中世纪的欧洲和世界

Knights and monks, castles and queens, popes, emperors, heresies, invasions, migrations, theologians, jesters and a global pandemic of plague that devastated Eurasia in the 1340s: the medieval world continues to fascinate us with its rich and complex history. Reversing the outdated image of the “dark ages”, recent scholarship has highlighted the surprising degree of interconnectivity of the medieval world, nurtured by an intense and far-reaching circulation of peoples, technology, material culture, ideas, religions and non-human agents such as viruses and bacteria across Eurasia, the Middle East, Northern Africa and, eventually, the Americas. In this course we will re-interpret the history of medieval Europe (500 – 1500 CE) within the context of a global Middle Ages. We will start our survey from the collapse of the Roman empire and the large-scale migrations of Germanic populations that redefined of the political and demographic composition of Europe in the Early Middle Ages (500-1000 CE). We will analyze the rise of Islam in the Middle East, the consolidation of the Byzantine empire and the birth of feudal society. The second part of the course will focus on the economic revolution of the 11th and 12th centuries, when improvements in agriculture and trade were accompanied by perduring conflicts between religious and political power, city and countryside, cultural traditionalism and the rise of new bourgeois mentality. The history of the crusades will provide us with a window on the military, cultural and political interactions that continued to link – rather than dividing – Europe and the Islamic world. In the third part of the course, we will focus on the multiple connections that relate medieval Europe to Eurasia via the Mongol empire. Will conclude our study with a triple analysis of the “end” of the Middle Ages triggered the birth of the Renaissance, the protestant Reformation and Columbus’ voyages to the Americas. During the course we will read excerpts from major works by Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and the One Thousand and One Nights and analyze the portrayal of medieval history in contemporary cinema.