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podcast transcript
A thousand years ago, the world was a fundamentally different place. While Europe was divided and struggling, China and the Islamic world were at the peak of power and innovation.
Great empires rose and fell, religions spread across continents, and trade routes quietly began to unite distant civilizations.
It was a world without a single center, but full of momentum in all directions.
Learn more about the world in the year 1000 in this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
In episode 1500, I began a series looking at the state of the world every 100 years, then every 50 years, and eventually every 25 years. The pace of change in the world has accelerated as we move closer to the present, necessitating the need to speed up the creation of episodes.
As we enter the present, 2025, many people are wondering what will happen next. Some people have suggested that I make predictions about the future, but honestly, that would just be made up and probably worthless. Because I’m sure almost every prediction will be wrong.
What I decided to do instead was to go back every 100 episodes and look at what the world looked like every 500 years.
This will make it impossible to sync the year with the episode number, but if it goes earlier than a year it won’t be possible anyway. You cannot have negative episode numbers.
I will advance every 500 years for the same reason that we went every 25 years at the turn of the 20th century. Rate of change.
Technological change was slow in the ancient world. Innovations were rare, spread slowly, and took considerable time to become widely adopted.
Empires and kingdoms rose and fell, but the process usually took centuries.
There is also a simple matter of time. When I started the series from episode 1500, I planned to cover only the next 500 years of history.
But moving backwards requires much more ground to be covered. The history of written records dates back to around 3000 BC, and the emergence of modern humans and the agricultural revolution began around 9,000 to 11,000 years ago, towards the end of the Syndriatic period.
So for each of the next 100 episodes, I’ll go further and further back in history, looking at the state of the world until I get to prehistoric times, and finally into the realm of archeology and paleontology.
So what happened to the world between 1500 and 1000?
Not much. The rise and fall of the Mongol Empire, the Crusades, the Black Death, the fall of Constantinople, the Great Schism, the Norman Conquest, the rise of the Inca and Aztec Empires, the fall of the Mayan Empire, and the beginning of the Age of Discovery.
Most of this was devoted to an entire episode, so while acknowledging that there is a lot of history between 1500 and 1000, I’d like to spend the rest of the episode focusing on the state of the world in 1000.
We’ll start in Europe.
One popular idea is that in Western Europe the first millennium was a time of fear and religious zeal, and that Christians were entering the end of an era. Kind of like medieval Y2K.
However, the evidence for this is not very strong. Most chronicles of the period do not mention anything special about those years. One reason for this was that the Anno Domini calendar system had not yet been standardized and there was disagreement about what the actual year was.
Christianity was the dominant religion in Europe, but it was not a universal religion. There were still groups of paganists, but they were diminishing.
Significant things were happening. On December 25, Stephen I was crowned the first king of Hungary at Esztergom, establishing Hungary as a Christian state. The Althing of Iceland accepted Christianity in 1000.
Continental Europe recognized Emperor Otto III’s Holy Roman Empire as the most powerful country.
France consolidated its early feudal fiefdoms under the rule of Robert II, known as Robert the Pious, the first Capetian king since Hugh Capet.
The unified Kingdom of England was united from Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and was 66 years away from the Norman invasion that would change the country forever.
The papacy during this period was in deep decline, and in retrospect it was called ‘the Pope’. dark ages Or “the dark ages.” It was a time when a powerful Roman family took control of the papacy and was marked by political corruption, instability, and moral decline.
The Viking raids that had terrorized Europe for centuries were still occurring, but a transition to settlement and state formation was beginning to occur, especially in places like Normandy. The economy was overwhelmingly agricultural and the cities were small, but a slow recovery from the decline of the previous century was underway.
In Eastern Europe and the Byzantine world, the Byzantine Empire remained the most sophisticated and powerful state in Europe. Under Emperor Basil II, later known as the “Bulgar Slayer”, the empire was expanding and strengthening its power, especially against the Bulgarian Empire.
Constantinople was the largest and wealthiest Christian city in Europe and served as a center for trade with Asia. Orthodox Christianity was spreading among Slavic peoples, including the Kievan Rus’, who had recently accepted Christianity under Vladimir the Great.
The Islamic world of 1,000 years was arguably the most intellectually active civilization on Earth. The Islamic world was reaching the pinnacle of historical and scientific achievement.
Among the scholars active at the time was Ibn al-Haytham, who wrote: optical bookFundamental research in the science of light and vision, including Avicenna, Al-Biruni, and Al-Zahrawi, known as the “Father of Surgery”.
The Islamic world was still organized into a caliphate. It was ruled by the Abbasid Caliphate, to the west was the Caliphate of Córdoba, and in North Africa was the Fatimid Caliphate. Persia was in a period of instability as various groups seceded from Abbasid rule.
Cordoba in Islamic Spain was the world’s largest city at the time with a population of approximately 450,000. It was a vast metropolis with far more libraries, hospitals, and learning than anything else in modern Europe. Although the Reconquista had gained some ground, the southern Iberian Peninsula remained under Islamic rule for centuries to come.
China was during the Song Dynasty. This was a period of incredible cultural and technological achievement that I covered in a previous episode. The inventions of gunpowder, the compass, and printing all occurred during the Song period.
Printed books became widely available, and books and paper were exported to many countries. Confucianism became the main ruling ideology, and the government actively encouraged the spread of schools.
The Song dynasty is often described as a “pre-modern” commercial society characterized by bustling cities, merit-based civil service, and a prosperous merchant class. China was the richest and most technologically advanced civilization in the world in the year 1000.
Korea was under the Goryeo Dynasty, and Vietnam was under the Jeonle Dynasty.
Japan in the year 1000 was the Heian period, an era steeped in elegance and art. Court life was dominated by poetry and complex social rituals. Murasaki Shikibu began writing. The Tale of Genji Around this time, it is widely known as the world’s first novel to comprehensively describe the aristocratic life of the Kyoto imperial family.
India was divided into several small empires, including the Eastern Chalukyas, the Pala Empire, and the Chola Dynasty under Rajaraja I.
The Chola Empire, based in southern India, was a remarkable maritime power, launching naval expeditions throughout Southeast Asia and establishing trade ties as far away as China.
It was also the beginning of a shocking era. It was during this period that Mahmud of Ghazni, ruler of the Ghaznavi Empire in what is now Afghanistan, launched a series of devastating raids on the Indian subcontinent, targeting rich Hindu temples and cities.
Sub-Saharan Africa developed urban centers and empires, most notably the Ghana Empire. The trans-Saharan slave trade became an important factor in the formation of the Sahelian kingdoms.
The Empire of Ghana controlled lucrative gold and salt trade routes across the Sahara, making it one of the wealthiest countries in the world. North Africa was ruled by the Fatimid dynasty, which made Cairo its magnificent capital.
In pre-Columbian America, the Wari and Tiwanaku cultures were declining in South America, while the Chachapoya and Cimú cultures rose to prominence. In the Caribbean, the Taino people are now the dominant culture in Puerto Rico.
In Mesoamerica, the great Mayan cities were past their classical heyday but were still vibrant. Chichen Itza in the Yucatan region was a thriving center of power.
The Pueblo ancestors of the American Southwest were building amazing cliff dwellings and multi-story stone complexes in places like Chaco Canyon.
In the year 1000, the great era of Polynesian exploration was in full swing. Descendants of the early Lapita culture had already spread across vast areas of the Pacific, and Polynesian navigators were among the most skilled navigators in human history.
Using double-hulled canoes and sophisticated knowledge of the stars, sea swells, winds, and bird behavior, they settled on islands thousands of miles away.
Areas such as Hawaii are likely to have been settled or in the process of being settled during this period, and expansion into New Zealand and Easter Island will likely occur within the next few centuries.
These societies developed complex chiefdoms, rich oral traditions, and agricultural systems suited to the island environment, growing crops such as taro, breadfruit, and sweet potatoes.
Perhaps the most dramatic event of the first millennium was the arrival of Norse people to the Americas. Nordic explorer Leif Erikson became the first European to land in the Americas at L’Anse aux Meadows in modern-day Newfoundland.
Archaeological evidence suggests that the Vikings crossed the North Atlantic and landed in northeastern Canada.
The settlement of L’Anse aux Meadows did not lead to long-term contact between Europe and America. It will take centuries for that to happen. But it was a starting point.
Historian Valerie Hansen argues that the year 1000 was a turning point when previously separate regional trade networks across Afro-Eurasia began to connect into a more persistent system of exchange driven not by large empires but by merchants, improved maritime routes, and increased demand for goods.
In her book Year 1000: When explorers connected the world and globalization began.She argues that this period saw the first significant steps toward globalization, as goods, ideas, technologies, and even people began to travel greater distances than ever before, linking places such as China, the Islamic world, Europe, and parts of Africa into emerging, but still fragile, global networks.
There wasn’t much global trade, but the first hints of it were starting to appear.
Additionally, although the term Dark Ages is no longer used by historians and its accuracy is debatable, the 1000 Years refers to the end of the Dark Ages.
The year 1000 was a radically different world from the year 1500, and the world 500 years ago was very different again. This is what we will cover in the next 100 episodes.
