High Middle Ages

People were already struggling to feed themselves properly, and there were food shortages.

In Europe, the population had boomed during the High Middle Ages, reaching its peak at around the beginning of the 14th century.

Medieval farming methods were unable to keep up with demand and feed so many.

A lot of surplus grain could only be transported by water, and frozen waterways caused more and more inhabitants of the inland towns and cities to starve when their own farms failed to produce enough foodstuffs, or the crops failed.

And suddenly you realize every single contemplation that we're having has to do with our place in creation.

In the midst of which I'm preparing to teach my course on Europe in the High Middle Ages.

And I realize, I realize we need some way of making sense of like everything.

And guess what? Somebody in the Middle Ages knew how.

Around 871 AD, the Vikings decided to colonize Iceland, but they could not do so on their own.

There is a cultural memory of Ireland that Iceland maintains into the High Middle Ages, which would suggest that the Irish had a strong presence in Iceland at the founding.

An old Icelandic saga hints at the nature of this presence.

Written down some 800 years ago, it describes events said to have taken place in the 10th century.

It gave riders stability, allowed them to carry out devastating charges, and turned mounted knights into the kings of European battlefields for more than a thousand years.

From roughly the High Middle Ages throughout the medieval period and into the Renaissance, a knight mounted on a good horse was worth dozens of infantry soldiers.

These warriors were expensive to train, expensive to equip, and they dominated the social and military hierarchy.

Kings launched entire wars simply to secure supply lines that would guarantee them good war horses.

Precisely.

Then Silva jumps to the High Middle Ages, focusing on Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century.

Now, Aquinas is often stereotyped as just a dry Aristotelian philosopher, but Silva praises his biblical work, right?

He does.

Or sorry, what these data indicate are that temperature, the sea surface temperature, in this case, taken from the Makassar Strait between the islands of Kalimantan or Borneo and Sulawesi in Indonesia.

These, the sea surface temperature has fluctuated over the past two thousand years, where we have warm periods and cold periods also similar to the temperature, to the world temperature, where we have warm periods in the Iron Age and then cold period in the Dark Age, warm period again in the High Middle Ages during the Medieval Warm Period, and then the cold period again in a little ice age similar to the temperature.

And then we have our current warm period where we see a warming of the sea surface temperature, which again, is a recovery from the little ice age.

And the fact that we had warm and cold periods happening while the CO2 concentration remains constant at about three hundred and eighty parts per million prior to the Industrial Revolution also is an indication that CO2 is not the only factor that affects sea surface temperature.

To put that into perspective, I mean, just think about eight hundred or nine hundred years in the past starting from now, uh, calculated from the, the present day.

That puts us roughly in the High Middle Ages, the twelve hundreds at the nearest.

So the time in which the Lanka is written is very far removed from the context in which the historical Buddha lived and taught.

It was a distant historical memory.

To meet dietary obligations, maintaining a supply of dried fish became a necessity.

In response to the demand, formal organizations such as the Hanseatic League arose during the High Middle Ages to control the flow of fish across borders.

The Hanseatic League developed new types of ships, including the kogge or cog, that could carry more cod back to markets in mainland Europe.

In exchange for the supplies necessary for a cod expedition on a large Hanseatic ship, the league demanded the entire summer catch of fish for their Norwegian and Baltic Sea markets.

He said it's absolutely brilliant.

It's, it's basically like going back in time to the High Middle Ages.

It's warlords, it's feasts, it's battles, it's chivalry.

He s- he says, you know, "Life in, uh, in Britain and in Western Europe now is very boring and industrial and suburban.