Like others have said, the Middle Ages are hard to define. I think you have to more or less limit it to Western/Central Europe, because it doesn’t really make much sense elsewhere.
If we take the Renaissance as the near bookend of the Middle Ages, it’s because the Renaissance was the point when there was literally a rebirth of interest in Classical learning, and new developments, such as perspective and Copernican astronomy. Prior to that point, literacy was primarily a Church thing, and even there, used primarily as a way to further the Church’s goals, not scholarship in general.
So with that in mind, it makes sense to try and figure when the Classical period ended, and for that, the easy way in the West is to tie it to the last of the Roman Emperors- Romulus Augustulus and/or Julian Nepos.
Of course, it was a gradual process. The 125 AD Roman Empire wasn’t the 300 AD Roman Empire, which wasn’t the Empire at it’s dissolution in 476. Similarly, Britain of 250 AD wasn’t the Britain of 500 AD, which wasn’t the Britain of 900 AD.
But if you want bookend dates, 476 and say… 1350 are as good as any. The Renaissance is more vague; there’s not one defining moment.
At the risk of coming up with something even harder to pin down temporally… I think the defining characteristic of the Middle Ages is feudalism. So the bookending “event” at the beginning is the end of the old slave economy in the Roman-controlled areas and various tribal arrangements elsewhere in Europe and the establishment of a (to one degree or another) formalized system of vassalage and manorial obligation that tied workers to the land. The other bookend would be when landowners started dissolving those ties and replacing serfs with wage laborers.
That obviously creates some problems making a nice round date, since there were nascent forms of feudalism in the later Roman Empire, and on the other end the dissolution of those manorial obligations took a little longer some places (ahem… Russia). But overall, and especially if you mostly only look at Western and Southern European, that gives you a nice round date of 500-ish to 1500-ish, which is in the same general ballpark as the bookends given by more “great men, great events” type historians.
It’s a little grim, but you could say that the Middle Ages ended at the end of first the black plague, which in turn ended at different times in different places in Europe. The resulting demographic collapse led to higher real wages and disrupted old institutions creating an opening for newer power brokers and sometimes ideas at least in northern Italy.
Apparently black death reoccurred every year through 1671, at least somewhere. But the first repeat was in 1360. Eh, maybe 1350 is a decent date. It’s round and by that time the plague had done most of its damage in Europe, though it wouldn’t reach Russia until 1351.
1492 isn’t too bad though: most (all?) of the greatest hits of the Renaissance came after that date. Machiavelli’s The Prince, Mona Lisa, Sistine Chapel, Copernican theory, etc.
410, the Roman Legions left Britain. Beginning of the ed for the Roman Empire in the West
1453, fall of Constantinople - end of the Roman Empire in the East, but also the end of the Hundred Years War which signaled the beginning of France as a nation state, as well as the introduction of firearms and the end of Age of Chivalry.
I think you’re off on your dates there. I’ve heard some people suggest that the first "nation-state"as such was Revolutionary France, and the whole heyday of nationalism was the 19th century. I’ve heard some arguments pushing the concept back to the Treaty of Westphalia in the 17th century, which I think is kind of stretching it, but even if you accept that, how are nation states reestablished (or established for the first time) in 1000?
That is a common belief, but it wasn’t really true. Many Latin texts were in wide circulation throughout the period and were definitely known to Carolingian scholars. Even though many people were illiterate, learning did not die out. The new Germanic rulers of Europe did take some time to get up to speed on education, but it would have been commonplace in many areas. Further, urban centers continued throughout the entire era.
It depends on how you define it, but he (or she) isn’t totally wrong, either. Although borders did go back and forth, but the High Middle Ages many of the ethno-cultural identities we associate with the nation-state today had already come into being. A.D 1000 is too early for a real nationalistic feeling, although most fo the seeds were there.
By 1500, however, national identities were substantially formed. Machiavelli, for example, talked about the distinction between Italians and others, even though Italy was definitely divided, and explicitly called for a union of all the Italic peoples. Likewise, a proto-French nationalism had emerged in France and England as a result of the Hundred Years’ War. Spain was now unified and people had begun to think of it as such.
Nitpick: instead of wage labor it was much more common for landowners to rent out the land to tenant farmers. But yeah, a cash economy and freedom to leave the land meant the end of classical feudalism.
There’s no agreed-upon definition, but most people won’t argue with you too strenuously if you assume the Middle Ages started with the sacking of Rome and ended with the start of the Italian Renaissance,
Well, when the “Dark Ages” began and ended (or whether they even occurred) is more problematic. The “Dark Ages” are generally considered the first period of the Middle Ages, specifically WRT Western Europe. Therefore, I would place the beginning of the Middle Ages with the fall of Rome in the West – which was a gradual process, but we can conveniently date it to 476 A.D. when the last Western Emperor was deposed. Justinian’s later efforts to reconquer Italy are Middle-Ages events, IMO.
330 - Founding of Constantinople
378 - Eastern Romans lose Battle of Adrianople
410 - Romans withdraw from Britain
410 - Visigoths under Alaric sack Rome
476 - Deposing of Romulus Augustulus in Rome
486 - Clovis unites the Frankish kingdom
493 - Theodoric founds the Ostrogoth Kingdom in Italy
698 - Arab capture of Carthage and end of Roman rule in North Africa
718 - Arab siege of Constantinople fails
800 - Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor
1002 - Death of Holy Roman Emperor Otto III
1054 - Great Schism between Catholic and Orthodox churches
1066 - Normans win the Battle of Hastings and conquer England
1071 - Turks defeat Eastern Romans at Battle of Manzikert
1095 - Pope Urban II calls for a Crusade
Possible dates for the end of the Middle Ages:
1259 - Death of Mongke Khan
1305 - Giotto completes the Scrovegni Chapel
1345 - Petrarch’s discovery of Cicero’s ad Atticum
1348 - Arrival of the Black Death
1397 - The Medici bank is founded
1413 - Brunelleschi demonstrates linear perspective
1417 - The rediscovery of Lucretius’ De rerum natura
1453 - Fall of Constantinople
1455 - Printing of the Gutenberg Bible
1485 - Battle of Bosworth Field brings Tudor dynasty to power in England
1492 - Columbus’ voyage to America
1492 - Introduction of double entry bookkeeping
1492 - Castille and Aragon defeat and occupy Granada
1517 - Martin Luther posts his Ninety-Five Theses
1598 - Death of Feodor Ivanovich, the last Rurik Tsar
The term “Middle Ages” defines itself. It’s the age between Antiquity and the Renaissance. When did Antiquity end? With the fall of the western Roman empire in the 400s, by 476 nobody even bothered to pretend to be the western roman emperor. When did the Renaissance begin? Fall of Byzantium to the Turks is as good a date as any, since it finally closed the land trade routes to the Orient, which eventually led to Columbus. By 1492 we are already unarguably firmly in the Renaissance.
I’d place the end at the advent of pike and shot armies, which spelled the end of the military dominance of horse archers, and set the groundwork for the future mass levee armies.
Well, I’ll agree I haven’t heard anyone ending Late Antiquity at the First Crusade. But I have heard people ending the Dark Ages then (although possibly because they wanted to split the period between Antiquity and Renaissance into two roughly equal halves). And if you talk about Late Antiquity/Dark Ages as the “Migrations Period” and describe the Crusades as “the last of the Germanic invasions” (just as the arrival of the Turks in Anatolia a few years earlier was the last of the Asiatic migrations)… Of course the Germans had been migrating/invading since the Cimbri and Tuetones in the days of the Roman Republic, so again, definitions get fuzzy.
Was the Danelaw Antique? Well, was it Medieval? It was certainly nothing like the Hollywood definition of Medieval as manorialism plus serfdom plus castles plus Christianity (that didn’t really get started, even in France, until the 9th or 10th Century). Sure, there was a lot of difference between the Europe of 400AD and 1100AD, but there was even more between 400AD and 1500AD, so if they can’t both be Late Antiquity, can they both be the Middle Ages?
If you look at Scandinavia or Germany or other parts of Europe outside the Roman Empire (Britain is, literally, an edge case), then “the fall of the Roman Empire” is a meaningless distinction and the change from Ancient to Medieval is the change from the old tribal society to the new one of dynastic rule, feudal landholding and organised religion. That didn’t start until centuries after the fall of Rome - and by the time the last pagan nation in Europe had finally converted, the Italians were already at work on the Renaissance.
If you look at the Levant, I’d certainly argue that the Levant of the mid-6th century was very similar to the Levant of the mid-4th century, and also that society under the early Umayyads wasn’t that dissimilar to that under the late Romans (it’s been argued that the Arab “conquest” was less an invasion of Romans by Arabs than a case of Arab federates dispensing with Roman overlordship, as the Germanic federates had a couple of centuries earlier). Then again there wasn’t that much change between the early and late Umayyads, or between the late Umayyads and the Abbasids - and suddenly we’ve gone from Ctesiphon to Baghdad without finding a hard distinction.
If you limit yourself only to the former territories of the Western Roman Empire, I suppose you can make a case for starting in 476 - if only because it’s a convenient midpoint between the Great Invasion of 406 (after which Roman rule in most of Gaul, Iberia and Britannia was pretty much a dead letter) and the Lombard invasions of the 6th century, which finished off Justinian’s dream of returning Italy to Rome. But that’s defining the Middle Ages by exclusion - 500AD and 1300AD get shoved together because anything not clearly Ancient (with Ancient meaning “Roman”) and not yet Modern (with Modern meaning “reformed”) must be Medieval. Ultimately, all “bookend” dates are arbitrary.
I am not familiar with the eras in question, but I find it hard to think of Gutenberg Bible (1455) as an creation of the Middle Ages. But the Black Plague (1350)? Sure. Also, the Age of Discovery dates from the early 1400s, which doesn’t feel like the Middle Ages either.
I opt for Brunelleschi’s presentation of linear perspective (1413) or 1400 if you like round numbers.
Is there anything before 476 that definitely belongs in the Middle Ages? Is there anything after 476 that definitely is of the Ancient World? Well ok then. Though arguably you could say the same for 410. Or maybe 493. 400 or 500 are both round numbers.
Feudalism grew as Frankish kings developed military and political relationships following invasions in the early 700s. The crowning of Charlemagne (800) seems like an event of the Middle Ages, as opposed to something that started it off. I wouldn’t want to peg that late a date.
Yeah, but I don’t like the term “Dark Ages” - it’s ambiguous and pejorative. Ambiguous because some historians use it in a “they’re dark because we don’t have much to go with there and don’t know much”, which is less and less true ; and others use it in the more directly pejorative “the shit times when Neanderthals and The Church took over” which is even *less *true.
I will absolutely agree that there is a qualitative difference between the directly post-Rome period and the rise of feudality in the IXth-Xth though - there’s clearly a paradigm shift there, and the whole period has an arc, a hero’s journey about it - new kings, rising to the stage ! Conquering everything, gaining power, making new friends ! Giving all of that power away, slowly but surely, bit by bit ! Winding up with dick all and oh, look, now their underlings are building castles everywhere ! How are them King boys getting out of that’un ?!
That however wouldn’t really be accurate outside of England/Great Britain IMO. Maybe Spain too, but then the last one was the 8th century one so that’d be two centuries of “migrants” twisting their thumbs :o.
I’d define it more as “the devolution of cities” - that’s the end of Rome as far as I’m concerned, when people that could afford to opted to flee from the cities because they were too full, too dangerous, too starving, too unsanitary ; and retreated to their little fortified estates slash labour camps. That’s the paradigm shift.
And it’s a convenient one because it happened in the ERE, too :).
Not necessarily - even for people who weren’t inside it, the Roman Empire was affecting their lives in many ways - as a trade partner, as a raiding cash cow, as a diplomatic interlocutor, even just as a prestigious Thing. In many ways the Barbarian Kingdoms that succeeded Rome were shaped and got their identities *from *Rome - in all the examples I’m familiar with, the guys that ended up becoming local kings and overthrowing the Roman governors or busting past the *limes *in force were people that Rome had formally recognized and had either made partners in some way, or whose rule Rome had legitimated. Rome was kind of the US of their day, they had their noses in everybody’s shit :p.
Although I’ll grant that when you go *really *far to the North and East (like Scandinavia, Lithuania, Russia…), the story’s probably different. But then “the Middle Ages” is fundamentally a Western European construct.
The Arabian peninsula wasn’t Roman ;). But it’s true that a lot of the Muslim “conquests” were them showing up in Byzantine lands and going “hey, we heard they were persecuting you guys because you’re not the right kind of Christians ? Howsabout you let us in, *we *don’t give a shit. We’ll lower your taxes, too”. But the Umayyad empire was a patchwork of cultures and circumstances really, there wasn’t really a single, universal administrative system or principle by which it was governed. It was very much ad hoc - in Persia and Syria the Persian administration pretty much just changed the letterhead and kept going without missing a beat, in Egypt and Anatolia the Arabs changed more things, in other places the locals just wouldn’t surrender and had the boot put to them hard, etc…
I wouldn’t really agree there - by the end of the Umayyad dynasty, their Empire had become an *Arab *empire for real, with Arabic having become the unifying “Latin”, with Arab landowners having consolidated property and powerbases just about everywhere… and of course, Islam had spread quite a lot (a lot more than they expected it would, or wanted it to really - the Umayyads would much rather have lorded over a whole lot of dhimmis than non-Arab Muslims asking for equal rights).
As I said, that’s the very definition of the Middle Ages - that’s how the term came about in the Renaissance, and that’s why it has “middle” in it.
We can certainly argue whether those boundaries or “ages” are significant or useful at all when discussing history, however. Obviously it’s really all a continuum.
476 for the end of antiquity, 1492 for the end of the Middle Ages. I can live with these cutoffs.
I’m not ready to scrap the idea of the Dark Ages, though. They’re the period after (Western) Rome fell, but before France, Germany and England began to take shape. I’d say they were the part of the Middle Ages before Christendom and Islam were vying for control of the landscape. But do we date that to the First Crusade or to Charles Martel holding the Moors off at the Pyranees?
One way of demarcating the late Middle Ages from the Dark Ages is, Late Middle Ages began when the Pope was able to raise an army and have it do what he wanted (First Crusade), and it ended when he lost that ability (with the Protestant Reformation). The Dark Ages also began with what some non-historians would describe as the “Arthurian” era. He didn’t exist, but it’s fun to consider when he conceivably could have. NC Wyeth always depicted that era as roughly 11-12th Century, but late 5th would fit the timeline better.
And yeah, beginning and ending points of any epoch are pretty arbitrary. That’s what makes discussing them fun.