Medieval Geopolitics: Could King Richard have captured Jerusalem during the Third Crusade?
What if Richard had pressed his attack in December 1191? Would the city have fallen to the crusaders? Or would the Christian host have smashed itself to pieces on the walls of the Holy City?
Medieval Geopolitics: Richard the Lionheart and the Third Crusade
Why did King Richard decide to abandon his attempt to liberate Jerusalem in 1192?
Medieval Geopolitics: The Crusades to the Holy Land – Phase 1
In my next few columns, I’m going to explore the way in which crusading manifested itself in the Holy Land.
Medieval Geopolitics: The Institution of the Crusade
How did the crusades emerge as an institution in the medieval world?
Medieval Geopolitics: The Medieval Church as a Military Power
By the late 11th century the Roman Catholic Church began to evolve into a distinctive – and powerful – controller of military power.
Medieval Geopolitics: The Medieval “Church-State”
If you’re interested in why the medieval Church did what it did – and how it was able to do so in the political sphere – I think you’ll enjoy this series.
Medieval Geopolitics: War in the Medieval Mind
How was war understood in late medieval culture?
Medieval Geopolitics: The Medieval State
What did medieval states look like? A look at the most common and significant forms: kingdoms, principalities, communes and leagues.
Medieval Geopolitics: The Invention of the Idea of Sovereignty
In this column, I trace on the evolution of the idea of “sovereignty,” which I believe to be the conceptual linchpin of this historical process.
Medieval Geopolitics: The Moral Purpose of the State
What were the fundamental social goods toward which it was ordered and from which it derived it legitimacy? In short, what was the moral purpose of the later medieval state?
How the medieval past can be used for today’s challenges
Let us, in other words, return to the medieval era…
Medieval Geopolitics: The Invention of the Idea of “Political Community”
How a distinctively post-feudal, later medieval understanding of “political community” evolved in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Medieval Geopolitics: The Medieval “Fiscal Revolution”
So far in this series, we have talked about medieval “revolutions” in military power and judicial authority. A third great change in the late medieval era was in the control of money.
Medieval Geopolitics: The Medieval “Judicial Revolution”
During the early medieval era, judicial power and authority – the right and ability to adjudicate legal disputes and enforce the law – had hemorrhaged from the public authorities of the Carolingian empire into the hands first of great magnates and then lesser lords.
Medieval Geopolitics: The Medieval “Military Revolution”
From the late 1200s onward, royal warmaking capabilities underwent profound changes – changes that made them decisively less feudal and decidedly more state-like.
Medieval Geopolitics: The Two Types of Warfare in Medieval Europe
In this, the first post of the Medieval Geopolitics series, I take a look at the two types of political war fought in medieval Europe.
