High Middle Ages

Salisbury Cathedral, built in the 1200s with a 100 meter tall spire. Not the work of illiterate dung farmers

"War of the roses, Chaucer's tales.
The brutal feudal system.
Holy crusades, Bubonic plague.
Can't say that we've really missed 'em.
So dark and barbaric, so dull and mundane.
That was so Middle Ages.
That was so... Charlemagne."

– Something Rotten!

Around the year 1000, the people in Western Europe began to get their shit together and moved out of the Dark Ages. The year 1066 and the three-way war involving Norwegian and Norman invasions of Britain ending in Norman victory and the coronation of William the Conqueror is generally held as the point where the Dark Age/Early Medieval Period ended. The economies of the various kingdoms steadily improved and cities began to grow again. Though no single state had risen to unify Europe since the Carolingian Empire, individual kingdoms had risen to replace the old tribal confederations (though feudalism was still the rule of the day), allowing for a degree of political stability, and with it, the growth of trade networks and major cities such as London, Paris, Venice, and the resurrected Rome. Skills were honed and new technologies were acquired. Some of these were brought in from the East such as gunpowder, giant hamster wheel powered cranes, and paper, while others were developed locally, such as stained glass and an increasingly wide use of water power. Gothic architecture emerged, producing iconic, overly ornamented cathedrals that still stand in many parts of Europe. While slavery was gradually abandoned in much of Europe, the slave trade in the Mediterranean became more and more profitable, especially to the benefit of Arab traders in the region. The Byzantine–Seljuq wars also happened at this time, which influenced a much more famous later event, the Crusades.

Unfortunately the good times did not last, as the 14th century was a bit of a doozy. First there was famine, which is never a nice thing. Then in 1346 came the single biggest buttfuck to hit Europe since the fall of Rome: the Black Death. The Death swept across Europe and wiped out about a third of the continents population, with some areas getting hit worse than others. Ironically, the aforementioned improvements in trade and rise of major cities was what made such a colossal die-off possible. Small, isolated villages hit by the plague were typically wiped out before it could spread, leaving a ghost town and spooked but healthy neighbors. In contrast, cities might have tens of thousands of people living cheek-by-jowl. Sanitation wasn't a thing, so all kinds of rubbish and filth were generally left to accumulate in the streets, including such nice things as human and animal waste, food scraps, blood from slaughtered animals, dead stray dogs, dead rats which feed on this stuff, and other such grodiness. Add to this the fact that carts, barges, and ships were always coming and going and could propagate the plague far and wide like a Nurgle Machine. (This period gave us the word for and the modern concept of quarantine. The crews of ships visiting Venice were required to remain isolated on their vessels for 40 days to see whether they would develop symptoms. This period was known as "quarantena", which evolved into "quarantine".) Despite the mass deaths and the horrendous effect the plague had on Europe, there proved to be a silver lining. As peasants were now in short supply, they were therefore more valuable and could ask for and receive higher wages to lift themselves out of serfdom and earn some (very basic) rights. Medicine also advanced as healers were forced to change their means and methods and had plenty of sick people to practice and try new things on. Primitive superstition surrounding diseases slowly began to give way out of simple necessity.

In Japan the Heian era ended in 1185 with the rise of the Kamakura shogunate. Except for the short lived (3 years) Kenmu Restoration, the Emperor would be a powerless figurehead for almost 700 years until the Meiji revolution of 1868. This is also the era when the samurai class emerged. The katana would only appear at the very end of this period, with the true form only emerging around 1400. Samurai wore the longer tachi instead.

High Middle Ages Around Europe

The toll of the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the later fall of the Carolingian Empire, plus the ongoing raids from Vikings, Magyars, and Muslims, had left the European continent in a weakened state. However, by the time the 11th century started, the feudal economic system was in full effect, and the relative (keyword being "relative") moment of peace allowed its cities and kingdoms to begin recovering. Trade and commerce began picking up steam once again, making cities important financial and political points of interests. Likewise, the different monarchies and ruling nobles began the slow process of accumulating power. The idea of the primus inter pares (first among equals) was fine and good, but it meant that the kings had little more power (and on many occasions, less effective power) than the nobles they supposedly ruled over. This consolidation of power in the hands of national monarchies was a long, loooong process that only started coming into fruition at the very end of the period. In the meantime, though, there were many processes of cultural renovation with the birth of the Romanesque and Gothic styles, and even more deep changes with the Gregorian reformation, the start of the mendicant orders and the spread of the first universities.

Different areas of Europe evolved in different ways. In the Iberian Peninsula, this period included most of the second half of the wars of the Reconquista. The fall of the Caliphate of Cordoba in favour of the Taifas system (basically a fragmentation of the caliphate into a bunch of little independent Muslim kingdoms) was the signal for the Christian kingdoms of the north to kick the reconquest of the south into overdrive. This doesn't mean this was an unified campaign, though. As was usual for medieval kingdoms, backstabbing and general infighting was abundant on both sides, but the weakened Muslim kingdoms slowly but surely lost ground, despite briefly unifying themselves under the Almoravids and Almohades. The last Muslim kingdom, the Kingdom of Granada, was conquered in 1492 by the Catholic kings. Meanwhile, the Christian kingdoms started their unification process, which would culminate in the marriage of Elisabeth of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, setting up the basis for the unification of Spain. Meanwhile, Portugal started a campaign of exploration through the Atlantic, which would later be followed by Castile, birthing a competition for the exploration and discovery for shorter trade routes to India (and later the Americas) between the two.

In the region that was once the Carolingian Empire, the Kingdom of France slowly but surely started gaining territory against the other two members of the Treaty of Verdun, and its ruling dynasties managed to slowly build up the power that had been lost centuries ago. Of particular importance was the conquest of England by the Duke of Normandy. William the Bastard (who became the Conqueror after his victory) managed to pull off a successful invasion of England by taking advantage of a dynastic dispute and a Viking invasion of the north. This generated quite a dilemma for the time: though William was still the Duke of Normandy and nominally a vassal of the French king, in practice he had as much (if not more) power and influence than his lord, which put both of them in a difficult position. The French kings tried to reduce the English monarchs' influence in France by limiting the boundaries of their continental possessions, which only increased the tensions between the two kingdoms. This situation finally came to a head with the death of the last Capetian king of France. With no obvious successor to the French throne and English King Edward III having a more or less legitimate dynastic claim, he eventually declared war on Philip of Valois, the other claimant. And thus began the Hundred Years War, which, as it name implies, was fucking long. This clusterfuck of a war (both a massive international conflict, a civil war and a bloody family feud) eventually involved pretty much all the active players in Western Europe at one point or another, and, alongside the Black Death and the massive famines, caused a lot of death and destruction. The war kept going on and on until the eventual French victory, managing to drive the English back onto their side of the English Channel and starting a rivalry between the two nations that would last for centuries. After this defeat, England immediately became embroiled in another civil war, the War of the Roses.

Speaking of England, they went through a lot of upheaval while bickering with France. The new Norman rulers had to deal with the nearby kingdoms and a lot of political instability, and then the last heir of the House of Normandy died, which started a civil war which ended with the Plantagenets as the kings of England. During the rule of the famous Richard the Lionheart, the ongoing instability worsened, especially when Richard decided he'd rather go off crusading in the Holy Land instead of actually ruling his kingdom. His brother John took control of the country after Richard was kidnapped, a move which not only pissed many people off (John was seen as an usurper already, though many historians nowadays see this bad image as the result of his political enemies' propaganda), it gave the disgruntled nobles the perfect excuse to rebel against him. John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, a legal document which guaranteed a lot of rights and freedoms to the English nobility at the expense of the crown. This document is often considered one of the most important political reforms in history, since it paved the way for modern parliamentary systems (even though the original document was never put into practice, only a heavily modified version was eventually applied after many political shenanigans).

On the Italian peninsula, the fragmentation caused by the fall of the Roman Empire and the infighting between different factions was the catalyst for the birth of most of the Italian city-states. With the Norman conquest of the Catepanate of Italy (basically a province of the Byzantine Empire in Southern Italy), the biggest political power on Italy became the Papacy by far, since the young city-states simply couldn't compete with the Catholic Church in political, spiritual and financial power. The Church's power was not uncontested, though. On the one hand, pushing for the Crusades had given the Pope quite a lot of authority and prestige over all Christendom, but on the other hand, the concentration of power in the hands of nobility and the national monarchies meant that their earthly powers were questioned by secular authorities. In particular, the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire clashed frequently, since both papal and imperial powers claimed to represent the will of God in some form, though the dispute centers around their influence on the "dominium mundi", and more specifically, the temporal powers. The Investiture Controversy was but the first of the many clashes between them which would continue all throughout the rest of the Middle Ages.

Speaking of the Holy Roman Empire (which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor technically an empire), it was the technical successor of the imperial authority of Rome. Also, it was big. In fact, it was the biggest Christian kingdom by far during the High Middle Ages (the Byzantine Empire had lost quite a lot of ground by this point, and would continue to do so during the period). However, despite its size, population and political influence, it was mostly a loose confederation of Germanic kingdoms and principalities, all with their own rules and customs. The only truly cohesive element was the figure of the Emperor, and there were frequent internecine struggles to claim the seat. Thus, the HRE was unable to consolidate its power into a centralized monarchy like France, England or Spain, though it was still the great Christian power of this period, and would continue to be a powerhouse until Napoleon killed it in the 19th century.

In the northern parts of Europe, the Scandinavian kingdoms were undergoing Christianization. After raiding the southern lands for a couple of centuries, many Norsemen were starting to realize that feudalism was actually more beneficial than piracy in the long run (although the Viking raids took a long while to disappear altogether), so they adopted Christianity. This process was accompanied by the adoption of modern political systems and customs, which would pave the way for the Viking and German chieftains to actually create proper medieval kingdoms. In particular, these new kingdoms focused on sea trade, since they already had a lot of naval know-how and agriculture in Scandinavia was a difficult proposition anyway. In particular, they clashed with the Hanseatic League, a a mercantile confederation of cities, principalities, and other minor states which tried to monopolize the regional trade around the Baltic Sea and northern Europe. To counter this, the kingdoms of Sweden, Norway and Denmark created the Kalmar Union, with Queen Margaret I of Denmark ruling over all three kingdoms at once. However, this union didn't translate into the creation of an unified state and dissolved at the beginning of the Early Modern Ages.

On the other side of Christendom, the Eastern Roman Empire (or the Byzantine Empire) was not in the best shape. It had received a massive mauling during the previous centuries, due to the wars against the Persians and later the sudden appearance of Islam, which took away most of its territories in Northern Africa and the Middle East. It was the fast advance of the Seljuk Turks over Anatolia which forced the Roman Emperor to ask for help from anyone that he could find; considering they had broken with the Roman Church very recently, this was interpreted as a massive sign of weakness everywhere. This appeal for help led directly to the Crusades. While the Crusades helped the Byzantines stabilize their eastern borders by funding the Crusader states in the Holy Land, Byzantine territories like Bulgaria managed to gain independence. And then the Fourth Crusade happened, which instead of going to the Holy Land to fight the infidels, ended up besieging and raiding Constantinople itself to pay off some Venetian loan sharks. By the time the Byzantine emperors could retake the capital, they'd lost most of their territories elsewhere, which left the Eastern Roman Empire as a vestigial state whose only ace in the hole was Constantinople's geographically advantageous position on the Black Sea. By 1453 the Ottomans finally managed to finally conquer the remains of the empire (which was basically just Constantinople by this point), signaling the end of whatever was left of the Roman Empire of old.

In Central and Eastern Europe, the last big processes of Christianization took place from Bohemia to Lithuania to the Rus Kingdoms, along with the resultant expansion of trade and political stability. And then the Mongols came knocking. The arrival of the Mongols in Eastern and Central Europe signaled a massive power shift in the area, as the Mongols managed to defeat and conquer many of the European kingdoms in these regions. The Europeans, with their emphasis on heavy armored cavalry, were tactically outmatched by the Mongols' light, fast horse archers, especially in the great open plains of central and eastern Europe. Bohemia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Lithuania were crippled by the Mongol onslaught, and the Rus Kingdoms were outright conquered and annexed into the Mongol sphere of influence. The death of the Mongol leaders stopped the invasions from going further, but their influence was only removed after a long war waged by the early Russian czars. After the Mongol khanates were defeated, the main concern of the kingdoms from Eastern Europe became the Ottoman Empire, since the Turks had consolidated their influence in the region that used to be the Byzantine Empire and were now eyeballing the rest of Europe. The Ottomans and the Christian kingdoms would go on to wage war on each other more or less continuously during the Early Modern Age. Also, during all of this, this area was squarely hit by the Black Plague, just as the rest of Europe was. Unlike the western kingdoms, where peasants manage to wrestle some limited concessions out of the nobles due to the fact there were becoming pretty scarce, the exact opposite happened here. Many Russian nobles managed to reinforce their authority over their peasant population. This would become known to some historians as the "second serfdom", which would strengthen the nobility's grasp over the peasants. This system was so ironclad that it would survive for over 500 years and would only finally be abolished for good in the Russian Revolution in 1917... only for the Soviet Union and Putin's Russia to continue it in far less obvious ways to the present day.

Islamic Golden Age

The Islamic Golden Age occurred during the Abbasid Caliphate, between 750 and 1258. As you might expect, the Muslim world was doing very well during this period. The Abbasid Caliphate during the reign of Harun-Al-Rashid was the largest and most powerful polity in the world. Meanwhile, in the realm of the sciences, the Muslims were making use of a lot of the classical knowledge they had found when they overran the Byzantines and expanded on it. During this time the Islamic World saw major advancing in terms of science (they first started developing chemistry based on alchemical traditions), medicine, mathematics (there's a reason why they call them Arabic Numerals) (the reason is that they were introduced to Europe through Arabs, though the numbers themselves originate from India), technology (optics, ceramics, architecture, windmills), art (a lot of Islamic art relies on geometric patterns given the religion's taboo about images due to fear of idolatry, so having trigonometry was a big boon here) and trade. Baghdad was a thriving urban center and a nexus of art and culture, with cities like Samarkand, Damascus, and Cordoba not far behind. Unfortunately, the Crusades and the Mongols put a stop to it and trashed a lot of the Middle East. Baghdad in particular was sacked so brutally that it still hasn't recovered. However, the spirit of scientific advancement and glorious conquest would live on past the fall of Baghdad in places like Mughal India and the Emirate/Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain.

Khmer Golden Age

While Europe wallowed in the grimdark Middle Ages, the city of Angkor was busy becoming a (short lived) paradise on Earth in what is now Cambodia. The Khmer were Hindu at the time and Angkor was constructed as a massive temple/urban area encompassing over a thousand square kilometers, complete with canals and two hand-dug reservoirs that are easily visible from space and capable of holding a hundred million cubic meters of water. The entire complex is larger than New York City and at its height may have had over a million residents. The good times ended when they went full Buddhist.

Notes

• This is the high point of chivalry as a thing, when the concept of "armored dudes on horseback" had been refined into a truly devastating force. Battles were generally won or lost by the strength of the heavy cavalry that one side could bring to bear. Infantry largely became a secondary concern, used mostly for garrisons and sieges. Major exceptions include Agincourt, Crecy, and Poitiers, where English longbowmen made a mockery of French knights.
• This is the golden age of castles. Any lord of any significance wanted a stone castle to consolidate his position and provide an invulnerable bastion for his household. Castle design advanced from motte-and-bailey to what most people nowadays think of when they hear the word "castle ". They were also very resilient, not only to bombardment by siege engines or attempts to storm them, but often had granaries and water supplies so that they could weather sieges that could last months or even years.
• Warfare in this age was mostly a matter of fairly small parties of knights (in the ballpark of 100) raiding villages and merchants in the other guy's territory, defensive actions against said raids and armies besieging castles and fortified cities. Battles involving mass armies of thousands of men clashing with each other out in the open did happen, but these were the exception rather than the rule. That said, warfare was fairly constant during this period. There were always some squabbling city states, obstinate lordlings making a fuss, armed trade disputes, succession disputes between rival claimants, religious conflicts, blood feuds or fights between a couple of the bigger kingdoms happening somewhere in Europe, as well as a lot of banditry.
  • Notably the Knights Templar managed to be a key pillar of the Crusader States with at most 2,000 knights. They did so through mobility, retreating to very well supplied castles and being very cautious in picking their battles.
• Cannons and firearms begin to show up in Europe around the late 13th century, though both were crude affairs largely of marginal use compared with more traditional muscle-powered weaponry like longbows.
• While hardly a unique feature to this period, or even Europe, people at this point thought in terms of Knowing Their Place. The role a person had in medieval society was largely determined by birth; if you were the son of a blacksmith or a baker or a fisherman, you were going to inherit that trade from your dad when you grew up. Some people did the telling and the rest did what they were told. Medieval peasants by and large didn't give much of a shit about what the kings and lords were up to unless it directly and overtly affected them in some way. Wars of succession, trade disputes, and religious arguments weren't their business; there were other people out there who knew better than they did about all of these things, and their judgment had God's backing. This was not an absolute mentality, of course; they did have an idea that there were obligations that nobles needed to fulfill to their subjects and if they were pushed or abused too much they would riot. Even so is a major distinction that people should consider when trying to get into the mind of a medieval peasant or lord.
• The common portrayal of everyone and their mother wearing clothes with dour, muted colors is completely inaccurate. Dyeing was a thriving industry, and while natural dyes had a relatively limited color range (red, blue, yellow, brown, indigo, green, pink, and orange were all common) it was still abundant and middle class or higher non-clothing items were generally decorated (clothes were restricted to, at most, simple patterns as the methods of washing clothes weren't delicates friendly). A large portion of this perception comes from the fact that nearly all surviving art from the period has deteriorated over the centuries. The colors have faded due to age and sun exposure and most of these works have accumulated centuries of grime which can't be removed without harming the work in question. This misunderstanding actually applies to many periods of history, but the Middle Ages get hit with it especially hard.
• The standard of living was generally really low, even for those of higher birth. Being wealthy largely meant being able to have proper nutrition, access to primitive healthcare and little more than that. Many scientific concepts that our modern understanding of engineering is built on were still centuries away or had been lost during the decline of the Roman Empire, and this meant that every winter was bad news for everyone. Disease and exposure were constant dangers everyone, no matter their status, had to deal with in some way or form. For all its big walls and pretty banquet halls, a medieval castle was generally a pretty shitty place to live in, being very cold and difficult to reach. There are nuances to this however; for one, hygienic standards were actually higher than during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods as the bathing culture of the Romans was one of the few things that survived the turmoil of the Empire's fall. One or even several large public baths were standard inventory in many cities during that period and broadly accessible to the majority of people. The image of the dirty medieval peasant and common city-dweller is therefore something that is to be banished into the realm of myth.
• The low life expectancy of this age was massively exaggerated by pop historians, as the major contributing factor to it was the insanely high child and infant mortality. It wasn't unheard of for many families to give birth to more than ten children, however, only a few often survived into adulthood. If they did survive however, they often had a fairly long life ahead of them. Part of what made the Black Death so feared was exactly because the disease broke the norm of adults surviving most dieases.

The Appeal of the High Middle Ages

How do you like your medieval fantasy? Do you like it more refined and heroic? With beautiful Gothic cathedrals with stained glass windows and mighty castles of stone with fluttering banners full of fat friars and proud knights? Or are scholarly sultans and zealous hashashin more your type of deal? Well, this period is for you. Not that it was all lollipops and sunshine. The nobles were still playing the game of thrones via dynastic squabbles, wars of succession, and the occasional assassination. There were also the Crusades, Islamic and Mongol marauders, and endless wars over territory, resources, and stupid bullshit like where the pope should live. The fact that its the point where gunpowder was just barely coming into use also helps mark this as the standard point of development where a Medieval Stasis work will take place. Being a serf or a Jew in the path of these armies at this time sucked. The mix of medieval splendor and brutality makes for a nice contrast. The classical civilizations have fallen, but the dark age of turmoil that resulted is over, and beauty and refinement are on the rise, but the sword is still the rule of the world, if not every day as it used to be.

This period also gave us folk heroes such as Robin Hood. And though King Arthur has his roots in the Dark Age when the native British were fighting against the invading Saxons, his popularity massively took off thanks to Norman literature and adapted by countless countries across Europe.

Fun Facts and Moronic Misconceptions about the High Middle Ages

• Arguably, the first acts of "shitposting" or memes can be found in some illuminated manuscripts which have such things as knights jousting with snails, animals beating up humans with weapons and people showing off their genitals to one another.
• Most educated people believed/knew that the Earth was a sphere and could even broadly estimate it's circumference. You know those Orbs with crosses on top that Kings often hold in paintings and tapestries? Those were designed as globes with (very) rough maps of what medieval people thought the world looked like with a cross on top to represent Jesus as master of the world. It was however still widely believed that the Sun goes around the Earth, the centre of the universe
• Modern football partially originates from the medieval version known as "mob football" which themselves could take a variety of shapes and forms.
• "Cures" for diseases could get truly bizarre such as: wearing a bird's beak around the neck, drilling a hole in the head and ingesting ground-up emeralds. Interestingly, they were occasionally not too far off, even if the practices were one hell of a lot more dangerous than our contemporary medicine of course. Drilling a hole into a skull is still the very basic principle of neurosurgery, after all and the Miasma theory, for example, at least got the "don't enter a room full of sick people" right, even if it was later disproven.
• Filth in the cities really started becoming an issue later in the period when construction picked up as previously there were literal "greenfield" spaces within city walls that would absorb the bulk of organic waste, and the rest would have been eaten by pigs and dogs. This problem would actually continue well into the 19th century due to the abundance of horse poop filling the streets, with major cities like New York worrying that they’d soon be under mountains of literal shit if the population kept increasing. It actually ended up being the invention of the automobile before poop-filled streets would become a thing of the past.

High Middle Ages-Inspired Games, Factions and Settings

• A Song of Ice and Fire
• Bretonnia
• Kings of War
• The Elder Scrolls
• Chainmail
• Dungeons and Dragons (more specifically Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Mystara)

Historical Time Periods
Deep Time:	Prehistory
Premodern:	Stone Age - Bronze Age - Classical Period - Dark Age - High Middle Ages - Renaissance
Modern:	Age of Enlightenment - Industrial Revolution - The World Wars - The Cold War - Post-Cold War