Lets rephrase: Romantic Love is from the 11th century or so, Firearm weapons from 1210 ad. Coincidence.?

Question

It seems to me that men began to cooperate with romance about the time they could be shot dead at considerable range. Is romance a expediter of sex, because large numbers of men were running out of time. Just curious about the elevation of women to the pedestal, and warfare using weapons like guns to kill off large numbers of males.

Answer 1

Interesting hypothesis. There is certainly a chronological parallel. But instead of finding a link between the two phenomenon, the link could be found in the common source. In this case gunpowder and Courtly Love as a product of a rising contact with the Orient. Two innovations spreading via the same, new channel : the Crusades in Spain and the Levant.

1) Gunpowder :

"Saltpetre combustion technology spread to the Arabs in the 13th century. The Turks destroyed the walls of Constantinople in 1453 with 13 enormous cannon up to a bore of 90 cm firing a 320 kg projectile a distance of over 1.6 km."

"Building on the development of early gunpowder technology in the East, Europe soon began to surpass the rest of the world."

"Islam" in "Gunpowder", Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder#Islam

Courtly Love as an idea started at the courts of Aquitaine and Provence in the South of France. Close to the Islam-occupied Iberian peninsula. With many knights away on the Crusades in both Spain and the Levant. With in Islamic Spain a thriving cultural and scientific scene, with Islamic, Jewish and Christian scientists working together translating texts from Ancient Greece. (Most of those text were unknown in the rest of Medieval Europe, and would later be the basis for Humanism and the Renaissance.)

And then we have indeed the Turks literally ending the Middle Ages by bombarding curtain walls into oblivion. It was the beginning of the end for small castles and traditional Chivalry.

2) Courtly Love

"This idealistic outlook may be explained partly by contemporary religious devotions, both orthodox and heretical, especially regarding the Virgin Mary, and partly by France's exposure to Arab mystical philosophy (gained through contacts with Islam during the Crusades), which embodied concepts of love--as a delightful disease, as demanding of faithful service--that were to characterize courtly love."

"Castles themselves housed many men, few women; poets, wishing to idealize physical passion, looked beyond the marriage state. "

"courtly love", Encyclopedia Britannica CD 2000

The same potential transmission route as with gunpowder. There's also a second link here. Many knights being away on Crusade, the Nobel Women became the centre of courtly life, and poorer nobility see a chance of advancement through extramarital love.

Hope these few ideas help your quest! ;-)

Answer 2

I don't think that firearms really caused large battlefield casualty figures until much later in history. To illustrate my point the Battle of Crecy was one of the 1st times firearms were used on a European battlefield. The Battle of Agincourt, almost a century later did not feature guns at all. The long bow was still the most devastating weapon in both these battles.

Answer 3

You are referring to the origins of tragic love. Shakespeare reinforced it in the modern mind. Tragic love, in literature and the arts and in many ways in life too, was the only type of romantic love - it was the purest form of romance. A lover loved but one, and when that love affair ended, either by death or by abandonment, the life of the other party was over. If they were women they may as well retire to a convent for the rest of their days. Of course there are lots of cases in Tudor and Elizabethan England, in the court circles, where lusting was even condoned. Nowadays, as a writer called James Bowman says, ' Hollywood has lost its romantic slant'. Now, like the inner court of Elizabethan England, sex is not an act of love but something that is considered detrimental to the health. If one lover leaves or dies, for the sake of hygiene we are encouraged to replace them. Like Beyonces song, 'Everything u own in a box to the l.left, don't u ever get to thinking, your irreplaceable'. It sucks, but that's the way romance has fizzled out in the popular cultural spectrum.

Answer 4

Yeah... right... got to watch all of those AK-47's that were just laying around in 1210.