I don’t even have time to read a magisterial five-volume history of the Hundred Years War, let alone write one. But a little while ago I was in Albi and got more interested in the bloody and tragic history of that place, and learned that [Jonathan] Sumption had written a book about it that might or might not be magisterial, but had the distinct advantage of not being five volumes long. I read it, and I’m glad I did, because this short history of one of the nastiest little wars in the entire Middle Ages has many weird and unexpected echoes with our own era, not to mention a lot to tell about the creation of the modern nation-state.
An Albigensian is an inhabitant of Albi, in the South of France. Before we get to that, though, we need to talk about the Cathars. An important rule of thumb in the history of Christianity is that heresies generally originate in the East and gradually spread to the West. I think this is mostly because, at least for the first thousand years or so, the vast majority of the population, GDP, and theological disputation was happening in the East. If you have theological ferment, you will have heresies, as assuredly as modifying software produces bugs and copying a cell’s DNA produces cancer. There were just a lot more people arguing about the nature of God in the East for a long time, and so given a constant error rate we should expect that most of the bad ideas come from there as well as most of the good ones. Now, why it is that this rule of thumb still holds true, despite the bulk of population and GDP moving to the West, is a very interesting question. Perhaps the legalistic Latin mind is just not as given to flights of fancy.
Whatever the case, the East was doing its usual thing and spitting out heresies, and two in particular are important to our story here. The first is dualism, which is a very old solution to the Problem of Evil, and which states that the forces of good and the forces of evil are evenly matched in some ontological sense. Many religions (for instance Zoroastrianism) are officially dualist. Christian dualism, on the other hand, has always been severely frowned upon if not outright condemned. Yet it’s also always been there, almost from the very start. I theorize that the dualist temptation arises again and again in Christianity because it “humanizes” an otherwise quite otherworldly faith, making it more like the stories and situations that human beings hear and encounter elsewhere.1
The second heresy is gnosticism, the belief that the physical world we all experience is an illusion, or a deception, or at least very much worse than the world of pure spirit. Once again, this is an important official element of religions like Buddhism, and once again it’s a tendency that Christianity has had to battle from the very start, probably because of some common, cross-cultural psychological quirk about human beings. Many modern Christians don’t actually realize that gnosticism is, technically speaking, totally heretical, because much modern Christianity is quite gnostic-inflected. But in the early days, and still today in some more traditionalist corners, Christianity is an earthy religion of bodies and physical substances and matter that is capable of being sanctified. For much more on all of this, read our review of Origen’s Revenge.
Anyway, relatively early in the history of Christianity, these two great ur-heresies flowed into one, like Godzilla and Mothra becoming a single monster that both flies and is radioactive. According to this grand synthesis, the false, illusory world of our physical reality is the domain of the forces of evil. The “god” of this world, often called the demiurge, is a diabolical figure, an anti-god that has trapped us all in prisons of flesh and blood. The real God is somewhere above and outside this reality, and our mission is to use secret knowledge, gnosis, to transcend to the spirit world. The guy who codified and turbo-charged this combined doctrine was a rich shipowner named Marcion (from the East, naturally), so you may sometimes see this heresy referred to as “Marcionism”.
If the physical world is the creation of an evil demiurge, then all physicality and physical matter must be irredeemably corrupt. In fact a much later Marcionist theologian actually used this as an argument for his views: “God is perfect; nothing in the world is perfect; therefore nothing in the world was made by God”. Consequently, the Marcionists practiced unbelievably extreme forms of asceticism to try to disconnect themselves from this corrupted world. They meditated and wore rags and occasionally starved themselves to death. Needless to say, having children was severely frowned upon, because it meant trapping new souls in the prison of reality. Critics of Marcionism accused them of endorsing sodomy as an alternative to normal sexual intercourse. The Marcionists also rejected the entire Old Testament on the grounds that the God of the Old Testament was actually the Devil, because only an evil being would do something as terrible as create the world.
The Marcionists were persecuted by the Roman authorities just as much as the Christians were, and this kept their numbers under control until by chance they spread to an empire with different laws. A wild-man from Persia named Mani, claimed by his followers to be a prophet and a magician, became deeply influenced by Marcion, traveled to India, returned to Persia, and created his own spin on Marcionism that incorporated elements of Buddhism and of his native Zoroastrianism. This combined religion became known as “Manicheanism,” and his followers refused to work normal jobs, serve in the military, or marry. Mani was promptly killed, but his teachings jumped back into the Eastern Roman Empire, and started spreading like a wildfire.
In the 8th century, Manicheanism (via a quick detour through a dualist Armenian group called the Paulicians) jumped the firebreak separating Asia from Europe and took off amongst the Bulgarian Slavs. Here, their champion was a priest named Bogomil, and his followers became the “Bogomils“. The English slang-term “buggery” is actually derived from the word “Bulgaria,” because of the old knock against the Marcionists. Did Bogomil in fact endorse buggery? It’s a little hard to say, but the “radical” Bogomils really got quite wild.2 The most extreme of them preached that performing disgusting or blasphemous acts was actually good, because it was a way of debasing and disrespecting our corrupted physical reality. It was also in Bulgaria that the word “Cathari” meaning “the purified ones” began to appear as an alternative name for this church.3
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Albigensian Crusade, by Jonathan Sumption”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-09-02.
- You can also see it as injecting some excitement and drama and narrative stakes into the religion. A critic of Christianity might call it boring because the forces of evil are always and everywhere ultimately powerless. I don’t agree with this characterization, because the drama is taking place on a different level, namely the struggle towards sanctification that every living being engages in. But that might be too abstract for some. A much more immediate kind of drama is angels and demons duking it out on roughly equal terms, which is why you see this in all kinds of popular media, movie, video games, etc. Again, this is not an anomaly, it’s been present in Christian folk culture forever.
- Thought not as wild as some even later Slavic adherents of Dualism/Gnosticism. The 18th century sect of the skoptsy interpreted the anti-physical, anti-reproduction message of Marcion as requiring castration for all true believers. Warning: the Wikipedia page has graphic pictures.
- Anything you read about the Dualists, Gnostics, Marcionists, Manicheans, Paulicians, Bogomils, and Cathars is made considerably more confusing by the fact that tons of authors use these terms completely interchangeably (including ancient authors, and including the Dualists/Gnostics/Marcionists/Manicheans/Paulicians/Bogomils/Cathars themselves). It’s not even entirely wrong to do so, because there really is a continuous tradition here that all these groups are manifestations of.
June 2, 2026
QotD: Christian heresies
May 19, 2026
How to Eat Like a Medieval Peasant
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 25 Nov 2025Boiled carp fillets with a thick garlic-walnut sauce
City/Region: England
Time Period: c. 1450In addition to their regular schedule of backbreaking work, medieval European peasants often had to work extra days for their lord, called boon days. The upside to this was that the peasants were given better food on boon days, which could include cheese, good bread, ale, meat, and fish.
While the medieval cookbooks we have today were written for the wealthy, these seemed like good choices if a lord wanted to feed their serfs: good, but not too good, and fancier than their everyday fare, but not heavily spiced like the nobility’s dishes.
I’d never tried carp before and thought it was quite good, and the garlic is by far the dominant flavor in the sauce. All in all, it’s not amazing, but if I was a medieval peasant, I don’t think I would complain.
Barbell boyled.
Take a barbell, and kutte him, and draw him round; And pike in the nape of the hede and seth him in water and salt, Ale, and parcely. And whan hit bygynneth to boile, skeme hit clene, and caste the barbel there-to, And seth him. And his sauce is garlek or vergesauce, And then serve him forth.
— Harleian MS 4016 (c. 1450)Take kernels of walnuts, and cloves of garlic, and pepper, bread, and salt, and cast all in a mortar; and grind it small, & mix it up with the same broth that the fish was sodden in, and serve it forth.
— Ashmole MS 1439
May 11, 2026
QotD: The cultural importance of the church in early Medieval Europe
The very first thing to note is that the Church (in this case, both the Latin West and the Greek East) pre-dated the Middle Ages themselves. The Church arrived in the Middle Ages as relic of the Roman Imperial past. It inherited Roman Imperial organization – the diocese, for instance, derived from the boundaries of Roman super-provinces called dioceses (Greek: διοίκησις). Unlike the new medieval aristocracy, which tended to rule from fortified estates in the countryside, the Church remained centered in towns and cities, many of which had been major centers under the Romans. As the Roman provincial administration collapsed, it largely fell to the Church – as one of the few surviving literate institutions – to replace some of the core functions, like record keeping and the preservation of literature and learning. This was less true [in] Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, places where the Church was a relative late-comer, but for most of Western Europe, the Church was not some new institution grafted on to a pre-existing society (as it had been under the Romans), but rather part of the bedrock cultural foundation upon which that new society was constructed (fellow pedants! – please note carefully the phrase part of in the previous sentence; I am aware there were other things).
That said, the institutional power of the Church (and here we really do mean what would be the Roman Catholic Church) begins to change dramatically in the 11th century, right as we enter the High Middle Ages, and continues for the next several centuries (keeping in mind that Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire really evoke the High and Late Middle Ages, rather than the Early period). In short, the institutional heft of the Church grows dramatically. Quite a few things begin happening which are linked together: the Popes begin trying to wrest control over the Church’s hierarchy (specifically, the investiture of bishops) from secular rulers. Clerical celibacy was more stringently enforced. The Church intruded into warfare (as we’ve discussed with the Peace of God / Truce of God movements). It began to more directly attempt to regulate marriage, especially among the powerful (marriage was a made a sacrament in 1184). By the 1300s, this included keeping detailed records in many parts of France about births, deaths and marriages, in part to ensure no one married a close relative.
(And, of course, for those of you thinking, “wait, isn’t this also the period of the Crusades – military expeditions called by and at least nominally (but not in practice) under the auspices of the Pope?” Yes, it is, and that’s not an accident either).
In my experience teaching this, it is the next step that baffles my students the most. This vast increase in the institutional power of the Church was made possible, not by armies or shrewd real-politic (though both were involved), but by belief. The primary weapon wielded by Popes in this effort was the threat of excommunication, which (under Catholic doctrine) cut off the excommunicated individual or community from salvation, potentially damning them for all eternity. But of course that threat is only real if you believe the Pope has that power. And therein is the key point: most of Europe did believe. As I tell my students, it is safe to assume, as a general matter, that people in the past believed their own religion. Of course there are exceptions, but the general rule remains.
In the conflicts that arose – because, as you might imagine, secular rulers were unwilling to give up their prerogatives – it did not actually much matter if the king or emperor believed in the power of excommunication, because no one rules alone. Thus when the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV was excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII in 1076, the audience for this act wasn’t Henry himself (who had already declared Gregory illegitimate anyway). It was directed at all of Henry’s vassals and supporters, releasing them from their oaths of allegiance and essentially saying, “stick with this guy, and he’ll take you to hell with him”. It worked, sparking a major rebellion and forcing Henry to humiliatingly apologize the following year.
(History note: this would be “round 1” in a multi-round fight that wasn’t settled until 1122 with the Concordat of Worms; in the end the Papacy mostly won, sharply limiting the Holy Roman Emperors’ power over their bishops).
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part II”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-04.
April 22, 2026
QotD: Traditional Chinese approaches to science
It’s not just physics. The central technique of modern science is that of boiling something down to its absolute simplest form, understanding the simplest non-trivial case as thoroughly as possible, and only then building back up to more familiar situations. In physics we start with contrived gedankenexperimenten: “what if two particles collided in a vacuum”, and build experimental apparatuses designed to mimic these ultra-simple cases. In economics we imagine markets with a single buyer and a single seller, both perfectly rational. In political philosophy we imagine human beings in a state of nature, or societies established by a primitive contract. In biology we try to understand the functions of organisms, organs, or other systems by recursively taking them apart and trying to figure out each part in isolation. In every case, what we’re engaging in is “analysis”, ἀνά-λυσις, literally a “thorough unravelling”, understanding the whole by first understanding its parts.
This approach is totally alien to the traditional Chinese understanding of reality, which held instead that no part of the world could be understood except in its relation to the rest of the universe. You can see this in the domains of science where they did maintain a lead. Is it really a coincidence that the Medieval Chinese got frighteningly far with the mathematics of wave mechanics? Or quickly deduced the causes of the tides? Or made great strides with magnetism? In each of these cases, the physical phenomenon in question was compatible with an “organicist conception in which every phenomenon was connected with every other according to a hierarchical order”. Indeed, in all of these cases real understanding was aided by the assumption that a universal harmony underlay all things and connected all things. The tides really are in harmony with the moon, and the lodestone with the earth.
This science, founded on holism rather than on analysis, made great strides in some fields but fell behind in others. It readily imbibed action at a distance, but it could not and would not tolerate the theory of atoms. In this way it serves as a strange mirror of Medieval European science, which also loved the theory of correspondences, also loved alchemy and disdained analysis. The difference is that the glorious intellectual synthesis of Neo-Confucianism was never seriously challenged, it survived the Mongol conquest, it survived the desolation of the civil wars that preceded the Ming founding, it survived everything until communism. In contrast, the eerily-similar Thomistic metaphysics of the High Middle Ages was broken apart by the Reformation, and sufficiently discredited that analytical methods could take their first tentative steps.
This is, to be clear, my own crazy theory, because Needham never really gave a solution to his own puzzle. I came up with it only as a sort of thought-experiment, because I wanted to see if I could find a solution to Needham’s puzzle that disdained material explanations in favour of intellectual tendencies, because I find such theories curiously underrated in our culture. I only half-believe this theory,1 but I find it interesting because twentieth-century Western science has in some ways come back around to the holistic view of things: from Lagrangian methods in theoretical physics, to category theory in mathematics, to systems biology and ecology. It wouldn’t be the first time that a way of viewing the world useful to one age became an impediment to reaching the next one. The question is: what are we missing today?
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-14.
- The thing about material conditions is they usually are dispositive!
April 21, 2026
Ivan the Terrible – Feeding the Evil Russian Tsar
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 14 Oct 2025Soft buns filled with cabbage, onion and dill
City/Region: Russia
Time Period: 16th CenturyIn Russian, Ivan the Terrible is Ivan Grozny, and the translation of “terrible” was meant more in the way of “fearsome” or “formidable” rather than “cruel” or “awful”, though Ivan ended up being all of those. What started off as a good reign with military victories, building Saint Basil’s Cathedral, and restricting the boyars‘ (aristocracy) power over the people descended into a reign of terror with a secret police, the massacre of a city, and even killing his eldest son in a fit of rage.
While Ivan truly was terrible, these piroshki are not. They are absolutely delicious. The bread is soft, and the filling is savory and slightly sweet with the dill really coming through. These were made with all different kinds of fillings, so feel free to try out other ingredients, like meat, fish, fruit, or other vegetables, or put in a hard boiled egg for a modern touch.
Small pies filled with mushrooms, poppy seeds, kasha, turnips, cabbage, or whatever else God sends.
When the servants bake bread, order them to set some of the dough aside, to be stuffed for piroshki.— The Domostroi, 16th Century
April 20, 2026
QotD: The quality of evidence problem for historians
And yet, you can’t entirely discount them, either. Crecy (along with of course Agincourt) is supposed to be the triumph of the English longbow, and that’s the thing: We’ve reconstructed English longbows, and put them through all kinds of trials. The results, as I understand it — which, again, ain’t much — were highly variable. A very strong, well-fed, highly trained longbowman, firing an ideally constructed and maintained bow under optimal conditions, really can put X number of arrows up a flea’s ass at Y range in Z time.
Or they could miss the broad side of a barn at twenty feet, depending.
So: What was the weather like in Northern France on 26 August 1346? That’s not an idle question. Rather, it’s the central question. Assume perfect shooting conditions, and you’ve got a far, far different picture of the battle than if you assume poor ones. And if that seems to be giving too much credit to the weather, watch a few baseball games — you’ll quickly discover that quite often, the difference between a home run and a long out is just a few percentage points of relative humidity.
Ultimately it comes down to judgment. More importantly, it’s a judgment on how any particular event fits into the larger argument you’re trying to make. In a way, then, the details really don’t matter very much on their own — the mechanics of how the English won are almost irrelevant, except insofar as they feed into an analysis of why they won. Why did the French king attack uphill, in the mud? Was he stupid? Overconfident? Did he feel he had to, because of political problems inside his host? Did he have faulty information? Did he have accurate information, but just made a bad call?
That’s the art of History, and why, despite what the Peter Turchin (and Karl Marx) crowd keeps insisting, it will always be an art, not a science. We can have a high degree of confidence, most times, in what happened — there really was a battle at Crecy, and the English really did win it. It’s the why that is susceptible to radical reinterpretation.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-17.
April 11, 2026
QotD: Kingdoms were not “nations” in the Middle Ages
It is thus a bit odd that the regions of Westeros are seen by its inhabitants as being clear and unchanging. For instance, the Reach has borders, those borders do not move and everyone in those borders is loyal to House Tyrell. This is not how medieval rule works. The borders of, say, France, shifted over time (some places we consider “obviously” part of France were added only quite late, like French Flanders or Provence) as the ability of the French king to control those regions changed. For long periods of the Middle Ages, large parts of France were effectively controlled by the Kings of England (because they were also Dukes of this or that French duchy).
The idea that France, or Germany or Italy was a distinct, permanent entity with its own existence apart from a given royal family – more than just a space on a map – which comprised a people, their language and the government of those people, this is a modern phenomenon. Indeed, one may argue, it – that is, the nation-state – is the modern phenomenon.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-12.
April 1, 2026
The fall of Rome and the rise of Islam
Gustavo Jalife points out that a work from nearly a century ago identified the rise of Islam as being far more disruptive to western civilization than the fall of the western Roman Empire (and the surge of Islamic power destroyed the Persian Empire and nearly toppled Constantinople as well):
Expansion of the Caliphate: Mohammed, 622-632 (red), Rashidun Caliphate, 632-661 (orange), and the Umayyad Caliphate, 661-750 (yellow).
Wikimedia Commons.
In Mohammed and Charlemagne – posthumously published in 1937 – renowned historian Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) advanced a thesis at once simple and much contested: that the true rupture between Late Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages was not the fall of Rome in the fifth century, as traditionally held, but the expansion of Islam in the seventh. The Germanic kingdoms, he argued, had preserved much of the Roman economic and cultural architecture. Trade across the Mediterranean continued; cities, though diminished, remained nodes in a wider network sustained by the circulation of goods and by administration. For the Romans, the mare nostrum was a highway rather than a barrier.
If a good article starts after it ends, one might say that a civilisation reveals itself most clearly not in its proclamations, but in the modification of its habits – when what was once assumed becomes contested. In such subtle alterations, Pirenne discerned the end of the ancient world.
With the Islamic expansion the greater part of the Mediterranean’s southern and eastern shores fell under Muslim control, from the Levant and Egypt to North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. The sea was no longer a unified Roman basin, but a divided one. Authority and function shifted: the Mediterranean ceased to operate as a shared commercial zone. Long-distance trade dwindled, the flow of goods between East and West was disrupted and with it the urban and monetary life that depended upon it. Only then did Western Europe withdraw inward, shrinking into the medieval world as it is recognised today.
The argument has been debated, qualified, and revised. Yet its inner core endures: civilisations are sustained not merely by armies or laws, but by the invisible fibres of exchange – commercial, intellectual and cultural – that bind their parts together. Sever those threads and, without even the cut of a sword, a whole order may vanish into a rumour.
To draw a parallel with present-day Europe is to tread on disputed ground. The language of “invasion” is often employed with more heat than light; yet to deny that significant demographic and cultural changes are under way would be equally unhelpful. The question, then, is whether Pirenne’s model can illuminate what many believe is a tragedy without reducing it to a farce.
The spread of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries was a series of military conquests. The Arab fleets that took North Africa and Spain, the armies that crossed into Gaul, and the long struggle for control of the Mediterranean were enterprises of war and empire. Contemporary migration into Europe, by contrast, occurs largely through civilian movement, legal and illegal. However, both historical processes demonstrate that massive migratory movements, whatever their specific nature, do not merely add numbers to a population; they introduce new networks, new loyalties, new values and new norms that eventually fracture the existing state of affairs.
Before the eighth century, the Mediterranean economy continues to function, vibrant and connected. After the eighth century, that system is shattered. The sea is closed. Trade disappears. Europe faces an empire whose only wealth is the land, where the movement of goods is reduced to a bare minimum. Far from advancing, society regresses.
Pirenne’s thesis gains thrust and edge in presenting the Islamic expansion as embodying a fundamental alteration in coexistence.
March 31, 2026
This Recipe Took 3 Years … Ninja Kikatsugan
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 23 Sept 2025Very bitter, very sake-flavored balls that include ginseng, coix seeds, and licorice
City/Region: Japan
Time Period: 1676Much like cowboys, pirates, and knights, ninja have been fictionalized to be a far cry from the intelligence gathering and sabotage experts of history. The term “ninja” didn’t even become popular until the mid-20th century.
Even the historical text I’m using here, the Bansenshukai, has been called into question. Because it was written over the period of several centuries, often by people who weren’t even alive during the period when ninja, or shinobi, were active, who knows if it’s an accurate portrayal of their tools and methods.
If this recipe is accurate, I feel bad for the people who had to eat them. They’re really bitter with an overwhelming sake flavor that isn’t pleasant. Really, I wouldn’t recommend making these; they’re not worth the 3 year time investment, and hyōrōgan are a much tastier ninja survival food.
Kikatsugan
10 ryō Asiatic ginseng
20 ryō Buckweat flour
20 ryō Millet Flour
20 ryō Yam
1 ryō Liquorice
10 ryō Coix seed
20 ryō Rice flour
Grind this into a powder, soak it in three shō of sake for three years until it has dried. Afterward, roll it into balls the size of peach pits.
Eating three of these daily will keep you healthy even when you have nothing else to eat.
Eating three will prevent both mental and physical fatigue.— Bansenshukai, 1676
March 30, 2026
QotD: The Revenge of the Archaeologists
It is thus relevant that over the past half-century or so, it has so happened that effectively all ancient historians have had to develop a strong grasp of archaeological data; we don’t all necessarily learn to do the excavation work, of course (that’s what archaeologists do), but pretty much all ancient historians at this point are going to have to be able to read a site or artifact report as well as have a good theoretical grasp of what kinds of questions archaeology can be used to answer and how it can be used to answer those questions. This happened in ancient history in particular for two reasons: first, archaeology was a field effectively invented to better understand the classical past (which is now of course also used to understand the past in other periods and places) so it has been at work the longest there, but also because the sources for ancient history are so few. As I like to say, the problem for the modern historian is taking a sip of meaning from the fire-hose of evidence they have; but the challenge of an ancient historian is finding water in the desert. Archaeological data was a sudden, working well in that desert and much of the last two decades of ancient history has been built around it. Other fields of history are still processing their much larger quantity of texts; why dig so deep a well when you live next to a running river?
The result, in ancient history, has been what I tend to refer to as “the revenge of the archaeologists”. Not, mind you, revenge on medievalists, but in fact revenge on a very specific ancient historian and classicist, Moses Finley. Moses Finley was, from the 1950s to the 1980s, one of the most prominent classicists and his work touched on many fields, including the study of the ancient economy. Finley, writing in the 1960s was generally skeptical of the ability of archaeology to provide useful answers about the ancient economy (he preferred to understand the question by probing the mentalities of the Greek and Roman elite). Archaeology, Finley thought, was frequently over-interpreted and could never give a representative sample anyway; as he quipped in his 1965 article “Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World”, “we are too often victims of that great curse of archaeology, the indestructibility of pots”, a line for which, as far as I can tell, he is still quite unforgiven by some archaeologists.
As if in response, the archaeologists have spent the subsequent almost-six-decades proving again and again the tremendous value of their discipline by, among other things, utterly burying Finley’s The Ancient Economy (1973) under a mountain of archaeological data. It turns out the mentalités of aristocrats who largely hated merchants were not a good barometer of the activities of those merchants.
But you may now guess how this is going to play out in the discussion of Late Antiquity. The ancient historians come to the question ready to think in archaeological terms and ask what archaeological data can do to clear up these questions. Scholars of Late Antiquity trained as medievalists on the other hand, may or may not be well versed in archaeological methods or data (to be clear, some medievalists very much are versed, including prominent voices on the “change and continuity” side of this debate! But it is also very possible to be a “pure text” medievalist in a way that I don’t think I know a “pure text” ancient historian younger than sixty) because their field has not been forced, by dint of the paucity of sources, to revolve so heavily around archaeological data and because the archaeological data on the Middle Ages is not yet as voluminous as that on Classical Antiquity.
As I noted in the first post, beginning in the 1970s, what James O’Donnell calls the “reformation in Late Antique studies” launched a long overdue reassessment of Late Antiquity and the impact of the Fall of Rome – what we’ve called the “change and continuity” argument. I bring up all of this to note that the “counter-reformation” – what we’re calling the “decline and fall” argument – that really emerges beginning in the 90s is in many ways an extension of the “revenge of the archaeologists” in Classical studies (and especially the ancient economy) into the field of Late Antiquity. Indeed some of the scholars are the same (e.g. Willem Jongman) and many of them enter the debate on Late Antiquity as an extension of the debate about the Roman economy (in part demanding that “change and continuity” Late Antique scholars acknowledge things now generally considered “proved” by ancient historians about the earlier Roman economy).
In my own experience, particularly in more informal conversations, the methodological difference that interaction creates between ancient historians – for whom it has long been almost entirely settled that in a “fight” between archaeological evidence and effectively any other kind, the archaeological evidence “wins” – and medievalists for whom archaeology is a much less central part of their method (in part because their textual sources are more extensive) can lead to situations where the two sides of the debate talk past each other.
But when it comes to questions of demographics, economics and the conditions of life for the sort of people who rarely figure in our sources, archaeological evidence – although it is often incomplete and hard to interpret – offers the possibility of decisive answers to questions that otherwise would have to live entirely within the realm of speculation.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-02-11.
March 24, 2026
Baking the Original Apple Pie from Medieval England
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 16 Sept 2025Hot water crust pie filled with mashed apples and pears with raisins, figs, and spices
City/Region: England
Time Period: c. 1390This is the first recorded recipe for apple pie, written in England around 1390 in The Forme of Cury. As many historical recipes are, this one is bare bones and leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The “good spices” in the recipe could mean basically any combination of spices you like. I think this is probably referring to a popular medieval spice mixture called poudre douce, whose exact contents varied from cook to cook. Popular spices included cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, black pepper, long pepper, cardamom, ginger, galangal, and cloves, so feel free to experiment and make up your own.
Whichever spices you use will affect how familiar or exotic the pie tastes, and I really enjoyed the version I made. It’s not too sweet with most of the sweetness coming from the fruit, and I found the spices to be really strong but really pleasant. Unlike modern apple pies, the filling is more of a compote texture, but it holds together nicely. It’s a perfect recipe to try for the fall.
For to make Tartys in Applis.
Tak gode Applys and gode Spycis and Figys and reysons and Perys and wan they are wel ybrayed coloured with Safron well and do yt in a cofyn and yt forth to bake wel.
— The Forme of Cury c. 1390
March 13, 2026
What did ordinary Tudors do for work? Inside the 16th-century daily grind
HistoryExtra
Published 4 Nov 2025From sunrise in the fields to the heat of the brew house, Ruth Goodman reveals the untold story of how the Tudors really worked.
Forget silk-clad courtiers – most people in the 16th-century toiled from dawn to dusk just to keep food on the table. Men ploughed, hedged, and hauled in the fields while women brewed ale, milked cows, churned butter, and raised children – often all at once. Every Tudor household was a finely balanced machine of survival.
In this episode of her new series on Tudor Life, historian Ruth Goodman explains how every pair of hands mattered. It wasn’t as simple as “men’s work” and “women’s work”. You’ll hear how the two worlds were completely intertwined. And what about those who were unable to work? This video sheds light on an innovative 16th-century welfare scheme that made all the difference.
Filmed on location at Plas Mawr – an Elizabethan townhouse in Conwy, North Wales, now in the care of Cadw – this series with Ruth looks beyond the royals who often dominate the headlines, and considers the everyday routines of those living in England and Wales in the Tudor era.
00:54 How did Tudors earn money?
03:20 Where did men work?
08:15 What if you were unable to work?
March 3, 2026
QotD: The rise of archives-based history in the late Middle Ages
All of this, I suggest, is because people increasingly thought factual accuracy was important. And that only comes with the increasing sense of linear time. The chronicles of the first two or three Crusades, for instance, are filled with wild exaggerations and impossible claims … but they’re not lies. They just serve a different purpose. They’re called “histories”, but that’s a misleading translation (of the word historia, I’ll admit). What they really are is much closer to exempla — saints’ lives, that kind of thing. Their point isn’t “This and that actually happened”; it’s more like “Let us all praise God, for the wondrous things he allowed us to do!”
Gesta Francorum means “deeds of the French”, but in the sense of “The wonders done in God’s name,” not “a list of battles and their outcomes”.
Severian, “The Ghosts (II)”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-18.
March 2, 2026
QotD: King Stephen and “the anarchy”
At this point, I ought to mention that the year is 1120; the young man is William Adelin, heir to the throne of England; and the “ferry” is the infamous White Ship.
Anyway, back to the story: the wine keeps flowing and, before long, the crew are drunk too. Not far out of port, the ship hits a submerged rock and rapidly sinks.
In all, hundreds are drowned — and yet that is just the start of the tragedy.
William’s father, King Henry I, had gone to great lengths to proclaim an heir. As the son of William the Conqueror, he knew just how messy succession could get. He had himself inherited the throne from his brother, William Rufus. This second William had died of a chest complaint — specifically, an arrow in the lungs (the result of a hunting “accident”). Henry was determined that his son would inherit the throne without mishap — and so carefully prepared the ground for a smooth transfer. Indeed, the name “Adelin” signified that the third William was the heir apparent.
The sinking of the White Ship left Henry with one remaining legitimate heir, his daughter Matilda. She was a formidable character, also known as Empress Maud (by virtue of her first marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor). She was, nevertheless, a woman — a big problem in an age when monarchs were expected to lead their men in battle. When Henry died in 1135, Maud’s cousin — Stephen of Blois — seized the throne. This was widely welcomed by the English nobility, but Maud wasn’t giving up easily, and she had powerful allies. Her second husband was Geoffrey, Count of Anjou; her illegitimate half-brother, Robert of Gloucester, was a wealthy baron; and her uncle was King David I of Scotland.
Stephen was assailed on all sides — by Geoffrey in Normandy, by Robert in England, by invading Scots and rebellious Welshmen. The civil war (if that’s what you can call this multi-sided free-for-all) dragged on for almost 20 years. There weren’t many set-piece battles, but there was lots of looting and pillaging in which countless nameless peasants perished.
In the end it was the death of another heir — Stephen’s son, Eustace — that opened the way to peace. The war-weary king agreed that Maud’s son (the future Henry II) would succeed him. And thus “The Anarchy” came to end: two decades of pointless devastation — and all because some young fool got pissed on a boat.
Peter Franklin, “Why Boris needs an heir apparent”, UnHerd, 2020-08-17.
February 22, 2026
QotD: The shift from “motte-and-bailey” construction to stone castles
To talk about how these designs work, we need to clear some terminology. The (typically thin) wall that runs the circuit of the castle and encloses the bailey is called a “curtain wall“. In stone castles, there may be multiple curtain walls, arranged concentrically (a design that seems to emerge in the Near East and makes its way to Europe in the 13th century via the crusades); the outermost complete circuit (the primary wall, as it were) is called the enceinte. Increasingly, the keep in stone castles is moved into the bailey (that is, it sits at the center of the castle rather than off to one side), although of course stone versions of motte and bailey designs exist. In some castle design systems, with stone the keep itself drops away, since the stone walls and towers often provided themselves enough space to house the necessary peacetime functions; in Germany there often was no keep (that is, no core structure that contained the core of the fortified house), but there often was a bergfriede, a smaller but still tall “fighting tower” to serve the tactical role of the keep (an elevated, core position of last-resort in a defense-in-depth arrangement) without the peacetime role.
While the wooden palisade curtain walls of earlier motte and bailey castles often lacked many defensive features (though sometimes you’d have towers and gatehouses to provide fighting positions around the gates), stone castles tend to have lots of projecting towers which stick out from the curtain wall. The value of projecting towers is that soldiers up on those towers have clear lines of fire running down the walls, allowing them to target enemies at the base of the curtain wall (the term for this sort of fire is “enfilade” fire – when you are being hit in the side). Clearly what is being envisaged here is the ability to engage enemies doing things like undermining the base of walls or setting up ladders or other scaling devices.
The curtain walls themselves also become fighting positions. Whether on a tower or on the wall itself, the term for the fighting position at the top is a “battlement”. Battlements often have a jagged “tooth” pattern of gaps to provide firing positions; the term for the overall system is crenellation; the areas which have stone are merlons, while the gaps to fire through are crenals. The walkway behind both atop the wall is the chemin de ronde, allure or “wall-walk”. One problem with using the walls themselves as fighting positions is that it is very hard to engage enemies directly beneath the wall or along it without leaning out beyond the protection of the wall and exposing yourself to enemy fire. The older solution to this were wooden, shed-like projections from the wall called “hoarding”; these were temporary, built when a siege was expected. During the crusades, European armies encountered Near Eastern fortification design which instead used stone overhangs (with the merlons on the outside) with gaps through which one might fire (or just drop things) directly down at the base of the wall; these are called machicolations and were swiftly adopted to replace hoardings, since machicolations were safer from both literal fire (wood burns, stone does not) and catapult fire, and also permanent. All of this work on the walls and the towers is designed to allow a small number of defenders to exchange fire effectively with a large number of attackers, and in so doing to keep those attackers from being able to “set up shop” beneath the walls.
[I]t is worth noting something about the amount of fire being developed by these projecting towers: the goal is to prevent the enemy operating safely at the wall’s base, not to prohibit approaches to the wall. These defenses simply aren’t designed to support that much fire, which makes sense: castle garrisons were generally quite small, often dozens or a few hundred men. While Hollywood loves sieges where all of the walls of the castle are lined with soldiers multiple ranks deep, more often the problem for the defender was having enough soldiers just to watch the whole perimeter around the clock (recall the example at Antioch: Bohemond only needs one traitor to access Antioch because one of its defensive towers was regularly defended by only one guy at night). It is actually not hard to see that merely by looking at the battlements: notice in the images here so far often how spaced out the merlons of the crenellation are. The idea here isn’t maximizing fire for a given length of wall but protecting a relatively small number of combatants on the wall. As we’ll see, that is a significant design choice: castle design assumes the enemy will reach the walls and aims to prevent escalade once they are there; later in this series we’ll see defenses designed to prohibit effective approach itself.
As with the simpler motte and bailey, stone castles often employ a system of defense in depth to raise the cost of an attack. At minimum, generally, that system consists of a moat (either wet or dry), the main curtain walls (with their towers and gatehouses) and then a central keep. Larger castles, especially in the 13th century and beyond, adopting cues from castle design in the Levant (via the crusades) employed multiple concentric rings of walls. Generally these were set up so that the central ring was taller, either by dint of terrain (as with a castle set on a hill) or by building taller walls, than the outer ring. The idea here seems not to be stacking fire on approaching enemies, but ensuring that the inner ring could dominate the outer ring if the latter fell to attackers; defenders could fire down on attackers who would lack cover (since the merlons of the outer ring would face the other way). As an aside, the concern to be firing down is less about the energy imparted by a falling arrow (though this is more meaningful with javelins or thrown rocks) and more about a firing position that denies enemies cover by shooting down at them (think about attackers, for instance, crossing a dry moat – if your wall is the right height and the edges of the moat are carefully angled, you can set up a situation where the ditch never actually offers the attackers any usable cover, but you need to be high up to do it!).
Speaking of the moat, this is a common defensive element (essentially just a big ditch!) which often gets left out of pop culture depictions of castles and siege warfare, but it accomplishes so many things at such a low cost premium. Even assuming the moat is “dry”! For attackers on foot (say, with ladders) looking to approach the wall, the moat is an obstacle that slows them down without potentially providing any additional cover (it is also likely to disorder an attack). For sappers (attackers looking to tunnel under the walls and then collapse the tunnel to generate a breach), the depth of the ditch forces them to dig deeper, which in turn raises the demands in both labor and engineering to dig their tunnel. For any attack with siege engines (towers, rams, or covered protective housings made so that the wall can be approached safely), the moat is an obstruction that has to be filled in before those engines can move forward – a task which in turn broadcasts the intended route well in advance, giving the defenders a lot of time to prepare.
Well-built stone castles of this sort were stunningly resistant to assault, even with relatively small garrisons (dozens or a few hundred, not thousands). That said, building them was very expensive; maintaining them wasn’t cheap either. For both castles and fortified cities, one ubiquitous element in warfare of the period (and in the ancient period too, by the by) was the rush when war was in the offing to repair castle and town walls, dig out the moat and to clear buildings that during peace had been built int he firing lines of the castle or city walls.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-10.
