The Middle Ages didn’t start and stop at the same time everywhere in Europe, and the events that ended it–discovery of America, the Protestant Reformation, the European development of the printing press, the receding of the Mongol Khanate, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, the end of the Rurik dynasty–all occurred within roughly a 50-year period.
The beginnings of the Middle Ages are a bit harder to pin down. Some have to do with interactions between Christendom and the Muslim world, but frankly, they have always been right next door to each other. The Fall of Rome? Kind of a gradual process. The Pope dislodging the Roman Emperor as the most powerful figure in Europe? Well, would that be the pope who put a hit out on Attila, or the one who converted Constantine?
Personally, I would put it at the rise of the European nation-states, sometime between Charlemagne and William the Conqueror. About a 300-year spread there, but communications were kind of slow back then.
I think you can make a good argument for Constantine establishing the new capital at Constantinople in 330. This was pretty much a sign to Western Europe that it was being abandoned to its own resources.
Eh, I’m kinda a traditionalist. I go with the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476, not because it was particularly significant in of itself, but is a convenient enough stepping off point and you might as well have one. Any of the others work just as well, though.
I stop at Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492. Because, again, why not?
There really is no right or wrong answer IMHO. Well, okay - I guess I’d stipulate that a Middle Ages defined as the period from the Battle of Ipsus in 301 B.C. to the election of Barak Obama in 2009 would be wrong. But any of the various semi-reasonable dates thrown out there are, y’know, semi-reasonable.
Woah, hold your horses, tiger. There were no nation-states anywhere *near *the Middle Ages. The term implies a) a central, sovereign state and b) a cultural and/or ethnic identity shared across the entire territory claimed by said state. The fragments of Carolingian Empire was a far cry from that.
But anyway, answering your question is pretty easy. What are the Middle Ages ? By definition, the (long-ass) period that bridges the gap between Antiquity and the Renaissance. So they, perforce, begin where Classical Antiquity ends. Which is a lot easier to define : that’s the fall of Rome, the last remnant of the Big Classical Players (well, actually Persia would hold on a little longer, but it doesn’t count 'cause they’re not Western European, so there).
Depending on who you ask, that’s either 476 (when the last legit emperor of the WRE got scragged and nobody even bothered usurping his title)… or 1453 :p.
But between Clovis shacking up in France and Western Germany, Britannia abandoned to the Britons and Danes, Italy in the hands of Ostrogoth strongmen (then Lombardian strongmen), Spain left to the Wisigoths… Classical Antiquity was over (in the West) by the early VIth at the very latest. And, really, the Western Empire had already been on its death bed for a while.
I always figured the fall of Rome and the Reformation. Yes, the fall of Rome is a vague thing - there was never a day, I understand, when people decided Rome wasn’t Rome anymore, but rather the idea gradually emerged that Rome must have fallen a long time ago. Vague is fine, though. We use “warm” and “cool” all the time without knowing where the boundary is.
Attilla either choked to death on his own blood after a bad nosebleed or from internal bleeding, not a papal hitman. Leo I had met with Attila when he was outside Rome earlier and convinced him not to attack the city, but we don’t know what was said.
And Constantine converted himself, but the man who baptized him was Eusebius, Bishop of Berytus (Beirut).
I know it’s a traditional date but I have a hard time going with it. In historical context, it’s such a minor event. Romulus Augustulus wasn’t even a real Emperor.
I agree that the final fall of Roman authority is what started the middle ages in Western Europe, but it started at different places in different parts. For instance, it’s pretty clear that the final fall of Rome in Britain was in 410.
Depends; do you lump everything between Antiquity and the Renaissance as “the Middle Ages”, or is the period ~450-1000 AD the “Dark Ages”, with the period after that the High Middle Ages?
ETA: however, the question is probably the least clear in Italy, where the Germanic tribes preferred initially to cloak their rule as ruling in the stead of the emperor (and the Eastern emperors often obliged because it would allow them to save some pretense of a continuing empire.)
I’d say at the very latest, the middle ages in Italy started in the Gothic Wars, where the feel to me is less of fighting to restore or not restore the Western Roman Empire, but rather of Germany and the Eastern Empire fighting over Italy to see who controls it. I’m not sure if all of Southern Europe was definitively un-Roman before, but the Gothic Wars were so disruptive that Italy no longer had the manpower or resources to have any hope of being a Mediterranean superpower again.
But it’s a convenient symbol. He was the last guy the emperor of the east recognized as a legit emperor of the west and deigned supporting (even just in words), and the last “central authority” the provincial governors were at least nominally loyal to.
And while his death didn’t exactly change conditions on the ground overly much, the fact that nobody took up the mantle, not even a “not real Emperor” ; coupled with the evident inability of Byzantium to do *anything *west of Macedonia could have been seen as a strong signal that yup, stick a fork in that there Rome, it’s done. And more importantly : it’s just not coming back, guys.
Which, in turn, meant the authority and legitimacy of the provincial governors claiming to rule in the name of Rome were diminished. Cue the local strongmen flexing their muscles.
[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
And Constantine converted himself, but the man who baptized him was Eusebius, Bishop of Berytus (Beirut).
[/QUOTE]
Blaspheme ! God his own self converted Constantine. Showed him a sign in the clouds, talked to him and made him win a blue-on-blue battle. You know, as god does. He’s big on internecine strife, is god.
[QUOTE=Lumpy]
Depends; do you lump everything between Antiquity and the Renaissance as “the Middle Ages”, or is the period ~450-1000 AD the “Dark Ages”, with the period after that the High Middle Ages?
[/QUOTE]
Can’t really have a “High Middle Ages” without at least a Low one ;).
Monty Python and the Holy Grail would be a good contender for such depending on if it was a substance or just general insanity that caused the LARPers to re-enact the quest.
In English history textbooks, the Middle Ages traditionally started with the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and ended with the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.
The last one is sorta defensible - the Tudors were very much a Renaissance dynasty, and I don’t thank many historians would include the Renaissance in the Middle Ages. If you look at Europe as a whole, the Renaissance started in Italy in the 14th-15th centuries and spread - the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 is as good a divider as you’ll get.
For the starting point, you hit the question Lumpy brought up - do you jump straight from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages or do you have Late Antiquity (aka “the Dark Ages”) in the gap?
If you accept Late Antiquity, then presumably it’s part of Antiquity and so the Middle Ages begin whenever it ends, which could be as early as the Arab conquests in the early 600s, or as late as the end of the Ottonian dynasty (1003), or even the Great Schism, the Battle of Manzikert or the First Crusade.
Really, it’s all arbitrary - things changed at different times in different places and in just about anywhere you’ll find more similarity between the early Early Middle Ages and late Late Antiquity a couple of generations earlier than with the Late Middle Ages hundreds of years further on.
That said, I’ll go with the fall of the Umayyad Caliphate in 750 - the last successor of Rome (and Persia) that could seriously aspire to universal empire.
Oh come on. Late Antiquity all the way to the First Crusade ? Might as well argue the Renaissance is still going.
I could see Britons arguing that for them it ended around the time of the Norman invasion (and even then, that’s kind of ridiculous - what’s Antique about the Danelaw for example ?), but where the rest of greater Europe is concerned there is precious little commonality to be found in daily life, political systems, architecture, art, religion, warfare, geopolitical dynamics, social dynamics… between the years 400 AD and 1100 AD.
Same goes for the Levant, where while you kinda sorta could still say with a straight face that life under the early Umayyads was not all that different from life under the Sassanids, by the time the Crusaders rolled in ? Night and day. Different language, different elites and ruling ethnic groups, different culture and administration, etc…
The only place where attempts at defining a breaking point tend to fail is the matter of the ERE - but I’d opine that after Justinian I, while the Emperors never quite gave up the notion that they ruled shit here while we just lived here (where “here” is to be understood as “everywhere”) both they and their people just gave up not only on the notion to actually make good on those claims, but the rationale behind it. Once Constantinople stopped grokking why it should be the one to do all the heavy lifting all of the time ; it stopped being the idea that was Rome in any real sense. Plus when even the Roman Emperors don’t speak Latin any more…
I’m going to go with the Middle Ages ending in about 1413 when Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated perspective. He’s the genius who later went on to design and build Il Duomo for the Florence cathedral with unreinforced masonry, which still is not fully understood today. I’ll accept that it started with the fall of Rome in 476, but the Western Empire was a shambles for decades before that.
That was my point. The Eastern Roman Empire didn’t recognize Romulus Augustulus as Emperor. The official Western Emperor was Julian Nepos, who was still in power albeit not in Rome.
An army officer, Orestes, had decided to lead a rebellion. He succeeded to the point where Emperor Julian Nepos had to leave Rome and move the capital across the Adriatic to Dalmatia. Orestes was from way out in the provinces so he figured people wouldn’t accept him as Emperor. He therefore appointed his fourteen year old son Romulus as the figurehead Emperor.
But Julian Nepos was still regarded as the real Emperor by everyone outside the territory Orestes controlled. It wasn’t considered that big a deal that the capital had moved out of Rome either - it had happened before.
Another general, Odoacer, came along a few months later and overthrew Orestes and Romulus Augustulus. But the overthrow was considered to be putting down a usurper rather than deposing an Emperor. Odoacer titled himself King of Italy and, at least on paper, recognized Julian Nepos as the Emperor above him.
Is this not the common thought? I was taught that the time from the fall of the Roman empire to the re-establishment of nation states (~450 to ~1000) was the dark ages, and the middle ages where sandwiched between that time and the Renaissance (~1000 to ~1400).
The term the dark ages has pretty much fallen out of favor among historians. If they use it at all, it’s only to refer to the earliest part of the middle ages.
