VI

PESTIS

Christendom in Crisis, c. 1250–1493

THERE is a sense of fatalism about life in the later Middle Ages. People knew that Christendom was sick; they knew that the ideals of the Gospel of Love were far removed from prevailing reality; but they had little idea of how to cure it. The senior Christian state, the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to a pathetic rump. The Holy Roman Empire could not control its own mighty subjects, let alone exercise leadership over others. The Papacy was falling into the quagmire of political dependence. Feudal particularism reached the point where every city, every princeling, had to fight incessantly for survival. The world was ruled by brigandage, superstition, and the plague. When the Black Death struck, the wrath of God was clearly striking at Christendom’s sins. ‘According to a popular belief, no-one since the beginning of the great Western Schism had entered Paradise.’

At the same time, ‘the violent tenor’ of medieval life, its ‘vehement pathos’, had so intensified the pains and pleasures of living that modern sensibility is said to be barely capable of grasping them. ‘The violent contrasts and impressive forms lent a tone of excitement and passion to everyday life, and tended to produce that perpetual oscillation between despair and distracted joy, between cruelty and pious tenderness, which characterises the Middle Ages.’

Johan Huizinga, whose studies have had a powerful impact on perceptions of the period, was talking not only of insecurity in face of constant calamities but also of the ‘proud or cruel publicity’ which surrounded almost all persons and events—the lepers with rattles, the beggars in churches, the public executions, the hellfire sermons, the processions, the dwarves and magicians, the pageantry, the stark colours of heraldry, the steeple bells and the street-criers, the stench and the perfume:

When the massacre of the Armagnacs was in full swing… [in 1418] the Parisians founded a brotherhood of Saint Andrew in the church of Saint Eustache: every one, priest or layman, wore a wreath of red roses, so that the church was perfumed … as if washed with rose-water.3

Map 14. Europe, c.1300

This ‘extreme excitability of the medieval soul’ may owe something to the Gothic enthusiasms of the later Romantics. But it is an essential element to be considered in the impossible task of recapturing the medieval past.

Yet the very brilliance of Huizinga’s thesis invites caution. Like most Western historians, he directed his researches to one corner of Western Europe, in his case to France and the Netherlands; and there must be some reluctance to apply the generalizations to Christendom as a whole. More importantly, in portraying the spirit of the declining Middle Ages so vividly, there must be some danger of underplaying the seeds of change and regeneration which were also present. Renaissance scholars have no difficulty in tracing the origins of their subject to the early fourteenth century (see Chapter VII). It stands to reason that there was a very long period when the old coexisted with the new. Historians stress the one or the other according to the burden of their tale. Huizinga suggested that humanist forms did make a late appearance, but without the ‘inspiration’ of the Renaissance. And he ended with that favourite metaphor of all historians struggling with the rhythms of change: ‘the tide is turning’.4

In the circumstances, it may be wise to resist the metaphor of the waning medieval twilight. It might be more accurate to think of the period in terms of a prolonged crisis for which contemporaries had no solution. There was no awareness of a dawn to come. In more senses than one, late medieval Europeans were children of the plague.

The Byzantine Empire, as reconstituted after the expulsion of the Latin Emperors, was a mere shadow of a shadow. On the European shore it held little more than the city of Constantinople and the adjacent province of Roumelia. In Asia Minor it held a few towns on the Black Sea, and most of the Aegean coastline. Elsewhere, its former provinces were in the hands of the independent kingdoms of Bulgaria and Serbia; of assorted Frankish princes, displaced crusaders, and Venetian governors; and in Anatolia, of the Turkish sultans of Iconium, the so-called empire of Trebizond, and the kingdom of Lesser Armenia. From 1261 to its eventual destruction in 1453, it was ruled by the dynasty of the Palaeologi, descendants of Michael VIII Palaeologus (1258–82), who had engineered the recapture of Constantinople during the absence of the Venetian fleet. Of this Empire, in its dotage, it has been written:

The Greeks gloried in the name of Romans: they clung to the forms of imperial government without its military power; they retained the Roman code without the systematic administration of justice, and prided themselves on the orthodoxy of a Church in which the clergy … lived in a state of vassalage to the imperial Court. Such a society could only wither, though it might wither slowly.5

The desperate Palaeologi sought aid from all and sundry. To hold off Venice, they turned to the Genoans who at various times possessed Amastris, Pera, and Smyrna and the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Samos. They allied with Aragon; and on several occasions they tempted the Papacy with the prospect of ending the Schism. In the Epoch of Civil Wars, 1321–54, they briefly restored their rule as far as Epirus. Until 1382 an anti-emperor maintained his court at Mistra in the Morea. By that time John V (1341–91) had become both a catholic and a vassal of the Turks. In 1399 his successor, Manuel II (1391–1425), set off on a vain journey to raise support in Rome, Paris, and London, [MOUSIKE]

The most sensational development of the era was the appearance of a new Turkish warrior tribe that was destined to supplant the Byzantines. The Osmanlis or Ottomans moved into the void left by the Mongols’ defeat of the Seljuks. They took their name from Osman I (r. 1281–1326), son of their founder, Ertugrul, who had established an outpost in the Anatolian interior. From that base they raided far and wide, chipping away at the Byzantine frontier, launching fleets of pirates into the Aegean, and crossing over into the Balkans. They first entered Europe in 1308, when a band of Turkish mercenaries was imported by the Byzantines’ own mercenary force, the Catalan Grand Company, which had rebelled against its imperial employers. In that year they took Ephesus; in 1326, Bursa—which became their first capital; in 1329, Nicaea; in 1337, Nicomedia. Osman’s son, Orkhan (r. 1326–62), established a permanent bridgehead on the Dardanelles, and styled himself Sultan. His grandson, Murad I (r. 1362–89), having set up the second Ottoman capital in Adrianopolis (Edirne), dared to use the old Seljuk title ‘Sultan-i-Rum’ (Sultan of Rome). Sultan Bayezit (r. 1389–1403), though defeated by Tamerlane, conducted the main conquest of Asia Minor, overwhelming the Greek settlements with Muslim colonists, whilst attacking both the Peloponnese and Wallachia. On his death, Ottoman territory was forty times greater than a century earlier, and Constantinople was surrounded (see Appendix III, p. 1259).

During that century of conquest, the frontier between Christendom and Islam was remade. The Byzantines’ former subjects, in Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia, enjoyed a brief interval of liberty and confusion, before they too were subjugated by the invincible Turk. The Ottomans led a supreme nation of ghazis, ‘warriors of Islam’—and they knew it. In the old mosque at Bursa, an inscription to Orkhan runs: ‘To the Sultan, son of the Sultan of the Ghazis, Ghazi son of Ghazi, Margrave of the horizons, hero of the world.’

Medieval Greece, in the interval between the Latin and the Ottoman conquests, was split into local principalities. The despotate of Epirus, the duchy of Athens, the southern principality of Achaea, and the island duchy of Naxos all passed a couple of centuries in the sun. Their commercial interests were controlled by the Italian cities; their rulers were Latins; the populace Orthodox. [ROMANY]

Bulgaria, too, moved away from the Byzantine orbit. The second Bulgarian empire, which had emerged in the late twelfth century, was a dynamic, multinational realm. From his capital at Trnovo, Ivan Asen (r. 1186–1218), ‘Tsar of the Bulgars and Greeks’, spread his sway to Belgrade and Skopje. His successor, Ivan Asen II (r. 1218–41), took in Albania, Epirus, Macedonia, and Thrace. Two further dynasties were of Cuman origin. But on 28 June 1330 Tsar Michael Shishman was slain by the Serbians, who thereby established their hegemony. In the following decade the Ottomans began to ravish the valley of the Maritsa. By 1366 the last Bulgarian Tsar, Ivan Shishman III, was obliged to send his sister to the Sultan’s harem and to declare himself an Ottoman vassal. Trnovo was razed. Bulgaria was starting its 500-year career as an Ottoman province.

ROMANY

IN 1378 the Venetian governor of Nauplion in the Peloponnese confirmed privileges already granted to the local community of atsingani. It was the first documented record of Romany gypsies in Europe. In 1416 the city of Brasov (Kronstadt) in Transylvania made gifts of silver, grain, and poultry to one ‘Emaus of Egypt and his 120 companions’. In 1418 the same group reached Hamburg. In August 1427 a band of some 100 travellers, presenting themselves as victims of persecution in Lower Egypt, were refused entry to Paris and lodged instead at St Denis. The anonymous chronicler of the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris described them as swarthy, poorly dressed, the women with knotted shawls, the children with earrings. They were moved on when the Church authorities protested against their palmistry and fortune-telling.1

There is no doubt that the Romanies migrated to Europe from India, although their earlier movements can only be reconstructed from linguistic evidence. Romany is an Indo-European language akin to Hindi, and is spoken all along the trail through the Middle East to Europe. The fact that the European dialects of Romany contain a strong admixture of Slavonic and Greek words indicates a lengthy sojourn in the Balkans.

The long list of names given to Romanies reinforces popular confusion about their origins. The Greek atsingani, which gave rise to gitans (French), zingari (Italian), gitanos (Spanish), zigeuner (German), and tsigan (Russian), derives from the name of a medieval Manichean sect from Asia Minor, and is an obvious misattribution. ‘Bohemians’ and ‘Egyptians’—hence gyfti (Greek), gypsy (English), and faraoni (Hungarian)—are also common. ‘Romany’ probably derives from their medieval attachment to the Byzantine Empire, rather than to Romania. They call themselvesRom(singular) or Roma (plural).

Attempts to regulate the presence of nomadic gypsies by law created a wide variety of practices. An English statute of 1596 carefully distinguished between gypsies and common vagabonds, [PICARO] A band of gypsies had been apprehended in Yorkshire, and some of them executed for necromancy. But the statute permitted law-abiding gypsies to travel, to pursue their tinker’s trade, and to receive victuals in payment. Similar protection was extended in France in 1683. In Austria the statutes of 1761 sought to settle the gypsies in fixed abodes—but to no lasting effect. In Russia, Catherine II sought to protect gypsies by giving them the status of ‘Crown slaves’ which they had previously been assigned in Moldavia and Wallachia. But, like the Jews, they were forbidden to enter St Petersburg. In the Netherlands and several German states, a policy of total exclusion was pursued.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European Romanies have struggled to sustain their nomadic lifestyle, their specialized trades, their language, and their music [FLAMENCO]. Their culture emphasizes the occult, their social organization the importance of extended families and tribes presided over by ‘kings’ and judges. Their communal activities are centred on annual gatherings which take place at regular venues. Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in Camargue, for example, is the scene of a Romany festival and pilgrimage which heads every May to the tomb of their patroness, Sara. According to legend, Sara was a companion of Mary Magdalen who saved a party of Christ’s relatives and disciples from persecution, and brought them as refugees to Provence.

During the Romantic era, Romanies attracted great artistic and literary attention. Hugo, Mérimée, and Borrow all wrote books on gypsy themes. Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème (1849) enjoyed huge popular success. Liszt wrote a learned treatise on Romany music, starting a vogue which influenced both the classical repertoire and café entertainment. Bizet’s Carmen (1875), based on a story by Mérimée, and Puccini’s La Bohème (1895), based on Murger’s Scènes, are among the most enduring of operas.

Romanies have always been subject to harassment and to periodic violence.2 But the Nazis’ wholesale genocide of gypsies, which mirrored their extermination of Jews, had no precedent. Communist regimes were generally indifferent. The post-war democracies have attempted to combine regulation with humanitarian tolerance. But the stereotype of the rootless, alien gypsy constantly resurfaces, most recently in the ugly campaign in 1993 against asylum-seekers in Germany. It is perhaps inevitable that the conventionally settled population of Europe will always feel a mixture of phobia and fascination for a lifestyle which is so fundamentally different from their own:

Come, let me read the oft-told tale again:

The story of that Oxford scholar poor,

Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,

Who, tired of knocking at Preferment’s door,

    One summer morn forsook

His friends, and went to learn the Gipsy-lore,

And roam’d the world with that wild brotherhood …3

Serbia suffered a similar fate. Pressed by the neighbouring kingdom of Hungary, where their south Slav relations had joined the Catholic fold, the Serbs balanced between their Roman and their Orthodox connections. The country was first united under Stefan I Nemanya (1114–1200), who had obliged Byzantium to concede his independence. Nemanya’s youngest son, St Sava (1175–1235), a monk of Athos, had emancipated the Serbian Church from the Greek archbishop at Okhrid. He persuaded his brother, Stefan II, to accept a royal crown from the Pope. Medieval Serbia reached its apogee under the ferocious Stefan IV Dushan (1308–55). In 1346, when Dushan was crowned Tsar, Serbia controlled several former Bulgarian and Byzantine provinces in the south; a Serbian Patriarch ruled from Pec (Ipek); and an imperial Zakonnik or Codex regulated the administration. Dushan exercised suzerainty over the young Vlach principalities, and even made plans to conquer Constantinople. But Serbia was no match for the advancing Ottomans. On 15 June 1389, at Kosovo, on the ‘Field of the Blackbirds’, the Serbian host was humbled. The last Serbian king was slain and the Ottoman sultan treacherously murdered. Serbia joined Bulgaria as an Ottoman province. [ZADRUGA]

North of the Danube the Latin-speaking Vlachs, strengthened by migrants from the mountains of Transylvania, succeeded in creating independent principalities of their own. Henceforth Wallachia and Moldavia became the frontier posts of Christian rule in the Balkans. The plight of the Balkan Christians reawakened the crusading traditions of the West. In 1344 a naval league headed by Venice and the Hospitallers retook Smyrna from the Ottomans for a season. In 1365 Amadeus VI of Savoy briefly recaptured Gallipoli, and released the emperor imprisoned by the Bulgars. In 1396 a crusading army led by Sigismund of Hungary met disaster at Nikopolis on the Danube. In 1402 a garrison of crusaders under the French knight Boucicault manned the walls of Constantinople, awaiting the Sultan’s imminent assault. Beyond the Black Sea, the Orthodox Christians of the former Rus’ gradually eased the grip of the Tartar yoke. In this they were assisted by the two rising power-centres of the north-east—the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, [NIKOPOLIS]

The princes of Moscow grew from obscurity to prominence in the two centuries following the Mongol invasion. First, by a combination of valour and treachery, they established their supremacy over numerous Rurikid princelings in the surrounding region of Vladimir-Suzdal. The hereditary title of Grand Prince of Vladimir was theirs from 1364. Secondly, by currying favour with the Khan of the Golden Horde, they obtained the yarlyk to act as the Mongols’ chief tribute-gatherers, accepting responsibility for the payments, and arrears, of all other princes. Ivan I (r. 1301–40), known as Kalita or ‘the Money-Bag’, spent more of his reign on the road to Sarai than he did in Moscow. Karl Marx wrote that he blended ‘the characters of the Tartars’ hangman, sycophant, and slave-in-chief‘.7Thirdly, by lavishly patronizing the Orthodox Church they added an aura of religiosity to their political supremacy. In 1300 the Metropolitan Archbishop of Kiev moved to Vladimir, and from 1308 resided in Moscow. Monasteries were planted far and wide in the forest wilderness, forming new centres for commercial and territorial expansion. Despite the Mongol blockade, and a long river and sea journey of two months, close contact was maintained with the Patriarch of Constantinople. Muscovy was a patrimonial state par excellence, where the prince’s subjects and their possessions could be treated with total disregard. The hold over the resources of the apanage princedoms inexorably strengthened Muscovite hegemony. In 1327 Ivan Kalita helped the Mongols to suppress a rebellion by his chief rival, the city of Tver’ on the Volga. Yet in 1380–2 Prince Dmitri Donskoy (r. 1350–89) challenged the military might of the Mongols for the first time. At Kulikovo, on 8 September 1380, he won a famous victory over the invincible horde, only to see Moscow burned in revenge two years later. In 1408 Dmitri’s son, Vasili I (r. 1389–1425), was tempted to withhold the tribute but, with Moscow besieged, relented. The Muscovites were waxing powerful, but were still vassals.

ZADRUGA

ARTICLE 70 of the law code of Stefan Dushan, published c.1349–54, makes a clear reference to the existence of extended families and of joint patrilinear households. ‘A father and son, or brothers, who live in the same house and share the same hearth’, it states, ‘but who have separate food and property, should work like the other peasants.’ The Serbian Tsar was evidently trying to ensure that every peasant household could be taxed on the same basis.

The Article has been invoked, however, to justify the assumption that the zadruga or ‘joint patrilinear household’ has been the standard form of social organization among the Balkan Slavs since time immemorial. It is now commonplace for overenthusiastic scholars to discuss the role of thezadruga in Slavonic kinship patterns at all points between prehistory and contemporary Europe. Yet expert comment has recently exploded some of the grosser generalizations. It turns out that the term zadruga is an academic neologism first recorded in a Serbian dictionary in 1818. It has never been current in the speech of the people who are supposed to practise it. Moreover, it is not actually mentioned in the text of Stefan Dushan’s law code. Although one may conclude from Article 70 that some form of joint household did exist in medieval Serbia, there is no reason to assume that the zadruga was the standard or prevalent form in all parts of the realm.

In modern times, the distribution of the zadruga across the Balkans is extremely patchy. It is common in the mountainous stock-breeding zone that runs from Bosnia and Hercegovina to Montenegro, Macedonia, and central Albania. It is frequently encountered in the Rhodopes and the Balkan Range. But it is not known on the Adriatic littoral or in most of Bulgaria. It is present in sectors of the old Military Frontier or Krajina settled by Serb immigrants to Croatia in the sixteenth century, and among the non-Slavic Vlachs. It is largely absent from Greece and Romania.

Most seriously, a cursory survey of recent scholarship on the subject, especially in the West, shows that the zadruga is employed for any number of contradictory purposes. Above all it is used, with very little foundation of fact or detailed research, to bolster spurious assertions either about the collectivist inclinations of all Slav peoples, or about the uniform structure of a (non-existent) pan-Slav society, or about the backwardness of the Balkans, the Volksmuseum of Europe. In short, it is in real danger of becoming a sort of racial myth, a worthy partner to that other figment of the Western imagination, ‘the Slav soul’.1

NIKOPOLIS

ON the evening of 25 September 1396 a great French champion, the Sire de Coucy, was dragged before the victorious Sultan Bajazet on the field of Nikopolis. Together with some other rich crusaders, including Jean de Nevers, the future Duke of Burgundy, who were being held for ransom, he watched as the scimitars of the Sultan’s guards decapitated several thousand lesser Christian captives. (The crusaders had recently treated their Muslim captives likewise.) He was marched in chains over the 350 miles to Gallipoli, then taken to Bursa in Asia, where he wrote his last will and died, heirless.

Nikopolis is forever associated with this last great catastrophe of the crusading movement. The principal fortress of Bulgaria, it commanded the lower Danube; and its capture by the Ottomans had provoked the expedition raised by the King of Hungary. An army of Latin knights had assembled at Buda to avenge the Sultan’s boast that he would ‘feed his horse oats on the altar of St Peter’s’. They brought wine and silks, but no catapults. So the siege of Nikopolis failed; and they had to face the Ottomans in the open. A premature assault by the French, as at Crécy, was exploited by the cavalry of the Sultan’s Serbian allies: and the main body of crusaders was encircled. Sigismund of Hungary escaped, and a Polish knight famously swam the Danube in full armour. But most of the survivors were captured. Their defeat left Bulgaria in Muslim hands for 500 years, ended the Latin challenge in the East, and presaged the fall of Constantinople.

Enguerrand de Coucy VII (1340–97), Count of Soissons, has been taken as a man whose biography encapsulates the ‘crisis of Christendom’. Lord of the largest castle in Europe, at Coucy in Picardy, and a patron both of Froissart and Chaucer, he was personally involved in almost all the catastrophes of a catastrophic age. His father was probably killed at Crécy. His mother, a Habsburg, died of the Black Death. After Poitiers he spent five years as a hostage in England, where he married the King’s daughter. He fought alongside Hawkswood, the condottiere, in Savoy, against the ‘Free Companies’ which infested France, and in the Swiss campaign of 1375–6. He was the first ashore at Tunis (1390). He loyally served a rotten French monarchy in all the contortions of imperial rivalry and the papal schism. When Hungarian envoys arrived in Paris, calling for a crusade ‘in the name of kinship and the love of God’, he eagerly volunteered.1

It was in this period that the Muscovites began to call their state by the Greek name for Rus’, Rossiya (Russia), and to call themselves Russians. These Muscovite-Russians had never ruled over Kiev; but the disability did not prevent them from regarding Moscow as the sole legitimate heir of the Kievan succession. It was their variant of east Slav speech that provided the roots of the modern Russian language. Their tendentious version of history, which persisted in confusing Muscovy-Russia with the whole of Rus’, was not accepted by those other east Slavs who remained beyond Moscow’s rule for centuries to come.

The Lithuanians were the last pagans of Europe. Secure in their remote Baltic forests, they escaped both the initial advance of the Teutonic Knights and the Mongol conquest. They were ruled by Baltic warrior princes who recognized a historic opportunity in the disintegration of the Kievan state. Hence, at the same time that Moscow was consolidating the northern and eastern remnants of Rus’, Lithuania began its takeover of the western and southern remnants. Three great leaders stand out in a state-building exercise that, in the period, outstripped even the Muscovite effort—Grand Duke Gediminas (c.1275–1341), his son Algirdas (r. 1345–77), and Jogaila (r. 1377–1434), who launched the historic union with Poland. A century of raiding, castle-building, and tribute-gathering brought spectacular results throughout the vast Dnieper basin. White Ruthenia (now Belarus’) was absorbed whole. Red Ruthenia (or Galicia) was carved up in 1349 with the Poles. Kiev was taken in 1362, after Algirdas had broken the Mongol grip at the Battle of the Blue Water in the Dnieper bend. In 1375 he took Polotsk. The Lithuanians were not checked until in 1399 they were defeated by the Tartars in the far south, on the River Vorksla. By that time Lithuania stretched virtually ‘from sea to shining sea’, from the Baltic to the Black Sea approaches. From 1386 its ruling circles were converted to Roman Catholicism (see p. 430), and were increasingly polonized. But the mass of the population, in White Ruthenia and Ukraine, were Orthodox Slavs. They called themselves rusini or ‘Ruthenes’; and it is the Ruthenian variants of east Slav speech from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that provided the roots of the modern Byelorussian and Ukrainian languages. Until 1700 the official language of the Grand Duchy, which was largely administered by literate Christian Slavs, was not Lithuanian but Ruthenian.

At first sight the Orthodox Church was necessarily more passive than its Catholic counterpart. Its head, the Patriarch of Constantinople, was closely bound to the fate of the Byzantine Empire. Yet its role was not trivial. It was the stubborn determination of the Orthodox Church in the East, where Christendom was under attack from Mongols and Turks, which sowed the seeds of modern nationhood among the Serbs, Bulgars, and Romanians of the Balkans, among the Russians of Muscovy, and among the Ruthenes of Lithuania.

At the other end of the Peninsula, in Spain, the Reconquista was virtually suspended. (See Appendix III, p. 1241.) After 1248 the Moorish armies had retreated to the Sierra Nevada, in whose shadow the emirate of Granada could flourish for two centuries more. Thenceforth it was the only Muslim-ruled state in Iberia. Beyond its borders local Muslim leaders, notably Ibn-Hud, had overthrown their African Moorish overlords and had established themselves in ‘Al-Andaluz’ as dependents of Castile. The result was a broad frontier region, whose countryside was dominated by the estates of the military orders and whose towns were swelled by Muslim and Jewish migrants. The majority of the population were Spanish speakers, irrespective of their religion. The kingdom of Portugal, independent since 1179, controlled the Atlantic seaboard, where it conquered the Algarve in 1250. The kingdom of Navarre, which straddled the Basque districts of the northern Pyrenees, was subject from 1234 to French rulers, who maintained their independence until 1516.

The victorious kingdom of Leon and Castile, having swept from the northern to the southern coast, where it surrounded Granada on all sides, was left in a state of internal anarchy. The first race of conquistadores grew rich from the plunder of the south and from the establishment of great latifundia. The successors of Ferdinand III the Saint (r. 1217–52), who was eventually canonized for his part in the Reconquista, were plagued by disputed successions, by fractious nobles, by the vagaries of the Cortes or ‘diets’, and by the hermandades or ‘armed leagues’ of the cities. Alfonso X (r. 1252–84) competed unsuccessfully for the imperial crown in Germany. In 1340 at Salado, Alfonso XI (r. 1312–50) achieved the first Castilian victory over the Moors for almost a century, and crossed the Straits to Algeciras. Pedro the Cruel (r. 1350–69) deserved the epithet. Henry III (r. 1390–1406) combined a talent for administration with an alliance with the Lancastrian kings of England. But he died young; and Castile passed under the despotic rule of the Constable, and Master of the Order of St James, Alvaro de Luna. Thanks to the sturdy, African merino sheep which grazed on the uplands of the Meseta or Plateau, Castile became Europe’s principal exporter of wool, which was carried from Bilbao and Santander to Flanders.

The kingdom of Aragon, in contrast, turned to the sea. (See Appendix III, p. 1251.) Forged from the union of the Pyrenean district of Aragon with Catalonia and Valencia, it had gained an early foothold on the coast. James I the Conqueror (r. 1213–76) occupied Minorca and Majorca in the Moorish war, where he magnanimously gave Murcia to Castile. Peter III (r. 1276–85) was given the throne of Sicily in 1282 following the expulsion of the French. Sardinia was taken from the Genoese in 1326. Alfonso V (r. 1416–58) took southern Italy from the Angevins in 1442. Aragon’s domination of the western Mediterranean created an inimitable maritime community, based on Barcelona, Palermo, and Naples, where Catalan was the lingua franca and where the nobles enjoyed a regime of remarkable liberality. Disputes between the monarchs and their subjects were referred to the Justiciar of the Cortes, usually a lowly knight who was raised by his peers to the office of supreme arbiter. In 1287, by the Privilege of Union, the nobles were empowered to take up arms against any king who infringed their rights—a liberty unequalled except in Poland. The result was a nation of unusual solidarity. ‘It is as hard to divide the nobles of Aragon’, said Ferdinand V (r. 1479–1516), ‘as it is to unite the nobles of Castile.’ In the fifteenth century Aragon controlled both the largest city in Iberia—Barcelona—and the largest city in Europe—Naples.

The cultural synthesis of medieval Spain was something quite inimitable. In the five kingdoms, three main religions were practised: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism; and six main languages were spoken: Castilian, Gallego, Catalan, Portuguese, Arab, and Basque. The Christian population, dominated by the ranchers and soldiers of the central Plateau, was generally much rougher than the more urbanized and civilized Moors of the fertile south. But they were emerging from centuries of isolation, and were now in full commercial and intellectual contact with the rest of Christendom. The Spanish Jews, who had gained a foothold through the tolerance of Muslim rulers, spread throughout the Peninsula and played a prominent part in administration, medicine, learning, trade, and finance. They figured in many roles. The philosopher Maimonides of Cordoba (1135–1204), who had emigrated to Egypt, was long remembered as author of the Guide to the Perplexed. Samuel Halevi (d. 1361), chief tax-collector of Pedro the Cruel, who tortured him to death, was a patron of the arts. The convert Pablo de Santa María (Solomon Halevi, b. 1350) served as diplomat, Bishop of Burgos, and notorious antisemite. Earlier, disputations between the religions were popular. Later, and particularly in 1348–51 and 1391, ugly pogroms occurred. In the fifteenth century a large caste of conversos or New Christians—the Lunas, Guzmáns, Mendozas, Enríquez—filled the highest offices of Church and State. Nothing conveys the symbiosis more eloquently than Spanish architecture, an exquisite blend of Mediterranean romanesque, Catholic Gothic, and oriental ornament.8 [CABALA]

In the heart of the Catholic world, politics still revolved round the triangle of rivalries between the Empire, the Papacy, and the kingdom of France. In the course of the fourteenth century, each of the three main parties was subject to such tremendous local stresses that no international victor emerged. Following the interregnum of 1254–73, the Emperors were so absorbed by the internecine affairs of Germany that Italy was abandoned. The Papacy, overwhelmed by the wars of Italy, took refuge in the Midi for nearly seventy years before falling into schism. The kingdom of France, hopelessly overrun by the Hundred Years War against England, did not recover until the middle of the fifteenth century. By 1410, when there were three emperors, three popes, and two kings of France, the leaders of Catholic Christendom were in despair. Such was the chaos in the centre that opportunities arose for the creation of powerful new states. Apart from Aragon, the newcomers were Switzerland, Burgundy, and Poland-Lithuania.

The Holy Roman Empire was permanently weakened by the fall of the Hohenstaufen. The interregnum, which met its nadir with the execution of Conradin at Naples, ushered in decades of chaos (see p. 353). Worse still, there was little prospect that imperial power could be reasserted. By gambling so heavily on their Italian ambitions, the Hohenstaufen had condemned their successors to a position of perpetual subservience in Germany. With the imperial coffers empty, and the imperial domain dispersed, it could hardly have been otherwise. As a result the German princes perpetuated their privileges, and the elective constitution of the Empire became ossified. In 1338 the Electoral College rejected papal claims to confirm Emperors; and in the Golden Bull of 1356 the mechanics of election were fixed for the duration. Henceforth Frankfurt-am-Main was to be the site of imperial elections. A majority of votes among seven named Electors was to be decisive. The seven Electors were to be the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier and the princes of Bohemia, the Rhine Palatinate, Saxony, and Brandenburg.* The Emperor Charles IV, who formulated the Golden Bull, was bowing to reality. In Bryce’s famous pronouncement, ‘He legalised anarchy and called it a constitution.’

From 1273 onwards the enfeebled Empire struggled to recover. Of the nine emperors from Rudolf von Habsburg (r. 1273–91) to Sigismund of Luxemburg (r. 1410–37), only three attained the dignity of a full imperial coronation. Two—Adolf von Nassau in 1298 and Wenzel of Luxemburg in 1400—were deposed by the Electors. Henry VII (r. 1308–13), Dante’s last great hope, aped his forebears by making a progress through Italy; he was shut out of Rome and died ignominiously of fever at Pisa. His successor, Ludwig of Bavaria (r. 1314–47), having fallen foul of the Pope, took Rome by storm in 1328; but his action only provoked yet another round of anti-popes and anti-kings. Charles IV of Luxemburg (r. 1346–78) brought a measure of stability. Upgraded from anti-king to Emperor, he used the Empire to build up his beloved Bohemia. Germany was ruled for a season from the Karlstejn. High politics was disputed between four leading families—the Bavarian-based Wittelsbachs, who also held Hainault and Holland; the Luxemburgs, who held Luxemburg, Brabant, and Bohemia from 1310, Silesia from 1333, and Lusatia and Brandenburg to 1415; the Wettins of Saxony; and the Habsburgs of Austria, whose possessions spread across the south from the Sundgau to Carniola. Local politics were controlled by the ubiquitous predatory prelates, by the powerful imperial cities, or by the seething mass of petty knights. This was the age of theRaubritter, the robber barons, and the Faustrecht, the law of the fist. Late medieval Germany lacked the confident national monarchies which ruled on either side in France and in Poland. Not until the election of three successive Habsburgs, in 1438,1440, and 1486, did the Empire begin to assume the guise of a quasi-hereditary monarchy. And even then the emperors gained little freedom of action. If particularism is the measure of the feudal system, Germany was the most feudal country of all.

CABALA

SOME time after 1264 but before 1290, a Hebrew work entitled Sepher ha-Zoharal ha-Torah, ‘the Book of Splendour on the Law’, began to circulate among the Jews of Spain. It purported to be the writings of a revered rabbi of the second century, Simon ben Jochai. In reality, it had been composed by a local scholar, very probably Moses of Leon (1250–1305). It took the form of complex and lengthy commentaries on the Pentateuch, and it was soon known to both Jewish and Christian biblicists. A definitive three-volume edition was printed at Mantua in Italy in 1558–60. It was, and is, the standard textbook of the Cabala.

The word Cabala means ‘the tradition’. It generally refers to a collection of mystical doctrines and techniques, which had been used for centuries to find hidden meanings beneath the literal text of the scriptures. The basic doctrines of the Cabala probably derived from neo-Platonist and Manichean ideas of the late classical period. They centred on the contending realms of Light and Darkness, the one ruled by God and the other by the Devil. God as well as the Devil consisted of paternal and maternal components, the male being white in colour and active in nature, the female being red and receptive. God’s forms could be either abba (father/king) or imma (mother/queen); those of the Devil could either be Shamael, the poisonous Angel of Death, or Aholah, the Great Harlot. The intercourse of these pairs produced alternatively harmony or disorder.

Since the Godhead and the Devil were judged boundless and invisible, they could only be comprehended by means of their ten emanations. Each emanation corresponded to one of the ten main members of Adam Kadmon (Primordial Man) or Adam Belial (the Worthless One). The ten divine emanations were: Kether (Crown or the head), Chochma (Wisdom or the brains), and Bina (Comprehension or the heart), which made up ‘the intellectual world’; Chased (Mercy) and Din (Justice), the arms, and Tephereth (Beauty or the bosom), which made up ‘the moral world’;Nezach (Splendour) and Hod (Majesty), the legs, and Jesod (Foundation or the genitals), which made up ‘the material world’; and lastly Malchuth (the Kingdom). They could equally be arranged as the ten branches of llan, ‘the cabbalistic tree’, or in the Three Pillars:

	Comprehension	Crown	Wisdom
	Justice	Beauty	Mercy
	Splendour	Foundation The Kingdom	Majesty

The Cabalists believed that God created the world after several abortive attempts; that everything real is imperishable; and that souls migrate from body to body. They looked for a Messiah who would come when the seductions of the Devil had been rejected.

The techniques for decoding the Scriptures included notarikon, the attribution of words to initial letters within other words, gematria, the numerical equivalence of letters, and temurah or ‘permutation cyphers’.

Examples of notarikon would be ADaM, ‘Adam, David, Messiah’, or the famous Greek Christian ICHTHOS, ‘the Fish’, meaning ‘Jesus Christ, God’s Son’.

Gematria operated by calculating sums derived from names and dates. One such sum worked out in the nineteenth century for Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany, born on 22 March 1797, gave: 22 + 3 + 1797 + 7 (letters in his name) = 1829 (his marriage):

1829 + 1 + 8 + 2 + 9 = 1849(Suppression of Revolution)

1849 + 1 + 8 + 4 + 9 = 1871 (Imperial Coronation)

1871 + 1 + 8 + 7 + 1 = 1888 (Death)

Temurah used twenty-four permutated sequences of the Hebrew alphabet. Its application to the four letters of YaHVeH or ‘God’, for example, produced 2,112 variations on the divine name.

The Cabala profoundly influenced Judaic thought. It greatly strengthened the religion’s mystical aspects, and undermined the rational study of the Torah. It was specially attractive to the Chassidim of a later age, who sang and danced to cabbalistic incantations, and who ascribed infallible truth to the oracular riddles and prophecies of their zaddiks.

Many Christian scholars, too, from Raymond Llull to Pico and Reuchlin, were fascinated by the Cabala; and it became a standard ingredient of European magic. A Latin translation of the Book of Splendour, published by Baron Rosenroth at Sulzbach in Germany in 1677–8, made its secrets more widely accessible. Its ideas, images, and vocabulary permeated European language and literature, often unannounced and unattributed.1

In Italy, too, the Hohenstaufen left a bitter legacy. In the north, the warring communes substituted domestic for German oppression. All the cities of Lombardy and Tuscany fell under the control of one or other of the leading contenders—Milan, Florence, or Venice. This was an age of burgeoning commercial wealth and cultural splendour, but also of unending strife. The swordsmen and poisoners nourished alongside the artists and poets. In central Italy, a Concordat signed in 1275 between the Empire and the Papacy abolished all claims to imperial suzerainty over the Patrimony of St Peter. The Papal State, which, in addition to Rome, included the Romagna, the Pentapolis, the March of Ancona, and the Campagna, found itself free but defenceless. And it was eternally racked by the restless citizens of Rome. In the south, the Papacy’s clients, the House of Anjou, which had been imported to replace the Hohenstaufen, became unbearable in their turn. The ‘Sicilian Vespers’ of 30 March 1282, when the resentful populace of Palermo massacred perhaps 4,000 of their French rulers, led to the introduction of Aragonese rule in Sicily, to the encirclement of the Angevins in Naples, and to a twenty-year war. [CONCLAVE]

The city of Florence stood in the centre of the squalls and sun-shafts of late medieval Italy. Nurtured on the wool of its beautiful Apennine contado, it grew in the thirteenth century into a thriving community of perhaps 100,000 turbulent souls. Its gold coin, the florin, became standard currency far beyond Italy. An ambitious bourgeoisie, calling itself the popolo, organized in opposition to the traditional comune of the castle-based nobles of the contado—the Donati, Uberti, Cerchi, Alberti. The major and minor arti or guilds clamoured for a place in the city’s elected councils and rotating magistracies; and a lusty mob added to the fray. The podestà or governor, once an imperial appointee, was brought under municipal control. Constitutions enacted in 1266,1295, and 1343 failed to quell the uproar.

CONCLAVE

THE Roman Catholic Church is not a democracy. But its procedures for electing a pope are based on hard experience. The system of conclave was regularized by Gregory X to avoid the scandalous delays of his own appointment. Meeting at Viterbo at the end of 1268, the cardinals had wrangled for three years. Their prevarication so incensed the town authorities that the doors of the cardinals’ residence were locked from the outside, then their roof was removed, and their diet reduced to starvation levels.

Henceforth, the College of Cardinals was to assemble in the Vatican Palace in Rome within fifteen days of the death of an incumbent pope. (Prior to the age of telegraph and rail travel, this rule automatically excluded most cardinals not already in Italy.) The papal chamberlain was then ordered to lock their Eminences into a suitable apartment, usually the Sistine Chapel, and to keep them there con chiave—’with his keys’—until they had reached a decision. Voting could be by acclamation, by committee, or, as became customary, by secret ballot. In votes held morning and afternoon, each cardinal placed the name of one preferred candidate in a chalice on the altar. Each day, the chamberlain burned the voting papers of inconclusive rounds, sending a column of black smoke from the chimney of the stove. Voting was to continue until the successful candidate achieved a majority of two-thirds plus one. At which point the chamberlain released the tell-tale signal of white smoke, and the electors cemented their choice of the new pontiff with a sacred vow of homage.

Gregory X’s system remains essentially intact, modified only by the constitution Vacantis apostolicae sedis (1945). In the twentieth century, the workings of providence overcame a veto from the Emperor Francis-Joseph delivered to the conclave of 1903, and produced a record one-day conclave in 1939. Pope John Paul II was elected in October 1978, apparently at the eighth ballot and with a final vote of support from 103 out of 109 cardinals.1

Traditionally, Florence was a Guelph city resistant to imperial authority. But the Emperor’s absence turned the city’s energies in new directions. Relations with the Papacy were strained, and the Florentine Guelphs were themselves riven by faction. Florence gained local supremacy after the Battle of Campaldino, where on 11 June 1289 the forces of Ghibelline Arezzo were overcome following the earlier defeat by the Sienese at Montaperti (1260). But then the feud between ‘the Blacks’ and ‘the Whites’ took over. In 1301, after the failure of a papal arbiter in the person of Charles de Valois, the Whites, like the Ghibellines before them, were banished. This factionalism was the sure precursor of despotic power, subsequently exercised by the Medici. Florence was so full of poison, says one of the inhabitants of Dante’s Hell, ‘that the sack brims o’er … Three sparks from Hell — Avarice, Envy, Pride— I In all men’s bosoms sowed the fiery seed.’

Yet social and political turbulence seems to have stimulated cultural life. The three great writers of the era—Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, and Boccaccio—were all Florentines. The city’s buildings reflected its progress to opulent self-confidence: the Bargello (begun in 1254), the new city walls (1284–1310), the Palazzo Vecchio (begun in 1298), the rebuilt Ponte Vecchio (1345), and the Loggia della Signoria (1381); the palaces of the Arte della Lana or Wool Guild (1300), of the Guelph Party, of the Pazzi, Pitti, Strozzi, Antinori, and Medici-Riccardi (1444); and, above all, the religious art—the romanesque church of San Miniato al Monte, the Gothic Santa Croce (1294), the marble-plated octagon of the Baptistery of St John (1296), the Duomo (begun in 1294), Giotto’s Campanile (1339), Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome (1436), Ghiberti’s baptistery doors (1452), and the frescos of Fra Angelico in the Dominican convent of San Marco.

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was the greatest of the poets of Christendom. He was deeply involved in Florentine politics, and walked the city’s streets when its finest monuments were under construction. His literary and visionary powers are unsurpassed. As a youth, he had charged in the front ranks at Campaldino. He served as one of the municipal priors in the regime of the White Guelphs, only to be banished for life by the Blacks. Embittered by twenty years in exile, he died in Ravenna at the court of Can Grande da Polenta, who placed the laurel wreath on his fading brow. His Vita Nuova (The New Life) makes a rare medieval excursion into a man’s internal emotions. His De Monarchia (On Monarchy) makes an impassioned plea for the restoration of imperial rule. In De Vulgari Eloquentia, his reasoned advocacy of the vernacular makes him the father of modern European literature.

Dante’s masterwork, the Commedia, a poem of 100 cantos, acquired the epithet of ‘Divine’ from its admiring readers. It describes the poet’s journey through the three realms of the afterlife—through the Pit of Hell in the Inferno, the Mount of Expiation in the Purgatorio, and the sunlit Circles of Heaven in the Paradiso. At one level, like the Odyssey or the Aeneid, it is a voyage of fictional adventure, where Virgil is Dante’s initial guide, and where a convincing setting is created for meeting the shades of people past and present. At another level it is an extended allegory of the spiritual journey of a Christian soul from sin to salvation, rewarded by a blinding vision of God. At yet another level it is an elaborate exercise in moral architecture, whose teeming inhabitants are precisely located according to their vices and virtues among the Damned, the Hopeful, or the Blessed. The language dazzles by its beautiful economy. The tales enrapture both by the quaint detail of the poet’s encounters and by the grandeur of the moral landscape in which they occur. Appropriately, the lowest point of human experience is to be found where all Love is lost—in the icy infernal depths round the frozen figure of Judas. The Earthly Paradise is reached in a fragrant grove atop Mount Purgatory, ‘where pain gives way to hope’. The ultimate pinnacle is reached beyond the Primum Mobile, in the heart of the heavenly Rose of Light, in ecstasy too intense for words. This is the source of ‘the Love that moves the Sun and other stars’, ‘L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle’.

Dante was equally the source of vivid legend. One story tells how the poet heard a donkey-driver singing one of his songs, interspersed with shouts of Arri, arri!, ‘Giddy-up!’ The furious poet then made to strike the donkey-driver, shouting ‘Cotesto arri non vi misi io’ (That there ‘giddy-up’ was not put in by me!).11

Dante’s prime overlapped with the youth of Francesco Petrarca (1304–74). Petrarch’s exquisite love poems, the Canzonieri, echo the spirit of the Vita Nuova, just as his devotion to Laura mirrors Dante’s devotion to Beatrice. Both looked back to the founders of the dolce stil nuovo, such as the Bolognese poet Guido Guinicelli (1230–76), whom Dante called his literary ‘father’; and their ‘sweet new style’ was only one step removed from the troubadours. It is only the pedantry of critics which would categorize Dante as ‘profoundly medieval’ and Petrarch as ‘the harbinger of the Renaissance’:

Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte,
mi guida Amor; ch’ogni segnato calle
provo contrario alia tranquilla vita.
Se ’n solitaria piaggia, rivo, o fonte,
Se ’n fra duo poggi siede ombrosa valle,
ivi s’acquieta l’alma sbigottita;
e, com’Amor la ’nvita,
or ride, or piange, or teme, or s’assicura:
e ’l volto che lei segue, ov’ella il mena
si turba e rasserena,
ed in un esser picciol tempo dura;
onde alia vista uom di tal vita esperto
diria: questi arde, e di suo stato è incerto.

(From thought to thought, from mountain to mountain, | Love leads me on; since every marked path | I find contrary to a tranquil life. | Where’er a river or fountain [adorns] a lonely slope, | Or ’twixt two hills a shady vale [is hid], | There the disturbed soul can calm itself, | And, as Love bids, | Either laughs or weeps or fears or is assured. | And the face, which follows the soul where’er it leads | Is tormented and serene by turns, | And stays little time in any one state. | Whence, on seeing it, a man learned in such a life | Would say: this one burns, and is unsure of his condition.)

Fourteenth-century Italy provided the breeding-ground both for violent municipal blood-feuds and for Europe’s first merchant bankers. The former gave rise to the incessant depredations of the Free Companies—largely foreign mercenaries such as those of Conrad von Wolfort, of the ex-hospitaller Fra Moriale, of the knight errant John of Bohemia, or of the Englishman Sir John Hawkwood. Venice and Genoa were locked in perpetual maritime warfare over the Levantine trade. Rome, shorn of its popes, was racked by the oppression of its aristocratic factions and by the revolts of its citizens, notably in 1347–54 under its visionary popular dictator Cola di Rienzo. Angevin Naples raged through the anarchy presided over by Joanna I (r. 1343–82) and her four husbands.

Italian bankers learned how to profit from the conflicts. They devised all manner of modern financial techniques, from letters of exchange to insurance and accountancy; and by using the network of the Church hierarchy they extended their activities throughout Latin Christendom. Florence was rocked in 1339–49 by the bankruptcy of its leading houses, ruined by overextended credit; but it recovered. Somewhere, in the midst of the wealth and the misery, the world of capitalism was born, [COMPUTATIO]

The late medieval Papacy, after a brief paroxysm of self-assertion under Boniface VIII, relapsed into dependency and exile. Boniface VIII (1294–1303) has been described as ‘the last medieval pope’. He was elected in succession to the miserable hermit Pietro del Morrone (Celestine V), whom he had advised to abdicate and later imprisoned for life. He was intent on enriching his family, the Gaetani, on beggaring the rival Colonnas, and on restoring the Angevins to Sicily in the endless ‘War of the Vespers’. None the less, he was responsible for the Sextus (1298), the third part of the corpus of canon law; and in 1300 he launched a jubilee year, with plenary indulgence for the million pilgrims who flocked to Rome. His Bull Unam Sanctam (1302) contained an extreme statement of papal supremacy, claiming that no creature could attain salvation without it. However, having picked a quarrel with France, for whose benefit Unam Sanctam was framed, he overreached himself. He died from the shock of being kidnapped at his native Anagni by the French King’s agent. Dante, who may have met Boniface in person during a Florentine embassy to Rome, was totally unforgiving, calling him ‘the prince of the new Pharisees’. In Inferno he consigned him to hell for simony. In Paradiso he puts the words of denunciation into the mouth of St Peter himself:

Quegli ch’usurpa in terra il luogo mio,

il luogo mio, il luogo mio…

COMPUTATIO

IN 1494 Luca Pacioli’s Summa de Arithmetica was printed and published in Venice. It contained the same author’s treatise Particularis de Computis et Scripturis, ‘On the Particulars of Accounting and Records’. In this work, the modern profession of accountancy received its first textbook.

Pacioli (1447–1517), otherwise known by his religious name of Fra Luca di Borgo San Sepolcro, was a Franciscan friar and a prominent itinerant Florentine professor. His best-known treatise, De Divina Proportione (1509), was illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci. Recent authors have dubbed him the ‘Father of Accountancy’.1

The ‘Venetian method’ of double-entry book-keeping had grown up in the Italian cities some considerable time before Pacioli described it. It required three books—a memorial book, a journal, and a ledger. The memorial received a note of all transactions as they were made. The journal was made up from the memorial and summarised each day’s business in chronological order. It had a left-hand column for debts in dare, and a right-hand column for credits, in havere. The ledger reserved a double page for each account, debits on the left and credits on the right, together with an index of accounts. It also contained a record of running balances, summaries of the merchant’s assets, and lists of various categories of income and expenditure. As each account was closed, the closing profit and loss was entered in the main capital account, where the proprietor’s net worth could be seen in the total capital balance.2

Systematic accounting methods are often seen as a pre-condition for the growth of capitalism. Their spread across Europe can be traced in the publications which followed Pacioli’s. These included: Jan Ympyn Christoffel’s Nieuwe instructie ende biwijs de der loofelijcker consten des rekenboecks (Antwerp, 1543); Valentin Mennher’s Practique brifue pour cyfrer et tenir livres de coupte (Antwerp, 1550); James Peele, The maner and fourme how to kepe a perfect reconying … (London, 1553); Claes Pietersz, Boeckhouwen op die Italienische maniere (Amsterdam, 1576); and Simon Stevin’s, VorstelicheBouckhouding … (Leyden, 1607) which was written for Prince Maurice of Nassau.

Historians often forget. Even the most mundane of professions have their history.3 And those mundane professions increasingly run the capitalist world, including academic life.

He who on earth usurps my see,

my see, my see, which now stands vacant

before the Son of God

Has made a sewer from my sepulchre

full of blood and pus—at which the Perverse One,

who fell from here, takes pleasure down below….

 

In shepherd’s guise, rapacious wolves

are seen among the pastures. Oh, why

do God’s defenders lie so low?

Gascons and Cahorsines prepare to drink

our blood. Oh, fine principle,

to what foul end is it fit for you to fall?

The ‘foul end’ of the Papacy turned out to be the long exile of the popes in Avignon, begun by the Gascon, Bertrand de Got, who reigned as Clement V (1305–14).

The Babylonish captivity of the Avignon popes lasted from 1309 to 1377. It began at the instigation of Philippe le Bel, who pressured Clement V mercilessly; it ended at the instigation of St Catherine of Siena, who confirmed Gregory IX (1370–8) in his resolve to return to Rome. In the mean time all seven popes were Frenchmen, elected by a French-dominated College of Cardinals. Avignon, on the Rhone, did not lie in French territory but in an enclave of the Venaissin granted to the Papacy by its Angevin clients, and bought outright in 1348 for 80,000 gold crowns. But French influence was paramount; and many acts of policy, such as the dissolution of the Templars, were dictated by it. The authority of the Avignon popes was not accepted in all countries. Latin Christendom was divided against itself in the most blatant manner possible.

The manifest abuses of ecclesiastical power inevitably provoked strong reactions. One such reaction lay in the retreat into mysticism, with its emphasis on religious ecstasy and on the experience of direct communion with God (see pp. 436–7). Another lay in the proliferation of popular sects—all more or less unconventional in their theology. What they shared was a sense of betrayal by the established Church. Such were the Fraticelli, or Franciscan Spirituals, who held property to be contrary to salvation, the wandering mendicants, known as ‘Beghards and Beguines’, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the German Luciferans, who were Pantheists, the mystical Gottesfreunde or Friends of God, and the Lollards in England. All were bitterly persecuted by the Inquisition.

Church reform could not be widely discussed given the political chaos and fear of the Inquisition. It had both theological and organizational aspects. The Englishman John Wyclif (c.1330–84), sometime Master of Balliol College, railed against the wealth of the Church, rejected papal supremacy, and denied the doctrine of transubstantiation of the Eucharist. He was burned as a heretic, but only posthumously. The Czech Jan Hus (c.1372–1415), sometime Rector of the University at Prague, was much influenced by Wyclif. He stressed the concept of predestination, and the Church of the Elect. In Bohemia he became the focus of Czech resentment against the largely German hierarchy. Hus, excommunicated, appealed to a General Council of the Church. Though they lacked the name, Wyclif and Hus were the pioneer Protestants, [MAGIC]

Switzerland, die Schweiz, takes its name from the district of Schwyz on Lake Lucerne, one of three cantons that began to assert their separate political identity against the German Empire in the late thirteenth century. In 1291 Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden signed an ‘Everlasting League’ of self-defence, swearing to assist each other against outside interference. In this way they sought to break free of the local counts, the Habsburgs, who had tried to impose servile judges on the free men of the valleys. In 1315, at the battle of Morgarten, a Habsburg army was routed, and the League became the nucleus for other disaffected districts. The first of these was Luzern (1331) whose advent created the Vierwaldstaette of ‘Four Forest Cantons’. After that came the Imperial city of Zurich (1351), Glarus (1351), Zug (1352), and the powerful city-state of Bern (1353). Another Habsburg defeat, at Sempach in 1386, where dismounted knights were cut to pieces by Swiss halberdiers, established the cantons’ practical independence. (See Appendix III, p. 1257.)

In the mid-fifteenth century the Habsburgs fomented a civil war by supporting Zurich against its neighbours. But a crushing Swiss victory over Burgundy in 1474–6, when the red flag with white cross was first carried, brought another train of members—Fribourg and Solothurn (1481), Basle and Schaffhausen (1501), and Appenzell (1513). By then, Switzerland stretched from the Jura in the west to Tyrol in the east. There were extensive ‘subject’ and ‘protected’ territories, including the Vaud round Lake Geneva, the Valais on the upper Rhône, the Ticino as far south as Lake Lugano, and the Graubunden or Grisons, the ‘Grey Leagues’, to the east. There were German-speakers, French-speakers, Italian-speakers, and speakers of Romansch. Yet apart from the Compact of Stans (1481), which regulated the network of mutual alliances, there were no common institutions. Though the Empire recognized the League’s existence by the Treaty of 1499, there had been no formal declaration of independence. The Swiss had proved themselves the finest soldiers in Europe, widely in demand as mercenaries. The Switzers or Swiss Guard of the Vatican, with costumes by Michelangelo, date from 1516.

South and west of Switzerland, the ancient House of Savoy was consolidating its own alpine territories. Amadeus V (r. 1285–1323) reunited the county of Savoy round Chambéry with the principality of Piedmont at Turin. Amadeus VT (r. 1343–83)> the Conte Verde, a crusader, introduced a system of state-supported poor relief. Amadeus VIII (r. 1391–1440) lived in the hermitage of Ripaille on Lake Geneva. The Emperor made him a Duke, and the Council of Basle elected him the last anti-pope, as Felix V (1439–49).

Given the disarray of the Empire and the Papacy, the kingdom of France faced the first of several historic opportunities to become the dominant power in Europe. As the heirs of St Louis, the last three generations of Capetian kings—Philippe III le Hardi (r. 1270–85), Philippe IV le Bel (r. 1285–1314), and the latter’s three sons, Louis X (r. 1314–16), Philippe V (r. 1316–22), and Charles IV (r. 1322–8)—ruled a large population which was growing in numbers and prosperity and was well administered. That they failed to press home their advantage can be attributed partly to the disputed succession, partly to their ruinous rivalry with England, and partly to the pestilence.

MAGIC

THE ‘Twelve Conclusions’ of the Lollards of 1395 contains a direct attack on the medieval English Church’s involvement with magic. The Protestant movement contained a very strong impulse ‘to take the magic out of religion’, and this very first manifestation of Protestantism demonstrated the impulse in no uncertain manner:

That exorcisms and hallowings, made in the Church, of wine, bread and wax, water, salt and oil and incense, the stone of the altar, upon vestments, mitre, cross and pilgrims’ staves, be the very practice of necromancy, not of holy theology. For … we see nothing of change in no such creatures that is so charmed, except by false belief, which is the principle of the devil’s craft.1

None the less, in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries Europe continued to be devoted to every form of magical belief. The landscape was filled with alchemists, astrologers, diviners, conjurers, healers, and witches, [ALCHEMIA] [HEXEN] [NOSTRADAMUS] The countryside was populated with ghosts, fairies, hobgoblins, and elves. Wyclif, the Lollards’ guru, translated the Bible into English to make it accessible to all. Yet 300 years later, in Cromwell’s Puritan England, the sales charts were topped by William Lilly’s astrological almanac, the Merlinus Anglicus, and by his Collection of Ancient and Moderne Prophecies.2 Magic and religion were often inseparable. People who venerated the Christian saints also believed in Puck and Queen Mab and Merlin the Magician. Magic held its own throughout the Reformation era.

In this respect, therefore, the Protestant onslaught on magic enjoyed only partial success, even in countries where Protestantism was to be nominally triumphant. But the intentions of the radicals were unmistakable. After Wyclif came Luther’s attack on indulgences (see p. 484) and Calvin’s dismissal of transubstantiation as ‘conjury’. Every aspect of religious life with the slightest supernatural connotation came under suspicion. Protestants abhorred oaths, miracles, consecrations, symbols, images, holy water, saints’ days, processions, pilgrimages. Moreover, since Protestant Christianity was supposedly magic-free, Protestantism’s enemy, ‘Popery’, was judged equivalent to black magic; the Pope was a wizard; and the Catholic Mass was a branch of devil-worship.

In reality, such views contained a high dose of hypocrisy. Despite all manner of statutes and reforms, the Protestant clergy could not avoid finding a modus vivendi with magic. Anglicans and Lutherans would stay closer to sacramental religion than did Calvinists, Anabaptists, and other evangelicals. But it proved difficult to abandon the sign of the Cross, oaths in court, or the ‘churching’ of women after childbirth. It proved virtually impossible to abandon the consecration of church buildings, of battle standards, of food, of ships, and of burial grounds. Protestantism was due to create a new form of Christianity, with the emphasis on conscious belief; but magic was never eliminated.

The decline of magic did not really commence until the latter part of the seventeenth century. It has been attributed to the Scientific Revolution (see pp. 507–10), to the consequent rise of rationalism, to modern medicine, to mathematics and a greater understanding of probability, and to a social environment which gradually grew less threatening. [LLOYD’S] Yet belief in magic, and its interdependence with religion, has never died out. In the twentieth century, horoscopes are ubiquitous. In the land of the Lollards, sacramental magic was revived in the newfangled rituals of the British monarchy, reaching a pinnacle in the coronation of 1953.3 In Catholic countries such as Poland and Italy, priests bless everything from motor cars to football mascots. The Vatican still holds with faith-healing and prophecies, [BERNADETTE] [FATIMA] Even in Russia, where Communism decimated Orthodox religion, belief in astrology and fairies could not be purged.

The study of magic and religion is inevitably coloured by prejudices and preferences. Ever since Frazer’s Golden Bough, scientific anthropologists have tried to act with impartiality. But scholars cannot always resist the temptation to denigrate other people’s magic. That may be a form of superstition in itself, [ARICIA]

Philippe le Bel, grandson of St Louis, was fair of face, and unfair by nature. He was notorious for minting debased coinage and for extorting ingenious taxes. His one act of successful territorial aggrandisement—the incorporation of the city of Lyons in 1312—was undertaken by stealth during the absence of the Emperor in Italy. His confrontation with the Papacy, which led to the scandal of Anagni, began over money. When faced with the Bull Clericis laicos, whereby Pope Boniface had sought to prevent him taxing the clergy, he simply banned the export of all money. His vendetta against the Templars, which ended with their proscription, was rooted in envy and pursued with malice. Their trial, 1307–12, was marked by fiendish accusations about leagues with the Devil or with the infidel, by confessions extracted under torture, and in the end by legalized murder and state robbery. The death of the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molai, burned at the stake in Paris after retracting all his confessions, left a lasting stain. [ANGELUS]

Yet Philippe le Bel was the author of durable institutions. With the aid of his légistes or legal counsellors, he found all manner of pretexts to fleece his subjects, to institutionalize his depredations, and to cloak them in the guise of a national consensus. His guiding principle lay in the Roman adage quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem (whatever pleases the king has the force of law). The old royal court was divided into three branches: The royal council governed the kingdom; the chambre des comptes, or exchequer, managed its finances; the parlement was charged with royal justice, and with registering all royal edicts. (It was not a true parliament.) The Estates-General, which first met in 1302, summoned nobles, clergy, and commoners to approve royal policy. Philippe le Bel died opportunely, thereby avoiding a popular outburst; but much of his administrative machinery survived till 1789.

In 1316 the Capetian succession was thrown into confusion. The three sons of Philippe le Bel had produced six daughters between them, but no male heir. When Louis X le Hutin (the Quarrelsome) died suddenly, he left one daughter, a pregnant queen, and an unborn child, who, as Jean I the Posthumous, lived and reigned for less than a week. The ultimate outcome was the so-called Salic Law, which the lawyers of Louis’s brothers devised to exclude their sister (and all subsequent females of the French royal house). But in 1328, when the throne passed to the founder of a new line, Philippe de Valois, the succession was inevitably challenged. The challenger was Philippe le Bel’s only surviving grandson, Edward III, King of England, [MONTAILLOU]

ANGELUS

WHILST preaching the First Crusade, Pope Urban II had urged the faithful to recite the ‘Angelus’ three times daily. The Blessed Virgin was patroness of the Crusaders; and the prayer which begins Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae (‘The Angel of the Lord announced to Mary’) was already the standard invocation to the Virgin. The Pope’s proposal was largely ignored. But the cathedral church of Saint-Pierre at Saintes in Poitou was an exception. Not only did the clergy of Saintes recite the Angelus regularly; they established the practice of sounding a bell at sunrise, noon, and sunset to announce the commencement of their devotions.

According to local tradition, Pope John XXII renewed the appeal of his predecessor in 1318, ordering the custom of Saintes to be adopted throughout the universal Church.1 Other authorities point to the pontificate of Callistus III in 1456. At all events, the sound of the angelus bell was to become as characteristic for the towns and villages of Latin Christendom as the sound of the muezzin in Islam. The Middle Ages was a world without background noise. There were no factories, no engines, no traffic, no radio, no musak. Sound had not been devalued. In the narrow, crowded streets of tiny towns, vendors’ cries mingled with the bustle of artisans’ workshops. But in the vast open countryside, the sounds of nature were largely undisturbed. The only serious competition for the church bell came from the wind in the trees, the lowing of cattle, and the distant clang of the blacksmith’s forge, [SOUND]

England under three Edward Plantagenets—Edward I (r. 1272–1307), Edward II (r. 1307–27), and Edward III (r. 1327–77)—saw only three reigns in more than a century. There was no lack of baronial discontent and foreign wars; and, since the Plantagenets continued to hold Gascony and Guyenne as fiefs of France, the territorial base was still fluid. But the wool trade with Flanders was booming, and the towns were growing. Under Edward I, in particular, there were concerted policies to consolidate the institutions of government, and to secure England’s dominant position within the British Isles. The ‘model parliament’ of 1295, which followed De Montfort’s precedent thirty years before, summoned burgesses as well as lords and knights of the shire, thereby laying the foundation of the House of Commons. Magna Carta was reconfirmed. But in an amendment accepted during a parliamentary session on Stepney Green in 1297, the principle of ‘no taxation without representation’ was established. Thereafter, Westminster Hall became the permanent site of England’s Parliament. Edward’s writ of Quo Warranto (1278) had threatened the barons’ landholdings: but the Second Statute of Westminster (1285), which favoured the entailing of estates, benefited both the monarchy and the tenants-in-chief. His conflict with the Church over Clericis laicos was controlled by the simple device of outlawing the clergy. His conquest of Wales, 1277–1301, which was held down by the chain of magnificent castles from Harlech to Conway, proved to be permanent. But his invasion of Scotland provoked the Scots’ bid for total independence. Edward II, who understood little of his father’s motto Pactum servare, ‘Keep Troth’—was murdered at Berkeley Castle on the orders of his queen. Edward III fell into the endless struggle of the Hundred Years War with France.

Scotland emerged as a nation-state much sooner than England did. The Scots had not been directly overrun by the Norman Conquest; and they reached a modus vivendi with the Gaelic clans long before the English came to terms with the Welsh. Scots monarchs and nobles had long been embroiled in English affairs, much as the English were embroiled in France. But they cut themselves free nearly two centuries earlier. The critical moment occurred during the decades of war which followed Edward I’s intervention in a disputed succession. One contender, John Balliol (d. 1313), was imprisoned in England, then exiled in France. Another, Robert the Bruce (r. 1306–29), victor of Bannockburn in June 1314, started as England’s vassal and finished as Scotland’s saviour. But none had a greater impact than William Wallace (1270–1305), who roused the commons of Scotland to resistance. Betrayed, and hanged in London as a common bandit, he was the martyrhero of Scotland’s cause:

Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

Welcome to your gory bed

Or to victorie.14

‘We are resolved never to submit to English domination,’ the Scots lords informed the Pope in the Declaration of Arbroath (1320); ‘we are fighting for freedom, and freedom only.’ Their cause was finally vindicated in 1328.

The wars of England and Scotland had direct repercussions in Ireland. In 1297, Edward I’s viceroy in Dublin, Sir John Wogan, had set up an Irish parliament in imitation of the ‘model parliament’ in London. But the English defeat at Bannockburn gave the Irish lords the opportunity to rebel, and for three years, 1315–18, they accepted a Scottish Bruce as king. Subsequent decades of turmoil were not brought to an end until the Statute of Kilkenny (1366) limited English rule and the English language to Dublin and to a surrounding Pale of Settlement.

The ‘Black Death’ of 1347–50 stopped Europe’s petty troubles in their tracks. Here was a pandemic of plague such as the world had not seen since the sixth century and was not destined to see again till the 1890s. It was fuelled by a devastating brew of three related diseases—bubonic plague, septicaemic plague, and pneumonic or pulmonary plague. The first two variants were carried by fleas hosted by the black rat; the third, airborne variant was especially fast and lethal. In its most common bubonic form, the bacillus pasteurella pestis caused a boil-like nodule or bubo in the victim’s groin or armpit, together with dark blotches on the skin from internal haemorrhage. Three or four days of intolerable pain preceded certain death if the bubo did not burst beforehand.

Medieval medicine, though generally conscious of infection and contagion, did not comprehend the particular mechanisms of the plague’s transmission. Doctors watched in anguish. Crowded tenements and poor sanitation, especially in the towns, provided excellent encouragement for the rats. The result was mass mortality. Boccaccio wrote that 100,000 died in Florence alone. Eight hundred corpses a day had to be buried in Paris. ‘At Marseilles,’ wrote the cynical English chronicler, Henry Knighton, ‘not one of the hundred and fifty Franciscans survived to tell the tale. And a good job too.’

The pandemic, which began in central Asia, spread with frightening speed. Initially it had turned east, to China and India; but it was first reported in Europe in the summer of 1346, at the Genoese colony of Caffa in the Crimea, which was under siege by the Tartars. The besiegers catapulted plague-ridden corpses into the city to break its resistance; whereupon the defenders took to the galleys, and rowed for safety. In October 1347 the plague reached Messina in Sicily. In January 1348 it reached Genoa, by way of a well-authenticated galley from Caffa. Expelled from its home port by the terrified citizens, the stricken galley sailed on to Marseilles and to Valencia. That same winter the plague struck Venice and other Adriatic cities, before moving on to Pisa, Florence, and central Italy. By the summer it was in Paris, and by the end of the year it had crossed the English Channel. 1349 saw it march northwards across the British Isles, eastwards across Germany, and south-eastwards into the Balkans. 1350 saw it entering Scotland, Denmark, and Sweden and, via the Hansa cities of the Baltic, Russia. There were few places which stayed inviolate—Poland, the county of Béam in the Pyrenees, Liège.

MONTAILLOU

BETWEEN 1318 and 1325 Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers in the Pyrenean county of Foix, conducted a campaign of inquisition into the revival of heresy in his diocese. In 370 sessions he examined 114 suspects, 48 of whom were women, and 25 from the village of Montaillou. All the questions and all the answers were recorded in the Bishop’s Register.

Montaillou was a community of some 250 souls drawn from 26 main clans known as ostal or domus, living in perhaps 50 separate households. It sprawled down the hillside from the castle at the top to the church at the bottom. Its inhabitants were mainly peasant farmers and craftsmen. There was also a strong contingent of transhumant shepherds, who were organized into cabanes or ‘folds’ working the pastures and trails leading into Catalonia. Though officially Catholic, they were in large part secret Cathars, who hid the itinerant Perfecti in their barns and cellars. Their natural feuds and rivalries were intensified by fears of the Inquisition, whose arrests during the last visitation in 1308 had turned the village into ‘a desert for sheep and children’. The Register has served as a sort of ‘historical microscope’, revealing every detail of the villagers’ lives. ‘Montaillou is only a drop in the ocean,’ wrote its celebrated historian, ‘but we can see the protozoa swimming about in it.’

The twenty-two members of the ostal of the Clergues dominated the village. Old Pons Clergue, a die-hard heretic, had four sons and two daughters. One son, Pierre, the priest of Montaillou, was a flagrant womanizer who died in prison. Another son, Bernard, the bayle or manorial bailiff, eventually suffered the same fate after elaborate attempts to save his brother by suborning witnesses. Pons’s widow, Mengarde, the matriarch of Montaillou’s heretics, was none the less buried under the altar of the parish church. One of the priest’s many lovers, Béatrice de Planissoles, a noblewoman, was first married to Bérenger de Roquefort, the castellan and agent of the Count of Foix. Twice widowed, she became the accepted concubine of the priest’s bastard cousin, Pathaud, who had once raped her. She took numerous bed-partners, even as an old lady, bore four daughters, and revealed all to the Inquisition. In 1322 she was condemned to wear the double yellow cross of the repentant heretic, [CONDOM]

The religious practices of the Cathars were heatedly discussed during the long fireside talks of the winter, and during long, intimate delousing sessions. They betrayed a two-tier system of morality—extremely severe for the Perfecti and extremely lax for the laity. At the end of their lives the former submitted to the endura, a last act of suicidal ritual fasting. The laity sought to be ‘hereticated’, that is, to receive the ritual consolamentum or ‘absolution’.

The dilemmas inherent in a part-Cathar and part-Catholic community were illustrated by the incident of Sybille Pierre’s infant daughter, who had been administered the consolamentum. The Perfectus forbade the sick baby to receive milk or meat. ‘When [they] had left the house, I could bear it no longer,’ the mother related, ‘I could not let my daughter die before my eyes. So I put her to the breast. When my husband came back … he was very grieved.’

Everyday life in medieval Occitania exuded a special emotional climate. People could weep quite openly. They saw no sin in sexual liaisons that were mutually pleasurable; they were not driven by any developed work ethic; and they had a marked distaste for conspicuous wealth. They had large numbers of children to compensate for high infant mortality; but they were not indifferent to their losses. They lived in a complicated world of belief where magic and folklore mingled with Catholicism and heresy. And they were frequently visited by death.

Bishop Fournier’s career was not damaged by his zeal at Pamiers. He rose to Cardinal in 1327, and Pope, as Benedict XII, in 1334. His Register found its way into the Vatican Library. His most lasting monument is the Palais des Papes at Avignon.

One of the best attempts to describe the plague was made by a Welsh poet, Ieuan Gethin, who saw the outbreak in March or April 1349:

We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance. Woe is me of the shilling of the armpit … It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion, a small boil that spares no-one. Great is its seething, like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of ashy colour … They are similar to the seeds of the black peas, broken fragments of brittle sea-coal … cinders of the peelings of the cockle weed, a mixed multitude, a black plague like halfpence, like berries …17

Popular reactions to the plague varied from panic and wild debauchery to dutiful fortitude. Many who could flee, fled. Boccaccio’s Decameron is set among a company of men and women incarcerated in a country castle for the duration of the plague. Others, losing the sense of restraint, indulged in orgies of drink and lechery. The clergy often suffered disproportionately from tending their flock. Elsewhere they left the sick to shrive themselves, the black flag flapping forlornly from the abandoned parish churches. The conviction reigned that God was punishing mankind for its sins.

Calculating the losses is a difficult, and highly technical, task. Contemporary estimates are often, and demonstrably, exaggerated. Boccaccio’s report of 100,000 dead in Florence exceeded the total known population of the city; 50,000 may be nearer the mark. Generally speaking, the towns were hit more severely than the countryside, the poor more than the rich, the young and fit more than the old and infirm. No pope, no kings were stricken. In the absence of anything resembling a census, historians have to base their calculations on fragmentary records. In England they use the court rolls, the payment of frank-pledge dues, post mortem inquisitions, or the episcopal register. Specific studies can suggest very high rates of mortality: the manor of Cuxham in Oxfordshire lost over two-thirds of its inhabitants;18 the parish priests of England were reduced by 45 per cent. But it is hard to extrapolate any general conclusions. Cautious estimates suggest overall losses of one-third. ‘That one European in three died during the Black Death … cannot be wildly far from the truth.’ This works out at 1.4–2 million deaths in England: 8 million in France, perhaps 30 million for Europe as a whole.

The social and economic consequences of such gigantic losses must have been very far-reaching. Indeed, the Black Death was conventionally seen by historians as the decisive point in the decline of the feudal system in Western Europe. The second half of the fourteenth century was clearly a period of manorial dislocation, of languishing trade, of labour shortages, of urban distress. Yet nowadays specialists tend to argue that many of the changes were visible before 1347. Even basic demographic decline had set in at least thirty years before. This means that the Black Death was the accelerator of existing processes rather than their originator. At all events, serfs were increasingly commuting their labour dues for money rents, thereby creating a more mobile, and less dependent, labour force. Feudal vassals were increasingly commuting their military and judicial obligations for cash payments, thereby creating a phenomenon which in England has been called ‘bastard feudalism’. Above all, in a labour market deprived at a stroke of manpower, wages were sure to rise with rising demand. The money economy was expanded; social barriers were threatened, [PROSTIBULA]

The psychological trauma ran deep. Though the Church as an institution was weakened, popular religiosity increased. Charity foundations proliferated. Intense piety came into fashion: people felt that God’s wrath must be placated. In Germany, huge companies of flagellants flourished until suppressed on orders from Avignon. Communal scapegoats were sought. In some places lepers were picked on; elsewhere the Jews were charged with poisoning the water. In September 1348 a trial of Jews at Chillon was supported by evidence extracted by torture. It was the signal for wholesale pogroms: in Basle, all the Jews were penned into wooden buildings and burned alive; similar scenes occurred in Stuttgart, Ulm, Speyer, and Dresden. Two thousand Jews were massacred in Strasbourg: in Mainz as many as 12,000. The remnants of German Jewry fled to Poland—henceforth the principal Jewish sanctuary in Europe, [ALTMARKT] [USURY]

PROSTIBULA

THE terminal period of medieval Europe, from 1350 to c.1480, ‘was a golden age of prostitution’.1 Prostibula publica, public brothels, were licensed to operate in most towns. A small place like Tarascon, with 500 or 600 households, supported ten municipal whores. The Church did not protest: since the evil existed, it had to be channelled. Licensed fornication tempered street disorder, diverted young men from sodomy and worse, and broke them in for conjugal duty. After 1480, practice changed. Expensive courtesans served the rich, but many whorehouses were closed down. In Protestant countries, fallen women were liable to re-education.2

Throughout history, prostitution circulates through phases of licensed control, futile proscription, and unofficial toleration.

Popular risings were a prominent feature of the period following the Black Death. Demands on the surviving peasants soared, and a decimated labour force resented attempts to hold down wages, as in England’s Statute of Labourers (1351). A peasant jacquerie ravaged the castles and families of the nobility in the lle de France and Champagne before being cruelly suppressed. But the rash of risings in the years 1378–82, exactly one generation after the plague, does seem symptomatic of some general social malaise. Marxist historians have seized on the events as evidence of the ‘timeless characteristics’ of class warfare. Others have dismissed them as ‘outbursts of anger without a future’.20

Yet contemporaries had good reason to take fright when the endemic disorders of the towns were fused with more widespread violence in the countryside. In 1378, during the revolt of the ciompi or wool-carders, Florence was taken over for several months by riotous elements. In 1379 the weavers of Ghent and Bruges rose against the Count of Flanders in a vicious outbreak reminiscent of an earlier episode in the 1320s. Both culminated in pitched battles with the royal army, and once again, Ghent held out for six years. In 1381 several counties of England were drawn into the Peasants’ Revolt; in 1382 it was the turn of Paris:

The ramifications of the movement were noted by a Florentine merchant, Buonocorso Pitti, who was present at the French court:

The people of Ghent rebelled against their overlord, the Count of Flanders, who was the father of the duchess of Burgundy. They marched in great numbers to Bruges, took the city, deposed the Count, and robbed and killed all his officers … Their leader was Philip van Artevelde. As the number of [Flemish rebels] increased, they sent secret embassies to the populace of Paris and Rouen … Accordingly, these two cities rebelled against the King of France. The first insurrection of the Paris mob was sparked off by a costermonger, who, when an official tried to levy tax on the fruit and vegetables he was selling, began to roar, ‘Down with the gabelle.’ At this cry, the whole populace ran to the tax-collectors’ houses, and robbed and murdered them …. The popolo grasso, or men of substance, who in French are called bourgeois, fearing lest the mob might rob them, too, took arms and managed to subdue them.

ALTMARKT

ON Shrove Tuesday 1349, the Altmarkt of Dresden, the Old City Square, was filled with the smoke and flames of burning pyres. The Margrave of Meissen had ordered all the city’s Jews to be burned, probably on a charge of spreading the plague. This veritable auto-da-fé is described in theChronicum Parvum Dresdense.1

Six hundred years later, at 10 pm on the evening of another Shrove Tuesday, 13 February 1945, Dresden’s Old City was illuminated by a phosphorescent Primary Flare dropped by a high-flying pathfinder plane of 83 Squadron RAF. The Altmarkt had been selected as the base-point of the Target Area of the most destructive bombing raid in Europe’s history.

Despite the public stance, which affirmed that only military and industrial targets were selected, both the RAF and the USAF had followed the German Luftwaffe into a strategy of indiscriminate ‘area bombing’. In a bitter controversy over the priorities of the Allied Bombing Offensive, the advocates of area bombing, led by Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Harris, had won out. The technique was to send massed fleets of heavy bombers repeatedly against one city, and to wreak a crescendo effect of devastation.2 As Harris was to boast: ‘We shall take out one German city after another, like pulling teeth.’ The first 1,000-bomber Raid was launched against Cologne on 31 May 1942. But the desired effect was not fully achieved until the night raid on Hamburg on 27/28 July 1943, when the resultant firestorm killed over 40,000 people.

Dresden, the capital of Saxony, had reached 1945 virtually intact. The medieval Altstadt was ringed by elegant squares and boulevards, lined with Renaissance and Baroque monuments. The Royal Palace, the Georgenschloss, dated from 1535. The Catholic Hofkirche (1751) commemorated the Saxon Elector’s conversion to Catholicism. The Protestant Frauenkirche (1742) had been built to deplore it.

Dresden was now selected for a Main Force Raid in response to Soviet requests for Allied air support. The city was the main reception centre for hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the Soviet advance, and for their relief teams, mainly young women.

Ten minutes after the Primary Flare was dropped, the first wave of 529 Lancasters began to arrive from the south-west on a flightpath of 68°. Undeterred by flak or fighters, they dropped a lethal cocktail of high-explosive blockbusters and incendiary clusters. Within 45 minutes, the firestorm was raging. Dresden’s ancient heart, and everyone in it, was consumed.3

In the morning, as relief columns approached on the ground, a second wave of 450 Flying Portresses of the 1st Air Division of the US Strategic Air Force arrived. Fighter escorts strafed anything that moved.

Huge discrepancies divide estimates of the damage. The British Bombing Survey reported 1,681 acres totally destroyed. The post-war Dresden Planning Report counted 3,140 acres 75% destroyed. The local Abteilung Tote or ‘Death Bureau’ reported 39,773 identified dead by May 1945. This figure did not account for missing or unregistered persons, unrecorded burials, or the contents of numerous mass graves. It must be reckoned an absolute minimum. The chief of the Bureau later ventured an estimated total of 135,000 deaths. A British historian has suggested a range of 120–150.000.4 No one knows how many uncounted corpses were disposed of behind the SS cordons, as an endless stream of carts fed the pyres blazing once again on the Altmarkt.

The strategic impact of the raid appears to have been slight. Trains were running through Dresden within two days. Vital war factories, such as the electronics plant at Dresden-Neusiedlitz, were unscathed. The Red Army did not arrive until 8 May.

An information battle ensued. An Associated Press report, later disowned, announced ‘Allied air chiefs have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror-bombings of German population centres.’ A Nazi communiqué agreed: ‘SHAEF war criminals have cold-bloodedly ordered the extermination of the innocent German public.’ In the House of Commons, on 6 March 1945, Richard Stokes MP asked ‘Was terror-bombing now part of official government policy?’ The official reply was: ‘We are not wasting time or bombers on purely terror tactics.’

At 10.10 pm on 13 February 1946, church bells tolled in remembrance throughout the Soviet Zone of Germany. Of all Dresden’s churches, only the solitary shell of the Frauenkirche, with its shattered cupola, was still standing. On that same day, ex-Air Marshal Harris boarded a ship at Southampton in a bowler hat, bound for a civilian career abroad. Though he received a belated knighthood in 1953, he was not honoured like his peers until a monument was unveiled in London’s Strand on 31 May 1992. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the raid on Cologne. The Oberbürgermeister of Cologne lodged a public protest: ‘In my view, it makes no sense to commemorate war heroes like Arthur Harris’, he wrote, ‘although he fought on the right side and for the right cause.’

Anticipating Dresden’s own anniversary in 1995, Germany’s President Herzog reflected further. The bombing of Dresden, he said, ‘was an example … of the brutalization of man in war … History written by individual nations in which each one selects what he has done well cannot be allowed to continue. If we really want to unify this Europe, then history must be unified as well.’