A new era of decline and catastrophe was experienced in Europe during the early fourteenth century. A climate change phenomenon known as “The Little Ice Age” with declining temperatures that led to widespread famine of 1315 to 1317. This was followed by one of the major developments during the late Middle Ages known as the Black Death, or the Bubonic Plague of 1346 to 1350, descended on Europe carried by flea infested rats that came in caravans that travelled the trade routes of Central Asia from China. Earlier Mongol conquests and efficient trade route conditions had facilitated travel between Asia and Europe at a time when rats were a factor of everyday life, along with lice fleas that lived on the rats that were feeding bacteria, and slowly killed them before their carcasses cooled, and then attacked humans by feeding on their blood and causing fatal infections. There was not any immunity, other than escaping, whenever this could be possible, at the risk of spreading its effects over wider distances.
With these effects travelling westward, Constantinople as a trading centre became ravaged by this disease by 1347. Tartar armies besieging the Black Sea port of Kaffa, a trading post for Genoese merchants, contracted the disease and hurled the corpses of the victims over its walls. It was then brought to western Europe when merchant ships that housed infected rats fled Kaffa to Italian ports, beginning in Messina in October 1347, and affected the entire Italian peninsula by April 1348, including Florence in April 1348, where traders from Genoa more than likely contracted the disease from traders who carried it to the Black Sea from China. The disease spread fast. By August, it was devastating French and German population, especially in unhygienic urban centres, including killing eight hundred people a day in Paris in 1348. It then spread over England, attacking every part of the country in 1349, and possibly killed half of the population. Anywhere from twenty-five to forty-five percent of European populations, or anywhere between seventy-five and two hundred million people, was killed by its effects.
It was widely believed that the plague signified the wrath of God, since it was believed a plague so sweeping and unforgiving could only be the manifestation of divine punishment on humanity for its sins. In addition to the enormous sense of collective guilt, another negative effect was blaming Jews for allegedly poisoning wells in an attempt to destroy Christendom, which led to violence against them all over Europe, and their subsequent emigrations to Poland and Russia where they were afforded greater protections. Another one of its negative effects was the church’s authority came into question after it had already been weakened by controversies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and many found the church unable to respond adequately to those wondering why their religious obedience had failed to prevent the Black Death. Another negative effect was blaming Jews for allegedly poisoning wells in an attempt to destroy Christendom, which led to violence against them all over Europe. Another one of its negative effects was the church’s authority came into question after it had already been weakened by controversies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and many found the church unable to respond adequately to those wondering why their religious obedience had failed to prevent the Black Death.
While this was a tragedy of epic proportions, after the plague ran its course and the population levelled off, there was a shortage of labour, which meant that workers enjoyed an increase in wages. For a few years, labour was scarce and wages rose, to the benefit of the poor in the country and in the towns, but this advantage was temporary. The growing discontent among the farming classes in England may be ascribed partly to the results of the great plague and partly new taxes that were levied to prolong the unsuccessful war with France. Up to this time, the majority of those who cultivated the land were serfs who belonged to some particular manor, paid regular dues to their lord, and performed definite services. There were hitherto few farm hands who might be hired and who sought employment anywhere they could get it. By greatly decreasing the number of production by over fifty percent, wages were increased and served to increase the importance of free labourers. Consequently, they not only demanded higher wages than before, but readily deserted another who offered more money, or else leave the farms altogether and pursue employment in the cities that maintained their independence from the landholding nobility in the countryside, establishing a separate economic and political orientation that was separate from the feudal political fragmentation outside the cities that composed a different type of stability under feudalism with its separate legal and socioeconomic distinctions. This development was egregiously evident during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when the Holy Roman empire was constituted of roughly 1,600 practically independent states, ranging in size and importance from the duchies of Austria, Bavaria and Saxony, the Margravate of Brandenburg, and the county palatinate of the Rhine, to the territories of petty imperial knights and the free cities.
Cities competed directly against feudal lords by maintaining their independence through defending themselves against their attacks. Although the free towns rarely quarrelled with the monarchy, they were almost always at war with both the secular and ecclesiastical nobility, which led to forming leagues or confederations for mutual defence. One such confederation was the Rhenish League, which was formed in the mid-thirteenth century, and was composed of at least seventy towns. The growth of towns corresponded with the creation of trade guilds, in which the members improved their skills as craftsmen and expanded their economic roles by extending the range of trade.
The most remarkable commercial association of the medieval period was merchant guilds in towns and cities along the North and Baltic seas. Hansa was the common term used to describe a commercial union between different cities, and many such unions were formed, beginning with such an alliance created between Hamburg and Lübeck in 1241 for the preservation of their mutual interests and promoting trade through waterways. The establishment of the Hanseatic League united several cities for mutual legal, commercial and armed mutual protection of their interests that developed during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This confederation of seventy-seven cities at its height, including London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Bruges, Gdansk, Königsberg, Bergen, Bremen, Hanover, Cologne Novgorod, administered by German merchants acquired a practical monopoly over commerce in the Baltic and a primary share of the trade engaged over the North Sea, while operating under joint agreements to facilitate international trade among its member cities. By the fifteenth century, some of these cities became autonomous authorities under the auspices of the Holy Roman Empire while strengthening and combining economic assets of these settlements, along with securing trade routes and economic cooperation.
Economic independence appeared very shocking to those who were accustomed to the old rates of payment for individual labourers. Local industry had prospered to a greater degree in England, which had been less disturbed and molested as on the continent where disparate feudal states disrupted commercial activity. The English monarchy undertook to keep down wages by prohibiting labourers from asking more than had been customary before the plague. Every labourer, when offered work at the established wages, was ordered to accept it on pain of imprisonment. The first “Statute of Labourers” was issued in 1351, which forbade employers to pay more than the customary wages, and that all labourers accept those wages. but apparently it was not obeyed, and similar laws were enacted occasionally for a hundred years.
The old manor system was also breaking up at this time, as many of the labouring class no longer held lands as serfs, but moved from place to place and made a living working for wages. Serfs in England also began to regard the dues they had been accustomed to paying the lords as unjust. Peasants rose in revolt against the poll tax imposed on each invidual levied on them in 1381, to carry on the Hundred Years’ War against France. Although this revolt met with little success, serfdom disappeared rapidly. It became increasingly more common for the serf to pay his dues to the lord in money instead of working for him, and thereby he lost one of the chief characteristics as a serf. The landlord then either hired men to cultivate the fields which he reserved for his own use, or rented the land to tenants, and serfdom practically disappeared in England.
The Holy Roman Emperors continued ruling according to who had to be elected by great vassals who maintained their privileges and independence. The German states vacillated between having a central feudal monarchy whether or not the vassals of the central authority could be pacified, such as under the leadership of Frederick of Hohenstaufen, also known as Barbarossa (1152-1190) or when the princes of Germany as independent rulers constituted a loose alliance of states under the vague sovereignty of an elected king, After Rudolf of Hapsburg came to power, Austrian possessions continued to be extended in the Holy Roman Empire. German princes then elected kings from different royal houses to maintain their own independence from a central authority. The German states agreed in the Declaration of Renza in 1338 that the election of the emperor would no longer be subject to the papacy’s approval, and would be chosen by the rulers of the states of the empire, who would simultaneously become the king of the German states.
This decision to separate the administration of the German states and the Holy Roman Empire later opened the way to the Golden Bull of 1356 under Karl IV who began his reign in 1346, which consolidated the election of the emperor by seven separate electors constituting the prince-electors with the underlying hope of ending civil warfare as a result of succession disputes. There were three ecclesiastical electors – the archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne, and four secular ones – the king of Bohemia, the count palatinate of the Rhine, the duchy of Saxony-Wittemberg, and the margrave of Brandenburg. As the Holy Roman Empire hereafter depended on these electors, they would eventually begin regularly choosing the ruler of the Austrian possessions as their emperor, so that title of emperor became hereditary in the Hapsburg line. However, the Hapsburgs were more interested in adding to the family domains than in advancing the interests of the Holy Roman Empire as a whole, and created a vast empire through an extraordinary series of royal marriages that had been arranged by Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor from 1493 to 1519, who introduced a semblance of order in the empire by ending the practice of crowning rulers in Rome, and replacing informal noble meetings with a permanent Imperial Diet as a central legislative body with representatives from emperors, princes and cities.
Maximilian married Mary of Burgundy, whose inheritance included present day Holland, Belgium and parts of eastern France, which were therefore added to the Hapsburg Empire. After Mary died in 1482, her lands were inherited by their son Philip. Maximilian then arranged a marriage between Philip and Joanna, the heiress to the Spanish kingdoms that had come into existence in northern Spain in the eleventh century while most of the Iberian Peninsula was divided into Arab Muslim states, otherwise known as Al-Andalus. Christians were largely allowed to practice their religion, but the Christian kingdoms launched the Reconquista, or reconquest, from the kingdoms of Asturius and Leon. Other Christian kingdoms became created, including Castile, Navarre, Arago, and Portugal. Toledo, the old capital of Spain, fell to king Alfonso VI in 1085, which began shifting the balance of power on the Iberian Peninsula. King Alfonso VIII of Castile finally broke the Moors at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. By the thirteenth century, the Moors were left with just the Emirate of Granada in the south by 1249, before were completely driven out from their last stronghold in Spain in 1492, when the Mohammed XII, the Emir of Granada, surrendered this final holding to queen Isabella of Castile.
Spain was likewise become a European power. Queen Isabella of the Christian kingdom of Castile married Ferdinand, the heir to the crown of the Christian kingdom of Aragon, in 1469, which united these two of the most powerful states on the Iberian Peninsula, which initiated the unification of Spain. The completion of the reconquests of Spain from the Moors would thereafter lead to the Spanish monarchy possessing more military power than any other European state upon the discoveries in the New World by Spanish explorers. These new possessions abroad enabled Spain to hold a position in Europe that its ordinary resources would never have allowed, in addition to being matched with the Hapsburg empire, which was united with Spanish possessions, first under Philip, and then his son Charles V who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1520, and finalised the unification of the Spanish states as their master, in addition to functioning as the king of Castile and Aragon, king of Naples, Sardinia and Sicily, lord of the Netherlands, and the duke of Burgundy.
Charles V was unable to impose imperial authority in the German states during this time, while facing conflicts against France and its expansionist aims in Burgundy and Italy, and Turkish encroachments in southeastern Europe. He summoned his first national assembly in Worms where he did not have the power to control the hundreds of vassals there while the real power in the German states since the thirteenth century lay in the hands of the more important vassals, the seven electors, who were empowered with electing the emperor, in contrast to other European monarchs ruling on the basis of the concept of divine right as an unwritten covenant between the sovereign and the subjects of a monarchy, with certain exceptions that were imposed in England owing to the Magna Carta having been extorted from king John on 15 June 1215 that codified the principle that imposed limits of royal authority by establishing law as a power in itself. Although a central authority remained in place, English aristocrats established political liberty to a degree while defending the privileges and rights of a feudal compact.
The most important matter of concern at the Holy Roman Empire assembly in 1521 proved to be the consideration of the case of a university professor, Martin Luther, who was accused of heresy, and attended this assembly to defend his doctrines questioning the practices of the Catholic Church at that time. Luther had begun what proved to be the first successful revolt against the medieval church under the guise of the princes of the northern German states, composing the least economically advanced representatives of German society, who applied his doctrines as a weapon against the interference of the Holy Roman Emperor, and maintaining their independence against the power of the trading classes located in the cities.
The various crises that were experienced during the late Middle Ages led to people seeking new meaning for existence, apart from church doctrines, which were found among the classical works that were created in ancient Greece and Rome, during a secular development in the growing Italian city-states, where there was a new interest in individualist pursuits, which became known as humanism – an intellectual movement focusing on the importance and nature of humanity that emerged from Italian universities. A new body of thought emerged that was characterised by cultural growth, known as the Renaissance, ushered in a period of renewal of trade and cultural achievements from 1350 to 1500. It was most distinguishable from the past in intellectual and cultural terms, particularly in terms of art and architecture. The movement known as the Renaissance in Italy gathered strength in about the middle of the fourteenth century, and there were impressive brilliant achievements of the Italian cities in art, literature and philosophy, centered in the independent states of Italy that were set up around individual cities, such as Florence, Venice, Milan and Pisa where innovations stimulated by pagan classical models broke away from the Christian tradition of earlier centuries, which led to a sudden flourishing of renewed civilization, which was distinguished by individuals who manifested new learning. In Florence, the wealthy banking Medici family rose to prominence, and their patronage of the arts supported Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Botticelli, which would signal the beginning of the Renaissance.
Trade and commerce served as the catalyst for the Renaissance in Italy, where city states benefited financially from trade from the Mediterranean Sea that never completely disappeared, even after the fall of Rome. Italy also exported wool from Flanders and Italy to foreign traders who then took the goods and resold them elsewhere. The Italian merchants then used the money to purchase imported goods, such as spices, silks and other luxury items to resell throughout Italy and northern Europe. By the end of the Middle Ages, Italy had established quite a vast network of buyers and sellers throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, which made many men extremely wealthy. Merchants sold their goods, while financiers made fortunes by lending money.
War was constant in the Middle Ages, and it was very expensive, and it could not be maintained with high taxes alone. The church also sought to expand its sphere of influence by building churches, monasteries and schools, and therefore also needed to borrow money. The Medici family of bankers in Florence thus became especially rich and influential, and expanded their influence beyond Florence politically as well as culturally, beginning with Cosimo de Medici (1389-1464). In addition to controlling the political life of Florence, they also spent large amounts of money on sponsoring the greatest painters, sculptors and architects of the time, including Michelangelo, and thus helped define the legacy the Italian Renaissance. Some popes also distinguished themselves as patrons of scholars, poets and artists, despite the irreligious quality of much of their work.
One characteristic of this rebirth was that this was a time when classical texts and ideas were resurrected. Scholars throughout Europe, beginning in Italy, began to realise a common heritage that could be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome, and therefore there was a desire to collect and study Greek and Roman texts, and from literature, admiration for the classical models passed over to art and architecture, which followed classical ideas in combination with contemporary scientific developments. It therefore was a change in attitudes toward life, which was expressed through literature and art.
The greatest intellectual movement of the Renaissance was humanism, which emphasized the importance, potential and greatness of man by restoring the ideals and values of classical civilization. Italians took notice of classical civilization following the efforts of Francisco Petrarch (1304-1374), another Florentine, who hoped to improve the world by bringing back the glory of Rome, encouraging others to accept cultural and moral values and the form of government laid out by the ancient Romans, and devoted himself to a study and criticism of the literary works of pagan Latin writers, initially by gathering any surviving ancient manuscripts. He thus became of the earliest humanists, or those who preferred to study things human rather than divine, or literature rather than theology. Although they identified themselves as Christians, they considered their effort to be staging a renewal of spiritual life. The elevated view of humanity was later maintained by Pico della Mirandolla (1463-1494) in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, which stated that man’s potential had no limits and that man was the pinnacle of God’s creation. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was at once the literary summator of the intellectual life of the thirteenth century and the herald of new literary departures in the field of literature. His vernacular crystallized literary Italian, making the Florentine dialect the standard for subsequent Italian writers. His greatest work, The Divine Comedy, recounted Dante’s imaginary travels through hell, purgatory, and heaven. In the course of this journey, Dante met the leading figures of history and learned from them the secrets of the universe. Another such influential literary personality was Giovanni Boccaccio, whose most notable works are The Decameron, a collection of short stories about women in history that became a determining element for the Italian literary tradition. Boccaccio along with Dante Alighieri and Petrarch constituted the so-called “Three Crowns” of Italian literature who laid the foundation of the humanist movement in Florence.
The classical spirit, and humanism manifested itself in many places. One of his followers of Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati, came across the speeches of the Roman lawyer Cicero, and developed with the idea of extending poetry and literature from private reading or scholarly study to be used in court, calling this negotium, or applying learning for practical life. After he became the Chancellor of Florence, he started writing his diplomatic correspondence in the style of Cicero, and soon other states started to get interested in the new “humanist” scholarship that was pioneered in Florence, and new schools for the study of humanistic literature were established in several Italian towns, where the Medici family founded the Florentine Academy, in imitation of Plato’s Academy. Florence soon became a major centre of humanist scholarship. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, many Greek scholars went to Florence and introduced some of the ancient Greek masters, including Aristotle in the original, rather than a very bad Latin translation, and Plato. Forty years later, the whole Jewish population of Spain was expelled, and Hebrew scholars also headed to Florence. The educated elite, especially in Florence, made the classical languages and texts part of their educational curriculum. These texts became the focal points of instructional curriculum. Many students and religious scholars learned Greek and Roman to study the original classical texts, which was a departure from medieval scholarship that Leexamined commentaries on the texts, and not the primary sources themselves. By studying the original texts, Renaissance scholars restored classical Greek and Roman ideals.
Leonardo Bruni was another humanities scholar who was considered one of the most influential historians of the time, who analysed history as being divided into major phases of human development – ancient, medieval and modern periods. He was among the first historians involved in studying classical Greece, and translated the Greek works of Aristotle, and wrote biographies of leading earlier personalities, including Petrarch and Dante.
A famous individual who was well educated in the humanist tradition was Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) who demonstrated a critical and worldly spirit in his writings, including Discourses on Levy, The Prince, History of Florence and Art of War while he spent his retirement reading Latin classics and examining Italian political events. His political reflections bear a certain analogy to the effort of renaissance artists, which was to describe men as they are, and not as they ought to be. The Prince, for example, was a work that he intended to serve as a guide for acquiring, maintaining and expanding political power, describing how society is run and how people behave, in contrast to political philosophers in the past who argued what should be. This underlying idea led him to believe that human nature with regard to politics was essentially evil, in contrast to the ideals of chivalry during the middle ages, which justified abandoning morality. He also introduced a secular concept of the state, regarding the Church as a social rather than spiritual force, and therefore argued for a state separated from the influence of the church. He turned away from morality, religion and the papacy, and believed that people, such as the prince, were the truly decisive factors in human history and in maintaining power in the state, while the intervention of God in history was unfounded. In the interest of maintaining power, the prince as a ruler of the state was also to forsake the ordinary principles of morality. The prince was also not to hesitate to deceive his people to preserve his state from upheaval and ensure stability, as well as be feared while maintaining popular support by respecting women and property. Hence, as a humanist he thought of politics as a secular affair that was removed from religious or theological implications.
The weakening of Christian attitude and feelings that were demonstrated in Italian literary development was also reflected in the history of art. Some of the greatest Renaissance artists travelled to Rome to measure and sketch great Roman ruins, statues and other relics. As a result, much classical art was reborn, as well as giving rise to new ways of thought. Painters turned from medieval techniques and themes, which had not placed any emphasis on realism and detail. For example, admiration for classical art and literature along with a sensuous interest in the world led Alessandro Botticelli (1444-1510) to paint his famous Birth of Venus, which demonstrated how renaissance painters like him strove to achieve accuracy of realistic detail above all else. To improve the accuracy of their painting, some artists studied anatomy, botany and physics.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the most famous such artist-scientist. His notebooks contained five thousand pages of suggestions and ideas for technical innovations and scientific experiments in addition to matters more closely related to the problems of painting, at which he excelled, such as having painted masterpieces including the Mona Lisa from 1503 to 1506. He generally otherwise embodied the Renaissance ideals that every individual has unlimited potential and requires the proper environment in which they could progress. He took little interest in the supposed wisdom of the ancients, and decided that everything could be discovered in nature, and that is where they discovered meaning. He determined that nature speaks to individuals in detail, and through detail and structure, they could discover nature’s design.
While painting was perhaps the most brilliant branch of renaissance art, new styles of sculpture and architecture were also developed. Sculptors created marvelous figures of marble and bronze that glorified the human body as a work of art, and architects used arches and columns found in antiquity. The use of domes became especially characteristic of renaissance public buildings, with the earliest example being the dome of the cathedral of Florence, planned by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), and the largest and most magnificent was that of St. Peter’s in Rome, which was planned by Lazzari Bramante (c. 1444-1514) and Michelangelo.
Italian cultural leadership was acknowledged throughout Europe by the end of the fifteenth century. Italian influence had been only sporadic, but even at the height of the influence of the Italian renaissance, the culture of the rest of Europe remained somewhat different. The revival of classical antiquity never penetrated as fully as it did in Italy, while the Christian impression and religious interest inherited from earlier ages remained correspondingly stronger. The northern Renaissance was thus characterised differently in northern Europe, since it was coloured by Christianity rather than the secular spirit of Italy, and came to be called Christian humanism. It sought to use the primary source texts to come to a better understanding of the early Church and of man’s understanding of God. It tried to use the model of Christianity taken from the classical texts to improve not only the modern church and modern Christianity, but also to modern society.
One of the best examples of Christian humanism was Thomas More (1478-1535), who is remembered for his work Utopia. This was a book about an ideal society that indirectly criticised the state of politics and society in England and Europe, intending to create a better world by combining elements of Christianity and humanism. Unlike Machiavelli, he advanced the notion that the state existed for the common good of its subjects rather than the power of the prince. He also believed that man was not evil by nature, but social structures created by man created evil.
Another northern humanist philosopher in Holland was Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) who exemplified northern Renaissance humanism. He criticised the practices of the church while his main purpose was to improve it while emphasing that true faith was of greater importance than reason. One of his most well known books was In Praise of Folly, in which he criticised hypocritical popes and emperors and abuses of the Church, such as the sale of indulgences, and tried to make Christianity more human by introducing a more rational conception of Christian doctrine, hoping that people could think for themselves rather than conform to what the authorities were telling them. He also devoted his life to using classical texts to promote the education of Christians, believing that the way to improve society was to educate society about the true nature of Christianity, which was found in the example and action of Christ, and combining Christian principles with classical virtues, and produced a Greek version of the New Testament to rectify mistakes in the Church’s official version of the Bible, or the Vulgate. It appeared that if everybody could read the Bible, especially the New Testament, for themselves, it would bring a great change for the better since individuals had the potential to progress by extending their knowledge. Moreover, the time was appropriate for reform, considering that there were leading authorities in Europe, such as advisors to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, who believed that the arguments Erasmus forwarded were justifiable, and were prepared to work for a reform of the Catholic church.
The greatest contributions of what is known as the northern Renaissance was in printing and theology following the invention of the printing press by a German goldsmith, Johann Gutenberg (1399-1468). In the 1450’s, he employed his knowledge and skill in metalworking to fashion single letter and words out of metal, which could be combined in trays to form words and sentences, rather than a page at a time being printed by a single wooden block. The press could print countless combinations of words simply by rearranging the movable type. This allowed books to be mass produced at a fraction of the time and cost of books copied by hand or printed with block printing, making it possible for printed material to be distributed across Europe quickly and inexpensively. Gutenberg printed a Bible in approximately 1456,, which is counted as the earliest typeset book. Because books were available to people in their first language, people could read more than ever and the literacy rate increased across Europe as a result, and also formed a cause for the later Protestant Reformation that began in Germany. With the spread of new ideas that had begun by Renaissance scholars, greater numbers of people would look to the future with new ideas that would break from the medieval past.
What were significant developments during this period of European history?
Group investigation
1. Groups of 4 prepare a subject to present for the final exam presentation
2. choose any subject relating to medieval history, and explain its causes and consequences
Follow these points:
1.Identify the topic
2. Gather sources, data and references
3. Develop an outline
4. Plan the presentation contents
5. Revise the contents.
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