Imagine a time without TVs, cars, computers, and flush toilets.
Imagine a time when most people worked hard tilling the soil with simple implements and couldn’t even call that land their own. Imagine a time when so little was known about disease that the average life span was 35 years, and many children died in infancy. Welcome to the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages refers to the period in Europe roughly between A.D. 500 and 1500. It began with the fall of the Roman Empire. It ended about 1,000 years later, when artists and scholars in northern Italy began to take an interest in the arts and science of ancient Rome and Greece. They wanted a rebirth of ancient learning. The French word for “rebirth” is renaissance. This period is now called the Renaissance (REN-uh-saunce).
During the Renaissance, people called the period between the fall of Rome and their own time the Middle Ages. Today, it is also called the medieval period, from the Latin words for “middle ages.”
