Editing High Middle Ages (section)

==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.