Developments in Western during the High : c1000 CE to c1500 CE

Changes in Agriculture

Population growth in the Middle Ages after the tenth century resulted from decreases in Viking raids and improvements in agricultural methods for producing food. Farmers experimented with new crops and with different cycles of rotation (such as the three-field system) to ensure the most abundant harvest possible without compromising the fertility of the soil. During the high middle ages, European peoples expanded their use of water mills and wheeled heavy iron plows (like the moldboard plow), which had appeared during the , and also introduced new tools and . Two simple items in particular – the and the collar – made it possible to increase sharply the amount of land that cultivators could work. helped to prevent softened and split hooves on and tramped throughout moist European soils. Horse collars placed the burden of a heavy load on an animal’s chest and shoulders rather than its neck and enabled horses to pull heavy plows without choking. Thus Europeans could hitch their plows to horses rather than to slower oxen and bring more land under the plow. Scholars believe that the diffusion of the horse collar to Europe was a complex phenomenon, with the collar itself diffusing to northern Europe across and the breast strap harness diffusing from north Africa through Islamic Iberia. The agricultural surplus created in part by these varied innovations encouraged the growth of towns and of markets that could operate more frequently Figure 1 A peasant plows using the moldboard plow, horse collar, and breast strap harness. than just on holidays.

Excerpted from Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, p410

The Revival of Towns and Trade

“With abundant supplies of food, European society was able to support large numbers of urban residents – artisans, crafts workers, merchants, and professionals. Attracted by urban opportunities, peasants and serfs from the countryside flocked to established cities and founded new towns at strategically located sites. Cities founded during Roman times, such as Paris, London, and Toledo (in Spain), became thriving centers of government and business, and new urban centers emerged from Venice in northern Italy to Bergen on the west coast of Norway. Northern Italy and Flanders (the northwestern part of modern Belgium) experienced especially strong urbanization. For the first time since the fall of the western Roman empire, cities began to play a major role in European economic and social development.

The growth of towns and cities brought about increasing specialization of labor, which in turn resulted in a dramatic expansion of manufacturing and trade. Manufacturing concentrated especially on the production of wool textiles. The cities of Italy and Flanders in particular became lively centers for the spinning, weaving, and dyeing of wool. Trade in wool products helped to fuel economic development throughout Europe. By the twelfth century the counts of Champagne in north France sponsored fairs that operated almost year-round and that served as vast marketplaces where merchants from all parts of Europe compared and exchanged goods. The revival of urban society was most pronounced in Italy, which was geographically well situated to participate in the trade networks of the Mediterranean basin. During the tenth century the cities of Amalfi and Venice served as ports for merchants engaged in trade with Byzantine and Muslim partners in the eastern Mediterranean. During the next century the commercial networks of the Mediterranean widened to embrace Genoa, Pisa, Naples, and other Italian cities. Italian merchants exchanged salt, olive oil, wine, wool fabrics, leather products and glass for luxury goods such as gems, spices, silk and other goods from India, southeast Asia, and that Muslim merchants brought to eastern Mediterranean markets.

As trade expanded, Italian merchants established colonies in the major ports and commercial centers of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. By the thirteenth century, Venetian and Genoese merchants maintained large communities in Constantinople, Alexandria, Cairo, Damascus, and the Black Sea ports of Tana, Caffa, and Trebizond. Caffa was the first destination of the Venetian brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo when they embarked on their commercial venture of 1260. Those trade posts enabled them to deal with Muslim merchants engaged in the Indian Ocean and overland trade with India, southeast Asia, and China. By the mid- thirteenth century the Polos and a few other Italian merchants were beginning to venture beyond the eastern Mediterranean region to central Asia, India, and China in search of commercial opportunities.

Figure 2 Trade in Europe, c1300

Although medieval trade was most active in the Mediterranean basin, a lively commerce grew up also in the northern seas. The Baltic Sea and the North Sea were sites of a particularly well-developed trade partnership known as the Hanseatic League, or more simply as the Hansa – an association of trading cities stretching from Novgorod to London and embracing all the significant commercial centers of Poland, northern Germany, and Scandinavia. The Hansa dominated trade in grain, fish, furs, timber, and pitch (used for waterproofing ships) from northern Europe. The fairs of Champagne and the Rhine, the Danube, and other major European rivers linked the Hansa trade network with that of the Mediterranean.

As in post-classical China and the Islamic world, a rapidly increasing volume of trade encouraged the development of credit, banking, and new forms of business organization in Europe. Bankers issued letters of credit to merchants traveling to distant markets, thus freeing them from the risk and inconvenience of carrying cash or bullion. Having arrived at their destinations, merchants exchanged their letters of credit for merchandise or cash in the local currency. In the absence of credit and banking, it would have been impossible for merchants to trade on a large scale.

Meanwhile, merchants devised new ways of spreading and pooling the risks of commercial investments. They entered into partnerships with other merchants, and they limited the liability of partners to the extent of their individual investments. The limitation on individual liability encouraged the formation of commercial partnerships, thus further stimulating the European economy.

The growing cities of medieval Europe were by no means egalitarian societies: cities attracted noble migrants as well as peasants and serfs, and urban nobles often dominated city affairs. Yet medieval towns and cities also reflected the interests and contributions of the working classes. Merchants and workers in all the arts, crafts, and trades organized guilds that regulated the production and sale of goods within their jurisdictions. By the thirteenth century the guilds had come to control much of the urban economy of medieval Europe. They established standards of quality for manufactured goods, sometimes even requiring members to adopt specific techniques of production, and they determined the prices at which members had to sell their products. Figure 3 A tailors' guild in London, England

Excerpted from Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, p411-412 & 415

Gender Roles in the High Middle Ages

Women who lived in the countryside continued to perform the same kinds of tasks that their ancestors tended to in the early middle ages: household chores, weaving woolen cloth, and the care of domestic animals. But medieval towns offered and cities offered fresh opportunities for women as well as men. In the patriarchal society of medieval Europe, few routes to public authority were open to women, but in larger towns and cities women worked alongside men as butchers, brewers, bakers, candle makers, fishmongers, cobblers, innkeepers, launderers, money changers, merchants, and occasional pharmacists and physicians. Women dominated some occupations, particularly those involving textiles and decorative arts, such as sewing, spinning, weaving, and the making of hats, wigs, and fur garments. The career path of midwifery – the medical profession dealing with pregnancy and childbirth – was also dominated by women.

Women found their rights eroding as a wave of patriarchal thinking and writing accompanied the movement from an agricultural society to a more urban one. Men thought that less education was necessary for women, even though women often managed manor accounts. However, Christine di Pisan of Venice strongly challenged the idea that women could not be literate. She herself wrote prose and poetry in praise of women’s accomplishments, including The Book of the City of Ladies. Women in religious orders, such as nuns, had more opportunities to demonstrate their administrative skills than most other women of the time. Figure 4. Medieval midwives assisting with childbirth. Some women were allowed to become guild members and artisans, although not all had property rights. Women in Islamic societies tended to enjoy higher levels of equality, particularly in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia.

Advances in Medieval Scholarship

Scholarship in the medieval period was almost entirely in the hands of the Catholic Church and its clergy. For example, medical advances were almost unknown in Western Europe, since Church authorities believed that sin was the cause of illness. In their minds there was little need to look for other answers.

Nevertheless, had it not been for scribes in the monasteries, few manuscripts would have been saved and much more classical literature would have been lost in the days before the revival of learning in the Renaissance. Aristotle’s writings were the foundation for most of the learning in the period, along with Saint Jerome’s translation for the Bible into Latin, called the Vulgate Bible, created in the late Roman Imperial period.

Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century tried to reconcile Aristotelian knowledge with Christian faith, a system of study called Scholasticism. He argued that faith was not endangered by logical thinking. Aquinas’ view would open the way for secularism and Christian humanism of the Renaissance (beginning in Italy during the 1400s), as well as for the later Enlightenment ideas of progress, reason, and natural law (beginning in the 1600s in Western Europe).

During the high middle ages, economic development sharply increased the wealth of Europe and made more resources available for education. Meanwhile, an increasingly complex society created a demand for education. Meanwhile, an increasingly complex society created a demand for educated individuals who could deal with complicated political, legal, and theological issues. Beginning in the eleventh century, the Catholic Church in France and northern Italy began to organize schools in their cathedrals and invited scholars to serve as master teachers. Schools in the cathedrals of Paris, Chartres, and Bologna in particular attracted students from all parts of Europe.

By the twelfth century these cathedral schools had established formal curricula based on writings in Latin, the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. Instruction concentrated on the liberal arts, especially literature and philosophy. Students read the Bible as well as classical Latin literature and the few works of Plato and Aristotle that were available in Latin translation. Some cathedral schools also offered advanced instruction in law, medicine, and theology.

In time, these cathedral schools transformed into Europe’s first universities, operated by faculty guilds. The first universities in were those of Bologna, Paris, and Salerno – noted for instruction in law, theology, and medicine, respectively – but by the late thirteenth century, universities had appeared also in Rome, Naples, Seville, Oxford, Cambridge, and other cities throughout Europe.

The evolution of the university coincided with the rediscovery of the works of Aristotle. Western European scholars of the early middle ages knew only a few of Aristotle’s minor works that were available in Latin translation. Byzantine scholars knew Aristotle in the original Greek, but they rarely had any dealings with their Roman Catholic counterparts. During the high middle ages, as commerce and communication increased between Byzantine Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians, western Europeans learned about Aristotle’s thought and obtained Latin translations from Byzantine philosophers. Western European scholars learned about Aristotle also Figure 5. A classroom at a medieval university. Notice the attentive students, students holding through Muslim philosophers who conversations between themselves, and the students bored to tears and fast asleep. appreciated the power of his thought and had most of his works translated into Arabic. Christian and Jewish scholars in Sicily and Spain became aware of those Arabic translations, which they retranslated into Latin. This made Aristotle’s thought accessible to Western European scholars.

Towns that could afford it had an outstanding feature – a cathedral in the new Gothic style, which replaced a style common since the mid-eleventh century known as Romanesque. Rectangular in shape with stone vaulted ceilings, Romanesque cathedrals rested upon massive pillars and walls, and windows were few and narrow. These Figure 6. Chartres Cathedral in the Gothic style, France traits created a dark and forbidding appearance. Beginning in the middle of the twelfth century, the new Gothic cathedrals were lighter and airier, featuring architectural details such as arches; spires; stained-glass windows; gargoyles, which were exaggerated carvings of humans or animals designed to serve as water spouts; and flying buttresses, in which the buttresses, or supports, were extended outward from the wall to a stone foundation, rather than running alongside the wall.

Rising Social Tensions

In Europe, the death toll caused by the Black Death and Little Ice Age led to an acute labor shortage. Desperate to find tenants to cultivate their lands, the nobility had to offer generous concessions, such as release from labor services, that liberated the peasantry from the conditions of serfdom. The incomes of the nobility and the Catholic Church declined by half or more, and many castles and monasteries fell into ruin. The shortage of labor enabled both urban artisans and rural laborers to bargain for wage increases. Rising wages improved living standards for ordinary people, who began to consume more meat, cheese, and beer. At the same time, a smaller population reduced the demand for grain and manufactured goods such as woolen cloth. Many nobles, unable to find tenants, converted their agricultural land into pasture. In much of central Europe, cultivated land reverted back to forest. Thus, the plague redrew the economic map of Europe, shifting the economic balance of power.

Economic change brought with it economic conflict, and tensions between rich and poor triggered insurrections by rural peasants and the urban lower classes throughout western Europe. In 1378, in the Italian city-states, the working classes of Florence, led by unemployed wool workers, revolted against the wealthy families who controlled the city’s government. While the revolt failed, it clearly demonstrated the awareness of Florence’s working classes that the plague had undermined the status quo, creating an opportunity for political and economic change.

The efforts of elites to respond to the new economic environment could also to conflict. In England, King Richard II’s attempt to shift the basis of taxation from landed wealth to a head tax on each subject incited the Peasant Revolt of 1381. Led by a radical preacher named John Ball, the rebels presented a petition to the king that went beyond repeal of the head tax to demand freedom from the tyranny of noble lords and the Catholic Church.

In the end the English nobles mustered militias to suppress the uprising. This success could not, however, reverse the developments that had produced the uprising in the first place. High wages, falling rents, and the flight of tenants brought many estates to the brink of bankruptcy. Declining aristocratic families intermarried with successful entrepreneurs, who coveted the privileges of the titled nobility and sought to emulate their lifestyle. A new social order began to form, one based on private property and entrepreneurship rather than nobility and serfdom, but equally extreme in its imbalance of wealth and poverty.”

Excerpted from Crossroads and Cultures: A History of the World’s Peoples, p482-483

Changes in Politics and Warfare: 1350-1492

In the wake of the Black Death, kings and princes suffered a drop in revenues as agricultural production fell. Yet in the long run, royal power grew at the expense of the nobility and the Catholic Church. In England and France, royal governments gained new sources of income and established bureaucracies of tax collectors and administrators to manage them. The rulers of these states transformed their growing financial power into military and political strength by raising standing armies of professional soldiers and investing in new military . The French monarchy, for instance, capitalized on rapid innovations in gunpowder weapons to create a formidable army and to establish itself as the supreme power in continental Europe. This gunpowder technology had been introduced to Western Europe by the mid-fourteenth century due the expansion of the Mongol Empire (1200s-1300s).

The progress of the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) between England France reflected the changing political landscape in Western Europe. On the eve of the Black Death pandemic, the war broke out over claims in territories in southwestern France and a dispute over succession to the French throne. In the early years of the conflict, the English side prevailed, thanks to the skill of its bowmen against mounted French knights. As the war dragged on, the English kinds increasingly relied on mercenary armies, paid in plunder from the towns and castles they seized. By 1400, combat between knights conducted according to elaborate rules of chivalry had yielded to new forms of warfare. Cannons, siege weapons, and, later firearms undermined both the nobility’s preeminence in Figure 7. A medieval cannon, c1500

war and its sense of identity and purpose. An arms race between France and its rivals led to rapid improvements in weaponry, especially the development of lighter and more mobile cannons. Ultimately the French defeated the English, but the war transformed both sides, and the unified effort needed to prosecute the increasingly costly war all contributed to the evolution of royal governments and the emergence of a sense of national identity.

Ultimately, consolidation of monarchical power in Western Europe would create new global connections. In their efforts to consolidate power, Ferdinand and Isabella, like so many rulers in world history, demanded religious conformity. In 1492, they conquered Granada, the last Muslim foothold in Figure 8. Illustration of early firearms, c1500. Note the support Spain, and ordered all Jews and Muslims to convert to needed to operate the heavy gun. Christianity or face banishment. With the Reconquista (Spanish for “reconquest”) of Spain complete, Ferdinand and Isabella turned their crusading energies toward exploration. That same year, they sponsored the first of Christopher Columbus’ momentous transatlantic voyages in pursuit of the fabled riches of Asia.”

Excerpted from Crossroads and Cultures: A History of the World’s Peoples, p483-484

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