Crucially, right from the start, some of those who lived through the period recognized they were living in a new age. Among the first to state it was Leonardo Bruni, who wrote an epic, History of the Florentine People, in which he identified the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century as the end of one great age, and his own times in the early fifteenth century as the culmination of a long road back to civilization.9 This notion still underpins our sense of the boundaries of the Middle Ages—as the scope of books like this one shows.
