This article is about medieval Europe. For a global history of the period between the 5th and 15th centuries, see 😄 Post-classical history . For other uses, see Middle Ages (disambiguation)

In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period 😄 (also spelled mediæval or mediaeval) lasted approximately from 500 AD to 1500, although alternative starting and end points exist. The 😄 Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: antiquity, medieval, and modern. The medieval 😄 period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages, and the early medieval period is alternatively referred 😄 to as the Dark Ages.

Population decline, counterurbanisation, the collapse of centralised authority, invasion and the mass migration of tribes, which 😄 had begun in late antiquity, continued into the Early Middle Ages. The large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including of 😄 Germanic peoples, led to the rise of new kingdoms in Western Europe. In the 7th century, the Middle East and 😄 North Africa came under caliphal rule with the Arab conquests. The Byzantine Empire survived in the Eastern Mediterranean and advanced 😄 secular law through the Code of Justinian. In the West, most kingdoms incorporated extant Roman institutions, while the influence of 😄 Christianity expanded across Europe. The Carolingian dynasty of the Franks established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th and early 😄 9th centuries in Western Europe before it succumbed to internal conflict and external invasions from the Vikings from the north, 😄 Magyars from the east, and the Muslims from the south.[not verified in body]

During the High Middle Ages, which began after 😄 1000, the population of Europe increased greatly as technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish and the Medieval Warm 😄 Period climate change allowed crop yields to increase. Manorialism, the organisation of peasants into villages that owed rent and labour 😄 services to the nobles, and feudalism, the political structure whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords 😄 in return for the right to rent from lands and manors, were two of the ways society was organised in 😄 the High Middle Ages. This period also saw the formal division of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, with the East–West 😄 Schism of 1054. The Crusades, which began in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of 😄 the Holy Land from Muslims and also contributed to the expansion of Latin Christendom in the Baltic region and the 😄 Iberian Peninsula. Kings became the heads of centralised nation states, reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a 😄 unified Christendom more distant.[not verified in body] In the West, intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised 😄 joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities. The theology of Thomas Aquinas, the paintings of Giotto, the 😄 poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the travels of Marco Polo, and the Gothic architecture of cathedrals such as Chartres mark 😄 the end of this period.

The Late Middle Ages was marked by difficulties and calamities including famine, plague, and war, which 😄 significantly diminished the population of Europe; between 1347 and 1350, the Black Death killed about a third of Europeans. Controversy, 😄 heresy, and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the interstate conflict, civil strife, and peasant revolts that occurred 😄 in the kingdoms. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages and beginning the early modern 😄 period.