Millennium

by Ian Mortimer

  What matters about vernacular languages in the context of this book, however, is not primarily their internal linguistic changes but their use – their external history, so to speak. The various vernacular languages of Europe were already old by the start of the fourteenth century. The earliest extant documents in Old French date from the ninth century, in Anglo-Saxon from the seventh and in Slavic from the late tenth century; the oldest texts in Norwegian and Icelandic are from the twelfth century, and in Swedish and Danish from the thirteenth. But throughout Europe, Latin was the more commonly used language for record-keeping and formal literary composition. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the aristocratic troubadors wrote thousands of poems in the vernacular languages of southern Europe – Galician-Portuguese, Occitan and Provençal – but their importance was largely recreational and had little or no impact on the lives of ordinary people. The same can be said of their German-singing counterparts, the Minnesingers. What happened with the vernacular languages of Europe after about 1300 (although slightly earlier in Castile) is that they came to be allied with the forms of nationalism we encountered above, and were regarded by rulers as the principal languages of their kingdoms. Latin was increasingly marginalised as the language of scholarship and the Church. Just as the influence of the pope waned and national interests grew, so the importance of the common tongue of the people rose in every region.

  That link between national pride and the vernacular emerges clearly from the English evidence of the period. In 1346, in order to secure the support of Parliament for extra taxation, a Franco-Norman invasion plan dating back to 1338 was shown to the members, being described as ‘an ordinance . . . to destroy and ruin the whole English nation and language’. This is a remarkable statement: almost no members of the nobility and gentry had spoken English in 1300, yet barely four decades later its preservation was being presented as crucial to the survival of the English nation. In 1362, the king confirmed in the Statute of Pleadings that men should be allowed to plead in English, confirming it as ‘the tongue of the country’. Shortly afterwards, his chancellor began to use the vernacular for his speeches when opening Parliament. In 1382, another parliamentary record connects national interests with the English language:

  This kingdom has never been in as much danger as it is in now, both within and without, as will be apparent to all who possess either reason or judgment: so that if God does not bestow his grace on the land and the inhabitants do not strive to defend themselves, this kingdom will be on the verge of being conquered, which God forbid, and made subject to its enemies; and as a consequence, the language and nation of England will be completely destroyed: so that now, we are faced with only two choices, to surrender or to defend ourselves.19

  By the end of the century, English had become the dominant tongue, and most of the royal family spoke it. Edward III composed several mottos in the language. Henry IV swore his coronation oath in English in 1399. For John Wycliffe and his supporters, it was imperative that the Bible be available in English – to encourage that direct allegiance to Christ, rather than the pope, which we noted above. Geoffrey Chaucer chose to write in English rather than French, retaining the structural forms of French poetry but communicating in the tongue of the nation. The fourteenth century saw the flowering of the English language as an element of national pride.

  Other kingdoms across Europe were following a similar path. Portugal and Galicia shared a language at the start of the fourteenth century, Galician-Portuguese. It was one of the languages of choice for the troubadors. Yet this vibrant vernacular fell apart in the fourteenth century as Portuguese and Galician speakers went their separate ways. In the late thirteenth century, Castilian was standardised at Toledo under the personal influence of the king of Castile, Alphonso the Wise. He commissioned many works of law, history, astrology and geology and insisted that they be made available in Castilian so his people were able to understand them. What he started continued in the fourteenth century with the works of his nephew, Juan Manuel, Prince of Villena, and Juan Ruiz, ‘the Spanish Chaucer’. By the end of the century, Castilian had replaced Galician-Portuguese as the Iberian language of choice for lyric poetry. It was also the language in which the nobleman Pedro Lopez de Ayala wrote his many works, including chronicles, a satire on society, and a book of falconry. A similar attempt was made to standardise Aragonese and present it as a national language. Juan Fernández de Heredia, grand master of the Knights Hospitaller, created a corpus of Aragonese literature and brought about a golden age for the language in the late fourteenth century.

  Old French was already a prestigious language by 1300: Marco Polo’s book of his marvellous travels was written in French, not Venetian. Nevertheless, this language too saw considerable change in its importance. Outside France it lost ground to other vernaculars (such as English, Italian and Castilian), but within the borders of France it slowly established itself as the tongue of the nation, edging out the twenty or thirty regional dialects. In the north of France, the last writer of stature to use the Picard dialect was Jean Froissart, a late-fourteenth-century chronicler and poet. By the end of the century, Middle French was making inroads into areas where Occitan and Provençal was spoken. In the cities and towns of the Holy Roman Empire, letters, wills and chronicles were more frequently written in German. Among the Slavic languages, Polish and Czech speakers produced literary texts for the first time. Hungarian writing also first appeared in the fourteenth century. Everywhere across Europe there was a great linguistic shift in education and composition, from Latin to the vernacular languages, encouraged more often than not by a new sense of national pride and patronised by the monarch.

  And then we come to Italy, the exception to almost every generalisation about medieval Europe. Only here did the rise of the vernacular lack the concomitant nationalism that we notice elsewhere. The Italians were late in breaking away from Latin, no doubt for the simple reason that Italy had been the birthplace of the language and it was where the influence of the Roman Church remained strongest. The earliest extant document written entirely in an Italian vernacular dates from about 960 but examples of Italian from before 1200 are rare. In the thirteenth century a number of Italian poets chose to write in Provençal, and Marco Polo’s amanuensis was not the only Italian to use French: Brunetto Latini, Dante Alighieri’s teacher, did likewise. This wide range of Romance languages in use in Italy in 1300 was described by Dante in his study of the nobility of vernacular tongues, De Vulgari Eloquentia (ironically also written in Latin). His own great composition, The Divine Comedy, was composed in Tuscan, the language of his native Florence. This work commanded such respect throughout Italy that soon after it was published it became a benchmark of Italian culture, a demonstration of what could be achieved in the vernacular. A host of Florentine writers took up the challenge of widening cultural horizons through the use of Dante’s Tuscan form of Italian. The Florentine Giovanni Villani wrote his chronicle in the vernacular and praised Dante in its pages. Soon after Dante’s death, Boccaccio wrote the first biography of him – in Italian, of course – and a little later, Petrarch produced his enduring poetic models for the Italian tongue. In Italy as elsewhere in Europe, by 1400 the language of the people had become, for rich and poor, literate and illiterate, the language of choice.

  Conclusion

  Two of the four changes picked out here are imbued with death and tragedy. But beneath the dark clouds of plague and war, many smaller things glitter. In Italy, at the start of the century, Giotto was painting expressive faces that told of human pain and suffering – the first artist to do so with a degree of depth and perspective. By the end of the century, Italian art was in demand all across Europe, especially in the form of altarpieces. On a more mundane level, buttons came into use at the courts of England and France in the 1330s, allowing clothing to be tailored elegantly to fit the human body rather than having to hang from the shoulders, as it had in previous centuries. A golden rose made by Minucchio da Siena at Avignon, and
now in La Musée de la Moyen Age in Paris, shows just how exquisite the art of the goldsmith had become. Culturally speaking, the fourteenth century was an age of brilliance. Enamelled gold cups abounded at the courts of Europe; kings and courtiers listened spellbound to their minstrels; and some of the finest poetry ever written was composed. But this book is not about artistic masterpieces; rather it is about society as a whole, and few peasants ever saw Giotto’s art. For the vast majority of people the century was characterised by famine, plague, war and conquest. All four horsemen of the apocalypse rode into town, and everyone shuddered. The gleaming treasures and bright tunics of noblemen might serve to remind us of the sophistication of medieval taste, but fourteenth-century people were more concerned with the proximity of death than they were with cultural innovations and Earthly delights.

  The principal agent of change

  The plague caused more change than anything or anybody else in the fourteenth century. But if we have to select an individual who consciously changed his world more than anyone else, it has to be Edward III of England.

  Despite the fact that Edward is the only king to be reckoned a ‘principal agent of change’ in this book, these days he is almost forgotten. When the BBC carried out a poll in 2002 to find ‘the 100 greatest Britons’ of all time, many far less important monarchs featured, but Edward failed to make the list. It marks an extraordinary downturn in his reputation. His epitaph in Westminster Abbey describes him as ‘the glory of the English, the flower of kings past, the pattern for kings to come, a merciful king, the bringer of peace to his people . . . the undefeated warrior, a second Maccabeus . . .’ Even 300 years after his death, a Cambridge scholar called him ‘one of the greatest kings that perhaps the world ever saw’.20 The reason he has come to be neglected in recent times is because priorities change and, as time goes by, we take more and more things for granted. Few of us today stop to think about how English came to be the tongue of the English nation, or how ordinary people rather than the knightly class came to dominate the battlefield. In addition, Edward’s achievements are not the sort of things we like to celebrate. He demonstrated the effective use of projectile weapons on the battlefields of Europe, and did more for militant nationalism than anyone else of his time. But in order to judge him fairly, we have to remember that nationalism was a very different thing in the fourteenth century. Forging a nation in which the king and Parliament had to negotiate with one another was a remarkably enlightened initiative in the Middle Ages, preceding as it did the absolutist monarchies of later centuries. Whether you admire Edward or not, he has to be singled out as the principal agent of change on account of his contribution to the development of methods of war, for the impetus he gave to nationalism in England and France, for his role in promoting the vernacular, and for starting the conflict that later became known as the Hundred Years War, described by one modern military historian as ‘perhaps the most important war in European history’.21

  1401–1500

  The Fifteenth Century

  You might recall the quotation from Francis Bacon at the start of this book: ‘Printing, gunpowder and the compass – these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.’ All three of his catalysts for change developed in the fifteenth century. The printing of texts was introduced to the West in grand fashion when Johannes Gutenberg produced a complete edition of the Latin Bible in 1455. Although gunpowder itself had been known for over a hundred years, the casting of cannon grew considerably more sophisticated. The Dardanelles Gun, for example, cast in bronze in 1464, weighs 37,037 pounds, is 17 feet in length and can blast a cannon ball 2 feet in diameter over a mile. Such guns were used by the Turks to bring down the walls of Constantinople in 1453. The compass similarly came into its own in this century as explorers crossed the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Finally, although Francis Bacon failed to mention it, there was the small matter of the Renaissance, which represents a profound and energetic change in human awareness and thinking. On the face of things, the fifteenth century has a good claim to be the one that saw the most change over the last millennium.

  The overwhelming characteristic of the century, however, is war. The rise of the Ottoman Empire dealt several savage blows to Christendom. Constantinople, the capital of the once-great Byzantine Empire, fell to the Turks, the last emperor dying in the desperate defence of his city alongside his soldiers. The Turks also seized Serbia, Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria and much of Greece; they overran the Genoese trading outposts in the Black Sea and a number of Venetian possessions in the Mediterranean. For Italians, these losses were only one of their worries. This was the golden age of the condottieri, the mercenary war captains who sold their services to whichever city would employ them, and they were much in demand. Padua was defeated by Venice in 1405, the same year that Florence conquered Pisa. Venice waged a war against Milan for 21 years which finally ended in 1454. Genoa succumbed to the armies of Milan in 1464. Florence’s longstanding conflict with Milan was finally resolved in 1440, allowing the Florentines to concentrate on wars with Naples and Venice. The Neapolitans sacked Rome in 1413. In the 1490s, the French invaded Italy, defeated the Florentines and overran Rome on the way to attack Naples. It becomes almost comical to describe the seemingly unending appetite of the Italian cities for fighting each other.

  Nor can we say that the Italians were unusual: every country in fifteenth-century Europe experienced war, and many of them were torn apart by civil wars – the least noble and most desperate sort of conflict. In 1400, and again in 1500, England was ruled by a King Henry who had taken the throne by force from a King Richard and killed him, and who then suffered a number of rebellions before passing the throne to his son, also called Henry. Between those two successions there was much bloodshed. Henry IV had an ongoing conflict with the dissident Welsh lord Owen Glendower. Henry V aggressively restarted the war with France to prove his dynasty’s legitimacy in 1415. After his death in 1422, his heirs had to demonstrate their right to the thrones of both France and England through repeated victories. Talk about a poisoned chalice! After the English were finally thrown out of France in 1453, the war they had been fighting simply moved on to English soil.1 That phase of the conflict, the Wars of the Roses, continued intermittently from 1455 until the Battle of Stoke in 1487. Almost every landed family in England lost men or lands in the Wars of the Roses.

  In Spain, too, we can find a whole assortment of military struggles. There was a war with the Hanseatic League (1419–43), the civil war of the mid 1440s and the War of the Spanish Succession (1475–9). These were followed by a 10-year-long invasion of Granada, ending with the completion of the Reconquista in 1492. The Dutch also fought the Hanseatic League (1438–41) and coped with two civil wars (1470–4 and 1481–3). In eastern Europe, the Lithuanians had a civil war over the succession (1431–5); the Teutonic Knights were finally destroyed by the Poles in 1466; the Hungarians and their allies fought the Turks until they were crushed at the battle of Varna (1444); and there were four crusades against the followers of Jan Hus, in Bohemia (1419–34), not to forget a 10-year war between Bohemia and Hungary (1468–78). And this is just the tip of the military iceberg: there were many other local and less prominent conflicts.

  You cannot help but wonder what would have happened if there had been greater peace in Europe in the fifteenth century. Would there have been less change or more? Indeed, here we confront a profound historical question. In the modern world, conflicts undoubtedly speed up technological progress, as states compete against one another, and they can have a positive effect on social development. But was this also the case in the fifteenth century? The wars in Italy offered a wealth of opportunities to Renaissance artists, whose painterly skills were useful in the propaganda battles waged between competing families and rival city states. Engineers, whose skills could be employed in building walls and bridges, were similarly empowered. But at the same time, militarisation reduced the money available for the patronage of artists, scienti
sts and writers. Violence and uncertainty inhibited trade and thus reduced the vitality of the towns and ports whose livelihood was threatened by enemies on land and sea. Indeed, many towns shrank in size. As a result, it is probably fair to say that war triggered change in some respects and inhibited it in others in the century of Gutenberg and Columbus.

  The age of discovery

  One of the most profound changes of the last thousand years has been the expansion of the West beyond the borders of Europe. It was not the compass that brought this about, despite Francis Bacon’s assertion. That instrument had been invented more than two hundred years earlier, as we saw in the chapter on the twelfth century, but it had had little effect. Early-fourteenth-century navigators had reached the Canary Islands, and although the news of that discovery spread throughout Europe with the papal appointment of a prince of the Fortunate Islands’ (as the Canaries were then called), it did not lead to many further voyages of discovery. As so often was the case, it was not the technological innovation that mattered but money and the political will to explore, which were frequently entwined with each other. The technology just facilitated the realisation of this combined, intensified ambition.