Nobody in 1300 thought they were medieval
The names we give historical periods were almost all handed out afterwards, usually by people with an opinion. MEDIEVAL means belonging to the middle age, and the idea of a middle age came from Italian scholars in the 1400s who saw themselves as reviving the ANCIENT world after a long gap. The thousand years in between became, in their account, a dull stretch in the middle.
The RENAISSANCE got its name even later — the French historian Jules Michelet used it for a whole period in 1855, and it stuck. The Dark Ages, the Industrial Revolution, the Victorian era: each is a label someone chose looking back, and each carries an argument about what mattered. People living through them simply lived in the present. Historians have largely dropped the Dark Ages for exactly this reason: the centuries it described produced Beowulf, the great illuminated gospel books, Charlemagne's schools and the preservation of a large share of the classical writing that the Renaissance later claimed to rediscover.
The calendar has seams in it
There is no year zero. The BC and AD system was worked out by a monk, Dionysius Exiguus, around AD 525, and it runs straight from 1 BC to AD 1, so the third millennium properly began in 2001 rather than 2000. His date for the birth of Jesus is also generally thought to be off by several years.
Britain lost eleven days in 1752. The old Julian calendar had drifted against the seasons, and when Britain finally adopted the Gregorian calendar that most of Catholic Europe had used since 1582, Wednesday 2 September was followed directly by Thursday 14 September. The year had also officially started on 25 March until then, and the change still shows: the British tax year begins on 6 April because the old quarter day of 25 March, pushed forward by the eleven lost days, landed there. Russia did not switch until 1918, so its October Revolution happened in November by everyone else's reckoning.
What the grid covers
The words run across the whole span: the PHARAOH and PYRAMID of Egypt, the KNIGHT and CASTLE of the MEDIEVAL KINGDOM, the CRUSADE, the PLAGUE, the EXPLORER and the VOYAGE, the COLONY and the CONQUEST that followed, and the REVOLUTION that tipped a THRONE over. EMPIRE, DYNASTY, MONARCH and EMPRESS are the vocabulary of who held power; TREATY and BATTLE are how it changed hands. The EMPRESS is a reminder that the list of rulers is not only men. Wu Zetian declared herself emperor of China in 690 and ruled in her own name for fifteen years, the only woman ever to do so; Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great each ran a state for decades; and Hatshepsut ruled Egypt as a PHARAOH, depicted in statues with the ceremonial false beard of the office.
Every one of these has a sub-topic of its own with a dedicated grid, from ancient Egypt to the space race. Several of the places are still standing, and our world landmarks page covers the ones you can visit.