Around the year 1000, a variety of historical forces were set in motion that gradually reshaped European civilization. Although imperfectly understood by Europeans at the time, those forces that included feudalism, the wars of the Crusades, the rise and fall of the Catholic Church, and the re-emergence of literature and the arts gradually reached their zenith by the 1400s to recreate Europe and place its civilization on the threshold of what historians today refer to as Modern Europe.