![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a term that has European connotations, but it absolutely stretches into the Levant and North Africa as you include the Crusades and Reconquista. For the most part, the same sort of Norman forces who won at Hastings also fought for Jerusalem and attacked the Byzantine Romans across the Levant and Anatolia. And in that period you have the rise of the Holy Roman Empire in AD 800. My favorite joke is that it runs from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in AD 476 to the fall of the Roman Empire in the East in AD 1453. Create a force of Saracens to fight in the Middle East, North Africa and even Western Europe (The Battle of Tours in 732).Įnzo: Others have hit the nail on the head by pointing out that the Medieval Era is huge. It’s important to remember that this period doesn’t have to be Western-eurocentric. You can field armies of Knights, Saracens, Vikings and more. In gaming terms, this short recap of the period means that you can go from Romanesque battles, such as the Gothic peoples coming into clashes with Roman remnants as they search for new lands to settle, to the War of the Roses as the Plantagenet and Yorkist forces battle for the crown. It led to more social unrest and wars.įoot Serjeants raid a small village. ![]() The Black Death hit in the early 14th century and depopulated Europe to half of what it had been before. Finally, in the Late Middle Ages you have a shift from prosperity to struggle. As that turmoil begins to settle down and you have centralized regional power structures, you begin to see the rise of vast kingdoms with rapidly rising populations and urbanization. With the Early Middle Ages, you’re coming out of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the huge amount of societal change and upheaval resulting in lots of small (and very large) wars with factions many of us are familiar with – the Saxons, Franks, Goths of all sorts, the Huns, etc. To me, and this is a very rough outline, I think there are really three main areas of the Middle Ages – Early, High and Late. Zuul: Yeah, Medieval wargaming is a big beast, both regionally and temporal. ![]() These dudes got around, and were involved in conflicts all over Europe and the near east. That’s before you even get to anything dealing with the Crusades (which ran on and off from 1095 to 1291). And it’s worth noting that when the Normans first got there, Sicily was a Muslim emirate state. For instance in the Baltic/Northwestern Europe, 793 CE starts what is commonly referred to as “The Viking Age.” Scandinavian raiders (and their descendants) would influence a lot of conflicts throughout Europe in the middle ages – for instance with the Normans (themselves descended from vikings who conquered parts of what is now France) establishing their own kingdom in Sicily between 10. Ilor: It’s also worth pointing out that a lot depends on where you are in the region. Any given point in the timeline would give you a very different wargame, with early medieval games (600ish-900ish) fixating on shieldwalls, high/mid medieval ones (1000ish-1300ish) being very cavalry focused, and late medieval games (1400ish-1600ish) being right in the middle of the infantry revolution and having a pretty big range of units and tactics compared to earlier periods. That said, you could argue for a variety of different starts and ends. The Medieval Period is generally agreed to stretch from somewhere around Odoacer’s conquest of the Italian Peninsula and destruction of one of the Roman Empires in 476 all the way to 1453, when the Ottomans finally got around to finishing the job of the last guy with a name starting in O and ended the other Roman Empire. It’s kinda weird that 1000 years of history get crammed into one little box. Peri: I honestly would play the hell out of a game that let you go Carolingians VS Tercios, but yeah, there are a lot of sub-periods within the Middle Ages, because it is generally speaking a much larger period and topic than most people give it credit for. Medieval means many things to many people, and turning up with your Battle of Pavia (1525) army to fight your opponent’s Merovingians (5th-7th centuries) is going to be a disappointment for everyone involved! Lenoon: Out of every common wargaming period, it’s probably most important with “Medieval” to get this right before you buy miniatures. What exactly are we covering here when talking about “medieval” times? The Goonhammer Historicals Team is happy to help, emerging from the office basement as a groggy Kraken with a range ruler that’s both metric and imperial. Getting started with a new historicals project can be daunting, especially if you don’t have a handy degree in history or any previous knowledge on what the exact color of a lance in 1421 is. ![]()
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