The Age of Illumination

Book excerpt: The Middle Ages are widely considered to be a thousand-year period of superstition, ignorance, and belief in a flat earth, punctuated by witch burnings and violent crusades to the Middle East. But the medieval period, more than any other time in history, laid the foundations for the modern world. The work of scholars, architects, statesmen and craftsmen led to rise of towns, the earliest bureaucratic states, the culmination of Romanesque and the beginnings of Gothic art, the recovery of Greek science and philosophy, and the beginnings of the first universities.This book is a chronological and thematic exploration of the history of the Middle Ages, starting with the Roman Empire's collapse in the fifth century and marches through Charlemagne's reign, the breakup of his empire, the Black Plague, the fall of Constantinople, and everything in between. It explores social aspects of the Middle Ages that are still largely misunderstood (for example, no educated person believed the earth was flat). There was also a surprisingly high level of medieval technology--mechanical clocks, horse stirrups, and even primitive human flight emerges at this time. Most surprisingly, there was a lack of witch burnings, which were not popularized until the Thirty Years War in the Renaissance Period.The Middle Ages were not a time to suffer through until the Renaissance returned Europe to a path of intellectual and cultural ascendance. Rather, they illuminated the darkness following the collapse of Rome and guided the path to the world we inhabit today.