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Introduction to the late Middle Ages
Dies Irae ("Day of
Wrath"), a thirteenth-century hymn commonly sung in services for the dead,
powerfully expressed the sense of overwhelming disaster in which the Middle Ages
ended. For in the fourteenth and the earlier fifteenth centuries, it seemed very
much as if God's wrath was indeed pouring down upon Christendom, as if the Day
of Judgment was at hand, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (who symbolized
famine, disease, war and death) thundering across the sky.
Even
a brief catalog of the major disasters to be confronted in this period should
give some sense of the steep decline that ended the Medieval period—the second
great cycle of civilization in Western history. Perhaps the best-known
catastrophes of the period between 1300 and 1453 were the plague called the Black
Death, the Hundred Years' War between
England and France, and the capture of Constantinople in 1453 by
the Turks. When we add crisis and schism in the Catholic Church, a
late-medieval economic decline, civil unrest in the countryside leading to peasant’s
revolts, and a steep decline in European population, the Western
preoccupation with death and judgment during these centuries is clearly
understandable. If there was ever an age that looked like the end of the world,
surely it was the Late Middle Ages.
During
this time of crisis, monarchs continued to consolidate their royal power,
especially in England and France. They built functioning royal bureaucracies
that extended royal control especially in the area of finances and the law.
Kings continued to develop their close relationship with towns in an alliance
against the power of the lords. Also important was a growing sense of national
identity—a stronger sense of belonging to a nation—that developed in the
wake of the Hundred Years’ War
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Problems of the Late Middle Ages
The Black Death
Read and High-light the following as you read:
Time period of the first major outbreak.
How the plague came to Europe
What we now know about the spread of the Black Death.
What people thought at the time about the meaning of the plague.
Impact on European Jews.
When into the notable city of Florence, fair over every other of Italy, there came a death-dealing pestilence… being sent down upon mankind for our correction by the just wrath of God…extending without cease from one place to another…
---Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron
The Italian poet, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) left us a chilling account of the plague as it struck Florence in 1348. His Decameron relates the story of seven ladies and three gentlemen who leave the city for their country villa for a period of ten days. They each take turns telling stories, one hundred in all. Imagine, that a mere five days after having read this that all of your best friends have succumbed to an illness that cannot be explained. Imagine also, that all the residents who live on your street have died under similar circumstances in the same amount of time. If you can conceive of such a dreaded act occurring within your experience than you may have some glimpse into the mindset of the mid-14th century European who was unfortunate enough to have experienced the BLACK DEATH.
In October 1347, twelve Italian trading ships from the Black Sea put into the harbor in Sicily. The ships contained rather strange cargo: dead or dying sailors showed strange black swellings about the size of an egg located in their groins and armpits. Those who suffered did so with extreme pain and were usually dead within a few days. The disease was the plague and it came in two forms--spread by physical contact and spread by respiration (coughing, sneezing, breathing). The plague was deadly -- a person could go to sleep at night feeling fine and be dead by morning. In other instances, a doctor could catch the illness from one of his patients and die before the patient.
By January 1348, the plague had penetrated France. By May, it entered Rome and Florence. In June, it had moved to Paris and London. Switzerland and Hungary fell victim in July. The plague accomplished its work in three to six months and then faded from view, generally following the medieval trade routes through Europe. The plague came and went like a tornado. In northern cities, the plague lay dormant in winter and then reappeared the following spring. In 1349, the plague reappeared at Paris and eventually spread to Holland, Scotland and Ireland. In Norway, a ghost shipped drifted offshore for months before it ran aground with its cargo of death. By the end of 1349, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Iceland and Greenland felt the full effects of the plague. The plague left nearly as quickly as it had appeared. By mid-1350, the plague had completed its deed across the continent of Europe.
By the middle of the 14th century, the largest cities of Europe were Paris, Florence, Venice, and Genoa. These were cities with populations in excess of 100,000 people. The plague raged through all these cities killing anywhere between thirty and sixty percent. The death rate from the plague was erratic and ranged from twenty percent to one hundred percent. Between thirty and thirty-five percent of Europe's population disappeared in the three years between 1347 and 1350. This meant about 20 million deaths out of an estimated population of 70 million.
Amid the accumulating death and fear of contagion, people died without being administered the last rites. Such an act terrified other victims since there seemed to be nothing worse in the Age of Faith than to be buried improperly. The plague forced people to run from one another. Lawyers refused to witness wills, doctors refused to help the sick, priests did not hear confessions, parents deserted children, and husbands deserted their wives. In the words of the Pope's physician, "charity was dead."
General ignorance about the causes of the plague did nothing to dispel fear and terror. The carriers of the plague -- rats and fleas -- were not suspected for one very simple reason: rats and fleas were common and familiar to the 14th century. The plague's usual form of transportation was the small medieval black rat that was a constant companion of sailor's on board sailing vessels. The death of the rat caused the relocation of the flea, and if its next host just happened to be a human, then contagion was the result.
For almost everyone, the plague signified the wrath of God. A plague so sweeping and unforgiving could only be the work of some species of Divine punishment upon mankind for its sins. The widespread acceptance of this view created an enormous sense of collective guilt. If the plague had descended upon mankind as a form of divine punishment, then the sins that created it must have been terrible.
A scapegoat was needed since anger and frustration had to be focused. On charges that they had poisoned the water with the "intent to kill and destroy all of Christiandom," the extermination of European Jews began in the spring of 1348. In all, sixty large and 150 smaller Jewish communities were exterminated. Between 1347 and 1351, there were recorded more than 350 massacres. Why did this occur? The Jew was the eternal stranger in Christian Europe. According to the Church, the Jews had rejected Jesus as their savior. As early as the 4th century, Jews were denied their civil rights. They were excluded from all crafts and trades. There was also the belief that Jews often performed the ritual murder of Christians, in order to re-enact the Crucifixion. Throughout the 13th and 14th centuries the Church issued laws that isolated the European Jew. Jews could not own Christian servants, could not intermarry and could not build new synagogues. They were, furthermore, barred from weaving, mining, metalworking, shoemaking, baking, milling and carpentry. At the 4th Lateran Council of 1215, Pope Innocent III forced the Jews to wear a yellow badge.
One of the more bizarre episodes of the Black Death was the Flagellant Movement. In 1348, processions of men, initially well-organized, walked two by two, chanting their prayers. Each marcher carried a heavy leather thong, tipped with metal studs. With this they began to beat themselves and others. Three Brethren acted as cheerleaders while the Master prayed for God's mercy on all sinners. During the ceremony, each Brother tried to outdo the next in suffering. Meanwhile, the townspeople looked on in amazement -- most quaked, sobbed and groaned in sympathy. The public ceremony was repeated twice a day and once at night for a period of thirty-three and a half days! The Church ultimately denounced the flagellants as heretics.
Peasants Revolts
The decline in populations and other problems deeply disturbed 14th century Europe. The previous two or three centuries had been remarkably stable on the part of the laboring classes but the 14th century brought numerous peasant revolts. This was something completely new and developed from a local circumstances made worse by famine, war, and the plague.
In 1358, French peasants took up arms in protest against the blundering of the countryside by French soldiers during the 100 Years' War. Perhaps 20,000 peasants died in this uprising known as the Jacquerie.
The most spectacular of all the 14th century peasants was the English Peasants' War. In 1381, the English peasants revolted, angered over legislation like the Statute of Labourers, which tied them to the land and imposed new taxes. One of these taxes, the poll tax, was particularly troublesome. A whole or head tax is a tax levied on individual simply because he exists. In 1380, the English government issued a new poll tax, the third in just four years. Meanwhile, landlords were constantly increasing rents on their land..
In 1381, and under the leadership of Wat Tyler, the peasants marched to London in order to present a petition to the king. The petitioned called for the abolition of serfdom and tithes as well as the right to freely use the forests. The peasants also demanded that the poll tax be abolished. John Ball, a priest who spoke regularly to the people gathered in the marketplace, expressed the sentiments of the revolt in the following way:
My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common; when there shall neither be vassal nor lord, and all distinctions leveled; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. But ill have they used us! And for what reason do they hold us in bondage? Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve? And what can they show, or what reasons give, why they should be more the masters than ourselves? Except, perhaps, in making us labor and work, for them to spend. . . . They had handsome manors, when we must brave the wind and rain in our labors in the field; but it is from our labor they have wherewith to support their pomp.
A popular jingle of the time asked this question: “When Adam dug and Eve span (sewed)/Who was then a gentleman?”
The peasants turned to violence to make their demands heard. The Savoy Palace, home of the King's uncle, was burned to the ground. The Tower of London was under siege. King Richard II (at the time only 14 Years old) met with the rebels. He granted their requests for the abolition of feudal services and their right to rent land at an agreed price. But the meeting then took a most unexpected turn. Wat Tyler rode up to the king, his "horse's tail under the every nose of the king's horse," made the mayor of London lose his temper. He knocked Wat Tyler off his horse with a broadsword and as Wat lay on the ground one of the king's squires stabbed him in the stomach, killing him. The English Peasants' War was over. Wat Tyler's head was cut from his corpse and displayed on London Bridge. John Ball was hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of Richard II and his quarters were displayed in four other towns as a warning to other rebels. The promises made to the rebels by Richard II were quickly withdrawn although the poll tax was abolished.
The primary issue of these revolts was not misery, hunger or poverty. Instead, the primary motivation for these revolts was specifically moral -- peasants routinely denied certain rights. While the peasants often did not immediately win redress of their basic grievances, looking back, historians see the peasant revolts as a clear sign of the waning of serfdom and the whole feudal organization of European society.
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While it is accurate to recognize the "religious uniformity" of Western civilization in the later Middle Ages, this is not to be confused with universal religious happiness. A wide range of scandals, embarrassing episodes, and corrupt practices contributed to a serious decline in confidence in the Church as early as the High Middle Ages. Attempts at Church reform were relatively successful during the High Middle Ages. A reform movement began at the Abbey of Cluny in southern France. The “Cluniac’ reform movement cleansed monastic life of some of the worldliness and corruption that had tainted it. New religious orders of “mendicant” (meaning begging) brothers and sisters were founded in the 1200s. Rather than live lives secluded in monasteries and convents, they lived and preached among the people. The Franciscans, founded by St. Francis of Assisi, the Dominicans, founded by St. Dominic, the Order of Poor Clares, founded by St. Clare, all were dedicated to reform and to living lives of simple poverty.
Unfortunately for the Church, the High medieval religious reforms began to fade in influence as the Middle Ages wore on. By the 1300s, serious problems began to erode the confidence of the faithful in the institutional Church.
For
much of the 1300s, the popes abandoned Rome and established the papacy in a
small city in southern France called Avignon.
The Avignon Captivity of the papacy undermined the prestige
of the popes for several reasons. Abandoning
the "city of Peter" looked bad. The
elaborate papal palace and luxurious style of living practiced by the Avignon
popes looked even worse. The
Avignon Captivity, which lasted until 1370, led to an even stranger episode for
the papacy: the so-called Great Schism (split).
At the death of the pope in 1370, a group of cardinals in Avignon and a
separate group of cardinals in Rome each elected popes.
From 1370 to 1417, you had at least two, and sometimes three, different
men claiming to be pope. Very embarrassing.
Then
there was the problem about the group of popes elected in the 1400s to early
1500s, a group of popes known to history as the "Renaissance Popes."
Even the Catholic Encyclopedia says "the popes of the
Renaissance had become Italian princes among other princes, who warred and
intrigued for worldly interests. Excessive
pomp, luxury, and immorality set the tone for the papal court."
Three popes who sat in the chair of St. Peter between 1490 and 1521
illustrate the point. Alexander
VI spent a fortune bribing the College of Cardinals to win his election.
He had a series of mistresses and openly acknowledged a number of
illegitimate children, receiving them at the papal palace. Pope
Julius II, known to history as the "warrior pope" had a single
ambition: to extend the power and territory of the Papal States in Italy. Pope Leo X, unfortunately, occupied the papacy when Martin
Luther came on the scene. He coveted the papacy for different reasons.
He used the resources of the Church to become one of the greatest patrons
of the arts, spending lavishly on grand, artistic projects.
The modern historian Barbara Tuchman commented ironically that Leo X
wasn't really a bad man and that he would have made a good pope "if only he
had been religious." That
comment says it all about the Renaissance Popes.
Questionable Practices. A range of questionable or corrupt practices caused comment and scandal for the Church. Some examples:
Indulgences. The practice of selling indulgences for the forgiveness of sins. This is the issue that first captures the attention of Martin Luther and triggers the Protestant Reformation.
Simony. The selling of high Church offices, such as bishops and archbishops.
Absenteeism. The common practice of bishop absent from their dioceses, not serving the duties of the bishop, but collecting the tithes and revenues for personal use.
Nepotism.
The papal practice of granting high offices to family members.
. The firewood for a great religious conflagration had been piling up for two centuries. Martin Luther lit the match, and the blaze roared. The tragedy for the Church was a leadership who ignored the problems and refused to listen to voices calling for reform. By the time the Church begins a significant effort to reform itself in the middle of the 1500s, much of the population of Northern Europe had already left.
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