Farming had expanded onto lands with soil that was of lower quality than that of the river valleys previously farmed. With improved farming methods and more acreage being farmed, a surplus of food was being produced, lowering its price but making it harder for farmers to make a living on marginal land.
With the reclamation of land coming to an end, people who had farmed were moving to the towns in search of work, and work was harder to find. The economy didn't keep up with the rise in population, and at the end of the 1200s an economic recession was developing, and the confidence that characterized the earlier 1200s in Europe was on the wane.
Monarchical Power versus Church Power
Monarchs, meanwhile, had been building centralized bureaucracies and extending their rule across territory that had been dominated by nobles. In 1284 the English monarchy completed its conquest of the English countryside.
The papacy in Rome considered itself independent of Byzantium's authority and was enjoying a rise in its influence. Only a few small pockets of paganism remained, in Scandinavia and among the Lithuanians. The church remained at the center of people's lives. It controlled education, including the universities, with all teachers being members of the clergy. With scholastic thought it dominated western Europe intellectually. Princes frequently went to the papacy to settle their disputes. But from this peak, the Church was about to decline
However more successful, maintaining authority over the many aspects of people's lives was difficult for the Church. Many people were ignoring Church law. The Church condemned the killing of newborn babies, but this continued to be widely practiced, especially the exposure of infant daughters – exposure preferred over abortion.
The Church's position was being threatened by the growing power of kings. In 1294, two Christian monarchs, King Edward I of England and Philip IV of France, went to war against each other over a fishing conflict. This led to conflict with the Church. Edward and Philip laid taxes upon the clergy in order to pay for their war, and Pope Boniface VIII objected. He insisted that all Christians were subject to him and that kings must submit to papal authority. Boniface proclaimed that the clergy was not to pay taxes to secular rulers. King Edward resisted, and King Philip maintained that he was completely sovereign and responsible to God alone. Philip stopped the flow of money from France to the Vatican. Philip charged Boniface with heresy and in 1303 sent troops to Italy to arrest him. Pope Boniface had no substantial military power of his own. He was rescued by friends. But he was 69, and he died a month later.
In 1305, French influence in the College of Cardinals in Rome resulted in the election there of the Biship of Bordeaux as the new pope. He became Pope Clement V. A French pope left Romans feeling slighted, and they rioted. At the request of Philip IV of France, Pope Clement moved his court away from hostile Rome to the fortress town
Avignon, in southeastern France. Pope Clement appointed cardinals from French clergy.
The monarchies of England and France taxed and took payments from bishops and lower clergy within their realm. Papal prestige suffered. English, Germans and Italians accused the pope and cardinals at Avignon of being the tools of the French monarchy. And pious Christians called the Avignon papacy the Babylonian Captivity.
Plague and Progress in the 1300s
Between the years 1000 and 1300 the availability of food in Christendom allowed its population to grow 2.5 times.
Paris,
Milan,
Florence and
Venice had become cities with more than 80,000 inhabitants.
London,
Cologne and
Barcelona had more than 40,000.
Rome,
Naples,
Vienna,
Prague and
Lisbon had more than 20,000, and
Dublin had more than 10,000. But a decline in Europe's economy was on its way, and it would be followed by the worst of plagues.
Farm expansion in Western Europe had come to an end by the year 1300. Marginally productive lands had been abandoned. Pastures, heaths and meadows had been converted to farming, and cattle raising had declined, reducing the amount of protein in diets and reducing manure for fertilizer, contributing to a decline in crop yields. This coincided with a climate change caused by the advance of polar and alpine glaciers, bringing longer winters, wetter weather and what is called a "Little Ice Age" – which was to last for the next 400 years. The growing season shortened, and a major food source from the sea – herring – began to disappear.
Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Grain production failed in Iceland and diminished in Scandinavia. Rains In the year 1315 were incessant, and people talked of the return of the flood described in Genesis. Crops were ruined. With food shortages came a rise in food prices. Between the years 1315 to 1317, famines developed in the poorer areas of Christendom. Hunger produced cannibalism. It is said that in Poland and Silesia the bodies of hanged criminals were taken down from the gallows as food for the poor.
Technological Progress
Europe was enduring its longest economic depression. But linen production as an alternative to wool had arisen. Metal and glass industries were growing. The use of free labor – in contrast to slave gangs of ancient times – would in the 1300s contribute to inventions such as cogwheels, gears and suction pumps in mining. Power driven bellows were soon to make it possible to fully melt iron. Rare and expensive in ancient times, iron would soon become inexpensive and its use more widespread.
Europe was benefiting from geographical advantages. It had a variety of slow-moving rivers on which goods could be transported, which was easier and cheaper than transporting goods across land by pack animals as was done in some other parts of the world. Europe had just enough mountains for the slow moving rivers useful in transforming water movement into mechanical power.
In Europe governments were uninterested in taking over or holding a monopoly on any industry, leaving industry freer than in China. Instead of businessmen being dependent on government for favor, monarchs in Europe were dependent on businessmen. If a monarch repudiated his debts he was in effect killing the geese that laid the golden eggs.
The increase in world trade and movement of people within the last two centuries exposed more people to the bubonic plague. Rats gave the disease to fleas, the rats were transported by humans and fleas passed the disease – a bacterium, Yersinia pestis – to humans by biting them. Then diseased humans made the disease airborn, spreading it to the lungs of others.
In December 1347 the disease was in the
Crimea and
Constantinople. That same month it spread to
Sicily,
Sardinia,
Corsica and
Marseille. By June, 1348, it was in Spain, Italy and as far north as Paris. By June 1349 it had advanced through London and central Europe. From there in the year and a half that followed it swung as if on a hinge in central Europe, through Ireland and through Scandinavia. It reached people weakened by decades of hard times and malnutrition.
Black Death and Sin
Spread of the disease was made worse by crowding in the cities. Some cities lost from half to two-thirds of their population. Some small cities became ghost towns. Common folks were dying as well as the most pious. Perhaps a third of the Catholic clergy died, with priests who attended the afflicted being hit the hardest. The poor were hit harder than aristocrats because they were generally in poorer health and less able to resist the disease and because they lived closer together. Wolves fared better and appeared in some cities.
The mindset of these times was on the spiritual as causation rather than the purely physical. The benefit of wearing the kind of medical mask that people might wear in the 21st century was unknown. The belief in witchcraft was revitalized. There was panic. Believing that the end of the world was at hand, some groups engaged in frenzied bacchanals and orgies. People called the Flagellants believed with others that the plague was the judgment of God on sinful mankind. The Flagellants traveled the country, men and women flogging each other. They preached that anyone doing this for thirty-three days would be cleansed of all his sins – one day for every year that Christ lived. The Church was still on guard against innovative religious proclamations, and in 1349 Pope Clement VI condemned the movement.
The wandering mobs focused their wrath upon clergy who opposed them, and they targeted Jews, whom they blamed for inciting God's wrath. In Germany rumors arose that Jews had caused the plague by poisoning the water. Pogroms followed. Jews were arrested. Their fortunes were seized by the lords under whose jurisdictions they lived, and Jews were put to death by burning. The attacks on Jews were condemned by Clement VI, and he threatened excommunication for those Christians who harmed Jews.
he success of this greatest of plagues was limited and destined to diminish as it had centuries before in Europe. The body that the bacterium entered was its environment and source of life. It used up its environment and again faded away, but not completely.
Depopulation, Rebellion and Social Progress
It has been roughly estimated that a third of England died from the Black Death of 1348-49, and perhaps this is not far from the percentage of losses suffered in other areas of Europe. Much farm land went into disuse, reducing the output of food. Farm animals died, further diminishing the food supply. With all the deaths and drop in demand for food, the price of food dropped. In Western Europe, with fewer people to do work the demand for labor increased, as did wages.
The shortage of labor increased the demand for slaves, cutting into the demand for free labor. Wealthy merchants vied for servants to staff their households. Craftsmen and shopkeepers felt that they had to keep slaves. Cobblers, carpenters, weavers and woolworkers bought men and women from the slave dealers to help in their industries. And more slaves were put on the market as hungry parents sold their children, preferring their children's enslavement to watching them starve to death.
With labor in short supply, common people were aware of their added value as producers and eager to improve their situation. In response to rising wages, authorities started to fix wages at a low level. Hostility toward employers and authorities increased. Peasants and other workers tried to dodge these impositions. Peasants called for a reduction in service obligations. In cities, workers rose against the wealthy merchants who had been running city hall. Peasants and workers revolted in Spain, the Netherlands, southern Germany, Italy, and England.
In England, some asked why there was bondage when all were from one father and mother – Adam and Eve. Rebellion was mixed with religious fervor and a call for holding everything in common and for the abolition of differences between lord and serf. But in most of England were castles with soldiers enough to control local peasants, and the peasants failed to transform their questions and hostilities into successful social revolution.
But other changes were taking place. Land had become cheaper to buy. With fewer people to labor in agriculture, serfdom was diminishing in Western Europe. Landlords in need of people to work their lands had begun renting out their land to peasants for sharecropping, and great estates were being replaced by small farms.
The opposite, however, was happening in Eastern Europe. There, populations had been less dense and towns smaller and more distant from one another. In Eastern Europe the availability of land had given peasants freedom and opportunity, and serfdom had all but disappeared. But, following the plague, this changed. Large estates were not regulated by governmental authority, and they were able to force peasants to work their land under the added servitude of serfdom.
The Hundred Years' War
The Norman-English king, Edward I, who ruled from 1272 to 1307, had married into France's royal family. His son and successor, Edward II , was forced to relinquish his crown in 1327 to one of his sons, who at age 15 became Edward III, and he held to the belief that the French throne vacated in 1328 should be his. French king, Charles IV, died in 1328 and left no direct descendant to carry on the Capet dynastic line.
Edward III was denied adding what had been Charles IV's territory to his own. It went instead to Philippe of Valois, at the age of thirty-five, Philippe taking the title Philippe VI. It was to be the beginning of the Valois dynasty.
Within a few years, King Philippe VI of France intervened in a conflict in
Flanders, on the continent side of the English Channel, which was not yet a part of France and where the English were dominant. Edward III retaliated and claimed again to be the legitimate ruler of France. Philippe retaliated by declaring Edward's fiefs in France as his. Philippe's retaliation created a war that began in 1337 and was to last, on and off, for 100 years, a lot of strife and bloodshed over a couple of vain monarchs in conflict over who should rule where.
An End to Chivalry
The major occupation of nobles had been warfare, and among these nobles were those who had earned their knighthood through long and hard training on horseback from early childhood. But on the field of battle, knights on horseback were becoming an anachronism. Feudalism was in decline as kings were gaining over nobles and acquiring a monopoly on war-making and violence. Edward III supported the trappings of chivalry. Heraldry, tournaments, banquets, courtly love and the writing of epic romances flourished during his reign. But in the place of knights, mercenaries were being hired. Edward's military was armed with the longbow, with arrows that hit effectively at a range of 250 to 300 yards. Ten arrows could be shot per minute, faster and with greater range than the crossbow being used by the French and like the crossbow able to pierce chain link armor.
Some historians speak of an infantry revolution taking place. The dominance of men on horseback was being challenged. As historian Max Boot writes in
War Made New: "English longbow men and Swiss pikemen proved to be more than a match for cumbersome heavy cavalry, the pikemen winning their first notable victory at Laupen in 1339" – a battle of Swiss against feudal landholders of Burgundy.
note30
Europeans were using gunpowder and firearms but with less range and accuracy than the longbow. The longbow, however, required more training, conditioning and skill than previous archery. There was on the field of battle advantages in the use of firearms, and English nobles saw killing men with gunpowder and shot as cowardice. According to the fourteenth-century Italian scholar, Petrarch, anyone captured by a noble who had been using such weaponry might have his hands cut off and his eyes poked out.
The Battles of Crécy and Poitiers
The Hundred Years' War began in earnest in 1346, with England in control of the English Channel and the North Sea. At the Battle of Crécy, Edward’s army of 12,000 faced a French army of 36,000 across a battle line 2,000 yards wide. Edward’s army had 7,000 archers, and they devastated the assaults attempted by France’s armored knights on horseback and foot soldiers with crossbows.
Ten years later, at Poitiers, the British defeated the French again, French knights and their horses falling in heaps. The English captured and held for ransom the French king, John II (son of Philippe VI) and many French nobles – captivity and ransom a major goal and source of wealth for combatants.
The Jacquerie, Robin Hood and Other Unrest
Peasants near Paris disliked the increased tax burden that accompanied the Hundred Years' War, and they were fed up with being forced to labor on castles and fortifications and fed up with marauding English and French soldiers. In 1358 near Paris, peasants called the Jacquerie went on a rampage, moving through the countryside, killing nobles, raping the wives and daughters of noblemen, setting fire to castle interiors and destroying estates. The aristocracy united against the rebels. They were better organized and had a larger army, and thousands of peasants were slaughtered – the guilty and the innocent alike.
In 1360 the first phase of the Hundred Years' War ended in a treaty called the Peace of Brétigny. In France, out of work mercenary soldiers who had been hired by the English, were living off plundering the French. In England, knights idled by a truce in the Hundred Years' War were trying to keep up with the fading culture of chivalry by resorting to their old habit of robbery and abuse of the poor. A group of vigilantes formed who would become known as Robin Hood and his band of followers, living in the
Sherwood Forest. According to legend they were opposed to corruption and abuse by aristocrats, grasping landlords and wicked sheriffs.
In 1381 English peasants rose as they never had before. Peasants feared the lords would be taking back lands they had given them after the Black Death. Peasants were unhappy about having to work on Church land, sometimes twice in a week, making, as they saw it, the Church rich and leaving them unable to do needed work on their own land. The most pressing grievance was increased taxes – demanded by government to help pay for the Hundred Years' War. An incident regarding resistance to the poll tax sparked rebellion. Peasants marched from Kent to London, along the way burning to the ground buildings that housed tax records and tax registers. People in London opened their city's gates to them, and in London King Richard II (r 1377-99) met the peasants at Mile End, gave them what they asked, and invited them to return home in peace. Some did not. Discipline among the rebels was lax. There was the drinking of alcohol. Some executed ministers, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sudbury, and they sacked the mansions of some bishops and lords.
War into the 1400s
The war picked up again in the new century. England's King Henry V (r 1413-22) resumed the war in part as a distraction from social tensions in England. In 1415 the French blocked him as he led his force on the road from Flanders to the port city of
Calais. The Battle of Agincourt followed. In that battle, French knights charged against the British and were compressed by the terrain, with England's archers mowing down the leading wave of knights and the fallen horses preventing other knights from advancing. In a half hour of battle thousands of French knights were taken prisoner. The fear of a second attack prompted the English to kill them on the spot. In a single day, France's nobility had been decimated. For France the use of knights in warfare was at an end. The French king from 1422, Charles VII, would create France's first standing, professional, rather than feudal, army. No longer needed in battle, the knights would take refuge in the tournaments that were merely staged pageantry.
Joan of Arc
Birthplace of Joan of Arc
After Agincourt, French morale was low, with some believing that only a miracle could save them from the English. Among the French appeared the illiterate daughter of a modest but locally prominent farming family. They were devout Catholics. Joan heard voices, and in 1428 at the age of sixteen a voice told her that the English had to be expelled from France. Joan was noticed more than would an independent individual who made declarations in the more densely populated mass society of 21st century. Her story was accepted by several leaders of the French army, and the following year, 1429, Joan persuaded Charles VII to support her effort at relieving the city of Orléans, then being besieged by the English. She knew little of warfare, but she believed that if the French soldiers with her would not swear or visit prostitutes they would win.
The English had been weakened by disease and their supplies were low. They pulled back from
Orléans, and the French defeated them in a number of battles. The English were allied with the
Burgundy, it being common to have as an ally a power that was a neighbor of one's enemy. And in 1430 Joan and four or five hundred men attacked the Burgundians at
Campiègne. Joan and her army were driven back. Most escaped, but Joan was captured, and the Burgundians turned Joan over to the English. The English, suffering from attacks by forces under Joan's command had come to see her as a witch and as an agent of the devil. Wishing to have her discredited before she was executed, the English turned her over to ecclesiastic authorities – the Inquisition – at the French town of
Rouen, then under English rule.
The Inquisition pondered the question whether Joan's visions were genuine or delusions of the devil. The British wanted her executed and were displeased when it appeared that she would be allowed to recant. In her cell Joan was given a dress as a part of her recantation. But Joan was found back in her usual men's garb. Her recantation a failure, Joan was charged with sorcery (witchcraft) and burned to death in the marketplace at Rouen.
End of the Hundred Years' War
After Joan's death, the war continued in desultory fashion as before. There were changes in military organization. National armies were replacing armies belonging to noblemen. Infantry had been growing and cavalry diminishing. For a while the French had been hurting because of their slowness in making these changes. But France was a larger and more prosperous nation and eventually developed superiority in weaponry, especially in mobile field artillery. The English longbow could not match France's new artillery – which had a devastating effect on the ranks of an advancing English army.
Hand guns were used with more regularity, convenient because of their small size, but hand guns were effective if at all only up close and often as threatening to its user as to the target.
England lost its alliance with Burgundy, both countries were exhausted by the war, and the insistence on total victory had dissipated. Both countries welcomed peace. England had won nothing. Except for
Calais, on the channel coast, the English withdrew from the continent. The end of the Hundred Years' War marked the end of attempts by English kings to hold territory on the continent. And with the end of the Hundred Years' War, in October 1453, came a revival of trade and an end to economic depression.
Cannon, Politics and Machiavelli
The End of Byzantium
The emperors at Constantinople had been losing territory in Asia Minor to the Seljuk Turks, and with this they lost revenues from taxing agricultural production. In the 1100s they lost eastern markets to Venetian and Genoese maritime traders and revenues from customs duties. Constantinople had come to see the upkeep of their merchant fleet as a drain on their meager money supply, and the city's neglected fleet rotted away while foreign ships came and went from its port.
The government also lost revenues with the growth of big estates, which were worked by a growing army of people living in bondage. These estates were less efficient than lands worked by free peasants, and less was collected from them in taxes, while estates owned by the Church and worked by monks were often tax exempt.
The royal government continued spending money for extravagant displays necessary to keep up the appearance of grandeur. Constantinople became impoverished. Some of the poor of Constantinople emigrated. The once proud Christian people, enthusiastic for their racing team at the sports arena, were no more. By the 1400s Constantinople had a diminished population and Constantinople was diminished militarily.
When the Turks overran Constantinople in May 1453, Constantinople's thousand year reign as the center of the Roman Empire had come to an end. The flow of refugees from Constantinople to Italy included intellectuals with their manuscripts. This stimulated a new interest in the ancient past, an interest that was humanistic rather than concerned with sin and salvation. Byzantium's loss was Italy's gain. Wealthy businessmen in Italy began to support education and the arts – the beginning of what would be called the Renaissance.
Patriotism, Central Authority and the New State
Also on the rise in Western Europe was national identity, stimulated by the Hundred Years' War. The English and the French were looking more toward their king as a father figure, away from the Holy Father in Rome. France's king had gained politically with the numerous deaths of nobles during the war. There were now fewer local lords between the king and his subjects and fewer layers of authority: barons, earls, counts and knights. The expansion of the money economy had contributed to the breakdown of the old agricultural feudalism. Fiefdoms had been disappearing. Warring nobles were of the past. A new kind of state was developing. The king of France won the right to tax, judge and legislate for all inhabitants in his realm. Political power was becoming more centralized.
In England between 1455 and 1471 there was civil war between royal families, the Lancasters and the Yorks – the "War of the Roses." This was more of the usual wars concerning succession. Henry VI, king since, 33 in 1455, was enfeebled by insanity, and the two families were fighting for influence. Henry was captured by one family and then the other, the family having him in their possession claiming rule in his name. Henry was deposed in 1461 by a member of the York family, who became King Edward IV. In 1483 he was followed by his son, Edward V, who reigned a couple of months, followed by Richard III, the last of the York kings. In 1485 a member of the Lancaster family defeated Richard III at the Battle of
Bosworth Field. (His bones, with marks from a violent death, were to be discovered during a parking lot excavation in August 2012.)
Henry Tudor, the only surviving male representing the House of Lancaster, became King Henry VII. He married Elizabeth of York, the leading Yorkist claimant to the throne. This union realigned the Yorks and the Lancasters, merging the red rose symbol of the Lancasters with the white rose symbol of the Yorks into a new red and white rose emblem of the Tudors. Henry VII strengthened his position by executing some who might be rivals claiming the throne (a policy that would be continued by his son, Henry VIII). Henry VII further strengthened his position by weakening the nobles through taxation.
The English people wanted order and an end to the disruptions and costs of warfare, and they supported strong central authority. Feudalism in England had come to an end.
In France, meanwhile, Charles VII (r 1403-61) had managed to reform the military, to pursue sound fiscal policies and encourage trade. He was succeeded by his son, Louis XI, who had been in revolt against his father since 1446. In 1477, he extended Valois authority to Burgundy, and in 1480 he wrested
Anjou,
Armagnac, and Provence (surrounding
Marseille) from feudal rulers. His successor, Charles VIII married Ann of Brittany, adding
Brittany to territory belonging to the French king. As historian Max Boot writes, "Charles VIII presided over the most powerful nation in Europe at a time when the very concept of a 'state' was just taking shape."
note31
In Italy much wealth had been accumulated from commerce and trade, and city-states were controlled by wealthy merchants and bankers, while patriotism had remained local. Five powers dominated Italy:
Venice,
Milan,
Florence, the
Papal states (in central Italy, including Rome) and Naples (which ruled the southern half of the peninsula). Competition for territory was intense, and an old worry appeared. There was worry that one state might become so powerful as to rule the others. So alliances were formed. Warring in Italy was continuous, including a war in 1450 between Venice and Milan, with an alliance between Florence, Naples and Milan on one side and Venice and the papacy on the other.
Cannon and Charles VIII to Italy
In 1489, Pope Innocent VIII, then at odds with Ferdinand I of Naples, offered Naples to Charles VIII of France, who had a vague claim to the Kingdom of Naples through his paternal grandmother, Marie of Anjou
Charles entered Italy with 25,000 men (including 8,000 Swiss mercenaries) in 1494 and marched across the peninsula, reaching Naples on 22 February 1495. France had around thirty-six of the latest in cannon. Borrowing techniques used in casting church bells, French cannons of molded bronze were lighter and could be moved around and transported more easily. And the French had better gunpowder and ammunition, cannon balls that went farther and hit harder than the stone shot of former times. Max Boot writes that, "By the 1490s, smoothbore, muzzle-loading artillery had essentially reached the shape it would assume for the next 350 years."
note32
The French army subdued Florence in passing and took Naples without a pitched battle or siege. Charles was crowned King of Naples. His cannon had frightened and made a big impression on the Italians. In the city-state of Florence, the Dominican friar Savonarola, known for his book burning and destruction of what he considered immoral art, believed that Charles VIII and his cannon were sent by God to purify the Florentines. He looked forward to Charles ousting sinners and making the city a center of morality appropriate for a restructured Catholic Church.
Instead, an anti-French coalition of powers, the League of Venice, arranged by Innocent's successor, Pope Alexander VI, drove Charles back to France. Charles wanted to rebuild his army and return to Italy, but he was now heavily in debt and couldn't afford it.
In Italy, Charles left behind concern about the nature of warfare in the mind of many including a Florentine named Machiavelli – his view more secular in its interpretation of events than Savonarola's. Savonarola, by the way, was later excommunicated by Pope Alexander, charged with heresy and executed.
Machiavelli
Machiavelli, cropped portrait, painted by Santi di Tito in the second half of the 1500s.
Word had spread that walls and castles were no longer much of a defense. The world had noticed this when the Muslims finally broke down Constantinople's walls (with European cannon and cannoneers) in 1453.
Castles were on their way to becoming relics. Rulers saw that security would have to be provided by something more than stone walls, namely large standing armies and perhaps good alliances and a balance of power, which required diplomacy.
Addressing the art of diplomacy at the end of the1400s was Niccolò Machiavelli. William H McNeil describes him as "well educated in the humanist tradition." Machiavelli anticipated the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th century – which contained views of events as of human origin rather than God-directed. Machiavelli believed that a ruler should be concerned not with how things ought to be but with how things are and that politics should be about empirical realities rather than religious faith. He was of the city of Florence and advised the ruler of Florence that there were bad people in the world and that his realm might have to contend with them other than with prayer and Christian love. As late as the twentieth century and perhaps the twenty-first, these views would earn him a reputation among a few people as an unprincipled schemer and a cynic.
Machiavelli claimed that a good ruler maintained permanent embassies in other lands and based his diplomacy on good information. His better known work,
The Prince, was written in 1505 and published in 1515. Machiavelli was trying to win back his standing as a diplomat. It is believed that he wanted a new appointment from the Medici family, which ruled Florence. He urged a development similar to what had been taking place in France. An advanced princely state, claimed Machiavelli, needed a professional military rather than old seasonal mobilizations by knights. He saw rulers as needing the support of their subjects gaining in strength by political and other improvements. He wrote that a prince should act in the interest not just of himself but in the interest of his subjects, that a prince should create institutions that serve and evoke loyalty. Societies, he held, should be governed by laws rather than whim.
Machiavelli described the king of France as still "placed in the midst of an ancient body of lords ... and the king cannot take them away without danger to himself. " Machiavelli observed that Turkish rule in Constantinople was benefitting from a more centralized administration. Later in the 1500s France's monarchs would seek similiar centralization at the expense of the landed aristocrac
Russia and the Mongols, to Ivan III
The Grand Prince of Moscow beginning in 1325 was Ivan I. He was frugal. He had saved his money and was known as Ivan the moneybag. He bought property, enhancing himself economically.
A nearby rival town,
Tver, rebelled against Mongol rule, and Ivan sided with the Mongols. The Mongols and Muscovites crushed the rebellion, around the year 1326, killing or enslaving many of Tver's inhabitants and ending Tver's chance to be supreme in Russia.
Ivan enhanced Moscow's prestige by creating a headquarters in Moscow for Eastern Orthodox Christianity while the world center of Eastern Orthodox Christianity remained at Constantinople. The Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Russia was called the Russian Eastern Orthodox Church.
Ivan I died in 1340. Ivan III, whose rule began in 1462, bought the town of
Rostov, south toward
Crimea and the Black Sea. He warred against
Pskov – a republican merchant town. And in the 1470s Ivan III extended his rule through warfare to
Novgorod and its territories. Ivan exiled 1,000 wealthy families from Novgorod and replaced them with families from Moscow.
With Islamic rule having come to Constantinople, Church leaders in Moscow spoke of "Holy Russia" and described Moscow as the "Third Rome." Ivan III saw himself as the heir of Rome's emperors – the wordtsar (czar) being derived from the word Caesar. Ivan III saw Eastern Orthodox Christianity as the one true faith. All the Catholic kings in the West, he believed, were heretics.
In 1480 Ivan III felt strong enough to refuse to pay tribute to the Mongols. The Mongols were fighting among themselves, and Ivan was able to make his independence stick. He annexed Tver in 1485. He maintained friendly relations with the khan who ruled in the Crimea. And with passage through the Crimea, Ivan maintained communications with Islamic Constantinople. He was interested in trade and knew its benefits and the benefits of diplomacy, and in 1495 he opened an embassy in Constantinople.
Toward the end of the 1400s the area around Moscow and the rest of Europe was returning to the population levels that had existed before the Black Death. Earlier agriculture had been largely slash and burn. Now, with more people, agriculture around Moscow became what it was in the West: the three-field system, with the raising of farm animals. Farming was becoming more profitable around Moscow, and those with wealth, including enterprising monasteries, were absorbing more land.
A trend had begun: the rich were getting richer. The nobles were buying more land and less land was available to free peasants – not only in Russia but elsewhere in Eastern Europe. In Russia, Ivan III gave land away as a reward for military service. These new landholders hired people to work their lands, and in 1497 Ivan III accommodated the landowners by limiting the rights of agricultural workers. More peasants in Eastern Europe were forced to labor on the estates of nobles and to give an exorbitant amount of their produce to the nobles as rent
The Rising Powers of Portugal and Spain
The Black Death had encouraged the development of sailing ships that would not require a lot of manpower. The Portuguese built such ships – three-masted ships with stern rudders that could sail forty-five degrees into the wind, carry more cargo and sail the high seas. These ships carried cannon that fired stone or iron balls, which could demolish a ship at a distance, reducing the need for armed marines. Cannon and gunpowder came to Europeans by way of the Mongols, who were using these in the 1200s.
Sea captains benefited from pilot books – first created around the year 1280. Away from shore they benefited from use of a magnetic compass and from an astrolabe for measuring the angle of celestial bodies from the horizon, the astrolabe enabling sea captains to determine their location north and south. Positions east and west were calculated from speed and time.
The Portuguese were interested in trade. They reached the
Canary Islands, off the coast of northwestern Africa, in 1415. They discovered the Azores Islands in 1419, about 900 miles west of
Portugal. Of concern to the Portuguese was Islam. They wished to find a route to India that outflanked Muslim dominated trade routes. They also wished to convert the "heathen" and to establish Christian colonies. In 1424 they began to colonize
Madeira Island. They warred against Muslims at
Ceuta and Tangier. In 1441 a ship brought back to Portugal the first slaves and some gold dust. In 1443 the Portuguese discovered the four by two-mile
Arguin (Arguim) Island – a 1000 mile (1600 kilometer) sail from the Canaries. An increase in slave trading followed, the Portuguese buying more slaves from Africans. The Portuguese saw themselves as giving the slaves an opportunity to become Christians.
Aiming toward the Riches and the Saving of Souls
The kingdom of
Castile had expanded to
Cordoba and
Seville in 1236, and since then it had been forcing
Grenada to pay tribute. In 1469 Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of
Aragon married, more or less unifying these two kingdoms, creating what looks like the modern map of the Iberian peninsula except for the Islamic kingdom of Grenada in the south and the small kingdom of
Navarre in the northeast.
Headscarves were the convention among married and some unmarried Christian women in medieval Europe. (A painting by Boccaccio Boccasccino, 1504-05)
Pursuing what they believed was God's will, Isabella and Ferdinand moved against Judaism and Islam within their realms – an effort toward creating Christianity as the universal faith. It was the time of Tomás de Torquemada, Inquisitor General under Isabella and Ferdinand. Converted Jews, Muslims and non-conforming Catholic intellectuals were among the persecuted. Of the 200,000 or so Jews who had lived in Spain, perhaps as many as 150,000 fled. And, in 1482, Castile launched a war of conquest against Grenada.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese had reached the equator, and in 1487 a Portuguese explorer, Bartolomew Diaz, sailed as far as the southern tip of Africa – the Portuguese having overcome fears of monsters at sea and boiling water at the equator.
In 1492, after having defeated Grenada, Isabella and Ferdinand backed Christopher Columbus's dream of reaching India by sailing westward. By now, many literate Europeans believed that the world was round, and Columbus was among them. He calculated that a couple thousand miles of ocean lay between his point of departure and Japan. He promised to bring back gold, whose value had risen with economic recovery following the plague. He promised also to bring back spices and silks, and he promised to spread Christianity and to lead an expedition to China.
Columbus and his crew were at sea seventy days, his crew saying their vespers and singing a hymn to the Virgin Mary every night before sleeping. The island they came upon, on October 12th, was in what today are the Bahamas. Columbus called the island San Salvador after Christ the Savior. The people he encountered, the Lucayan, Taíno, or Arawak, were peaceful and friendly. Columbus and his team moved on and explored the northeast coast of Cuba, where he landed on October 28th. From there he went to what he was to call Hispaniola (the island that today includes the Dominican Republic and Haiti).
It was a Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, who arrived at what had been Columbus's destination: India. Da Gama sailed around Africa, stopping at four places in eastern Africa along the way and picking up a guide. More than ten months after he left Portugal he dropped anchor at
Calicut in India, and he returned to Portugal in 1499 with a load of spices which brought him a huge profit. From his king he received the rank of an untitled noble, a pension and property. Portugal then sent a fleet of thirteen ships to make another voyage south around Africa. The fleet was blown off course and ended in what is today Brazil, which the Portuguese claimed as theirs.
Relations between Europeans, including Columbus, and the indigenous people of the "New World" will be described in a later chapter. Da Gama's success inspired a scramble for more voyaging across the sea in search of opportunity and gold. Europe's penetration of the "New World" had begun. The new technology employed in sailing had shrunk the world. And another kind of technology was changing the world: In the second half of the 1400s printing with movable type had come into being in Europe – printing on paper. A new age was dawning
Europe's Renaissance Begins
From the mid-1300s and into the 1400s a few scholars in one of the most urbanized areas of Europe, in Italy, were searching through libraries and recovering works in Latin by ancient writers such as Cicero, Livy and Seneca. People there saw daily the remains of ancient Roman structures around them and they were looking to understand what the ancients thought. They lived in republics where merchants and trade dominated, free of monarchical oppressions, and it was here that a cultural movement called the Renaissance began that included sculptors, Florentine painters and in the late 1400s the political philosophy of Machiavelli (1469-1527).
With the conquest of Constantinople by Islamic Turks in 1453, a wave of Christian scholars fled to Italy, and they brought with them manuscripts concerning ancient Greece, many of which had fallen into obscurity in the West. A new attention to the Greek and Arabic works followed, on the natural sciences, philosophy and mathematics. This gave rise to those called humanists, people who pursued literary knowledge and linguistics acquired from the ancient Greeks. They are said to have criticized the "barbarous Latin" being used in Europe's universities, and some would see the importation of the Greek classics from the Mid-East as saving Europe from barbarity. The humanists focused on humanity's doings, without denying the supreme being that was traditional in the culture of Christians, including Platoism.
Associated with a new attitude toward humanity was a work published in 1468 called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance." It was titled Oration on the Dignity of Man and written by a 23-year-old Italian, Pico della Mirandola, from the town of Mirandola in north-central Italy. He was to be described as having studied everything there was at that time. He wrote that exercising one's brain added to one's dignity and that if one fails to exercise his intelligence he vegetates
Individual accomplishments were on the rise in Italy. In Florence was Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). He was an inventor, engineer, anatomist, botanist, geologist, musician, painter and sculptor. He appreciated the freedom to formulate ideas and freedom in general: he would buy caged birds and release them.
There were others like da Vinci who were curious, interested in science and expressing themselves artistically. Outside of Italy at the University of Paris, a Roman Catholic institution, was Erasmus (1466-1536). He was from Rotterdam, a major commercial center and becme a celebrated Biblical scholar. In 1509 he wrote
In Praise of Human Folly and become known as the "Prince of Humanists." He believed that a common person might be able to understand Christianity as well as a priest, and he advocated tolerating diversity in ideas. He saw what he called absurd superstitions among Christians. And regarding heretics he wrote, "It is better to cure a sick man than to kill him."
note34
England's Thomas More, born in 1478, ten years before Erasmus, was another who has been classified as a social philosopher, a humanist and part of Europe's Renaissance. In 1504 he was elected to Parliament. In 1516 his Utopiawas published, a book that advocated communal ownership of land, education for both males and females, and almost complete religious toleration.
Going into the new century, an interest in mechanics similar to da Vinci's produced the pocket watch, a wheel-locked musket and the first flush toilets. And there was the Biblical hero David, sculpted by a 28-year-old Florentine, Michelangelo. A part of his humanism was idealizing the human body as well as the human spirit, done better with David unclothed.
The Seljuk Turks against the First Crusade
Crusader states are in shades of green. The Sultanate of Rum and the Emirate of Damascus are parts of Seljuk rule.
In early 1097 a Crusader army from western Europe and a Byzantine army from Constantinople marched into territory in Asia Minor occupied by the Seljuk Turks. The first objective of the Crusaders was the city of
Nicaea, 55 miles southeast of Constantinople. After months of siege, the Seljuks surrendered. Constantinople's army entered Nicaea and the Crusaders went ahead without delay toward Jerusalem, to be delayed at the city of Antioch in northern Syria.
Anitoch had been taken by the Seljuks in 1085. It had been a Christian city, and without its capture, it is said, the Crusaders would not have been able to move on to Jerusalem. The Crusaders besieged the city for 7.5 months. The Seljuks attacked twice to end the siege but were defeated both times.
While the Saljuks were busy against the Crusaders, the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt sent a force to the coastal city of Tyre, a little more than 145 miles north of Jerusalem. The Fatimids took control of Jerusalem in February 1098, three months before the Crusaders had their success at Antioch. The Fatimids, who were Shia, offered the Crusaders an alliance against their old enemy the Seljuks, who were Sunni. They offered the Crusaders control of Syria with Jerusalem to remain theirs. The offer didn't work out. The Crusaders were not going to be deterred from taking Jerusalem.
The Crusaders passed by Acre, 77 miles north of Jerusalem, the ruler there providing the Crusaders with supplies, as had some other communities. On 7 June 1099 the Crusaders began their siege of Jerusalem, with Fatimid loyalists in defense. The city fell on 15 July 1099. As already described, there was a week of slaughter. The Crusaders seized gold, silver, horses and mules and invaded houses in search of loot. They killed Muslims and Jews, believing that the Jews had killed Christ. Jews who took refuge in Jerusalem's main synagogue were burned to death. And some crusaders were sickened and shamed by the brutality.
The port town of Jaffa (today Tel Aviv) was captured by a force arriving on ships from Genoa. And in August a fleet of ships from Venice put Haifa under Crusader control. The Crusaders gained control over the entire eastern Mediterranean coastline
Muslims Strike Back
It was decades before the Muslims initiated a substantial retaliation against Crusader gains. Rule by the Seljuk family had been fragmenting and the retaliation was organized by Imad ad-Din Atabeg Zengi, whose father had been a Seljuk governor. Zengi became the chief Turkish potentate in Syria and Iraq. He took the major Syrian city of Aleppo from squabbling localemirs. He was recognized as the ruler of this territory by the Seljuk sultan, Mahmud II, whose position was nominal.
In November 1144, with his added strength through a new unity, Zengi moved militarily against the landlocked, northern-most and least populated of the Crusader possessions: Edessa. He had more strength than he needed. The city was only lightly defended. After a short siege Zengi's troops rushed into the city, killing all those who were unable to flee to the city's citadel. In a panic, thousands were suffocated or trampled to death. Zengi ordered his men to stop the massacre. Prisoners taken by his troops were executed anyway. But there were survivors, and a Christian bishop, Basil, was recognized as leader of the Christian population.
Muslims in the Seljuk empire celebrated Zenghi as a "defender of the faith." Then in 1146 he was assassinated, and like most assassinations little changed: Zengi's power passed to two sons.
Count Joscelin II, of a Crusader family, tried to retake Edessa. His force captured the city's citadel, but with no help from other Crusader states his efforts failed. In November he was driven out of Edessa. Zengi's son, Nur ad-Din, governing from Aleppo, exiled the entire Christian population, leaving the city deserted. Meanwhile, Europeans were responding to news about Edessa and were organizing a return – what would be called the Second Crusade
Saladin and the Second and Third Crusade
he Second Crusade
In October 1147 troops from Europe pushed southeast of Constantinople into Asia Minor. There were Seljuks Turks, their empire having broken up with their
Sultanate of Rùm remaining. At the Second Battle of Dorylaeum, about 100 miles southeast of Constantinople, the Seljuks began driving Conrad and his troops back to Constantinople, harrassing Conrad's army daily.
Meanwhile, troops led by Conrad's half-brother, Otto of Freising, a bishop, were marching southward along the Mediterranean coast toward Jerusalem. His force was decimated but he made it to Jerusalem and a year later returned to Bavaria.
Another force, led by the French king, Louis VII, arrived and in December 1147 won a minor battle against the Seljuks near Ephesus, on the west coast of Asia Minor. From there, marching toward Jerusalem, the king's troops were almost entirely wiped out by sickness and Seljuk forces. King Louis arrived at Antioch by boat, went on to Jerusalem and eventually back to France.
Fall of the Fatimid Caliphate and Rise of Saladin
After the failure of the Second Crusade, Nur ad-Din, who ruled Seljuk Turks in Damascus and Syria, was eager to expand his power. In 1163 he sent his most trusted general, Shirkuh, on a military expedition to the Nile. With General Shirkuh was his young warrior nephew, Saladin – Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub
Governors in North Africa had become Sunni and had declared their independence from the Shia caliphate, the Fatimid dynasty, whose rule was reduced to Egypt. The Fatimid caliphate from 1160 at age eleven was al-Adid. His caliphate allied with the Crusaders in Jerusalem in order to protect themselves from the aggressions of a Sunni force led by General Shirkuh. Caliph al-Adid suffered a serious illness and died of natural causes in 1171. General Shirkuh had also been ill, and he died of his illness. Saladin replaced General Shirkuh, and owing to the success of his army in Egypt, he became Egypt's new sultan. The Fatimid caliphate was no more.
Saladin was interested in a Sunni revival in Egypt and in driving the crusaders out of the Middle East. In Damascus, Saladin's boss, Nur ad-Din, died of fever in May 1174. Nur ad-Din's eleven-year-old son succeeded him. Saladin preferred not to honor his obligation to the eleven-year-old and was on his way to taking power in Damascus and creating an empire of his own. From Cairo in 1174 Saladin rode across desert with 700 horsemen through what today is Jordan, picking up support along the way from Turks, Kurds, Bedouins and others. On November 23 he arrived in Damascus where he, a Kurd, had grown up. There, amid general acclamations, he rested at his father's home. Four days later he installed himself in the city's citadel castle and received the homage and salutations from the city's citizenry.
Saladin's Gains Power and Moves against Jerusalem
Saladin left his brother Tughtigin as Governor of Damascus. He established control over nearby cities in Syria that had grown in independence. He struggled against Shia led by Rashid al-Din Sinan from the al-Nusayri Mountains in Northwestern Syria.
In 1182, Saladin began his move against the Crusaders. His motives have been described as both his devotion to Islam and as dynastic aggrandizement. On July 4 1887 his force, estimated as 30,000 including 12,000 cavalry, met a Crusader force out of Jerusalem consisting of something like 15,000 infantry and 1,200 knights. This was the
Battle of Hattin (in what today is northeastern Israel), won by Saladin and his troops, a victory to be celebrated by Muslims into the 21st century. Saladin ordered some of the captives to be treated humanely. Some of the captives were beheaded, including all 200 of the Knights Templar and Hospitaller military orders, with the exception of the Grand Master of the Temple. Saladin troops took away lower ranking prisoners as slaves.
The victory at Hattin was followed by the reconquest of various Crusader towns. Saladin besieged Jerusalem and offered it generous terms of surrender, which were rejected. The Crusader nobleman in charge, Balian of Ibelin, threatened to kill his Muslim hostages, estimated at 5000, and to destroy Islam’s holy shrines of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque. They offered their own terms of surrender. Saladin consulted his council and their terms were accepted. Every Christian man, woman and child was to pay a ransom for his freedom. On 2 October 1187 Saladin took possession of the city – after 88 years of Christian rule. Saladin allowed many to leave without a ransom consideration, and most Christian foot soldiers were sold into slavery.
With Jerusalem secure, Saladin summoned Jews to resettle in the city, and Jews formed the large settlement in Ashkelon responded to his request.
Third Crusade
Disturbed by Saladin having taken back Jerusalem, western Europe organized another crusade. The German Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick I, 68, was the first to lead a force into Muslim territory. On May 18, 1190, his army captured Iconium, the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rüm (see map). On June 10 Frederick's horse slipped, Frederick died of a heart attack caused by the shock of the fall. Much of his army returned to Germany and the rest went on to disaster.
The Crusaders established at Tyre held out against Muslim assaults, and a French knight, Guy of Lusignan, who had been considered King of Jerusalem, moved to take the city of Acre with a newly arrived French force. During the winter of 1190-91 dysentery and fever claimed the lives of the Crusader forces besieging Acre. England's King Richard I (the Lion-hearted) arrived in June, 1191, after a disastrous sea voyage that had significantly reduced his force. Acre was taken by the Crusaders in June. In July a large fleet of English ships arrived at Acre with reinforcements. On August 20, after deciding that Saladin was not going to agree to the terms they wanted in a treaty, Richard had 3,000 Muslim prisoners executed. It was in full view of Saladin's camp just outside the city. Richard's move proved unproductive as Saladin retaliated by executing his Christian prisoners of war.
In September 1191, Richard won the Battle of Arsuf (see map) and established his headquarters at Jaffa. In July 1192, while Richard was away, Saladin's army attacked and captured Jaffa. Saladin lost control of his army because of their anger over Richard's massacre at Acre. Richard returned by ship and on July 31 recaptured the city. Another battle was fought on August 5, and Richard again was triumphant. On September 2, 1192, Richard and Saladin signed a treaty that left Jerusalem under Muslim control but allowed unarmed Christian pilgrims to visit the city. Richard started back to Europe on October 9. The Third Crusade was over.
Saladin allowed Christian pilgrims to visit Jerusalem without official papers. He posted soldiers for their safety. He commanded that every kindness be extended to his guests, and he enjoyed conferring with the Bishop of Jerusalem and allowed him to visit Bethlehem and Nazareth and to leave behind Latin priests and deacons.
Saladin returned to Damascus in mid-November 1192 and was greeted with jubilation. Crowds followed him through the streets. Poets praised him. They called him the great protector who had spread the wings of justice over all and rained gifts on his people "from the clouds of his munificence and kindness."
In 1193, at the age of 55, Saladin died of yellow fever. He had given his wealth to charity, except for one gold piece and forty-seven pieces of silver.
Tyre remained under the control of Europeans – until a century later, when it would be taken by Mameluk forces. The Principality of Antioch and the County of Tripoli remained predominantly Christian.
Divisions before the coming of Genghis Khan
Saladin bequeathed his empire to his sons – the Ayyubid dynasty. Following his death in 1193, one son, al-Afdal, inherited rule over Damascus. Another, al-Aziz, inherited rule over Egypt. A third, al-Zahir, inherited rule over Aleppo (in northeast
Syria). And they squabbled. Each attempted to surround himself with larger Mameluk warrior retinue. The Mameluks were trained warriors. They had begun as child slaves, selected for military training and given a special status as warriors.
By 1200, Salidin's brother, al-Adil, had moved against his squabbling nephews and secured control over the whole of the Ayyubid empire. He killed or imprisoned his brothers and nephews during his takeover. And with each victory he collected the Mameluks of his defeated kin. With his Mameluk armies he ruled Egypt, through Palestine to Syria and a coastal region of Arabia along the Red Sea, including Medina.
Al-Adil died in 1218 at an advanced age, followed by family feuding and a breakup of the Ayyubid empire in regions governed by Mameluk military takeovers.
The Khwarazmian Dynasty
1200 CE. Cyprus, Antioch, Tripoli and Acre are Christian Crusader states. Armenian Celicia is also Christian, formed in 1198 by Armenians fleeing from the Seljuks.
Meanwhile, most of what today is Iran had come under the rule the Khwarazmian dynasty, a dynasty founded a century before, in 1077, by Anush Tigin Gharchai, a former slave of the Seljuk sultans. The Khwarazmian ruler from 1200 was Ala ad-Din Muhammad II. By 1217 he had conquered beyond
Samarkand and almost to
Kabul. It was Ala ad-Din Muhammad II whose rudeness toward Genghis Khan's emissaries that brought
Genghis Khan and his army to the region.
Village and Town Politics
The near east had a variety of authoritarian dynastic rulers, while people in villages and towns held on to relationships that provided some social order. There were neighborhoods according to religious sect and sometimes occupation, but not economic class as would develop in the West.
There were people who belonged to Sufi brotherhoods, which provided a governance of sorts. And there was the local ulama – arbiters of Islamic law. And there were the police, the practitioners of violence working for whomever ruled.
Local societies had their ulama and Sufi who were the teachers exemplars and leaders of the community. There were rival schools concerning doctrine, competition for prestige and local struggles for control of judicial offices and teaching positions.
Islam provided a sense of community that transcended locality. There were associations of scholars and teachers and students adhering to codes of law that had developed by discussion and debate from centuries before. There were ideological fraternities that extended beyond sultanates to the broader world of Islam. As the scholar Ira M. Lapidus writes, "Muslim communal loyalties were factional and parochial at the local level, but cosmopolitan and universal at the international level."
