Middle Ages

What makes the European Middle Ages religiously decisive is less its beliefs than its institutions, most of which are still standing in some form. Monasticism was organised into orders with written rules, visitation, and international structures, and C. H. Lawrence's survey follows the sequence from Benedictine houses through the reformed Cistercians to the friars, who broke the pattern by living in towns and begging rather than farming an estate. The universities emerged with degrees, faculties, a licence to teach and a corporate identity that could defend itself against bishop and king.

George Makdisi has argued that the college as an endowed teaching institution has a genealogy running through the Islamic world, and the comparison is part of the point: the period was not a single Latin Christian development but four traditions, Latin, Byzantine, Islamic and Jewish, working in contact and in competition across the Mediterranean. Canon law was codified and made marriage, annulment, legitimacy and inheritance matters for church courts. Scholastic theology built a method for arguing doctrine. The cathedrals were financed, designed and built. Every one of those is an arrangement rather than an idea, and arrangements outlive the arguments that produced them.

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.