11th-century Europe: not just the Norman Conquest

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. When we think of Europe in the 11th century, one date stands out, 1066. However, as Professor Charles West explores in his new book Europe in the eleventh century, Beyond Revolution and Reform, this was a century of great change and great events across all of Europe. In conversation with David Musgrove, Charles explains why the eleventh century is a story of cities and popes as much as it is of conquest and the Normans. There's a couple of great maps in the start of your book that I really like and they map the changing cultural networks that you can see across Europe, which sounds a bit academic, but it's very interesting when you look at them.

And there's two of them. There's one from the year 1000 and one from the year 1100, so charting how things have changed over the course of the century. So can you give me a rough sense of what we're talking about here? What are those cultural networks at the start and in the year 1100? Absolutely.

I mean, I think it's helpful just to begin with to think in terms of cultural networks rather than political borders, right? Because we generally think when we see the world, we often today see it through political borders. People in the 11th century generally didn't. Maps of that time almost universally never show political boundaries, right? So it's not about political borders.

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