A few short years, so long ago. But the opening decades of the 1200s saw a wealth of spectacular and future-shaping events occur.  We start with an account of the nature of the medieval polity, of “feudal” political relations; we see the new Latin principalities of the east Mediterranean as prototypes of the European approach to political society; we also see that slavery and serfdom, perennial in human societies, gradually became extinct in the home countries of medieval Europe. We see the rise of a culture of Liberties, embodied in charters. We trace the great French dynastic civil war that created ‘France’ and began the process of the creation of ‘England’, and which framed and gave rise to the Magna Carta. Finally, we see the definitive reconquest of the Iberian peninsula for Christendom, and end with the emergence of parliamentary political institutions as the European norm during the 1200s.