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The Late Middle Ages or late medieval period was the period of European history generally comprising the 14th and 15th centuries (c. 1301–1500). The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern era (and, in much of Europe, the Renaissance). Around 1300, centuries of prosperity and growth in Europe came to a halt. A series of famines and plagues, including the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the Black Death, reduced the population to around half of what it was before the calamities.〔Austin Alchon, Suzanne (2003). A pest in the land: new world epidemics in a global perspective. University of New Mexico Press. p. 21. ISBN 0-8263-2871-7.〕 Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare. France and England experienced serious peasant uprisings, such as the Jacquerie and the Peasants' Revolt, as well as over a century of intermittent conflict in the Hundred Years' War. To add to the many problems of the period, the unity of the Catholic Church was shattered by the Western Schism. Collectively these events are sometimes called the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages.〔Cantor, p. 480.〕 Despite these crises, the 14th century was also a time of great progress in the arts and sciences. Following a renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman texts that took root in the High Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance began. The absorption of Latin texts had started before the Renaissance of the 12th century through contact with Arabs during the Crusades, but the availability of important Greek texts accelerated with the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, when many Byzantine scholars had to seek refuge in the West, particularly Italy.〔Cantor, p. 594.〕 Combined with this influx of classical ideas was the invention of printing which facilitated dissemination of the printed word and democratized learning. These two things would later lead to the Protestant Reformation. Toward the end of the period, an era of discovery began (Age of Discovery). The rise of the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, eroded the last remnants of the Byzantine Empire and cut off trading possibilities with the east. Europeans were forced to seek new trading routes, leading to the expedition of Columbus to the Americas in 1492, and Vasco da Gama’s circumnavigation of India and Africa in 1498. Their discoveries strengthened the economy and power of European nations. The changes brought about by these developments have led many scholars to view this period as the end of the Middle Ages and beginning of modern history and early modern Europe. However, the division is somewhat artificial, since ancient learning was never entirely absent from European society. As a result there was developmental continuity between the ancient age (via classical antiquity) and the modern age. Some historians, particularly in Italy, prefer not to speak of the late Middle Ages at all, but rather see the high period of the Middle Ages transitioning to the Renaissance and the modern era. ==Historiography and periodization== The term "Late Middle Ages" refers to one of the three periods of the Middle Ages, along with the Early Middle Ages and the High Middle Ages. Leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodization in his ''History of the Florentine People'' (1442).〔Leonardo Bruni, James Hankins, ''History of the Florentine people'', Volume 1, Books 1–4, (2001), p. xvii.〕 Flavio Biondo used a similar framework in ''Decades of History from the Deterioration of the Roman Empire'' (1439–1453). Tripartite periodization became standard after the German historian Christoph Cellarius published ''Universal History Divided into an Ancient, Medieval, and New Period'' (1683). For 18th-century historians studying the 14th and 15th centuries, the central theme was the Renaissance, with its rediscovery of ancient learning and the emergence of an individual spirit.〔Brady ''et al.'', p. xiv; Cantor, p. 529.〕 The heart of this rediscovery lies in Italy, where, in the words of Jacob Burckhardt: "Man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such". This proposition was later challenged, and it was argued that the 12th century was a period of greater cultural achievement. As economic and demographic methods were applied to the study of history, the trend was increasingly to see the late Middle Ages as a period of recession and crisis. Belgian historian Henri Pirenne continued the subdivision of Early, High, and Late Middle Ages in the years around World War I.〔"Les periodes de l'historie du capitalism", ''Academie Royale de Belgique. Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres'', 1914.〕 Yet it was his Dutch colleague, Johan Huizinga, who was primarily responsible for popularising the pessimistic view of the Late Middle Ages, with his book ''The Autumn of the Middle Ages'' (1919). To Huizinga, whose research focused on France and the Low Countries rather than Italy, despair and decline were the main themes, not rebirth.〔Allmand, p. 299; Cantor, p. 530.〕 Modern historiography on the period has reached a consensus between the two extremes of innovation and crisis.〔 It is now (generally) acknowledged that conditions were vastly different north and south of the Alps, and "Late Middle Ages" is often avoided entirely within Italian historiography.〔Le Goff, p. 154. See e.g. 〕 The term "Renaissance" is still considered useful for describing certain intellectual, cultural, or artistic developments, but not as the defining feature of an entire European historical epoch.〔Brady ''et al.'', p. xvii.〕 The period from the early 14th century up until – and sometimes including – the 16th century, is rather seen as characterised by other trends: demographic and economic decline followed by recovery, the end of western religious unity and the subsequent emergence of the nation state, and the expansion of European influence onto the rest of the world.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「late middle ages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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