But we'll get boring Europe out of the way first. Let's go to the Thought Bubble. Medieval Europe had less trade, fewer cities, and less cultural output than the original Roman Empire. London and Paris were fetid fire traps with none of the planning or sewage management of places 5,000 years older, like Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley civilization, let alone Rome. In these more powerful governments, wars were at least smaller, which is one reason why Europeans living in medieval times… Ugh, Thought Bubble, I knew you were gonna do that! Anyway, people in medieval times lived slightly longer, life expectancy was 30, than Europeans during the Roman Empire, when life expectancy was 28. Instead of centralized governments, Europe in the Middle Ages had feudalism, a political system based on reciprocal relationships between lords, who owned lots of land, and vassals, who protected the land and got to dress up as knights in exchange for pledging loyalty to the lords.