Middle Ages — Speck in Time Archive

Columbus crosses the Atlantic

1,492 CE · Europe

Contact between hemispheres begins, along with the deadliest exchange of disease in human history.

The Columbian Exchange

1,492 CE – 1,700 CE · Global Turning Points

Contact between hemispheres moved maize, potatoes, horses and silver — and smallpox, measles and influenza. Disease killed a large majority of the population of the Americas within a century, the deadliest demographic event in recorded history.

turning-point Read more — Columbian exchange Image source (unverified) auto-matched

The Songhai Empire

1,464 CE – 1,591 CE · Sub-Saharan Africa

The largest state in West African history, ended by a Moroccan army with firearms.

Machu Picchu built

1,450 CE · Andean Peoples

A royal estate on a ridge, abandoned within a century and never found by the Spanish.

Gutenberg's press

1,440 CE · Europe

Movable type in Europe makes books cheap, and makes it very hard to control what people read.

The Inca Empire

1,438 CE – 1,533 CE · Andean Peoples

The largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas, run without writing, wheels or money — but with knotted cords and superb roads.

The Aztec Empire

1,428 CE – 1,521 CE · Mesoamericans

A tribute empire run from Tenochtitlan, a lake city of a quarter million people.

The Sultanate of Sulu

1,405 CE – 1,915 CE · Philippines

The founding date is genuinely contested. 17 November 1405 is most commonly cited; 1457 also appears in the sources. Both are in circulation and neither is settled.

Sharif ul-Hashim, a scholar from Johore, establishes the Sultanate of Sulu and issues the Diwan, its first code of laws. Sulu becomes a durable maritime power in the southern seas — one that Spain never fully subdued across three centuries of trying.

Zheng He's sailing charts

1,405 CE – 1,433 CE · Philippines

The treasure-fleet voyages produce working navigational charts of Southeast Asian waters — sailing directions, not decoration. The knowledge was later preserved in the Mao Kun chart. These were seas people knew how to cross and wrote down how to cross.

cartography Read more — Zheng He Image source

The Renaissance

1,400 CE – 1,600 CE · Europe

A rediscovery of classical learning and an explosion in art, anatomy and engineering.

Mound-building declines

1,400 CE · North American First Peoples

The great Mississippian centres empty out, before European contact.

The Malacca Sultanate

1,400 CE – 1,511 CE · Southeast Asia

A port city that became the hinge of Indian Ocean trade, and the route by which Islam spread through the region.

Joseon

1,392 CE – 1,897 CE · Korea

Five centuries of Confucian government. King Sejong commissions Hangul, an alphabet designed for ordinary people to learn.

Asia maps itself, before Europe arrives

1,389 CE – 1,402 CE · Philippines

The Chinese Da Ming Hun Yi Tu and the Korean Kangnido are detailed world maps drawing on Chinese and Islamic geographic knowledge, made a century before any European ship reached these waters. The region was being systematically charted the whole time — just not in Europe, and not for Europe.

cartography Read more — Da Ming Hunyi Tu Image source

Islam reaches the southern islands

1,380 CE · Philippines

Karim al-Makhdum arrives at Simunul in Tawi-Tawi, where the earliest mosque in the Philippines is established. Islam takes hold in the south well over a century before Christianity reaches the north — a sequence that most tellings of Philippine history quietly invert by starting in 1521.

islam Read more — Islam in the Philippines

Timur

1,370 CE – 1,405 CE · Steppe Peoples

A conqueror out of Samarkand whose campaigns were devastating even by the standards of the period.

The Ming Dynasty

1,368 CE – 1,644 CE · China

The Forbidden City is built and Zheng He's fleets sail as far as Africa — then the voyages stop.

The Black Death

1,347 CE – 1,351 CE · Europe

Bubonic plague kills perhaps a third to a half of Europe in four years, and remakes its economy.

The Black Death

1,347 CE – 1,351 CE · Global Turning Points

Plague travelled the trade routes that had made Eurasia rich and killed perhaps a third to a half of Europe in four years. Labour became scarce and expensive, which weakened serfdom and reshaped the economy — a catastrophe that cleared ground for the Renaissance.

turning-point Read more — Black Death Image source (unverified) auto-matched

The Hundred Years' War

1,337 CE – 1,453 CE · Europe

England and France fight on and off for more than a century. Joan of Arc appears near the end of it.

Mansa Musa

1,312 CE – 1,337 CE · Sub-Saharan Africa

His pilgrimage to Mecca distributed so much gold that it disrupted Mediterranean economies for years.

Tondo, Maynila, Cebu, Butuan

1,300 CE – 1,565 CE · Philippines

By the fourteenth century the islands hold a scatter of independent polities — Tondo and Maynila on Manila Bay, Cebu in the Visayas, Butuan in Mindanao — trading with China, Borneo and the wider region. They are not a kingdom and never were. They are a network, and they face outward.

Islam spreads through the archipelago

1,300 CE – 1,600 CE · Southeast Asia

Carried mainly by traders rather than armies, it becomes dominant across what is now Indonesia and Malaysia.

Majapahit

1,293 CE – 1,527 CE · Southeast Asia

A Javanese maritime empire whose reach across the archipelago later Indonesian states would invoke.

Mongol invasions fail

1,274 CE – 1,281 CE · Japan

Two invasion fleets are wrecked by storms the Japanese called kamikaze — divine wind.

Mongol rule — the Yuan

1,271 CE – 1,368 CE · China

Kublai Khan rules China as part of the Mongol world. Marco Polo claims to have visited.

The moai of Easter Island

1,250 CE – 1,500 CE · Austronesians

Nearly a thousand stone figures carved and moved across the island.

The Mali Empire

1,235 CE – 1,670 CE · Sub-Saharan Africa

Home to Timbuktu and its libraries.

Magna Carta

1,215 CE · Europe

English barons force the king to accept that he is not above the law.

The Delhi Sultanate

1,206 CE – 1,526 CE · India

Turkic and Afghan dynasties rule northern India for three centuries.

Genghis Khan

1,206 CE – 1,227 CE · Steppe Peoples

Unites the Mongol tribes and begins the conquest of most of Eurasia.

The Mongol Empire

1,206 CE – 1,368 CE · Steppe Peoples

The largest contiguous land empire ever, connecting Europe and China closely enough that plague could travel it.

Rise of the samurai

1,185 CE · Japan

Military households take real power; the emperor remains but does not rule.

The Kingdom of Benin

1,180 CE – 1,897 CE · West Africa

Famous for cast brass plaques and sculptures, looted by a British expedition in 1897.

Angkor Wat built

1,150 CE · Southeast Asia

Begun as a Hindu temple, later Buddhist, and still the largest religious monument in the world.

Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings

1,100 CE – 1,300 CE · North American First Peoples

Multi-storey stone villages built into canyon walls in the Southwest.

Great Zimbabwe

1,100 CE – 1,450 CE · Sub-Saharan Africa

A city of mortarless stone walls, centre of a gold-trading state reaching the Indian Ocean.

The Crusades

1,095 CE – 1,291 CE · Europe

Two centuries of European campaigns in the eastern Mediterranean.

Cahokia

1,050 CE – 1,350 CE · North American First Peoples

A city on the Mississippi larger than contemporary London, with a plaza and a pyramid of earth.

Norse settlement in Newfoundland

1,000 CE · Europe

Europeans reach the Americas roughly five centuries before Columbus, and do not stay.

Ma-i appears in Chinese records

971 CE – 1,225 CE · Philippines

A Philippine polity called Ma-i turns up in Song dynasty records, and by 1225 Zhao Rukuo's survey of foreign peoples describes trading there in some detail — including the practice of leaving goods on the beach to be collected and paid for later, which he presents as evidence of unusual honesty. Regular Chinese trade predates any European arrival by centuries.

cartography Read more — Ma-i

The Song Dynasty

960 CE – 1,279 CE · China

Paper money, gunpowder weapons, porcelain and movable type — arguably the most inventive state in the world at the time.

The Toltecs

950 CE – 1,150 CE · Mesoamericans

A militarised state at Tula that later peoples treated as a golden age to claim descent from.

Goryeo

918 CE – 1,392 CE · Korea

Gives Korea its English name, and produces the world's first metal movable type.

Reaching Hawaii and Easter Island

900 CE – 1,200 CE · Austronesians

Navigators cross thousands of kilometres of open ocean using stars, swells and birds.

The Laguna Copperplate Inscription

900 CE · Philippines

A thin sheet of copper inscribed in Kawi script, mixing Old Malay, Sanskrit and Old Tagalog, recording that a man's debt has been cleared. It is the earliest written document found in the Philippines. It names Tundun — Tondo — along with other settlements, and refers to Medang in Java. In the year 900 there were people here keeping written legal records and dealing with polities across the sea.

The Khmer Empire

802 CE – 1,431 CE · Southeast Asia

Centred on Angkor, with hydraulic engineering that supported one of the largest pre-industrial cities on Earth.

The Empire of Charlemagne

800 CE – 888 CE · Europe

A Frankish king is crowned emperor, briefly reuniting much of western Europe.

The Maya collapse

800 CE – 950 CE · Mesoamericans

Southern lowland cities are abandoned within a few generations. Drought is the leading explanation.

The three sisters

800 CE · North American First Peoples

Maize, beans and squash, adopted from Mesoamerica, are grown together in a system that feeds all three.

Borobudur built

800 CE · Southeast Asia

The largest Buddhist temple in the world, raised in central Java.

The Heian court

794 CE – 1,185 CE · Japan

An aristocratic culture that produced The Tale of Genji, often called the first novel.

The Vikings

793 CE – 1,066 CE · Europe

Scandinavian raiders, traders and settlers reach Baghdad, Newfoundland and everywhere between.

Printing invented

700 CE · China

Woodblock printing appears in China roughly seven centuries before Gutenberg.

The Ghana Empire

700 CE – 1,240 CE · Sub-Saharan Africa

A West African power built on control of the gold and salt trade across the Sahara.

Trans-Saharan trade

700 CE – 1,600 CE · West Africa

Camel caravans link West African gold to the Mediterranean, and carry Islam south.

Silla unifies Korea

668 CE – 935 CE · Korea

With Tang help, Silla takes most of the peninsula and then pushes the Tang back out.

Conquered by Muslim armies

651 CE · Persia

The Sasanian state falls; Persia becomes Muslim but keeps its language and much of its culture.

Srivijaya

650 CE – 1,288 CE · Southeast Asia

A Sumatran maritime empire controlling the straits, and a major centre of Buddhist learning.

The Tang Dynasty

618 CE – 907 CE · China

Cosmopolitan, confident and outward-facing. Chang'an is the largest city on Earth.

Pakal the Great

615 CE – 683 CE · Mesoamericans

Ruler of Palenque, buried beneath a pyramid under a carved sarcophagus lid.

Wari and Tiwanaku

600 CE – 1,000 CE · Andean Peoples

Two highland states with monumental stonework, including the Gate of the Sun in Bolivia.

Turkic expansion

550 CE – 1,000 CE · Steppe Peoples

Turkic peoples spread west across Central Asia, eventually reaching Anatolia.

Buddhism and Chinese characters arrive

538 CE · Japan

Both come by way of Korea, and reshape Japanese religion, writing and government.

The worst year to be alive

536 CE – 550 CE · Global Turning Points

Mortality figures for the Plague of Justinian are estimates and have been revised downward by some recent work.

Volcanic dust dimmed the sun for over a year, temperatures dropped, and harvests failed across Eurasia. The Plague of Justinian followed, killing a large share of urban populations. Together they helped push the Huns west, the Germanic peoples into Roman land, and the western Mediterranean order into pieces.

turning-point Read more — Volcanic winter of 536 Image source (unverified) auto-matched

Austronesians settle Madagascar

500 CE – 1,000 CE · Austronesians

Sailors from Borneo cross the Indian Ocean and settle an island off the coast of Africa.

The Western European Dark Ages

500 CE – 1,000 CE · Europe

Not empty, but poorer, less literate and less connected than what came before.