The Middle Ages, medieval or historical period is the middle of Western Civilization from V and XV century. It is at this time that the name, badges and crests begin to have greater relevance, as familiar and distinctive expression of art. Traditionally start their set in the year 476 with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and its end in 1492 with the discovery of America or in 1453 with the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, the date coincides with the end of the Hundred Years War. Major events occurred during the Middle Ages, which marked the evolution of later times, wars, discoveries, changes in social thought defined the fate of many people in Western Europe and the world.

Historians make a distinction between Antiquity and Middle Ages through a period of transition between centuries III and VIII in economics, is the replacement of the slave mode of production by the feudal mode of production in society, is presented disappearance of the concept of Roman citizenship and the definition of the medieval estates, in politics is the breakdown of centralized structures of the Roman Empire that led to a dispersal of power and in the ideological and cultural absorption and replacement of culture Classical by teocéntricas Christian or Islamic.

The concept of the Middle Ages was born as the second age of the traditional division of historical time. It is often considered to prejudice the Middle Ages as a dark age, steeped in the intellectual and cultural decline, and a secular social and economic stupor (which in turn is associated with feudalism in its most obscurantist traits, a dominated by the isolation, ignorance, theocracy, superstition and fear fueled by the millenarian endemic insecurity, violence and brutality of constant wars and invasions and epidemics apocalyptic.

Castillo Davilillo in San Asensio, Photography of: Marathoniano
However, in this period of thousand years there were all sorts of facts and processes quite different, distinct in time and geographically. Many of them had a large projection to the future, including those who laid the foundations for the development of further European expansion and the development of players who developed a society based predominantly rural estate but that witnessed the birth of a nascent urban life and a bourgeoisie that eventually developed capitalism. Far from being an unchanging time, the Middle Ages, which began with the migration of entire villages, and continued with high repopulation processes.

Castillo de Burton, Photography of: SantiMB
Emerged the political forms, such as the Islamic caliphate, the universal powers of Latin Christendom (pontificate and Empire) or the Byzantine Empire and the Slavic kingdoms into Eastern Christianity (evangelization and acculturation of Cyril and Methodius) and on a smaller scale any type of city-states, from small towns to German bishops had empires maritime republics as Venice, leaving in the middle of the scale on which future projection was more: the feudal monarchy, which turned into authoritarian monarchies prefigure the modern state.