IMC 2024: Sessions

This panel explores the historiographical application of explanatory frameworks of crisis to medieval phenomena such as the Wolf minimum and related climate change, early 14th c. famines, demographic crisis/plague related mass mortality of the mid-14th c., economic and monetary crises of the late 15th c. but with a main focus on crises of empire, comparing the Mamluk and the Holy Roman Empire. While the notion of crisis has been heavily criticized in its application to the long 14th c., we suggest that to see 'crisis' as a mere transformation and to emphasize continuity over rupture tends to throw out the child with the bathwater. While it is uncontroverisal that narrative sources construct bleak tableaux of crisis for a variety of reasons and might exaggerate the severity of floods, climate events, famines, or political crises, it is still worthwhile to investigate these motifs and their possible links to natural phenomena such as climate change, famine, plague-related mortality but also political crises e.g. of the Mamluk Empire in the mid-14th c. under the Qalawunids before the ascent of Barquq (cf. Steenbergen's Order out of Chaos) but also of the Roman Empire in the late 15th c. How useful is the concept of crisis in describing and analysing multi-causal and entangled phenomena of demographic, economic or political stress and decline?