Middle Ages: meaning, history and chronology

Middle Ages: the history and characteristics of this important era. Chronology, most important events and when the high and late Middle Ages begin

The term “Middle Ages” refers to the age between the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which occurred in 476 AD, and the discovery of America, in 1492. By convention, historians divide the Middle Ages with the year 1000 in two parts:

• Early Middle Ages: from the 5th century to 1000;
• Late Middle Ages: from the year 1000 to 1492.

The word Middle Ages, meaning middle age, first appeared in the 15th century with a negative connotation. The men of the fifteenth century used it to indicate the decadence experienced by humanity from the arrival of the Barbarians within the borders of the Western Empire until the Renaissance.

Early Middle Ages: the protagonists

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, due to economic problems and barbarian invasions, the Barbarians created the Roman-barbarian kingdoms in the territories of the former Empire. Some of these kingdoms proved fragile such as that of the Ostrogoths in Italy, while others resisted and survived for a long time, such as the Franks in Gaul.

In Rome the Christian Church remained unscathed by the barbarian invasions and with Gregory the Great, the first pope to have political power in the territory around Rome, the primacy of the Roman bishop over the others of Christianity was established.
In the 6th century monasticism developed. In 529 Saint Benedict founded the monastery of Montecassino where the Rule was followed from 534, a set of rules with which monastic life was organized on the basis of the principles of poverty, chastity and obedience.
Christianity was precisely the element that united Western and Eastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages, even if relations between Rome and Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Empire, were slowly breaking down.

The eastern emperor favored the Patriarch of Constantinople in opposition to the bishop of Rome and the theological conflicts of the 8th century led to the Eastern Schism in 1054.

What were the consequences? From a political point of view, the eastern part of the Empire survived the western one. The emperor Justinian managed to recover Italy during the Greek-Gothic wars between 535 and 554 AD, but the reconquest was made in vain by the descent into Italy in 568 of the Lombards who gave life to a Kingdom that expanded across a good part of the peninsula until 774.
The Eastern Empire was also put in difficulty by another protagonist of the Early Middle Ages: Islam. The Arab tribes united militarily and politically around the new religious belief of which Muhammad was the prophet. After his death in 632, the Muslims created a vast power that, under the command of the caliphs, expanded from the Middle East to Spain and North Africa.

The advance of the Muslims in Europe was stopped only in 732 in Poitiers by Charles Martel, king of the Franks of the Carolingian dynasty which in this phase had managed to strengthen itself thanks to the establishment of personal relationships called vassal-beneficiaries with the most powerful subjects and which they returned to the system called feudalism: the vassals placed themselves under the protection of a lord, swearing loyalty to him and performing military service. In exchange they received protection and any asset – for example a landed property – which returned to the person who had granted it upon the death of the person who had obtained it. The dynamic was this until 1307, the year in which the principle of inheritance of the asset was established: upon the death of the person who had obtained it, it no longer returned to the nobleman or the emperor but remained with his heirs.

The greatest representative of the Carolingian dynasty was the Christian Charlemagne who, after various conquests in Europe – the Carolingian empire included the territories of Catalonia, France, Germany and northern Italy – was crowned emperor by the Pope in 800. The Carolingian empire gradually disintegrated starting from the death of Charlemagne.
The heir was his son Ludovico the Pious who also had 3 children. In 843 the empire was divided into 3 kingdoms and in 877 it finally collapsed. The new kingdoms were:

• Italy, whose sovereign retained the title of emperor
• Eastern France (Germany)
• Western France

The new sovereigns abandoned their predecessors’ idea of ​​universal power and began to refer to the national realities that constituted their dominions.

Otto I,traditionally known as Otto the Great, was crowned emperor by Pope John XII in 962, an event that historians consider as the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire.
In the Kingdom of the West Franks the curtense system appeared in which plots of land cultivated with a three-year rotation were divided into:

• Dominico, lands directly managed by the owner of the land and cultivated by servants
• Massaricio, the part of land divided into small hamlets, rented to free families in exchange for money or work.

Late Middle Ages: from darkness to light?

At the threshold of the year 1000, imperial power was weak and this determined the birth of lordships, territories led by local lords, lay and ecclesiastical, who centralized legal and administrative powers in their hands and, if particularly powerful, erected castles to defend themselves in a autonomous from the invasions of the Saracens and Normans.

n Italy in the 11th century the papacy began the reform of the Church, which aimed to moralize customs and return to the original Christian values, condemning instead:

• Simony, the sale of religious positions
• Concubinage, the practice whereby priests took wives
• Nepotism, the transfer of offices to relatives

In conjunction with the reform, in 1096 the first crusade against the Islamic infidels who had occupied Jerusalem in the Holy Land was banned by Pope Urban II. Thanks to the use of knights, but also to the birth of mendicant Orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans and of chivalric Orders, such as the Templars, who propagated and defended the Christian faith, eight Crusades were fought between 1096 and 1272:

• Against the infidels to reconquer the Holy Land
• Against heretics for religious reasons
• Against Constantinople for economic reasons.

Timeline of the Crusades:

• 1099 – Banned by Pope Urban II: Jerusalem is reconquered.
• 1147 – Banned by Pope Eugene III, it brings no results.
• 1189 – The Third Crusade is banned by Gregory VIII but this too leads to irrelevant results.
• 1202 – It is invoked by Boniface II of Monferrato. The Crusaders conquer and sack Constantinople.
• 1217 – Conducted by King John of Brienne of Jerusalem. The expedition, after some initial success, will prove disastrous.
• 1227 – Banned by Pope Gregory IX, it saw no bloodshed: Frederick II in fact concluded an agreement with the Sultan of Egypt which guaranteed that Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth remained with the Christians.
• 1248 – Louis IX known as the Saint lands in Cyprus and conquers Damietta.
• 1269 – The expedition led by James of Aragon is decimated already in Barcelona by a storm which sinks a large part of the fleet. It is the decline of the Christian dream.

Between the 11th and 13th centuries the action of the papacy was based on the idea that the power of the pontiff was superior to that of any other and this generated harsh conflicts with the Emperor who had the same claim as the pope, during the investiture fight between 1077 and 1122.

In 1152 Frederick “Barbarossa” became emperor and, during his reign, his main enemies were the municipalities of the cities in Northern Italy to which he guaranteed autonomy in the Peace of Constance of 1183 after thirty years of struggle.

In 1198 Innocent III was elected pontiff and with him the power of the Roman Church reached its maximum. In 1220 Frederick II became emperor and united the dominions of the Empire with those of the kingdom of Sicily in Southern Italy. However, upon his death in 1250, the papacy and the empire clashed again. The last act of the medieval conflict between the papacy and the Empire occurred in 1302 when Pope Boniface VIII reiterated the superiority of spiritual power over temporal power.

Starting from the 13th century, the balance began to change and alongside the papacy and the Empire, other powers were strengthened which, although not universal, had strong territorial roots: the national monarchies. They arose in:

• France, where with Philip Augustus, the authority of the Frankish kings extended after the outcome of the battle of Bouvines in 1214
• England, where in 1215 John Lackland signed the Magna Carta Libertatum, a document that the Sovereign was forced to grant to the barons of England. In reality it was not a unilateral concession but a contract in which each party recognized rights to the other.
• Spain, where we witnessed the expulsion of the Muslims from the Iberian peninsula – the so-called Reconquista – concluded in 1492.

The situation was different in Italy where the State of the Church and the Kingdom of Sicily founded by the Norman Roger II in 1130 were present.

Between the 13th century and the first half of the 14th century, European cities reached their peak splendor. In Italy, cities such as Venice, Milan and Florence achieved economic supremacy thanks to the emerging classes who gathered together in arts and crafts guilds.
On a political level, factions such as the Guelphs, who supported the papacy, and the Ghibellines, who supported the Empire, joined contenders such as the Magnates and the People within the Municipalities. From 1240 the cities maintained their municipal institutions only at a superficial level while they became city lordships led by important families such as the Viscontis in Milan and the Medicis in Florence.
In the 14th century the city lordships expanded, becoming Principalities with hereditary dynasties, before transforming into true regional states in the 15th century.

The fourteenth century was a century of great crises. The famines and the spread of the plague, which caused the death of a third of the European population between 1347 and 1351, added to the riots caused by the poor conditions of the people such as the Ciompi revolt in Florence in 1378 and the outbreak of the War of the Hundreds. years between France and England.

The Avignon captivity of 1305-1378, which sanctioned the movement of the pope from Rome to Avignon, and the Western Schism of 1378-1418, during which three popes were also elected simultaneously, put the prestige of the papacy in difficulty.

Middle Ages: the end

Things changed in the 15th century thanks to the economic recovery and political stability guaranteed in Italy by Lorenzo the Magnificent. This was achieved after the Peace of Lodi in 1453, signed by the Italian regional states that had fought each other.

Peace and stability also favored the development of Humanism, the cultural phenomenon of rediscovery of classical antiquity and the value of man, and of inventions that would change the world such as that of movable type printing (1455).
In these same years, Constantinople fell under the attack of the Ottoman Turks (1453) who were pressing towards Europe. However, the world is about to change: with the discovery of America in 1492 the Middle Ages can be considered over.