Reddit reviews A Poisoned Past: The Life and Times of Margarida de Portu, a Fourteenth-Century Accused Poisoner (Thinking Historically)

First, I want to say that one of the first things you're taught when studying history is not to measure something as "good" or "bad", especially in a very different time and place, because then you're imposing modern sensibilities and concepts onto a period when those simply didn't exist. So saying that the medieval period was somehow worse than Rome just isn't a sound historical comparison to make.

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Now to answer your question, bad things certainly happened in the medieval period, but with them came plenty of good things. If you want an interesting historical read, this book talks about a young woman accused of poisoning her husband. If anything, the story of the trial of this woman, named Margarida de Portu, shows what a great job the church and the legal system did at protecting a young girl against a powerful man. If you're into war history, one of my favorite stories about the Hundred Years War involves the blind John of Bohemia asking to be led into battle. His men do so in order to maintain his dignity. They tie their horses to his, and at the end of the battle, the horses are found still tied together, as are the remains of the men. To a modern audience, this may seem bizarre, but it seems that the English were appreciative of the gesture; Edward III had the man's body washed, wrapped in linen and returned to Germany in a litter. This is an impressive amount of respect to show one's enemy, since most of the bodies were buried in a mass grave.

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I know there's a tendency to define the Middle Ages by the Crusades, but that simply isn't the case. Even with Europe's interference in the Crusades, if you look at books like this one, there tends to be a complicated picture of even life in Jerusalem. There was tension, of course, and rulers like Saladin were intolerant of other people, but the Mamluks in particular focused their attention on restoring Jerusalem and spreading Muslim architecture in particular. The Mamluks seemed not to have ill will towards Jews or Christians. Muslims, of course, made important contributions to things like mathematics, art, and architecture in the medieval period. On the topic of conversions, not all conversions to Christianity were bloody. The conversion of England in particular seems to have happened in relative peace.

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I'm not as brushed up on what happened in medieval Asia, so I don't feel comfortable telling you much about that, but I strongly encourage you to look into that.

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If you feel the need to compare all this to Rome, I suggest being very careful. Roman history tends to get appropriated for all sorts of sinister purposes, from British imperialism to furthering the agenda of white supremacists. Antiquity isn't really my area to study, but I'm a research assistant for my university's classics department, and I can tell you that a lot of the literature has an incredible emphasis on violence. If you want a super long example of this, I would suggest reading Silius Italicus' Punica, which is a poem retelling the Punic Wars. Of course, it's fiction, so it takes some liberties. Hannibal is regarded as one of the greatest generals of all time. This was one of my favorite sections of the poem (courtesy of the Loeb Classical Library), in which Hannibal seems very vengeful over the death of his brother Hasdrubal. Of course, Rome isn't all bad either, but my point is, it's unfair to make those moral comparisons.