The Middle Ages was a period of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The period followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, and preceded the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period in a three-period division of history: Classic, Medieval, and Modern. The term “Middle Ages” (medium aevum) was coined in the 15th century and reflects the view that this period was a deviation from the path of classical learning, a path supposedly reconnected by Renaissance scholarship.

The breakdown of Roman society was dramatic. The patchwork of petty rulers was incapable of supporting the depth of civic infrastructure required to maintain libraries, public baths, arenas, and major educational institutions. Any new building was on a far smaller scale than before. The social effects of the fracture of the Roman state were manifold. Cities and merchants lost the economic benefits of safe conditions for trade and manufacture, and intellectual development suffered from the loss of a unified cultural and educational milieu of far-ranging connections.

As it became unsafe to travel or carry goods over any distance, there was a collapse in trade and manufacture for export. The major industries that depended on long-distance trade, such as large-scale pottery manufacture, vanished almost overnight in places like Britain. Whereas sites like Tintagel in Cornwall (the extreme southwest of modern day England) had managed to obtain supplies of Mediterranean luxury goods well into the 6th century, this connection was now lost.

Between the 5th and 8th centuries, new peoples and powerful individuals filled the political void left by Roman centralized government. Germanic tribes established regional hegemonies within the former boundaries of the Empire, creating divided, decentralized kingdoms like those of the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Suevi in Gallaecia, the Visigoths in Hispania, the Franks and Burgundians in Gaul and western Germany, the Angles and the Saxons in Britain, and the Vandals in North Africa.

Roman landholders beyond the confines of city walls were also vulnerable to extreme changes, and they could not simply pack up their land and move elsewhere. Some were dispossessed and fled to Byzantine regions; others quickly pledged their allegiances to their new rulers. In areas like Spain and Italy, this often meant little more than acknowledging a new overlord, while Roman forms of law and religion could be maintained. In other areas, where there was a greater weight of population movement, it might be necessary to adopt new modes of dress, language, and custom.

The Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries of the Persian Empire, Roman Syria, Roman Egypt, Roman North Africa, Visigothic Spain, Sicily and southern Italy eroded the area of the Roman Empire and controlled strategic areas of the Mediterranean. By the end of the 8th century, the former Western Roman Empire was decentralized and overwhelmingly rural.

The High Middle Ages were characterized by the urbanization of Europe, military expansion, and intellectual revival that historians identify between the 11th century and the end of the 13th century. This revival was aided by the conversion of the raiding Scandinavians and Hungarians to Christianity, by the assertion of power by castellans to fill the power vacuum left by the Carolingian decline, and not least to the increased contact with the islamic civilization, which had preserved and elaborated all the classic Greek literature forgotten in Europe after the collapseof The Roman Empire. This was now retranslated into Latin, along with newer works of important advances in science and technology (see 12th-century Renaissance).

The High Middle Ages saw an explosion in population. This population flowed into towns, sought conquests abroad, or cleared land for cultivation. The cities of antiquity had been clustered around the Mediterranean. By 1200, the growing urban centres were in the centre of the continent, connected by roads or rivers. By the end of this period, Paris might have had as many as 200,000 inhabitants. In central and northern Italy and in Flanders, the rise of towns that were self-governing to some degree within their territories stimulated the economy and created an environment for new types of religious and trade associations. Trading cities on the shores of the Baltic entered into agreements known as the Hanseatic League, and Italian city-states such as Venice, Genoa, and Pisa expanded their trade throughout the Mediterranean. This period marks a formative one in the history of the western state as we know it, for kings in France, England, and Spain consolidated their power during this period, setting up lasting institutions to help them govern. Also new kingdoms like Hungary and Poland, after their sedentarization and conversion to Christianity, became Central-European powers. Hungary, especially, became the “Gate to Europe” from Asia, and bastion of Christianity against the invaders from the East until the 16th century and the onslaught by the Ottomon Empire. The Papacy, which had long since created an ideology of independence from the secular kings, first asserted its claims to temporal authority over the entire Christian world. The entity that historians call the Papal Monarchy reached its apogee in the early 13th century under the pontificate of Innocent III. Northern Crusades and the advance of Christian kingdoms and military orders into previously pagan regions in the Baltic and Finnic northeast brought the forced assimilation of numerous native peoples to the European entity. With the brief exception of the Kipchak and Mongol invasions, major barbarian incursions ceased.

The Late Middle Ages were a period initiated by calamities and upheavals. During this time, agriculture was affected by a climate change that has been documented by climate historians, and was felt by contemporaries in the form of periodic famines, including the Great Famine of 1315-1317. Medieval Britain was afflicted by 95 famines, and France suffered the effects of 75 or more in the same period. The Black Death, a disease that spread among the populace like wildfire, killed as much as a third of the population in the mid-14th century. In some regions, the toll was higher than one half of the population. Towns were especially hard-hit because of the crowded conditions. Large areas of land were left sparsely inhabited, and in some places fields were left unworked. Because of the sudden decline in available labourers, the price of wages rose as landlords sought to entice workers to their fields. Workers also felt that they had a right to greater earnings, and popular uprisings broke out across Europe. Even the king Louis I of Hungary was forced to stop his long war against the Kingdom of Naples in 1347, because of the deaths in the Italian region. The Black Death soon took the life of Louis I’s wife, Margaret, daughter of the German emperor Charles IV, and as well few Hungarians, although the negative consequences of this disease in the Kingdom of Hungary were relatively mild.

This period of stress, paradoxically, witnessed creative social, economic, and technological responses that laid the groundwork for further great changes in the Early Modern Period. It was also a period when the Catholic Church was increasingly divided against itself. During the time of the Western Schism, the Church was led by as many as three popes at one time. The divisiveness of the Church undermined papal authority, and allowed the formation of national churches.

In the end of the 15th century the Ottoman Empire advanced all over West Europe conquering eventually the Byzantine Empire and extending their control on the slavish states of the Balkans. Hungary became eventually the last bastion of the Latin Christian world, and fought for the keeping its rule on his territories during two centuries. After the tragic death of the young King Vladislaus I of Hungary during the Battle of Varna in 1444 against the Ottomans, the Kingdom without monarch was placed in the hands of the count John Hunyadi, who became Hungary’s regent-governor (1446–1453). Hunyadi was considered by the pope as one of the most relevant military figures of the 15th century (The Pope Pius II awarded him with the title of Athleta Christi or Champion of Christ), because he was the only hope of keeping a resistance against the Ottomans in Central and West Europe. Hunyadi succeeded during the Siege of Belgrade in 1456 against the Ottomans, which meant the biggest victory against that empire in decades. This battle became a real Crusade against the Muslims, as the Hungarian, Bohemian and slavish peasants were motivated by the Franciscan monk Saint John of Capistrano, which came from Italy predicating the Holy War. The effect that it created in that time was one of the few main factors that helped achieving the victory. However the premature death of the Hungarian Lord left defenseless and in chaos that area of Europe.

As an absolutely unusual event for the Middle Ages, Hunyadi’s son, Matthias, was elected as King for Hungary by the nobility. For the first time, a member of an aristocratic family (and not from a royal family) was crowned.. The King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (1458–1490) was one of the most prominent figures of this Age, as he directed campaigns to the west conquering Bohemia answering to the Pope’s claim for help against the Hussite Protestants, and also for solving the political hostilities with the German emperor Frederick III of Habsburg he invaded his west domains (For the end of his life Matthew of Hungary also held the title of Duke of Austria). Matthew organized the Black Army of Hungary, composed of mercenary soldiers that is considered until the date as the biggest army of its time. Using this powerful tool, the Hungarian king led wars against the Turkish armies and stopped them during his reign. However, the Ottoman Empire grew in strength, and the Black Army of Hungary disappeared, leaving the Kingdom defenseless after the death of Matthew. At the same time, Hungary became under his reign the most important country where the Renaissance developed after the Italian states. Many sculptors, poets, musicians, painters, scientists moved to Hungary from all corners of Europe, gathering all in the court of the King. He established what was at the time of Europe’s largest libraries, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, with over 3000 codices.

Hungary resisted until 1526 when the Ottoman armies won the Battle of Mohács, and the Christian Kingdom lost his King Louis II of Hungary, falling in a serious crisis. The Protestant reform, and The American Continent’s discovery left behind the matter of the Ottoman wars, and mutilated the medieval Europe leaving it without one of its most important Kingdoms. This episode is considered to be one of the final ones of the Medieval Times.