The period from the end of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the sixteenth was mainly one of general distension. The balance between local and universal political institutions that had existed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was upset by the rising power of the national monarchies. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the papal hope of establishing universal rule through Latin Christendom was decisively destroyed, and a long struggle between France and England, beginning in 1338, absorbed the attention of these two powerful kingdoms until 1453, while other territorial conglomerates with rudimentary political structures lacked technical and institutional elements to maintain central authority by fulfilling specialised military, judicial and administrative functions.
The consolidation of the England and France developing as national monarchical states was hampered during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War, which lasted from 1337 to 1453, when English monarchs waged war against France to establish their claims in France as a result of their connections with the Angevin lineage of kings. Intermarriage and conquest had blurred the lines of claims over centuries that would take over a century for these property claims to be resolved. This extended series of conflicts began over feudal disputes over land in northwestern France and English claims for the throne of France. King John of England had lost almost all of the French possession of the Plantagenets, and he had to do homage to the king of France and become his vassal for what remained to him. This arrangement lasted for many years, but in 1328, the French king Charles IV, also called the Fair, died without a son to inherit the throne, thus ending the Capetian dynasty in the time of Edward III, who declared himself to be the rightful ruler of all of France because his mother Isabella was a sister of the last French king of the old line. Hence, he was the closest male relative as the nephew of the deceased king. However, the French would not accept a foreigner on the throne, and thus legal scholars found a very old law that prevented property and other inheritances from passing through a female line, thus disqualifying Edward III, and instead opted for a distant relative in the Valois family who became the new king as Philip VI.
Edward III, the Black Prince as he known due to the colour of his armour, had a legitimate claim to the French monarchy owing to the Capetian kings having failed to produce a male heir, and could therefore claim this throne as the grandson of a French king, in opposition to the nomination of king Philip VI in 1328 from the house of Valois, which was related to the Capetians. Philip’s seizure of the last English possession in France, the duchy of Gascony, sparked the outbreak of the war, which began with minor skirmishes and naval battles. Edward landed with an English army in Normandy in 1346, laid waste to the country and marched up the Seine toward Paris. He met the French troops serving under Philip at Crecy in the first major engagement, where a battle was fought in which the English with their long bows and well directed downhill aimed arrows routed the French knights. Ten years later, the English made another attack on France during a lull in the effects of the Black Death, and again defeated the French cavalry in the decisive battle of Poitiers in 1356, where the king himself, John II, was captured and held him for ransom in London. Although the English were able to occupy a large part of France, Edward III found it impossible to conquer France, and Charles V, the successor to John II, managed before Edward III died in 1337 to re-acquire almost all the lands that the English had occupied. A peace treaty was signed in 1360, Treaty of Brétign, in which England would receive Aquitaine.
However, Charles V of France would resume hostilities to re-acquire French possessions from 1369. Most of France was taken back from the English between 1364 and 1380 under the efforts of Bertrand du Guesclin, the Constable of France, and almost succeeded in driving the English out of France, until Richard II of England signed a second truce in 1389. However, French success was nullified by the outbreak of civil war between French noble factions during the of king Charles VI of France invited new intervention from the English, and war renewed in 1415 when the English king Henry V, who was descended from the Plantagenet lineage in the house of Lancaster, invaded France to seize the French throne, and prolonged this conflict until 1453. He won a great victory at the Battle of Agincourt, where again English archers slaughtered great numbers of French knights who were rendered powerless in their heavy armour by rain and muddy conditions. Henry V of England became heir to the French throne, and was recognized as the legitimate ruler of France by the Duke of Burgundy of the French royal family, who sought to become independent of France.
Fifteen years later, the English had succeeded in occupying a great part of France south of the river Loire, and although a considerable region to the south was still in possession of the heir to the French throne, Charles VII, the dauphin regent, was ineffective at checking the English victories. The English were engaged in besieging the city of Orleans when help and encouragement came to the French from a seventeen-year old peasant girl who believed that she received messages from God to help return the French king to the throne and drive the English out of France. Joan of Arc emerged on the political and military scene by making her way to the hitherto uncrowned Charles VII, who served as regent due to his father the king’s insanity, and persuading him in 1429 to supply her with an army. She inspired his troops with enough of her pious confidence to allow them to help lift the siege at Orléans, which revitalized French resistance that led to forcing the English to withdraw from French territory toward the north from central France following this pivotal battle. She then conducted Charles to Rheims, where he was later crowned as king of France on 17 July 1429.
She continued fighting the king’s battles with success by inspiring the French army against the English and Burgundians plans to partition France, leading them to believe they were contending with a supernatural enemy. However, other leaders were jealous of her, and soldiers were ashamed of being led by a woman. During the defence of Compiegne in May 1430, the governor refused to share the honour of this successful defence with a woman, and allowed her to fall into the hands of the duke of Burgundy, who handed her over to his English allies. A type of ecclesiastical tribunal was appointed for her trial at Rouen. She was then put on trial by French priests who supported the English for heresy, based on having worn mens’ battledress, in order to belittle what she had achieved, and was executed as a witch guilty of heresy in Rouen in 1431, but her impact on the war could not be stopped. The French rallied around Charles and her memory.
Meanwhile, the English Parliament became increasingly unwilling to grant money for England’s own mercenaries when there were no more victories gained. The French eventually pushed the English forces from Normandy by 1450, when Calais was the last English stronghold in France. Three years later, the French won the Battle of Castillon in 1453 that was the last battle of the war, with the remaining English positions in Gascony in southern France being taken, leaving the English only in control of Calais. France was thereafter united under a single monarch, although fighting continued against the Burgundian state until 1477, which led to France continuing to add to its territory.
The Hundred Years War had a profound effect on France, in terms of undermining representative institutions due to the necessities of war, as well as expanding its territory. The French parliament, commonly called the Estates General composed of the nobility, the clergy and prosperous merchants and others from the whole kingdom, came together to consider the war with England. In view of the ravages of soldiers and the general disorder that reigned for so many years, the estates-general agreed in 1439 agreed that the king should use a certain tax called the taille to support troops necessary to protect the frontier. Hence, the king now had an army and the right to collect a permanent tax to support it, and was no longer dependent, as the English king was, upon grants he could persuade Parliament to make, and which usually lasted only for short periods. Moreover, after the French king was able to build up a strong and relatively efficient army of mercenaries who were trained in the cities that replaced the feudal army, as the vassals of the king were forbidden to coin money, keep their own armies, and tax their subjects. This paved the way for the development of an absolute monarchy, since a king who had unquestioned rights of taxation was able to support a standing army with which local opposition could usually be overcome. In addition, the French king never admitted that he did not have the right to levy taxes if he wished without consulting his subjects.
This was in striking contrast to the English parliament, where the kings had repeatedly agreed that no new taxes should be imposed without the consent of Parliament, which did not grant any money until the king had satisfied their complaints. Representative government continued developing in England and gained in power during the Hundred Years’ War. In 1265, a famous Parliament was held, where a most important new class of members – the commons – were present. These were the representatives of rich and influential persons who did not belong to the clergy or higher nobility. In addition to the nobles and clergy, two knights were summoned from each county, and two citizens from each of the more flourishing towns, to attend and take part in the discussions.
Edward I, son of Henry III, occasionally continued to invite the commons to be present. He undoubtedly called in the representatives of the towns because the townspeople were becoming rich, and he wished to have an opportunity to ask them to make grants of money to meet the expenses of the government. He also wished to obtain the approval of all the upper classes when he determined on important measures affecting the whole realm. The power of the monarch was thus limited again in 1295 when King Edward I created the Model Parliament, which also included representatives of the freemen. The Parliament early on took the stand that the king must agree to “redress the grievances” before it would grant him any money. This meant that the king had to promise to remedy any acts, of himself or his officials, of which Parliament complained about before it would agree to raise the taxes.
The major reason for calling and allowing representatives of the lower ranks was the king’s constant need for money. By calling together representatives of the towns and of the lesser landholders, the king could negotiate with them for grants of special taxes and in general he could try to secure their support for various undertakings of the royal government. The long wars in France necessitated frequent appeals for additional taxes, and the custom gradually established itself for knights and burgesses to meet together in the House of Commons, while the barons came to constitute the House of Lords. From the king’s point of view, parliamentary grants were a convenient way of increasing royal revenues, including during the expensive war with France that required large sums of money. Consequently, Parliament came to be summoned every year.
However, the English Parliament became weakened at the expense of the monarchy becoming stronger after the Wars of the Roses, which broke out in England at the close of the Hundred Years’ War, from 1455 to 1485. The rival families of Lancaster and York struggled for the crown, and each party was supported by a group of wealthy and powerful nobles who, like the king, relied on mercenaries. During this conflict, the Duke of York succeeded in displacing the Lancastrian king Henry VI until Henry VII of the house of Tudor came to the throne thirty years later. The results of this conflict were that a great part of the nobility had perished on the battlefield or lost their heads in wholesale executions carried out by each party after it gained a victory, and thus the feudal organisation was broken up. This left the king far more powerful than before, and could now control Parliament. For a century and more after the accession of Henry VII, like in France, the Tudor kings that had supplanted the last Plantagenet king in 1485 exercised almost unlimited power, with no longer being forced to rely on the faithfulness of their vassals.
In addition to the centralization of power, English administrative and judicial machinery underwent notable expansion during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Manorial and ecclesiastical courts lost most of their jurisdiction to the growing system of royal courts, which administered the common law, and new sources of income were introduced, notably export and import duties that replaced them. The same events took place in France, where the powers of the king’s judges had been extended all over the realm, and business and industry, like in England, supplied the monarchs with the income necessary to support government officials and a sufficient army to keep order. Hence, there were modernizing effects on both England and France. Firearms were gradually superseding using the bow and cavalry, which had been hitherto the most important part of an armed force, which were considerably diminished in value as a result of the new system of warfare. These changes in warfare had a considerable influence on the political condition of society for the aristocracy, which had hitherto possessed great influence by the importance of their services. Their influence rapidly diminished by being superseded by hired soldiers, which eliminated the previous authority of the feudal aristocracy. Political authority in England shifted to the members of the house of commons, and thus secured the guarantees of the rule of law under a constitution, whereas political authority in France centered on the monarchy that was enabled to establish an absolute monarchy.
Another factor during the Late Middle Ages that signified a break with the earlier past was the political overthrow of the Papacy, after its universal power was undermined by the new monarchs in England and France, with the clergy beginning to be taxed in France and England to finance their ongoing wars against each other, and at a time of expanding nation states and the desire for the consolidation of power by the increasingly powerful monarchs. In England, Edward I (1272-1307) began to levy taxes on the clergy, despite papal opposition, and forbade the acquisition of additional lands by the Church. Philip IV of France (1285-1314) likewise began to tax the clergy of one half of their annual income.
Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) attempted to check such encroachments of royal government on the rights and immunities of the church, and in his bull (papal edict) Clericis laicos in February 1296, he forbade the clergy to pay taxes to secular rulers without papal approval. The pope was eventually compelled to moderate his claims when king Philip retaliated by stopping all export of money from France, thus seriously cutting into the papal revenues that the church required to able to function. Boniface had no choice but to meet Philip’s demands, while informing Philip that “God has set popes over kings and kingdoms.”
Boniface again challenged secular authority five years later, by forbidding the trials of clerics by secular courts, and once again claiming immunity from royal taxation. King Philip retaliated by calling an assembly of the clergy, nobility and bourgeoisie of his kingdom, the Estates General, for the first time in 1302 where he put his cause before them, and asked for and received their support. Boniface then reacted by issuing a bull, Unam sanctam in 1302, which proclaimed the absolute supremacy of the pope in temporal as well as spiritual affairs. This concluded with a famous sentence: “We therefore say, declare and affirm that submission on the part of every man to the bishop of Rome is altogether necessary for salvation,” which pushed papal supremacy to its historical extreme.
However, events showed where the real power resided. The French government organized a defamation campaign against Boniface, as Philip’s chief minister Guillaume de Nogaret denouncing him as a heretical criminal against the French clergy. In 1303, Philip and Nogaret were excommunicated. However, on 7 September 1303, an army led by Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna of the Colonna family, enemies of Boniface, surprised Boniface at his retreat in Agnani. The king and the Colonnas demanded that he resign, to which Boniface VIII responded that he would “sooner die.” In response, Boniface was abducted and beaten, but was released from captivity three days later, and eventually died of kidney stones on 11 October 1303. This incident stands as the symbol of the decay, just as the incident at Canossa stands as a symbol of the rise of the political power of the medieval papacy. There would no longer be a universal papal monarchy.
Two years after Boniface’s death, Philip orchestrated the election of the French archbishop Bertrand de Goth as Pope Clement V in 1305. Rather than going to Rome, Clement lived at Poitier and then moved the official seat of the papacy to Avignon in 1309, an enclave surrounded by French territories on the Rhone River, in 1309, due to the unrest in Rome while the authority of the papacy was tenuous, which was partially exemplified by the purge of the Templar Order in France on 13 October 1307 on the pretext of alleged heresies, regardless of these order members being under the protection of the papacy. Since they were not subjected to religious rather than ecclesiastical justice, Clement V stated their persecution was an attack on the church. This pope attempted to restore order by absolving Philip of all blame for the attack on Boniface, and by appointing new cardinals from among the French clergy, he made the papacy controlled by the French monarchy. This Babylonian captivity, which lasted from 1305 to 1377 until order in the papal state could be restored, where there were seven French popes thereafter who lived there and were always careful not to antagonize the king of France. This papacy at Avignon and the monarchs of France and England also reached an agreement by which both supported the other in the task of extracting increasingly larger taxes and other payments from the bishops and the lower clergy. As a consequence, sale of church offices became quite open, and the pressing financial needs of the popes led to the invention of a variety of new taxes and fees that were levied on the lower clergy. The sale of indulgences, which were believed to replace penitential good works, but did not remit sin, was also developed by the Avignon popes as a supplement to their other income sources.
Pope Gregory XI decided to return the papacy to Rome in 1377 in the interest of church reform, but died the following year. The cardinals charged with electing the new pope faced the demand from the people of Rome to choose an Italian pope who would return the papacy to its proper home. Upon being threatened by a mob of Romans who stormed the Vatican in the following year, the mostly French cardinals reluctantly elected an Italian pope, Urban VI. Immediately following his election, Urban began preaching intemperately to the cardinals, some of whom thought the delirium of power had made Urban mad and unfit for rule, insisting that the business of the curia should be carried on without gratuities and gifts, forbidding the cardinals to accept annuities from rulers and other lay persons, condemning the luxury of their lives and retinues, and the multiplication of gifts of lands and bishoprics in their hands, and were thus mortally offended. Nor would he remove again to Avignon, thus alienating Charles V of France.
With the approval of this French monarch five months after his election, the French cardinals met and issued a manifesto of grievances, declaring the election invalid and claiming that they had been cowed by the mob into electing an Italian. This was followed by electing a new second pope from France who took the title of Clement VII. Urban VI proceeded to appoint a new College of Cardinals, and lived in Rome, while the French Pope Clement VII took up residence in Avignon. Each pope anathemised the other, and when they died their respective successors maintained the breach. Thus began the Great Schism, which lasted from 1378 to 1414, with the two popes claiming authority while the kingdoms of Europe supported the pope of their choosing, thus dividing all of western Europe according to whether the local government was friendly or hostile to France.
A Conciliar Movement was then begun that put pressure on the papacy in Italy and France to resolve the dispute. A number of cardinals from both sides met the Council of Pisa in 1409 to attempt to resolve the problem of setting up the new head of the Catholic church by creating an ecumenical council. This council deposed both popes, and appointed a new one, John XXIII, and thus there were three popes, which solved nothing other than to result in a second action to end the schism by conciliar action. Progress was finally made when the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund called for a meeting of the general council of the church, which came to be known as the Council of Constance between 1414 and 1418, which resolved the problem of conflicting claims to the papacy. This Council proceeded to act as the sovereign body of the Church, supported by the secular power of the emperor while facing three major problems: check heresy, reform the church, and to choose a new pope who would be able to win general support and end the schism. This council elected Pope Martin V in 1417, while claiming that had supreme authority over certain matters, which ended the schism.
New heresies had arisen in the face of the Great Schism. John Wyclif (1320-1384), an Oxford university professor, had developed radical views as a result of how the Church needed to be reformed, and thus became the first church reformer of the Late Middle Ages. He criticised the wealth and corruption of the church, as well as the pope’s claim to absolute authority. He questioned the rightfulness of ecclesiastical possession of property, maintaining that the Church had become too interested in wealth and property, holding vast estates and numerous properties, and many of the clergy in England and throughout Europe had lavish lifestyles. He therefore maintained that the church had forsaken the teachings of the Bible, which had called for poverty on the part of the church. He also took exception to the Catholic church when its clergy began selling indulgences, or pardons, and differed from the church on the issue of temporal and spiritual authority.
Moreover, he argued that people did not need priests to forgive their sins and give them communion. He also challenged such doctrines as the Petrine supremacy. The church had always maintained that the Pope held supreme authority and that what the pope said was equal to the Bible in importance, in contrast to Wycliffe’s claim that the Bible was the ultimate and final authority on everything, and should be interpreted literally as the sole authority for religious truth. People and not the church were to be able to interpret the Bible for themselves, thus emphasising the authority of Scripture as superior to the Church and the priesthood. He therefore translated the Bible from Latin to English so that all English people could read it, as he thought all people ought to be able to read it for themselves. During this time of the Great Schism, he also maintained that the papacy was created by man and not by God. He further challenged the idea that members of the clergy could or should hold positions of temporal political authority, just as Christ and the disciples had submitted to earthly authority, and therefore proposed that the king and not the pope should be supreme in matters of the kingdom.
In addition to debating the authority of the papacy, he also refuted one of the fundamental doctrines of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Under the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the bread and wine of the Eucharist, symbolising the body and blood of Christ, actually undergoes a genuine physical transformation of the body and blood of Christ. Wycliffe argued that there was no physical transformation, but that Christ’s spirit was present in the bread and wine. The pope declared Wyclif as a heretic in 1377, but despite the pope, he attracted numerous followers, known as Lollards who continued to agitate for reform after his death. They completed and distributed the English translation of the bible and spread the word of God as they interpreted it. In 1395, the Lollards presented their Conclusions, or their statement of beliefs, to the English parliament, in which they argued against transubstantiation, purgatory, confession to priests, and clerical celibacy, which were all foundations of Catholic dogma. They were ruthlessly suppressed. The Church held a special council at Constance that ordered Wyclif’s bones to be dug up and scattered.
From England, however, Wyclif’s ideas spread to Bohemia through Czech students who studied at Oxford. John Hus (1371-1415), espoused Wyclif’s doctrines, and won a numerous following among the common people. Another reformer was Jan Hus, A Czech from present-day Bohemia, who, like Wycliffe, argued that the clergy must not hold secular political possessions, since they were meant to serve in spiritual matters only. He also produced copies of the Bible and pamphlets in the Czechoslovakian vernacular, and wrote a book called The Church, in which he spoke of the church as a body of believers with Christ at the head, which meant that the pope could not be at the head of the church, and went on to condemn the sale of indulgences. For these actions, he was excommunicated in 1412 for insubordination. He was later ordered to appear at the Council of Constance in 1414, where he was ordered to recant for teaching a number of doctrines that opposed Catholic dogma, which he refused to do, and he was later burned at the stake in 1415 as a heretic.
Little was accomplished within the Catholic Church toward church reform. Decrees were accomplished that recommended various reforms, and provided for the periodic assembly of councils. However, the Council of Constance was able to secure the abdication of two of the three popes, and to deprive the third of all political support so that he could be safely neglected. A new pope, Martin V was elected in 1417 with the support of all western Christendom. He and his court were sent to Rome to rule over the church, ending the Great Schism. However, the damage was done, and the church’s authority over political and spiritual matters was severely tarnished. Moreover, various papal practices, such as freely using spiritual weapons to forward temporal interests of the papacy, continued to offend the pious. However, the hierarchy of the Church took little cognizance of such feeling until it was compelled to do so by the later Reformation movement, and clergymen were increasingly becoming subject to the political and economic control of local secular governments.
The feudal system of government gradually gave way a more centralized system that the Romans had established toward the close of the middle ages, as trade and communications grew along with the growth of growing cities, where growing populations could afford to pay taxes to a monarchy in exchange for protection against the depredations of feudal lords. Local lords practically lost all of their independence in England earlier than elsewhere in Europe, whereas this was a very gradual process in France that would last four centuries, where remnants of feudalism continued until being abolished in 1789, whereas absolute royal authority established over most of the Spanish peninsula before 1500 with the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon.
The establishment of increasingly stronger central governments led to commercial developments that eventually broke the power of feudalism, which had maintained barriers that had kept localities apart, with wealth being concentrated in the cities. As monarchs had subjects who could pay taxes, a large part of the state tax revenues was spent on strengthening military positions by building mercenary armies. Princes also mainly waged war through hired troops. These in turn broke the powers of the local feudal lords as a former chief feature of feudalism that continued disappearing during this time, and the religious wars following the protestant reformation, which also reinforced the independence of independent states using hired troops using gunpowder weapons, rather than aristocrats in exchange for land grants. While these feudal lords were good old-fashioned fighters, they could withstand the pressure of standing armies that kings were able to call into existence that forced the feudal lords to yield their local powers. Although these feudal lords enjoyed fighting, they were amateurs who did not making fighting their business, in contrast to the king’s mercenaries who were disciplined and trained professionals that a monarch could eventually afford to pay for by hiring mercenary companies that changed the nature of warfare, along with the use of new forms of military technology.
Cannon appeared in Europe in 1324, and formed a regular element of military equipment in western European states, although stone and metal balls were too light and launched with too little velocity to do much damage to stone walls. Besides, they also lacked movable mounts, and were therefore mainly used for defensive purposes. Artillery began to be more important in the siege of castles and towns to batter down gates to gain entrances for besieging troops, or used for defensive purposes to make ground in front of them untenable. The introduction of gunpowder in warfare used by a body of common men on foot also had a decisive advantage over knights on horseback, which increased the superiority of these mercenary armies of professional soldiers by adding to the value of training, which the monarchs had the money to invest in and therefore had an advantage. In turn, government could proceed to be developed on the basis of an extended territory and developing a national revenue collection system that enabled concentrating national resources. Feudalism as a political force therefore expired during the late fifteenth century, as control over divisions of tracts of land as the leading productive asset in hitherto stable arrangements to establish order was superseded by the greater circulation of money payments, which did not depend on mutually beneficial arrangement based on the control of land composing a primary source of wealth and upon which peasantry depended on for their continued well being and sustenance. Centralised states would hereafter come into being on the strength of military power that emanated from money payments, and the growth of cities that lent their support to a central state authority. The various German states composed a striking contrast to the political and economic development in other regions, as the central government hardly had any power, while the real authority rest in hundreds of petty states, without the presence of a central power to keep them in order while there were continual conflicts between them, which also stunted economic development among them when they were devoid of a central organizing authority.
What were separate underlying developments can you identify this period in European history?
What were the causes and developments of these major events?
Affinity grouping
1. Form groups of three to individually generate ideas about a topic, and write each separate topic on a different sheet of paper with headings for different themes to identify.
2. Go over results as a class.
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