“Middle Ages began at four?” asked Sophie, feeling stupid but no longer
nervous.
“About four o’clock, yes. And then it was five and six and seven. But it was as
if time stood still. And it got to be eight and nine and ten. But it was still the Middle
Ages, you see. Time to get up to a new day, you may think. Yes, I see what you mean.
But it is still Sunday, one long endless row of Sundays. And it got to be eleven and
twelve and thirteen. This was the period we call the High Gothic, when the great
cathedrals of Europe were built. And then, some time around fourteen hours, at two in
the afternoon, a cock crowed—and the Middle Ages began to ebb away.”
“So the Middle Ages lasted for ten hours then,” said Sophie. Alberto thrust his
head forward out of the brown monk’s cowl and surveyed his congregation, which
consisted of a fourteen-year-old girl.
“If each hour was a hundred years, yes. We can pretend that Jesus was born at
midnight. Paul began his missionary journeys just before half past one in the morning
and died in Rome a quarter of an hour later. Around three in the morning the Christian
church was more or less banned, but by A.D. 313 it was an accepted religion in the
Roman Empire. That was in the reign of the Emperor Constantine. The holy emperor
himself was first baptized on his deathbed many years later. From the year 380
Christianity was the official religion throughout the entire Roman Empire.”
“Didn’t the Roman Empire fall?”
“It was just beginning to crumble. We are standing before one of the greatest
changes in the history of culture. Rome in the fourth century was being threatened
both by barbarians pressing in from the north and by disintegration from within. In
A.D. 330 Constantine the Great moved the capital of the Empire from Rome to
Constantinople, the city he had founded at the approach to the Black Sea. Many
people considered the new city the “second Rome.” In 395 the Roman Empire was
divided in two—a Western Empire with Rome as its center, and an Eastern Empire
with the new city of Constantinople as its capital. Rome was plundered by barbarians
in 410, and in 476 the whole of the Western Empire was destroyed. The Eastern
Empire continued to exist as a state right up until 1453 when the Turks conquered
Constantinople.”
“And its name got changed to Istanbul?”
“That’s right! Istanbul is its latest name. Another date we should notice is 529.
That was the year when the church closed Plato’s Academy in Athens. In the same
year, the Benedictine order, the first of the great monastic orders, was founded. The
year 529 thus became a symbol of the way the Christian Church put the lid on Greek
philosophy. From then on, monasteries had the monopoly of education, reflection, and
meditation. The clock was ticking toward half past five ...”
Sophie saw what Alberto meant by all these times. Midnight was 0, one o’clock
was 100 years after Christ, six o’clock was 600 years after Christ, and 14 hours was
1,400 years after Christ...
Alberto continued: “The Middle Ages actually means the period between two
other epochs. The expression arose during the Renaissance. The Dark Ages, as they
were also called, were seen then as one interminable thousand-year-long night which
had settled over Europe between antiquity and the Renaissance. The word ‘medieval’
is used negatively nowadays about anything that is over-authoritative and inflexible.
But many historians now consider the Middle Ages to have been a thousand-year
period of germination and growth. The school system, for instance, was developed in
the Middle Ages. The first convent schools were opened quite early on in the period,
and cathedral schools followed in the twelfth century. Around the year 1200 the first