Size matters in global history. Even if the means and merits of studying the human past on vast geographical and temporal canvases are contested by historians, scale is widely acknowledged as integral to the theory and practice of any form of transnational history. Some global historians choose to go small, arguing that the macro dimensions of the past are most fruitfully analysed through a micro-historical approach. But for many scholars, global means not only thinking big, but also writing big. Field-setting volumes customarily cover vast chronologies and geographies, and frequently weigh in at many hundreds of pages. For the professional historian eager to embrace the global turn there is great value in exhaustive appraisals. But how can university instructors take their students with them on these global adventures? How can undergraduate and early-stage graduate students even begin to engage with the multiplicity of themes, geographies and chronologies that operating on a global canvas implies without drowning in a sea of pages teeming with unfamiliar names, places and political regimes?
In very recent years, publishers have begun to respond directly to this challenge in Higher Education. In the case of the medieval world, Cambridge University Press has launched the “Global Middle Ages” Cambridge Elements series under the editorship of Geraldine Heng, which offers succinctly presented insights into many different aspects of the human past across the globe in the c. 500-1500 period. In a similar vein, Alfred Andrea, the author of the book under review here, is the editor of “Critical Themes in World History,” a series of short publications from the Hackett Publishing Company which are designed to present undergraduates with “events and institutions that have had a profound impact on humankind through time and across the globe” (vii). As an experienced medievalist, particularly in the field of crusade studies, Andrea has decided to enhance the series with this volume on the relationship between western medieval Europe and the wider world. His Expanding Horizons represents an elegant refashioning of materials that originally formed the basis of a university seminar he ran in the 1980s and 1990s. The course (and now the book) was (is) designed to rebut suggestions of an inert and isolated medieval Europe and to persuade students of the continent’s deep-seated connections to a wider Afro-Eurasian history.
Andrea’s study is prefaced by a substantial twenty-two-page introduction, where it becomes clear that the “medieval Europe” of the book’s title equates to “medieval Western, or Latin, Christendom”; and that it is the expansion of the horizons of those living under the (sometimes theoretical) authority of the Roman pontiff which is the book’s central concern (xiv-xv). In addition to establishing geographical and temporal parameters, these opening remarks also introduce the reader to western medieval ideas about the nature of the world and the peoples who inhabited it, including the “monstrous races” at the peripheries. In this discussion, Andrea draws effectively on visual evidence, particularly contemporary maps, and in the process dispels common misconceptions that medieval people inevitably located Jerusalem at the centre of their maps and that they thought the earth was flat. In fact, there are few extant Jerusalem-centred maps before the thirteenth century, and a spherical earth was a widely accepted idea across the medieval era.
Four chapters follow the introduction. Chapter 1 focuses primarily on the early medieval Christianisation of the western European provinces of the former Roman empire and on the expansion of Latin Christianity into neighbouring regions from the fifth to tenth centuries. Chapter 2 is devoted to Latin pilgrimage, crusade, mission and commercial expansion after 1000 C.E., especially in the eastern Mediterranean. Somewhat less is said about Spain, Sicily or the Baltic, although these regions are not entirely neglected. Towards the end of the chapter, Latin engagement with the Mongol empire dominates. The post-1300 period is presented in Chapter 3 as a pivotal epoch, in which certain long-term commercial and missionizing connections, especially with Asia, eventually eroded away amidst climate change and demographic crisis; nonetheless this is also seen as a period in which new horizons began to open up, especially in the Atlantic world and in the Horn of Africa. European engagement with Asia, the Indian Ocean, and Africa during the fifteenth century is the subject of the final chapter, in which the 1490s are accorded their traditional role as a time of exceptionally rapid expansion, although Andrea emphasises the degree to which the voyages of figures such as Da Gama and Columbus would not have been possible without a multitude of actors earlier in the fifteenth century itself and indeed in the many preceding centuries. A short epilogue concludes the volume together with a list of further readings.
It is important to appraise this volume in the light of the undergraduate audience for which it is intended. In this context, it represents an accessible and informative introduction. Each chapter includes several maps and illustrations as well as four translated source excerpts. These sources are prefaced with pertinent contextual reflections and questions for classroom discussion. The text is broken up into digestible sections with clear sub-headings. As far as I can judge, there are few errors, although it is worth noting that the Ilkhan site of Sultaniyya is in modern-day Iran, not Azerbaijan. Perhaps most importantly, while well-known western European individuals and groups are highlighted (e.g., Charlemagne, Crusaders, Marco Polo, and Christopher Columbus), the author does not try to name-check everyone or everything. Instead, certain key themes are developed across all four chapters, above all the connection between commerce, mission, and martial conflict. The focus on maps, first developed in the introduction, continues into later chapters, particularly in a valuable discussion of the late fourteenth-century “Catalan atlas” produced in Majorca by the Jewish cartographer, Abraham Cresques (86-89), and the world map of Fra Mauro, created in mid-fifteenth-century Venice, which represents a fusion of ancient learning, earlier medieval textual traditions, and contemporary eyewitness accounts, including those of Ethiopian clerics returning eastwards from the Council of Florence (107-111). Andrea’s discussion of cartography illuminates a wider point: namely, that despite his express focus on Latin Europe, this was not a homogeneous world. Jews and Muslims living under Latin rule and the presence of other Christian groups to the east of Latin Christendom are referenced. Andrea also acknowledges differentiation among Latins according to time and place. He selectively incorporates more than the usual world history suspects: thus, in discussing Latin missionizing among the Mongols, he invokes the experiences of many thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century friars, not just John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck. And although the dominant foci of the book have clearly been shaped by Andrea’s own research and teaching interests dating back to the 1980s and 1990s, the author has tried to integrate more recent areas of specialist scholarship, including climate change and Latin Christians’ ideas about race. Perhaps most successful in this sense is his presentation of bilateral diplomatic, trading, and devotional contacts between Latin Europe and Ethiopia in the later medieval centuries.
Undergraduates encountering Andrea’s book will undoubtedly have any preconceptions about the backwardness and isolation of medieval Europe dispelled. Yet, if they make it to the epilogue, they will also realise that a more dynamic medieval Europe did not equate to incipient world domination c.1500. Instead, later in his text Andrea explicitly acknowledges the enduring power and significance of other world societies, even at a time in the early sixteenth century when the Portuguese were aggressively moving into the Indian Ocean trading systems and establishing the stations in west Africa that would become integral to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Elsewhere in the book too, Andrea implicitly recognises the importance of non-Latins in the story he is trying to tell, whether in chapter 1 when outlining the trading and raiding of the pre-Christian Scandinavians, or in chapter 2 when depicting papal envoys among the crowds of ambassadors submitting to the Mongols at the enthronement of Güyük Khan.
Nonetheless, Andrea’s study stops short of fully integrating non-Latins into his analysis of Latin expansion. The implications of the cross-cultural entanglements identified here are not explored deeply, and despite the “globalization” referred to in the title, it is not entirely clear what genre of long-term or large-scale history this is intended to be. My sense is that Andrea is operating more in the tradition of world rather global history. However, at a time when the periodisation, conceptualisation, and content of the “medieval” are being actively questioned, a little more could have been done to acknowledge the epistemological challenges of “the global,” and to consider the implications of these challenges for established scholarly paradigms such as the expansion of the medieval west.