- 500 AD to 1400 AD - It was a time of change despite what it is believed - the black ages is associated with the black

death that happen later in history - formation of states and universities - saw some advancements - castles, cathedrals, knights, armor - warfare between Germanic tribes - the Huns, the vugalers - witchcraft and supernatural belief - shift from gods to supernatural beilfs - beilfs that people can be reincarnated by the devil and be witches - fortune tellers - lots of entertainment, carnivals and circuses - thrid of the population died from disease - namely from sanitation issues - suddenly people living in tiny villages with no running water - people were killing each other to stay alive - in some respects there were advancements but other ways there were great disadvantages - lot had to do with the split of the west and east empire - the role of the catholic church that was getting more and more powerful ______________________ - contradictions - early middles ages ended in 1000 - high middle ages ended in 1300 - later middle ages ended in 1500 - roman did not fall, that the church inherited Rome - the church remained the only corporate body, it operated in a public way - church was a cooperation versus the private knightship - the church was in the process of finding itself - in the beginning there was no pope - in the early years of the church there wasn't much organization - oringnally the pope was just a bishop - a key figure in the transformation was Charelemange - he was named emperor, middle ages began - a man who for a brief time seemed to revive the roman empire - he himself proclaimed emperor on Christmas day by the pope in 800 - while he was known by his political and military leadership, he was illerate - the wars was able to create a cultural center - you could say without him, there would not be a Europe today would not exist today and by extent the rest of the western world - 1014 died, Europe experience a decline - the high middle ages saw the introduction of armored knight on horse back - this was the era of the religious crusades - the middle ages as a society organized itself over war - a huge amount of wealth goes into warfare expensives - a clear relation between warfare and social - man and horse was a fighting unit - fighting on horseback was a very specialized skil - you have to start very early - hard with 60 lbs of armor on you - knights were only the elite in wealth, skill and build

- violent by not fatal - knights were prestigious, later on they were a little more than gang members - thugs - later 12th century is when knighthood becomes what we think of when someone says knights - knighthood is a social status - symbols become more and more Christian - war and church, two things on the surface seem they could bit be further apart - the crusades were efforts to wage war for not selfish reasons of the reconcile of the holy land - they went knowing the likelihood the chances of them coming back was 50/50 - they didn't went for cynical reasons - in some respects the crusades was apart of a larger movement - exploration, the processions of Christianity - knighthood was honor, fame, glory - contradiction: blunder and pitey - they had to have the support of someone from the church - historians have had a hard time to justify the mass killings - the church goal of the crusades is still disputed today - one thing for sure that greed and violence was prevalent - religion was a much bigger part of the lives of the people in the middle ages - we are as superstitious as they were - they had weird theories on the physical world and the human place in it - religion was the center of their lives - the architecture style was deemed gothic - the churches really tried o stretch to eternity - you have to imagine as it was - the people who started these projects would never live to see them finished - most of the people who built them were illiterate - they weren't dumbasses, they understood math and craftsmenship - futilitism is almost unheard of today, fully developed 8th and 9th century - lord an vessel - he gives himself to a man in trade for safety - dienism - pesentism - 95% were not rich - surfs, worked for lords - the only modern equivalent is slaves but they were free - surfs actually had a piece of land that were theirs - they were more tied to the land than their owner - surfs had legally binding family's and legally binding marriages - learning was revered - regulates society - the later ages - first kings and kingdoms appeared - the concept of nation states came into being - many countries and states had no central king - Italy or Germany was not unified over a central ruler - the central monarchy - the church lost power and influence not only because the failure of the crusades but also the rse of state power - western Europe seemed on the verge of an economic break throug - but nature had other

- no antibiotics, not enough food and water, the life average life span was 29 - for them it was just life - the 100 years war started 1337 - 1348 was the bunomic Plauge or the black death - 1/3 of the society died and its amazing it didn't fall apart - it showed that the government was inept in dealine with a huge crisis - some people deregarded the black death as a punishments for sins - in many respects helped, less people ment more food and jobs and foods