Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 215 - The Medieval Podcasters.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the King's College London Philosophy Department and the LMU in Munich. This episode will be an unusual and, I hope you'll agree, exciting one. As you know, I'm currently looking at medieval philosophy on the podcast, and today I'll be interviewing three other podcasters who have also covered the medieval era in their historical podcast series. Sharon Estaw of the History of the Crusades podcast, Robin Pearson of the History of Byzantium podcast, and Jamie Jeffers of the British History podcast. And my first guest is Sharon Estaw, who is the host of the History of the Crusades podcast, which recently completed looking at the entire history of the Crusades. Hi, Sharon, thanks for being interviewed. Hi, Peter. It's great to have you on. I've listened to your whole series. It is great and I encourage people to listen to it as well. Oh, thank you. Well, it was fun to do and I'm a bit sad it's over, really. I'm sad it's over too, but you're maybe moving on to other topics, right? I may well be, so you have to watch this space. So you've actually covered the Crusades. Maybe you can explain what that means. I mean, I guess everyone's heard of the Crusades, so Latin Christians going off to the Holy Land to try to reconquer Jerusalem and other territory. But how did you conceive of the project? What are the boundaries of the project for you? I basically wanted to focus on the Crusades in the medieval era, focusing on the Middle East. I actually read an article this morning, strangely, that from one of the historians that writes books on the Crusades, who was actually arguing that the Crusades started in medieval times and are still going on today. So I wanted to sort of draw boundaries and make sure that I was just concentrating on the Middle Eastern Crusades of the Middle Ages. So I started off at the end of the 11th century with the call to arms by Pope Urban II, and we did the First Crusade, which established the Crusader states in the Holy Land and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And then we went through the Second Crusade, the Third Crusade, the Fourth Crusade, which ended up being the Latin Christians attacking the Christian, Orthodox Christian city of Constantinople, and the Fifth Crusade, which involved Egypt, and then the gradual decline of the Crusader states, ending with the fall of Acre. So it covers about 200 years of history. Yeah, and it basically is a series of increasingly disastrous outings from the Latin Christian point of view, I mean, after the initial successes. But once you get into the Fourth and Fifth Crusades, it's really some horrible historical events that really brought a lot of shame on the people who launched the Crusades in the first place. Absolutely. It's actually a really fascinating couple of hundred years of history. It starts off with, as you said, a success where the Latin Christians came in and conquered quite a bit of territory in the Holy Land, and then they established themselves, and from then on they kind of peaked and then went downhill rapidly. And most of the Crusades were dramatically unsuccessful from the Latin Christian point of view. But what I found really interesting was that relatively recently there's also been a lot of scholarship done on the Muslim point of view, because before that we really had the history of the Crusades only from the Latin Christian point of view, where the Muslim side was sort of not discussed. But of course you really need the two sides to the story, otherwise you don't have the complete picture. So I tried to also give the Muslim point of view, which makes it quite interesting. So now that I'm actually now looking at Latin Christianity, and I'm just sort of going through the 12th and early 13th century, and that's exactly the time that they started getting the import of knowledge about Aristotle and other authors from the Islamic world into the Latin world, with the result that Muslim philosophers like Avicenna, Avarwes, and Ghazali became very influential on figures like, say, Thomas Aquinas, just to name the most famous person. And so something that I'm sort of necessarily emphasizing a lot in my series is the kind of friendly relationship, or at least very productive relationship, between Islamic culture and Christian culture in the medieval period. And I guess that a lot of people think about the Crusades as representing exactly the opposite of that. They think of the Crusades as a real clash of cultures, as a phrase, or clash of civilizations, as a phrase that's often used. Do you think that the history of the Crusades bears out that characterization of the relationships between Latin Christianity and Islam in the medieval period? Well, that's a really interesting question, because I guess I'll maybe approach that in two parts. First, I think there was a huge clash of culture, particularly at the beginning of the Crusades, where the Latin Christians thought of themselves as being very learned and of being sort of the dominant force. But at the time of the First Crusade, for instance, the population of London and the population of Paris was about 20,000 people, and they really weren't very sophisticated cities. And I know they thought of themselves as being sophisticated, but when they, for instance, went to Constantinople, I mean, that was a city of 500,000 people with a very rich culture and a heritage that stretched back a very long time. And I think it was a bit of a shock for the Latin Christians to see how cultured Constantinople was. And also in the Islamic world, once they got to the Middle East, Baghdad, for instance, had a population of around half a million people, and they had a very rich culture. A lot of work had been done in mathematics and science, and they were really a lot more advanced in the Islamic world than in the West, which I imagine was a bit of a shock to a lot of Crusaders. And there were some Crusaders, particularly as the Crusader states were established, there were quite a lot of people who were fluent in Arabic, who freely interacted with Muslims. A lot of Muslim merchants also freely interacted with the trading centers in the Crusader states. And there was quite a lot of overlap and interaction, and a lot of Crusaders who were coming to the Crusader states for the first time were shocked at the level of interaction between the two cultures. So for a lot of people, they did think of it as Islam versus Christianity, but the reality was much more fluid and blurred. Something else that actually surprised me, I have to admit, while I was listening to your series, is how complicated the political dynamic was between the Christians and the Muslims, partially because there isn't just a monolithic group of Christians and a monolithic group of Muslims, but sometimes the Christians would try to play different groups of Muslims off against each other. Or the most remarkable thing is when there was an attempt to forge an alliance between the Mongols and the Christians in order to fight the Muslims and dislodge them from Egypt. So that kind of thing would tell you that the people at that time didn't really see it as just a kind of clash of civilizations, you know, all Muslims against all Christians. They had a much more nuanced understanding of the political realities on the ground. Absolutely. And it was all really about politics rather than religion. You know, while some people did set out on the Crusades for purely religious reasons, there were a goodly few that set out for reasons of personal gain. For example, Baldwin of Boulogne, who was Geoffrey de Bouillon, who was one of the leaders of the First Crusade, he was his younger brother. Being a younger son, he was not due to inherit any of his family's lands, and he was actually destined for life in the church. But he was a very ambitious man, and the church didn't really suit him. So during the First Crusade, he journeyed to the Middle East with his wife and his children, clearly not intending to return back to Europe, and ended up founding one of the Crusader states and later on becoming King of Jerusalem. While there was a veneer of clash of religions, I think a lot of it was about politics and advancement, personal gain, and the like. And I guess that the lower ranking soldiers who weren't going to wind up, you know, running a Crusader state, they could still hope for booty, at least, to bring it back. Absolutely. And at the time of the First Crusade, at least, there'd been some terrible famines in Europe and a lot of peasants were just, you know, anything was going to be better than staying in Europe. And they were promised that the Middle East would be the land of milk and honey and that everything would be brilliant if they made the 2000 mile journey on foot to the Middle East. And a lot of them found that life there was worse and more harsh than life back home. But it's true, a lot of people went there trying to improve their lives. It seems like also it changed people's views once they actually contacted some society or once they settled in the Crusader states and they started, for example, trading with Muslims. Something that you mentioned at one point in one of the later episodes, as I recall, is that some Crusaders turn up in the Crusader states and they're outraged to find that the local Christians are trading and consorting with all the local Muslims and they get really bent out of shape about this. It reminds me a little bit of things that happen in the history of philosophy where Christian scholars who are maybe living nearer to Muslim society, so a famous example would be in Toledo where a lot of the translations happened, they actually are collaborating with Jewish and Muslim scholars in order to produce, say, Arabic, Latin scientific translations. Absolutely. I think the event you mentioned was probably just prior to the fall of Acre where a group of Italian Crusaders came to the Crusader states, or the last remaining Crusader state, which was the Kingdom of Acre. They were all hell-bent on taking back Jerusalem and pushing the Muslims back out of the territory that had been won by the Latin Christians. But when they arrived at Acre, they were absolutely astonished to find Muslims walking around freely in the city and buying and selling and even drinking in the taverns. And a group of probably intoxicated Italian Crusaders decided that they wouldn't wait to kill Muslims out on the battlefield, they may as well start now in the city of Acre. So they started a bar fight which quickly got well out of hand and spread to the city and many Muslims lost their lives. And as a result of that, the peace treaty between the Latin Christians and the Egyptians was called off with the result that eventually Acre fell, which meant that the Latin Christians were effectively evicted from the Holy Land. So yes, it's sad that a lot of people arriving from the West just had this quite prejudiced view of Muslims and Islam, whereas the people who'd been living there, as you said, they interacted quite freely. Many of them could speak Arabic fluently. And they used to interact with Muslims on a daily basis. Right. So actually, just to take that as an example, one thing that you talk about a bit in your series, but not as much as say Jamie Jeffers, who I'm going to be interviewing later on in this episode, is the kind of sources that you're dealing with. So how do we know something like that? I mean, how do we know that these Italian Crusaders turned up and then they started a bar fight because it's hard to believe that the Italian Crusaders would have been eager to talk about their role in this hugely counterproductive event? Well, that's another very interesting question because sources in the medieval era are very difficult. For example, the speech that Pope Urban made at Clamont, which started the First Crusade, there's five different versions of that speech. And apparently most of them were written decades after the actual speech occurred. But luckily there is an existing letter that was penned by Pope Urban. I think he wrote to some Belgians pleading with them to go on crusade. So the sources of first, I guess, are sketchy. And secondly, there was a tendency back in medieval times not so much to pitch for historical accuracy, but for drama and for really showing events how they would have liked them to have happened rather than how they actually did happen. But luckily we've got many historians and scholars who've spent their careers sifting through all the sources and trying to work out the history from the myth. And I rely heavily on their work. So let me ask you one last question before I move on to my next podcaster. I wanted to ask everyone if you could just name one person or one historical figure from the series that you've been doing, who would you name and why would you say that they're so fascinating? I spent a lot of time trying to narrow this down to one figure. I got a top three in the end. Eleanor of Aquitaine, of course, made it into the top three, as did the leper king, poor old King Baldwin, who was king at a time. It was a horrible time to be a king as it was. But the poor man, his body was falling apart on him as he was trying to rule this terrible sort of factions and infighting that was going on. But the person that I chose as the most fascinating person was Emperor Frederick II Stupor Mundi. He was king of Sicily and emperor of Germany. And he was a totally fascinating person. He was clearly very intellectual, but he saw himself as really superior to just about everyone else in the western part of Europe. Because he was brought up in the court in Sicily, he was fluent in Arabic and had a lot of interaction with the Muslim world. And he was very into philosophy, interestingly. And his big opponent in the Crusades was the current leader of Egypt at the time, Al-Kamil. And they used to exchange philosophical arguments amongst each other. In fact, when they were trying to negotiate the return of Jerusalem, at one stage, Stupor Mundi, who he was often called, decided to try and intellectually belittle Al-Kamil by sending him a list of historical, I mean, sorry, philosophical questions and mathematical questions and scientific questions to try and prove his superiority. The reason why he was fascinating, I think, is that because clearly there was a clash between Latin Christendom and Islam, but Emperor Frederick was really almost on the Muslim side. He was clashing constantly with the Pope. And in fact, apparently one Pope attempted to have him assassinated. And one Pope also mustered an army and invaded his territory while he was in Jerusalem trying to establish Jerusalem as for Latin Christendom. It seemed to have a lot more respect for Islam than for his own religion, which strangely the Muslims found quite baffling. And of course, the Latin Christians found quite baffling as well. And he's actually one of several people we could name who sort of stand at the nexus between our two podcast series. So another would be Bernard of Clairvaux, who helped launch one of the Crusades by giving rousing speeches. So he appeared in your podcast series doing that. And then he appeared in my podcast series attacking Peter Avelard and other philosophers. So he's a major medieval figure who's sort of too big to be contained by any one podcast series. And the same goes for Frederick II. By the way, I can't believe you didn't name Peter the Hermit as your favorite figure, because it's sort of a running joke in your podcast as Peter the Hermit. It is. I sort of, I found Peter the Hermit quite irritating. And I also found King Guy of Jerusalem quite irritating. But my irritation came out in a sort of an unexpectedly and unintentionally sort of humorous way. That's sort of how I dealt with my irritation over them. You seem quite affectionate, especially towards Peter the Hermit. You can tell in those series that you really don't like Guy, King Guy. He's just a jerk. He is. Although Peter the Hermit, I mean, yeah, he was such a strange man. I mean, he rode around on a donkey barefoot in rags. And yet he managed to convince 20,000-odd peasants from Europe to walk 2,000 miles to the Holy Land to their eventual deaths, really. He managed to escape the carnage, but a lot of the peasants who followed him to the land of milk and honey didn't. And he just keeps popping up through it. You sort of can't keep Peter the Hermit down. He pops up in the siege of Antioch. He's everywhere. I'll never underestimate anyone named Peter. Right, well, if you want to hear more about Peter the Hermit and Frederick II and a range of other fascinating figures from medieval history, then I would encourage you, like I said, to listen to Sharon's podcast. It's called The History of the Crusades. First, Sharon, thanks very much for being interviewed for the podcast series. Thank you for having me. It was fun. My next guest is Robin Pearson of the History of Byzantium podcast. Hi, Robin. Thanks for coming on to be interviewed. Hello. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm a big fan of your podcast as well. So I'm really pleased to have this chance to talk to you. And surprisingly, our two podcasts have something in common, which is that they were both inspired, at least in part, by another podcast. So this is Mike Duncan's very popular History of Rome podcast, which is a more obvious model for you than for me. But I was listening to it, and it's part of what gave me the idea to do the History of Philosophy podcast because I thought, oh, I could tackle the history of philosophy with the same kind of detail and narrative that he tackled the history of Rome. And you explicitly said at the beginning of your podcast that you were going to be taking up the story of Rome where he left off, right? Yeah, absolutely. I actually wrote to Mike, I'm not sure if he ever got the email saying, you know, you should continue. And I'm sure people would want to pay to keep you going and, you know, continue the Roman story. And I was just transfixed by how great a job he did of telling the whole story century after century and keeping it entertaining and walking this great line between holding your hand and assuming you can figure stuff out for yourself. And because I was already recording podcasts on American TV shows, I had this possibility in my mind when I sent him that message of, well, you know, I suppose it's something I could think about doing, but I'd never thought about it before he said he was going to finish. It all happened very, very fast. And I suppose it was inspired by just not wanting him to stop and wanting to have this audio history of the whole Roman Empire from start till 1453. Because he stopped at the fall of the Western Empire. So basically your podcast series picks up the story with the Eastern Empire, which we then call the Byzantine Empire. Exactly. And you didn't have like a pre-existing obsession with Byzantine history or anything. I think that's actually very unusual, if that's true. I mean, most podcasters are not au fait with the podcasting technology, but they're on top of the topic and you wrote the opposite situation. Yeah. I'd grown up with an interest in the Romans from all sorts of different angles, including just going to church or whatever, and the Romans are everywhere you look. And I had studied Justinian a little bit at university in my first year. And I ended up reading John Julius Norwich's well-known series on Byzantium, which is very entertaining and definitely presents the Byzantines as these historical underdogs surviving against the odds. So I did sort of know the story and I was interested in it, but I hadn't looked into it with any more depth than that. So I think one thing that that whole story raises, if we're thinking about medieval history, is how inappropriate in a way it is to talk about medieval history and apply that concept to Byzantine history, because we usually think of the relationship between ancient history or Roman history and medieval history as a kind of societal collapse in Europe at the end of the Roman Empire, and then that ushers in the medieval period. And in your case, or rather in the case of the Byzantine Empire, that just doesn't happen. So you have basically a continuity between what we think of as the Roman Empire and then the Byzantine Empire. Yeah, I mean, one could say that within Constantinople, the ancient world never went away. They never stopped. And, you know, the libraries there just carried on as if no big change had happened. Out in the countryside, there was more noticeable change. But yeah, I mean, you bring up the point. I think a lot of us who end up studying history come to realize how much famous historians like Gibbon have influenced the way we view history, that we, as you said, we tend to think of pre-Roman and post-Roman Europe as a dividing line. But then if you look at how the Roman state developed, it was changing all the time. And one could argue that a psychological and spiritual change for the empire actually came around the first century, that the fact that a figure like Jesus could find receptive ears for his message beyond Palestine indicates that the old world of pagan gods had changed significantly, and that what we think of as the medieval Christian world had begun then. Or if you look at things on the level of government, the crisis of the third century in Rome saw the state have to become much harder and more professional to survive. And so the ancient world of city-states and a sort of elite private life where the rich played out their rivalries by becoming politicians, that ended then. And so you do look at the Roman world the more you get into it and think, when did a real change from the ancient world come? And in my story, of course, the coming of Islam and the Arab empire is probably more directly disruptive in a way that the fall of the West was, that it's less easy to point to one moment where everything changed. But of course, that only affects the Eastern Mediterranean initially, it doesn't affect the West. It's quite hard to say this point ancient world, this point medieval world, the more you look into it, the more continuity there is, and the more you see this process of change happening slowly over different areas of life. Yeah, I think something is true in the history of philosophy, actually. I mean, I haven't gotten to Byzantine philosophy yet, I will eventually. And by the way, when I do, I will be glad that I've been listening to your podcast, because I don't know all the history stuff as context. But I know enough about Byzantine philosophy to know that it's a lot like late ancient Greek philosophy. I mean, not just because it's in Greek, but they're still using Neoplatonic ideas to understand Christian theology. They still write commentaries on Aristotle. And in general, it's sort of like they keep going without missing a beat from the late antique school of Alexandria, let's say. That's probably a bit oversimplified, but it's a much more continuous tradition than you would have in the case of Latin Christian Europe in the medieval period. Although even there, there's a lot of ways in which it's very continuous. I mean, the most influential texts in early medieval philosophy are by people like Boethius and Augustine, who are late ancient figures. So do you think then that there's a kind of misconception here about medieval Byzantine society or history among people who haven't looked into it so much, where they think of it as a kind of, you know, a distinctively medieval period that's very sharply contrasted with the Roman period? In fact, actually, I think Byzantine, like medieval, it's one of the few historical designations that's also used as an insult. It's overly complicated. Right. Would you say that's something you're trying to dispel among your audience? I hope I can give people an idea of how slowly a lot of transitions take place. Because I think, like when you look at Christianity, you can look at its development on many different levels and, you know, Constantine converts in 300 and by 400, you've got an emperor like Theodosius making laws against, you know, any other kind of belief or worship in the public sphere, but you move on 100 years later into the 500s and you've got, you know, someone like Procopius writing who clearly doesn't believe in any of the imperial propaganda about Christianity and the state, even if he himself goes to church. And where I've reached now in the 700s, we find people out in the countryside are still, you know, celebrating weddings or gathering in the harvest in using the same traditions and invocations of pagan gods that their ancestors would have done a millennium before. But if you saw them in church on Sunday, you would think, oh, you know, they are medieval Christians just like I imagined. I think if you look at a process like that, you start to get a sense that history is ever changing and medieval is a helpful designation because you need to know quickly what period you're in and, you know, where you are in the timeline and so on. But it's important not to pigeonhole a whole era of time as representing kind of fixed values. You know, the medieval is a helpful distinction, but don't think it means people and have come out of nowhere and are nothing like the people they were 100 or 200 years before. Yeah, I think what you mentioned before that in some ways the coming of Islam and the conquering of so much land that had belonged to the Romans, as the Byzantines actually called themselves, that that was a more disruptive event, at least in the East, than anything that had happened in the Western Empire. And I think that that maybe should tell us that if we're going to sort of look for a really pivotal moment in Byzantine history, we shouldn't look earlier than that. We should look in a period which we would now consider to be sort of in the midst of early medieval time, namely the seventh century and then into the eighth century. So one thing I wanted to ask you, because I'm asking all three of the guests on this episode, and I think it's maybe especially important to ask you this because you're working on a period of history that a lot of people don't know anything about. If you were going to name one figure who you've covered who you would consider particularly fascinating or who you think more people should know about, who would it be? I mean, I think the controversial but correct answer would be that looking into Muhammad and his origins is very fascinating, but we don't know enough about him to have a very concrete sense of who he was or what he did. So I would probably fall back on the classic Byzantine answer of Justinian, who was a very famous emperor from the sixth century. And Muhammad is not a bad place to start in the sense that we know almost nothing about Muhammad's daily life. No one was writing around the time where he would have lived. Whereas Justinian, we have three or four different historians who may have even met him but directly lived under his policies. And so you start to get a real rich, complicated sense of his personality. And that's very rare for most figures in ancient and medieval history to have that many sources. And he lived in very interesting times, which is always fun to read about. One thing that you mentioned a lot when you were looking at the rise of Islam is the question of how much religious ideology or religious zeal motivated the armies that spread Islam in the end, as opposed to other motivations like just trying to take land or winning honor or booty. And I think that's an interesting question also to ask about some of the earlier material that you've covered in your series. So for example, Justinian seems to have been motivated both by politics and by religion. And I think that's a salutary lesson because when we think about the medieval period, we tend to think about people who were motivated above all by religious belief. And I think that's true in philosophy too, by the way, that people have a tendency to assume that all medieval philosophy is just theology. But as you've been showing in your podcast, actually their motivations are much more nuanced and various than that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, religion plays a very big part in people's lives, but it is balanced by earthly concerns. Certainly the Byzantines are very rarely motivated directly by religion when it comes to making war. Pragmatic concerns take over and they very much don't view Islam as a sort of competing religion for a long time. They're so sure of their own Christian beliefs as the truth that if your neighbor, even if they're strong and powerful says, well, we believe in X, Y, Z, you just say, well, that's crazy. You know, we know the truth. There must be an explanation within our scripture. What you believe is irrelevant. In terms of how politics plays out, religion tends to play a very big role. I think religion in a way becomes molded in with what we would think of as mundane political concerns, legitimacy and popularity and so on. Leaders increasingly understand that they must be seen to be fulfilling a religious role in society and fulfilling God's plans in their public policy. In the Byzantine case, a lot of that has to do with unity, that we are all God's people, therefore we must all believe the same thing. We must all follow the same religious practices. I think that's a particular sort of Roman concern, that the Roman Empire was built on the idea that we observe what the gods want better than anyone. It was an idea that went very deep into the soil of the Mediterranean so that even though Jesus didn't say anything in particular about that, it was just assumed that God will favor us if we get everyone on the same page and performing the rights the same way. It's a common political concern, I think, to get your nation or get your empire on the same page, everybody pushing in the same direction to achieve things, but it definitely assumes a religious complexion and that touches almost everything in society. But again, in that blended way, it's not as simple as they believed something we don't, therefore they are different. I think they were behaving in a very similar way to us, but instead of thinking about how can we grow the economy, they were thinking about how can we please God. And that might actually be the same thing. Well, there's a lot in that, I think. So I think one thing about Byzantine history is that you actually have some very powerful women who play a significant role in Byzantine politics and so on. And so, again, we have a tendency to think about medieval history as being the story of men waging war on other men, mostly, but that's not necessarily the case for the Byzantine historical story. Yeah, I mean, as far as I know, women were just as put upon and dismissed in terms of real power and authority and choice in their own lives as you would expect in ancient and medieval times. But in two areas, I suppose, women could gain some power in the Byzantine world in particular. One of course is if they were in the royal family, which gave them not only a connection to the ruling political dynasty, but an aura of being connected to God. And so we will get more interesting empresses as my story goes on. We do have one way back in the late 400s, the wife of Zeno Arigny, when the emperor dies, it's said that she chooses his successor because she is the legitimate ruler. And we don't really know a lot more about it, but it's nice to think that maybe she really did have a say and she ends up choosing a man, Anastasius, who turns out to be a very good emperor. So, you know, maybe she should get the credit for that. But the other area, of course, is in what we would say a nunnery that monks and nuns were genuinely thought of as people to go to for advice or for healing, you know, out in the countryside. And so women could gain some freedom and some status through that. So I hope to be able to explore that more as the podcast goes on. It hasn't come up a lot by 700. Yeah, I'm actually coming to a case very much like your second category soon, because I'm going to be looking at Hildegard of Bingen in an episode in my series. Right. So we've had a nice little look there at what you've been doing on your podcast and how Byzantine history might relate to other parts of medieval history. And of course, it relates very much to the Islamic world, just like I was talking about with Sharon. So thank you very much. That was really helpful and interesting. Thanks so much for having me. And again, that's the History of Byzantium podcast, if you want to hear Robin's own series on Byzantine history. And my next guest will be Jamie Jeffers of the British History Podcast. Hello, Peter, thank you. Again, I'm a big fan of your podcast, and I would encourage everyone who's listening to this to go check it out if they haven't already. As I just said, it's called the British History Podcast, and I guess the title pretty much explains what it is. But maybe you can tell us a little bit about it nonetheless. Well, it's a chronological retelling of the story of Britain. We start in the ice ages, so we start pretty far back, and we have been moving steadily forward now for about two, no, God, what is it, three and a half years now. And we are up to the late eighth century, which is the period where we have, off of Mercia, this big Anglo-Saxon king jockeying for power with Charlemagne. So it gets pretty exciting. But essentially what it is is it's just a chronological retelling of the story of Britain. And I include in that story side comments on cultural developments, how trade, how geography, how climate change, because that was an issue, how all kinds of things play into this story and change the way history played out. So I try and take a full view of everything instead of just focusing on the great man approach and hopefully provide people with a three-dimensional picture of what was going on. That is interesting, actually, because you are, after three and a half years, getting to just about the point, historically speaking, where I began with medieval philosophy, not with philosophy in general, because of course I started in antiquity. But I started medieval philosophy in basically the Carolingian period with Alquin and then Ariugina. And so Alquin obviously was at the court of Charlemagne. And so he's right about where you are now. And I guess maybe that even raises the question of to what extent you would consider what you've been doing to be medieval. I mean, I'm saying that this is a kind of chance for people who work on medieval topics and podcasting to come together. And I guess no one could deny that the Crusades are medieval. But people don't necessarily think of Byzantine history as medieval. And I don't know whether you think of what you've been doing as medieval or late antiquity or what. Oh, you know, that's a great question. One of those things where, you know, where do you draw the lines, especially in a period of history that's so poorly studied? I would say that the last year would probably be easily classified as medieval. The sub-Roman period, what happened after Rome pulled out, I can imagine that there might be some arguments as to whether or not that hundred year period after Rome pulled out of Britannia, whether or not that could legitimately be called medieval or if we should just call it sub-Roman or whatever. And then the first year was ice ages and Roman, which is pretty clearly not medieval. But yeah, this is one of those periods of time that it's just soupy. And the nice thing about studying this area of history, and actually history in general, is that the more you study it, the more you realize that everything is soupy. And unfortunately, our classifications for antiquity, you know, sub-Roman, medieval, it's all soupy as well. So I honestly don't know. I would say that definitely the last year is, it's got to be medieval. But other than that. Medieval, if anything, is medieval. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, actually, one thing that's interesting, I think, about your podcast is that you've spent so much time lavishing attention on things that happened between the Roman withdrawal, and people obviously know about the Romans being in Britain, and the period of medieval history in Britain that people first think of. So you know, William the Conqueror, knights running around in shining armor, that sort of medieval history. And in a way, your podcast takes a similar approach to mine. So the slogan of my podcast is without any gaps, right? And so what I'm trying to do is look at the whole history of philosophy without leaving anything out. And I think you may be even taking that approach a little bit more seriously than I am. You get the history of Britain without any gaps. I get into some trouble. I get the occasional negative review because I go too far. But it's one of those things where the way British history is typically taught is that we had the, there was darkness, right? In the beginning, there was darkness. And then there were the Romans. And then there was darkness again. And then there was William the Conqueror. And that's pretty much how most people have learned this period of history. But the reality is, is that the Romans were there for less than 400 years. And really, considering how badly they did towards the end, you could probably say about 300 years. And then you have this massive gap from 400, about 400 to 410, where there are just no Romans, right? All the way to 1066, all this history, all this development of cultural history that we just don't want to talk about. And instead, we just give it this kind of soupy, I guess soupy is, cartoony would be a better word. We have this cartoony view that essentially what happened was all the Britons went back to living in caves. And it was just like prehistory. And then along came the Normans, and then things started getting better. There was this brief period with Alfred, but for the most part, he just burned some cakes. And that's all that people know. And the reality is, is that there's this rich tapestry of history, and there are these crazy events, this amazing drama that's going on. And it's the foundry of what becomes Englishness. The modern English culture is finding its beginnings right there. As well as conflicts between the Welsh and the English and the Scots and the English, there's all these conflicts that are brewing that can reach back all the way to this period in time. And so the fact that we ignore it is just criminal. And I can't for the life of me understand how people can expect to have a full understanding of what 1066 was and why it's important without understanding the Anglo-Saxons. It just doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. So yeah, I don't think you can have any gaps. Yeah, there's something similar that happens in philosophy, but maybe even more so, where if you are doing a normal—even if you majored in philosophy, this is something I've complained about on a regular basis on my podcast—that standardly you might do, you know, Plato, Aristotle, and then maybe you would do like Augustine, who's late antiquity already, or maybe some Plotinus, also late antiquity. Then you might do Aquinas, like a medieval philosopher, but pretty much you're immediately going to move on to Descartes. And so you have these huge jumps from one place to another in the history of philosophy. And I guess, you know, we have to admit that if you're trying to design a syllabus to take people through the whole history of philosophy in one or two semesters, you don't have a choice. But of course, this is an advantage of podcasting, because no one's making us go any faster than we want to. Right. I think one of the things that I would agree is a kind of misconception about philosophy and history is that all the action is provoked by a few really extraordinary individuals who are usually men. Do you think that there are more specific misconceptions about the period of British history you've been looking at in your podcast? The biggest misconception I've run into, because I have people who write into me, when I first got into the Middle Ages, so after Rome pulled out, I had a bunch of people writing in and asking questions. And the questions that I was getting, the predominant number of questions that I was getting belonged in prehistory. Not even like Neolithic, but they're like Paleolithic questions. And it goes into this way that we've been teaching history where the Victorians identified strongly with the Normans and they identified strongly with the Romans. But the Anglo-Saxons, not so much. And so they treated them as sort of a speed bump and a bit of an embarrassment. And we still have that hangover from the Victorian era where we look at the Anglo-Saxon period as sort of this period of darkness where everybody was filthy all the time. And it's shocking how many things people get wrong when you investigate their biases when it comes to the Anglo-Saxon period. I mean, the fact that most people believe that the Anglo-Saxons were eating rotten meat is just stunning. But if you talk to some random person on the street and ask them why the Anglo-Saxons heavily spiced their food, they'll tell you it was because the meat was rotten, as if, you know, people in the Middle Ages didn't get sick from rotted food. It's one of those strange things that everybody, if you think about it for 30 seconds, you're like, that's ridiculous. No one's going to do that. But it's just one of those zombie myths that people pass around. It never seems to go away. And it's the same thing with cleanliness. We imagine them being much dirtier than they were. If you went in to a feast and you didn't wash your hands beforehand, people would react to you like you just grew a third head. Not even a second head, like a third head. Like you're the weirdest guy in the world. And so the idea that they were these just disgusting, primitive people is just wildly off base. And you've also been showing that the political situation in Anglo-Saxon Britain was very complicated and involved a lot of moving parts. So it was a very sophisticated world politically and socially speaking as well. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And it was definitely bloody. We imagine it being bloody and it was. But it's one of those things where you look at it and while it is bloody, it's no less bloody than things were under the Plantagenets or under the Tudors. There was a lot of intrigue, there was a lot of fighting, but that just seems to be the way things went for a very long period of time. It was really no worse than any other period of time. But it was. It was a very complicated world that they were living in. They had to balance a lot of different things. They were influenced by things that are remarkably similar to what were influenced by today. They were influenced by trends, by cliques. They were remarkably similar to us in certain ways. They're obviously, the past is a foreign country, so in many ways they were alien. But there are certain ways that they are very familiar. And you've actually applied that to something that's come up a lot on my podcast, which is the role of religion in medieval culture. I think a lot of people, and I would in fact say this is probably the biggest misconception about medieval philosophy, is that it's really all just theology and they never talk about anything that isn't to do with God or God's relationship to the world or the incarnation of Christ or the Eucharist or something like that. And although of course they do talk about those things, they talk about the full range of philosophical issues like everything from political philosophy to theory of knowledge, free will, you name it, often with an eye on some kind of theological issue in the background. I think there's a real kind of fallacy that the history of medieval philosophy is just kind of philosophy of religion, but in Latin. And something you've mentioned on the podcast, on your podcast that is, is that you think that their attitudes towards religion were a lot more nuanced than we might expect for early Christian Britain. Oh yeah, yeah. The way they approached religion seems very familiar. You had people that were clearly pious. You had people who were clearly deep believers, but you also had people who were just going along to get along. And you also had people who were getting into these religious power structures because there was power there. It was a deeply cynical move. And you have people converting for deeply cynical reasons. I mean, the famous story of Edwin's conversion, Edwin was this Northumbrian king who is one of the big highlights of my show so far, actually. But he converts. And when he's converting, you have these Christians making arguments on why they should convert and why it would be better if Edwin became a Christian. And his religious advisors are making arguments against that. And essentially what it comes down to is if you become a Christian, you're going to get fabulous cash and prizes. And you can see him, he's playing both sides for a long period of his history. And then right at the last minute, he decides to go and convert. And it strikes me as such a cynical move. It strikes me as definitely, there's the possibility that he had a legitimate experience. We don't have a diary from Edwin saying, I was in my room late at night, I had a dream, and Jesus came to me and talked to me and I need to convert. But based upon how long it took him to convert and the things that he was weighing and the moment where he chose to convert, it strikes me as a deeply cynical political move. And we do see that play out quite a bit in the medieval period where you have priests and monks who don't even know the 10 commandments. They have no idea what the 10 commandments are, but yet they're men of the cloth. And the reason why that is happening is because you have these rich families stacking the religious houses with their lesser sons and their unwanted daughters, because that's where the other political structure is, the other power structure is. So they're trying to just expand their power base to better manipulate what's happening on the island and maybe even across the channel. But it's not necessarily because they felt the call. You do have people who felt the call, but you also have people like Wilfred who pretty clearly just wanted to be the Archbishop of York and was going to do what he had to in order to become it. Yeah, he's a real character, isn't he? Wilfred, he keeps coming up on your podcast at the Archbishop who won't die. Yeah. So for the people who haven't listened to my show, there's this recurring Archbishop who is, he won't die, he keeps on coming back from seemingly nothing. He ends up at one point shipwrecked and fighting to the death against a bunch of pirates. He takes a couple trips to Rome to go and tattle on the King of Northumbria to the Pope himself, and then comes back and complains to the King of Northumbria and says, hey, the Pope's on my side and the King of Northumbria doesn't care and chucks him in jail. Like, there's this huge thing that's going on. And essentially what everything seems to be coming down to for Wilfred is he wants to be the Archbishop. It's not about God's plan. He just wants to be the Archbishop. And for good reason, because when he was the Archbishop briefly, he was marching around with an army of his own. Like, this wasn't like he had ecclesiastical duties and he really liked ministering to his flock. He had a damn army. So he wanted to get back to that. And it's one of those interesting things where you can have clearly pious people. I think Bede is a good example of someone who is clearly pious. And I think Alcuin is another example. But then you have people like Wilfred and I suspect Archbishop J.M. Burt and others who were there purely for the power. Actually, something I was going to ask you, because I've asked also Sharon and Robin about this in the earlier parts of this episode, if you had to name one most fascinating person from the period you've covered so far, would you name Wilfred or Edwin or one of the people you've already mentioned or someone else? King Offa of Mercia, hands down. King Offa of Mercia took over his kingdom after he had a distant cousin ruling it who was famous for sleeping with a bunch of nuns out of wedlock. And his name was Ethelbald. And so he took over his kingdom in the middle of a civil war and then went into a kind of a kinslaying, just bloodlust. He said, and we only get hints of it. And we get hints of it primarily in letters from Alcuin and in land grants and stuff like that. But essentially what happened was Offa was running around trimming the family tree in order to make sure that his line went ahead of time. Because this was a period where the requirement that you were born into a legitimate marriage wasn't part of rule. So all these bastard kids from all these different nuns all had a claim to the throne. So he's running around doing that. While at the same time consolidating his kingdom, expanding it. So he's going and taking over the Huissa. He's going and taking over for part of it Kent. He's fighting with Wessex. He's doing all this other stuff. And solidifying his power, he creates this gigantic dike between England and Wales. Probably there's some argument, but it's probably him. And at the same time as all of that, he's also jockeying for power with Charlemagne himself. To such an extent that Charlemagne actually suggests that they go and have their kids marry. Which seemed like it was going to work and it actually might go and unify the two kingdoms and correct trade relations. All the way until Offa said, well that's fine, but I also want one of your daughters to marry my son. And Charlemagne showed his true colors and said, there's no way in hell I'm going to have one of your filthy English sons sleeping with my daughter. And then everything went sideways. But I mean, this is an incredibly important character in English history. His reign is the starting point of the continuous use of currency in England. Like there's all these things that come about because of Offa. And at the same time, you have a very tortured character because he's engaging in these incredibly brutal policies in order to secure the throne for his son. And so he's both an intriguing character and clearly powerful, but he's got this dark side as well. Mad Fientist Another thing that I like a lot about your podcast, and maybe I like this because it's something that I'm aspiring to do with my podcast as well, is that you focus a lot on the role of women in the history of Britain. And in fact, one thing that I like about medieval philosophy is that it gives me a chance to do that. So it's a much richer period than most of what I've been covering so far in the podcast series. And this is something that you've been doing pretty much right along in your podcast series as well. Dr. The reason is because a lot of our history was written by monks, at least in this period. We have a tremendous amount of material for monks. And pretty much by design, monks don't know a hell of a lot about women. And so there's a lot, there's this huge gap in our knowledge as to what was going on with women during this period. I'm positive that there were women working with these kings and talking to them and, and trying to figure out what they should do politically or economically or whatever. But the monks aren't writing it down, so we just don't know. Dr. That's a kind of microcosm or certainly a good example of a problem that you come up with a lot in your podcast. The sort of refrain of your podcast is, well, here's an interesting question and we just don't know the answer. It happens in almost every single episode. And I guess I don't have to say that too much in my podcast because by the very nature of looking at the history of philosophy, we're only looking at texts that have managed to survive. Although, I guess I did talk about recently, I talked about the fact that a lot of interesting medieval texts that have survived are in fact anonymous. So you have a manuscript, but you don't know who it's by. And these tend to get ignored by historians of philosophy. But you've alluded in a lot of your podcast episodes to archaeological evidence, like you were just mentioning coins, for example. So do you get frustrated at the sort of barriers that are thrown up in your way in terms of the poverty of sources available to us? Or is that part of the excitement for you? Well, I mean, it's fun to talk about to a certain degree, but it definitely is frustrating. I do occasionally get people writing in or writing negative reviews saying that they're tired of me not giving them straight facts. And one of my favorite complaints I got was that I don't give enough details on what was happening in Wales during this period. And the way the person wrote it was, I want more information on what happened in Wales during this period. And I wrote back and said, me too. The thing is that we do just not know a lot of things. And I'm really looking forward to getting to a period where things are better documented. But on the other hand, it is fun because it's a bit like a murder mystery. You're constantly just trying to piece things together and tease out facts and figure out what was going on. Well, that seems like as good a note to end on as any for a roundup of discussions about medieval history. So thanks very much, Jamie. Thank you. And thank you very much for listening. That you've just heard me talking to Sharon Eastaw of the History of the Crusades podcast, Robin Pearson of the History of Byzantium podcast, and Jamie Jeffers of the British History podcast. And of course, you can join me again next time to hear more about medieval philosophy here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.