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BEST DOCUMENTARY High Middle Ages | Mediterranean Europe - part 01 | Middle Ages Wiki

🏰🔍Step into the medieval world with us as we unlock the secrets of the "Middle Ages Wiki." Join us as we explore the highlights of middle ages life, from the noble pursuits of knights to the tumultuous events that shaped history. Whether you're a history buff or simply curious about the past, there's something for everyone in the pages of the "Middle Ages Wiki." Subscribe now for a journey through time and let's embark on an adventure to uncover the wonders of the middle ages.📜✨ #middleageswiki #medievalhistory #medieval #history #middleages --------------------------------------------- Certain scenes along the Mediterranean coast linger in the mind: salt-marsh grasses swaying under a too bright sky; aquatic birds in flocks, pairs or solo gliding through warm, humid air, restless until they settle along the lagoons to fish and preen. Not too far from where the sea laps the shore lie expanses of green fields that men and women have been tending for centuries. In the distant uplands, stands of oak and fir dominate the landscape. In the villages, from vines and from grove after grove of flowering fruit trees issue the fragrances of late spring and summer. Virtually a tideless sea, the Mediterranean, along with its European hinterland, offered medieval fowlers, fishermen and mariners abundant opportunities. There was sport: aristocratic falconers loved to hunt the heronries, and rustics took hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of the estimated fifty billion migratory birds that annually leave their winter shelters in Africa to summer in Europe, making fatal stopovers on the northern shores of the Mediterranean. There was food in the sea as well, although its higher salinity made the population of fish less dense than in northern waters. And there were occasions for contact with peoples of different religions and cultures who were in port as emissaries, traders and slaves. But the Mediterranean was also an untrustworthy companion. Winter storms could be savage, and mariners hesitated to sail in that season. Many of the continental harbours were inadequate for great vessels, partly because the gentle rising and falling of the sea was incapable of dissipating the quantities of silt disgorged by the sluggish rivers that fed it. In high summer the stench from the lagoons and the scourge of disease-bearing insects could make life loathsome. Now and again great, stiff winds blew in from the sea, freshened the air and swept the swarms of midges and biting flies from the air, but they also battered the poorly sheltered ships in their path. High summer also brought drought. Rainfall in southern Europe does not compare to that in the north. The spring run-off from the mountain ranges produces innumerable rivulets that often become dry beds in their lower courses by late June or early July. By August parts of central Spain, southern France and southern Italy are desert-like in their ecology. Once verdant hills and hillocks take on an ashen grey look. Lizards delight in the revivifying heat of the morning sun and in lazing under the blazing midday sky; humans and their domestic herds and flocks languish in whatever shade they find. Fortunately, nearer the mountains the lakes and streams often stay full, and the sprawling meadows nearby offer, or once did offer, plentiful pastures to enormous herds and flocks. In the mountains themselves as well as on the islands and in numerous geographically sheltered regions of the south, the natural abundance of the land and the return from human agriculture were as varied as almost anywhere on earth. Sometimes human intervention was the key. Irrigation techniques introduced earlier but perfected by the Muslims had turned Valencia into a garden of earthly delights by the eleventh century. Elsewhere nature, less radically altered, produced similar benefits: the bewitchingly beautiful valleys of Sicily were among the most productive districts in eleventh-century Europe. On the continent, lush pastures attracted herders of the plains from great distances to Alpine and Pyrenean valleys in late spring, even if in other ways the mountains were forbidding and lonely and, as folk tales ceaselessly recount, more suitable for savage beasts and wild men than for Christians, civilized human beings.