When did the Middle Ages end in Europe?

[brucejoel99]

Yeah, the end is certainly a bit vague but because the Middle Ages are said to have begun with the Vandals' sacking of Rome in 455, I like to personally define 'the end' of the Middle Ages as being when Mehmet II captured Constantinople, since that marked the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire; so, yeah, 1453.

In addition to being just shy of exactly 1,000 years, this dating also appeals to me because of how both events serve to mark very profound changes. 455 was the death knell of the Western Roman Empire, which had stumbled along & could've possibly been saved right up until that point; it marks the ascent of the Eastern Roman Empire, & 1453, the end date, marks said empire's death. Sure, the Byzantines had up's & down's across the thousand years in between (&, at times, they were de facto Ottoman vassals), but 1453 put an end to all that. In marking the death of the last vestiges of the Roman Empire, the Turks breaking through Constantinople's walls with cannons also marked an end to the supremacy of castles & conventional siege warfare, & marked the beginning of what would soon become widespread firearm usage in Europe.

IMO, the other possible end date that can be legitimately considered is the 1517 one re: Martin Luther (probably with his letter to the Archbishop), but that's a rather late date & is further complicated by the fact that it places the end of the Middle Ages long after Cosimo de' Medici (who was contemporaneous with Mehmet II) & even his grandson, Lorenzo de' Medici, would be dead long before that. 1517 would mean that the Middle Ages includes most of the lives of da Vinci & Machiavelli, which is just a little strange. By moving the date forward to 1453, you let these rather famous champions of the Italian Renaissance kick off their own particular period in history without stepping on the Middle Ages' toes too much.

[brucejoel99]

The Middle Ages aren't "everything that feels old-timey to us 21st century people", they have to be defined by their own inner logic and not in opposition to our present time.

The issue here is that Americans are sundered from the Middle Ages and what it wrought in ways that Europeans are not. It has no real existence in the American imagination other than 'the olden days when there were knights and castles'. As far as most Americans are concerned, Chaucer, Hildegard von Bingen and the Catalan Company are no more real than Robin Hood. Whereas I (for instance) am surrounded by the period's extremely visible legacy; by the ruins of castles and abbeys, by still-extant churches and cathedrals, by woods, boundary-ditches, hedges and fields that the people of the time knew as well as I do, and even by the continuing impact of administrative boundaries first idly sketched out during the period. And one way or another, this is true of everyone else in this continent. The period is part of our living past; it almost feels as if one can reach out and touch it, and in a way, of course, one can. The result is a fundamental divergence in perspective, amongst other things. There is a reason why academic Mediaevalism in North America is such a poisonous pit of stupidity.

Yeah, that might be the one thing about Americans I've had the most trouble relating to. I've been keenly aware of being part of a multi-millenary history since third grade (Our Ancestors the Gauls etc. - though of course I never bought that part for obvious reasons), and that has always been a source of wonder for me, even when modern history became my main interest. It's hard for me to put myself in the shoes of someone from a "young" country whose history is four centuries old at most (of course, the lands they occupy had a much older history, but that history was deliberately destroyed, so those few centuries are all that remains).

Now, stopping at 1945 as Nathan points out is an entirely self-imposed problem, and one that's becoming more and more dangerous as time goes on. I can see an argument for not teaching the last few decades, since it's genuinely hard to put much historical analysis on them, but you people are soon going to miss a full century.

I don't want to defend American history education, and I really don't want to defend the College Board, but I think the latter part is a bit overstated - I remember when taking my AP US and Euro tests five years ago that we had essay questions on the rise of the right from Goldwater to Reagan and the fall of overambitious gunners.

Yeah, my APUSH curriculum went all the way through to the end of the Cold War.