There were no TVs, cars, computers, or flush toilets.
People used simple tools on land that wasn’t even theirs. The average person died at 35—if they hadn’t died as a baby. That’s what it was like in the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages was a period in Europe between about A.D. 500 and 1500. The fall of the Roman Empire was when it started. It ended about 1,000 years later. That’s when 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 period is called the Renaissance (REN-uh-saunce).
In the Renaissance, people called the time between Rome’s fall and their own era the Middle Ages. Today, it’s also called the medieval period. That comes from the Latin words for “middle ages.”
