Why is the West the way it is today?

Modern history explains much, but a full picture is impossible without knowing these early medieval history highlights. ✨ (AD 330 - 1066)

From the conversion of pagan kings to the repeated sieges of Constantinople, let's explore them. 🧵 330 AD - Due to the Eastern half of the empire being more populated and prosperous compared to the stagnating Western half, and due to it's strategic location for defense and trade, connecting Asia with Europe, Constantine makes Constantinople the new capital of the Roman Empire.

Today, medieval fantasy allows us to escape and explore worlds of elves, dragons, and the very same mythical monsters of the Middle Ages that people once actually believed in.

But where did the fantasy genre come from? 🧵

(You'll want to bookmark this) George MacDonald is often credited as being the first fantasy author.

Although he was born in 1824 and his works are older than Tolkien’s or Michael Ende’s, flaunting MacDonald as the founder of fantasy is misleading and doesn’t explain where fantasy really came from.

Mega swords, super swords and all other fantasy swords belong where they rightly exist--in fantasy, not reality!

This is because there is a SECRET GEOMETRY behind real medieval swords that fantasy rarely considers.

Real swords look the same for very important reasons.🧵
Think of a hammer. There’s a reason why hammer design hasn't changed much.

Most people would recognize one as soon as they saw it.

The hammer looks the way it does because it possesses the optimal shape for doing a specific job, just like a sword, and it's very good at it!

The typical knight of the Middle Ages was often not like what you see in the movies. 🎦

There's often a big part of the picture missing.

This is what you should know about real medieval knights. 🧵 Ancient Rome had a military horseman class, but in the so-called Dark Ages or Migration Period in Late Antiquity, knights didn’t quite exist yet.

The nearest equivalent would be members of a king’s comitatus like in Merovingian Gaul for instance (6th and 7th centuries).

Ever wonder why people put leeches on their skin in the Middle Ages?

Medieval bloodletting was all about healing via balancing the four bodily humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.

This is everything you need to know about medieval bloodletting and the four humors. 🧵 Galen, Aristotle and Avicenna were great contributors to the corpus of the medieval understanding of humoral theory.

The concept of humors originated in ancient Greek medicine, as they were even mentioned by Hippocratic treatises, and were defined as “specific bodily fluids essential to the physiological functioning of the organism”.

A book called De Natura Hominis (“On the Nature of Man”) by the 4th-century Christian philosopher Nemesius was what presented the standard set of four humors.