2d4chan - User contributions [en]

High Middle Ages

2023-06-19T19:08:33Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:B414: /* Fun Facts and Moronic Misconceptions about the High Middle Ages */

[[File:Salisbury cathedral.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Salisbury Cathedral, built in the 1200s with a 100 meter tall spire. Not the work of illiterate dung farmers]]
{{Topquote|1=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.|2=[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggrk3Z7lqYY Something Rotten!]}}
Around the year 1000, the people in Western Europe began to get their shit together and moved out of the [[Dark Age]]s. 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 [[Monarchy|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) [[Wikipedia:Kenmu Restoration|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 [[Long War|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 [[Nurgle|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 [[The Empire (Warhammer Fantasy)|Holy Roman Empire]] ([[meme|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, [[fail|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 <s>(there's a reason why they call them Arabic Numerals)</s> (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 [[Genghis motherfucking Khan|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 [https://www.google.com/maps/@13.434607,103.8607491,31561m/data=!3m1!1e3 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 [[bandit|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.
* [[Cannon]]s and [[firearm]]s 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 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 [[A Song of Ice and Fire|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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avignon_Papacy 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 [[Bretonnia|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]])

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

High Middle Ages

2023-06-19T19:07:05Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:B414: /* Fun Facts and Moronic Misconceptions about the High Middle Ages */

[[File:Salisbury cathedral.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Salisbury Cathedral, built in the 1200s with a 100 meter tall spire. Not the work of illiterate dung farmers]]
{{Topquote|1=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.|2=[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggrk3Z7lqYY Something Rotten!]}}
Around the year 1000, the people in Western Europe began to get their shit together and moved out of the [[Dark Age]]s. 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 [[Monarchy|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) [[Wikipedia:Kenmu Restoration|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 [[Long War|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 [[Nurgle|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 [[The Empire (Warhammer Fantasy)|Holy Roman Empire]] ([[meme|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, [[fail|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 <s>(there's a reason why they call them Arabic Numerals)</s> (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 [[Genghis motherfucking Khan|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 [https://www.google.com/maps/@13.434607,103.8607491,31561m/data=!3m1!1e3 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 [[bandit|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.
* [[Cannon]]s and [[firearm]]s 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 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 [[A Song of Ice and Fire|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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avignon_Papacy 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 [[Bretonnia|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.
* 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]])

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Age of Enlightenment

2023-06-19T16:08:58Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:B414: /* Notes */

{{Skub}}
[[file:HMS Endeavour.jpg|300px|thumb|right|When you have tall ships like this you can reach across the world]]
The '''Age of Enlightenment''' (or often just '''The Enlightenment''') is a period of history from about 1600-1650 to 1800 in which Europe rose in prominence, strength and especially in knowledge. Roughly speaking, it was when ideas and events that were forming in the [[Renaissance]] came into their own. Maritime trade really took off during the Enlightement thanks to steady improvements in the art of shipbuilding and navigation, and new ideas on how to get a voyage off the ground as joint stock companies started to appear, to the point the era is often known as/overlaps with the Age of Sail. Instead of a ship's captain financing a long voyage or having a patron who funded it, both of whom could be ruined by failure, hundreds of people could invest in a company with a fleet of ships, spreading the risk about and lessening the financial impact should a ship or two be lost. This coincided with an increase in the population due to the introduction of New World crops and other such improvements in agriculture. Both of these led to the further growth of cities and the rise of literacy and the mercantile classes. These were people to whom education was of paramount importance, both for practical reasons (writing contracts, keeping inventory, managing a business empire, keeping track of world events that they could capitalize on, having a career in law) and because it was a way of accessing the nobility through marriage. Being a commoner didn't matter so much when you had a pile of money and could charm the local baron's son or daughter by acting in accordance with their increasingly complex fashions and etiquette which often involved studying the [[Classical Period]].

The result of all this was that there was a growing class of wealthy, politically marginalized people reading up on the latest developments in art, culture, science, and philosophy, then sharing their ideas through letters, meetings, and books and responding to others' ideas. Many of them began to question the established order of things and old dogmas such as the notion that the path to knowledge was through revealed truth and submission to religious and monarchical authority simply because they were the ones in power. From the classical age they drew upon ideals of reason, logic, and discussion, but rather than just blindly accepting the words of Aristotle or Plato or replicating the "pure discussion/rhetoric" form of philosophical discourse, they began backing up their claims with systematic observation and review by their peers. From their works and experiments gradually saw a new surge in natural philosophy which would gradually give rise to modern science and with it breakthroughs in in engineering.

Their efforts generated useful results in a variety of fields, which got them more patronage from the established powers. Science became popular with many monarchs of the time for practical and political gain, as who would not want to have an enlightened monarch with a keen eye for modernization? That said, the merchant class (or bourgeoisie) also extended its reach into the political sphere and promoted the idea that everyone (for a certain value of everyone) had legal rights. In England the House of Commons rose in prominence in the British government due to political dealings (including a coup by a pretender king that involved the British Army looking the other way) and dynastic squabbles. These ideas would be taken further a century later in England's colonies during the American Revolution and further still in the French Revolution.

This has been a rather rosy description of this period so far, though there is a fair deal that should not be overlooked. Spain and Portugal both ruled over huge chunks of South America, setting up garrisons, missions, mines, plantations, and ports to suck the regions dry of resources while the Dutch did similar horrible things to [[Dune|monopolize spice production]]. The notion of racial [[slavery]] arose as well as racial pseudosciences such as phrenology, all of which led to a formalization of prejudices that had gotten their start years earlier. The assholish "racism due to arbitrary differences" thing started here, rather than the entirely practical resource-related hatred in which [[Settlers of Catan|you hated those dickheads in the next country over because they were sitting on a giant stockpile of wheat and iron ore and refusing to trade for your sheep and lumber]]. Nations got into wars specifically to impose bullshit tariffs so they could screw each other over. The dominant economic outlook was mercantilism, which basically said that trade was a zero-sum game in which someone always got screwed over, therefore a country should always seek to screw over everyone else.

One particularly low part of the period was scurvy. This disease killed millions of sailors in a prolonged and horrible fashion, and nobody could identify the cause. Today we know that scurvy is caused by a lack of Vitamin C, but it took till '''1753''' for James Lind to publish a paper on how citrus fruit and acidic foods cured and prevented scurvy and even then he wasn't entirely sure ''why'' these things worked. It wouldn't be till the early [[Industrial Revolution]] that sauerkraut (which is preserved with salt and fermentation instead of heat) was issued to prevent scurvy. We now know that scurvy affected sailors because they ate entirely preserved food and, in addition to the general difficulty in preserving fruits and vegetables, heat destroyed the vitamin C. Further, vitamin C dissolves in water and is lost if the cooking water is discarded, which means that even if you did have preserved food with vitamin C, boiling vegetables (one of the most common preparation methods) outside of a stew/soup will kill the nutrition value. Still even if the exact reason why was unknown, citrus fruits and juices were ''eventually'' carried by ships to ward off scurvy. Lemons were generally the fruit of choice for this purpose, except for the British whose colonies instead grew limes, hence why the British to this day are known derogatorily or semi-derogatorily as "''Limeys''."

==The Golden Age of Piracy==
If you have ever seen a pirate movie, or read ''Treasure Island'', or seen ''Muppet Treasure Island'', then this is the period where it probably takes place. Between the 1650s and the 1730s, organized and legal privateering (authorized by a letter of marque and reprisal) became a very common weapon in the numerous wars between the colonial European powers in order to disrupt the movement of gold, spices, trade goods, and other stuff from the American colonies and Indian companies to the European mainland. This period was quite brutal for many colonies involved; for example, the settlement of Maracaibo (located in modern day Venezuela) alone was sacked 3 times in the span of just ten years.

This first golden age paled in comparison to the second, which lasted between 1707 and 1721. The end of the War of the Spanish Succession, the first major pan-European war of the century, left a lot of trained and press ganged seamen unemployed. In turn, these sailors used their newfound skills to take over several ships and plunder their way to endless riches. At least in theory. While being a pirate earned you a modicum of freedom when compared to your average European laborer at the time (or a lot in the case of blacks, a not insignificant number of pirates of that time were former slaves) life at sea was very harsh, and by the time the European powers started to crack down on piracy in earnest, the risks of piracy started to outweigh the benefits to many. It should be noted that your typical pirate crew was fairly democratic: when a pirate crew formed they laid out a charter with rules that were generally followed, pirate captains were elected by all crewmen and loot was split fairly evenly and there were even clauses for compensation for those guys who lost a hand or something in battle.

The end of the golden age is universally agreed to be around 1721, when the last former privateers that still operated from Madagascar were hunted down and mostly executed. The Barbary States of north Africa briefly attempted to revitalize piracy in the late 1700s to profit off the African slaves that were still in high demand in the US, where slavery was legal (even more so when the Great Powers of Europe one by one outlawed slavery in their colonies), but the Royal Navy and the newly formed US Navy stepped in pretty quickly to shut that down.

For more roleplaying and worldbuilding inspirations, consult [[Pirate|this page]].

==American Revolution==
{{topquote|No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.|United States Constitution: Section 9, Article 8}}

From 1607 to 1776 England (both in terms of the English Crown and English people going to lands claimed by the Crown) had established a series of colonies on the eastern coast of North America which grew in population, wealth and general capacity. While the colonies were initially staunchly loyal to Britain, time and distance conspired to start driving a wedge between parent and child. The aftermath of the Seven Years' War threw the problem into sharp relief for a variety of reasons: new taxes were levied on the colonies that they had no say in to pay for said war; Parliament enacted mercantilist policies in which the colonists were forbidden from trading with anyone other than the British home islands and could not have any industry of their own and signed treaties with natives whose land the colonists wanted for themselves; the British Army was allowed to quarter its soldiers in people's homes; and the passing of laws which allowed Catholics to hold public offices in newly conquered Quebec. Unrest gradually built until it came to a head with the outbreak of war between the colonials and the English government and its loyalists. The colonials threw together a rag-tag government to train and mobilize and support a new army with support from the French and eventually managed to win out against the English forces and achieve independence. After a bit more political shuffling when it became obvious that a loose confederacy would not work the United States of America was born.

The important thing here was that the new United States was a nation fundamentally built on Enlightenment ideals. Socially speaking, not much changed in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution. The Thirteen Colonies had been controlled by an elite group of wealthy, educated men who were subject to the crown but mostly handled local affairs on their own, and afterwards the early US was controlled by the same men alongside some representative government without having to deal with crown officials. However the system of government which was created was one which broke with the longstanding European tradition of hereditary [[monarchy]] backed by the church. The British had already started using some of these ideas in the Home Islands, and said ideas were transplanted to America along with the colonists, especially the Magna Carta. That said, America's Founding Fathers had no truck with kings or lords or the idea that the right to rule was bestowed on people chosen by God, which supposedly made them fundamentally better human beings. Instead, they believed that governments should be accountable to their people, and the Constitution and its appended Bill of Rights would be the ultimate law of the land that no ruler could overturn.

This is not to say that they got everything right the first go. The franchise was still limited to only white men of means and even then there would be some residual property requirements which would not fully fade away until about 1830. The issue of slavery in particular would fester until it came to a head in the American Civil War and was only abolished with the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment. Even so, the US would be a prototype of democratic government which many people would seek to emulate elsewhere, to various degrees.

==Situation in Europe==
[[file:Louis XIV of France.jpg|250px|thumb|Right|King Louis XIV, AKA the "Sun King" because he was the man around whom all the other kingdoms of Europe orbited and were bathed in his radiance. He and his court were not known for subtlety.]]
Europe experienced drastic changes in this period in both positive and negative ways. Christian world dominance and the rapid rise of European powers that began with the Age of Colonialism was practically cemented in this time-period. New colonial powers, such as England, France, and the Netherlands started to participate in colonial expansion along with the established colonizing powers of Spain, Portugal and the often overlooked Denmark, whose colonial history actually preceded those of the former. Society and state structures became much more centralized as monarchs started to crack down on the privileges of feudal lords, building the first modern centralized nation states. As a side effect, the petty and middle-class nobility saw their importance and influence dwindle rapidly as they were being demoted from local lords of their own fiefdoms to being figureheads in political plays, all instigated by their monarchs to keep them from thinking too hard about this "being forced to hand power to the king" business. While this was the typical development for most of the western hemisphere, there were a couple of nations where this development didn't take place in the archetypical French way, with the biggest outliers being England, where Parliament became an instrument of commoners and nobles to negotiate with the king and vice versa and most notably Poland-Lithuania, where the local nobility resisted the idea of handing over power to the monarch so fiercely that they turned the game on its head and effectively seized total control of the state from the king, building one of the first rudimentary, if dysfunctional and easily corrupted, modern-style democracies.

This was also the time when the Ottoman Empire started its long, steady decline after the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. The fact that they had a civil war due to a lack of succession protocols was a part of this, as was general conservatism, a bureaucracy which became increasingly prone to thinking exclusively in religious terms, a corrupt military and the rise of their European rivals. So naturally, everything changed when absolutism kicked in. This is also the period when [[Kislev|Tsardom of Russia]] emerged with a claim to being the Third and Final Rome and began giving regular beatings to the Ottomans. In particular, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great oversaw considerable modernization and expansion of the country, leading Russia to Great Power status in fairly short order. Much of the crisis also had to do with mismanagement and general non-uniform administration and maltreatment of the empire's Christian population. Also, despite being called "Turkey" anachronistically and historically, the Ottomans were an extremely elitist state, where even the word "Turk" was associated with nomadic Turkoman or Anatolian peasants and was used like we use the word "retard" nowadays. Due to this, the court elite were alienated from the common population of the Empire and ended up having revolts every time they didn't win a war and had to raise taxes to pay for their fuckup.

Undoubtedly, the star of the Enlightenment was France, which emerged as a global power player and the place from where practically every relevant ideology of the time originated. First thing to note is the aforementioned absolutism. Under Louis XIV, the power of the aristocracy was sharply curtailed in favor of a stronger central government and expanded French influence throughout the world via wars and diplomatic pursuits. Over time, however, absolutism practically begat the ideas of the Enlightenment, conceptualized by the French philosophers that opposed the tyrannical rule of the monarchs and supported democratic and free states along the lines of the classical societies they'd grown up studying.

That is to say, not everything was all well and good at the time. The rise of mass armies and the evolution of firearms into relatively reliable and efficient killing tools made wars larger, costlier, and bloodier. Numerous countries such as England experienced civil turmoil. France, after enjoying nearly a century and a half of glory and stability under the reign of two kings (the aforementioned XIV and his great-grandson Louis XV ''The Well-Beloved''), had become decadent, vain, and was beginning to have financial troubles that impacted the lives of the general populace (who increasingly resented the gross wealth of the aristocracy). The latter combined with Enlightenment ideals to lead to the events mentioned below.

==French Revolution==
The French Revolution came about for various reasons: the spreading of new ideas, natural disasters, the effects of the Little Ice Age that increased the price of grain. However, the lion's share of the fault lay with the generally decadent and increasingly useless aristocracy. In a financial report by Jacques Necker, minister of finance under Louis XVI, [[Bretonnia|the largest part of the state expenses went to the pensions and salaries of useless nobles, financed by taxes and the labor of peasants and serfs that lived like shit]]. France faced a large financial crisis at the time, amplified by the country's participation in numerous wars.

To deal with the issue, Louis XVI invited the [[High Lords of Terra|Estates General]], the traditional representative body of all France, to assemble. However, there was a simple problem with the Estates: [[derp|it was retarded]]. French society was divided into three estates: the nobles, the clergy, and everyone else, and each got one vote in the Estates General. The problem here was that the nobles and the clergy together represented maybe two or three percent of the entire population, but they still got equal voting rights in the Estates. So yes, 98% of the population could not overcome the rest by voting. With that being said, some of the nobles and priests were also discontent with this rigged and illogical system, so when the Estates General failed, some joined the Third Estate when it refused to disband. That and the dismissal of the lowborn Necker led to increasing anger and unrest, culminating in the storming of the Bastille, which sparked off the French Revolution.

The revolutionaries at first sought the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, and they even guaranteed the safety of the king. However, the strongly negative and outright threatening reaction to the whole thing from the neighboring monarchies, combined with the fact that Louis XVI was a fucking moron who tried to flee the country, led to complete abolition of the monarchy and Louis being placed on trial and executed, with one vote deciding everything. Numerous revolutionaries actually opposed the execution, mostly citing that this would lead to wars with neighboring countries.

However, a more serious concern was the fact that executing the king would set a VERY negative precedent in general and would mark the start of much, much, much more political executions and repressions. This fear turned out to be entirely and sadly justified, as after Louis XVI's execution, everything went downhill. Once the provisional government fell under the sway of the most radical revolutionary faction, numerous revolutionaries were sent to the guillotine on flimsy pretenses, peasants and workers lynched former nobles, militant anti-Christians desecrated churches and cathedrals and strove to remove all Christian influence, which only reinforced the hatred of the pious Christian population towards the revolution which deepened the chasm in society, and in general chaos took over the country. It became obvious that an iron-fisted ruler was needed to bring back stability and order and such a ruler appeared in the form of a certain Corsican manlet.

==Napoleonic Wars==
Napoleon Bonaparte came into power as a Consul after the coup d'etat, declaring "Gentlemen, Revolution is over". This marked the beginning of the Napoleonic era. Sadly, nowadays the much more noble deeds of Napoleon are ignored. He stabilized the country, created an effective administration, built up France's infrastructure and adopted and spread the metric system, much to the despair of later generations of freeaboos. His magnum opus was the Napoleonic Code that went on to become the legal basis for numerous modern day countries. On a personal level, he was known to be honorable and respectful even to his enemies. One example is his admiration of Pyotr Bagration, a Georgian general who served under the Russian Empire and engaged Napoleon at Borodino.

However, he is mostly remembered for his schemes and utterly devastating wars of conquest. He invented new doctrines of warfare that concentrated on extensive usage of artillery; he had been an artilleryman by trade prior to the Revolution and still regarded it as the pinnacle of warfighting technology. Later, he abolished the republic and proclaimed himself [[God-Emperor of Mankind|Emperor of France]]. Under his rule, France engaged in numerous wars against virtually everyone else in Europe. In short order he smashed the Austrian, Prussian, Spanish and Russian armies and saw most of the continent fall under his influence, with his brothers and other close relatives claiming half a dozen thrones across Europe. His families usurpation of the spanish throne an example of said expansion. He also blockaded Great Britain from continental trade and instigated the final collapse of the Unholy German Confederation (aka the Holy Roman Empire). For a while, it seemed like nothing and no one could stop Napoleon; the British were still fighting in Portugal and Spain, but nobody else in Europe thought that was going to end in anything other than another negotiated peace in France's favor. Then Napoleon fell victim to one of the classic blunders and decided it was time to invade the Russian Empire. While both sides engaged in battle at first, the [[Kryptman|Russians eventually realized that they couldn't beat Boney in a straight fight and turned to a scorched earth policy, burning their own farms and settlements to the ground as they retreated into the vast Russian interior. When Napoleon finally reached Moscow, he took an empty and burned city.]] Out of supplies, freezing, exhausted, and being raided by Russian [[Vostroyan Firstborn|Cossacks]] and guerrillas, Napoleon's Grande Armee was forced into a long, cold, and ugly retreat. Sources vary on exactly how big the Grande Armee was at the beginning and end of the invasion. The most famous number, given in an infographic by Charles Joseph Minaud, gives a total strength of 450,000 French troops going in and 10,000 coming out, while others give numbers as high as 650,000 initially and 70,000 survivors at the end of the campaign. Either way, Napoleon's magnificent army was in ruins, his reputation for invincibility had been permanently shattered, and France was drained of manpower. The French army was finally defeated by a coalition of forces at Leipzig despite the Emperor's determination.

Napoleon was forced to abdicate and was first exiled to the island of Elba off the coast of Italy, but after the whole Hundred Days incident where he came back to France and was instantly re-proclaimed Emperor before Wellington and Blucher slapped the bitch out of him at Waterloo, the British opted to ship him all the way to the island of Saint Helena, a tiny little speck in the middle of the far South Atlantic, where he spent the remainder of his life. Once the man that shook the very foundations of the continent, he now lived in exile and disgrace with his pride and confidence shattered. This marked the start of the Congress of Vienna, which acted as the foundation for European international politics until the outbreak of World War I a century later.

==Europe After Napoleon==
With the dawn of the Epoch, the Continent and the world was considerably changed. In this period, Europe became the dominant region of the world, but it was also wracked by constant turmoil. With the development of more efficient gunpowder and the adoption of Napoleonic tactics, warfare became even more deadly and unforgiving, with artillery being used more prominently. The new ideologies shook the old regimes and the French Revolution sparked later revolutionary and civil movements in other countries throughout the 19th century. The Congress of Vienna formalized the rule of five major powers throughout the world. After the Napoleonic Wars, although she retained her core territories, France became extremely weakened and was slowly overshadowed by the United Kingdom as it entered its Golden Age. [[Industrial Revolution|But that story continues elsewhere]].

==Notes==
* This period in military history has been called "the Age of Lace Trimmed Warfare". Between muskets and field [[cannon]]s, armor was gradually abolished due to the immense cost of the new standing armies that gradually replaced the mercenary armies of former periods, while the idea of giving every soldier in your army clothes that are all the same gradually caught on. The fancier the better, since an army which still looked well dressed after a month on campaign was obviously disciplined and professional; iconic examples included the French musketeers and the English redcoats. Big blocky formations gave way to lines of soldiers two or three ranks deep at most which could bring as many muskets to bear as possible, supported by cavalry with sabers, lances, and pistols.
** The way armies were fielded also changed dramatically. The Thirty Years War, while mostly fought on German soil, showed every participant how difficult it was to keep mercenaries in line, especially when the money dried up or there was nothing left to plunder. The big mercenary and levy armies of prior centuries gave way to the standing army, sworn to serve King and Country as a cadre of professionally trained and drilled soldiers and officers. Improvements in bureaucracy, more effective taxation and a population boom also made conscription a viable option, although it would be some time until that idea truly caught on. The military organization reforms introduced in these times also persist to this day, with terms like lieutenant, platoon, and division coming into common use for the first time.
* Newspapers! Technically they started up in the mid 1550s in Italy and there were periodical government publications for the Imperial Chinese bureaucracy before that, but from the late 17th century onward in Europe every major city had a print shop which regularly stamped out broadsheet newspapers for general consumption by those who had a few spare farthing, allowing them to keep track of events both at home and abroad. In particular, newspapers used the story of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hole_of_Calcutta Black Hole of Calcutta] to gather public support in England for the gradual conquest of India and later played a role in both the American and French revolutions.
* The Seven Years' War was fought during this period. This was the first truly global conflict in human history, as it saw fighting on every continent save Australia and Antarctica.
* Pretty much everywhere in the world would be affected in some way by the European powers by end of the Age of Enlightenment. India would fall under the control of the British East India Company, China's economy would become reliant on Western silver, Africa would be affected by the slave trade and the Americas and eventually Australia would be colonized and settled. Even the still-isolationist Japanese adopted a surprising amount of Western ideas through the Dutch, in what's known as Rangaku.
* Speaking of the British East India Company, corporate warfare and piracy were rife in this era, and the line between the two was vanishingly thin. The distinction between pirate and privateer was often a matter of one's point of view, and even the proper navies were down for a bit of prize-taking. The various trading companies were practically real-life [[Rogue Trader]] dynasties, with the power to raise armies and wage war in the name of profit. For example, in 621.M2 the VoC executed [[Exterminatus]] on the Banda Islands so they could import more [[Grimdark|cooperative slaves]].
* In England and France at this time a few engineers were looking into more effective ways of producing thread, making cloth, casting iron for cannons and sowing seeds with various mechanical contrivances. One particular issue they had to deal with in England in particular was the matter of fuel. Wood was becoming scarce during the Enlightenment as more people were burning it and more ships were being built. To save on wood, people began burning coal in large quantities instead, but their mines had a nasty tendency to flood and kill everyone who was down the pit. In 1712 Thomas Newcomen invented a machine which burned coal to pump the water out, which James Watt would refine and improve on fifty years later. These were developments which were easily overlooked at this stage, but gradually the stage was set for revolutionary change.
** Speaking of coal, the development of the process of turning coal into coke in 1714 was also a pretty big game-changer. Coke is coal that has been refined by heating it up to 1000°C and freeing it of sulphur, water and other substances that would contaminate raw iron. Coke quickly replaced charcoal as the primary fuel for furnaces (on the merit that it is far more efficient; you need a tenth of the amount of charcoal required to melt any given quantity of iron) which made the large-scale production of iron and later steel possible.
* Crops that originated in the New World included potatoes, tomatoes, corn, pineapple, pumpkins, peppers, tobacco, vanilla, and chocolate ([[Wikipedia:New World crops|among others]]). While not a crop, all but [[Wikipedia:Rhipsalis baccifera|one species of cactus]] (which doesn't even look like a cactus) are native to the New World. If you see any of these in a European setting prior to this era or a cactus in a European/Asian/African desert, feel free to call whoever wrote/designed/programmed it a fucking hack.
* In this period you had the rise of our conception of an Artist. Beforehand you had artists who did what their clients/masters wanted and aristocrats which took up painting and writing to pass the time. By the 18th century, you had a few men and women which were not wealthy but reasonably well educated who had enough of a reputation that they could make their art their own way and sell it to a general audience.
* Our modern methods of Vaccination were invented in this era. Some enterprising English Doctors had noticed that dairy farmers that had contact with a form of cow pox seemed to be immune against the Smallpox pandemics of the early 1720s that were ravaging England and the Thirteen Colonies. Although they couldn't explain why, they advocated for people to rub some pus or necrotic tissue taken from the sick into small incisions on their body, with the result being that the people first got somewhat ill, but retained an immunity against Smallpox for the rest of their lifes. The methods of inoculation would be refined over the coming decades and significantly increased the life expectancy of large swathes of the world population.

==The Appeal of the Age of Enlightenment==
The Age of Enlightenment is the prelude to the modern world. Its basic ideas and features were taking shape and growing but were not quite there yet and are still largely overshadowed by the Ancient Regime (the old order of things with kings, nobles and the Church) and they were still constrained by many limitations which had been the case since the Bronze Age. Scientists (sometimes organized into bodies such as the Royal Society) were uncovering the world's secrets and making important discoveries in the areas of biology, astronomy and physics while kings set their sights on building empires on which the sun would never set and you had grand financial chicanery such as the South Seas Company, but people still relied on guys with ox carts to bring in their daily grain and take away their crap, law enforcement was handled by gangs of thugs hired out by rich people to keep the riffraff away from their properties, and in many places when people built buildings they still used literal rule of thumb. In spite of that there was a notion of historical transformation about. By the 18th century, an increasing number of people had become cognizant that they had in many ways surpassed their ancestors in numerous fields both practical and theoretical, and some of them foresaw that greater achievements were yet to come.

The Enlightenment was also the high point for the idea of absolute monarchy, realms where power had been consolidated in thrones to be distributed among nobles which had become less subordinate rulers and more components in the apparatus of government. With this came the idea of the enlightened [[monarch]], an educated and cultured man or woman who'd be up to date on natural philosophy with the strength and power to rationalize his/her kingdom, do away with superstition and bring in a new age of elegant humane efficiency.

This is also the height of the Age of Sail: tall ships of the line bristling with cannons, fast frigates and pirate ships raiding merchantmen on the high seas with all the action and swashbuckling therein. It's also a time of global reach, where a poor farmer's son might travel to burgeoning colonies, the ports of rival nations and to distant foreign parts with strange ancient civilizations if he winds up on a ship. The battles of the day with their line infantry, cuirassiers with a brace of pistols and sabers and field artillery are distinctive. The epoch was known for its massive battles and the advancement of artillery as a component of infantry engagements.

The inspiration derived by Napoleon deserves a separate mention. His entire history, from humble beginnings to the expedition in Egypt to the coup d'etat to becoming the Emperor that trashed everyone and everything in his path to his final exile, despair and disgrace has served as a great, great inspiration for people ever since.

==Enlightenment inspired Games, Factions and Settings==
* While not set in our world but the [[Age of Sigmar]], the lore of the [[Kharadron Overlords]] follows a certain pattern which caters to the Age of Enlightenment, with the coming of Chaos and the abandonment of their gods and allies being something akin to the religious wars, plagues and social strife which ravaged Europe during the late medieval ages, many duardin were forced to migrate to new territories, like the Europeans of the early modern age these refugees were forced to reevaluate their beliefs and culture, and, like them, they shifted from putting their faith no longer in traditional religious systems and absolute monarchs, but in technological development and plutocratic meritocracy. During the five centuries of the Age of Chaos the Kharadron Overlords not only survived the onslaught of the Dark Gods but thrived, building sky-cities and floating ports, developing scientific weaponry and tools based on the substance known as aether-gold and establishing tradelines among them, by the beginning of the Age of Sigmar they are arguably the most technologically advanced race of the setting, with energy-projected weaponry, armoured airships and a set of laws which allows them to pull back from doomed battles and democratically choose or demote, without shame or blood, their own leaders.
* As you might expect, there are plenty of tabletop games set during the Napoleonic Wars. Some of the bigger names are:
** Sharp Practice (a company-level game published by TFL, who have also recreated the original ''Kriegsspiel'' used to train Prussian officers)
** Black Powder (battalion-level game by [[Warlord Games]] that can be scaled up to army size if you're insane enough)
** Black Seas (Napoleonic naval combat, also by Warlord)
** Chosen Men (skirmish-level game by [[Osprey Games]])
** Bataille Empire (you know how those psychos that shat out [[FATAL]] claimed it was incredibly historically accurate and insanely detailed? This is what that actually looks like, but for the Napoleonic Wars. The book has rules to let you model every aspect of a Napoleonic engagement, down to tailored army lists for specific battles, and is designed to work with any collection of miniatures you might have.)

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Medieval Stasis

2023-06-19T15:53:18Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:B414: /* Why the Medieval Stasis of the Post-Roman Middle Ages Ended */

{{Topquote|[[Eberron]] in 998 YK is based on the idea that ''civilization is evolving''.|Keith Baker, explaining why Eberron is not a normal campaign setting.}}
'''Medieval Stasis''' describes the state of essentially all fantasy worlds that never get to [[steampunk]], and a crucial component of the [[standard fantasy setting]].

As the title implies, most fantasy worlds are stuck at a technological level roughly equivalent to Europe between 1000 CE and 1500 CE, being more advanced in some fields and more primitive in others, until the universe collapses. A [[knight]]'s ancestors five thousand years ago fought against Orcs on the back of a great warhorse, wielding [[sword]] and lance, wearing plate and a greathelm, just as he does at present and how his descendants 25 generations down the line will. At best, some groups in the universe may be more advanced than others (some peoples might be building castles and forging plate armor while others live as primitive cave men armed with flint axes and stone tipped spears), but nobody will be developing new technology, or, on the off chance one or two factions are, it will never spread much or catch on anywhere else. This also applies to social structures such as feudalism, with a max of one non-Greco-Roman democracy per setting. It will be conquered and restored from edition to edition as fanboys war behind the scenes.

While it is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, as it creates a set mood and style of play, we run into the fact that many writers are hacks, and use it to both rip-off other writers (principally, Tolkien) and to [[Advancing the Storyline|keep the world stagnant enough that they don't risk smashing something people actually like that they didn't have the skill to ''realize'' they shouldn't smash, while still maintaining the illusion of forward momentum]]. The ''[[Forgotten Realms]]'' is a prime example of this, featuring both several powerful organizations out to stifle any attempt to progress the technological or socioeconomic advancement of the setting, and many lame-brained "advances" in story from edition to edition, most infamously with 4th edition's "Spellplague" and retconned twin planet where all the new 4e races were hiding.

A common thing among fantasy writers is treating firearms of any kind as a taboo. Many feel that featuring firearms would somehow ruin the medieval feeling despite the fact that firearms were used in the late medieval period (and in Warhammer.) Granted, [[neckbeards|many people's]] weapon history knowledge is such that they believe that having guns would immediately mean having AK-47s rather than merely having handcannons or matchlock muskets.

Note that in high-magic settings, sorcery sometimes gets so common and overpowered that it basically replaces technological progress. Why would you build robots or rockets if you can just create golems or cast Teleport Without Error?

Another issue with medieval stasis is that a lot of writers—most of them in fact—probably know less about the actual Middle Ages than the average Crusader Kings 2 player and thus present not only a world in medieval stasis but one that's in, at best, a theme-park version of the medieval period and quite often only really showing Anglo-French medievalism (and a bastardized shitfarmer version of it at that). The somewhat more historically literate might put in some anachronisms like references to ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome, or to the Aztecs (usually a ramshackle mishmash of half remembered tidbits of the Mayans, Aztecs, and Inca thrown together with no real thought), and if you're extra lucky you might get something that's an extended reference to a (largely inaccurate) medieval Islamic polity or to the Holy Roman Empire, mixed in with the usual barbarian tribes, but that's usually about it. Like the Democracy thing mentioned above? It was nowhere near that simple in real life. A great many of the tribal societies we have records of were actually very democratic, where the King was elected and so were the chiefs below them and they absolutely did not have absolute authority over their subjects. And of course "feudalism" is simply a catch all label for a hugely varied and complicated array of societal organization systems that can be vaguely described as an aristocratic hierarchy based around land and military service and assorted ties of loyalty and bloodline.

And even in medieval Europe you had systems that broke the norm, like the merchant republics of Italy or the north German free cities, and of course you had lands directly ruled by the Church. Never mind that you also had rather different systems of organization elsewhere in the world, like in the Islamic world, India, the Americas, and of course, China's quite literal bureaucracy where civil servants hired based on their performance in examinations did most of the day-to-day governing of China; dynasties could come and go but the bureaucracy was eternal. Tolkien was himself, of course, a medievalist with very deep knowledge of the time period, even by today's standards, with our rather improved access to knowledge of the time period. Warhammer was created by history nerds who very much knew what they were writing about and so populated the world of Warhammer Fantasy with references to just about every political system that predominated in the medieval and renaissance periods as well as a lot of those that predominated in antiquity. So not only does Medieval Stasis perpetuate an annoying degree of sameness in the fantasy genre, it also tends to be based on a conception of medieval times that's not only essentially completely limited to France + England with some scattered references to other stuff, but is also almost completely wrong about everything and doesn't even scratch the surface of the depth of medieval history.
==Some general historical points==
One thing that should be known is that no one group of people has a monopoly on innovation. You have some stodgy conservative societies with "revere your ancestors and their wisdom" and "If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It" mentalities which hinders improvements and those which value innovation and believe in progress for the sake of progress and various groups in between, but nobody has been so dedicated to stagnation that they would shun all attempts at improvement in perpetuity. Civilizations which don't keep up tend to be conquered by those that do. Actual resistance to the adoption of new technologies is typically not to the effect of people in authority demanding the inventors or the presenters of the new breakthrough be burned at the stakes for witchcraft; instead, generally, it would be more to the effect of seeing a new device and declaring it to be an interesting novelty, but be reticent to adopting it because doing so would be expensive and its benefits are still unclear, that there is not a particularly pressing need to improve that field right now, that it might be profitable in one sense but on the other hand it might destabilize the social order of things that has stood for centuries which can result in social unrest as people which profit from the current set up become redundant or that this beneficial machinery might come with complications that leave them in the pockets of foreign powers (buying spare parts for their machines or importing foreign fuel). Concerns which generally do have at least a kernel of truth to them (example: industrialization leading to the rise of a prominent bourgeoisie which eclipses the landed nobility), and the attitude that they often engender is to adopt changes gradually, "on their own terms". Other factors are general xenophobia and resistance to the ideas of Methodological Naturalism as opposed to Dogmatism, though even these are not absolute barriers.

Most improvements don't come in big breakthroughs made by some lone mastermind; a [[Stone Age|genius hunter/gatherer]] did not one day decide [[Bronze Age|"Lets start clearing out land, plowing it and sowing it with seeds and capturing animals to breed so we can have all the food we want"]]. That process took thousands of years, starting with little things such as weeding patches of wild food plants which were gradually added onto with other practices until you got farming as we'd understand it, with silos, farmhouses, fields, plows, pens of livestock, irrigation ditches, and so forth. Improvements can come about by people trying to be more thrifty, having to do with less of a previously common resource, more of a specific resource becoming available or by minor accidental variations. The idea that technology comes all at once from super special smart people ex nihilo instead of being born of conditions produced by years of decisions made by everyone from politicians down to the lowliest peasant is something born of a combination of fiction being kind of clumsy at showing things at a societal instead of an individual level and narratives which are basically hagiographic propaganda about how great some inventor was (while almost invariably not crediting all the people who helped them), with a bit of market campaigning meant to make you think that a slightly faster electric toothbrush is some massive revolution. If you look at society as a product of decisions made by the masses under conditions, rather than some smart guy having a great idea, questions of why some people didn't invent some things become much easier to answer. Even in the last two centuries where quick spread of knowledge meant one genius could share their idea quick, it was still common for more than one of them to have the same idea at the same time. It's why some science concepts are named after two people instead of one.

Certain technologies and conditions are conducive towards innovation. Let's look at the history of literacy, paper, printing, and the scientific method, for example. If your tribe can farm you have support some artisans who spend all their time weaving, making pots and tools, building boats, working wood, etc. These guys and gals know more about their field of expertise and work out ways of doing it more efficiently. Writing (developed to keep inventory records) means that ideas can be passed down from generation to generation more effectively. Mathematics (ditto) is a major boon to construction and later engineering. Movable type means that both are more readily available to the masses. The scientific mindset is also a valuable aid in this regard and is allowed to flourish because the greater spread of reading pushed by the movable type press and the adoption of paper makes it easier to become educated as well as record the results of experiments and share them with others. Before you had paper and printing presses, writing surfaces were expensive and all copying had to be done by hand. Afterwards, you could print newspapers, books of natural philosophy and manuals for the operation of machines.

What does this mean for the scientific method? Well in this era to have a great, world renown library meant having one thousand or so books and generally they were chained to the library to prevent people from stealing them because they were literally worth their weight in gold. Today a random middle class bookworm could easily have more than a thousand books given some time to collect them, and the really big libraries have literally tens of millions of paper documents. So the massive paper trail of the modern scientific method was simply not affordable, and the need for manual copying basically kneecaps peer review. Add to that that paper itself was introduced to Europeans during the 1300s when Marco Polo returned from China (something many medieval fantasy writers simply gloss over out of convenience). Part of the reason why so little material survived from the days of Rome and earlier is because their preferred material was Papyrus, which takes very badly to any kind of humidity. Paper merely gets wet and the writing on it can be saved if it's handled carefully, Papyrus just dissolves. During the dark and middle ages, the material of choice in most parts of central and western Europe became parchment made from animal skins, which was extremely expensive and could therefore only be used to write and copy documents of utmost importance. But with cheap paper, a greater number of people able to afford it thanks to black death induced changes to Feudal Europe, and printing presses science as we now know it could really get into motion.

Refinements in existing technologies can be a prerequisite to the development of new technologies. As an example, the Romans knew the basic principle of how to make a steam engine and even how to put rotary power to work (having watermills for grinding grain and sawing wood) but they could not apply that technology because they lacked the ability to cast iron as they lacked proper blast furnaces, something you need to be good at doing to make one which is actually useful. The steam engines known to the Mediterranean world at the time were basically fancy toys for the idle rich. The Chinese had the technology to theoretically make steam engines, but the issue tended to be a lack of substantial need as well as [[China]]'s bad habit of periodically exploding into colossal gigadeath civil wars. The Song Dynasty might have sparked the need for such technologies as they were rapidly transitioning towards a highly commercialised economy and out of the bounds of feudalism and were starting to run into issues of demand outpacing the ability of work to meet, [[Genghis motherfucking Khan|but things didn't go too great for them.]]

Finally there is the matter of Diffusion, the spread of technology from one country or civilisation to another if they are in contact with each other. This can be done directly (kidnapping a blacksmith and telling him to train up some of your bronzesmiths to work iron and beat him if he does not comply) or indirectly (a trader from the next kingdom over comes into town with a donkey pulling a wheeled cart, a carpenter sees this, thinks it's a good idea and decides to try to make one himself). There is no point in reinventing the wheel from log rollers on up when you can just copy someone else's work. Moreover if the idea spreads there will be a hell of a lot of people working on it making wheels coming to useful improvements by accidents, making refinements and big breakthroughs which will in turn spread again. If you started in Portugal and went east through Spain, France, Italy, the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, The Fertile Crescent, Iran, Pakistan, India, Indochina and China, you'd come across a series of well developed civilizations that had existed for thousands of years and each one had dealings with their neighbors. Ideas that started in India or Rome or Greece flowed along that pathway to be taken and refined elsewhere.

tl;dr: Stop being lazy and go read Guns, Germs and Steel.

=== Fantasy authors are bad Medievalists and historians, part 2 ===

The vision of medieval times that exists in fantasy is a gigantic pile of anachronisms, pop-history, and misconceptions. Much of this is due to Fantasy's scope of time being seriously out of whack even without innovations like gunpowder or industrial technology. See, our monkey brains aren't very good at really comprehending spans of time longer than a handful of decades (hence why your childhood and youth memories always appear a lot more recent than they actually are, yes, 1990 really was 30 years ago). So we tend to mash up entire "eras" of history into indistinct blobs in our headspace, even though the entire concept of a historical era is more or less for academic convenience and categorization. Charlemagne's Empire was as far back in the past relative to Joan of Arc as she is to the present day. And technology and culture certainly did not remain static in those intervening seven hundred years. Paris went from a fairly small city of a few tens of thousands to a bustling metropolis of nearly a quarter of a million people, mail or banded armour was largely replaced by solid plated armour, gunpowder was popularised, sugar was introduced to the European diet, the Magyars went from eastern horseback-mounted pagan invaders to a solidly Catholic and Europeanised mainstay of central Europe as the Hungarians, and eastern Europe was Christianised in a rather gory and unpleasant process, to name just a few of the drastic changes over the years. Of course, any Crusader Kings 2 player could tell you how ridiculous the idea of the political map of a faux-medieval realm remaining static for centuries is.

Let's now take the common complaint among Fantasy authors that guns render castles and knights in shining armour obsolete. Full Plate armour coexisted with man-portable gunpowder weapons throughout literally the entirety of its military service and was phased out because of reasons of cost as armies got bigger, not because it was ineffective against guns. Making a fully articulated suit of plate armour fitted to every soldier is expensive and time consuming, so as armies got more standardized as countries centralized, with equipment being given by the military rather than soldiers being left to figure it out themselves, it was deemed easier to just give people the basics needed to protect their bodies. In that case, ditching the limb armor to reduce costs while keeping the helmet and breastplate like the Swiss Landsknecht and the Spanish Tercio. Hell: in Japan, the increasing prevalence of guns is what made the Samurai go from only partially metallic lamellar armour to full metal plated suits in the first place.

Furthermore, Plate armour by and large did not coexist with other types of metallic armour. It straight up replaced them all because it was just flatly better. Whether it's just a breastplate, a suit of half-plate (half referring to how much of the body is protected), or full plate, there was basically zero reason to wear anything else. Once the metal casting technology for plate armour became widespread, other forms of armour largely disappeared save for covering joint areas because plate armour is simply better in every way and is cheaper to make. Full coats of mail or scale didn't coexist with efficiently made plate armour; there's no need for a chain shirt when a solid steel breastplate offers superior protection for no downside, and full plate is actually considerably more comfortable and lighter than a full coat of mail. So that adventuring party where the Barbarian is wearing chainmail for mobility and the fighter is wearing full plate to tank better at the cost of agility? Simply didn't happen. You're mixing your dark ages and your late medieval/renaissance era armour styles. Mixing armor did, however, happen with conquistadors, and ''may'' have occurred with other small groups of fighting men. This was due purely to costs, not armor types having pros and cons, as used obsolete gear was far cheaper than armor anyone actually wanted. The equipment log for the 287 combatant Coronado expedition lists five suits of full plate (four belonging to Coronado himself), four suits of plate armor for horses (all Coronado's), 16 sets of partial plate, 56 pieces of sleeveless chain armor for the torso (two vests only), one suit of sleeved chain armor, and 250 gambesons. Archaeologists have found a medieval kettle hat in New Mexico, which would have been obsolete for hundreds of years before it got there.

As for Castles, anyone who seriously believed that cannons made strong walls obsolete would be laughed out of any gunpowder-era military engineering course; hell, even as late as the World Wars, fixed fortifications were a very daunting task for artillery to try and crack and often required specialist super heavy guns or ultra high penetration air-dropped bombs to break. After the development of gunpowder artillery, contemporary militaries simply converted their castles into star forts or polygonal fortresses (where the walls are made sloped and are backed by a lot of sloped compressed dirt. Meanwhile, in China, average city walls were already several meters thick and filled with lots of compressed dirt and gravel compared to the famous walls of Constantinople (which were two to three meters thick at best and less stuffed). This meant that the Chinese had less incentive to refine their artillery for centuries (which came back to backfire on them when modern howitzers and specialized shells were used against them by the Europeans when they sent out colonial expeditions). Have you ever heard the term Forlorn Hope? It refers to the supremely unfortunate soldiers who get the job of being the first to rush into the breach of a fortress when after what is typically days, weeks, or even months of non-stop cannon fire they ''finally'' break open one of the walls. Which is rather obviously a suicide mission for the first wave. If it were easy to crack open fortresses with cannonades there would be no need for them.

What actually changed about Castles is that as countries became more centralized, control over military forts passed unto the Kingdom/Empire proper and out of the hands of local nobles, meaning that fortresses largely stopped also being houses for the resident Baron or Count of whatever. This had the benefit of ensuring that local nobles had a harder time rebelling because the fortresses were loyal to the Capital, rather than being their private property. It wasn't until well into the 20th century with the invention of the atomic fucking bomb that a line of fixed fortifications was no longer regarded as a serious obstacle to a truly determined attacker and that was only if the attacker was willing and able to drop one on the battlefield. With conventional munitions, even today with all our missiles and precision weapons, a fortified line is something that most attackers would rather bypass than breach. Of course, most defenders know this and essentially use fortifications to funnel attackers into battlefields of their choosing.

And what about industrial technology? Surely that has no place in my pre-modern setting or would be obsoleted by magic! That too was driven in large part by increased centralization. Artisanal production is relatively fine if you never need to send products very far away from where they're made and are only meeting relatively small amounts of local demand and the occasional distant but super wealthy patron. But as realms centralize and unify and economies grow interconnected, suddenly monks copying maybe a handful of books a year at a premium isn't enough to meet the needs for more literature. You need higher output, which leads to mass industrialization and standardization of production which requires growing mechanization of production to ensure that quality remains consistent. This drives the greater reliance on machines in producing things and these machines make it easier to make better machines until you can meet the demand or until you get to the point where you're starting to reach the limitations of your power source like wind, muscle, or waterpower. As medieval societies got bigger, you saw more windmills and watermills to get more power for all this work.

Fantasy settings, however, offer magic and alchemy which should realistically, unless there are heavy restrictions on the commonality of either, make for ideal power sources to make for even better machines until you end up in industrialism via such powers. Whether they do this on their own or are used to augment mundane technology is mostly irrelevant. And indeed, powerful mages and alchemists are likely to end up as the predominant class as they control access to these all important resources. So societies that don't want to rely on either would likely double down on trying to find alternatives to having to rely on them, much like how Merchants pushed for quite a lot of what we take for granted in modern society to wriggle out from the thumb of the Aristocracy, like moving centers of production into cities not owned by nobles so they didn't have to pay the local Baron and would have better access to labourers not tied to the land as they sought to maximize profit in their class interest.

Societies are products of the conditions in which they exist. Things are the way they are because of responses to needs and pressures or perceived needs and pressures. They are never really static because the wheel of history is constantly turning and even something as simple as fluctuations in population size can result in radical transformations. Did a big war just depopulate a country in a fantasy setting? Well, gee whiz, now the labourers in the country have a much greater position of power and influence due to the scarcity of their services, which can lead to undermining the entire basis of medieval feudalism and pave the way for late Feudalism or even early Capitalism. Or perhaps something else entirely if the setting conditions allow for it (probably not a regression to Classical era slavery though; that required huge surpluses of labour.)

==Why the Medieval Stasis of the Post-Roman Middle Ages Ended==

In our own world, there were several critical developments which dramatically altered the status quo and led to the disruption of Medieval Stasis. These were:

* '''Printing:''' The invention of printing resulted in an upswing of literacy and education across all but the lowest classes of society. Greater availability of religious texts immediately caused schisms in Christianity as its foundational texts were scrutinized, while broadsheets and pamphleteering became the first form of ostensibly independent "news" through which the masses could be swayed to one view or another. The church had been instrumental in raising people to subscribe to the status quo and its disruption left the system it was propping up vulnerable. Printing (and the refinements of the techniques for producing paper) also lead to a revolution in administration, as the rapid reproduction of records and similar documents simply made it easier to govern by decree, rather than giving a local noble you appointed some broad orders and hope he would stick to them.
* '''Casting & Gunpowder:''' These two technologies were linked at the hip. Gunpowder weaponry was powerful, but also expensive and complicated to make (cannons are generally cast, and once you can cast guns you can cast all kinds of new things). It made feudalism untenable; no longer could a lord have his smith hammer out some weapons and outfit some men at arms. Instead he paid taxes (bastard feudalism) so the king could buy guns made by...
* '''Craft Guilds (the Emergence of a Middle Class):''' The increasing complexity of creating of arms and desired goods drove the formation of labor organizations specifically focused on production; all kinds of production from guns to fabrics to ships and everything else. As these organizations gained wealth, they gained power and with it an awareness of their importance relative to the importance of their supposed betters; this awareness found its outlet in the growing public forum fueled by printing.
* '''Fractional Investment:''' With craft guilds and casting, economies were primed to begin growing rapidly, beyond the ability of the nobility to retain control or even complete awareness of what was going on. Into this the growing artisan classes (particularly in the Netherlands) threw in the concept of modern investment, allowing individuals of lower means to participate in larger endeavors at reasonable risk. Whether it was building polders or sending ships on trading missions or establishing businesses, this lit a fuse for explosive economic growth which ultimately made feudalism (and its tendency to maintain the status quo) economically obsolete.
* '''Colonialism:''' This also goes hand in hand with the emergence of the Middle Class. The discovery of the Americas single-handedly fixed the decades long economic recession Europe experienced by opening up the vast deposits of precious metals (so vast in fact, that some of the mines established by the Spanish in the 1500s are operating to this very day) sitting there to the European powers (mostly Spain). Expansionism and wars between ''Nations'' as opposed to ''Kings'' over economical and strategic dominance (instead of dynastic struggles over thrones and titles) that seem more familiar to us became the norm as a result, as nations started to argue over their slice of the cake instead of the cake as a whole. Additionally, the founding of the colonies in the Americas and trade stations in Asia and Africa gave birth to the first vestiges of a globalized economy, where nations across the world directly started to interact with each other, with the sideeffect of adverse events directly impacting everyone involed. Colonialism changed the face of the world in ways that would take up too much space to even broadly lay down on this page, so we'll just leave it at that.

While there were innumerable other factors, these were major destabilizing elements that individually might have been coped with, but in concert made change inevitable. In designing a medieval setting, care must be given to the degree of technology that is introduced. As a general rule anything which cannot be created by the labor of a single person (excluding buildings, anyway), is liable to begin a chain reaction of economic activity which transfers wealth (and thus, power) away from a landholding nobility to a middle, merchant class.

This is why Venice with its shipbuilders and traders was the birthplace of the Renaissance. Unlike all the rest of Europe, Venice never succumbed to medieval stasis from feudalism; instead it succumbed to naked plutocracy. The middle merchant class of wealthy citizens (citizen in the Roman/Byzantine sense) grew so powerful so fast from shipbuilding and trade that they engaged in centuries of backstabbing and petty power grabs. In feudalistic countries, you were rich ''because you were king'', and your line might reign for centuries. In Venice you were Doge (we swear, that's what they called the guy in charge) ''because you were rich'' and used your money to bribe/threaten/murder enough people to make you Doge; and odds were you'd be dead within a couple years to make someone else Doge. In a fit of irony, Venice, Ragusa and other merchant city-states eventually suffered a stagnation due to the closing of the Silk Road and the shift of trade lines from Mediterranean to Atlantic, this just goes to show how historical conditions can make or break a society.

==Notable Examples of Medieval Stasis==

*'''[[Lord of the Rings]]:''' Tolkien wasn't too fond of industrialization, having seen the First World War's highly industrialized warfare and the pollution-spewing effects of the Industrial and Transportation Revolutions on his native countryside up close and personal, so the heroes of his stories preferred Medieval Stasis as well, barring a few anachronisms like clocks and matches. Unlike most of the writers that he inspired, Tolkien had [[Fluff|five hundred pages of background]] explaining why, namely because Middle-earth was in a state of decline due to the ravages of Morgoth and Sauron, the gradual decline of the elves and the Dunedain after the downfall of Numenor, and much of their technology was given to them by the Valar rather than inventing it themselves, and is intended as a mythological history of the world that ultimately explains why humans are on top and everyone else is gone. The funny thing is, based on supplementary books and scrapped stories, Numenor came quite close to being a Steampunk world power, equipped with steamships and even rockets, which, in their decadent colonialist period, they promptly used to imperialize the shit out of much of the world in a manner that led to their ultimate downfall. Indeed, that's why Harad, Rhun, Khand and other humans hate Gondor so much. The Numenorian ancestors of Gondor's people were taking them for [[Chaos Dwarfs|industrial-level human sacrifices]] and doing other atrocities to them, so the descendants of their victims still hold genocidal hatred (abetted by Sauron playing all sides against each other). Also, it's worth mentioning that Tolkien designed his setting as a literal Earth backstory myth, so technically the age of industrialization and modernisation will start in Middle-Earth anyway.
* '''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]:''' Westeros is ''extra'' static, because not only has everything been fairly stable for thousands of years until the Great Fuckening of the current time frame, some ''individual families'' have had unbroken rule over their lands for a hundred odd generations (The Starks being the prime example, as they have ruled in Winterfell for over ''eight thousand years'') which is something patently absurd when you consider how much real life royal, imperial, and noble families have had to struggle to avoid patrilineal extinction in just a few centuries, decades even in some cases, with the oldest still extant aristocratic house being the Japanese house of Yamato and even then it's likely that they bent the rules of succession at least once in their 2500 year history. That said, it should be noted that part of the backstory involves the Bronze Age First Men defeating the Stone Age Children of the Forest, who were themselves conquered by the Iron Age Andal invaders everywhere but in the Iron Islands and the North (who adapted and adopted the technology of their would-be conquerors), and the records of the ancient days are spotty at best, full of mythical accounts and many of the Maesters believe that said events happened over a shorter timeframe. Granted, the whole "millenia old houses" might be something that tended to happen with noble houses IRL claming to be much older than they actually were and could not being contradicted in the absence of reliable records, all the way to the Ethiopian "Solomonids" that still exist to this day, and the aforementioned Yamato being helped by the fact that Japan did not have reliable calendars until the late 19th century, so there's that. While the exact timespan between the Andal invasion and the current events isn't exactly established, the stasis is still quite bad especially when you consider how dragons (essentially domesticated flying animals) are present yet people are none wiser on things such as flight or the use of heat and steam in proto-industrial activities.
* '''[[Forgotten Realms]]:''' Not only have things been more-or-less exactly the same for all of recorded history, there is a powerful, international, theoretically-good-or-at-least-neutral organization actively devoted to making sure that ''no progress of any kind is ever made'': the [[Harpers]]. Whenever anyone invents something useful (guns, locomotion, steel plows, etc.) and tries to market it, the Harpers confiscate it and make it clear they'll kill the creator and their whole family if they don't go back to being a happy little peasant. Whenever a good-aligned king tries to unite and stabilize the warring states, the Harpers murder his ass (makes one wonder if the Harpers aren't part of the problem). Faerun hasn't budged an inch since Ao glued it together. And even [[Al-Qadim]], located on a southern continent beyond their reach, is a somewhat-hidebound and conservative society where progress is uncommon. The only exception to this was the island nation of [[Lantan]]. The island was a theocratic state in service to Gond Wonderbringer, a deity whose portfolio included innovation and technology, who gifted his followers with knowledge of smokepowder which lead to functional in-setting [[firearm|firearms]]. At least until 4th edition blew it up along with everything else fun or interesting in the Forgotten Realms. As of 5th edition, the current (albeit scattered and/or vague) lore seems to imply that Lantan's destruction has been retconned like the rest of the Spellplague.
* '''[[Greyhawk]]:''' Despite the impotent bitching on the page for this [[Old School Roleplaying|oldest-of-the-old school]] settings, it also has a society where nothing much ever has happened or will happen to bring about changes in the lifestyles of its inhabitants. And ''this'' is the setting with [[Murlynd| a literal god of Old West gunfighting]] and an army of [[firearm]]-toting [[gunslinger|paladins analogous to sheriffs]].
* '''[[Dragonlance]]:''' Apocalyptic calamities come and go, but Krynn stays at pretty much the same level of pseudo-medieval tech forever, world without end, amen. And, no the [[Gnomes|tinker gnomes]] do ''not'' count, since their stuff almost never does anything useful, gets mass-produced, or catches on outside the gnomes themselves. In fact, some material explicitly says that the reason for the stasis is '''because''' of the fucking gnomes; their absolute idiocy when it comes to producing technology has actually convinced pretty much every other culture on the planet that science is fundamentally inferior in every way to sorcery! The one culture that doesn't think they're entirely a waste of time is only interested because it pretty much hates magic... and is made of a bunch of knight-in-shining-armor types so hidebound that they haven't been able to properly fix their organization since the first Cataclysm, and so anything like vehicles or gunpowder is certain to get dismissed on grounds of being "dishonorable". So, yeah, '''fuck''' tinker gnomes.
* '''[[Warcraft]]:''' In a cartoony match for the Dragonlance example above, Azeroth's many factions never adopt one another's technological advancements. Goblins and gnomes can invent as many steampunk robots as they want, none of their stuff will ever change the world in a concrete way. Even the aliens are mostly just sword-and-sorcery types using magic for space travel and other advanced projects. That said, firearms had established themselves in the comparatively recent past.
*'''[[Ravenloft]]:''' This is probably the most interesting example. The Demiplane of Dread doesn't so much "advance" as it does "absorb some place where things are a little more complicated," and most of the Domains of Dread are already tailor-made just to torture their prisoners (and the Darklords can also choose to simply seal off all access to their Domains entirely when they're not just isolated by the Mists). Thus, though individual Domains might be advanced enough for common people to have firearms and gaslights or so primitive that they aren't even ''into'' the Stone Age (King Crocodile for the win!), they will almost never learn from or assimilate one another's technology even on the rare chance xenophobia doesn't get in the way first. Each Domain will be mostly frozen into the level it's at, medieval or not. Amusingly, this works both ways: technologically-advanced societies are no more likely to take up magic than lower-tech ones are to learn to use gunpowder. There's a notable exception in the Rokushima Táiyoo, which is listed as "Dark Age", but said to find the gunpowder weapons of Dementlieu "tantalizing;" this is a reference to the fact that that land is a pastiche of Sengoku Jidai Japan, and its Darklord of Western fanboy and gunpowder aficionado Oda Nobunaga.
*'''[[Star Wars]]:''' Not medieval, but absolutely in technological stasis in the Old Republic. In the 4000 years before the Battle of Yavin (the situation before and after this 4000 year period is discussed below) technological , the only thing that has noticeably improved is hyperdrives which have become faster and smaller. This would eventually be justified by a devastating war ~1100 years before the original film bringing about a dark age that killed several major technology companies and destroyed any FTL communication (sans courier) past the core worlds. This does ''not'' however apply to the period of 36 years covered by the films and the decades after it covered by the Expanded Universe (see below). There are some in-universe technological achievements that supposedly result in better results (the kolto made by an isolationist monopoly being replaced by the superior bacta made by multiple rival cartels, for instance, as the flesh-healing miracle drug), but none of them are really noticeable through the window the audience sees.
*'''[[Dune]]:''' One of the major inspirations for ''Star Wars'' (and [[Warhammer 40K]]). At some point in the past, AI went rogue and humanity's struggle against it became a literal holy war (the Butlerian Jihad), after it ended, development of any "thinking machines" was banned by religious fiat. As a result, technological and scientific development has slowed to a crawl, new technology is seen as suspicious, the "[[Drug|Spice]]" from Arrakis allows people to become human supercomputers, expanded lifetimes, and have space folding, so there was no desire to experiment and find alternatives, the development of personal shields made every other weapon outdated except for melee weapons (unless you shoot a [[lasgun]] into a shield, then the [[Exterminatus|shooter, the target, and the surrounding landscape are deleted in a massive explosion]]) and the Bene Gesserit and Navigator's Guild collaborated to set up a feudalistic government with full knowledge that it would be easier to control. However, the main plot of the series is eventually revealed to be about making humanity escape this stagnation.
*'''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battles]]:''' Bretonnia is literally in Medieval Stasis despite having one of the most technologically-advanced nations right next door. The Elves of all types give no fucks about advancing their technology, but in their defense what they have still works, they have access to giant monsters such as dragons and hydras and the Dark Elves are a minor exception. The Warriors of Chaos are again literally medieval, but in their case they're Medieval [[Vikings]] who get supplied with advanced tech by the Chaos Dwarf allies or demons. Orcs have not been introduced to the wonders of "Dakka" yet; the Lizardmen still use wood and stone, but are literally designed for specific taskes and make up for it by also using dinosaurs and the best magic in their world. Lastly, the Ogres are pretty much in "Stone Age Stasis" as they're not very intelligent but they've started to reverse engineer blackpower weapons and under Overtyrant Greasus started to discover the benefits of commerce. Human nations outside of Bretonnia are at the tail end of the Renaissaince, while the Empire of Man is in slowly fighting through the early Enlightenment but they are under constant attack from various Eldritch horrors so progress is existent but slow. The various elf factions are averse to blackpowder weapons due to environmental damage (for High and Wood elves), using magic and monsters instead of technology and being "...content with weapons that will not blow up in (our) faces" (actual quote from the 5th Ed High Elves armybook). The only races that have had any technological developments on a grand scale are the Skaven and Dwarfs, and more so the Chaos Dwarfs. The Dwarfs are reluctant to share their technology with anybody other than the Empire and all their inventions must have at least several centuries of successful use before the guilds allow it to be mass-produced. While Skaven have guns, electricity and powered vehicles, most inventions of the Skaven end up blowing up in their faces and rely on the highly dangerous and unstable Warpstone (plus little regard for collateral damage). The Chaos Dwarfs' technology has gotten to the point of tanks and war golems, but it is literally built and run on daemons, souls and bloody sacrifices. You can see why others have not copied the latter two.
** The undead factions are an interesting case. The Vampire Counts vary with Luthor Harkon's pirate fleets using black powder weapons while outside that the most advanced technology seen in that faction was crossbows. The Tomb Kings had varying technology, with their most technologically advanced city, Lybaras, reaching the steampunk level. Also, they have superhuman abilities and being undead eliminates many of the needs that lead people to develop technology (no need to develop automation when undead laborers don't get tired or bored, no need for medicine because the dead don't get sick naturally plus their bodies can be repaired by magic and non-vampire undead don't need sustenance) and they also have magic and monsters.
** Not that any of this matters because the entire world got nuked by the Chaos Gods. The sequel setting, Age of Sigmar, has the successor factions be at roughly the same level as they were at the End Times, but stuff has become understood enough that Steam Tanks and Cannons won't randomly blow up as often and can be reliably mass produced, and it should be pointed out that Mass Production is itself a game changer. Stasis is more then raw technology: it is as much application. The Kharadron Overlords have surpassed steampunk via magic punk. The setting also has more-widely-available magic than the Old World did, significantly changing and improving the qualify of life of its inhabitants (in theory, in practice it's still pretty bad due to Chaos, [[Nagash]], Greenskin and giant rampages and the realms being pretty fucked up places even when those three aren't involved, even Azyr is under a heavy dictatorship to prevent chaos of both lowercase c and capital C varieties).
* '''[[Banestorm]]''': This one can be especially surprising, given the titular Banestorm makes the setting [[Isekai|Portal Fantasy]], so it's surprising that technology is still medieval. However, two issues present themselves: Most otherworlders are too familiar with modern society to function in the world of Yrth, and the powers that be specifically stop it.

==Notable Settings ''Without'' Medieval Stasis==

*'''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battles]]:''' The Empire, Dwarfs and Grand Cathay are actually about the level of most European countries around 1500, at the start of the early modern period and the Renaissance. They're also advancing, albeit slowly, as the Dwarfs have steampunk helicopters and recently invented airships. But the problem is that they are under constant Chaos invasions and Chaos Gods themselves are not above screwing with the world, which puts something of a crimp on pure research. Imagine what Nurgle would do to the guy who discovered penicillin in this world. The fact that relations between the engineers and the Cult of Sigmar are not the best in the world does not help things at all. The Dark Elves have progressed from bows to rapid-fire armor-piercing crossbows, including a one-handed variety, during their war against the High Elves. The other notable technology users are the Skaven, but the Skaven technology only affects their weapons (god help the world if they ever figure out sanitation considering what it did to our own population) and it's almost all magitech based on weaponizing [[Warpstone|solidified Chaos.]] Undead straddle the line between the two, with the vampires not being afraid to use technology; the problem is most of their undead minions lack the physical and mental acumen to use it while the vampires physical, mental and magical abilities make technology practically redundant to them at a personal level. The [[Tomb Kings]] had technology at the steampunk level, though this isn't represented in the game, but they are more concerned about rebuilding their realm, which has fallen into disrepair due to hundreds of years of war, natural disasters and no maintenance, rather than advancing their society. They do have golem-esque undead constructs, which are the undead magical equivalent of robots.
**''''[[Warhammer: Age of Sigmar]]:''' As noted above, the sequel setting shows clear technological development with mass production of the best of the stuff known in the World-That-Was, with the [[Kharadron Overlords]], the [[Cities of Sigmar]] subfaction Ironweld Arsenal and the Skaven Clans Skyre being the resident technological factions. The Lumineth are also a borderline case, as they've developed solar-powered golems, but knowing them magic might also be involved.
*'''[[Iron Kingdoms]]:''' The Iron Kingdoms setting is one of the best examples of steampunk fantasy. They're developed to the extent of the Victorian era (the mid-to-late 1800s), with a slow-but-growing industrial revolution and the discovery and development of electricity and chemistry, with the ongoing big international clusterfuck behind the wargame constantly fueling magical and technological advancement. At the same time, it remains a recognizably fantasy setting in many ways, with wizard orders, barbarian tribes, and dangerous monster threats on the frontier demanding plucky-adventurer solutions. (Or did before the wheels came off partway through Third Edition to make way for the science fiction spin-off nobody wanted. Still isn't medieval stasis though.)
*'''[[Eberron]]:''' Eberron is weird and expressly focused on subverting the usual D&D cliches, so the technology is a strange mixture of all eras with a side order of JRPG-style magitech. It's one of the few settings that avoids both medieval stasis and outright steampunk, since magic is so common that it has effectively displaced technology, but unlike most settings, this manifests as mass ''availability'' of magic conveniences. As there is no continuity and by default every game starts at exactly the same point in time as every other game, in 998 YK, [[Advancing the Storyline| there's no real status quo to worry about upsetting]]. Only modules/novels that are direct sequels ever reference the events of other modules/novels as having happened.
*'''[[Dark Sun]]:''' A weird example. Depending on edition, the past of Athas may have included anything from a standard fantasy setting to a bio-mechanical halfling empire. But, either way, the Brown Age is a barbaric decline of these past glories, with little metal and no feasible way of shaping more leaving the world in an oddly-civilized nigh-Stone Age. Still, there is an undercurrent of rebuilding and reforming throughout the more-heroic-minded books on the setting, helped by the same eventual anti-continuity Eberron had, so the idea that things ''could'' progress or get better isn't ''impossible''.
*'''[[Ironclaw]]:''' The once-fantasy world is undergoing a pseudo-Renaissance shift away from magic and feudalism to machinery and Italian-style guild-republics. PCs are actually explicitly part of the burgeoning new middle class. Not bad for a furry RPG, huh?
*'''[[Mystara]]:''' Depending on where you are, there might be airships, magic-powered technological conveniences, and drill-tanks to explore the hollow earth full of dinosaurs. Either way, things are a little less generic here in proto-Eberron.
*'''[[Pathfinder]]:''' [[Golarion]] features relatively advanced technologies such as flintlock and matchlock firearms, the printing press, galleons (crewed by pirates reminiscent of the Golden Age of piracy in the Caribbean), and, in certain sourcebooks, [[Spelljammer|steampunk/magi-tech spaceships]]. Not to mention the number of people whose clothes and equipment are explicitly based on 18th-century fashions (see, among others, Andoran, Taldor, and Alkenstar). At least one source (''05-13: Hellknight's Feast'') says high class dwellings have actual porcelain toilets. Also, there's that one random corner of the world where aliens are trying to peacefully settle and/or invade, only to realize they picked the *one* corner of the world where pleas of "We come in peace!" are met with [[Barbarian|warcries and the judicious application of battleaxes to various vital areas]]. One sourcebook (''Technology Guide'') includes *lots* of super-high-tech stuff and different class archetypes that make use of it. On the socio-political front, the Chelaxian breakaways Andoran and Galt have started to push for a less aristocratic government. Come second edition, cannons have become widespread on naval vessels.
**And '''[[Starfinder]]''' reveals that at least at some point various sci-fi technologies will be developed.
*'''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]''': It was true in the past, but by the time of the original series the Fire Nation has become an industrial power, complete with colonial ambitions towards the rest of the world. In fact, the main character's previous incarnation as Avatar Roku actually ''stopped'' the Fire Nation from breaking medieval stasis ''because'' he foresaw that doing so would mean allowing them to subjugate all the other peoples. In fact Sozin, the Fire Lord during this industrial age and Roku's former friend, outright stated that's exactly what he planned to do, and hoped Roku would join him. And after Sozin got rid of Roku, the Fire Nation immediately went all Imperial Japan on the world, even inflicting genocide on the Air Nomads to stop the next Avatar, Aang, which forced Aang to flee. Which is perfectly sensible because even if they weren't the designated pacifist culture, Aang was literally 12 and had no way of meaningfully stopping them (''yet''). Even the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes have a few tinkerers and inventors, and during the time of Avatar Aang, the first airships and submarines are invented, albeit the magitek varieties. At the end of the show, the protagonist Avatar Aang makes peace between all three surviving factions and begins the reestablishment of the aforementioned genocided faction, and the sequel reveals that doing so helped the world advance to a roughly 20s/30s era of technology, complete with automobiles, moving pictures, the printing press, political propaganda videos, and croneyist democracy.
*'''[[Dragonmech]]''': Dragonmech's setting used to be in Medieval Stasis, then chunks of the moon started to rain down on them along with Alien Moon Dragons riding the rocks down for a full-on invasion, people first hide underground but then a dwarf kickstarts the creation of Pacific Rim sized steampunk robots to fight the Dragons and the whole world is now in a full-on steam-powered Industrial Revolution without the gunpowder.
*'''[[Star Wars]]:''' After the Celestials fell, the Rakata developed significantly and only failed as they lost their connection to the force. After the Rakata collapse, technology advances with some anachronisms due to FTL travel being discovered early on through Rakatan and other ruins and slave revolts against the Rakata. This continues until the period between the start of the New Sith Wars (2000 BBBY) to the Ruusan Reformation (1000 BBY) (where everyone was too busy killing each other, even more so than usual), and after that technology actually ''does'' advance noticeably throughout Post-Reformation Old Republic and especially the prequels (32 BBY onward) all the way to the era of the Legacy comics (138 ABY). Hyperdrives improve (in speed, how small a craft they can fit in and how big a craft they can propel) at a much faster rate than they did in the 1000 years since the end of the dark age. It's not just direct improvements either, with new technologies like [[Android]]s, relatively cheap cloaking devices that don't require unobtainum, silent and invisible blasters, biological technology merged with mechanical tech, and more. Even military strategy changes significantly between back and forth transitions between symmetrical and asymmetrical warfare. Amazingly all this occurs organically as new technology is introduced to allow a plot and gets improved upon in future installments.
*'''[[Masque of the Red Death|Gothic Earth]]''': Perhaps the ultimate aversion as Gothic Earth follows real world technological history of tech development ''almost'' exactly, even stating players can only obtain certain items after a certain point in time. Ordinarily this wouldn't be notable, as Gothic Earth is still Earth, but [[RPGA|Living Death]] included some technology that was explicitly anachronistic, such as submarines capable of cross Atlantic voyages and long term submerging, and a few people who have lived somewhat longer.
*'''[[Discworld]]''': Entire ''Discworld'' novels revolve around a particular innovation that drastically changes how the Disc's society works: ''Moving Pictures'' - the movie camera, ''Soul Music'' - Rock N' Roll ("music with rocks in it"), ''The Truth'' - moveable type (i.e. the printing press, and with it, journalism), ''Going Postal'' - mail modernization and the telegraph, ''Making Money'' - paper money and modernized banking, ''Raising Steam'' - the steam engine.
*'''[[Arcanum]]''': The world of Arcanum is in the midst of an industrial revolution with an in-universe acknowledged past of Medieval Statis. What makes it particularly noteworthy is how it portrays the ever faster changing world pushing old fantasy norms and customs away, with Technology replacing Magic entirely.
[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Gamer Slang]]

Medieval Stasis

2023-06-19T15:49:56Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:B414: /* Why the Medieval Stasis of the Post-Roman Middle Ages Ended */

{{Topquote|[[Eberron]] in 998 YK is based on the idea that ''civilization is evolving''.|Keith Baker, explaining why Eberron is not a normal campaign setting.}}
'''Medieval Stasis''' describes the state of essentially all fantasy worlds that never get to [[steampunk]], and a crucial component of the [[standard fantasy setting]].

As the title implies, most fantasy worlds are stuck at a technological level roughly equivalent to Europe between 1000 CE and 1500 CE, being more advanced in some fields and more primitive in others, until the universe collapses. A [[knight]]'s ancestors five thousand years ago fought against Orcs on the back of a great warhorse, wielding [[sword]] and lance, wearing plate and a greathelm, just as he does at present and how his descendants 25 generations down the line will. At best, some groups in the universe may be more advanced than others (some peoples might be building castles and forging plate armor while others live as primitive cave men armed with flint axes and stone tipped spears), but nobody will be developing new technology, or, on the off chance one or two factions are, it will never spread much or catch on anywhere else. This also applies to social structures such as feudalism, with a max of one non-Greco-Roman democracy per setting. It will be conquered and restored from edition to edition as fanboys war behind the scenes.

While it is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, as it creates a set mood and style of play, we run into the fact that many writers are hacks, and use it to both rip-off other writers (principally, Tolkien) and to [[Advancing the Storyline|keep the world stagnant enough that they don't risk smashing something people actually like that they didn't have the skill to ''realize'' they shouldn't smash, while still maintaining the illusion of forward momentum]]. The ''[[Forgotten Realms]]'' is a prime example of this, featuring both several powerful organizations out to stifle any attempt to progress the technological or socioeconomic advancement of the setting, and many lame-brained "advances" in story from edition to edition, most infamously with 4th edition's "Spellplague" and retconned twin planet where all the new 4e races were hiding.

A common thing among fantasy writers is treating firearms of any kind as a taboo. Many feel that featuring firearms would somehow ruin the medieval feeling despite the fact that firearms were used in the late medieval period (and in Warhammer.) Granted, [[neckbeards|many people's]] weapon history knowledge is such that they believe that having guns would immediately mean having AK-47s rather than merely having handcannons or matchlock muskets.

Note that in high-magic settings, sorcery sometimes gets so common and overpowered that it basically replaces technological progress. Why would you build robots or rockets if you can just create golems or cast Teleport Without Error?

Another issue with medieval stasis is that a lot of writers—most of them in fact—probably know less about the actual Middle Ages than the average Crusader Kings 2 player and thus present not only a world in medieval stasis but one that's in, at best, a theme-park version of the medieval period and quite often only really showing Anglo-French medievalism (and a bastardized shitfarmer version of it at that). The somewhat more historically literate might put in some anachronisms like references to ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome, or to the Aztecs (usually a ramshackle mishmash of half remembered tidbits of the Mayans, Aztecs, and Inca thrown together with no real thought), and if you're extra lucky you might get something that's an extended reference to a (largely inaccurate) medieval Islamic polity or to the Holy Roman Empire, mixed in with the usual barbarian tribes, but that's usually about it. Like the Democracy thing mentioned above? It was nowhere near that simple in real life. A great many of the tribal societies we have records of were actually very democratic, where the King was elected and so were the chiefs below them and they absolutely did not have absolute authority over their subjects. And of course "feudalism" is simply a catch all label for a hugely varied and complicated array of societal organization systems that can be vaguely described as an aristocratic hierarchy based around land and military service and assorted ties of loyalty and bloodline.

And even in medieval Europe you had systems that broke the norm, like the merchant republics of Italy or the north German free cities, and of course you had lands directly ruled by the Church. Never mind that you also had rather different systems of organization elsewhere in the world, like in the Islamic world, India, the Americas, and of course, China's quite literal bureaucracy where civil servants hired based on their performance in examinations did most of the day-to-day governing of China; dynasties could come and go but the bureaucracy was eternal. Tolkien was himself, of course, a medievalist with very deep knowledge of the time period, even by today's standards, with our rather improved access to knowledge of the time period. Warhammer was created by history nerds who very much knew what they were writing about and so populated the world of Warhammer Fantasy with references to just about every political system that predominated in the medieval and renaissance periods as well as a lot of those that predominated in antiquity. So not only does Medieval Stasis perpetuate an annoying degree of sameness in the fantasy genre, it also tends to be based on a conception of medieval times that's not only essentially completely limited to France + England with some scattered references to other stuff, but is also almost completely wrong about everything and doesn't even scratch the surface of the depth of medieval history.
==Some general historical points==
One thing that should be known is that no one group of people has a monopoly on innovation. You have some stodgy conservative societies with "revere your ancestors and their wisdom" and "If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It" mentalities which hinders improvements and those which value innovation and believe in progress for the sake of progress and various groups in between, but nobody has been so dedicated to stagnation that they would shun all attempts at improvement in perpetuity. Civilizations which don't keep up tend to be conquered by those that do. Actual resistance to the adoption of new technologies is typically not to the effect of people in authority demanding the inventors or the presenters of the new breakthrough be burned at the stakes for witchcraft; instead, generally, it would be more to the effect of seeing a new device and declaring it to be an interesting novelty, but be reticent to adopting it because doing so would be expensive and its benefits are still unclear, that there is not a particularly pressing need to improve that field right now, that it might be profitable in one sense but on the other hand it might destabilize the social order of things that has stood for centuries which can result in social unrest as people which profit from the current set up become redundant or that this beneficial machinery might come with complications that leave them in the pockets of foreign powers (buying spare parts for their machines or importing foreign fuel). Concerns which generally do have at least a kernel of truth to them (example: industrialization leading to the rise of a prominent bourgeoisie which eclipses the landed nobility), and the attitude that they often engender is to adopt changes gradually, "on their own terms". Other factors are general xenophobia and resistance to the ideas of Methodological Naturalism as opposed to Dogmatism, though even these are not absolute barriers.

Most improvements don't come in big breakthroughs made by some lone mastermind; a [[Stone Age|genius hunter/gatherer]] did not one day decide [[Bronze Age|"Lets start clearing out land, plowing it and sowing it with seeds and capturing animals to breed so we can have all the food we want"]]. That process took thousands of years, starting with little things such as weeding patches of wild food plants which were gradually added onto with other practices until you got farming as we'd understand it, with silos, farmhouses, fields, plows, pens of livestock, irrigation ditches, and so forth. Improvements can come about by people trying to be more thrifty, having to do with less of a previously common resource, more of a specific resource becoming available or by minor accidental variations. The idea that technology comes all at once from super special smart people ex nihilo instead of being born of conditions produced by years of decisions made by everyone from politicians down to the lowliest peasant is something born of a combination of fiction being kind of clumsy at showing things at a societal instead of an individual level and narratives which are basically hagiographic propaganda about how great some inventor was (while almost invariably not crediting all the people who helped them), with a bit of market campaigning meant to make you think that a slightly faster electric toothbrush is some massive revolution. If you look at society as a product of decisions made by the masses under conditions, rather than some smart guy having a great idea, questions of why some people didn't invent some things become much easier to answer. Even in the last two centuries where quick spread of knowledge meant one genius could share their idea quick, it was still common for more than one of them to have the same idea at the same time. It's why some science concepts are named after two people instead of one.

Certain technologies and conditions are conducive towards innovation. Let's look at the history of literacy, paper, printing, and the scientific method, for example. If your tribe can farm you have support some artisans who spend all their time weaving, making pots and tools, building boats, working wood, etc. These guys and gals know more about their field of expertise and work out ways of doing it more efficiently. Writing (developed to keep inventory records) means that ideas can be passed down from generation to generation more effectively. Mathematics (ditto) is a major boon to construction and later engineering. Movable type means that both are more readily available to the masses. The scientific mindset is also a valuable aid in this regard and is allowed to flourish because the greater spread of reading pushed by the movable type press and the adoption of paper makes it easier to become educated as well as record the results of experiments and share them with others. Before you had paper and printing presses, writing surfaces were expensive and all copying had to be done by hand. Afterwards, you could print newspapers, books of natural philosophy and manuals for the operation of machines.

What does this mean for the scientific method? Well in this era to have a great, world renown library meant having one thousand or so books and generally they were chained to the library to prevent people from stealing them because they were literally worth their weight in gold. Today a random middle class bookworm could easily have more than a thousand books given some time to collect them, and the really big libraries have literally tens of millions of paper documents. So the massive paper trail of the modern scientific method was simply not affordable, and the need for manual copying basically kneecaps peer review. Add to that that paper itself was introduced to Europeans during the 1300s when Marco Polo returned from China (something many medieval fantasy writers simply gloss over out of convenience). Part of the reason why so little material survived from the days of Rome and earlier is because their preferred material was Papyrus, which takes very badly to any kind of humidity. Paper merely gets wet and the writing on it can be saved if it's handled carefully, Papyrus just dissolves. During the dark and middle ages, the material of choice in most parts of central and western Europe became parchment made from animal skins, which was extremely expensive and could therefore only be used to write and copy documents of utmost importance. But with cheap paper, a greater number of people able to afford it thanks to black death induced changes to Feudal Europe, and printing presses science as we now know it could really get into motion.

Refinements in existing technologies can be a prerequisite to the development of new technologies. As an example, the Romans knew the basic principle of how to make a steam engine and even how to put rotary power to work (having watermills for grinding grain and sawing wood) but they could not apply that technology because they lacked the ability to cast iron as they lacked proper blast furnaces, something you need to be good at doing to make one which is actually useful. The steam engines known to the Mediterranean world at the time were basically fancy toys for the idle rich. The Chinese had the technology to theoretically make steam engines, but the issue tended to be a lack of substantial need as well as [[China]]'s bad habit of periodically exploding into colossal gigadeath civil wars. The Song Dynasty might have sparked the need for such technologies as they were rapidly transitioning towards a highly commercialised economy and out of the bounds of feudalism and were starting to run into issues of demand outpacing the ability of work to meet, [[Genghis motherfucking Khan|but things didn't go too great for them.]]

Finally there is the matter of Diffusion, the spread of technology from one country or civilisation to another if they are in contact with each other. This can be done directly (kidnapping a blacksmith and telling him to train up some of your bronzesmiths to work iron and beat him if he does not comply) or indirectly (a trader from the next kingdom over comes into town with a donkey pulling a wheeled cart, a carpenter sees this, thinks it's a good idea and decides to try to make one himself). There is no point in reinventing the wheel from log rollers on up when you can just copy someone else's work. Moreover if the idea spreads there will be a hell of a lot of people working on it making wheels coming to useful improvements by accidents, making refinements and big breakthroughs which will in turn spread again. If you started in Portugal and went east through Spain, France, Italy, the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, The Fertile Crescent, Iran, Pakistan, India, Indochina and China, you'd come across a series of well developed civilizations that had existed for thousands of years and each one had dealings with their neighbors. Ideas that started in India or Rome or Greece flowed along that pathway to be taken and refined elsewhere.

tl;dr: Stop being lazy and go read Guns, Germs and Steel.

=== Fantasy authors are bad Medievalists and historians, part 2 ===

The vision of medieval times that exists in fantasy is a gigantic pile of anachronisms, pop-history, and misconceptions. Much of this is due to Fantasy's scope of time being seriously out of whack even without innovations like gunpowder or industrial technology. See, our monkey brains aren't very good at really comprehending spans of time longer than a handful of decades (hence why your childhood and youth memories always appear a lot more recent than they actually are, yes, 1990 really was 30 years ago). So we tend to mash up entire "eras" of history into indistinct blobs in our headspace, even though the entire concept of a historical era is more or less for academic convenience and categorization. Charlemagne's Empire was as far back in the past relative to Joan of Arc as she is to the present day. And technology and culture certainly did not remain static in those intervening seven hundred years. Paris went from a fairly small city of a few tens of thousands to a bustling metropolis of nearly a quarter of a million people, mail or banded armour was largely replaced by solid plated armour, gunpowder was popularised, sugar was introduced to the European diet, the Magyars went from eastern horseback-mounted pagan invaders to a solidly Catholic and Europeanised mainstay of central Europe as the Hungarians, and eastern Europe was Christianised in a rather gory and unpleasant process, to name just a few of the drastic changes over the years. Of course, any Crusader Kings 2 player could tell you how ridiculous the idea of the political map of a faux-medieval realm remaining static for centuries is.

Let's now take the common complaint among Fantasy authors that guns render castles and knights in shining armour obsolete. Full Plate armour coexisted with man-portable gunpowder weapons throughout literally the entirety of its military service and was phased out because of reasons of cost as armies got bigger, not because it was ineffective against guns. Making a fully articulated suit of plate armour fitted to every soldier is expensive and time consuming, so as armies got more standardized as countries centralized, with equipment being given by the military rather than soldiers being left to figure it out themselves, it was deemed easier to just give people the basics needed to protect their bodies. In that case, ditching the limb armor to reduce costs while keeping the helmet and breastplate like the Swiss Landsknecht and the Spanish Tercio. Hell: in Japan, the increasing prevalence of guns is what made the Samurai go from only partially metallic lamellar armour to full metal plated suits in the first place.

Furthermore, Plate armour by and large did not coexist with other types of metallic armour. It straight up replaced them all because it was just flatly better. Whether it's just a breastplate, a suit of half-plate (half referring to how much of the body is protected), or full plate, there was basically zero reason to wear anything else. Once the metal casting technology for plate armour became widespread, other forms of armour largely disappeared save for covering joint areas because plate armour is simply better in every way and is cheaper to make. Full coats of mail or scale didn't coexist with efficiently made plate armour; there's no need for a chain shirt when a solid steel breastplate offers superior protection for no downside, and full plate is actually considerably more comfortable and lighter than a full coat of mail. So that adventuring party where the Barbarian is wearing chainmail for mobility and the fighter is wearing full plate to tank better at the cost of agility? Simply didn't happen. You're mixing your dark ages and your late medieval/renaissance era armour styles. Mixing armor did, however, happen with conquistadors, and ''may'' have occurred with other small groups of fighting men. This was due purely to costs, not armor types having pros and cons, as used obsolete gear was far cheaper than armor anyone actually wanted. The equipment log for the 287 combatant Coronado expedition lists five suits of full plate (four belonging to Coronado himself), four suits of plate armor for horses (all Coronado's), 16 sets of partial plate, 56 pieces of sleeveless chain armor for the torso (two vests only), one suit of sleeved chain armor, and 250 gambesons. Archaeologists have found a medieval kettle hat in New Mexico, which would have been obsolete for hundreds of years before it got there.

As for Castles, anyone who seriously believed that cannons made strong walls obsolete would be laughed out of any gunpowder-era military engineering course; hell, even as late as the World Wars, fixed fortifications were a very daunting task for artillery to try and crack and often required specialist super heavy guns or ultra high penetration air-dropped bombs to break. After the development of gunpowder artillery, contemporary militaries simply converted their castles into star forts or polygonal fortresses (where the walls are made sloped and are backed by a lot of sloped compressed dirt. Meanwhile, in China, average city walls were already several meters thick and filled with lots of compressed dirt and gravel compared to the famous walls of Constantinople (which were two to three meters thick at best and less stuffed). This meant that the Chinese had less incentive to refine their artillery for centuries (which came back to backfire on them when modern howitzers and specialized shells were used against them by the Europeans when they sent out colonial expeditions). Have you ever heard the term Forlorn Hope? It refers to the supremely unfortunate soldiers who get the job of being the first to rush into the breach of a fortress when after what is typically days, weeks, or even months of non-stop cannon fire they ''finally'' break open one of the walls. Which is rather obviously a suicide mission for the first wave. If it were easy to crack open fortresses with cannonades there would be no need for them.

What actually changed about Castles is that as countries became more centralized, control over military forts passed unto the Kingdom/Empire proper and out of the hands of local nobles, meaning that fortresses largely stopped also being houses for the resident Baron or Count of whatever. This had the benefit of ensuring that local nobles had a harder time rebelling because the fortresses were loyal to the Capital, rather than being their private property. It wasn't until well into the 20th century with the invention of the atomic fucking bomb that a line of fixed fortifications was no longer regarded as a serious obstacle to a truly determined attacker and that was only if the attacker was willing and able to drop one on the battlefield. With conventional munitions, even today with all our missiles and precision weapons, a fortified line is something that most attackers would rather bypass than breach. Of course, most defenders know this and essentially use fortifications to funnel attackers into battlefields of their choosing.

And what about industrial technology? Surely that has no place in my pre-modern setting or would be obsoleted by magic! That too was driven in large part by increased centralization. Artisanal production is relatively fine if you never need to send products very far away from where they're made and are only meeting relatively small amounts of local demand and the occasional distant but super wealthy patron. But as realms centralize and unify and economies grow interconnected, suddenly monks copying maybe a handful of books a year at a premium isn't enough to meet the needs for more literature. You need higher output, which leads to mass industrialization and standardization of production which requires growing mechanization of production to ensure that quality remains consistent. This drives the greater reliance on machines in producing things and these machines make it easier to make better machines until you can meet the demand or until you get to the point where you're starting to reach the limitations of your power source like wind, muscle, or waterpower. As medieval societies got bigger, you saw more windmills and watermills to get more power for all this work.

Fantasy settings, however, offer magic and alchemy which should realistically, unless there are heavy restrictions on the commonality of either, make for ideal power sources to make for even better machines until you end up in industrialism via such powers. Whether they do this on their own or are used to augment mundane technology is mostly irrelevant. And indeed, powerful mages and alchemists are likely to end up as the predominant class as they control access to these all important resources. So societies that don't want to rely on either would likely double down on trying to find alternatives to having to rely on them, much like how Merchants pushed for quite a lot of what we take for granted in modern society to wriggle out from the thumb of the Aristocracy, like moving centers of production into cities not owned by nobles so they didn't have to pay the local Baron and would have better access to labourers not tied to the land as they sought to maximize profit in their class interest.

Societies are products of the conditions in which they exist. Things are the way they are because of responses to needs and pressures or perceived needs and pressures. They are never really static because the wheel of history is constantly turning and even something as simple as fluctuations in population size can result in radical transformations. Did a big war just depopulate a country in a fantasy setting? Well, gee whiz, now the labourers in the country have a much greater position of power and influence due to the scarcity of their services, which can lead to undermining the entire basis of medieval feudalism and pave the way for late Feudalism or even early Capitalism. Or perhaps something else entirely if the setting conditions allow for it (probably not a regression to Classical era slavery though; that required huge surpluses of labour.)

==Why the Medieval Stasis of the Post-Roman Middle Ages Ended==

In our own world, there were several critical developments which dramatically altered the status quo and led to the disruption of Medieval Stasis. These were:

* '''Printing:''' The invention of printing resulted in an upswing of literacy and education across all but the lowest classes of society. Greater availability of religious texts immediately caused schisms in Christianity as its foundational texts were scrutinized, while broadsheets and pamphleteering became the first form of ostensibly independent "news" through which the masses could be swayed to one view or another. The church had been instrumental in raising people to subscribe to the status quo and its disruption left the system it was propping up vulnerable. Printing (and the refinements of the techniques for producing paper) also lead to a revolution in administration, as the rapid reproduction of records and similar documents simply made it easier to govern by decree, rather than giving a local noble you appointed some broad orders and hope he would stick to them.
* '''Casting & Gunpowder:''' These two technologies were linked at the hip. Gunpowder weaponry was powerful, but also expensive and complicated to make (cannons are generally cast, and once you can cast guns you can cast all kinds of new things). It made feudalism untenable; no longer could a lord have his smith hammer out some weapons and outfit some men at arms. Instead he paid taxes (bastard feudalism) so the king could buy guns made by...
* '''Craft Guilds (the Emergence of a Middle Class):''' The increasing complexity of creating of arms and desired goods drove the formation of labor organizations specifically focused on production; all kinds of production from guns to fabrics to ships and everything else. As these organizations gained wealth, they gained power and with it an awareness of their importance relative to the importance of their supposed betters; this awareness found its outlet in the growing public forum fueled by printing.
* '''Fractional Investment:''' With craft guilds and casting, economies were primed to begin growing rapidly, beyond the ability of the nobility to retain control or even complete awareness of what was going on. Into this the growing artisan classes (particularly in the Netherlands) threw in the concept of modern investment, allowing individuals of lower means to participate in larger endeavors at reasonable risk. Whether it was building polders or sending ships on trading missions or establishing businesses, this lit a fuse for explosive economic growth which ultimately made feudalism (and its tendency to maintain the status quo) economically obsolete.
* '''Colonialism:''' This also goes hand in hand with the emergence of the Middle Class. The discovery of the Americas single-handedly fixed the decades long economic recession Europe experienced by opening up the vast deposits of precious metals (so vast in fact, that some of the mines established by the Spanish in the 1500s are operating to this very day) sitting there to the European powers (mostly Spain). Expansionism and wars between ''Nations'' as opposed to ''Kings'' over economical and strategic dominance (instead of dynastic struggles over thrones and titles) that seem more familiar to us became the norm as a result, as nations started to argue over their slice of the cake instead of the cake as a whole. Colonialism changed the face of the world in ways that would take up too much space to even broadly lay down on this page, so we'll just leave it at that.

While there were innumerable other factors, these were major destabilizing elements that individually might have been coped with, but in concert made change inevitable. In designing a medieval setting, care must be given to the degree of technology that is introduced. As a general rule anything which cannot be created by the labor of a single person (excluding buildings, anyway), is liable to begin a chain reaction of economic activity which transfers wealth (and thus, power) away from a landholding nobility to a middle, merchant class.

This is why Venice with its shipbuilders and traders was the birthplace of the Renaissance. Unlike all the rest of Europe, Venice never succumbed to medieval stasis from feudalism; instead it succumbed to naked plutocracy. The middle merchant class of wealthy citizens (citizen in the Roman/Byzantine sense) grew so powerful so fast from shipbuilding and trade that they engaged in centuries of backstabbing and petty power grabs. In feudalistic countries, you were rich ''because you were king'', and your line might reign for centuries. In Venice you were Doge (we swear, that's what they called the guy in charge) ''because you were rich'' and used your money to bribe/threaten/murder enough people to make you Doge; and odds were you'd be dead within a couple years to make someone else Doge. In a fit of irony, Venice, Ragusa and other merchant city-states eventually suffered a stagnation due to the closing of the Silk Road and the shift of trade lines from Mediterranean to Atlantic, this just goes to show how historical conditions can make or break a society.

==Notable Examples of Medieval Stasis==

*'''[[Lord of the Rings]]:''' Tolkien wasn't too fond of industrialization, having seen the First World War's highly industrialized warfare and the pollution-spewing effects of the Industrial and Transportation Revolutions on his native countryside up close and personal, so the heroes of his stories preferred Medieval Stasis as well, barring a few anachronisms like clocks and matches. Unlike most of the writers that he inspired, Tolkien had [[Fluff|five hundred pages of background]] explaining why, namely because Middle-earth was in a state of decline due to the ravages of Morgoth and Sauron, the gradual decline of the elves and the Dunedain after the downfall of Numenor, and much of their technology was given to them by the Valar rather than inventing it themselves, and is intended as a mythological history of the world that ultimately explains why humans are on top and everyone else is gone. The funny thing is, based on supplementary books and scrapped stories, Numenor came quite close to being a Steampunk world power, equipped with steamships and even rockets, which, in their decadent colonialist period, they promptly used to imperialize the shit out of much of the world in a manner that led to their ultimate downfall. Indeed, that's why Harad, Rhun, Khand and other humans hate Gondor so much. The Numenorian ancestors of Gondor's people were taking them for [[Chaos Dwarfs|industrial-level human sacrifices]] and doing other atrocities to them, so the descendants of their victims still hold genocidal hatred (abetted by Sauron playing all sides against each other). Also, it's worth mentioning that Tolkien designed his setting as a literal Earth backstory myth, so technically the age of industrialization and modernisation will start in Middle-Earth anyway.
* '''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]:''' Westeros is ''extra'' static, because not only has everything been fairly stable for thousands of years until the Great Fuckening of the current time frame, some ''individual families'' have had unbroken rule over their lands for a hundred odd generations (The Starks being the prime example, as they have ruled in Winterfell for over ''eight thousand years'') which is something patently absurd when you consider how much real life royal, imperial, and noble families have had to struggle to avoid patrilineal extinction in just a few centuries, decades even in some cases, with the oldest still extant aristocratic house being the Japanese house of Yamato and even then it's likely that they bent the rules of succession at least once in their 2500 year history. That said, it should be noted that part of the backstory involves the Bronze Age First Men defeating the Stone Age Children of the Forest, who were themselves conquered by the Iron Age Andal invaders everywhere but in the Iron Islands and the North (who adapted and adopted the technology of their would-be conquerors), and the records of the ancient days are spotty at best, full of mythical accounts and many of the Maesters believe that said events happened over a shorter timeframe. Granted, the whole "millenia old houses" might be something that tended to happen with noble houses IRL claming to be much older than they actually were and could not being contradicted in the absence of reliable records, all the way to the Ethiopian "Solomonids" that still exist to this day, and the aforementioned Yamato being helped by the fact that Japan did not have reliable calendars until the late 19th century, so there's that. While the exact timespan between the Andal invasion and the current events isn't exactly established, the stasis is still quite bad especially when you consider how dragons (essentially domesticated flying animals) are present yet people are none wiser on things such as flight or the use of heat and steam in proto-industrial activities.
* '''[[Forgotten Realms]]:''' Not only have things been more-or-less exactly the same for all of recorded history, there is a powerful, international, theoretically-good-or-at-least-neutral organization actively devoted to making sure that ''no progress of any kind is ever made'': the [[Harpers]]. Whenever anyone invents something useful (guns, locomotion, steel plows, etc.) and tries to market it, the Harpers confiscate it and make it clear they'll kill the creator and their whole family if they don't go back to being a happy little peasant. Whenever a good-aligned king tries to unite and stabilize the warring states, the Harpers murder his ass (makes one wonder if the Harpers aren't part of the problem). Faerun hasn't budged an inch since Ao glued it together. And even [[Al-Qadim]], located on a southern continent beyond their reach, is a somewhat-hidebound and conservative society where progress is uncommon. The only exception to this was the island nation of [[Lantan]]. The island was a theocratic state in service to Gond Wonderbringer, a deity whose portfolio included innovation and technology, who gifted his followers with knowledge of smokepowder which lead to functional in-setting [[firearm|firearms]]. At least until 4th edition blew it up along with everything else fun or interesting in the Forgotten Realms. As of 5th edition, the current (albeit scattered and/or vague) lore seems to imply that Lantan's destruction has been retconned like the rest of the Spellplague.
* '''[[Greyhawk]]:''' Despite the impotent bitching on the page for this [[Old School Roleplaying|oldest-of-the-old school]] settings, it also has a society where nothing much ever has happened or will happen to bring about changes in the lifestyles of its inhabitants. And ''this'' is the setting with [[Murlynd| a literal god of Old West gunfighting]] and an army of [[firearm]]-toting [[gunslinger|paladins analogous to sheriffs]].
* '''[[Dragonlance]]:''' Apocalyptic calamities come and go, but Krynn stays at pretty much the same level of pseudo-medieval tech forever, world without end, amen. And, no the [[Gnomes|tinker gnomes]] do ''not'' count, since their stuff almost never does anything useful, gets mass-produced, or catches on outside the gnomes themselves. In fact, some material explicitly says that the reason for the stasis is '''because''' of the fucking gnomes; their absolute idiocy when it comes to producing technology has actually convinced pretty much every other culture on the planet that science is fundamentally inferior in every way to sorcery! The one culture that doesn't think they're entirely a waste of time is only interested because it pretty much hates magic... and is made of a bunch of knight-in-shining-armor types so hidebound that they haven't been able to properly fix their organization since the first Cataclysm, and so anything like vehicles or gunpowder is certain to get dismissed on grounds of being "dishonorable". So, yeah, '''fuck''' tinker gnomes.
* '''[[Warcraft]]:''' In a cartoony match for the Dragonlance example above, Azeroth's many factions never adopt one another's technological advancements. Goblins and gnomes can invent as many steampunk robots as they want, none of their stuff will ever change the world in a concrete way. Even the aliens are mostly just sword-and-sorcery types using magic for space travel and other advanced projects. That said, firearms had established themselves in the comparatively recent past.
*'''[[Ravenloft]]:''' This is probably the most interesting example. The Demiplane of Dread doesn't so much "advance" as it does "absorb some place where things are a little more complicated," and most of the Domains of Dread are already tailor-made just to torture their prisoners (and the Darklords can also choose to simply seal off all access to their Domains entirely when they're not just isolated by the Mists). Thus, though individual Domains might be advanced enough for common people to have firearms and gaslights or so primitive that they aren't even ''into'' the Stone Age (King Crocodile for the win!), they will almost never learn from or assimilate one another's technology even on the rare chance xenophobia doesn't get in the way first. Each Domain will be mostly frozen into the level it's at, medieval or not. Amusingly, this works both ways: technologically-advanced societies are no more likely to take up magic than lower-tech ones are to learn to use gunpowder. There's a notable exception in the Rokushima Táiyoo, which is listed as "Dark Age", but said to find the gunpowder weapons of Dementlieu "tantalizing;" this is a reference to the fact that that land is a pastiche of Sengoku Jidai Japan, and its Darklord of Western fanboy and gunpowder aficionado Oda Nobunaga.
*'''[[Star Wars]]:''' Not medieval, but absolutely in technological stasis in the Old Republic. In the 4000 years before the Battle of Yavin (the situation before and after this 4000 year period is discussed below) technological , the only thing that has noticeably improved is hyperdrives which have become faster and smaller. This would eventually be justified by a devastating war ~1100 years before the original film bringing about a dark age that killed several major technology companies and destroyed any FTL communication (sans courier) past the core worlds. This does ''not'' however apply to the period of 36 years covered by the films and the decades after it covered by the Expanded Universe (see below). There are some in-universe technological achievements that supposedly result in better results (the kolto made by an isolationist monopoly being replaced by the superior bacta made by multiple rival cartels, for instance, as the flesh-healing miracle drug), but none of them are really noticeable through the window the audience sees.
*'''[[Dune]]:''' One of the major inspirations for ''Star Wars'' (and [[Warhammer 40K]]). At some point in the past, AI went rogue and humanity's struggle against it became a literal holy war (the Butlerian Jihad), after it ended, development of any "thinking machines" was banned by religious fiat. As a result, technological and scientific development has slowed to a crawl, new technology is seen as suspicious, the "[[Drug|Spice]]" from Arrakis allows people to become human supercomputers, expanded lifetimes, and have space folding, so there was no desire to experiment and find alternatives, the development of personal shields made every other weapon outdated except for melee weapons (unless you shoot a [[lasgun]] into a shield, then the [[Exterminatus|shooter, the target, and the surrounding landscape are deleted in a massive explosion]]) and the Bene Gesserit and Navigator's Guild collaborated to set up a feudalistic government with full knowledge that it would be easier to control. However, the main plot of the series is eventually revealed to be about making humanity escape this stagnation.
*'''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battles]]:''' Bretonnia is literally in Medieval Stasis despite having one of the most technologically-advanced nations right next door. The Elves of all types give no fucks about advancing their technology, but in their defense what they have still works, they have access to giant monsters such as dragons and hydras and the Dark Elves are a minor exception. The Warriors of Chaos are again literally medieval, but in their case they're Medieval [[Vikings]] who get supplied with advanced tech by the Chaos Dwarf allies or demons. Orcs have not been introduced to the wonders of "Dakka" yet; the Lizardmen still use wood and stone, but are literally designed for specific taskes and make up for it by also using dinosaurs and the best magic in their world. Lastly, the Ogres are pretty much in "Stone Age Stasis" as they're not very intelligent but they've started to reverse engineer blackpower weapons and under Overtyrant Greasus started to discover the benefits of commerce. Human nations outside of Bretonnia are at the tail end of the Renaissaince, while the Empire of Man is in slowly fighting through the early Enlightenment but they are under constant attack from various Eldritch horrors so progress is existent but slow. The various elf factions are averse to blackpowder weapons due to environmental damage (for High and Wood elves), using magic and monsters instead of technology and being "...content with weapons that will not blow up in (our) faces" (actual quote from the 5th Ed High Elves armybook). The only races that have had any technological developments on a grand scale are the Skaven and Dwarfs, and more so the Chaos Dwarfs. The Dwarfs are reluctant to share their technology with anybody other than the Empire and all their inventions must have at least several centuries of successful use before the guilds allow it to be mass-produced. While Skaven have guns, electricity and powered vehicles, most inventions of the Skaven end up blowing up in their faces and rely on the highly dangerous and unstable Warpstone (plus little regard for collateral damage). The Chaos Dwarfs' technology has gotten to the point of tanks and war golems, but it is literally built and run on daemons, souls and bloody sacrifices. You can see why others have not copied the latter two.
** The undead factions are an interesting case. The Vampire Counts vary with Luthor Harkon's pirate fleets using black powder weapons while outside that the most advanced technology seen in that faction was crossbows. The Tomb Kings had varying technology, with their most technologically advanced city, Lybaras, reaching the steampunk level. Also, they have superhuman abilities and being undead eliminates many of the needs that lead people to develop technology (no need to develop automation when undead laborers don't get tired or bored, no need for medicine because the dead don't get sick naturally plus their bodies can be repaired by magic and non-vampire undead don't need sustenance) and they also have magic and monsters.
** Not that any of this matters because the entire world got nuked by the Chaos Gods. The sequel setting, Age of Sigmar, has the successor factions be at roughly the same level as they were at the End Times, but stuff has become understood enough that Steam Tanks and Cannons won't randomly blow up as often and can be reliably mass produced, and it should be pointed out that Mass Production is itself a game changer. Stasis is more then raw technology: it is as much application. The Kharadron Overlords have surpassed steampunk via magic punk. The setting also has more-widely-available magic than the Old World did, significantly changing and improving the qualify of life of its inhabitants (in theory, in practice it's still pretty bad due to Chaos, [[Nagash]], Greenskin and giant rampages and the realms being pretty fucked up places even when those three aren't involved, even Azyr is under a heavy dictatorship to prevent chaos of both lowercase c and capital C varieties).
* '''[[Banestorm]]''': This one can be especially surprising, given the titular Banestorm makes the setting [[Isekai|Portal Fantasy]], so it's surprising that technology is still medieval. However, two issues present themselves: Most otherworlders are too familiar with modern society to function in the world of Yrth, and the powers that be specifically stop it.

==Notable Settings ''Without'' Medieval Stasis==

*'''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battles]]:''' The Empire, Dwarfs and Grand Cathay are actually about the level of most European countries around 1500, at the start of the early modern period and the Renaissance. They're also advancing, albeit slowly, as the Dwarfs have steampunk helicopters and recently invented airships. But the problem is that they are under constant Chaos invasions and Chaos Gods themselves are not above screwing with the world, which puts something of a crimp on pure research. Imagine what Nurgle would do to the guy who discovered penicillin in this world. The fact that relations between the engineers and the Cult of Sigmar are not the best in the world does not help things at all. The Dark Elves have progressed from bows to rapid-fire armor-piercing crossbows, including a one-handed variety, during their war against the High Elves. The other notable technology users are the Skaven, but the Skaven technology only affects their weapons (god help the world if they ever figure out sanitation considering what it did to our own population) and it's almost all magitech based on weaponizing [[Warpstone|solidified Chaos.]] Undead straddle the line between the two, with the vampires not being afraid to use technology; the problem is most of their undead minions lack the physical and mental acumen to use it while the vampires physical, mental and magical abilities make technology practically redundant to them at a personal level. The [[Tomb Kings]] had technology at the steampunk level, though this isn't represented in the game, but they are more concerned about rebuilding their realm, which has fallen into disrepair due to hundreds of years of war, natural disasters and no maintenance, rather than advancing their society. They do have golem-esque undead constructs, which are the undead magical equivalent of robots.
**''''[[Warhammer: Age of Sigmar]]:''' As noted above, the sequel setting shows clear technological development with mass production of the best of the stuff known in the World-That-Was, with the [[Kharadron Overlords]], the [[Cities of Sigmar]] subfaction Ironweld Arsenal and the Skaven Clans Skyre being the resident technological factions. The Lumineth are also a borderline case, as they've developed solar-powered golems, but knowing them magic might also be involved.
*'''[[Iron Kingdoms]]:''' The Iron Kingdoms setting is one of the best examples of steampunk fantasy. They're developed to the extent of the Victorian era (the mid-to-late 1800s), with a slow-but-growing industrial revolution and the discovery and development of electricity and chemistry, with the ongoing big international clusterfuck behind the wargame constantly fueling magical and technological advancement. At the same time, it remains a recognizably fantasy setting in many ways, with wizard orders, barbarian tribes, and dangerous monster threats on the frontier demanding plucky-adventurer solutions. (Or did before the wheels came off partway through Third Edition to make way for the science fiction spin-off nobody wanted. Still isn't medieval stasis though.)
*'''[[Eberron]]:''' Eberron is weird and expressly focused on subverting the usual D&D cliches, so the technology is a strange mixture of all eras with a side order of JRPG-style magitech. It's one of the few settings that avoids both medieval stasis and outright steampunk, since magic is so common that it has effectively displaced technology, but unlike most settings, this manifests as mass ''availability'' of magic conveniences. As there is no continuity and by default every game starts at exactly the same point in time as every other game, in 998 YK, [[Advancing the Storyline| there's no real status quo to worry about upsetting]]. Only modules/novels that are direct sequels ever reference the events of other modules/novels as having happened.
*'''[[Dark Sun]]:''' A weird example. Depending on edition, the past of Athas may have included anything from a standard fantasy setting to a bio-mechanical halfling empire. But, either way, the Brown Age is a barbaric decline of these past glories, with little metal and no feasible way of shaping more leaving the world in an oddly-civilized nigh-Stone Age. Still, there is an undercurrent of rebuilding and reforming throughout the more-heroic-minded books on the setting, helped by the same eventual anti-continuity Eberron had, so the idea that things ''could'' progress or get better isn't ''impossible''.
*'''[[Ironclaw]]:''' The once-fantasy world is undergoing a pseudo-Renaissance shift away from magic and feudalism to machinery and Italian-style guild-republics. PCs are actually explicitly part of the burgeoning new middle class. Not bad for a furry RPG, huh?
*'''[[Mystara]]:''' Depending on where you are, there might be airships, magic-powered technological conveniences, and drill-tanks to explore the hollow earth full of dinosaurs. Either way, things are a little less generic here in proto-Eberron.
*'''[[Pathfinder]]:''' [[Golarion]] features relatively advanced technologies such as flintlock and matchlock firearms, the printing press, galleons (crewed by pirates reminiscent of the Golden Age of piracy in the Caribbean), and, in certain sourcebooks, [[Spelljammer|steampunk/magi-tech spaceships]]. Not to mention the number of people whose clothes and equipment are explicitly based on 18th-century fashions (see, among others, Andoran, Taldor, and Alkenstar). At least one source (''05-13: Hellknight's Feast'') says high class dwellings have actual porcelain toilets. Also, there's that one random corner of the world where aliens are trying to peacefully settle and/or invade, only to realize they picked the *one* corner of the world where pleas of "We come in peace!" are met with [[Barbarian|warcries and the judicious application of battleaxes to various vital areas]]. One sourcebook (''Technology Guide'') includes *lots* of super-high-tech stuff and different class archetypes that make use of it. On the socio-political front, the Chelaxian breakaways Andoran and Galt have started to push for a less aristocratic government. Come second edition, cannons have become widespread on naval vessels.
**And '''[[Starfinder]]''' reveals that at least at some point various sci-fi technologies will be developed.
*'''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]''': It was true in the past, but by the time of the original series the Fire Nation has become an industrial power, complete with colonial ambitions towards the rest of the world. In fact, the main character's previous incarnation as Avatar Roku actually ''stopped'' the Fire Nation from breaking medieval stasis ''because'' he foresaw that doing so would mean allowing them to subjugate all the other peoples. In fact Sozin, the Fire Lord during this industrial age and Roku's former friend, outright stated that's exactly what he planned to do, and hoped Roku would join him. And after Sozin got rid of Roku, the Fire Nation immediately went all Imperial Japan on the world, even inflicting genocide on the Air Nomads to stop the next Avatar, Aang, which forced Aang to flee. Which is perfectly sensible because even if they weren't the designated pacifist culture, Aang was literally 12 and had no way of meaningfully stopping them (''yet''). Even the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes have a few tinkerers and inventors, and during the time of Avatar Aang, the first airships and submarines are invented, albeit the magitek varieties. At the end of the show, the protagonist Avatar Aang makes peace between all three surviving factions and begins the reestablishment of the aforementioned genocided faction, and the sequel reveals that doing so helped the world advance to a roughly 20s/30s era of technology, complete with automobiles, moving pictures, the printing press, political propaganda videos, and croneyist democracy.
*'''[[Dragonmech]]''': Dragonmech's setting used to be in Medieval Stasis, then chunks of the moon started to rain down on them along with Alien Moon Dragons riding the rocks down for a full-on invasion, people first hide underground but then a dwarf kickstarts the creation of Pacific Rim sized steampunk robots to fight the Dragons and the whole world is now in a full-on steam-powered Industrial Revolution without the gunpowder.
*'''[[Star Wars]]:''' After the Celestials fell, the Rakata developed significantly and only failed as they lost their connection to the force. After the Rakata collapse, technology advances with some anachronisms due to FTL travel being discovered early on through Rakatan and other ruins and slave revolts against the Rakata. This continues until the period between the start of the New Sith Wars (2000 BBBY) to the Ruusan Reformation (1000 BBY) (where everyone was too busy killing each other, even more so than usual), and after that technology actually ''does'' advance noticeably throughout Post-Reformation Old Republic and especially the prequels (32 BBY onward) all the way to the era of the Legacy comics (138 ABY). Hyperdrives improve (in speed, how small a craft they can fit in and how big a craft they can propel) at a much faster rate than they did in the 1000 years since the end of the dark age. It's not just direct improvements either, with new technologies like [[Android]]s, relatively cheap cloaking devices that don't require unobtainum, silent and invisible blasters, biological technology merged with mechanical tech, and more. Even military strategy changes significantly between back and forth transitions between symmetrical and asymmetrical warfare. Amazingly all this occurs organically as new technology is introduced to allow a plot and gets improved upon in future installments.
*'''[[Masque of the Red Death|Gothic Earth]]''': Perhaps the ultimate aversion as Gothic Earth follows real world technological history of tech development ''almost'' exactly, even stating players can only obtain certain items after a certain point in time. Ordinarily this wouldn't be notable, as Gothic Earth is still Earth, but [[RPGA|Living Death]] included some technology that was explicitly anachronistic, such as submarines capable of cross Atlantic voyages and long term submerging, and a few people who have lived somewhat longer.
*'''[[Discworld]]''': Entire ''Discworld'' novels revolve around a particular innovation that drastically changes how the Disc's society works: ''Moving Pictures'' - the movie camera, ''Soul Music'' - Rock N' Roll ("music with rocks in it"), ''The Truth'' - moveable type (i.e. the printing press, and with it, journalism), ''Going Postal'' - mail modernization and the telegraph, ''Making Money'' - paper money and modernized banking, ''Raising Steam'' - the steam engine.
*'''[[Arcanum]]''': The world of Arcanum is in the midst of an industrial revolution with an in-universe acknowledged past of Medieval Statis. What makes it particularly noteworthy is how it portrays the ever faster changing world pushing old fantasy norms and customs away, with Technology replacing Magic entirely.
[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Gamer Slang]]

Medieval Stasis

2023-06-19T15:48:25Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:B414: /* Why the Medieval Stasis of the Post-Roman Middle Ages Ended */

{{Topquote|[[Eberron]] in 998 YK is based on the idea that ''civilization is evolving''.|Keith Baker, explaining why Eberron is not a normal campaign setting.}}
'''Medieval Stasis''' describes the state of essentially all fantasy worlds that never get to [[steampunk]], and a crucial component of the [[standard fantasy setting]].

As the title implies, most fantasy worlds are stuck at a technological level roughly equivalent to Europe between 1000 CE and 1500 CE, being more advanced in some fields and more primitive in others, until the universe collapses. A [[knight]]'s ancestors five thousand years ago fought against Orcs on the back of a great warhorse, wielding [[sword]] and lance, wearing plate and a greathelm, just as he does at present and how his descendants 25 generations down the line will. At best, some groups in the universe may be more advanced than others (some peoples might be building castles and forging plate armor while others live as primitive cave men armed with flint axes and stone tipped spears), but nobody will be developing new technology, or, on the off chance one or two factions are, it will never spread much or catch on anywhere else. This also applies to social structures such as feudalism, with a max of one non-Greco-Roman democracy per setting. It will be conquered and restored from edition to edition as fanboys war behind the scenes.

While it is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, as it creates a set mood and style of play, we run into the fact that many writers are hacks, and use it to both rip-off other writers (principally, Tolkien) and to [[Advancing the Storyline|keep the world stagnant enough that they don't risk smashing something people actually like that they didn't have the skill to ''realize'' they shouldn't smash, while still maintaining the illusion of forward momentum]]. The ''[[Forgotten Realms]]'' is a prime example of this, featuring both several powerful organizations out to stifle any attempt to progress the technological or socioeconomic advancement of the setting, and many lame-brained "advances" in story from edition to edition, most infamously with 4th edition's "Spellplague" and retconned twin planet where all the new 4e races were hiding.

A common thing among fantasy writers is treating firearms of any kind as a taboo. Many feel that featuring firearms would somehow ruin the medieval feeling despite the fact that firearms were used in the late medieval period (and in Warhammer.) Granted, [[neckbeards|many people's]] weapon history knowledge is such that they believe that having guns would immediately mean having AK-47s rather than merely having handcannons or matchlock muskets.

Note that in high-magic settings, sorcery sometimes gets so common and overpowered that it basically replaces technological progress. Why would you build robots or rockets if you can just create golems or cast Teleport Without Error?

Another issue with medieval stasis is that a lot of writers—most of them in fact—probably know less about the actual Middle Ages than the average Crusader Kings 2 player and thus present not only a world in medieval stasis but one that's in, at best, a theme-park version of the medieval period and quite often only really showing Anglo-French medievalism (and a bastardized shitfarmer version of it at that). The somewhat more historically literate might put in some anachronisms like references to ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome, or to the Aztecs (usually a ramshackle mishmash of half remembered tidbits of the Mayans, Aztecs, and Inca thrown together with no real thought), and if you're extra lucky you might get something that's an extended reference to a (largely inaccurate) medieval Islamic polity or to the Holy Roman Empire, mixed in with the usual barbarian tribes, but that's usually about it. Like the Democracy thing mentioned above? It was nowhere near that simple in real life. A great many of the tribal societies we have records of were actually very democratic, where the King was elected and so were the chiefs below them and they absolutely did not have absolute authority over their subjects. And of course "feudalism" is simply a catch all label for a hugely varied and complicated array of societal organization systems that can be vaguely described as an aristocratic hierarchy based around land and military service and assorted ties of loyalty and bloodline.

And even in medieval Europe you had systems that broke the norm, like the merchant republics of Italy or the north German free cities, and of course you had lands directly ruled by the Church. Never mind that you also had rather different systems of organization elsewhere in the world, like in the Islamic world, India, the Americas, and of course, China's quite literal bureaucracy where civil servants hired based on their performance in examinations did most of the day-to-day governing of China; dynasties could come and go but the bureaucracy was eternal. Tolkien was himself, of course, a medievalist with very deep knowledge of the time period, even by today's standards, with our rather improved access to knowledge of the time period. Warhammer was created by history nerds who very much knew what they were writing about and so populated the world of Warhammer Fantasy with references to just about every political system that predominated in the medieval and renaissance periods as well as a lot of those that predominated in antiquity. So not only does Medieval Stasis perpetuate an annoying degree of sameness in the fantasy genre, it also tends to be based on a conception of medieval times that's not only essentially completely limited to France + England with some scattered references to other stuff, but is also almost completely wrong about everything and doesn't even scratch the surface of the depth of medieval history.
==Some general historical points==
One thing that should be known is that no one group of people has a monopoly on innovation. You have some stodgy conservative societies with "revere your ancestors and their wisdom" and "If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It" mentalities which hinders improvements and those which value innovation and believe in progress for the sake of progress and various groups in between, but nobody has been so dedicated to stagnation that they would shun all attempts at improvement in perpetuity. Civilizations which don't keep up tend to be conquered by those that do. Actual resistance to the adoption of new technologies is typically not to the effect of people in authority demanding the inventors or the presenters of the new breakthrough be burned at the stakes for witchcraft; instead, generally, it would be more to the effect of seeing a new device and declaring it to be an interesting novelty, but be reticent to adopting it because doing so would be expensive and its benefits are still unclear, that there is not a particularly pressing need to improve that field right now, that it might be profitable in one sense but on the other hand it might destabilize the social order of things that has stood for centuries which can result in social unrest as people which profit from the current set up become redundant or that this beneficial machinery might come with complications that leave them in the pockets of foreign powers (buying spare parts for their machines or importing foreign fuel). Concerns which generally do have at least a kernel of truth to them (example: industrialization leading to the rise of a prominent bourgeoisie which eclipses the landed nobility), and the attitude that they often engender is to adopt changes gradually, "on their own terms". Other factors are general xenophobia and resistance to the ideas of Methodological Naturalism as opposed to Dogmatism, though even these are not absolute barriers.

Most improvements don't come in big breakthroughs made by some lone mastermind; a [[Stone Age|genius hunter/gatherer]] did not one day decide [[Bronze Age|"Lets start clearing out land, plowing it and sowing it with seeds and capturing animals to breed so we can have all the food we want"]]. That process took thousands of years, starting with little things such as weeding patches of wild food plants which were gradually added onto with other practices until you got farming as we'd understand it, with silos, farmhouses, fields, plows, pens of livestock, irrigation ditches, and so forth. Improvements can come about by people trying to be more thrifty, having to do with less of a previously common resource, more of a specific resource becoming available or by minor accidental variations. The idea that technology comes all at once from super special smart people ex nihilo instead of being born of conditions produced by years of decisions made by everyone from politicians down to the lowliest peasant is something born of a combination of fiction being kind of clumsy at showing things at a societal instead of an individual level and narratives which are basically hagiographic propaganda about how great some inventor was (while almost invariably not crediting all the people who helped them), with a bit of market campaigning meant to make you think that a slightly faster electric toothbrush is some massive revolution. If you look at society as a product of decisions made by the masses under conditions, rather than some smart guy having a great idea, questions of why some people didn't invent some things become much easier to answer. Even in the last two centuries where quick spread of knowledge meant one genius could share their idea quick, it was still common for more than one of them to have the same idea at the same time. It's why some science concepts are named after two people instead of one.

Certain technologies and conditions are conducive towards innovation. Let's look at the history of literacy, paper, printing, and the scientific method, for example. If your tribe can farm you have support some artisans who spend all their time weaving, making pots and tools, building boats, working wood, etc. These guys and gals know more about their field of expertise and work out ways of doing it more efficiently. Writing (developed to keep inventory records) means that ideas can be passed down from generation to generation more effectively. Mathematics (ditto) is a major boon to construction and later engineering. Movable type means that both are more readily available to the masses. The scientific mindset is also a valuable aid in this regard and is allowed to flourish because the greater spread of reading pushed by the movable type press and the adoption of paper makes it easier to become educated as well as record the results of experiments and share them with others. Before you had paper and printing presses, writing surfaces were expensive and all copying had to be done by hand. Afterwards, you could print newspapers, books of natural philosophy and manuals for the operation of machines.

What does this mean for the scientific method? Well in this era to have a great, world renown library meant having one thousand or so books and generally they were chained to the library to prevent people from stealing them because they were literally worth their weight in gold. Today a random middle class bookworm could easily have more than a thousand books given some time to collect them, and the really big libraries have literally tens of millions of paper documents. So the massive paper trail of the modern scientific method was simply not affordable, and the need for manual copying basically kneecaps peer review. Add to that that paper itself was introduced to Europeans during the 1300s when Marco Polo returned from China (something many medieval fantasy writers simply gloss over out of convenience). Part of the reason why so little material survived from the days of Rome and earlier is because their preferred material was Papyrus, which takes very badly to any kind of humidity. Paper merely gets wet and the writing on it can be saved if it's handled carefully, Papyrus just dissolves. During the dark and middle ages, the material of choice in most parts of central and western Europe became parchment made from animal skins, which was extremely expensive and could therefore only be used to write and copy documents of utmost importance. But with cheap paper, a greater number of people able to afford it thanks to black death induced changes to Feudal Europe, and printing presses science as we now know it could really get into motion.

Refinements in existing technologies can be a prerequisite to the development of new technologies. As an example, the Romans knew the basic principle of how to make a steam engine and even how to put rotary power to work (having watermills for grinding grain and sawing wood) but they could not apply that technology because they lacked the ability to cast iron as they lacked proper blast furnaces, something you need to be good at doing to make one which is actually useful. The steam engines known to the Mediterranean world at the time were basically fancy toys for the idle rich. The Chinese had the technology to theoretically make steam engines, but the issue tended to be a lack of substantial need as well as [[China]]'s bad habit of periodically exploding into colossal gigadeath civil wars. The Song Dynasty might have sparked the need for such technologies as they were rapidly transitioning towards a highly commercialised economy and out of the bounds of feudalism and were starting to run into issues of demand outpacing the ability of work to meet, [[Genghis motherfucking Khan|but things didn't go too great for them.]]

Finally there is the matter of Diffusion, the spread of technology from one country or civilisation to another if they are in contact with each other. This can be done directly (kidnapping a blacksmith and telling him to train up some of your bronzesmiths to work iron and beat him if he does not comply) or indirectly (a trader from the next kingdom over comes into town with a donkey pulling a wheeled cart, a carpenter sees this, thinks it's a good idea and decides to try to make one himself). There is no point in reinventing the wheel from log rollers on up when you can just copy someone else's work. Moreover if the idea spreads there will be a hell of a lot of people working on it making wheels coming to useful improvements by accidents, making refinements and big breakthroughs which will in turn spread again. If you started in Portugal and went east through Spain, France, Italy, the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, The Fertile Crescent, Iran, Pakistan, India, Indochina and China, you'd come across a series of well developed civilizations that had existed for thousands of years and each one had dealings with their neighbors. Ideas that started in India or Rome or Greece flowed along that pathway to be taken and refined elsewhere.

tl;dr: Stop being lazy and go read Guns, Germs and Steel.

=== Fantasy authors are bad Medievalists and historians, part 2 ===

The vision of medieval times that exists in fantasy is a gigantic pile of anachronisms, pop-history, and misconceptions. Much of this is due to Fantasy's scope of time being seriously out of whack even without innovations like gunpowder or industrial technology. See, our monkey brains aren't very good at really comprehending spans of time longer than a handful of decades (hence why your childhood and youth memories always appear a lot more recent than they actually are, yes, 1990 really was 30 years ago). So we tend to mash up entire "eras" of history into indistinct blobs in our headspace, even though the entire concept of a historical era is more or less for academic convenience and categorization. Charlemagne's Empire was as far back in the past relative to Joan of Arc as she is to the present day. And technology and culture certainly did not remain static in those intervening seven hundred years. Paris went from a fairly small city of a few tens of thousands to a bustling metropolis of nearly a quarter of a million people, mail or banded armour was largely replaced by solid plated armour, gunpowder was popularised, sugar was introduced to the European diet, the Magyars went from eastern horseback-mounted pagan invaders to a solidly Catholic and Europeanised mainstay of central Europe as the Hungarians, and eastern Europe was Christianised in a rather gory and unpleasant process, to name just a few of the drastic changes over the years. Of course, any Crusader Kings 2 player could tell you how ridiculous the idea of the political map of a faux-medieval realm remaining static for centuries is.

Let's now take the common complaint among Fantasy authors that guns render castles and knights in shining armour obsolete. Full Plate armour coexisted with man-portable gunpowder weapons throughout literally the entirety of its military service and was phased out because of reasons of cost as armies got bigger, not because it was ineffective against guns. Making a fully articulated suit of plate armour fitted to every soldier is expensive and time consuming, so as armies got more standardized as countries centralized, with equipment being given by the military rather than soldiers being left to figure it out themselves, it was deemed easier to just give people the basics needed to protect their bodies. In that case, ditching the limb armor to reduce costs while keeping the helmet and breastplate like the Swiss Landsknecht and the Spanish Tercio. Hell: in Japan, the increasing prevalence of guns is what made the Samurai go from only partially metallic lamellar armour to full metal plated suits in the first place.

Furthermore, Plate armour by and large did not coexist with other types of metallic armour. It straight up replaced them all because it was just flatly better. Whether it's just a breastplate, a suit of half-plate (half referring to how much of the body is protected), or full plate, there was basically zero reason to wear anything else. Once the metal casting technology for plate armour became widespread, other forms of armour largely disappeared save for covering joint areas because plate armour is simply better in every way and is cheaper to make. Full coats of mail or scale didn't coexist with efficiently made plate armour; there's no need for a chain shirt when a solid steel breastplate offers superior protection for no downside, and full plate is actually considerably more comfortable and lighter than a full coat of mail. So that adventuring party where the Barbarian is wearing chainmail for mobility and the fighter is wearing full plate to tank better at the cost of agility? Simply didn't happen. You're mixing your dark ages and your late medieval/renaissance era armour styles. Mixing armor did, however, happen with conquistadors, and ''may'' have occurred with other small groups of fighting men. This was due purely to costs, not armor types having pros and cons, as used obsolete gear was far cheaper than armor anyone actually wanted. The equipment log for the 287 combatant Coronado expedition lists five suits of full plate (four belonging to Coronado himself), four suits of plate armor for horses (all Coronado's), 16 sets of partial plate, 56 pieces of sleeveless chain armor for the torso (two vests only), one suit of sleeved chain armor, and 250 gambesons. Archaeologists have found a medieval kettle hat in New Mexico, which would have been obsolete for hundreds of years before it got there.

As for Castles, anyone who seriously believed that cannons made strong walls obsolete would be laughed out of any gunpowder-era military engineering course; hell, even as late as the World Wars, fixed fortifications were a very daunting task for artillery to try and crack and often required specialist super heavy guns or ultra high penetration air-dropped bombs to break. After the development of gunpowder artillery, contemporary militaries simply converted their castles into star forts or polygonal fortresses (where the walls are made sloped and are backed by a lot of sloped compressed dirt. Meanwhile, in China, average city walls were already several meters thick and filled with lots of compressed dirt and gravel compared to the famous walls of Constantinople (which were two to three meters thick at best and less stuffed). This meant that the Chinese had less incentive to refine their artillery for centuries (which came back to backfire on them when modern howitzers and specialized shells were used against them by the Europeans when they sent out colonial expeditions). Have you ever heard the term Forlorn Hope? It refers to the supremely unfortunate soldiers who get the job of being the first to rush into the breach of a fortress when after what is typically days, weeks, or even months of non-stop cannon fire they ''finally'' break open one of the walls. Which is rather obviously a suicide mission for the first wave. If it were easy to crack open fortresses with cannonades there would be no need for them.

What actually changed about Castles is that as countries became more centralized, control over military forts passed unto the Kingdom/Empire proper and out of the hands of local nobles, meaning that fortresses largely stopped also being houses for the resident Baron or Count of whatever. This had the benefit of ensuring that local nobles had a harder time rebelling because the fortresses were loyal to the Capital, rather than being their private property. It wasn't until well into the 20th century with the invention of the atomic fucking bomb that a line of fixed fortifications was no longer regarded as a serious obstacle to a truly determined attacker and that was only if the attacker was willing and able to drop one on the battlefield. With conventional munitions, even today with all our missiles and precision weapons, a fortified line is something that most attackers would rather bypass than breach. Of course, most defenders know this and essentially use fortifications to funnel attackers into battlefields of their choosing.

And what about industrial technology? Surely that has no place in my pre-modern setting or would be obsoleted by magic! That too was driven in large part by increased centralization. Artisanal production is relatively fine if you never need to send products very far away from where they're made and are only meeting relatively small amounts of local demand and the occasional distant but super wealthy patron. But as realms centralize and unify and economies grow interconnected, suddenly monks copying maybe a handful of books a year at a premium isn't enough to meet the needs for more literature. You need higher output, which leads to mass industrialization and standardization of production which requires growing mechanization of production to ensure that quality remains consistent. This drives the greater reliance on machines in producing things and these machines make it easier to make better machines until you can meet the demand or until you get to the point where you're starting to reach the limitations of your power source like wind, muscle, or waterpower. As medieval societies got bigger, you saw more windmills and watermills to get more power for all this work.

Fantasy settings, however, offer magic and alchemy which should realistically, unless there are heavy restrictions on the commonality of either, make for ideal power sources to make for even better machines until you end up in industrialism via such powers. Whether they do this on their own or are used to augment mundane technology is mostly irrelevant. And indeed, powerful mages and alchemists are likely to end up as the predominant class as they control access to these all important resources. So societies that don't want to rely on either would likely double down on trying to find alternatives to having to rely on them, much like how Merchants pushed for quite a lot of what we take for granted in modern society to wriggle out from the thumb of the Aristocracy, like moving centers of production into cities not owned by nobles so they didn't have to pay the local Baron and would have better access to labourers not tied to the land as they sought to maximize profit in their class interest.

Societies are products of the conditions in which they exist. Things are the way they are because of responses to needs and pressures or perceived needs and pressures. They are never really static because the wheel of history is constantly turning and even something as simple as fluctuations in population size can result in radical transformations. Did a big war just depopulate a country in a fantasy setting? Well, gee whiz, now the labourers in the country have a much greater position of power and influence due to the scarcity of their services, which can lead to undermining the entire basis of medieval feudalism and pave the way for late Feudalism or even early Capitalism. Or perhaps something else entirely if the setting conditions allow for it (probably not a regression to Classical era slavery though; that required huge surpluses of labour.)

==Why the Medieval Stasis of the Post-Roman Middle Ages Ended==

In our own world, there were several critical developments which dramatically altered the status quo and led to the disruption of Medieval Stasis. These were:

* '''Printing:''' The invention of printing resulted in an upswing of literacy and education across all but the lowest classes of society. Greater availability of religious texts immediately caused schisms in Christianity as its foundational texts were scrutinized, while broadsheets and pamphleteering became the first form of ostensibly independent "news" through which the masses could be swayed to one view or another. The church had been instrumental in raising people to subscribe to the status quo and its disruption left the system it was propping up vulnerable. Printing (and the refinements of the techniques for producing paper) also lead to a revolution in administration, as the rapid reproduction of records and similar documents simply made it easier to govern by decree, rather than giving a local noble you appointed some broad orders and hope he would stick to them.
* '''Casting & Gunpowder:''' These two technologies were linked at the hip. Gunpowder weaponry was powerful, but also expensive and complicated to make (cannons are generally cast, and once you can cast guns you can cast all kinds of new things). It made feudalism untenable; no longer could a lord have his smith hammer out some weapons and outfit some men at arms. Instead he paid taxes (bastard feudalism) so the king could buy guns made by...
* '''Craft Guilds (the Emergence of a Middle Class):''' The increasing complexity of creating of arms and desired goods drove the formation of labor organizations specifically focused on production; all kinds of production from guns to fabrics to ships and everything else. As these organizations gained wealth, they gained power and with it an awareness of their importance relative to the importance of their supposed betters; this awareness found its outlet in the growing public forum fueled by printing.
* '''Fractional Investment:''' With craft guilds and casting, economies were primed to begin growing rapidly, beyond the ability of the nobility to retain control or even complete awareness of what was going on. Into this the growing artisan classes (particularly in the Netherlands) threw in the concept of modern investment, allowing individuals of lower means to participate in larger endeavors at reasonable risk. Whether it was building polders or sending ships on trading missions or establishing businesses, this lit a fuse for explosive economic growth which ultimately made feudalism (and its tendency to maintain the status quo) economically obsolete.
* '''Colonialism:''' This also goes hand in hand with the emergence of the Middle Class. The discovery of the Americas single-handedly fixed the decades long economic recession Europe experienced by opening up the vast deposits of precious metals (so vast in fact, that some of the mines established by the Spanish in the 1500s are operating to this very day) sitting there to the European powers (mostly Spain). Expansionism and wars between ''Nations'' as opposed to ''Kings'' over economical and strategic dominance (instead of dynastic struggles over thrones and titles) that seem more familiar to us also became the norm. Colonialism changed the face of the world in ways that would take up too much space to even broadly lay down on this page, so we'll just leave it at that.

While there were innumerable other factors, these were major destabilizing elements that individually might have been coped with, but in concert made change inevitable. In designing a medieval setting, care must be given to the degree of technology that is introduced. As a general rule anything which cannot be created by the labor of a single person (excluding buildings, anyway), is liable to begin a chain reaction of economic activity which transfers wealth (and thus, power) away from a landholding nobility to a middle, merchant class.

This is why Venice with its shipbuilders and traders was the birthplace of the Renaissance. Unlike all the rest of Europe, Venice never succumbed to medieval stasis from feudalism; instead it succumbed to naked plutocracy. The middle merchant class of wealthy citizens (citizen in the Roman/Byzantine sense) grew so powerful so fast from shipbuilding and trade that they engaged in centuries of backstabbing and petty power grabs. In feudalistic countries, you were rich ''because you were king'', and your line might reign for centuries. In Venice you were Doge (we swear, that's what they called the guy in charge) ''because you were rich'' and used your money to bribe/threaten/murder enough people to make you Doge; and odds were you'd be dead within a couple years to make someone else Doge. In a fit of irony, Venice, Ragusa and other merchant city-states eventually suffered a stagnation due to the closing of the Silk Road and the shift of trade lines from Mediterranean to Atlantic, this just goes to show how historical conditions can make or break a society.

==Notable Examples of Medieval Stasis==

*'''[[Lord of the Rings]]:''' Tolkien wasn't too fond of industrialization, having seen the First World War's highly industrialized warfare and the pollution-spewing effects of the Industrial and Transportation Revolutions on his native countryside up close and personal, so the heroes of his stories preferred Medieval Stasis as well, barring a few anachronisms like clocks and matches. Unlike most of the writers that he inspired, Tolkien had [[Fluff|five hundred pages of background]] explaining why, namely because Middle-earth was in a state of decline due to the ravages of Morgoth and Sauron, the gradual decline of the elves and the Dunedain after the downfall of Numenor, and much of their technology was given to them by the Valar rather than inventing it themselves, and is intended as a mythological history of the world that ultimately explains why humans are on top and everyone else is gone. The funny thing is, based on supplementary books and scrapped stories, Numenor came quite close to being a Steampunk world power, equipped with steamships and even rockets, which, in their decadent colonialist period, they promptly used to imperialize the shit out of much of the world in a manner that led to their ultimate downfall. Indeed, that's why Harad, Rhun, Khand and other humans hate Gondor so much. The Numenorian ancestors of Gondor's people were taking them for [[Chaos Dwarfs|industrial-level human sacrifices]] and doing other atrocities to them, so the descendants of their victims still hold genocidal hatred (abetted by Sauron playing all sides against each other). Also, it's worth mentioning that Tolkien designed his setting as a literal Earth backstory myth, so technically the age of industrialization and modernisation will start in Middle-Earth anyway.
* '''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]:''' Westeros is ''extra'' static, because not only has everything been fairly stable for thousands of years until the Great Fuckening of the current time frame, some ''individual families'' have had unbroken rule over their lands for a hundred odd generations (The Starks being the prime example, as they have ruled in Winterfell for over ''eight thousand years'') which is something patently absurd when you consider how much real life royal, imperial, and noble families have had to struggle to avoid patrilineal extinction in just a few centuries, decades even in some cases, with the oldest still extant aristocratic house being the Japanese house of Yamato and even then it's likely that they bent the rules of succession at least once in their 2500 year history. That said, it should be noted that part of the backstory involves the Bronze Age First Men defeating the Stone Age Children of the Forest, who were themselves conquered by the Iron Age Andal invaders everywhere but in the Iron Islands and the North (who adapted and adopted the technology of their would-be conquerors), and the records of the ancient days are spotty at best, full of mythical accounts and many of the Maesters believe that said events happened over a shorter timeframe. Granted, the whole "millenia old houses" might be something that tended to happen with noble houses IRL claming to be much older than they actually were and could not being contradicted in the absence of reliable records, all the way to the Ethiopian "Solomonids" that still exist to this day, and the aforementioned Yamato being helped by the fact that Japan did not have reliable calendars until the late 19th century, so there's that. While the exact timespan between the Andal invasion and the current events isn't exactly established, the stasis is still quite bad especially when you consider how dragons (essentially domesticated flying animals) are present yet people are none wiser on things such as flight or the use of heat and steam in proto-industrial activities.
* '''[[Forgotten Realms]]:''' Not only have things been more-or-less exactly the same for all of recorded history, there is a powerful, international, theoretically-good-or-at-least-neutral organization actively devoted to making sure that ''no progress of any kind is ever made'': the [[Harpers]]. Whenever anyone invents something useful (guns, locomotion, steel plows, etc.) and tries to market it, the Harpers confiscate it and make it clear they'll kill the creator and their whole family if they don't go back to being a happy little peasant. Whenever a good-aligned king tries to unite and stabilize the warring states, the Harpers murder his ass (makes one wonder if the Harpers aren't part of the problem). Faerun hasn't budged an inch since Ao glued it together. And even [[Al-Qadim]], located on a southern continent beyond their reach, is a somewhat-hidebound and conservative society where progress is uncommon. The only exception to this was the island nation of [[Lantan]]. The island was a theocratic state in service to Gond Wonderbringer, a deity whose portfolio included innovation and technology, who gifted his followers with knowledge of smokepowder which lead to functional in-setting [[firearm|firearms]]. At least until 4th edition blew it up along with everything else fun or interesting in the Forgotten Realms. As of 5th edition, the current (albeit scattered and/or vague) lore seems to imply that Lantan's destruction has been retconned like the rest of the Spellplague.
* '''[[Greyhawk]]:''' Despite the impotent bitching on the page for this [[Old School Roleplaying|oldest-of-the-old school]] settings, it also has a society where nothing much ever has happened or will happen to bring about changes in the lifestyles of its inhabitants. And ''this'' is the setting with [[Murlynd| a literal god of Old West gunfighting]] and an army of [[firearm]]-toting [[gunslinger|paladins analogous to sheriffs]].
* '''[[Dragonlance]]:''' Apocalyptic calamities come and go, but Krynn stays at pretty much the same level of pseudo-medieval tech forever, world without end, amen. And, no the [[Gnomes|tinker gnomes]] do ''not'' count, since their stuff almost never does anything useful, gets mass-produced, or catches on outside the gnomes themselves. In fact, some material explicitly says that the reason for the stasis is '''because''' of the fucking gnomes; their absolute idiocy when it comes to producing technology has actually convinced pretty much every other culture on the planet that science is fundamentally inferior in every way to sorcery! The one culture that doesn't think they're entirely a waste of time is only interested because it pretty much hates magic... and is made of a bunch of knight-in-shining-armor types so hidebound that they haven't been able to properly fix their organization since the first Cataclysm, and so anything like vehicles or gunpowder is certain to get dismissed on grounds of being "dishonorable". So, yeah, '''fuck''' tinker gnomes.
* '''[[Warcraft]]:''' In a cartoony match for the Dragonlance example above, Azeroth's many factions never adopt one another's technological advancements. Goblins and gnomes can invent as many steampunk robots as they want, none of their stuff will ever change the world in a concrete way. Even the aliens are mostly just sword-and-sorcery types using magic for space travel and other advanced projects. That said, firearms had established themselves in the comparatively recent past.
*'''[[Ravenloft]]:''' This is probably the most interesting example. The Demiplane of Dread doesn't so much "advance" as it does "absorb some place where things are a little more complicated," and most of the Domains of Dread are already tailor-made just to torture their prisoners (and the Darklords can also choose to simply seal off all access to their Domains entirely when they're not just isolated by the Mists). Thus, though individual Domains might be advanced enough for common people to have firearms and gaslights or so primitive that they aren't even ''into'' the Stone Age (King Crocodile for the win!), they will almost never learn from or assimilate one another's technology even on the rare chance xenophobia doesn't get in the way first. Each Domain will be mostly frozen into the level it's at, medieval or not. Amusingly, this works both ways: technologically-advanced societies are no more likely to take up magic than lower-tech ones are to learn to use gunpowder. There's a notable exception in the Rokushima Táiyoo, which is listed as "Dark Age", but said to find the gunpowder weapons of Dementlieu "tantalizing;" this is a reference to the fact that that land is a pastiche of Sengoku Jidai Japan, and its Darklord of Western fanboy and gunpowder aficionado Oda Nobunaga.
*'''[[Star Wars]]:''' Not medieval, but absolutely in technological stasis in the Old Republic. In the 4000 years before the Battle of Yavin (the situation before and after this 4000 year period is discussed below) technological , the only thing that has noticeably improved is hyperdrives which have become faster and smaller. This would eventually be justified by a devastating war ~1100 years before the original film bringing about a dark age that killed several major technology companies and destroyed any FTL communication (sans courier) past the core worlds. This does ''not'' however apply to the period of 36 years covered by the films and the decades after it covered by the Expanded Universe (see below). There are some in-universe technological achievements that supposedly result in better results (the kolto made by an isolationist monopoly being replaced by the superior bacta made by multiple rival cartels, for instance, as the flesh-healing miracle drug), but none of them are really noticeable through the window the audience sees.
*'''[[Dune]]:''' One of the major inspirations for ''Star Wars'' (and [[Warhammer 40K]]). At some point in the past, AI went rogue and humanity's struggle against it became a literal holy war (the Butlerian Jihad), after it ended, development of any "thinking machines" was banned by religious fiat. As a result, technological and scientific development has slowed to a crawl, new technology is seen as suspicious, the "[[Drug|Spice]]" from Arrakis allows people to become human supercomputers, expanded lifetimes, and have space folding, so there was no desire to experiment and find alternatives, the development of personal shields made every other weapon outdated except for melee weapons (unless you shoot a [[lasgun]] into a shield, then the [[Exterminatus|shooter, the target, and the surrounding landscape are deleted in a massive explosion]]) and the Bene Gesserit and Navigator's Guild collaborated to set up a feudalistic government with full knowledge that it would be easier to control. However, the main plot of the series is eventually revealed to be about making humanity escape this stagnation.
*'''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battles]]:''' Bretonnia is literally in Medieval Stasis despite having one of the most technologically-advanced nations right next door. The Elves of all types give no fucks about advancing their technology, but in their defense what they have still works, they have access to giant monsters such as dragons and hydras and the Dark Elves are a minor exception. The Warriors of Chaos are again literally medieval, but in their case they're Medieval [[Vikings]] who get supplied with advanced tech by the Chaos Dwarf allies or demons. Orcs have not been introduced to the wonders of "Dakka" yet; the Lizardmen still use wood and stone, but are literally designed for specific taskes and make up for it by also using dinosaurs and the best magic in their world. Lastly, the Ogres are pretty much in "Stone Age Stasis" as they're not very intelligent but they've started to reverse engineer blackpower weapons and under Overtyrant Greasus started to discover the benefits of commerce. Human nations outside of Bretonnia are at the tail end of the Renaissaince, while the Empire of Man is in slowly fighting through the early Enlightenment but they are under constant attack from various Eldritch horrors so progress is existent but slow. The various elf factions are averse to blackpowder weapons due to environmental damage (for High and Wood elves), using magic and monsters instead of technology and being "...content with weapons that will not blow up in (our) faces" (actual quote from the 5th Ed High Elves armybook). The only races that have had any technological developments on a grand scale are the Skaven and Dwarfs, and more so the Chaos Dwarfs. The Dwarfs are reluctant to share their technology with anybody other than the Empire and all their inventions must have at least several centuries of successful use before the guilds allow it to be mass-produced. While Skaven have guns, electricity and powered vehicles, most inventions of the Skaven end up blowing up in their faces and rely on the highly dangerous and unstable Warpstone (plus little regard for collateral damage). The Chaos Dwarfs' technology has gotten to the point of tanks and war golems, but it is literally built and run on daemons, souls and bloody sacrifices. You can see why others have not copied the latter two.
** The undead factions are an interesting case. The Vampire Counts vary with Luthor Harkon's pirate fleets using black powder weapons while outside that the most advanced technology seen in that faction was crossbows. The Tomb Kings had varying technology, with their most technologically advanced city, Lybaras, reaching the steampunk level. Also, they have superhuman abilities and being undead eliminates many of the needs that lead people to develop technology (no need to develop automation when undead laborers don't get tired or bored, no need for medicine because the dead don't get sick naturally plus their bodies can be repaired by magic and non-vampire undead don't need sustenance) and they also have magic and monsters.
** Not that any of this matters because the entire world got nuked by the Chaos Gods. The sequel setting, Age of Sigmar, has the successor factions be at roughly the same level as they were at the End Times, but stuff has become understood enough that Steam Tanks and Cannons won't randomly blow up as often and can be reliably mass produced, and it should be pointed out that Mass Production is itself a game changer. Stasis is more then raw technology: it is as much application. The Kharadron Overlords have surpassed steampunk via magic punk. The setting also has more-widely-available magic than the Old World did, significantly changing and improving the qualify of life of its inhabitants (in theory, in practice it's still pretty bad due to Chaos, [[Nagash]], Greenskin and giant rampages and the realms being pretty fucked up places even when those three aren't involved, even Azyr is under a heavy dictatorship to prevent chaos of both lowercase c and capital C varieties).
* '''[[Banestorm]]''': This one can be especially surprising, given the titular Banestorm makes the setting [[Isekai|Portal Fantasy]], so it's surprising that technology is still medieval. However, two issues present themselves: Most otherworlders are too familiar with modern society to function in the world of Yrth, and the powers that be specifically stop it.

==Notable Settings ''Without'' Medieval Stasis==

*'''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battles]]:''' The Empire, Dwarfs and Grand Cathay are actually about the level of most European countries around 1500, at the start of the early modern period and the Renaissance. They're also advancing, albeit slowly, as the Dwarfs have steampunk helicopters and recently invented airships. But the problem is that they are under constant Chaos invasions and Chaos Gods themselves are not above screwing with the world, which puts something of a crimp on pure research. Imagine what Nurgle would do to the guy who discovered penicillin in this world. The fact that relations between the engineers and the Cult of Sigmar are not the best in the world does not help things at all. The Dark Elves have progressed from bows to rapid-fire armor-piercing crossbows, including a one-handed variety, during their war against the High Elves. The other notable technology users are the Skaven, but the Skaven technology only affects their weapons (god help the world if they ever figure out sanitation considering what it did to our own population) and it's almost all magitech based on weaponizing [[Warpstone|solidified Chaos.]] Undead straddle the line between the two, with the vampires not being afraid to use technology; the problem is most of their undead minions lack the physical and mental acumen to use it while the vampires physical, mental and magical abilities make technology practically redundant to them at a personal level. The [[Tomb Kings]] had technology at the steampunk level, though this isn't represented in the game, but they are more concerned about rebuilding their realm, which has fallen into disrepair due to hundreds of years of war, natural disasters and no maintenance, rather than advancing their society. They do have golem-esque undead constructs, which are the undead magical equivalent of robots.
**''''[[Warhammer: Age of Sigmar]]:''' As noted above, the sequel setting shows clear technological development with mass production of the best of the stuff known in the World-That-Was, with the [[Kharadron Overlords]], the [[Cities of Sigmar]] subfaction Ironweld Arsenal and the Skaven Clans Skyre being the resident technological factions. The Lumineth are also a borderline case, as they've developed solar-powered golems, but knowing them magic might also be involved.
*'''[[Iron Kingdoms]]:''' The Iron Kingdoms setting is one of the best examples of steampunk fantasy. They're developed to the extent of the Victorian era (the mid-to-late 1800s), with a slow-but-growing industrial revolution and the discovery and development of electricity and chemistry, with the ongoing big international clusterfuck behind the wargame constantly fueling magical and technological advancement. At the same time, it remains a recognizably fantasy setting in many ways, with wizard orders, barbarian tribes, and dangerous monster threats on the frontier demanding plucky-adventurer solutions. (Or did before the wheels came off partway through Third Edition to make way for the science fiction spin-off nobody wanted. Still isn't medieval stasis though.)
*'''[[Eberron]]:''' Eberron is weird and expressly focused on subverting the usual D&D cliches, so the technology is a strange mixture of all eras with a side order of JRPG-style magitech. It's one of the few settings that avoids both medieval stasis and outright steampunk, since magic is so common that it has effectively displaced technology, but unlike most settings, this manifests as mass ''availability'' of magic conveniences. As there is no continuity and by default every game starts at exactly the same point in time as every other game, in 998 YK, [[Advancing the Storyline| there's no real status quo to worry about upsetting]]. Only modules/novels that are direct sequels ever reference the events of other modules/novels as having happened.
*'''[[Dark Sun]]:''' A weird example. Depending on edition, the past of Athas may have included anything from a standard fantasy setting to a bio-mechanical halfling empire. But, either way, the Brown Age is a barbaric decline of these past glories, with little metal and no feasible way of shaping more leaving the world in an oddly-civilized nigh-Stone Age. Still, there is an undercurrent of rebuilding and reforming throughout the more-heroic-minded books on the setting, helped by the same eventual anti-continuity Eberron had, so the idea that things ''could'' progress or get better isn't ''impossible''.
*'''[[Ironclaw]]:''' The once-fantasy world is undergoing a pseudo-Renaissance shift away from magic and feudalism to machinery and Italian-style guild-republics. PCs are actually explicitly part of the burgeoning new middle class. Not bad for a furry RPG, huh?
*'''[[Mystara]]:''' Depending on where you are, there might be airships, magic-powered technological conveniences, and drill-tanks to explore the hollow earth full of dinosaurs. Either way, things are a little less generic here in proto-Eberron.
*'''[[Pathfinder]]:''' [[Golarion]] features relatively advanced technologies such as flintlock and matchlock firearms, the printing press, galleons (crewed by pirates reminiscent of the Golden Age of piracy in the Caribbean), and, in certain sourcebooks, [[Spelljammer|steampunk/magi-tech spaceships]]. Not to mention the number of people whose clothes and equipment are explicitly based on 18th-century fashions (see, among others, Andoran, Taldor, and Alkenstar). At least one source (''05-13: Hellknight's Feast'') says high class dwellings have actual porcelain toilets. Also, there's that one random corner of the world where aliens are trying to peacefully settle and/or invade, only to realize they picked the *one* corner of the world where pleas of "We come in peace!" are met with [[Barbarian|warcries and the judicious application of battleaxes to various vital areas]]. One sourcebook (''Technology Guide'') includes *lots* of super-high-tech stuff and different class archetypes that make use of it. On the socio-political front, the Chelaxian breakaways Andoran and Galt have started to push for a less aristocratic government. Come second edition, cannons have become widespread on naval vessels.
**And '''[[Starfinder]]''' reveals that at least at some point various sci-fi technologies will be developed.
*'''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]''': It was true in the past, but by the time of the original series the Fire Nation has become an industrial power, complete with colonial ambitions towards the rest of the world. In fact, the main character's previous incarnation as Avatar Roku actually ''stopped'' the Fire Nation from breaking medieval stasis ''because'' he foresaw that doing so would mean allowing them to subjugate all the other peoples. In fact Sozin, the Fire Lord during this industrial age and Roku's former friend, outright stated that's exactly what he planned to do, and hoped Roku would join him. And after Sozin got rid of Roku, the Fire Nation immediately went all Imperial Japan on the world, even inflicting genocide on the Air Nomads to stop the next Avatar, Aang, which forced Aang to flee. Which is perfectly sensible because even if they weren't the designated pacifist culture, Aang was literally 12 and had no way of meaningfully stopping them (''yet''). Even the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes have a few tinkerers and inventors, and during the time of Avatar Aang, the first airships and submarines are invented, albeit the magitek varieties. At the end of the show, the protagonist Avatar Aang makes peace between all three surviving factions and begins the reestablishment of the aforementioned genocided faction, and the sequel reveals that doing so helped the world advance to a roughly 20s/30s era of technology, complete with automobiles, moving pictures, the printing press, political propaganda videos, and croneyist democracy.
*'''[[Dragonmech]]''': Dragonmech's setting used to be in Medieval Stasis, then chunks of the moon started to rain down on them along with Alien Moon Dragons riding the rocks down for a full-on invasion, people first hide underground but then a dwarf kickstarts the creation of Pacific Rim sized steampunk robots to fight the Dragons and the whole world is now in a full-on steam-powered Industrial Revolution without the gunpowder.
*'''[[Star Wars]]:''' After the Celestials fell, the Rakata developed significantly and only failed as they lost their connection to the force. After the Rakata collapse, technology advances with some anachronisms due to FTL travel being discovered early on through Rakatan and other ruins and slave revolts against the Rakata. This continues until the period between the start of the New Sith Wars (2000 BBBY) to the Ruusan Reformation (1000 BBY) (where everyone was too busy killing each other, even more so than usual), and after that technology actually ''does'' advance noticeably throughout Post-Reformation Old Republic and especially the prequels (32 BBY onward) all the way to the era of the Legacy comics (138 ABY). Hyperdrives improve (in speed, how small a craft they can fit in and how big a craft they can propel) at a much faster rate than they did in the 1000 years since the end of the dark age. It's not just direct improvements either, with new technologies like [[Android]]s, relatively cheap cloaking devices that don't require unobtainum, silent and invisible blasters, biological technology merged with mechanical tech, and more. Even military strategy changes significantly between back and forth transitions between symmetrical and asymmetrical warfare. Amazingly all this occurs organically as new technology is introduced to allow a plot and gets improved upon in future installments.
*'''[[Masque of the Red Death|Gothic Earth]]''': Perhaps the ultimate aversion as Gothic Earth follows real world technological history of tech development ''almost'' exactly, even stating players can only obtain certain items after a certain point in time. Ordinarily this wouldn't be notable, as Gothic Earth is still Earth, but [[RPGA|Living Death]] included some technology that was explicitly anachronistic, such as submarines capable of cross Atlantic voyages and long term submerging, and a few people who have lived somewhat longer.
*'''[[Discworld]]''': Entire ''Discworld'' novels revolve around a particular innovation that drastically changes how the Disc's society works: ''Moving Pictures'' - the movie camera, ''Soul Music'' - Rock N' Roll ("music with rocks in it"), ''The Truth'' - moveable type (i.e. the printing press, and with it, journalism), ''Going Postal'' - mail modernization and the telegraph, ''Making Money'' - paper money and modernized banking, ''Raising Steam'' - the steam engine.
*'''[[Arcanum]]''': The world of Arcanum is in the midst of an industrial revolution with an in-universe acknowledged past of Medieval Statis. What makes it particularly noteworthy is how it portrays the ever faster changing world pushing old fantasy norms and customs away, with Technology replacing Magic entirely.
[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Gamer Slang]]

Medieval Stasis

2023-06-19T15:46:29Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:B414: /* Notable Examples of Medieval Stasis */

{{Topquote|[[Eberron]] in 998 YK is based on the idea that ''civilization is evolving''.|Keith Baker, explaining why Eberron is not a normal campaign setting.}}
'''Medieval Stasis''' describes the state of essentially all fantasy worlds that never get to [[steampunk]], and a crucial component of the [[standard fantasy setting]].

As the title implies, most fantasy worlds are stuck at a technological level roughly equivalent to Europe between 1000 CE and 1500 CE, being more advanced in some fields and more primitive in others, until the universe collapses. A [[knight]]'s ancestors five thousand years ago fought against Orcs on the back of a great warhorse, wielding [[sword]] and lance, wearing plate and a greathelm, just as he does at present and how his descendants 25 generations down the line will. At best, some groups in the universe may be more advanced than others (some peoples might be building castles and forging plate armor while others live as primitive cave men armed with flint axes and stone tipped spears), but nobody will be developing new technology, or, on the off chance one or two factions are, it will never spread much or catch on anywhere else. This also applies to social structures such as feudalism, with a max of one non-Greco-Roman democracy per setting. It will be conquered and restored from edition to edition as fanboys war behind the scenes.

While it is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, as it creates a set mood and style of play, we run into the fact that many writers are hacks, and use it to both rip-off other writers (principally, Tolkien) and to [[Advancing the Storyline|keep the world stagnant enough that they don't risk smashing something people actually like that they didn't have the skill to ''realize'' they shouldn't smash, while still maintaining the illusion of forward momentum]]. The ''[[Forgotten Realms]]'' is a prime example of this, featuring both several powerful organizations out to stifle any attempt to progress the technological or socioeconomic advancement of the setting, and many lame-brained "advances" in story from edition to edition, most infamously with 4th edition's "Spellplague" and retconned twin planet where all the new 4e races were hiding.

A common thing among fantasy writers is treating firearms of any kind as a taboo. Many feel that featuring firearms would somehow ruin the medieval feeling despite the fact that firearms were used in the late medieval period (and in Warhammer.) Granted, [[neckbeards|many people's]] weapon history knowledge is such that they believe that having guns would immediately mean having AK-47s rather than merely having handcannons or matchlock muskets.

Note that in high-magic settings, sorcery sometimes gets so common and overpowered that it basically replaces technological progress. Why would you build robots or rockets if you can just create golems or cast Teleport Without Error?

Another issue with medieval stasis is that a lot of writers—most of them in fact—probably know less about the actual Middle Ages than the average Crusader Kings 2 player and thus present not only a world in medieval stasis but one that's in, at best, a theme-park version of the medieval period and quite often only really showing Anglo-French medievalism (and a bastardized shitfarmer version of it at that). The somewhat more historically literate might put in some anachronisms like references to ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome, or to the Aztecs (usually a ramshackle mishmash of half remembered tidbits of the Mayans, Aztecs, and Inca thrown together with no real thought), and if you're extra lucky you might get something that's an extended reference to a (largely inaccurate) medieval Islamic polity or to the Holy Roman Empire, mixed in with the usual barbarian tribes, but that's usually about it. Like the Democracy thing mentioned above? It was nowhere near that simple in real life. A great many of the tribal societies we have records of were actually very democratic, where the King was elected and so were the chiefs below them and they absolutely did not have absolute authority over their subjects. And of course "feudalism" is simply a catch all label for a hugely varied and complicated array of societal organization systems that can be vaguely described as an aristocratic hierarchy based around land and military service and assorted ties of loyalty and bloodline.

And even in medieval Europe you had systems that broke the norm, like the merchant republics of Italy or the north German free cities, and of course you had lands directly ruled by the Church. Never mind that you also had rather different systems of organization elsewhere in the world, like in the Islamic world, India, the Americas, and of course, China's quite literal bureaucracy where civil servants hired based on their performance in examinations did most of the day-to-day governing of China; dynasties could come and go but the bureaucracy was eternal. Tolkien was himself, of course, a medievalist with very deep knowledge of the time period, even by today's standards, with our rather improved access to knowledge of the time period. Warhammer was created by history nerds who very much knew what they were writing about and so populated the world of Warhammer Fantasy with references to just about every political system that predominated in the medieval and renaissance periods as well as a lot of those that predominated in antiquity. So not only does Medieval Stasis perpetuate an annoying degree of sameness in the fantasy genre, it also tends to be based on a conception of medieval times that's not only essentially completely limited to France + England with some scattered references to other stuff, but is also almost completely wrong about everything and doesn't even scratch the surface of the depth of medieval history.
==Some general historical points==
One thing that should be known is that no one group of people has a monopoly on innovation. You have some stodgy conservative societies with "revere your ancestors and their wisdom" and "If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It" mentalities which hinders improvements and those which value innovation and believe in progress for the sake of progress and various groups in between, but nobody has been so dedicated to stagnation that they would shun all attempts at improvement in perpetuity. Civilizations which don't keep up tend to be conquered by those that do. Actual resistance to the adoption of new technologies is typically not to the effect of people in authority demanding the inventors or the presenters of the new breakthrough be burned at the stakes for witchcraft; instead, generally, it would be more to the effect of seeing a new device and declaring it to be an interesting novelty, but be reticent to adopting it because doing so would be expensive and its benefits are still unclear, that there is not a particularly pressing need to improve that field right now, that it might be profitable in one sense but on the other hand it might destabilize the social order of things that has stood for centuries which can result in social unrest as people which profit from the current set up become redundant or that this beneficial machinery might come with complications that leave them in the pockets of foreign powers (buying spare parts for their machines or importing foreign fuel). Concerns which generally do have at least a kernel of truth to them (example: industrialization leading to the rise of a prominent bourgeoisie which eclipses the landed nobility), and the attitude that they often engender is to adopt changes gradually, "on their own terms". Other factors are general xenophobia and resistance to the ideas of Methodological Naturalism as opposed to Dogmatism, though even these are not absolute barriers.

Most improvements don't come in big breakthroughs made by some lone mastermind; a [[Stone Age|genius hunter/gatherer]] did not one day decide [[Bronze Age|"Lets start clearing out land, plowing it and sowing it with seeds and capturing animals to breed so we can have all the food we want"]]. That process took thousands of years, starting with little things such as weeding patches of wild food plants which were gradually added onto with other practices until you got farming as we'd understand it, with silos, farmhouses, fields, plows, pens of livestock, irrigation ditches, and so forth. Improvements can come about by people trying to be more thrifty, having to do with less of a previously common resource, more of a specific resource becoming available or by minor accidental variations. The idea that technology comes all at once from super special smart people ex nihilo instead of being born of conditions produced by years of decisions made by everyone from politicians down to the lowliest peasant is something born of a combination of fiction being kind of clumsy at showing things at a societal instead of an individual level and narratives which are basically hagiographic propaganda about how great some inventor was (while almost invariably not crediting all the people who helped them), with a bit of market campaigning meant to make you think that a slightly faster electric toothbrush is some massive revolution. If you look at society as a product of decisions made by the masses under conditions, rather than some smart guy having a great idea, questions of why some people didn't invent some things become much easier to answer. Even in the last two centuries where quick spread of knowledge meant one genius could share their idea quick, it was still common for more than one of them to have the same idea at the same time. It's why some science concepts are named after two people instead of one.

Certain technologies and conditions are conducive towards innovation. Let's look at the history of literacy, paper, printing, and the scientific method, for example. If your tribe can farm you have support some artisans who spend all their time weaving, making pots and tools, building boats, working wood, etc. These guys and gals know more about their field of expertise and work out ways of doing it more efficiently. Writing (developed to keep inventory records) means that ideas can be passed down from generation to generation more effectively. Mathematics (ditto) is a major boon to construction and later engineering. Movable type means that both are more readily available to the masses. The scientific mindset is also a valuable aid in this regard and is allowed to flourish because the greater spread of reading pushed by the movable type press and the adoption of paper makes it easier to become educated as well as record the results of experiments and share them with others. Before you had paper and printing presses, writing surfaces were expensive and all copying had to be done by hand. Afterwards, you could print newspapers, books of natural philosophy and manuals for the operation of machines.

What does this mean for the scientific method? Well in this era to have a great, world renown library meant having one thousand or so books and generally they were chained to the library to prevent people from stealing them because they were literally worth their weight in gold. Today a random middle class bookworm could easily have more than a thousand books given some time to collect them, and the really big libraries have literally tens of millions of paper documents. So the massive paper trail of the modern scientific method was simply not affordable, and the need for manual copying basically kneecaps peer review. Add to that that paper itself was introduced to Europeans during the 1300s when Marco Polo returned from China (something many medieval fantasy writers simply gloss over out of convenience). Part of the reason why so little material survived from the days of Rome and earlier is because their preferred material was Papyrus, which takes very badly to any kind of humidity. Paper merely gets wet and the writing on it can be saved if it's handled carefully, Papyrus just dissolves. During the dark and middle ages, the material of choice in most parts of central and western Europe became parchment made from animal skins, which was extremely expensive and could therefore only be used to write and copy documents of utmost importance. But with cheap paper, a greater number of people able to afford it thanks to black death induced changes to Feudal Europe, and printing presses science as we now know it could really get into motion.

Refinements in existing technologies can be a prerequisite to the development of new technologies. As an example, the Romans knew the basic principle of how to make a steam engine and even how to put rotary power to work (having watermills for grinding grain and sawing wood) but they could not apply that technology because they lacked the ability to cast iron as they lacked proper blast furnaces, something you need to be good at doing to make one which is actually useful. The steam engines known to the Mediterranean world at the time were basically fancy toys for the idle rich. The Chinese had the technology to theoretically make steam engines, but the issue tended to be a lack of substantial need as well as [[China]]'s bad habit of periodically exploding into colossal gigadeath civil wars. The Song Dynasty might have sparked the need for such technologies as they were rapidly transitioning towards a highly commercialised economy and out of the bounds of feudalism and were starting to run into issues of demand outpacing the ability of work to meet, [[Genghis motherfucking Khan|but things didn't go too great for them.]]

Finally there is the matter of Diffusion, the spread of technology from one country or civilisation to another if they are in contact with each other. This can be done directly (kidnapping a blacksmith and telling him to train up some of your bronzesmiths to work iron and beat him if he does not comply) or indirectly (a trader from the next kingdom over comes into town with a donkey pulling a wheeled cart, a carpenter sees this, thinks it's a good idea and decides to try to make one himself). There is no point in reinventing the wheel from log rollers on up when you can just copy someone else's work. Moreover if the idea spreads there will be a hell of a lot of people working on it making wheels coming to useful improvements by accidents, making refinements and big breakthroughs which will in turn spread again. If you started in Portugal and went east through Spain, France, Italy, the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, The Fertile Crescent, Iran, Pakistan, India, Indochina and China, you'd come across a series of well developed civilizations that had existed for thousands of years and each one had dealings with their neighbors. Ideas that started in India or Rome or Greece flowed along that pathway to be taken and refined elsewhere.

tl;dr: Stop being lazy and go read Guns, Germs and Steel.

=== Fantasy authors are bad Medievalists and historians, part 2 ===

The vision of medieval times that exists in fantasy is a gigantic pile of anachronisms, pop-history, and misconceptions. Much of this is due to Fantasy's scope of time being seriously out of whack even without innovations like gunpowder or industrial technology. See, our monkey brains aren't very good at really comprehending spans of time longer than a handful of decades (hence why your childhood and youth memories always appear a lot more recent than they actually are, yes, 1990 really was 30 years ago). So we tend to mash up entire "eras" of history into indistinct blobs in our headspace, even though the entire concept of a historical era is more or less for academic convenience and categorization. Charlemagne's Empire was as far back in the past relative to Joan of Arc as she is to the present day. And technology and culture certainly did not remain static in those intervening seven hundred years. Paris went from a fairly small city of a few tens of thousands to a bustling metropolis of nearly a quarter of a million people, mail or banded armour was largely replaced by solid plated armour, gunpowder was popularised, sugar was introduced to the European diet, the Magyars went from eastern horseback-mounted pagan invaders to a solidly Catholic and Europeanised mainstay of central Europe as the Hungarians, and eastern Europe was Christianised in a rather gory and unpleasant process, to name just a few of the drastic changes over the years. Of course, any Crusader Kings 2 player could tell you how ridiculous the idea of the political map of a faux-medieval realm remaining static for centuries is.

Let's now take the common complaint among Fantasy authors that guns render castles and knights in shining armour obsolete. Full Plate armour coexisted with man-portable gunpowder weapons throughout literally the entirety of its military service and was phased out because of reasons of cost as armies got bigger, not because it was ineffective against guns. Making a fully articulated suit of plate armour fitted to every soldier is expensive and time consuming, so as armies got more standardized as countries centralized, with equipment being given by the military rather than soldiers being left to figure it out themselves, it was deemed easier to just give people the basics needed to protect their bodies. In that case, ditching the limb armor to reduce costs while keeping the helmet and breastplate like the Swiss Landsknecht and the Spanish Tercio. Hell: in Japan, the increasing prevalence of guns is what made the Samurai go from only partially metallic lamellar armour to full metal plated suits in the first place.

Furthermore, Plate armour by and large did not coexist with other types of metallic armour. It straight up replaced them all because it was just flatly better. Whether it's just a breastplate, a suit of half-plate (half referring to how much of the body is protected), or full plate, there was basically zero reason to wear anything else. Once the metal casting technology for plate armour became widespread, other forms of armour largely disappeared save for covering joint areas because plate armour is simply better in every way and is cheaper to make. Full coats of mail or scale didn't coexist with efficiently made plate armour; there's no need for a chain shirt when a solid steel breastplate offers superior protection for no downside, and full plate is actually considerably more comfortable and lighter than a full coat of mail. So that adventuring party where the Barbarian is wearing chainmail for mobility and the fighter is wearing full plate to tank better at the cost of agility? Simply didn't happen. You're mixing your dark ages and your late medieval/renaissance era armour styles. Mixing armor did, however, happen with conquistadors, and ''may'' have occurred with other small groups of fighting men. This was due purely to costs, not armor types having pros and cons, as used obsolete gear was far cheaper than armor anyone actually wanted. The equipment log for the 287 combatant Coronado expedition lists five suits of full plate (four belonging to Coronado himself), four suits of plate armor for horses (all Coronado's), 16 sets of partial plate, 56 pieces of sleeveless chain armor for the torso (two vests only), one suit of sleeved chain armor, and 250 gambesons. Archaeologists have found a medieval kettle hat in New Mexico, which would have been obsolete for hundreds of years before it got there.

As for Castles, anyone who seriously believed that cannons made strong walls obsolete would be laughed out of any gunpowder-era military engineering course; hell, even as late as the World Wars, fixed fortifications were a very daunting task for artillery to try and crack and often required specialist super heavy guns or ultra high penetration air-dropped bombs to break. After the development of gunpowder artillery, contemporary militaries simply converted their castles into star forts or polygonal fortresses (where the walls are made sloped and are backed by a lot of sloped compressed dirt. Meanwhile, in China, average city walls were already several meters thick and filled with lots of compressed dirt and gravel compared to the famous walls of Constantinople (which were two to three meters thick at best and less stuffed). This meant that the Chinese had less incentive to refine their artillery for centuries (which came back to backfire on them when modern howitzers and specialized shells were used against them by the Europeans when they sent out colonial expeditions). Have you ever heard the term Forlorn Hope? It refers to the supremely unfortunate soldiers who get the job of being the first to rush into the breach of a fortress when after what is typically days, weeks, or even months of non-stop cannon fire they ''finally'' break open one of the walls. Which is rather obviously a suicide mission for the first wave. If it were easy to crack open fortresses with cannonades there would be no need for them.

What actually changed about Castles is that as countries became more centralized, control over military forts passed unto the Kingdom/Empire proper and out of the hands of local nobles, meaning that fortresses largely stopped also being houses for the resident Baron or Count of whatever. This had the benefit of ensuring that local nobles had a harder time rebelling because the fortresses were loyal to the Capital, rather than being their private property. It wasn't until well into the 20th century with the invention of the atomic fucking bomb that a line of fixed fortifications was no longer regarded as a serious obstacle to a truly determined attacker and that was only if the attacker was willing and able to drop one on the battlefield. With conventional munitions, even today with all our missiles and precision weapons, a fortified line is something that most attackers would rather bypass than breach. Of course, most defenders know this and essentially use fortifications to funnel attackers into battlefields of their choosing.

And what about industrial technology? Surely that has no place in my pre-modern setting or would be obsoleted by magic! That too was driven in large part by increased centralization. Artisanal production is relatively fine if you never need to send products very far away from where they're made and are only meeting relatively small amounts of local demand and the occasional distant but super wealthy patron. But as realms centralize and unify and economies grow interconnected, suddenly monks copying maybe a handful of books a year at a premium isn't enough to meet the needs for more literature. You need higher output, which leads to mass industrialization and standardization of production which requires growing mechanization of production to ensure that quality remains consistent. This drives the greater reliance on machines in producing things and these machines make it easier to make better machines until you can meet the demand or until you get to the point where you're starting to reach the limitations of your power source like wind, muscle, or waterpower. As medieval societies got bigger, you saw more windmills and watermills to get more power for all this work.

Fantasy settings, however, offer magic and alchemy which should realistically, unless there are heavy restrictions on the commonality of either, make for ideal power sources to make for even better machines until you end up in industrialism via such powers. Whether they do this on their own or are used to augment mundane technology is mostly irrelevant. And indeed, powerful mages and alchemists are likely to end up as the predominant class as they control access to these all important resources. So societies that don't want to rely on either would likely double down on trying to find alternatives to having to rely on them, much like how Merchants pushed for quite a lot of what we take for granted in modern society to wriggle out from the thumb of the Aristocracy, like moving centers of production into cities not owned by nobles so they didn't have to pay the local Baron and would have better access to labourers not tied to the land as they sought to maximize profit in their class interest.

Societies are products of the conditions in which they exist. Things are the way they are because of responses to needs and pressures or perceived needs and pressures. They are never really static because the wheel of history is constantly turning and even something as simple as fluctuations in population size can result in radical transformations. Did a big war just depopulate a country in a fantasy setting? Well, gee whiz, now the labourers in the country have a much greater position of power and influence due to the scarcity of their services, which can lead to undermining the entire basis of medieval feudalism and pave the way for late Feudalism or even early Capitalism. Or perhaps something else entirely if the setting conditions allow for it (probably not a regression to Classical era slavery though; that required huge surpluses of labour.)

==Why the Medieval Stasis of the Post-Roman Middle Ages Ended==

In our own world, there were several critical developments which dramatically altered the status quo and led to the disruption of Medieval Stasis. These were:

* '''Printing:''' The invention of printing resulted in an upswing of literacy and education across all but the lowest classes of society. Greater availability of religious texts immediately caused schisms in Christianity as its foundational texts were scrutinized, while broadsheets and pamphleteering became the first form of ostensibly independent "news" through which the masses could be swayed to one view or another. The church had been instrumental in raising people to subscribe to the status quo and its disruption left the system it was propping up vulnerable. Printing (and the refinements of the techniques for producing paper) also lead to a revolution in administration, as the rapid reproduction of records and similar documents simply made it easier to govern by decree, rather than giving a local noble you appointed some broad orders and hope he would stick to them.
* '''Casting & Gunpowder:''' These two technologies were linked at the hip. Gunpowder weaponry was powerful, but also expensive and complicated to make (cannons are generally cast, and once you can cast guns you can cast all kinds of new things). It made feudalism untenable; no longer could a lord have his smith hammer out some weapons and outfit some men at arms. Instead he paid taxes (bastard feudalism) so the king could buy guns made by...
* '''Craft Guilds (the Emergence of a Middle Class):''' The increasing complexity of creating of arms and desired goods drove the formation of labor organizations specifically focused on production; all kinds of production from guns to fabrics to ships and everything else. As these organizations gained wealth, they gained power and with it an awareness of their importance relative to the importance of their supposed betters; this awareness found its outlet in the growing public forum fueled by printing.
* '''Fractional Investment:''' With craft guilds and casting, economies were primed to begin growing rapidly, beyond the ability of the nobility to retain control or even complete awareness of what was going on. Into this the growing artisan classes (particularly in the Netherlands) threw in the concept of modern investment, allowing individuals of lower means to participate in larger endeavors at reasonable risk. Whether it was building polders or sending ships on trading missions or establishing businesses, this lit a fuse for explosive economic growth which ultimately made feudalism (and its tendency to maintain the status quo) economically obsolete.
* '''Colonialism:''' This also goes hand in hand with the emergence of the Middle Class. The discovery of the Americas single-handedly fixed the decades long economic recession Europe experienced by opening up the vast deposits of precious metals (so vast in fact, that some of the mines established by the Spanish in the 1500s are operating to this very day) sitting there to the European powers (mostly Spain). Expansionism and wars between ''Nations'' as opposed to ''Kings'' over economical and strategic dominance that seem more familiar to us also became the norm. Colonialism changed the face of the world in ways that would take up too much space to even broadly lay down on this page, so we'll just leave it at that.

While there were innumerable other factors, these were major destabilizing elements that individually might have been coped with, but in concert made change inevitable. In designing a medieval setting, care must be given to the degree of technology that is introduced. As a general rule anything which cannot be created by the labor of a single person (excluding buildings, anyway), is liable to begin a chain reaction of economic activity which transfers wealth (and thus, power) away from a landholding nobility to a middle, merchant class.

This is why Venice with its shipbuilders and traders was the birthplace of the Renaissance. Unlike all the rest of Europe, Venice never succumbed to medieval stasis from feudalism; instead it succumbed to naked plutocracy. The middle merchant class of wealthy citizens (citizen in the Roman/Byzantine sense) grew so powerful so fast from shipbuilding and trade that they engaged in centuries of backstabbing and petty power grabs. In feudalistic countries, you were rich ''because you were king'', and your line might reign for centuries. In Venice you were Doge (we swear, that's what they called the guy in charge) ''because you were rich'' and used your money to bribe/threaten/murder enough people to make you Doge; and odds were you'd be dead within a couple years to make someone else Doge. In a fit of irony, Venice, Ragusa and other merchant city-states eventually suffered a stagnation due to the closing of the Silk Road and the shift of trade lines from Mediterranean to Atlantic, this just goes to show how historical conditions can make or break a society.

==Notable Examples of Medieval Stasis==

*'''[[Lord of the Rings]]:''' Tolkien wasn't too fond of industrialization, having seen the First World War's highly industrialized warfare and the pollution-spewing effects of the Industrial and Transportation Revolutions on his native countryside up close and personal, so the heroes of his stories preferred Medieval Stasis as well, barring a few anachronisms like clocks and matches. Unlike most of the writers that he inspired, Tolkien had [[Fluff|five hundred pages of background]] explaining why, namely because Middle-earth was in a state of decline due to the ravages of Morgoth and Sauron, the gradual decline of the elves and the Dunedain after the downfall of Numenor, and much of their technology was given to them by the Valar rather than inventing it themselves, and is intended as a mythological history of the world that ultimately explains why humans are on top and everyone else is gone. The funny thing is, based on supplementary books and scrapped stories, Numenor came quite close to being a Steampunk world power, equipped with steamships and even rockets, which, in their decadent colonialist period, they promptly used to imperialize the shit out of much of the world in a manner that led to their ultimate downfall. Indeed, that's why Harad, Rhun, Khand and other humans hate Gondor so much. The Numenorian ancestors of Gondor's people were taking them for [[Chaos Dwarfs|industrial-level human sacrifices]] and doing other atrocities to them, so the descendants of their victims still hold genocidal hatred (abetted by Sauron playing all sides against each other). Also, it's worth mentioning that Tolkien designed his setting as a literal Earth backstory myth, so technically the age of industrialization and modernisation will start in Middle-Earth anyway.
* '''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]:''' Westeros is ''extra'' static, because not only has everything been fairly stable for thousands of years until the Great Fuckening of the current time frame, some ''individual families'' have had unbroken rule over their lands for a hundred odd generations (The Starks being the prime example, as they have ruled in Winterfell for over ''eight thousand years'') which is something patently absurd when you consider how much real life royal, imperial, and noble families have had to struggle to avoid patrilineal extinction in just a few centuries, decades even in some cases, with the oldest still extant aristocratic house being the Japanese house of Yamato and even then it's likely that they bent the rules of succession at least once in their 2500 year history. That said, it should be noted that part of the backstory involves the Bronze Age First Men defeating the Stone Age Children of the Forest, who were themselves conquered by the Iron Age Andal invaders everywhere but in the Iron Islands and the North (who adapted and adopted the technology of their would-be conquerors), and the records of the ancient days are spotty at best, full of mythical accounts and many of the Maesters believe that said events happened over a shorter timeframe. Granted, the whole "millenia old houses" might be something that tended to happen with noble houses IRL claming to be much older than they actually were and could not being contradicted in the absence of reliable records, all the way to the Ethiopian "Solomonids" that still exist to this day, and the aforementioned Yamato being helped by the fact that Japan did not have reliable calendars until the late 19th century, so there's that. While the exact timespan between the Andal invasion and the current events isn't exactly established, the stasis is still quite bad especially when you consider how dragons (essentially domesticated flying animals) are present yet people are none wiser on things such as flight or the use of heat and steam in proto-industrial activities.
* '''[[Forgotten Realms]]:''' Not only have things been more-or-less exactly the same for all of recorded history, there is a powerful, international, theoretically-good-or-at-least-neutral organization actively devoted to making sure that ''no progress of any kind is ever made'': the [[Harpers]]. Whenever anyone invents something useful (guns, locomotion, steel plows, etc.) and tries to market it, the Harpers confiscate it and make it clear they'll kill the creator and their whole family if they don't go back to being a happy little peasant. Whenever a good-aligned king tries to unite and stabilize the warring states, the Harpers murder his ass (makes one wonder if the Harpers aren't part of the problem). Faerun hasn't budged an inch since Ao glued it together. And even [[Al-Qadim]], located on a southern continent beyond their reach, is a somewhat-hidebound and conservative society where progress is uncommon. The only exception to this was the island nation of [[Lantan]]. The island was a theocratic state in service to Gond Wonderbringer, a deity whose portfolio included innovation and technology, who gifted his followers with knowledge of smokepowder which lead to functional in-setting [[firearm|firearms]]. At least until 4th edition blew it up along with everything else fun or interesting in the Forgotten Realms. As of 5th edition, the current (albeit scattered and/or vague) lore seems to imply that Lantan's destruction has been retconned like the rest of the Spellplague.
* '''[[Greyhawk]]:''' Despite the impotent bitching on the page for this [[Old School Roleplaying|oldest-of-the-old school]] settings, it also has a society where nothing much ever has happened or will happen to bring about changes in the lifestyles of its inhabitants. And ''this'' is the setting with [[Murlynd| a literal god of Old West gunfighting]] and an army of [[firearm]]-toting [[gunslinger|paladins analogous to sheriffs]].
* '''[[Dragonlance]]:''' Apocalyptic calamities come and go, but Krynn stays at pretty much the same level of pseudo-medieval tech forever, world without end, amen. And, no the [[Gnomes|tinker gnomes]] do ''not'' count, since their stuff almost never does anything useful, gets mass-produced, or catches on outside the gnomes themselves. In fact, some material explicitly says that the reason for the stasis is '''because''' of the fucking gnomes; their absolute idiocy when it comes to producing technology has actually convinced pretty much every other culture on the planet that science is fundamentally inferior in every way to sorcery! The one culture that doesn't think they're entirely a waste of time is only interested because it pretty much hates magic... and is made of a bunch of knight-in-shining-armor types so hidebound that they haven't been able to properly fix their organization since the first Cataclysm, and so anything like vehicles or gunpowder is certain to get dismissed on grounds of being "dishonorable". So, yeah, '''fuck''' tinker gnomes.
* '''[[Warcraft]]:''' In a cartoony match for the Dragonlance example above, Azeroth's many factions never adopt one another's technological advancements. Goblins and gnomes can invent as many steampunk robots as they want, none of their stuff will ever change the world in a concrete way. Even the aliens are mostly just sword-and-sorcery types using magic for space travel and other advanced projects. That said, firearms had established themselves in the comparatively recent past.
*'''[[Ravenloft]]:''' This is probably the most interesting example. The Demiplane of Dread doesn't so much "advance" as it does "absorb some place where things are a little more complicated," and most of the Domains of Dread are already tailor-made just to torture their prisoners (and the Darklords can also choose to simply seal off all access to their Domains entirely when they're not just isolated by the Mists). Thus, though individual Domains might be advanced enough for common people to have firearms and gaslights or so primitive that they aren't even ''into'' the Stone Age (King Crocodile for the win!), they will almost never learn from or assimilate one another's technology even on the rare chance xenophobia doesn't get in the way first. Each Domain will be mostly frozen into the level it's at, medieval or not. Amusingly, this works both ways: technologically-advanced societies are no more likely to take up magic than lower-tech ones are to learn to use gunpowder. There's a notable exception in the Rokushima Táiyoo, which is listed as "Dark Age", but said to find the gunpowder weapons of Dementlieu "tantalizing;" this is a reference to the fact that that land is a pastiche of Sengoku Jidai Japan, and its Darklord of Western fanboy and gunpowder aficionado Oda Nobunaga.
*'''[[Star Wars]]:''' Not medieval, but absolutely in technological stasis in the Old Republic. In the 4000 years before the Battle of Yavin (the situation before and after this 4000 year period is discussed below) technological , the only thing that has noticeably improved is hyperdrives which have become faster and smaller. This would eventually be justified by a devastating war ~1100 years before the original film bringing about a dark age that killed several major technology companies and destroyed any FTL communication (sans courier) past the core worlds. This does ''not'' however apply to the period of 36 years covered by the films and the decades after it covered by the Expanded Universe (see below). There are some in-universe technological achievements that supposedly result in better results (the kolto made by an isolationist monopoly being replaced by the superior bacta made by multiple rival cartels, for instance, as the flesh-healing miracle drug), but none of them are really noticeable through the window the audience sees.
*'''[[Dune]]:''' One of the major inspirations for ''Star Wars'' (and [[Warhammer 40K]]). At some point in the past, AI went rogue and humanity's struggle against it became a literal holy war (the Butlerian Jihad), after it ended, development of any "thinking machines" was banned by religious fiat. As a result, technological and scientific development has slowed to a crawl, new technology is seen as suspicious, the "[[Drug|Spice]]" from Arrakis allows people to become human supercomputers, expanded lifetimes, and have space folding, so there was no desire to experiment and find alternatives, the development of personal shields made every other weapon outdated except for melee weapons (unless you shoot a [[lasgun]] into a shield, then the [[Exterminatus|shooter, the target, and the surrounding landscape are deleted in a massive explosion]]) and the Bene Gesserit and Navigator's Guild collaborated to set up a feudalistic government with full knowledge that it would be easier to control. However, the main plot of the series is eventually revealed to be about making humanity escape this stagnation.
*'''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battles]]:''' Bretonnia is literally in Medieval Stasis despite having one of the most technologically-advanced nations right next door. The Elves of all types give no fucks about advancing their technology, but in their defense what they have still works, they have access to giant monsters such as dragons and hydras and the Dark Elves are a minor exception. The Warriors of Chaos are again literally medieval, but in their case they're Medieval [[Vikings]] who get supplied with advanced tech by the Chaos Dwarf allies or demons. Orcs have not been introduced to the wonders of "Dakka" yet; the Lizardmen still use wood and stone, but are literally designed for specific taskes and make up for it by also using dinosaurs and the best magic in their world. Lastly, the Ogres are pretty much in "Stone Age Stasis" as they're not very intelligent but they've started to reverse engineer blackpower weapons and under Overtyrant Greasus started to discover the benefits of commerce. Human nations outside of Bretonnia are at the tail end of the Renaissaince, while the Empire of Man is in slowly fighting through the early Enlightenment but they are under constant attack from various Eldritch horrors so progress is existent but slow. The various elf factions are averse to blackpowder weapons due to environmental damage (for High and Wood elves), using magic and monsters instead of technology and being "...content with weapons that will not blow up in (our) faces" (actual quote from the 5th Ed High Elves armybook). The only races that have had any technological developments on a grand scale are the Skaven and Dwarfs, and more so the Chaos Dwarfs. The Dwarfs are reluctant to share their technology with anybody other than the Empire and all their inventions must have at least several centuries of successful use before the guilds allow it to be mass-produced. While Skaven have guns, electricity and powered vehicles, most inventions of the Skaven end up blowing up in their faces and rely on the highly dangerous and unstable Warpstone (plus little regard for collateral damage). The Chaos Dwarfs' technology has gotten to the point of tanks and war golems, but it is literally built and run on daemons, souls and bloody sacrifices. You can see why others have not copied the latter two.
** The undead factions are an interesting case. The Vampire Counts vary with Luthor Harkon's pirate fleets using black powder weapons while outside that the most advanced technology seen in that faction was crossbows. The Tomb Kings had varying technology, with their most technologically advanced city, Lybaras, reaching the steampunk level. Also, they have superhuman abilities and being undead eliminates many of the needs that lead people to develop technology (no need to develop automation when undead laborers don't get tired or bored, no need for medicine because the dead don't get sick naturally plus their bodies can be repaired by magic and non-vampire undead don't need sustenance) and they also have magic and monsters.
** Not that any of this matters because the entire world got nuked by the Chaos Gods. The sequel setting, Age of Sigmar, has the successor factions be at roughly the same level as they were at the End Times, but stuff has become understood enough that Steam Tanks and Cannons won't randomly blow up as often and can be reliably mass produced, and it should be pointed out that Mass Production is itself a game changer. Stasis is more then raw technology: it is as much application. The Kharadron Overlords have surpassed steampunk via magic punk. The setting also has more-widely-available magic than the Old World did, significantly changing and improving the qualify of life of its inhabitants (in theory, in practice it's still pretty bad due to Chaos, [[Nagash]], Greenskin and giant rampages and the realms being pretty fucked up places even when those three aren't involved, even Azyr is under a heavy dictatorship to prevent chaos of both lowercase c and capital C varieties).
* '''[[Banestorm]]''': This one can be especially surprising, given the titular Banestorm makes the setting [[Isekai|Portal Fantasy]], so it's surprising that technology is still medieval. However, two issues present themselves: Most otherworlders are too familiar with modern society to function in the world of Yrth, and the powers that be specifically stop it.

==Notable Settings ''Without'' Medieval Stasis==

*'''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battles]]:''' The Empire, Dwarfs and Grand Cathay are actually about the level of most European countries around 1500, at the start of the early modern period and the Renaissance. They're also advancing, albeit slowly, as the Dwarfs have steampunk helicopters and recently invented airships. But the problem is that they are under constant Chaos invasions and Chaos Gods themselves are not above screwing with the world, which puts something of a crimp on pure research. Imagine what Nurgle would do to the guy who discovered penicillin in this world. The fact that relations between the engineers and the Cult of Sigmar are not the best in the world does not help things at all. The Dark Elves have progressed from bows to rapid-fire armor-piercing crossbows, including a one-handed variety, during their war against the High Elves. The other notable technology users are the Skaven, but the Skaven technology only affects their weapons (god help the world if they ever figure out sanitation considering what it did to our own population) and it's almost all magitech based on weaponizing [[Warpstone|solidified Chaos.]] Undead straddle the line between the two, with the vampires not being afraid to use technology; the problem is most of their undead minions lack the physical and mental acumen to use it while the vampires physical, mental and magical abilities make technology practically redundant to them at a personal level. The [[Tomb Kings]] had technology at the steampunk level, though this isn't represented in the game, but they are more concerned about rebuilding their realm, which has fallen into disrepair due to hundreds of years of war, natural disasters and no maintenance, rather than advancing their society. They do have golem-esque undead constructs, which are the undead magical equivalent of robots.
**''''[[Warhammer: Age of Sigmar]]:''' As noted above, the sequel setting shows clear technological development with mass production of the best of the stuff known in the World-That-Was, with the [[Kharadron Overlords]], the [[Cities of Sigmar]] subfaction Ironweld Arsenal and the Skaven Clans Skyre being the resident technological factions. The Lumineth are also a borderline case, as they've developed solar-powered golems, but knowing them magic might also be involved.
*'''[[Iron Kingdoms]]:''' The Iron Kingdoms setting is one of the best examples of steampunk fantasy. They're developed to the extent of the Victorian era (the mid-to-late 1800s), with a slow-but-growing industrial revolution and the discovery and development of electricity and chemistry, with the ongoing big international clusterfuck behind the wargame constantly fueling magical and technological advancement. At the same time, it remains a recognizably fantasy setting in many ways, with wizard orders, barbarian tribes, and dangerous monster threats on the frontier demanding plucky-adventurer solutions. (Or did before the wheels came off partway through Third Edition to make way for the science fiction spin-off nobody wanted. Still isn't medieval stasis though.)
*'''[[Eberron]]:''' Eberron is weird and expressly focused on subverting the usual D&D cliches, so the technology is a strange mixture of all eras with a side order of JRPG-style magitech. It's one of the few settings that avoids both medieval stasis and outright steampunk, since magic is so common that it has effectively displaced technology, but unlike most settings, this manifests as mass ''availability'' of magic conveniences. As there is no continuity and by default every game starts at exactly the same point in time as every other game, in 998 YK, [[Advancing the Storyline| there's no real status quo to worry about upsetting]]. Only modules/novels that are direct sequels ever reference the events of other modules/novels as having happened.
*'''[[Dark Sun]]:''' A weird example. Depending on edition, the past of Athas may have included anything from a standard fantasy setting to a bio-mechanical halfling empire. But, either way, the Brown Age is a barbaric decline of these past glories, with little metal and no feasible way of shaping more leaving the world in an oddly-civilized nigh-Stone Age. Still, there is an undercurrent of rebuilding and reforming throughout the more-heroic-minded books on the setting, helped by the same eventual anti-continuity Eberron had, so the idea that things ''could'' progress or get better isn't ''impossible''.
*'''[[Ironclaw]]:''' The once-fantasy world is undergoing a pseudo-Renaissance shift away from magic and feudalism to machinery and Italian-style guild-republics. PCs are actually explicitly part of the burgeoning new middle class. Not bad for a furry RPG, huh?
*'''[[Mystara]]:''' Depending on where you are, there might be airships, magic-powered technological conveniences, and drill-tanks to explore the hollow earth full of dinosaurs. Either way, things are a little less generic here in proto-Eberron.
*'''[[Pathfinder]]:''' [[Golarion]] features relatively advanced technologies such as flintlock and matchlock firearms, the printing press, galleons (crewed by pirates reminiscent of the Golden Age of piracy in the Caribbean), and, in certain sourcebooks, [[Spelljammer|steampunk/magi-tech spaceships]]. Not to mention the number of people whose clothes and equipment are explicitly based on 18th-century fashions (see, among others, Andoran, Taldor, and Alkenstar). At least one source (''05-13: Hellknight's Feast'') says high class dwellings have actual porcelain toilets. Also, there's that one random corner of the world where aliens are trying to peacefully settle and/or invade, only to realize they picked the *one* corner of the world where pleas of "We come in peace!" are met with [[Barbarian|warcries and the judicious application of battleaxes to various vital areas]]. One sourcebook (''Technology Guide'') includes *lots* of super-high-tech stuff and different class archetypes that make use of it. On the socio-political front, the Chelaxian breakaways Andoran and Galt have started to push for a less aristocratic government. Come second edition, cannons have become widespread on naval vessels.
**And '''[[Starfinder]]''' reveals that at least at some point various sci-fi technologies will be developed.
*'''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]''': It was true in the past, but by the time of the original series the Fire Nation has become an industrial power, complete with colonial ambitions towards the rest of the world. In fact, the main character's previous incarnation as Avatar Roku actually ''stopped'' the Fire Nation from breaking medieval stasis ''because'' he foresaw that doing so would mean allowing them to subjugate all the other peoples. In fact Sozin, the Fire Lord during this industrial age and Roku's former friend, outright stated that's exactly what he planned to do, and hoped Roku would join him. And after Sozin got rid of Roku, the Fire Nation immediately went all Imperial Japan on the world, even inflicting genocide on the Air Nomads to stop the next Avatar, Aang, which forced Aang to flee. Which is perfectly sensible because even if they weren't the designated pacifist culture, Aang was literally 12 and had no way of meaningfully stopping them (''yet''). Even the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes have a few tinkerers and inventors, and during the time of Avatar Aang, the first airships and submarines are invented, albeit the magitek varieties. At the end of the show, the protagonist Avatar Aang makes peace between all three surviving factions and begins the reestablishment of the aforementioned genocided faction, and the sequel reveals that doing so helped the world advance to a roughly 20s/30s era of technology, complete with automobiles, moving pictures, the printing press, political propaganda videos, and croneyist democracy.
*'''[[Dragonmech]]''': Dragonmech's setting used to be in Medieval Stasis, then chunks of the moon started to rain down on them along with Alien Moon Dragons riding the rocks down for a full-on invasion, people first hide underground but then a dwarf kickstarts the creation of Pacific Rim sized steampunk robots to fight the Dragons and the whole world is now in a full-on steam-powered Industrial Revolution without the gunpowder.
*'''[[Star Wars]]:''' After the Celestials fell, the Rakata developed significantly and only failed as they lost their connection to the force. After the Rakata collapse, technology advances with some anachronisms due to FTL travel being discovered early on through Rakatan and other ruins and slave revolts against the Rakata. This continues until the period between the start of the New Sith Wars (2000 BBBY) to the Ruusan Reformation (1000 BBY) (where everyone was too busy killing each other, even more so than usual), and after that technology actually ''does'' advance noticeably throughout Post-Reformation Old Republic and especially the prequels (32 BBY onward) all the way to the era of the Legacy comics (138 ABY). Hyperdrives improve (in speed, how small a craft they can fit in and how big a craft they can propel) at a much faster rate than they did in the 1000 years since the end of the dark age. It's not just direct improvements either, with new technologies like [[Android]]s, relatively cheap cloaking devices that don't require unobtainum, silent and invisible blasters, biological technology merged with mechanical tech, and more. Even military strategy changes significantly between back and forth transitions between symmetrical and asymmetrical warfare. Amazingly all this occurs organically as new technology is introduced to allow a plot and gets improved upon in future installments.
*'''[[Masque of the Red Death|Gothic Earth]]''': Perhaps the ultimate aversion as Gothic Earth follows real world technological history of tech development ''almost'' exactly, even stating players can only obtain certain items after a certain point in time. Ordinarily this wouldn't be notable, as Gothic Earth is still Earth, but [[RPGA|Living Death]] included some technology that was explicitly anachronistic, such as submarines capable of cross Atlantic voyages and long term submerging, and a few people who have lived somewhat longer.
*'''[[Discworld]]''': Entire ''Discworld'' novels revolve around a particular innovation that drastically changes how the Disc's society works: ''Moving Pictures'' - the movie camera, ''Soul Music'' - Rock N' Roll ("music with rocks in it"), ''The Truth'' - moveable type (i.e. the printing press, and with it, journalism), ''Going Postal'' - mail modernization and the telegraph, ''Making Money'' - paper money and modernized banking, ''Raising Steam'' - the steam engine.
*'''[[Arcanum]]''': The world of Arcanum is in the midst of an industrial revolution with an in-universe acknowledged past of Medieval Statis. What makes it particularly noteworthy is how it portrays the ever faster changing world pushing old fantasy norms and customs away, with Technology replacing Magic entirely.
[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Gamer Slang]]