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11 views

Middle Ages

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marcialavelinoalterno
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We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Middle Ages

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


This article is about medieval Europe. For a global history of the period between
the 5th and 15th centuries, see Post-classical history. For other uses, see Middle
Ages (disambiguation).
"Medieval times" redirects here. For the dinner theatre, see Medieval Times.

Middle Ages

c. AD 500 – 1500

A medieval stained glass panel from Canterbury


Cathedral, c. 1175 – c. 1180, depicting the Parable of the
Sower, a biblical narrative
Early Middle Ages
Including
High Middle Ages
Late Middle Ages

Key events Fall of the Western Roman Empire


Spread of Islam
Treaty of Verdun
East–West Schism
Crusades
Magna Carta
Hundred Years' War
Black Death
Fall of Constantinople
Exploration of North America

Chronology
 Early modern period
 Renaissance
Antiquity  Age of Discovery
Late antiquity

In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately
from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the Post-classical period of global
history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and transitioned into
the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of
the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval
period, and the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into
the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages.

Population decline, counterurbanisation, the collapse of centralized authority,


invasions, and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in Late Antiquity,
continued into the Early Middle Ages. The large-scale movements of the Migration
Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained
of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East
—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate,
an Islamic empire, after conquest by Muhammad's successors. Although there were
substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical
antiquity was not complete. The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire, Rome's direct
continuation, survived in the Eastern Mediterranean and remained a major power.
The empire's law code, the Corpus Juris Civilis or "Code of Justinian", was
rediscovered in Northern Italy in the 11th century. In the West, most kingdoms
incorporated the few extant Roman institutions. Monasteries were founded as
campaigns to Christianise pagan Europe continued. The Franks, under the Carolingian
dynasty, briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th and early 9th
centuries. It covered much of Western Europe but later succumbed to the
pressures of internal civil wars combined with external invasions: Vikings from the
north, Magyars from the east, and Saracens from the south.

During the High Middle Ages, which began after 1000, the population of Europe
increased greatly as technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to
flourish and the Medieval Warm Period climate change allowed crop yields to
increase. Manorialism, the organisation of peasants into villages that owed rent and
labour services to the nobles, and feudalism, the political structure
whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords in
return for the right to rent from lands and manors, were two of the ways society was
organized in the High Middle Ages.

This period also saw the collapse of the unified Christian church, with the East-West
Schism of 1054. The Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by
Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims.
Kings became the heads of centralised nation-states, reducing crime and violence
but making the ideal of a unified Christendom more distant. Intellectual life was
marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, and
by the founding of universities. The theology of Thomas Aquinas, the paintings
of Giotto, the poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the travels of Marco Polo, and the Gothic
architecture of cathedrals such as Chartres are among the outstanding achievements
toward the end of this period and into the Late Middle Ages.

The Late Middle Ages was marked by difficulties and calamities including famine,
plague, and war, which significantly diminished the population of Europe; between
1347 and 1350, the Black Death killed about a third of Europeans.
Controversy, heresy, and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled
the interstate conflict, civil strife, and peasant revolts that occurred in the kingdoms.
Cultural and technological developments transformed European society,
concluding the Late Middle Ages and beginning the early modern period.

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