During the Late Middle ages, medieval civilization declined. Four major factors contributed to this decline. One was the early fourteenth-century agricultural crisis and famine. Another was a silver shortage that caused prices to rise and the nobility to resort to heavy taxation, plunder, and warfare. A third factor was the Black Death that exacerbated economic troubles, prompted a spiritual crisis, provoked uprisings among peasants and townspeople, and ultimately killed up to a third of Europe's population. The final factor was the Hundred Years' War between England and France that further undermined the social and economic stability of Western Europe.

A principal symptom of this cultural crisis was the decline of papacy. Unsuccessful conflicts with France over papal authority culminated with the Babylonian Captivity during which the papacy lost much of its power and prestige. During these conflicts, critics of papal power, such as Marsiglio of Padua, gave intellectual support to assertive monarchs, arguing that because church and state operated in separate spheres, the church should not meddle in worldly affairs. The Great Schism further undermined papal authority and prestige, as more and more Europeans came to see the papacy as a corrupt institution more concerned with its wealth and worldly position than with the spiritual needs of Christians. The Conciliar Movement succeeded in healing the Schism and reenergizing the church, but failed to transform it into a constitutional system. While dealing with these challenges, the papacy also confronted the heresies led by Wycliffe and Hus, both of whom denounced clerical luxury and rejected the church's position as the sole avenue of salivation.

Mirroring the decline of the papacy was the dissolution of the scholastic theological synthesis. High-medieval theologians such as Aquinas had harmonized Aristotelian reason and Christian faith, but fourteenth-century thinkers asserted that reason and faith often contradicted each other. For example, Duns Scotus argued that Christian doctrine was the province of faith alone, and William of Ockham proposed that natural reason could not prove the existence of God or any tenets of faith. Reason, Ockham insisted, was best used to investigate the workings of nature, an idea that anticipated the modern scientific outlook.

The modern age both inherited and broke from medieval ideas and institutions. Many modern cities grew form medieval towns, and organizations ranging from the university to the centralized state had originated in the Middle Ages. Feudal traditions persisted beyond the French Revolution, influencing military values into the twentieth century. The Christian outlook that dominated the Middle Ages encouraged the inventiveness that enabled Europe to take the lead in technological development. The Middle Ages also passed to the modern age the Christian stress on individual worth and representative institutions that evolved into liberal democracies. However, the modern age fundamentally broke with the Middle Ages by reasserting the autonomy of reason, proposing the uniformity of nature's laws, stressing equality of opportunity and legal status, and asserting the objectivity of the law. Finally, unlike the medieval world-view, the modern outlook envisioned a universe that is at once comprehensible to the human mind and unresponsive to human needs.