Every clime has peculiarities familiar to its inhabitants, but a person who has never left their hearth and has confined their researches to the narrow field of the history of their own country cannot be compared to the courageous traveller who has worn out their life in journeys of exploration to distant parts and each day has faced danger in order to persevere in excavating the mines of learning and in snatching precious fragments of the past from oblivion.
Mas’ūdī, The Meadows of Gold, C.E.943-56
The ‘global middle ages’ is a relatively new idea in both medieval and global history. ‘Globalization’ is often envisaged as the process of planetary connection that began, or accelerated, after 1492 and intensified into our contemporary modernity. The view that we live in a ‘globalised’ world is fundamental to our identity as ‘modern’, which creates the expectation that the medieval period was not ‘global’ and that the ‘global’ is something that emerged later. The concept of a ‘global middle ages’ runs against these two ways of approaching global history. Rather than seeing the period 500-1500 as a precursor, as a time of ‘archaic’ or ‘proto’ versions of modern capital-based globalization, this paper explores the ways in which humans and human societies during these centuries were ‘global’, interconnected, mobile and dynamic on their own terms and in their own activities, practices, ambitions, ideas and imaginations. Rather than beginning with states and empires as units of analysis, this paper asks you to start by thinking in planetary terms: of the vast and diverse spaces within which humans made their habitations; of terrain, environment, complex ecosystems and biodiversity; of the seasons, moon, stars and planets which were fundamental for time-keeping, navigation and cosmologies. How did people live in this world? How did they organise food, shelter, sex, reproduction, child-rearing, marriage, communities, labour, manufacturing of goods, trade, transport, communication, cities, governance, finance, hierarchy, loyalties, courtesies, knowledge, belief, health, war, death? What were the consequences of their choices for the shapes of their societies, for the many ways in which groups, communities and societies affected each other, for the lives of individuals, and for the natural world around them?
The paper draws on material from a millennium of human history, and allows you to explore and compare case studies from many parts of the planet, as well as examining formative connections between different regions and types of society. A fascinating wealth of material survives from across the period. Texts written by men and women document extensive travels and encounters; the mundane, comic and tragic in daily life; the intricacies and complexities of court culture; the administration of empires and kingdoms; diverse practices of faith and belief; strange tales, heroic sagas and ancient myths; stories of love, sex and family; scholarly treatises on philosophy, science, technologies, geography, history, theology, magic and the occult; accounts of suffering, disease and disaster; of collapsing empires and terrible armies on the move. These can be read for glimpses of personality,period and place, but in a global history paper, one might also ask about when, how, why and for whom such materials were made in different parts of the world, and what common patterns might be detected in the making and keeping of records, both as technology and practice. At the other end of the scale, a burgeoning field of research examines medieval societies through the lens of climate and environmental sciences, setting the historical record against the findings of surveys of shifting planetary conditions, regional changes, and the effects on the local environment of particular cities and ways of living. How far can the patterns of change for societies in our period be explained by the shift from the benign climate of the classical period to the colder, wetter climate of the early middle ages – precipitating the failure of imperial governance in China, the Mediterranean and Americas – and the warmth and stability of the later medieval period, declining abruptly into erratic and chilly climate patterns in the fourteenth century? When and how were states and societies resilient, and in what ways? Some historians have come to ask whether periods in which states were weaker and therefore less able to tax and coerce labour were better for ordinary people. There is a renewed interest in patterns of nomadic and sedentary life and their role in the larger dynamics of regions. Thinking about the period on this scale unsettles many of our more conventional narratives and analytic priorities and opens up interesting new questions about those centuries and our more general historical understanding.
Much of the reading for this paper reflects the most recent developments in historical thinking, in which analytical frameworks associated with the nation-state are being superseded by a growing awareness of systems of power that work on a larger scale, and the need radically to revise older narratives that celebrate ‘progress’ and ‘growth’ in order to equip ourselves to respond the new realities and uncertain future of human life on earth. The medieval period might seem irrelevant in this context, but the longer view that is offered by its study is extremely illuminating, since so many of our ways of thought and behaviour, techniques of governance, ideas of civilisation and barbarism, attitudes to the natural environment and the place of humans within larger ecosystems were thoroughly established long before the more conventional starting dates for the ‘global’.