Claim: The Renaissance was after the Middle Ages.

In the history of Europe , the Middle Ages or Medieval Period lasted from the 5th to the 15th century . It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery . The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history : classical antiquity , the medieval period , and the modern period . The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early , High , and Late Middle Ages .   Population decline , counterurbanisation , invasion , and movement of peoples , which had begun in Late Antiquity , continued in the Early Middle Ages . The large-scale movements of the Migration Period , including various Germanic peoples , formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire . In the seventh century , North Africa and the Middle East -- once part of the Byzantine Empire -- came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate , an Islamic empire , after conquest by Muhammad 's successors . Although there were substantial changes in society and political structures , the break with classical antiquity was not complete . The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire survived in the east and remained a major power . The empire 's law code , the Corpus Juris Civilis or `` Code of Justinian '' , was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became widely admired later in the Middle Ages . In the West , most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions . Monasteries were founded as campaigns to Christianise pagan Europe continued . The Franks , under the Carolingian dynasty , briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th and early 9th century . It covered much of Western Europe but later succumbed to the pressures of internal civil wars combined with external invasions -- Vikings from the north , Hungarians from the east , and Saracens from the south .   During the High Middle Ages , which began after 1000 , the population of Europe increased greatly as technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish and the Medieval Warm Period climate change allowed crop yields to increase . Manorialism , the organisation of peasants into villages that owed rent and labour services to the nobles , and feudalism , the political structure whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords in return for the right to rent from lands and manors , were two of the ways society was organised in the High Middle Ages . The Crusades , first preached in 1095 , were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims . Kings became the heads of centralised nation states , reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a unified Christendom more distant . Intellectual life was marked by scholasticism , a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason , and by the founding of universities . The theology of Thomas Aquinas , the paintings of Giotto , the poetry of Dante and Chaucer , the travels of Marco Polo , and the Gothic architecture of cathedrals such as Chartres are among the outstanding achievements toward the end of this period and into the Late Middle Ages .   The Late Middle Ages was marked by difficulties and calamities including famine , plague , and war , which significantly diminished the population of Europe ; between 1347 and 1350 , the Black Death killed about a third of Europeans . Controversy , heresy , and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the interstate conflict , civil strife , and peasant revolts that occurred in the kingdoms . Cultural and technological developments transformed European society , concluding the Late Middle Ages and beginning the early modern period .