Episode 104: The Medieval Era or “That Time Europe Lost Its Mind”

(upbeat music) Welcome back to Anti-Ssocial Studies, the podcast for people who wish they'd stayed awake in high school. Today we're gonna get down to one of the most important questions of history. What is your zombie apocalypse plan? Really. Last episodes we explored the classical empires, but now they've fallen, which brings us to the aptly named post-classical era from 600 to 1450 CE. This era is definitely the most difficult one to simplify, because while the other time periods have overarching themes that are common for most of the world, in the post-classical era, everyone was sort of doing it their own way. Classical empires have collapsed and have been replaced by different things around the world. The Middle East becomes a caliphate or Islamic empire and expands into Africa and India, trying to continue its synastic cycle, and in Europe there's essentially anarchy. Ultimately the Mongols will do us a favor for our narrative and wipe the slate clean. Before we get started, a reminder that if you like what I'm doing, please subscribe to my podcast so you'll know in the next episodes or up. And if you really like what I'm doing, then go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast and give me a review. Thanks. All right, enough business. Let's get to history. (upbeat music) Today we're going back to the post-classical era in the West, or as I like to call it, that time Europe lost its mind. We'll look at how people reacted to the barbarian invasions, who reunified Western Europe, and how they dug their way out of the dirt hole they jumped into when Rome fell. This is anti-social studies. I'm Emily Glankler, Settling, and let's go back in time. (upbeat music) Act one, the barbarian apocalypse. Last episode we talked in general about why these classical empires declined, and one of the reasons was invasions by various groups generally known as barbarians. The word barbarian comes from the Greek barbaros, which just means foreigner. So this term is entirely subjective. For example, in the Roman Empire, it was considered barbaric to our pants, real men wore togas. That is, until they conquered England, felt a cold draft and thought, "Oh, I get it now, let's switch to pants." So as Romans and decline, various groups like the Visagoths, and Ostragoths, and Emogoths, they enter the region. There are tons of groups, but I'm just gonna call them Germanic people, because they sort of came from the area known as Germany. And the best way to think about the fall of Rome is the zombie apocalypse, seriously. Okay, so what's your zombie apocalypse plan? If you don't already have one, then you're not gonna make it. When I ask my students this question, if you could always think they're really smart, and they say something like, "I'm gonna hole up in Walmart or IKEA." And then I have to spend the next 10 minutes explaining to them that that's a short-sighted answer, because there would be so much competition for such precious real estate. It's kind of like in Hunger Games, how the smart players run away from the cornucopia and go hide in the forest. Boom, that's a bonus Hunger Games reference for you. I didn't even put that one on my original blog post. So I'm not gonna share with you my entire apocalypse plan because I can't afford for my tens of podcast followers to steal my spot. But most people's plan consists generally of getting out of the cities, finding an isolated place and fortifying it. For example, I have family out in East Texas that own land and a lot of guns and I would go there. So when the Germanic tribes came in and were sacking the cities of the Roman Empire around the 300s, that's what people did. They fled the cities and went out to the countryside. If you were a patrician or a wealthy landowner, then you had a country estate and you were good. If you were a plebe or a landless peasant, then you had to go to those country states and beg for help. Please, let me in, I'll do anything. I'll work your fields, fight for you, whatever. Just give me protection and a place to live. And that's how we get feudalism. The petitions become lords, the plebs become vassals, and over time their country states get fortified until they are straight up castles. New weapons also get created over time to defend first against invading barbarians but eventually against other estates and then kingdoms. And there are two fictionalized depictions of medieval warfare that are actually really great. The first is the Battle of the Bastards from Game of Thrones. If you haven't seen it, oh my god, I was out of breath watching it while sitting on the couch. The other is actually the Battle of Helms Deep from the Lord of the Rings, and pay attention to which creatures get each weapon. The orcs carry crossbows that are much simpler to use and were good weapons for untrained soldiers, and you know orcs are dumb. Meanwhile, the majestic Orlando Bloom Elves wheeled longbows, which required a lot more skill than the crossbow and were way more accurate. So in the medieval era, after you flee the city, you lived your entire life on this massive estate or manner. You got everything you needed and really had no reason to ever leave, except maybe to go one manner over and do some light trading. So the follow-up room is basically like the Walking Dead. And most of the Middle Ages is like that terrible boring time where they just hold up on the farm for like a season and a half. Seriously, that season was so boring that the highlight of an episode was Rick yelling "Coral" because at least you hope that maybe he wouldn't make it or he would like cut his hair or something, either one. So during the Middle Ages, most people never went more than a few miles from the place they were born, and this leads to a breakdown of unified European society. Culturally, they're all mostly Christian and the main institution that provides some semblance of unity and control is the church. And it's at this point in history that church and state could have easily consolidated into one. The Pope could have just said, "Okay, y'all are struggling. "I'm taking over." But there's a passage in the Bible that says, quote, "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's "and give unto God what is God's. "Basically leave politicking to the politicians "and leave faith to the Pope." Monasteries are basically the only place where you can go to learn to read and write, and so learning declines. Latin slowly fragments into various spoken romance languages, romance from the Romans, and that further isolates the various parts of Europe, which is gonna make it really hard to ever unite them again. Also, if you haven't seen Monty Python in the Holy Grail, then you really should just pause this episode, go watch it, and then come back. It's one of the only full movies that I show in my class every year, and I could probably quote every line to you. Anyway, every time I think of medieval monks, I wanna talk about the holy hand grenade of Antioch. ♪ Pia, yes, udame, ne dona, aes, brek, we am ♪ smack. Oh, I love it so much. Politically, the rule of law breaks down, and justice becomes localized. What this means is that each manner or village developed its own rules and punishments, although they were heavily influenced by the church. Cannon Law, or the laws laid down by the church, helps guide the system, but there are a lot of gaps that get filled in with incredibly creative punishments. Queue medieval torture music. (upbeat music) Okay, quick tangent. A few years ago, I ranked my top medieval torture devices, because you know, you know me by now. So let's go through some of the highlights. They had the brazen bull, a hollow metal sculpture of a bull. They would put you inside and light a fire underneath. Or maybe you prefer the wreck. They would lay you naked on a board with your ankles tied to a roller on one end and your wrist tied to another. And they would roll each side slowly pulling you apart. And I mean, obviously we have the iron maiden. It was a hollow metal cabinet that could barely fit a human inside, and covering the insides were spikes, often placed strategically so that they wouldn't hit any major organs. Remember, a lot of these torture devices were used for interrogations or trying to get people to convert to Christianity. So they wanted you to live long enough to either answer their questions or choose to accept Jesus. When I was in Brewerge, I made my husband spend hours at a museum of medieval torture. Like he really is the best. One of my favorite punishments was just good old fashioned public humiliation. My high school students really identified with this one. People who had been convicted of smaller crimes would be placed in the middle of the community. Sometimes in the stocks or hung up in a cage over the town square. Everyone else would be encouraged to walk by and throw things at them and yell insults. This one is timeless. Enemies of communism under mal will be subjected to something similar in the cultural revolution and stand up comedians have been putting themselves through this torture for decades. Now, were the dark ages really so dark? It's an important question because Europeans in the next era are really gonna benefit from playing into this idea that this time period is backwards in every way because it makes what they're gonna do all the more impressive. You can't have a renaissance rebirth if you didn't die and you can't be enlightened if it was never dark. So in a lot of ways, yes, the middle ages were pretty dark. Again, medieval torture. Although some of these torture devices actually were invented later in Europe and attributed to the medieval era to make them seem even worse. Like the first story is mentioning the Iron Maiden actually didn't appear until the 19th century. Ha ha, I tricked you. Also general learning and scholarship does decline and that makes it quote unquote dark. But that doesn't mean it goes away completely. Most of the literature this time was religious but there are some notable exceptions. Bayowulf was written in the 900s by the way, it was not the only kid who had to read Bayowulf in school. Also dibs baby name, Bayowulf, stop hitting your sister. But there are also documents from around the time of the fall of Rome that show that some citizens preferred to be ruled by Germanic groups because they were providing more order than Rome was at that point. And we're biased in favor of Rome so we see the invaders as inherently terrible. But we'll see that some of these tribes actually had big plans for reuniting and reviving Europe. (upbeat music) Act two, thanks Franks. Just five years after Rome fell for the final time, a 15 year old named Clovis became ruler of a Germanic group called the Franks. He soon came to control most of Gaul, modern day France. That's where the name comes from, Franks. By reuniting all the various Frankish tribes under his rule, he's considered the first king of France and his Germanic name comes from two phrases that mean fame and combat, flood and weak. This gets changed eventually until Louis and will be the name of a ton of kings and French histories some of which got to keep their heads. The biggest thing that Clovis does is convert to Christianity, mostly at the urging of his wife. She becomes a saint, clotilde, because of this. When he converts, a ton of the Franks also convert, creating a massive united Christian kingdom in northwestern Europe, and they're going to expand under a few other notable leaders. Fast forward. 200 years and there's a guy in charge named Charles Martel. He is famous for two huge things. One, he leads his military into Spain and defeats the advancing Muslim army at the Battle of Tours. We'll talk about a more next episode, but Islam was on the rise and was spreading across North Africa and up into southern Spain. They're called the Moors from the European perspective. It's generally thought that without the Frankish Kingdom and Charles Martel to stop their advance, the Muslims very easily could have swept through Europe, taking advantage of the decentralization and weak unity. So without Charles Martel, we could all be speaking Arabic today. The second thing he's famous for is having an important grandson. His son is hilariously named Peppin the Short, but let's just skip past him and get to another The Great in History. Charles the Great or Charlemagne? Charlemagne has been nicknamed the Father of Europe, and this has meant somewhat literally, if you're a white person and you go to ancestry.com, you can probably trace some part of your lineage back to Charlemagne. Really? He had 18 kids, 18. We don't need to get into the exponential after effects of procreation, but just trust me, if you have European heritage, congratulations, you're related to Charlemagne. Metaphorically, he was the Father of Europe because he reunited most of Europe into an empire, for the first time since the Romans, and the descendants of Charlemagne and his empire are going to become the royalty of most of the European kingdoms. Charlemagne's rule sees a flowering of cultural and intellectual activity that helps Europe come out of its so-called dark ages. Latin is dying, even amongst the clergy, so he forces all church officials to relearn proper Latin, helping preserve a lot of ancient scholarly traditions. And this brings me to a big turning point in the Middle Ages. In the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope. This is a crucial moment, in which we have the leader of the church crowning a Germanic person as the new Roman Emperor. This is mostly symbolic, but it marks the end of the dark ages and the reunification of Europe. Even though Charlemagne's empire will fall apart after his death. But this event also upsets the people who had been holding down the Roman Empire for the last 300 years. Oh, yet did I not mention that? Yeah, only half the Roman Empire fell. Act 3. The Byzantines Meanwhile, in the part of the Roman Empire that survived, so let's rewind a little bit. Before Rome fell, it was in decline. And during this period of decline, a few Emperor's did some things to try to prevent a complete collapse, and it worked halfway. First, a guy named Diocletian saw how big an unwieldy the empire had become, and so he divided the empire into two halves. He would rule the empire in the east from an ancient city called Byzantium in modern day Turkey, and another guy would rule the western half from Rome. And so at this point, there are two Roman emperors, and this helped stave off crisis for a little while longer. Just a few decades later, a guy named Constantine became emperor, and he rebuilt and fortified the eastern city of Byzantium, and he took a page out of Alexander's book and named it Constantinople. So when Rome fell, this city and the eastern half of the empire that it controlled did not fall. Constantinople was much more protected by its geography. The city itself is stemmed today. You know the song. It's surrounded by water almost every side. The Germanic tribes never made it that far. They had enough land to conquer as it was with the western half, so the eastern Roman empire continued to exist. Now, this is confusing but important. We now call this empire the Byzantine empire, but that's wrong, because they still viewed themselves as the Roman Empire. They were just the one that survived, which kind of makes them the better one. So all this time that we're talking about the Franks, reuniting Europe, and Charlemagne, Ming crown, Holy Roman Empire is all really frustrating over in the east. They're like, what the hell man? This Frank is dude, unites some land, you crown him Roman Emperor. We've been here this whole time. This is one of the many reasons that western and eastern Europe start to diverge during the medieval era. Later their differences are going to become so great that the church splits into two, Roman Catholicism in the west, and eastern or Greek orthodox in the east. The most important guy you might want to know from the Byzantine Empire is Justinian. He did a lot, maybe because he was a great ruler or maybe because he ruled in this unique moment, the 500s. When there was a power vacuum in Europe, this is 300 years before Charlemagne, and the Middle East, so there weren't a ton of threats to his power. Justinian did a few things that impact your life today, the biggest of which is his law code. So he compiled all of the Roman laws that were still in practice and added some of his own to compile the body of civil law or Justinian's code. He preserved Roman laws so that they could become the foundation of the modern western legal system today, ideas like precedence or earlier court decisions informing future ones, and the belief that all humans have some basic natural rights that cannot be taken away. Pretty important stuff. Justinian also built the Hagia Sophia, which is still standing today in Istanbul. It was originally a church, then a mosque, and now it's basically a tourist attraction. The reason I love Justinian is because of his badass wife, Enter Theodora. Theodora grew up as part of the lower class in Byzantium. Her father was a bear keeper in their version of the Colosseum. It was called the Hippodrome. She became an actress when she was young, which in this society probably meant that she was also a prostitute. By the time Justinian met her, she had given up that career and joined a religious group. And all reports tell us that she was incredibly bright, and Justinian falls in love and wants to marry her. Their union was such a big deal that they actually had to pass new legislation, allowing actresses and high-ranking politicians to get married. And she basically ruled alongside Justinian and passed laws, outlying sex trafficking and protecting basic women's rights. Go Theodora! At one point, Justinian was facing revolts in Constantinople. There were two rival street gangs that had started as fan groups for the sport and spectacle in the Hippodrome, but they'd grown into political parties. It would be like a frial Madrid and FC Barcelona got into politics. They were called the Blues and the Greens, and I typically snap my fingers and do a little west side story dance at this point in my lecture. The Blues and the Greens were mad about a lot of things, but what sparked the riots was the conviction of a few chariot-racing fans who were convicted of hooliganism, one of my favorite words. They were sentenced to death, and even though Justinian commuted their sentence to imprisonment, their buddies were not happy. This was also just an opportunity to try to put one of their own guys on the throne, so they revolted and it sparked the Nika riots, which would eventually burn down half of Constantinople and kill tens of thousands of people. The story goes that Justinian was ready to flee the city and assemble his army somewhere else. All of his male advisors were ready to board ships when Theodora showed up to give them a passive-aggressive lecture only a wife could give. I'm going to read it in full because I love it. Quote, "My lords, the present occasion is too serious to allow me to follow the convention that a woman should not speak in a man's council. Those whose interests are threatened by extreme danger should think only of the wisest course of action, not of conventions. Basically, I know I shouldn't be talking because I'm a woman, but things are getting crazy out there." Quote, "In my opinion, flight is not the right course, even if it should bring us to safety. It is impossible for a person having been born into this world not to die, but for one who has reigned, it is intolerable to be a fugitive. May I never be deprived of this purple robe, and may I never see the day when those who meet me do not call me empress." Essentially she's saying, "Y'all need to stay here and fight because there's no way you could survive on the run. Also, what's the point of living if you can't rule an empire?" So true Theodora. Quote, "If you wish to save yourself, my lord, there is no difficulty. We are rich, over there is the sea and yonder are the ships. Yet reflect for a moment whether, when you have once escaped to a place of security, you would not gladly exchange such safety for death. As for me, I agree with the adage that the royal purple is the noblest shroud." Basically, you can save yourself if you want to, but I'm not afraid of death, I would rather die than live as a coward." Mike drop. Justinian replies, "Yes, dear, and stays. The rebellion is put down and he stays in power, so really behind every powerful man is a woman who's rolling her eyes." This high point of the Byzantine Empire is going to face a new threat from the south. Just five years after Justinian died, a boy was born in modern-day Saudi Arabia who would change the world forever, and his name was Muhammad. Now, we're going to talk more about the rise of Islam next episode, but for now, just know that Islam rose in the Middle East. And a few hundred years after Justinian, the Byzantine Empire had been threatened by the spread of Islam into both the Holy Land and on their own borders for centuries now. And eventually, the Byzantines can't hold them off by themselves anymore, and so they asked the Pope in the West for help. In 1095, Pope Urban II orders the first crusade by issuing a call to all Christians to reclaim the Holy Land crying, "God wills it." Apparently, God willed it, but for the other side. Because after hundreds of years of sporadic crusades, the Holy Land will still be controlled by the Muslims. In the third crusade, there was an English prince and commander named Richard the Lionheart, who faced off against the famous Muslim general Saladin. Even though they were enemies throughout the fighting, they exchanged letters. One of them highlights the unwillingness of both sides to give in, which really for shadows almost every other east-west interaction in the Middle East up until today. Richard wrote a letter to Saladin explaining that he wanted three things. One, control of Jerusalem. He writes Saladin that, "It is our place of worship and we will never agree to renounce it, even if we have to fight to the last man." Yeah, good luck with that. Two, they want more territory in the Holy Land west of the Jordan River, and three, the true cross. You see, it was believed that the true cross, the wood on which Jesus was crucified, had been discovered earlier on and that the Muslims had come to possess it. He argued, "For you and his merely a piece of wood, whereas for us, its value is inestimable." Saladin responded with his own life. letter, in which he countered that Jerusalem is holy to Muslims too, and that the true cross is too useful as a bargaining chip to be given away. But the part of the letter that highlights the crux of the issue is about the land in general. Saladin writes, quote, "As for the land, it was ours to begin with, and you invaded it." Now, I'm going to try to avoid getting too far down the rabbit hole that is the conflict between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the holy land, but I just want to point out that the situation can look way different depending on your scope of history. So if we were to zoom in to just Saladin's lifetime, then he is correct. The Muslims were living in the holy land peacefully until the crusaders came in and invaded. But if we zoom out a little bit to around the time of Justinian, then the Byzantines controlled the holy land, and it was taken from them, the Christians by the Muslims. But wait, because if we zoom back even further to the ancient era, then the Jews have a claim, because they lived there before they were kicked out the Jewish diaspora. So who is right and who is wrong in this debate depends totally on your perspective and how large or small your view of history is. Needless to say, this problem has not gone away with time. And for now, let's just get out of this quagmire and go back to Western Europe as they try to dig themselves out of the mud. Act 4. Europe started from the bottom out here. So Europe started out with weak or non-existent kings, but by the end of this time period, we're going to be at the height of absolute monarchy. Basically picture an old European monarch, incredible wigs, huge palace, men and women at court, shooting fesants probably. You literally never hear about fesants unless they're been killed by rich guy. So how did we get there? When Sharlameen united most of Western Europe again, he jump starts this process. His empire does split apart, but his heirs become the kings of each new section. Basically France, again named after the Franks, and the Holy Roman Empire, which really is just a collection of principalities ruled by princes that are all loosely joined in this empire that's basically modern day Austrian Germany. It's really confusing and I'm not going to get too much into it. So Western continental Europe is starting to take shape into the boundaries that we know today. Meanwhile, across the pond, so England sort of originates when the Anglo-Saxons arrive. They were another Germanic group that ended up in modern day England and southern Scotland around the time of the fall of Rome. They introduced the Old English language and ward with many of the other groups there, including the people of Wales, Cornwall and the Old North. I bet there was a John Snow in the Old North. I hope you survived. England was also populated by Norsemen from Scandinavia and Vikings who made raids on the island, and it was eventually conquered by William. They called him William the Conqueror, because, well, you know, at the time there were literally two heralds fighting each other, and really one was a herald from Norway and one was a herald from England. Anyway, it's really confusing, but William conquered England, but then a new house came into power and it's this new house that has a guy named King John. Remember Richard the Lionheart from the Crusades? Yeah, this is his little brother. Imagine trying to live up to an older brother whose nickname was the Lionheart. To make it even worse, Richard and John's mother was this total badass named Eleanor of Aquatain. Through some thrifty marrying, she was actually both the queen of England and France at different points in her life, and she also led one of the holy Crusades. She justified going with her husband to tend to the wounded and care for the soldiers, you know, women's stuff, but she ended up leading armies into battle. So awesome. Anyway, King John has a lot to live up to, and he is currently having trouble with his nobles. He wants more money for them to wage war on France and they are unhappy with his fiscal policies. You see, at the time in the medieval era, there was really no such thing as a parliament or any sort of official advisory group for any king. It was just another feudal relationship, albeit on a national scale. So if the king, who was the lord, needed support from his vassals, the nobles, he would call them, hold out his hand and say, "Money please!" and they were supposed to support him. But the barons or nobles had had enough of that, and they forced King John to sign a document saying that they had some rights that even he couldn't take away. It was a great charter or the Magna Carta. So what didn't the Magna Carta do? Well, it didn't guarantee rights for everyone, just for noble men. Typical. It didn't even really guarantee rights for noble men because John almost immediately went back on his word and didn't honor the Magna Carta, which caused a revolt back to France. Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system. Help help, I'm being repressed. But the Magna Carta did set an incredibly important precedent for the establishment of basic rights in England. In the document, the king promised to protect the nobles from false imprisonment with access to swift justice. This is where we get our fair and speedy trial idea. It also limited feudal payments to the crown and set up an advisory council of 25 barons to oversee these payments, and this is the origin of the British Parliament. Every new king was expected to resign the Magna Carta, and it sets England on this vastly different path than the rest of Europe. While continental Europe is firmly entrenched in their absolute monarchies, basically where kings and queens can do whatever they want, with very little protection for their citizens. England is beginning to establish what will become a constitutional monarchy. This is huge for them and also huge for the United States, but more on that in a few episodes. In other political developments, the crusades play a big role in consolidating the power of the kings. As armies go off to fight, they start as small groups of men fighting for their lord, but they grow until they come to represent entire nations. Also, since the Christians ultimately lost the crusades, wah wah. It casts a negative light on the church, who kept claiming that God was on their side, and people's allegiances slowly shifted toward their king. They didn't become disloyal to the Pope, but he now had to share the spotlight. Finally, a war between England and France is going to begin the steady growth of nationalism in Europe. It lasts for around 100 years, and it's called, well, you know, the 100 years war. It actually lasted 116 years, but that doesn't sound as catchy. Honestly, it's not that important why this war started. It was a debate over the succession of the French throne or how it ended, France wins. What is important is that it is considered the beginning of what historians call national consciousness. Up until this point, boundaries shifted regularly, with England often claiming land on the continent and vice versa. But this war solidified national boundaries between England and France and the rivalry between the two nations. Whereas before, if you lived in the countryside, you would have identified as John, a Christian peasant from some countryside. After the 100 years war, you would consider yourself John, a Christian Englishman, and you hated the French. So, moneypith and a holy grail had to have been set after the 100 years war, or else the silly rivalry with the French guy on top of the castle wouldn't have made much sense. I am French. Why do you think I have this outrageous accent? Also, side note, when he insults the king by saying your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberry, what he's saying is that his mom got around because hamsters procreate very efficiently, and that his dad was a drunk because a common wine was made from elderberries, #MadeEvilBurn. Also, the 100 years war is the war of Joan of Arc. When Joan of Arc was 13, she started hearing voices. Believing them to be messages from God, she believed that she had been sent a mission to free France from the invading English who had taken over the throne and to install the French prince or Dauphine Charles as the rightful king. She took a vow of chastity, her father tried to force her to marry at 16, but she convinced the court not to allow it, and she dedicated herself to this mission. She chopped her hair off, dressed him in clothes, and rode off to meet with Charles. Pretty gutsy for a teenage girl, but then again as a high school teacher, I can definitively say that teenage girls are terrifying. Charles allowed her to join his fight, probably because it was a good PR move to have a young girl who claimed to be speaking directly with God. I imagine he didn't expect her to do any real fighting, but just to inspire the troops. Instead, Joan of Arc took command and drove the English back at the Battle of Orleans. The Old Orleans, not the New Orleans, that would be weird. Her reputation grew, and she insisted that Charles should continue pushing to retake Paris, but others in the court started to worry that she was becoming too influential. She was eventually taken prisoner by the English during a battle and put on trial. Joan of Arc had to answer to 70 different crimes, including witchcraft, heresy, and dressing like a man. Because apparently those were all equally bad. Charles did not defend her, but after a year in prison she relented and signed a confession. But just days later, she wore men's clothes again, and it got her burned at the stake at the age of 19. The Middle Ages were crazy, man. Culturally, the high or late Middle Ages saw the growth of non-religious literature. Poetry and songs of courtly love were all the rage, especially from knights and soldiers who had gone off to fight in the crusades. A lot of them say things like, "I hope I can stay faithful to you because I really love you." "Yeah, you know what you could do to prove you love me? Just drop the hope and stay faithful." And all right, ladies. Every year when we talk about chivalry in my high school class, I show them the clip from ten things I hate about you, where Heath Ledger serenades cat with some Frankie Valley, and every year I get sadder because less and less kids know who Heath Ledger is. Time is cruel. There were also some female writers who challenged medieval society and its view of women as an object of affection to be one. Christine de Pazan is the most famous. Her book The City of Women Profiled a bunch of notable women of the day and it's considered one of the first feminist texts. So just as politics and culture are growing, so is the economy. Towns begin forming trading alliances which eventually get consolidated under kingdoms, and two seemingly unrelated events really do a lot to jumpstart the economy. First, the Crusades. So think about this. Most men in the Middle Ages had never left the village where they were born. Then all of a sudden, they march off, get on a ship, and end up in the Byzantine Empire of the Holy Land. That must have been so insane and hard to process. But once they did, they looked around and were like, "Whoa, everyone else has way nicer stuff than us." Also, a lot of these guys don't go home. Some become merchants staying behind in the port cities where they got off the ship after returning from the crusades. Because why go home to your little manor once you've seen the world? Most of these new trading cities that grow up are in Italy, which was geographically positioned perfectly to send soldiers off across the Mediterranean to fight in the Middle East. Italian city states rise and powerful families of merchants gain influence. We'll come back to them later. They're the people who are going to hire guys like Leonardo and Michelangelo. Note, the crusades also spark learning, knowledge, and curiosity about the outside world again. When the Roman Empire collapsed, it was the Byzantines and eventually the Islamic empires that preserved Greco-Roman knowledge. As the crusaders travel through the Holy Land, they are not just exposed to new people, but old ideas about philosophy, math, science, and art. The crusades open back up the eyes of Europeans to the outside world. However, this new exchange of goods and people also brings disease. Queue the Black Death. In the mid-1300s, right around the time the Mongols are sweeping across Asia, not a coincidence, we'll talk about that next episode, the bubonic plague destroys Europe. Some estimates are as high as a third of all people dying of the plague, so that scene where the guy is yelling at everyone to bring out what you're dead is probably not that far off. According to legend, the children's song Ring Around the Rosie was written during one of the plagues, and it alludes to the fact that people would fill their pockets with flowers to ward off the smell of the dead. Ring Around the Rosie, Pocket full of poses, ashes, ashes, we all fall down. It's the darkest children's song of all time. So every horror movie that has a small child singing that song just got infinitely more terrifying. The Black Death has a lot of obvious negative impacts, and it also produces some incredible skeleton art that I've posted on my blog. But it also has this weird unintentional positive effect on peasants, the ones who survived, obviously. Before the Black Death, peasants were not worth much, but now, after so many have died, they become incredibly valuable resources. If you were a lord on a manor, you might have lost one-fourth to a third of your workforce. At the same time, jobs in nearby town are opening up, and your peasants are looking to leave for better opportunities. Now that peasants have more options, a lot of them choose to escape to the growing towns, and take up jobs as apprentices to craftsmen or traders. And this does two things. It helps break down the mineral system into a more modern economy, and it fuels the rise of trade and production in Europe. This is another reason why Monty Python has to be set in the late Middle Ages. Coconuts originate in the Pacific, which was linked into the Indian Ocean trade, but Western Europe didn't become part of this global trade network until after the Crusades, until it's very unlikely that they would have had access to coconuts before around 1200, even if they were carried by an African swallow. So, Europe is on the rise. Kings are becoming powerful again, and the economy is growing. People have had their eyes open to the wider world, thanks to the Crusades, and they're looking outward. And it's at this point in the early 1300s that they're also hearing rumors of an incredibly rich king from Africa who's been spreading his wealth all across the continent on his way to Mecca, but more on that next week. So Europe fell apart, but it slowly putting itself together. But what was going on in the east? Islam is on the rise, and filling the power vacuum left behind from the collapse of classical empires. China is going to hide away and invent everything, and Africa will develop into an important trading hub. But the real story is going to be a group of nomadic barbarians who ravage Eurasia and leave the seeds of modern civilization in their wake. To be continued. Thanks for watching!