Medieval European History

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Many thanks! Very educational points.

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

My last post was a bit too darn long to put together, so I'm going to try and make the next few nice and short.

The Transition to the High Middle Ages

Koenigsberger outlines how the situation gradually changes in the western kingdoms. A few key points:

Agricultural advances.

• Iron tools help with the development of the iron plough, which is used in lands with darker, heavier soil. Such  plough require 6-8 oxen to pull though, and this is a reason for the distinctive long but narrow 'medieval' fields. They require less turning for the oxen. In places like Italy though, with their easier to till soil, wooden ploughs were still used, and the old square shaped fields remained common.
• Iron tools also helped with the spread of windmills. Watermills were a relatively old technology, but the newer and more sophisticated invention of windmills allowed for mechanised grain milling to be conducted in more places, such as flat lands like Flanders / Netherlands regions. Of course, as Jubal and I have experience with in the game Vintage Story, this mechanical power could also be used in smithing!
• The 3 field fallow system spread. Gradually farmers learned that you could grow things like beans to put nitrogen back into the soil, so rather than 2 fallow years and 1 productive year, you could have 2 productive years, and 1 fallow year. This meant quite a bit increase in how much food you could get out of the soil. Although Koenigsberger also notes that this technique did tend to exhaust the soil faster. It was still effective, but not as huge an improvement as we might think. It depended more on the quality of the soil.
• Expansion into more areas also allowed for an increase in food supply. A famous example would be the work of the Dutch and the dyke system later, but clearing of forests, draining of marshes etc. were part of this process. The limits of expansion were beginning to be felt by the 13th century though.

Economic advances

• The spread of silver coinage (more silver mines) made it easier for people to trade, and therefore specialise in different things. You see more people who might still be small farmers, but also they produce things like boots or clothing and sell them in their shop. I believe this is what Manor Lords tries to show with the way 'burghers' were still in many cases still farming their own food out the back too, given the long strips of land that were used.
• An extra level of specialisation begins to emerge. Architects, sculptors, scribes, teachers. These people were often itinerant, because there is not enough demand in any one place to support them long term. So while the common people were relatively less likely to roam about (with the exception of pilgrimages, which gradually became more popular), there was a class of international people who worked around the continent. These people often knew each other, and used Latin as a living language. This helps to set the scene for the coming renaissance movements.

Urbanism

• Agricultural advances mean a greater population, and specialisation and trade help foster the return of urban areas. Places like London, Paris, Bruges, Milan and Florence start to turn into little cities. (By the 14th century Paris apparently boasted around 80,000 people, with London at around 30,000 I think.)
• Cities started to develop their own laws, independent of the feudal system. This is something I didn't really appreciate before. It makes sense, in that merchants and other 'citizens' of cities needed a certain relative freedom from those older obligations (including things like trial by combat!) in order to be able to do their business. In places like Italy, this progresses to the point of cities really becoming their own 'city states'. I get the impression that while this was more of an Italy thing, still the relative legal independence of cities was something that was found to some degree throughout Europe. This is also where we see the development of fraternities or brotherhoods of different sorts, trade unions, guilds and so on. A different kind of bond between people could exist in this spaces than the feudal bonds of liege and subject.
• The (although still modest) growth in wealth allowed for the building of great castles, monasteries, churches and cathedrals (warfare and worship of God were high social priorities for spending any surplus wealth). The itinerant specialist builders mentioned above developed their skills, and constructed the great "Romanesque" (pre-Gothic) buildings. These are dominant in the 11th and 12 centuries. This is a pan-European style, the first to emerge it seems following the collapse of the Western Empire. This speaks to the international / itinerant nature of the specialist builders of this time.