The Medieval Era.

476 AD - Rome has fallen. The Medieval Era begins.

(But the eastern half of the Roman Empire lives on as the Byzantine Empire until 1453 AD. Montage.)


Note on Human Consciousness: not Nations, but Christendome.

"Its good to be king!"

Montage of History Channel's The Dark Ages.

c. 500 AD. Beowolf. A Geat in Daneland. The epic poem of the Anglo-Saxons. Movie trailer: Beowolf and Grendel.

October 10, 732. The Battle of Tours (aka The Battle of Poitiers). Charles Martel turns back the Muslim invasion of western Europe, once and for all. One documentary.

768 – 814 AD. The reign of Charlemagne. Grandson of Charles Martel, he attempted to piece the Roman Empire back together. And he was not nice about it. Documentary.


c. 1040 – July 10, 1099. The time of El Cid, when the Moors were in Spain. There's the man, and then there's the legend. A clip from the Charlton Heston movie. Which has an incident of single combat!
Musical montage.

14 October 1066. The Battle of Hastings. The Norman Conquerors whip the Anglo-Saxons of England. After this battle, the english language will come in to being. Documentary.

July 4, 1187 The Battle of Hattin. From the movie "Kingdom of Heaven"

Saladin and Richard Lionheart.

Autumn, 1187 Siege of Jerusalem. Trailer for the movie "Kingdom of Heaven."

7 September 1191. The Battle of Arsuf. Richard the Lionheart convinces Saladin to avoid direct attacks in the future. Movie clip. Overview the battle.

July 17, 1210. The Battle of Gestilren. Clip from the Swedish movie, "Arn - the Knight Templar."

April 5, 1242. The Battle of the Ice.
Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film, Alexander Nevsky. Battle scenes: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. This film is remarkably prophetic because the Germans would invade Russia in 1941 and would only be stopped by the Russian winter as Napoleon was in 1812. So that's three invasions the Russian winter did in.

23–24 June 1314. The Battle of Bannockburn. King Robert Bruce of Scotland decisively beats Edward II of England. Clip set to music. Documentary: The Story of King Robert the Bruce. The Fields of Bannockburn.

21 July 1403 Battle of Shrewsbury. English vs. Welsh rebels of the Glyndŵr Rising.
A clip from the Orson Wells' movie 'Chimes At Midnight.' It almost gives as good an impression of a battle as 'Saving Private Ryan.' Chaos. Random death. Ignoble man to man killing. Human beings in melee combat will do anything to stay alive no matter how ignoble it might be. Few films even try to portray that.

1337–1453The Hundred Years War. The throne of France becomes vacant, so the dukes will put up their dukes over it. And for a good long while, too."

......25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin's Day) Battle of Agincourt. Clip from the Kenneth Branaugh movie, Henry V. The battle as explained using SEGA's Medieval Total War computer game.

.....1412[2] – 30 May 1431. Joan of Arc.

.....12 October 1428 – 8 May 1429. The Siege of Orléans. The Milla Jovovich as Joan of Arc.

April 2, 1453 – May 29, 1453 Fall of Constantinople (Eastern Rome Empire) to the ottoman Turks.

27 September-October 14, 1529. The first siege of Vienna. One Documentary.

7 October 1571. The Battle of Lepanto. The Catholic Holy League of Europe defeats the battle fleet of the Ottoman Empire, saving Italy from certain invasion. Excellent overview. An emotional tribute that shows the passions involved. Excellent book by Roger Crowley.

8 August 1588. The Battle of the Gravelines. The English Defeat of the Spanish Armada. Overview montage. Documentary on the English ships vs. Spanish ships. Trailer for Elizabeth the Golden Age. (Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I). Helen Mirren's version of the famous Tilbury Speech.

Hey, what happened to the Renaissance and the Reformation?

1618 – 1648. The Thirty Years War. The last major war in Europe before 1700 was the Thirty Years War. That one was a total war in the full meaning of the term. It started out as a religious war between Catholics and Protestants in Germany, and then escalated politically until it spun completely out of control. It ended up with various armies of no particular religious or political orientation roaming all over central Germany, pillaging farms and burning them to the ground. The war ended only when there were no longer enough farms left to feed these roaming armies.

Movie: The Last Valley (Michael Caine, Omar Sharif) Its about a mercenary army finding one of the last un-destroyed farming valleys.

The Thirty Years War is what led to the 1700's idea of having a "cabinet war" instead of a total war. In a cabinet war, a king pays for a small, professionally trained army out of his own treasury - which limits its size. And then he goes to war against another king who has hopefully done the same thing, and they have a comparatively small set of encounters on a few battlefields that decide whatever is at issue between them. (The proverbial "final argument of kings."). And while doing so, each side follows a set of rules that were called the "laws" or "conventions of war."

It was also what paved the way for the Enlightenment. The ferocity of this war between Catholics and Protestants did a lot to dampen down religious fervor in Europe. It essentially discredited both religious hierarchy and aristocratic hierarchy.

19 May 1643. The Battle of Rocroi. The French beat the famous Spanish Tercio, putting an end to the century-long Spanish supremacy in military doctrine. The Tercio was the Renaissance version of the German Panzer Division of WW II. A combined arms force, it consisted of squares of pikemen, with sword and javelin men inside the squares, with squares of shot troops (arquebusiers and musketeers) surrounding them to pick off the enemy from a distance. The pikemen were nearby to protect the shot men from cavalry charges and enemy pikemen that closed in. This is essentially the same thing as having archers and spearmen, except the the archers have been replaced with gun powder troops whose shots can piece armor plate, and the spearmen have been replaced with pikemen whose pikes are longer than spears. Montage of warfare in this period, with clips from the movie Capitan Alatriste, which has a scene of the battle of Rocroi.


14 June 1645, The Battle of Naseby, during the English Civil War (1642 – 1651) Clip from the movie "Cromwell" Richard Harris plays Oliver Cromwell, Alec Ginness plays King Charles I. Montage from the BBC Battlefield Britain series.

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