The Late Middle Ages was the period of European history generally comprising the 14th to the 16th century (c. 1300–1500). The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern era (and, in much of Europe, the Renaissance).

Around 1300, centuries of prosperity and growth in Europe came to a halt. A series of famines and plagues, such as the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the Black Death, reduced the population to around half of what it was before the calamities. Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare. France and England experienced serious peasant uprisings: the Jacquerie, the Peasants' Revolt, as well as over a century of intermittent conflict in the Hundred Years' War. To add to the many problems of the period, the unity of the Catholic Church was shattered by the Western Schism. Collectively these events are sometimes called the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages.

Despite these crises, the 14th century was also a time of great progress within the arts and sciences. Following a renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman texts that took root in the High Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance began. The absorption of Latin texts had started before the 12th Century Renaissance through contact with Arabs during the Crusades, but the availability of important Greek texts accelerated with the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, when many Byzantine scholars had to seek refuge in the West, particularly Italy.

The Middle Ages (adjectival form: medieval, mediaeval or mediæval) is a period of European history encompassing the 5th to the 15th centuries. It is normally marked from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, accepted as the end of Classical Antiquity, until the beginning of the Renaissance and Age of Discovery, which ushered in the Modern Era. It is thus the middle period of the traditional division of Western history into Classical, Medieval, and Modern. The Middle Ages is often split into two or three sub-divisions.

In the Early Middle Ages, depopulation, deurbanization, and barbarian invasion, all of which had begun in Late Antiquity, continued apace. The barbarian invaders formed their own new kingdoms in the remains of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century North Africa and the Middle East, once part of the eastern empire, became an Islamic Empire after conquest by Muhammad's successors. Although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break was not as extreme as once put forth by historians, with most of the new kingdoms incorporating as many of the existing Roman institutions as they could. Christianity expanded in western Europe and monasteries were founded. In the 7th and 8th centuries the Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, established an empire covering much of western Europe; it lasted until the 9th century, when it succumbed to pressure from new invaders – the Vikings, Magyars, and Saracens.