The thirteenth century has been called, in economic terms, the autumn of the Middle Ages. Communication and commerce were part and parcel of medieval life, in spite of the arduous nature of travel. The Middle Ages witnessed the continued use of Roman road systems and the addition of many secondary routes creating a dense network across western Europe. Professional transporters handled a portion of medieval overland- and river-based trade. Such transporters worked the Champagne fairs and all towns feeding into them. Medieval towns were the sites par excellence of international trade, and of much regional traffic as well. The growth of international trade in the commercial revolution of the eleventh century was underpinned by the existence of recording methods sufficient to permit complex business transactions at a distance. The phenomenon of the medieval fair represents the best laboratory for the study of commerce and communications in thirteenth-century Europe.

No account of Islam in the west, nor indeed of the history of thirteenth-century Europe, would be complete that did not take into account the origins of the one Islamic state in Spain to survive throughout the fourteenth and nearly all the fifteenth century, the Nasrid kingdom of Granada. The origins of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada lay in the struggles within southern Spain from 1228 onwards, between factions flying the black banner of the Abbasid caliphs, and the Almohad caliph al-Mamun, who was based in Seville and Granada. Rachel Arie has pointed out that a whole area of the city was laid out to receive the swarm of Muslim refugees moving into Granada. One factor in the survival of Nasrid Granada was the survival of Muhammad I himself. The Majorcan kings had treaties with Granada by the early fourteenth century, and there were Catalan and Italian commercial stations at Almeria and Malaga.

The aristocracy of thirteenth-century Europe defined itself by its self-conscious adherence to a European-wide set of common cultural values and assumptions embodied in the cult of chivalric knighthood. By emphasising qualities of loyalty, generosity, military prowess and courtly style as constituent elements in true nobility, chivalry facilitated the incorporation of the chevaliers into the ranks of an aristocracy to which many had not been born. The legal unity of the French nobility was the product of royal fiscal and judicial policy. By 1300, the chevaliers of France were securely a part of the nobility, and their privileged legal status was increasingly seen as heritable even by their undubbed descendants. The absence of a legally privileged nobility from thirteenth-century England is conventionally seen as a sign of the overwhelming power of the English crown. Among the knights and squires, stability was somewhat less than it was among the greatest families.