Daniel Power

The Europe of 1320 was very different from the continent of three-and-a-half centuries earlier. After hundreds of years of Latin Christian expansion at the expense of Islam, Eastern Christianity, and pagan cultures, almost the whole continent apart from Russia and the southern and eastern Balkans now formed part of Latin Christendom. The candidacy of two Bohemian kings for the throne of the Holy Roman Empire in 1273 (Otakar II) and 1292 (Vaclav II) demonstrates the degree to which the kingdoms of east-central Europe had come to form an integral part of Latin Christendom. The extent of ‘Frankish’ aristocratic migration to the more remote parts of Europe may be seen in the fact that all the kings of Scots after 1292 were descended in the male line from French immigrants to England since 1066. Internal expansion had also transformed European society, which now enjoyed networks of towns, villages, parish churches, and roads that far surpassed their tenth-century counterparts; the growth in the number and complexity of settlements was especially far-reaching in northern and central Europe and in the interior of the Iberian peninsula, although hardly any part of Europe was unaffected.

Yet by the late thirteenth century the expansion of Latin Christendom was largely coming to a halt. Its end was most visible in the collapse of the ‘crusader states’ in the Eastern Mediterranean (see Chapters 3 and 6) in the face of resurgent Islamic power. Although the Mongols posed a terrible threat to Islamic power for a time, their defeat by the Mamluk rulers of Egypt near Nazareth in 1260 allowed the Mamluks to overthrow the surviving principalities established by the early crusades. Antioch fell in 1268 and Acre, the chief town of the ‘kingdom of Jerusalem’, in 1291. Meanwhile, the Latin Empire of

Constantinople came to a virtual end in 1261 thanks to a modest and short-lived resurgence of Byzantine power, and the Frankish colonies that clung on in mainland Greece were increasingly feeble. Thereafter the only significant Latin possessions in the Eastern Mediterranean were the islands conquered from the Byzantines, notably Crete and Cyprus.

Not all the eastern borders of Latin Christendom were in retreat: in the 1260s the Genoese took over Caffa in the Crimea and the Venetians acquired Tana in the Sea of Azov, in the fourteenth century both groups of Italians tightened their grip over the Aegean islands, and between 1306 and 1310 the Hospitallers (Knights of Saint John) attempted to compensate for their eviction from the ‘Holy Land’ by seizing Rhodes. Although the Scandinavian connection with Greenland was declining, sailors were venturing further and further afield elsewhere in the Atlantic, especially down the north-west African coast. In north-east Europe, the short-lived conversion to Christianity of the Lithuanian grand duke in 1251-3 foreshadowed the long-prepared conversion of his successors in 1386, which would bring the boundaries of Latin Christendom to within 250 miles of Moscow. Yet here, too, Latin Christian expansion suffered setbacks: the (Orthodox) Russian prince Alexander Nevsky halted the eastward advances of the Swedes and Teutonic Knights in 1240-2. Only in Spain did Latin Christendom continue to make substantial gains. The Muslim rulers of Seville were appealing to Morocco for aid in 1247-8, much as the Levantine Franks sent many pleas to the West for help throughout the thirteenth century; neither group was saved from defeat. Taking the Mediterranean as a whole, Christianity and Islam were broadly in equilibrium at the end of the period. There was as yet no hint that the Ottoman Turks, who began seizing Byzantine possessions in Anatolia in 1301, would establish one of the greatest Islamic empires in history, taking Constantinople in 1453 and reaching Morocco and the gates of Vienna by 1529.

Demographic growth within much of Europe was also slowing down or even ceasing altogether by the end of the thirteenth century, and there is widespread evidence that population growth was placing great pressure upon available resources. Then from 1315 to 1322 a series of natural disasters struck the northern part of the continent. A succession of exceptionally wet summers, harsh winters, and failed harvests combined with devastating outbreaks of livestock diseases to cause a substantial fall in human population as well as ruinous increases in food prices. These natural problems were compounded by the disruption of dynastic wars in Scandinavia, the Empire, Flanders, and the British Isles. It is unclear how far the demographic decline of the 1310s and early 1320s was a temporary blip or the beginnings of a long-term phenomenon. What is certain is that demographic growth ceased to be the chief factor shaping the European economy; that within a generation Europe’s population would suffer a much more substantial blow from the plague known to history as the Black Death (1347-51); and that recovery after 1351 was hindered by recurring plague epidemics as well as endemic warfare, with profound implications for European society, economy, and culture. It is one of the ironies of the central Middle Ages that its external expansion inadvertently sparked the end to internal growth, for the Black Death reached Italy in ships from one of Latin Christendom’s furthest outposts, the Genoese colony of Caffa in the Crimea. West European commercial expansion had imported a terrible commodity.

Yet, despite the continent’s economic stagnation, the profound commercial, religious, and political achievements of the period survived intact. The fourteenth-century European economy remained far more monetarized than in 950, its commercialization continued, and economic advances such as the development of long-distance banking and trading networks and the use of large-denomination coinage were not overturned. The phenomenal increase in the use of the written word was also sustained: the number of documents produced on behalf of the papacy and most monarchs, prelates, and urban associations continued to increase exponentially; by 1300 a sizeable proportion of these written instruments were in vernacular languages rather than in Latin. In the early fourteenth century European society was more culturally sophisticated, more literate, and wealthier than three-and-a-half centuries earlier.

Within Latin Christendom, however, the energies that had driven external expansion seem increasingly turned inwards. Even in the twelfth century the kings of Aragon had devoted as much concern to their claims in southern France and Provence as to their Muslim frontier; from 1282 the War of the Sicilian Vespers embroiled them in conflict with the kings of France and Sicily and the pope, who sponsored a French crusade against this Christian kingdom. ‘Holy’ wars proclaimed against other Christians were not a new phenomenon, but in the thirteenth century they gained in prominence compared with expeditions against non-Christians: other examples include the Albi-gensian Crusade, which affected the Catholic nobles and townspeople of southern France even as it sought to crush the Cathar heresy, and the wars sponsored by Pope Innocent IV against Emperor Frederick II. The sudden and brutal suppression of the Templars (1307-14), when the French crown systematically denigrated and destroyed an order of knights renowned for its warfare on the frontiers of Christendom, was a different but equally dramatic manifestation of growing Latin Christian introversion; so was the wholesale expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 and from the French royal domain in 1306. Nevertheless, many European warriors were still prepared to fight traditional non-Christian enemies. Throughout the fourteenth century the Teutonic Knights continued to attract recruits for their campaigns against the pagans of Lithuania. Holy wars against the Muslims continued until the eighteenth century, while the Templars’ fellow religious warriors and rivals, the Hospitallers, remained integral to the defence of Christian territory in the Mediterranean until Napoleon Bonaparte evicted them from Malta in 1798.

Conventional dynastic wars within Latin Christendom, which remained as prevalent in the fourteenth as in the tenth century, also provide indications that European society was entering a new era. Chief amongst these was the resurgence of infantry in battle. Cavalry had never been invincible, as several Anglo-Norman battles (see p. 36) as well as imperial defeats by the Saxons (1080) and the Lombards (1176,1237) revealed; nor did mounted warriors now cease to play a major role on the battlefield. However, the convincing defeats of French cavalry by Flemish militias at Courtrai (1302), of English cavalry by Scottish infantry at Stirling Bridge (1297) and Bannockburn (1314), of the Latin knights of Athens by the mercenary Catalan Company at Halmyros (1311), and of Austrian men-at-arms by the Swiss at Mortgarten (1315), together seem to usher in a new phase in European history--even though in each case the losers had made crucial tactical errors.

None of these infantry victories was due to technological innovation; indeed, the increased use of plate armour from c.1250 afforded greater protection to wealthier knights, while gunpowder, although first used in European warfare in the 1320s, would not play an important part until later in the century. Instead, ancient weapons such as the longbow and the pike were being used in new ways, in much greater numbers, and with more effective organization. The significance of these battles was primarily social. Stirling Bridge, Courtrai, Halmyros, and Mortgarten all demonstrate the ability of commanders of humble birth and infantry united by a common cause to overcome better armed warriors of high rank; such plebeian victories were, in Norman Housley’s words, ‘an affront to the age’s sense of social order’.54 Moreover, noble attitudes themselves were changing: noble commanders were increasingly willing to use their low-born infantry to defeat—and kill—fellow nobles. Some of the most dramatic victories involving massed infantry, notably Bannockburn and Crecy (1346), were possible only because a royal or noble general—in these instances, King Robert I (Bruce) of Scotland and King Edward III of England respectively—was prepared to countenance the slaughter of enemy noblemen by his own common soldiers. Just when the nobility was coming to enjoy greater legal definition across much of Europe (see pp. 37-40), its military predominance was being challenged by the very rulers whose laws were conferring that same legal protection; noble economic power was also being undermined (see p. 60).

Pitched battles remained a rare occurrence, and sieges, which were far more common, had always relied heavily upon infantry of all ranks; the chief technological innovation in siege warfare, the type of catapult known as the counterweight trebuchet, occurred in the middle of the period in question, around 1200. Yet the way that warfare was organized was fundamentally different in 1320 compared with 950. Rulers were now able to fund large armies on a regular basis, using their increased powers of taxation. As Bjorn Weiler has shown in Chapter 3, they did so at considerable political cost; the more formal character of political relations, for instance, through regularized representative assemblies, was one of the legacies of the central Middle Ages. Bolstered by such powers of exploitation, the monarchies of western Europe were well prepared for more sustained confrontation; and in 1294, renewed Plantagenet-Capetian war in south-west France and the Low Countries, after half a century of peace, was a prelude for the series of Anglo-French conflicts known to history as the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). Ostensibly fought because of the claims of Edward III of England and his successors to the French throne, these wars also embroiled Scotland and most Iberian kingdoms and occasionally threatened to engulf the Empire as well; their impact upon late-medieval European society and culture would be profound. They had more immediate consequences for the direction of European ‘high’ politics. to the chronic dynastic conflicts within the Empire following the death of the great emperor Frederick II (1250) and the demise of his Hohenstaufen dynasty soon after, the Capetian kings of France had emerged the most powerful rulers in Europe under Louis IX (1226-70) and Philip IV (1285-1314); they had also begun probing imperial territory in Lorraine and on the east banks of the Rivers Saone and Rhone, traditionally the eastern borders of the Capetian kingdom. Renewed conflict with the kings of England may therefore have averted a Franco-Imperial contest for the leadership of Christendom; that struggle would have to await the rise of the Habsburgs in the fifteenth century.

Meanwhile, monarchical power was undergoing qualititative changes either side of 1300. Its ideological foundations were being strengthened by the revival of interest in Roman Law, notably the precept ‘What pleases the prince has the force of law’. Its effectiveness was increasing because of the rise of professional lawyers and bureaucrats, which epitomized the shift in this period from mediation within local communities to their external direction by agents of superior authority. A different shift was in the treatment of political protest. Despite, or perhaps because of, the development of representative institutions, armed protest against the ruler was becoming less acceptable. Nowhere is this clearer than in the increasing severity of punishment for rebellion. In 1268 the Hohenstaufen prince Conradin, grandson of Emperor Frederick II, tried and failed to gain his grandfather’s kingdom of Sicily. His vanquisher, Charles of Anjou, the reigning king of Sicily, had him publicly tried and beheaded. Such an event would have been unthinkable two centuries earlier: there was nothing new about rulers doing away with rebels or dynastic rivals, and the politics of the Italian cities in particular had always been murderous, but the increasing use of law to destroy men of noble blood before public tribunals represented an ominous extension of monarchical power. Conradin’s execution was the first of many such judicial murders: King Edward I of England condemned to death Dafydd, last prince of Gwynedd in Wales, in 1283, and three brothers of Robert Bruce, claimant to the Scottish throne, in 1306-7. Still more significant was the increasing resort to public execution as a punishment for simple political failure: victims included Enguerrand de Marigny, grand chamberlain of Philip IV, sacrificed by Louis X to a rival court faction in 1315, and Piers Gaves-ton, the favourite of Edward II of England, the target for the wrath of rebel earls in 1312. Such events were becoming common across Europe, amongst urban oligarchies as much as royal courts; they heralded the vindictive factionalized politics of the late Middle Ages and early modern period.

The consolidation of monarchical power was the most common trend in Europe in the opening years of the fourteenth century, from Spain to Scandinavia and Hungary, but there were significant exceptions. In 1320 noble power varied enormously in strength across the continent. The western emperors continued to pursue universalist ambitions, although strife between rival claimants to the throne, especially during the so-called Interregnum (1256-73), seriously undermined their authority; it is telling that no fewer than four ‘kings of the Romans’ perished in battle between 1256 and 1308. In particular, imperial weakness south of the Alps after the death of Frederick II encouraged the rise of the signori* (often rather inaccurately translated as ‘despots’), dynasts who wrested power from the city communes or subverted them, and whose regional hegemonies would evolve into the little states of Renaissance Italy; in the 1310s Dante immortalized many of the most notorious signori by placing them amongst the inhabitants of Hell. North of the Alps, the chronic rivalries for the imperial crown (chiefly, moreover, between dynasties with few domains in central or northern Germany) thrust power into the hands of the princes, the most powerful of whom increasingly formed a coterie of ‘electors’*. Meanwhile, the flourishing cities of north Germany, buoyed by their growing monopoly of Baltic trade, were laying the foundations for the Hanseatic League.

The end of the period witnessed the decline of not only imperial but also papal leadership. While Julia Barrow challenges the concept of a single ‘reform’ movement (above, Chapter 4), the energy and scope of Innocent III’s Fourth Lateran Council (1215) outshone all succeeding councils until the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Council of Lyon (1274) effected a brief reunion with the Greek Orthodox Church but pales in comparison with its predecessor of 1215. In some ways the papacy still appeared to be occupying the heights to which the firm leadership of Urban II, Alexander III, and Innocent III had raised it. The quarrels of John XXII with Louis IV (Ludwig of Bavaria) in the 1320s appear very traditional in many respects, for it pitted a strident pope against an emperor who yearned to revive imperial power in Italy and was prepared to depose the pope if need be; each cultivated supporters amongst the peninsula’s cities and nobles and attracted strident propagandists such as Louis’s adherent Marsilius of Padua. However, increasing royal control of clerical taxation to fund internecine dynastic warfare signalled the weakening of the liberties for which successive popes and prelates had fought so hard. The papacy had never fully extricated itself from the mire of Italian politics, but the chief threat to its independence came from a different quarter. Boniface VIII’s quarrel with Philip IV of France even led to a French attempt to kidnap him in 1303, and was swiftly followed by the removal of the papacy to Avignon in Provence, on the very borders of the kingdom of France (although it technically lay in an imperial county held by the king of Naples). The ‘Babylonian Captivity’ at Avignon lasted until 1377.

The difficulties of the Catholic Church around 1300 were not confined to the papacy. Most of the monastic orders founded in the ‘long twelfth century’ witnessed a decline in benefactions from the late thirteenth century onwards; the friars continued to thrive, but internal crises within the Franciscan Order led to harsh papal persecution of the ‘Spiritual Franciscans’, and several friars were even executed as heretics in 1318. The sense of crisis should not be exaggerated: in 1300 the first papal ‘jubilee’ was celebrated, apparently because of spontaneous popular demands, and new orders emerged in response to lay aspirations, such as the ‘double’ communities of men and women of the Brigittine Order founded by Saint Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden (1346-50). Other forms of religious observance or endowment such as confraternities and chantry chapels would continue to grow in popularity. New forms of church architecture continued to flourish, not least at parish level, and Giotto’s frescos in Assisi, Padua, and Florence attest in a different fashion to the vibrancy of the Church at the end of the period. Nevertheless, the strong direction that characterized ecclesiastical organization from the mid-eleventh to the mid-thirteenth century had weakened by the 1330s.

Any final assessment of the central Middle Ages must recognize that the various national traditions or myths treat the period very differently from one another, and these have contributed heavily to differing interpretations of the period. French historiography has conventionally viewed it as the age in which a unitary French monarchical state emerged, forerunner of the modern French republic. English national tradition has depicted it as the age when English identity and national institutions, especially the triple blessings of the Common Law, Magna Carta, and Parliament, were forged in reaction to ‘foreign’ kings; for the Scots, the central Middle Ages witnessed the unification of the kingdom in preparation for its 300-year resistance against English dominance from 1296 onwards. The period has occupied a comparable place in the historical memory of the peoples of Scandinavia and east-central Europe: each major kingdom was established and each of the main peoples was converted to Christianity— the medieval equivalent of entry to the European Union, perhaps, but with the promise of eternal salvation as an extra inducement. For some of these peoples, notably the Danes and the Hungarians, the central medieval kingdom occupied a far larger territory than the equivalent modern state and so the period has sometimes evoked a particular pride. For the Spanish, the central Middle Ages traditionally marked the age of the Reconquista, or ‘reconquest’ of the Iberian peninsula from Muslim rule—a concept that historians have largely repudiated but that lingers in the popular imagination. In the same vein, some other national historical traditions regard the central Middle Ages far less positively. The Welsh and Irish have customarily seen it as a period of cruel repression when their ancient liberties were lost to the English; Slovakians and Croatians have regarded the period in the same light, but with the Hungarians as the oppressor. For the Greeks, haunted by dim memories of Byzantine greatness, this age of the Crusades is still recalled with horror. Above all, the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire has generally been regarded as a tragedy for Germany, since it appeared to prevent its emergence as a nation state before the nineteenth century; on the other hand, that same imperial disunity has been regarded more favourably by the Italians since it made possible the glories of the Italian Renaissance, which was fostered by the rivalries of the independent city states.

Such national traditions have proved very durable, despite being challenged by the more nuanced findings of modern scholarship. Yet both crude national myths and meticulous research demonstrate the fundamental place of the central Middle Ages in the history of most European countries, even though the vast majority of their citizens are unaware how much their culture and outlook owe to those distant centuries. Equally telling is the view from outside. For outsiders looking in, the period represents above all the age of the Crusades, when barbaric ‘Franks’ from western Europe brutally ravaged, pillaged, and attempted to conquer the more venerable and sophisticated civilizations that were unfortunate enough to live in proximity. ‘Franks’ became the generic term for Europeans in languages as dispersed as Greek, Arabic, Ethiopian, Iranian, and Chinese. It is the supreme irony of the period 950-1320 that it witnessed both the welding of a common ‘European’ culture, and the hardening of the continent’s chief divisions along national lines.