Timeline of human history - Timeline 15: 1,800 BP to Present - Europe and the World since the Roman Empire. Christian and Islamic empires. The Mongols and the Black Death

Timeline of human history
version 2 - by Finn Sivert Nielsen

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Timeline 15 - 1,800 BP to Present
Europe and the World since the Roman Empire. Christian and Islamic empires. The Mongols and the Black Death

We zoom in again, this time to the last 1,800 years before the present - roughly the time that has passed since the late days of the Roman Empire. More than any other of these timelines, this one gives me a feeling of the "web of history," the multitudes of crisscrossing influences and conflicts that together make up the onward-flowing texture of time. In the timeline we see this web (an ultra-simplified version of part it) creeping slowly along from the end of the Roman Empire, through the Great Migrations that transformed Europe, on through the explosive expansion of the Islamic empires, more migrations in the West while the Islamic Golden Age flourishes in the East and the Byzantine empire seems bound to continue for as long as the trilobites. As the High Middle Ages approach, the Europeans dream up the fool's errand of the crusades (the crusaders end up sacking Constantinople in the 4th Crusade - 1204). Then the vicious Mongol expansion rocks the continent from Vienna to Viet Nam (India was hit with a time delay of some 300 years), claiming perhaps 30-40 million dead, in addition to the 75-200 million (estimates are highly uncertain) killed by the Black Death they carried with them. After this, in quick succession, come the Renaissance, the Reformation, the religious wars, the Atlantic slave trade, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. Shimmering fragmented fantasies of these semi-mythical, semi-real entities flutter through the web of time as we approach the present, blown hither and thither on winds stirred up by technological innovations such as the printing press (1539) and regular trans-Atlantic steamship traffic (1840). There are many ironies in this picture, prominent among them the fact that the transatlantic slave trade was abandoned only as it was becoming clear that slave work could soon be done more cheaply and efficiently by machines.