In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages (or medieval period) lasted from the 5th to the 15th

century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and
the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of
Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval
period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages.
Population decline, counterurbanisation, collapse of centralized authority, invasions, and mass
migrations of tribes, which had begun in Late Antiquity, continued in the Early Middle Ages. The
large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new
kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the
Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate,
an Islamic empire, after conquest by Muhammad's successors. Although there were substantial
changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete. The
still-sizeable Byzantine Empire, Rome's direct continuation, survived in the Eastern Mediterranean
and remained a major power. The empire's law code, the Corpus Juris Civilisor "Code of Justinian",
was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became widely admired later in the Middle Ages. In
the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions. Monasteries were founded
as campaigns to Christianise pagan Europe continued. The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty,
briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th and early 9th centuries. It covered
much of Western Europe but later succumbed to the pressures of internal civil wars combined with
external invasions: Vikings from the north, Magyars from the east, and Saracens from the south.
During the High Middle Ages, which began after 1000, the population of Europe increased greatly as
technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish and the Medieval Warm
Period climate change allowed crop yields to increase. Manorialism, the organisation of peasants
into villages that owed rent and labour services to the nobles, and feudalism, the political structure
whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords in return for the
right to rent from lands and manors, were two of the ways society was organised in the High Middle
Ages. The Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians
to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralised nation-
states, reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a unified Christendom more distant.
Intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason,
and by the founding of universities. The theology of Thomas Aquinas, the paintings of Giotto, the
poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the travels of Marco Polo, and the Gothic architecture of cathedrals
such as Chartres are among the outstanding achievements toward the end of this period and into
the Late Middle Ages.
The Late Middle Ages was marked by difficulties and calamities including famine, plague, and war,
which significantly diminished the population of Europe; between 1347 and 1350, the Black
Death killed about a third of Europeans. Controversy, heresy, and the Western Schism within
the Catholic Church paralleled the interstate conflict, civil strife, and peasant revolts that occurred in
the kingdoms. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding
the Late Middle Ages and beginning the early modern period.
Wheelbarrows are human-powered carts with one wheel to assist in carrying all
kinds of burdens, from harvested crops to mine tailings, and pottery to building
materials. Sickly, wounded, or elderly people could be carried to the doctor before
the advent of the ambulance.

It's one of those ideas that seems so self-evident, once you have seen it in action.
Rather than carrying heavy loads on your back or burdening a pack animal with
them, you can put them into a tub or basket that has a wheel and long handles for
pushing or pulling. The wheelbarrow does most of the work for you. But who first
came up with this brilliant idea? Where was the wheelbarrow invented?

The First Wheelbarrow

The first wheelbarrows seem to have been created in China—along with the
first gunpowder, paper, seismoscopes, paper currency, magnetic
compasses, crossbows, and many other key inventions.
The earliest evidence of Chinese wheelbarrows is found in illustrations dated
around 100 CE, during the Han dynasty. These wheelbarrows had a single wheel
at the front of the load, and the operator holding the handles carried about half
the weight. A wall painting in a tomb near Chengdu, in Sichuan Province and
dated to 118 CE, shows a man using a wheelbarrow. Another tomb, also in
Sichuan Province, includes a depiction of a wheelbarrow in its carved wall reliefs;
that example dates back to the year 147 CE.

Medieval Drinks
 

In the Middle Ages, however, concerns over purity, medical recommendations and its low prestige of water made it
less favored.

Alcoholic beverages were always preferred. They were seen as more nutritious and beneficial to digestion than
water, with the invaluable bonus of being less prone to putrefaction due to the alcohol content.

Wine was consumed on a daily basis in most of France and all over the Western Mediterranean wherever grapes
were cultivated. Further north it remained the preferred drink of the bourgeoisie and the nobility who could afford it,
and far less common among peasants and workers. The drink of commoners in the northern parts of the continent
was primarily beer or ale. Because of the difficulty of preserving this beverage for any time (especially before the
introduction of hops), it was mostly consumed fresh; it was therefore cloudier and perhaps had a lower alcohol
content than the typical modern equivalent.

Plain milk was not consumed by adults except the poor or sick, being reserved for the very young or elderly, and then
usually as buttermilk or whey. Fresh milk was overall less common than other dairy products because of the lack of
technology to keep it from spoiling.

Juices, as well as wines, of a multitude of fruits and berries had been known at least since Roman antiquity and were
still consumed in the Middle Ages: pomegranate, mulberry and blackberry wines, perry, and cider which was
especially popular in the north where both apples and pears were plentiful. Medieval drinks that have survived to this
day include prunellé from wild plums (modern-day slivovitz), mulberry gin and blackberry wine.

Many variants of mead have been found in medieval recipes, with or without alcoholic content. However, the honey-
based drink became less common as a table beverage towards the end of the period and was eventually relegated to
medicinal use.

ASTROLABE
The astrolabe was a key astronomical instrument during the Middle Ages. It can be
used to tell the time, measure the heights of stars and buildings, and for many other
calculations and observations. It works because it is a 2-dimensional representation of
the 3-dimensional Universe as understood by the medieval astronomer - with the
Earth at the centre of the apparent motion of the Sun.

Parts of the instrument

This large brass instrument probably made in the 14th century, is typical of medieval
English astrolabes. It has been engraved for the latitude 52 degrees. This is the
latitude of London, so it is reasonable to suppose that it was intended for use in the
capital.

The rete, a cut-out plate with pointers showing the position of stars, rotates over the
projection. Most of the 41 pointers here are labelled with the names of stars, many of
them in Arabic, reflecting the Arab influences on medieval European astronomy. One is
in the shape of a bird but is not labelled - it is probably marking the beak of the
constellation Corvus (the crow) 

Religious uses

On the back of the astrolabe are concentric circles for calculations relating to the
calendar. As well as a zodiac calendar, there is also a calendar in which saints' days
and feast days are marked, providing a handy reference for a medieval religious man.
We know that monks, friars and clerics were among those who owned astrolabes in the
Middle Ages. This doesn't necessarily mean that this astrolabe was made for a religious
man - these kinds of scales would also be useful for a politician or a merchant, since
the medieval calendar was organised around saints' days and religious festivals.
Paper Money Takes the Load Off
During the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), however, merchants began to leave
those heavy strings of coins with a trustworthy agent, who would record how
much money the merchant had on deposit on a piece of paper. The paper, a sort
of promissory note, could then be traded for goods, and the seller could go to the
agent and redeem the note for the strings of coins. With trade renewed along the
Silk Road, this simplified cartage considerably. These privately-produced
promissory notes were still not true paper currency, however.
At the beginning of the Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE), the government licensed
specific deposit shops where people could leave their coins and receive notes. In
the 1100s, Song authorities decided to take direct control of this system, issuing
the world's first proper, government-produced paper money. This money was
called jiaozi. 

PUBLIC LIBRARY
The first libraries consisted of archives of the earliest form of writing – the clay tablets in cuneiform
script discovered in temple rooms in Sumer,[1][2] some dating back to 2600 BC.[3] About an inch thick,
tablets came in various shapes and sizes. Mud-like clay was placed in the wooden frames, and the
surface was smoothed for writing and allowed to dry until damp. After being inscribed, the clay dried
in the sun, or for a harder finish, was baked in a kiln. For storage, tablets could be stacked on edge,
side by side, the contents described by a title written on the edge that faced out and was readily
seen. The first libraries appeared five thousand years ago in Southwest Asia's Fertile Crescent, an
area that ran from Mesopotamia to the Nile in Africa. Known as the cradle of civilization, the Fertile
Crescent was the birthplace of writing, sometime before 3000 BC. (Murray, Stuart A.P.) These
archives, which mainly consisted of the records of commercial transactions or inventories, mark the
end of prehistory and the start of history.[4][5]
Things were much the same in the government and temple records on papyrus of Ancient Egypt.
[2]
 The earliest discovered private archives were kept at Ugarit; besides correspondence and
inventories, texts of myths may have been standardized practice-texts for teaching new scribes.
There is also evidence of libraries at Nippur about 1900 BC and those at Nineveh about 700 BC
showing a library classification system.[6]
Over 30,000 clay tablets from the Library of Ashurbanipal have been discovered at Nineveh,
[7]
 providing modern scholars with an amazing wealth of Mesopotamian literary, religious and
administrative work. Among the findings were the Enuma Elish, also known as the Epic of Creation,
[8]
 which depicts a traditional Babylonian view of creation, the Epic of Gilgamesh,[9] a large selection of
"omen texts" including Enuma Anu Enlil which "contained omens dealing with the moon, its visibility,
eclipses, and conjunction with planets and fixed stars, the sun, its corona, spots, and eclipses, the
weather, namely lightning, thunder, and clouds, and the planets and their visibility, appearance, and
stations",[10] and astronomic/astrological texts, as well as standard lists used by scribes and scholars
such as word lists, bilingual vocabularies, lists of signs and synonyms, and lists of medical
diagnoses.
The tablets were stored in a variety of containers such as wooden boxes, woven baskets of reeds, or
clay shelves. The "libraries" were cataloged using colophons, which are a publisher's imprint on the
spine of a book, or in this case a tablet. The colophons stated the series name, the title of the tablet,
and any extra information the scribe needed to indicate. Eventually, the clay tablets were organized
by subject and size. Unfortunately, due to limited bookshelf space, when more tablets were added to
the library, older ones were removed, which is why some tablets are missing from the excavated
cities in Mesopotamia.[11]
According to legend, mythical philosopher Laozi was keeper of books in the earliest library in China,
which belonged to the Imperial Zhou dynasty.[12] Also, evidence of catalogues found in some
destroyed ancient libraries illustrates the presence of librarians.

EYEGLASS
Eyeglasses needed to be invented to further the world’s
development as a whole. Furthermore, had eyeglasses not
been invented, a variety of other inventions would–most likely–
not have been created. For example, some inventions created
due to the eyeglasses’ invention include telescopes, binoculars,
microscopes, et cetera. In addition, many inventions would not
have arisen due to the lack of vision. 

In the Middle Ages, eyeglasses were made from two convex lenses confined by rims
made of bone or metal. These rims were secured by a rivet at the central point.
Additionally, the lenses were either positioned before the wearer’s eyes or secured on
either side of the wearer’s nose. Also, lenses of this age replaced magnifying glasses
in terms of usage. Furthermore, the level of corrective eyewear was determined by the
wearer’s age. With this in mind, as the age of the wearer increases, so did the intensity
of the lenses. Moreover, spectacles were available to persons of all social classes due
to the inexpensive construction of said product. In summary, eyeglasses then were
constructed with a simple system, but the impact was incredible.
COFFEE HOUSE
Coffee was cultivated in Africa as early as the 9th century, but it did not reach
Europe until the 17th century. However, when it did, it was met with many
varying opinions. It still caught on like a wildfire, even with the people that
detested its existence. The 18th century London coffee house was the center
of controversy, in many ways, even to the point of the king trying to ban coffee
and close the establishments. Being the place for political discussion, some of
the policies of our newly formed country might have originated in one of these
places.

Coffee did not come via a direct route from Africa, but found its way to Britain
through Mediterranean trade routes with the Muslim world. Queen Elizabeth I
irritated her European neighbors by opening up diplomatic relations with her
new-found Moroccan and Ottoman friends, establishing good trading relations
and sea-faring agreements. This trade allowed goods such as tea from Asia,
coffee, and chocolate to filter into England. The Middle East had coffee
houses over a hundred years before they ever appeared in England.

In 1652 Pasqua Rosee, the servant of a merchant trader and an immigrant

from Ottoman Smyrna, opened the first coffee house in London, which later
became known as “The Turks Head.” “Rosee’s coffee-house, in St Michael’s
Alley, Cornhill, was located in the centre of the financial district of the City of
London, and his first clientele were merchants of the Levant Company, the
trading house that organised and regulated trade with the Ottoman Empire.” 1

In 1662, the “Great Turk Coffee House” opened, “Apparently, inside could be
found a bust of Sultan Almurath IV himself, ‘the most detestable tyrant that
ever ruled the Ottoman Empire.’ The customer could not only find coffee, tea
and tobacco here, but also chocolate and a range of sherbets, which,
according to the Mercurius Publicus (12-19 March 1662), were ‘made in
Turkie; made of lemons, roses, and violets perfumed.'” 5 Not only did the
coffee catch on among the people, but so did some of the Turkish culture.
Some people began to wear turbans in the coffee houses.

Possibly because of the Islamic culture, and for other reasons, coffee houses
were viewed as a place for renegades of Christianity. The new interest in
other cultures continued past the fascination of the Middle East all of the way
to the Orient. The Georgian period is marked by an Asian influence in art,
literature, and academics.

Coffee houses caught on very quickly, so by 1663 there were more than 83
coffee houses in London. By the beginning of the eighteenth century there
were as many as five or six hundred.2 The Prussian nobleman Baron Charles
Louis von Pollnitz, who visited London in 1728, described them as one of the
great pleasures of the city. He describes how it is “a Sort of Rule with the
English, to go once a Day at least” to coffee-houses “where they talk of
Business and News, read the Papers, and often look at one another.” 2 Some
very famous companies even started as coffee houses. Lloyds of London, an
insurance brokerage company, began as Edward Lloyd’s coffee house on
Tower Street around 1688.

Today when we think of a coffee shop, we think of Starbucks. However, the

coffee shops of the past were drastically different with their Middle Eastern
culture. One thing they have in common is the social aspect, a place for
discussion of new ideas, and that is what we’ll look at next month.

The coffee house, which originated in the Middle East around 1511, began
simply as a place to enjoy an exotic drink, coffee, but soon evolved into a
place that helped change the course of history. Before coffee houses arrived
in London, the normal social gathering place was a pub or tavern. The first
attraction to coffee might have been its newness or the exhilaration from the
caffeine, but quickly it became another reason to meet, and the coffee house
was a place for socializing.

Water And Air WindMills

In the Middle Ages most windmills were used as mills proper - for
grinding corn into flour, the inhabitants of the manor usually having to
take their corn to the lord’s mill; exclusive possession of the manorial
mill was one of the privileges that the manorial lords generally managed
to arrogate to themselves.
Because of this established monopoly, the millers were in a position to
cheat, like the miller in Chaucer’s The Reves Tale (‘a theef he was for
sothe of corn and mele’), though his was a watermill, not a windmill. In
the next century John Lydgate suggested in a short poem Against
Millers and Bakers that those two groups of men should form a guild
and set up a chapel ‘Undir the pillory’ - the most appropriate place for
them!
Several types of sources are available for the study of the medieval
English windmill. First, there are documentary references giving
locations though rarely details of construction or even of appearance;
there are occasional literary references too, like the poem of c.1265-
based on a real incident - which tells how Richard of Cornwall ‘makede
him a castel of a mulne (mill) post’ though these are not useful for
studying the nature of the mills.

gunpowder
Gunpowder had many impacts during the middle ages. It's main impact
was the rise in fighting and conflict. It's social impact included more fighting
among different tribes/ civilizations. It's political impact is also that there is
more fighting and conflict between different civilizations therefore there is
more government force. Also thus created a job know as the "gunsmith."
Last, the economic impacts are positive because now there are more
inventions on the market and more money be made through out the place.
Gunpowder is the one of the most important inventions that was created
during the Middle Ages. It was also known as "black powder". Gunpowder
was the first chemical explosive invented, and it was created in the 9th
century by the Chinese. It is a mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium
nitrate. With the sulfur and charcoal acting as fuels. Gunpowder is a great
resource developed during this age which led to many innovations in
weapons and defense.
Gun Powder
mechanical clock
During the early medieval period, many different time-keeping devices were used. Nearly all of these devices had
been adopted from the period of classical antiquity with little to no innovation happening in time-keeping devices
during the early medieval period.

Among the traditional time-keeping devices used at the time were water clocks, candle clocks, the use of
astrolabes for determining time and sundials. It was during the High Middle Ages that new methods of time-
keeping were discovered and new instruments discovered for the purpose.

Christian monasteries around medieval Europe had a specific need for time keeping since monks had to strictly
observe the hours of daily prayers. To this purpose, the monasteries used many different types of time-keeping
devices.

Since monks also had access to classic literature on astronomy, mathematics and other subjects,
they were in a unique position to be able to invent new time-keeping devices. This need for time-
keeping led to the development of earliest mechanical clocks in the 10th century.

There is historical disagreement as to when the oldest mechanical clock in medieval Europe was invented. Pope
Sylvester II built a clock for a German town in 996 and it is considered one of the oldest clocks.

By the 11th century, clocks were being used in different parts of Europe. However, the use of proper mechanical
clocks which utilised heavy weights for time-keeping, is more accurately dated back to the 14th century.

One of these clocks was built by a monk at Glastonbury in the 14th century and exists to this day. From the 14th
century to the 15th century, mechanical clocks evolved so that they began to use a spring-powered operation
rather than relying on heavy weights. However, these clocks had to be wound up twice a day by the monks for
them to functional accurately.

When?
    Tidal mills were first used during the 7th century CE. They were first pioneered in
England. We do not know who built the first tidal mill.
Why?
    Tidal mills were built in order to make grinding grain in mills easier.
 How?
    Tidal mills were constructed in low-lying areas near the ocean or another source of
water. They could also be built at a section of a river estuary that would be made into
a reservoir. Tidal mills were modeled after watermills, with a couple slight
adjustments. Unlike the original watermills, they are powered by the rise and fall of
tide. Also, one of the main differences between watermills and tidal mills was the way
that the ponds, dams, and leats were built, but other than those two differences they
were very much identical. A dam with a sluice was used to make tidal mills across a
proper tidal inlet.  A sluice was a passage such as a gate that was used in order to
control the flow of water. When high tide arrived, the water entered through a gate,
and the gate then closed automatically during low tide. During low tide, the water that
had entered through the gate is then stored and used to turn a water wheel