I read about the fictional element Mithril from Lord of the Rings, and how it could have been inspired by titanium. I was wondering if, assuming they had the knowledge, it would be possible for a society with medieval-era technology to produce even a small amount of low quality titanium.
Would it have even been possible? If so, how difficult would it have been?
Not really. Although titanium is quite abundant, being the ninth most common element in the Earth's crust and amounting to 0.56% of its mass (in comparison, copper amounts to only 0.006%, i.e. almost 100 times less), chemical properties of this material make it very hard to process for any practical purposes. Unlike other metals commonly used throughout history, such as copper, tin, zinc, or iron, titanium is very hard to smelt because of its high reactivity that makes it react with oxygen, nitrogen and carbon, causing any processing in natural atmosphere to be almost impossible. Simple thermal processing of ore used in most other common metals that can be more or less reduced to the heating of ore in a furnace to separate molten metal from the remaining slag is useless here, as even with limited contact with air in a bloomery, titanium still reacts with carbon forming titanium carbide, an extremely hard material that is almost impossible to work with (although it makes excellent abrasive).
Modern technology allowed people to transgress all the aforementioned obstacles, and the titanium, already discovered in 1791, has been obtained in pure metal form only in 1910 by an American metallurgist Matthew Hunter who achieved this by heating titanium tetrachloride in presence of metallic sodium in relatively high temperatures (but still well below melting point of copper or iron) in an inert atmosphere at very high pressure. This process became the mainstay of titanium production for the next 20 years, but the complexity and costs made it impractical for any application save for the laboratory work. There were also other In 1932 however, Luxembourgian metallurgist William Kroll invented a similar process that made it more feasible to produce larger quantities of titanium, but he still required eight more years to perfect it. Today, another electrochemical methods, most notably Farthing-Fray-Chen process using calcium chloride as a process environment is seen as a possible alternative to produce pure metals that are hard to obtain in a different way. It is worth noting that titanium shares a lot of properties with aluminium, another abundant and useful metal that required complex electrochemical processes to be purified and produced on an industrial scale.
Kroll process, now commonly used in the industrial titanium production consists of four main steps. The first one is the production of titanium tetrachloride that requires thermal reduction of titanium oxide ore with carbon in chloride flow. The second step is the reaction of titanium tetrachloride in a liquid magnesium contained in a molybdenum-clad stainless steel reactor. This results in a so-called 'sponge' or a porous material, similar in appearance to slag that is later leached (this step is relatively simple). Purified titanium 'sponge' is then powdered mechanically, melted in an arc furnace and solidified in an inert atmosphere or vacuum. After that, titanium can be quite simply formed and processed as any other metal. If it seems extremely complex in comparison with smelting and impact processing typical for iron manufacture, that's because it is. Please note that most of the requirements of the process, such as high-current electricity, high pressures, vacuum or even such a relatively simple material as stainless steel were far beyond the capabilities of the humans prior to 19th century, making production of titanium (provided the former even knew of its existence in the first place) entirely impossible.
On a side note, titanium weapons would have been largely impractical. Relatively low density of the metal in comparison with iron (4.5 g.cm^(3) vs 7.8 g/cm^(3)), although beneficial in construction, would decrease a force of impact on any blunt or edged weapons intended primarily for slashing. This would make some sense in piercing or very sharp-edged weapons intended for use against lightly armoured or unarmoured opponents, but here we come to the main drawback of a titanium as a weapon material, because it merges two highly undesirable properties - high ductility and very high abrasion resistance, meaning that the titanium weapon would dull quickly but then would be very hard to sharpen by grinding (using a grinding wheel or whetstone). Prominent galling (i.e. 'sticking' of the metal particles in the abrasive material rendering it less useful) would have an additional effect of spoiling the sharpening equipment. On the other hand, titanium chain armour would be quite effective, presenting tensile strength on par of that of good quality modern steel and even slightly higher hardness with only 60% of mass (still, a far cry from Tolkien's mithril that was, if memory serves, compared with an easily concealable fabric while a titanium chain shirt would still weigh 3-4 kg) but again, given the technology required to produce titanium on a large scale, protection provided by chain armour or even early modern plate armour would be woefully inadequate in warfare.
So, to sum it up, practical production of titanium requires metallurgy and engineering not present prior to 18th century (most notably electricity) and not refined enough before late 19th century, making it completely unachievable prior to quite recent times.