‘Europe is only as wide as a short summer night.’ Thus Heinrich Boll could describe her breadth, from Russia in the east to the Atlantic seaboard in the west, in terms of a brief period of darkness. In contrast to the whole breadth and depth of the globe, small she might be. But her history was far from uniform. The attentive reader will have remarked that, for all the similarities between the histories of Europe’s numerous countries and the generalisations made by contributors to the first parts of this volume, the many differences noted have shown a continent of great variety.
As a major part of its inheritance, fifteenth-century Europe had accepted a considerable diversity of political systems. Furthermore, there had long existed an eagerness, now given greater actuality by the need to resolve the fundamental problem regarding authority created by the Great Schism, to discuss the nature and sources of authority, and how best it should be translated into legitimate and effective power. The system of rule by one, monarchy or principality, dominated much of Europe, particularly in its western parts. Yet other systems existed. One was that by which the Swiss Confederation was ruled, while another controlled the affairs of Venice. In Bohemia, there was a strong movement towards a wider form of popular participation in decision making in matters concerning society, something from which the Church, ruled by the pope (himself a kind of monarch), was not immune. Representation worked in some countries (England) but not in others (France). Some favoured it both out of principle and because it was thought to lead to more effective rule. One who taught this was Sir John Fortescue, whose criticisms of the French king’s dominium regale was based on the fact that the consent implied in his English counterpart’s dominium politicum et regale was conducive to a better relationship between ruler and ruled. The historian, it is clear, should not think of representative assemblies as being of only a single kind.
Indeed, it is argued, there were three, even four kinds of representative organisations in late medieval Europe, all representing different elements in the social order from which they were historically descended, all aiming to do rather different things. It is from the study of the functions of each form of such organisation that we can best understand its true nature, and thus judge the level of success of its achievement. Those who see assemblies as necessarily created to meet the political needs and demands of princes should think again. Corporate power could be exercised for purposes which were not political, because that had never been the intention in every case.
The diversity of European experience at the end of the Middle Ages could also be seen in the changing role played by nobilities, now increasingly national, in a rapidly altering world. How did this class (or classes) react to developments going on around it? What part, for instance, did nobilities play in the politics of their respective countries, and how far did ‘ascendant’ monarchies depend upon, and make use of, their support? There was certainly much variety of experience in this matter. How did this group, so varied in composition, background and tradition, react in different regions (even countries) to the changes occurring to its status? As the traditional fighting caste, how did the aristocracy adjust to developments taking place in the organisation and fighting of war? What had become of chivalry by 1500? Was it still something real, or was it mainly a show fit for the entertainment of court or public? And what of those attempting to achieve nobility, the new men who, having made their fortunes or reputations in trade or in the courts of law, sought to achieve social promotion, constituting, in some sense, a challenge to the older, military nobility? What is clear is that neither the problems, nor the solutions developed to resolve them, were uniform, their variety providing a further example of the diversity of experience of one group of people who, in spite of differences of nationality, saw themselves as sharing a common gentility, the vital hallmark of true noblesse.
In matters of religion much of the emphasis was on a world in which the lay believer was becoming significantly more important, the institutional Church and its clergy less so. In the long term, such a decline in appreciation of the Church’s sacramental life and teaching was likely to have more far-reaching effects than did heresy, whose manifestations were more readily perceived and counteracted. Yet it would be wrong to claim that the religion of the late Middle Ages, with its emphasis on personal devotion and its interest in the teachings of recluses (female as well as male), meant that the institutional Church no longer had the influence once claimed for it. The preaching of acts of piety and charity, the emphasis on penance, self-denial, prayer to the Virgin and to the saints, the growing appreciation by the individual of the Incarnation of God made man in the person of Christ, whose life, passion and death were a fecund source of devotional inspiration for artists and those who patronised them, constituted positive aspects of religious practice and thought in fifteenth-century Europe. The development of the manuscript book — in particular the book of hours — and, by the end of the century, of the printed prayer book met the growing demands of a world becoming more literate and better educated. Not surprisingly, when genuine calls for reform came (as they did), their source was often the laity seeking higher standards of morality and religious practice from all Christians. Likewise, it was a sign of the times that, as members of princely delegations, better educated laymen should have taken some part in the proceedings of the councils of the Church. The movement towards giving the laity a greater role in the Church’s affairs began at least a century before the Reformation occurred.
Such developments were encouraged and made possible by two factors. One was the growth of a better educated laity. The increase in the number of educational institutions, schools as well as universities, may be linked to the story of the layman’s growing role in society. Urban schools and charitable foundations helped to form the young. Opportunities for the educated to make careers outside the Church were becoming more numerous. It was increasingly the secular world, and its demands, which were to inspire the foundation of numerous new universities (and, at Oxford and Cambridge, a number of new colleges and other foundations) whose general purpose was not only to enhance the honour of God and the defence of the faith (the religious element underlining the foundation of universities, often the inspiration of a bishop, should not be forgotten) but also to help in the advancement of that more elusive ideal, ‘le bien et prouffit de la chose publique’. This could be furthered in a number of ways. The creation of an educated class to promote good government was one of them.
Closely linked to education as a means of advancing the layman’s position in society was the invention of printing, which appeared in the second half of the century. It is easy to claim that this development, whose practical effect was to be so great, was the most long-lasting single advance made in fifteenth-century Europe. However, it is as well to recall that contemporary opinion was not at one regarding the benefits and advantages of printing. Yet, in spite of such scepticism, it was soon to help in all forms of education, by encouraging learning and giving Europe ‘research centres of scholarship’, and allowing writers to enter controversy and argue their opinions in forms which could then be circulated. Princely courts soon seized upon the opportunities being offered. The texts of new laws could now be publicised in print. As men had been accustomed in time of war to listen to exhortatory propaganda from the pulpit, so now printing could be turned to educating the people about the issues of their day and increasing their awareness of the world around them. Erasmus was not alone in taking up the chance which the new technology gave him. The debates of the sixteenth century, the very form of the Reformation itself, might have been different without the development of the press.
The economic history of Europe was affected by famine and even more by war, although it is claimed that war did not have as ruinous an effect on international trade as might be expected. The worst sufferers were the vulnerable rural communities which took their time to recover (since recovery involved rebuilding, the reintroduction of marginalised lands into the economy, and investment of scarce financial resources in tools, as well as a determination on the part of populations to recreate their societies), but much was achieved in the years of relative peace of the second half of the century. Historians are broadly agreed that populations began to increase and the sources of wealth were regenerated mainly in the century’s third quarter, although the revival was not always general (France and Portugal were among the countries which did see this happen during these years; England, on the other hand, saw little change during that same period).
The decline in population had had less effect on towns which, although in many instances less prosperous than they had been, found their power extended as they came to dominate both their hinterlands and, in the case of important towns, the smaller ones within their economic orbit, a development which obliged such urban communities to take action to protect the activities of their merchants. Ports had a good future before them, in particular if they were involved in northern Europe’s trade with the eastern Mediterranean which dealt mainly in luxury goods, for which a strong demand existed in an age which witnessed a rising standard of living.
Towns had social as well as economic roles to play. In many parts of Europe, above all in Italy and the Low Countries, they had a cultural vocation to fulfil. This could take on a number of forms. Many towns saw themselves as the providers of education, chiefly in the form of schools, in some cases of universities as well. The large urban corporations, or guilds, acted as artistic patrons, whose demands attracted artists to work for them or their members. In some parts of Europe, in Germany and, in particular, in Italy, cities encouraged the study of their history as one means of securing political prestige in an increasingly competitive world; the present could be enhanced by men’s aware ness of the past. Likewise, the tradition of providing communal entertainment on feast days (a tradition which some rulers gratefully took up as a means of enhancing their own prestige) led to the writing of plays and the creation of pageants in which both religion and chivalry played a notable part. The early history of printing, too, was often associated with towns. By 1469 Venice had already become the adopted home of the German printer, Johannes de Spira, an early association which was to make Venice, with its wide network of commercial links stretching to all points of the compass, a natural centre for printers to set up their workshops.
Change was having an effect upon the traditional elites. The military nobility, as we have seen, was seeing far-reaching changes pass before it. The public’s esteem of the soldier, the artistic evidence would suggest, was at least an ambiguous one. New kinds of elites were appearing. With the development of technology, the technician began to rise in the world to enjoy a good standard of living as well as the favour and patronage of princes. It is clear, too, that a new view of the artist was emerging. This was promoted by the writing of the lives of artists, such as that of Brunelleschi composed by Manetti. It was also furthered by the enhanced role played in the public gaze by artists who competed against one another to secure public commissions. The artists’ places of work, their ateliers, also played a part in educating the layman in artistic values and techniques, so that ordinary citizens acquired a better understanding of artists and their work. In this way these drew attention to themselves and to their contribution to society, earning both public praise and criticism in the process.
A major theme, principally of the fourth part in the present History, has been the emphasis, however variable, placed upon the development of the state and the growth of government which accompanied it. The rise of the state, which historians of recent years have traced back to the thirteenth century, took on different forms and emerged at different tempi in different parts of Europe. Everywhere it was to involve, in some way or other, a development of central control over a variety of aspects of life: religious, economic, military and cultural. Royal intervention in England against the subversive activities of the Lollard heretics in the century’s early years, and the establishment, by royal request in 1478, of the Inquisition in Castile, originally to deal with converted Jews who renounced their Christianity, were both instances of the growth of an important trend, that of the extension of secular authority over matters which, not long before, might have been regarded as the preserve of ecclesiastical authority. In the socio-economic sphere, the significance of the political poem The Libelle of Engjyshe polycye (c. 1436) lay largely in the author’s urgings that the government of the day should take action to improve the future of England’s commercial and fishing communities which were being harmed by foreigners; while France, in the decades following the ending of the war with England, would witness royal intervention in the movement of populations and in the attempt to create favourable conditions for economic recovery through manufacture and the regulation of trade. The development of taxation, already advanced in many territories by 1400, was now becoming a marked feature of life over the whole of Europe. This was so particularly in those countries involved in long wars requiring the financial support which only the state, which alone had the authority and the means of raising taxes, could provide. What distinguished war in the fifteenth century from, say, war in the thirteenth was not so much the techniques used as the ability of the growing state to sustain the different forms of effort which war now required. Another, albeit very different, form of intervention could be observed in the encouragement given to printers by granting them a ‘privilege’, or monopoly of the production and sale of a particular book for a specified period of time after publication. Begun in Germany in 1479 as an agreement between a bishop and a printer anxious to secure the monopoly of providing breviaries for the diocesan clergy, the practice was taken up by the duke of Milan to promote a book in praise of the Sforza family, before spreading to other countries in the early sixteenth century. Originally an encouragement to enterprise, in different times the process could become a way of controlling the works which came off the presses.
The appreciation of how an educated class could help further the interests of states encouraged rulers not only to help found schools and universities, but also to influence the appointments of teachers and the creation of syllabuses. Humanism, with the contribution which it might make to the educational, administrative and political requirements of a country (the mastery of the Latin language which a humanist orator, or ambassador, might use to express his master’s ideas and intentions), was widely appreciated outside Italy. And with education went the importance of the printed word which lay behind the development of a better educated and more widely informed public. The translation into vernacular languages of texts from the ancient world, and the production of a wide variety of handbooks on how (for example) to rule, fight, pray, preach or hunt constituted typical products of the late Middle Ages. Every encouragement should be given, through self-education and the acquisition of knowledge, to the fulfilment of that human potential in which the humanists believed so strongly.
The history of state development was not simply the history of institutions. Individual rulers, and therefore the power of the office which they exercised, lay at the centre of that growth. Yet, to place proper emphasis upon the role played by the monarchies of Europe is not to return to an old-fashioned form of history ‘about kings and queens’. On the contrary, it is to give the monarchical office the attention which is its due. As one writer has recently put it, European monarchy consolidated its power during this century. In some kingdoms it did so by pursuing a policy founded on the complementary supports of legitimacy and dynasticism. In France (where the royal cause in the conflict against England was the legitimate succession to the throne enhanced by an appeal to a growing sense of dynasticism), in Portugal (where the Avis dynasty brought a sense of continuity and stability to the country) and in England (where there were four challenges to the succession between 1399 and 1485) legitimacy, expressed in the principle of obedience to the ‘natural lord’, lay at the base of monarchical stability. Not surprisingly, legitimacy embodied in dynasticism was emphasised by political propagandists, who stressed the age of a country’s monarchy (the older, the better) and the long centuries of continuous rule which it had given. Dynasticism was also important in another way. The case of the duchy of Burgundy demonstrates how it might cement the formation of a largely artificial state by emphasising loyalty to the (Valois ducal) dynasty as the force uniting a number of diverse territories (some acquired by force of arms) which shared neither the focal point, language, history nor customs which might otherwise have kept them together. Significantly, it became common to present a dynasty in the form of a family tree; the political claim being made was clear enough to all who saw it.
In spite of difficulties and some loss of power (to the nobility in eastern Europe, for example) ‘as the fifteenth century proceeded, the momentum of monarchy noticeably increased’, no sign of this being more effective than the increasingly frequent use made of the symbolic closed ‘imperial’ crown to demonstrate and underline the independence of the ruler and his firm control of his people. Thus reassured and, at least in theory, immune from deposition (although Pope Paul II formally deposed King George of Podebrady for heresy in 1466) rulers could assume increasingly ‘absolute’ powers, particularly in the kingdoms and principalities of western Europe. This was the case under Alfonso in the kingdom of Naples; it was so, too, in France under Louis XI, as it was under in Castile and Aragon under the ‘Catholic Kings’. Yet, in some cases, absolutism was softened by a more paternalistic form of rule: the obligations of rulers towards their people were emphasised by the dukes of Burgundy, while both Joao I of Portugal and Louis XII of France were to be accorded the title of ‘father of the people’ by their subjects.
Yet even the father must have sufficient power to rule (regere) firmly and effectively. The use of the comparative approach can tell us much about how rulers built up these powers. Some governed by personality, by centring power around themselves. In England, the rule of Edward IV is regarded as having been very ‘personal’; by contrast, Henry VII, his successor but one, relied more on institutions, perhaps unwittingly helping to usher in the age when, some decades later, a form of ‘revolution in government’ would be introduced. Portugal witnessed the growth of royal power through the control, exercised in the kings’ name, over the institutions of sovereignty, and the claim to sole authority to act for the general good against particular interests. The traditional role of the crown as legislator still won general consent. In France, among the most ‘advanced’ of the monarchies, royal power was made effective by using the nobility both to exercise royal authority in the regions and to act as ‘go-between’ between the king and the localities, thus usurping the traditional, but never well-developed, role of the estates. Strong links between kings and those who worked in their service became extremely important. In England, France and Scotland, for instance, bonds — which could take the form of membership of chivalric or princely orders — formed an increasingly important way of achieving clientage or dependence. Princely courts, always important, were to be accorded an increasingly significant role in the exercise of power and, in the case of monarchies and principalities, in the management of the developing state. Already centres of patronage where, in difficult times, men sought the offices which would lead, as in France, to the creation of a new nobility, de robe, they became centres of magnificence and of ceremony much of it, both north and south of the Alps, inspired by chivalry. In a world in which not all countries (such as Scotland and Savoy) had well-established and fixed capitals, the courts of itinerant kings and princes acted as both ceremonial and political alternatives, in effect as centres of power where the decisions affecting the state were taken.
Significantly, the political vocabulary of the time was being adapted both to take account of and to encourage the perceived development of the state. By the fifteenth century the term respublica, having come to mean first the people working together for a common end and then a synonym for the political community itself, now assumed yet another sense, with the emphasis placed on a particular political society admitting no superior and allowing no corporate rival within its jurisdiction, ruled by an ‘emperor’ wearing a closed crown. Such a development was likely to lead to the growth of self-awareness among individual states, deliberately cultivated and encouraged by princely and royal courts. This, too, would have the effect of furthering the divisions within society, something which became very clear to Pope Pius II when his failure to present a united response to the Ottoman threat at the Congress of Mantua in 1459 led him to recognise how much authority his office had lost and how far the interests and ambitions of individual states had become more important than the defence of Christendom. With the outbreak of the wars in Italy at the end of the century the process would take another step forward.
Europe was a continent whose constituent parts were now finding their feet, often painfully. Bohemia was divided by both religious belief and practice as well as by racial background and social thought. After the murder of Louis of Orleans in 1407, France, already long at war with England, inflicted upon herself the painful debate concerning tyrannicide, thereby making the century’s early years truly ‘le temps des divisions’. It was, in some measure, the need to find a response to those divisions which encouraged greater emphasis to be placed upon ‘Europe’, with its timely appeal to society’s sense of a corporate history, in the face of the growing Turkish threat from without and divisions from within. Helped by the humanists, the word ‘Christianity’ would very slowly be replaced by ‘Europe’ which, by the fifteenth century, was coming to be used with increasing frequency and marked emotional content. Significantly, it was the humanist, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, who would introduce the word ‘European’, meaning Christian, into the Latin language of his day.
Implied in this new word was a sense of unity among Christians. What was lacking, however, was peace. Men and women wrote about what it could do to society; in the early 1450s peace came to both France and Italy; in Castile, Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, above all in the Swiss Confederation, leagues were formed to create and preserve peace and the social order; and in 1464, a peace plan to encompass the whole of Europe was produced in the name of King George of Podebrady of Bohemia. In the early years of the new century the cry for peace would be taken up by Erasmus and his fellow humanists. Would their prayers ever be answered? Were the ambitions of the great monarchies, as well as those of smaller princedoms, truly compatible with lasting peace? Was there not something in the latest understanding of the word respublica which made it unlikely that the secular authority could live together with an independent Church? Could the peace of the late century be a reality? Or, as seemed more likely, was it simply the lull preceding the return to years of division which would shape the Christian Europe of the future?