A Label That Only Works in One Place

The Middle Ages is a European term and it carries an argument inside it. The name was coined by writers who saw themselves as recovering classical antiquity and who therefore described the centuries in between as a middle, an interval separating two better ages. That framing has been out of favour among historians for a long time, but the label survives, and the atlas uses it because readers look for it while stating what it does and does not cover. It does not travel. The centuries the term names are, in China, the Tang and Song and their successors; in India, the Chola, Delhi Sultanate and Vijayanagara; in Mesoamerica, the Postclassic.

None of those chronologies has a middle age, and applying the term to them imports a European periodisation and a European judgement at the same time. The atlas therefore treats the Middle Ages as a regional period rather than a global one, and files the same centuries elsewhere under their own names when the subject is elsewhere. It is also worth noting that the period is not religiously uniform even within Europe, since Latin Christendom, Byzantine Orthodoxy, the Islamic west and the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean each had their own chronology of change within it.