Comparing Medieval Worlds

The word "medieval" carries a lot of baggage. Centuries of European historiography used it to describe the period between Rome's fall and the Renaissance — a gap between greatnesses, an intermission. That framing was always wrong, but it has been especially stubborn. The period from roughly 500 to 1500 CE was one of the most consequential in human history, and most of it happened outside Europe.

The Islamic caliphates transmitted and refined classical knowledge while European monasteries kept a few flickering candles lit. Song China ran the world's largest economy. The Mongols created the largest contiguous land empire in history, then governed it for a century. Mali's Mansa Musa arrived in Cairo on pilgrimage in 1324 with so much gold his entourage crashed the regional economy for a decade. The Byzantine Empire — dismissed by its detractors as a mere holdover from Rome — preserved Roman law, Greek learning, and Christian theology for a thousand years and transmitted all three to the civilizations that followed it.

Every medieval ruler faced the same structural problem: how do you control territory too large for any single person to administer? The answers varied. The methods of enforcing those answers varied even more. But the underlying challenge was constant, from the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad to the Aztec tlatoani in Tenochtitlan.