Learning, Literature, and the Renaissance Political and Military Transformations Comparative Perspectives
Diversity and Dominance: Persecution and Protection of Jews, 1272-1349 Environment and Technology: The Clock
In a span of four years, from 1347 to 1351, a devastating plague known as the Black Death killed a third of western Europe’s population. A sense of the fragility of human life left a profound impression on Western art that persists to the present day. The relative prosperity that had characterized people’s self-consciousness in 1200 was shattered, and it would take fully three centuries before Europe’s population regained its previous size.
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Although their contemporary Muslim and Byzantine neighbors commonly called western Europeans “Franks," western Europeans ordinarily referred to themselves as “Latins." That term underscored their allegiance to the Latin rite of Christianity (and to its patriarch, the pope) as well as the use of the Latin language by their literate
Peasants and PopuLation
Members. The Latin West deserves special attention because its achievements during this period had profound implications for the future of the world. The region was emerging from the economic and cultural shadow of its Islamic neighbors and, despite grave disruptions caused by plague and warfare, boldly setting out to extend its dominance. Some common elements promoted the Latin West’s remarkable resurgence: competition, the pursuit of success, and the effective use of borrowed technology and learning.
Yet, in the summer of 1454, a year after the Ottoman Turks had captured the Greek Christian city of Constantinople, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini° was trying to stir up support for a crusade to halt the Muslim advances that were engulfing southeastern Europe and that showed no sign of stopping. The man who in four years would become pope doubted that anyone could persuade the rulers of Christian Europe to take up arms against the Muslims: “Christendom has no head whom all will obey," he lamented. “Neither the pope nor the emperor receives his due." Indeed, French and English armies had been at war for more than a century, the German emperor presided over dozens of states that were virtually independent of his control, and the numerous kingdoms and principalities of Mediterranean Europe had never achieved unity. With only slight exaggeration Aeneas Sylvius complained, “Every city has its own king, and there are as many princes as there are households."
Despite all these divisions, disasters, and wars, historians now see the period from 1200 to 1500 (Europe’s Late Middle Ages) as a time of unusual progress, in which splendid works of architecture were constructed, institutions of higher learning were founded, and urban culture was transformed in many ways. Although frequent wars caused havoc and destruction, they also promoted the development of more powerful weapons and more unified monarchies. A European fifty years later would have known that the Turks did not overrun Europe, that a truce in the Anglo-French conflict would hold, and that explorers sent by Portugal and a newly united Spain would extend Europe’s reach to other continents.
World History
