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Germanic tribes entered the Roman Empire for many reasons. The Germanic people migrated into the empire because they sought a warmer climate and better grazing land. -
The Roman Empire divides into two parts. The eastern half was known as the Byzantine Empire. It included most of the Balkan Peninsula, Italy, southern Spain, Asian Minor, Syria and North Africa. -
The Romans had invaded England and ruled over England for 400 years but in 410, the Romans left England because their homes in Italy were being attacked by fierce tribes and every soldier was needed back in Rome.
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The West was severely shaken in 410, when the city of Rome was sacked by the Visigoths, a wandering nation of Germanic peoples from the northeast. The fall of Rome was completed in 476, when the German chieftain Odoacer deposed the last Roman emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus. -
The Middle Ages, which started around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century A.C. and lasted until the beginning of the Renaissance in the 1300s, is often romanticized as a time of knights in armor, jousting, castles and chivalry.
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Muhammad was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. -
Throughout Islamic history, wars against non-Muslims, even when motivated by political and secular concerns, were termed jihads to grant them religious legitimacy.
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Charlemagne was a medieval emperor who ruled much of Western Europe from 768 to 814. Once in power, Charlemagne sought to unite all the Germanic peoples into one kingdom, and convert his subjects to Christianity. In order to carry out this mission, he spent the majority of his reign engaged in military campaigns.
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Viking expansion was the historical movement which led Norse explorers, traders and warriors, the latter known in modern scholarship as Vikings, to sail most of the North Atlantic
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The Holy Roman Empire was a political entity in Western, Central, and Southern Europe that developed in the Early Middle Ages and continued until its dissolution in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars. From the accession of Otto I in 962 until the twelfth century, the Empire was the most powerful monarchy in Europe
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The most important technical innovation for agriculture in the Middle Ages was the widespread adoption around 1000 of the mouldboard plow and its close relative, the heavy plow. These two plows enabled medieval farmers to exploit the fertile but heavy clay soils of northern Europe. -
The Crusades were a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims started primarily to secure control of holy sites considered sacred by both groups. In all, eight major Crusade expeditions—varying in size, strength and degree of success—occurred between 1096 and 1291.
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The Mongol invasion of China started in 1211 when Genghis Khan's forces took on the northern Chinese Jin Empire. Mongols took advantage of the fractured state of China, which was then divided into the Song Empire in the south and the Jin Empire in the north. -
The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages. Generally described as taking place from the 14th century to the 17th century, the Renaissance promoted the rediscovery of classical philosophy, literature and art
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After the wall of Constantinople, the leadership of the Eastern Orthodtox passed from Byzanines to the Slavs. -
The Protestant Reformation was a religious reform movement that swept through Europe in the 1500s. It resulted in the creation of a branch of Christianity called Protestantism, a name used collectively to refer to the many religious groups that separated from the Roman Catholic Church due to differences in doctrine.
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Mercantilism is an economic philosophy built around exports and trade. A mercantilist economy tries to increase its wealth by maximizing exports and minimizing imports. This school of thought teaches that there is a limited amount of wealth in the world, and all nations are competing against each other for it. -
The American Revolution was the insurrection fought between 1775 and 1783 through which 13 of Great Britain's North American colonies threw off British rule to establish the sovereign United States of America, founded with the Declaration of Independence in 1776.