A Short History of the Middle Ages Fourth Edition

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Seven Discordant Harmonies (c.1250–c.1350) IN THE SHADOW of a great Mongol empire that, for about a century, stretched from the ...

and might well have continued into the rest of Europe, had not unexpected dynastic disputes and insufficient pasturage for their ...

dominated by the rulers of Rus’, the so-called Golden Horde (“horde” derived from the Turkic word for “court”). Settled along th ...

routes. Other European traders and missionaries traveled arduous sea routes, setting sail from the Persian Gulf (controlled by t ...

cities. NEW ROUTES The first ships to ply the Atlantic’s waters in regular trips were the galleys of Genoese entrepreneurs. By t ...

Map 7.3: European Trade Routes, c.1300 At the same time as Genoa, Pisa, Venice, Majorca, and Catalonia were forging trade networ ...

own marketplace in the Baltic Sea region. Built on the back of the Northern Crusades, the Hanseatic League was created by German ...

NEW MONEY Workers were paid in silver pennies; the burgeoning economy demanded a lot of coins. Silver mines were discovered and ...

families had held their positions for generations. When, in the early 1270s, England slapped a trade embargo on Flanders, discon ...

to Parma... [and] second because the Parmesans were touring Piacentine territory buying corn from the threshing floors and field ...

Map 7.4: Piacenza, Late Thirteenth Century A similar evolution—from commune to the rule of the popolo and then to the rule of a ...

as well. It was as if the end of imperial rule in Italy, marked by the fall of Frederick II, ironically brought in its train the ...

Some anti-Jewish movements linked the Jews with lepers. Occupying a profoundly ambivalent place in medieval society, lepers were ...

Often imprisonment, along with both physical and mental torture, was used to extract a confession. Then penalties were assigned. ...

SPANISH CORTES The cortes of the Spanish kingdoms of Castile and León were among the earliest representative assemblies called t ...

Map 7.5: Western Europe, c.1300 LOCAL SOLUTIONS IN THE EMPIRE ...

In 1356 the so-called Golden Bull freed imperial rule from the papacy but at the same time made it dependent on the German princ ...

of Fifteen, chosen jointly by the barons and the king, and to limit the terms of his chief officers. Yet even this government wa ...

went on crusade, dying on the second expedition. Generalized and applied to the kingdom as a whole, Louis’s discipline meant dol ...