A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Corporate bodies accepted the obligation to help the poor as a religious duty. The statutes of craft guilds set aside a penny for charity, called “God’s penny,” from each contract of sale or purchase. Parish councils of laymen superintended maintenance of the “Table of the Poor” and of a bank for alms. On feast days it was a common practice to invite twelve poor to the banquet table, and on Holy Thursday, in memory of Christ, the mayor of a town or other notable would wash the feet of a beggar. When St. Louis conducted the ceremony, his companion and biographer, the Sire de Joinville, refused to participate, saying it would make him sick to touch the feet of such villeins. It was not always easy to love the poor.

  The clergy on the whole were probably no more lecherous or greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they were supposed to be better or nearer to God than other men, their failings attracted more attention. If Clement VI was luxury-loving, he was also generous and warm-hearted. The Parson among the Canterbury pilgrims is as benign and admirable as the Pardoner is repulsive, always ready to visit on foot the farthest and poorest house of his parish, undeterred by thunder and rain.

  To drawen folk to heaven with fairnesse

  By good ensample was his businesse.

  Nevertheless, a wind of discontent was rising. Papal tax-collectors were attacked and beaten, and even bishops were not safe. In 1326, in a burst of anti-clericalism, a London mob beheaded the Bishop and left his body naked in the street. In 1338 two “rectors of churches” joined two knights and a “great crowd of country folk” in attacking the Bishop of Constance, severely wounding several of his retinue, and holding him in prison. Among the religious themselves, the discontent took serious form. In Italy arose the Fraticelli, a sect of the Franciscan Order, in another of the poverty-embracing movements that periodically tormented the Church by wanting to disendow it. The Fraticelli or Spiritual Franciscans insisted that Christ had lived without possessions, and they preached a return to that condition as the only true “imitation of Christ.”

  The poverty movements grew out of the essence of Christian doctrine: renunciation of the material world—the idea that made the great break with the classical age. It maintained that God was positive and life on earth negative, that the world was incurably bad and holiness achieved only through renunciation of earthly pleasures, goods, and honors. To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next. Money was evil, beauty vain, and both were transitory. Ambition was pride, desire for gain was avarice, desire of the flesh was lust, desire for honor, even for knowledge and beauty, was vainglory. Insofar as these diverted man from seeking the life of the spirit, they were sinful. The Christian ideal was ascetic: the denial of sensual man. The result was that, under the sway of the Church, life became a continual struggle against the senses and a continual engagement in sin, accounting for the persistent need for absolution.

  Repeatedly, mystical sects arose in an effort to sweep away the whole detritus of the material world, to become nearer to God by cutting the earth-binding chains of property. Embedded in its lands and buildings, the Church could only react by denouncing the sects as heretical. The Fraticelli’s stubborn insistence on the absolute poverty of Christ and his twelve Apostles was acutely inconvenient for the Avignon papacy, which condemned their doctrine as “false and pernicious” heresy in 1315 and, when they refused to desist, excommunicated them and other associated sects at various times during the next decade. Twenty-seven members of a particularly stubborn group of Spiritual Franciscans of Provence were tried by the Inquisition and four of them burned at the stake at Marseille in 1318.

  The wind of temporal challenge to papal supremacy was rising too, focusing on the Pope’s right to crown the Emperor, and setting the claims of the state against those of the Church. The Pope tried to excommunicate this temporal spirit in the person of its boldest exponent, Marsilius of Padua, whose Defensor Pacis in 1324 was a forthright assertion of the supremacy of the state. Two years later the logic of the struggle led John XXII to excommunicate William of Ockham, the English Franciscan, known for his forceful reasoning as “the invincible doctor.” In expounding a philosophy called “nominalism,” Ockham opened a dangerous door to direct intuitive knowledge of the physical world. He was in a sense a spokesman for intellectual freedom, and the Pope recognized the implications by his ban. In reply to the excommunication, Ockham promptly charged John XXII with seventy errors and seven heresies.

  In economic man, the lay spirit did not challenge the Church, yet functioned in essential contradiction. Capitalist enterprise, although it held by now a commanding place, violated by its very nature the Christian attitude toward commerce, which was one of active antagonism. It held that money was evil, that according to St. Augustine “Business is in itself an evil,” that profit beyond a minimum necessary to support the dealer was avarice, that to make money out of money by charging interest on a loan was the sin of usury, that buying goods wholesale and selling them unchanged at a higher retail price was immoral and condemned by canon law, that, in short, St. Jerome’s dictum was final: “A man who is a merchant can seldom if ever please God” (Homo mercator vix aut numquam potest Deo placere).

  It followed that banker, merchant, and businessman lived in daily commission of sin and daily contradiction of the moral code centering upon the “just price.” This was based on the principle that a craft should supply each man a livelihood and a fair return to all, but no more. Prices should be set at a “just” level, meaning the value of the labor added to the value of the raw material. To ensure that no one gained an advantage over anyone else, commercial law prohibited innovation in tools or techniques, underselling below a fixed price, working late by artificial light, employing extra apprentices or wife and under-age children, and advertising of wares or praising them to the detriment of others. As restraint of initiative, this was the direct opposite of capitalist enterprise. It was the denial of economic man, and consequently even more routinely violated than the denial of sensual man.

  No economic activity was more irrepressible than the investment and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes—and it was based on the sin of usury. Nothing so vexed medieval thinking, nothing so baffled and eluded settlement, nothing was so great a tangle of irreconcilables as the theory of usury. Society needed moneylending while Christian doctrine forbade it. That was the basic dichotomy, but the doctrine was so elastic that “even wise men” were unsure of its provisions. For practical purposes, usury was considered to be not the charging of interest per se, but charging at a higher rate than was decent. This was left to the Jews as the necessary dirty work of society, and if they had not been available they would have had to be invented. While theologians and canonists argued endlessly and tried vainly to decide whether 10, 12.5, 15, or 20 percent was decent, the bankers went on lending and investing at whatever rates the situation would bear.

  Merchants regularly paid fines for breaking every law that concerned their business, and went on as before. The wealth of Venice and Genoa was made in trade with the infidels of Syria and Egypt despite papal prohibition. Prior to the 14th century, it has been said, men “could hardly imagine the merchant’s strongbox without picturing the devil squatting on the lid.” Whether the merchant too saw the devil as he counted coins, whether he lived with a sense of guilt, is hard to assess. Francisco Datini, the merchant of Prato, judging by his letters, was a deeply troubled man, but his agonies were caused more by fear of loss than by fear of God. He was evidently able to reconcile Christianity and business, for the motto on his ledger was “In the name of God and of profit.”

  Division of rich and poor became increasingly sharp. With control of the raw materials and tools of production, the owners were able to reduce wages in classic exploitation. The poor saw them now as enemies, no longer as protectors but as exploiters, as Dives, the r
ich man consigned to hellfire, as wolves, and themselves as lambs. They felt a sense of injustice that finding no remedy grew into a spirit of revolt.

  Medieval theory intended that the lord or ruler should respond to charges of oppression by investigating and ordering the necessary reform to ensure that taxes fell equally on rich and poor. But this theory corresponded to reality no more than other medieval ideals, and because of this, wrote Philippe de Beaumanoir in 1280–83, “there have been acts of violence because the poor will not suffer this but know not how to obtain their right except by rising and seizing it themselves.” They formed associations, he reported, to refuse to work for “so low a price as formerly but they will raise the price by their own authority” and take “certain pains and punishments” against those who do not join them. This seemed to Beaumanoir a terrible act against the common good, “for the common interest cannot suffer that work should stop.” He advocated that such persons should be arrested and kept long in prison and afterward fined 60 sous each, the traditional fine for rupture of the “public peace.”

  The most persistent ferment was among the weavers and cloth-workers of Flanders, where economic expansion had been most intense. The textile industry was the automobile industry of the Middle Ages, and Flanders was a hothouse of the tensions and antagonisms brewed in urban society by capitalist development.

  Once united by a common craft, the guild of masters, journeymen, and apprentices had spread apart into entrepreneurs and hired hands divided by class hatred. The guild was now a corporation run by the employers in which the workers had no voice. The magnates, who married into the nobility and bought country estates in addition to their city real estate, developed into a patrician class that controlled the government of the towns and managed it in their own interest. They founded churches and hospitals, built the great Cloth Halls, paved the streets, and created the canal system. But they made up the greater part of municipal expenses from sales taxes on wine, beer, peat, and grain, which fell most heavily on the poor. They favored each other in governing groups like the Thirty-nine of Ghent, named for life and serving in annual rotation of three parties of thirteen, or the twelve magistrates of Arras, who rotated among themselves every four months, or the oligarchy of the Hundred Peers of Rouen, which appointed the mayor and town councillors each year. The lower bourgeois who made fortunes and pressed upward could frequently penetrate the monopoly, but the artisans, despised as “blue nails” and vulnerable to unemployment, had no political rights.

  Beneath the cry of protest much of medieval life was supportive because it was lived collectively in infinite numbers of groups, orders, associations, brotherhoods. Never was man less alone. Even in bedrooms married couples often slept in company with their servants and children. Except for hermits and recluses, privacy was unknown.

  As nobles had their orders of chivalry, the common man had the confrérie or brotherhood of his trade or village, which surrounded him at every crux of life. Usually numbering from 20 to 100 members, these groups were associations for charity and social service as well as for entertainment and religious observance in lay life. They accompanied a member to the town gates when he went off on a pilgrimage and marched in his funeral when he died. If a man was condemned to be executed, fellow members accompanied him to the scaffold. If he drowned accidentally as in a case at Bordeaux, they searched the Garonne for three days for his body. If he died insolvent, the association furnished his shroud and the costs of the funeral and helped to support the widow and children. The furriers of Paris paid sick members three sous a week during incapacity for work and three sous for a week of convalescence. The associations’ money came from dues scaled according to income and payable weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

  The brotherhoods staged religious plays, furnished the music, and served as actors and stagehands. They held competitions, sports and games, awarded prizes, and invited the orator or preacher for special occasions. On feast days, after strewing the streets with flowers, the confréries joined in the processions, each marching in a body in the bright colors of its own costume, preceded by its banner and statue or portrait of its patron saint. Members were bound by rites and oaths; in some brotherhoods, they wore masks to conceal identity, making all within the group equal.

  When the confréries donated church windows or commissioned murals, choir stalls, or illuminated books, the members could take pride in being patrons of art just like the nobles and rich magnates. Through their association they could buy merit as benefactors, adopting a hospital, distributing alms and food to the poor, or undertaking the charge of certain categories—as when the grocers of Paris supported the blind and the drapers supported prisoners in the city jail. The confréries provided a context of life that was intensely sociable, with the solace and sometimes the abrasions that sociability implies.

  In 1320 the misery of the rural poor in the wake of the famines burst out in a strange hysterical mass movement called the Pastoureaux, for the shepherds who started it. Though less uprooted than the urban poor, the peasant too felt oppressed by the rich and was forever struggling against the lord’s effort to grasp by one means or another more of the peasant’s product or more of his services. Cases in manor courts going back to 1250 show peasants in concerted deliberate refusal to plow the lord’s field, thresh his grain, turn his hay, or grind at his mill. Persisting year after year, despite fines and punishment, they denied bondage, disposed of land without consent, joined in bands to assault the bailiff or to rescue a fellow peasant from the stocks.

  Oppression of the peasant by the landowner troubled the conscience of the time and evoked warnings. “Ye nobles are like ravening wolves,” wrote Jacques de Vitry, a 13th century author of sermons and moral tales. “Therefore shall ye howl in hell … who despoil your subjects and live on the blood and sweat of the poor.” Whatever the peasant amasses in a year, “the knight, the noble devours in an hour.” He imposes illicit taxes and heavy exactions. De Vitry warned the great not to scorn the humble or inspire their hate for “if they can aid us, they can also do us harm. You know that many serfs have killed their masters or have burned their houses.”

  A prophecy current in the time of the famine foretold that the poor would rise against the powerful, overthrow the Church and an unspecified great monarchy, and after much bloodshed a new age of unity under one cross would dawn. Combining with vague talk of a new crusade and preached among the poor by an apostate monk and an unfrocked priest, the prophecy “as suddenly and unexpectedly as a storm” swept the peasants and rootless poor of northern France into a mass marching southward toward an imagined embarkation for the Holy Land. Gathering adherents and arms as they went, they stormed castles and abbeys, burned town halls and tax records, opened prisons, and when they reached the south threw themselves in concentrated assault upon the Jews.

  Peasant indebtedness to Jews for loans to tide over bad times or enable the purchase of tools or a plow was of long standing. The peasants had thought the debt wiped out when Philip the Fair expelled the Jews in 1306, but his son Louis X brought them back on terms that made him a partner with a two-thirds share in the recovery of their debts. Exacerbating an old grudge, this drove the Pastoureaux, enthusiastically aided by the populace, to the slaughter of almost every Jew from Bordeaux to Albi. Despite the King’s order that the Jews be protected, local authorities could not restrain the attacks and in some cases joined them.

  That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis. If the Jews were unholy, then killing and looting them was holy work. Lepers too were targets of the Pastoureaux on the theory that they had joined the Jews in a horrible compact to poison the wells, and their persecution was made official by a royal ordinance of 1321.

  Menacing Avignon, attacking priests, threatening to seize Church property, the Pastoureaux spread the fear of insurrection that freezes the blood of the privileged in any era when the mob appea
rs. Excommunicated by Pope John XXII, they were finally suppressed when he forbade anyone to provision them on pain of death and sanctioned the use of force against them. That was sufficient, and the Pastoureaux ended like every outbreak of the poor sooner or later in the Middle Ages, with corpses hanging from the trees.

  In the woe of the century no factor caused more trouble than the persistent lag between the growth of the state and the means of state financing. While centralized government was developing, taxation was still encased in the concept that taxes represented an emergency measure requiring consent. Having exhausted every other source of funds, Philip the Fair in 1307 turned on the Templars in the most sensational episode of his reign. The result brought a curse, as his contemporaries believed, upon their country, and what people believe about their own time becomes a factor in its history.

  No downfall was to be so complete and spectacular as that of this arrogant order of monastic knighthood. Formed during the crusades to be the sword arm of the Church in defense of the Holy Land, the Templars had moved from ideals of asceticism and poverty to immense resources and an international web of power outside the regular channels of allegiance. Tax exempt from the start, they had amassed riches as bankers for the Holy See and as moneylenders at lower interest rates than the Lombards and Jews. They were not known for charity and, unlike the Knights of St. John, supported no hospitals. With 2,000 members in France and the largest treasury in northern Europe, they maintained headquarters in the Temple, their formidable fortress in Paris.