What years or century did the medieval and renissance eras begin and end?
The Medieval Period begins with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Problem is that there is no one date that can be pointed to as the fall. Somewhere between the the Battle of Adrianople in 378 and the deposition of Romulus Augustus by by Odoacer in 476. The end of the Middle Ages is messier still. The year 1300 was clearly medieval throughout Europe. The year 1600 was clearly not. Some things that happened in between were the start of the Italian Renaissance in Florence (see below for more on that), the Black Death in the 1340s, the end of the Hundred Years War and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the invention of printing in 1455, the voyages of Columbus in 1492, and the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. I have heard good argument for all of the above. As a student of English History I use 1485, the end of the Wars of The Roses, but this quite idiosyncratic. The Renaissance began in Italy and rolled north. It had its roots in the 14th century with Dante and Petrar
