The Late Middle Ages

The fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth saw decline, disruption, and disintegration. This period, usually referred to as the Late Middle Ages, has been described in terms such as "the decline of the Middle Ages" and "the waning of the Middle Ages." Certain developments support these descriptions. Demographically, the population increase of the High Middle Ages was over by the end of the thirteenth century. During the following century population decreased significantly, due in great part to poor harvests, disease, and war. Geographically, European expansion temporarily ended. Religiously, the Church faced a series of problems: The papacy suffered from increasing conflict with powerful European monarchs; heretical movements spread; the Church itself became divided during the Great Schism; and the papacy was threatened by a revolt of its own high clergy in the Conciliar Movement. Economically, wages and prices varied greatly, as did the availability of labor and goods; this disrupted relations among various social groups. Politically, almost unending conflict led to an unusually intense period of wars, the most serious of which was the Hundred Years' War between England and France.

To illustrate the disruptive developments of the Late Middle Ages, the selections in this chapter concentrate on two specific topics: problems facing the Church and the mid-fourteenth-century plague. What was the nature of the Conciliar Movement, which threatened the pope's authority? How was the Church threatened by heresy? How did it deal with heresy? What were the social and psychological consequences of the plague? How was the plague related to religious views of Europeans? How did institutions react to the consequences of the plague?

Although this chapter views the Late Middle Ages largely as a period of disruption and decline, it was also a period of continuity. Many aspects of medieval civilization would continue for centuries, evolving only very slowly. To show both the continuity and the decline characteristic of this era, the nature of society in the Late Middle Ages and the psychological characteristics of the period are analyzed. How was this society organized? What were typical members of this society like? What were the attitudes toward women and marriage? How were psychological trends reflected by conceptions of death? What sorts of rebellions occurred?

In sum, the materials paint a picture in marked contrast to our image of the High Middle Ages. But while the decline during the Late Middle Ages was real, the same period witnessed an extraordinary social and cultural revival in Italy, which will be the concern of the next chapter.

The Crisis of the

Late Middle Ages

Francis Oakley

Most historians agree that during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, medieval civilization suffered a crisis. What are less clear are the exact nature of that crisis and its causes. In the following selection Francis Oakley focuses on problems within the Church, wars, and economic difficulties as being the core of the crisis of the Late Middle Ages.

Consider: Whether the problems within the Church should be considered causes or symptom of the general crisis; the social consequences of wars and economic depression.

One of the most persistent features of ecclesiastical life from the early fourteenth century onward had been the extension once more of royal or princely control over the local churches. In ways subtle and not so subtle the work of the Gregorian reformers was being undone, and rulers were moved increasingly to assert their sovereign jurisdiction over all groups and institutions-clergy and churches included-within the territorial boundaries of their states. By the early fifteenth century the kings of France and England, in particular, had become adept at the art of marshaling national antipapal feeling in order to bring pressure on the papacy to concede them a handsome share of the taxes levied on their national churches and of the benefices or ecclesiastical positions belonging thereto. Given the difficulties that the Avignonese popes and the popes of the schism had had to face, they had had little choice but to yield to such diplomatic blackmail, even though by so doing they had committed the church piecemeal to a revolution that would ultimately leave to their successors nothing more than a theoretically supreme authority, the substance of power having passed in fact into the hands of kings, princes, and rulers of city-states like Venice.

Historians have frequently chosen to take this transformation of the church and the accompanying decline of papal fortunes as symptomatic of a more profound crisis in the very soul of medieval civilization itself. It is easy enough to understand why they should have been tempted to do so. The outbreak in 1296 of the war between France and England, which had led so rapidly to the disastrous confrontation with Boniface VIII, had marked the end of a comparatively peaceful era and the beginning of the prolonged struggle between the two major European powers, which, punctuated with intermittent truces and periods of peace, was to drag on well into the fifteenth century. While it lasted it caused a great deal of devastation in France and sponsored in that country a recrudescence of the aristocratic feuds and rival private armies characteristic of the anarchic early phase of feudalism. A similar growth of what has been called "bastard feudalism" occurred in England during the dynastic conflicts between the Yorkist and Lancastrian claimants to the throne which broke out in 1450 after the end of the war with France and which have gone down in history as the "Wars of the Roses." The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries marked, then, at best a pause in the development of the English and French states and at worst a positive setback. Certainly, they witnessed the breakdown of public order and the growth of violence to a degree that would have been unimaginable in the late thirteenth century.

To the social dislocations caused by invasion and civil war must also be added the tribulations consequent to the ending in the early fourteenth century of the great economic boom that had gathered force in the tenth century, accelerated in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and reached its peak in the thirteenth. Even before the advent of the Black Death (1348-50), population expansion had ceased, serious and widespread famines had reappeared, and the European economy had begun to slide into a financial crisis and a depression that was to last until the latter part of the fifteenth century and even, in some sectors, into the sixteenth.

The Black Death:

A Socioeconomic Perspective

Millard Meiss

Historians have argued that the Black Death, along with other mid-fourteenth-century developinents, led to important economic and social changes that characterized the Late Middle Ages. Most concretely, historians point to increasing wages and greater opportunities for social mobility as directly stimulated by the demographic ravages of the plague. In the following selection Millard Meiss makes this interpretation in examining the consequences of the plague in Florence and Siena.

Consider: The economic and social consequences of the Black Death in northern Italy; the groups that benefited most after the Black Death, and why; the ways in which this interpretation is supported by Boccaccio's account.

In the immediate wake of the Black Death we hear of an unparalleled abundance of food and goods, and of a wild, irresponsible life of pleasure. Agnolo di Tura writes that in Siena "everyone tended to enjoy eating and drinking, hunting, hawking, and gaming," and Matteo Villani laments similar behavior in Florence....

This extraordinary condition of plenty did not, of course, last very long. For most people the frenzied search for immediate gratification, characteristic of the survivors of calamities, was likewise short-lived. Throughout the subsequent decades, however, we continue to hear of an exceptional difference to accepted patterns of behavior and to institutional regulations, especially among the mendicant friars. It seems, as we shall see, that the plague tended to promote an unconventional, irresponsible, or self-indulgent life, on the one hand, and a more intense piety or religious excitement, on the other. Villani tells us, in his very next sentences, of the more lasting consequences of the epidemic:

"Men thought that, through the death of so many people, there would be abundance of all produce of the land; yet, on the contrary, by reason of men's ingratitude, everything came to unwonted scarcity and remained long thus; ... most commodities were more costly, by twice or more, than before the plague. And the price of labor, and the products of every trade and craft, rose in disorderly fashion beyond the double. Lawsuits and disputes and quarrels and riots arose everywhere among citizens in every land, by reason of legacies and successions; ... Wars and divers scandals arose throughout the world, contrary to men's expectation."

Conditions were similar in Siena. Prices rose to unprecedented levels. The economy of both Florence and Siena was further disrupted during these years by the defection of almost all the dependent towns within the little empire of each city. These towns seized as an opportunity for revolt the fall of the powerful Florentine oligarchy in 1343, and the Sienese in 1355. The two cities, greatly weakened, and governed by groups that pursued a less aggressive foreign policy, made little attempt to win them back.

The small towns and the countryside around the two cities were not decimated so severely by the epidemic, but the people in these regions felt the consequences of it in another way. Several armies of mercenaries of the sort that all the large states had come to employ in the fourteenth century took advantage of the weakness of the cities.

The ravages of the mercenary companies accelerated a great wave of immigration from the smaller towns and farms into the cities that had been initiated by the Black Death. Most of the newcomers were recruits for the woolen industry, who were attracted by relatively high wages. But the mortality offered exceptional opportunities also for notaries, jurists, physicians, and craftsmen. In both Florence and Siena the laws controlling immigration were relaxed, and special privileges, a rapid grant of citizenship, or exemption from taxes were offered to badly needed artisans or professional men, such as physicians.

In addition to bringing into the city great numbers of people from the surrounding

towns and country, the Black Death affected the character of Florentine society in still another way. Through irregular inheritance and other exceptional circumstances, a class of nouveaux riches arose in the town and also in decimated Siena. Their wealth was accentuated by the impoverishment of many of the older families, such as the Bardi and the Peruzzi, who had lost their fortunes in the financial collapse. In both cities, too, many tradesmen and artisans were enriched to a degree unusual for the popolo minuto. Scaramella sees as one of the major conflicts of the time the struggle between the old families and this gente nuova. Outcries against both foreigners and the newly rich, never lacking in the two cities, increased in volume and violence. Antagonism to "the aliens and the ignorant" coalesced with antagonism to the new municipal regime; the government, it was said, had been captured by them.

A Psychological Perspective of the Black Death

William L. Langer

Most historians have long been reluctant to view historical developinents from a psychological perspective. In recent decades historians have been challenged to apply psychological insights to history. In 1957 William L. Langer, then president of the American Historical Association, issued such a challenge to historians in his presidential address to the annual convention. In the following selection from that address, Langer suggests how modern psychology might be used to i nterpret the Black Death and related developments.

Consider: How a psychologist might explain various behaviors related to the Black Death; how The Triumph of Death fits with this interpretation.

The Black Death was worse than anything experienced prior to that time and was, in all probability, the greatest single disaster that has ever befallen European mankind. In most localities a third or even a half of the population was lost within the space of a few months, and it is important to remember that the great visitation of 1348-1349 was only the beginning of a period of pandemic disease with a continuing frightful drain of population.

At news of the approach of the disease a haunting terror seizes the population, in the Middle Ages leading on the one hand to great upsurges of repentance in the form of flagellant processions and on the other to a mad search for scapegoats, eventuating in largescale pogroms of the Jews. The most striking feature of such visitations has always been the precipitate flight from the cities, in which not only the wealthier classes but also town officials, professors and teachers, clergy, and even physicians took part. The majority of the population, taking the disaster as an expression of God's wrath, devoted itself to penitential exercises, to merciful occupations, and to such good works as the repair of churches and the founding of religious houses. On the other hand, the horror and confusion in many places brought general demoralization and social breakdown. Criminal elements were quick to take over, looting the deserted houses and even murdering the sick in order to rob them of their jewels. Many, despairing of the goodness and mercy of God, gave themselves over to riotous living, resolved, as Thucydides says, "to get out of life the pleasures which could be had speedily and which would satisfy their lusts, regarding their bodies and their wealth alike as transitory." Drunkenness and sexual immorality were the order of the day- "In one house," reported an observer of the London plague of 1665, "you might hear them roaring under the pangs of death, in the next tippling, whoring and belching out blasphemies against God.". . .

The age was marked, as all admit, by a mood of misery, depression, and anxiety, and by a general sense of impending doom. Numerous writers in widely varying fields have commented on the morbid preoccupation with death, the macabre interest in tombs, the gruesome predilection for the human corpse. Among painters the favorite themes were Christ's passion, the terrors of the Last judgment, and the tortures of Hell, all depicted with ruthless realism and with an almost loving devotion to each repulsive detail. Altogether characteristic was the immense popularity of the Dance of Death woodcuts and murals, with appropriate verses, which appeared soon after the Black Death and which, it is agreed, expressed the sense of the immediacy of death and the dread of dying unshriven. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries these pitilessly naturalistic pictures ensured man's constant realization of his imminent fate.

The origins of the Dance of Death theme have been generally traced to the Black Death and subsequent epidemics, culminating in the terror brought on by the outbreak of syphilis at the end of the fifteenth century. Is it unreasonable, then, to suppose that many of the other phenomena I have mentioned might be explained, at least in part, in the same way? We all recognize the late Middle Ages as a period of popular religious excitement or overexcitement, of pilgrimages and penitential processions, of mass preaching, of veneration of relics and adoration of saints, of lay piety and popular mysticism. It was apparently also a period of unusual immorality and shockingly loose living, which we must take as the continuation of the "devil-may-care" attitude of one part of the population. This the psychologists explain as the repression of unbearable feelings by accentuating the value of a diametrically opposed set of feelings and then behaving as though the latter were the real feelings. But the most striking feature of the age was an exceptionally strong sense of guilt and a truly dreadful fear of retribution, seeking expression in a passionate longing for effective intercession and in a craving for direct, personal experience of the Deity, as well as in a corresponding dissatisfaction with the Church and with the mechanization of the means of salvation as reflected, for example, in the traffic in indulgences.

These attitudes, along with the great interest in astrology, the increased resort to magic, and the startling spread of witchcraft and Satanism in the fifteenth century were, according to the precepts of modern psychology, normal reactions to the sufferings to which mankind in that period was subjected.

Chapter Questions

1. If you wanted to interpret the Late Middle Ages as a period of decline, what arguments and evidence would you emphasize? If you wanted to interpret this period primarily as one of transition, what arguments and evidence would you emphasize?

2. In what ways was the general character of the Late Middle Ages exemplified by the plague and reactions to it?