SHARK JUMPING IN HISTORY: So you all have sent many awesome replies to my request for Historical Shark-Jumps. Here are your comments.

First, from Tom Hoopes, a better definition of jumping the shark than the one I provided (although since this definition also narrows the field of play, you’ll notice that it’s pretty much discarded in what follows. Honored more in the breach than in the observance and all that): 1) A shark-jump must be an attempt to salvage oneself that goes awry, not merely a dumb move. (Joe McCarthy’s list was his shark-jump; calling the senate a “handmaiden of communism” wasn’t.)

2) A shark-jump must epitomize the wrong-headedness that leads to its doer’s demise; it can’t be a plausible but failed attempt.(ie … moving the capital to Richmond was a shark-jump for the Confederacy … but not the battle of Gettysburg.)

But then I suppose I’m a rigorist on the question …

From James Christiansen: The ends of eras is a great topic. Let’s start with Sasha Volokh’s off-the-cuff remark about whether “A Man for All Seasons” is set in the Middle Ages. One possible answer: all but the film’s last 15 minutes. The Middle Ages in England ended in June of 1535 with the execution, two weeks before More’s, of John Fisher, the only effective opponent of the English Reformation. The traditional date of 1485 really just marks the transition from an inept medieval dynasty to an effective one. The Tudors did things in traditional medieval fashion until the advent of Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell, who in addition to decapitating saints reorganized English administration and, still more important, dissolved the monasteries, a terrific change socially and economically. So the 1530’s are indeed the hinge decade for English history.

Maybe for all of Europe. The Middle Ages last at least until Contarini’s failure to conciliate the Protestants at the council of Ratisbon in 1540. By then St. Ignatius has founded the Jesuits, an immense step not just for the progress of the Counter-Reformation but for the whole future of Europe, especially its schools.

Of course, it’s not exactly radical to contend that the Reformation ended the Middle Ages. So let’s try a more interesting date — say, 1806, Napoleon’s dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. That’s not quite as frivolous as it sounds. One can argue seriously that the supposed innovations of the early modern period — Descartes, rise of nation-states, even the Reformation — pale in comparison with (1)

the Industrial Revolution, (2) the appearance of romantic individualism as an alternative to traditional religion [why romanticism but not Enlightenment rationalism a la Voltaire? Is it just because nationalism is being considered one of the core constitutive elements of modernity in this reading, and nationalism is more romantic than rationalism?–ed.], (3) the consolidation and rationalization of European states, and (4) the growth of nationalism. By 1806, the Industrial Revolution is in full swing in England and beginning elsewhere, and Napoleon has established himself as the perfect romantic hero. The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire is the symbolic beginning of the process leading to German and Italian unification and the fall of the Hapsburgs. This process is more significant than the early-modern development; in 1789, France and England were not vastly more centralized and “national” than they had been in 1517 or even 1215, and Germany and Italy were arguably even less so.

There’s also a pretty clear break in the intellectual world. Calvin, Descartes, Bossuet, and maybe even Hume are all more like Aquinas and Occam than any of them is like Feuerbach or Vico or Hegel.

Three hundred years from now, all this will be a lot clearer, and adjustments will be made. When I was in college, there was a course called “Revolutionary Europe, 1648-1848”; someday we’ll have, “Early Modern Europe, 1789-1989”. (Historians will probably prefer 1789 to 1806 as a more dramatic date, but to me the fact of the revolution is ultimately less significant than its fulfillment/betrayal in

romantic autocracy.)

But when do the Middle Ages start? It would be convenient to keep them at a thousand years, so maybe we can push them forward to, say, 751, when Pepin the Short deposes the last of the feeble Merovingians. But that attaches all of the barbarian interlude to

ancient history, which is counter to our usual notions. The traditional date, 476, is a lousy choice — the deposition of the Western emperor didn’t mean much because the western emperor hadn’t meant much for a while. Maybe a better choice is the Lombard

invasion of Italy in 568, which pretty much establishes that the barbarians are here to stay. Up till then, right through Justinian’s reconquest, you could think they were just a phase. People say the reconquest was doomed, but everything that fails seems doomed in retrospect, and it doubtless looked very different to Justinian.

But 568 isn’t a real fun date, so let’s go with 529, the traditional date of St. Benedict’s founding of Monte Cassino, which, by a wonderful and suggestive coincidence, is also the date Justinian closed Plato’s Academy.

OK, when did the Middle Ages jump the shark? Earliest possible date: 1215, a memorable year, fourth Lateran council and Magna Carta. But the slope still seems to be definitely upward through most of the thirteenth century. Maybe we jump the shark with Boniface VIII’s promulgation of Unam Sanctam in 1302, and the problems that follow, but the decline seems to have set in a little earlier. Probably it’s clear we’re moving into a decline phase with failure of the Seventh Crusade in 1270 upon the death of St. Louis, probably the last man really imbued with the confidence of the High Middle Ages.

As for Rome, you got two candidates for the shark-jumping date. The early one is A.D. 8, battle of the Teutoburg Forest, after which the Romans never really made a serious attempt to cross the Rhine. At the time, of course, there was a boy growing up in Palestine who would make something of splash. That’s very early in the history of the Empire itself, but arguably the high-water mark for the Republic/Empire. A later and less interesting date is Gibbon’s, 180, the death of Marcus Aurelius and the accession of the first of a lot of scumbags.

From Michael King: I have to enter this, since it seems like Eastern Christianity gets shorted by many blogs (actually, I’m a former Orthodox who’s just converted to Catholicism–right now I’m technically Byzantine Catholic, while I wait for the paperwork to officially become Roman).

The Middle Ages started when the Roman Emperor Heraclius was defeated by the Muslims at the Yarmuk River in Syria (I think that’s right) sometime in the 630s–I guess my equivocation explains why I’ve decided to be an econ rather than history grad student.

After Islam conquered the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire in the mid-seventh century, (Egypt, North Africa, the Middle East) and made significant inroads into modern Turkey, then the break with the classical world is lost. Islam in many different ways helps the schism between the Eastern Churches and Rome. Now the Roman Empire is only called that in theory–no more will there be Latin speaking Emperors like Justinian with realisitic goals to (re) conquer Europe.

Except for bigoted Byzantine scholars who like to point out that, yes, technically, the Roman Empire really fell on May 29, 1453, and that Byzantium was still Pax Romana, and so much more sophisticated than the West, etc, the state with its capital at Constantinople really becomes a Greek mini-Empire, with a significantly heterogeneous population (at least until decline sets in in the 11 century). In other words, Byzantium now overtakes the Roman Empire, and turns into a mere regional power, that in no way can be realistically called “The Roman Empire.”

The political cleavage of Byzantium from its Roman roots, and away from the west, has momentous consequences, and is really from where I start the Middle Ages.

From Jane Wangersky: For me, the Cold War ended the day I saw the headline in front of a newsdealer’s in The Hague: HET MUUR GAAT NEER, which even I could tell is Dutch for “THE WALL COMES DOWN”. Just months earlier (before getting thrown out of the Air Force) I’d been stationed in what was then West Germany, crawling into my chem suit and gas mask every few weeks to pretend the Soviets were attacking, because we had to be ready for it — we were “the

tip of the sword”. So now it was all just over?

When did the Cold War jump the shark? At the court-martial of a certain American soldier who got his German girlfriend to smuggle him into East Germany in the trunk of her car so he could defect. Eventually they got all the way to Russia, grew sick of life there — surprise! — and crawled on back, where he hired a civilian lawyer who whined about anti-Soviet prejudice. He was sentenced to — a bad-conduct discharge and time served.

Didn’t know that still bothered me.

I don’t know about you all, but I’m totally fascinated by these questions and responses. So please, fight about the stuff posted here already, or send in your own thoughts on when various historical eras or institutions began, ended, or jumped shark. Bonus points if you can find historical examples of the categories used on jumptheshark.com (e.g. “They Did It!”).

And I’ll post contest results TOMORROW, so if you have any funny thoughts about Elvis Costello or the 2002 presidential race get ’em in pronto. You’ll also get a real mailbag, with, like, replies and stuff, tomorrow.