The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were difficult ones in European history. The demographic growth and prosperity that had characterized the High Middle Ages gave way to plague, famine, social upheaval, and rampant warfare. The crises altered the structure of European society.
Plague and Famine
The signal event of the era was the Black Death, which struck Europe in 1347/1348, and returned periodically for much of the next hundred years. The contagion is believed to have originated in central Asia. It moved westward along the silk route and was pushed to the Black Sea by Mongol horsemen. Genoese traders encountered the disease at their colony of Caffa in the Crimea and transported it to western Europe, to the city of Messina in Sicily, in November 1347. It subsequently appeared in Pisa and Genoa, and then spread throughout the peninsula and the rest of Europe, traveling as far north as Iceland and moving back east through Islamic lands. It did not subside until the end of the fifteenth century.
There are few precise figures for the number of deaths. Contemporary chroniclers gave graphic descriptions of heaps of dead bodies piled in public areas but often exaggerated the losses. The standard agreement is that from one-third to one-half of Europe died of the plague and its recurrences. But the disease did not strike all towns and regions the same way. The city of Florence may have lost as much as three-quarters of its population. Milan, by contrast, probably lost no more than 10 to 15 percent. Bohemia also likely lost only 10 percent of its population.
The plague struck Europe at a time when it was already suffering the effects of a series of bad harvests. During the last decades of the thirteenth century, agricultural production in numerous areas had declined significantly. The boundaries of productive land reached their limits, and peasants worked marginal plots with diminished returns. Records from the estates of Winchester, an important grain-producing area in southern England, show that there were declines in yields of wheat, barley, and rye after 1250. Wheat yields were also down in German lands and in northern France. Evidence exists that the European climate changed on the eve of the fourteenth century. Winters and summers became colder and wetter. A series of crop failures occurred at the beginning of the century, followed by a widespread famine from 1315 through 1317. The effects of this famine were felt particularly in urban areas, which relied on outside imports of food. The commercial town of Bruges lost 5 percent of its population in six months; the cloth-producing town of Ypres lost 17 to 20 percent of its population. The mortality elsewhere in Europe may have reached as high as 10 to 25 percent, though such figures are disputed. Some scholars, chief among them the English economic historian M. M. Postan and his French counterpart Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, have cited the decreased yields and famines as evidence that Europe experienced a "subsistence" or "Malthusian" crisis, which preceded the plague and indeed paved the way for it. The interpretation remains at the core of a lively debate.
The dramatic loss of population affected the European economy. In general, the price of labor rose, while land values declined. The former helped the peasant class, which could now demand salaries for its labor; the latter hurt the nobility, whose wealth was derived from the profits of its estates. Authorities moved to forestall the changes—which threatened the traditional structure of society—by instituting wage and price controls. King Edward III in England's famous Statute of Laborers of 1351 ordered prices and wages frozen at pre-plague levels, forbade the movement of peasants from farms, and, to augment the labor force, required beggars to find work. Governments in France, Aragon, Castile, and elsewhere issued similar legislation. Economic historians tell of a "scissors effect," particularly after 1375, in which the price of wheat fell with respect to manufactured goods. In addition, the overall volume of trade declined. Exports of wine from Bordeaux declined from 100,000 tons in the first decade of the fourteenth century to 13,000 to 14,000 tons at the end of the century. The port of Genoa, one of the most active throughout the Middle Ages, experienced dramatic declines across the board.
The European economy was also affected by two important, though less-studied, factors: a shortage of bullion and the disruption of trade routes to Asia resulting from the advance of the Ottoman Turks. By the last decades of the fourteenth century the rich silver mines of central Europe and Tyrol, the source of much of the coin that sustained the earlier economic expansion, had become exhausted. They revived only toward the end of the century, with the help of new technology, and soon became augmented by the flow of specie from the New World. The Ottomans supplanted the Mongols, the traditional middleman between Europe and the East. Despite a reputation for ferocity in war, the Mongols had long been friendly to Christian traders. The Ottomans were less so. The Turkish presence expanded steadily, and in 1453 they took the great port city of Constantinople.
Scholars have long debated the broader meaning of the demographic crises and shifts in trade. Did they bring economic "depression" or did they result in a "new equilibrium," in which the standard of living, particularly among the wage-earning classes, improved? The disagreement has been particularly heated for Italy, the most commercially sophisticated part of Europe. Evidence exists on both sides. The city of Florence, for example, compensated for a decline in the overall production of wool cloth, its principal manufacture, by moving more forcefully into higher-priced silks and luxury cloth. Florence's banking industry, the international leader, all but collapsed just prior to the plague, but restructured itself, and emerged more resilient. Florentine bankers introduced the idea of limited liability, thus protecting themselves from losing more than what they invested in their businesses, and sought new markets. They remained closely attached to the papacy, a continuous source of money even in the worst of times. On the other hand, the evidence for the city of Genoa suggests that the decline in the volume of goods passing through its ports exceeded the decline in population and was not compensated for by other business ventures.
Warfare
Demographic crisis and economic change occurred against a backdrop of warfare. In Italy, where fighting among numerous autonomous states in close geographic proximity was already commonplace, the recourse to violence increased markedly. The city of Milan embarked on a series of aggressive campaigns that involved virtually all of the peninsula. This and other wars continued through the middle of the fifteenth century. In 1454, Italian states signed the Treaty of Lodi, bringing a temporary cessation of hostilities. But the truce was tenuous and at times ignored. The French under Charles VIII initiated a new round of warfare when they invaded Italy in 1494.
The most famous war of the era was the Hundred Years' War, which was fought between England and France in episodic fashion from 1337 until 1453. Much of the fighting took the form of destructive marches known as chavauchées, in which English armies rode through the French countryside burning houses and fields, inflicting heavy economic damage. The English scored impressive battlefield victories at Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415). The victories resulted in large part from superior English tactics, which included taking the defensive posture, descending from horses to fight on foot, and use of the longbow. The longbow could be fired more quickly than the traditional crossbow, yet still had impressive striking power. English archers sent thick volleys of arrows, which blunted French cavalry charges. The French clung to old methods, which corresponded to established chivalric codes of behavior, and were thus slow to respond to the English challenge. Their fortunes turned with the advent of Joan of Arc (c. 1412–1431), a young peasant girl who rallied local armies. By 1453, the French had expelled the English from all but Calais.
The Hundred Years' War was followed in short order by the Wars of the Roses in England (1455–1485) and the Burgundian wars in France (1470–1493). Both were essentially dynastic struggles arising from disputes within the ruling elite. In the Holy Roman Empire a series of bitter wars broke out between the emperor and religious dissenters, the Hussites. In Spain, attempts to retake land from the Muslims, the Reconquista, were ongoing; the kingdom of Aragon was involved in the Italian Wars through connections in southern Italy. Popes spearheaded crusades against the Muslim Ottomans. The crusade to Nicopolis in 1396 ended in a humiliating defeat for the Christians.
Some scholars have directly linked the increase in warfare and violence to the crises of plague and famine. In a study of eastern Normandy, Guy Bois argues that declines in feudal rents led lords to search for additional sources of revenue. They hired themselves out as soldiers and exerted pressure on their overlords to wage wars. The wars themselves helped accentuate the effects of the other crises. Armies burned crops, which exacerbated famine, and they moved from region to region, thus spreading plague. The need to keep armies in the field for prolonged periods of time hastened the end of the old feudal system of mutual obligation and accelerated the recourse to wages. English scholars speak of a "bastard feudalism" arising from the Hundred Years' War.
Social and Political Upheaval
Europe experienced at this time numerous revolts by the lower classes. The uprisings were stimulated not by abject misery, but by a general improvement in the lot of the poor, which inclined them to seek still more from the upper classes. One of the earliest rebellions occurred in the commercially advanced region of Flanders. Artisans and peasants refused to pay taxes. The revolt, aimed at the gentry class, was soon joined by weavers in Bruges and in Ypres. The weavers briefly took control in Bruges, but the insurrection was ultimately put down by a French royal army in 1328.
A revolt known as the Jacquerie broke out in Paris in 1358. Peasants, known derisively as "Jacques," a generic name for commoners, rose up against their lords, who had been unable to protect them from the ravages of roaming bands of soldiers during the Hundred Years' War. The bands had burnt local villages and exacerbated the already profound fiscal burdens brought on the peasantry by the war. In 1356 King John II (d. 1364) had been captured by the English in battle and the nobility, obliged to ransom him, attempted to shift some of the responsibility onto the peasantry. The peasants went on a rampage and, as in Flanders, were joined by artisans. But as in Flanders, the nobles ultimately crushed the rebellion.
Perhaps the most spectacular revolt occurred in England in 1381. It too grew out of tensions over taxation. The English government imposed a series of unpopular flat or "poll" taxes to help pay for the war. These fell disproportionately on the lower classes, and with the enactment of the poll tax of 1381, artisans and peasants rose up, stormed London and outlying villages, killed the archbishop of Canterbury, and nearly toppled the young King Richard II (ruled 1377–1399). The rebels expressed egalitarian ideas, some of the most radical of the period. Their famous slogan ran thus: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?" They demanded the abolition of serfdom, the commutation of services for rents, and the elimination of the poll tax. Like their predecessors, however, they were eventually crushed by the nobility.
The most successful uprising of the period happened in Florence in 1378. Members of the lower rung of the wool cloth business, the so-called ciompi, rose up against the town government. They called on authorities to set minimum production levels in the cloth industry, thus ensuring their employment. They also sought representation in government, the right to form their own guild, and the elimination of monetary speculation by the wealthy classes. The uprising succeeded, and the ciompi dominated Florentine government for three years until it was swept aside by what some scholars have called a "patrician regime."
Church Crises
The church experienced some of the most profound crises of the era. The great institutional battle between kings and popes, with deep roots into the Middle Ages, took a dramatic turn at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The French King Philip IV (ruled 1285–1314) vied with Pope Boniface VIII (reigned 1294–1303) over the issue of taxation of the clergy. Philip sought money from the clergy to wage his wars; Boniface objected and issued the famous bull Unam Sanctam, stating in bald terms the primacy of papal authority over that of kings. Philip responded by repudiating the pope and sending men to intimidate the elderly pontiff. The exchange represented a low point in papal prestige. Boniface died shortly thereafter and Pope Clement V moved the papacy in 1309 to Avignon in France, initiating the so-called Babylonian Captivity. The papacy remained in Avignon for nearly seventy years. Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1377, but died the next year. Under pressure from a Roman mob, the conclave chose an Italian, Urban VI. Alarmed French clerics, claiming they had been coerced, repudiated the choice and elected a Frenchman, who took the name Clement VII. There were now two popes. The English, at war with France, supported the Italian pope; the Scots, at odds with the English, supported the French claimant. A conciliar movement, rooted in the work of the Italian doctor and theorist Marsilius of Padua (c. 1280–c. 1343), sought to end the dispute by means of a church council. One such assembly met at Pisa in 1409. But the two popes refused to cede authority and for a brief time there were three popes. The schism was ended at the Council of Constance (1414–1418).
If the split in the papacy increased the cynicism of European Christians, so too did the plague, famines, and other disasters of the era. Some contemporary writers spoke of the coming of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) in the introduction to his Decameron described how some citizens in Florence let go all restraint, ate too much, drank too much, and lived for the day. Others responded in precisely the opposite way, seeking refuge in their faith. The great Dutchhistorian Johan Huizingaspeaksofa "somber melancholy" that descended upon European society. Clerics were often the first line of defense against the plague, comforting those who fell sick and burying those who died. Consequently they themselves died in large numbers, leaving a crisis in leadership and a dearth of qualified men.
Popular religious movements flourished. Flagellants appeared in German and Spanish lands. Men and women formed long processionals, publicly whipping themselves in an effort to gain absolution from God. The groups often preached anti-Semitic doctrine, blaming Jews for the contagion. They acted without the consent of the established church and were ultimately condemned by the pope. In England and Bohemia respectively, John Wycliffe (c. 1320–1385) and Jan Hus (1372/ 1373–1415) preached clerical poverty, the subordination of church to state, and the primacy of scriptures in faith. Both were condemned; Hus was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance, despite royal assurances that he would not be harmed. But the doctrines of Wycliffe and Hus continued to attract followers after their deaths.
The Balance
Amid all the crises and difficulties, there were positive developments. War necessitated taxes, and taxes brought complaints. But taxes also facilitated the emergence of more centralized nation states, enabling kings to consolidate their sources of revenue, expand royal bureaucracies, and strengthen court systems. France initiated a permanent army in 1422 and King Louis XI (ruled 1461–1483) set in place the first reliable system of royal taxation. Henry Tudor, the winner of the War of the Roses, became Henry VII and increased both his legal and fiscal authority. Meanwhile, the shortage of manpower resulting from the plague hastened technical laborsaving innovations, chief among them the invention of the printing press. The movements of the Ottomans and the difficulties trading with the East encouraged overseas explorations, which led to the discovery of the New World. The wars and dislocations in Italy coincided with an intellectual and cultural flowering, which produced writers such as Petrarch (1304–1374), Boccaccio, and Lorenzo Valla (1404–1457), and artists such as Masaccio (1401–1428), Donatello (1386?–1466), and Brunelleschi (1377–1446).
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