If you’ve written any kind of fantasy or watched or read, you know that quite a bit of it takes place in a relative version of the middle ages. We get these sweeping epics of swords and sorcery where people ride horses and or dragons and battle through cities snatched from history books. I had the fortune to walk through one of those cities today. Orvieto, Italy is an active medieval city. Everything is modern inside of the husks of these old buildings at the top of a hill, but the hill and everything on it looks to be in the condition it was as a castle keep.
Looking at the city offered me a quick understanding of everything writers get wrong, and I’ll need to go back there–spend more time writing there to get fantasy right. The main thing I think we sleep on as writers is the technology, and when they were still using swords, they had some amazing tricks we don’t even realize were happening. For example, the ballast system.
I need to dig deeper into the 800-1200 era and really explore what went down worldwide. This is the research fuel for the fire that will be a major fantasy series.