PowersAndThrones

• Very good. Learned a lot. Fast read.
• Great forces beyond our control: Climate change, mass migration, pandemic disease, technological change, and global network, sound like very modern or even postmodern concern, but they shaped the medieval world too.
• It is important to recognize how similar we are to medieval people.
• For much of their history Romans where blessed with good weather.
• The underpinning of Roman military hegemony was the empires ability to absorb defeat, escalate conflict, and exact pitiless revenge; Rome lost many battles but precious few wars.
• Overwhelming military power and reach alone did not distinguish Rome from other broadly contemporaneous superpowers of the classical world (eg: Macedonian empire, Persian empires and China). What made Rome so dominate in the Mediterranean world and beyond was the fact that overwhelming armed force developed in tune with a sophisticated civic machinery: a mesh of state-of-the-art social, cultural, and legal systems that Romans considered to be virtuous in and of themselves.
• The root purpose of the Roman empire was to funnel wealth to be spent in Rome: in that sense it was a racket based on rampant exploitation.
• There have been a few handful in recorded history of true "slave states" in which slavery permeated every facet of society, and on which an entire economy and culture was built. Rome was one.
• A large part of the western attachment to slavery sprang from the fact that it had been indivisible from Romes swaggering glory.
• For some people the collapse of the western Roman empire was a seismic event, for others it would have registered barely if at all.
• Rome was the historical foundation on which everything in the Middle ages was built.
• (5 Century AD) Although Rome would live on largely untouched in the east, where it thrived in mutant form as a Greek-speaking Byzantium, the future of the Roman west now lay in the hands of newcomers. The age of the barbarian had dawned.
• The antique world can be said to have crumbled – and the Middle Ages begun – on the banks of the Volga in the year AD 370. In that year there appeared crowds of people known as the Huns, who had left their homelands 1000s of miles away on the steppe north of China. There origins are sketchy, but their effect was profound. They were what we call today climate migrants or refugees.
• In 370 it was not the Huns that were the problem, but the people they had displaced. A climate emergency in Asia fed a secondary migrant crisis in eastern Europe.
• Once the policy of admitting vast numbers of refugees into the empire had been set, it proved impossible to reverse. Thrace slowly became home to thousands of disaffected and mistreated Gothic migrants. The Balkans were becoming a tinderbox.
• Eight hundred years had passed since Rome had last been sacked. Celts in 387 BC and Visigoths in 410 AD. The terrible symbolism of an assault on a world superpower far outweighed the immediate physical damage done. The Goths struck at the heart of the Roman Empire, leaving scars that only hardened and deepened as the years went by.
• Mass migration, rightly or wrongly, stirs fears and loathing, for as the history of the Western Roman Empire makes abundantly clear, it has the power to turn worlds upside down.
• In a single day, Carthage, the might city for which the Roman Republic had fought the Punic Wars for 100 years was severed from the Empire. The entire Roman economy depended on Carthaginian grain exports.
• Byzantium survived for centuries until it was ravaged by crusaders and later consumed by the Ottomans – an event that heralded the end of the Middle Ages.
• The Roman Empire had once been a super-spreader of classical learning across vast territories. But as it fell to pieces in the west and became ever-more doctrinally obsessed in the east, it became an active blocker to knowledge, and the transmission of ancient learning throughout the empire began to fail.
• Between the 6C and the first beginnings of the Renaissance in the late 13C, the scientific and rational insights of the ancient world were forgotten or suppressed in the west.
• 536: Across the world the sun dimmed, the sky darkened to a murky gloom and the temperatures dropped appreciably, much as happens during a solar eclipse. The gloom was probably the result of a massive volcanic eruption, perhaps in North America. One of the sharpest environmental crises in human history. As a result the worlds climate changed for as much as a decade. Temperatures fell by at least 2C globally and summers effectively disappeared.
• The Arab conquest of Syria in 632-642 was one of the most astonishing accomplishments of its age.
• With the exception of Spain, Portugal and Sicily, almost every major territory that was captured by early medieval Islamic armies retained, and still retains today, an Islamic identity and culture.
• Its absolutism which became increasingly pronounced during Islams early medieval history, would come to be its attraction, its strength, and its inherent menace to those who had not yet submitted to its teachings.
• Muslim soldiers who formed the conquering armies were largely kept separate form the populace garrisoned in military towns and paid a stipend funded by taxation. There were not rewarded with tracts of land or confiscated estate, a policy that helped reduce civil tension in the short term, and in the long term meant that Muslim armies did not blend over a couple of generations into the local population, in the Roman fashion.
• Pragmatic acceptance of local practices – at least in the short term – has always been an effective way of pursuing military expansion without provoking long insurgencies.
• The Byzantium empire had perfected a deadly, oil-based jelly know variously as Roman fire, marine fire, artificial fire, or Greek fire. It was a game-changing weapons system, and a military secrete that the Byzantine state would guard closely for 500 years, so closely indeed that the knowledge of how to manufacture and deploy it was ultimately forgotten.
• Many historians see the failure of the second Arab siege of Constantinople as a turning point in Western history: the moment when the spread of the first Islamic armies toward the Balkans was halted.

History

• Around the year 700 the Arabian leader ordered that public servants across the Islamic world should use only Arabic. This simple administrative change was in fact a moment of juddering cultural importance in the history of the Islamic world – for it ensured that there would be an Islamic world in perpetuity, rather than a short-lived federation of former Roman and Persian territories ruled over by a thin monotheistic elite.
• The defeat of the Arabs at the battle of Tours saved all of Europe form Islamification and prevented an alternative history from unfolding.
• Many of the late-medieval advances of the European Renaissance would have been impossible without the preservation of classical knowledge and technology from across the world in Islamic institutions like the House of Wisdom.
• One of the great and lasting stories of the Middle Ages is one of increasing ignorance and hostility between the Islamic east and the Christian west.
• During a reign that spanned forty years, Charlemagne united the lands we now know as France, Germany, northern Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands into a European superstate under his own command.
• The Franks and Vikings clashed as much as they cooperated while jockeying for resources and power. In the end their collisions created a third people the Normans, who would have a major role in medieval history.
• The pope would turn to the Franks as his secular defenders and throw his legitimizing influence behind the new Carolingian monarchy – if in return they would move South over the Alps and save the papacy from its enemies. It was a high-stakes deal on both sides. In retrospect it has come to represent a seminal moment in western history: the moment at which the bishops of Rome no longer looked east to Constantinople for support, but to the barbarian-descended peoples of the west.

History

• Like Alexander, Charlemagne had built an empire that proved itself possible only as an extension of one mans political self.
• It would take nearly a thousand years for one ruler to once again hold the whole Carolingian inheritance in his hands. He was Napoleon Bonaparte. It has only been possible to unite Europe once or twice in every millennium, and even then, not for very long.
• By the late 11C abbots of Cluny were on even terms with kings and popes, and participated in the highest conversations and conflicts of their age.
• Church authorities had no problem with the rich paying others to do their penance for them. By founding monasteries the landowning warrior classes of Europe could effectively offset their sins by paying for monks to beg forgiveness their behalf in the form of masses.
• The emperor of Constantinople thought salvation lay in the part of the Empire that had detached some 700 years ago. Constantinople sent an SOS call that would change history. Byzantine ambassadors were packed off to the realms of the west, to as for military and moral support from the "other" half of the Christendom: western Europe and the Franks. They had set in change events that would coalesce as one of the most astonishing events in medieval history – the First Crusade.
• All who went on his campaign of extermination and died along the way would be rewarded with "remission of sins". Their earthly misdeeds would be forgiven, their passage to heaven smoothed.
• The Franks had come to the east. They would remain there for two hounded years.
• After its promising beginnings, the second Crusade, was a disaster at virtually every turn.
• Besides using crusading to hound Muslims and pagan, the pope would deploy it (or allow it to be deployed) against heretics and dissenters within the Christian world. This was a momentous turn of events.
• The fourth Crusade was one of the most disgraceful and notorious escapades in the whole of the Middle ages.
• What they had thought was "King David" grandson of Prester John and savior of the Christian west, was in fact Genghis Khan.
• Although the Mongols period of global preeminence lasted only 150 years, their achievement in that time stood in comparison with those of ancient Macedonians, Persians, or Romans.

History

• Mongols rebooted the whole shape of trade and interaction across Asia and the Middle East.
• There was a lasting partnership between Venetian doges and Mongol khans, which endured well into the 14C paving the way for the famous adventures of Marco Polo and making the republic of Venice very rich.
• All of the sudden the Mongols abruptly halted their pursuit. They wheeled their horses around and rode away, back in the direction of their imperial heartlands. From the brink of apparent annihilation, eastern Europe was suddenly Mongol-free. It was as if God had taken pity, reached down, and plucked the tormentors of his people from the earth.
• "God has given you Scriptures, and you do not observe them, whereas to us he has given soothsayers and we do as they tell us and live in peace" a Mongol to a Christian emissary.
• Baghdad's House of Wisdom, which had a fair claim to the finest library in the entire world was ransacked. Thousands of books which had been translated over centuries were thrown into the river Tigris. So many books were lost that the river water said to have run black with their ink.
• Mongol methods of conquest prefigured the terror autocracies of the 20C, in which millions of civilians could be thoughtlessly murdered to service the demented personal ambitions of charismatic rulers, and the goal of spreading an ideology as far around the globe as it would go.
• What took place in the 13C and 14C was as economically significant as the Industrial Revolution of the 19C and the Digital Revolution of the 20-21C. The Commercial Revolution placed power in the hands of new agents besides emperors, popes, and kings.
• In the grand scheme of western history, the Middle Ages were a period of stagnated economic development, which lasted several hundred years.
• It had taken the Polo family 3 full years to make their way from Venice to China.
• Double-entry bookkeeping became a western business norm only in the 14C.
• Liberal Arts: are so named because they were once considered suitable for free people rather than the enslaved.
• Claudius Ptolemy's foundational work on astronomy was known as the Almagest
• The "12C Renaissance" was the return of classical works to the Western mainstream.
• Aquinas was the greatest scholar since Isidore of Seville to see how the wisdom of the ancient pagans could complement Christian theology.
• The event that turned the world upside down was a pandemic. It hit western Europe from ships arriving from the east. This was the Black Death, which killed around 40% of Europe's population and changed the world forever.
• The 14C was a time of major change, starting with the climate. Temperatures rose from 900 to 1300, but after they they started to fall sharply. The rapid cooling was due to volcanoes dumping sulfur dioxide (a sun reflecting aerosol) into the atmosphere. This period is known as the Little Ice Age.
• Human catastrophes are usually the result of the interplay of human society and the environment, and at the turn of the 14C western society was primed for a shock. There were too many people for the technology of the time, at the same time the globalization (spurred on by the mongol conquests) made the world ripe for global pandemic diseases.
• The Black Death began with the Mongols. The first wave was from 1347 - 1351 and killed ~60% of the population.
• The Black Death was a long drawn out process that killed half of the western world, and forever changed the survivors, the demography, and the political and social structures. The Black Death reshaped western civilization, placing much more power in the hands of ordinary people.
• The population loss stood the existing economic structure on its head and put labor at a premium, driving up wages. Land became dirt cheap and landlords scrambled to find tenants. The double whammy of soaring wages and plummeting rents shocked the political system. Legislation was enacted that fixed wages and required that all able-bodied people worked.
• One of the reasons that the 14C renaissance lasted so long is that the most powerful people were growing much more wealthy than the generations before from new sources of gold and good from the New World.
• Constantinople fell in 1453 after 1100 years of Christian emperors. The Roman Empire was dead. After the fall the whole world would be transformed.
• From the 15C until the 17C the Turk was an eminent threat to Christian Europe.
• The Ottomans impeded business in the eastern Mediterranean. As a result ambitious monarchies (Spain and Portugal) started branching out into other areas; the biggest wish was for a eastern passage to India, bypassing the Ottoman zone.
• We now know that the Vikings were the first to make contact with the Americas in the 10C.
• It was known that sub-Saharan Africa existed and had valuable resources. The Portuguese main goal was to find a route to central Africa that avoided the Islamic camel trains through the Saharan to the Mediterranean.
• History does not have to be made by nice people; the history of the Middle Ages demonstrates that it very rarely is.

History

• The line from Magellan and Elcano's circumnavigation to our current age of satellite surveys was long, but it was direct.
• Gutenberg's Bible was the first book printed in the west.
• Mechanized printing changed western culture in the 15C just as much as the smartphone changed it in our era.
• The printing press occupied a central place in the Reformation.
• Indulgences: anyone can donate to the church to get forgiveness for their earthly sins.
• With the printing press, indulgences (or tickets to salvation) which used to have to be written longhand could now be mass-produced.
• Sixtus was the 1st pope to sell indulgences on behalf of the dead.
• The sack of Rome by Charles V in 1527 was more than 1000 years after the barbarian sack in 410 AD .
• By the 1530s the west was no longer recognizably medieval. The printed word, encounters with the New World, the fracture of the church, demographic rearrangements from the Black Death, and the artistic revolutions of the Renaissance, had change the shape and fell of the West.