Period· The columns of time
Middle Ages
500 → 1500
A thousand years named by the people who came afterwards, and named as the gap between two ages they liked better. The name has stuck so well that it is easy to forget it was an insult.
What the evidence shows
Renaissance scholars coined the label because they saw themselves as reaching back over a hole to recover antiquity. The ten centuries they wrote off, from about 500 to about 1500, contain the spread of Islam, the Song dynasty and its printed books, the Mongol empire, the gold states of West Africa, the heavy plough and the horse collar, the first universities, and a plague that killed a large share of Eurasia's people. None of that is a gap. What the name records is the opinion of the fifteenth century about itself. That is a real historical fact, though not the one the label seems to state.
Bounds and conventions
Purely conventional, openly Eurocentric, and kept anyway. The alternative would be to invent a neutral name that no reader recognises, which buys accuracy at the cost of being understood. The honest course is to use the familiar word and to say here what it is worth.
500 to 1500. A European division, with no equivalent in most other cultural areas.