Epilogue
Cortéz may have used the old vocabulary of vassalage when speaking of his
conquests in the Americas, but clearly the reality was so changed that we are right to
see the years around 1500 as the turning point between the Middle Ages and a new
phase of history. The Middle Ages began when the Roman provinces came into their
own. They ended as those provinces—now vastly expanded, rich, and powerful, now
“Europe,” in fact—became in turn a new imperial power, its tentacles in the New
World, Asia, and Africa. In the next centuries, as Europeans conquered most of the
world, they (as the Romans had once done) exported themselves, their values,
cultures, diseases, inventions, and institutions, while importing, usually without
meaning to, many of the people, ideas, and institutions of the groups they conquered.
In another phase, one not yet ended, former European colonies—at least some of
them—have become, in turn, the center of a new-style empire involving economic,
cultural, and (occasionally) military hegemony. It remains to be seen if this empire,
too, will eventually be overtaken by its peripheries.
Does anything now remain of the Middle Ages? Without doubt. Bits and pieces of
the past are clearly embedded in the present: universities, parliaments, ideas about
God and human nature, the papacy, Gothic churches. We cling to some of these bits
with ferocious passion, while repudiating others and allowing still more to float in and
out of our unquestioned assumptions. Many things that originated in the Middle Ages
are now so transformed that only their names are still medieval. And beyond that?
Beyond that, “persistence” is the wrong question. The past need not be replayed
because it is “us” but rather because it is “not us,” and therefore endlessly
fascinating.
