Middle Ages
The Middle Ages center on the Eurasian world and are commonly dated from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. While the Western Roman Empire fragmented into numerous separate kingdoms, the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire survived until late in the Middle Ages. The period also corresponds to the Islamic conquests, subsequent Islamic golden age, and commencement and expansion of the Arab slave trade, followed by the Mongol invasions in the Middle East and Central Asia. South Asia saw a series of middle kingdoms of India, followed by the establishment of Islamic empires in India. The Chinese Empire experienced the successive Sui, Tang, Liao, Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Middle Eastern trade routes along the Indian Ocean, and the Silk Road through the Gobi Desert, provided limited economic and cultural contact between Asian and European civilizations. While the Middle Ages held sway in Europe, civilizations in the Americas, such as the Inca, Maya, and Aztec, continued to flourish, then ended at different times.
Read more about this topic: History Of The World
Famous quotes containing the words middle ages, middle and/or ages:
“Real socialism is inside man. It wasn’t born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can’t say it is finished.”
—Dario Fo (b. 1926)
“Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead center of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net.”
—Franklin Pierce Adams (1881–1960)
“but as an Eagle
His cloudless thunderbolted on thir heads.
So vertue giv’n for lost,
Deprest, and overthrown, as seem’d,
Like that self-begott’n bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay e’re while a Holocaust,
From out her ashie womb now teem’d
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deem’d,
And though her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird ages of lives.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)