Medieval Europe

The Middle Ages are a period of roughly one thousand years in European history, from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century to Early modern Europe, which began with the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery in the 15th century.

Understand

The Mediterranean region during the 7th century

The Migration Period from the 4th to the 6th century marked the end of the Western Roman Empire (while the east survived as the Byzantine Empire) and the expansion of Germanic tribes across western and southern Europe.

The Middle Ages saw the spread of Christianity to every part of Europe, the Islamic Golden Age with the Caliphates expanding to the Iberian and Balkan peninsulas and the subsequent Christian crusades to the Holy Land as well as the Mongolian invasion from the east and the Black Death killing a substantial part of the European population. During this long period of time many empires and societies emerged, flourished and disappeared.

The periodization varies between parts of Europe; in the Nordic countries the Middle Ages are held to have begun around AD 1000 with the establishment of Christianity and the decline of Viking raids. Some historians also argue that it was the rise of Islam, not the fall of the Roman Empire that caused the biggest shift in the Mediterranean world. Similarly the Renaissance, commonly held to be the transition from medieval to modern times began perhaps as much as a century earlier in Italy than north of the Alps.

The Early Middle Ages from the 5th to the 10th century was a time when political and economic power were largely decentralized. European kingdoms were founded in this period by peoples such as the Franks.

The High Middle Ages from the 11th to the 13th century was a period of urbanization, with foundation of castles, cathedrals, universities and merchant companies such as the Hanseatic League. The crusades united Catholic kingdoms in wars to conquer the Holy Land and other non-Catholic realms. The Mongol Empire reached eastern Europe in the 13th century, opening the Silk Road for European travellers such as Marco Polo.

Frankish Empire during the Early Middle Ages

The Late Middle Ages of the 14th and 15th centuries was marked by crises such as the 1340s Black Death and the Hundred Years War between England and the Kingdom of France. During this period, the nobles and the church lost power to peasants and townsmen for several reasons. The Black Death created a labour shortage, while crop rotation and other technologies improved food production. The printing press made books available to common people. Gunpowder weapons as part of the new "pike and shot" formations (a carefully determined ratio of pikemen and people equipped with firearms) would crush the old heavy infantry armies and the Swiss Confederacy briefly became a European power as it had perfected this method of warfare. While the armies turned from nobles to mercenary professionals ideas that the "war should feed itself" developed, resulting in horrific destruction.

Society

The dominant political and economic system in medieval Europe is known as feudalism. While the word lacks a universal definition, it implies that power was held by local landowners (usually nobles or clergy) and gave some legal privileges, combined with the duty to serve the monarch. Feudalism has been analyzed in different ways, but among the more common ways is a delegation of authority from top (king and high nobles) to lower ranks as well as comparing it to a "protection racket" as organized crime would later establish it - the feudal lords would demand obedience and "taxes" from their underlings in exchange for "protection" - and when a feudal underling was out of line and the overlord had the resources to enforce their will, they were made an example of. Serfdom, a kind of forced servitude where workers were bound to the land for life, was prevalent in many countries (in particular east of River Elbe) but was abolished over time - in the Russian Empire serfdom lasted well into the nineteenth century but took on a uniquely "Russian" character that weirdly had some aspects of agrarian proto-socialism of sorts. While the system of feudalism may seem harsh and brutal to modern observers, it did manage to keep life for most normal peasants largely peaceful, and eventually even managed to establish "perpetual peace of the realm" which ended feuds and highwaymanship. Cities managed to largely free themselves from the feudal system but instead had guilds and wealthy burghers who formed the top few percent of society run the show. There was a rule in many places that a serf who had run away to the city would become free (in the Germanies often "after a year and a day") for which the phrase "Stadtluft macht frei" ("City air frees") was coined. Still, the urban underclasses were not necessarily better off than serfs and virtually every city in Europe had a high mortality rate not made up by their birth rates so they could only maintain their population (or grow) through continuous immigration from rural areas. Apprenticeship was the rule for pretty much any non-agricultural manual labor. Journeymen and apprentices had little rights and even for those who owned their own shop there were often strictly enforced guild rules on quality, price and sometimes even techniques allowed to produce goods. Still medieval handicraft achieved remarkable precision and quality if not nearly the output of later industrial production.

Posterity has associated the "Dark Ages" with the lack of sanitation, named as the cause of the Black Death and other epidemics. The filthiness has been over-generalized; while many Roman aqueducts and baths fell into decay, bathing remained a virtue in some European regions. Cities indeed had issues with manure and other waste, but there was usually some regulation; in contrast to modern belief, waste was not commonly thrown out the window on city streets. Illustrations of people who emptied a potty on bypassers, implied that the scene was not normal, and that there was some disagreement with them. Filthy and disease-ridden cities did not end with the Middle Ages; well into the 19th century, cholera and other infectious diseases were common with increasing death tolls, and believed to spread with miasma, bad air from wetlands; the word malaria is medieval Italian for "bad air". The germ theory of disease became well-known only by the late 19th century, and well into the 20th century, city streets were covered by horse manure, while many European households had no plumbing or organized waste disposal.

Legal system

Posterity has depicted the Medieval justice system as harsh, with death and corporal punishment even for petty crimes. The truth was more complex. In many Germanic cultures, most prevalent in Scandinavia, justice was carried out in things, local assemblies where all free men, and in some cases women, had a voice. Death penalty was in many cases replaced by outlawing; where the condemned lost the protection of the law and could be killed without consequence. In essence outlawing and exile were often nigh-overlapping as losing the protection of society was often a nigh death sentence for people. And after all, if the perpetrator left and never showed up again, he or she was someone else's problem. Civil death was a related sentence, in which the condemned lost their property, the right to stand in court, and other rights of citizens. While corporal punishment was prevalent, many "medieval" torture methods such as the "iron maiden" were unattested, and either based on legend or made up by posterity. See also history of justice. The East Roman Empire under Justinian, the last ruler to speak Latin natively, compiled the most extensive collection of Roman law, the Corpus Iuris Civilis, which continues to form the basis of Civil Law in many European jurisdictions and began to be combined with Germanic (largely oral) legal traditions in Catholic Europe in the High Middle Ages. Germanic law texts where they were written down often take both tradition ("the laws as our forefathers knew them") and the justice of a king as their justification and are often an interesting insight both into the language of their era (though many were also written in Latin) and the concepts of justice. An old Germanic legal concept that might seem alien to modern observers is "were-gild" or "man money" - a payment the perpetrator of a killing could pay to the next of kin of the victim as restitution. While this might seem a disproportionately low penalty for modern sensibilities, it reduced the danger of endless cycles of revenge killings and is in a way still a part of Anglo-Saxon law with "wrongful death" torts to this day.

Trade and transport

Torre del Oro, Seville. Although 90 km from the sea, the tower was the customs post for river-borne trade with the city.

Transport and travel were difficult ventures through most of the Middle Ages. The most convenient mode for freight was sailing along coasts and navigable rivers, or walking or riding along the occasional remaining Roman roads. The idea that common people rarely travelled further than to the neighbor city is over-generalized; craftsmen regularly migrated between cities for work, and many people made a pilgrimage across the continent, or even to the Holy Land.

Towns and cities were often based on trading with almost every town having a market- place – an open area where sellers could pitch their stalls and offer their wares to the general public. Larger towns often had two or more market places, each specialising in a specific product. Many market squares still function as such, particularly in the smaller towns – traders pitch their stalls on market day and sell their everyday wares as they have done for centuries. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some of the markets died down or moved into buildings and the local authorities converted then into open spaces in the town centres where people could meet. In other cases the existence of the original market is known by the name of locality only – often the street will broaden out or the intersection will be more spacious, sometime with nothing more than a tree or fountain in its middle.

The location of towns and cities has often been dictated by not only the requirements for defence, but also for the ability of outsiders to enter the city to buy and sell products. Towns would often develop on river estuaries at the limit of navigation which not only protected ships against storms but also provided an extra layer of defence against surprise attacks. Today many relics of the wharfs and customs posts relating to seaborne trade can be found far inland. In many cities, river boat rides for visitors often start from one or other of these wharfs.

Alongside the markets, local merchants and craftsmen often banded together to form guilds in which they regulated their trades. The leaders of these guilds would meet in the guildhall, where problems would be thrashed out and where justice was dealt out to those merchants or traders who deviated from prescribed practices (such as giving short measure or producing inferior goods). The guildhall often became the centre of local government with autonomy from the king or feudal lord, and in particular Italy and Germany had many sovereign city-states. While only property-owning housemasters and dowagers could vote, these assemblies were an early form of parliamentary government. Many guildhalls are ornate, well preserved buildings and today have een put to a variety of uses; see local governments.

Scholarship and art

With the fall of the Roman Empire, literacy and cultural output declined, with the clergy remaining as the caretakers of the written word, and Latin as the language of scholarship and the Catholic church; a role that remains until present day. For reasons still not entirely understood the vast majority of ancient literature was lost in a relatively short time frame. Cassiodorus who lived in the 6th century in Italy tried to conserve ancient learning in a cloister called "Vivarium" he had founded and all the books he could get his hands on are still available to us today, but apparently a much vaster number had already been lost by then. A further problem was the knowledge of Greek in the West declined substantially and most learned men in the Latin West could only access Greek writing if there was a Latin translation available. Many classical works survived through Arabic translation in the Islamic Golden Age, and the Silk Road brought knowledge from Imperial China as well as other Asian cultures, including innovations such as the compass and gunpowder.

Functional folk medicine and folk science (such as the understanding of weather) overlapped with folklore and surviving pagan faiths, with ideas interchanging across the Afro-Eurasian landmass. Crafts such as astrology and alchemy were to a large extent based on superstition; still, many of their methods were the foundation for the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries, alchemists being credited with innovations such as distillation and oil painting. Folk magic, practiced by cunning men and women, was at times called witchcraft; but the witch-hunts which are today commonly associated with the Middle Ages began in earnest only in the late 15th century. Witch hunting was just as often combatted by the Catholic clergy as it was encouraged and several non-Catholic areas engaged in severe persecution. The famed Spanish Inquisition actually established a standard of proof for any "witchcraft" accusation that was nigh-impossible to match, given that witchcraft does not actually exist. There are also records of people deliberately committing "heresy" after having been accused of a "secular" crime in order to be tried by a church court which sometimes had higher standards of evidence and less use of torture.

The High Middle Ages saw the rise of universities and scholasticism, an intellectual movement based on Christian theology and Graeco-Roman philosophy. The scholastic view of the natural and spiritual world grew complex over the centuries; a famous exposé is Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, depicting hell (inferno), purgatory and paradise. It was published in 1319 in Dante's native Tuscan language, which over the succeeding centuries became established as standard Italian. Besides being notable as one of the first works of literature in a Romance vernacular to reach a mass audience, it is also a surprisingly "modern" work as it is in essence "self insert fan fiction" in which Dante makes not-so-veiled commentary about Italian politics of his age, his admiration for the poet Virgil and his admiration for a woman who probably barely knew him.

The image of Medieval scholarship as ignorant and superstitious has been exaggerated in modern times. For instance, few if any scholars believed that Earth was flat; good estimates of Earth's circumference were made already in Hellenic Greece. While the Voyages of Columbus made Europeans aware of the New World, few people doubted that Earth was spherical. In fact, it was those very estimates of earth's size (pretty accurate, as it turns out) that were used as arguments against Columbus' proposals - he'd have run out of provisions well before getting anywhere if the Americas hadn't been "conveniently" where they are.

Architecture

See also: Old towns

In western Europe, the Early Middle Ages left behind fewer and smaller buildings than the lost Roman Empire, most of them stone churches, monasteries and fortifications. Roman architecture survived and evolved in the Byzantine Empire; the Hagia Sophia was built in the 6th century. Despite Vitruvius remaining a well-studied classic in the Latin West, the lack of manpower and resources made many Roman architectural techniques and technologies disappear.

The High Middle Ages saw the rise of Romanesque architecture, with similarities to Roman architecture, and later Gothic architecture, prevalent in churches, universities and some grand houses. Renaissance architecture arose from the 14th century. These styles have seen later revivals, in particular during the romantic nationalism of the 19th century; buildings that look medieval might be much younger. In the High Middle Ages many towns would embark on truly "generational" projects with the construction of major churches - often it would take over a century from laying the first stones to topping out the roof. As structural engineering in those days was more art than science, some buildings collapsed during building, but it is more common that safety margins were so large that the structures have endured into our times - some even surviving aerial bombardment in World War II. To give an example of the timescales involved, construction of Cologne Cathedral was started in 1248, fizzled out in the mid 16th century, was restarted in the 1840s, completed in 1880 and there has been ongoing renovation for most of the post-war period.

A courtyard of the 14th-century Raseborg Castle in Snappertuna

At least since the High Middle Ages, most medieval towns and cities had some fortifications. Castles were fortified residences for a king or some other ruler; some of them large enough to contain a whole town. City walls could be used for defense, though their daily usage was for toll collection. City walls and castles became obsolete as gunpowder weapons became more advanced. Most walls were torn down as cities grew - often to make way for railways or the automobile. Given their role in toll collection, they had few defenders at the time they were torn down. While quite a few remain, it is rare for them to still be complete. Walls were often accompanied with a ditch, sometimes filled with water - where those remain they form a pleasant bit of green space or waterfront right in the heart of the city. Former walls often form ghostly relics in the shape of circular streets around the core old town, sometimes even named to indicate the former site of the city fortifications.

In rural regions and for nonrepresentative buildings the cheapest materials usually had to suffice. Sometimes this was locally quarried rock, but oftentimes no sufficiently hard material was in reach and thus mud, dung and other substances were filled into a wood "skeleton" making delightful half timbered houses which used to dominate the old towns of much of Central Europe before firebombing. The widespread use of timber in construction is a serendipitous blessing for modern archeologists as the science of dendrochronology can date trees by their telltale sequences of year-rings. In Europe this can be used for absolute datings (of the time a tree was cut down, not necessarily when it came to its final use) well into the medieval age.

Historiography and remembrance

Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in November 1095. One of his speeches there called to make the Holy Land Christian again - this would become known as the Crusades

The term "Middle Ages" is obviously made up by posterity, popularized from the 17th century, to describe the "dark age" between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, either as a period of ignorance and savagery, or a lack of known historic records.

The idea of the "Dark Ages" while deprecated among scholars still sees widespread use among the general public. When it was used as a scholarly term it referred to a break in the written record, especially when previously literate societies stopped producing written works. The term is still used to some extent in that sense for ancient Greece between the Bronze Age Collapse and the Classical Age. If the concept of the "dark middle age" is applicable at all, it would be specific for western Europe from the 5th to 8th centuries, as the legacy of written records, architecture and artifacts was meager, but far from absent - even in the "darkest" times someone in Europe was writing things down and the erstwhile much neglected oral record (often in the form of sagas or legends) preserves some things also confirmed by archaeology. Finally, many peoples outside the Roman Empire were illiterate both during and after the Roman age, and appear to have been barely affected by the fall of Rome, if at all.

Many non-Western civilizations saw tremendous progress during this millennium. The Islamic Golden Age developed the Graeco-Roman heritage of philosophy, medicine, architecture and art. And even within Europe, there were periods of tremendous advancement like the "Carolingian renaissance" under Charlemagne or the High Medieval era when cities flourished and scholasticism (later derided as "monks arguing about how many angels can dance on a pinpoint" by anti-Catholic authors) reached levels of sophistication comparable to ancient philosophy.

For those and other reasons, the term "Middle Ages" has been challenged by historians since the 20th century; some preferring to call it the "postclassical age".

Present-day medieval events may include jousting, just like tournaments in the Middle Ages

The 19th century romantic movement revised the patronising view of the Middle Ages, and depicted medieval life as close to nature, full of adventure and mystery. Nationalist movements searched for a common past, and the re-interpretation of legends such as the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf, the Finnish Kalevala (composed in the 19th century but based on oral traditions claimed to be medieval), King Arthur and Robin Hood.

Since the 19th century, the Middle Ages and their folklore have inspired fiction; both historical fiction, horror fiction and fantasy worlds, including Dracula, JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and some Astrid Lindgren works. Goethe's magnum opus "Faust" is ultimately based on a medieval folk tale and the famous first scene occurs (according to stage directions) "in a high Gothic room". The Middle Ages are a popular setting for reenactment and live-action roleplaying. "Renaissance fares" or "middle age markets" are held in many towns aiming for more or less accurate recreations of medieval times.

The music of the Middle Ages was the predecessor for European classical music and folk music, as well as contemporary medieval music with varying degrees of authenticity. Among perhaps the best known pieces of medieval music are the Carmina Burana (songs from Benediktbeuren in Bavaria) which are however best known with the melodies Carl Orff added to them as scholarship could not recreate the original melodies back then - it now can and the medieval melodies of course sound nothing like what Orff created. Medieval inspired music (again of varying degrees of authenticity) is often played at Middle Age Markets and some of the bands from that subculture have achieved mainstream success.

Eat

Medieval European food lacked many New World crops, such as potatoes, tomatoes, and zucchini. Turnips, leeks and other root vegetables were staples later replaced by the potato. While spices were a luxury, black pepper was well-known, and garlic was grown domestically. Barley, oats, and rye were consumed as bread, porridge, gruel, and pasta by people of all classes; wheat was generally more expensive. Cheese, fruits, and vegetables were important supplements for the lower orders while meat was more expensive and generally more prestigious. Game, meat acquired from hunting, was common only on the nobility's tables in the farmlands of western Europe, and more common in the forests of northern and eastern Europe. The most prevalent butcher's meats were pork, chicken, and other poultry. Beef, which required greater investment in land, was less common. In coastal areas, a wide variety of freshwater and saltwater fish was also eaten, with cod and herring being mainstays among the northern populations. Food was regularly pickled, cured or salted for conservation, making salt a valuable commodity.

Destinations

Map of Medieval Europe

All over Europe there are countless buildings and towns from the Middle Ages, some in better condition, some in ruins. Being a period of many small states and much warfare, virtually every urban settlement had a defensive wall. While they were made less useful by the advent of gunpowder weapons many of them were preserved into the railroad or even automotive age when traffic necessities were deemed more important than "outdated stuff" in many towns. Castles also flourished during the medieval era and many remain in various states of ruin or preservation.

50.77486.08391 Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle). The residence of Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, who ordered the Palatine Chapel to be built. This was to become the first part of the world heritage listed Aachen cathedral, which is also the emperor's final resting place. (updated Dec 2020)

43.949334.805872 Avignon. This city was the abode of the popes from 1309 to 1376 and then to one of two claimants to the Papacy (the other being in Rome) until 1403. The legacy of that period, sometimes called the "Babylonian captivity" of the popes, is the Palais des Papes (Papal Palace). It is an imposing building, and while many of its frescoes were destroyed by anti-clerical French revolutionaries, it is still very much worth seeing. (updated May 2022)

41.3842.1783 Barcelona. La Ciudad Condal, the City of the Counts, always a place of great trade and importance, it was the royal seat of the Crown of Aragon by the time it merged with the Crown of Castile to form Spain. The Royal Dockyards, today the Naval Museum, feature lovely Gothic military architecture, and the most preserved extant bits of the former city wall, of Roman origin. (updated Dec 2020)

50.9180.4834 Battle. The site of the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066, when the invading Normans under William the Conqueror beat the Anglo-Saxon army and killed the king Harold Godwinson. The Normans would eventually conquer all of England, William became the England's first Norman king and he ordered the Tower of London to be built. (updated Dec 2020)

53.0778.8085 Bremen. A Hanseatic city, still an independent free city, equivalent to a German state, together with its harbour Bremerhaven. Famous for its "Four Musicians" from the Grimm brothers' fairy tale. Has a lovely preserved medieval city centre. (updated Dec 2020)

53.0778.8086 Bruges. A relatively small city, once part of the Hanseatic League, with an exceptionally well-preserved historical centre, city wall and surrounding canal. (updated Mar 2024)

51.208883.224167 Carcassonne. Famous for its big medieval citadel towering over the present-day city. A center of the Cathars which was fought over during the Albigensian Crusade of the early 13th century. (updated Dec 2020)

41.01228.9818 Constantinople. In 330 Emperor Constantine who earlier had converted to Christianity as the first Roman emperor moved his capital to the former town of Byzantium (present-day Istanbul). This led to the split of the Roman Empire into a western and an eastern part. The western part would survive for about a century and a half, but the eastern part, known as the Byzantine Empire, would survive for more than a millenium, until 1453 when the Ottomans marched in. Known as the "second Rome", it would become the center for the Eastern Orthodox Christianity after the Great Schism in 1054. (updated Dec 2020)

37.884-4.7769 Córdoba. Former capital of a Roman province (Hispania Ulterior), a Moorish state (Al-Andalus) and a Caliphate, it has seen the birth of figures like Seneca, Averroes, and Maimonides. (updated Dec 2020)

42.64027818.10833310 Dubrovnik. Formerly known as Ragusa, this city was a protectorate of the Byzantine Empire and one of the major Mediterranean merchant republics.

43.76911.25811 Florence (Firenze). Politically, economically, and culturally, Florence was the most important city in Europe for around 250 years, from some time before 1300 until the early 1500s. Florentines reinvented money, in the form of the gold florin. This currency was the engine that drove Europe out of the Dark Ages, a term invented by Petrarch, a Florentine whose family had been exiled to Arezzo. However, the period Florence is best known for is the Renaissance. (updated Dec 2020)

44.4068.93612 Genoa (Genova). The capital of one of the most powerful maritime republics for over seven centuries, from the 11th century to 1797, nicknamed la Superba ("the proud one") by Petrarch due to its glories on the seas and impressive landmarks. Particularly from the 12th to the 15th century, the city was a powerhouse in the commercial trade in Europe, one of the largest naval powers of the continent, and among the wealthiest cities in the world. (updated Dec 2020)

37.179-3.60813 Granada. Former capital of the Emirate of Granada, which fell in 1492, the last target of the Spanish Christian Reconquista. It features a must-see Arab royal palace and fortress, the Alhambra. (updated Dec 2020)

50.061719.937414 Kraków. A lively trading point during the Middle Ages, and the Polish capital from 1038 to 1596, which was sacked by the Mongols and rebuilt. Notable sights are the royal Wawel Castle complex and the old town square. (updated Dec 2020)

53.867710.686115 Lübeck. One of the most important cities of the Hanseatic League with some impressive brick Gothic buildings from the Middle Ages. (updated Dec 2020)

54.0419.028116 Malbork. The town is called Marienburg in German, and so does its main attraction – the world's largest castle measured by land area. The large Gothic brick Malbork Castle was finished in 1406 as the headquarters of the Teutonic Order, a Catholic order that took part in crusades to the Holy Land and ruled much of today's Baltic states in the Late Middle Ages. (updated Dec 2020)

48.85210.48917 Nördlingen (Bavarian Swabia). Built inside a 15 million year old, 25 km diameter wide impact crater - the Nördlinger Ries - of a meteorite which hit with an estimated speed of 70,000 km/h, and left the area riddled with an estimated 72,000 tons of micro-diamonds. First mentioned in recorded history in 898, in 1998 the town celebrated its 1100th anniversary. The town was the location of two battles during the Thirty Years' War. (updated Dec 2020)

58.5231.27518 Novgorod. First mentioned in manuscripts as early as 859. Together with Kyiv, Novgorod was a very important cultural, social, and economical centre in Rus, and was the capital of one of the first European democracies, the Novgorod Republic, addressed publicly as Gospodin Veliky Novgorod, "Lord Novgorod the Great". (updated Dec 2020)

50.087314.420519 Prague. Prague Castle, towering over the city and listed as the "largest ancient castle in the world" by the Guinness World Records was built during the 9th century, and soon a city started growing around it. It became the Bohemian capital, and in the 14th century the Holy Roman capital during the rule of Charles IV. (updated Dec 2020)
49.377210.179620 Rothenburg ob der Tauber (Middle Franconia). A former free Holy Roman Imperial city, famous for its medieval town centre (Altstadt), seemingly untouched by the passage of time, encircled by its undamaged 14th-century town wall. (updated Dec 2020)
42.880447-8.54630321 Santiago de Compostela. This walled city is legendary as the place where the remains of the Apostle, St. James are said to have been discovered. These relics gave rise to a chapel during the reign of Alfonso II of Asturias and Galicia (791–842), and then a church in 899. The current grand cathedral was constructed from 1075-1122 and consecrated in 1211. A number of changes were made in subsequent centuries, including the addition of a Baroque façade in the 18th century, but the building can still be considered basically Romanesque. It is a major site for pilgrimages; see Way of St. James. (updated May 2022)
59.61617.71622 Sigtuna. Sweden's capital from the 10th to the 13th centuries; sacked by pirates in 1187, leading to the construction of a castle in Stockholm which later became the country's capital. Between 1648 and 1666, the city suffered three city fires and was eventually abandoned. It was revived in the 1910s as a nationalist project. (updated Jan 2021)
59.3333318.0666623 Stockholm. Sweden's capital since the 13th century. Gamla stan is a preserved medieval city, with Life of Vikings, the Museum of Medieval Stockholm, the Historical Museum, the Nordic Museum, and Skansen.

59.4373424.7453224 Tallinn. Formerly known as Reval, the city is known the capital of Estonia and important port town of the Baltic Sea since the 13th century when it became a member of the Hanseatic League in 1285. The picturesque medieval Old Town (Vanalinn) has been astonishingly well preserved and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997.

39.861-4.02325 Toledo. A former Roman fortress city, perched atop a dramatic bend of the Tagus river, has been a Visigothic royal seat as well, and features Spain's most important cathedral, in Gothic style. (updated Dec 2020)

49.75656.640626 Trier. The former Roman city lays claim the title of "oldest German city". A big local center of power since the Roman Imperial Crisis of the 3rd century, certainly the most important Roman town of the Germania province, it features a unique mix of Roman repurposed and Romanesque architecture. (updated Dec 2020)

47.3870.727 Tours. On 10 October 732 the Battle of Tours was fought between the Franks and the Umayyad Caliphate. The Franks were victorious, the Umayyad commander Abd al-Rahman ibn Abd Allah al-Ghafiqi was killed in battle, and it marked the end of the spread of Islam in Western Europe. (updated Dec 2020)

41.00539.71828 Trabzon. A Greek colony and trade hub on a nice natural harbour at the southeastern coast of the Black Sea. After a Turkmen attack on the city was repelled by a local force in the 1080s, the city broke relations with the Byzantine Empire, becoming an independent state, the Empire of Trebizond ruled by the Komnenos family, which also provided several emperors to the Byzantine throne in Constantinople. The longest surviving rump Byzantine state, the empire of Trebizond was captured by the Ottoman Turks in 1461, almost a decade after the fall of Constantinople. (updated Dec 2020)
59.858117.644629 Uppsala. The site of a famous pagan temple, which was torn down in the 11th century, as Sweden was christianized. Seat of the Swedish archbishop since the 12th century, and of Uppsala University since 1477. (updated Jan 2021)
45.43412.3330 Venice. During this timeline, La Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia rose to become the world's wealthiest and most successful city-state, and this is reflected in its historic sights. (updated Dec 2020)

57.638418.294731 Visby (Gotland). Known for the city wall, the Cathedral and many church ruins. In 1995 the old city on the west coast of Sweden's largest island was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. Has an annual Medieval festival, Medeltidsveckan. (updated Dec 2020)

49.6319448.36527832 Worms. Claiming to be the site of some of the events of the Niebelungenlied (if they are indeed based on real events, it is not entirely sure they did take place in Worms) and also the site of some Imperial Diets which gives the humorous (in English) turn of phrase "Diet of Worms".

53.9626-1.077633 York. The ancient capital of the former Roman province of Britannia Inferior is rich in Roman, Viking, Norman and medieval English history. The city walls are well-preserved and within are the magnificent Minster, cobbled alleys and wharves, and a teetering castle stump. (updated Dec 2020)