Run-down of what this post is about

This unit was completely unlike anything I had learnt. In terms of content, I mean. The Medival Ages were weird man! That’s what we studied. In our unit we studied: The Fall of Rome, it’s impact on the Medival times, The Crusades, The Impact of the Crusades on the Wordlview of the people of the Middle Ages and just The Medival Ages in general. We additionally studied myths, legends and heroes as part of a project involving the crusades and quilts, yes that makes no sense whatsoever but you’ll see later on.

And I will also be talking about the projects we did in this unit, and yes it’s project plural. PLURAL! Well, really focused on one big project with multiple parts. But there were other little side projects.

One of our projects was to create a quilt based on a story we made up about the crusades after having read a book about the crusades. We did this in teams of 4, my teammates were Lucy, Jason and Ben.

Our main question was: How did the Crusades and Feudalism impact worldview(s)?

The Fall of Rome

Okay. How the frig do Romans tie into this? I mean they were wayyyyyy before right? Well ish. Rather fall of Rome is really what impacted the Middle Ages. We learnt about why Rome fell (8 reasons) and that after Europe became spilt into 3 different groups, the Franks, The Anglo Saxons and the Vikings, really just the 3 cultural groups who had pilaged Rome in its later days.  Then…! the medieval ages came around. This is going to be something else.

The Crusades

The Crusades in my opinion were a huge wast of time and an awful bloodbath that was pointless and just something that spewed more hate and ignorance. But that doesn’t tell you what they are. The Crusades were an event, actually a series of events, that took place during the Middle Ages. The first Crusade started on August 15 1096, The last crusade ended in 1291.

The Crusaders were Christian men from Great Britain, France and Germany, really just all of Europe  and who “fought” for the Holy Land (Jerusalem). Why did I write “fought” in quotations marks? Because it was more of invasion and less of a “battle”. It was said to be for a noble cause, to be “for God” and doing God’s work. But the Bible, preaches love and peace and acceptance, so going to Jerusalem and slaughtering a bunch of people, mostly Muslims, in the name of “God” was kind of controversial to what the Christians sacred book preached. As you can tell I have very strong opinions about this 😅. 

Feudalism?

Okay so what is feudalism. Like seriously what does this word mean? Feudalism is a political structure like, say, a dictatorship or fashioniscm or capitalism. What it specifically was, was a series a “relationships” let’s say between Manour owners and their servants. Manours back then were a bit different, it was like a little kingdom within a plot of land. The Lord and Lady of the manour lived in a very fancy and big house and all their servants lived in that land and probably never saw any other place than there. It was called the Manorial system.

Another part of feudalism was the three f’s.

Fief: the land that they own, by they I mean the Lady and Lord of the manours and their serfs (servants/farmers)

Fealty : the loyalty the lord and lady of the manor had to the serfs and vice versa

Faith: what the inhabitants of the manor believed in, i.e. their religion.

Feudalism was not a very “just” system for those on the bottom of the economical chain. Serfs and peasants did not lead very luxurious lives, and if you were born into a family of serfs there wasn’t really a way to have a different job, it was what you were stuck with. But don’t worry, this will be changing.

OUR PROJECT

The main project of this unit was to create a quilt. Which is kinda weird but I’ll explain. The first part of this project was to read a book about the crusades. The second part, after having read the book, was to create a story of our own,based on the crusades, one Story but told in two parts, one from a Muslim (the defender) point of view and the other from a Christian Crusaders point of view (the invader).

 

We would create a quilt to represent our story. We then created quilt block designs based off of our story. To get inspiration for our project we went to the Gordon Smith Gallery. We got a taste of the Middle East by eating Donair food to represent the people in the Middle East during the Crusades.

Here are some images of the art we saw at the Gordon Smith Gallery, there were two quilts which we used as our inspiration for our quilts but we were unable to photograph them.

 

Creating our quilt

First off were the designs, now you will see that these designs are very abstract but I’ll explain more about what the symbols mean in a little bit.

So the first triangle in the first square with the piece missing is The Crusader named Joseph, he’s invading Jerusalem and he gets injured, his group retreats, he blacks out and the last thing he sees is a Muslim (Muhammad) reaching down to save him, Muhammad is the white triangle in the first one and he seems to be an enemy to Joseph, we chose red to represent the Red Cross often associated with the Crusaders. While in the other side of the quilt it’s from Muhammad’s point of view, he sees an injured invader and goes to save him, we made it green because green is a colour normally associated with the Islamic world. The sun in the middle of each square represents the sun rising and the beginning of their story.

 

The second square and First side is again from Joseph (the Crusader) point of view. He wakes up to find a Muslim soldier reaching down to help him and he tries to attack him because he thinks Muhammad (the Muslim solider) is trying to kill him, he’s still injured and the little dot next to him (the triangle him) represents him bleeding out. The second square second side is Muhammad’s point of view, Muhammad is trying to save the injured man but the man wakes up and tries to kill him, he defends himself but manages to calm the man down because he’s bleeding out. The sun half blacked out represents the middle of their adventure.

 

The last block is virtually the same for both. Muhammad managed to calm down Joseph enough and took him to the Imam (equivalent of a priest), the Imam convinces Joseph that he shouldn’t be attacking people but that there was nothing he could do to end this, so the newly allied Joseph and Muhammad run off to try and start a better life far away from fighting. The starry background represents the ending of the story and the star represents a new hope rising.