A Short History of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Treaty of Europe (6 page)

BOOK: A Short History of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Treaty of Europe
5.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

The population loss led to profound economic and demographic change. The sudden shortage of labour gave power to the peasants and landlords were forced to compete for their services. Wages went up and freedoms were offered in exchange for work, improving the lot of peasants enormously. Workers became more mobile and no longer had to rely on long-term
contracts, moving around from one highly paid temporary job to another. Fewer people also meant more fertile land, leading to cheaper prices for land and more food for everyone. Consumption of meat and dairy products increased and countries such as Germany and the Scandinavian nations began to export their beef and butter. All of these developments would have a beneficial long-term effect, with
a significant rise in population just over a century after the plague. Of course, much of the change was not to the liking of the upper classes who made every effort to introduce wage control and to keep earnings at a pre-plague level. These efforts met with varying degrees of success, sometimes leading to the kind of social unrest that characterised much of the fourteenth century.

There is little
doubt that the horrors of the plague led fourteenth-century people to rethink their lives. Death had become an all-too-familiar, everyday part of existence and things could never really be the same again. Within a few years a cultural movement was spreading its ideas across western Europe almost as fast as the plague pandemic. The world was about to experience an intellectual transformation,
with great developments in science, art, education and countless other fields. The sometimes glorious, but more often violent, Middle Ages were about to give way to the brilliance of a new age – the Renaissance.

Rebirth

From Crisis to Renaissance in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

In the 1300s, Europe had evolved rapidly. The Holy Roman Empire was no longer the all-pervasive power that it had been since the days of Otto I. It was losing out to the local interests of the German principalities and the Emperor – who, it should be remembered, was elected to his throne – no longer wielded the power
that the position had brought in the past. This had implications for the whole of Europe where change was also very much in the air.

In Italy, for instance, which would become the heart of the Renaissance, prosperity and cultural innovation were the staples and power had devolved to city officials. However, the cities remained individual entities – city-states – competing against each other for
trade and wealth. Conurbations such as Genoa, Venice, Florence and Milan were ruled in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by powerful families. The Doge of Venice was elected annually but, inevitably, he always came from the ranks of one of the city’s wealthy families and did not wield that much power. His city, however, would reach the zenith of its power and influence in the fifteenth century,
gaining territories, including Padua, on the Italian mainland.

Florence was ruled by a group of feuding families known as the
signoria
. In 1433, Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464), who had been effectively ruling the city without ever being elected to public office, was expelled by jealous rivals. The following year, he returned and seized power, controlling it for the remainder of his life. Milan
was governed from 1395 to 1447 by 12 successive members of the Visconti family, who made their head the Duke of Milan. This was followed by the rule of five members of the wealthy Sforza family, who conquered Milan in 1450 and made it one of the leading cities of the Italian Renaissance, governing until 1499. Rome would flower once again in the fifteenth century under the enlightened papacy of the
Florentine Nicholas V (Pope 1447–55).

Across the Mediterranean to the west, the Iberian Peninsula moved ever closer to unification. Aragon, Barcelona and Valencia were linked in a federation and they were also tied with Sicily in Italy’s south. When Aragon also took Naples, Sardinia and Corsica, it gained dominance over the entire western Mediterranean, laying the foundations for the great seafaring
nation that the unified Spain was about to become. Unification arrived in 1469 with the marriage of the two powers of Castile and Aragon in the shape of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. All that remained was the 1492 eviction of the Moors from Grenada, their last foothold in this part of the world, and Spain was one.

France and England, on the other hand, had been at war with one
another on and off since 1337. The Hundred Years War actually lasted longer than a hundred years, only coming to an end in 1453 when the French recaptured Bordeaux, leaving the port of Calais as the English king’s only possession in France. It was a different kind of war and, involving as it did other countries from across the continent (Aragon, Castile, Scotland and Burgundy all took sides), it provided
a model for future conflicts. It arose out of the feudal issue of vassalage. Since William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, the kings of England had remained vassals of the king of France. As they had gained land in France, largely through marriage, they had been reluctant to pay the French king the homage he was due. So the series of battles took place that made up the war and French nationalism
became enshrined in the body of a nineteen-year-old woman – Joan of Arc, the ‘Maid of Orléans’ (c. 1412–31).

There were cataclysmic changes, too, in the north. In 1397, Queen Margaret of Norway (ruled 1388–1412) succeeded in uniting the crowns of the Scandinavian monarchies into the Kalmar Union that would last, intermittently, until 1523. To the dismay of the Slavs, Eastern Europe had been gradually
Germanised since the twelfth century, as Germans had migrated to the vast empty territories of the east. This was coupled with the warlike Teutonic Knights’ conquest of Prussia. In the face of these irritants and the threat of Mongol invasion from the east, the Czechs and the Poles began to organise themselves into independent states, with religious thinker and philosopher, Jan Hus, playing
a large part in the development of Czech nationalism.

Meanwhile, the Poles had become increasingly concerned by the Teutonic Knights’ envious glances at Lithuania. In 1386, Poland and Lithuania became linked when Grand Duke Jagiello of Lithuania (ruled 1386–1434) married Hedwig, a Polish princess. Jagiello became king of both countries and, at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1410, he decisively defeated
the Teutonic Knights, securing the fledgling Polish state and ending the power of the Teutonic order once and for all.

In the thirteenth century, the Mongols had conquered Russia and it had become no more than a tributary state of the Golden Horde. In 1327, Ivan I of Moscow moved the country’s capital from Kiev to Moscow and the Mongol hold on the country began to decrease following their defeat
by Grand Prince Dmitri Donskoy at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380. Further south, the once great power of Byzantium had long faded and now it faced the growing threat of the Turks to the east. They had created the Ottoman Empire, named for their leader Osman I (ruled 1299–1326), and were now moving into eastern Europe where they would dominate for many centuries. In 1453, Constantinople’s defences
were breached by Sultan Mehmet II’s cannon and he entered the city. A thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the Eastern Empire, last vestige of that great imperial power, fell.

From Feudalism to the Modern State

In the feudal system that had prevailed for so long, the king had been at the top of a pyramid of power. Beneath him were countless smaller powers, each dependent
on the one above. At the bottom of the heap, of course, was the lowly peasant. There was a gradual evolution of this system as the fourteenth century arrived, the Roman notion of ‘the common good’ becoming popular and kings becoming more interested in the good of the people as a whole, rather than in just serving their own interests and those of their nobles. Rather than being identified by their
position in the hierarchy of power, people were now located in a social grouping, known as an ‘estate’. Generally speaking, there were three groupings – the nobility, the clergy and the commoners. This last grouping could be further split into a number of sections – the burghers or urban middle class (a new phenomenon) and the peasants.

In this early form of modern society, therefore, people
were no longer defined by wealth or power but by their function and by corporate institutions and, the clergy excepted, heredity became the key factor in deciding to which estate an individual belonged. The nobility’s military function and ownership of land ensured that, despite the growth of standing armies, their role was still vital, and they often governed the countryside through regional assemblies
which administered justice. It was, however, becoming increasingly difficult for the part-time gentleman soldier to carry out his duties as before. Armies needed proper training and a body of professional military officers began to emerge. The estate of the burghers was controlled by the freedoms and rights of the self-governing cities and especially of the city guilds, associations of craftsmen.
There was also a division between these free men and the vast majority of people who owned no property.

Increasingly, these estates would meet to govern and make decisions regarding taxes and so on. No longer were countries governed purely on the whim of a monarch. He often had to take the estates’ wishes into consideration and had to seek their authority for tax increases. A charter of rights
was sometimes created to protect the rights of the people. Thus, although the king increasingly became the central figure in a country, absolutism was avoided, as is evident in France in the fifteenth century where the embryonic modern state first began to appear during the reign of Louis XI (ruled 1461–1483). In the Holy Roman Empire, an assembly known as the Imperial Diet – the Reichstag – had
been meeting informally for centuries; it, too, began to gain power at the expense of the emperor.

The creation of geographically defined nation states eroded the power of the papacy that had reigned supreme for so long. People no longer united behind the Pope, but behind their king, feeling united by their ability as a group to withstand attack from another country or people. National governments
increased their authority with the appointment of civil servants, drawn often from the bourgeoisie. Permanent standing armies also encouraged the centralisation of power. Rich merchants, unwilling to see a change in the status quo, made substantial loans to the crown to ensure that outside threats could be dealt with, either by a well-equipped army or by the hiring of mercenaries.

The Western
Schism

The Gascon, Bertrand le Got, became Pope as Clement V in 1305 and, four years later, relocated the papacy to Avignon on grounds of security – Rome was dangerously unstable. The Avignon Papacy would last until 1378 and, during that time of seven French popes and a French-dominated College of Cardinals, Christendom was divided. Some countries rejected the authority of the Avignon popes.

Widespread discontent in the Church manifested itself sometimes in a retreat into mysticism or sometimes in downright dissent. Dissent and discussion of Church reform were, of course, ill-advised, given the threat of the Inquisition, the institution created by the Catholic Church to suppress heresy, a task which it performed with ruthless enthusiasm. Nonetheless, men such as the Englishman, John Wycliffe
(c.1330–84) and the Czech, Jan Hus (c.1372–1415), were severely critical of many elements of the Church, from its wealth to the concept of papal supremacy. Hus was burned to death for his beliefs and Wycliffe’s already-buried body was exhumed in 1428 and burned.

Gregory XI (Pope 1370–78) returned the papacy to Rome but, when he died shortly after doing so, the Avignon papacy’s reputation for
corruption and French influence led to riots, with Romans demanding a Roman pope. Since no suitable candidate was available, the cardinals elected the Neapolitan Urban VI (Pope 1378–89) but, regretting their decision, shortly afterwards elected another pope – the so-called antipope Clement VII – and relocated the papacy once again to Avignon. Never before had an antipope been elected by the same College
of Cardinals as had elected the legitimate pope and, to make matters worse, they elected a third pope in 1409 when neither of the rivals turned up at a council convened to reconcile their differences. The diplomatic crisis that followed divided Europe.

Only in 1414 did the schism come to an end when the reformist conciliar movement won the day at the Council of Constance. Summoned by the German
king, Sigismund of Luxembourg, 29 cardinals, 100 ‘learned doctors of law and divinity’, 134 abbots and 183 bishops and archbishops converged on the small lakeside town of Constance in Switzerland. The cardinals deposed all three popes and elected Odo Colonna as Martin V (Pope 1417–31). Instead of embarking on a programme of reform, however, he immediately published confirmation of all the decisions
made by his predecessors.

The Renaissance

The term ‘Renaissance’, meaning ‘rebirth’, as a description of the period from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, was first used in 1855 by the French historian Jules Michelet. Although it is a term whose meaning is widely understood, it is, nonetheless, difficult to define precisely. What is certain, however, is that it describes a period of remarkable
achievement in a great many fields, from art to science, philosophy to poetry and theology to music. In a letter to Paul of Middleburg, the humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino wrote in 1492:

If we are to call any age golden, it is beyond doubt that age which brings forth golden talents in different places. That such is true of this our age [no one] will hardly doubt. For this century, like
a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct; grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, the ancient singing of songs to the Orphic lyre, and all this in Florence. Achieving what had been honoured among the ancients, but almost forgotten since, the age has joined wisdom with eloquence, and prudence with the military art… it has recalled
the Platonic teaching from darkness into light…

BOOK: A Short History of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Treaty of Europe
5.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

In the Morning I'll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty
Embers by Laura Bickle
Catching Jordan by Miranda Kenneally
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
D by George Right
A Daughter's Dream by Shelley Shepard Gray
Come Back to me:Short Story by Terry , Candice