Well the Triumph of Belisarius (534 AD) does not feel like a Middle Age event. Nor do the Rome-Persian Wars which lasted another century after that.
Even the “fall of Rome” in 476 AD meant sweet fuck all, the capital was in Ravenna and the Romans would infact regain Rome the following century and hold onto it for longer than the US has been a country.
OTH, 698 (or 718) are very direct. The fall of N Africa meant that it was separated from the European World of which it has been a part and converted the Romans into what was essentially a Greek Empire.
The discovery of America, made a paradigm shift. It converted countries on the periphery of the world (England, Spain, France) into world powers.
They went a little further than the Pyrenees :), Poitiers is about halfway between the mountains and modern-day Paris.
Bit of a nitpick there I guess, but the Pope didn’t raise fuck all. He *called *for a crusading army to be raised by Christian kings. He had exactly zero power to do it himself, and answering his call was very much optional. His Hatness merely opined it would probably be a good idea, Salvation-wise.
Contrary to popular image, the kings and aristocrats of Europe were not quaking in their little booties at what pope said or didn’t say. Hell, we French essentially committed popenapping at one point, a feat of magnificent bastardry I’m not sure any of you lot ever matched (/smug).
OTOH the Levant happened to be really stinking rich, so… I mean, I’m sure many of the blokes who took the cross really did it out of personal religious fervour, but international military invasions and their logistics are not built on faith and dreams. Salvation or no, a buck is a buck and God wasn’t raining any manna that day.
Not just there - in addition to the Goths, Vandals, Franks and other Germanic types moving into former Roman territory, you’ve also got the Huns, Avars, Bulgars and the like pushing into Europe from the East, not to mention the expansion of the Slavs. Wikipedia describes the Migration Period as lasting from ~400 to ~800AD (though for some reason it excludes the Arabs), but the migrations didn’t end then - there were still the Magyars, Pechenegs, Cumans and Turks to come westwards and of course the Vikings coming down from the North.
The ones who migrated got all the press, but what about the ones who stayed in Germany? You can’t really talk about Western Europe let alone “Europe” without Germany (at least not once the Western Empire falls, which I suppose is an argument for ending Antiquity in the 5th century). I’ll agree that the Germans who migrated into the Empire ended up Romanised to some degree (through the Germanic tribal side of their culture tended to overcome the Roman urban one as time went on), but Germany itself wasn’t significantly Romanised until much later, and then by the Church, not the Empire.
The Arabian peninsula wasn’t Roman, but there were plenty of Arabs on the borders of Roman Palestine and Syria and some of them (e.g. the Ghassanids) were definitely Roman federates. There’s a theory that south of Anatolia the Roman garrisons were never restored following the devastation of the Persian War (in the same way that the Roman garrisons in Gaul were never restored after 406), and that security was left in the hands of local federates, who were then joined by more Arabs migrating into the power vacuum.
Incidentally, I didn’t see my suggestion of the fall of the Umayyads in 750 on LIttle Nemo’s excellent list.
If you want some other events round about that time, there’s the battle of Tours (the Muslim high-water mark in Western Europe) in 732 and the Donation of Pepin (which created the Papal State and formalised the partition of Italy) in 754.
Or you could go for the Treaty of Verdun in 843, which partitioned the Carolingian Empire and created the proto-states which ultimately became France and Germany - as my father put it “a thousand years of warfare between the Germans and the French can be traced to Charlemagne’s decision to divide his empire between his sons”
That’s nothing. The Emperor Henry III once dismissed three Popes at a sitting - which I think is an unbeatable record - before appointing his own candidate. Granted, they didn’t all stay dismissed once he’d left Rome, but still…
Was your father aware that Charlemagne was only survived by one son ;)?
It was the first half of the reign of his son Louis the Pious that probably stands as the high water mark of the Carolingian state. Now poor Louis was the one who calamitously produced four vigorous heirs, after several generations of good fortune. Partible inheritance had always been a Frankish custom - the Carolingians had just gotten lucky.
I could go later then. 698 or 718 would be ok with me. Or earlier: Constantine died in 337. Afterwards all would be tinged with Christianity, giving it a medieval feel. Or so I might claim with a str-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-tch. (The establishment of Constantinople in 330 would be more probable.) Honestly though my historical knowledge of this era is sadface.
Well there are 2 criteria. We can look at turning points in which case 476 loses big time, while 1492 is a grand slam champ.
But what I’m trying to do is pick dates that bundle together like with like. Placing the Gutenberg Bible and most of the Age of Discovery in the Middle Ages seems incongruous. But that means that my turning point has to be something relatively trivial (if symbolic) like Brunelleschi’s presentation of perspective. Impressive, but not exactly world-historic.
It seems though that the consensus is 500-1500 or thereabouts which feels odd to me. At both ends.
I think somebody’s forgetting about Drogo of Metz, Hugh, and Theodoric, all of whom Louis made sure took vows and found themselves no longer eligible to inherit. But Drogo became Archbishp of Metz, and Hugh became Louis’s archchancellor. I don’t know what happened to poor Theodoric.
If we’re including arbitrary dates, how about the execution of Boethius in 524, who’s been called the last classical philosopher and the first medieval one.
If you want an extreme end date, Philip Daileader (who is an authority) has argued that the Middle Ages didn’t end until the Modern Age began - an transition he places around the French Revolution.
Personally, I have a hard time accepting the idea of George Washington being a figure from the Middle Ages.
I could go with the Middle Ages being as late as the 1620s, really. They discovered America, but treated the natives like Saracens to be converted or killed; it didn’t really change their way of thinking. But meeting the Indians of Virginia and Massachusetts made a big impression on the English.
Up until this point, Europeans couldn’t imagine any greater freedom than to choose between two interchangeable despots. But with the Indians of North America, they encountered fairly structured and intricate societies whose individual members could drop out, and back in, at will without fear of being punished for desertion or apostasy. That was a whole new level of freedom and a bigger game-changer than finding new lands or Incan gold. It contributed more to the Enlightenment than all the Shakespeare plays and Florentine paintings combined.
I think it’s overstating the power of European monarchs to refer to them as despots.
And I think citing historical events is a problematic way of identifying epochal transitions. Did the end of WWII usher in a new age, or was it the social, political, economic, and technological factors that existed in the early 20th century which drove events that restructured the global order?
That’s why I cited the advent of pike and shot armies. The most important public good that a nation’s leadership could provide in the middle ages was defense. You can’t be a nation if you don’t have the means to defeat rebels or barbarians. The necessity of defense, coupled with medieval military technology, drove feudal social relations. But introduce gunpowder technology to a fractured and competitive Europe, and you lay the ground for a different kind of society, one that requires more centralization and industry to be effective, where there’s less need for a warrior class, where urban areas can thrive. It wasn’t any particular discovery that dawned a new age, it was the changing conditions that allowed increasing numbers of people to do more in life than grow food and wage war.
It’s true that longbows, pikes, and gunpowder broke the elite monopoly on force. But I think the more fundamental change was when paper, ink, and movable type broke the elite monopoly on information.
Poking around a few sites, I see estimates that the literacy rate in Europe from circa 1300 to 1800 jumped from 10% to 25%. I’d say the elite monopoly in information held on for a good while.
Bear in mind that you only need one person in a group to be able to read for the information in the newspaper/book to spread to the whole group - people used to organize news & book reading “parties”, particularly in the winter.