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Christianity was consolidated in Europe and spread to new territories, while Jerusalem passed into Muslim hands. It began with the fall of the Roman Empire.
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The consideration that the history of Europe is the history of the world is a biased, Eurocentric and discriminatory historical criterion. However, medieval life was far from being immovable or serene, but 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).Įspecially 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 century or the numerous Christian Crusades.įinally, 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. During this period, society embraced a feudal order, essentially rural or peasant, and Christian dogmatism ruled the culture. The Middle Ages receives its name from being the transition between the Ancient Age and the Modern Age. Its thousand-year duration was characterized by a relative stagnation in the development of culture and science, under the rule of the religious mentality of Christianity, which is why it was often called the “Dark Ages.” The period of Western history 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 culminated. Also, what was feudalism? The Middle Ages was a period of wars, plagues, and new political forms. We explain what the Middle Ages was, its stages, art, literature and other characteristics.
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