The Medieval Military Revolution: Parallel Transformations in Warfare
From knights to kataphraktoi to samurai — the medieval military revolution was never just European
How Medieval Societies Explained Natural Disasters: Theodicy Across Civilizations
When earthquakes struck the medieval world, every civilization asked the same question but blamed different people for the answer
How Medieval Societies Managed Water: Irrigation, Urban Supply, and Hydropolitics
Three civilizations, three solutions to humanity's oldest infrastructure challenge—revealing how water control shaped medieval power
The Silk Road's Religious Marketplace: How Faiths Competed for Medieval Converts
Medieval trade routes hosted fierce competition between faiths, where institutional flexibility—not doctrinal purity—determined which religions flourished
The Medieval Information Revolution: How Societies Managed Knowledge Before Print
From Byzantine archives to Islamic libraries to Chinese encyclopedias: how medieval civilizations solved information problems we think are modern
How Medieval Armies Fed Themselves: Logistics That Made Conquests Possible
The unglamorous truth: medieval empires were built not by warriors but by those who could keep them fed.
The Medieval Agricultural Revolution: Parallel Intensification Across Civilizations
From heavy plows to qanats to rice paddies—how Eurasia's civilizations simultaneously revolutionized farming
Medieval Border Zones: How Civilizations Met at Their Margins
Where civilizations blurred and borrowed, frontier zones reveal a connected medieval world that challenges every map we've drawn.
How Medieval Societies Built Trust: Credit, Contract, and Reputation Systems
From Maghribi traders to Chinese guilds, medieval merchants built sophisticated trust systems that rival modern institutions
Why Medieval Cities Grew: Urban Development Patterns Across Eurasia
Three civilizations, three models of urban governance—revealing that cities follow politics, not universal development laws
The Great Divergence's Medieval Origins: Why Europe and China Took Different Paths
Contingent medieval choices—not cultural essences—created the institutional divergence that would matter after 1500
Parallel Renaissances: The Twelfth Century's Global Intellectual Awakening
The Italian Renaissance loses its miraculous uniqueness when we discover that Toledo, Kaifeng, Constantinople, and Kyoto simultaneously pursued the same intellectual projects during the twelfth century.
The Medieval University's Global Cousins: Higher Learning from Bologna to Beijing
How medieval societies from Europe to China each solved the problem of advanced education—revealing multiple paths to cultivating learned elites
The Medieval Climate Anomaly: How Global Warming Shaped Five Civilizations
Paleoclimate data reveals how warming drove parallel expansion across medieval Europe, China, and the Americas—and how cooling triggered simultaneous collapse.
Empresses and Dowagers: How Women Ruled Medieval Empires
Across Byzantium, China, Africa, and beyond, medieval women wielded sovereign power through parallel institutional mechanisms that traditional histories have obscured.
How Medieval Societies Managed Epidemics: Lessons from the Black Death's Global Reach
Comparing European, Islamic, Byzantine, and Chinese responses to the Black Death reveals no civilization possessed superior epidemic management—only different frameworks constraining identical struggles.
Why Medieval States Taxed Religion: Fiscal Strategies Across Civilizations
From Baghdad's jizya to Chang'an's monastery confiscations, medieval rulers everywhere faced the same impossible choice between taxing the sacred and bankrupting the state.
The Afro-Eurasian Commercial Revolution: How Medieval Trade Networks Anticipated Modern Globalization
Before European maritime expansion, medieval merchants built an integrated economy from Timbuktu to Beijing—the first true world system.
Medieval Slavery's Comparative History: Bondage Systems Across Four Continents
Beyond Europe's serfs: how Islamic mamluks, Chinese bondservants, and African captives reveal slavery's diverse medieval forms