Medieval Times

Introduction
According to Professor Tom Beaumont James who teaches archaeology and history at the University of Winchester, “the Middle Ages were a period of massive social change, nationalism, international conflict, terrible natural disaster, climate change, rebellion, resistance and renaissance”. In this essay we will discuss the following three sections which are: The Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance and the Reformation. We hope this is to your liking.

The middle Ages
The middle ages occurred between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. The early middle ages are often referred as the Dark Ages. This period of time was known in Latin as the medieval era. During this time, live in Europe was really hard, most of people couldn’t read or write and as a result nobody had a real expectation that their situation had possibilities to improve.

Feudalism
Feudalism was the system of loyalties and protection during the middle ages. As the Roman Empire crumbled, emperors granted land to nobles in exchange for their loyalty. These lands eventually developed into manors such as a castle, a small village or a farmland. During the middle ages peasants could no longer count on the Roman army to protect them. German as well as Viking tribes invaded homes, farms and lands all around Europe. The peasants became the new landowners but not all of them remain free because most of them became serfs which were bound to the land. The following picture can illustrate the way that the feudalism worked in the middle ages.

The Huns
The Huns are considered as the most destructive people in history. They were from Central Asia, 200 years BC they invaded the Chinese Empire ruled by its Emperor Shih Huang-Ti who were forced to build the Great Wall of China in order to get rid of the Huns. In 445 Attila became the leader of the Huns after murdering his brother. He was called by the Roman people the scourge of God. The threat of the Huns died with Attila’s death in 453.

The Barbarians
In AD122, Emperor Hadrian built a wall to separate the Roman part of Britain from the land which nowadays we know as Scotland. The Romans used to call the Scottish people Barbarians because of their native language. This term was use to describe the people who lived in the border of the Roman Empire such as the Vandals, Lombards, Alamanni, Goths, Franks and Burgundians. Germanic tribes ruled over what was left the Roman Empire, on the other hand, the Ostrogoths conquered most of Italy and Greece. The Vandals ruled over North Africa which was part of the Roman Empire, the Franks invaded France, while the Saxons conquered the South part of England.

The Byzantine Empire
In 330, Constantine moved the Capital from Rome to Byzantium; the reason was to be safer from a Barbarian invasion. The emperor changed the name from Byzantium to Constantinople which also was known as the Byzantine Empire. This Empire conquered Greece, the Balkans, Syria and Egypt. When the Turks moved into the Byzantine Empire in the eleventh century the Emperor feared the fact of losing the Christian influence that his Empire had by the Muslim influence of the Turks. This was the time when the Holy wars or the crusades began. At the last, the Turks won the battles and the city which once was called Constantinople is nowadays known as Istanbul, Turkey.

The Moors
The Visigoths ruled Spain until 711 when the Moors crossed from North Africa into Spain and drive the Visigoths from Toledo. For the next three hundred years the Moors ruled Spain by establishing a religious center in Cordoba until King Ferdinand from Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile forced the Muslims and Jews to leave Spain in 1525.

The Vikings
The Vikings came from Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The Vikings were skilled sailors and brave warriors, by the tenth century they conquered parts of Britain, France and Russia and raided lands such as Egypt. 

The Bubonic Plague
Almost half of the people from the Western Europe died in a great sickness known as the Bubonic Plague which was also called the Black Death. It apparently began in China’s Gobi Desert and it killed 35 million Asian people, when sailors traveled to Asia, rats returned with them to Europe. The Black Death killed from thirty to sixty percent of Europe's population. This plague reduced the world population from 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in the 14th century.

Italian Renaissance
The term “Renaissance,” means “rebirth,” and it was a time where a conscious awareness marked a new way of living of the people.


Humanism
The Renaissance was manifested in new attitudes. An example of this was the way that the humanists loved the classical learning; these are the names of some remarkable humanist thinkers:
Lorenzo Valla: (1407-1457).
Giovanni Boccacio: (1313-1375)  
Niccolò Machiavelli: (1469 – 1527)
Renaissance thinkers and artists demonstrated their talent in more than one field. The first example of this kind of artist was Michelangelo, who was a painter but also a sculptor. The last example was Leonardo Da Vinci who was an artist as well as a scientist. 

Renaissance Art
Renaissance architects, painters, sculptors and musicians were deeply influenced by the culture of humanism. Renaissance artists tried to describe their reality, for example, they showed the human body as it really was, rather than the artificiality highlighted in the medieval art. Renaissance artist had two important concepts of its own art which were realism and perspective. 

The Reformation
The reformation was a period where the Catholic Church was reformed and reorganized. In 1517 Martin Luther appealed to the Pope to send a message to the clergy in order to stop the abuses that they were committing in the name of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope excommunicated Martin Luther for insubordination; as a result many wars erupted in Europe and continued intermittently for the next two hundred years. Martin Luther became the leader of the Reformation in Germany; his main complaint to the Pope was the fact that some of the clergy were selling indulgences to the people such as the monk Johann Tetzel. 

Other scholars who helped spreading the ideas of the Reformation were Phillip Melanchthon, Johannes Reuchlin of Heidelberg, Johannes Tauler of Strasbourg, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Lefevre d'Etaples of France, Huldrych Zwingli of Switzerland, John Colet of England and John Calvin of Geneva. All of them participated in The Reformation which was an outgrowth of the Renaissance. In 1555 Charles V made a peace treaty in which he was letting the people to choose from Catholicism and Lutheranism. Although the Catholic Church underestimated this treaty, they realized that the movement was been spreading from one country to another. At the end, the Church took action and started to correct abuses and reaffirm ancient doctrines and traditions. As a result, by the end of the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church regained the faith of the people in lands when they have lost it because of the Protestantism.  

Conclusion
In sum, we agreed that the middle ages were one of the hardest episodes in the history of the human being. Fortunately, that period has passed and the Renaissance appeared bringing a sign of improvement. Europe was transformed by increasing its food production and population as well as its economy. A new society emerged from their ashes letting us a legacy in which they made us believe that big changes can occur in our lives if we fight for an ideal.