![]() They looked outside themselves and saw barbarism. These modern thinkers used the fiction of Europe and the invented concept of “Western Civilization” as a thread to tie the modern world together. ![]() ![]() They found the proto-nations of the Middle Ages useful as a past to point to for their modern origins, pointing to both medieval connections to Greece and Rome and the independence and distinct traditions of medieval polities. Later, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imperialist European powers and their intellectuals sought a history for their new world order to justify and explain why whiteness-a modern idea, albeit with medieval roots-justified their domination of the world. What is clear is that people in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, frustrated with the political chaos and warfare of their ugly era, decided to draw nostalgic links to the worlds of ancient Rome and Greece, using the distant past to sever their connection to the previous thousand years of history. The peoples, the plague, the art, the governments, and the wars all belong to the medieval world. The French Revolution was possible only because medieval people experimented with democratic representation, oftentimes at a small scale, and had a long history of anti-authoritarian revolt. The Ottoman Turks emerged out of generations-long interactions between steppe and city, a people fully steeped in an intellectual culture that shuttled competing interpretations of both scripture and Aristotle from Persia to Iberia, a people carrying the same luxury goods and bacteria across regions. The plague arrived because of connections between Asia and Europe that had been established across centuries. Ultimately, none of these moments are satisfactory.
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