CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

SERIES FOREWORD
The Middle Ages are no longer considered the “Dark Ages” (as Petrarch
termed them), sandwiched between the two enlightened periods of classical
antiquity and the Renaissance. Often defined as a historical period
lasting, roughly, from 500 to 1500 c.e., the Middle Ages span an enormous
amount of time (if we consider the way other time periods have
been constructed by historians) as well as an astonishing range of countries
and regions very different from one another. That is, we call the
“Middle” Ages the period beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire
as a result of raids by northern European tribes of “barbarians” in the late
antiquity of the fifth and sixth centuries and continuing until the advent
of the so-called Italian and English renaissances, or rebirths of classical
learning, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. How this age could be
termed either “Middle” or “Dark” is a mystery to those who study it. Certainly
it is no longer understood as embracing merely the classical inheritance
in the west or excluding eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia,
or even, as I would argue, North and Central America.
Whatever the arbitrary, archaic, and hegemonic limitations of these
temporal parameters—the old-fashioned approach to them was that they
were mainly not classical antiquity, and therefore not important—the
Middle Ages represent a time when certain events occurred that have
continued to affect modern cultures and that also, inevitably, catalyzed
other medieval events. Among other important events, the Middle Ages
saw the birth of Muhammad (c. 570–632) and his foundation of Islam in
the seventh century as a rejection of Christianity which led to the imperial
conflict between East and West in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
In western Europe in the Middle Ages the foundations for modern