Middle Ages (aka Dark Ages): 476-1450
• The Sack of Rome and the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 marked the beginning of
the Middle Ages. The Empire had been under attack throughout its final centuries, and after the
fall, barbarians filled the power vacuum in Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries.
• Under Clovis (466-511) Franks conquered the Roman state of Gaul (present-day France) in
496. Clovis was a Catholic, so his rise to power paved the way for the spread on Catholic
Christianity in Europe. (2 slides)
• By the 6th century, polytheism and animism had given way to primarily monotheistic religions.
Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism spread along trade routes throughout western Europe,
southern Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. The prophet Muhammad was born in 570,
and following his death in 632, his successors, called caliphs, established the Islamic faith.
Meanwhile (since this is History of Math), the decimal system we use today was devised in
India in 595.
• From 641-711, adherents of Islam conquered Egypt, northern Africa and present-day Iran,
Afghanistan and Pakistan, coming to govern an area stretching continuously from the borders of
China to Spain. The Islamic religion and culture will continue to spread eastward through the
coming centuries. The westward expansion of the Islam, however, was halted in 732 with a
defeat at Poitiers, France. This was also the time (725) when the AD dating system was first
disseminated in Europe.
• Knowledge of classical Greek and Roman culture declined in Western Europe in the early
medieval period. Knowledge of the Greek language had largely died out in the West, and
Christianity was dominant. By the 8th century, education in Western Europe was structured
almost entirely around the Bible, but Muslim scholars preserved the works of classical Greek
philosophers.
• The Arab societies in the Middle East, North Africa and Arab Spain, had inherited many aspects
of classical Greek culture. To Islamic scholars, Aristotle was “the Philosopher” and his works
were standard texts.
• In 768 Charlemagne became the Frankish emperor. He was a devout Catholic and led the
Franks in 30 years of warfare against the pagan Saxon tribes to the east (present-day eastern
Germany) and converted them to Christianity. In 774 he defeated the Lombards in northern
Italy, saving Rome and Pope Adriam I, and Pope Leo III crowned him Roman Emperor in 800.
His empire was eventually renamed the Holy Roman Empire.
• The contact with other cultures brought on by these invasions enabled Charlemagne to attract
scholars to his court. By 782, his court has stimulated the Carolingian Renaissance and the
Frankish court became a center of learning where aristocratic families sent their sons. This
“literary awakening” lasted into the 9th century. Before Charlemagne, society lacked most basic
educational skills and the royal court had difficulty finding literate men to act as scribes.
Charlemagne created schools and assembled the greatest scholars of the time in Europe at his
court. His primary concern, though, was creating educated clergy and reforming the Frankish
church. As a side note, it was called the Carolingian Renaissance because it was at this time
that a new, more legible script known as Caroline minuscule replaced the previous
handwriting, and was used in Western Europe until the 12th century. Charlemagne dies in 814,
and in 843 his empire was divided into three pieces. Two of these lands roughly correspond to
present-day France and Germany.
• In 832, Caliph Al-Ma'mun established the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, and Islamic
equivalent to the Museum at Alexandria, after being inspired when Aristotle came to him in a
dream. There many classical Greek works were translated into Arabic, and a “flurry” of
commentaries were composed.
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Leading up to the 11th century, Western Europe was suffering a long period of raids from
outsiders – the Vikings from the north, the Muslims from the south and the pagan Magyars from
the east. By 1000, though, Western Europe had become more stabilized and was dominated by
a common religious culture as Latin Christianity ceased to be under constant attack. The church
grew more prosperous, self-confident, centralized, powerful and assertive, but also more
intolerant and politically divided. Europe of the 11th and 12th centuries was the era of the
medieval knights, and the cities and towns were expanding from simple defensive settlements
into cosmopolitan centers of trade, power and art.
The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 in southern England between the Anglo-Saxons and
the Normans. The Normans won and their leader became King William I of England, better
known as William the Conquerer. The Bayeux Tapestry illustrates the battle and the events
leading up to it.
In 1095, Pope Urban II made an impassioned appeal for a military expedition to liberate
Jerusalem and the Christians there from Muslim rule, and thus began the two centuries of
battles in the Middle East, known collectively as the Crusades. Besides religious grounds,
there was a political impetus behind the Crusades since by the late 11th century much of the
Eastern Roman Empire was under Muslim control. Jerusalem was captured in the First Crusade
in 1099, and the Eighth and final Crusade took place in 1270. After the fall of the Port of Acre
(in present-day Israel) in 1291, the remaining Crusader states in the Holy Land were evacuated
(and there has been peace there ever since... oh wait...)
The Crusades did, however, encourage the spread of Islamic learning into Europe. The first
universities were founded in the 12th and 13th centuries. They evolved from cathedral schools
and monasteries and were created to study theology, law, medicine and art. Classes were taught
at masters' homes or in churches. In the 13th century, King Alfonso X of Spain established
scribal translations of Greek and Arab texts to Latin (paving the way for us to ignore Islamic
contributions to math for several centuries). Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was an
Italian friar and the medieval church's greatest thinker. His greatest contribution was Summa
Theologica, which systematically synthesized Aristotle's theories and Christian tradition. We
see that the way is being paved for the European Renaissance.
Meanwhile, Temujin, was born in Mongolia in 1162 In 1206 he gave himself the title Genghis
Khan (“universal ruler”) and declared himself ruler of the Mongol tribes that he had united,
beginning the world's longest unbroken empire, which lasted until 1368. (No slide - show gif on
Wikipedia)
By 1250, the Mongolian Empire established by Genghis Khan stretched from the Yellow Sea to
the Black Sea. Under Mongol protection, the Silk Road flourished as a 4,000-mile long trade
route and was the greatest thoroughfare of the 13th and 14th centuries. Marco Polo (1254-1324)
was a Venetian who went with his dad and uncle on an expedition to China in 1291. Marco
spent three years, but when he returned to Venice in 1295, he was captured in a naval battle the
next year. While imprisoned, he wrote his book Travels, which was the most detailed account
of eastern Asia available to Europeans at the time. It was published in 1483 and influenced
many would-be explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries.
Textile production, banking and shipping made enormous fortunes in the 12th-14th centuries in
the Italian states, still at the crossroads of many major trade routes. And in northern Europe,
Flanders (part of present-day Belgium) became a second powerful trade center.
By the 14th century, universities were more widespread, but theology remained the most
prestigious area of study, and all students doubled as at least low-ranking clergy. However, the
first 6 years of study now focused on the seven liberal arts: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy,
music, grammar, logic and rhetoric
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~1346 the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, spread to Europe from central Asia.
Towns and villages across medieval Europe were littered with corpses, and “death carts”
dragged bodies to pits that served as mass graves. Up to 60% (!!!) of Europe's population
(between 25 and 50 million people) died from the plague in the 14th century, with the more
densely populated cities being the worst affected. Many of the survivors of the plague received
large inheritances from deceased relatives, so the early Renaissance was marked by to trends:
the rebirth of classical scholarship competing with drunken orgies and week-long parties.
Renaissance: 1400-1600
• In 1300, the Ottoman Empire was founded in Turkey, and by the late 1400s it controlled most
of the Middle East and southeast Europe. The Ottoman siege of Constantinople (the capital of
the Byzantine aka Eastern Roman Empire) in 1453 marked the end of the Roman Empire's rule
in all forms. (2 slides)
• In 1415, the Portuguese capture Ceuta and establish the first permanent European possession in
northern Africa. By 1436, Portuguese explorers have moved further on, to the western coast of
Africa.
• Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press in 1445, allowing for the mass production and
dissemination of printed books. (2 slides – prints from late 1400s)
• The power of the church in the everyday lives of the urban classes was waning in the 15th
century since merchants and craftsmen and their families could mostly now read and write. The
Renaissance refers to two centuries of flourishing art, education, wealth architecture, ideas,
technology and culture in Europe and was centered in Italy.
◦ The Florence Cathedral was completed in 1436 and included the largest dome built to
date.
◦ Michelangelo's David (of David and Goliath) was made in Florence in 1504, and he painted
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in 1508.
◦ Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa in 1504 in Florence and illustrates Pacioli's De Divina
Proportione, a geometry book, in 1509. He was also dissecting corpses and inventing
(failed) flying machines.
◦ Humanist scholars placed humankind rather than God at the center of their world view. The
Ambassadors shows the fascination at the time with scientific instruments, hidden
messages and visual tricks (i.e. the distorted skull, symbolizing mortality, that appears
correctly is viewed from just the right angle).
• Meanwhile, In 1479, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon married, joining their
kingdoms to become the first king and queen of France. In 1478 they established the Spanish
Inquisition, intended to ensure the Catholic orthodoxy of those who converted from Judaism
and Islam. The Christian reconquest of Spain was completed in 1492 with the fall of Granada,
the last Moorish (Muslim) kingdom in Spain, and the regulation of the faith of the newly
converted was intensified after a royal decree ordered Jews and Muslims to convert or leave.
Also, in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to finance Columbus's expedition and Columbus
sailed the ocean blue. (slide shows their wedding portrait!)
• After more than a month at sea with 90 men, at 2am on Oct 12, 1492 Columbus landed in the
Caribbean. This set in motion the galvanization of European explorers in the discovery of two
new continents and the prolonged suffering and repression of the native people there. In
January 1493 he headed back to Spain, still convinced he had made it to Asia. The first African
slaves were sent to Cuba ten years later, marking the beginning of the slave trade. (Map is from
1490)
• In 1517 (around the height of the Renaissance in France) Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses
to a church door in Germany in protest of the corruption of the Catholic church, setting of the
Reformation and the advent of the Protestant church. Meanwhile, European exploration
continues as Magellan sails around the tip of South Africa in 1520 and Pizzaro lands in Peru in
1532 and subsequently kills the Inca emperor and conquers the Inca capital. A vast Spanish
empire is established in Central and South America.