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The lies that built the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages have long been portrayed as an era of obscurantism, populated by millenarian terrors, lords claiming the ius primae noctis, and men who believed in a flat Earth. Yet none of these three images corresponds to historical reality. The "terrors of the year 1000" never existed: the Church had already interpreted the thousand years of the Apocalypse as a symbol, not as a prophetic date, and the year 1000 passed like any other. The ius primae noctis was never a recognised right: no medieval sources attest to it, and it was only born centuries later as a political accusation against the aristocracy. Finally, the Earth was known to be spherical since antiquity: the myth of the flat Earth in the Middle Ages was a nineteenth-century invention. These legends have survived because they tell us a simple and reassuring story: we are light, they were darkness. But real history is always more complex and nuanced, and requires the courage to look it in the face.
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