How did life change between the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages?

Answer 1

It went from an organized society with a Roman government and services to chaos in 410 AD when Rome fell. In the early middle ages Vikings were invading and there was constant war. By the time of the high middle ages society and nobility was getting stronger and the church was taking control. William the Conqueror became king and the Magna Carta was signed. The late middle ages saw the 100 years war between France and England, the plague, the church was fighting, and new ideas grew. Exploration had begun.

Answer 2

You might think that the advances of the Roman Empire were lost and the people of the Middle Ages very suddenly found themselves with a very much reduced level of culture, but it happens this was not the case.

The Roman Empire started to decline long before it collapsed. Though I am personally inclined to date the beginning of the decline with the reign of Emperor Commodus, in 192 AD, we can surely trace it to the Crisis of the Third Century, which began in about the year 235. Over the next seventy years, almost seventy people staked claims to be emperor. Of these, only a couple died of natural causes, and most were murdered by their own troops, lieutenants, or bodyguards. Only one died of old age, which he was able to do because he abdicated. The numbers of these people was so great that the names of some have been lost to history; in some cases, the only thing we know about some claimant is that he had enough troops and sufficient wealth to mint his own coins, which we know because a few of the coins remain.

This crisis was a time when there was little writing done, so history went unrecorded, but we can guess that most people of the empire were negatively effected. Despite the efforts of emperors like Diocletian and Constantine, the empire never fully recovered, and really never came even close to the robust strength it had under Trajan and Hadrian.

In the 4th and 5th centuries, the situation slowly declined from what it had been under Constantine. Ultimately, the time came that generations had passed by whose lives were almost continually impacted by a series of invasions and rebellions in the West Roman Empire, and people's expectations of government was that it would be so.

Historians today often date the fall of the West Roman Empire to an event, which was when the Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476. The importance of this event is purely that it has a convenient date. The event itself had little to no effect on the day to day life of the people in any part of the West Roman Empire. The Senate of the Roman Empire continued to operate in Italy for another 127 years, at least, until 603.

The fact is that not only do we not have a good date for the fall of the empire, we cannot even pick the century it happened with any real objectivity. During the course of the 20th century, historians looking at the truth of the matter began to observe more and more commonly that when the West Roman Empire fell, nearly no one noticed.

Most people of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages were agricultural. The coloni of the Roman villas were bound to the soil in precisely the same manner that the serfs were bound to the soil of the medieval manors. This can be traced to a law enacted by Emperor Constantine the Great in 330 AD. These people endured wars, plagues, and famines in the Middle Ages just as they had done in under the Romans.

There were differences that are worth noting. Most of the time of the Roman Empire was under a government with moral direction entirely at the whim of an emperor; by contrast, most of the countries of the Middle Ages were Christian. The efforts of the Church were toward improving the lives of the ordinary people. While it is true that some of the popes called for crusades and inquisitions, popes also repeatedly issued bulls against such things as slavery and torture. The effect of this was slow and had reversals, but it did proceed. Slave trade was prohibited in England by William the Conqueror, and the institution of slavery was finally prohibited by King Henry I, not to be reintroduced in English lands until after the Middle Age ended. This is just one example, and other medieval laws also tended to elevate the place of the common people above where they had been in ancient times.

Of course, in the East, the Roman Empire continued through the entire Middle Ages. Though we call it the Byzantine Empire today, that is a name they never knew; they just called it the Roman Empire, as they had from the time of Augustus, until it fell in 1453, ending the Middle Ages.

Answer 3

Some life changes were that the population of Europe increased. Feudalism started to occur as well as trade.