Italian society in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was characterized by marriage patterns in which men in their late twenties or thirties customarily married women in their mid - to late teens. This demographic fact probably contributed to the widely shared belief that wives were essentially children, who could not be trusted with important matters and who were best trained by being beaten. Renaissance humanism did little to change such attitudes. In some cases, it even reinforced them.
Fter my wife had been settled in my house a few days, and after her first pangs of longing for her mother and family had begun to fade, I took her by the hand and showed her around the whole house. I explained that the loft was the place for grain and that the stores of wine and wood were kept in the cellar. I showed her where things needed for the table were kept, and so on, through the whole house. At the end there were no household goods of which my wife had not learned both the place and the purpose. . . .
Only my books and records and those of my ancestors did I determine to keep well sealed. . . . These my wife not only could not read, she could not even lay hands on them. I kept my records at all times. . . l ocked up and arranged in order in my study, almost like sacred and religious objects. I never gave my wife permission to enter that place, with me or alone. . . .
[Husbands] who take counsel with their wives. . . are madmen if they think true prudence or good counsel lies in the female brain. . . . For this very reason I have always tried carefully not to let any secret of mine be known to a woman.
I did not doubt that my wife was most loving, and more discreet and modest in her ways than any, but I still considered it safer to have her unable, and not merely unwilling, to harm me. . . . Furthermore, I made it a rule never to speak with her of anything but household matters or questions of conduct, or of the children.
Source: Leon Battista Alberti, "On the Family," in The Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. and trans. Renee N. Watkins (Columbia, SC: 1969), pp. 208-13, as abridged in Julie O'Faolain and Lauro Martines, eds., Not in God's Image: Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians (New York: 1973), pp. 187-88.
Questions for Analysis
1. For what reasons did Alberti argue that a wife should have no access to books or records?
2. Would you have expected humanism to make attitudes to women more liberal and "modern"? How do views like Alberti's challenge such assumptions?
3. Compare Alberti's view of women to that of Christine de Pisan (page 364). How do you think Christine would have responded to this passage?
Denigration often mirrored in the works of classical literature that these humanists so much admired.
The Emergence of Textual Criticism
The humanists of Florence eventually surpassed Petrarch in their knowledge of classical literature and philosophy, especially that of ancient Greece. In this, they were aided by a number of Byzantine scholars who had migrated to
Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century and who gave instruction in the ancient form of their own native language. Wealthy, well-connected Florentines increasingly aspired to acquire Greek masterpieces for themselves, which often involved journeys back to Constantinople. In 1423, one adventurous bibliophile managed to bring back 238 manuscript books, among them rare works of Sophocles, Euripides, and Thucydides. These were quickly paraphrased in Latin and thus made accessible to western Europeans for the first time.
This influx of new classical texts spurred a new interest in textual criticism. A pioneer in this activity was Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457). Born in Rome and active primarily as a secretary to the king of Naples and Sicily, Valla had no allegiance to the republican ideals of the Florentine humanists. Instead, he turned his skills to the painstaking analysis of Greek and Latin writings in order to show how the historical study of language could discredit old assumptions and even unmask some texts as forgeries. For example, some papal propagandists argued that the papacy’s claim to secular power in Europe derived from rights granted to the bishop of Rome by the emperor Constantine in the fourth century, enshrined in a document known as “The Donation of Constantine.” By analyzing the language of this spurious text, Valla proved that it could not have been written in the time of Constantine because it contained more recent Latin usages and vocabulary.
This demonstration not only discredited more traditional scholarly methods, it made the concept of anachronism central to all subsequent textual study and historical thought. Indeed, Valla even applied his expert knowledge of Greek to elucidating the meaning of Saint Paul’s letters, which he believed had been obscured by Jerome’s Latin translation (see Chapter 6). This work was to prove an important link between Italian Renaissance scholarship and the subsequent Christian humanism of the north, which in turn fed into the Reformation (see Chapter 13).
THE END OF THE EASTERN ROMAN EMPIRE
The Greek-speaking refugees who arrived in Italy after the Black Death were self-appointed exiles. They were responding to the succession of calamities that had reduced the once-proud eastern Roman Empire to a scattering of embattled provinces. As we’ve noted, when Constantinople fell to western crusaders in 1204, the surrounding territories of Byzantium were severed from the capital that had held them together as constituent parts of that empire (see Chapter 9). When the Latin presence in Constantinople was finally expelled in 1261, imperial power had been so weakened that it extended only into the immediate hinterlands of the city and to parts of the Greek Peloponnese. The rest of the empire had become a collection of small principalities that existed in precarious alliance with the Mongols and indeed depended on the Pax Mongolica for survival (see Chapter 10). Then, with the coming of the Black Death, the imperial capital suffered the loss of half of its inhabitants and shrunk still further. Meanwhile, the disintegration of the Mongol Empire laid the larger region of Anatolia open to a new set of invaders.
The Rise of the Ottoman Turks
Like the Mongols, the Turks were originally a nomadic people whose economy depended on raiding. When the Mongols arrived in northwestern Anatolia, the Turks were already established there and were being converted to Islam by the resident Muslim powers of the region: the Seljuq Sultanate of Rum and the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad. But when the Mongols toppled these older powers, they eliminated the two traditional authorities that had kept Turkish border chieftains in check. Now they were free to raid, unhindered, along the soft frontiers of Byzantium. At the same time, they remained far enough from the centers of Mongol authority to avoid being destroyed themselves. One of their chieftains, Osman Gazi (1258-1326), established his own independent kingdom. Eventually, his name would characterize the Turkish dynasty that controlled the most ancient lands of Western civilizations for six centuries: the Ottomans.
By the mid-fourteenth century, Osman’s successors had solidified their preeminence by capturing a number of important cities. These successes brought the Ottomans to the attention of the Byzantine emperor, who hired a contingent of them as mercenaries in 1345. They were extraordinarily successful—so much so that the eastern Roman Empire could not control their movements. They struck out on their own and began to extend their control westward. By 1370, their holdings stretched all the way to the Danube. In 1389, they defeated a powerful coalition of Serbian forces at the battle of Kosovo, which enabled them to begin subduing Bulgaria, the Balkans, and eventually Greece. In 1396, the Ottoman army even attacked Constantinople itself, although it withdrew to repel an ineffectual crusading force that had been hastily sent by the papacy.
In 1402, another attack on Constantinople was deflected—this time, by a more potent foe who had ambitions to match those of the Ottomans. Timur the Lame (Tamerlane, as he was called by European admirers) was born to a family of small landholders in the Mongol Khanate of Chagatai (named for its first ruler, the second son of Genghis Khan). Although Timur may have been a Turk himself, he acted as the spiritual heir of the Mongol Empire. While still a young man, he rose to prominence as a military leader and gained a reputation for tactical genius. He was no politician, though, and never officially assumed the title of khan in any of the territories he dominated. Instead, he moved ceaselessly from conquest to conquest, becoming the master of lands stretching
THE HEAD OF TIMUR THE LAME. This bust of the Mongol leader known in the West as Tamerlane is based on a forensic reconstruction of his exhumed skull.
From the Caspian Sea to the Volga River, as well as most of Persia. For a time, it looked briefly as if the Mongol Empire might be reunited under his reign. But Timur died in 1405, on his way to invade China, and his various conquests fell into the hands of local rulers. Mongol influence continued in the Mughal Empire of India, whose rulers claimed descent from the followers of Genghis Khan. But in Anatolia, the Ottoman Turks were once again on the rise.
The Fall of Constantinople
After the death of Timur, Ottoman pressure on Constantinople resumed and escalated. During the 1420s and 1430s, monasteries and schools that had been established since the fourth century found themselves in the path of an advancing army, and a steady stream of fleeing scholars strove to salvage a millennium’s worth of Byzantine books—many of them preserving the heritage of ancient Greece and the Hellenistic world. Then, in 1451, the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II turned his full attention to the conquest of the imperial city. In 1453, after a brilliantly executed siege, his army succeeded in breaching its walls. The Byzantine emperor was killed in the assault, the city itself was plundered, and its remaining population was sold into slavery. The Ottomans then settled down to rule their new capital in a style reminiscent of their Byzantine predecessors.
The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople administered an enormous shock to European rulers and intellectuals—and, indeed, the latter would profit mightily from this event. Yet its actual political and economic impact was minor. Ottoman control may have reduced European access to the Black Sea, but the bulk of the Far Eastern luxury trade with Europe had never passed through Black Sea ports in the first place. Europeans got most of their spices and silks through Venice, which imported them from Alexandria and Beirut, and these two cities did not fall to the Ottomans until the 1520s. Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 10, Europeans already had colonial ambitions and significant trading interests in Africa and the Atlantic that connected them to far-reaching networks.
But if the practical effects of the Ottoman conquest were modest where western Europe was concerned, the effects on the Turks themselves were transformative. Vast new wealth poured into Anatolia, which the Ottomans increased by carefully tending to the industrial and commercial interests of their new capital city, Constantinople, which they also called Istanbul—the Turkish pronunciation of the Greek phrase eis tan polin “in (or to) the city.” Trade routes were redirected to feed the capital, and the Ottomans became a naval power in the eastern Mediterranean as well as in the Black Sea. As a result, Constantinople’s population grew rapidly, from fewer than 100,000 in 1453 to more than 500,000. By 1600, it was the largest city in the world outside of China.
Slavery and Social Advancement in the Ottoman Empire
Despite the Ottomans’ careful attention to commerce, their empire continued to rest on the spoils of conquest. To manage its continual expansion, the size of the Ottoman army and administration grew exponentially, drawing more and more manpower from conquered territories. And because both army and bureaucracy were largely composed of slaves, the demand for more soldiers and administrators could best be met through further conquests that would capture yet more slaves. Those conquests, however, required a still larger army and an even more extensive bureaucracy—and so the cycle continued. It mirrors, in many respects, the
THE GROWTH OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. Consider the patterns of Ottoman expansion revealed in this map. ¦ Where is Constantinople, and how might the capture of Constantinople in 1453 have facilitated further conquests? ¦ Compare the extent of the Ottoman Empire in 1566 with that of the Byzantine Empire under Justinian (see the map on page 212). How would you account for their similarities?
Dilemma of the Roman Empire in the centuries of its rapid expansion beyond Italy (see Chapter 5), which created an insatiable demand for slaves.
Not only were slaves the backbone of Ottoman government, they were also critical to the lives of the Turkish upper class. One of the important measures of status in Ottoman society was the number of slaves in one’s household. After the capture of Constantinople, new wealth would permit some elites to maintain households in the thousands. By the sixteenth century, the sultan alone possessed more than 20,000 slave attendants, not including his bodyguard and elite infantry units, both of which also comprised slaves.
Where did all of these slaves come from? Many were captured in war. Many others were taken on raiding forays into Poland and Ukraine and sold to Crimean slave merchants, who shipped their captives to the slave markets of Constantinople. But slaves were also recruited (some willingly, some by coercion) from rural areas of the Ottoman Empire itself. Because the vast majority of slaves were household servants and administrators rather than laborers, some men willingly accepted enslavement, believing that they would be better off as slaves in Constantinople than as impoverished peasants in the countryside. In the Balkans especially, many people were enslaved as children, handed over by their families to pay the “child tax” the Ottomans imposed on rural areas too poor to pay a monetary tribute. Although an excruciating experience for families, this practice did open up opportunities for social advancement. Special academies were created at Constantinople to train the most able of the enslaved male children to act as administrators and soldiers, some of whom rose to become powerful figures in the Ottoman Empire.
For this reason, slavery carried relatively little social stigma. Even the sultan himself was most often the son of an enslaved woman. And because Muslims were not permitted to enslave other Muslims, the vast majority of Ottoman
SULTAN MEHMET II, "THE CONQUEROR" (r. 1451-81).
This portrait, executed by the Ottoman artist Siblizade Ahmed, exhibits features characteristic of both Central Asia and Europe. The sultan's pose-his aesthetic appreciation of the rose, his elegant handkerchief-are indicative of the former, as is the fact that he wears the white turban of a scholar and the thumb ring of an archer. But the subdued coloring and three-quarter profile may reflect the influence of Italian portraits. ¦ What did the artist achieve through this blending of styles and symbols? ¦ What messages does this portrait convey?
Slaves were Christian—although many eventually converted to Islam. And because so many of the elite positions within Ottoman government were held by these slaves, the paradoxical result was that Muslims, including the Turks themselves, were effectively excluded from the main avenues of social and political influence in the Ottoman Empire. Avenues to power were therefore remarkably open to men of ability and talent, most of them non-Muslim slaves.
Nor was this power limited to the government and the army. Commerce and business also remained largely in the hands of non-Muslims, most frequently Greeks, Syrians, and Jews. Jews in particular found in the Ottoman Empire a welcome refuge from the persecutions and expulsions that had characterized Jewish life in late-medieval Europe. After their expulsion from Spain in 1492 (see Chapter 12), more than 100,000 Spanish (Sephardic) Jews ultimately immigrated to the territories of the Ottoman Empire.
Because the Ottoman sultans were Sunni Muslims, they often dealt harshly with other Muslim sects. But they were extremely tolerant of non-Muslims. They organized the major religious groups of their empire into legally recognized units and permitted them considerable rights of self-government. They were especially careful to protect and promote the authority of the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople over the Orthodox Christians of their empire. As a result, the Ottomans enjoyed staunch support from their Orthodox Christian subjects during their wars with the Christians of western Europe.
Russia: "The Third Rome"
The Orthodox Church also received staunch support from the Russian people, whose own Church had been founded by Byzantine missionaries in the tenth century (see Chapter 8) and whose written language was based on the Greek alphabet and Greek grammar. Indeed, the emerging duchy of Muscovy (see Chapter 10) saw itself as the natural protector and ally of the eastern Roman Empire, and its alienation from western Europe increased as Byzantium grew weaker and the responsibility for defending Orthodox Christianity devolved onto the Russian Church.
But when the patriarch of Constantinople agreed to submit to the authority of Rome in 1438, in the desperate hope that the papacy would rally military support for the besieged city, Russian clergy refused to follow suit. After Constantinople fell to the Turks—predictably, without any help from Latin Christendom—the Russian Church emerged as the only surviving proponent of Orthodox Christianity.
Its sense of isolation was increased by developments on its western borders. In the thirteenth century, the small kingdom of Poland had struggled to defend itself from absorption by German princes. But when the Holy Roman Empire’s strength waned after the death of Frederick the Great (see Chapter 9), Poland’s situation grew more secure. In 1386, its reigning queen, Jadwiga, subsequently enabled its dramatic expansion when she married Jagiello, the duke of neighboring Lithuania, thus doubling the size of her kingdom. Lithuania had begun to carve out an extensive territory stretching from the Baltic to modern-day Belarus and Ukraine, and this expansionist momentum increased after its union with Poland. In 1410, a combined Polish and Lithuanian force defeated the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Tannenberg, crushing the military order that controlled a crucial region lying between the allied kingdoms. Thereafter, Poland-Lith-uania began to push eastward toward Muscovy.
Although many of Lithuania’s aristocratic families were Orthodox Christians, the established church in Poland was loyal to Rome. Thus, when the inhabitants of Muscovy started to feel threatened by Poland-Lithuania, one way of constructing a shared Muscovite identity was to direct hostility toward Latin Christendom. Another was to take up the imperial mantle that had been abandoned when Constantinople fell, and to declare the Muscovite state the divinely appointed successor to Rome. To drive the point home, Muscovite dukes began to take the title of tsar, “caesar.” “Two Romes have fallen,” said a Muscovite chronicler, “the third is still standing, and a fourth there shall not be.”
WARFARE AND NATION-BUILDING IN EUROPE
War has always been an engine for the development of new technologies. This is something we have noted since Chapter 1, but in the era after the Black Death the pace and scale of warfare was escalated to an unprecedented degree— and so was the deployment of new weapons. Although explosives had been invented in China, and originally used in displays of fireworks, they were first put to devastating and destructive effect in Europe. In fact, the earliest cannons were as dangerous to those who fired them as to those who were targeted. But by the middle of the fifteenth century, they were reliable enough to revolutionize the nature of warfare. In 1453, heavy artillery played a leading role in the outcomes of two crucial conflicts: the Ottoman Turks breached the ancient defenses of Constantinople with cannon fire and the French captured the English-held city of Bordeaux, bringing an end to the attenuated conflict known as the Hundred Years’ War.
Thereafter, cannons made it more difficult for rebellious aristocrats to hole up in their stone castles and so consequently aided in the consolidation of national monarchies. Cannons placed aboard ships made Europe’s developing navies more effective. A handheld firearm, the pistol, was also invented in the fourteenth century, and around 1500 the musket ended forever the military dominance of heavily armored cavalry, giving the advantage to foot soldiers recruited from the ranks of average citizens.
This suggests that there is a symbiotic relationship between warfare and nation-building as well as between warfare and technology. Because Europeans were almost constantly at war from the fourteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, governments claimed new powers to tax their subjects and to control their subjects’ lives. Armies became larger, military technology deadlier. Wars became more destructive, society more militarized. As a result of these developments, the most successful European states were aggressively expansionist and aggressively engaged in creating an idea of national identity that would bind people together against a common enemy.
The Hundred Years' War Resumes
The hostilities that make up the Hundred Years’ War can be divided into three main phases (see the maps on page 000). The first phase dates from the initial declaration of war in 1337 (see Chapter 10), after which the English won a series of startling military victories before the Black Death put a temporary halt to the hostilities. The war then resumed in 1356, with another English victory at Poitiers. Four years later, in 1360, Edward III decided to leverage his strong position: he renounced his larger claim to the French throne, and in return he was to be guaranteed full sovereignty over a greatly enlarged duchy of Gascony and the promise of a huge ransom for the king of France, whom he held captive.
But the terms of the treaty were never honored, nor did it resolve the underlying issues that had led to the war itself, namely the problem of making good on any claim to sovereignty in contested territory and the question of the English king’s place in the French royal succession. The French king continued to treat the English king as his vassal, while Edward and his heirs quickly renewed their claim to the throne of France.
Although there were no pitched battles in France itself for two decades after this, a destabilizing proxy war developed during the 1360s and 1370s, which spread violence to neighboring regions. Both the English troops (posted in Gascony) and the French troops (eager to avenge their losses) were reluctant to settle down. Many organized into “Free Companies” of mercenaries and hired themselves out in the service of hostile factions in Castile and competing city-states in northern Italy. By 1376, when the conflict between England and France was reignited, the Hundred Years’ War had become a Europe-wide phenomenon.
England's Disputed Throne and the Brief Victory of Henry V
In this second phase of the war, the tide quickly shifted in favor of France. The new king, Charles V (r. 1364-80), imposed a series of taxes to fund the raising of an army,
A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SIEGE WITH CANNONS. Cannons were an essential element in siege warfare during the Hundred Years' War.
Restored order by disbanding the Free Companies, and hired the leader of one of these bands as the commander of his army. He thereby created a professional military that could match the English in discipline and tactics. By 1380, English territories in France had been reduced to a core area around the southwestern city of Bordeaux and the port of Calais in the extreme northeast.
Meanwhile, the aging Edward III has been succeeded by his nine-year-old grandson, Richard II (r. 1377-99), who was too young to prosecute a claim to the French crown. This was problematic, because the war had been extremely popular in England. Indeed, its mismanagement by Richard’s advisers was one of the issues that triggered the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. And when Richard came of age and showed no signs of martial ambition, many of his own aristocratic relatives turned against him. Richard retaliated against the ringleader of this faction, his cousin Henry of Lancaster, by sending him into exile and confiscating his property. Henry’s supporters used this as pretext for rebellion. In 1399, Richard was deposed by Henry and eventually murdered.
As a usurper whose legitimacy was always in doubt, Henry IV (r. 1399-1413) struggled to maintain his authority in the face of retaliatory rebellions and other challenges to his kingship. The best way to unite the country would have been to renew the war against France, but Henry was frequently ill and in no position to lead an army into combat. But when his son Henry V succeeded him in 1413, the new king immediately began to prepare for an invasion. His timing was excellent: the French royal government was foundering owing to the insanity of the reigning king, Charles VI (r. 1380-1422). A brilliant diplomat as well as a capable soldier, Henry V sealed an alliance with the powerful Duke of Burgundy, who was allegedly loyal to France but stood to gain from its defeat at the hands of the English. Henry also made a treaty with the German emperor, who agreed not to come to France’s aid.
When he crossed the Channel in the autumn of 1415, Henry V’s troops thus faced a much-depleted French army that could not rely on reinforcements. Although it was still vastly larger and boasted hundreds of mounted knights, it was undisciplined. It was also severely hampered by bad weather and deep mud when the two armies clashed at Agincourt on October 25 of that year—conditions that favored the lighter English infantry. Henry’s men managed to win a crushing victory.
Then, over the next five years, Henry conquered most of northern France. In 1420, the ailing Charles VI was forced to recognize him as heir to the throne of France, thereby disinheriting his own son. (This prince bore the ceremonial title of dauphin, “the dolphin,” from the heraldic device of the borderland province he inherited.) Henry sealed the deal by marrying the French princess, Catherine, and fathering an heir to the joint kingdom of England and France.
Joan of Arc's Betrayal and Legacy
Unlike his great-grandfather Edward III, who used his claim to the French throne largely as a bargaining chip to secure sovereignty over Gascony (see Chapter 10), Henry V honestly believed himself to be the rightful king of France. And his astonishing success in capturing the kingdom seemed to put the stamp of divine approval on that claim. But Henry’s successes in France also transformed the nature of the war, turning it from a profitable war of conquest and plunder into an extended and expensive military occupation. It might have been sustainable had Henry been as long-lived as many of his predecessors. But he died early in 1422, just short of his thirty-sixth birthday. King Charles VI died only a few months later.
The new king of England and France, Henry VI (r. 1422-61), was only an infant, and yet the English armies under the command of his regents continued to press southward into territories held by the dauphin. Although it seemed unlikely that English forces would ever succeed
JOAN OF ARC. A contemporary sketch of Joan was drawn in the margin of this register documenting official proceedings at the Parlement of Paris in 1429.
In dislodging him, confidence in the dauphin’s right to the throne had been shattered by his own mother’s declaration that he was illegitimate. It might have happened that England would once again rule an empire comprising much of northern France, as it had for a century and a half after the Norman conquest.
But this scenario fails to reckon with Joan of Arc. In 1429, a peasant girl from Lorraine (a territory only nominally part of France) made her way to the dauphin’s court and announced that an angel had told her that he, Charles, was the rightful king, and that she, Joan, should drive the English out of France. The fact that she even got a hearing underscores the hopelessness of the dauphin’s position, as does the extraordinary fact that he gave her a contingent of troops. With this force, Joan liberated the strategic city of Orleans, then under siege by the English, after which a series of victories culminated in Charles’s coronation in the cathedral of Reims, the traditional site for the crowning of French kings.
But, despite her miraculous success, Joan was an embarrassment whose very charisma made her dangerous: a peasant leading aristocrats, a woman leading men, and a commoner who claimed to have been commissioned by God. When, a few months later, the Burgundians captured her in battle and handed her over to the English, the king she had helped to crown did nothing to save her. Accused of witchcraft, condemned by the theologians of Paris, and tried for heresy by an English ecclesiastical court, Joan was burned to death in the market square at Rouen in 1431. She was nineteen years old.
The French forces whom Joan had inspired, however, continued on the offensive. In 1435, the duke of Burgundy withdrew from his alliance with England, and when the young English king, Henry VI, proved first incompetent and then insane, a series of French military victories brought hostilities to an end with the capture of Bordeaux in 1453. English kings would threaten to renew the war for another century, and Anglo-French hostility would last until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. But after 1453, English control over French territory would be limited to the port of Calais, which eventually fell in 1558.
The Long Shadow of the Hundred Years' War
The Hundred Years’ War challenged the very existence of France. The disintegration of that kingdom, first during the 1350s and 1360s, and again between 1415 and 1435, glaringly revealed the fragility of the bonds that tied the king to the nobility, and the royal capital Paris to the kingdom’s
THE PHASES OF THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. Here we see three snapshots of the political geography of France during the Hundred Years' War. ¦ In what areas of France did England make its greatest territorial gains before 1360? ¦ How and why did this change in the period leading up to 1429? ¦ What geographic and strategic advantages did the French monarchy enjoy after 1429 that might help explain its success in recapturing the French kingdom from the English?
Outlying regions. Nonetheless, the king’s power was actually increased by the war’s end, laying the foundations on which the power of early modern France would be built.
The Hundred Years’ War also had dramatic effects on the English monarchy. When English armies in France were successful, the king rode a wave of popularity that fueled an emerging sense of English identity. When the war turned against the English, however, defeats abroad undermined support for the monarch at home. Of the nine English kings who ruled England between 1307 and 1485, five were deposed and murdered by factions.
This was a consequence of England’s peculiar form of kingship, whose strength depended on the king’s ability to mobilize popular support through Parliament while maintaining the support of his nobility through successful wars. Failure to maintain this balance was even more destabilizing in England than it would have been elsewhere, precisely because royal power was so centralized. In France, the nobility could endure the insanity of Charles VI because his government was not powerful enough to threaten them. In England, neither the nobility nor the nation could afford the weak kingship of Henry VI. The result was an aristocratic rebellion against the king that led to a full-blown civil war: the Wars of the Roses, so called—by the novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)—because of the floral emblems, red and white, adopted by the two competing noble families
Lancaster and York. It ended only when a Lancastrian claimant, Henry Tudor (r. 1485-1509), resolved the dynastic feud by marrying Elizabeth of York, ruling as Henry VII and establishing a new Tudor dynasty whose symbol was a rose with both white and red petals. His son was Henry VIII (see Chapter 13).
So, despite England’s ultimate defeat, the Hundred Years’ War strengthened English identity in several ways. First, it equated national identity with the power of the state and its king. Second, it fomented a strong anti-French sentiment that led to the triumph of the English vernacular over French for the first time since the Norman conquest over 300 years earlier: the first English court to speak English was that of Richard II, a patron of Geoffrey Chaucer. And having lost its continental possessions, England became, for the first time, a self-contained island nation that looked to the sea for defense and opportunity—not to the Continent. This would later prove to be an advantage in many ways.
Conflict in the Holy Roman Empire and Italy
Elsewhere in Europe, the perpetual warfare that began to characterize the history of Western civilizations in this period was even more destructive than it proved to be in the struggle between England and France. In the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, armed conflict among territorial princes, and between these princes and the German emperor, weakened all combatants significantly. Periodically, a powerful emperor would emerge to play a major role, but the dominant trend was toward the continuing dissolution of power, with German princes dividing their territories among their heirs while free cities and local lords strove to shake off the princes’ rule. Between 1350 and 1450, near anarchy prevailed in many regions. Only in the eastern regions of the empire were the rulers of Bavaria, Austria, and Brandenburg-Prussia able to strengthen their authority, mostly by supporting the efforts of the nobility to subject their peasants to serfdom and by conquering and colonizing new territories on their eastern frontiers.
In northern and central Italy, the last half of the fourteenth century was also marked by incessant conflict. With the papacy based in Avignon, the Papal States collapsed and Rome itself was riven by factional violence. Warfare among northern city-states added to the violence caused by urban rebellions in the wake of the plague. But around 1400, Venice, Milan, and Florence had succeeded in stabilizing their differing forms of government. Venice was now ruled by an oligarchy of merchants; Milan by a family of despots; and Florence was ruled as a republic but dominated by the influence of a few wealthy clans, especially the Medici banking family. Having settled their internal problems, these three cities then began to expand their influence by subordinating other cities to their rule.
Eventually, almost all the towns of northern Italy were allied with one of these powers. An exception was Genoa, which had its own trading empire in the Mediterranean and Atlantic (see Chapter 10). The papacy, meanwhile, reasserted its control over central Italy when it was restored to Rome in 1377. The southern kingdom of Naples and Sicily persisted as a separate entity but a constantly unstable one, riven by local warfare and poor government. After 1453, when the Hundred Years’ War had ended and Ottoman expansion had been checked at Constantinople, an uneasy peace was achieved in Italy. But diplomacy and frequently shifting alliances did little to check the ambitions of any one state for further expansion, and it could not change the fact that none of these small-scale states could oppose the powerful national monarchies or empires that surrounded Italy.
The Growth of National Monarchies
In France and England, then, as well as in smaller kingdoms like Scotland and Portugal, the later Middle Ages saw the emergence of European states more cohesive than any that had existed before. (In Chapter 12, we will see how powerful this cohesion made the new united kingdom of Spain.) The basic political patterns established in the formative twelfth and thirteenth centuries had made this possible, yet the active construction of a sense of national identity in these territories, and the fusion of that identity with kingship, were new phenomena. Forged by war and fueled by the growing cultural importance of vernacular languages, this fusion produced a new type of political organization: the national monarchy.
The advantages of these national monarchies when compared to older forms of political organization—such as the empire, the principality, or the city-state—would become very evident. When the armies of France or Spain invaded the Italian peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century, neither the militias of the city-states nor the far-flung resources of Venice were a match for them. Germany and the Low Countries would suffer similar invasions only a few generations later and, along with Italy, would remain battlegrounds for competing armies until the middle of the nineteenth century. But the new national monarchies brought significant disadvantages, too. They guaranteed the prevalence of warfare in Europe as they continued their struggle for sovereignty and territory, and they would eventually transport their rivalry to every corner of the globe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
World History
