Christians like to deny the Dark Ages existed, and instead reimagine them as a glorious age of knowledge and progress. That’s just not true. I document the material and textual evidence against that in my chapter on the subject in Christianity Is Not Great, for anyone who really wants to explore why that novel thesis doesn’t fly. But a piece of that new mythology is the claim that Christians alone invented or substantively deployed automation and industrial machinery. I’ve written on the broader myth that Christians invented everything before (in Flynn’s Pile of Boners, Lynn White on Horse Stuff, and Did the Environment Kill Rome?). But here I’ll focus on the one specific example I’ve been reflecting on lately: industrial automation.

The Myth

Medievalist and Christian apologist James Hannam wrote back in 2011:

In the field of physics, scholars have now found medieval theories about accelerated motion, the rotation of the earth and inertia embedded in the works of Copernicus and Galileo. Even the so-called “dark ages” from 500 AD to 1000 AD were actually a time of advance after the trough that followed the fall of Rome. Agricultural productivity soared with the use of heavy ploughs, horse collars, crop rotation and watermills, leading to a rapid increase in population.

This is all a bit specious. In fact Roman era astronomers were already discussing “theories about accelerated motion, the rotation of the earth and inertia” and indeed it looks that Copernicus and Galileo and others were getting these ideas from ancient sources. Usually sources that didn’t survive the Middle Ages. We know of them only from second-hand sources that mention them, like Plutarch, who has Menelaus, the most famous astronomer of his own time (c. 100 A.D.), discuss such theories in his semi-fictional dialogue On the Face in the Moon.

Other ancient authors mention the heliocentric and dynamic geocentric theories, both of which posit the rotation of the earth, and principles of inertia and centripetal force, even universal gravitation to explain all planetary motion as well as the lunisolar tides. They were going debates of the age. That something akin to gravitation accelerated all objects in its pull had already been a consensus position since Aristotle, and experimentally studied by Strato, and mathematically modeled by Hipparchus. In treatises Medieval Christians didn’t care to copy. They chose instead to preserve only the work of the anti-inertial static geocentrist Ptolemy (and even that, only just barely, and with minimal comprehension). I discuss all of this, the sources, evidence, scholarship, in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (pp. 184-88; and more on pp. 138-39, 259-60, 369-70).

Of course Copernicus means the 1540s; Galileo the 1600s. Not the Middle Ages. This conflation of periods is a common device in Christian mythmaking today. Where is the dynamic heliocentrism before that? Where any, literally just any, scientific advance before 1300? You know, before the Middle Ages ended. After roughly a thousand years of Christian dominance in the West. There simply is none (Scientist, pp. 535-41). Even what trivial advances were made by Muslims before that date, appear to be recoveries of lost ancient advances, or minor improvements in measurement actually requested by ancient sources (ibid., pp. 17, 98, 152-54, and pages cited in the previous paragraph).

But here I’m talking about technology. The “Dark Ages” were not a significant time of “advance,” but in fact a doomed era of loss and deprivation, to precede a poor, slow, and feeble recovery of lost knowledge and ability. Hannam claims “agricultural productivity soared,” but in fact it remained massively depressed compared with antiquity; Western agroproduction never recovered until the 1300s at the earliest. So even the late Middle Ages did not get us back. It just slowly crawled out of a long deep hole. Once we were out, the Renaissance began. But it took a thousand years to do this. Not a resounding commendation. Had Christianity been at all useful to such a recovery, it should have taken less than a century. Not a millennium.

In truth, the ancient Romans were widely employing “heavy ploughs” (Scientist, p. 229), fully functional horse harness systems (Scientist, pp. 203-04), “crop rotation” and “watermills,” and more (see Scientist, “Index of Ancient Inventions,” pp. 625-27); and because of this, supported a vastly greater population than anything the Dark Ages ever achieved. It wasn’t until the end of High Middle Ages that Western populations regained the same levels under the height of the Roman Empire. All current economic historians of antiquity agree: the West didn’t get back on its ancient footing on any agricultural or industrial measure until after the Middle Ages.

We can see several physical markers of this. Ice cores from Greenland preserve the scale of industrial pollution caused by Roman commerce and industry. Using the proxy of how much lead dust the Empire kicked up into the atmosphere of the planet from mining and smelting, the Dark Ages stand out like a sore thumb:

The extraordinary peak in 50 A.D. reflects Rome’s greatest push toward wealth and expansion. But the average for the ancient world at its height is exhibited by the levels from 150 B.C to 150 A.D. The crisis of the 3rd century (when the Roman Empire was falling apart from continual civil war) saw a decline back to the levels of the Hellenistic empires of 250 B.C. But even that towers over production across the whole of the Dark Ages, when industry fell to levels below a quarter the previous average, and didn’t even significantly recover to a pre-Medieval state of decline until after the year 1000, when the Dark Ages were over. It hadn’t even gotten back to the scale of Roman industrial production by 1450, achieving then (now mid-Renaissance, the Middle Ages long past) only the levels managed during the 3rd century crisis. The Dark Ages were not “a time of advance” that “soared.” It was basically apocalyptic fucktown.

And lest you think maybe one marker isn’t enough to really be sure of that, let’s take a gander at the evidence of sea trade, proxied by the number of shipwrecks surveyed from each period, which represents how many ships were putting to sea, and thus how much trade and commerce was afoot. Since land transport was too inadequate for much more than local distribution, the only way significant trade could occur was by river and sea. And as on average the same percentage of ships sink, the number sunk, will be in ratio to the number sailed. And that, therefore, in ratio to the scale of regional trade. And that, therefore, in ratio to the scale of industry and commerce needed to sustain such trade. Look what happened:

The model is the same. Once again, trade exploded and flourished under the Roman Empire, from about 150 B.C. to 150 A.D. It declined to about half that capacity during the 3rd Century Crisis, around 250 A.D. Fell further the next century. And then hit rock bottom in the Dark Ages, falling to a scale of half even the Crisis-era levels, then a quarter, then an eighth, then almost non-existent. Even by the end of the Dark Ages, trade and commerce were at an eighth that of the Crisis period, a sixteenth that of the average under the Roman Empire. Even by 1450 A.D. trade had not yet recovered to the levels of post-fall Rome. Of course that century began the Age of Exploration that would hugely recover the world economy—albeit on the greased wheels of mass slavery and genocide. But still, not the Middle Ages.

Another proxy is urban population, which we can determine from archaeological field surveys. The inability to sustain cities, or indeed even the lack of need of them, is a strong indication of massive population decline, and massive declines in economic activity and capability. It also proxies to agricultural production; as most agro-product serves the sustaining of cities. It’s literally the fundamental basis of civilization as a development in human history. If you aren’t sustaining cities, you obviously aren’t producing an agro-surplus sufficient to. A massive decline in urbanization, entails a massive decline in civilization itself. And lo:

The line I have colored blue shows the percentage of population living in cities in Italy from the first century to the 19th century. I have marked red part of the line indicating this statistic for the Netherlands, measures for which begin from the 16th century, showing about 15% urbanization, rising to ancient levels again by the 17th century before surpassing them. And yet the Netherlands were unmatched in this rise anywhere else in the West. Note where the Dark Ages are.

The urbanization rate of Italy under the Roman Empire was around 20%. In An Urban Geography of the Roman World, J.W. Hanson finds the same urbanization rate for the whole Roman Empire at its peak, in some provinces even higher (above 20% up to even 30%). But look here. As soon as the Dark Ages hit, in fact already by the 4th century when Christianity took over, that rate precipitously declines, falling below 10% until the Renaissance, with only a slight uptick to about 10% during the High Middle Ages (not the Dark Ages), still full half what it once was. It doesn’t recover to ancient levels until the 14th century. The Renaissance. Worse, if you look at the measure for Europe as a whole, it doesn’t match the Roman era until the end of the 19th century! England, powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution, doesn’t even get to that level until the 18th century.

Think about this. Not only does this match and thus reinforce and confirm the other two markers we just observed—indeed industry collapsed to an eighth Rome’s capacity; trade collapsed to a sixteenth Rome’s capacity—here we have actual measures of population. The Dark Ages could support not even half the population of the ancient Roman Empire. That means tens of millions of people starved to death, and half of all cities fell into ruin or collapsed into mere villages. The horror of that should not escape your comprehension. The people who lived through this, lived through dark times indeed. It’s just foolish to attempt to deny this. A correspondingly massive increase in income disparity may have kept a few centers of wealth and the fatted elite happy, but all around them the world was falling into death and ruin.

No, James Hannam. The Dark Ages did not produce “a rapid increase in population.” It produced it’s horrific decline. From which the West would not recover until the end of the middle ages.

Even the purported recovery of the later middle ages has been exaggerated relative to the actual evidence of productivity and urbanization. Such counts have been corrected by more modern estimates but also typically include Germany, Poland, Russia and Scandinavia, thus creating invalid comparisons to estimates of the population of the Roman Empire which didn’t govern, develop or civilize those regions. Yet by latest estimates that Empire contained nearly 100 million people, half of them “in Europe,” but most of “Europe” under that Medieval definition wasn’t Roman, and much of what was, wasn’t its center of development.

So direct comparisons don’t make sense. North Africa and the Middle East were massively populated under the Empire, along with its European provinces with Mediterranean ports. This is where most of its energy and production was going, where most of its civilization was. Did late Medieval Europe exceed this simply by relocating its centers of population and production? Not that we can tell. All it did was move them. And still not catch up. If Rome was already feeding fifty million people in southern Europe alone, what would its European population have been had it also occupied and developed Germany, Poland, Russia, and Scandinavia? Surely far greater than all measures of Medieval Europe.

So when we look at more applicable measures of comparative success (like trade, productivity, and urbanization), late Medieval Europe didn’t catch up to Ancient Rome at all. It took the Renaissance to do that. A period largely defined by the recovery of ancient pagan values, discoveries, and ideals.

Economic historian Josiah Ober has recently illustrated this fact in The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, by mapping a consumption index over time, multiplying population by how much it produced and consumed beyond subsistence—in other words, how much wealth was generated rather than simply barely scraping by to survive, or even starving out. His resulting graph matches all the others we’ve looked at, and verifies our entire point:

Notably, this is only for the Greek East, not even the Western Dark Ages. And yet look how similarly the East is ruined in respect to the even worse declines of the West. The period marked by the Dark Ages show massive decline in consumption, to a mere fifth of what it was under the Roman Empire (which in turn is half what the Greek world enjoyed before Roman rule). Indeed, it falls to pretty much the same as the previous Dark Ages, so-called for being a dismal era of lost knowledge, desolated regions, and crushed economies between the collapse of Mycenae and the dawn of Archaic and Classical Greece. Notably as well, consumption declines to half already by the time the Christians took over in the 4th century, after the ruin caused by the Crisis of the 3rd century. And for Greece never recovers to even half Roman-era levels before the 19th century. Think about that. And marvel.

The “Machinist” as the Bedrock of Civilization

A fan of mine, a machinist himself, sent me a book by Fred Colvin, akin to an autobiography and in a way a biography of mechanical technology, published in his 70s in 1947. Also a machinist by trade, and famed journalist of the industry who played key roles in modernizing the American military in the World Wars, Colvin lived to nearly a hundred. He died in 1965, having witnessed the human race go from the then-ongoing industrial revolution of the 1880s, built on a foundation of piecemeal and often secretive standards and the raw arts of craftsmen, when bicycles were newfangled and horse and carriage the way of getting about and railroads had just begun unfolding across the nation and powered flight was still a mad fantasy, to the first mechanized wars, airforces and airlines, the automobile age, the electric age, the digital age, the atomic age, and the space age, all the way to the first robotic factories. That guy saw a world of change we can hardly imagine. And we live in quite a world of change ourselves!

Colvin’s book, Sixty Years with Men and Machines, makes a really solid and important point: that all civilization, all industry in particular, only exists because of machinists; mechanics in the broadest sense, the people who actually make the things that make the things. Without fundamental tools, there is no industry, no civilization. Colvin in particular identifies the lathe as one of the most fundamental devices on which civilization ultimately is built. But not exclusively that. Planers, polishers, presses, drills, punches, saws. Everything we actually need to make things. Colvin points out the first ever example in human history is the fist hatchet, the first tool that makes tools, indeed even makes itself.

We take this far too much for granted. And yet think about how any piece of work becomes useful: it has to be shaped, cut, drilled. Almost always, it has to be ground, whether by lathe or plane or elsewise. From cars, to computers, to space ships. All impossible but for fitted parts and templates; thus impossible but for the machinist and his most basic tools. Which may be incredibly sophisticated, yet really are just juiced up ancient tech. Lathes for instance, now come in countless varieties and are of such an incredible construction that would seize any ancient observer with awe (just check out the frickin space age wonder at right). But it’s still just, basically, a lathe.

Unfortunately, no writings on machinist’s tools from antiquity survive. So we can only guess at what varieties of lathe tech they had, from observing the things it produced, among what few things survive for us to tell by. I have an extensive section in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire on technology, that is heavily sourced, so you can find there the leading works on any particular tech that interests you, including ancient tools, even lathes (pp. 200, 216, 227, 243). And indeed, we’ve recovered examples from the Roman period that demonstrate “precision tooling of nested cylinders to within a tenth of a millimeter,” which tells us they had more than mere ordinary lathes available. This will be relevant again in a moment. But it is one of hundreds of examples of how modern Medievalist assessments of ancient technology are often hugely uninformed. And consequently their evaluation of Medieval achievements hugely exaggerated.

Ancient Industrial Automation

It used to be believed the Romans “had” automation, but just didn’t use it significantly. But a massive sea change in the consensus of ancient historians took place in the last two decades that has completely reversed that conclusion. It turns out the Romans extensively deployed and utilized privately capitalized automation in numerous industries, far beyond anything seen in the Dark Ages—which, when we see anything at all, is just a dim reflection of tech the Romans already invented and far more widely used. More often, that tech was forgotten in the Dark Ages, and had to be reinvented in the later Middle Ages. Or even later than that. The Renaissance was more a recovery of countless things lost, both science and technologies, than any progress beyond them.

As I write in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, “the mechanization of larger industries was beginning” and expanding considerably during the Pax Romana:

[A]n inscription of the 2nd century, for example, reports that the city of Beroea in Macedonia was deriving substantial income from a whole array of “watermachines” (hydromêchanai), a term that entails far more than just milling grain. We know the technology had disseminated to other industries. For lumber and stonecutting there is clear evidence the Romans invented and widely disseminated the water-powered sawmill, while in the mining industry there is evidence of the use of water power to mechanize ore-crushing, and water power was certainly employed in early forms of hushing and strip mining.

Rotating mills, turned by animals or men, were also used to grind ores, as well as sand for the glass industry, and there is no particular reason to believe watermills were not thus employed as well. Water-powered mechanical hammers were also in use, in agriculture (for hulling and pounding), and in mining and metalworking, and possibly for fulling and felting as well. And as we noted already, the Romans certainly expanded the use of water power to grind grain. In fact, Kevin Greene confirms “it is now known from archaeological evidence” that watermills “were used extensively in the Roman empire,” with remains recovered from widely diverse locations, from Palestine to Rome to the frontiers of Britain and almost everywhere in between—in fact, the technology was so common that by the 2nd century A.D. there were entire watermiller guilds. And Pliny the Elder reports that by mid-1st century A.D. “most of Italy uses the bare pestle, as well as wheels turned by passing water, and the [ordinary capstan] mill.”

The most spectacular example recovered so far is the massive industrial millery at Barbegal, France, where a Roman aqueduct powered a binary system of sixteen overshot watermills, a facility now known to date from the early empire. There is some evidence the Romans may also have developed tide mills.

The above quotes from Scientist (pp. 225-28), and the footnotes with sources and scholarship are extensive for every point. Wikipedia now even has some good pages on these things (e.g. “List of Ancient Watermills,” “Hierapolis Sawmill,” etc.). “Roman-era turbine watermills also existed,” and there is “evidence of automated hammers in Roman iron works, and possibly a water-powered bellows,” and hints of use “in Roman fulling mills” and “in Roman armor manufacture.” Water power was also employed to power a whole range of automata, from clocks to planetariums to elaborate orreries (e.g. Scientist, p. 146).

There were even watermiller guilds, essentially licensed associations of machinists and engineers specializing in building and maintaining all water-turned machinery, whether for grinding grain, ore, or sand, or sawing wood or stone. And, indeed, water-powered clocks and automata in temples, theatres, baths and museums. We even have the epitaph of one of these mechanics, boasting of his achievements in the field with a carved relief displaying one of his automated sawmills, and comparing himself to the mythical Daedalus.

We’ve also recovered “the metal crankshaft of a Roman sawmill in Switzerland dating to the 2nd century” (Scientist, p. 225). Indeed, the crank and shaft was a widely employed Roman technology, contrary to previous assumptions that these were invented a thousand years later. And here we revisit the significance of machinists at the foundations of civilization: this crankshaft had to be manufactured. And not just made, but turned on a lathe or other apparatus to give it its needed smoothness and consistency of shape and size for effective operation. This is evidence of considerable skill and capability among Roman machinists.

Similarly, the Romans we now know invented the cam, camshaft, and cylinder block. Their wooden cylinder block cam-operated water pumps maintained a continuous flow of considerable volume. For which the holes had to be bored. Machinists. The cylinders had to be precision made, turned, and fitted. Machinists. All the parts of the cam, shaft, and lever apparatus had to be made, dressed, punched, and fitted. Machinists. And from continual use, regular repairs would be needed, and parts replaced. Machinists. All just for this one thing. That was employed all over the empire. And is yet just one variety of pump technology among a great plethora of pumps and pump types the Romans built and used for every purpose.

Finally, I mentioned the Barbegal millery. This exemplifies a lot that goes wrong when Medievalists try to fabricate triumphal narratives for the in-fact-actually-shitty Dark Ages. You’ll still read from some of them the claim that (if they even are aware this example exists at all) the Barbegal facility was a desperate government-funded project for feeding the military built in the 4th century and thus not representative of the High Roman Empire. That’s all now known to be false.

The Barbegal factory is now firmly dated to the 2nd century. And is but one now of many such facilities of that era known. And it’s confirmed to have been a private, capital-funded venture. Which is remarkable for its scale. An artist’s reproduction heads this article. Not only did it operate sixteen enormous millstones for grinding grain into flour, producing 25 tons of product a day, but an entire aqueduct extension and bypass was built solely to supply this factory with power. Latest analysis suggests it was most likely owned and operated by investors dominating the market for hardtack, which would be sold to denizens supplying the diverse shipping industry. In other words, it was built not out of necessity (such as to feed a local town), but to make money.

Note that the Middle Ages produced nothing like this scale of application of water power, in numbers or areas of use. Until just before the Renaissance, the 13th century and later. (Contrary to what is commonly claimed, the “Domesday Book” of the 11th century never mentions a single watermill. Excess conjecture as to which mills it lists are water powered has instead generated an absurdly high number no more likely to be congruent with reality then any more than in antiquity.)

Conclusion

Be extremely cautious whenever you hear triumphalist revisionism of the Middle Ages, especially by Christian apologists and their like. It is almost always factually inaccurate, often wildly. So here is a reminder, and above an example, of how to keep your eye on common tactics.

They will play a dodgy shell game by conflating historical periods—things that actually happened in the Renaissance inexplicably become things that happened in the Middle Ages; and things that happened in the High Middle Ages become things that happened in the Dark Ages. They will also sometimes get facts wrong, about what actually was done, said, or accomplished in the Medieval period, or by whom. But most commonly they will be completely oblivious to, or even wildly wrong about, what the ancient Greco-Roman civilization had done, said, or accomplished in the first place. Often using, as is often the case in Christian apologetics, wildly obsolete scholarship, that doesn’t reflect current knowledge or consensus—often, that didn’t reflect known facts even in the half century or so ago when it was written.

It’s by this last device most commonly that shady revisionists will invent a narrative whereby Christendom invented everything awesome…that in fact had already been invented, and done better, and more widely used, by pagans long before. Indeed, often, a technology was forgotten in the Dark Ages, and had to be reinvented a thousand years later. Which is one of the many reasons we call them the Dark Ages. How so much was lost, in tech and knowledge, in technique and ability. But also how much civilization collapsed and declined, and how long it remained in dismal ruin compared to where it once was. How many tens of millions horribly went to their graves because of it, whole populations that couldn’t recover, not even after hundreds of years of misery under the heel of a shrunken, wealth-hoarding elite. Until finally something changed. And that change was not “discovering Christianity.”