Why did Medieval Times end?

Answer 1

There were a number of factors that brought the middle ages to an end.

The middle ages happened because of the chaotic conditions surrounding the fall of the West Roman Empire. The people who lived in the West needed security, and the people who invaded and took control needed legitimacy. As the time of Germanic migrations ceased, it was possible to create social structures that created the security people needed. These structures included the manorial system and the feudal pyramid.

But times change, and the need for these systems also passed. Agricultural technology changed, both from inventions and technologies imported, mainly from Arabs. The farms produced a surplus and there was good reason form many lords to want to reduce the number of serfs on the land. So the serfs had reasons to move away from the farms.

Other technologies and a rise in trade and crafts created jobs in towns and cities, so the serfs who had reason to leave the land also had jobs to go to. Trade and crafts gave rise to mercantilism, which made the serfs who had been freed more powerful.

Mercantilism gave rise to guilds and leagues of Hansas which were powerful governing forces beyond the control of much of the feudal hierarchy.

Communications increased, first because the Church wanted pilgrims to be safe, then because the kings saw profit from it. Merchants could travel more safely as the middle ages passed, increasing their wealth. The crusades gave people knowledge of the outside world, compounding the influence of trade.

Republican forms of government sprang up. The Hansas operated out of free cities with republican governments in the Holy Roman Empire and elsewhere in the Baltic area. In Italy, there were republican city states and communes, of which Venice was among the most important.

Early in the Middle ages there were very few schools. By the end of the Viking Age, the Vikings themselves were opening schools. Education was becoming more important, not only for the clergy and the nobility, but for the rising middle class. The first university was founded at Bologna in 1088, and by the end of the middle ages, there were over seventy universities in Europe.

As more and more people were literate, written legal codes became more important. This produced systems that were less arbitrary and less under the control of individual lords and knights. The legal system was controlled nominally by a king, but the day to day operation was mostly under the control of commoners.

The kings were always working on strengthening central governments. With the passing of the middle ages they succeeded more and more. This produced a situation where standing armies were being kept for the first time since the Roman Empire. This reduced the importance of lesser nobility. The reduction of importance of knights was exacerbated by the introduction of newer weapons, particularly the English long bow, which destroyed fields of knights repeatedly in the Hundred Years War.

The plague reduced the population of farmers, which put the serfs who had remained on the farms into the situation where their labor was in such demand that they were tempted away by better deals offered illegally by other lords than their own. The result was that serfdom ended before the end of the middle ages in many places, especially in Scandinavia, Scotland and England.

The Church, which was one of the most important unifying forces of in the middle ages, began to have its control eroded in the eleventh century, when the Great Schism produced a Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Eastern Orthodox Church in the East. With the passing of time, the control eroded further, partly as a result of the Western Schism, partly as a result of heresies, and partly as a result of reformers who anticipated Protestantism.