Quick Hits on a Permeable Medieval Europe
Reflecting on a "Crusader" Sword and Ivory in Early Medieval England
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
For a while, we had a regular column at Smithsonian Magazine. There, we’d try to highlight new discoveries related to the (expansively-defined) European Middle Ages; these could include new books, archeological discoveries, or even how history can help us better navigate pop culture medievalism.
In November 2021, we published a piece commenting on the discovery of a sword off the coast of Israel that quickly gained international attention. The discovery was fantastic but it was, problematically, hailed as a “crusader” sword, which revealed we thought an unfortunate assumption about who could have owned this particular sword and what they were doing in the region. As we said at the time,
Instead of labeling all potentially relevant finds “Crusader,” historians must develop terminology that accurately reflects the people who inhabited the Middle East around the 12th century. A potential alternative is “Frankish,” which appears routinely in medieval Arabic sources and can be a useful “generalized term for [medieval] Europeans,” according to [Prof. Stephennie] Mulder.
…[This matters because] an item like a sword has value. It’s forged with the intention of being passed from hand to hand, taken as plunder, given as a gift or handed down to heirs. In the Middle Ages as a whole, but perhaps especially in this corner of the Mediterranean, objects, people and ideas moved across borders all the time. Let’s celebrate the recovery of this artifact, study it, learn what we can and let it speak to us. Let’s not speak on the past’s behalf with our own modern preconceptions, nor lock in the sword’s identity as a symbol of religious violence. It’s a medieval sword, perhaps of Frankish design. We’ll know more about it soon. For now, let that be enough.
And now we do indeed know more.
Just today, we were contacted by one of the researchers at the Israel Antiquities Authority who took seriously our comments and incorporated them into a new peer-reviewed article. It does some work to push back against the immediate association of the sword with the term “crusader” - in large part because of the assumptions that underlie such a term in both the popular and academic imaginations. The article, as a PDF, is free to read, so go have a look.
The other interesting thing that we found during our internet scrolling today was the report of new scientific testing on an archeological site near the eastern coast of England, and dating from ca. 500 CE.
Graves from England in this period - the supposed “darkest of the dark ages” - have often been found to contain large, ivory rings. Mostly coming from women’s graves, and much too large for fingers, scholars now think they were bag rings, intended to be “tied around the waist and held bags that functioned as pockets, holding whatever small objects the women had to hand.”
This has all been known.
What’s new is that, thanks to collaboration across disciplines, we now know which ivory was used in some of these rings. And it came from very far (about 4,000 miles) away because the ivory on these rings derived from African elephants, likely originating in the Kingdom of Aksum (on the coast of the Arabian Sea, part of modern Ethiopia). And as such, the “finding indicates a trading network brought the objects from eastern Africa and across post-Roman Europe to England — perhaps one of the longest trade route distances known from that time.” Read the full research article here.
As we also wrote about in Smithsonian, the Christian Ethiopic kingdom is often grossly misunderstood. So too are the continued contacts among early medieval England (as well as the rest of Europe), the Mediterranean, and even beyond. These rings, for example, were almost certainly carved in Aksum and then traded north before reaching England - and this trade continued for at least 100 or more years, across the supposed (but incorrect) “Fall of Rome.”
In both of these cases, we see a permeable medieval Europe - one that was its own thing, in a way, but that never stopped thinking about and engaging with a world beyond its borders. It’s fascinating and complex and one we know so very much about, even as we’re learning more.
There’s been a lot of pushback from a set of people really invested in the idea that there was a “Dark Ages.” We countered that recently (as well as in our book) by saying there were indeed times when life was hard for a greater or lesser percentage of people in a particular time and place, but when you do the reading, you never stop finding humans doing human things: making art, crossing borders, loving each other, killing each other, etc. All the things! When you escape the gravity well of “Dark Ages” or “Fall of Rome,” your eyes are opened to all we can know about the period.
Here, we find ivory on the move and swords falling into the ocean. Please keep doing the reading with us.
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