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. The lords were also vassals to more important lords, with the most important of all being the king. Below the knights were peasants, who did the actual work on the land in exchange for protection from bandits and other threats. Feudalism was also an economic system, with the peasants working the land and keeping some of their production to feed themselves, while giving the rest to the landowner whose land they worked.