Middle ages why

Nor are we interested in back-projecting into the medieval centuries a modernization or globalization narrative. Instead we put the social interactions, expectations and demands of people who lived in these times into global focus through the juxtaposition of specific cases.

This means that we explore a range of global phenomena, including cosmologies, networks, mobility, value, trust, political mediation and resources, many of which have not been recognized as such because they do not map easily onto the categories of enquiry that global historians have used most frequently.

We outline the ways in which scholars with expertise in different world regions, including those outside Eurasia, can start from their different regional evidence bases and interpretative traditions and work productively together at a global level.

Indeed, rather than seeing those disparities in evidence and interpretation as barriers, we present a bottom-up methodology that does not simply accommodate but takes advantage of difference.

Rather it is to describe how we as a group of authors have done the global history of the Middle Ages contained in the chapters of this book.

In the second half of the introduction we identify and reflect upon the principal themes that arise from our doing of global history between roughly and ; 5 we end with a general set of characterizations from which we present a working hypothesis of the Global Middle Ages as a time of options and experiments. The next two chapters also provide information and ideas that help, in distinctive ways, to frame the rest of the volume. Their approach to these issues of definition has shaped the thinking of all members of our original project network and is reflected throughout this book.

Their chapter also demonstrates the indispensability of drawing world regions outside Eurasia into our considerations of the Global Middle Ages. Together, these first three chapters sketch some of the conceptual underpinnings to the global themes and new directions charted by the chapters that follow.

This book is about the Global Middle Ages, but it is not just for medievalists. We seek to engage with global historians of all periods, and regional specialists from all world regions, whether established academics or students.

In a contemporary world where western liberal certainties about the inevitability of globalization are now challenged, we should not imagine that global thinking or acting have themselves necessarily come to an end, even if the forms of that thinking and acting are changing fast. We also want to convey here our enthusiasm for an approach which takes all of us out of our intellectual and regional comfort zones, and has the power to give us new ways of thinking and fresh evidence bases.

It is a matter of immense sadness to us that two of the project members most committed to the challenge and the enjoyment of the Global Middle Ages did not live to see this volume published. Both Glen Dudbridge and Mark Whittow were taken from us in cruel circumstances. But in what proved to be their last years, they turned with astonishingly productive fervour to global history and encouraged their colleagues to do likewise. This volume is dedicated to their memories.

The turn to the global has been the most striking historiographical development of recent decades. One consistent characteristic of this epistemological uncertainty has been a persistent battle over approaches and appropriate labels.

For all this debate, however, global history has been a field with relatively little input from those working on periods before It is well known that the kinds of phenomena often associated with global history, including dense and intense trading connections and very extensive empires, often happened outside Europe before In the case of the medieval centuries obvious examples include the overland Silk Roads Map 3 and the Islamic Caliphate Map 6 in the early medieval period; the Mongol-shaped, pan-Eurasian world system described by Abu-Lughod Map 8 ; a cosmopolitan medieval Indian Ocean world that linked products from China with the east coast of Africa from as early as the seventh century; and systems of connection and exchange within the American continent s which were no less dramatic for running as much on north—south axes as on east—west ones Map 2.

Of course, the main reason why the pre period has played such a limited role in the field of global history is the assumption that whatever the wider capacity for travel, exchange and communication in earlier centuries, global history itself only really begins with the European voyages of discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A particularly powerful defence of the proposition that global history should be confined to the centuries after Columbus crossed the Atlantic in was made by the early modern historian Jerry Bentley:.

Increasingly during these centuries, cross-cultural interactions and exchanges influenced the ways people led their lives and organized their societies in almost all parts of planet earth. Those overlapping and mutually reinforcing processes after included the creation of global networks of sea lanes, global exchanges of biological species and the forging of an early capitalist global economy, all underpinned, of course, by European colonialism.

The results varied from region to region but precipitated immense demographic growth, the greater diffusion of technology and the consolidation of centralized states and imperial projects. This presentation of global history as a globalization and modernization process inspired by changes driven by early modern Europeans has necessarily been questioned. For many historians, this model only really applies to the world from the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century on.

But despite debate about the chronology of its evolution and the distribution of power within a globalized world, the basic paradigm within which those debates flourish remains stubbornly similar. It is a Europe- and north America-centred model defined primarily by the end point of globalization, namely the triumph of the West in the modern era; and secondarily, by anxieties about that triumph: what if that end point is now over?

The result is that for all the equivocation about terminology global, world, transnational or international , overarching conceptions of the history of the planet have tended to be quite narrowly framed. A narrative of increasing integration and circulation in which European, and later north American, initiative, institutions and capital were the crucial drivers has made it difficult to incorporate any world region from before into a global history narrative, including, paradoxically, Europe itself.

Such have been the traditional barriers that have kept scholars who work on pre-modern centuries at the margins of debates about global history. Undoubtedly, this picture has begun to change in very recent years.

Take the diffusion of chess, for instance, a complex game with its origins in sixth-century India which, over the course of the next millennium, was transmitted across the globe. The material remains are striking.

To these evocative early medieval cases of global interconnection we could add a Buddhist reliquary from Chaoyang in north-east China, dated no later than , decorated with beads including jade probably from Khotan in the Tarim basin, a whitish coral from south or south-east Asia, and the darker amber found around the Baltic. In Australia, transcontinental trade carried mother-of-pearl from the north-west to the south coast and ochre from the south to Queensland Map 4.

And there may have been visits to the islands or northern coast of the Australian land mass from Sulawesi, possibly to collect sea cucumbers. These are notable examples of interactions and common experiences in the pre period over exceptionally long distances, but they are far from isolated instances. Tens of thousands of documents and textiles recovered from the caves near Dunhuang in central Asia bear witness to the culture, communities, movements and interactions of a host of different peoples across Eurasia c.

Indeed, rather than a lack of available material, the greater challenge is establishing methods which allow us to interpret a complex evidence base that takes each of us far out of our individual regional and source specialisms, and demands a range of linguistic and technical skills beyond the scope of any individual or any one lifetime. Despite the scale of the evidence base, however, the Global Middle Ages is still a fledgling field. On the positive side, there are new and lively initiatives which speak either directly or indirectly to the notion of a global history for the millennium before As Whittow suggests in his chapter on sources, causal connections between evidence for environmental change and transformations in other spheres of human activity are not always easy to discern.

Sounding a negative note is not, of course, to ignore the long traditions of very substantial scholarship by regional specialists on the history of different world regions, including those outside Eurasia, in the pre centuries.

The result of the marginalization of areas outside Eurasia can all too easily turn into a reading of the millennium before as one in which Africa and the Americas fell behind Europe and Asia in terms of political development and technological and commercial exchange, creating a context against which Asian prosperity followed by European maritime expansion and eventual global dominance then appears inevitable.

There are, of course, many causes of this marginalization of regions outside Eurasia and indeed of some regions within Eurasia, especially the northern reaches. Aside from often unacknowledged assumptions of cultural superiority, the most important reason, as discussed in the next chapter, is the marked disparities in surviving evidence types. It is not necessarily that less evidence on aggregate survives in one world region than in another; rather that we may think it easier to discuss certain types of human behaviour if we have access to particular kinds of records.

Thus, we could argue that the internal workings of ruling elites do not always emerge easily or in detail in some parts of Africa or the Americas, where we are primarily reliant on archaeological data, as they do in some parts of Eurasia, where there is a thickness of surviving written records.

And yet, as is demonstrated in several of our chapters, regions without written records quite clearly had sophisticated ruling elites, were often characterized by citied cultures, and frequently had their own forms of record keeping. We must, of course, be attentive to the regional specificities of evidence and its production, whether in terms of genre, compositional practices, or medium: manuscripts, imprints, inscriptions, khipus, pictographs requiring oral elucidation, and objects.

One of the objectives and characteristic features of this book is to afford more coverage to evidence bases and to interpretative models from outside Eurasia, and just as importantly to integrate such evidence and interpretation into our overall thinking about the Global Middle Ages, rather than seeing non-Eurasian regions as, at best, merely adjuncts to an essentially Eurasian story. The sheer weight of evidence may have blunted the claims of some early modernists that the period before was not interconnected enough to be considered global.

Others lack confidence in a term mobilized so freely by nineteenth-century European nation-building projects. The idea of a superstitious, religious, feudal, backward, irrational, static Middle Ages did not preexist the colonial subject upon which it became mapped. To the contrary, the temporalized characteristics attributed to the Middle Ages emerged from and advanced the process of identifying and ruling colonized subjects. At the same time, this process helped to underwrite European nationalist histories as well as the entire edifice of Orientalism.

The becoming medieval of the centuries apportioned to the Middle Ages, in other words, was a regulative process providing ideological support for practices with material, economic, political and institutional effects … effects that are fully entwined with the conditions of globalization today … Indeed the identification of the Middle Ages as a global era preceding may have the unintended effect of not only masking crucial aspects of this history but also corroborating its narrative logic.

Our response to these criticisms is not to deny them entirely. Some of the post-colonialist critique is justified and requires careful thought and navigation, as the chapters by Pennock and Power and by Yarrow in this volume elaborate more fully. Moore have suggested that a comparative methodology is the most useful global approach for those working on the pre centuries.

Thus China is praised for its advanced state in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, while its subsequent falling behind the West occasions much head-scratching, and sometimes triumphalism. But it can result in a discussion which focuses on the two ends of Eurasia and pays scant regard to the large area in between and beyond: the rest of Asia central, south, south-east, west , the Eurasian steppes, Africa, the Americas, Australasia and the Pacific.

These become regions with indeed peoples, but without history. We do not endorse the development of a Global Middle Ages on terms set by the globalization narrative.

We acknowledge the depth of the problems that the post-colonial critique reveals and we do not seek to promote simplistic solutions to those difficulties. For instance, some medievalists with post-colonialist concerns who are more positively disposed towards the idea of globalizing the Middle Ages have suggested that this approach might be a way of seeking out and amplifying the multiple voices of those colonized either by modern Europeans or by normative western historiographies.

But this apparently benign intention can itself be hazardous. The risk here is the acceptance of these regions into the Middle Ages only if they are demonstrably different from Europe, a position which paradoxically maintains the normative character of the European Middle Ages as the ones that really count.

Such diversity is surely what we would expect, but to allow it to come into view we have to displace Europe not only as the central object of study but also as the core of our Problematik.

There are important objections, then, to the Global Middle Ages; but in this volume we argue that these problems are not insuperable. The world in the millennium before was not only extraordinarily complex and diverse but, crucially, it was multi-centred and western Europe was, at best, one region among many: no single region held a hegemonic position over the rest. The contributors to the chapters that we present here have sought to understand this world in terms that might have made sense to contemporaries themselves, as a means of developing a fresh conceptual framework for treating global history before Instead our goal is to treat the Global Middle Ages as a distinctive period and as an analytical approach with its own agenda and momentum.

Readers may ask why we have chosen to focus on the millennium before rather than adopting a much wider pre-modern focus, ranging from Antiquity through to as late as the eighteenth century, particularly given recent theoretical discussion of the pre-modern, as well as the suggestions about continuities between the Global Middle Ages and the Global Early Modern made by Alan Strathern in the final chapter here.

As we outline in sections V and VI below, these characteristics can serve to distinguish the Global Middle Ages from periods which came earlier as well as later.

But integral to our understanding of how and why the Global Middle Ages can be identified as a distinctive period is the method of rooting ourselves in regional evidence that we used to derive its defining characteristics. As we explain in the next section, those methods involved working from the evidence outwards rather than by fetishizing predetermined chronological boundaries.

This original group included historians and archaeologists with expertise in the evidence bases and historiographies of a variety of pre world regions: central and eastern Eurasia, south and south-east Asia, western Europe, the Mediterranean, as well as Africa and the Americas. That said, the group still remained somewhat skewed towards specialists on western Europe and China, and we had no expert on the Pacific.

Having discovered that many of these categories did not relate all that closely or powerfully to our medieval evidence bases or contexts, in later workshops we moved on to consider networks, and cultures of recording, where our analytical approach and medieval evidence enjoyed more fruitful interactions.

Our methods were ostensibly very familiar: we emphasized discussion over presentation, sat round the same table, and had generous tea, lunch and dinner breaks. But a couple of additional tweaks turned out to enhance significantly what we could achieve. Fewster 4. Raedts 6. Margue and P. To Whom Does Byzantium Belong? Niehoff-Panagiotidis 9. Italy's Various Middle Ages; M. Moretti and I. Porciani Medievalism and Swiss National Identity; G.

Marchal These policies helped it to amass a great deal of money and power. Meanwhile, the Islamic world was growing larger and more powerful. At its height, the medieval Islamic world was more than three times bigger than all of Christendom.

Under the caliphs, great cities such as Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus fostered a vibrant intellectual and cultural life. Poets, scientists and philosophers wrote thousands of books on paper, a Chinese invention that had made its way into the Islamic world by the 8th century.

Scholars translated Greek, Iranian and Indian texts into Arabic. Inventors devised technologies like the pinhole camera, soap, windmills, surgical instruments, an early flying machine and the system of numerals that we use today. And religious scholars and mystics translated, interpreted and taught the Quran and other scriptural texts to people across the Middle East.

Crusaders, who wore red crosses on their coats to advertise their status, believed that their service would guarantee the remission of their sins and ensure that they could spend all eternity in Heaven. They also received more worldly rewards, such as papal protection of their property and forgiveness of some kinds of loan payments. The Crusades began in , when Pope Urban summoned a Christian army to fight its way to Jerusalem , and continued on and off until the end of the 15th century.

In , Christian armies captured Jerusalem from Muslim control, and groups of pilgrims from across Western Europe started visiting the Holy Land.

Many of them, however, were robbed and killed as they crossed through Muslim-controlled territories during their journey. Around , a French knight named Hugues de Payens created a military order along with eight relatives and acquaintances that became the Knights Templar , and they won the eventual support of the pope and a reputation for being fearsome fighters. They did make ordinary Catholics across Christendom feel like they had a common purpose, and they inspired waves of religious enthusiasm among people who might otherwise have felt alienated from the official Church.

They also exposed Crusaders to Islamic literature, science and technology—exposure that would have a lasting effect on European intellectual life. Another way to show devotion to the Church was to build grand cathedrals and other ecclesiastical structures such as monasteries.

Cathedrals were the largest buildings in medieval Europe, and they could be found at the center of towns and cities across the continent. Between the 10th and 13th centuries, most European cathedrals were built in the Romanesque style.

Romanesque cathedrals are solid and substantial: They have rounded masonry arches and barrel vaults supporting the roof, thick stone walls and few windows. Around , church builders began to embrace a new architectural style, known as the Gothic. Gothic structures, such as the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis in France and the rebuilt Canterbury Cathedral in England, have huge stained-glass windows, pointed vaults and arches a technology developed in the Islamic world , and spires and flying buttresses.

In contrast to heavy Romanesque buildings, Gothic architecture seems to be almost weightless. The battle of Barnet, the Wars of the Roses clash that killed the Kingmaker. Traders and crusaders. Josiah Wedgwood: the radical father of English pottery. More medieval battles. The battle of Hastings. The battle, won by William, marked the beginning of the Norman conquest of The Danish Conquest that led to the battle of Hastings.

More on the battle of Hastings. The battle of Agincourt. The battle of Agincourt and the Spanish communists. Michael Wood on… the battle of Agincourt. The Last Kingdom and Agincourt. More on the battle of Agincourt. The battle of Bosworth. The battle of Bosworth, which took place on 22 August , was the last significant clash of the Wars of the Roses.

Richard III was killed during the brutal battle. Where the Bosworth battle really happened and a detailed look at rationing. Bosworth: the dawn of the Tudors. More on the battle of Bosworth. The Wars of the Roses. The Wars of the Roses were the civil wars fought in England and Wales between the Yorkist and Lancastrian dynasties between and The Wars of the Roses: the 15th-century clash of kings that heralded the dawn of the Tudor dynasty.

A brief history of the English rose. Fresh views on the Wars of the Roses. Edward IV: champion of the Wars of the Roses. The Wars of the Roses: York v Beaufort?

The power behind the throne: women in the Wars of the Roses. More Wars of the Roses. The crusades.