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Eventually most of the invading tribes were converted to Christianity and a new unifying force, the Christian religion, began to assert itself. Christianity influenced art throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and art developed almost exclusively as a religious enterprise. Artists decorated churches and copied and illustrated religious literature. Representational or naturalistic art was not practiced during the Middle Ages. The reason for this was that artists had to be very careful in their portrayals of Jesus and other Christian religious figures. For example, the importance of a person determined their size in a picture. Servants had to be portrayed as smaller than their masters, Kings had to be larger than their subjects, and so forth. This conceptualization of imagery created some problems for artists, especially when they painted pictures of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus. Consequently, medieval art was more often a statement about faith and religious dogma than about visual reality. The best example of how Europe changed during the Middle Ages lies in the method of construction of churches. Early in the Middle Ages, churches were constructed like fortresses in a style known as Romanesque. Their walls were thick and their windows were narrow. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, when the only wars were between competing Christian armies, churches began to soar to enormous heights with huge stained glass windows in a style known as Gothic. Along with the change in society during the Middle Ages, there was a large increase in the population. There were sufficient young men that hundreds of thousands could be spared to go on crusades to recapture the Holy Land (modern day Israel) following the rise of Islam. Thousands were killed or died on these crusades. Clearly, the value of individual human lives had diminished. During the late Middle Ages, international commerce and trade grew. One of the unfortunate imports from the Far East, along with exotic spices and pasta, was the Plague , or the "Black Death. " This infection spread throughout the urban populations of Europe and caused a dramatic reduction in population. Since there were fewer people, there was more value placed on human life. Those who survived the plague gained property and wealth and eventually created a new social class: the merchant and banking middle class. To do business in an orderly way, the merchant class required something that was missing in the tumultuous early Middle Ages: a set of rules to govern commerce. They began to research the ancient books and manuscripts that had been preserved by monks in monasteries for centuries for what they recognized as Roman "law and order." Along with the resurrection of Roman Law came the discovery of ancient Greek science and philosophy and, subsequently, the discovery of Greek and Roman Art. Many examples of these artifacts were being uncovered as foundations were being dug for new construction. This inevitably led to the Renaissance.
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