In 1992, historian and biographer William Manchester published a powerful, if brief, popular history of medieval Europe and how a continent then so steeped in violence both gratuitous and religious — the two often poisonously blended — was able slowly to enter a new phase, the Renaissance, that would mark the beginning of widespread enlightened thinking. His book’s title, A World Lit Only by Fire, seemed to suggest the literal darkness in which Europe dwelled, torches and bonfires (candles among nobles) the only illumination until gas lighting emerged wholesale in the nineteenth century.
But that was not the light to which Manchester referred. Instead, his fire was that lit around hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of heretics and those deemed socially unwanted, who were burned alive at stakes or on pyres heaped up throughout the homicidal continent. For Manchester, medieval Europe, “pitiless” and “unlovely” in the extreme, was “a mélange of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness.”
Strong, eloquent words intended to encapsulate an ugly time that, incredibly, lasted nearly a millennium.
Those reading Manchester now might breathe a sigh of relief. Despite huge world wars, one after another, the world of today, nestled in the anti-medieval twenty-first century, has no stakes or bonfires and civil life largely prevails in a world determined never to revisit the widespread darkness of another, and illiterate, time.
But there are holes in this tapestry of relief. Large holes, in fact, but not the kind today’s Europe has much interest in dwelling on. To do so would ruin an image of man entirely rid of medieval cobwebs.
Until very recently, Syria was a panoply of lawlessness, mindlessness, corruption, and murder. All of which enlightened Europe watched with a sigh, hoping the worst would lift, not out of concern for Syria’s medieval regime but because its awfulness was spilling non-Christian refugees into the still-biased Western continent, parts of which still seem to honor the spirit of the Crusades.
Further south, well into the terrain of Conrad’s latter-day heart of darkness, lies Sudan. Once the joint property of Egypt and England, it has for seventy years been left on its own, over time becoming the capital of modern medievalism.
It is torn asunder by civil wars pitting tribes and political organizations against one another, spurring violence, the nation’s common currency. Sudan is burdened also by drought and famine that aid agencies are unable to control. Random killing is commonplace, as is pillaging, looting, rape, and destruction, sometimes sudden, of whole villages. Here is Manchester’s pitilessness in full scope. Mindlessness also.
Europe, confronted with a version of itself confined to the ancient, can do little more than send symbolic care packages, most of which are hijacked. Since Sudan is also home to Islamic extremist groups, the prevailing if unstated European view has much in common with the phrase, “Let them annihilate each other.” Better Islamists fight it out in Africa than migrate north.
Sudan is a sliver of the Dark Ages all choose to ignore — or explain away as longstanding African chaos. The white man’s burden is now his sin of omission.
Now, it takes merely an image and a bounty to condemn the unwanted to death.
There is also Yemen, dissolute and broken, its plight once again ignored because it is a haven for armed Islamists ready to fire rockets at Israel or send drones to upend shipping in the Red Sea. So many are the factions and subfactions that no one dares do anything but bomb them. Yet again, this is Manchester territory. Only the fiery stakes are missing, but not by much. Now, it takes merely an image and a bounty to condemn the unwanted to death.
There are more such states, all in in the hinterlands, none a threat to Europe’s enlightened vision of itself and its future.
Smugness is a useful tool when most of the worst of things is far away. Until, as happened to the Roman Empire, the new Huns come calling.