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Jul. 22nd, 2016 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have been reading more about medieval history.
England really is a tiny little backwater of history for a really long time.
And fantasy history is really really really too thin. Oversimplified. Small.
There were so many more political entities around and they took bites out of each other and decided which of their neighbours was technically king and then ignored them and kept grinding up against each other and running off to the pope to see who Christ liked best while also trying to make the church into a branch of the secular government and appointing their own bishops.
There were so many more major religions than fantasy usually bothers with.
There were giant political divisions between people that said Christ was basically a god and people that said Christ was basically a dude.
East and West zoomed off in different directions partly because of the migration routes of different tribes that picked different sides in the Christianities battle, or didn't pick Christian at all.
The whole idea of the Pope being the top dude religiously applied only to one side, and the other thought the Emperor was the man, which obviously gave everyone ideas.
And then there were Muslims, who I just learned more about in a chapter than I ever had before, and wow were their early years wild.
And the pagan religions the montheisms replaced had so many gods. I mean I read a thing complaining players can never keep track of more than a handful, but there were 360 pagan idols hanging out in the same big place until Muslims got annoyed at them and kicked them all out.
Nobody sits down and invents 360 gods and the tribes to go with them.
Vikings changed the world by building boats nippy enough to go up rivers and then just going up every river they saw to see what they could plunder. And maybe settling down. And building trade empires.
And then there's people off the edges of the map that were nonetheless hugely influential, and events we have to infer mostly because everyone from over thataway suddenly tried to move in thisaway, which was inconvenient to those not wanting to be horribly killed to make room.
Fantasy, even the biggest grandest sort I've ever read, is really weak soup compared to all this all.
And they all spoke different languages, except when they didn't, which was mostly because of Rome and religion. They had to make treaties in different languages and declare them both at once so armies knew what they said.
And if you take monotheism out and don't replace it with an obvious clone you don't get anything even vaguely close to western medieval history. Everything after the Roman Empire caught Christianity is just so hugely influenced by monotheism grinding everyone else down.
Also, plague and famine seem a lot more influential than war. Narratively unsatisfying, but, far more powerful. They'd just sweep through and be the end of everything every few centuries, and grinding misery many of the times between.
I don't think modern readers/writers really grok this. There's so few people in the familiar geography, and the sheer scarcity does things to the ability to specialise and learn. Stratification of society has a lot to do with trying to get enough skills to go around. Oh, and society needs soldiers to protect them against societies that need soldiers, and therefore make all the bonuses of life come from beating up the other guy. Things I've said before about how AD&D encourages people to behave through having murder be the main mechanism for XP? See the middle ages. Once you make the most violent people the richest, stuff happens in a really ongoing way.
But when the power is in the hands of the church you also get things going wonky because of a basic human desire to make sure their kids are well taken care of. The idea that church people shouldn't have kids might have some serious theological underpinnings, but it has some practical roots in trying to make sure the secular administration doesn't end up outclassed. Or indeed outnumbered. And I just finished reading a bit about how they sold high office, so the boss people were the richest applicants and so the richest were boss and could keep raising the price and reaping the rewards. Not very Christian, given the repeated emphasis on being poor to get into heaven, but once power, money, and rather a lot of land was involved, well. Things happen. And sometimes those things involve large armies, because the church held lands also had feudal/vassal obligations to provide soldiers in return for their fief, sometimes.
The idea of the seperation of church and state is an absolute nonsense in earlier eras. They were right in the middle of power.
Also, any fantasy story that says the status quo holds steady for thousands of years? Is not playing in the realm of plausibility.
Given any hundred year stretch you see major churn in political systems, let alone political entities and the rulers thereof, much of it driven as much by changes in technology as by ideology and the plague/famine/war events. Water wheels and windmills and improvements thereof made such a huge difference. Three field crop rotation. Ploughs. Knowing how to attach horses to things without choking them (which took a depressingly long number of centuries, ugh). And it all changes quick quick quick, in a big feedback loop where every agricultural change makes changes in how many men in armour there might be wandering around.
It is glorious. Way more fun than fantasy books today.
Also the book I'm reading keeps on having women in it. As if we've always been there. Wonder of wonders.
But I can see why inventing anything even vaguely in its league is a teensy tiny bit challenging. Like, everything is connected, sometimes globally, and things that happened a thousand years ago can still get people moving, and it's just... way bigger than any one story is going to cover.
But it's still weird and frustrating when they get the demographics wrong and have some epic stagnation to make it mythic.
History is fun to learn when I find the right books though.
England really is a tiny little backwater of history for a really long time.
And fantasy history is really really really too thin. Oversimplified. Small.
There were so many more political entities around and they took bites out of each other and decided which of their neighbours was technically king and then ignored them and kept grinding up against each other and running off to the pope to see who Christ liked best while also trying to make the church into a branch of the secular government and appointing their own bishops.
There were so many more major religions than fantasy usually bothers with.
There were giant political divisions between people that said Christ was basically a god and people that said Christ was basically a dude.
East and West zoomed off in different directions partly because of the migration routes of different tribes that picked different sides in the Christianities battle, or didn't pick Christian at all.
The whole idea of the Pope being the top dude religiously applied only to one side, and the other thought the Emperor was the man, which obviously gave everyone ideas.
And then there were Muslims, who I just learned more about in a chapter than I ever had before, and wow were their early years wild.
And the pagan religions the montheisms replaced had so many gods. I mean I read a thing complaining players can never keep track of more than a handful, but there were 360 pagan idols hanging out in the same big place until Muslims got annoyed at them and kicked them all out.
Nobody sits down and invents 360 gods and the tribes to go with them.
Vikings changed the world by building boats nippy enough to go up rivers and then just going up every river they saw to see what they could plunder. And maybe settling down. And building trade empires.
And then there's people off the edges of the map that were nonetheless hugely influential, and events we have to infer mostly because everyone from over thataway suddenly tried to move in thisaway, which was inconvenient to those not wanting to be horribly killed to make room.
Fantasy, even the biggest grandest sort I've ever read, is really weak soup compared to all this all.
And they all spoke different languages, except when they didn't, which was mostly because of Rome and religion. They had to make treaties in different languages and declare them both at once so armies knew what they said.
And if you take monotheism out and don't replace it with an obvious clone you don't get anything even vaguely close to western medieval history. Everything after the Roman Empire caught Christianity is just so hugely influenced by monotheism grinding everyone else down.
Also, plague and famine seem a lot more influential than war. Narratively unsatisfying, but, far more powerful. They'd just sweep through and be the end of everything every few centuries, and grinding misery many of the times between.
I don't think modern readers/writers really grok this. There's so few people in the familiar geography, and the sheer scarcity does things to the ability to specialise and learn. Stratification of society has a lot to do with trying to get enough skills to go around. Oh, and society needs soldiers to protect them against societies that need soldiers, and therefore make all the bonuses of life come from beating up the other guy. Things I've said before about how AD&D encourages people to behave through having murder be the main mechanism for XP? See the middle ages. Once you make the most violent people the richest, stuff happens in a really ongoing way.
But when the power is in the hands of the church you also get things going wonky because of a basic human desire to make sure their kids are well taken care of. The idea that church people shouldn't have kids might have some serious theological underpinnings, but it has some practical roots in trying to make sure the secular administration doesn't end up outclassed. Or indeed outnumbered. And I just finished reading a bit about how they sold high office, so the boss people were the richest applicants and so the richest were boss and could keep raising the price and reaping the rewards. Not very Christian, given the repeated emphasis on being poor to get into heaven, but once power, money, and rather a lot of land was involved, well. Things happen. And sometimes those things involve large armies, because the church held lands also had feudal/vassal obligations to provide soldiers in return for their fief, sometimes.
The idea of the seperation of church and state is an absolute nonsense in earlier eras. They were right in the middle of power.
Also, any fantasy story that says the status quo holds steady for thousands of years? Is not playing in the realm of plausibility.
Given any hundred year stretch you see major churn in political systems, let alone political entities and the rulers thereof, much of it driven as much by changes in technology as by ideology and the plague/famine/war events. Water wheels and windmills and improvements thereof made such a huge difference. Three field crop rotation. Ploughs. Knowing how to attach horses to things without choking them (which took a depressingly long number of centuries, ugh). And it all changes quick quick quick, in a big feedback loop where every agricultural change makes changes in how many men in armour there might be wandering around.
It is glorious. Way more fun than fantasy books today.
Also the book I'm reading keeps on having women in it. As if we've always been there. Wonder of wonders.
But I can see why inventing anything even vaguely in its league is a teensy tiny bit challenging. Like, everything is connected, sometimes globally, and things that happened a thousand years ago can still get people moving, and it's just... way bigger than any one story is going to cover.
But it's still weird and frustrating when they get the demographics wrong and have some epic stagnation to make it mythic.
History is fun to learn when I find the right books though.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-23 09:29 pm (UTC)May I ask what book you're reading?
no subject
Date: 2016-07-24 12:40 pm (UTC)by Kay Slocum
It covers a whole lot more geography than I'm used to seeing, and has further reading sections, which is so useful.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-24 05:59 am (UTC)People apply this to real life too. Just recently, I was told that two people who lived in different time zones three generations apart were "contemporaries". It's like common sense flies out the window when we're talking about the past. We all know that we're not that much like great-grandma, but 2,000 years ago great-grandma might as well have been your twin.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-24 12:38 pm (UTC)