In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages (or medieval period) lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. In this long period of a thousand years there were all kinds of events and processes that were very different from each other, temporally and geographically differentiated, responding both to mutual influences with other civilizations and spaces and to internal dynamics. Many of them had a great projection towards the future, among others those that laid the foundations of the development of the subsequent European expansion, and the development of social agents who developed a predominantly rural-based society but witnessed the birth of an incipient urban life and a bourgeoisie that will eventually develop capitalism.
Authors: Mikael Eskelner, Martin Bakers, Tobias Lanslor