The Fall of Acre in 1291 marked the destruction of the last remaining Crusader refuge in the Holy Land, and Pope Clement V dissolved the Knights Templar in 1312. Many of them, however, were robbed and killed as they crossed through Muslim-controlled territories during their journey.Īround 1118, a French knight named Hugues de Payens created a military order along with eight relatives and acquaintances that became the Knights Templar, and they won the eventual support of the pope and a reputation for being fearsome fighters. In 1099, Christian armies captured Jerusalem from Muslim control, and groups of pilgrims from across Western Europe started visiting the Holy Land. The Crusades began in 1095, when Pope Urban summoned a Christian army to fight its way to Jerusalem, and continued on and off until the end of the 15th century. (They also received more worldly rewards, such as papal protection of their property and forgiveness of some kinds of loan payments.) Crusaders, who wore red crosses on their coats to advertise their status, believed that their service would guarantee the remission of their sins and ensure that they could spend all eternity in Heaven. Toward the end of the 11th century, the Catholic Church began to authorize military expeditions, or Crusades, to expel Muslim “infidels” from the Holy Land. And religious scholars and mystics translated, interpreted and taught the Quran and other scriptural texts to people across the Middle East. Inventors devised technologies like the pinhole camera, soap, windmills, surgical instruments, an early flying machine and the system of numerals that we use today. Scholars translated Greek, Iranian and Indian texts into Arabic.
Poets, scientists and philosophers wrote thousands of books (on paper, a Chinese invention that had made its way into the Islamic world by the 8th century). Under the caliphs, great cities such as Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus fostered a vibrant intellectual and cultural life. At its height, the medieval Islamic world was more than three times bigger than all of Christendom. After the prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, Muslim armies conquered large parts of the Middle East, uniting them under the rule of a single caliph. Meanwhile, the Islamic world was growing larger and more powerful. These policies helped it to amass a great deal of money and power. Ordinary people across Europe had to “tithe” 10 percent of their earnings each year to the Church at the same time, the Church was mostly exempt from taxation. Over time, Charlemagne’s realm became the Holy Roman Empire, one of several political entities in Europe whose interests tended to align with those of the Church. In 800 CE, for example, Pope Leo III named the Frankish king Charlemagne the “Emperor of the Romans”–the first since that empire’s fall more than 300 years before. Kings, queens and other leaders derived much of their power from their alliances with and protection of the Church. Instead, the Catholic Church became the most powerful institution of the medieval period. The Catholic Church in the Middle AgesĪfter the fall of Rome, no single state or government united the people who lived on the European continent. However, today’s scholars note that the era was as complex and vibrant as any other. This way of thinking about the era in the “middle” of the fall of Rome and the rise of the Renaissance prevailed until relatively recently. It was especially deadly in cities, where it was impossible to prevent the transmission of the disease from one person to another. The people of the Middle Ages had squandered the advancements of their predecessors, this argument went, and mired themselves instead in what 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon called “barbarism and religion.”ĭid you know? Between 13, a mysterious disease known as the "Black Death" (the bubonic plague) killed some 20 million people in Europe-30 percent of the continent’s population. Accordingly, they dismissed the period after the fall of Rome as a “Middle” or even “Dark” age in which no scientific accomplishments had been made, no great art produced, no great leaders born. Starting around the 14th century, European thinkers, writers and artists began to look back and celebrate the art and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. The phrase “Middle Ages” tells us more about the Renaissance that followed it than it does about the era itself.
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