Chapter 7 of 16 · The great periods of history
Chapter 6. The Middle Ages
A thousand years filed under a name coined afterwards: what the word covers, its three phases, its sources, and why its bad reputation is false.
A name given by those who came after
No inhabitant of this period ever believed themselves to be in the middle of anything. The name "Middle Ages", in French Moyen Âge, says, to the letter, an age of the MIDDLE: an interval placed between two other things. A name like that cannot come from those who lived under it, since it assumes that what comes afterwards is already known. It was therefore given from outside, by people standing on the other side of the interval, and that position can still be read in the word.
It is the only period name in the convention built in this way. Prehistory describes a state of the sources, Antiquity says oldness, Modern Times and the Contemporary Era say nearness. The Middle Ages, for its part, describes nothing: it places something between two other things. Remembering that saves you from half the received ideas that follow.
The period is also the third longest in the convention, at about a thousand years, behind Prehistory and Antiquity. A span like that obviously cannot be uniform: between the fifth and the fifteenth century everything changes several times over, including the things believed to be stable. Historians therefore divide it in turn, into three phases that this chapter gives.
| Phase | Centuries covered | The feature that characterises it |
|---|---|---|
| The high Middle Ages, in French haut Moyen Âge | From the fifth to the tenth century | Kingdoms re-form over the space of the old Empire of the West; the population is low, the towns small, writing rare and concentrated in the monasteries |
| The central Middle Ages, in French Moyen Âge central | From the eleventh to the thirteenth century | The population rises, land clearance spreads, towns fill up again, great building sites multiply and writing spreads outside the monasteries |
| The low Middle Ages, in French bas Moyen Âge | From the fourteenth to the fifteenth century | Epidemics, long wars and crises strike a population that has become numerous; States acquire permanent administrations and regular taxes |
The words high and low say nothing about the quality of the period, and they do not read the way you would expect: in this French vocabulary the high Middle Ages is the OLDEST, from the fifth to the tenth century, and the low Middle Ages the most RECENT, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. English usually says early and late instead, which removes the trap but also removes the words a reader will meet in French books, so this book keeps the French pair and states what it means. The dates in the table above are enough to make sure, and that is the only useful check: the confusion is very common, including among well-informed readers.
What the official syllabus keeps of this period
The official history syllabus published in 2026 devotes a whole theme to the Middle Ages, entitled "daily life in the Middle Ages", and it bounds it to the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The choice of the boundary says something: it is the central phase that is kept, the one in which the population grows and in which traces are most numerous.
The choice of angle says still more. Daily life, and not kings, battles or treaties. This orientation reflects a long-standing shift in the discipline: what interests historians of this period today is as much the way people ate, worked and were treated when ill, as the succession of sovereigns.
This shift has a material cause, and it deserves to be said because it comes back throughout this book. The sources available have changed. As long as only chronicles were read, only what the chroniclers told could be told, that is to say the powerful. Since villages have been excavated, bones analysed and account books gone through, something else can be told.
Two images of the Middle Ages, and only one holds
The widespread image
- A thousand motionless years, without invention or change.
- A whole population illiterate and without curiosity.
- An isolated continent, with no exchanges with the rest of the world.
- Constant filth and brutality, everywhere and all the time.
- A blocked way of thinking, incapable of discussion or reasoning.
What the sources show
- Deep changes: farming tools, water power, building techniques, accounting.
- Writing that is rare but very active, with schools, libraries and a considerable output of manuscripts.
- Continuous exchanges, from northern Europe to the Mediterranean, and far beyond along the trade routes.
- Hard living conditions, very unequal depending on the century, the region and the social group.
- A culture of regulated debate, where arguing follows strict rules, in schools and then in universities.
Where what we know of this period comes from
Three families of sources complete one another, and none is enough on its own. The first is the manuscript: books copied by hand, chronicles, deeds, registers. The great libraries hold them, describe them in detailed scientific notices, and publish reproductions online that can be consulted free of charge, as the example given later in this chapter shows.
The second is the ordinary written act: charters, contracts, wills, harvest accounts, tax lists. These documents were not trying to impress anyone, which makes them precious: an account book lies far less than a chronicle, because it was not written to be read by posterity.
The third is archaeology, and it is the most recent. Excavating a medieval village, a cemetery or the floor of a hut gives access to what no text says: the size of houses, what people ate, the age at which they died, the illnesses they suffered from. It is archaeology that has changed the image of the period most over the last fifty years.
A precise example shows what these sources allow. The Bibliothèque nationale de France holds a collection of historical texts copied in the second half of the fifteenth century, which carries among other things an account of the taking of Constantinople drawn up from the report of one Jacques Tedaldi. The manuscript is digitised and can be consulted freely, since its content is in the public domain.
The text
What the source says about itself
The account opens by announcing itself: "Sensuit la manière de la prise de la noble cité de Constantinoble par l'empereur thurq le 28e jour de may l'an mil cccc cinquante et trois", that is, here follows the manner of the taking of the noble city of Constantinople by the Turkish emperor on the 28th day of May in the year one thousand four hundred and fifty-three. The sentence is reproduced here in its original spelling, as the notice of the Bibliothèque nationale de France gives it, and the English rendering is by ODERSA.
It teaches three things at once. That the text is dated, which is rare. That it designates the attacker by his function and not by his name. And that it gives a precise date, 28 May, whereas the scientific notice drawn up by the library writes that the city fell on the 29th. Both are telling the truth, and that is what makes the example useful: the same notice states that the main assault was delivered on 28 and 29 May 1453. The account dates the beginning of the assault, the notice dates the fall. Two different dates for one and the same episode are therefore not always a contradiction: you first have to ask what each of them claims to date.
The image
What a drawing adds and what it invents
Beside the account, the manuscript carries a large view of the siege. The library's notice describes it precisely and notes that it mixes bird's-eye views with ramparts shown flat, and that the size of the buildings in it depends on their symbolic importance rather than on their real size. It also observes that there is no scale, but numerous indications of distances in the captions: the image does not measure, it puts figures on things.
It also observes that some details are conventional and due to a western painter, while noting that this artist must have had first-hand information. One and the same document can therefore be, on the same page, faithful on one point and invented on another. That is the very definition of the work of criticising a source.
The lesson
Why this example is in the chapter on the Middle Ages
The event it recounts serves as a boundary between the Middle Ages and Modern Times in the French convention. Yet the source closest to it, written in that very year, is a day out and comes with an image that is partly imagined.
This disqualifies neither the document nor the date. It is a reminder that a periodisation boundary rests on documents, that these documents have known faults, and that knowing them is part of the knowledge. The chapter on sources takes up this method and generalises it.
| Landmark | Phase | What it makes it possible to understand |
|---|---|---|
| The fall in population and in towns after the fifth century | High Middle Ages | A demographic change explains the landscape of this phase better than any political date |
| The growth of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries | Central Middle Ages | It is the phase the official syllabus keeps for studying daily life, because the traces there are numerous |
| The development of universities from the twelfth century onwards | Central Middle Ages | Knowledge leaves the monasteries, organises itself into institutions and adopts written rules of discussion |
| 1453, the taking of Constantinople | Low Middle Ages | One of the two end-of-period boundaries kept by the convention, documented by contemporary accounts |
Why the period looks darker than it is
Three causes add up, and none of them has anything to do with what actually happened. The first is the name, coined by people who wanted to devalue the period in order to give value to the one they were opening. A pejorative name passed on for five centuries produces its effect even on those who no longer know where it came from.
The second is the scarcity of sources for the high Middle Ages. Few texts means few accounts, therefore few mental images, therefore an impression of emptiness. Yet we saw in the chapter on the timeline that a blank in the documentation is not a blank in people's lives.
The third is fiction. Films, novels and games have built a conventional Middle Ages, uniformly muddy, brutal and motionless, which is to history what a stage set is to a house. The official syllabus in fact explicitly asks that pupils learn to tell fictional accounts apart from historical accounts, and this period is the one where the exercise is most needed.
The remedy is the one used throughout this book: ask where the statement comes from. A sentence about the Middle Ages that rests on no identifiable document has a good chance of coming from a stage set rather than from a source.