The 14th Century in Europe: Art and Beauty in Times of War, Plague, and Societal Change

This is Part 10 of our Centuries series. In it, we will review the 14th century, the twilight of the High Middle Ages, the beginning of the Late Middle Ages, and a period of unprecedented tumult. After reviewing the end of the Crusades, we move to the Wars of Scottish Independence, the reign of Philip IV of France, and the Avignon Papacy.

The famines of the 14th century are examined next in relation the Black Death and its consequences before turning to the birth of Renaissance Humanism in Florence.

We then take a look at the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War along with the rise of the Duchy of Burgundy and the changing nature of medieval warfare. North of the Alps, we examine events in Germany, namely the ratification of the Golden Bull and the formal foundation of the Hanseatic League.

Finally, we return to the wealth and warfare of Italy, the role of foreign mercenaries there, and the influence that great Italian minds like Petrarch and Boccaccio had on Geoffrey Chaucer.

Few periods have been as tumultuous as the 14^th century, but while most maintain that it was a time of great pessimism, it is resilience in the face of famine, war, and plague that most distinguishes the attitude of people who survived and thrived during that troubled epoch. We have on the one hand the macabre late medieval obsession with death, and on the other is the vitality and exuberance of Chaucer.

It was a time when chivalry was replete with contradictions: obedience v. independence, deference v. self-interest, masculine aggression v. gentlemanly court culture. The line between knight and mercenary began to blur, and it is Chaucer again who offers the satire to understand these contradictions.

At the same time that Gothic art and architecture were coming into their fullness of expression and manuscript production was surging, that the Order of the Garter was founded by Edward III (one of the greatest employers of mercenaries), and that etiquette and court culture were being introduced, warfare became endemic and devastating to the common people to a previously unknown degree, noble knights were being challenged by mercenaries and even by commoners fighting as infantry, and the entire population was living in the shadow of famine and plague.

These contradictions are what make 14^th century Europe one of the most fascinating and most studied historical topics today, and this study reveals just how much of our own contradictory and confusing modern world is rooted in a period that is falsely regarded as being so foreign as to be alien to modern people.

After the failed Crusades of the 13^th century, the last remnants of the Crusader Kingdoms on the mainland, the port cities of Tripolis and Acre fell in 1289 and 1291 respectively. Many of the survivors were evacuated to the island of Cyprus, which held out until 1489 and continued to be a launching point for other, more minor campaigns, such as the Alexandrian Crusade that sacked Egyptian Alexandria in 1365.

Although the name applied to them is a modern invention created in the wake of the American Revolution, the Wars of Scottish Independence were a series of conflicts divided into two periods, 1296-1328 and 1332-1337, whereby the Kingdom of Scotland was able to retain its status as realm independent of the powerful Anglo-Norman dynasty to the south.

The wars began with a Scottish succession crisis following the death of King Alexander III. Initially invited by Scottish nobles to arbitrate the dispute as the liege of their lands in England, King Edward I of England took advantage of the instability to attempt to subjugate Scotland the way Henry II had Ireland in the 12th century. Although hampered by the Scottish alliance with France, Edward I was able to reverse the successes of William Wallace and defeat him at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298. In spite of this successful campaign, and the capture and execution of Wallace in 1305, resistance continued after his death.

King Philip IV of France, crowned in 1285 at the age of 17, was given the epithet “the Fair” not for his demeanor and personality but rather because of his looks. He waged wars against his vassals to submit them to the new central power in Paris as well as against the English and Flemish. He also commanded an unprecedented army of bureaucrats and hated taxmen.

In his pursuit to strengthen and centralize France, he proved himself willing to engage in activities that were distinctly unfair and underhanded. Philip took advantage of an agreement with the English whereby King Edward I would give his continental possessions to Philip as a sign of his homage as Duke of Aquitaine and Philip would then return the land after a grace period to confirm their feudal contract. Philip had no intention of honoring the agreement, but his get-rich-quick scheme turned into a drawn out conflict whereby the English eventually regained Aquitaine but both sides were exhausted.

To finance his wars, Philip began to overtax the Champagne fairs, which were the lynchpin of transalpine trade due to the geography of the region’s rivers that stretched northward to the Low Countries and southward to Italy. This only served to rob the Champagne fairs of their competitiveness, and trade routes began to shift – either via a sea route to Bruges or to other cities like Lyon, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Geneva. Since this tax scheme did not work, Philip then began to persecute Italian merchants and then in 1306, he expelled the Jews from France, seizing their property. Even this scurrilous act was insufficient to fill his coffers, and so he went after a bigger and richer fish: the Templars.

Other Templars were pursued across Europe, but most were not punished. Many joined the Hospitallers, and Templar property was mostly handed over to them as well. Other order members simply “retired” and a popular legend maintains that many Templars found refuge in Scotland, where they helped to aid Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn.

The instability of Italian politics in general and of Rome in particular created an untenable situation for the papacy. This was the result of the failed ambition of the heirs of St. Peter to assert their secular authority over the princes of Europe. During the second half of the 13^th century and the early 14^th century, the popes spent most of their time either at their palaces outside of the city, or maintaining temporary residences at various Italian cities.

Under the influence of the powerful King Philip IV of France, the conclave was forced to elect his relative as Pope Clement V in 1305, who subsequently had the papacy moved from Poitiers to Avignon in southern France in 1309. All 7 Avignon popes would be French and the correct perception of Avignon as a tool of the French monarchy was widespread. From their luxuriously appointed fortress in Avignon, the newly reorganized and centralized papal administration proceeded to tax Europe with a previously unknown level of efficiency. The luxurious lifestyle of the pope permeated the curia from top to bottom – graft and licentiousness abounded.

Such conspicuous consumption was contrasted by the pseudo-anorexic asceticism of St. Catherine of Siena. Thus, the term “Babylonian Captivity” – allegedly coined by Petrarch, was also a shot at such luxury.

Meanwhile, Rome slid into insignificance with most of its great churches closed, the papal palace unfit for habitation, streets that were as filthy as they were dangerous, and a population of barely 20,000. The papacy returned to Rome during the reign of Gregory XI in 1377, but a new crisis broke out as two popes were elected after his death, creating a decades-long schism.

The first of the great crises to afflict Europe during the 14^th century was the Great Famine of 1315-17, resulting in millions of deaths and tremendous social upheaval. The event was only the worst of a series of famines and bad harvest suggesting that the Medieval Warm Period came to a close sometime before 1300 because harvests had been in decline since at least 1280 and prices were rising.

The decades between 1310 and 1330 constituted an unprecedented period of bad weather characterized by long, severe winters and relatively cool and rainy summers. It is hypothesized that a massive volcanic eruption was responsible, and scholars debate between the eruption of the Indonesian Salas Volcano in 1257 and that of Mt. Tarawera in modern New Zealand ca. 1315. It may have been a combination of both that put so much ash into the atmosphere that it created the “Little Ice Age” in Europe which lasted with some intermittent warm periods until the 19^th century.

The result was lower harvests, which lead to decreased tax revenue for the nobility, who in turn increased taxes that further drove up prices, causing bread riots, malnutrition, and a generally weakened population that was more vulnerable to disease. It is in this context that one must understand the coming devastation of the Black Death.

The Bubonic Plague, commonly known as the Black Death or simply as the Plague, that reached Europe in 1348 had already decimated much of the Asian continent, killing hundreds of millions as it travelled along the Silk Road. After making landfall in Pisa, Italy it felled at least one third of the European population.

The plague killed people so quickly – usually within days or even hours – that doctors barely had time to react, a fact that was further compounded by the manifold strains of the disease which had varying symptoms and progressed at different rates. The monastic populations were particularly hard hit because it was the monks and nuns who were treating people. People were dying at such a rate that they were being buried in mass graves and usually unshriven, meaning that they had not been absolved of their sins and given Last Rites – hence the term “short shrift”. This breakdown of ritual and other dignities signaled a larger breakdown of the social order.

However, the focus on the devastation of the Black Death often ignores its causes. The population of Europe in the year 1000 is estimated to have been about 24 million, but this skyrocketed to 54 million by 1340, resulting in overcrowding, fallen living standards, and breakdowns of economic and political systems. Furthermore, the population was weakened by a series of famines during the 14^th century that left it vulnerable to disease, as did the longer, colder winters that kept people crowded inside.

By 1450, a century after the first and most deadly wave of the plague, the population had only recovered to 37 million and would not return to pre-plague levels until the 16^th century.

All too often, our image of the Black Death is of suffering, of oozing wounds and the horrible stench of death, of macabre acts of penance like those who would go around flagellating themselves, or those who conversely resigned themselves to orgies and other debauched acts of nihilism. However, the catastrophe was a time of huge opportunity for those who survived.

The civic principles established by Latini came to be among the fundamental principles of Humanism, the intellectual movement that defined the Renaissance and has distinguished European civilization and philosophy ever since. Therefore, Humanism did not have its genesis in academia but rather emerged among statesmen and men of letters before being embraced by scholars, who were still rooted in the traditions of Scholasticism.

The new Humanism of the Renaissance dispensed with the secular-religious duality that concerned Scholastics like Saint Thomas Aquinas and focused on the study of classical literature - studia humanitatis. The aim of the studia humanitatis was simply to develop human nature and thereby produce virtuous action. The term “Humanist” has its root in the word umanisti or “one who studies the classics”. Aside from a classical education, this involved encouraging participation in public life that would bring about social change.

The Humanists praised authors from antiquity like Aristotle, Cicero, and Livy for their eloquence above all their other virtues. Classical learning was not looked upon with nostalgia by the humanists, who rather associated it with the future and felt a kinship with ancient minds who could so succinctly express the intrinsic and permanent reality of human existence. This analysis of perception and experience resulted in a fascination with history as a subject whose study and practice could contribute to life in the present. It is difficult to overstate how fundamentally modern western thought rests upon philosophical principles that were first established during one of the most tumultuous periods in history.

In addition to being friends, Francesco Petrarca (1304-74) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) were two primary representatives of Renaissance Humanism. Their genius attracted the patronage of the most powerful people of the 14^th century.

Boccaccio is best known for his monumental Decameron, which sought to reinterpret the human experience based on perceived reality: reason, nature, and a moral order built on human potential. Set against the backdrop of the Black Death in Florence, the Decameron relates the meeting of ten young people at a Villa outside the city, who each tell ten stories over the course of ten days, totaling in 100 tales encompassing morality, tragedy, romance, humor, and wit.

The Hundred Year’s War (1337-1453) was not a single century-long conflict but rather a series of wars that took place over the course of 116 years and drew five generations into the fray. They devastated parts of France to an extent that was not matched until the 20^th century, drew in powers from across Europe, and played a critical role in the formation of the late medieval kingdoms of England and France.

This began with a dynastic crisis: King Charles IV died without sons or brothers in 1328 and his sister Isabella de France put forth her son – King Edward III of England – as the heir. Worthy of note is the fact that Isabella of France was also a descendant of Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, reuniting that bloodline with the English crown and now threatening the French crown as well.

The conflict was rooted in the year 1066, when the Norman Conquest made one of the most powerful nobles in the Kingdom of France into the King of England, who could now use the resources of that country to support his lands and ambitions in France. A Franco-Scottish alliance that was signed in 1295 further exasperated cross-channel relations.

The English were not taken seriously as a threat at first, France was the largest and richest kingdom in Europe with a population several times larger than England. However, what had seemed to be a prudent political marriage to her father Philip IV ended up being the source of untold sorrow for the French as their country was afflicted by the Anglo-Normans, the most advanced military force of the High Middle Ages.

French knights who competed for glory with one another in lavish tournaments and on the battlefield were considered the best in Europe. Frankish heavy cavalry dominated the European battlefield and the Franks earned both the praise and scorn of Pope Urban II as he called for the First Crusade. However, the purely feudal armies of the French had long been unwieldy in battle.

Meanwhile, the armies of Edward III consisted of a tactically flexible mix of feudal levies and mercenary troops balanced between infantry, longbowmen, and cavalry that made good use of the terrain. They were commercial enterprises driven by the promise of pillage whereby the lowborn could rise.

Europe was shocked on August 26^th, 1346 when the army of the English, numbering 10-14,000, decisively defeated a French army at least twice its size at Crécy. The English were in a strong defensive position on a slopping hillside that could not be outflanked and the English knights fought on foot with the infantry. The French charged recklessly at these positions, facing the concentrated fire of 5-7,000 longbowmen, who supposedly fired as many as 500,000 arrows on that day. The result was a crushing French defeat, one that would be repeated at Poitiers in 1356, when Edward the Black Prince killed or captured much of the French nobility, including King John II himself and his son Philip. These two disasters left France reeling for years and another was to come before the French began to reform their army.

Captured along with his father at the Battle of Poitiers, Philip the Bold was rewarded with the Duchy of Burgundy in 1363 by his father King John II of France for his bravery in the disastrous battle. By virtue of his marriage to Margaret of Dampierre, his lands were appended by the Free County of Burgundy – the Duchy’s imperial counterpart – in addition to the Duchy of Brabant, the County of Flanders, and the County of Artois.

He acted as regent during the minority of King Charles VI from 1380-88, after which he was sacked in favor of other counselors, before reassuming control of France from 1392 to 1402 and again in 1404, shortly before his death. This created a rivalry within the ruling House of Valois between the families of Philip and his cousin Louis, Duke of Orléans, which would have disastrous consequences for France.

Named the Golden Bull because of the golden seal it carried (the word “bull” coming from the Latin bulla meaning seal or sealed document), it is a legal document issued in 1356 by the Imperial Diet at Nuremberg and Metz that was headed by Emperor Charles IV, establishing the constitutional structure of the Holy Roman Empire for the next four centuries.

It specified seven Kurfürsten  or Prince-Electors who would have the privilege of choosing the Kaiser, consisting of the three ecclesiastical and four secular princes, and established the principle of majorityvote (to avoid the problems of getting a unanimous decision and the ensuing dynastic struggles) along with specific procedures for voting. Being in the old Frankish heartland of the empire, Frankfurt was felt to be the natural place for such elections and Aachen continued to be the site for coronations. The document also stipulated the rights of the various local rulers, helping to establish them as autonomous states within the empire with rights to mint currency, exact tolls, and build castles.

Significantly, the papacy had virtually no involvement with the creation of the document, and the document made no mention of the need for papal confirmation. However, the Golden Bull did nothing to address the problems of the anemic imperial office, namely shrinking crown lands and the resulting loss of tax income, the lack of a standing army, or a professional bureaucracy. Although the empire was now more durable, the power of the imperial office continued to depend on the individual sitting on the throne.

Throughout the course of the 12^th and 13^th centuries, German merchants rose to dominate trade in the Baltic region while also playing a significant role in the trade of the North Sea and along the Lower Rhine. After the capture of Lübeck in 1158, German merchants were able to start spreading northward and eastward, establishing commercial cities at Visby on the island of Gotland, as well as Riga, Reval, Danzig, and Dorpat. During this time, associations of German merchants – known as a Hansa from the Middle Low German for “convoy” – in the West, North, and East began to emerge to protect their shared commercial interests and suppress piracy.

During this period of time, Italy was benefitting from an unprecedented level of trade. The Genoese merchant fleet boasted 1,000-ton ships that would not be surpassed in size until the 18^th century. Milan’s position on the Po River and the stability of the despotic rule of the Visconti not only attracted artists but merchants as well. Florins from Florence were a dependable international currency when other coins were being debased by short-sighted rulers like King Philip IV of France.

Italians became the bankers of all Europe, which came with risks: the Florentine Bardi and Peruzzi banking families were ruined when King Edward III of England defaulted on loans totaling more than a million Florins and brought down a third firm, the Acciaiuoli.

Such catastrophic domino effects were not the only feature of modern economics to ring true in the 14^th century, when many of our modern financial tools were invented or commonly used: checks, bills of exchange, holding companies, insurance, courier services, and double-entry bookkeeping, which they learned from Jewish merchants in the Middle East who had developed the method during the Early Middle Ages.

It was not just their ability to conduct and finance trade, but their ability to manufacture products – e.g. fine textiles from Florence or plate armor from Milan – that made the Italians so wealthy. A single Italian commune generated as much wealth as an entire kingdom north of the Alps, usually more.

The effects that mercenaries had on 14^th century society were no less devastating than the plague, but it was when they were unemployed that they were most dangerous. Periods of peace during the Hundred Years’ War left idle mercenary companies, often referred to as “free companies” because they were not bound by feudal oath, to victimize the people.

This was the case of Pont-Saint-Esprit, a key mercantile city in southern France controlling one of only four bridges over the Rhône, which was suddenly attacked during the night of September 28^th/29^th, 1360. The so-called Great Company, which numbered in the thousands, had intended to intercept a shipment of gold being raised for King John’s ransom, but the city itself was a rich prize. Rather than sacking the city in an orgy of violence, they calmly took control of the city and began assessing how much they could squeeze from it because these sophisticated mercenary companies also employed accountants, lawyers, and notaries to keep accounts, settle disputes, and draft contracts.

However, this conquest only whet their appetites, and the city of Avignon, brimming with the treasure and tax revenues of the papacy, was a tempting prize that was only 20 miles away. The mercenaries set about blockading the city and would have stormed Avignon were it not for its strong defenses. Pope Innocent VI was unable to dispel the mercenaries: excommunicating them did nothing, the reduced prestige of the Avignon papacy made attracting Crusaders to deal with them difficult, and so he was forced to do the worst possible thing – buy them off. This dangerous precedent only encouraged the rapacious mercenaries.

The manpower of the wealthy commercial cities was at sea, manning their great merchant fleets. As a result, they could only maintain small militias which suffered from a lack of martial spirit and were no match for feudal armies. Florence offers an example of this lack of martial spirit: of the 600 knights that the city’s upper classes supposedly provided, only 75 were proper “full-dress” knights with the rest consisting of paid replacements.

These wealthy communes saw a solution in mercenary companies, usually consisting of men from England, the Low Countries, and Germany, and led by captains called Condottieri. The word itself means “trafficker”, coming from come from condotta or “contract”, and could be applied to a merchant, but in this case, they were a Condottieri d’Armi a contractor or trafficker of armed men.

Arguably the greatest of them was named John Hawkwood, a veteran of Crécy who supposedly won his spurs (i.e. his knighthood) at Poitiers and was born in Essex ca. 1320. In 1363, he rose to become the leader of the White Company (free companies were democratic in nature and elected their own leaders), formed from among the 6,000 mercenaries who had broken off from the Great Company to take up a contract against Bernabò Visconti of Milan. Hawkwood made a reputation for himself by fighting for and against nearly every major power in Italy over the next 30 years, eventually marrying a Visconti and spending the last 15 years of his life fighting for Florence, where he was buried in the Duomo after being given an unprecedented funeral procession in a city that had once cursed him as the devil incarnate.

Born in London ca. 1343 to a wealthy family, Chaucer came to France in 1359 as part of the Hundred Years’ War acting as a courtier, diplomat, and civil servant as he had been in England. He became a member of the court of Edward III on June 20^th, 1367 as a valet de chambre.

It was in this capacity that he travelled to Milan in 1368, where he came into contact with Petrarch and Jean Froissart, a French-speaking author of chivalric literature and court historian. He may have become acquainted with John Hawkwood during this visit as well, but certainly would have come into contact with him during his second and third Italian expeditions in 1372 and 1378. It is believed that John Hawkwoodwas the inspiration for Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale. It was then that he came into contact Boccaccio, whose works served as an inspiration for his own along with those of Dante and Petrarch.

Chaucer became devoted to the translation of their works and to adapting them. His famous Canterbury Tales are an adaption of the Decameron that, along with other works, did for English what these three authors had done for Italian. This contributed significantly to the rise of English during the Late Middle Ages. Together with the theologian/philosophers William of Ockham and John Wycliffe, Geoffrey Chaucer laid the foundations for the coming Renaissance in England along with helping to define not only a language for the English nation but a sense of identity as well.