With all of the Mongol savagery and Crusade-related horror and fiasco, you probably thought the thirteenth century sounded kind of rough. Well, turns out that an awful lot of people in the fourteenth century looked back to the robust prosperity of their grandparents and great-grandparents as a golden age that would probably never come again. This week, we start to see some of the appalling horrors that made the 1300s a century to remember, in one's darkest nightmares!
1. In the period of 1250-1350, say the historians, trade in this stuff was “the backbone and driving force in the English medieval economy.” And at the beginning of the 1310s, its export – mostly to Flanders – was at its very peak. What was England’s great proto-industrial export commodity?
2. The Great Pyramid had been the tallest building in the world for thousands of years, but when this building was completed in 1311 it was the new world champion. It would hold the record for 238 years, when its central spire was destroyed by a storm in 1549.
Here’s what it looks like today, and a map to help you find it. Name that Building!
3. In the twelfth century, the settlement shown here grew with in-migration from nearby regions that had been struck by drought. But by the 1310s, it had itself been abandoned, also due to drought. Where is it?
4. Construction finished in or around the 1310s on King Haakon V’s Akershus Fortress. The presence of the fortress, and the long-term residency of the king, helped make __________ its country’s capital.
5. In 1312, a Genoese adventurer named Lancelotto Malocello found and lived for a couple of decades on an archipelago off the west coast of Africa. The Greeks, Romans, and Phonecians had all been there, but Malocello is usually said to have “rediscovered” them. Today they are part of Spain. What are they called?
6.
Celebration in Jade Pool, dated at 1314, is an example of the medieval art of what country?
7. In September 1315, Edward Bruce – brother of the King of Scotland – led an army to victory at the Battle of Moiry Pass near Armagh. Beyond being a way to hassle the English, it was also a good start to his ultimately doomed attempt to revive the High Kingship of ____________.
8. It
was the first of a series of large-scale crises that struck Europe early in the fourteenth century. Most of Europe (extending east to Russia and south to Italy) was affected. It
caused millions of deaths over an extended number of years and marked a clear end to the period of growth and prosperity from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. It
was marked by extreme levels of crime, disease, mass death, and even cannibalism and infanticide.
And, it was not a plague. What manner of horribleness was the Great __________ of 1315-1317?
Like a lot of decades on either side of it, the 1310s saw a great deal of what can seem to modern eyes like very complicated conflict between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.
9. In what country were the Guelphs and the Ghibellines the major political factions?
10. In very simplistic terms, Guelphs supported one institution, and Ghibellines another. What were these opposing institutions?
Through History with The New Monday Quiz: the 1300s
1. Covering Lazio, Marche, Umbria, and Romangna from 1300 to 1871:
The Papal States.
2.
South is up on the
Tabula Rogeriana, which you can pick out from various details.
3. Avoirdupois is
the weight system of pounds and ounces, or at least one of them.
4. From "Tuareg" and "salt caravans" we can figure that Agadez must be in
the Sahel of West Africa, but knowledge or a good guess would place it in modern
Niger.
5. The Condottieri were
mercenaries in medieval Italy.
6. Robert the Bruce was King of
Scotland.
7. Piers Gaveston prospered for a while as King Edward's best buddy, but the nobles didn't much like the open favoritism and
he got exiled a couple of times and then, eventually, killed. Or, per pfly,
it "worked out badly for him. In a Game of Thrones-y way." You can read all about it in Marlowe!
8. Philip IV's novel solution to a debt crisis is why you never see
Knights Templar around anymore.
9. Clement V moved the Papacy to
Avingnon.
10.The tallest building, for this one last decade, was
The Great Pyramid.
It kind of feels like everybody tied at awesome. You all do much better at these than I would.
Christine M and
UnwiseOwl were probably the rightest, although the Owl loses .03 point for not anticipating that there was a reason that I asked about the tallest building in the decade that I did.
