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A thousand years ago, the world was a radically different place. Europe was fragmented and struggling, while China and the Islamic world stood at the height of their power and innovation. Great empires rose and fell, religions spread across continents, and trade routes quietly began stitching distant civilizations together. It was a world without a single center, yet full of momentum in every direction. Learn more about the world in the year 1000 on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Mint Mobile. It's been said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I'd like to update this and suggest that insanity is paying too much for something when you can get something equally as good for less. With Mint Mobile you can stop the insanity and get high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network starting at only 15 bucks a month. Bring your own phone and number, activate with ESIM in minutes and start saving immediately. No long term contracts, no hassle. That is why I recommend Mint Mobile. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans@mintmobile.com eed that's mintmobile.com eed upfront payment of $45 for 3 month 5GB plan required equivalent to $15 a month new customer offer for first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. This episode is sponsored by Quints. Steve Jobs is famous for having multiple versions of the same outfit that he wore every day. And I'm not saying I'm Steve Jobs, but I do have a rather simple wardrobe, a habit I developed through years on the road living out of a bag. My Quince cashmere sweater is something I've mentioned before and I've come to wear it almost every single day. Not only does it look good, but it's incredibly durable. And the best part is that Quince's prices are 50 to 60% lower than those of similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. Everything is designed to last and make getting dressed easy. Two things that I really care about. Refresh your wardrobe with quince. Go to quince.com daily for free shipping and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. Go to q u I-N-E.com daily for free shipping and 360 five day returns. Quints.com daily. In episode 1500 I began a series which looked at the state of the world every 100 years, then every 50 and eventually every 25. The need to increase the rate at which I did episodes was necessary because as we got closer to the present, the rate of change the world underwent accelerated. Once I reached 2025, I had arrived in the present and many people were wondering what I'd do next. I had some people suggest I make predictions about the future, but honestly, that would just be making stuff up and there would be no value in it, since I'm sure almost all of my predictions would be wrong. What I decided to do instead was to start going backwards every 100 episodes and look at the state of the world every 500 years. This will not allow the year to sync with the episode number as it did before, but that'd be impossible anyways once I get earlier than the year one, because you can't have negative episode numbers. I'm also going to be advancing every 500 years for the same reason I went every 25 years once I got to the 20th century. It all has to do with the rate of change. Technical change was slow in the ancient world. Innovations were rare, spread slowly, and took a considerable time to be widely adopted. Empires and kingdoms rose and fell, but the process also usually took several centuries. And there's also simply the issue of time. When I started the series in episode 1500, I planned to cover only 500 years of history going forward. Going backwards, however, requires covering a lot more ground. Recorded human history goes back to about the year 3000 BC and the rise of modern humans. And the agricultural revolution begins about 9,000 to 11,000 years ago, around the end of the Younger dryas. So every 100 episodes going forward, I'm going to be going back further and further in history, looking at the state of the world until we get to prehistory, and then finally to the realm of archaeology and paleontology. So with that, what happened in the world between the years 1000 and 1500? Not much, really. Just 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 Incan and Aztec empires, the fall of the Mayan Empire, and the start of the Age of Discovery. Most of these I have devoted entire episodes to. So while acknowledging that there's a lot of history between 1500 and 1000, I want to spend the rest of the episode focusing on the state of the world in the year 1000. And we'll start in Europe. One popular idea holds that in Western Europe, the year 1000 was a time of fear and religious fervor, with Christians believing that they were entering the end times, kind of like a medieval version of Y2K. However, the evidence for this is not very strong. Most chroniclers of the period note nothing special about the year. And part of the reason was that the anno Domini calendar system was not yet standardized and there was disagreement as to what, what year it actually was. Christianity was the dominant religion in Europe, but it was not universal. There were still pockets of paganism, but they were shrinking fast. Momentous things were happening that year. On December 25, Stephen I was crowned the first king of Hungary, establishing Hungary as a Christian state. The Althing of Iceland embraced Christianity in the year 1000 as well. Continental Europe recognized the Holy Roman Empire under Emperor Otto III as the preeminent power. France was ruled by Robert ii, AKA Robert the Pious, the first Capetian king after Hugh Capet. Consolidating early feudal domains, a unified kingdom of England had coalesced around Anglo Saxon kingdoms and was still 66 years away from the Norman Conquest, which would forever change the country. The papacy during this time was in a period of deep decline, retrospectively called the Saeculum Obscurum, or Dark Age, a period when the papacy was dominated by powerful Roman families and marked by political corruption, instability and moral decline. Viking raids, which had terrorized Europe for centuries, were still occurring, but were beginning to transition into settlement and state formation, especially in places like Normandy. The economy was overwhelmingly agrarian and towns were small. But a slow recovery from earlier centuries of decline was underway in Eastern Europe and the Byzantine world. The Byzantine Empire remained the most sophisticated and powerful state in all of Europe. Under Emperor Basil ii, later known as the Bulgar Slayer. The empire was expanding and consolidating its power, particularly against the Bulgarian Empire. Constantinople was the largest and wealthiest Christian city in Europe, serving as a trade hub with Asia. Orthodox Christianity was spreading amongst the Slavic peoples, including the Kyivan Rus, which had recently adopted Christianity under Vladimir the Great. The Islamic world In the year 1000 was arguably the most intellectually vibrant civilization on earth. The Islamic world was reaching the peak of its historical scientific achievements. Scholars working at this time included Ibn Al Haytham, who was writing his Book of Optics, a foundational work in the science of light and vision, as well as Avicenna Al Birindi and Al Zarhawi, known as the Father of Surgery, amongst many other scholars. The Muslim world was still organized into caliphates. It was dominated by the Abbasid Caliphate, with the Caliphate of Cordoba to the west and the Fatimid Caliphate in North Africa. Persia was in a period of instability with various groups seceding from Abbasid rule. Cordoba in Islamic Spain was the world's largest city at this time with a population of roughly 450,000 people. It was a vast metropolis of libraries, hospitals and learning far beyond anything in contemporary Europe. The Reconquista was starting to gain some ground, but the southern Iberian peninsula would still be dominated by Islam for centuries to come. China was in the Song Dynasty, a period of extraordinary cultural and technological achievement that I've covered in a previous episode. The inventions of gunpowder, the compass and printing all occurred under the Song. Printed books became widespread and books and paper were exported to many lands. Confucianism became a major governing ideology with the government actively encouraging the spread of schools. The Song dynasty is often described as a pre modern commercial society characterized by bustling cities, a merit based civil service and a thriving merchant class. China was by most measures the wealthiest and most technologically advanced civilization in the world. In the year 1000, Korea was in its Goryeo dynasty and Vietnam was in its anterior Le dynasty. Japan in the year 1000 was deep into the elegant art obsessed Heian period. Court life was dominated by poetry and intricate social ritual. Murasaki Shikibu began writing the Tale of Genji around this time, Widely considered to be the world's first novel. A sweeping portrait of aristocratic life at the imperial court in Kyoto. India was divided into several smaller empires including the Eastern Chaluka, 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 across Southeast Asia and establishing trade links as far as China. This was also the dawn of a traumatic era. Mahmud of Ghazni, ruler of the Ghaznavid empire in what is today Afghanistan, began launching a series of devastating raids into the Indian subcontinent around this time Targeting the wealth of Hindu temples and cities. Sub Saharan Africa had developed urban centers and empires, notably the Ghana Empire. The trans Saharan slave trade was becoming an important factor in the formation of the kingdoms of the Sahel. The Ghana Empire controlled lucrative gold and salt trade routes across the Sahara, making it one of the wealthiest nations in all the world. North Africa was under the Fatimid Caliphate which made Cairo its magnificent capital. In the pre Columbian Americas. The Wari and Tiwanaku cultures were in decline in South America, while the Chachapoya and Chimu cultures were rising to prominence in the Caribbean. The Taino had become the dominant culture in what is today Puerto Rico. In Mesoamerica, the great Mayan cities were Past their classic peak, but still functioning. And places like Chichen Itza in the Yucatan were still a thriving center of power in the American Southwest. Ancestral Pueblo peoples were building remarkable cliff dwellings and multi story stone complexes at places such as Chaco Canyon. By the year 1000, the great age of Polynesian exploration was in full swing. Descendants of the earlier Lapita culture had already spread across vast stretches of the Pacific. And Polynesian navigators were among the most skilled seafarers in human history. Using double hulled canoes and sophisticated knowledge of the stars, ocean swells, winds and bird behavior, they settled islands thousands of miles apart. By this time, places like Hawaii were likely settled or in the process of being settled. While expansion towards New Zealand and Easter island would occur within the next few centuries, these societies developed complex chiefdoms, rich oral traditions and agricultural systems adapted to island environments, cultivating crops like taro, breadfruit and sweet potato. But perhaps the single most dramatic event of the year 1000 was the Norse reaching the Americas. Norse explorer Leif Erikson became the first European to land in the Americas at Leon Saul Meadows in modern day Newfoundland. Archaeological evidence proves that the Vikings crossed the North Atlantic and landed in northeastern Canada. Their settlement at Leon Sau Meadow didn't result in any long term contact between Europeans and early Americans. It would be centuries before that would happen. However, it was a starting point. Historian Valerie Hansen argues that the year 1000 marks a turning point when previously separate regional trade networks across Africa, Afro Eurasia, began to connect in more of a continuous system of exchange, driven not by large empires, but by merchants, improved maritime trade routes, and growing demand for goods. In her book the year 1000, when explorers connected the World and Globalization Began, she contends that this period saw the first meaningful steps towards globalization as goods, ideas, technologies and even people began moving across much greater distances than before, linking places like China, the Islamic world, Europe and parts of Africa into an emerging, though still fragile, global network. There wasn't a lot of global trade, but the very first hints of it started to appear. Also, while the term Dark Ages isn't used by historians anymore, and it's debatable if it's even accurate, the year 1000 is about the point at which the Dark Ages would have ended. The year 1000 was a radically different world from that of the year 1500, and the world was again very different 500 years earlier. Something I'll be covering in another 100 episodes. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My Big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible, and I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast, and links to those are available in the show Notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read on the show.