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Later medieval Europe was a period of attempted political union, multi-national institutions, charismatic leaders, transnational law, bureaucratic expansion, religious violence, ethnic minority conflict, economic volatility, and profound climate change. Déjà vu?

This survey looks at a range of European political projects and identities, focusing from the fall of crusader Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187 to the death of the great poet Dante Alighieri in 1321. In between, many institutions which we think of as typically ‘modern’ crystallized: ‘the state’, bureaucracies, universities, scientific reasoning, accounting, legal systems. Simultaneously so did many we think of as emblematically ‘medieval’: gothic art, friars, inquisitions. ‘Europe’ as a place was volatile. Turkey or Syria might be European, or not—but whether southern Spain or France were part of ‘Europe’ was also violently contested. Europeans were energetic crusading colonizers yet also terrified of military aggression on their eastern borders (by Mongols). A period of enormous economic, demographic and growth ended with increasingly volatile climate change and terrible famines. A hundred years of papal triumphalism closed with a pope accused of sodomy and demon worship. This was another ‘age of extremes’, to use Eric Hobsbawm’s description of the twentieth century.

Between these extremes what did it mean to live in this religiously defined Europe – ‘Christendom’? How similar were social, political and religious patterns from Dublin to Damascus? How did Europeans cultivate ideas of union in practice, and with what effects? We will think about European identities, not only on Christendom’s terms, but also through the many cultures which interacted and sometimes conflicted with it: Byzantine, Mongol, Islamic, Jewish. You will use a wide range of political, religious, visual and literary sources to gain an understanding of one of the most creative, formative and interesting periods of European history.