Turnings before year 1435?

[nguyenivy]

I notice when looking at the table on Wikipedia about the various Turnings & Saeculua, the 1st listed Saeculum starts with a 3rd Turning. Did S&H simply didn't study further back to figure out any prior Turnings, or had to have a cut-off somewhere & 1435 was a good place for them? Maybe it made no sense to derive prior Turnings due to the 100 Years' War?

[pbrower2a]

It's been done. Howe and Strauss suggested such with some of the best-known events of history and religion such as the Trojan War (at least as recorded in the Iliad and Odyssey) and the Exodus from Egypt. They notice that the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad are definitely Idealist types and that Alexander was clearly a Civic type.

The problem is that populations in western Europe were small before the early Renaissance., and most of the achievements are slight. I would guess that the Black Death was a really-nasty Crisis Era. Byzantine cycles?  Even at that, just see what I wrote about the demise of the Byzantine Empire  in a comment page on the topic in Wikipedia:

Pardon the self-praise, but someone had to write this, and I did.

Not to trivialize the significance of the incorporation of what had been a great city of one civilization into another by force...


Not to trivialize the significance of the incorporation of what had been a great city of one civilization into another by force...

It would seem that toward its last years, the Byzantine Empire was no longer a going concern. Contemporary sources must have seen the fall of Constantinople as a shocking event due to the earlier reputation of the Byzantine Empire as an economic and military power, but by 1453 it was at most a city-state and at that practically a remnant of one. Modern scholarship recognizes the demographic realities of Constantinople in its last days the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Its fall was by then a certainty. In view of the declining population and worsening conditions of its inhabitants its intellectual life could not have sustained what it had.

As an intellectual center it was by then at most a relic. Byzantine culture had been taken to Russia and Italy, among other places. Much of the literature of Byzantium was copies, and a few intellectual refugees could not have brought all of it. Byzantine learning had shaped late-medieval intellectual activity in most of Europe long before 1453.

The fall of Constantinople did not itself so cut off the east-west trade between Europe and the Far East as used to be claimed. Columbus' and later voyages to the New World and voyages of Portuguese sailors around the Cape of Good Hope being caused by the Turks controlling the east-west trade routes shows a post hoc fallacy. First, were the contention true, then east-west trade between the Far East and western Europe would have ended long beforehand. Second, the Turks were themselves avid traders, and a country generally sympathetic to Turkey (like Poland or France) would have never noticed a difference. Already surrounded by the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople would have been an inconvenient way-station for any long-distance trade long before 1453. Third, the Ottoman Empire never controlled the Silk Road that lay far to the north of Turkey, an expensive portage between Europe and China whose cost no matter who controlled it made explorations of the New World and southern seas attractive. Pbrower2a (talk) 04:41, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

I agree.DragonTiger23 (talk) 17:19, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

The importance of the event that, all things considered, the Fall of Constantinople was also the Fall of the Roman Empire. Granted we call it the "Byzantine" Empire, but in reality, it was the Roman Empire. And Constantinople was the moment that the great world changing Empire ceased to be. I would call it significant. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.195.212.149 (talk) 06:26, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

The Turks could not cut off trade through the Bosporus because the Genoese controlled the sea and trade routes. For a hundred years before 1453, most of the trade revenues were going through Pera (87%), rather than Constantinople. The Turks had at that time (1453) a rather poor naval fleet, as shown in the sea battle between a few Genoese supply ships, verses dozens of Turkish warships during the siege. I wasn't until Mehmed built the Rumeli Hisari that he could cut the shipping route through the Bosporus by cannon fire. After the fall, Mehmed did cut the route on occasion, sometimes just to provide the point, but when passage was allowed, a heavy toll was placed greatly increasing the cost of goods. This gave western Europeans the incentive to find an alternate route to the Far East as a large part of their tax revenues were collected from the spice/silk trades. Its all in the economics... Dinkytown talk 08:41, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

European explorers eventually tried to reach India and China through other means because of their loss of Constantinople and Anatolia. The Conquering of Constantinople had an immense effect. 1907AbsoluTurk (talk) 09:31, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Oversimplistic explanation. The cheapest means of transportation have typically been by sea, followed by rivers and canals. The more predominantly by sea a trade route is (barring piracy) the less expensive it is. The most economical trade route between India and most of of Europe remains from the eastern Mediterranean, through the Suez isthmus (possibly using the Nile delta), the seas around Arabia (Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and the Arabian Sea) to India. Any land portage is far more expensive than a sea passage of similar length. Today of course that route includes the Suez Canal. This is a major shipping lane today, and it is likely one that the Romans knew well. In the late 15th century the Turks never controlled any part of the land route. The Mamluks rulers of Egypt did throughout that time. If they stopped the transshipment of goods through their territory, then they and not the Ottoman Turks are to be named as the ones who caused Europeans to seek to go East by going West. Second-best was through what are now Syria and Iraq into the Persian Gulf, then into the Arabian Sea. The Turks at most cut off the Black Sea as an approach to the Silk Road, always an expensive way across a huge land mass, and they did so even when Constantinople was still a tiny Greek city-state. Barring a war, few powers stop a lucrative trade that they can tax or otherwise profit from.

Christopher Columbus sought an all-water route to the rich lands of the Far East, as did Vasco Da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, and Henry Hudson. Costs dictate the routes used in transportation, and profits drive trade. Columbus simply failed to recognize how far the far East was from Spain and of course that there were two continents were in the way. As an impediment to trade between Christian Europe and either India or China, the Fall of Constantinople is vastly overrated. Constantinople falling or not, the Spanish and Portuguese would have been seeking new trade routes through the Atlantic either around Africa or directly west to China. Pbrower2a (talk) 21:50, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

[Anthony '58]

John Wycliffe and Jan Hus are a pretty good argument that an "Awakening" preceded the "Retreat From Europe" that S&H mentioned in "The Fourth Turning."

[pbrower2a]

(11-21-2021, 12:29 PM)Anthony Wrote: John Wycliffe and Jan Hus are a pretty good argument that an "Awakening" preceded the "Retreat From Europe" that S&H mentioned in "The Fourth Turning."

They weren't as effective as Luther, Calvin, Knox, Zwingli... Luther survived to be a bitter old man, and Hus was burned at the stake. I think of how different the world would be had Hus succeeded. Just imagine Czech as a language that people study because far more people use it. as in Saxony, Thuringen and Silesia (fewer people identify as Germans, which as history shows, might have been a good thing)**, and because it is essential to understand most fully the official doctrines of the Moravian Brethren which, had Hus been more effective, might be the dominant manifestation of Protestant Christianity. Maybe Hus didn't have as much access to the printing press as did Luther and Calvin. 

The generational theory depends upon examples, and only after populations recovered from the Black Death can one speak of sizable generations. In musical composition, every generation from the Glorious to at least GI's except perhaps the Awakening has either one master composer who dominates his generation (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven)  or multiple masters (the Gilded have Bruckner, Smetana, Brahms, Saint-Saens, Bizet, Dvorak, and Tchaikovsky). If you wonder about later generations, then the Silent and later composers have yet to get their reputations settled. Mahler took about fifty years after his death to get the recognition that he merits.

Not until the Renaissance do Western painting and sculpture start to show the standards of professional execution that people ignore only if incompetent*. Artists applied the innovation of perspective that applies as much to Impressionism as to the High Renaissance of Italian and Dutch masters. (I can see similarities between the paintings of the High Renaissance and Impressionism, and the most obvious difference is between the dark backgrounds of Renaissance painters and the lighter backgrounds of Impressionist painters. Paint in Michigan, and you will have plenty of gray skies. Leonardo was as much an engineer as a painter, and know well that engineering and architectural drawings can be quite sophisticated. With perspective in art came more sophisticated depictions of the Heavens and of course analytic geometry. People who can recognize parabolic motion of objects such as fireworks (something supposedly difficult for many painters, but as a relative novice I get them) can better understand the physics of motion under the influence of gravity.

Medieval art is mostly a disappointment. It is terribly unprofessional, with few exceptions. 

*It might be possible to have art with multiple vanishing points, which would be a serious violation of norms. Failure to recognize perspective can show in:

• details of distant objects just as clear as those closest to the front
  
• failure to recognize the shrinking of objects with distance
  
• lacking a vanishing point
  
• colors not fading and blurring in the distance
  

I know, I know, I know. Religious sensibilities mattered more than anything else, so of course Jesus is taller than the tallest NBA star (unless an infant with the Virgin Mary).  Devotion is no excuse for incompetent art, music, or poetry. 

**Am I self-hating German-American? No. I hate Nazis, and it is impossible to be a good person without hating Nazis, especially for what they did to people with much in common with me for culture and morals. You can guess who those people are.

[Eric the Green]

I would argue that medieval art in Europe was magnificent. Just because it was not realistic in its portrayals of the human figure, or didn't follow the Renaissance invention of perspective, is no mark against it. For them, placing a picture according to a human viewpoint was less significant than portraying the glory of God and the dedicated devotion and compassion of saints. The architecture of the Romanesque and Gothic eras is unmatched in history. Stained glass and sculpture were tops by the 12-13th century. Much great art on smaller scales was being created in the 10th century renaissance. Prosperity was widespread in the medieval era that started at that time, and the scale and frenzy of construction was tremendous. Religious devotion was impressive and elevated the people. Although marred by cruelty, poverty and tyranny, and by narrow pre-scientific views, in many ways the Medieval civilization of circa 10th to 15th century was superior to that which succeeded it. Even the tyrants were less powerful in the feudal, religious medieval era than in the aristocratic Age of Kings that followed.

That said however, marking off saecula in this era is less accurate and harder to trace. That's because the scale and population of civilization, and the pace of changes to it, were too slow and too small. Even in the Renaissance and Baroque era the saeculum turned more slowly than it did from the 18th century onward. That's because the seaculum depends on generation gaps and children not following in their parents' footsteps. Napoleon called it "careers open to talent." By the 18th and 19th centuries people no longer did what their parents did as often as before, and they were more aware of their nation and not just of their town and their religious district. Class mobility increased. When change is too slow, when the number of people actually allowed to participate in political decisions is too small, a saeculum is harder to trace.

Unprofessional?





This art historian's portrayal of medieval art and civilization is well worth viewing:




In the ancient classical world, there was change and participation at least on the same scale as in the Renaissance/Baroque era. That's why the Romans invented the whole concept of the saeculum and gave it the name of a 100-year period. Now in our time, since the Age of Revolution, the people change faster and have more voice, and there are many more people who can participate. So, this "hurricane" of progress, as I call it, has speeded up to 82-84 years long.

[pbrower2a]

The architecture of the cathedrals is of course magnificent (expressions of piety, architectural innovation, civic pride), and there are some fine paintings. Let's not forget the illustrated books and the stained-glass windows (intended to teach as a visual aid to the overwhelming majority of illiterate people. I associate the Middle Ages with juvenile incompetence, barbarous cruelty, mass ignorance, and grinding poverty with few people seeing anything wrong. Ro be sure there was some isolated intellectual life and capitalist commerce was taking root.

It is not until Gutenberg invented the printing press that people could pass down expertise easily and without a personal connection. With printed books, scholars in Krakow could more easily discover what was going on in Cambridge or Cremona. The printing press may have been the one invention that changed everything as nothing else could. Other technologies have since made things more efficient or allowed people to do what they had been doing before to do more of it. Electric lights, for example, allowed people to do work when natural lighting or even candles were inadequate. Radio allows people to disseminate sound instantly instead of relying upon the dissemination of sound recordings by land or sea transport.