June 1381, thousands of laborers from the English countryside rose up in rebellion against local authorities. Most were peasants or village craftsmen who were dismissed as ignorant by contemporary chroniclers. Yet the revolt was carefully coordinated: Plans were spread in coded messages circulated by word of mouth and by the followers of a renegade Oxford professor, John Wycliffe, who had called for the redistribution of Church property and taught that common people should be able to read the Bible in their own language. The rebellion’s immediate catalyst had been a series of exorbitant taxes levied by Parliament for the support of the ongoing war with France. But its more fundamental cause was an epidemic that had occurred thirty years earlier. The Black Death had reduced the entire population of Europe by 30 to 50 percent and had drastically altered the world of those who survived it. In this new world, workers were valuable and could stand up to those who paid them poorly or treated them like slaves. In that fateful summer of 1381, the workers of England even vowed to kill representatives of both the Church and the government— to kill (as they put it) all the lawyers—and to destroy all the documents that had been used to keep them in subjection. It was
THE PLAGUE CLAIMS A VICTIM. A priest gives last rites to a bedridden plague victim as a smiling devil pierces the dying man with a spear and as Christ looks mercifully down from heaven.
¦ What are the possible meanings of this image? ¦ What does it reveal about contemporary attitudes toward death by plague?
A revolution, and it partly succeeded. Although the leaders were eventually captured and executed, the rebellion had made the strength of the common people known to all.
The fourteenth century is often seen as a time of crisis in the history of Western civilizations. Famine and plague cut fearful swaths through the population; war was a brutally recurrent fact of life; and the papacy spent seventy years in continuous exile from Italy, only to see its prestige decline further after its return to Rome. But this was also a time of extraordinary opportunity and achievement. The exhausted land of Europe recovered from centuries of overfarming, while workers gained the economic edge; eventually, some even gained social and political power. Meanwhile, popular and intellectual movements sought to reform the Church. A host of intellectual, artistic, and scientific innovations contributed to all of these phenomena.
This era of rebirth and unrest has been called by two different names: the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The latter refers to an intellectual and artistic movement that began in northern Italy, where the citizens of warring city-states desperately sought new models of governance and cultural cohesion by looking back to the older civilizations of Greece and Rome. But these are not two separate historical periods; rather they reflect two different ways of looking back at an era that is considered to be the immediate precursor of modernity. To understand it, we need to study it holistically. And we need to begin with a survey of Western civilizations after the Black Death.
By 1353, when the bubonic plague began to loosen its death grip on Europe, the Continent had lost nearly half of its population. This happened suddenly, within a half century, owing to a combination of famine and disease (see Chapter 10). In the following century, recurring outbreaks of the plague and frequent warfare in some regions would result in further drastic reductions. In Germany, some 400,000 villages disappeared. Around Paris, more than half of the farmland formerly under cultivation became pasture-land. Elsewhere, abandoned fields returned to woodland, increasing the forested areas of Europe by about a third.
Life after the Black Death would therefore be radically different for those who survived it, because this massive depopulation would affect every aspect of existence, from nutrition to social mobility to spirituality.
First and foremost, it meant a relative abundance of food. The price of grain fell, which made it more affordable.
At the same time, the scarcity of workers made peasant labor more valuable: wages rose and work became easily obtainable. With wages high and food prices low, ordinary people could now afford more bread and could also spend their surplus cash on dairy products, meat, fish, fruits, and wine. As a result, the people of Europe were better nourished than they had ever been—better than many are today. A recent study of fifteenth-century rubbish dumps has concluded that the people of Glasgow (Scotland) ate a healthier diet in 1405 than they did in 2005.
In the countryside, a healthier ecological balance was almost immediately reestablished in the wake of the plague. And gradually, with the lessened demand for fuel and building materials, forests that had almost disappeared began to recover and expand. Meanwhile, the declining demand for grain allowed many farmers to expand their livestock herds. By turning arable land into pastureland, farmers reduced the need to hire so many workers and they also improved the fertility of the soil through manuring. Some farmers were even able to enlarge their holdings, because so much land had been abandoned.
Most of these innovations were made by small farmers because many great lords—individuals as well as monasteries—were slower to adjust to the changing circumstances. But some large landholders were quick to seize the advantage, responding to the shortage of workers and the rising cost of wages by forcing their tenants to perform additional unpaid labor. In parts of eastern Europe, many free peasants became serfs for the first time as a result. In Castile, Poland, and Germany, too, lords succeeded in imposing new forms of servitude.
In France and the Low Countries, by contrast, peasants remained relatively free, although many were forced to pay a variety of new fees and taxes to their lords or to the king. In England, where peasant bondage had been more common than in France, serfdom eventually disappeared altogether. Although the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was ultimately unsuccessful, increased economic opportunity allowed English serfs to vote with their feet, either by moving to town or to the lands of a lord who offered more favorable terms: lower rents, more animals, fewer work requirements, and greater personal freedoms. Geographical mobility and social mobility are, as we have often noted, intertwined.
Mortality rates were high in the crowded cities and towns of Europe, but not all cities were equally affected by the plague and many recovered quickly. In London and Paris, for example, large-scale immigration from the countryside reversed the short-term declines caused by the plague. Many of these newcomers were women, whose economic opportunities (usually very limited) were greatly enhanced by urban labor shortages. Other urban areas suffered more from internal violence or warfare than from disease. In Florence, for example, the population rebounded quickly after the Black Death but was eventually depleted by civil unrest: by 1427, it had dropped from around 300,000 to about 100,000. In Toulouse (southwestern France), the population remained fairly stable until 1430, when it was reduced by a staggering 75 percent as a result of the ravages of the Hundred Years’ War.
So while the overall population of Europe declined drastically because of the plague, it is noteworthy that a far larger percentage of all people were living in towns by 1500: approximately 20 percent as opposed to 10 or 15 percent prior to the Black Death. Fueling this urban growth was the increasing specialization of the late-medieval economy. With farmers under less pressure to produce grain in bulk, land could be devoted to livestock, dairy farming, and the production of a more diverse array of fruits and vegetables; and these could now be exchanged more efficiently on the open market.
Towns with links to extant trading networks benefited accordingly. In northern Germany, a group of entrepreneurial cities formed a coalition to build an entirely new mercantile corporation, the Hanseatic League, whose members came to control commerce from Britain and Scandinavia to the Baltic. In northern Italy, the increased demand for luxury goods—which even some peasants and urban laborers could now afford—brought renewed wealth to the spice - and silk-trading city of Venice and also to the fine-cloth manufacturers of Milan and the jewelers of Florence. Milan’s armaments industry also prospered, supplying its warring neighbors and the armies of Europe.
Of course, not all urban areas flourished. The Franco-Flemish cities that had played such a large role in economic and cultural life since the eleventh century suffered a serious economic depression, exacerbated by incessant wars in the region. But, on the whole, surviving Europeans profited from the plague. A century afterward, they were poised to extend their commercial networks farther into Africa, Asia, and (ultimately) the Americas (see Chapter 12).
Popular Revolts and Rebellions
Although the consequences of the Black Death were ultimately beneficial for many, Europeans did not adjust easily to this new world; established elites, in particular, resisted the demands of newly powerful workers. When these demands were not met, violence erupted. Between 1350 and 1425, hundreds of popular rebellions challenged the status quo in many regions of Europe. In 1358, peasants in northeastern France rose up violently against their lords, destroying property, burning buildings and crops, and even murdering targeted individuals. This incident is known as the Jacquerie Rebellion, because all French peasants were caricatured by the aristocracy as “Jacques” (“Jack”).
A HUNTING PARTY. This fifteenth-century illustration shows an elaborately dressed group of noblemen and noblewomen setting out with falcons, accompanied by their servants and their dogs. Hunting, an activity restricted to the aristocracy, was an occasion for conspicuous consumption and display.
In England, as we have already noted, a very different uprising occurred in June of 1381, far more organized and involving a much wider segment of society. Thousands of people marched on London, targeting the bureaucracies of the royal government and the Church, capturing and killing the archbishop of Canterbury, and meeting personally with the fourteen-year-old king, Richard II, to demand an end to serfdom and taxation and to call for the redistribution of property. It ended with the arrest and execution of the ringleaders. In Florence, workers in the cloth industry—known as the Ciompi (chee-OHM-pee)— protested high unemployment and mistreatment by the manufacturers who also ran the Florentine government. They seized control of the city, demanding relief from taxes, full employment, and political representation. They maintained power for a remarkable six weeks before their reforms were revoked.
The local circumstances that lay behind each of these revolts were unique, but all of them exhibit certain common features. First of all, they were not bread riots spurred by destitution: those who took part in them were not protesting starvation wages, they were empowered by the new economic conditions and wanted to leverage their position in order to enact even larger changes. Some rebellions, like the English Peasants’ Revolt, were touched off by resistance to new and higher taxes. Others, like the Jacquerie and the revolt of the Ciompi, took place at moments when unpopular governments were weakened by factionalism and military defeat. The English revolt was also fueled by the widespread perception of corruption within the Church and the royal administration.
Behind this social and political unrest, therefore, lies not poverty and hunger but the growing prosperity and self-confidence of village communities and urban laborers who were taking advantage of the changed economic circumstances that arose from the plague.
For the most part, the rebels’ hopes that they could fundamentally alter the conditions of their lives were frustrated.
Kings, aristocrats, and urban oligarchs sometimes lost their nerve in the middle of an uprising, but they were almost always successful, after a time, in reasserting dominance. Yet this tradition of popular rebellion would remain an important feature of Western civilizations. It would eventually fuel the
American War of Independence and the French Revolution (see Chapter 18), and it continues to this day.
Aristocratic Life in the Wake of the Plague
Although the urban elites and rural aristocracies of Europe did not adapt easily to “the world turned upside down” by the plague, this was hardly a period of crisis for those in power. Quite the contrary: many great families became far wealthier than their ancestors had ever been. Nor did the plague undermine the dominant position they had established. It did, however, make their situations substantially more complex and uncertain, at a time when the costs of maintaining a fashionable lifestyle were escalating rapidly.
Across Europe, most noble families continued to derive much of their revenue from vast land holdings. Many also tried to increase their sources of income through investment in trading ventures. In Catalonia, Italy, Germany, and England, this became common practice. In France and Castile, however, direct involvement in commerce was regarded as socially demeaning and was, therefore, avoided by established families. Commerce could still be a route to ennoblement in these kingdoms; but once aristocratic rank was achieved, one was expected to abandon these employments and adopt an appropriate way of life: living in a rural
A NOBLE BANQUET. Uncle of the mad king Charles VI, the Duke of Berry left politics to his brothers, the Duke of Burgundy and the Duke of Anjou. In return, he received enormous subsidies from the royal government, which he spent on sumptuous buildings, festivals, and artworks, including the famous Book of Hours (prayer book), which includes this image. Here, the duke (seated at right, in blue) gives a New Year's Day banquet for his household, who exchange gifts while his hunting dogs dine on scraps from the table. In the background, knights confront one another in a tournament.
Castle or urban palace surrounded by a lavish household, embracing the values and conventions of chivalry (engaging in the hunt, commissioning a family coat of arms), and serving the ruler at court and in war.
What it meant to be “noble” became, as a result, even more difficult to define than it had been during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In countries where noble rank entailed clearly defined legal privileges—such as the right to be tried only in special courts—proven descent from noble ancestors might be sufficient to qualify a family as noble in the eyes of the law. Legal nobility of this sort was, however, a somewhat less exclusive distinction than one might expect. In fifteenth-century Castile and Navarre, 10 to 15 percent of the total population had claims to be recognized as noble on these terms. In Poland, Hungary, and Scotland, the legally privileged nobility was closer to 5 percent, whereas in England and France fewer than 2 percent could plausibly claim the legal privileges of noble status.
Fundamentally, however, nobility was expressed and epitomized by an individual’s lifestyle. Hereditary land ownership, political influence, deference from social inferiors, courtly manners, and the ostentatious display of wealth— these combined to constitute a family’s honor and hence to mark it as noble. This means that, in practice, the social distinctions between noble and non-noble families were very hard to discern. And even on the battlefield, where the mark of nobility was to fight on horseback, the supremacy of the mounted knight was being threatened by the growing importance of professional soldiers, archers, crossbowmen, and artillery experts.
There were even hints of a more radical critique of the aristocracy’s claims to innate superiority. As the English rebels put it in 1381: “When Adam dug and Eve spun, Who then was a gentleman?”
In other words, all social distinctions are entirely artificial.
Precisely because nobility was contested, those who claimed it took elaborate measures to assert their exclusive right to this status through conspicuous consumption. This accounts, in part, for the extraordinary number, variety, and richness of the artifacts and artworks that survive from this period. Aristocrats— or those who wanted to be classed as such—vied with one another in hosting lavish banquets, which required numerous costly utensils, specially decorated dining chambers, legions of servants, and the most exotic foods attainable. They dressed in rich and extravagant clothing: close-fitting doublets and hose with long pointed shoes for men, multilayered silk dresses with ornately festooned headdresses for women. They maintained enormous households: in France, around 1400, the Duke of Berry had 400 matched pairs of hunting dogs and 1,000 servants. They took part in elaborately ritualized tournaments and pageants, in which the participants pretended to be the heroes of chivalric romances. Aristocrats also emphasized their tastes and refinement by supporting authors and artists and sometimes by becoming accomplished artists themselves. Nobility existed only if it was recognized, and to be recognized noble status had to be constantly reasserted and displayed.
Rulers contributed to this process; indeed, they were among its principal supporters and patrons. Kings and princes across Europe competed in founding chival-ric orders such as the Knights of the Garter in England and the Order of the Star in France. These orders honored men who had demonstrated the idealized virtues of knighthood, virtues celebrated as characteristic of the nobility as a whole. By exalting the nobility as a class, then, chivalric orders helped cement the links that bound the nobility to their kings and princes. These bonds were further strengthened by the gifts, pensions, offices, and marriage prospects that kings and princes could bestow on their noble followers.
Given the decline in the agricultural revenues of many noble estates, such rewards of princely service were critically important to maintaining noble fortunes. Indeed, the alliance that was forged in the fifteenth century between kings and their noble supporters would become one of the most characteristic features of Europe’s ruling class. In France, this “Old Regime” (ancien regime) alliance lasted until the French Revolution of 1789. In Germany, Austria, and Russia, it would last until the outbreak of World War I. In England, it persisted in some respects until World War II.
The writings of literary artists who survived the Black Death, or who grew up in the decades immediately following it, are characterized by intense observations of the real world—and by appeals to a far larger and more diverse audience than their predecessors. We have noted that vernacular languages were becoming powerful vehicles for poetry and narrative in the twelfth century (see Chapter 9). Now they were being used to express some of the most innovative and critical perspectives on changing social mores, political developments, and philosophical outlooks. Behind this phenomenon lie three interrelated developments: the growing identification between vernacular language and the community of a realm, the still-increasing accessibility of education, and the emergence of a substantial reading public for literature in these languages. We can see these influences at work in three of the major authors who flourished during this period: Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Christine de Pisan.
Boccaccio (bohk-KAHT-chee-oh, 1313-1375) is best known for The Decameron, a collection of prose tales about sex, adventure, and trickery. He presents these stories as being told over a period of ten days (hence the title of the book, which means “work of ten days”), by and for a sophisticated party of young women and men who have taken up residence in a country villa outside Florence in order to escape the ravages of the Black Death. Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of many of these tales from earlier sources, especially the fabliaux discussed in Chapter 9, but he couched them in a freely colloquial Italian. Whereas Dante had used the same Florentine dialect to evoke the awesome landscape of sacred history in the exquisite verse of his Divine Comedy (Chapter 10), Boccaccio used it to capture the foibles of human beings and their often graphic sexual exploits in plainspoken prose.
The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) is similar in many ways to Boccaccio, whose influence on him was profound. Chaucer was among the first generation of English authors whose compositions can be understood by modern readers of that language with relatively little effort. By the late fourteenth century, the Anglo-Saxon (Old English) tongue of England’s preconquest inhabitants had mixed with the French dialect spoken by their Norman conquerors, to create the language which is the ancestor of our own: Middle English.
Chaucer’s masterpiece is The Canterbury Tales. Like The Decameron, this is a collection of stories held together by a framing narrative. In this case, the stories are told by an array of people traveling together on a pilgrimage from London to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury. But there are also significant differences between The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s stories are in verse, for the most part, and they are recounted by people of all different classes—from a high-minded knight to a poor university student to a lusty widow. Each character tells a story that is particularly illustrative of his or her own occupation and outlook on the world, forming a kaleidoscopic human comedy.
This period, a generation or so after the Black Death, also saw the emergence of professional authors who made their living through the patronage of the aristocracy and the publication of their works. One of the first was a woman, Christine de Pisan (c. 1365-c. 1434). Although born in northern Italy, Christine spent her adult life in France, where her husband was a member of the king’s household. When he died, the widowed Christine wrote to support herself and her children. She mastered a wide variety of literary genres, including treatises on chivalry and warfare, which she dedicated to King Charles VI of France. She also wrote for a larger and more popular audience. For example, her imaginative Book of the City of Ladies is an extended defense of the character, capacities, and history of women, designed to help female readers refute their male detractors. Christine also took part
CHRISTINE DE PISAN. One of the most prolific authors of the Middle Ages, Pisan used her influence to uphold the dignity of women and to celebrate their history and achievements. Here she is seen describing the prowess of an Amazon warrior who could defeat men effortlessly in armed combat.
In a vigorous pamphlet campaign that condemned the misogynistic claims made by influential (male) authors like Boccaccio. This debate was ongoing for several hundred years and became so famous that it was given a name: the querelle des femmes, “the debate over women.” Remarkably, Christine also wrote a song in praise of Joan of Arc.
Sadly, she probably lived long enough to learn that this other extraordinary woman had been put to death for behaving in a way that was considered dangerously unwomanly (see below).
Just as the desire to capture real experiences and convey real emotions was a dominant trait of the literature produced after the Black Death, so it was in the visual arts. This is evident both in the older arts of manuscript illumination and also in the new kinds of sculpture we discussed in Chapter 10.
A further innovation in the fifteenth century was the technique of painting in oils, a medium pioneered in Flanders, where artists found a ready market for their works among the nobility and wealthy merchants.
Oil paints were a revolutionary development: because they do not dry as quickly as water-based pigments, a painter can work more slowly and carefully, taking time with more difficult aspects of the work and making corrections as needed. Masterful practitioners of this technique include Rogier van der Weyden (c. 1400-1464), who excelled at communicating both deep spiritual messages and the minute details of everyday life (see Interpreting Visual Evidence on page 366). Just as contemporary saints saw divinity in material objects, so too an artist could portray the Virgin and Child against a background vista of ordinary life, with people going about their business or a man urinating against a wall. This was not blasphemous. To the contrary, it conveyed the message that the events of the Bible are constantly present, here and now: Christ is our companion, such artworks suggest, not some distant figure whose life and outlook are irrelevant to us.
The same immediacy is also evident in medieval drama. Plays were often devotional exercises that involved the efforts of an entire community, but they also celebrated that community. In the English city of York, for example, an annual series of pageants reenacted the entire history of human salvation from the Creation to the Last Judgment in a single summer day, beginning at dawn and ending late at night. Each pageant was produced by a particular craft guild and showcased that guild’s special talents: “The Last Supper” was performed by the bakers, whose bread was a key element in their reenactment of the first Eucharist, while “The Crucifixion” was performed by the nail makers and painters, whose wares were thereby put on prominent display in the depiction of Christ’s bloody death on the cross. In Italy, confraternities competed with one another to honor the saints with songs and processions. In Catalonia and many regions of Spain, there were elaborate dramas celebrating the life and miracles of the Virgin, one of which is still performed every year in the Basque town of Elche: it is the oldest European play in continuous production. In northern France, the Low Countries, and German-speaking lands, civic spectacles were performed over a period of several days, celebrating local history or the place of the community in the sacred history of the Bible. But not all plays were pious. Some honored visiting kings and princes. Others celebrated the flouting of social conventions, featuring cross-dressing and the reversal of hierarchies. They were further expressions of the topsyturvy world created by the Black Death.
World History
