1. Europeans suffered economic dislocations and demographic disasters in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
2. Europe suffered from depressions in trade and industry, but then recovered.
3. Economic, psychological, and social factors led the lower classes in rural and urban areas to revolt, adding to the upheaval of the period.
4. Wars, weakening central authority, and questions about royal succession reflected the considerable political instability of the period.
5. After the thirteenth century, the Byzantine Empire declined until it was finally overwhelmed by the expanding Ottoman Empire in 1453.
