Incessant wars caused economic dislocation—both directly by the destruction that they visited upon the countryside, and indirectly by their heavy costs as well. A large part of public spending went for war at the moment when Europe could least afford it.8
Domestic insurrections also occurred in many parts of Europe, with similar result. In Rome a rebellion broke out against Boniface VIII, a pope who was hated for his despotism and despised for his impiety. The people of Rome took him prisoner and forced him to resign his office. He died shortly afterward—of humiliation, the faithful believed. Others suspected poison. His successor Benedict XI was murdered, and the papacy fled to Avignon in 1305. There it remained in opulent exile for more than seventy years.
Even Venice, the most stable of Italian city-states, suffered the only major insurrection in its thousand-year history—an uprising called Tiepolo’s Rebellion in 1310. It was suppressed by a vigilante group called the Council of Ten, which made itself a permanent part of the Venetian government, along with secret police, anonymous informers, savage torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and an apparatus of official terror which today is exhibited to tourists in the Doge’s Palace. This system of repression was the price of stability in the Venetian republic.
In the monarchies of northern Europe, nobles turned against their kings and toppled them from their thrones. An aristocratic revolution was organized against England’s Edward II and his supporters of the hated Despenser family, whose name had become a byword for avarice and oppression. In September 1324, when the people of England were groaning under the weight of their accumulated miseries, the young Hugh Despenser had accumulated large deposits in Italian banks. This money had been extracted from starving peasants on his estates and from the profits of his offices. Despenser and his father so outraged their countrymen that they were seized by the rebels and summarily executed. Young Hugh Despenser’s head was triumphantly displayed on London Bridge, “with much tumult and the sound of horns.”
For England’s much-hated King Edward II, a worse fate was in store. He was forcibly deposed and cast into a deep dungeon at Berkeley Castle in the west of England. His captors faced a dilemma. They could not let him live, but neither could they appear to kill their sovereign. They solved their problem by inventing a unique method of execution that left no visible marks. The king was seized and tightly bound. A red-hot iron was driven slowly upward through his anus until it penetrated his brain. It is said that his dying screams could be heard for miles across the Severn Valley. The folk memory of this event is still alive in Gloucestershire. Some swear that the death cry of Edward II can still be heard in the silence of a moonless night.
That savage act of regicide was not an isolated horror. The people of Flanders rose against their hated French masters in 1302, and killed many of them in an epic slaughter called the Matin de Bruges. Then they defeated the French nobility in the Battle of the Spurs at Courtrai. In France, King Louis X (remembered as Louis the Quarrelsome) was deposed in 1316. Twelve years later, the Capetian dynasty collapsed after more than three centuries in power.
In Sweden after 1290, a civil war between royal brothers ended in a popular insurrection, in the expulsion of King Birger in 1319 and in the collapse of royal authority. Denmark dissolved into anarchy after 1332, when King Christopher II was deposed by Gerhard Count Holstein, who was murdered in his turn. The Holy Roman Empire suffered a protracted civil war between contending parties called Guelfs and Ghibbelines. The popes were driven into exile for seventy years, and in Rome a popular revolution led by Cola di Rienzi overthrew the city’s patriciate. The Italian city-states were consumed by internal conflict. Florence, unable to govern itself, invited a tyrant named Walter of Brienne, Duke of Athens, and soon found its liberties crushed beneath his heel.
Order also collapsed throughout eastern Europe. In the year 1304, an army of 6,000 Catalonian mercenaries laid waste to broad areas of Thrace and Macedonia. The Ottoman Turks first appeared in the early years of the fourteenth century, attacking the Byzantine Empire and capturing Greek cities in Asia Minor. The Tartars rode eastward from the steppes as far as the plains of Hungary, and for a time gained effective control of Russia.
These disorders, cruel as they may have been, were not the worst of Europe’s sufferings. Famine, pestilence, war and insurrection returned repeatedly to Europe during the 1320s and 1330s. Some places—Tuscany for example—suffered worse famines in the period 1328–30 than in 1315–20. Prices surged and declined in great swings. The rural population shrank, arable lands began to be abandoned, and peasants grew poorer.
At the same time, some of the rich continued to grow richer. This was the period when the French popes lived in high luxury at Avignon. Pope John XXII (1316–34) spent vast sums for jewels and ornaments and gold cloth for his vestments. Papal banquets were served on gold plate beneath gilded frescoes and ceilings. Petrarch protested that even the papal horses were “dressed in gold, fed on gold, and soon to be shod in gold if God does not stop this slavish luxury.” The cardinals accumulated great wealth; one Prince of the Church required 51 houses for his servants. Similar scenes were enacted in royal courts and noble households.
At the same time, many small seigneurs were caught up in the general misfortunes. A study of the Norman seignury finds evidence of a “sharp collapse of rents” in the fourteenth century, caused mainly by the decline of population, after the long rise of the thirteenth century.9
Meanwhile, the peasants suffered and the poor starved. The generation born in this age of crisis was so debilitated by hunger, disease, exploitation, war and disorder that a few years later it succumbed to a still greater catastrophe, the worst in world history.10 In 1346 a Tartar army besieged the Genoese town of Caffa (now Feodosia) in the Crimea. The attackers were stricken by plague, and converted their misfortune into a weapon of war—catapulting their dead into the city in a deliberate attempt to spread the infection. This tactic succeeded so well that the Genoese abandoned the city and fled in their galleys through the Black Sea, the Aegean and the Mediterranean, carrying with them the plague that came to be called the Black Death.
By October 1347, the Black Death had established itself in Sicily, and spread swiftly to Africa, Sardinia, Corsica and the mainland of Europe. In January 1348, it reached Venice, Genoa and Marseilles, where 56,000 people died. By June it crossed the Alps and Pyrenees. England was infected by December, and Scotland and Scandinavia by 1349. A few cities miraculously escaped—Milan, Nuremberg, Liège, and several fortunate regions such as Bearn, as well as much of eastern Germany and Poland where the population was sparse.
But most of Europe felt the full force of the epidemic. Great centers of commerce and culture suffered severely. The plague found a vulnerable population that had outstripped the means of its subsistence and was already beginning to decline. Historian Philip Ziegler writes, “Whatever one’s thesis about the inevitability of the Black Death, it cannot be denied that it found awaiting it in Europe a population singularly ill-equipped to resist. Distracted by wars, weakened by malnutrition, exhausted by his struggle to win a living from his inadequate portion of ever less fertile land, the medieval peasantry was ready to succumb even before the blow had fallen.”11
We shall never know how many people died in the Black Death. Among England’s parish clergy, whose deaths were comparatively well recorded, something like 45 percent are known to have perished. Most scholars believe that the death toll in the general population was smaller, but still very large. Many historians estimate that Europe lost between 25 and 40 percent of its inhabitants. Altogether, the European population fell from approximately 80 million at its peak in the early fourteenth century to 60 million or less after the Black Death—the largest decline in the cruel history of that continent.12
Figure 1.14 measures the catastrophic impact of the Black Death (1348) on two communities 25 miles northeast of London. A meticulous study by L. R. Poos also finds that the fall of population began as early as 1310 and conti
nued in Great Waltham as late as 1400. The source is L. R. Poos, “The Rural Population of Essex in the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review 2nd ser., 38 (1985) 22.
This great depopulation had many economic consequences. The price of food rose sharply during the epidemic years, then began to fall very rapidly as there were fewer mouths to feed. At the same time prices of manufactured goods tended to rise, partly because artisans and craftsmen could demand higher wages, and also because of dislocations in supply. These countervailing trends—falling agricultural prices and rising industrial prices—were called by Thorold Rogers a “price scissors.” Their effect was particularly severe after the catastrophe of the fourteenth century, but they were not unique to this period. Similar movements would also occur in every other price-revolution. In the years that followed the Black death, the “price scissors” added much to Europe’s miseries.13
The catastrophe of the fourteenth century was followed by cultural disintegration. Jews and foreigners were massacred. Among Christians, the practice of flagellation spread rapidly in cities and the countryside. Processions of Christians scourged one another until their bare backs ran red with blood. Entire villages and towns were abandoned, the doors and shutters of the vacant buildings creaking sadly in the wind. Empty churches and deserted castles fell into ruin. Grass grew in the marketplaces, and the country roads that had been thronged with pilgrims were reclaimed by weeds and brush.
In the period from 1314 to 1348, the great wave crested and broke in a shattering catastrophe. As it did so, the people of Europe suffered through the darkest moment in their history: a terrible time of starvation and pestilence, insurrection and war, persecution and political chaos. This was more than merely the collapse of the medieval economy. It was the death of medieval civilization.
The Equilibrium of the Renaissance, 1400–1470
The time of troubles continued in western Europe for many years. It was a long, grinding misery that lasted a lifetime, and must have seemed an eternity to those who were condemned to suffer through it.1
The Black Death did not strike merely a single blow. It was one of a family of epidemics that returned again and again to Europe. In many places the first visit was not the worst. The Tuscan city of Pistoia, for example, suffered its first great plague in 1339. This was not the Black Death but another pestilence, which came after famines had weakened the population for twenty-five years. The epidemic of 1339 probably killed a quarter of Pistoia’s population in the city itself and the surrounding countryside. Eight years later, in 1347, another pestilence returned to that region. In 1348 the Black Death arrived, and did its work so thoroughly that the keeper of the city’s chronicle remembered that “hardly a person was left alive.” Slowly the survivors struggled to their feet, only to be struck by other epidemics of “mortal fevers” (not the Black Death but different diseases) in 1357, 1389 and 1393. Then, in 1399, bubonic plague came back to Pistoia and destroyed half of the city’s inhabitants in one final visitation.
Thereafter, conditions began at last to grow better, but even this period of improvement was punctuated by lesser epidemics that overswept the town in 1410, 1418, 1423, 1436 and 1457. No other community experienced the same sequence of misfortunes as did the city of Pistoia, but similar events occurred in most European towns and in much of the countryside as well.2
While epidemic disease continued to ravage Europe, many parts of the continent were laid waste by war. This was the period of the Hundred Years War (ca. 1337–1453) between France and England.
Figure 1.15 shows the impact of the long crisis of the fourteenth century on Pistoia, an Italian city state thirty kilometers northwest of Florence. The source is David Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia: The Social History of an Italian Town, 1200–1430 (New Haven, 1967), 70. Each campaign reduced large areas to anarchy, and left in its wake wandering gangs of mercenaries and freebooters who preyed upon the peasantry. Some of these bands were as big as a modern infantry brigade. When they passed through a rural region, they left a wide swath of devastation.
For self-defence, French peasants converted their stone churches into castles. The clang of bells that had summoned families to worship in time of peace now sounded a warning tocsin when raiders were in the neighborhood. In the beautiful Loire Valley, peasants retreated at night to islands in the river. In Picardy, they moved underground into tunnels and caves with hidden entrances. Another dark age had descended upon Europe.3
One consequence was a continuing decline of population. The number of inhabitants did not merely fall during the great plague year of 1348. In many parts of Europe it kept on falling, in a long contraction that persisted from 1315 to 1400. A careful Danish study of farms on the manors of the Bishops of Roskilde near Copenhagen found that the proportion of abandoned houses increased steadily for sixty years after the Black Death. The decline of rural population reached its nadir not in 1348 but half a century later, in the period 1401–20.4
Figure 1.16 measures the impact of falling population on farm tenancy in Denmark. Here again we find evidence not of a single catastrophe but of a long decline that reached its nadir circa 1400. A large literature on the Wstungsproblem (“lost village question”) finds similar trends throughout Europe. The source is C. A. Christensen, “Aendringerne i landsbyens Økonomiske og sociale strukur i det 14. og 15. århundrede,” Historisk Tidsskrift 12 (1964) 346.
At the same time that Europe’s population continued to fall and social unrest continued, an economic problem developed. Money began to disappear. Europe’s stock of silver and gold contracted sharply during the late fourteenth century. Historian John Day writes, “for the better part of two decades the European economies were scourged by a genuine scarcity of money.” In the violence of the fourteenth century, much silver and gold had been lost. Some of it disappeared into forgotten hordes that are being rediscovered even today. At the same time the West had an unfavorable balance of trade with Asia, and specie drained rapidly away. Imports of gold from Africa also declined, and many silver mines in central Europe were abandoned or became less productive.
After 1390, a severe monetary famine developed. In France, the low point was reached during the year 1402, when the minting of money virtually came to an end. In Florence, the minting of silver coins ceased entirely from 1392 to 1402. In London, the entire output of the Royal Mint was merely eight pounds in silver pennies during the year 1408. The mints of Flanders closed altogether. Only Venetian gold ducats, which have been called “the dollar of the middle ages,” continued to be struck in quantity; and even in Venice silver was in short supply. This money famine was part of a deep economic depression that continued to the end of the fourteenth century.5
The decline of population and scarcity of money had a powerful effect on European prices.6 In Pistoia, famine and plague had reduced the population from more than 40,000 souls in the late thirteenth century to less than 14,000 by the early fifteenth. Houses and estates fell empty; rents and land values declined roughly in proportion to the loss of population. Grain prices also came down, but the growing scarcity of labor caused wages to rise.7 The money-income of unskilled workers in Pistoia doubled from 1349 to 1400, and real wages (measured in terms of purchasing power) increased in even greater proportion. These trends appeared generally throughout Europe.8
In the midst of these many tendencies, an important social transformation began to take place. From the long travail of the fourteenth century, a new society was born. Forms of status and obligation were altered in fundamental ways. England and western Europe underwent an economic process that historian M. M. Postan summarizes as the “commutation of labour services and the emancipation of serfs.” Similar trends also occurred in the cities of northern Italy, where urban workers improved their material condition. A major cause was the scarcity of labor that allowed workers to bargain for better terms. This process continued for nearly a century after the Black Death.
Angry social conflicts broke out as a consequence o
f this assertiveness. Among them was the Jacquerie in France (1358), a rebellion of peasants against their masters. Another was the revolt of the Ciompi in Florence (1378), when the popolo minuto rose violently against the ruling families of that city.9 A third was England’s great Peasant Rebellion (1381). In that year there was a insurrection in East Anglia, and the Kentish Rising of Wat Tyler who led his followers into the streets of London. In many places, peasants burned the manorial rolls that recorded their servile obligations.10
These rebellions were suppressed, but the conditions that produced them had lasting consequences. In Postan’s words, a “rapid withering away of servile dues and disabilities” transformed social relationships. Vestiges of the old obligations remained for many generations, but Postan concludes that “in general rural serfdom had gone out of the land, and was all but forgotten by the time Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne of England [in 1558].”
This transition would have momentous consequences in English history during the early modern era. England was ahead of France and Germany, and eastern Europe lagged far behind, but similar trends were stirring in many parts of the Western world.11
At the dawn of the fifteenth century, economic conditions began at last to stabilize in Europe. Prices ceased falling and began to fluctuate in a more regular way. A long period of comparative equilibrium followed in the fifteenth century.
Once again, the city of Pistoia represented the general trend. Historian David Herlihy writes, “After about 1400, Pistoia’s agricultural economy was attaining a new equilibrium, and was achieving a real if moderate prosperity. Declining commodity prices bespeak a returning abundance, and profits to investors, reaching 12 percent by the century’s end, registered a distinct if modest gain. Among the factors which contributed to the new rural prosperity was the stabilization and then steady growth of the rural population. . . . Population and social tumult was largely, if not finally, calmed. . . . The new agricultural system of the fifteenth century . . . provided Pistoia’s Renaissance society with a firm and stable basis for its political life and for its cultural growth.”12
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