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Home›World history

Middle Ages

From the end of the western Roman empire in 476 to the decades around 1500. Eight units cover Europe after Rome, Byzantium, the Islamic world and its scholars, lords and peasants, the Crusades, the Mongol empire, the Black Death and the end of the Middle Ages, with maps, timelines and flashcards. Numbers such as death tolls and army sizes are estimates, and each unit says where historians disagree.

Progress

About this course

In 1939, with war about to break out, the landowner Edith Pretty asked a local archaeologist, Basil Brown, to dig the largest of the burial mounds on her estate at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. He found the outline of a ship 27 metres long. The wood had rotted away, but rows of iron rivets still lay in the sand in the shape of the hull. The course covers the Middle Ages, from the end of the western Roman empire in 476 to the decades around 1500, with maps, timelines and flashcards.

The eight units are Europe after Rome, Byzantium, the Islamic world, lords and peasants, the Crusades, the Mongol empire, the Black Death and the end of the Middle Ages. The emperor Justinian I, who reigned from 527 to 565, set out to win back the western provinces, and his general Belisarius took North Africa from the Vandals in 533 and 534. According to Muslim tradition, around 610 Muhammad began to receive revelations that were later gathered as the Quran, and in 622 he and his followers moved to Medina. Medieval people never used the word feudalism; lawyers and historians of the 17th and 18th centuries built it from feudum, the medieval Latin word for a fief. Numbers such as death tolls and army sizes are estimates, and each unit says where historians disagree.

Two units show how far events could reach. The Mongols kept a network of relay stations called the yam, where official riders could change horses, so that orders and news crossed the empire far faster than before. The Black Death was an epidemic of plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, that swept across western Asia, North Africa and Europe from 1346 to 1353.

Before you start

The story picks up in 476, exactly where Greece and Rome stops, so that course is the best preparation. The units travel from Europe to Constantinople, Baghdad and the Mongol steppe, so a world map or Continents and oceans helps you keep track.

When you finish

Once you finish, you can explain who retired the last western emperor in 476 and why Byzantium carried on, follow Islam from Mecca to Baghdad and Córdoba, and describe how a manor's three-field system worked. You can say what the Fourth Crusade did, how far the Mongol empire reached, where the word quarantine comes from and why printing marks the end of the period.

  1. 1Europe after Rome: Franks, monks and CharlemagneOn Christmas Day 800 Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome, 324 years after the last emperor in the west had been sent into retirement.
  2. 2Byzantium: the Roman empire in the eastThe Roman empire did not end in 476. Its eastern half, ruled from Constantinople, lasted until 29 May 1453.
  3. 3The Islamic world: from Mecca to Baghdad and CórdobaThe English words algebra and algorithm both come from one 9th-century scholar in Baghdad: from the title of his book and from his name, al-Khwarizmi.
  4. 4Lords, knights and peasants: feudalism and the manorIn 1086 William the Conqueror’s commissioners asked the same questions about 13,418 places in England, down to how many plough teams and mills each one had.
  5. 5The CrusadesCrusaders lost Acre, their last large city on the coast of the Levant, in 1291, almost two centuries after Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in 1095.
  6. 6The Mongol empireAt its height the Mongol empire covered about 23 million square kilometres, from the Pacific to the Danube, the largest connected land empire in history.
  7. 7The Black DeathThe word quarantine comes from quaranta, Italian for forty, the number of days some ports made travellers wait after the Black Death.
  8. 8The end of the Middle AgesIn March 1455 a future pope wrote that he had seen pages of a new Bible from Mainz at the Frankfurt fair, printed so clearly that they could be read without glasses.

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Sources for this course (9)
  • The Met Heilbrunn Timeline essay "The Byzantine State under Justinian I" (metmuseum.org/essays) and Met object 1993.256, Safe Conduct Pass (Paiza) in Phags-pa script
  • British Museum, "The Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo" and "The Bayeux Tapestry" exhibition page (britishmuseum.org)
  • The National Archives, "Domesday Book" research guide (nationalarchives.gov.uk)
  • Britannica: "Black Death", "Mongol empire", "Genghis Khan", "Battle of Hattin"
  • Spyrou et al., "The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia", Nature 606 (2022)
  • CDC Emerging Infectious Diseases, "Etymologia: Quarantine" (2013) and "Lessons from the History of Quarantine" (2013)
  • Library of Congress, The Canon of Medicine record (loc.gov/item/2021667335)
  • Fordham University Internet Medieval Sourcebook, "Urban II: Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095"
  • Natural Earth coastlines (public domain).

Checked: 2026-10-17