Chapter 13 (pp. 385- 400) and Chapter 15 Notes

Crisis and Recovery in the West
LECTURE NOTES
The Crises of the Fourteenth Century in the West
The Black Death: From Asia to Europe
• A disaster known as the Black Death struck in Asia, North Africa, and Europe. The
bubonic plague was the most common and potent form of plague. The Black Death was
spread by black rats infested with fleas who were host to the deadly bacterium Yersinia
pestis.
• The plague originated in Asia. In the early 1300s, rats accompanying Mongol troops
spread the plague into central China and by 1331 to northeastern China. In one province
in China it was reported that 90 percent of the population died. The dispersion of people
and goods throughout the Eurasian landmass also facilitated the spread of the plague. In
the 1330s it spread to Central Asia and by 1339 had reached Samarkand, a caravan stop
on the Silk Road. Trading caravans would bring it to Caffa on the Black Sea, and from
there the plague made its way to Italian ports.
• The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century was the most devastating natural disaster
in European history, ravaging Europe’s population and causing economic, social,
political, and cultural upheaval. Estimates range as high as 40 million dead.
Economic Dislocation and Social Upheaval
• The deaths of so many people had severe economic consequences. Trade declined and
some industries suffered greatly. A shortage of workers caused a dramatic rise in the
price of labor, while the decline in the number of people lowered the demand for food,
resulting in falling prices. Landlords were paying more for labor at the same time that
their rental income was declining.
Political Instability
• Political instability also plagued Europe. England and France engaged in the Hundred
Years’ War. The war began in a burst of knightly enthusiasm. By the fourteenth century
the feudal order had begun to break down. With money from taxes, kings could now hire
professional soldiers, who tended to be more reliable.

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The Decline of the Church
• These crises led to a serious decline for the church. By that time, the monarchies of
Europe were no longer willing to accept papal claims of temporal supremacy, as is
evident in the struggle between Pope Boniface VIII and King Philip IV.
• Philip IV refused to accept the pope’s position and sent a small contingent of French
forces to capture Boniface and bring him back to France for trial. The pope escaped but
soon died from the shock of his experience.
• When Pope Gregory XI died in Rome, the cardinals met and elected a new Italian pope.
Five months later a group of dissenting cardinals—the French ones—declared Urban’s
election invalid and chose a Frenchman who took the title of Clement VII and promptly
returned to Avignon. This created the Great Schism. The Great Schism led large
numbers of churchmen to take up the theory of conciliarism, or the belief that only a
general council of the church, not the pope, could reform the church.
Recovery: The Renaissance
• People who lived in Italy between 1350 and 1550 believed that they were witnessing a
rebirth of classical antiquity: the world of the Greeks and Romans. To them, this marked
a new age, which historians later called the Renaissance or rebirth. The Renaissance was
also an age of recovery from the disasters of the fourteenth century, including the Black
Death, political disorders, and economic recession.
The Intellectual Renaissance
• The emergence and growth of individualism and secularism as characteristics of the
Italian Renaissance are most noticeable in the intellectual and artistic realms.
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement based on the study of the classics,
the literary works of Greece and Rome. Humanists studied the liberal arts: grammar,
rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy or ethics, and history. Petrarch, the father of Italian
Renaissance humanism, did more than any other individual to foster its development.
• Historians have disagreed over the benefits of the Renaissance for women. Some maintain
that during the Middle Ages upper-class women in particular had greater freedom to satisfy
their emotional needs, whereas upper-class women in the Renaissance experienced a
contraction of both social and personal options as they became even more subject to male
authority.
The Artistic Renaissance
• Renaissance artists sought to imitate nature in their works of art. Their search for
naturalism became a quest for many to persuade onlookers of the reality of the object or
event they were portraying. The new style had two major developments. One
emphasized the technical side of painting: an understanding of the laws of perspective
and the geometrical organization of outdoor space and light. The second development
was the investigation of movement and anatomical structure. The realistic portrayal of
the human nude became one of the foremost preoccupations of the Italian Renaissance
artists.

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The State in the Renaissance
• Milan, Florence, and Venice proved especially adept at building strong, centralized
states. They devised systems of taxation that generated enormous revenues for the
government. The patronage of aristocrats provided financing for vast art projects through
the region.
• The development of a French territorial state was greatly advanced by King Louis XI,
known as the spider king. Louis strengthened the use of the taille, an annual direct tax,
usually on land or property. England was burdened by the cost of war and the loss of its
labor force. In 1485, when Henry Tudor established a new dynasty and created a strong
monarchical government, he ended the petty wars of the nobility by abolishing their
private armies. The peninsula of Spain also experienced the growth of a strong national
monarchy. The union of Aragon and Castile after the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand
was a major step toward unifying Spain.
Chapter 15: EUROPE IN CRISIS LECTURE NOTES
Europe in Crisis: 1560–1650
Politics and the Wars of Religion in the Sixteenth Century
• Huguenots as the French Calvinists were called, constituted only about 7 percent of the
population, but 40 to 50 percent of the French nobility became Huguenots, including the
house of Bourbon which stood next to the Valois in the royal line of succession. Towns
and provinces, which had long resisted the growing power of monarchical centralization,
were only too willing to join a revolt against the monarchy
• The greatest advocate of militant Catholicism in the second half of the sixteenth century
was King Philip II of Spain (1556–1598), the son and heir of Charles V. Philip’s reign
ushered in an age of Spanish greatness, both politically and culturally. The Catholic faith
was crucial to the Spanish people and their ruler.
• When Elizabeth Tudor, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, ascended the
throne in 1558, England was home to fewer than 4 million people. Caution and
moderation also dictated Elizabeth’s foreign policy
Economic and Social Crises
• Population trends of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveal Europe’s worsening
conditions. Europe again experienced a climate change, which lowered temperatures and
led to food shortages. Hysteria over witchcraft affected many lives, and perhaps more
than 100,000 people were prosecuted. Many would be brought to trial, tortured, and
executed.
• New economic trends also emerged. Mercantilism was the idea that nations were
prosperous if they maintained a plentiful supply of bullion. It was desirable to achieve a
favorable balance of trade in which goods exported were of greater value than those
imported, promoting an influx of gold and silver payments. Commercial expansion was
made easier by new forms of commerce such as joint-stock companies and the use of
investors.

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Seventeenth-Century Crises: Revolution and War
• The Thirty Years’ War began in 1618 in the Germanic lands of the Holy Roman Empire
as a struggle between Catholic forces and Protestant Calvinists. The war in Germany
officially ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which proclaimed that all German
states were free to determine their own religion.
• Some historians believe that the changes that occurred in the science of warfare between
1560 and 1650 constituted a military revolution. Mounted knights and archers had been
transformed into infantry armed with pikes and halberds. Sweden developed the first
standing army of conscripts. But larger armies and navies could be maintained only by
levying heavier taxes, making war a greater economic burden than ever.
Response to Crisis: The Practice of Absolutism
• An increase in monarchical power became an obvious means for achieving stability. The
result was absolutism or absolute monarchy, where sovereign power or ultimate authority
of the state rested in the hands of a king who claimed to rule by divine right, the idea that
kings received their power from God15–3a France Under Louis XIV
• France during the reign of Louis XIV has traditionally been regarded as the best example
of an absolute or divine-right monarchy in the seventeenth century. Louis controlled his
central policy-making machinery of government because it was part of his court and
household. The greatest danger to his rule came from high nobles and princes of the
blood. He eliminated this threat by removing them from the royal council and enticing
them to his court, where he could keep them preoccupied with court life. His ministers
came from new aristocratic families. Court life surrounded the Palace of Versailles and
became highly ritualized. Louis had considerably less success with the internal
administration of the kingdom. The traditional groups and institutions of French
society—the nobles, officials, town councils, guilds, and representative estates—were
simply too powerful for the king to have direct control over.
Absolutism in Central and Eastern Europe
• Frederick William, the Great Elector, laid the foundation for the Prussian state. Realizing
he had inherited a country with no natural frontiers for defense, he built an army of
40,000 men, making it the fourth largest in Europe.
• The Austrian Habsburgs had long played a significant role in European politics as Holy
Roman Emperors. By the end of the Thirty Years’ War, their hope of creating an empire
in Germany had been dashed. Their monarchy never became highly centralized because
it contained so many different national groups.
• A new Russian state emerged in the fifteenth century under the leadership of Muscovy
and its grand dukes. In the sixteenth century Ivan I became the first ruler, expanded the
territories of Russia eastward, and crushed the power of the Russian nobility. He was
known as Ivan the Terrible because of his ruthless deeds. When his dynasty came to an
end, the national assembly chose Michael Romanov as the new tsar, establishing a
dynasty that lasted more than four hundred years.
• Peter the Great traveled to the West in 1697 and returned determined to westernize
Russia. He established the city of St. Petersburg and begin to build up the Russian army
and navy. His primary goal was to “open a window to the West,” meaning an ice-free
port easily accessible to Europe.