The Mental Floss History Of The World Part 20

A full suit of combat armor in the early Middle Ages could weigh between forty-five and eighty pounds.

Early jousts were often held in lieu of actual battles. Combatants would get together, joust to the death, and the winners could be home by dark. By the twelfth century, those battles had evolved into "melees," in which a group of knights would charge into each other all at once, with the winner being the last guy still on his horse.Melees, in turn, more often became one-on-one contests. By 1292, a Statute of Arms for Tournaments set rules to limit bloodshed. The contests became more tests of skill and less of brute force.Although condemned by the Church and frowned on by some royalty, jousting remained a popular spectator sport through the mid-sixteenth century. It began to lose steam in 1559, however, after King Henry II of France was killed in a joust. It seems a lance splinter got through the viewing slot in his helmet and penetrated his brain.Belts and Bridles It's a common scene in many ribald tales of the Middle Ages: The macho Crusader, off on his way to a few years in the Holy Land, has his wife, daughters, or any other women he feels protective toward (or possessive of) fitted with a chast.i.ty belt. You know, those things that sort of look like metal underwear, only with a lock on them to prevent hanky panky.Trouble is, it didn't happen, at least not among medieval knights. The earliest such devices that have been found date from the sixteenth century, well after the Crusades and the Age of Chivalry. It appears that linking chast.i.ty belts to knights and Crusaders was dreamed up by nineteenth-century writers who loved to romanticize about courtly love during the Middle Ages.Far more common, and somewhat less romantic, was the brank, also known as the scold's bridle. It was sort of an iron cage with a tongue depressor. Women who were deemed nags or gossips were forced to wear the thing as punishment. Fortunately for radio talk show hosts, use of the device faded out in the seventeenth century.BY THE NUMBERS [image]

3.

number of books in Dante's The Divine Comedy The Divine Comedy ( (Inferno, Purgatorio, and and Paradiso Paradiso)

7.

number of oxen considered equal in value to one pound of nutmeg, according to a 1393 German table of prices

10.

estimated percentage of the population of Nuremberg, Germany, killed by the Black Death (believed by some historians to be the lowest death rate from plague of any major European city)

12.

period of apprenticeship, in years, that a medieval European craftsman might have to serve before being considered a master

13.

number of years it took to build Westminster Abbey, which was finished in 1065

17.

number of years the Venetian trader and explorer Marco Polo spent at the court of Kublai Khan

21.

minimum age for being a knight

23.

number of years in the thirteenth century when the Holy Roman Empire had no emperor (a period, between 1250 and 1273, known as "The Great Interregnum")

30.

approximate number of Mongol tribes united by Genghis Khan into a unified fighting force

100.

number of cantos, or divisions, in The Divine Comedy The Divine Comedy 116.

length in years of the Hundred Years' War between France and England, from 1337 to 1453 400.

number of years spent building the spectacular royal palace of Great Zimbabwe in southeastern Africa 2,000.

number of Jews hanged simultaneously at Strasbourg, Germany, in 1348 because they were held responsible for the Black Death 5,000.

number of flour mills in England in 1086, according to the Domesday Book, a census of the country's a.s.sets ordered by William I 30,000.

number of Scotsmen under the command of Robert Bruce VIII, who defeated an English force of one hundred thousand and took the last English-held castle in Scotland at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 100,000.

estimated number of men and women who volunteered for the First Crusade in 1095 110,000.

approximate maximum size of Genghis Khan's army, which was pretty small by medieval standards 500,000.

approximate population of Kyoto, j.a.pan, in 1185 1,000,000.

approximate population of the Song Chinese city of Hangzhou in the late 1200s

RENAISSANCE, ANYONE? (AND HOW ABOUT GENOCIDE AND SLAVERY?).

(13001575)

IN A NUTSh.e.l.l.

To be honest, the Renaissance was one bizarre era: incredible violence was everywhere, as great thinkers made huge advances in art and philosophy-by returning to the ancient past. In fact, it was a sort of "Great Leap Backward" in human civilization. During this period, educated people in southern Europe reconnected with Roman and Greek culture from the Cla.s.sical Age, laying the foundations for modern society. Yet the themes of the movement-reason, harmony, and humanism-were totally at odds with what was going on in Europe at the time. Even more strangely, the Renaissance arguably resulted from one of the worst disasters in human history: the Black Death.

In northern Europe, the Hundred Years' War and endless struggles between kings and powerful n.o.bles convinced the kings that it was time to subdue the n.o.bles once and for all. Chipping away at the n.o.bles' territory and power, the English and French kings created something entirely new: nation-states, whose citizens were bonded to each other by shared ident.i.ties and history, instead of by loyalty to n.o.ble lords.

Other European kingdoms were sharpening their claws in preparation for a devastating period of global expansion. The first wave of exploration, colonization, and genocide was led by Spain, a new hyper-Catholic nation created by Ferdinand and Isabella from the ashes of a Muslim empire. They not only helped Europe map out the globe, but also destroyed the largest and most powerful empires in the history of the Americas, the Aztecs in Mexico and the Inca in Peru (with a little help from those empires' respective rivals).

Meanwhile, in 1376, angry Chinese peasants, led by a charismatic commoner named Zhu Yuanzhang, threw out the last Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty. The native Ming Dynasty he established was one of the most powerful in Chinese history.

But it wasn't all bad news for the Mongols. They had one last hurrah, in India, well after the Chinese chucked them out. Unlike their cousins who conquered China, the Moghuls (a corruption of Mongol Mongol) of eastern Persia kept their nomadic ways, thus remaining effective warriors. In 1527 they left Afghanistan to conquer the broad fertile floodplains of Pakistan and India.

Nearby, another set of nomadic hors.e.m.e.n from Central Asia-the Ottoman Turks-established a very powerful empire encompa.s.sing most of the Mediterranean Basin and Eastern Europe. The Muslim Ottomans had the kings of Western Europe shaking in their ermine-lined boots for a good two centuries. Their arrival also doomed the wealthy medieval trading republic of Venice, in northern Italy, which lost control of Mediterranean trade routes.

As Venice declined, other Italian city-states launched an intellectual, economic, and cultural revolution-the whole Renaissance thing. The ideas and cultural creations of the Italians were so compelling they soon spread across Europe, making the Renaissance a continent-wide affair. Europe was awakening from its long medieval slumber, and the world would never be the same.

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN.

1305.

Papal Schism begins.

1348.

Bubonic plague strikes Europe, eventually killing one third of the population.

1376.

Ming Dynasty established in China.

1378.

First attempt to end the Papal Schism fails.

1402.

Florence defeats Milanese tyrant Gian Galeazzo.

1405.

Tamerlane dies.

1415.

Henry V of England invades France, claiming throne.

1453.

Ottomans seize Constantinople, ending Byzantine Empire.

1492.

Ferdinand and Isabella take back Spain from the Moors; Columbus "discovers" America.