The 21st century is looking more and more like the 11th in Europe, a continent that is regressing in many aspects to the Middle Ages, falling into a darkness only altered by some attempts at Renaissance.
First it was the Covid pandemic, becoming the plague of this new Middle Ages. The riots that, for one reason or another, periodically shake European cities have also returned. Chaos has engulfed France again this week, with hundreds of arrests and looting across the country. A spark is enough for the bonfire to light up, just like in the Middle Ages with the Grande Jacquerie.
Inequalities grow and discomfort, too. The Italians of medieval times even had two names to designate it and that could be used today: the popolo grasso in front of the popolo minute, that is, the fat and rich, in front of the poor and skinnier.
In parallel, another symptom of the medievalization of contemporary Europe has been shown to us by an army of Russian mercenaries named after a German composer, Wagner. We have returned, on European soil, to a time of crusades and “soldiers of fortune” paid by the highest bidder.
Yevgeni Prigozhin, when he mutinied along with his mercenary troops, challenging the new Russian czar Vladimir Putin, not only bit off one of the hands that he feeds him, but showed it to the whole world (in case it wasn’t already clear in the war in Ukraine) to what point the human being has regressed when, in theory, he enjoys the greatest scientific, technical, educational and health advances in history. But, it is already known that Homo homini lupus, that “man is man’s wolf”.
Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century English philosopher, made us reflect on selfishness in human behavior, although society tries to correct it by favoring coexistence. But, when we are going back to the Middle Ages, these lessons are forgotten.
Russia was for a few hours on the verge of civil war with Prigozhin’s mercenaries staging a Blitzkrieg (lightning war) after taking Rostov-on-Don, the ninth largest city in the country, and staying only 200 kilometers from Moscow before reaching a agreement and turn around, with the mediation of the Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, an ally of Putin and also related to Prigozhin. In other words, what in the Spanish proverb is known as “God raises them and they get together”, although, in this case, perhaps this other one is better: “The greedy and the cheater easily agree”.
Hours later, when Putin showed signs of life again, he revealed that the Russian government had paid the group led by Yevgeny Prigozhin about 1,000 million dollars (922 million euros, around 86,000 million rubles) between May 2022 and May 2023. The Wagners are making a living off the pain and horror of the war in Ukraine, but not nearly enough, it seems.
As in our time we are getting closer to the Middle Ages, it is necessary to look for references there. And, in this case, we are in the year 988, after the Christianization of Kievan Rus by Prince Vladimir I, who had recently usurped power with an army of mercenaries made up of Varangian soldiers. These were Vikings, mostly Swedish, who went east and south through what is now Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, and the Balkans into the Byzantine Empire.
After reaching agreements with Basil II of Byzantium, Vladimir sent him 6,000 mercenaries as part of a military assistance agreement. This is how the Varangian Guard arose, a kind of medieval Wagner Group, which was an elite unit of the Byzantine Empire between the 10th and 14th centuries. Just as an autocrat like Putin tends to be wary of his surroundings, Basil didn’t have it all with the native Byzantine guards, whose loyalties ran just as close to other claimants to the throne, so he made the Varangians his protectors. Putin thought that Prigozhin played this role, but it backfired on him, although surely there is nothing that money cannot solve.
The princes of kyiv and Novgorod hired the Varangians from the 9th to the 11th centuries. The last mention of these mercenaries in Russia dates from 1043, although it is possible that they were no longer talked about because they had already been assimilated into Russian society. Could you imagine at that time that other soldiers of fortune would have such a leading role in the Rus of the 21st century?
In the Middle Ages it was common practice to hire contingents of foreign mercenaries. This is how the Byzantine emperors did it, something they inherited from the Romans. But, the Middle Ages were also a time of crusades, where, with the support of religion, military campaigns were justified (isn’t that the same thing that Putin is doing with Ukraine in this new Middle Ages of the 21st century?).
The most famous medieval crusades are the religious wars promoted by the Church to recover the Holy Land for Christianity, which had been under the rule of Islam since the 7th century. Crusaders took temporary religious vows and were granted leniency for their sins, just as Putin’s Wagners have had carte blanche in Ukraine and even fed on criminal conscripts from prisons.
Interestingly, there were also the Baltic Crusades, which were waged during the Middle Ages by the Catholic kings of Sweden and Denmark and the Teutonic and Livonian orders against the pagan peoples of northeastern Europe and the Baltic Sea basin. Today, this area of ??Europe is one of the most militarized, on the border with Russia. The contemporary European Middle Ages manifests itself like nowhere else from the Black Sea to the Barents Sea.
But, the Middle Ages, with all their moral and value setbacks, are also increasingly present in the rest of the continent. Spain, without going any further, is currently approaching the idea of ??the taifa kingdoms over which it plans a new reconquest in the style of the Catholic Monarchs, according to the most ultra-extreme discourses. There is a clash between the left and the right, whose new impact will take place in the next general elections on 23-J.
In the medieval Spain of the taifas, the small kingdoms into which the Caliphate of Córdoba was divided, there were also mercenaries. They were hired to fight against their neighbors or to oppose the Christian kingdoms of the north. There were even Christian warriors, like the Cid Campeador, who served Muslim kings, even fighting against other Christian kings.
This all against all, with the country currently divided into territorial and ideological blocs, is dominated by a more mercenary political class than ever. There are more and more politicians who basically seek to ensure a good livelihood, without a vocation for public service, which is giving birth to this new Middle Ages of the 21st century.
