The dominant political and economic system in medieval Europe is known as feudalism. While the word lacks a universal definition, it implies that power was held by local landowners (usually nobles or clergy) and gave some legal privileges, combined with the duty to serve the monarch. Feudalism has been analyzed in different ways, but among the more common ways is a delegation of authority from top (king and high nobles) to lower ranks as well as comparing it to a "protection racket" as organized crime would later establish it - the feudal lords would demand obedience and "taxes" from their underlings in exchange for "protection" - and when a feudal underling was out of line and the overlord had the resources to enforce their will, they were made an example of. Serfdom, a kind of forced servitude where workers were bound to the land for life, was prevalent in many countries (in particular east of River Elbe) but was abolished over time - in the Russian Empire serfdom lasted well into the nineteenth century but took on a uniquely "Russian" character that weirdly had some aspects of agrarian proto-socialism of sorts. While the system of feudalism may seem harsh and brutal to modern observers, it did manage to keep life for most normal peasants largely peaceful, and eventually even managed to establish "perpetual peace of the realm" which ended feuds and highwaymanship. Cities managed to largely free themselves from the feudal system but instead had guilds and wealthy burghers who formed the top few percent of society run the show. There was a rule in many places that a serf who had run away to the city would become free (in the Germanies often "after a year and a day") for which the phrase "Stadtluft macht frei" ("City air frees") was coined. Still, the urban underclasses were not necessarily better off than serfs and virtually every city in Europe had a high mortality rate not made up by their birth rates so they could only maintain their population (or grow) through continuous immigration from rural areas. Apprenticeship was the rule for pretty much any non-agricultural manual labor. Journeymen and apprentices had little rights and even for those who owned their own shop there were often strictly enforced guild rules on quality, price and sometimes even techniques allowed to produce goods. Still medieval handicraft achieved remarkable precision and quality if not nearly the output of later industrial production.

Posterity has associated the "Dark Ages" with the lack of sanitation, named as the cause of the Black Death and other epidemics. The filthiness has been over-generalized; while many Roman aqueducts and baths fell into decay, bathing remained a virtue in some European regions. Cities indeed had issues with manure and other waste, but there was usually some regulation; in contrast to modern belief, waste was not commonly thrown out the window on city streets. Illustrations of people who emptied a potty on bypassers, implied that the scene was not normal, and that there was some disagreement with them. Filthy and disease-ridden cities did not end with the Middle Ages; well into the 19th century, cholera and other infectious diseases were common with increasing death tolls, and believed to spread with miasma, bad air from wetlands; the word malaria is medieval Italian for "bad air". The germ theory of disease became well-known only by the late 19th century, and well into the 20th century, city streets were covered by horse manure, while many European households had no plumbing or organized waste disposal.

Posterity has depicted the Medieval justice system as harsh, with death and corporal punishment even for petty crimes. The truth was more complex. In many Germanic cultures, most prevalent in Scandinavia, justice was carried out in things, local assemblies where all free men, and in some cases women, had a voice. Death penalty was in many cases replaced by outlawing; where the condemned lost the protection of the law and could be killed without consequence. In essence outlawing and exile were often nigh-overlapping as losing the protection of society was often a nigh death sentence for people. And after all, if the perpetrator left and never showed up again, he or she was someone else's problem. Civil death was a related sentence, in which the condemned lost their property, the right to stand in court, and other rights of citizens. While corporal punishment was prevalent, many "medieval" torture methods such as the "iron maiden" were unattested, and either based on legend or made up by posterity. See also history of justice. The East Roman Empire under Justinian, the last ruler to speak Latin natively, compiled the most extensive collection of Roman law, the Corpus Iuris Civilis, which continues to form the basis of Civil Law in many European jurisdictions and began to be combined with Germanic (largely oral) legal traditions in Catholic Europe in the High Middle Ages. Germanic law texts where they were written down often take both tradition ("the laws as our forefathers knew them") and the justice of a king as their justification and are often an interesting insight both into the language of their era (though many were also written in Latin) and the concepts of justice. An old Germanic legal concept that might seem alien to modern observers is "were-gild" or "man money" - a payment the perpetrator of a killing could pay to the next of kin of the victim as restitution. While this might seem a disproportionately low penalty for modern sensibilities, it reduced the danger of endless cycles of revenge killings and is in a way still a part of Anglo-Saxon law with "wrongful death" torts to this day.

Transport and travel were difficult ventures through most of the Middle Ages. The most convenient mode for freight was sailing along coasts and navigable rivers, or walking or riding along the occasional remaining Roman roads. The idea that common people rarely travelled further than to the neighbor city is over-generalized; craftsmen regularly migrated between cities for work, and many people made a pilgrimage across the continent, or even to the Holy Land.

Towns and cities were often based on trading with almost every town having a market- place – an open area where sellers could pitch their stalls and offer their wares to the general public. Larger towns often had two or more market places, each specialising in a specific product. Many market squares still function as such, particularly in the smaller towns – traders pitch their stalls on market day and sell their everyday wares as they have done for centuries. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some of the markets died down or moved into buildings and the local authorities converted then into open spaces in the town centres where people could meet. In other cases the existence of the original market is known by the name of locality only – often the street will broaden out or the intersection will be more spacious, sometime with nothing more than a tree or fountain in its middle.

The location of towns and cities has often been dictated by not only the requirements for defence, but also for the ability of outsiders to enter the city to buy and sell products. Towns would often develop on river estuaries at the limit of navigation which not only protected ships against storms but also provided an extra layer of defence against surprise attacks. Today many relics of the wharfs and customs posts relating to seaborne trade can be found far inland. In many cities, river boat rides for visitors often start from one or other of these wharfs.

Alongside the markets, local merchants and craftsmen often banded together to form guilds in which they regulated their trades. The leaders of these guilds would meet in the guildhall, where problems would be thrashed out and where justice was dealt out to those merchants or traders who deviated from prescribed practices (such as giving short measure or producing inferior goods). The guildhall often became the centre of local government with autonomy from the king or feudal lord, and in particular Italy and Germany had many sovereign city-states. While only property-owning housemasters and dowagers could vote, these assemblies were an early form of parliamentary government. Many guildhalls are ornate, well preserved buildings and today have een put to a variety of uses; see local governments.

With the fall of the Roman Empire, literacy and cultural output declined, with the clergy remaining as the caretakers of the written word, and Latin as the language of scholarship and the Catholic church; a role that remains until present day. For reasons still not entirely understood the vast majority of ancient literature was lost in a relatively short time frame. Cassiodorus who lived in the 6th century in Italy tried to conserve ancient learning in a cloister called "Vivarium" he had founded and all the books he could get his hands on are still available to us today, but apparently a much vaster number had already been lost by then. A further problem was the knowledge of Greek in the West declined substantially and most learned men in the Latin West could only access Greek writing if there was a Latin translation available. Many classical works survived through Arabic translation in the Islamic Golden Age, and the Silk Road brought knowledge from Imperial China as well as other Asian cultures, including innovations such as the compass and gunpowder.

Functional folk medicine and folk science (such as the understanding of weather) overlapped with folklore and surviving pagan faiths, with ideas interchanging across the Afro-Eurasian landmass. Crafts such as astrology and alchemy were to a large extent based on superstition; still, many of their methods were the foundation for the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries, alchemists being credited with innovations such as distillation and oil painting. Folk magic, practiced by cunning men and women, was at times called witchcraft; but the witch-hunts which are today commonly associated with the Middle Ages began in earnest only in the late 15th century. Witch hunting was just as often combatted by the Catholic clergy as it was encouraged and several non-Catholic areas engaged in severe persecution. The famed Spanish Inquisition actually established a standard of proof for any "witchcraft" accusation that was nigh-impossible to match, given that witchcraft does not actually exist. There are also records of people deliberately committing "heresy" after having been accused of a "secular" crime in order to be tried by a church court which sometimes had higher standards of evidence and less use of torture.

The High Middle Ages saw the rise of universities and scholasticism, an intellectual movement based on Christian theology and Graeco-Roman philosophy. The scholastic view of the natural and spiritual world grew complex over the centuries; a famous exposé is Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, depicting hell (inferno), purgatory and paradise. It was published in 1319 in Dante's native Tuscan language, which over the succeeding centuries became established as standard Italian. Besides being notable as one of the first works of literature in a Romance vernacular to reach a mass audience, it is also a surprisingly "modern" work as it is in essence "self insert fan fiction" in which Dante makes not-so-veiled commentary about Italian politics of his age, his admiration for the poet Virgil and his admiration for a woman who probably barely knew him.

The image of Medieval scholarship as ignorant and superstitious has been exaggerated in modern times. For instance, few if any scholars believed that Earth was flat; good estimates of Earth's circumference were made already in Hellenic Greece. While the Voyages of Columbus made Europeans aware of the New World, few people doubted that Earth was spherical. In fact, it was those very estimates of earth's size (pretty accurate, as it turns out) that were used as arguments against Columbus' proposals - he'd have run out of provisions well before getting anywhere if the Americas hadn't been "conveniently" where they are.

In western Europe, the Early Middle Ages left behind fewer and smaller buildings than the lost Roman Empire, most of them stone churches, monasteries and fortifications. Roman architecture survived and evolved in the Byzantine Empire; the Hagia Sophia was built in the 6th century. Despite Vitruvius remaining a well-studied classic in the Latin West, the lack of manpower and resources made many Roman architectural techniques and technologies disappear.

The High Middle Ages saw the rise of Romanesque architecture, with similarities to Roman architecture, and later Gothic architecture, prevalent in churches, universities and some grand houses. Renaissance architecture arose from the 14th century. These styles have seen later revivals, in particular during the romantic nationalism of the 19th century; buildings that look medieval might be much younger. In the High Middle Ages many towns would embark on truly "generational" projects with the construction of major churches - often it would take over a century from laying the first stones to topping out the roof. As structural engineering in those days was more art than science, some buildings collapsed during building, but it is more common that safety margins were so large that the structures have endured into our times - some even surviving aerial bombardment in World War II. To give an example of the timescales involved, construction of Cologne Cathedral was started in 1248, fizzled out in the mid 16th century, was restarted in the 1840s, completed in 1880 and there has been ongoing renovation for most of the post-war period.

At least since the High Middle Ages, most medieval towns and cities had some fortifications. Castles were fortified residences for a king or some other ruler; some of them large enough to contain a whole town. City walls could be used for defense, though their daily usage was for toll collection. City walls and castles became obsolete as gunpowder weapons became more advanced. Most walls were torn down as cities grew - often to make way for railways or the automobile. Given their role in toll collection, they had few defenders at the time they were torn down. While quite a few remain, it is rare for them to still be complete. Walls were often accompanied with a ditch, sometimes filled with water - where those remain they form a pleasant bit of green space or waterfront right in the heart of the city. Former walls often form ghostly relics in the shape of circular streets around the core old town, sometimes even named to indicate the former site of the city fortifications.

In rural regions and for nonrepresentative buildings the cheapest materials usually had to suffice. Sometimes this was locally quarried rock, but oftentimes no sufficiently hard material was in reach and thus mud, dung and other substances were filled into a wood "skeleton" making delightful half timbered houses which used to dominate the old towns of much of Central Europe before firebombing. The widespread use of timber in construction is a serendipitous blessing for modern archeologists as the science of dendrochronology can date trees by their telltale sequences of year-rings. In Europe this can be used for absolute datings (of the time a tree was cut down, not necessarily when it came to its final use) well into the medieval age.

The term "Middle Ages" is obviously made up by posterity, popularized from the 17th century, to describe the "dark age" between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, either as a period of ignorance and savagery, or a lack of known historic records.

The idea of the "Dark Ages" while deprecated among scholars still sees widespread use among the general public. When it was used as a scholarly term it referred to a break in the written record, especially when previously literate societies stopped producing written works. The term is still used to some extent in that sense for ancient Greece between the Bronze Age Collapse and the Classical Age. If the concept of the "dark middle age" is applicable at all, it would be specific for western Europe from the 5th to 8th centuries, as the legacy of written records, architecture and artifacts was meager, but far from absent - even in the "darkest" times someone in Europe was writing things down and the erstwhile much neglected oral record (often in the form of sagas or legends) preserves some things also confirmed by archaeology. Finally, many peoples outside the Roman Empire were illiterate both during and after the Roman age, and appear to have been barely affected by the fall of Rome, if at all.

Many non-Western civilizations saw tremendous progress during this millennium. The Islamic Golden Age developed the Graeco-Roman heritage of philosophy, medicine, architecture and art. And even within Europe, there were periods of tremendous advancement like the "Carolingian renaissance" under Charlemagne or the High Medieval era when cities flourished and scholasticism (later derided as "monks arguing about how many angels can dance on a pinpoint" by anti-Catholic authors) reached levels of sophistication comparable to ancient philosophy.

For those and other reasons, the term "Middle Ages" has been challenged by historians since the 20th century; some preferring to call it the "postclassical age".

The 19th century romantic movement revised the patronising view of the Middle Ages, and depicted medieval life as close to nature, full of adventure and mystery. Nationalist movements searched for a common past, and the re-interpretation of legends such as the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf, the Finnish Kalevala (composed in the 19th century but based on oral traditions claimed to be medieval), King Arthur and Robin Hood.

Since the 19th century, the Middle Ages and their folklore have inspired fiction; both historical fiction, horror fiction and fantasy worlds, including Dracula, JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and some Astrid Lindgren works. Goethe's magnum opus "Faust" is ultimately based on a medieval folk tale and the famous first scene occurs (according to stage directions) "in a high Gothic room". The Middle Ages are a popular setting for reenactment and live-action roleplaying. "Renaissance fares" or "middle age markets" are held in many towns aiming for more or less accurate recreations of medieval times.

The music of the Middle Ages was the predecessor for European classical music and folk music, as well as contemporary medieval music with varying degrees of authenticity. Among perhaps the best known pieces of medieval music are the Carmina Burana (songs from Benediktbeuren in Bavaria) which are however best known with the melodies Carl Orff added to them as scholarship could not recreate the original melodies back then - it now can and the medieval melodies of course sound nothing like what Orff created. Medieval inspired music (again of varying degrees of authenticity) is often played at Middle Age Markets and some of the bands from that subculture have achieved mainstream success.

• Belfries of Belgium and France
• Castles
• Gothic architecture
• Grand houses
• Longobard sites
• Old towns