Can you imagine a time without TVs, cars, computers, and flush toilets?
Can you imagine a time when most people used simple tools on land that wasn’t even their own? Can you imagine a time when the average person died at 35 and many died as babies? If you can, you’ve imagined the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages started in Europe with the fall of the Roman Empire, around A.D. 500. It ended about 1,000 years later. At that time, around A.D. 1500, artists and scholars in northern Italy became interested in the arts and science of ancient Rome and Greece. They wanted to start a rebirth of ancient learning. The French word for “rebirth” is renaissance. So this time is called the Renaissance (REN-uh-saunce).
During the Renaissance, people called the time between the fall of Rome and their own era the Middle Ages. Today, it’s also called the medieval period. That comes from the Latin words for “middle ages.”