What is the Middle Ages and its characteristics
As Middle Ages is called the historical period spanning from the 5th century to the end of the 15th century AD. It is also known as Middle Ages either Medieval. It must be written with capital letters in the initials.
As such, the Middle Ages lasted for a thousand years, and is in turn subdivided into the Early Middle Ageswhich runs from the 5th to the 10th century, and the Middle Ageswhich covers approximately the last five centuries, between the 11th and the 15th.
The Middle Ages It is a period in human history that It is usually limited to the European level specifically, due to the absence of contact between Europe and other world civilizations, such as Chinese, Japanese, Indian or Islamic, not counting the cultures of black Africa or the pre-Hispanic civilizations of America.
Hence the milestones on which its chronological delimitation be Eurocentric: the beginning would be marked, on the one hand, by the fall of the Western Roman Empirein the year 476 of our era, and on the other, the knowledge by European man of the existence of America from the first voyage of Christopher Columbus to America, in 1492. However, there are also those who point to the end of the Middle Ages in coincidental events such as the fall of the Byzantine Empirethe end of the Hundred Years’ War and the invention of the printing press, coming together in the year 1453.
Characteristics of the Middle Ages
Some characteristics most relevant of the Middle Ages are, in what economic, the transition from the slave to the feudal mode of production; in social, society would be redefined according to classes, leaving behind the concept of citizenship, used until then in the Roman Empire; in political, the power previously centralized and concentrated by Rome, would begin to disintegrate into small kingdoms and city-states; in the plane ideologicaltheocentric thinking, fundamentally advocated by Christianity, begins to subordinate everything.
The Middle Ages has traditionally been described as a dark period (obscurantism), fundamentally associated with feudalismthe isolation of Europe with respect to the rest of the world’s civilizations, the cultural and technical backwardnesswith a sovereignly ignorant population, with poor health conditions, and subject to the designs of the Catholic Church and the generalized violence resulting from wars, invasions and crusades.
See also Medieval Literature.
The origin of the term
The term Middle Ages It was born as a necessity to name the intermediate time that was located between the Ancient Age, associated with classical culture and Greco-Roman civilization, and the Modern Age, related to the cultural renewal of the Renaissance and Humanism.
See also: