It seemed as if the Medieval world would last forever. But the system contained the seeds of its own destruction. Noble houses saw the power of a king and wanted it for themselves. And the power of the king was only upheld with the help of the nobles. Hence, they began to build their own power bases in the militias.
Politics was on the mind of these aristocrats. And this politics was always self-centred and grounded in manipulation, as made clear at the end of the period in ‘The Prince’, a book on statecraft by Italian philosopher Nicolo Machiavelli in 1513.
TOWARDS THE MODERN STATE
In France the power of the monarchy was curtailed by the Duchy of Burgundy, taking Burgundy and Flanders by 1384. By 1356 imperial hold on many German duchies was so weak that a compromise was produced – the Golden Bull – devolving power from the emperor to local Elector aristocracies.
By 1400 Italy was disunited with 5 states – Florence, Venice, Naples, Milan and the Papal State – becoming virtually independent. Further splits in the Alps led to the Swiss Confederation. In Scandinavia, Margaret of Norway ruled from 1397, but she was a puppet, the real power in the aristocracy.
Spain rose as the most powerful region. The Spanish Reconquest was under way, driving out the Muslims, or Moors. The 11th century mercenary Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar set the scene, a disgraced noble who joined forces with the monarchy at the defence of Valencia. Centuries later he was to emerge as the national hero, El Cid.
By 1248 Spain was back in Christendom, power contested by two noble houses, Aragon and Castile. In 1479 they united, leaving Spain all powerful at the dawn of European expansion overseas.
In 1477 the power of Burgundy was finally smashed, the area partitioned between France and Germany, laying the seeds for centuries of antagonism. Further east, Poland and Hungary transformed into new empires. The Muscovites around Moscow came awake, while the Ottoman Turks swallowed up areas of the Balkans.
SENSE OF THE LOCAL
These new states had a greater sense of themselves, with civic and bureaucratic importance creeping into government. In 1445 France commissioned Europe’s first standing army, quickly adopted by the rest. In England the Star Chamber was set up to oversee judicial and administrative matters for the king.
Such bureaucracy brought a more organised tax system and for the first time monarchies organised embassies, with ambassadors furthering national interests.
This all had a dire effect on the Church, which was becoming increasingly corrupt. In 1294 the last recognisably medieval pope appeared in Boniface VIII. At odds with the monarchy of England and France, in 1300 he appeared in public with two swords carried before him, declaring his right to temporal power.
In 1303 he was seized by Italian nobles in the pay of France. By 1305 French manipulation of the bishops led to a French pope in an attempt to smash papal power. The papacy itself was moved from Rome to Avignon, restored to Rome in 1377.
Even some clerics defied the pope, aiding monarchs with the idea of national Churches. In 1378 there was a Great Schism as Roman bishops elected a pope in Rome, and France placed another at Avignon.
The Schism was ended in the 1417 Council of Constance, but papal authority was severely weakened, the seeds of future Protestantism placed, reformers such as the English John Wyclif arguing against Church influence and the Confessional, investing the authority of God in the Bible rather than the pope.
BLACK DEATH
In 1315 a Great Famine struck much of Europe. It was a shock: how could such a Godly society be struck by such a heinous act of God? In 1346 the Black Death – bubonic plague – arrived, ravaging Europe until 1353, killing 25 million, a third of the population. For 4 centuries it would reappear, such as the Great Plague of London in 1665.
Plague didn’t discriminate between classes. Killing many monks and priests, a now inexperienced clergy couldn’t cope with the political pressure. A shortage of manpower strengthened the peasant, the feudal system crashing down with his withholding of labour as he demanded a wage.
It reshaped the agrarian world, crop rotation being too labour intensive, farmland converting to pasturage for cattle and sheep. The leaseholder and sharecropper began to appear.
A CHANGING SOCIETY
The lot of the peasant had been known throughout the Middle Ages with ballads being popular and folk heroes getting the better of the king. The most famous was Robin Hood, robbing the rich to give to the poor. From the 14th century peasant uprisings came, such as the English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, led by agitator Wat Tyler. It failed, but the message was obvious.
The period also saw the rising power of the mayor, reflecting the growing size and importance of towns, rising from the country fairs but outside the feudal system. Merchants had been degraded as mere pedlars, but a merchant middleclass was on the rise, power centred in the towns, with the cottage wool industry beginning.
As the merchants became wealthy, the monarchs wanted a slice. But how? The merchants purchased from the monarchs privileges for their towns, leading to elected town councils, the burghers beginning to appear. England remembers this period in the tale of Dick Whittington, yet a real Richard Whittington did become thrice mayor of London.
THE NEW TRADE
The rise of the merchant middleclass was uppermost in the cities of northern Italy, rich banking families rising such as the Medicis. Populations exploded above 40,000, Paris, Constantinople, Naples, Venice and Milan reaching 100,000. Venice became famed for adventure and trade, epitomised by Marco Polo’s trading journey to China in the 1270s. The Venetian merchant fleet forged a huge network, trading with the Middle East and north Africa, bringing silk from the Far East, spices from the Arabs, gold and ivory from sub-Saharan Africa. The 14th century saw the invention of the ‘bill of exchange’, a written promise to pay money to another.
This outer trade merged with European trade, centred in London, Augsburg and Cologne. The two regions met at Bruges and Lyons, where merchants met to settle accounts. A hundred north German towns known as the Hanse formed the Hanseatic League in the 13th century, lasting as a trading confederation until 1669.
With the discovery of the New World trading declined in the Mediterranean, now centred on the Atlantic ports. Modern banking was inaugurated with the Amsterdam Exchange Bank in 1609, the Bank of England in 1694. The merchant middleclass became a central factor in breaking the Medieval world.
INTELLIGENTSIA
Another factor grew from the need for an educated elite, creating the ‘studia generalia’, schools opened by monks for those with an inclination towards learning. The ‘seven liberal arts’ were taught – arithmetic, astronomy, music, geometry, grammar, rhetoric and logic.
The first university opened at Salerno, Italy, in the 9th century. Bologna followed in 1088, Paris and Oxford about 1150, Cambridge in 1209. A new idea arose: God had given man a mind to think; so why not use it?
Until the 12th century the Bible reigned supreme. Plato and Aristotle had been partially consolidated with Biblical thought. But the Spanish Reconquest opened up the Arab libraries to Europe, with Classical texts appearing.
This presented a problem. Classical philosophy pre-dated the New Testament. How could this be if God was truth? Medieval philosophy grappled with the question in the form of the Scholastics, or Schoolmen.
In 1274 St Thomas Aquinas died, having devoted his life to the problem. He argued there was ‘natural’ theology and ‘revealed’ theology. The latter came from faith and the Scriptures, the former from our sense experiences of the world. But both were simply different ways to the same truth of God.
Aquinas took away the contradiction, but he had let the intellectual genie out of the bottle. The English monk, Roger Bacon went on to stress the importance of experiment over simple belief.
BIRTH OF SCIENCE
It was the dawn of modern science, furthered by William of Occam, and his ‘Occam’s Razor’. Dying in 1349, his idea was simple: when we provide theories of how the world works, the most likely truth is the simplest. Following the idea through, if a simple explanation could be found with no need of God, then God could be discounted.
But if God could be discounted, what about the Church? Could it have validity without God at the apex? And if the Church could be discounted, what of the entire Medieval system?
In all areas, from peasant discontent to intellectual musing, Medievalism was becoming a thing of the past. Then, in 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the New World of America. The Bible told us nothing of this land. It existed, apparently other than God. Unless, of course, the idea of God was more a matter of essence than existence.
The European was now on the verge of an explosion of reason and expansion. The entire world stood at its heels. But what of that world? In the next post, we will begin a study of the history of the rest of the world.
© Anthony North, August 2007
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