Gone Medieval - Global Middle Ages with Peter Frankopan

Episode Date: April 23, 2022

The term “Middle Ages” is commonly used but really only applies to a Western European view of history. It was created at the beginning of the Early Modern period in England to categorise what had gone before.The acclaimed historian Peter Frankopan is widening the geographic focus to understand the period in world history as a whole, and counter a Euro-centric perspective that has dominated and shaped our view of the past.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Peter Frankopan joins Matt Lewis to explore where the real centre of global geography sat then, and why life on our own doorstep is important - but far from the whole story.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Middle Ages is a tricky term. It really only applies to a Western European view of history and it was created at the beginning of the early modern period in England to categorise what had gone before. For most of the world, there was no middle, at least not when we think of it taking place. Historian Peter Frankapan, the author of Silk Roads, is the perfect person to explain to us why the medieval period is so much bigger than Western Europe, where the centre of global geography sat then and why our doorstep is important, but far from the whole story.

Thank you very much for joining us today, Peter. Great, nice to be with you. So I guess what we're trying to look at here is how did we get this idea of the world being so Eurocentric during the medieval period? So what would you call the centre of a medieval world? I think if we look at some old maps, they tend to put Jerusalem as literally the centre of the world, but we also have this idea of it leaning much, much further west.

So where would you place the centre of the medieval world? I think you place the centre of the world wherever you're standing. I mean, you know, I can show you maps from Turkic and Turkish texts, which places it in cities in Central Asia that people literally never heard of, like Balasagoon. So generally, we are each of us the centre of our own worlds. You know, Jerusalem has a particular importance resonance for the people of the Abrahamic faiths, for Christians, Jews and Muslims. And so the sort of religious and spiritual idea that there is a kind of central focal point, obviously is one thing.

But, you know, I think we shouldn't get carried away even with those worlds, you know, for all of us, our own conceptualizations about what's important starts with our own backyard. And we can have lots of ideas about, you know, how New York is that great or Shanghai or Cape Town or big cities in the world. without ever having visited them. But those are all sort of, I wouldn't necessarily say surreal, but, you know, they're not real experiences. So I think we start with where people are living. And, you know, in the worlds that I work on and the connections across that link Asia, Europe,

and North Africa through the Indian Ocean world, when one thinks about exchange, people are very unbothered about the idea of there being a centre in the first place. I mean, it's quite a Eurocentric question, I guess, in the first place, about why do we need to have a centre? Why do we need to have a kind of fixed point?

why do we need to have a sort of story that explains everything rather than rolling set of narratives that one finds in other parts of the world? I guess it's part of human nature to think of your own doorstep as the most important place in the world. Yeah, I think that's right. I think you start with what you know, you start with who's in front of you, your next door neighbours, and evidently, even the word civilisation we specifically means in its strict meaning the study of cities

and where civilisation starts where you have lots of people living together. And I guess what happens when you find cities is that they bring people, or they typically bring people from near and far to buy and sell goods. And so the velocities of exchange are much higher than they would be living in the countryside. So you might think that you're starting out with your own backyard. But if you're living in a city and it's a big city with lots of people, then it's the fact that you can hear different languages, different lifestyles, you can have different foods, different kinds of experiences.

Those kinds of things tend to mean that where you have the highest and most vibrant levels of exchange are in cities that have large population sizes. And in the middle ages that we're talking about, which is a very European concept anyway, the fact of the matter is most of the big cities in the world were not in Europe. I mean, the only real exception to that is the city of Constantinople of a population of maybe quarter of a million, maybe even half a million. But compare that to cities like Baghdad or Kaifeng or Merv with a population certainly into the hundreds of thousands. In Chang'an, population of, according to some sources, of well over a million. And so that just means that the interactions that people have, the knowledge exchange as well as the commercial exchanges,

are significantly enhanced. And that's not what the European Middle Ages looks like, where we find small cities, you know, Paris and London, maybe 20,000 people. It means that the experiences of what it means to be civilized, let alone urbanized or whatever, are just much, much lower. And of course, the other thing which we forget about Europe, because our geography are all scrambled by the age of European empires, is that, you know, Paris is very well located if you're in the UK and you want a weekend away. It's not very well located if you are trying to bring fragrances and spices and aromatics from South Asia, or you're trying to bring silks and textiles from China or Central Asia. The European landmass in northern Europe is miles away from

anywhere, so you don't tend to get visitors coming from different places. You don't tend to get people speaking different languages and therefore not so many bringing different ideas. And of course, as all of us know, the one big thing about a metropolis is that you have lots and lots of different influences. And it would stand to me to reason that the more kinds of impulses, the more kinds of people you have coming from near and far, the greater the richness of that experience would be. That's why cities like London and New York are very different today, even to cities like Chongqing and Shanghai, which I know all of your listeners will know. Chongqing has a urban population of around about 30 million people, but very, very few of them are not from mainland. China. And so that mix of people who are traveling and bringing their wares, trying to make their fortunes and to buy and sell things and to learn, those look different. So it's no surprise,

I suppose, that the big intellectual powerhouses in the period between about 500 and 1,500, you know, they're really not in Europe. I mean, Oxford and Cambridge get going around about 12, 1,300. Bologna has an important cultural centre. Rome, of course, likewise, Paris has an important university. But, you know, the really the best scholars in the world are in places like Bukhara and Isfahan and Kaifung, Shian, Damascus, Baghdad, and so on, because population sizes, breed funding, patronage, political clout, and above all, they attract other people who are clever, and you need lots of people who are clever to bounce ideas off. So the experience looks very different in Europe to what it looks like in North Africa, for example, or in East Africa and

Ethiopia too is an important part of that knowledge exchange with the Indian Ocean, and then, of course, Asia and its different clusters of network worlds as well. So, you know, Europe just has a very different and quite deflated positions. It's not good or bad. It's just what it is. And do you think that cauldron in which we have all of these high centres of population, lots of travel and movement ideas and goods moving around, does that play into why so many of the world's major religion spring from this same region, so many ideas that we still have today about being Caucasian, brings from this very region. Is that the reason all of this happens in that place? I don't know. I don't think that there's a sort of rhyme or reason to it. I don't think that

if populations were the only and large population is the only sort of key cause, then you expect lots of other things to flow from it too. I think that religion is much more complicated than saying stick a lot of people in a room together or a lot of people in a city together and they'll come up with different ideas about cosmologies. The reason why the major global religions have managed to spread and survive is because they were effective. And they gave good answers to complex questions, and they gave compelling answers to complex questions. Obviously, it helps if there's that information and knowledge and ideas can be disseminated and spread, but that doesn't just involve people. That involves charismatic individuals. It involves

high-level scholarship, involves thought, and it involves an ability to adapt as well. So I don't think that there's a particular answer to that one. I mean, it seems to me quite obvious that Christianity and Judaism that are born in the Middle East, as it's now called, the Near East or in Palestine and Israel, Islam that's born in Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz in what's now Saudi Arabia, but the heartlands of the Islamic world are in Damascus and Samara and in Baghdad eventually. The blending of how these global religions interact with each other, exchange with each other and compete is obviously quite an important part of their success. So I think it's not just so simple as to say they spring from where you have populations,

but interaction is a very important way of making ideas better and sharper. And, you know, in Europe, there are plenty of other religions that Christianity has to compete with when it starts to spread, not least all the ancient Roman religions, which are multiple. And, you know, to displace those, Christianity needs to give better and sharper and more compelling answers, otherwise it doesn't take off. And do you buy into it all the idea, of the dark ages in Europe being a period in which that continent specifically is kind of culturally and scientifically and in other ways in the dark compared to other parts of the world. I mean, I think there's been a bit of a pushback against that, but were we in the dark in

Europe compared to other places in the world? Well, you know, I think his story's got to be careful about this one. I mean, I've got lots of friends of mine and colleagues who are very keen to sort of to downplay ideas of the dark ages and to sort of bring it back into the light and so on. And, you know, I'm perfectly happy to let everybody cut the cloth the way that they want, and a lot depends on how well you do it. I mean, for me, I suppose that there are sort of some fundamentals, which is, you know, let's look at literacy levels. You know, can more people read after the fall of the Roman Empire than could read beforehand? And in any event, is that a particularly

useful metric? I mean, so what does that even prove in the first place? I think what's obvious is that after the Western Roman provinces fall around about the 400s onwards, that you see a major decline of civic infrastructure, of a political unity, of literacy levels, and high levels of localised violence. And those seem to be quite good indicators of the fact that institutional protection and overlay has disappeared for all sorts of different reasons and presupposes, of course, that institutional overlays are good. I mean, we sort of all exist in a world where we believe that states are good in their own right. But it doesn't stand to reason to me at all that somebody living in an agricultural settlement in the year 400 or the year 800 in what's now

France, for example, whether they were able to ask them to compare and contrast. It's not clear to me at all that they're better or worse off with Roman rule or Carolingian rule or no rule at all. So I think a lot depends on how one wants to see it. But in my cosmologies, in terms of the fundamentals, there's no question that the collapse of the Roman Empire brings about complete dip in living standards in Western Europe. There's almost no building in stone. Literacy levels, as I said, plummet. Mortality rates and life expectancies go down. Levels of exchange are massively reduced. And even things like smelting of metals collapses. Is that necessarily bad? Does that mean there's darkness? Those are words that other scholars will have to work out for themselves.

I think what's more interesting from my perspective is that the side of Europe that is much more effervescent in this sort of so-called dark period is the eastern side of Europe. And the eastern side of Europe is still left out of all stories and all narrative histories of Europe. You know, there's no space at all for what's happening in Hungary, which is Hungary is probably the, certainly one of, if not the most important cultural centre in Europe in around about the year 1,000. The Byzantine Empire, an area I work on extensively myself, is usually completely omitted

from the story as well. One, here's nothing about not one, but two, Bolshell. Bulgarian empires that are created in this period. And I think that that's breakdown of what we think of as being Europe is hugely dangerous and damaging. And I'm saying this at a time where we see war in Europe and Ukraine being flattened by a Russian invasion. And I think that our conceptualisation of Europe and thinking about the darkness and the light completely omits any sort of understanding or recognition of the eastern side of Europe, particularly the southeastern quadrant, you know, so the Croatian coast, Greece, Bulgaria, the Balkans, and into Russia,

where things look very, very different to how they look in Western Europe. So I think we struggle with a couple of things. First, I think we're trying to sort of reboot the idea of Europe and say it was not all doom and gloom. And by the way, there's lots going on compared to what's happening in the rest of the world, which I don't completely agree with. But, you know, I understand why scholars are trying to say it. But second, I think our formulations of Europe could do with a bit of a reality check. But part of the problem, I mean, of course, with all these things, is that almost all medievalists in Europe work in Latin. Very few do old church Slavonic, very few do Greek, and very few do Arabic or Syriac or Armenian or other languages a bit further eastwards.

So it means that if you're only dealing with Latin all the time and dealing with Western Europe, then of course your idea of medieval history is going to be not limited or worse. It's just going to be different to if you're looking at exchange across larger distances. So, you know, I think everybody has to work these things out for themselves. I definitely don't think there's a one-size fits-all answer. I mean, for myself, I'm particularly interested in exchange and borrowings and how the world links up to each other. But there's a lot of theory about this at the moment. A lot of people talking about it without a great deal of substance underpinning it. And the ideas of trade and travel and the exchange of ideas are central to your wonderful book,

the Silk Roads, which talked about the paths, the trade routes that linked east and west throughout this period. How far did they extend? How far might we expect things, goods to have travelled during that period? Do we see things, items and ideas from the west reaching the far east and from the east reaching the far west? Most exchange is local. Most exchange is, you know, what you buy from your local farmer or local agricultural produce. You know, not much goes long distance. The stuff that goes long distance is high value and usually low bulk. So things that are bulky are expensive to move and there's no real profit margin. So things that, again, that are shiny and gold and precious are the ones that get photos of them in books because they're the ones

that go over long distances, right? And they're not very many in quantum. And in fact, they are all about elite exchange. And so one has to distinguish, I think, between exchange on a day-to-day basis, And, you know, what does it mean to have objects that have come from China at a court in Western Europe? Or what does it mean to find objects going the other direction? And so one of the problems, I think, is that we shouldn't be thinking about east to west or west to east. That bit in the middle is a hugely important powerhouse in itself of consumption and production. So cities like Samakand, which are very famous and Bukhara and Kiva and so on, are not just sort of locations that ping goods onto the next buyer and eventually that buyer's got to be in Europe.

it's a web of interconnected locations where gift exchange between leaders, where consumption by elites and by the wealthy is looked at differently to perhaps more general consumption patterns. But, you know, and I think one then has to separate the things that, again, we find in shiny museums, you know, golden things and garret and diamonds and so on. You know, some of the things that writers talk most about being most valuable are foodstuffs. You know, one of the ways in which you can show your wealth is by hosting dinner parties. And we know that today. And having not just exotic foods, but stuff that tastes really good is an important part of hosting.

And it's important by showing off one's wealth. And that's not located to a single area or region. That's a kind of seems to be a common human thing. So I think these exchange networks are global insofar as, you know, you can find wood from Southeast Asia and from Vietnam being bought in Rome, in the Roman Empire. You can find spices from all over South Asia being bought and being sold in Ethiopia, in the Red Sea. You can find silks from China in Norway and Scandinavia. But the question is, are these smaller amounts of goods, are they exceptional? And what do they even show?

What does it really prove? For me, what it proves is that there is an awareness and a growing awareness of interconnectivity in a world and of an idea of people's places, locations, trade connections, where it's worth people's while making an effort to get stuck in. And those exchanges seem to me completely self-evident that they are exciting and interesting. And they seem to me to be what drives a lot of the sort of things that we can easily over-romanticize. So travellers and explorers and pilgrims and whatever. But, you know, all of us are curious. People listen to this podcast. You know, every time we watch TV, we're trying to do, every time we read a book, we're trying to learn

something new. And I think that that speaks to our species at its best, which is that we can be curious. But, you know, I can say that as an academic, lots of people aren't curious. Lots of people don't want to learn new things. Lots of people are happy with what they've, what they have. And that's not just okay. It's not my position to say it's okay or otherwise. It's just that's what it is. But some people want to go and travel, want to bring back exotica, want to show them off. And of course, that does shape a narrative because it brings new ideas, new kinds of materials, new kinds of goods, and it can produce change. And so, for example, the silver that comes from Central Asia along the river routes of Ukraine and Russia in exchange for slaves, that silver, that bullion probably plays an important part of kickstarting the early medieval European economy. Because so much silver ends up in the Scandinavian circulatory networks that eventually it gets.

plugged into acquisitions from outside Scandinavia and then the availability of silver, of which is not an enormous amount in Europe. It's a bit, very little gold in Europe, a little bit of silver. But it looks to me that that injection of vast amounts of silver, all from Central Asia, from Samanid mines in what's now sort of Uzbekistan, is absolutely fundamental in reshaping patterns of exchange and creating reasons for people in Europe to move more widely within Europe. So I think that these things, they can produce significant over-spill effects, but they don't always. And you mentioned the slave trade in that. How important was the slave trade in these kinds of economies? Huge. I mean, there's no two words about it. I mean, huge. And the reason

we can know that is because we've got silver finds from hordes that are deposited all along the Russian river systems and Ukrainian river systems, the NEPRA and de Niestra in particular, but also along the vistula up into what's now the Baltic states, and then we can see the amount of silver going in through Gotland and above all, which one of the big islands off the coast of eastern Sweden. And that silver is attesting to large amounts of trade and traffic. And there's not an enormous amount that Europe has to offer in terms of its productivity. I mean, we, like I said, there's a little bit of gold in Europe, but not much. All the things that you'd want to have, if you were playing fantasy, global domination, you'd probably want spices, you'd want silks,

You'd want clever people and universities. You'd want to have, in today's world, oil and digital. But in the medieval world, there's not a great deal of difference of what comes out of the ground in Italy or in France or in Germany. I mean, it's just how it is. Maybe that's one of the reasons why in Europe we fight each other so often. I mean, that's a separate story for another occasion. But what the Scandinavians do and the Vikings who trade down the river systems of Russia and Ukraine,

they do quite well in selling furs and trapping furs. which are in great demand in the Arabic-speaking world, but the key commodity that is the backbone of all of that silver, which is measured in not the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions, but at least in the tens of millions, if not the hundreds of millions of silver pieces, are slaves and primarily women and children, not only, but primarily women and children. And the scale of that trafficking is vast. So, I mean, there's a project we're doing in Oxford at my university,

which calls Slaves for Durham's. And we're trying to sort of get some texture around exactly the numbers involved. But, you know, it's no surprise that some of the great European cities like Dublin or Utrecht or Verdin and above all Venice start as exit ports for slaves to be sold to the east. Because if you want to tap into that world of lapis and silks and fine materials, etc, you've got to have something you've got to give back in return. And by and large, we in Europe didn't have a great deal to offer, but there was an almost infinite demand for slaves.

It would be wonderful to get you back to talk about that when you have got a little more information on that project. Sounds like a wonderful project. Does the medieval worldview, as it was by the end of the period, quite Eurocentric, quite Western-leaning? Does that affect the way that we see the globe today? Are we still dealing with kind of problems and prejudices that were baked in a millennium or more ago?

Absolutely. You won't find anybody you can get to come on your podcast who can tell you the difference between Russian and Ukrainian. You know, we're in the middle of a world, war because we've underinvested not just in our education system, but we've underinvested in thinking about the rest of the world. I mean, again, ask the next person you get on the podcast to name you an Arabic film star or, you know, an Indian pop star or the highest grossing film or album made in China in the last 20, 30 years. No, I mean, it's absolutely self-evident. Again,

that we don't think that other parts of the world have anything to offer. Whereas, you know, I can take you onto the streets of Shanghai, well, post-lockdown maybe. And I can show you, out, a picture of Tom Cruise and David Beckham, and everyone will know who they are. So we expect everyone to learn about us, and we've spent zero time thinking about other people. And that's a product of lots of different things. That's a product of having had an empire, and that's what you bought, I suppose, one of the prices you pay, which is you expect everyone to want to learn about us, because there's no point learning about anybody else.

I suppose some of that is a product of how we think and think about and teach history that we are self-isolating. some of it is about languages and the inability or unwillingness to learn about other parts of the world some of it is about you know just the sheer indolence of accepting the story that other people write and you know until silkboards came out i mean one of the reasons it i think did so well around the world is that you know it's pretty obvious that we should be not just thinking about europe you know it seems to me crazy that everybody knows about henry the eighth and how many wives he had but can't tell you what else is going on in the rest of the world at the same time that

perhaps is more important. But I think history became or has become a sort of series of stories and myths and, you know, feel good tales rather than, it doesn't have to be instructive. I'm not asking history to teach you things that you'll learn about and need for today. But it's not surprising that we completely fail to understand other parts of the world. I mean, you will not go into class from today in the UK and hear a word about the pre-Columbian indigenous peoples of the Americas. You will not hear a single word about sub-taharan Africa other than perhaps a little window into Benin in the 9th century that was sort of inserted during the last history reforms for reasons that were completely unclear. But, you know, just the number of scholars working from the global South

in our institutions here in the UK or the amount of support we give global South institutions from the UK and Europe, you know, it's pathetic, absolutely hopeless. So, I mean, of course, our faculties are filled with scholars who are brilliant, and they are brilliant, writing about the First and Second World Wars or the Tudors or whatever. but it wouldn't hurt for us to be thinking about the world in a more joined up and perhaps more interesting and exciting way. I was going to ask how we do that, but I guess the answer there is education and getting better education on these areas. Yeah, I mean, it involves curriculum. It involves politicians getting out the way and allowing historians to work out, you know, what it is that we think we should teach.

And if I'm being fair, it's not just about history. It's not even just about geography. or things that look like they're similar. This is the same about the sciences too. It's the same about mathematics. I've got children who have grown through the school system and they've learned exactly the same stuff that I did. I'm the other side of 50 now. And they've done all the same fractions,

the same long multiplications. And their world has changed. I mean, all my children said to me when they were having to do long multiplication, they would all say, Dad, won't I just have my mobile phone with me and I can multiply whatever? And I find myself telling them,

no, no, no, it's really important that you can multiply 22,615 times 6,05, and thinking, well, you know, actually do they need to be able to do that in the same way? But, you know, skills do need change. And I think that we are preparing children today for a world that looks like it's 1900 rather than the 21st century. And that's partly because politicians get in the way. It's partly that, you know, sometimes academics and historians can't agree with themselves. But, you know, the real biggest challenge is availability of materials. So, when Silkrose did well, I said to my publishers, you know, I'd love to do a kid's version or younger reader's version to encourage the next generation. There's no point just appealing to people

who are, who've retired or, you know, reading it on their holiday from work. And they rang me back the week later and asked if I meant it and then commissioned me to do it. And what's been great, because that was a huge success, lots of other books have now been produced in children's version, you know, from David Law Sugar through to Tim Marshall and so on, you know, friends of mine who, and it's great to see that, but we maybe didn't have to wait until 2018 when Silk Road's Illustrated, the kids version came out to think that maybe front-line historians or best-selling historians, you know, who know, there are plenty. You know, maybe we should have been thinking about this a bit earlier. How do we make history

accessible? How do we stop making it kind of elite so that the only people who can afford to read this stuff are people on their holidays who can spend 20 quid on a hardback, rather than how do we get our ideas into the classroom? How do we do that? at a price point that's okay, you know, 10 quid for a kid's book. And how do we get those, you know, can we also help get those books into the classroom? And I've been a bit involved with that with my own book and others in helping teachers devise modules for their courses for primary schools, year sevens upwards, but some cases year five's upwards to get young people interested in falling in love with history and to explore how we are all connected. So there are

lots of different answers. It's quite interesting. I get asked by lots of different parts a government to give advice about one thing or another. But the one group that never really comes to ask me anything is the Department of Education. So, you know, that tells its own own story, I guess, insofar as, you know, wouldn't it be straightforward if you were at the DFE to think, how do we increase interest in history, how do we increase interest in any of the subjects we teach in schools? And why don't we get people in a room together to get them to think about how they can do that in a more effective way? And I think there's a lot, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit. But, you know, never, never, never underestimate the ability of a politician to miss an open

goal. I think that's a good challenge for us to end on that perhaps some politicians ought to talk to some historians about how we can do these things better. Thank you very much for your time today, Peter. That's been a wonderful discussion. Thank you. Thanks, Matt. You can join Dr. Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, us a review or rate us wherever you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify. It really does help new listeners to find us. If you're enjoying this podcast and looking for a little bit more medieval goodness in your life, then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter. Just follow

the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.