Middle Ages

In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages (or medieval period) lasted from the 5th to the 15th century.

The fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476 traditionally marks the start of the Middle Ages.

It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery.

The Renaissance was a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries.

The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages.

They marked the start of the Middle Ages of European history.

The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages.

The High Middle Ages were preceded by the Early Middle Ages and were followed by the Late Middle Ages, which ended around 1500 (by historiographical convention).

Population decline, counterurbanisation, collapse of centralized authority, invasions, and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in Late Antiquity, continued in the Early Middle Ages.

Late antiquity is a periodization used by historians to describe the time of transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages in mainland Europe, the Mediterranean world, and the Near East.

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.

The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinople (modern Istanbul, formerly Byzantium).

The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period.

Post-classical history (the "Middle Ages," c. 500–1500 CE ) witnessed the rise of Christianity, the Islamic Golden Age (c.

The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th and early 9th centuries.

The Carolingian Empire (800–888) was a large Frankish-dominated empire in western and central Europe during the early Middle Ages.

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.

Saracen is a despective term widely used among Christian writers in Europe during the Middle Ages to refer to Arabs and Muslims.

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 organised in the High Middle Ages.

Feudalism was a combination of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries.

Intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities.

Scholasticism was a medieval school of philosophy that employed a critical method of philosophical analysis presupposed upon a Latin Christian theistic paradigm which dominated teaching in the medieval universities in Europe from about 1100 to 1700.

Monasteries were founded as campaigns to Christianise pagan Europe continued.

During and after the Middle Ages, the term paganism was applied to any unfamiliar religion, and the term presumed a belief in false god(s).

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.

Widely seen as the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages, he is best known for The Canterbury Tales.

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.

Gothic architecture (Latin: francigenum opus) is a style that flourished in Europe during the High and Late Middle Ages.

The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th and early 9th centuries.

In the Middle Ages, the term Frank came to be used as a synonym for Western European, as the Carolingian Franks were rulers of most of Western Europe, and established a political order that was the basis of the European Ancien Régime that only ended with the French Revolution.

Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages and beginning the early modern period.

1500), known as the Middle Ages, through the beginning of the Age of Revolutions (c.

Kings became the heads of centralised nation-states, reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a unified Christendom more distant.

In its historical sense, the term usually refers to the Middle Ages and to the Early Modern period during which the Christian world represented a geopolitical power that was juxtaposed with both the pagan and especially the Muslim world.

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.

His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa (modern Italian: Commedia) and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered the most important poem of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.

In the 19th century, the entire Middle Ages were often referred to as the "Dark Ages", but with the adoption of these subdivisions, use of this term was restricted to the Early Middle Ages, at least among historians.

The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages, that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.

Intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities.

At the time of the emergence of urban town life and medieval guilds, specialized "associations of students and teachers with collective legal rights usually guaranteed by charters issued by princes, prelates, or the towns in which they were located" came to be denominated by this general term.

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.

950–c. 1250, during the European Middle Ages.

The Roman Empire reached its greatest territorial extent during the 2nd century AD; the following two centuries witnessed the slow decline of Roman control over its outlying territories.

The fall of the Western Roman Empire to Germanic kings, along with the hellenization of the Eastern Roman Empire into the Byzantine Empire, is conventionally used to mark the end of Ancient Rome and the beginning of the Middle Ages.

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 organised in the High Middle Ages.

Manorialism originated in the Roman villa system of the Late Roman Empire, and was widely practiced in medieval western and parts of central Europe as well as China.

Monasteries were founded as campaigns to Christianise pagan Europe continued.

Various strategies and techniques were employed in Christianization campaigns from Late Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages.

In 376, the Goths, fleeing from the Huns, received permission from Emperor Valens (r.

The Goths (Gutþiuda; Gothi) were an early Germanic people, two of whose branches, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, played an important role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the emergence of Medieval Europe.