No period of history is more misunderstood or underappreciated than the Middle Ages.

The 10th century is from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the start of the Renaissance in the 15th.

This is especially true between the year 1000 when global warming brought grapes to England and grain to the coast of Greenland,

doubling the population and reviving town life all across Europe and 1348 after the warming had ended and the Black Death arrived from the east.

Let's take a closer look at these years.

We'll make a good start by dispelling some nonsense.

The people of the Middle Ages did not believe the earth was flat.

They knew it was round. The ancients said it was round. The fathers of the church said it was round.

They saw it shadowed during an eclipse of the moon and the shadow was round. They saw masses of ships sinking below the horizon.

Round. More nonsense. The Middle Ages were cheerless. Quite the reverse. They were full of color. Of celebrations involving everybody in town.

They invented the carnival. They revived popular drama which had lain dormant for a thousand years.

Whatever they did, whether it was sinning or fighting or repenting or falling in love or traveling thousands miles to Rome or to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, they did it with energy and gusto.

What do we owe to the Middle Ages?

How about the university? Medieval man invented it. For the first time in the history of the world, you could go to Paris or Bologna or Padua or Oxford or Prague or Cologne and study under masters of law, medicine, philosophy and theology.

And your degree, designating you as a master or a doctor, would hold good anywhere in Europe. It was an international community of scholars.

A young Thomas Aquinas born in southern Italy at the beginning of the 13th century would travel to Cologne to study philosophy under the philosopher biologist Albert LeGrate.

Then to Paris where he taught theology and philosophy, then to Rome and back to France. And this sort of thing was the rule among scholars, not the exception.

How about modern science? Thomas' teacher Albert was a biologist. Why should that surprise us? Medieval man believed that God made the world as an ordered whole.

They learned it both from scripture and from pagan thinkers such as Aristotle. Science did not burst on the scene with Galileo.

Copernicus died in the 16th century, but he was a priest astronomer at a Polish university founded in the Middle Ages.

He wasn't even the first man to suggest that the earth orbited the sun. Others adventured the suggestion.

Most prominent was the late medieval Nicholas of Cusa, a philosopher and a cardinal in the church.

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