- What was the Middle Ages?
- Characteristics of the Middle Ages
- Stages of the Middle Ages
- Literature of the Middle Ages
- Art of the Middle Ages
- Philosophy of the Middle Ages
- Feudalism of the Middle Ages
- Church of the Middle Ages
We explain what the Middle Ages was, its stages, art, literature and other characteristics. Also, what was feudalism?
What was the Middle Ages?
It is known as the Middle Ages, Middle Ages or Medieval to the period of history of the West that begins with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, and ends with the discovery of America in 1492 or the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the date on which the Hundred Years War also ended.
Its thousand-year duration was characterized by a relative stagnation in the development of the culture and of the Sciences, under the rule of the religious mentality of Christianity, which is why it used to be called the "Dark Ages."
The Middle Ages gets its name from being the transit between the Old age and the Modern age. During this period the society it embraced a feudal order, essentially rural or peasant, and Christian dogmatism ruled the culture.
However, medieval life was far from being immovable or serene, rather it was the scene of numerous human displacements, abundant wars and new political forms, mainly in the border cultures to the European one, like Muslim Arab or Eastern Christianity (Byzantium).
Especially important was the clash between Christian and Islamic civilizations, with reciprocal attempts at conquest such as the Muslim expansion from the 7th to the 15th centuries or the numerous Christian Crusades.
Finally, it should be noted that the Middle Ages, as a historical period, cannot be fully applied to civilizations other than the Western one, such as China, India or Japan, flourishing during that same period. Considering that the history of Europe it is the history of the world, it is a biased, Eurocentric and discriminatory historical criterion.
Characteristics of the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is the time of knights errant, of Catholic kings and kingdoms, and of long rural wars for reasons of religion. Although much of it is shown romantically in contemporary fiction, there never was magic, no species other than human (elves, orcs, goblins, etc.), or dragons.
However, these supernatural beings were part of the current imaginary at the time, in which the traditions Y beliefs local with the dominant Christian religion. In general, faith prevailed over reason or understanding.
It was a long period of deep but slow transformations. For example, the ancient slave mode of production was replaced by the feudal mode of production.
The diversity of what happened over a thousand years does not allow a too homogeneous reading. However, in the Middle Ages massive epidemics, military invasions and superstition abounded, although in the latter it is possible that Christianity classified as ignorance or superstition any vestige of previous pagan religions.
Stages of the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is commonly divided into two stages:
- Early or High Middle Ages (5th to 10th centuries). It began with the fall of the Roman Empire. Christianity was consolidated in Europe and spread to new territories, while Jerusalem passed into Muslim hands. It ended with the proper beginning of feudal institutions, the rise in the East of the Macedonian dynasty, and the decline of the Abbasid Caliphate.
- Low Middle Ages (11th to 15th centuries). The properly feudal stage of the Middle Ages, marked by the appearance of the Black Death that claimed millions of lives in Europe and reduced its population by half. At this stage the bourgeoisie early as a new social class, which promoted the changes necessary for the emergence of the capitalism and the end of the Middle Ages.
The late Middle Ages in turn comprise two stages:- Full Middle Ages. It spans from the 11th to the 13th centuries, in which the birth of the town and the expulsion of the Islam from various parts of Europe, such as the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily or the Middle East. It is considered a peak moment of medieval culture, with the optimal climatic period providing the heat necessary to have more tolerable winters and more abundant harvests.
- Crisis of the fourteenth century. Also called The Secular Crisis, it covers the last two centuries of the Middle Ages and witnessed the destabilization of medieval society as a consequence of prolonged war conflicts, as well as the emergence of future modern values, such as the crisis of scholasticism. This is the final stretch of the Middle Ages.
Literature of the Middle Ages
Medieval literature is well known, especially with regard to chivalric cycles, which recounted the adventures of Christian warriors in a vast world, full of magic and mysteries. They were generally narrated through symbols and metaphors Christian or religious.
These cycles, such as the Arthurian or the Breton, were later accompanied by bestiaries, books often supplemented with images in which the animals known to man were accounted for, many of them imaginary, and interpreted from a moral Christian.
Later, hagiography and poetry religious like genders main events in Christian Europe, whose cultural and scientific manifestations were controlled by the Church. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, courtly love became important as the protagonist of the stories, always in a bucolic imaginary, as well as the epic songs and the fables.
Some representative titles of the medieval tradition are: The Amadís de Gaula (anonymous, 1508), Beowulf (anonymous, date unknown), Sing of mine Cid (anonymous, 1200) and the Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri, 1304-1321) and The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1387-1400).
Art of the Middle Ages
When thinking about the art of the Middle Ages, we must consider that it arose at a time in history in which the notion of art as an end in itself did not exist, not even that of Fine arts, but of the mechanical arts, linked to the trade.
Thus, medieval art had a clear function, which could be:
- Serve as an offering to God.
- Serve as a pedagogical accompaniment of Christian rites and knowledge.
- Be an affirmation of political power (portraits of kings, nobles, etc.) or religious (religious scenes).
In many cases, medieval art was influenced by other invading or bordering cultures, such as Byzantine art, Mozarabic Iberian art, among others. Great works of painting, architecture Y music they were composed during this period.
Philosophy of the Middle Ages
The philosophy throughout its thousand years of duration, tried to find a synthesis between the various traditions of thought that he inherited, such as the Christian, the Jewish, the Islamic (by contagion) and the one from Classical Antiquity.
Due to the Christian predominance in medieval culture, most of the fundamental authors of Antiquity, such as Plato, Socrates or Aristotle, were inaccessible due to the censorship and prohibition of “pagan” influences. Paradoxically, many of them came by Muslim translations, since the Arab culture was more open to influences from the past.
These translations allowed the re-entry of Aristotle, who was a name abundantly referred to after the 12th century, influencing the work of authors such as Ramón Llull, Tomás de Aquino, Guillermo de Ockham and Juan Duns Scoto, while other previous authors such as Agustín de Hipona, Juan Escoto Erígena or Anselmo de Canterbury were of Platonic affiliation.
The central themes of medieval philosophy had to do with faith, reason, nature Y existence divine, the trouble evil, human free will and other matters that reflected on the way in which the divine and earthly worlds interpenetrated. The modern ideas of science, of empirical knowledge and experiment they did not exist as such in the mentality of the time.
Feudalism of the Middle Ages
The feudal society of the Middle Ages was fundamentally rural. In it two large social classes, which constituted the feudal mode of production:
- The military aristocracy. Composed of landowners who administered their territories socially, politically and legally.
- The serfs of the impoverished peasantry. Those who worked the land for the benefit of feudal lord, and secondly, his own, receiving security and order in return.
On the other hand, they were joined by the clergy, that is, the Catholic Church, which crowned the kings and administered the moral, spiritual and legal authority of the different Christian kingdoms, as representatives of the law of God on Earth.
Often the adherence to the clergy (the entrance to its institutions) was the only way of social advancement of the poor classes, together with the war, since the adherence to the nobility or the commoners was determined from birth.
Feudalism found its end with the rise of the bourgeoisie. It was a new social class that administered business and merchandise, emerging as a can political and economic detached from the nobility of origin.
Eventually that new middle class drove the Renaissance and the Modern Age. Through the Bourgeois Revolutions, they established capitalism and the Republic as the new values of the West.
Church of the Middle Ages
One of the best known features of the Middle Ages was the omnipresence of the Catholic Church, whose interventions in politics were constant and fundamental. This era is often characterized by its governments theocratic, in which the Church crowned kings and endorsed them as emissaries of God on earth.
The Church controlled the written letter, the official knowledge and exercised judicial functions, since the laws with which the society was governed were the religious ones, beyond those imposed by the feudal lords in their respective local governments. The ecclesiastical authorities could even prosecute kings and nobles, since the law of God was above that of men.
In that sense, the role of the Holy Inquisition of the Catholic Church was infamous. Their representatives acted as emissaries of ecclesiastical power who questioned the faith of people accused of witchcraft, demonic pacts or paganism.
Any person accused by their enemies, scientists dedicated to research, or women accused of witches could be involved in these processes. The accusation alone served for the Inquisition to take matters into its own brutal hands, and subject people to torture, humiliation and persecution.