You have heard “Timbuktu” as a stand-in for the ends of the earth, but this episode opens with West Africa at the center of wealth, learning and trade. Chris Spangle and Matt Wittlief trace the rise of the Mali Empire, from Sundiata Keita to Mansa Musa, whose famed pilgrimage to Mecca becomes a lens for how gold, scholarship and Islamic trade networks connected the medieval world.
Then the timeline snaps back to Europe and the crisis of the late Middle Ages. The conversation follows demographic collapse from the Great Famine through the Black Death, including how plague spread and why it hit with such force. From there, it moves through religious turmoil tied to the Avignon papacy and growing resentment of clerical wealth, plus the long-running battles over heresy that set the stage for later upheaval.
Finally, the episode returns to political instability, from uprisings in Flanders and France to the burdens of the Hundred Years’ War, shifting labor laws, Parliament’s pushback, and England’s convulsions from Edward II to Edward III to Richard II. It closes with the Peasants’ Revolt, court politics, a cascade of titles and rivalries, and the fall of Richard II as Henry Bolingbroke takes the crown as Henry IV, with a tease of more turmoil before the Tudors.
