have a knack for working with copper, and enjoys it; he’d rather spend more time working in his makeshift shop. But ever since he was kicked by a donkey as a boy, he’s always been nervous around large animals, and he doesn’t like tending them. Before long, the farmers realize they can make a deal, tending animals in exchange for better quality tools. The productivity of both farms rises.

Meanwhile, another farmer dislikes fishing and going out on boats, but is good at making fishing nets from reeds and grasses. So he spends a few hours a week making fishing nets for his neighbor, who catches more fish with better quality nets. One farmer is skilled at making pots, and eventually everyone knows to go get a new earthen jar from him, rather than make their own. One farmer bakes the best bread in town, and eventually he decides to build new dome-shaped ovens that are much larger, and can handle many loaves of bread at once.

Women are also quick to specialize. One woman is adept at spinning sheep’s wool to make yarn, while another lives next to an exposed gully with a rich mineral deposit that makes dyes. Another woman has a knack for brewing beer from barley. No one particularly likes “the daily grind” of turning grain into flour though, and so everyone is happy when someone proposes to make a large millstone connected to a wooden shaft, tied to a donkey which can walk around in a circle. Another farmer later realizes that a similar setup can be used to crush olives and make oil.

In terms of payment, many farmers may just exchange favors with one another, in an “I’ll make this for you if you’ll help me fix my roof next week,” handshake-deal. Or they may develop routine patterns of exchange, wherein one housewife always gives some of her best dyed wool to her neighbor, who makes the best beer in town. The European custom of harvest-festivals, which continues even today in German traditions of Oktoberfest and American Thanksgiving, still echoes this very ancient tradition of rewarding favors and settling accounts with neighbors as farmers celebrate the end of the agricultural year, and brace themselves for winter. If your neighbor loaned you his plow when yours broke, you’d be sure to give him an extra ham come slaughtering time.

At some point, it became easier to start commoditizing these deals using measures of accounting, especially as networks and communities grew in size. In other words, people could start charging fixed prices. This might involve payment in terms of labor, or other goods. Our word for “capital,” which we still use when talking about banking or investing (i.e., an investor putting capital stock into a project), comes from the Latin word “caput,” in reference to heads of cattle. The forum boarium in ancient Rome was the cattle market where cows could be bought, sold, and used as collateral in loans. Of course, using cows as currency was fine for very large deals, but not so useful in day-to-day transactions. The only way to make change out of a cow is to butcher it. In the long run, grain became a useful medium of exchange, and then coinage. As we shall see, kings and states played a key role in this process.

Back to our thought experiment: as farmers specialize more and more into separate tasks, they get better and better, and the benefits spread to everyone and compound upon themselves. Even relatively “non-specialist” farmers who mostly just focus on growing grain and raising animals, are better off, because they can rely on the specialist blacksmiths, bakers, millers, weavers, brewers, potters, carpenters, and fishermen for more and better goods. Consequently, they produce more and better grain, which they can “spend” on even more and better tools, bread, fish, pots, beer, and furniture.

Not only are craftsmen getting better at their specialized tasks, but the village is coming together as a whole through this process. People spend more time talking to and bartering with one another, seeing each other less as competitors for the same resources, and more as partners who can aid each other. Increased productivity also means increased leisure time resting and socializing, with more food for feasts and festivals. More time relaxing also leads to more time thinking and planning about the future, instead of just focusing on surviving each day. The blacksmith might start experimenting with different materials, and one day accidentally discover how to make bronze, and the potter might have more time to devote to decorating his jars, producing artwork.

As the village produces more food and goods, its population rises, leading to even more specialization. As people look further afield, trade with other villages increases also. Gradually, one village might realize that it has a special advantage in particular goods (perhaps better clay for pots, fields for grain, dyes for wool, or pasture for animals) and focus more on producing what it does best, and trading with other villages which also specialize in their own crafts. Many innovations and techniques spread between towns, especially as trade picks up.

This process of incremental improvements and greater and greater specialization has gone on for thousands of years, and continues to this day. Sometimes a brilliant insight or confluence of several key variables produces huge new gains in trade or innovation, but much of human history is a story of very small incremental improvements, simply compounding over many many years.

Although hunter-gatherers also specialized, and also exchanged with one another, their low population numbers limited the size and scale of their networks. Sedentary farming significantly accelerated the value of specialization, because farming could support so many more people in a given area. A valley that several hunter-gatherer tribes might have fought over for dwindling game animals, might instead support multiple villages with hundreds of individuals in each. In a similar but far larger process today, mass urbanization and population density supercharge this process of specialization.

Coming in two weeks - Temples, Herbs, and Stars.

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These wars can help shed light on the current events right now in the Middle East, especially through their geography. And the fallout from the current conflict between Iran and the US and Israel could easily echo the wars of Augustus, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, and Heraclius.

Iran is Persia, and Persia is Iran

As I tell students when introducing Cyrus the Great, Darius, and the Achaemenids, Iran is Persia, and Persia is Iran. “Persia” is originally a Greek name for the province of Pars, and also the origin of Farsi, the main language spoken today in Iran. Iran refers to the Iranians’ own origin myth, that the Persians originally hailed from the Iranian-speaking invaders that came down from the Steppe well before 1,000 BC, and settling on the Iranian Plateau.

Modern Americans are sometimes guilty of lumping everyone in the Middle East together into vaguely similar categories of Arab and Muslim, but this is not the best way to understand the Middle East. While Iran is a Muslim country, it is the epicenter of Shia Islam, which is a rival to the Sunni tradition of most of the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia. Culturally and ethnically, the Persians see themselves as the heirs of a civilizational tradition that is over twenty-five hundred years old. Much of Middle East geopolitics snaps clearer into focus when you re-conceptualize the modern country of Iran as having a profound continuity with the civilization of Cyrus and Xerxes.

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Even when Iran is conquered by outsiders, the substrate of Persian civilization survives underneath.1 It was for good reason that Alexander tried to rule in the guise of a Persian emperor, and wanted to hybridize his Macedonians with the Persian elite. The golden age of Arab Islamic philosophy and government under the Abbasids during the Middle Ages had far more Persian influences underneath it than modern Arab nationalists care to admit. The early Arab dynasties wisely copied Sassanian administration and tax collection wholesale. The great Islamic philosophers Avicenna and Al-Ghazali were Persian, as are substantive parts of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

Persia’s remarkable civilizational continuity undoubtedly owes much to its very favorable geography. Persia/Iran is one of those few unique spots on the map which can interchangeably be labeled a geographic region, modern day nation-state, and civilizational entity, all in one (other examples include Egypt and China). The core Iranian plateau is a rugged series of highlands which produce good agriculture. Many classical fruits such as pomegranates, figs, and apricots came from Persia, and even better horses. Surrounding the Iranian plateau, however, are even more rugged mountains and deserts. Most importantly, the Zagros.

The Zagros mountains are a shield between Mesopotamia and Iran. Running from the Persian Gulf essentially up to the Caucasus, the Zagros are a formidable obstacle to almost any invader. The flat lowlands and alluvial plain of Mesopotamia lie exposed in the shadow of these mountains. Even as far back as the Bronze Age, before the Aryan invasions, empires such as the Elamites projected power into Mesopotamia from the Iranian plateau. Historically, the power that controls Iran can invade Iraq almost at will.

This fundamental geographic logic did much to shape the centuries-long conflict between Rome and Persia, and explains why so many of those wars had similar outcomes.

Rome’s Eastern Center of Gravity

Lay audiences today still tend to underrate the Eastern Roman Empire, due to English readers having an understandable Anglophone bias for Western Europe, as well as more familiarity with the campaigns of Caesar and the Germanic invasions which helped end the Western Roman Empire. However, the East was always the wealthier, more populous, and strategically more important half of the empire.2 The East also featured the single most powerful rival Rome ever fought. The Parthians and later Sassanians were rival imperial dynasties to Rome whose resources, population, and administrative skills outstripped the fractious coalitions of Celtic and Germanic tribes that Rome faced along its Rhine and Danubian frontiers.

And the Romans knew it. Surveys of Rome’s legionary bases and manpower allocation show that, especially by the 2nd century, Rome concentrated much of its military resources in the East, in Egypt and along the Syrian and Mesopotamian frontiers. Even when the late Roman Empire began to struggle administratively to recruit and maintain sufficient armies to patrol the frontiers, emperors never neglected the East, and even stripped the Western provinces of forces in order to fight Persia.3 Rather confusingly for all our pop-civilizational theories of decline and fall, the Western Roman Empire may have fallen precisely because it was the secondary frontier, not the primary one. The greatest Romano-Persian War, fought between Heraclius and Khosrow II, occurred more than two centuries after Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome.

In addition to the archaeological and textual evidence of Rome’s prioritization of the East, two anecdotes reinforce the point clearly. When Augustus and Mark Antony divided the Empire between them, Antony was, at the time, seen as the senior figure, and he chose the more prosperous East. Much later, when Diocletian stabilized Rome at the end of the tumultuous 3rd Century Crisis and instituted the Tetrarchy system of four co-rulers, Diocletian personally chose to rule from Nicomedia, in Asia Minor. Everyone knows about Hadrian’s famous wall in Scotland, but the Roman limes also stretched from Anatolia down through Syria and Palestine, with a series of military fortresses and bases from which to wage campaigns and defend against Persia to the East.

Over the centuries, the frontier between Rome and Parthia/Persia ebbed and flowed across the North Mesopotamian plain and the Syrian desert. Large wars were fought frequently for control over just one or two key border fortresses. In 530, Belisarius won one of his greatest victories over the Persians outside the frontier fortress-city of Dara. To the North, Armenia became perhaps the quintessential client-kingdom, perpetually caught between Roman and Persian imperial hegemony, in a delicate balancing act that continued on into the era of Byzantine-Arab, and then Byzantine-Turkish rivalries. The Armenian-Azeri-Kurdish triangle that straddles the borders of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, is one of the most delicate zones in the region today.

The Parthians, and then the Sassanians, delivered some of Rome’s most famous defeats.4 Herodotus said that the Persians taught their sons to ride, shoot, and always tell the truth, and the Parthians and Sassanians more than kept alive Iranian traditions of horsemanship and archery. Parthian light cavalry delivered one of Rome’s most iconic defeats in 53 BC at Carrhae, when Crassus attempted to invade Mesopotamia, only to find his heavy infantry encircled and peppered to death with missile fire from swift horse archers skilled in the “Parthian Shot.” The story of Crassus having his head removed and skull doused in molten gold as a maudlin commentary on his wealth and greed is one of those excellent “too good to check” anecdotes from ancient history.

Later, in the 4th century, Julian the Apostate, Rome’s last pagan emperor, launched an enormous invasion of Mesopotamia, floating his army and logistics train down the Euphrates towards the Persian capital of Ctesiphon (the “C” is silent). However, a Persian relief army threatened to cut off Julian’s supply lines further up the river, and he was forced to retreat north across the desert, losing his life and much of his army along the way near Samarra in Northern Mesopotamia.

Less well known to popular audiences, but extremely important within Persian imperial iconography, was what happened during the first Sassanian dynasty, formed after the collapse of the Parthians. In 260 AD, the Persian Emperor Shapur I repeatedly invaded the Eastern Roman Empire, sacked Antioch, and then captured the Roman Emperor Valerian in battle at Edessa (also in upper Mesopotamia), one of the very few times in 1400 years that a Roman Emperor was taken alive by an opponent. The fate of Valerian is unclear, but accounts variously claimed that Shapur used Valerian as a footstool to mount his horse, and that, after his death, Valerian’s stuffed skin-sack was displayed in Shapur’s palace. Once more, chalk these up as “too good to check.”

Roman Victories in the East

But these famous defeats are not the whole story. Less well known, but perhaps even more important, is what happened under emperors such as Augustus, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, and finally Heraclius. Augustus Caesar may have erected the Ara Pacis and closed the doors of the Temple of Janus, but these celebrations of peace were explicit codas coming after ostensible great victories. Near the top of the list of Augustus’ claimed triumphs, was his recovery from Parthia of the lost legionary standards captured at Carrhae.5 In Rome’s official narrative, Crassus’ death at Carrhae was avenged, even if the recovery of the lost standards was a feat of diplomacy as much as of arms.

At the start of the second century Trajan crowned one of the greatest runs of imperial history anywhere with his conquest of Mesopotamia, pushing the legions all the way to Charax on the Persian Gulf, and the Parthians back to the Zagros mountains. This ability to invade and conquer Mesopotamia, and even sack the Persian royal capital at Ctesiphon, near ancient Babylon and later Baghdad, was demonstrated multiple times over the course of the empire. Ctesiphon was captured in 165 during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and his brother Lucius Verus, and then again in 197-198 by Septimius Severus, whose defeat of Parthia was so decisive that it helped cause the subsequent collapse of the Arsacid Parthians (readers should note this precedent). Although the resurgent Sassanian Persian dynasty defeated the Romans and captured Valerian in the 260s, by the 280s, Rome was back on the offensive, and the emperor Carus probably sacked Ctesiphon in 283, or came very close to doing so.

The greatest Roman/Byzantine war with Persian took place in the early 7th century, during the reigns of Phocas and Heraclius. The Persians under Khosrow II enjoyed enormous early success, capitalizing on civil war in Constantinople. By about 620, Persia had overrun Syria, Palestine and Egypt, launched major raids all the way across Anatolia, and had, by treaty, reduced Heraclius to vassaldom. However, in one of the most brilliant and extraordinary reversals in all Roman history, Heraclius personally trained and led a new army into the field against Persia, trusting the land walls of Constantinople to hold off a simultaneous invasion and siege from the Slavs and Avars in the West. Heraclius proceeded to outmarch, outmaneuver, and outfight every single Persian army he faced, culminating in a decisive victory at the Battle of Nineveh in 627. Heraclius then advanced south, sacked the Persian imperial palace at Dastigerd outside Ctesiphon and recovered the True Cross, which had been taken in the Persian conquest of Jerusalem.6 In the aftermath, the Sassanian dynasty collapsed into chaos, and proved easy pickings for the Muslims, who were about to burst out of the Arabian desert to the South. As with the Parthian dynasty, Sassanian military defeat led to dynastic collapse.

Even Empires are Subjects of Geography

Across six centuries, Rome’s wars with Persia showed some remarkable continuities. During times of relative peace or parity, the border between the two empires landed along the Northern Mesopotamian plain, running from Armenia and Southeastern Anatolia, down to the South and West along the Syrian frontier towards the Levant. But whenever one empire got the upper hand, military successes could cascade quickly in either direction. Periods of Persian dominance threatened Syria, the Levant, and much of Anatolia. Antioch, one of the leading cities of the Roman Empire, was sacked and plundered multiple times. Conversely, periods of Roman dominance saw much or even all of Mesopotamia fall, often very rapidly. Persia’s imperial capital at Ctesiphon was sacked at least four times, and threatened several times more. In both directions, control over upper Mesopotamia and Northern Syria served as a springboard, either West into the Levant (for Persia), or down towards Ctesiphon (for Rome).

But these cascading victories had their limits. Persia could never existentially threaten Rome’s hold over the Mediterranean basin, or even seriously pressure the Eastern capital at Constantinople, outside of 626 AD. And while Trajan, Septimius Severus, and Heraclius all scored decisive and stunning victories over Parthia/Persia, Rome never even attempted to cross the Zagros mountains and invade the Iranian plateau itself. Once past the border fortresses and the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, Mesopotamia itself was easy enough to invade, leading to multiple dramatic Roman victories and the collapse of Persia’s ability to project power. But the old core Persian territories inside Iran, and the latent civilizational infrastructure of Persian culture and state capacity, repeatedly enabled Persia to bounce back and reconstitute itself.

Even the most famous non-Roman antagonist of Persia proves the rule, as Alexander the Great’s victories against Persia were fought across this same geographic axis. After defeating Persian provincial forces at the Granicus River in northwest Asia Minor, Alexander faced Darius III twice, at Issus and Guagamela. Issus is located near the border of Asia Minor and Syria, and Guagamela is on the North Mesopotamian plain. Depending on which location you pick for Guagamela, Alexander’s greatest victory over Persia was located only a few dozen miles away from the Battle of Nineveh, where Heraclius would defeat the Sassanians nine-hundred years later. Alexander proceeded to cross the Zagros mountains and enter Iran proper, but only after Darius III had been deposed and killed by his own nobles. As with the Parthians and Sassanians, the Achaemenids suffered internal collapse after a decisive external defeat.

However, even Alexander the Great didn’t really destroy Persia, so much as take it under new management, famously dressing and acting like a Persian Emperor, to the displeasure of his Macedonian Companions. After Alexander’s death, the Diadochi successor kingdom of the Seleucids continued to rule what was essentially the previous Persian superstate, including both Iran and Mesopotamia, and often Syria. The Seleucids fought the Ptolemies along the same Syrian/Levantine corridor as the Romans and Parthians.

Once more with feeling. And very large smart-bombs.

Once a lot of ideology (and theology) is stripped away, aspects of the current geopolitical map of the Middle East bear an uncanny resemblance to this same historical pattern.

Over the last three decades, Iran built and expanded a network of clients and proxies across the same Mesopotamian/Syrian/Levantine corridor. This was effectively an imperial project, even if western observers often failed to read it as such. We are so taken with the idea of nation states as the fundamental unit of modern political sovereignty, that we forget that ancient empires frequently ruled through clients and proxies, and often used suzerainty to dominate areas which they didn’t actually administer on a day to day basis (recall King Herod’s relationship with the Romans and Pontius Pilate in the Gospels).

By late 2022 or early 2023, Iran looked to be in a very strong position across Mesopotamia and Syria. Iranian influence filled the vacuum in Iraq left by both the defeat of ISIS and the withdrawal of American forces. Iranian-backed Shia militias are a major power bloc in Iraq, and were bussed into Iran to help massacre protestors in January of this year, in keeping with the long tradition of empires using foreign muscle to crush civilian unrest. Further West, Bashar Al-Assad appeared to have effectively won the Syrian civil war, preserving his pro-Iranian Alawite regime. Iranian influence in Iraq and Syria enabled the shipment of resources and weapons across Mesopotamia and into the Levant, where Iran’s most powerful proxy, Hezbollah, controlled much of Southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah was a serious paramilitary organization, even fighting as a conventional military allied with Assad in Syria, against ISIS and the Sunnis rebels. At its height, Hezbollah boasted of having almost 100,000 personnel, and a rocket/missile arsenal of anywhere from 40,000 to 120,000 weapons. Above all else, Hezbollah was Iran’s trump card in the event of a war against Israel. Any direct Israeli action against Iran was always held hostage by the specter of tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets raining down on Northern Israel in conjunction with Iranian ballistic missile and drone strikes.

Rounding out the proxy empire were the capable Houthis, who had fought in the Yemeni civil war for almost a decade, repeatedly outlasting and embarrassing the Saudi military in its incursions into Yemen. Supplied by sea from Iran, the Houthis made life hazardous for shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and threatened Saudi attempts to export oil and gas via the Red Sea instead of the Persian Gulf. Through proxies and clients, Iran projected power all over the region, in a self-proclaimed “ring of fire” around Israel, but also arrayed against the Sunni Arab Gulf states.

In terms of the “why,” one could talk about the theology of radical Shia Twelver Islam, or about how taking the lead in the fight against Israel positioned Iran as the leader of the Islamic world in the Middle East. There is also the very important (and underappreciated by lay audiences in the West) longstanding rivalry between Gulf Arab states and Persia, both of which see themselves as the natural leaders of the Middle East; the Arabs as the font of Islam and home of Mohammed, and the Persians as heirs to the greatest and most ancient continuous civilization in the region. There may also simply be a coordinating principle at work, where Iran used existing animus towards Israel across the region as a conduit for rallying support around Tehran’s standard.

But whatever the reason, the same geographic logic as in the ancient world rears its head. The Mesopotamian/Syrian/Levantine crescent remains the hinge of the Middle East, and controlling it is the key to the region. As recently as early 2023, Iran controlled the corridor, while the US was absent or distracted, and Israel was beset with internal political factional strife. In March 2023, the Saudis even agreed to Chinese-brokered talks aimed at normalizing relations with Iran.

And then October 7th happened.

What has followed has been an extraordinary reversal at the tactical, operational, and strategic level. In just three years, Iran has seen decades of work reversed or blown up. At the popular level the scale of this reversal remains underappreciated, as it has been overshadowed by the more easily seen and viscerally-felt moral salience of the Israel/Palestine issue. Most Americans still can’t easily distinguish between Hamas and Hezbollah, or identify which is more powerful.7

Today, Hezbollah is a shell of its former self, still reeling from Israel’s stunning pager operation and subsequent air campaign which took out the group’s senior leadership several times over. The majority of Hezbollah’s vaunted rocket arsenal is gone, which is one of the single most important things making Israel’s current operations against Iran possible.

At the end of 2024, the Syrian civil war suddenly exploded back into relevance and then ended with astonishing speed, as Sunni Arab rebels suddenly routed Assad’s forces.8 With Russia bogged down in Ukraine and unable to offer any assistance, Assad’s government fell quickly, and a new Sunni Arab group, some of whose leaders are literally former Al Qaeda members, came to power. In the span of less than two years, Iran’s hold on the Levantine corridor was shattered. Today, the only major component of Iran’s proxy empire still intact is the Houthis in Yemen, and they have mostly sat out the current conflict.

With Hamas and Hezbollah broken or heavily degraded, and Syria turned over, Israel finally attacked Iran directly last Summer, in the so-called Twelve Day War, which was capped off with air strikes from the US, using B-2 Spirit bombers dropping enormous 30,000lb MOPs (Massive Ordinance Penetrators) on Iran’s most important nuclear sites.

This past winter, the combination of inflation, economic sanctions, a water crisis, and the lingering humiliation of suffering so many reversals over the last several years, finally erupted into another round of protests against the Iranian Regime. The Islamic Republic has endured outbreaks of these protests every few years for decades now, but these latest were by far the most serious yet. More than anything else, the protests probably spurred the US and Israel to launch the current war, on the assumption that the Iranian government was uniquely vulnerable, and might finally be tottering on the brink. I also suspect a strong personal motive on the part of President Trump, who very publicly urged the Iranians to continue their protests, and even promised them that help was on the way, just before the regime massacred as many as 30,000 civilians.

Air and Ballistic Missile Raids

The current war with Iran is the largest American military operation since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, finally making real a conflict which had loomed over the Middle East for decades. Attacking Khamenei in the opening strikes seemed to signal that this was an existential war against the Iranian regime itself. Iranian retaliatory strikes in response have probably done more damage to American bases in the region than fully admitted yet, but by any measure they have been underwhelming against Israeli and Gulf state civilian targets compared to pre-war fears. The volume of Iranian strikes quickly decreased as American and Israeli surveillance and air assets suppressed and degraded Iranian missile launchers. Western militaries have come a long way from the mostly-ineffective Scud-hunting missions of 1991. Iran’s one main success and point of leverage has been shutting down the strait of Hormuz, and that may prove self-defeating in the long run if global oil flows rebalance elsewhere. The Saudis and Gulf States were unenthusiastic about the war initially, but after weeks of missile and drone raids in their countries, are unlikely to warm to Tehran, especially when the regime has so clearly been weakened.

In return, American and Israeli airpower have systematically targeted the Iranian regime at almost every level, from the Grand Ayatollah down to individual IRGC and Basij street checkpoints in Tehran. Striking thousands upon thousands of targets, American and Israeli air strikes have hammered Iran’s missile and nuclear program, air force, navy, and defense industrial base. Before last Summer, Iran had what was claimed to be one of the better air defense networks in the world, with a large number of fairly modern Russian-made S-300 batteries in a layered and integrated air defense network. There can be no doubt now that Western air forces have enormously successful capabilities to use against almost any Integrated Air Defense System in the world. Capabilities that for years were argued about and sometimes doubted as expensive or unproven, including the worth of fifth generation fighters and ballistic missile defense, have been decisively shown to be as effective as advertised. I may write more about this in a separate post, and exercise less restraint in discussing some of the nerdier aspects of this war.

And yet for all this tactical brilliance (no other air force on earth can conduct a strike campaign remotely close to this), Iran’s regime is still, on paper, intact. The IRGC survives, the civilian populace remains cowed, and re-opening Hormuz is not yet a given. This has led some commentators to describe Iran as, in some sense, “winning,” simply because it has not collapsed, and may retain some leverage over Hormuz. At the end of the day, as it’s often noted, air raids alone rarely win a war.

It could be that the regime will recover and remain in power for decades to come. However, judging the outcome right now, in April of 2026 also seems manifestly premature, in terms of picking “winners and losers.”9 We need time to absorb the fallout, and observe the second and third-order consequences of the last few years.

If you link the current conflict to everything that has happened since October 7th, then it seems impossible to deny that the Islamic Republic has suffered a massive defeat. Iran spent decades and billions of dollars building its “ring of fire” in the Middle East, which was intended to both threaten Israel, and protect Iran itself. Tehran sacrificed its international legitimacy, became a pariah state, and implicitly asked its populace to suffer severe economic hardship and isolation, all for the sake of a now-shattered imperial project. Its enemies have demonstrated the ability to violate Iranian territorial integrity virtually at will, and have decapitated the head of the Iranian state itself. A government that cannot protect its borders or its head of state is one that cannot sustain even basic claims of sovereign legitimacy. The best the Islamic Republic can probably hope for is that it retains enough internal loyalty and patronage over its security forces that it can rule by terror indefinitely, which looks more like North Korea or Cuba than a respected and feared regional hegemon.

What could easily happen, although I couldn’t even begin to hazard a prediction as to when, is that the Iranian regime eventually falls apart from within, as a downstream project of imperial defeat. This could happen after years of economic misery, factional infighting amongst IRGC leadership once the pressure of outside threat fades, or as different patronage networks within Iran drift apart absent coordinating leadership from the supreme religious council. In history books, events which are often linked together casually within a single sentence can take years to unfold in practice. The Parthians and Sassanians didn’t collapse instantly either.

Conclusion

There are plenty of claims floating around that the new Supreme leader, Motjaba Khamenei, is a puppet figure who might even be incapacitated. If so, it’s hard not to be reminded of the story Herodotus tells about the Persian Emperor Cambyses II (son of Cyrus the Great), who died and was replaced by a cadre of advisors who pretended that Cambyses’ brother was alive and ruling. The conspiracy was finally penetrated by a team of noblemen which included Darius the Great, who infiltrated the palace and fought with and killed the usurping Magi.

We return here to imperial Persian history. Over and over again, when Persia falls, it suffers internal collapse, rather than external conquest. Rome demonstrated a textbook playbook for rolling back Persian imperial power by routing the Persian military, and plundering Mesopotamia, but even Rome never directly invaded Iran proper. Instead, it might be better to think of Rome as repeatedly conducting large scale raids which shattered Persian imperial power in Mesopotamia. Both in the ancient world and today, the Israel-Levant-Syria-Mesopotamia axis is the hinge upon which Persian imperial fortunes rise and fall.

Here, the parallels between Rome and the American/Israeli strategy resolve into a coherent picture. Rome didn’t conquer the Parthians or the Sassanians, but it did humiliate and delegitimize them. Even Alexander didn’t kill or capture Darius III; that was left to Darius’ own noblemen after he so clearly lost all legitimacy. For all the power of American and Israeli military might, it’s worth dwelling on the verb we use for air and missile campaigns. You don’t invade Persia. You raid it.

Although exact details will of course remain secret, it is known that the strike which assassinated Ayatollah Khamenei on February 28th, at the outset of the war, was carried out by Israeli planes (probably F-15Is), using Sparrow-series air-launched ballistic missiles. The most likely mission profile would have seen the strike aircraft take off from Israel, cross into Iraq, and then launch their missiles at Tehran from standoff range. Debris from the booster rockets used in the missiles was reportedly found in Western Iraq. Wherever the missiles were launched from, they may well have passed within a few hundred miles of Nineveh and Guagamela.

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The traditional, “dawn of civilization” narrative that most people still refer to, and which you used to find in just about every school textbook over the last century, described civilization only beginning some time after the advent of sedentary farming. The old narrative was simple, easy to understand, and created an appealing notion that modern states and civilization are the natural result of this process of development from cavemen hunter-gatherers, to civilized farmers and city-dwellers. The start of this process traditionally dates to around 10,000 BC.

Modern archaeology and science, however, have complicated this narrative quite a bit, resulting in one of those annoying cases of the professional experts telling you, “well, it’s complicated…” and proceeding to offer a series of qualifications, nuances, and exceptions to the old story, which nevertheless don’t completely overturn it. They definitely muddy up the narrative however. Often in history, science, politics, or any complex social phenomenon, there’s a difficult balance to be struck between simple clear overarching narratives with lots of explanatory power, and the frustrating exceptions and complications to those rules. Once again, think of your own life, and how difficult it would be to boil your life-experience down to just two or three main themes, even if those themes really did explain a lot about you.

So, on one level, yes, it’s true that humans eventually figured out widespread permanent farming, and that the first major civilizations grew up in the areas where that farming was most successful. However, that process took a very long time, occurred in different ways in many different places, and wasn’t a simple clear story of farming leading to kings and cities with walls and armies all at once. In fact, in some places, settling in one place may have happened first, and thereby created the need for farming, which is the exact opposite of the old story.

Hopefully, we’ve already made it clear that barter, trade, and specialization were already major features of human society long before the Neolithic Revolution. This point is worth re-emphasizing, because one of the persistent myths of the old “everyone knows” narrative was that trade and commerce were features of settled civilization. As a result, champions of civilization used to portray complex trade and economics as “newer” triumphs of civilized man, while romantics and reactionaries (such as Rousseau) who didn’t like civilization saw complex trade and economics as aberrations and deviations from nature. But instead, we should very much view trade and commerce as fundamental features of the human condition, which predate “civilization.” Humans have always bartered with each other, and relied upon each other. There is probably no such thing as a truly self-sufficient human who could really live all on their own without any society. After all, humans are social creatures (remember the necessity of God speaking in Genesis). Sedentary living, agriculture, and civilization did have a massive impact upon specialization, however. While many hunter-gatherers must have specialized in different types of hunting, foraging, or crafting, they were still generalists in many ways, and constantly had to move about in search of food or resources. The ability to stay in one place opened up and improved many skill sets. It’s hard to be a nomadic blacksmith, potter, or carpenter.

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Domestication

The domestication of plants and animals probably happened across multiple times and places. Humans may have left out food for certain game animals, and then gradually realized it was possible to keep and protect wild goats, sheep, and aurochs (cows) rather than kill them right away. Dogs may have skulked around campfires hoping for scraps, gradually learning to trust and be trusted by humans. Humans certainly would have learned to exploit wild plants that grew in certain areas, returning to favorite spots each season. Perhaps they noticed that seeds dropped along trails, or scattered near campsites or from animal droppings would eventually sprout. Probably for thousands of years many humans spent part of the year hunting, and returned to seasonal foraging sites which eventually turned into something like primitive farms. There is evidence of cultivated edible grasses as far back as 20,000 BC near modern day Israel and Palestine, and what seem to be semi-permanent granaries for storing cereals in the same region, even before 10,000 BC.

It took many many generations to produce the domesticated species we’re all familiar with today, which separate modern farm animals from their wild ancestors. Likewise, it took thousands of years of selective cultivation to produce the domesticated grains, fruits, and vegetables we take for granted today. Wild ancestral strains of wheat and maize were much smaller and produced much less edible grain per stalk, and ancient apples would have looked almost tiny in comparison to what you might see in the grocery store today. Many ancient carrots weren’t orange, and the Roman Empire is older than broccoli, which was selectively bred by early medieval farmers from wild cabbages.

Even once humans started seriously cultivating plants in one location, permanent sedentary agriculture still wasn’t necessarily possible. Planting the same crop year after year will quickly leach the soil of important nutrients (especially nitrogen) meaning that crop yields would rapidly fall off after a few harvests. Eventually, farmers figured out that rotating their crops between fields and letting animal manure fertilize the ground would help rejuvenate the soil, but before this, many humans practiced “slash and burn” agriculture, burning land clear and letting ashes act as fertilizer, and then moving on to another patch of land after a year or two, and starting all over again.

Gobekli Tepe

On an elevated plateau in the foothills of the Taurus mountains In South-Eastern Turkey, archaeologists are slowly excavating one of the most important sites in early human history. Gobekli Tepe is a large artificial mound, with an elaborate complex of buildings, statues, and monuments. The twenty-two acre complex contains double-walled enclosures, each with large T-shaped stone pillars and columns, the largest of which are eighteen feet tall. Four enclosures have been uncovered, but there are up to twenty compounds altogether, with as many as two-hundred structures and pillars. Gobekli Tepe appears to have been active from 9,600-8,200 BC, which means we have solid evidence of man-made structures that are almost twelve-thousand years old.

The carved pillars contain images of animals, and a few humans. Lions, gazelles, foxes, and serpents are common, but vultures feature prominently. Human remains and a few graves have been found, but not so many as to suggest that the entire complex was chiefly used for burials. Much of the complex has yet to be excavated, so our understanding of Gobekli Tepe will probably continue to change.

Gobekli Tepe almost certainly had some sort of religious purpose, and perhaps housed a priestly-class of humans who lived there year-round. The complex has underground cisterns for collecting rainwater, and evidence of cereal processing (i.e., grinding grain to make bread and porridges). But also, lots and lots of animal bones, mostly local wild gazelle. It seems that wild gazelle herds tended to congregate around Gobekli Tepe during seasonal migrations.

With all this in mind, we can reconstruct a plausible thought-experiment. What follows isn’t known for sure, but it’s a helpful way to think about how Gobekli Tepe might have emerged.

Imagine tribes of hunter-gatherers following the annual gazelle migrations. Each year, tribes tended to run into each other at the best hunting grounds. Usually-separate tribes might have established connections and friendships, married off daughters and sons, and traded and bartered with each other. Gradually, as these meetings became annual traditions to look forward to and prepare for, they took on a life of their own. Eventually, tribes built dedicated altars and structures to celebrate these annual gatherings, which priests or shamans stayed behind to tend year-round, and perhaps even skilled craftsmen.

One of the most interesting theories about Gobekli Tepe, is that the domestication of wild plants and beginning of farming in the area might have been a consequence of sedentary living, rather than the other way round. The old survey-textbook narrative for the Neolithic Revolution that most people are familiar with, presented the story as, “hunter-gatherers invented civilized farming, and so could finally settle down and live in one place.” But it may be the case that in many areas where farming developed, something first encouraged humans to stay in one place for periods of time, which then incentivized new ways of finding food. In addition to the pressure to find food, plain boredom may have played a role in this process. Imagine living as a priest at Gobekli Tepe with little to do much of the year in between the gazelle-migrations, and as a result experimenting with planting wild grasses to see which ones could produce the most grain.

Catalhoyuk

About a thousand years after Gobekli Tepe, further to the West in Southern Turkey, another settlement took shape, known as Catalhoyuk. Catalhoyuk was active from about 7,400 to 5,200 BC, and consists of a complex of houses, covering about 30 acres. Catalhoyuk was not very large by our standards, and might have only had between one and two-thousand inhabitants.

Catalhoyuk looks a bit like an early city at first glance, until you realize that there are no streets. Instead, buildings shared walls with each other, and the outer “walls” of the city are just the walls of houses all joined together, with no alleys or ground-level entrances. The houses also have no doors, but instead square holes in the roofs, accessed via ladders. There were probably ladders connecting housetops, which people used to move from house to house instead of streets.

Each house was fairly small (about the size of a school classroom), with one or two windows (and the “door”) letting in light from above, and smoke from the fireplace, out. The interiors were clean, with plastered walls, and storage for domesticated grains. Evocative painted murals on the walls showed animals such as aurochs (wild cows), often in hunting scenes.

Unlike in Gobekli Tebe, Catalhoyuk suggests whole families living together, and permanent agriculture, along with some domestication of animals in addition to hunting. One interesting twist about Catalhoyuk, however, is that there are no palaces or large temples; nothing suggesting a ruling hierarchy or military. It’s possible to imagine Catalhoyuk growing up over time, with houses being added next to each other in an ad hoc fashion, without a larger political class ruling and directing affairs.

Other settlements from the areas around Turkey, Syria, and Palestine from this period and later, show similar styles of construction, including the practice of using the exterior walls of houses as boundary walls for a city. In the Biblical story of Jericho, Hebrew spies searching out the city escape by being lowered out through the window of the prostitute Rahab’s house, which were part of the walls of the city. Archaeology has confirmed that Jericho did in fact exist, and was a very old city, dating back to as early as 9,000 BC.

Coming in two weeks: villages and specialization. Thank you for reading, and please consider sharing.

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Despite the fact that early humans can seem primitive and strange to us, we still have much in common with them. On a genetic level, our bodies, brains, and instincts are still programmed to deal with life as a hunter-gatherer; our modern civilized life of towns and cities is very much not natural to us. From an evolutionary perspective, fifty-thousand years is not very long. There’s a lot you can understand about yourself if you think of your caveman brain as still operating underneath your modern civilized consciousness.

For example, the size of our social circles remains surprisingly similar; we have a small number of very close friends and family who we feel intense loyalty and care for, and a wider circle of more casual friends and acquaintances. Anthropologists have noticed a correlation between brain size and the size of social groupings in humans and primates; larger brains correspond to larger tribes. This correlation is known as “Dunbar’s number,” and for humans, it seems to be about one-hundred and fifty or so individuals that you can reliably count as a friend in “your tribe.” This grouping just so happens to roughly fit the size of many military units, including Roman maniples and WWII infantry companies, and the size of small businesses. Once you grow beyond a hundred to a hundred-fifty employees, you start needing a more regimented bureaucracy to give orders and hold people accountable.

It’s easy to feel intense care and loyalty to someone very close to you, as if they were still part of your hunter-gatherer group. Anthropologically, this is someone you’d be willing to risk your life for in a crisis, because you know that they’d do the same for you. A person with a pure utilitarian outlook might say that, if they were being chased by a bear, the only thing that matters is outrunning the person next to them. But members of a family group will turn and face the bear together, knowing that their overall survival is better with mutual self-sacrifice; you might get away from the bear this time, but next time, you’ll be alone and helpless. Similarly, hunter-gatherers will share food and resources freely within the group; even a skilled hunter won’t always bring back a fresh kill, and will sometimes have to depend on the generosity of others.

This close feeling of intimate friendship and security, however, does not extend outside of your group, which is why we can sometimes feel great pity and anguish for those close to us, but indifference or even callous disregard for the sufferings of “outsiders”. This loyalty for the in-group and disregard for the out-group is probably how nations and governments have historically justified incredible violence and cruelty towards outsiders who “don’t count.” Such tribal loyalties probably also help explain the devotion of sports fans and political partisans towards their own “team,” and why we will so easily excuse or ignore the faults of those close to us, while focusing on the perceived failings of outsiders. The scandals of “our” politicians are rarely as serious as those of our opponents.

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The intense loyalty and devotion of a hunter-gatherer group isn’t purely a matter of biological kinship however. While we naturally trust our parents and siblings, we can easily come to regard our friends and closest associates as essentially family. Religious adherents sometimes address fellow members as brothers and sisters, male friends constantly refer to each other as sworn brothers, and college students form fraternities and sororities. You can probably remember movies where close friends swear blood-oaths, or rag-tag bands of misfits learn to put aside their differences, and rely on each other in defeating a common opponent. The ability to forge close relationships and make new family groups almost certainly reflects a history where hunter-gatherer groups sometimes joined together, split apart into colonies, and where outsiders earned the trust of a group enough to be initiated into “the family.”

Some behavioral tropes between male and female humans appear to be biological, and not just learned as part of culture. Generally speaking, men have much more upper-body strength than women, and are more interested in physically-demanding and risky activities. Young men naturally form groups of friends (or even gangs) and sort themselves into hierarchies. They will also attempt to test and demonstrate their strength and courage with feats of (perhaps foolish) daring. In this, their caveman brains are still imagining that killing a woolly mammoth might earn them a place in the group, and the approval of the tribal chieftain.

Women, on the other hand, are generally more adept at understanding nuanced social interactions. Even as infants, young boys are better at tracking movement, while girls are better at reading facial features and interpreting gestures. Women are generally more skilled at reading the social dynamics of a group and understanding who is friends with who, and who isn’t (which could be a life-or-death skill for a pre-modern mother in an unstable social grouping). This is not to say at all that women can’t hunt or fight if necessary. A mother will fight with extreme desperation to protect her children, and some of the most ruthless characters in Shakespeare’s plays are women. In times of necessity, prehistoric men and women must have hunted or gathered together as needed, while also being generally better at their respective roles most of the time.

Food cravings are another caveman legacy. We desire sweet and fatty foods because they were originally rare, but also full of energy (sugars especially would be energy-rich delicacies). One theory about our eyesight, which is very good at seeing colors, is that it adapted in order to recognize ripe from unripe or rotten fruits. Eating large meals is a good idea when you don’t know if you’ll be able to kill another deer in the next week. As a result, our bodies are still wired for a world of scarce nutrition, and require a great deal of training and discipline to handle a modern world of abundant calories artificially flavored with scientific precision to appeal to our taste buds.

Physical health also needs discipline and effort in order to be maintained in the modern world. Hunter-gatherers, as well as pre-modern farmers, were constantly active, with a level of physical fitness that often rivals professional athletes today. Life indoors, sitting all day in front of a desk or on the couch after dinner, has an unprecedented amount of leisure time. We are a bit like astronauts whose muscles atrophy in space, in that we need to constantly work to maintain that which our ancestors had by necessity.

On the other hand, we also have modern medicine, which can address an enormous number of ailments that killed or disabled a huge percentage of our ancestors. Pre-modern skeletons of all types and time periods show a huge variety of chronic health problems and traumatic injuries. Malnourishment, intestinal parasites, joint pain, broken bones or torn ligaments, are all common health problems that pre-modern individuals mostly had to suffer through. An old farmer with arthritis, a bad back, and few family members for assistance might not have had any choice but ever-increasing pain, or hunger.

Danger and stress are another caveman-brain feature not optimized for the modern world (think of our instinctive and irrational fears of darkness, or murky still waters hiding aquatic terrors). A hunter-gatherer would have experienced many life-or-death encounters with wild animals, natural hazards, or other humans, but most of these experiences were likely fleeting and abrupt. As a result, our bodies and minds are adapted for short bursts of very high-intensity stress and effort, but followed by rest in the safety and comfort of a fire surrounded by the group. Today, it can be hard to convince the instinctual side of ourselves that we really are extraordinarily safe most of the time. We can become paranoid or overly worried about trivialities, because we are all descended from paranoid hunter-gatherers who thought that a rustle in the long grass might be a saber-tooth cat (after all, the non-paranoid humans were eventually eaten).

But while the modern world is unprecedentedly safe compared to most of human history, it can be very stressful. School, jobs, and unpleasant social relationships can create lingering and slow-burning stress, which can eventually wear us down without periodic rest and rejuvenation, because our physiologies are wired for short periods extreme effort, and not long-term chronic tension. During WWI and WWII, even the very best and toughest soldiers started suffering from combat fatigue after several months of continuous fighting on the front line. A demanding boss or difficult academic class isn’t actually a saber-tooth cat rustling in the grass, but our caveman brain doesn’t always know that. Just as we need self-control over food, and physical discipline and moral self-control, we must work to build mental toughness and resilience.

This seems to be a theme for humans. We are still very much creatures of nature, but now live in a world of our own making that is no longer very “natural.” Romantics today sometimes express nostalgia for the world that came before the Industrial Revolution, as though humans only recently began remaking their environment. But humans have been changing our environment and learning to adapt and live with the consequences for far longer than the past few hundred years. As we shall see, the greatest example of this may have been the invention of farming itself.

Coming in two weeks; the Neolithic Revolution.

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Hunter-Gatherer Tribes

Early humans began (anatomically) around 300,000 BC, and developed behavioral modernity sometime after that. By at least 40,000 BC they were making cave paintings, and they were ritually burning their dead long before that. Now to look at how they lived (as best as we can tell).

Early humans lived in very small Hunter-Gatherer societies, often with only a few dozen members at most. As the name suggests, these humans split their time between hunting animals and gathering plants, nuts, roots, and berries. Notice that the very name of the society refers to food collection, which probably took up the vast majority of their time. Hunter-gatherers were also closely-knit and bonded together. Even members not related by blood treated each other as family, and groups treated outsiders warily.

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These groups were nomadic, not staying in one place, but traveling to seasonal hunting and foraging grounds. Constantly moving and changing environments, early humans put their large brains and complex social skills to work at many different types of hunting, fishing, and gathering. In some areas they even hunted huge game animals to extinction, such as woolly mammoths and giant ground sloths, and they sometimes had to fight off saber-toothed cats and ten-foot tall terror birds (basically, a dinosaur that hadn’t quite finished turning into an ostrich). Humans also learned to adapt and survive in every climate on earth.

Early human population density was very low. Modern cities can pack thousands of people into a single square mile, but even twenty or thirty hunter-gatherers required many square miles of land to support game animals and foraging, and too many humans in one area would soon eat up all the available food. As a result, there was pressure on tribes to spread out, except when important hunting grounds or dwindling animal numbers might bring them together.

Since we know so little about early humans, and often have to rely on theory and educated guesses to make sense of sparse archeology, modern scholars have shifted their opinions over time on how early humans lived. There’s a fairly well-known debate in anthropology about whether or not early hunter-gatherers were idyllic and peaceful, reflecting a sort of noble-savage archetype that was ruined by civilization and organized warfare. According to this theory, early humans had plentiful food and lots of rest, and could avoid conflict simply by spreading out.

This theory is probably wrong, if the current evidence of violence death in the archeological record is anything to go by. Across the world, hunter-gatherer burials and skeletons show (by modern standards) very high rates of interpersonal violence, including punctured skulls, defensive wounds on hands and limbs, and evidence of old wounds that healed. It’s possible that “battles” between tribes were rarer than we might suppose, simply because two evenly matched tribes would probably avoid taking heavy casualties. Modern hunter-gatherer tribes sometimes fight, and many of their conflicts are surprisingly non-violent, with lots of shouting, chest-beating, and demonstration of strength and bravery, in an attempt to intimidate the other tribe into leaving (think of male animals during mating season in a nature documentary, or even brawls between the fans of rival sports teams). Anthropologists have witnessed entire “battles” with two tribes skirmishing by throwing rocks and spears at each other from a distance, with hardly any casualties. Eventually, one side is cowed into backing down and giving up the territory.

But there is another, much more brutal form of conflict, when one tribe seeks to exterminate a rival by raiding their camp. These raids, often occurring early in the morning while the other tribe is still asleep, can be gruesome affairs in which men and small children are massacred, and women are captured and forcibly married into the victorious tribe. In another parallel between anthropology and religious myth, the first murder in Genesis was an ambush.

So early hunter-gatherers were probably no strangers to conflict. And yet, clearly, not all of their interactions with each other were violent. In fact, it now seems certain that early humans cooperated with each other far more than is commonly appreciated in our stereotypes of crude cavemen. In fact, the old peaceful idyllic noble-savage stereotype is probably doubly wrong. Early humans were at the same time, both more violent and more cooperative with each other.

If nothing else, tribes must have had contact with each other in order to arrange marriages outside of the group, thereby avoiding excessive inbreeding. Many marriages may have come from “bride-napping,” but tribes that figured out the benefits of marriage alliances would have had a huge advantage over more rapacious rivals.

Also, we now have very good archeological evidence that humans, from a very early period, almost certainly exchanged goods across very great distances. Objects have been found hundreds of miles away from their point of origin (coastal seashells in Australia found far inland, metal or stone tools and plants far from where they were mined or harvested), and show specific signs of being worked by certain groups of humans and not others (tools, pottery, and other artifacts can often be traced to specific cultures or tribes based on how they were made).

The idea of hunter-gatherers trading with each other cuts against our usual image of cavemen as self-sufficient, and we usually associate concepts such as merchants and markets only coming along with the advent of cities. But once you think about it, it’s not hard to imagine one tribe living near water, and becoming skilled at making fish-hooks, which could be traded with another tribe that lived up in the mountains, and had access to better stone or metal tools. Run down the list of niche animals, plants, and tools that might only come from certain areas, or could be made better by one tribe spending extra time on that specific item, and it’s not hard to see how early humans had much to gain from trading with one another, and from a very early period. It’s an important change to some of our older theories of sociology to realize that trade and barter were probably invented before civilization, and not after it.

Otzi the Iceman

In 1991, hikers in the Austrian Alps found some exposed bones sticking out of the ice. Summoning the authorities, they assumed that the body belonged to an unfortunate mountain climber who had died in a fall, but in reality the hikers had stumbled upon one of the oldest and most complete remains of a pre-modern hunter-gatherer. The deceased caveman was nicknamed “Otzi” after the regions in the Alps where he was found. Otzi’s remains are a remarkable archeological discovery, and shed a tremendous amount of light upon the pre-modern past. Because Otzi was frozen almost immediately after he died his skin, internal organs, hair, clothes, and tools were all astonishingly well preserved.

Otzi lived between 3300 and 3200 BC, in the mountains along the modern-day border between Italy and Austria. Although he lived thousands of years after the start of the Neolithic Revolution introduced farming, and long after the Near East had started producing large scale cities and kingdoms, Otzi lived in a pastoral society that was probably very similar to that of hunter-gatherers. While it’s hard to shake off the notion that such humans must have been primitive (and we just called him a “caveman” a moment ago), Otzi was very well equipped to handle his harsh life.

Otzi was frozen wearing multiple layers of well-made clothes, including animal-skin leggings and a coat, along with a thick overcoat made of woven grass that would have kept him warm even in winter. He had a bearskin cap, and soft, wide shoes (lined with grass that functioned like socks) that could help walk on snow. Otzi had pouches containing meat and herbal remedies from several different valleys in the region. He also had a wide array of tools, including a knife, flint, scraper, drill, arrow-quiver, and an unfinished bow along with a number of arrows (some finished). His most valuable possession, however, was almost certainly his copper axe, which featured a small copper blade carefully bound into an L-shaped wooden handle.

Otzi’s clothes and equipment were generally well made; so well made, in fact, that it’s highly unlikely that Otzi could have made, found, hunted, or harvested everything himself. Instead, it’s almost certain that Otzi’s world had what we would think of as professional craftsmen who must have made and traded among each other. Otzi’s shoes were so cleverly designed, in fact, that a Czech outdoor clothes-wear company supposedly expressed interest in patenting and copying a modern version. The food, herbs, and medicine Otzi had also all came from different valleys in the region (DNA and pollen testing can tell scientists which subspecies of goat produced the leather, and where a certain plant was grown), and it’s therefore likely that Otzi must have traded and bartered among other shepherds frequently. But once again, Otzi’s axe is most remarkable, as the copper used to make the blade came from over seven hundred miles away in Italy, indicating the presence of long-distance trade networks.

Otzi’s life was not easy, however. Thanks to the Alpine ice, much of Otzi’s skin was preserved, which revealed a large number of tattoos which seem to correspond with acupuncture pressure points, and possibly were used to alleviate pain. His lungs had soot in them from spending many hours around a campfire, possibly smelting copper (there were traces of copper and arsenic particles in his hair). Many of the herbs and fungi found on Otzi had medicinal properties, especially as painkillers. Otzi’s teeth had cavities from eating lots of poor-quality grain, and he suffered from intestinal parasites. He was 45 years old, 5 ft 3 inches, and weighed only 110 pounds at the time of his death, which was violent. Otzi had an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder, and other small cuts and contusions on his hands and arms, suggesting a fight. His knife and arrows also had blood from other individuals, suggesting that he had given as good as he got.

Otzi didn’t live as far back as the pre-modern hunter-gatherers we’ve been focusing on so far, but his life was probably not that dissimilar from many of them. Adding all this information up, we have a picture of a pastoralist who may have guarded herds of goats or sheep at high altitude, and spent lots of time hiking up and down high elevations. But Otzi clearly did not have to be self-sufficient for all his needs and gear; he was almost certainly part of a complex and interdependent society. But also, as many other pre-modern skeletal remains suggest, a violent one too.

Thanks for reading, and look for the next installment in two weeks. One more piece to go before we get to the advent of farming.

From a zoological (animal) perspective, humans are strange creatures. We are weaker than many animals our size, don’t run very fast, and don’t have teeth or claws useful for self-defense or hunting. We also lack fur to keep us warm; even sixty degrees Fahrenheit is a problem for humans with no clothes on after several hours, and prolonged sun exposure to bare skin also causes problems (notice how people in desert climates cover themselves entirely).

Humans are also pretty helpless at birth. Many large mammals can walk or even run within an hour of being born, and animals which can take years to reach maturity often look after themselves by the time they’re a few months or years old. But human infants are completely helpless at birth, and need almost constant twenty-four-hour adult supervision until at least two-years old. Toddlers are incredibly curious, and have no idea how many things in the world can easily kill them. Even small children have trouble taking care of themselves until at least age seven (this is the age at which children have been known to survive on the street, and this is also the age at which the medieval christian church thought children reached, “the age of reason”). Humans don’t begin to reach physical maturity until their teenage years, and full mental maturity until later (up to twenty-five or so for males).

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In short, a human can’t run fast enough to catch a rabbit, isn’t strong enough to bring down a large game animal, can’t defend itself against a predator, can’t survive for long below fifty degrees or without shade, and needs years of extremely-intensive parenting and protection. Physically, we are rather pathetic animals. And yet we have taken over the earth.

Actually, the answer starts with the reason why we’re so helpless at birth. Humans have very large brains, which take a long time to develop. As a result, humans are born very premature compared to other large animals (elephants have the longest mammalian gestation, which can last for over twenty-months), otherwise our heads wouldn’t fit through a mother’s birth canal. Recall that in Genesis, another consequence of the Fall and the acquisition of knowledge is painful and difficult childbirth for women. That extra brain capacity is connected to everything else that makes us remarkable, unlocking speech, memory, art, abstract thought, and the ability to shape and mold the world around us.

We’re helpless at birth and for many years after, so we benefit from a social unit, and especially pair-bonding between parents. A mother with a small child isn’t completely helpless, but she and her child will do much better with a father around to help gather food, make tools, and provide protection. A larger family grouping can look after every individual in the tribe, and all of the complex relationships needed for this level of social coordination are made vastly more powerful by the ability to talk, think, and create together. With speech, humans can borrow knowledge and ideas from one another, make complex plans, and solve social problems without brute force and violence (or, alternatively, with even more lethal violence). Memory, stories, and songs pass knowledge and hard-won lessons down to other groups and the next generation, and abstract thought lets us learn from all humans that have ever lived; turning the entire species into an enormous social organism. You can find hints of this with other animals (many primates use tools, and killer whale pods have social hunting strategies), but nothing approaching the scale and complexity of homo sapiens (the Latin sapiens refers to knowledge and wisdom).

Large brains and social groupings pair well with some of our other adaptations. We don’t have claws, but our fingers are good for grasping and tool-making, and our shoulders are adapted for throwing motions. We can’t run fast, but standing on two legs helps us stand up higher to see better. Also, while our gait isn’t fast, it’s extremely efficient. Humans can walk and jog for incredibly long stretches, enabling us to constantly move from one hunting or foraging area to another. Some hunters in Africa are still known to acquire game by startling a gazelle, and jogging after it for hours on end until it drops from exhaustion. You can imagine how having a social group of hunters and domesticated dogs makes this much easier.

The need to travel great distances probably also explains why we lost most of our hair (except for on our vitally important heads). Humans sweat and shed excess heat easily, making it easy to jog or walk for an entire day at a time. The lack of hair probably wasn’t a problem on the warm African Savannah tens of thousands of years ago. But as humans moved into new and colder environments, those large brains again helped lead to new adaptations, including clothes and physical shelter.

In Greek mythology, Plato tells a story about the gods tasking Epimetheus and Prometheus with creating animals and humans, only for Epimetheus to give all the useful attributes to other animals, and leaving little left over for humans. You can find similar myths from all over the world (Asia, Africa, North and Central America) which emphasize these same themes of human frailty compared to animals.

In various versions of the Greek myth, Prometheus realizes how helpless humans are compared to animals, and so he steals fire from the gods. Zeus is initially angry at the theft, and punishes Prometheus by chaining him to rock and having an Eagle eat his liver every day. But as humans gaze at the fire and watch sparks fly upward, their minds and souls become aware of the heavens and the gods, and they make the first sacrificial offerings and prayers to Zeus. Fire awakens something in humans.

Fire and Painting

In Kipling’s The Jungle Book, fire is one of the special and terrifying attributes that man has access to and which separates him from animals. Perhaps early humans witnessed lightning strikes and wildfires, and eventually learned to keep wood burning. With fire, humans had warmth, protection, and the means to cook, which was an extremely important asset for us. Roasting meat kills parasites and softens tough tissues and gristle, significantly easing digestion and giving us more nutrition (one downside of having big brains is needing all the extra energy to power them). There’s probably a reason we still enjoy the smell of smoked or roasted food so much.

Fire had important social consequences as well. For early humans, fire could represent home and safety, and a gathering place for the whole tribe. Sitting around a fire, waiting for meat to cook, humans probably learned more complex speech, and maybe even how to tell stories, leading to art and abstract thought. Imagine generations of humans trying to explain how they caught an animal or avoided a predator, first with crude gestures and grunts, and gradually unlocking lessons, stories, myths, and legends. Notice today how much we still enjoy the rituals of sitting around a campfire telling stories and singing, or putting fireplaces in our homes. We also bond around the sharing of food, from families sitting down to dinner every night, to thanksgiving feasts, religious rituals at church, and friend groups at school marking out status and identity by sitting together for lunch. You’ll probably find that many of the best conversations you’ll have in life take place in the kitchen, which is often the most important room in the house.

Fire probably helped humans develop more tools as well, in addition to simple stone hand-axes and wooden spears. When baked, soft clay turns hard, pointing to the invention of pottery. Pots could hold food and water, leading to the cooking of soups and stews (the tough fibers of plants are much easier to digest when softened by cooking). It’s also possible to imagine an early human reacting with surprise when metal ore inside a rock started to melt, only to harden again after cooling. Eventually, melting and intentionally shaping copper ore created the first metal tools.

Imagine early humans telling stories of hunting or travel, inside a firelit cave, with shadows dancing on the wall, during a long winter night. Modern children will inevitably pick up the ashen tips of burned branches and scribble marks on concrete, and it’s easy to picture our ancestors doing the same. Eventually, humans learned to make more permanent drawings using pigments from plants, animal byproducts, and minerals, and some of the first great works of art to survive from the past came into being. Many cave paintings survive around the world (with the earliest known being from around 40,000 BC), and while they can seem primitive, simple, or strange, they are unquestionably art, as humans attempted to express themselves and create meaning.

In the case of early cave paintings, some of the greatest examples come from Lascaux and Chauvet, in France. Lascaux dates from roughly 20,000 years ago, and Chauvet from around 30,000 years ago. Many of these animal paintings are remarkably lifelike, and show exceptional understanding of animal physiognomy, as well as accurately reflecting the diversity of large game animals and predators found in the region at the time, including cave lions and wooly rhinoceroses.

At Chauvet, archeologists have noticed that the placing of certain animals within the cave may correspond to the surrounding geography, as if the cave itself were a map. Researchers have also theorized that the corridors of the cave seem to correspond with the type of animal. Chauvet’s large cats are found in acoustic dead zones with little noise, and loud braying herbivores in rooms with lots of echoes. Thin-waisted animals such as horses are painted on convex walls, and fat-waisted animals related to cows are on concave walls, mimicking the curves of the animals and making them appear more lifelike.

The exact purpose and use of such cave paintings is obviously up for debate. But their realism and attention to detail clearly suggests they were imbued with great meaning and care. In capturing the likeness and essence of the creatures around them, early humans were helping define and understand them.

And perhaps, as in Genesis, even name them.

Thank you for reading, and thank you to everyone who made “The First Humans” such a highly-viewed piece. Look for the next installment, on hunter-gatherers, in two-weeks.

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