Middle Ages, period in Europe dating from the collapse of the Roman
Empire in the West, around the 5th century, to the 15th century. However, the
fixing of dates for the beginning and end of the Middle Ages is arbitrary;
at neither time was there any sharp break in the cultural developmentof the
continent. The term seems to have been first used by Flavio Biondo of Forlí,
a historian and apostolic secretary in Rome, in his Historiarum ab Inclinatione
Romanorum Imperii Decades (Decades of History from the Deterioration of the Roman
Empire), which was first published in 1483, although written some 30 years earlier.
The term implied a suspension of time and, especially, a suspension of progress-a
period of cultural stagnation, once referred to as the Dark Ages, between the glory
of classical antiquity and the rebirth of that glory in the beginnings of the modern
world. Modernscholarship generally divides the Middle Ages into three stages and is
much more concerned with diversity even within the subdivisions.
