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The Middle Ages

Timeline

TEXTS   CONTEXTS
 
529
Foundation of Monte Cassino,
first Benedictine monastery
 610–32
The Koran

 

 8th–10th centurie
Beowulf• Latin lyrics, saints’ lives, and histories

8th–10th centuries
Invasions of Western Europe by Arabs, Norsemen, and Magyars
   800
Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor
 

899
Alfred the Great, king of Wessex in England, dies

11th century
Hispano-Arabic and
Provençal lyrics • The Song of Roland

11th century
Consolidation of feudal
social structure

 
1066
Norman invasion of England
 

1099
Knights of the First Crusade capture Jerusalem

12th century
Marie de France, Lais •
Chrétien de Troyes, Story of the Grail

12th century
Establishment of the
universities of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna • Recovery of Aristotelian philosophy • Period of religious reform

 

1187
Arabs recover Jerusalem
permanently

13th century
Fabliaux • Romance of the Rose • Thorstein the Staff-Struck

13th century
Age of the great cathedrals and of scholastic philosophy
 

1226
Francis of Assisi, founder of the first order of friars, dies

 

1274
Thomas Aquinas, leading scholastic philosopher, dies

1301–21
Dante, The Divine Comedy

 
 

1337
War begins between France and
England (The Hundred Years’ War),
ending only in 1453

 

1348–50
Bubonic plague sweeps through Europe, killing over a third of the population

 1353
Boccaccio, The Decameron
 

1380?
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

 
 

1384
John Wyclif, promoter of religious views that prepare for the Reformation, dies

1386–1400
Chaucer, The Canterbury
Tales

 

14th century
The Thousand and One
Nights

14th century
Peasant risings in England, France, Flanders, and Italy

 

15th century
Growing centralization of state power throughout Europe

 

1453
Fall of Constantinople to the
Muslim Turks

 

1455
Gutenberg prints the Bible, the first printed book

ca. 1470
Villon, The Testament

1492
Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Western Hemisphere

1495?
Everyman