Hello everyone, and welcome to the History of England, Episode 95, the History of Medieval

Europe, Part 3. It's not time quite yet for the results of our poll. On the death of

Edward II, I said I'd give it a couple of weeks, so a couple of weeks I shall give it.

So I thought before we went any further, it would be good to catch up on the European

context. After all, we've reached the reign of a man in Edward III who spent a fair

percentage of his time driven by affairs on the continent. So this week and next, that's

what we're going to do. I looked back, it was in fact almost exactly a year ago that

I've posted the second of my History of Europe podcasts, seems like only yesterday.

Anyway, when we left, the baby Frederick II had been elected King of the Romans in 1196,

which was the normal anti-room for the job of Holy Roman Emperor. One of the most shocking

events of the entire medieval age had occurred, the capture and sacking of Constantinople

by the Latins in 1204 led by the completely unscrupulous old man Enrico Dandelo. And

as a consequence for the first time in the medieval world, the East was held by a Latin

Empire at a Greek one, and the Roman Empire had been fatally wounded. Meanwhile in Spain,

the reconquista was well underway, and only the Kingdom of Granada in the South remained

to the Maus. Let's start with a little economic and social background, and you'll be relieved

to know that it's all going to be reassuring and familiar. The 13th century was for Europe,

just as it was for England, a time of plenty and growth, with the population continuing

to expand. Unsurprisingly of course, it's the same basic climatic shift, the medieval

warm period that changes somewhere between 131350-ish to a colder climate. For most of

Europe, the same process of agricultural expansion was going on, a process of what you might

call internal and external expansion. Internally, forest and brushland were cleared,

...