Augustus
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It never recovered from being sacked during the 4th Crusade which was basically the final nail in the coffin.
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Mediaeval Thread
- Thread starter Rival
- Start date
It never recovered from being sacked during the 4th Crusade which was basically the final nail in the coffin.
The biggest job of medieval spymasters was tracking salt. Any army or navy needed to move massive quantities of salt for food preservation, so big movements of salt was equivalent to moving large amounts of weapons today.
If you became a social outcast or exile and couldn't sneak around well, you were very likely to die during the winter because you could not preserve food to last, and public land wasn't really a thing. Most land good for game or arbor was owned by the church or king and you could be imprisoned or executed for hunting and gathering without permission.
The hermit life was mostly impossible, you had to rely on the king and church to get by. You had no other feasible option. This made for tight knit communities but also a lot of petty tribalism, and very little social mobility. Social outcasts had short, brutal lives.
If you became a social outcast or exile and couldn't sneak around well, you were very likely to die during the winter because you could not preserve food to last, and public land wasn't really a thing. Most land good for game or arbor was owned by the church or king and you could be imprisoned or executed for hunting and gathering without permission.
The hermit life was mostly impossible, you had to rely on the king and church to get by. You had no other feasible option. This made for tight knit communities but also a lot of petty tribalism, and very little social mobility. Social outcasts had short, brutal lives.
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber
The 4th Crusade was a full two centuries before Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire, and Mehmed II a very tenacious Sultan. It being in the middle of "enemy territory" also made it likely to eventually fall regardless.
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber
That's only because they haven't seen the concrete tower blocks of the 20th and 21st centuries, lmao.It's the wonderful Salisbury Cathedral.
It's quite funny to think of some Renaissance fops looking at buildings like that the way we would look at some concrete tower block from the 1960s
Augustus
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Another myth is that Magna Carta was a big deal (it was annulled almost instantly and sort of remade a bit later and even then it was probably less influential than Charter of the Forest - Wikipedia)
Augustus
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They didn't just sack the city, they broke up much of the Empire too
1200 onwards in that video illustrates it pretty effectively.
Frankokratia - Wikipedia
The Frankokratia (Greek: Φραγκοκρατία, sometimes anglicized as Francocracy, lit. "rule of the Franks"), also known as Latinokratia (Greek: Λατινοκρατία, "rule of the Latins") and, for the Venetian domains, Venetokratia or Enetokratia (Greek: Βενετοκρατία or Ενετοκρατία, "rule of the Venetians"), was the period in Greek history after the Fourth Crusade (1204), when a number of primarily French and Italian states were established by the Partitio terrarum imperii Romaniae on the territory of the dissolved Byzantine Empire.
The term derives from the name given by the Orthodox Greeks to the Western European Latin Church Catholics: "rule of the Franks or Latins". The span of the Frankokratia period differs by region: the political situation proved highly volatile, as the Frankish states fragmented and changed hands, and the Greek successor states re-conquered many areas.
With the exception of the Ionian Islands and some islands or forts which remained in Venetian hands until the turn of the 19th century, the final end of the Frankokratia in most of Greek lands came with the Ottoman conquest, chiefly in the 14th to 17th centuries, which ushered in the period known as "Tourkokratia" ("rule of the Turks"; see Ottoman Greece).
exchemist
Veteran Member
That looks like Salisbury Cathedral. Is it?I personally cannot stand the Dark Ages/Renaissance/Enlightenment periodisation as it is hugely self-congratulatory on behalf of the later scholars who were basically saying 'look how great we are".
Also the "Renaissance" was in part a reaction to the "vulgarity" of Gothic styles like this monstrosity
Augustus
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Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
Not quite Middle Ages...
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber
Vlad Dracul III, Vlad the Impaler, the Impaler Prince is not just my favorite figure from the Medieval era, he's one my all time favorite historic figures. And he had such a complicated and tragic life, being a prisoner at least twice, tortured and molded into a monster, and a ruler defending his people from the monsters who shaped him and taught him his methods of cruelty. He nearly killed Mehmed II (and had he succeeded in the Night Raid we'd no doubt all remember him as a great Christian warrior who killed the Conqueror and severely hindered the Ottoman march into Europe), his killing Hamza Bey is an interesting story, as is the noble who complained of the smell (he was impaled on a taller stake), the Hungarian guard he killed is very interesting (he told the king the guard's beheading was a suicide for invading Vlad's dwelling), and really it shows at our core though we may use terms like "monster" we're all human with fragile minds that can be broken (it's said Vlad was very intelligent, well learned, and even in his youth he was caring and kind).
We watched a great series on the art of the era The Dark Ages: An Age of Light - Wikipedia
amorphous_constellation
Well-Known Member
seems kinda broad... well, what do you find most interesting about it
Viker
Häxan
Swords. Battles for honor.
amorphous_constellation
Well-Known Member
the imagery of those things seem to represent the time period rather easily. I wonder how many large scale battles happened, in total
Augustus
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Another myth is that most people who went on the early Crusades did so to get rich or steal some land.
You were far more likely to bankrupt yourself than get rich as Crusading was ridiculously expensive. Most knights had to sell their property to afford their equipment, horses and pay for supplies and their entourage.
So many people sold property and valuables that it depressed the market in parts of Europe.
Most people also wanted to go home and had no intention of 'stealing land', although a handful of powerful figures obviously did take the opportunities to set themselves up as rulers.
Europe as a whole did benefit from the establishment of the crusader states though as this improved trade networks.
This was far more a consequence rather than a cause of the crusades though
You were far more likely to bankrupt yourself than get rich as Crusading was ridiculously expensive. Most knights had to sell their property to afford their equipment, horses and pay for supplies and their entourage.
So many people sold property and valuables that it depressed the market in parts of Europe.
Most people also wanted to go home and had no intention of 'stealing land', although a handful of powerful figures obviously did take the opportunities to set themselves up as rulers.
Europe as a whole did benefit from the establishment of the crusader states though as this improved trade networks.
This was far more a consequence rather than a cause of the crusades though
Kooky
Freedom from Sanity
In Central Europe, public land very much existed, but in many ways, we are looking at a situation that was very much the reverse of what we experience today: Today, the land that we use economically is owned privately, and public land is designated as non-usable generally; in post-Carolingian Central Europe it was typical for rural communities to hold most of the arable land in common, with usage of specific portions of the land typically left to individual farmholds to manage; forests and other non-arable land, meanwhile, was typically held by the lord of the land for their private usage - usually for hunting (although local communities were also allowed usage to some extent, such as allowing forest usage for the purpose of feeding pigs or collecting firewood to some).
With that said, I do agree with your assessment that itinerant people who were not members of a community had it pretty hard, as there was no social safety net of any kind outside these communities. The tales of brigands living in forests and on the road may well have had their origins in the need of these itinerants to band together in order to feed and shelter themselves.
In addition, it was very common for urban communities to deal with criminals via exile rather than imprisonment (as there was little in the was of prison infrastructure at the scale us moderners would have been used to), so they tended to compound the issue by simply cutting most criminals loose and leaving them to fend for themselves.
Wars - or rather, the end of war - were also a common source of "vagrancy" and "brigands" as you'd often have soldiers being cut loose from their armies after war with little in the way of assistance or infrastructure to allow them to actually get back to their communities, and so these people would frequently resort to simply bullying the local population at swordpoint to make a living.
Kooky
Freedom from Sanity
In the spirit of this thread, in a blog I frequent I recently came across an interesting article on medieval medicine, which tries to tackle a lot of the myths and half-truths that are common in people's perception of pre-industrial - and here specifically medieval - European medicine. One point I found particularly interesting was this one:
The author also goes into another interesting aspect of medieval medicine, in which the medical practices of that period differ significantly from our modern understanding of the profession:
Of course, when we talk about intellectual texts of the medieval time period, there is the elephant of gender that's always in the room, and the author adresses this, too. Medieval medicine was very, very gendered, with male theorists and practictioners typically only adressing and treating male patients, and female practitioners treating female patients. This was to such degree that male medical professionals' understanding of specifically female anatomy was often extremely limited to nonexistent, with many educated men believing in nonsense such as the "wandering uterus" or being frequently puzzled by the phenomenon of menstruation.
However, the author stresses that this blind spot was very much one of these men, and that female practitioners (e.g. midwives) probably had a more accurate understanding of the female body:
The author also goes into another interesting aspect of medieval medicine, in which the medical practices of that period differ significantly from our modern understanding of the profession:
Of course, when we talk about intellectual texts of the medieval time period, there is the elephant of gender that's always in the room, and the author adresses this, too. Medieval medicine was very, very gendered, with male theorists and practictioners typically only adressing and treating male patients, and female practitioners treating female patients. This was to such degree that male medical professionals' understanding of specifically female anatomy was often extremely limited to nonexistent, with many educated men believing in nonsense such as the "wandering uterus" or being frequently puzzled by the phenomenon of menstruation.
However, the author stresses that this blind spot was very much one of these men, and that female practitioners (e.g. midwives) probably had a more accurate understanding of the female body:
Heyo
Veteran Member
Yep. The plague (and the beginning of the Little Ice Age) changed a lot. Fear makes people irrational and having one out of three people around you dying produces a lot of fear and irrationality.
And the reformed were just as active in it as the RCC. (Except when the local Lord, Count, Earl or King prohibited it. There were times and areas were no witch trials were held.)