What If?

[Thiudareiks Flavius]

The Dark Ages having never occured has always held a fascination with me. Imagine a 1800 moon misson, machine guns in the British civil war, Cars driving on Roman highways in the 1700's. Then I think of nuclear arms being developed, and have to shudder. I would like to think Europe under Rome, imperial or not, would have flourished beyond wildest dreams. I try and picture what the "New World" would look like in such an instance...boggles the imagination...

Well, as Matt has pointed out history in general, and the history of technology in particular, is not always quite that neat. As Tarbicus points out, there is good evidence that the Roman slave economy and the general abundance of cheap labour was a strong disincentive for the development of mechanical technology. The Romans did develop some very effective technologies of this kind, but tended to utilise them in highly specific circumstances; the result being that they were not widely disseminated. So they certainly had overshot watermills and sometimes used them on an industrial scale, but the economic benefit of constructing and maintaining these machines was usually undercut by the abundance of cheap muscle labour, provided either by slaves or cheap workers.

We don’t really start to see any substantial utilisation of this kind of technology until the Third Century onwards, where population declines and labour shortages seem to have given an impetus to utilising mechanical power. The archaeological evidence for the extent of this change is patchy and documentary sources even more so, but even then there doesn’t seem to have been any ‘Roman technological revolution’, just a (seemingly) greater utilisation of these labour-saving technologies.

And then along came the collapse of the Western Empire and the political and economic chaos that followed for several centuries. Here’s where history gets messy again.

There’s a common assumption that ‘if the barbarians could have been defeated the Empire wouldn’t have fallen’. But this relies on the Nineteenth Century misconception that the Empire collapsed because it was overcome militarily by screaming hordes, whereas it’s now clear that the causes of the collapse were (at first, anyway) more internal – political and economic – than external. One of those internal factors also seems to have been the population disruptions, movements and declines that caused the labour shortages mentioned above. So ‘dealing with the Germanic barbarians’ back in the First Century may not have made much of a difference at all, though it may have been other barbarians who took advantage of the Fourth and Fifth Century social, political and economic woes of the Western Empire – Slavs rather than Germanics, for example.

There’s also an assumption that the Dark Ages automatically meant that technological progress must have stopped with the collapse of the Empire, since ‘everyone knows’ that the ‘Dark Ages’ extended until the Renaissance and no-one in the period between 476 and 1482 (or whenever) was clever enough to invent anything or develop or utilise older technology (and if they did, the Evil Old Church would instantly burn them as heretics or something).

But, again, things didn’t actually work like that. What we actually see in the early Middle Ages (ie the darkest of the ‘Dark Ages’) is a proliferation of mechanical technology on a scale never before seen in Europe. So we go from a tiny handful of watermills in Roman Britain in around 300 AD to well over 6000 of them in England alone in 1100. We see a similar proliferation over the same period in other parts of Europe and a vastly greater utilisation of a range of other labour-saving mechanical technology in this period generally.

Why? Partly because the labour shortages that caused a wider use of this technology in the late Roman period continued and worsened, so it made sense to harness technology better. And partly because of the political fragmentation caused by the collapse of the Empire.

With an Empire-wide transport system and central administration, having a few large wheat-grinding complexes supplementing the hand-ground and animal-ground supplies made sense: it was easy to grind large amounts of flour in one place and then administer the transport of it to many others. With the collapse of those systems, however, there was a greater local incentive to build many more, smaller mills to supply local demands. So, far from retarding the utilisation, dissemination and development of these mechanical technologies, the political, administrative and economic fragmentation of the old Empire actually stimulated these things to an enormous extent.

And wider dissemination tends to lead to experimentation and development. So not only do we see a wider use of these technologies in the Dark Ages (despite that period’s ugly popular reputation) but we also see the development of new technologies at the same time – using water power for a far wider range of usages, development of windmills, building tidal mills etc.

The end of the Empire also had other effects in this regard. The Church (something else with a terrible popular reputation when it comes to technology, though not justifiably so) lost a powerful state sponsor with the collapse of the Empire and monastic communities were often thrown on their own resources. Some of them, the Cistercians in particular, were at the forefront of using and developing these technologies to help make their often isolated ‘wilderness’ communities more self-sufficient. The communities made a point of founding ‘daughter houses’ in forest or moorland and bringing these areas under effective cultivation. They also used wind and water power on an industrial scale not seen for centuries, with man-made or diverted water courses flowing into the monastery grounds and being used to thresh, grind flour, sieve bran, heat beer fermenting vats, full cloth, pump bellows and then carry away waste from washrooms, baths and tanning vats before flowing out the other side.

Since medieval people weren’t actually stupid at all, this intelligent use of water power, wind power and other efficient technologies soon caught on, and what we see as a result is a vast increase in the agricultural capacity of Europe – an area which had been something of an economic backwater in Roman times.

This in turn led to a revival of agrarian surpluses, a revival of long-distance trade, a huge expansion of the medieval European economy and a cultural and intellectual revival generally (and this was in the Twelfth Century, long before the Renaissance of our school books).

It also led to a change in attitude towards machines and technology generally. Most medieval people lived within a short stroll of a watermill, windmill or tidal mill, while those in towns lived alongside mills on their river banks, under their bridges and anchored on barges in their rivers. Mills were also social centres, where people gathered, gossiped, did business and even picked up prostitutes. As a result, mechanical technology was a common part of everyday life in a way it had never been before. From the Twelfth Century onwards we see mechanical solutions being applied to a wide range of other usages – eg turing meat spits via thermal power, the development of true mechanical clocks and, eventually, mechanised book production.

So the idea that the fall of the Empire and the ‘Dark Age’ fragmentation that followed retarded technology is a bit too simplistic. In fact, it seems to have stimulated it substantially.

Sorry for the lengthy post – pet topic of mine.
:wink: