After the prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, Muslim armies conquered large parts of the Middle East, uniting them under the rule of a single caliph. Meanwhile, the Islamic world was growing larger and more powerful.
These policies helped it to amass a great deal of money and power. Ordinary people across Europe had to “tithe” 10 percent of their earnings each year to the Church at the same time, the Church was mostly exempt from taxation. The people of the Middle Ages had squandered the advancements of their predecessors, this argument went, and mired themselves instead in what 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon called “barbarism and religion.” Accordingly, they dismissed the period after the fall of Rome as a “Middle” or even “Dark” age in which no scientific accomplishments had been made, no great art produced, no great leaders born. Starting around the 14th century, European thinkers, writers and artists began to look back and celebrate the art and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. The phrase “Middle Ages” tells us more about the Renaissance that followed it than it does about the era itself. Many scholars call the era the “medieval period” instead “Middle Ages,” they say, incorrectly implies that the period is an insignificant blip sandwiched between two much more important epochs.
People use the phrase “Middle Ages” to describe Europe between the fall of Rome in 476 CE and the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th century.
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