THE 15 MOST IMPORTANT EVENTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES - HISTORY

Some of the most important events of the Middle Ages were the fall of the Roman Empire, the Battle of Hastings or the Magna Carta, among others. Most scholars consider the Middle Ages, or the medieval period, as the time from the fall of Rome in 476 AD to the birth of the Modern Age, which begins around the 15th or 16th century.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the influence of the Catholic Church was extremely important. In many ways, this institution had more power than the nations. Often kings and queens were forced to act in accordance with the wishes of the clergy, and corruption in the Catholic Church was common.

Civil authority was often determined by the Pope. In 800 AD, Pope Leo III crowned the Franciscan King Charlemagne, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, a title that dates back to the times of imperial Rome.

In addition to the power of the Church, there were other events that marked the Middle Ages. The Battle of Hastings established the feudal system in England and gave way to feudalism in other parts of the continent.

The Declaration of the Magna Carta was also a very relevant event, but it is better to see one by one the most important events of the Middle Ages.

List of the 15 most important events of the Middle Ages

1- The fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 AD)

Julius Nepos Empire Gold Coins

The fall of the Western Roman Empire is considered the beginning of the Middle Ages. The last Roman emperor was Julius Nepos, who was nominated by the eastern emperor Zeno.

The Nepo rebellion dethroned Julius Nepos and declared his own son, Romulus Augustus, the new emperor of the Western Roman Empire.

However, Odoacar invaded Italy and defeated Orestes and deposed Romulus Augustus on September 4, 476. He then invited Zeno to be the Emperor of the Eastern and Western Empire. Zeno accepted the invitation while Julius Nepo was assassinated by his own soldiers in 480 AD.

2- Charles "The hammer" and the battle of Tours (732 AD)

Charles Martel, also known as Charles “The Hammer”, was a French-speaking political and military leader who worked under the Merovingian kings as mayor of the palace.

In AD 732, he defeated the Moorish invaders at the Battle of Tours, which put a permanent end to the Islamic invaders and their expansion into Western Europe.

Charles Martel is considered one of the founding fathers of feudalism and chivalry in Europe. He prepared the grounds for the establishment of the Carolingian Empire. He was Charlemagne's grandfather.

3- Charlemagne, the emperor of the Romans (800 AD)

Charlemagne or Charles the Great was a Frankish king who expanded his kingdom and covered almost all of western and central Europe. He was declared the emperor of the Romans in 800 AD and enjoyed the empire until his death.

He associated his political steps with the Church and encouraged the resurgence of art, religion and culture also with the help of the Church.

4- Treaty of Verdun (843 AD)

Louis the Pious was declared the successor, who ruled as the Emperor of the Romans. However, after his death, the Carolingian Empire faced a civil war due to internal fighting between the three surviving sons of Louis the Pious who fought for the empress.

Finally, the Carolingian Empire was divided into three parts in August 843 AD through the Treaty of Verdun, which ended a three-year-long civil war.

5- The Holy Roman Empire of Germany (962 AD)

Otto I was the successor to Henry the Fowler, the Duke of Saxony who became the first Saxon emperor. Like his father, Otto I managed to protect the Germans against the invading Magyars.

He chose to create a German monastery. This natural loyalty to the German Church and kingdom helped him gain control over the rebellious dukes and establish his empire.

In 962 AD, the papacy of Italy invited him and declared him the Emperor of Italy and established his Holy Roman Empire.

6- The Battle of Hastings (1066 AD)

On October 14, 1066, William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, defeated the last Anglo-Saxon king: Harold II.

William the Conqueror thus established the Norman Empire and to protect it he rewarded all his Norman supporters who fought for him in war with large portions of land from England.

In this way, he divided the entire English land into mansions and established the feudal system and manpower.

7- Declaration of the Magna Carta (1215 AD)

The Magna Carta Libertatum, or Great Charter of the Liberties of England, was originally issued in 1215 AD. This charter is considered the first step towards the constitutional government of England. The Magna Carta restricted the power of the Emperor and demonstrated the importance of a Constitution.

8- The Great Famine (1315-1317 AD)

All of northern Europe suffered from the Great Famine, the beginning of which is dated 1315 and lasted for two years, until 1317. During this period, a large part of the population died of hunger and disease.

In addition to the lack of food, the crime rate increased to the extreme and there was cannibalism, rapes and infanticides.

The great famine caused unrest among the peasants and even the members of the nobility suffered a setback. As a result, they became more bloodthirsty and renounced the oath of knighthood.

9- The Hundred Years War (1337 AD)

The Hundred Years' War began in 1337, when the Kingdom of England waged war against the Kingdom of France.

While there were many periods of peace and ceasefire between England and France during the period, this war continued over and over with different conflicts until 1453.

10- The Black Death (1348-1350 AD)

The Black Death or Black Death is the most threatening epidemic of the European Middle Ages, and it significantly weakened the feudal system and the Church in Europe.

Huge masses of people suffered premature death due to this plague and the economic and political power of the kingdoms of Europe was significantly reduced.

To take advantage of the situation, the peasants rebelled and demanded better treatment. The rest of the population got angry with the Church because no volume of prayers could save them. They also got upset with the government because the government couldn't help them either.

11- The Great Schism (1378-1417 AD)

Chronicles of Jean Froissart

The Church suffered its first shock in 1054, when it was divided into the Eastern and Western Christian Church. The Eastern Orthodox Church believed that the Western Catholic Church was corrupt and exploitative.

Western Christendom suffered a much larger shakeup between 1378 and 1417, when there were three candidates for the papacy. This internal struggle for the supreme power of the papacy significantly reduced the influence and power of the Church over the secular population.

12- The Islamic conquest

In 627 the Byzantine emperor Heraclius appeared triumphant. His forces had pushed the Persians from the very gates of Constantinople, and their advance into Mesopotamia had inflicted a crushing defeat on their commander Rhahzadh at the Battle of Nineveh.

However, less than a decade later, Heraclius' generals were beaten at the Battle of Yarmouk. His adversaries on this occasion were the Arab tribes, successfully united into a single political entity under Prophet Muhammad.

Armenia fell to the Muslims followed by Egypt between 638 and 642. Under the Rashidun and the Umayyad Caliphates the Muslims conquered an area of perhaps 13 million square miles.

The expansion of the empire brought wealth, commerce and urbanization. By the 10th century Abbasid Baghdad was the largest city in the world and was home to banks, hospitals, schools and joint societies in between the city's mosques and palaces.

13- The Renaissance of Learning in the West

In 711 the Muslims invaded Spain, transforming it into Al-Andalus. After 375 years of Islamic settlement, Christian forces in the Peninsula made substantial advances, capturing the important center of Toledo.

As a result, they came into contact with the Greek-Islamic scientific corpus and men like Gerard de Cremona and Robert de Ketton began to translate it into Latin.

Interestingly, not much of the classical literature seems to have translated into these particular movements (in contrast to the later renaissance in the 13th century).

Instead, the focus was primarily on logic and natural philosophy, indicating that there was a strong demand for these in the 12th and 13th centuries. There was some need to be filled by natural and philosophical works, a need fed by the schools started by Charlemagne.

These schools developed as important centers of learning and quickly replaced the rural monastic centers as the center of intellectual study.

These gave birth to university - corporations with separate legal personality that could set their own statutes and were not restricted in the subjects they could teach or how they were organized.

14- The foundations of modern science

Modern science emerged as the triumph of three civilizations: Greek, Arab, and Latin Christian.

However, by the end of the Middle Ages (1400), the total mass of scientific knowledge was much greater than it had been at the end of the Roman Empire; An institutional home for natural philosophy had been created: the university. Scholasticism had created a kind of questioning and curious intellectual culture; important questions had been asked and progress had been made in answering them.

Between 1150 and 1500, more literate Europeans had had access to scientific materials than any of their predecessors in earlier cultures.

This allowed natural philosophy to develop in ways that had not previously been feasible and that led to the Scientific Revolution.

15- The birth of natural rights

The evolution of rights in European thought began with the "Renaissance of Law" in the late 11th and early 12th centuries.

During the 12th century there was a great revival of legal studies, centered around the city of Bologna in Italy. By presenting subjective definitions of Ius naturale, canon lawyers came to see that an adequate concept of natural justice must include a concept of individual rights.

By the year 1300, the jurists of the commune of Ius had developed a solid language of rights and created a series of rights derived from natural law.

During the period from 1150 to 1300, they defined property, self-defense, non-Christian, marriage and procedural rights as rooted in natural, not positive law.

References

Prologue to the Spanish edition in The history of the world in the Middle Ages, Riu, Manuel, Madrid, Sopena, 1978.
Were the Middle Ages Dark?, Anthony Esolen, Prager University, United States, 2013.

THE 15 MOST IMPORTANT EVENTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES - HISTORY - 2024