Knights, crusades, plagues, and cathedrals — how much do you know about the era that shaped modern Europe? 20 questions spanning five centuries of medieval history.
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Stretching roughly from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to the dawn of the Renaissance a thousand years later, the Middle Ages shaped the Europe we recognise today. It was an age of stone castles rising on hilltops, armoured knights charging across muddy fields, pilgrims walking thousands of miles to distant shrines, and monks copying ancient manuscripts by candlelight in silent scriptoria.
The period gave us the feudal order binding lords and peasants together, the soaring Gothic cathedrals of Chartres and Notre-Dame, the Crusades that sent thousands east toward Jerusalem, and the universities of Paris, Oxford and Bologna where scholastic philosophy took root. It also witnessed the Black Death of 1347-1351 that killed perhaps a third of Europe's population, the Hundred Years' War between France and England, the trial of Joan of Arc, and the invention of movable-type printing by Gutenberg around 1450 — a revolution that would soon end the medieval world itself.
Whether you are drawn to the mystique of King Arthur's legends, the brutal realities of trial by ordeal, the everyday life of a serf tied to the manor, or the intellectual brilliance of , the medieval millennium offers endless discoveries. Step into a world of guilds, tournaments, plague doctors and illuminated manuscripts.