The Idea of The Middle Ages

The idea of the Middle Ages
The term and concept before the 18th century
From the 4th to the 15th century, writers of history thought within a

linear framework of time derived from the Christian understanding of
Scripture—the sequence of Creation, Incarnation, Christ’s Second
Coming, and the Last Judgment. In Book XXII of City of God, the
great Church Father Augustine of Hippo (354–430) posited six ages of
world history, which paralleled the six days of Creation and the six
ages of the individual human life span. For Augustine, the six ages of
history—from Adam and Eve to the Flood, from the Flood to Abraham,
from Abraham to King David, from David to the Babylonian Exile,
from the Exile to Jesus Christ, and from Christ to the Second Coming
—would be followed by a seventh age, the reign of Christ on earth.
World history was conceived as “salvation history”—the course of
events from Creation to the Last Judgment—and its purposes were
religious and moral. Thus, all the references by Augustine and other
early authors to a “middle time” must be understood within the
framework of the sixth age of salvation history. Early Christian
interpretations of the biblical Book of Daniel (Daniel 2:31–45, 7),
especially those of the Church Father Jerome (c. 347–419/420) and
the historian Paulus Orosius (flourished 414–417), added the idea of
four successive world empires—Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome.
Late writers in this tradition added the idea of the translatio
imperii (“translation of empire”): from Alexander the Great to the
Romans, from the Romans to the Franks under Charlemagne in 800,
and from Charlemagne to the East Frankish emperors and Otto I. A
number of early European thinkers built upon the idea of the
translation of empire to define European civilization in terms of
scholarship and chivalry (the knightly code of conduct). All these ideas
were readily compatible with the Augustinian sequence of the six ages
of the world.
St. Augustine
St. Augustine, undated engraving.
© Lanmas/Alamy
The single exception to this trend was the work of the late 12th-
century Calabrian abbot and scriptural exegete Joachim of
Fiore (c. 1130–c. 1201). According to Joachim, there were three ages in
human history: that of the Father (before Christ), that of the Son (from
Christ to an unknown future date, which some of Joachim’s followers
located in the late 13th century), and that of the Holy Spirit (during
which all Christendom would turn into a vast church with a universal
priesthood of believers). But Joachim’s view was also firmly expressed
in terms of salvation history. Many chroniclers and writers of
histories, of course, wrote about shorter periods of time and focused
their efforts on local affairs, but the great Augustinian metanarrative
underlay their work too. From several confessional perspectives, this
view still survives.
In the 14th century, however, the literary moralist Petrarch (1304–74),

fascinated with ancient Roman history and contemptuous of the time
that followed it, including his own century, divided the past into
ancient and new—antiquity and recent times—and located the
transition between them in the 4th century, when the Roman
emperors converted to Christianity. According to Petrarch, what
followed was an age of tenebrae (“shadows”), a “sordid middle time”
with only the hope of a better age to follow. Although Petrarch’s
disapproval of the Christianized Roman and post-Roman world may
seem irreligious, he was in fact a devout Christian; his judgment was
based on aesthetic, moral, and philological criteria, not Christian ones.
Petrarch’s limitless admiration for Rome heralded a
novel conception of the European past and established criteria for
historical periodization other than those of salvation history or the
history of the church, empire, cities, rulers, or noble dynasties. His
followers in later centuries focused primarily on the transformation of
the arts and letters, seeing a renewal of earlier Roman dignity and
achievement beginning with the painter Giotto (1266/67 or 1276–
1337) and with Petrarch himself and continuing into the 15th and 16th
centuries.
Petrarch
Petrarch, engraving.
© Ancient Art & Architecture Collection
In the early 16th century, religious critics and reformers, including
both the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus and the Protestant
reformer Martin Luther, added another dimension to the new
conception and terminology: the idea of an evangelical, apostolic
Christian church that had become corrupt when it was absorbed by the
Roman Empire and now needed to be reformed, or restored to its
earlier apostolic authenticity. The idea of reform had long been built
into the Christian worldview. This conception of the period between
the 4th and 16th centuries was laid out in the great Protestant history
by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Centuriae Magdeburgensis (1559–74;
“The Magdeburg Centuries”), which also introduced the practice of
dividing the past into ostensibly neutral centuries. The Roman
Catholic version of church history was reflected in the Annales
Ecclesiastici (“Ecclesiastical Annals”) of Caesar Baronius (1538–1607),
completed by Oderico Rinaldi in 1677. Thus, the historical dimension
of both the Protestant and the Catholic reformations of the 16th and
17th centuries added a sharply polemical religious interpretation of the
Christian past to Petrarch’s original conception, as church history was
put to the service of confessional debate.
Petrarch’s cultural successors, the literary humanists, also used

variants of the expression Middle Ages. Among them was media
tempestas (“middle time”), first used by Giovanni Andrea, bishop of
Aleria, in 1469; others were media antiquitas (“middle
antiquity”), media aetas (“middle era”), and media tempora (“middle
times”), all first used between 1514 and 1530. The political theorist and
historian Melchior Goldast appears to have coined the
variation medium aevum (“a middle age”) in 1604; shortly after, in a
Latin work of 1610, the English jurist and legal historian John
Selden repeated medium aevum, Anglicizing the term in 1614
to middle times and in 1618 to middle ages. In 1641 the French
historian Pierre de Marca apparently coined the
French vernacular term le moyen âge, which gained authority in the
respected lexicographical work Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et
infimae latinitatis (1678; “A Glossary for Writers of Middle and Low
Latin”), by Charles du Fresne, seigneur du Cange, who emphasized the
inferior and “middle” quality of Latin linguistic usage after the 4th
century. Other 17th-century historians, including Gisbertus
Voetius and Georg Horn, used terms such as media aetas in their
histories of the church before the Reformation of the 16th century.
The term and idea circulated even more widely in other historical
works. Du Cange’s great dictionary also used the Latin term medium
aevum, as did the popular historical textbook The Nucleus of Middle
History Between Ancient and Modern (1688), by the German
historian Christoph Keller—although Keller observed that in naming
the period he was simply following the terminology of earlier and
contemporary scholars. By the late 17th century the most commonly
used term for the period in Latin was medium aevum, and various
equivalents of Middle Ages or Middle Age were used in European
vernacular languages.

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The idea of the Middle Ages

The term and concept before the 18th century

From the 4th to the 15th century, writers of history thought within a

In the 14th century, however, the literary moralist Petrarch (1304–74),

Petrarch’s cultural successors, the literary humanists, also used

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