ST FRANCIS OF ASSISI, in a fresco by the 13th Century Italian master Cinia-bue, is shown with the marks of the Crucifixion on his hands. The wounds appeared, it is said, after the saint had seen a vision of Christ crucified.
To all outward appearances, the 14th Century in medieval Europe opened on a note of triumph. At its very start, in 1300, Pope Boniface VllI proclaimed a Jubilee to celebrate the new centenary of Christ's birth. In overwhelming response, joyous multitudes poured into the Eternal City. The size of the throngs—estimated at two million for the year—compelled the unprecedented use of traffic rules on Rome's narrow bridges. The generosity of the gifts and offerings, heaped upon the altars, created a pleasanter problem. At St. Paul's, one chronicler reported, two priests were kept busy night and day "raking together infinite money."
The Church and the faithful alike had cause to feel that the Jubilee year augured well for the decades to come. In the two centuries past, medieval people had progressed beyond all expectation, and the papacy had reached a new peak of power. Boniface had before him the example of Innocent 111, a Pope so skilled at asserting his supremacy over emperors and kings that he had humbled five of them by excommunication or interdict. Boniface assumed that he could continue on the same path. But within three years of the Jubilee he was to die of the shock of the greatest personal insult ever to be inflicted upon a pontiff. The anticipations of lesser men would also be jolted. Famine, war, plague, peasants' revolts, disorder within the Church-troubles of many sorts were to disrupt European life. Even as Jubilee celebrants rejoiced, forces were at work which marked the beginning of the end of the Middle Ages.
Politically, medieval people were adrift somewhere between the old moorings of feudalism and the new moorings of centralized monarchy. Economically, each stratum of society had its reasons for dissatisfaction. Bourgeois entrepreneurs felt hemmed in by jealously localized trade practices. Less well-to-do townsfolk resented the widening gap between merchants and artisans. Serfs who had seen their fellows leave the manor for the town were restive. The feudal noble faced ruination. Cold cash was what he now needed to keep himself in fine clothes and armor, and cold cash was what he notably lacked. Many aristocrats were reduced to "gentleman beggars." In France, some manor houses came to be known as "chateaux de la misere."
In a money economy, money talked. Increasingly men at the top of the medieval power structure realized that they had to command ever-larger sources of revenue. This, in turn, required a broader authority to tax. The struggle over this issue, between the Church and the brash national monarchies of England and France, touched off the turmoil of the 14th Century.
The throne of England was occupied by Edward I, the throne of France by Philip the Fair. Both were strong, self-assured personalities, and at odds with each other over lands in France still under English control. To finance their costly campaigns, Edward and Philip hit upon the same solution: a tax on the clergy within their realms. But—in the Church view—Church revenues were exempt from compulsory assessments, and taxable only by the Church.
In 129o Boniface VIII issued Clericis laicos, a bull threatening excommunication for any lay ruler who taxed the clergy and any churchman who paid without papal consent. But Edward and Philip were a new breed of secular monarch, unimpressed by fulminations from Rome. Edward's retort was to decree that if the clergy did not pay, they were to be shorn of all legal protection, and their temporal property was to be seized by the King's sheriffs. Philip's answer was to place a complete embargo on the export of all gold, silver and jewels from his domains, thus depriving the papal coffers of a major fount of revenue from Church collections in France. Boniface soon gave way. He explained that he had not meant to proscribe clerical contributions for defense in times of dire need. Since the Kings could decide what constituted "defense" and "dire need," the victory for Edward and Philip was clear.
It was not yet complete, however. Buoyed by the smashing success of the Jubilee year, Boniface concluded that the spiritual obeisance it manifested for him in every corner of Christendom extended to the temporal sphere as well. Concentrating his fire upon Philip, the Pope proceeded to try to teach him his place. In 1301 the King imprisoned a French bishop—a former papal legate—on charges of treason. Boniface ordered the prelate's release and rescinded his earlier concession on clerical taxation. Philip's response, in 1302, was to summon representatives of the French nobility, clergy and bourgeoisie—the debut of his national assembly, the Estates-General—and elicit their unanimous support in his quarrel with the Pope. One of Philip's ministers put the choice baldly. "My master's sword is made of steel," he commented. "The Pope's is made of verbiage."
Several months later Boniface issued Unam sanctum, the most extreme assertion of papal temporal supremacy in all Church history. This time Boniface made his meaning unmistakable. "It is altogether necessary," he declared, "for every human being to be subject to the Roman pontiff." The King's countermaneuver was no less drastic. He prepared to have Boniface deposed on the ground that his election had been illegal. To prosecute this task he chose William of Nogaret, one of the shrewdest of the lawyers who were helping Philip build the foundations for his nation-state.
Nogaret was also a master of the trumped-up charge. He had been known to approve the use of "voluntary" testimony obtained by such means as stripping a witness, smearing him with honey and hanging him over a beehive. Nogaret's bill of particulars against Boniface grew to include not only the illegitimacy of his election, but heresy, simony and immorality. Armed with authority from an assembly of French prelates and nobles to bring the Pope to France for trial before a special Church council, he sped to Italy. Boniface, now So, had left the heat of Rome to summer in the foothills of the Apennines at his birthplace, Anagni. Nogaret and some troops he had marshaled broke in on the aged pontiff in his bedroom. Whether they actually manhandled him is in dispute. That they heaped imprecations upon him there is no doubt. Boniface was kept prisoner for several days. At last the plain people of Anagni rose up and rescued him. Numbed and humiliated, he died within weeks.
Anagni came to symbolize the nadir of papal power even as Canossa, some two centuries before, had symbolized its zenith. When Boniface's successor in Rome died after a brief, ineffectual reign, Philip's daring coup bore its fruit. In 1305 the College of Cardinals elected a Frenchman, Clement V, as Pope. Clement never set foot in Rome, preferring to stay closer to home, where he was always accessible to royal bidding.
Clement's election marked the start of the 72-year period in Church history called—after the long exile of the ancient Jews in Babylon—the Babylonian Captivity. Following Clement, six successive Popes, all of French origin, chose not to reside in Rome. Avignon, on the Rhone River just across from the borders of Philip's domain, became the site of the Holy See. From a small town, Avignon grew into a busy city of 80,000, with all the panoply of an immense clerical bureaucracy and with a sumptuous papal palace. The forte of the Avignon popes was financial and administrative. The spiritual guidance they offered seemed somehow dilute; the voice of the Vicar of Christ had a less majestic ring from Avignon than from the Eternal City. Having witnessed the degradation of the papacy, now watching its incumbents settle under the thumb of the French monarchy, Europeans grew hardened. They were weary of church-state strife, and other troubles engrossed them.
Among these was the start in 1337 of the Hundred Years' War between England and France. Except as a chronological convenience, the title is a misnomer. The war was neither continuous nor full-scale but rather a number of disjointed campaigns, essentially a continuation of the fighting in which the English and French had engaged off and on ever since 1066. The reasons for bad blood between the two countries were many. Their seafarers clashed over pirating practices in the Channel. Their sovereigns quarreled over feudal homage due for lands held by the English in France. French kings gave military aid and comfort to Scotland, a perennial thorn in England's side. English kings rallied to Flanders, the traditional market for English wool, against attempted encroachments by the French.
Added to these older sources of friction was the cocky spirit of the new nationalism. To the men on the English and French thrones, the notion of national aggrandizement was far from displeasing. When Philip the Fair's youngest son died, the direct Capetian line of French kings died with him, and the throne went to a cousin, Philip VI. Thereupon Edward 111 of England, whose mother was a daughter of Philip the Fair, laid claim to the French crown. To the lions on his royal coat of arms he added the French fleur-de-lis, and personally headed an invasion force into Normandy.
The initial phase of the war saw a battle dear to the heart of every Englishman since. It took place at Crecy, due north of Paris, in 1346. Although the French army far outnumbered the English, Edward had a deadly surprise in store. Flanking his knights were archers armed with a devastating weapon, the longbow. The French forces also included archers —Genoese mercenaries—but the familiar crossbows they were using were outclassed. The longbow could shoot yard-long arrows a distance of almost 400 yards at the rate of five to six arrows a minute, compared to one for the crossbow. The English poured arrows into the ranks of enemy horsemen so fast that, according to the chronicle of Froissart, "they fell like snow."
Crecy brought a great surge of national pride among Edward's subjects. The war found wide favor with them. Understandably, the French viewed it with loathing. Added to the usual ravages of warfare was a newer kind of calamity. Both armies had recruited soldiers who fought for pay rather than under the old feudal concept of service. Between battles, both English soldier and Genoese hireling roamed the land with all the gusto of the early barbarians. Large areas of France were laid waste. Crops and houses were burned, property picked clean and the inhabitants made penniless— when they were not wantonly killed.
While France reeled and England rejoiced, a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions awaited them both, and all the rest of the Continent as well. Out of the East came a terrible pestilence. Medical historians now believe that it was a variety of the bubonic plague. Contemporary accounts labelled it the Black Death, because of the dark skin blotches which heralded its onset. The Black Death dispatched its sufferers after an agonized interim of one to three days in which they spewed up blood, fell into delirium, and broke out in boils, carbuncles, and lumps the size of eggs.
Medieval writers ascribed responsibility for the plague to the Mongol hordes which had swept west from Asia and were besieging the Genoese trading station of Kaffa on the Black Sea. Among Asians, the plague was no stranger. Whenever a soldier succumbed, his corpse would be catapulted over Kaffa's walls. Rats carried the disease aboard homeward-bound Italian vessels, and in April 1348 it struck in Florence. Later that year it overran the rest of Italy and France. England's turn came in 1349, Germany's and Scandinavia's in 1350. Estimates of the toll range from one fourth to one half of Europe's entire population.
The effects of war were as a pinprick compared with the tragic consequences of the plague. Food supplies ran short because, in many places, there was no one left to cultivate the soil or to supervise the cultivators. Commercial enterprises slumped. Schools, universities and charitable services shut down for lack of qualified personnel to run them. Crafts suffered irretrievable losses through the death of guild masters who could pass their skills on to apprentices. The sharp break in continuity extended to the most basic institutions; for decades afterward, litigants in court cases were not expected to be familiar with the old unwritten laws that had governed their fathers and grandfathers.
The dimensions of the disaster compelled the widespread conviction that the plague represented divine retribution for human sins. Many Europeans, disenchanted by Avignon, already tended to be introverted and individual in their faith. The fright and horror stirred by the plague now sent them to extremes. Some lost faith completely and formed cults for the worship of Satan. Others indulged in frenzies of religious excess. Many joined the Flagellants, who believed that they could be purged of sin, and thus escape punishment from on high, by flogging themselves with leather scourges studded with iron spikes. Other Europeans sought solace in superstition, personal revelations and mystical ecstasies. A morbid fascination grew for the grotesque, the revolting and the necrophilic. Treatises on the y4rs moriendi, the art of dying, became immensely popular.
The plague also cast a long shadow in the form of social unrest. In a number of European countries the previously well-ordered structure of medieval society began to be shaken by violent uprisings by peasants and artisans against nobles and wealthy merchants.
France saw the first major eruption. The French had scarcely begun to assess the shattering impact of the Black Death when they had to contend with a new English invasion in the southwest. In 1356, at Poitiers, French forces suffered a defeat as com-
THE DANCE OF DEATH, printed in 1486, was a favorite theme in that era of war, plague and famine. Here, with macabre glee, skeletons snatch a bishop and a noble; other versions showed poor peasants achieving equality with the rich in death.
Plete as at Crecy in 1346. Edward III had put his troops in the charge of his eldest son, Edward, called the Black Prince because of the black armor he habitually wore. Using the same general strategy his father had devised at Crecy, the Prince added a stunning success of his own. He captured the French King, Philip VPs son, John II, and carried him off to London.
The French government was in disarray, and the pent-up wrath of the lower classes exploded. The Dauphin of France, ruling in his father's absence, had to flee Paris after a mob had forced him into the indignity of donning a cap with the red and blue colors of the popular opposition. Far more ruinous events rocked the countryside to the north, in an uprising known as the Jacquerie, for Jacques, the nickname of the peasant. Jacques nursed a special fury of his own, directed at the local lord who, although he had failed to shield his tenants from the destruction of war and the depredations of mercenaries, blandly continued to insist on his usual rents and services.
Banding together, peasants put the torch to manor houses and set upon their masters. But staves and scythes were no match for swords and lances. The insurrection was crushed, and brutal reprisals followed in short order. Known troublemakers were hanged outside their own cottages and entire villages were razed.
The same spirit of rebellion lurked in England. The plague had created a critical shortage of farm labor. Surviving peasants were emboldened to ask for higher wages. If they were refused, they deserted to new employers who would meet their price. Parliament, composed largely of landholders, was aghast. In 1351 it approved a Statute of Laborers decreeing imprisonment for anyone who refused to work for the wages prevailing before the plague. Neither this nor a subsequent string of similar laws won much compliance. But resentment over their attempted enforcement simmered, and began to boil up when the tide turned against the English in the war with the French.
The chief architect of this military reversal was a brilliant Breton general, Bertrand du Guesclin. The same Dauphin who had been mocked by a Paris mob now sat on the throne as Charles V. In 1369 the people under the repressive rule of the Black Prince in southwestern France appealed to Charles for help. Confident of his military commander, Charles renewed the war. By the time of his death in 1380, his judgment had been fully borne out. In 10 years Du Guescelin had driven the English from virtually all their territories in France except the ports of Calais, Bordeaux and Bayonne.
It was England's turn to loathe the war and watch its government flounder. Edward III, the hero of Crecy, had died in his dotage in 1377; his son, the Black Prince, had died a year earlier. The Prince's son, Richard II, was only 10 when he was crowned, and ruled under the guidance of a 12-man council. To help prosecute the war. Parliament imposed a new kind of poll, or head, tax. Unless he were a total pauper, every Englishman was required to pay.
For the lower classes, the poll tax proved the final straw. Open revolt flared in 1381. Under an ex-soldier named Wat Tyler, rebels of Kent and Essex marched on London. Sympathetic artisans opened the gates, and the newcomers ran amok. Among the high dignitaries they murdered was the Archbishop of Canterbury; among the mansions they burned was that of the King's uncle, John of Gaunt. After three days of terror, the rebels confronted the King himself. Richard, now 14, went into their midst and promised to meet all their demands, including more equitable rents and taxes and the abolition of the tenure of serfdom. But at a second parley the next day, one of the royal escort slew Wat Tyler. The revolt collapsed. Tyler's followers were permitted to go home. Their demands were unfulfilled and, as in the earlier French uprising, retribution by local lords awaited them.
Rebellion, nevertheless, had its lasting effects. No more in medieval times would a poll tax be levied. Serfdom would gradually die out. Even more significant, the serf in the country and the artisan in town had forged a bond; the lower classes had given expression to their grievances in words and deeds. Out of the English uprising came one of the most notable declarations of human equality ever voiced. Its author was a Kentish priest, John Ball. The gentry called him mad, but the people listened. "By what right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we?" Ball asked. "If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride?" In the retelling. Ball's preachment was condensed to a simple verse: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?"
However effective. Ball's influence was minor compared to that of John Wycliffe, a teacher at Oxford. Wycliffe fanned the flames of egalitarianism not on social but on religious grounds. Every man's salvation, he argued, rested on his own faith and behavior. Wycliffe not only challenged the clergy's authority to administer the sacraments but also denied the truth of the doctrine of transubstan-tiation, which declares that all the bread and all the wine used in the Mass become the whole body and blood of Christ as a result of the words of consecration. Wycliffe asserted that the believer did not partake of Christ's body, but communed with Him in spirit, through personal faith. An individual did not need the Church to guide him in matters of religious belief and practice; he could consult the Bible directly. Pursuing his doctrine, Wycliffe and his followers produced an English translation of the Bible so the people could read for themselves.
For a time Wycliffe enjoyed elite as well as popular support. As a corollary of his theories, he urged that the Church divest itself, or be divested, of its worldly wealth, and once more embrace the poverty of the Apostles. For years Englishmen had watched the outflow of English gold and silver to support the papacy at Avignon—and, they suspected, to help finance the French campaigns against them. Parliament had tried to nullify the supranational power of the popes, financial and otherwise, by a law in 1351 which in effect barred the appoint-
Ment of foreigners to Church benefices in England, and by a law in 1353 which forbade appeals of cases from English to foreign courts. Neither statute, however, prevented Avignon from the continued enjoyment of its English resources. In 1376 a Parliamentary report indicated that the taxes levied by the Pope in England totaled five times those collected by the King.
Wycliffe's proposal to deprive the Church of property not used for religious purposes brought him influential admirers all too willing to help in the proposed seizure. But few would go along with such unorthodoxy as his attack on transubstantia-tion. He lost still more support in high places after the Peasants' Revolt, which he was accused of helping foment. Wycliffe's works were condemned and he left Oxford. He died in 1384, implacably turning out tracts to the end.
He left his imprint on many people in many places. His countrymen now had their own Bible, and considerable food for thought. In far-off Bohemia two scholars, Jerome of Prague and Jan Hus, took up some of Wycliffe's beliefs and spread them through Central Europe, where the Protestant Ref-
JOAN OF ARC appears as the victorious "Maid of Orleans" in this sketch done in 1429. Although it is the only known contemporary picture of Joan, if is imaginary, for the court scribe who drew it had never seen the courageous girl who restored French pride.
Ormation would be born a century or so hence. Within the Church itself men recognized the danger signals and the need to revitalize the faith.
A step in that direction had been taken with Gregory XI's move back to Rome from Avignon in 1377. Joy over the re-establishment of the Holy See in the Eternal City was short-lived. Gregory's death within a year necessitated a new papal election. The College of Cardinals, still heavily weighted with Frenchmen, yielded to the clamor of a Roman mob and chose an Italian, Urban VI. Then, however, the French cardinals declared the proceedings invalid because of intimidation. From their own number they chose another Pope, Clement VII. Urban ruled from Rome; Clement from Avignon.
Thus began the bleak chapter in Church annals known as the Great Schism. It lasted for 39 years. Each Pope had his own College of Cardinals, thereby insuring the papal succession to a suitable choice. Each Pope claimed to be the true Vicar of Christ, with the power to excommunicate those who did not acknowledge him.
Periodic attempts to heal the breach foundered over such questions as which Pope had the right to call a Church council. Some of the rival cardinals united long enough to arrange a conclave at Pisa in 1409, at which both Popes were deposed and a new one elected. But neither deposed Pope would accept the verdict. The papacy now had not two, but three, incumbents.
This bizarre denouement discomfited Europe sufficiently to goad its leaders into firm action. From 1414 to 1418 the German city of Constance played host to a great international council attended not only by prelates, but by representatives of kings and princes acting in the specific name and interests of their own nations. At length the Council got one papal incumbent to abdicate, deposed the other two, and chose a new pontiff, Martin V. One of the deposed Popes, Benedict XIII of Avignon, clung to his claim, but to all practical purposes, Constance ended the Great Schism.
While the Council was still in session, another of medieval Europe's major dilemmas, the Hundred Years' War, began to be resolved. In 1415 hostilities were renewed by England's strutting young King Henry V. At Agincourt, not far from the scene of his great-grandfather's triumph at Crecy, similar strategy and the same fateful longbow again bested the French. Proceeding through Normandy, Harry had a formidable ally in the Duke of Burgundy, a kinsman but bitter enemy of Charles VI, the weakling French monarch. Charles, noted for his deranged behavior, put on one of his oddest performances after the Burgundians captured Paris. He disowned his own son, married off his daughter to Henry and made him his heir.
The way seemed clear for a complete English take-over in France. Both Charles and Henry died less than two years after they had made their curious pact. Henry's infant son, Henry VI, was acclaimed King of both countries. A royal uncle, the Duke of Bedford, confidently laid siege to the city of Orleans, the gateway to central and southern France, which were still unsubdued.
It was here that a lowly peasant girl intervened to alter history. Joan of Arc became convinced that she heard the voices of saints urging her to save her country. Leaving her native village in Lorraine, she made her way through areas controlled by the English and the Burgundians to Chinon, the headquarters of the disinherited son of Charles VI. She told the younger Charles of her divine mission. Impressed but cautious, Charles first had some theologians examine her for signs of witchcraft. When they pronounced her pure, he sent her on to Orleans with a few troops.
Frenchmen ever after would glory and grieve over Joan's subsequent fortunes. Wearing a man's armor and riding a white horse, she so inspired her soldiers and the beleaguered people of Orleans that the siege was raised and the English routed in short order. On July 17, 1429, she stood near the Dauphin as he was crowned Charles VII in the great cathedral at Rheims. Months later the Burgundians captured her and sold her to the English. Under English pressure, a Church court found her guilty of heresy. The man whose throne she had secured made no effort to save her. In 1431, the Maid of Orleans was burned at the stake in the marketplace of Rouen.
After a quarter-century the Church reversed her sentence, and after five centuries recognized her as a saint; her canonization came in 1920. But the countrymen to whom she had taught the meaning of patriotism passed their own judgment on her. Imbued with her courage, they began to push the invaders back. When the Hundred Years' War ceased in 1453, the English held only Calais.
The winds of change blew everywhere. That same year the Turks took Constantinople. Blocked at one end of the Mediterranean, Europeans increasingly turned the opposite way. In 1456 doughty Portuguese sailors, venturing into the Atlantic some 400 miles out of sight of land, discovered the Cape Verde Islands, encouraging a Genoese named Columbus to make a more distant journey a few decades later.
At home Europeans expanded their horizons without stirring, thanks to the proliferation of a new machine, the printing press, devised in a shop in the Rhineland. The second half of the 15th Century saw the birth of Niccolo Machiavelli, who would transform men's ideas of politics and statecraft; of Martin Luther, who would revolutionize their ideas of religion; of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti, who would elevate their ideas of art. The Middle Ages had run their course, but the soil they had prepared would nourish generations to come.
A LIVELY TOWNSWOMAN carved on Jacques Coeur's mansion in Bourges, France, gazes at the bustling street below.
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