Meanwhile, the Islamic world was growing larger and more powerful. These policies helped it to amass a great deal of money and power. Ordinary people across Europe had to “tithe” 10 percent of their earnings each year to the Church at the same time, the Church was mostly exempt from taxation. Over time, Charlemagne’s realm became the Holy Roman Empire, one of several political entities in Europe whose interests tended to align with those of the Church. In 800 CE, for example, Pope Leo III named the Frankish king Charlemagne the “Emperor of the Romans”–the first since that empire’s fall more than 300 years before. Kings, queens and other leaders derived much of their power from their alliances with and protection of the Church. Instead, the Catholic Church became the most powerful institution of the medieval period. The Catholic Church in the Middle AgesĪfter the fall of Rome, no single state or government united the people who lived on the European continent. However, today’s scholars note that the era was as complex and vibrant as any other. This way of thinking about the era in the “middle” of the fall of Rome and the rise of the Renaissance prevailed until relatively recently. It was especially deadly in cities, where it was impossible to prevent the transmission of the disease from one person to another. The people of the Middle Ages had squandered the advancements of their predecessors, this argument went, and mired themselves instead in what 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon called “barbarism and religion.”ĭid you know? Between 13, a mysterious disease known as the "Black Death" (the bubonic plague) killed some 20 million people in Europe-30 percent of the continent’s population. Accordingly, they dismissed the period after the fall of Rome as a “Middle” or even “Dark” age in which no scientific accomplishments had been made, no great art produced, no great leaders born. Starting around the 14th century, European thinkers, writers and artists began to look back and celebrate the art and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. In the Iberian Peninsula, Christian armies had pushed south through modern Spain and Portugal beginning in the 8th century, graduating expelling the Moorish caliphate that had taken hold in the years following Rome’s withdrawal from the region.The phrase “Middle Ages” tells us more about the Renaissance that followed it than it does about the era itself. Intellectualism also began to prosper, with the advent of the printing press in 1439 allowing the masses ready access to new ideas and mass communication for the first time. In Italy, the 14th century saw the beginning of the cultural explosion known today as the Renaissance, with painting, sculpture, and architecture seeing marked advancement. The closing years of the medieval period were marked by discovery, be it technological, artistic, or territorial. ![]() It was also during this time that plague stalked the continent, with the Black Death taking the lives of an estimated 75 to 200 million people across both Europe and Asia between 13. ![]() Image credit: Public Domain, via Wikimedia CommonsĪt the same time as waging costly wars against the French, England also fought a series of conflicts against the Kingdom of Scotland, including the famous Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297, when Scottish armies led by Sir William Wallace defeated numerically superior English forces. Jean Froissart: Battle of Crécy between the English and French in the Hundred Years’ War. The Hundred Years’ War, fought between England and France from 1337 to 1453, exemplified this phenomena, as royal families grappled for control of Europe’s borders. Dynastic warsīoth the high period of the medieval era and the subsequent Late Middle Ages were marked by the rise of organised militaries and international conflict. The rise and dominance of the Catholic Church was a hallmark of the medieval epoch, and shaped the next period of the era – the High Middle Ages – in dramatic fashion.įrom 1000 to 1250 AD, the church sanctioned the seismic military pilgrimages known as the Crusades, which saw thousands of Europeans flock to the Middle East, ostensibly to win back Christian holy sites from Muslim hands.Ĭatholicism also came to govern daily life for many of the common people across Europe, as low literacy rates and poor medical provisions saw peasants turn to the church for education, comfort, and salvation.ĭuring the High Middle Ages, universities gradually began to prosper however, and the scholastic movement, spearheaded by figures such as Italian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, grew rapidly. Cat Jarman ventures out into ancient Selwood Forest in Wiltshire with art historian Amy Jeffs.
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