Video Lecture/Vorlesung "Krise des Spätmittelalters? Das 14. Jahrhundert", Sommersemester 2008

2019

The Crisis of the 14th Century

The Crisis of the 14th Century - Teleconnections between Environmental and Societal Change?, 2020

This article demonstrates how tree-ring material can be applied to historical research using the climate-driven crises of the fourteenth century as a case study. Medieval northeastern Europe is a promising case study for such a purpose, because climate-sensitive tree-ring data are readily available for this period and region. Whereas large areas of western Europe were affected by continuous heavy rains and bitter winters during the 1310s, this dendrochronological evidence suggests that northeastern Europe was not. Favorable climatic conditions prevailed in northeastern Europe in the late 1310s, and, more generally speaking, during the first half of the fourteenth century, as well. The juxtaposition of this new information from tree-ring analyses with the established understanding of the development of the region challenges the view that the crises of the fourteenth century reached the northeasternmost corner of Europe. The case study demonstrates how teleconnections of climate and society, like the crises of the early fourteenth century, can materialize on a societal level very different ways in different locations.

2016

2001

In the “calamitous” 14th century, as Barbara Tuchman called it in her classic „A Distant Mirror“ (1978) , the medieval world entered a period of severe crisis in demography, economy, politics and religion. This crisis took hold in all regions, ranging from China in the East to England in the West. Even before the catastrophic pandemic of the Black Death (1346-1352), deteriorating climatic conditions had ended the period of demographic and economic expansion that began in the 10th century. The local and regional impacts and consequences of these general potentially crisis-laden conditions may have differed; outcomes ranged from actual societal collapse to the emergence of powerful new polities – while Byzantium´s power dwindled away, Hungary entered a period of strong rulership and external power in the reign of Louis I of Anjou (1342-1382), for instance. But these conditions provide a framework for global perspective on this period and allow us to use the 14th century-crisis as a field of “natural experiments of history”, as Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson have called them ; accordingly, we analyse how similar crisis phenomena influenced the development of societies with different (or similar) traditions, religions, institutions, geographies or ecologies. In order to be able to capture the local variations and complexities, we adopt concepts and tools provided by the field of complexity science. Mono-causal or linear explanations are inadequate for the analysis and the description of crisis, transformation or collapse of pre-modern polities. Within this framework, complex systems are understood as large networks of individual components, whose interactions at the microscopic level produce “complex” changing patterns of behaviour of the whole system on the macroscopic level. In the last decades, historians and social scientists who became interested in complexity theory tried to use its concepts and terminology for the conceptualisation and description of phenomena in their own fields, but often only in a “metaphoric” way. Less frequently, though, historians have tried to make use of the mathematical foundations of complexity theory or of quantitative tools provided by this field. Recent scholarship has implemented some of these tools especially for the construction of macro-models of socio-economic development. While these studies help us construct analytical tools for the macro-level of our own research, they run the same risk as earlier scholarship of neglecting complex variations at the local and regional levels. Therefore, we combine complexity theory with the analytical framework of „systems theory“ developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann in order to capture the interveawements between politics, economy and religion within a polity and with the political, economic and ecological environment. In addition, we employ the methods and tools of network analysis, which allow us to capture, analyse and model linkages and cause-effect correlations in society, economy, politics and religion on the macro- and micro-level down to groups and individuals. Overall, as a complement to earlier studies our analytical approach shall allow us to capture the “diversité véritable” of our period without losing track of essential commonalities (the “strange parallels”, as Victor Liebermann has called them in his remarkable study on Southeast Asia in Global Context, 2009 ) of this “first world crisis” across all cultures and societies. The scientic value of this approach will be demonstrated for some specific cases.

Urban History, 2007

Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature, 1990

The book is a long one, and purposely so. Not only does it undertake to deal with a period at once the most complicated and the most inherently page 1 / 886 interesting of any in the whole recorded history of mankind, but it aims to impart sufficiently detailed information about the various topics discussed to make the college student feel that he is advanced a grade beyond the student in secondary school. There is too often a tendency to underestimate the intellectual capabilities of the collegian and to feed him so simple and scanty a mental pabulum that he becomes as a child and thinks as a child. Of course the author appreciates the fact that most college instructors of history piece out the elementary textbooks by means of assignments of collateral reading in large standard treatises.

The natural history of a medieval empire - new publication: A Companion to the Environmental History of Byzantium (Brill's Companions to the Byzantine World 13), edited by Adam Izdebski and Johannes Preiser-Kapeller. Brill: Leiden and Boston 2024, 568 pp. Published online on 4 March 2024: https://brill.com/display/title/24910 The Byzantine Empire is one of the longest-lived states in history. At various times between the 4th and 15th centuries CE, it ruled over areas in southern and southeastern Europe, western Asia and North Africa - and thus also linked developments on all three continents. The new “Companion to the Environmental History of Byzantium”, edited by Adam Izdebski (professor at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena) and Johannes Preiser-Kapeller (medieval and environmental historian at the OEAW), was published in the series “Brill 's Companion to the Byzantine World" and is the first book to systematically examine the question of how this empire was able to survive and adapt to enormous climatic changes, devastating pandemics and other natural disasters over more than 1,000 years. In the book, not only the capital Constantinople, for a long time the largest metropolis in medieval Europe, and its supply networks are examined, but also the interaction between people and the environment in the various provinces and islands of the Byzantine Empire, from the Aegean to the Caucasus and from Anatolia to Egypt. The interplay between climate change and migration as well as the adaptation of immigrants to unfamiliar environmental conditions, for example in the context of the Crusades, are also surveyed. To do this, the 23 international experts who contributed to the volume analysed not only historical sources, but also archaeological and scientific data such as ice cores, tree rings, speleothems, plant pollen, DNA traces and human and animal remains. On this basis, a completely new picture of the climatic and environmental history of the transition zone between Africa, Asia and Europe from ancient to modern times emerges.