Chapter 11: The Later Middle Ages

Prelude to Disaster

Climate Change and Famine

The period from about 1000 to about 1300 saw a warmer-than-usual climate in Europe, which underlay all the changes and vitality of the High Middle Ages.
Evidence from nature emerges through the study of Alpine and polar glaciers, tree rings, and pollen left in bogs.
Across Europe, an unusual number of storms brought torrential rains, ruining the wheat, oat, and hay crops on which people and animals almost everywhere depended.
Almost all of northern Europe suffered a Great Famine in the years 1315 to 1322, which contemporaries interpreted as a recurrence of the biblical “seven lean years” that afflicted Egypt.
Even in non-famine years, the cost of grain, livestock, and dairy products rose sharply, in part because diseases hit cattle and sheep

Social Consequences

The changing climate and resulting agrarian crisis of the fourteenth century had grave social consequences.
Poor harvests and famine led to the abandonment of homesteads.
As the subsistence crisis deepened, starving people focused their anger on the rich, speculators, and the Jews, who were often targeted as creditors fleecing the poor through pawnbroking.
Rumors spread of a plot by Jews and their agents, the lepers, to kill Christians by poisoning wells.
Based on “evidence” collected by torture, many lepers and Jews were killed, beaten, or heavily fined.
Meanwhile, the international character of trade and commerce meant that a disaster in one country had serious implications elsewhere.
Government responses to these crises were ineffectual.
The three sons of Philip the Fair who sat on the French throne between 1314 and 1328 condemned speculators who held stocks of grain back until conditions were desperate and prices high, and they forbade the sale of grain abroad.
He did try to buy grain abroad, but little was available, and such grain as reached southern English ports was stolen by looters and sold on the black market.
The king’s efforts at famine relief failed.

Popular Religion

Colder weather, failed harvests, and resulting malnourishment left Europe’s population susceptible to disease, and unfortunately for the continent, a virulent one appeared in the mid-fourteenth century.
Around 1300 improvements in ship design had allowed year-round shipping for the first time.
The most frightful of these diseases, carried on Genoese ships, first emerged in western Europe in 1347; the disease was later called the Black Death.

Pathology

Most historians and microbiologists identify the disease that spread in the fourteenth century as the bubonic plague, which is caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis
The disease normally afflicts rats.
Fleas living on the infected rats drink their blood and then pass the bacteria that cause the plague on to the next rat they bite.
The fourteenth-century outbreak showed many similarities to the nineteenth-century one, but also some differences.
There are no reports of massive rat die-offs in fourteenth-century records.
Though there is some disagreement about exactly what kind of disease the plague was, there is no dispute about its dreadful effects on the body.
The classic symptom of the bubonic plague was a growth the size of a nut or an apple in the armpit, in the groin, or on the neck.
Finally, the victim began to cough violently and spit blood.
This stage, indicating the presence of millions of bacilli in the bloodstream, signaled the end, and death followed in two or three days.
The coughing also released those pathogens into the air, infecting others when they were breathed in and beginning the deadly cycle again on new victims.

Spread of the Disease

Plague symptoms were first described in 1331 in southwestern China, then part of the Mongol Empire.
Plague-infested rats accompanied Mongol armies and merchant caravans carrying silk, spices, and gold across Central Asia in the 1330s.
In October 1347 Genoese ships brought the plague from Kaffa to Messina, from which it spread across Sicily.
Venice and Genoa were hit in January 1348, and from the port of Pisa the disease spread south to Rome and east to Florence and all of Tuscany.
Medieval urban conditions were ideal for the spread of disease. Narrow streets were filled with refuse, human excrement, and dead animals.
Houses whose upper stories projected over the lower ones blocked light and air.
Of a total English population of perhaps 4.2 million, probably 1.4 million died of the Black Death.
Densely populated Italian cities endured incredible losses.
Nor did central and eastern Europe escape the ravages of the disease.
One chronicler records that, in the summer and autumn of 1349, between five hundred and six hundred died every day in Vienna.
Across Europe the Black Death recurred intermittently from the 1360s to 1400.
It reappeared from time to time over the following centuries as well, though never with the same virulence because by then Europeans now had some resistance.
And only in 1947, six centuries after the arrival of the plague in Europe, did the American microbiologist Selman Waksman discover an effective treatment, streptomycin.
Plague continues to infect rodent and human populations sporadically today.

Care of the Sick

Fourteenth-century medical literature indicates that physicians tried many different methods to prevent and treat the plague.
People understood that plague and other diseases could be transmitted person to person, and they observed that crowded cities had high death rates, especially when the weather was warm and moist.
People tried anything they thought might help.
Perhaps loud sounds like ringing church bells or firing the newly invented cannon would clean poisoned air.
Medicines made from plants that were bumpy or that oozed liquid might work, keeping the more dangerous swelling and oozing of the plague away.
It is noteworthy that, in an age of mounting criticism of clerical wealth, the behavior of the clergy during the plague was often exemplary.
Priests, monks, and nuns cared for the sick and buried the dead.
The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), describing the course of the disease in Florence in the preface to his book of tales, The Decameron, identified what many knew— that the disease passed from person to person.
To avoid contagion, wealthier people often fled cities for the countryside, though sometimes this simply spread the plague faster.

Economic, Religious, and Cultural Effects

Economic historians and demographers sharply dispute the impact of the plague on the economy in the late fourteenth century.
The traditional view that the plague had a disastrous effect has been greatly modified.
The Black Death did bring on a general European inflation.
High mortality produced a fall in production, shortages of goods, and a general rise in prices.
The plague also had effects on religious practices.
Despite Boccaccio’s comments about family members’ coldness, people were saddened by the loss of their loved ones, especially their children.
Believing that the Black Death was God’s punishment for humanity’s wickedness, some Christians turned to the severest forms of asceticism and frenzied religious fervor, joining groups of flagellants, who whipped and scourged themselves as penance for their and society’s sins.
Along with seeing the plague as a call to reform their own behavior, however, people also searched for scapegoats, and savage cruelty sometimes resulted.
The literature and art of the late Middle Ages reveal a people gripped by morbid concern with death.
The years of the Black Death witnessed the foundation of new colleges at old universities and of entirely new universities.
As is often true with devastating events, the plague highlighted central qualities of medieval society: deep religious feeling, suspicion of those who were different, and a view of the world shaped largely by oral tradition, with a bit of classical knowledge mixed in among the educated elite.

The Hundred Years’ War

The plague ravaged populations in Asia, North Africa, and Europe; in western Europe a long international war that began a decade or so before the plague struck and lasted well into the next century added further misery.
From 1337 to 1453 the two countries intermittently fought one another in what was the longest war in European history, ultimately dubbed the Hundred Years’ War, though it actually lasted 116 years.

Causes

The Hundred Years’ War had a number of causes, including disagreements over rights to land, a dispute over the succession to the French throne, and economic conflicts.
The immediate political cause of the war was a disagreement over who would inherit the French throne after Charles IV of France, the last surviving son of Philip the Fair, died childless in 1328.
In 1329 Edward III formally recognized Philip VI’s lordship over Aquitaine.
Eight years later, Philip, eager to exercise full French jurisdiction there, confiscated the duchy.
The governments of both England and France manipulated public opinion to support the war.
The English public was convinced that the war was waged for one reason: to secure for King Edward the French crown he had been unjustly denied.
Economic factors involving the wool trade and the control of Flemish towns were linked to these political issues.
The war also presented opportunities for wealth and advancement. Poor and idle knights were promised regular wages.
Criminals who enlisted were granted pardons.
The great nobles expected to be rewarded with estates.
Royal exhortations to the troops before battles repeatedly stressed that, if victorious, the men might keep whatever they seized.

English Successes

The war began with a series of French sea raids on English coastal towns in 1337, but the French fleet was almost completely destroyed when it attempted to land soldiers on English soil, and from that point on the war was fought almost entirely in France and the Low Countries.
During the war’s early stages, England was highly successful.
At Crécy in northern France in 1346, English longbowmen scored a great victory over French knights and crossbowmen.
Edward was not able to take all of France, but the English held Aquitaine and other provinces, and allied themselves with many of France’s nobles.
War began again in 1415 when the able English soldier-king Henry V (r. 1413–1422) invaded France.
At Agincourt, Henry’s army defeated a much larger French force, again primarily through the skill of English longbowmen.
The English continued their victories, however, and besieged the city of Orléans, the only major city in northern France not under their control.
But the French cause was not lost.

Joan of Arc and France’s Victory

The ultimate French success rests heavily on the actions of Joan, an obscure French peasant girl whose vision and military leadership revived French fortunes and led to victory.
Joan traveled to the French court wearing male clothing.
She secured his support to travel with the French army to Orléans dressed as a knight— with borrowed armor and sword.
There she dictated a letter to the English ordering them to surrender.
Such words coming from a teenage girl— even one inspired by God— were laughable given the recent course of the conflict, but Joan was amazingly successful.
The king made Joan co-commander of the entire army, and she led it to a string of victories; other cities simply surrendered without a fight and returned their allegiance to France.
Joan and the French army continued their fight against the English and their Burgundian allies.
In 1430 the Burgundians captured Joan. Charles refused to ransom her, and she was sold to the English.
A church court headed by a pro-English bishop tried her for heresy, and though nothing she had done was heretical by church doctrine, she was found guilty and burned at the stake in the marketplace at Rouen.
A new trial in 1456— requested by Charles VII, who either had second thoughts about his abandonment of Joan or did not wish to be associated with a condemned heretic— was held by the pope.
It cleared her of all charges and declared her a martyr.
She became a political symbol of France from that point on, and sometimes also a symbol of the Catholic Church in opposition to the government of France.

Aftermath

In France thousands of soldiers and civilians had been slaughtered and hundreds of thousands of acres of rich farmland ruined, leaving the rural economy of many areas a shambles.
The war had wreaked havoc in England as well, even though only the southern coastal ports saw actual battle.
England spent the huge sum of over £5 million on the war effort, and despite the money raised by some victories, the net result was an enormous financial loss.
In both England and France, men of all social classes had volunteered to serve in the war in the hope of acquiring booty and becoming rich, and some were successful in the early years of the war.
The war stimulated technological experimentation, especially with artillery.
Cannon revolutionized warfare, making the stone castle no longer impregnable.
The long war also had a profound impact on the political and cultural lives of the two countries.
Most notably, it stimulated the development of the English Parliament.
Between 1250 and 1450 representative assemblies flourished in many European countries.
The frequency of the meetings is significant.
Representative assemblies were becoming a habit.
Knights and wealthy urban residents— or the “Commons,” as they came to be called— recognized their mutual interests and began to meet apart from the great lords.
In England, theoretical consent to taxation and legislation was given in one assembly for the entire country.
France had no such single assembly; instead, there were many regional or provincial assemblies.
In both countries, however, the war did promote the growth of nationalism— the feeling of unity and identity that binds together a people.
After victories, each country experienced a surge of pride in its military strength.

Challenges to the Church

The Babylonian Captivity and Great Schism

Conflicts between the secular rulers of Europe and the popes were common throughout the High Middle Ages, and in the early fourteenth century the dispute between King Philip the Fair of France and Pope Boniface VIII became particularly bitter.
The popes lived in Avignon from 1309 to 1376, a period in church history often called the Babylonian Captivity (referring to the seventy years the ancient Hebrews were held captive in Mesopotamian Babylon).
The Babylonian Captivity badly damaged papal prestige.
The seven popes at Avignon concentrated on bureaucratic and financial matters to the exclusion of spiritual objectives, and the general atmosphere was one of luxury and extravagance, which was also the case at many bishops’ courts.
Roman citizens pressured the cardinals to elect an Italian, and they chose a distinguished administrator, the archbishop of Bari, Bartolomeo Prignano, who took the name Urban VI.
Urban VI (pontificate 1378– 1389) had excellent intentions for church reform, but he went about it in a tactless manner.
The cardinals then elected Cardinal Robert of Geneva, the cousin of King Charles V of France, as pope.
Cardinal Robert took the name Clement VII. There were thus two popes in 1378— Urban at Rome and Clement VII (pontificate 1378–1394) at Avignon.
So began the Great Schism, which divided Western Christendom until 1417.
The powers of Europe aligned themselves with Urban or Clement along strictly political lines.
France naturally recognized the French pope, Clement.
The schism weakened the religious faith of many Christians and brought church leadership into serious disrepute.

Critiques, Divisions, and Councils

Criticism of the church during the Avignon papacy and the Great Schism often came from the ranks of highly learned clergy and lay professionals.
One of these was William of Occam (1289?–1347?), a Franciscan friar and philosopher who predated the Great Schism but saw the papal court at Avignon during the Babylonian Captivity.
The Italian lawyer and university official Marsiglio of Padua (ca. 1275– 1342) agreed with Occam.
In his Defensor Pacis (The Defender of the Peace), Marsiglio argued against the medieval idea of a society governed by both church and state, with church supreme.
Marsiglio was excommunicated for these radical ideas, and his work was condemned as heresy— as was Occam’s— but in the later part of the fourteenth century many thinkers agreed with these two critics of the papacy.
They believed that reform of the church could best be achieved through periodic assemblies, or councils, representing all the Christian people.
Those who argued this position were called conciliarists
The English scholar and theologian John Wyclif (ca. 1330–1384) went further than the conciliarists in his argument against medieval church structure.
The ongoing schism threatened the church, and in response to continued calls throughout Europe for a council, the cardinals of Rome and Avignon summoned a council at Pisa in 1409.
Finally, under pressure from the German emperor Sigismund, a great council met at the imperial city of Constance (1414–1418).
A conclave elected a new leader, the Roman cardinal Colonna, who took the name Martin V (pontificate 1417–1431).
Martin proceeded to dissolve the council. Nothing was done about reform, the third objective of the council.
But the schism and the conciliar movement had exposed the crying need for ecclesiastical reform, thus laying the foundation for the great reform efforts of the sixteenth century.

Lay Piety and Mysticism

The failings of the Avignon papacy followed by the scandal of the Great Schism did much to weaken the spiritual mystique of the clergy in the popular mind.
In the thirteenth century lay Christian men and women had formed confraternities, voluntary lay groups organized by occupation, devotional preference, neighborhood, or charitable activity.
In Holland beginning in the late fourteenth century, a group of pious laypeople called the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life lived in stark simplicity while daily carrying out the Gospel teaching of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick.
For some individuals, both laypeople and clerics, religious devotion included mystical experiences.
Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373) was a noblewoman who journeyed to Rome after her husband’s death.
She began to see visions and gave advice based on these visions to both laypeople and church officials.
The confraternities and mystics were generally not considered heretical unless they began to challenge the authority of the papacy the way Wyclif, Hus, and some conciliarists did.
However, the movement of lay piety did alter many people’s perceptions of their own spiritual power.

Social Unrest in a Changing Society

Peasant Revolts

Nobles and clergy lived on the food produced by peasant labor, thinking little of adding taxes to the burden of peasant life.
The first large-scale rebellion was in the Flanders region of present-day Belgium in the 1320s.
In order to satisfy peace agreements, Flemish peasants were forced to pay taxes to the French, who claimed fiscal rights over the county of Flanders.
In the following decades, revolts broke out in many other places.
In 1358, when French taxation for the Hundred Years’ War fell heavily on the poor, the frustrations of the French peasantry exploded in a massive uprising called the Jacquerie, after a mythical agricultural laborer, Jacques Bonhomme (Good Fellow).
In England the Black Death drastically cut the labor supply, and as a result peasants demanded higher wages and fewer manorial obligations.
The English revolt was ignited by the reimposition of a tax on all adult males.
Despite widespread opposition to the tax in 1380, the royal council ordered the sheriffs to collect it again in 1381.
This led to a major uprising known as the English Peasants’ Revolt, which involved thousands of people.
The boy-king Richard II (r. 1377–1399) met the leaders of the revolt, agreed to charters ensuring peasants’ freedom, tricked them with false promises, and then crushed the uprising with terrible ferocity.
The English Peasants’ Revolt did not bring social equality to England, but rural serfdom continued to decline, disappearing in England by 1550.

Urban Conflicts

In Flanders, France, and England, peasant revolts often blended with conflicts involving workers in cities.
Unrest also occurred in Italian, Spanish, and German cities.
The urban revolts had their roots in the changing conditions of work.
While capitalism provided opportunities for some artisans to become investors and entrepreneurs, especially in cloth production, for many it led to a decrease in income and status.
Urban uprisings were also sparked by issues involving honor, such as employers’ requiring workers to do tasks they regarded as beneath them.
Guilds increasingly came to view the honor of their work as tied to an all-male workplace.
When urban economies were expanding in the High Middle Ages, the master’s wife and daughters worked alongside him, and female domestic servants also carried out productive tasks.

Sex in the City

Peasant and urban revolts and riots had clear economic bases, but some historians have suggested that late medieval marital patterns may have also played a role.
In northwestern Europe, people believed that couples should be economically independent before they married.
The most unusual feature of this pattern was the late age of marriage for women.
Unlike in earlier time periods and in most other parts of the world, a woman in late medieval northern and western Europe generally entered marriage as an adult in her twenties and took charge of running a household immediately.
She also had fewer pregnancies than a woman who married earlier, though not necessarily fewer surviving children.
Men of all social groups had long tended to be older than women when they married.
In general, men were in their middle or late twenties at first marriage, with wealthier urban merchants often much older.
The prohibitions on marriage for certain groups of men and the late age of marriage for most men meant that cities and villages were filled with large numbers of young adult men with no family responsibilities who often formed the core of riots and unrest.
Young men associated visiting brothels with achieving manhood; for the women themselves, of course, their activities were work.
Some women had no choice, for they had been traded to the brothel manager by their parents or some other person as payment for debt, or had quickly become indebted to the manager (most of whom were men) for the clothes and other finery regarded as essential to their occupation.
Though selling sex for money was legal in the Middle Ages, the position of women who did so was always marginal.
In the late fifteenth century cities began to limit brothel residents’ freedom of movement and choice of clothing, requiring them to wear distinctive head coverings or bands on their clothing so that they would not be mistaken for “honorable” women.
Along with buying sex, young men also took it by force.
Unmarried women often found it difficult to avoid sexual contact.
According to laws regarding rape in most parts of Europe, the victim had to prove that she had cried out and had attempted to repel the attacker, and she had to bring the charge within a short period of time after the attack had happened.
Same-sex relations— what in the late nineteenth century would be termed “homosexuality”— were another feature of medieval urban life (and of village life, though there are very few sources relating to sexual relations of any type in the rural context).
Same-sex relations were of relatively little concern to church or state authorities in the early Middle Ages, but this attitude changed beginning in the late twelfth century.
Between 1432 and the abolition of the board in 1502, about seventeen thousand men came to its attention, which, even over a seventy-year period, represents a great number in a population of about forty thousand.
Thus in Florence, and no doubt elsewhere in Europe, sodomy was not a marginal practice, which may account for the fact that, despite harsh laws and special courts, actual executions for sodomy were rare.
However, female-female desire was expressed in songs, plays, and stories, as was male-male desire, offering evidence of the way people understood same-sex relations.

Fur-Collar Crime

The Hundred Years’ War had provided employment and opportunity for thousands of idle and fortuneseeking knights.
But during periods of truce and after the war finally ended, many nobles once again had little to do. Inflation hurt them.
This “fur-collar crime” involved both violence and fraud.
Groups of noble bandits roamed the English countryside, stealing from both rich and poor.
Aristocratic violence led to revolt, and it also shaped popular culture.
The ballads of Robin Hood, a collection of folk legends from late medieval England, describe the adventures of the outlaw hero and his merry men as they avenge the common people against furcollar criminals— grasping landlords, wicked sheriffs, and mercenary churchmen.

Ethnic Tensions and Restrictions

Large numbers of people in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries migrated from one part of Europe to another in search of land, food, and work: the English into Scotland and Ireland; Germans, French, and Flemings into Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary; Christians into Muslim Spain. Everywhere in Europe, towns recruited people from the countryside as well.
In the early periods of conquest and colonization, and in all regions with extensive migrations, a legal dualism existed: native peoples remained subject to their traditional laws; newcomers brought and were subject to the laws of the countries from which they came.
The great exception to this broad pattern of legal pluralism was Ireland.
From the start, the English practiced an extreme form of discrimination toward the native Irish.
The English distinguished between the free and the unfree, and the entire Irish population, simply by the fact of Irish birth, was unfree.
The later Middle Ages witnessed a movement away from legal pluralism or dualism and toward legal homogeneity and an emphasis on blood descent.
The most extensive attempt to prevent intermarriage and protect ethnic purity is embodied in the Statute of Kilkenny (1366), a law the ruling English imposed on Ireland, which states that “there were to be no marriages between those of immigrant and native stock; that the English inhabitants of Ireland must employ the English language and bear English names; that they must ride in the English way [that is, with saddles] and have English apparel; that no Irishmen were to be granted ecclesiastical benefices or admitted to monasteries in the English parts of Ireland.”
Late medieval chroniclers used words such as gens (race or clan) and natio (species, stock, or kind) to refer to different groups.
They held that peoples differed according to language, traditions, customs, and laws.
As Europeans increasingly came into contact with people from Africa and Asia, and particularly as they developed colonial empires, these notions of blood also became a way of conceptualizing racial categories.

Literacy and Vernacular Literature

The development of ethnic identities had many negative consequences, but a more positive effect was the increasing use of the vernacular, that is, the local language that people actually spoke, rather than Latin.
Two masterpieces of European culture, Dante’s Divine Comedy (1310–1320) and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387–1400), illustrate a sophisticated use of the rhythms and rhymes of the vernacular.
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) is an epic poem of one hundred cantos (verses), each of whose three equal parts describes one of the realms of the next world: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.
The Divine Comedy portrays contemporary and historical figures, comments on secular and ecclesiastical affairs, and draws on the Scholastic philosophy of uniting faith and reason.
Geoffrey Chaucer (1342–1400) was an official in the administrations of the English kings Edward III and Richard II and wrote poetry as an avocation.
His Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories in lengthy rhymed narrative.
Like the Divine Comedy, the Canterbury Tales reflects the cultural tensions of the times.
Ostensibly Christian, many of the pilgrims are also materialistic, sensual, and worldly, suggesting the ambivalence of the broader society’s concern for the next world and frank enjoyment of this one.
Beginning in the fourteenth century, a variety of evidence attests to the increasing literacy of laypeople.
The penetration of laymen into the higher positions of governmental administration, long the preserve of clerics, also illustrates rising lay literacy.
The spread of literacy represents a response to the needs of an increasingly complex society.
Trade, commerce, and expanding government bureaucracies required an increasing number of literate people.