Medieval history, also called medieval history, refers to the history from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to the outbreak of the British bourgeois revolution in 1640. The formation, development and disintegration of the feudal system were the main thread of European history during this period. However, the development of feudal society in various countries around the world is uneven. When Western Europe first entered feudal society in the 5th century, China had already completed about 1,000 years of feudal society.
In European feudal society, large and small feudal lords such as kings, nobles and knights formed a pyramid-like hierarchy, but their rights and obligations were limited. "My vassal's The vassal is not my vassal." This complex hierarchical relationship has kept European feudal countries in a state of separatism for a long time. It is similar to the centralized feudal monarchs in Eastern China who say "all the people in the world are not the kings; who lead the land are the kings." Authoritarianism is very different. Rulers of various countries continue to engage in wars, plunder and annex each other, and many countries have never had a unified and stable political power. Feudal landlords exploited peasants by virtue of their land ownership and political power. In Europe, the Christian church has become a tool of feudal rule. They and the secular feudal lords jointly maintain the feudal system. The labor of peasants and serfs was misappropriated by feudal lords in the form of labor service, real rent, numerous taxes and church "tithes". Peasants' resistance continued, but the scale of the uprisings was generally relatively small, and there were no large-scale peasant wars like in China that overthrew a dynasty many times.
Whether it is the West or the East, the feudal economy was mainly a self-sufficient natural economy with a family of farmers as the basic production unit. Because farmers can own some basic means of production and living and can obtain certain labor products, their labor enthusiasm is much higher than that of slaves. In the Middle Ages, iron tools had long been popularized, and coupled with the continuous advancement of production technology, social wealth was greatly enriched and the development of commerce was promoted. In the 14th and 15th centuries, in the Mediterranean coastal areas, capitalist handicraft industries specializing in commodity production appeared in cities with developed commodity economies. In China, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the sprouts of capitalism also appeared in cities in the south of the Yangtze River. The emergence of capitalist production relations from feudal production relations shows that feudal society has reached its end. Since then, the rise of capitalism in some European countries has formed an irreversible momentum.
Medieval Europe was culturally backward and ideologically ignorant. It was the so-called "dark age" in history. However, in China, it was a period of highly developed culture, science and technology, and there was a strong contrast between Eastern and Western cultures. . Religion occupies a dominant position in the realm of thought in vast areas of the world. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam have become “state religions” in many countries. Confucianism dominates China's ideological field. Although this cultural phenomenon once promoted the consolidation of feudal society, when capitalism emerged, it became an obstacle to social progress and scientific development. Along with the emergence of capitalism, the "Renaissance" that emerged in Europe was a great liberation of human thought. It promoted the prosperity of culture and art and the great leap of modern science. In the East, due to the long-term shackles of feudal ideology, social development tended to be slow, and it began to lag behind the West.
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1. Definition:
The term Middle Ages (the middle age) is the most It was first proposed by the Italian humanist historian Biondo in the 15th century. He called the thousand years from the 5th to the 15th centuries in Western Europe the Middle Ages, meaning a historical period between the two cultural peaks of classical culture and the Renaissance; at the end of the 17th century, the German historian Keleler wrote in his book World History , for the first time divided the entire history of mankind into three periods: ancient times, the Middle Ages, and modern times; by the 18th century, the term Middle Ages was widely used by European historians; the ancient Chinese thinker Han Feizi had a theory of ancient times, medieval times, and modern times, which was translated in the late Qing Dynasty It was adopted when writing the history of the Western world. The Middle Ages is a unique concept that applies to Western Europe. When applied to other regions, we often use medieval world history to replace it.
2. Beginning and ending dates:
Due to different concepts, the understanding of the beginning and ending dates of ancient world history is also different. In the past, domestically, the upper limit was traditionally set as the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, and the lower limit was the British bourgeois revolution in 1640. This was based on the revolutionary seizure of power, which is often not used now. Textbooks now set the lower limit as before the geographical discovery at the end of the 15th century, but the upper limit is still the fifth century.
The Cambridge History of the Middle Ages in the United Kingdom introduces twelve opinions on the upper limit. It starts with the immediate accession of the Roman Emperor Daiko to the throne in 284 as the beginning of world medieval history, and the lower limit uses the demise of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 as the boundary. This theory is more popular in the West. When authors such as "A Brief History of the European Middle Ages", "History of World Civilizations", and "General Global History" set time limits, the lower limit is the 15th century, and the upper limit ranges from the 3rd to the 5th century.