Key figures of medieval Europe

When were the Middle Ages, and what defined them

Historians usually date the Middle Ages from the fall of the last Western Roman emperor in 476 to the late 1400s, marked by the fall of Constantinople (1453), the printing press or Columbus's voyage of 1492. It is often split into three parts: the Early Middle Ages (about 500 to 1000), the High Middle Ages (about 1000 to 1300) and the Late Middle Ages (about 1300 to 1500). The name itself was invented by Renaissance writers who saw the period as a gap between ancient glory and their own revival; historians today avoid calling it the “Dark Ages”.

What defined it:

• The Church: Latin Christianity was the shared culture of western Europe. Monasteries kept schools and libraries; from about 1100 the first universities grew up at Bologna, Paris and Oxford.
• Land and lordship: most people were peasants, many of them serfs bound to a lord's land. Kings depended on great nobles who owed them military service in return for land.
• Contact and conflict: Viking raids and settlement (from 793), the Crusades (from 1096), trade with the Islamic world and Byzantium, and the Mongol empire that opened the road to China.
• Crisis: the Black Death of 1347 to 1351 killed perhaps a third or more of Europe's population, followed by revolts such as the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and the Hundred Years' War between England and France (1337 to 1453).

Early Middle Ages: Charlemagne and Leif Erikson

Charlemagne (about 747 to 814) became king of the Franks in 768 and, through more than forty years of war, ruled most of what is now France, Germany, the Low Countries and northern Italy. On Christmas Day 800 Pope Leo III crowned him Emperor of the Romans in St Peter's; his biographer Einhard says he claimed he would not have gone into the church had he known the Pope's plan. He brought scholars such as Alcuin of York to his court at Aachen, ordered schools at cathedrals and monasteries, and backed a clear new handwriting, Carolingian minuscule, which is the ancestor of our lower-case letters. Einhard adds that Charlemagne kept writing tablets under his pillow to practise letters at night, but started too late in life to write well. His Saxon wars were brutal: the Royal Frankish Annals record the execution of 4,500 Saxons at Verden in 782, and his laws for Saxony made refusing baptism a capital crime.

Leif Erikson (about 970 to about 1020) represents the Norse world that raided and settled from Ireland to Russia. According to the Icelandic sagas he sailed west from Greenland around 1000 to a land he called Vinland; the excavated Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland proves Norse people reached North America about five centuries before Columbus.

High Middle Ages: William, Hildegard, Eleanor and Richard

William the Conqueror (about 1028 to 1087) became Duke of Normandy as a boy. Claiming that King Edward the Confessor had promised him England and that Harold Godwinson had sworn to support him, he invaded in 1066 and killed Harold at Hastings on 14 October. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day. Over the next twenty years the English nobility was almost entirely replaced by Normans and hundreds of castles went up. In the winter of 1069 to 1070 his army laid waste to the north of England, the Harrying of the North, and the chronicler Orderic Vitalis claimed 100,000 died of the famine that followed. In 1085 he ordered the survey of land and wealth that we call Domesday Book.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098 to 1179) was placed in a religious community as a child and became abbess of a Benedictine house in the Rhineland. With papal approval she recorded her visions in Scivias (1141 to 1151), composed more than seventy chants and a sung morality play, the Ordo Virtutum, wrote on plants and healing, and made preaching tours, which was very rare for a woman. About three hundred of her letters survive, including ones to Bernard of Clairvaux, popes and the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, whom she rebuked. The Catholic Church named her a Doctor of the Church in 2012.

Eleanor of Aquitaine (about 1124 to 1204) inherited the duchy of Aquitaine, a huge territory in south-western France, in her early teens in 1137. She married Louis VII of France, rode with him on the Second Crusade (1147 to 1149), had the marriage annulled in March 1152, and eight weeks later married Henry of Anjou, who became Henry II of England in 1154. After she backed her sons' revolt against Henry in 1173 he kept her in custody for about sixteen years. Released on his death in 1189, she governed for her son Richard while he was on crusade and helped raise his ransom. The famous “courts of love” in which she judged lovers' disputes come from a single literary text and are probably fiction.

Richard the Lionheart (1157 to 1199) became king of England in 1189 but spent only about six months of his ten-year reign there. On the Third Crusade he took Acre in 1191, where he had about 2,700 Muslim prisoners executed when ransom talks broke down, beat Saladin at Arsuf, and agreed the Treaty of Jaffa in 1192, which left Jerusalem in Muslim hands but open to Christian pilgrims. Captured on the way home, he was held by the German emperor until a huge ransom was paid in 1194. He died of a crossbow wound at Châlus in France in 1199. His coronation in 1189 was followed by attacks on Jews in London, and in 1190 by the massacre of the Jews of York.

Late Middle Ages: Marco Polo, Dante, Chaucer and Gutenberg

Marco Polo (1254 to 1324) shows how far medieval Europeans could reach: his book about seventeen years in Mongol China, dictated around 1298, was copied in many languages. See key figures of the Age of Exploration.

Dante Alighieri (1265 to 1321) was a Florentine politician exiled in 1302 who wrote the Divine Comedy, an imagined trip through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, in Italian rather than Latin. It is a map of medieval belief, and it names real popes and politicians among the damned.

Geoffrey Chaucer (about 1343 to 1400) was a London wine merchant's son who served the court as a soldier, diplomat and customs official. Captured in France in 1360, he was ransomed with help from King Edward III, who paid £16. His Canterbury Tales (about 1387 to 1400), left unfinished, follow a group of pilgrims from a knight to a miller, each telling a story, and show English as a language for serious literature at a time when the court still often used French. He also wrote a guide to the astrolabe in plain English for his young son Lewis.

Johannes Gutenberg (about 1400 to 1468) brings the period to a close. His 42-line Bible, printed in Mainz by about 1455, began the age of the printed book and helped make the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution possible. See key figures of the Renaissance.

Medieval Europe timeline

Big themes and debates about the Middle Ages

• Were they “dark”? Medieval Europe produced Gothic cathedrals, universities, mechanical clocks, eyeglasses and the windmill. Historians use “Dark Ages” only, if at all, for the shortage of written sources in parts of the early period.
• Was there such a thing as feudalism? The neat pyramid of king, lords, knights and peasants is a later model. Historians such as Elizabeth A. R. Brown (1974) and Susan Reynolds (1994) argued it misdescribes how land and loyalty really worked, which varied by place and century.
• Women's power. Eleanor and Hildegard were exceptional, but abbesses, queens, widows running estates and townswomen in guilds all held real authority. Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) argued for women's abilities.
• Crusade and persecution. The Crusades brought massacres of Jews in the Rhineland (1096) and England (1189 to 1190), and the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290. A fair account names the victims as well as the kings.
• How do we know? Most medieval sources were written by churchmen. Students should ask who could write, who paid for the writing and whose lives went unrecorded.

Primary sources to read

• Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne (written between about 817 and 836): short, and modelled on Suetonius's lives of the Caesars.
• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, entries for 1066 and 1085 to 1087, including its portrait of William at his death.
• The Bayeux Tapestry (1070s), which is really an embroidery, stitched rather than woven: a 70-metre picture story of the Norman Conquest, viewable online scene by scene.
• Domesday Book (1086): search your own town on the Open Domesday website.
• Hildegard of Bingen, her letter to Bernard of Clairvaux (1146 or 1147) and a recording of her chant O virtus Sapientiae.
• Magna Carta (1215), especially clauses 39 and 40.
• Dante, Inferno, Canto 1, and Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, lines 1 to 18.
• Baha al-Din ibn Shaddad on Richard and Saladin: the Third Crusade from the other side.

How to study medieval Europe: projects

• Domesday detective. Look up a village in Domesday Book, list who held land there in 1066 and in 1086, and explain what changed.
• Make an embroidery panel. Draw one scene of a later event in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry, with a Latin caption, then discuss what the Normans chose to show.
• Pilgrim tales. Write a new Canterbury pilgrim in Chaucer's General Prologue style: occupation, clothes, one revealing habit.
• A crusade from two sides. Compare Christian and Muslim accounts of Acre in 1191.
• Interview a medieval figure. Write questions for Eleanor of Aquitaine or Hildegard and practise them by voice with Eleanor of Aquitaine on Yuga. The recreation draws on the chronicles and records, but it is not Eleanor and can be wrong, so cite the chronicles in your work. Our historical figure interview project shows how to structure it.