Stephen Batchelor - Medieval History For Dummies

Medieval History For Dummies

by Stephen Batchelor

Medieval History For Dummies

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-470-74783-4

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About the Author

Stephen Batchelor has taught Ancient and Medieval History for a number of years to a wide variety of student groups, and is currently Head of Faculty for Creative & Visual Arts at MidKent College.

Stephen has travelled extensively around the Mediterranean and worked there as an archaeological tour guide. He has written book reviews for Current Archaeology and History Today and is the author of The Ancient Greeks For Dummies.

Authors Acknowledgments

I would like to thank several people for their involvement in this book: firstly, thanks to Steve Edwards and all the team at Wiley who worked on the project, and to Samantha Spickernell for her enthusiastic support of the original idea. I would also like to thank my mother for her support and the loan of her spare room to use as a library, and my partner Samantha for putting up with me once again spending hours in the solitary activity of writing. Special thanks too are due to the very talented Sarah Shade for the tremendous illustration of a Viking ship that appears in Chapter 8.

Finally, I would like to thank the students at Richmond Adult Community College whom it was my pleasure to teach between 1998 and 2007. As a group they reignited by my interest in the Medieval World and their enthusiasm, ideas and desire to make the connections between so many disparate places and peoples played a big part in my thinking for this book.

Publishers Acknowledgments

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Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

Commissioning, Editorial, and Media Development

Project Editor: Steve Edwards

Content Editor: Jo Theedom

Commissioning Editor: Samantha Spickernell

Assistant Editor: Ben Kemble

Development Editor: Brian Kramer

Copy Editor: Andy Finch

Technical Editor: Amanda Richardson

Proofreader: Dawn Bates

Production Manager: Daniel Mersey

Cover Photos: Photononstop/Photolibrary.com

Cartoons: Rich Tennant (www.the5thwave.com )

Composition Services

Project Coordinator: Lynsey Stanford

Layout and Graphics: Tim Detrick, Joyce Haughey, Melissa K. Smith

Proofreader: Laura Albert

Indexer: Cheryl Duksta

Brand Reviewer: Jennifer Bingham

Introduction

I havent always been interested in the Middle Ages. My main interest used to be the Ancient World of Greece and Rome, and the Middle Ages always seemed to me a bit like the clearing up after a particularly good party. The period can be difficult to get your head around, what with being in the middle rather than at the start or at the end. Studying medieval history often means that you have to know what came before and can leave you with an awful lot of questions about what happened next. The times were certainly confusing too, with bits of territory changing hands all the time, and just as you get used to a king or a succession of kings, they all die and somebody else takes over.

But when I found out more about the Middle Ages, my opinions changed. I began to see that a great deal of the world that you and I know today came into being during the medieval period. I realised that some of todays most pressing issues and biggest conflicts have their roots in events that happened more than 1,000 years ago. I also got to know more about the people (many of them flat-out characters) who populate the period, the fantastic castles that dot the landscape and the curious, bizarre and sometimes extremely unpleasant things that people did. In the process, I began to knit together and understand how the world got from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance and beyond.

The more I read and discovered about the Middle Ages, the more I realised that in many ways the period has a greater relevance to my life than what happened in the time of the Ancient Greeks and the Roman emperors. Also, medieval history turns out to be just as much fun to read about as those earlier periods. If I had the chance to travel back in time to the medieval period, Id jump at the opportunity. Well, as long as I managed to avoid the danger of violent death, the bad food, the horrid diseases and the smell (Im confident that it would smell really, really bad).