Crisis of the Late Middle Ages

The period referred to as the late Middle Ages--roughly the 1300s and early 1400s--was an unsettling time of great plagues, power struggles and intellectual transformation.  In this time, a third of the population of Europe was wiped out in a few years, the Catholic Church was divided by rival popes, and the increasingly powerful monarchs fought both the church and each other in ever more terrible wars.  This time of trouble was also an important time of renewal--of renewed Christian piety, national patriotism, and new learning.  It is notable also as a time of great women, perhaps even the birth of feminism.

The Black Death

In the Black Death of 1347-50, about a third of the European population died of plague.   It was actually a mix of three related bacterial diseases that were transferred by rats, fleas or by air.  The most common form of the disease--bubonic plague--caused huge boils to develop followed by internal hemorrhaging.  After three or four days of agony, the victim was dead.

What was the result of such mass death? As you might imagine, some reacted by losing  hope and self-restraint, that is to say living for the moment, and by giving themselves to drink and lechery.  Others fled to country getaways.  The clergy were hit hard as they tended the dying and gave last rites.  As you might also imagine, many thought that God was punishing humankind for its sins.  In many places, on the other hand, scapegoats were found, especially Jews.  They were massacred by the thousands in several German cities.  In Basle, Switzerland, the town's Jews were penned into wooden buildings and burned.  The worst may have been Mainz, Germany, where 12,000 were murdered.  Most German Jews at fled into Poland during this time, which became the primary center of European Jewry (and the center of the Holocaust in our century).

The economic consequences were great.  Labor became scarce, and that meant that the value of labor was greatly increased.  This sped the change from an agricultural system based on serfdom (laborers permanently attached to their land who owed services to their lord) to a peasant-tenant system (where laborers held leases to a small plot of land in return for rent payments to the lord).  Peasants were more independent and could earn money for their produce.  It was even possible for a few to become fairly wealthy.  Consider the crisis of feudalism as described by an English chronicler after the plague had swept through his country.

The King sent a proclamation into all the counties that reapers and other laborers should not take more (of the crop) than they had been accustomed to take, under the penalty appointed by statute.  But the laborers were so lifted up and obstinate that they would not listen to the King's command, but if anyone wished to have them he had to give them what they wanted, and either lose his fruit and crops, or satisfy the lofty and covetous wishes of the workmen.  And when it was known to the King that they had not observed his command, and had given great wages to the laborers, he levied heavy fines upon abbots, priors, knights, greater and lesser . . .

The king tried to hold on to the status quo, but demographics and economics was against him in the long run.

What about the moral damage of the plague?  Piety seemed to increase after the plague, and a new age of mystic enthusiasm had begun, but the church itself seemed further weakened.  The old ways were not so appealing to Europeans after the disaster.

Decline of the Church

Even before the Black Death, the church's power was challenged by the kings.  By the 1300s kings came to have enough intellectual, legal and moral resources to do without the popes--though not without the church entirely.  Generally speaking, they stopped putting up with Papal interference, and the Papacy itself became a prize of their power struggles.

It all came apart after the end of the crusades, as I have mentioned.  After about 1270, both the English and French kings insisted on the right to tax the clergy.  And for good reason:  they owned a lot of the land.  This was the key issue in the power struggle between the Church universal (Christendom) and the monarchies (kingdoms).  The French king actually managed to have Pope Boniface arrested in 1303 (and later released).  In 1305, the French made sure that  a French pope was elected, and the new pope took up permanent residence in Avignon (virtually in France) to have king's protection.  It was a disgrace for the pope to leave Rome and seek French protection.  The Avignon Popes sought to replace lost moral authority with enhanced financial strength.  They renounced the doctrine of apostolic poverty (over many Franciscans' objections), built a fabulous new palace at Avignon and instituted a variety of new taxes on clergy.  The sale of church offices became common, and the practice of selling indulgences was begun in earnest.

Many devout leaders of the church raised the cry for reform, and others began to question the need or legitimacy of the papacy itself.  The idea arose that the church should be governed by a general council of the bishops, priests and monks, rather than the pope.  Things moved from bad to worse when in 1378, the cardinals, pressured by the leaders of the city of Rome, elected an Italian Pope, and then under French pressure, renounced him and elected a French pope.  The Italian one did not resign, however.  Now there were two popes--one in Avignon, and one in Rome.  The assembly of a special council in 1409  to resolve this "Great Schism" only led to the election of a third pope!  Finally, another council in 1417 managed to find a candidate that could win broad support and get the other three to abdicate.

St. Catherine leads the reform effort

Catherine of Siena was born in the first year of the plague (1347), the 24th of 25 children of a wealthy wool dyer.  As a girl,  Catherine vowed to remain a virgin, and at age eighteen joined a special order of women (usually widows) connected with the Dominican order.  They wore habits, but lived in their own homes.  She spent years in her room alone, reading and praying, and experiencing a mystical marriage to Christ.  At 21, she dedicated herself to the service of the sick and poor.  In 1370 she experienced a mystical death, a union with God for several hours while observers could only see a lifeless body.  In later years she wrote a great deal and began to take an active part in Italian and church politics.  She unsuccessfully preached a crusade, but more successfully pressed for the reform of the church (the elimination of the purchase of bishoprics and other abuses) and the return of the Papacy to Rome from Avignon.  But in the end, she could not stop the Great Schism which occurred just before her death at the age of 33.  Catherine was the St. Francis of her day.  She was revered throughout Italy and Europe, and believed by many to be genuinely intimate with God and a true prophet.  Europeans were seeking a new spiritual purity in a troubled age, and purity and truth were to be found in a woman.  She is now the patron saint of Italy.

War

The rise of national monarchies led to conflicts between kings and popes, and also between kings.   The first great war of nations in European history was the Hundred Years' War between France and England.  The key moment in the war was the awesome battle of Agincourt in 1415 between the English army under King Henry V, and a grand army fighting for the French King, Charles VI.  The English army consisted of knights, infantry, and a highly trained regiment of Welsh longbow archers.  The French army consisted mostly of a vast cavalry of France's best knights.  According to a French chronicler, " when the battalions of the French were formed, it was grand to see them; and as far as one could judge by the eye, the were in number fully six times as many as the English."

In spite of being badly outnumbered, the English won a huge victory.  The Welsh archers devasted the ranks of French knights, reports the chronicler:  "Before they went to close quarters, many of the French were disabled and wounded by the arrows; and when they came quite up to the English they were, as has been said, so closely pressed one against another that none of them could lift their arms to strike their enemies. . ."   The horses were wounded by arrows and could not get traction on the muddy field that day.  When the heavily armored knights fell to the ground they were killed by English footsoldiers or archers.  In the end it was a slaughter.  Many thousands of France's best knights were killed, while only a handful of English died.  In the final analysis, English peasants had defeated Europe's greatest and bravest knights.  The age of the feudal knight was over.

In France, knights were defeated by  the longbow.  Soon it would be the gun.  In 1453, Constantinople, the capital of the ancient Byzantine Empire, fell to the Muslim Turks.  The formerly impregnable walls had been breached by a new weapon--the cannon (provided by Italian smiths).  By the end of the 15th century, gunpowder firearms would ensure the superiority of infantry over cavalry and make kings--who could afford to organize and equip large infantry forces--the masters of warfare and of political power.  It also gave Europeans a decisive edge over other peoples they were encountering in their overseas voyages beginning at this time.

Back to France in the early 1400s.  The great victory of Agincourt placed France under the control of the King of England, Henry V.  He married a French princess and proceeded to solidify his new joint kingdom of England and France.  Although Henry V died prematurely, leaving only an infant son as king,  it looked as though nothing could stop the new English regime.  One of the last strongholds of the French was Orleans, and the English army arrived there in 1429 to take it and secure the whole of southern France.  At this time, an eighteen year old peasant girl, Joan of Arc, appeared at the exiled court of the French prince, declaring she had a mission from God to rescue France from English power.  She told the prince that since she was a young girl, she had heard voices of saints--including St. Catherine--telling her of her great mission.  Charles, prince of France, was convinced that she was telling him the truth, and gave her an army of 5000 men whom she led on horseback clad in coat of mail.  Inspired by the fearless young woman of God, and convinced of her holy calling, the French boldly attacked the English and succeeded in beating them back from Orleans.  The tide had turned.  The later capture of Joan by the English and her execution at the stake as a heretic only strengthened her legend among the French as a martyr and an inspiration.  She was certainly an inspiration to one woman at the French court, Christine de Pisan, who concluded that in her day men had become confused and weak, and only the strength of a woman could rescue them.

The Rise of Humanism

Christine de Pisan was a generation younger than Catherine of Siena (Pisan was born in 1365), though a generation older than Joan of Arc.  She was born in Italy, later to spend her life at the court of the King of France, where her father was court astrologer.  With her father's encouragement, Christine received the education of noble boys.  At age 25, she became a widow with three children.  She turned to writing both poetry and prose to support herself, and gained wealthy patrons at court.  She is regarded as the first feminist author.  What is notable is that she came to her feminist views through a new movement in thought called humanism.   Humanists in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance had great enthusiasm for classical Greek and Roman literture and values.  They were interested in secular life and human abilities, especially reason.  In this context, Christine argued that women have as much reason as men, and so deserve more respect that they have received.  She turned to classical literature for proof of her point.  Late in her life she saw Joan of Arc as a contemporary example of the leadership of women (though in a way quite different from Christine's humanism).

Mysticism, Humanism and Patriotism in History

Humanism was yet another response to a troubled and confusing time.  Educated Europeans looked back to the ancient period for knowledge, insights and a new beginning.  The late Middle Ages, then, might be summarized in terms of three responses to troubled times:  mysticism and reinvigoration of medieval institutions, as represented by St. Catherine; the new (old) learning of humanism exemplified by Christine de Pisan, and finally, a new call to patriotism, as we find in Joan of Arc.  Here is where we end this course.  I invite you to use your informed imagination:  are these three ideals still present in Western culture?  Is it the case that Amercians turn to patriotism, piety or rationality for answers?  If so, how have these notions changed over the course of 500 years?