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The Middle Ages
The Middle Ages
The "Middle Ages" is a term used to describe the period between the end of the late classical age
and the time of the Renaissance. The most common starting point for the Middle Ages begins
around the year 500 C.E., with the most common end point being around 1500. That time frame
is further delineated by the early Middle Ages from 500 to 1050; the High Middle Ages from
1050 to 1300; and the late Middle Ages (and early Renaissance) from 1300 to 1500.
The Middle Ages began with the fall of the Roman Empire. In the Roman Empire, a number of
Germanic kingdoms arose as the power of the Romans receded. In the fifth and sixth centuries,
the Visigoths and Vandals established kingdoms in Spain and North Africa, while the Ostrogoths
and Lombards established kingdoms in Italy. The most powerful and long-lasting Germanic
empires, however, were established by the Franks. In the sixth century, the Merovingian dynasty
established a strong and coherent kingdom in what is now southern Germany and northern
France. The Merovingians converted to Christianity, adopted some rudimentary forms of
administration, and established a diplomatic relationship with the Byzantine Empire.
During that early post-Roman period, life in Western Europe was difficult, often violent, and for
almost everyone, set within a very small world. Under a system that has come to be called
manorialism, peasants (a class that included just about everyone) lived under the protection of a
local strongman know as a lord. There was no centralized government to speak of and no
centralized state. For that reason, the things Roman citizens had once looked to the Roman
government for—protection and justice, for example—were the responsibility of the local lord.
In return, the peasants who resided on a lord's lands owed him either rent, labor, or some
combination of the two, which was dependent on the specifics of the relationship between them.
More crucially, for the peasants, the lord of the manor had what amounted at times to absolute
power over them. The lord, in turn, owed his allegiance to the king in whose realm he resided.
In time, the Merovingian dynasty was replaced by the Carolingian dynasty. The dynasty was
named after its founder Charles Martel, but its most notable member by far was Charles Martel's
grandson, Charlemagne. By the year 800, Charlemagne had incorporated huge territories into
his realm, which stretched from what is now southern France to what is now Denmark far east of
the Rhine and down into present-day Croatia and into Italy. On Christmas day of 800, Leo III
crowned Charlemagne as Holy Roman emperor, which formalized Charlemagne's role as the
protector of the Catholic Church.
Charlemagne's death in 814 began a long process of decline and disintegration for the united
Frankish state. Eventually, the centralized power that had once held together the domains of the
powerful local lords disappeared, and it was left to armed and aggressive mounted nobles, known
as knights, to fight amongst themselves for control of the choicest lands. Meanwhile, raids by
Vikings and Muslim pirates often went unopposed, which made the absence of effective
centralized government all the more painfully apparent.
The Vikings also menaced the shores of England during that period, and their raids helped to so
weaken three of the four English kingdoms during the eighth and ninth centuries that the fourth,
Wessex, was eventually able to claim all of the island for itself. The kings of Wessex, including
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The Middle Ages
most notably Alfred the Great, succeeded in uniting many smaller Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into
one formidable English kingdom. By the end of the 10th century, most of the territory south of
Glasgow, Scotland was in the hands of the Wessex kings.
On the Continent, however, was a rather different situation. Whereas there had once been a
unified and centralized Carolingian state, there now emerged another form of societal
organization called feudalism. Feudalism is a term used to describe the web of relationships that
characterized 10th-century political and social relations after the decline of the Carolingians.
Feudalism was a lot like manorialism, yet it was concerned with the social and political where
manorialism was concerned with the economic.
Feudalism was the dominant form of social organization as the 11th century and the High Middle
Ages began. With the High Middle Ages (conventionally taken to last until ca. 1300), there
occurred many shifts in the nature and locus of power and authority in European society. New
ways of organizing society developed, and society in general grew more prosperous, more
integrated, and more self-aware.
Perhaps the most important development of the High Middle Ages was the introduction of new
farming techniques that vastly expanded the yield of the farms of Europe. That agricultural
revolution was based on the cultivation of more land and new ways of farming those lands.
Forests were cleared, and land was reclaimed from swamps or lakes. Lands were taken through
conquest and then settled with an imported population. Next, peasants practiced the three-field
system, which made land more productive, and they plowed their lands with a new, more
effective plow. The combination of all of those developments produced prodigious surpluses,
which in turn led to the development of towns and cities, as well as greater populations.
The 11th century saw a considerable increase in the number and size of European towns. That
was due in part to a reinvigoration of trade, which had begun in the later 10th century and
accelerated with the encouragement of local fairs to which traders and merchants brought their
wares and made new contacts for future sales and purchases. As the agriculture boom of the 11th
century drove growth in population and fostered the growth of towns, towns and trading sites
developed into ever larger communities. That process was first visible in northern Italy at Venice
and other trade-oriented sites, and soon the towns of Western Europe were political, social, and
intellectual centers as well as commercial centers.
As the towns grew in economic power, their inhabitants began to agitate to be set free of feudal
obligations—they no longer wanted to be bound to lords or subject to their law or rule. Over time,
townspeople gained a certain measure of freedom from their old feudal relationships, and towns
emerged as communal enterprises in which a document known as a charter was drawn up
between the townspeople and the local lord that set an agreed-upon tax to be paid by the town to
the lord. In return, the townspeople as individuals were no longer subject to the lord, but rather to
the town and its laws.
It was also during the High Middle Ages that the first European universities appeared in such
cities as Paris, Bologna, and Oxford. In addition to those prestigious seats of education, more
humble cathedral schools also appeared where young men were trained in the arts of literacy.
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Those men became crucial administrators in the growing towns and at the courts of kings. They
became lawyers, accountants, and scribes, and with the proliferation of that literate class of
nonnoble elites, the written word assumed increased importance in the organization of European
society. The learned clerical class that emerged from the universities and the cathedral schools
was instrumental in the increased centralization of European society under powerful nobles and
kings. The elites were also instrumental in the birth of a distinctive culture called chivalry for
the courts of those nobles and kings.
In the universities of Europe, an influx of Greek and Islamic texts through the Muslim caliphate
in Spain helped to usher in a new age of learning. Intellectuals like Peter Abelard, Anselm of
Canterbury, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas used those new materials—principally the
restored works of Aristotle—to explore questions of Christian faith through the prisms of logic
and philosophical reason. Meanwhile, such proponents of natural philosophy as Robert
Grosseteste and Roger Bacon adapted the thought of Plato and Aristotle to develop a doctrine of
observation, hypothesis, and experimentation in order to discern the truths of the physical world,
thus setting the stage for later developments that would eventually lead to modern science.
Beginning in the 11th century, the Catholic Church began its own centralization, which involved
a series of reforms aimed at taking control of such local religious foundations as churches,
abbeys, and monasteries and the ability to invest clerics with ecclesiastical office away from
kings and nobles. That movement climaxed with a bitter struggle between Pope Gregory VII and
Holy Roman emperor Henry IV from which both pope and emperor emerged weakened. As that
movement progressed, Gregory's successor, Urban II, expanded its aims to include the formation
of a great army in service of the Church. In 1095, he called on the warriors of Europe to cease
fighting with one another (and with members of the clergy) and to instead take the Holy Land
from the Muslims, who had occupied Jerusalem since the seventh century. That initiated the
Crusades, a series of horrific battles and one of the darkest chapters in the history of
Christendom.
As the 14th century dawned and the High Middle Ages drew to a close, Europe experienced a
period of prosperity and growth. By the middle of the 14th century, however, dark days had
come over European society. The Black Death arrived in 1347, and within a few years, one-third
of the population of the Continent had died. A decade before, France and England had begun
what would prove a protracted and brutal struggle known as the Hundred Years' War. The
century would also see famine, an embarrassing and confusing crisis within the papacy, and a
new and powerful enemy from the east, the Ottoman Empire.
The late Middle Ages were a difficult time to be alive. The memory of the horror of the plague
haunted those who lived through it, having seen those they loved or depended on die terrifying
deaths. Often, religious expression turned to extreme forms of piety and a desperation to be
absolved of sins because people believed death hovered always nearby. Men flagellated
themselves to be rid of their sins, and women practiced fasting and other forms of asceticism.
Intellectuals and artists meditated on themes of death and damnation. Meanwhile, the anxieties
and superstitions of the age turned Europeans against Jews in frenzies of persecution and
paranoia.
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In spite of the hardships of the late Middle Ages, however, Europe continued through the 14th
and 15th centuries to develop politically, intellectually, and economically. Although the plague
tore through towns and cities with a frightening ferocity, by the beginning of the 15th century,
their populations were on the rise again. Out of the disaster of the Hundred Years' War, France's
monarchy grew stronger and more centralized, its population more self-consciously French,
which would set the stage for what would become the modern French state. Culturally, such
European literary giants as Giovanni Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, and
more people were able to read their works, thanks to advances in printing technology.
As the Middle Ages came to an end around 1500, Europe had transformed itself over the space
of a millennium from a collection of isolated and frightened post-Roman peoples into a strong,
prosperous, and culturally rich world entity. Its medieval past was one of reason, piety, and
progress, but also one of intolerance, war, and conquest. In the centuries to come, each of those
elements would have a role to play in Europe's journey into modernity.
"Middle Ages." World History: Ancient and Medieval Eras. 2009. ABC-CLIO. 5 Sep. 2009
<http://www.ancienthistory.abc-clio.com>.