A Brief History: The
Middle Ages
After the fall
of the Roman Empire, various tribes vied for power in an
almost endless war 
that was the Dark ages.
No one true tribe was
better than another and often they united for protection under one ruler.
One of these was the Franks who began in northern France
as one of the small groups. They created small composite armies of
volunteers who brought their own supplies. One such soldier was the
Knight, beginning in the new Frankish kingdom as mounted noble soldiers.
They all worked under an earlier form of a government called Feudalism. In
the time of Charlemagne the Empire had expanded to the rest of France, part of Italy and
most of Germany.
In the
post-Charlemagne period which ended the Dark ages, the Frankish Holy Roman
Empire was divided into three kingdoms ruled by each of Charlemagne's
sons. The new kingdom in England had begun 
due to
the colonization of Anglo-Saxons in the area. Spain had been conquered by the
Saracen invaders early on in the Middle Ages. The Frankish kingdoms would eventually
fall, too, because of Viking raids and other factors.
As the Middle
ages dragged on England also became a Feudalist kingdom, after William the
Conquer
or took the
throne in 1066 A.D.. Germany, or more correct the Teutonic city-states, never truly united until Frederick Barbarossa. All this would
keep Byzantium, or the Eastern Roman Empire, in power
until 1097 at the battle of Manzikert, against the Seljuk Turks.
This battle was what would begin the Crusades, in which
all of Europe united to defeat the Saracen foe. The Byzantine Empire had
been reduced to only three major original Roman provinces for the time, Thracia
(Thray-shuh), Greece, and
Anatolia, and the rest had been taken by the Muslim invaders in
their thirst for power.
After the 4th
Crusade most of the war beaten Europe went about their business, destroying
enemies and killing peasants, until the Mongol invasion
from the east. The Mongol army of about only 100,000 had far superior
tactics to
the European idea of noble warfare. The Mongols were able to defeat the
Europeans, if only temporarily, and it may have been for the best, after all
they did bring the technologies of the far east to Europe, which later
encouraged Marco Polo and others to go to
the east. And because the ruling
skills of the Mongols were vary bad, since they had been ruling small areas of
land in the desert, their kingdoms crumbled and they left.
Now with the
introduction of ancient ideas the final period of the middle ages began, the
Renaissance. At this time the new technologies like gunpowder, added to
European power. As kingdoms quickly
evolved to more modern nations, more people made money and a new class of citizen
arose. The middle class at this time mostly composed of merchant traders,
who had made money enough to out pass the peasant
class without getting enough money to be a noble. Men such as Leonardo da
Vinci and Michelangelo best represent the people of the renaissance.
As the middle
ages ended with imperialist nations ruling Europe, a new recently discovered
continent would become a colonial enterprise for kingdoms like France, England,
and Spain, and the middle ages would end and the revolutionary age would begin.
The three pictures (not effects) at the top from ensemblestudios.com
Picture key