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Message:: [QUOTE="kaparthy, post: 4443893, member: 57463"]To take the last point first, facts matter. We all live and learn. That is a big reason for participating here for me. Myself, I would have drawn the line at 1453 and the Fall of Constantinople for the end of the Middle Ages. That said, I can also stop and reconsider based on the argument that the end of the Thirty Years' War signaled important changes in the common worldview. The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were the foundations of modern society, at least in the European theater. My degrees are in social science (BS, MA) and I tell my conservative comrades who are engineers that human beings are more complicated than billiard balls. So, the descriptions of human action are more involved, more subtle, more nuanced. Right and wrong exist. It just takes more words to describe them. "F=ma" won't say enough about the most important aspect of being humans in societies. We like nice bright lines. September 4, 476, Roman Empire ends, Dark Ages begin. Christmas Day 800, Charlemagne crowned, Dark Age ends; Middle Age begins. But as I noted above, it is not so clear. No one saw the coronation of Charlemagne on CNN, turned to his neighbor and said, "Hey, look, the Dark Age is over." If anything marks the start of a new way of looking at the world, it could be Copernicus, or Galileo, or surely Newton. But that would ignore the radical shift in art of the Renaissance with its vivid colors and flowing human forms. Dante's Divina Commedia was written in vernacular Italian, not Latin. Latin had been changing. It was a living language even then. People who used new words and new phrasings knew that they were not imitating Cicero. And, even in 1832, Carl Friedrich Gauss published in Latin, not German. Nonetheless, I would acknowledge  Luther's Bible as the first work in modern German. Therefore, it was a landmark event in the end of the Middle Ages for more than its impact on religion. So, as above, I can accept your suggestion about the Treaty of Westphalia. On the EB, see my comments on the Spanish Armada (and the Battle of Lake Erie which is commemorated on US national bank notes). That being as it may, I wrote ten or so articles for The Celator. There, it was commonly accepted that "ancient" ended with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. They published articles about Medieval coinage and collectibles from other cultures as well. But that date for those writers and editors was pretty much set in stone. That being as it may, see also, the Celator article, "What (if anything) is a Byzantine?" by Clifton R. Fox<a href="http://www.romanity.org/htm/fox.01.en.what_if_anything_is_a_byzantine.01.htm" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.romanity.org/htm/fox.01.en.what_if_anything_is_a_byzantine.01.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.romanity.org/htm/fox.01.en.what_if_anything_is_a_byzantine.01.htm</a>Revised 3/29/96. The original version of this article appeared in the Celator [Volume 10, Number 3: March 1996]. Portions are also quoted in the book Ancient Coin Collecting by Wayne G. Sayles, published [June 1996] by Krause Publications. Right. Well, we speak, also, of the Caroliginian Renaissance, the Aquitaine Renaissance as the first false dawns of the coming new age. You would have to ask a Russian serf or an American slave of 1850 if the Middle Ages were actually over. I wrote up my definitions for the modern era for my blog here:<a href="https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-chronology-of-recent-historical.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-chronology-of-recent-historical.html" rel="nofollow">https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-chronology-of-recent-historical.html</a> Well, that is interesting. I had not considered that. Milled coinage would be the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Nothing else so completely put an end the Middle Ages (Russia and the American South excepted). And our focus here is on the coinage. Also, at that same time in the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we see the first wide acceptance of paper money. Yes, it had precursors with the Chinese. And it is a curious fact that bills of account in cuneiform on clay preceded coinage by thousands of years. But modern paper money is an artifact of true capitalism. Earlier societies had merchants, of course, but the ability to calculate risk and then buy and sell it was a turning point.[/QUOTE]

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