ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY confirm that, from prehistoric times, people created fortified places, and others tried to capture them. Ancient civilisations such as Greece, Rome, Persia, India and China reached high levels of strength, sophistication and advanced technology in both defence and attack.

Two of the last great empires of the ancient world, Rome (in its western division) and Persia, were replaced altogether between the fifth and seventh centuries AD, leaving a much transformed eastern Rome (Byzantium) as the sole memory of the classical world in Europe, Asia Minor, the Middle East and North Africa. China underwent dramatic upheavals, with “barbarian” invasions and new dynasties, while maintaining cultural continuity.

The following thousand-year period is known to Western historians as the Middle Ages, and it had sufficient common characteristics to justify it being seen as another historical era. The term “medieval” has been used to suggest an interval of ignorance, superstition, barbarism and “darkness” between the glories of classical civilisations before, and a more enlightened modern age after, born in Europe with the Renaissance, then exported to other corners of the world (whether wanted or not) through imperialist expansion. This book tries to view medieval history in its own terms. But medieval times were ignorant, barbaric and, for most of humanity most of the time, miserable. Only for a period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries (in Europe) was there sustained economic growth and prosperity, and even then economic development was very slow, despite significant technological innovation that made for substantial improvements in productivity. Normally, much of the surplus that was generated from the economy went (or was expropriated) to sustain the religious institutions and the lifestyle of the numerically relatively small class of rulers. Although medieval societies were different from each other and changed substantially over time, sometimes making the upper levels of the peasantry or townsfolk barely distinguishable (in economic terms) from the lower levels of the nobility, the rural knights, the fundamental shape of society remained the same, and status or caste continued to maintain social distinctions. The glories of the age, the magnificent architecture of cathedrals and major castles, stood in extreme contrast to the misery of life, most of the time, for the overwhelming majority.