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history of Europe
Table of Contents

 Introduction
 Prehistory
 The Metal Ages
 Greeks, Romans, and barbarians
 The Middle Ages
 The Renaissance
 The emergence of modern Europe, 1500–1648
 The great age of monarchy, 1648–1789
 Revolution and the growth of industrial society, 1789–1914
 European society and culture since 1914

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HomeWorld History

The Middle Ages

Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry
The period of European history extending from about 500 to 1400–
1500 CE is traditionally known as the Middle Ages. The term was first
used by 15th-century scholars to designate the period between their own
time and the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The period is often
considered to have its own internal divisions: either early and late or
early, central or high, and late.

Although once regarded as a time of uninterrupted ignorance,

superstition, and social oppression, the Middle Ages are now understood
as a dynamic period during which the idea of Europe as a distinct
cultural unit emerged. During late antiquity and the early Middle Ages,
political, social, economic, and cultural structures were profoundly
reorganized, as Roman imperial traditions gave way to those of
the Germanic peoples who established kingdoms in the former Western
Empire. New forms of political leadership were introduced, the
population of Europe was gradually Christianized, and monasticism was
established as the ideal form of religious life. These developments
reached their mature form in the 9th century during the reign
of Charlemagne and other rulers of the Carolingian dynasty, who
oversaw a broad cultural revival known as the Carolingian renaissance.

In the central, or high, Middle Ages, even more dramatic growth

occurred. The period was marked by economic and territorial
expansion, demographic and urban growth, the emergence of national
identity, and the restructuring of secular and ecclesiastical institutions. It
was the era of the Crusades, Gothic art and architecture, the papal
monarchy, the birth of the university, the recovery of ancient Greek
thought, and the soaring intellectual achievements of St. Thomas
Aquinas (c. 1224–74).

It has been traditionally held that by the 14th century the dynamic force
of medieval civilization had been spent and that the late Middle Ages
were characterized by decline and decay. Europe did indeed suffer
disasters of war, famine, and pestilence in the 14th century, but many of
the underlying social, intellectual, and political structures remained
intact. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europe experienced an intellectual
and economic revival, conventionally called the Renaissance, that laid the
foundation for the subsequent expansion of European culture throughout
the world.

Many historians have questioned the conventional dating of the

beginning and end of the Middle Ages, which were never precise in any
case and cannot be located in any year or even century. Some scholars
have advocated extending the period defined as late antiquity (c. 250–
c. 750 CE) into the 10th century or later, and some have proposed a
Middle Ages lasting from about 1000 to 1800. Still others argue for the
inclusion of the old periods Middle Ages, Renaissance,
and Reformation into a single period beginning in late antiquity and
ending in the second half of the 16th century.
Edward PetersMichael Frassetto

The idea of the Middle Ages

The term and concept before the 18th
century
St. Augustine
From the 4th to the 15th century, writers of history thought within a
linear framework of time derived from the Christian understanding of
Scripture—the sequence of Creation, Incarnation, Christ’s Second
Coming, and the Last Judgment. In Book XXII of City of God, the
great Church Father Augustine of Hippo (354–430) posited six ages
of world history, which paralleled the six days of Creation and the six
ages of the individual human life span. For Augustine, the six ages of
history—from Adam and Eve to the Flood, from the Flood to Abraham,
from Abraham to King David, from David to the Babylonian Exile, from
the Exile to Jesus Christ, and from Christ to the Second Coming—would
be followed by a seventh age, the reign of Christ on earth. World history
was conceived as “salvation history”—the course of events from Creation
to the Last Judgment—and its purposes were religious and moral. Thus,
all the references by Augustine and other early authors to a “middle
time” must be understood within the framework of the sixth age of
salvation history. Early Christian interpretations of the biblical Book of
Daniel (Daniel 2:31–45, 7), especially those of the Church
Father Jerome (c. 347–419/420) and the historian Paulus
Orosius (flourished 414–417), added the idea of four successive world
empires—Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Late writers in this
tradition added the idea of the translatio imperii (“translation of
empire”): from Alexander the Great to the Romans, from the Romans to
the Franks under Charlemagne in 800, and from Charlemagne to the
East Frankish emperors and Otto I. A number of early European thinkers
built upon the idea of the translation of empire to define European
civilization in terms of scholarship and chivalry (the knightly code of
conduct). All these ideas were readily compatible with the Augustinian
sequence of the six ages of the world.

The single exception to this trend was the work of the late 12th-century
Calabrian abbot and scriptural exegete Joachim of Fiore (c. 1130–
c. 1201). According to Joachim, there were three ages in human history:
that of the Father (before Christ), that of the Son (from Christ to an
unknown future date, which some of Joachim’s followers located in the
late 13th century), and that of the Holy Spirit (during which all
Christendom would turn into a vast church with a universal priesthood of
believers). But Joachim’s view was also firmly expressed in terms of
salvation history. Many chroniclers and writers of histories, of course,
wrote about shorter periods of time and focused their efforts on local
affairs, but the great Augustinian metanarrative underlay their work too.
From several confessional perspectives, this view still survives.

Petrarch
In the 14th century, however, the literary moralist Petrarch (1304–74),
fascinated with ancient Roman history and contemptuous of the time that
followed it, including his own century, divided the past into ancient and
new—antiquity and recent times—and located the transition between
them in the 4th century, when the Roman emperors converted to
Christianity. According to Petrarch, what followed was an age
of tenebrae (“shadows”), a “sordid middle time” with only the hope of a
better age to follow. Although Petrarch’s disapproval of the Christianized
Roman and post-Roman world may seem irreligious, he was in fact a
devout Christian; his judgment was based on aesthetic, moral, and
philological criteria, not Christian ones. Petrarch’s limitless admiration
for Rome heralded a novel conception of the European past and
established criteria for historical periodization other than those of
salvation history or the history of the church, empire, cities, rulers, or
noble dynasties. His followers in later centuries focused primarily on the
transformation of the arts and letters, seeing a renewal of earlier Roman
dignity and achievement beginning with the painter Giotto (1266/67 or
1276–1337) and with Petrarch himself and continuing into the 15th and
16th centuries.

In the early 16th century, religious critics and reformers, including both
the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus and the Protestant
reformer Martin Luther, added another dimension to the new conception
and terminology: the idea of an evangelical, apostolic Christian church
that had become corrupt when it was absorbed by the Roman Empire and
now needed to be reformed, or restored to its earlier apostolic
authenticity. The idea of reform had long been built into
the Christian worldview. This conception of the period between the 4th
and 16th centuries was laid out in the great Protestant history
by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Centuriae Magdeburgensis (1559–74; “The
Magdeburg Centuries”), which also introduced the practice of dividing
the past into ostensibly neutral centuries. The Roman Catholic version of
church history was reflected in the Annales Ecclesiastici (“Ecclesiastical
Annals”) of Caesar Baronius (1538–1607), completed by Oderico Rinaldi
in 1677. Thus, the historical dimension of both the Protestant and the
Catholic reformations of the 16th and 17th centuries added a sharply
polemical religious interpretation of the Christian past to Petrarch’s
original conception, as church history was put to the service of
confessional debate.

Petrarch’s cultural successors, the literary humanists, also used variants

of the expression Middle Ages. Among them was media
tempestas (“middle time”), first used by Giovanni Andrea, bishop of
Aleria, in 1469; others were media antiquitas (“middle antiquity”), media
aetas (“middle era”), and media tempora (“middle times”), all first used
between 1514 and 1530. The political theorist and historian Melchior
Goldast appears to have coined the variation medium aevum (“a middle
age”) in 1604; shortly after, in a Latin work of 1610, the English jurist
and legal historian John Selden repeated medium aevum, Anglicizing the
term in 1614 to middle times and in 1618 to middle ages. In 1641 the
French historian Pierre de Marca apparently coined the
French vernacular term le moyen âge, which gained authority in the
respected lexicographical work Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et
infimae latinitatis (1678; “A Glossary for Writers of Middle and Low
Latin”), by Charles du Fresne, seigneur du Cange, who emphasized the
inferior and “middle” quality of Latin linguistic usage after the 4th
century. Other 17th-century historians, including Gisbertus Voetius and
Georg Horn, used terms such as media aetas in their histories of the
church before the Reformation of the 16th century.

The term and idea circulated even more widely in other historical works.
Du Cange’s great dictionary also used the Latin term medium aevum, as
did the popular historical textbook The Nucleus of Middle History
Between Ancient and Modern (1688), by the German historian Christoph
Keller—although Keller observed that in naming the period he was
simply following the terminology of earlier and contemporary scholars.
By the late 17th century the most commonly used term for the period in
Latin was medium aevum, and various equivalents of Middle Ages or
Middle Age were used in European vernacular languages.