Hello and welcome to another blog post! This post will be covering what happened in Rome and Europe, starting with the fall of Rome until nearly the start of the Renaissance. This unit was pretty interesting to learn what exactly happened back then and it was cool to learn about town and civilization back then.

We started off by looking at the fall of Rome. In class we were split up into four groups and researched the four main ways the great empire of Rome fell. We were told the four reasons and then asked to elaborate on those statements. Here are the reasons:

1. The Black Death- the Black Death caused several deaths and many of the houses and estates went bankrupt, leading to a terrible economy

2. The peasant’s revolt- the peasants revolted against those in a higher class because they were treated brutally. The attack was unexpected for the higher class

3. Time and money- people started demanding more money for their business hours

4. Wealth- wealth greatly affected the social structure because it was changed to be based on a person’s amount of money they had and not just the amount of land they had.

The Black Death⬆️

These reasons led mainly to the fall of Rome. After that, we started to look at heros and myths. We studied different types of books and movies. After looking at those briefly, Ms. Willemse introduced the “hero’s journey” to us. Every one of your favourite storybook hero or favourite movie character has gone through the hero’s journey in order to succeed on their quest. I suggest that you watch the video down below to gain a further knowledge of this⬇️

This video really details the hero’s journey for you.

After this, we looked at the differences between history and myths. What I took out of the lesson was that myths are mainly false or made up, but they give people hope in that they can succeed. History is always correct, but you probably couldn’t have one without the other. They complete each other. A case study that we did for this topic was Robin Hood. We concluded that it didn’t matter whether he was a myth or part of history because of the effect the tale had on people.

After this, we went on to study feudalism. Feudalism was a political system that was built on a combination of military and legal customs. It structured the social system of medieval times. This system was built on 3 F’s: Fief, Fealty and Faith. Fief defined the land. It was basically the daily life of all the people of the manor such as serfs and freeholders. The second F is fealty. Fealty defined loyalty. This basically meant the duties of the people of the manor to each other. The third F, faith, is fairly self explanatory. This detailed the religion or faith  that the people of the manor believed in.

This photo detail what an old fashioned village would have looked like.

We then started to look at the crusades. The crusades was a series of battles between the Christian and Muslim forces. At first, the Muslims had territory on what the Christians believed to be their holy land so the pope ordered a Christian crusade to win their holy land back. This series of battles carried out for over 200 years. There was a total of nine crusades.

Overall, the crusades helped the Christians out. When they attacked the Muslim territory, they learned new knowledge and gained new resources that they didn’t know about before.

To further deepen our knowledge of the crusades, we were tasked with reading a book. The book was called The Book of the Lion. It was about a young man named Edmund who joined a crusade to try and take back the holy land. It was interesting to see a different point of view about because the book was told as if you were there following him. To get a summary of the book, click here.

Shortly after, we looked at the rise of towns in feudal Europe. Trading was a huge factor in the rise of towns because people wanted to create settlements where there was more resources. In doing so, they could trade easier and make money easier. Win-win situation! We also had to make a diagram for this using as few words as possible. Here’s a picture of mine⬇️

 

All of this led up to project using the knowledge we had learned. Our goal: to create a story and then use symbolism to put the story into a quilt! The story had to be based in the time of the crusades. There was one catch: it had to be a two part story, with one point of view coming from a Muslim side and another coming from a Christian point of view. I was put in a group with Taylor, Anika and (unfortunately) Luciano.

At first we struggled with our story because we made it much too complicated to put onto one quilt square. We had to have a clear beginning, middle and end for each story and so we cut a lot of details out of the story to make it work. To get a more clear image of what we had to do, we had to have the beginning of both stories on the same sheet of fabric. It was double sided. It was also the same idea for the middle and the end.

On one side of the story, we had a Christian couple named Henry and Jill. One day, Jill went missing. Henry goes to look for Jill and it turns out that a man named Aladdin has found her and they are reunited

On the other side of the story, the same man Aladdin lives and farms alone. One day, he finds Jill and takes care of her. Once she is reunited with her husband, he goes home happy.

We had to take this story and turn it into abstract art to put on our quilts. To help with getting ideas, we took another field study trip, this time to the Gordon Smith art gallery. We looked at some First Nations art that had lots of symbolism in them. It was a fun and eye-opening trip. Here’s a picture from the museum.

 

I didn’t get a lot of good pictures of that trip, but I gained a lot of knowledge.

Using the inspiration from the art gallery, our group put together a good idea of what our quilt would look like. We had to go through lots of critiques, but in the end I really felt as though our group had pulled it off. It was much more refined and more “professional” than our first drafts. Here are some pictures of our group holding up the completed version!⬇️

 

It was fun working with these people to grind out a solution for our quilts!

Well, that pretty much wraps up this blog post. Although it was a difficult unit, it was fun to learn all of the things that I did and I gained a lot from it.

Thanks for reading!!

Until next time… (new post Monday!)

Nik