Introduction. The history of the Middle Ages

Grade 7 History topic: 'Introduction. The history of the Middle Ages' (pp. 5–8, Sh. K. Kerimova). The history of the Middle Ages is a part of world history, a part of the history of the peoples of the whole world. In the Middle Ages most peoples had not a slave-owning but a feudal order, and its two main opposing classes were the feudal lords and the dependent peasants. The idea of the 'Middle Ages' was brought into scholarship by Italian humanist historians in the 15th and 16th centuries and took shape in the 18th century. The boundary between the history of the ancient world and the history of the Middle Ages is taken to be the fall of the slave-owning Roman Empire (476), and the boundary between the Middle Ages and modern history the English bourgeois revolution of the 17th century. The history of the Middle Ages is divided into three periods: the early feudal period (from 476 to the 11th century), the developed feudal period (the 12th to the 15th century) and the late feudal period (the 16th to the first half of the 17th century). Scholars study the Middle Ages from objects that have survived, from written documents in archives, from chronicles and from works of art. Until printing was invented in the middle of the 15th century, every document was written by hand.