per agros ac dispersi vagarentur], and that each possessed no more than he could seize or keep by his own strength, through killing or wounding others? But those who first arose endowed with superior virtue and prudence, having recognized a kind of intelligence and teachableness in man, gathered these scattered individuals together in one place and converted them from wildness to justice and gentleness. Establishing first political societies for the common advantage, then the small associations of men which were afterwards named towns, then those groupings of domiciles which we call cities, they fortified all these with law, human and divine, as with walls. And between our present mode of life, refined through humanity, and that wretched one, the principal difference is the difference between law and force.21
When writing of the Welsh’s dispersed manner of fighting (“If the Welsh would only … fight in ordered ranks instead of leaping about all over the place”),22 plunder, and rule by force, as he did in the Descriptio, Gerald would have had access not merely to stock “barbarian” ethnographic descriptions such as Caesar’s but to whole developmental models of culture in passages such as this one, which left a lasting imprint, as we shall see in the following chapter, on his seminal ethnographic work. For according to the evolutionary scale presented above, Gerald was free to conclude that the societies of Wales and Ireland had not progressed very far at all, still living as they did in unruly discord rather than “political societies for the common advantage” and in fields and forests rather than towns or fortified cities. And we can be certain of the influence on him of a like developmental model when he turns to the Irish in the following paragraph in the Topography of Ireland:
Est autem gens haec gens silvestris, gens inhospita; gens ex bestiis solum et bestialiter vivens; gens a primo pastoralis vitae vivendi modo non recedens. Cum enim a silvis ad agros, ab agris ad villas, civiumque convictus, humani generis ordo processerit, gens haec, agriculturae labores aspernans, et civiles gazas parum affectans, civiumque jura multum detrectans, in silvis et pascuis vitam quam hactenus assueverat nec desuescere novit nec descire.23
(They [the Irish] are a wild and inhospitable people. They live on beasts only, and live like beasts. They have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living. While man usually progresses from the woods to fields, and from the fields to settlements and communities of citizens, this people despises work on the land, has little use for the money-making of towns, contemns the rights and privileges of citizenship, and desires neither to abandon, nor lose respect for, the life which it has been accustomed to lead in the woods and countryside.)
As we will see in the following chapter, Gerald’s treatment of the Welsh will in fact be more ambivalent and equivocal than evolutionary influences allow, but his description of the Irish is another matter. Cicero’s more subtle progression from pastoral to city life is laid utterly bare here, as Gerald performs the act of interpreting the classical developmental tradition for his reader, according to which city life is the highest expression of civility.
In importing the classical theory of human cultural development into his ethnographic depictions, Gerald has in effect moved beyond ethnography and cultural description into formulating medieval anthropology. Nor is he alone among twelfth-century ethnographers of the Celtic fringe in doing so. For although in the Topography we find an unusually complete medieval formulation of ancient progressivism, Gerald’s contemporaries like William of Malmesbury, William of Newburgh, William of Poitiers, Ralph Glaber, and the author of the Gesta Stephani are so influenced by the same anthropological assumptions as to be unanimous in finding in Celtic lands a manifestation of what the ancients would have considered developmentally backward societies. Classical sources like Cicero shaped not only the twelfth-century ethnographer’s categories of description—native habitat, the rule of law versus that of (seemingly, at least) force alone, agricultural versus hunting economies—but more importantly, his very modes of interpreting such descriptive categories as so many signposts on the road to civility. Thus William of Malmesbury, one of the earliest classically influenced ethnographers, is able to discover in the existence of town life and agricultural arts evidence of his own cultural superiority: “Ita pro peniuria, immo pro inscientia cultorum, ieiunum omnium bonorum solum agrestem et squalidam multitudinem Hibernensium extra urbes producit; Angli uero et Franci cultiori genere uitae urbes nundinarum commertio inhabitant” ([Whereas] the soil [of Ireland] lacks all advantages, and so poor, or rather unskillful, are its cultivators that it can produce only a ragged mob of rustic Irishmen outside the towns, the English and the French, with their more civilized way of life, live in towns, and carry on trade and commerce).24
Such continuity of classical and medieval ideas of progress would surprise some intellectual historians who have argued for the intrinsic incompatibility of models of historical progress with the Middle Ages, whose “history moved not according to natural development but a series of divine revelations and interventions.”25 But as historians of anthropology know, the notion of human progress was not intrinsically compatible with the thinking of later centuries when biblical assumptions regarding human degeneration since the Fall were still conventional, as they were even in the heyday of evolutionary anthropology in the nineteenth century. Most periods in history are fraught with antithetical, countering intellectual forces and, it would appear, the Middle Ages are no exception. Any doubt as to the possibility of a progressivist medieval anthropology is best resolved by the contemporary evidence from the twelfth century. That evidence indicates that a secular view of history had in fact been imported via classical sources into a medieval frame where it irrepressibly influenced the ethnographic writing of those who employed such sources. In fact, the developmental model of culture was very well suited to the arena into which it was imported, for as we have already glimpsed, it functioned in the twelfth century, as it would in the nineteenth century, to justify the secular aim of conquest and control of the native populations.
CONVERSION AND THE BOUNDARIES OF THE “HUMAN” IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
If the twelfth-century expansion of Europe found developmental anthropology particularly suitable to its aims in nearby borderlands, the thirteenth century, an era of hope for the conversion of Asia to Christianity through missionary activity, was the age of elaborating the discourse of Christianity and defining the “human.” In a range of discourses, both popular and elite, the thirteenth century evinces a heightened interest in establishing the contours of the human. New theorizations of what constituted the human emerged from scholastic thinkers like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, as did new theorizations of the conditional rights of non-Christians abroad to cultural sovereignty through the papal decrees of Innocent IV.
While the thirteenth century might have witnessed the dream of converting Asia, in particular of bringing the Mongols within the Christian embrace, this by no means meant that the Mongols were universally regarded as particularly good candidates for conversion. On the contrary, the following description of the Mongols from Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora (c. 1240) is probably closer to the consensus view: “The men are inhuman and of the nature of beasts, rather to be called monsters than men, thirsting after and drinking blood, and tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and human beings; they clothe themselves in the skins of bulls, and are armed with iron lances; they are short in stature and thickset … and of great strength; invincible in battle, indefatigable in labour; they drink the blood which flows from their flocks.… They have no human laws, know no mercy, are more cruel than lions or bears; they know no other country’s language except that of their own, and of this all other nations are ignorant.”26 Matthew Paris’s description, we will see, accords closely with the scholastic discourse of the barbarian. Missionaries to Mongolia such as Carpini and Rubruck were—indeed, needed to be—rather more generous in their attributions of Mongol humanity. How then was such “humanity” to be identified and distinguished according to the definitions of their day?
Given the place of Pliny’s monstrous races at the outermost edges of the known world on medieval mappaemundi, medieval thinkers in search of demarcating the human from the barbarous or monstrous might well turn first to the definitions of Pliny the Elder, made available to them through Pliny’s medieval encyclopedic abbreviators. The monstrous races of Pliny’s Natural History, whom he terms gentes monstri and homines or gentes silvestres, appear in book 7 immediately after Pliny considers