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years’ monopoly of Christianity as a single ideological system were laid down. The
features of the medieval culture are the following: cultural heritage of antiquity,
Christian ideology, feudal dominant-servant principle of regulation of social and
economic relations. Despite countless regional differences the medieval culture

was distinguished by the universalist outlook and the society clearly divided into
three supra-ethnic subcultures: knights, clerics and peasants.
The term ‘Middle Ages’ was introduced by Italian humanists who saw this

epoch as a broad band of darkness and ignorance that separated themselves from
the glorious era of prosperity of the ancient Greco-Roman world. Thus, the term
originated primarily as an instrument of self-identifying the Renaissance which

seemed to put an end to ‘the dark Middle Ages’. However, Christianity and feudal
relations originated several centuries before the collapse of the Roman Empire
(476 AD is considered a chronological boundary between the Antiquity and

Middle Ages), and bourgeois (feudal) revolutions lasting from the late XVIth until
the beginning of XXth century showed that medieval means of mastering the
world, particularly in the peasant culture, survived the Renaissance and a number
of other cultural and historical eras.

2. Christianity in Byzantium’s culture

The foundation of medieval culture is Christianity - the religious system that
emerged in the first century BC by rethinking theological foundations of Judaism.
The Christianity postulated the faith in ‘living God’ - Jesus Christ. In the Vth

century it became the dominant form of religion in the Mediterranean basin with a
distinct recognized church organizational structure. By this time the writings of the
early Christian philosophers, theologists (so-called ‘church fathers’) had developed

the foundations of the Christian worldview. Consequently, the Christianity became
not only a system of liturgical rites (dedicated to Christ, and later - the Virgin
Mary, other saints) and the form of ideology, but also a universal value system of

medieval culture. After 395 in the Eastern Roman Empire witnessed the formation
of the early Christian superpower with its capital of Constantinople, the ‘Empire of
Christians and for Christians’, later being named the Byzantine Empire. In Western
Europe all forms of culture evolved in the struggle for supremacy between secular

power and authority of the church. In fact, the church became the most powerful
transnational feudal structure. Although Christianity emerged long before the
Middle Ages and continues to exist in the modern world, only in the medieval era

it transformed into the system of ideas about the world and a man which influenced
the outlook of the Europeans and eventually shaped the medieval culture.

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