section_path: History by region/Europe
section_name: Europe
paragraph_text: Europe
  
  In Europe, Western civilization reconstituted after the fall of the Western Roman Empire into the period now known as the Early Middle Ages (500–1000). The Early Middle Ages saw a continuation of trends begun in late antiquity: depopulation, deurbanization, and increased barbarian invasion.
  
  From the 7th until the 11th centuries, Arabs, Magyars, and Norse were all threats to the Christian Kingdoms that killed thousands of people over centuries. Raiders however, also created new trading networks. In Western Europe, the Frankish king Charlemagne attempted to kindle the rise of culture and science in the Carolingian Renaissance. In 800, Charlemagne founded the Holy Roman Empire in attempt to resurrect ancient Rome. The reign of Charlemagne attempted to kindle a rise of learning and literacy in what has become known as the Carolingian Renaissance.
  
  In Eastern Europe, the Eastern Roman Empire survived in what is now called the Byzantine Empire, which created the Code of Justinian that inspired the legal structures of modern European states. Overseen by Eastern Orthodox emperors, in the 9th–10th centuries the Byzantine Eastern Orthodox Church Christianized the First Bulgarian Empire and Kievan Rus', the cultural and political ancestors to modern-day Bulgaria and North Macedonia, on the one hand, and Russia and Ukraine, on the other. Byzantium flourished as the leading power and trade center in its region in the Macedonian Renaissance until it was overshadowed by Italian city-states and the Islamic Ottoman Empire near the end of the Middle Ages.
  
  Later in the period, the creation of the feudal system allowed greater degrees of military and agricultural organization. There was sustained urbanization in northern and western Europe. Later developments were marked by manorialism and feudalism, and evolved into the prosperous High Middle Ages. After 1000 the Christian kingdoms that had emerged from Rome's collapse changed dramatically in their cultural and societal character.
  
  During the High Middle Ages (c. 1000–1300), Christian -oriented art and architecture flourished and the Crusades were mounted to recapture the Holy Land from Muslim control. The influence of the emerging nation-state was tempered by the ideal of an international Christendom and the presence of the Catholic Church in all western kingdoms. The codes of chivalry and courtly love set rules for proper behavior, while the Scholastic philosophers attempted to reconcile faith and reason. The age of Feudalism would be dramatically transformed by the cataclysm of the Black Death and its aftermath. This time would be a major underlying cause for the Renaissance. By the turn of the 16th century European or Western civilization would be engaging in the Age of Discovery.
  
  The term "Middle Ages" first appears in Latin in the 15th century and reflects the view that this period was a deviation from the path of classical learning, a path supposedly reconnected by Renaissance scholarship.