The Medieval World, 500–1500: One Thousand Years on Every Continent

In 1324 the ruler of Mali, Mansa Musa, rode to Mecca with a retinue so large and a supply of gold so generous that, an Arab official told a visitor to Cairo some years later, the price of gold in that city stayed depressed for about twelve years. That is a good story. It is also a good lesson in medieval history: the evidence is a story told by someone else, in Arabic, about a place the teller never saw, in an archive that Mali itself did not keep in writing.

A thousand years is a long time to cover in one course, and the course is hard in a particular way. For the first time on this journey the evidence explodes: chronicles, tax rolls, letters, law codes, coins, poems, ship cargoes, buildings. It is also unevenly spread. A graduate of this course keeps a map of the evidence, a feel for how big things really were, and a set of the big arguments, with their ranges.

This piece describes what historians currently think and where they disagree. It mentions several faiths and empires; it does not rank them. Death-toll numbers are ranges because the sources are rhetorical or thin.

The label problem, and a tour in parallel

Italian humanists of the 1400s, led in this by writers such as Flavio Biondo, described the centuries between Rome and their own age as a "middle". The label stuck in Europe and travelled badly. In Tang China there was no middle age; in the Abbasid caliphate there was a golden one; in West Africa the same centuries held the rise of Ghana, Mali and Songhay. Historians now use 500–1500 as a convenient span and say plainly that it is convenient, not natural.

Move the slider and watch ten regions at once.

Around	Islamic world	Byzantium and Latin Christendom	East and South Asia	Africa and the Americas
650	Rashidun conquests; Umayyads next	Byzantine losses to Arabs; Frankish kingdoms	Tang rising (618)	Aksum; Classic Maya
800	Abbasid Baghdad (founded 762)	Charlemagne crowned (800)	Tang; Khmer empire begins (802)	Trade across the Sahara grows
1000	Fatimids in Cairo; Córdoba	Macedonian recovery; towns revive	Song (960); Chola	Ghana; Tiwanaku and Wari gone
1250	Mongols at the gates	Fourth Crusade (1204); universities	Southern Song; Delhi Sultanate	Mali; Great Zimbabwe; Cahokia
1450	Ottomans take Constantinople (1453)	Plague aftermath; printing starts	Ming; Muromachi Japan	Mexica Triple Alliance; Inca expansion

Sources: a different record on every continent

Latin Europe has parchment charters and chronicles; the best-known single record is England's Domesday Book of 1086, a survey of landholding ordered by William I. The Islamic world has chronicles, biographical dictionaries (which matter for the conversion story below), law and scientific books, and, from a Cairo synagogue's storeroom, the Geniza: hundreds of thousands of fragments of letters, contracts and lists, mostly from the 10th to 13th centuries, in which merchants complain about prices and delays. Tang and Song China produced official dynastic histories, gazetteers and household registers, and its caves at Dunhuang preserved a library sealed around 1000 CE. West Africa has oral epics recited by hereditary performers, the jeli or griots, and the notes of Arab travellers and scholars such as Ibn Battuta, who visited Mali in 1352–53. Great Zimbabwe has stone and the finds in the ground. The Inca kept accounts on knotted cords, khipu, of which about a thousand survive and whose full range is not understood. The Mexica painted books, and after the Spanish conquest Nahua scholars worked with the friar Bernardino de Sahagún on the Florentine Codex in Nahuatl and Spanish, compiled between the 1540s and the 1570s.

Pick a source and see what it is good for.

Without JavaScript: chronicles are best for rulers and events; merchants' letters (the Geniza) are best for trade and daily life; tax and land registers are best for numbers; oral epics carry memory and values; archaeology is the best check on everyone.

The general lesson is triangulation: every source has a blind spot, and the mark of a good medievalist is to set two kinds against each other. The Great Zimbabwe case is the standard warning. European writers in the 1800s and early 1900s, and the white-minority government of Rhodesia afterwards, claimed the stone city could not have been built by Africans. Gertrude Caton-Thompson's excavation in 1929 and everything since have shown that Shona-speaking ancestors built it, in dry-stone walls reaching up to about 11 metres, between roughly the 11th and 15th centuries. Archaeology corrected a prejudice that written sources had carried for generations.

Calendars: dating a world with five clocks

A chronicle that says "in the year 656" could be Islamic (656 AH, the Muslim lunar calendar counted from 622), Byzantine, or something else. Medieval documents date by the Hijri calendar, by years of the Byzantine world (Anno Mundi, counting from a supposed creation, year 1 beginning in 5509 BCE, with the year starting on 1 September), by the Chinese reign-era names (Kaiyuan, Xuanhe, Hongwu), by regnal years of kings, by the Christian Anno Domini, and by the Mexica 52-year cycle. The historian's first job is conversion.

The Islamic year is lunar, about 354.37 days, so the Hijri count gains on ours by about 3 years every century. The usual approximation is CE ≈ 0.970229 × AH + 621.58.

Without JavaScript: 656 AH is about 1258 CE (the Mongol capture of Baghdad); 857 AH is about 1453 (the fall of Constantinople); Byzantine year 6961 is 1452–53. Rule of thumb: CE is roughly 622 plus 0.97 times the Hijri year; for Byzantine years, subtract 5509 for September to December and 5508 for January to August.

Cities: who was big, with the error bar

The "largest city in the world" in the medieval period was nearly always Chinese or Middle Eastern; the largest in Latin Europe was Paris, around 1300, at perhaps 80,000 to 200,000. Estimates come from walled areas, grain supply and the odd tax roll, and from the 1987 compilation by Tertius Chandler and the later work of others. They are rough: the top of the table is stable, but the order in the middle shifts depending on which end of each range you believe. Choose the low, middle or high end for each and watch.

Without JavaScript: the biggest cities were Hangzhou (about 500,000 to 1.5 million around 1270), Chang'an (400,000 to 1 million around 750), Kaifeng and Baghdad; Paris, the largest in Latin Europe, had perhaps 80,000 to 200,000 around 1300, and Tenochtitlan about 150,000 to 250,000 in 1500.

Notice what does not change when you move the slider: Chinese and Middle Eastern cities lead, and Cahokia, on the Mississippi near today's St Louis, at 10,000 to 20,000 around 1100, was the largest city north of Mexico. This is a thousand-year-long reminder that Europe's urban weight is a later story.

Conversion and empire: how a faith spreads

In about a century the Arab-led armies of the early caliphs, from 632, built an empire from Spain to the Indus valley, ruled by the Umayyads from Damascus (661–750) and then the Abbasids from Baghdad, a city founded in 762. But conquering a country is not converting it. Richard Bulliet (Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period, 1979) had an ingenious method: collect the names of people in biographical dictionaries, and track how often a person with a Muslim-style name had a father or grandfather with a non-Muslim name. Plotted over generations the share of converts follows an S-curve (a logistic curve): slow, then fast, then slow. He argued that in Iran and several other regions the majority became Muslim during the 9th and 10th centuries, well after the conquest. Critics note that names are a proxy, that biographical dictionaries over-represent scholars, and that regions differ; the shape of the curve is now widely used even where the numbers are argued.

Shape your own curve. The speed is the part that is easy to misjudge: even a "fast" conversion took generations.

Without JavaScript: a midpoint of 860 and a speed of 0.03 per year give about 10% in 787, 50% in 860 and 90% in 933: about 150 years from 10% to 90%.

One more caution about labels: "feudalism" is the same kind of problem for Latin Christendom. Marc Bloch (Feudal Society, 1939–40) gave it its classic form; Elizabeth Brown (1974) and Susan Reynolds (Fiefs and Vassals, 1994) argued that the neat "system" of lord, vassal and fief was largely a later lawyers' construct and that medieval arrangements were far messier. Many medievalists now use the word with care or avoid it.

The Mongols, the plague and numbers you cannot trust

Temüjin was proclaimed Chinggis (Genghis) Khan in 1206. By his death in 1227 Mongol armies had destroyed the Khwarazmian empire in Central Asia; by 1258 they had taken Baghdad (10 February), ending the Abbasid caliphate in the city; by 1279 Kublai's forces had finished off the Song, and the Yuan dynasty (proclaimed 1271) ruled China. At its height the Mongol realm was the largest contiguous land empire in history, on the order of 24 million square kilometres. It also made the Eurasian road safe enough for merchants and envoys for about a century: the Venetian Marco Polo's book of the 1290s is the best-known account, and historians still debate how much of it he saw himself, though most think he did reach China.

The Black Death arrived in the Mediterranean in 1347 and moved through Europe, the Middle East and North Africa until about 1351. It was caused by Yersinia pestis, confirmed by ancient DNA from London burials (Bos and colleagues, 2011); a 2022 study of 14th-century graves near Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan (Spyrou and colleagues) points to Central Asia as an origin, which fits the picture of the Mongol-era trade network carrying it. European mortality is usually put at a third to a half of the population, with some scholars arguing for higher. Estimates of the global toll run from about 75 to 200 million and should be read as informed guesses. What follows in Europe, in labour shortages, higher wages and the end of serfdom in many regions, is itself argued; plague did not do the same thing everywhere.

Empires without our kind of record: Mali, the Inca and the Mexica

Three of this period's great states are in places where the main surviving record is not a library. The empire of Mali grew from the Mande heartland after a victory at Kirina in about 1235 by Sundiata Keita, whose life survives as an epic recited by the jeli, written down and published in the 20th century (D. T. Niane's version of 1960). It controlled gold and salt trade across the Sahara. The epic is a record of values and memory more than of dates, which is one reason travellers' reports matter. Mansa Musa's pilgrimage of 1324–25 is one of the best-dated events in West African history because of those Arabic reports. The claim in popular articles that he was "the richest person in history" cannot be measured and should be read as a way of saying he was very, very rich.

The Inca state, Tawantinsuyu, took shape from about 1438 under Pachacuti and fell to Pizarro's small force and civil war, plague and local allies after Cajamarca in 1532. It ran a road network, labour service instead of money, and a huge storage system, with a population put at somewhere between about 6 and 12 million, and the wide range is the point. The cords of the khipu encode numbers in a decimal system; whether some also record words is argued, with Sabine Hyland's 2017 study of a village khipu's colours claiming that they spell names, which not everyone accepts.

The Mexica of Tenochtitlan, founded about 1325 on an island in Lake Texcoco, formed a Triple Alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopan in 1428 and met Cortés in 1519; the city fell on 13 August 1521. The main narrative sources are written after the conquest, in Spanish hands, so a historian reads them for what the Nahua authors saw and what the friars wanted. A thousand years of evidence, once again, are not of one kind.

What a graduate just sees

• "Medieval" is a European label; the same thousand years had a golden age elsewhere.
• Each region's evidence is of a different kind, and a good historian sets two kinds against each other.
• A medieval date needs converting: 656 AH is 1258 CE, and the Byzantine year starts in September.
• Medieval city sizes have error bars of a factor of two or more, and the top of the ranking was nearly always Chinese or Middle Eastern.
• Conversion to a new faith follows an S-curve over generations, not a switch.
• A fall in recorded population is a mix of death, flight and lost records; read census drops with care.
• Stone, cords and epics are evidence too; the absence of a library does not mean the absence of a state.

Where it shows up next

• The Early Modern World, 1450–1800 (35/88): the Ottomans come out of this world, and the Atlantic crossing reaches the Inca and Mexica.
• Historiography (35/85): Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), Rashid al-Din and Sima Guang are historians in their own right, with theories of why states rise and fall.
• Epidemiology (35/58) and Public & Global Health (35/61): the Black Death is the template of a trade-route pandemic.
• Western Music History (35/70) and Music Traditions of the World (35/69): Gregorian chant, the Andalusi muwashshah and Chinese court music belong to this thousand years.
• In the world: the names of today's countries, borders and faiths, the Silk Road projects of the present, and the contested histories in Histories of Nations (32).

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1974), is the classic; for a modern survey, Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome (Penguin, 2009), for the West, with Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000 (Scribner, 2020), for the connected world.
• 📘 Gentler. Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World (2020); and Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (2015).
• 🌐 Free text. OpenStax World History, Volume 1 covers 500–1500 globally.
• 🌐 Free course. Open Yale Courses, HIST 210 The Early Middle Ages, 284–1000 (Paul Freedman) is free with full lectures; Khan Academy has a world-history sequence for the other regions.