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Middle Ages: Late Middle Ages
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The Late Middle Ages were a period initiated by calamities and upheavals. During this time, agriculture was affected by a climate change that has been documented by climate historians, and was felt by contemporaries in the form of periodic famines, including the Great Famine of 1315-1317. The Black Death, a bacterial disease that spread among the malnourished populace like wildfire, killed as much as a third of the population in the mid-14th century, in some regions the toll was as high as one half of the population. Towns were especially hard-hit because of the crowded conditions. Large areas of land were left sparsely inhabited, and in some places fields were left unworked. As a consequence of the sudden decline in available labourers, the price of wages rose as landlords sought to entice workers to their fields.
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As late as the Early Middle Ages, present Turkish territory was 'Europe' and present Scandinavian, Central European, British, Iberian and Russian territory was 'Asia'. The Origins of Europe are to be found in Turkey.
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The Late Middle Ages, which lasted from about 1300 to about 1450, had many severe crises. Europeans were subjected to famine, disease, and disastrous military conflicts. Yet it was ... a period of enormous vitality and advancement in art, literature, and thought. In fact, the dates of the Late Middle Ages are about the same as those of the early Renaissance. Just as there was no precise moment when the Middle Ages began, there was also no clear break between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
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The precise dates of the beginning, culmination, and end of the Middle Ages are more or less arbitrarily assumed according to the point of view adopted. The period is usually considered to open with those migrations of the German Tribes which led to the destruction of the Roman Empire in the West in 375, when the Huns fell upon the Gothic tribes north of the Black Sea and forced the Visigoths over the boundaries of the Roman Empire on the lower Danube. A later date... is sometimes assumed, viz., when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last of the Roman Emperors of the West, in 476. Others, again, begin the Middle Ages with the opening years of the seventh century and the death (609) of Venantius Fortunatus, the last representative of classic Latin literature. The close of the Middle Ages is also variously fixed; some make it coincide with the rise of Humanism and the Renaissance in Italy, in the fourteenth century; with the fall of Constantinople, in 1453; with the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492; or, again, with the great religious schism of the sixteenth century. Any hard and fast line drawn to designate either the beginning or close of the period in question is arbitrary.
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The Middle Ages are commonly dated from the fall of the Western Roman Empire (or by some scholars, before that) in the 5th century to the beginning of the Renaissance in the late 14th or early 15th century. Which field of study a scholar specializes in, or what regions of Europe they study cause much of the variation. Commonly seen periodization ranges span the years ca. 400–476 AD (the sackings of Rome by the Goths to the deposing of Romulus Augustus) to ca. 1453–1517 (the Fall of Constantinople to the Protestant reformation begun with Martin Luther's 95 theses). These dates are approximate, and are based upon nuanced arguments; for other dating schemes and the reasoning behind them, see "periodisation issues", below.
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The late Middle Ages were characterized by conflict. Towns and cities began to grow in alarming numbers; the new towns wanted to have their own self-control. They wanted to be free of outside leadership. One result of this struggle was the intensification of political and social thinking.
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Late Middle Ages