The Xenophile Historian

A History of Europe

1300 to 1485

	The Hanseatic League and the Merchants of Venice
	Scotland vs. England
	The Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy
	The Hundred Years War: From Sluys to Crécy
	The Black Death
	The Hundred Years War: Reverses and Revolts
	The Rise of the Hapsburgs
	The Union of Kalmar
	The Great Schism
	Wycliffe and the Hussites
	The Failure of Greenland
	The Hundred years War Resolved
	The End of the Byzantine Empire
	Burgundy's Bid for Glory
	The Wars of the Roses
	Showdown in Spain
	Renaissance Italy
	The Early Renaissance Men
	Economics at the End of the Middle Ages
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The Hanse was successful because it had bigger ships. The Danes were still using the Viking-style knarr, a shallow-drafted open boat designed to carry raiders. In the late twelfth century the Germans introduced the cog, a round-bellied, fully decked vessel. Cogs couldn't be dragged onto a beach, but they could carry five to ten times as much (150 tons), while costing little more to run. Scandinavian sailors couldn't compete with this; they still caught and salted herring in the Baltic and cod in the Atlantic, but their fish were now marketed by the Hanse.

Besides fish, the Hanse carried and sold the usual trade goods of northern Europe: wax, furs and woolens. Even so, the cogs had room for some new items, like Swedish copper and iron, or Prussian wheat and barley. The Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, himself a member of the Hanse, now became the greatest grain merchant in the world; when cargoes of his grain reached the West, it caused a significant price reduction.⁽¹⁾ Even more important in the long run were the English exports; England began to ship coal from Northumberland around this time. The British Isles and the Low Countries had been burning coal for many years, but it was only after Marco Polo reported large-scale use in China that people realized coal was worth selling to people who didn't live near the mines.

The Hanseatic trading network is an excellent testimony to the energy and initiative of medieval Germany. However, by Italian standards the Hanse was a minor-league player. Genoa, Milan, Venice and Florence each did ten times as much business as Lübeck. While Germany's economy was growing, so was Italy's, and the Italians remained ahead because they started so much earlier.

Besides the previously mentioned advantages of location and an advanced economy, Venice also had a powerful tool in the form of medieval Europe's largest industrial complex, a shipyard called the Arsenal (from the Arabic dar-sina'a, meaning "house of industry"). Founded in 1104, it was enlarged several times after 1300, until it sprawled across 80 acres and employed 16,000 men. The Arsenal dispatched Venice's commercial fleets, had storerooms with arms, armor and saddles for thousands of soldiers, and had a foundry for making cannon for the war galleys. Even so, Venice managed to keep the Arsenal's activities secret from most who didn't work in there, by surrounding it with high walls and twelve watchtowers.

The Venetians demonstrated the Arsenal's worth when King Henry III of France, a much-needed ally against the Turks, paid a state visit in 1574. City officials showed Henry the laying of a ship's bare keel in the morning, and twelve hours later they brought him back, so he could see the finished ship launched as a full-rigged galley. King Henry was duly impressed, and the alliance was assured.

In the sphere of finance the Italians were the masters until the Dutch took their place in the sixteenth century. Italian moneylenders were the first Europeans to practice banking as we know it; in fact, the word "bank" comes from banchi, the cloth-covered counters they used for doing business. It was also in Italy that the first gold coins were minted since the time of the Romans (Florence, 1252). These coins were known as florins, and soon Genoa and Venice had coins of their own, called genovinos and ducats (from ducate or duchy, the official description of the Venetian government). All three monetary units were made of pure gold, and weighed about 3.5 grams, so they were worth the same.

Italy's banking role came from the Papacy, the only international organization that made it through the Dark Ages. There were some sticky questions over the issue of banks charging interest ("usury"), which the Church had long prohibited, but nobody could find a profitable way to manage banks and investments without it, so priests and popes learned to look the other way, especially when bankers made donations to the Church or to charities. The pope's equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service preferred to employ Italian tithe collectors, and that alone kept plenty of Italians involved in banking, to the extent that even the North Sea trade was largely financed by them. By the early fourteenth century they had a banking network that stretched from London to Tabriz (the capital of Persia under the Mongols). Italian communities abroad were described as either Oltramonte (over the Alps) or Oltramare (overseas), while banking houses like the Bardi and Petruzzi of Florence had more money than most kings. In post-feudal Italy, money transformed values and became a new virtue, celebrated in poetry:

"Money makes the man,
Money makes the stupid pass for bright, ...
Money buys the pleasure-giving women,
Money keeps the soul in bliss, ...
The world and fortune being ruled by it,
Which even opens, if you want, the doors of paradise.
So wise he seems to me who piles up
What more than any other virtue
Conquers gloom and leavens the whole spirit."⁽²⁾

The new industry of finance made new demands on those who practiced it. The most important requirement was education, and this education had to be purely secular, not directed toward service in the Church. Maybe reading, writing and the ability to do math were optional in most industries, but to use the newly invented system of double-entry bookkeeping, they were absolutely essential. In addition, the complexity of the new society required more lawyers, and as they studied law, they turned to the precedents written down by Roman and Greek authors. Thus Italian education encouraged interest in the classics and prepared its students for the intellectual outburst of the Renaissance.

Soon other merchants were imitating the organization of the banking houses. For much of the Middle Ages trade was handled by individual peddlers, who wandered from market to market or gathered in towns for trade fairs. Now the most successful merchants established trading companies, and used their profits to build more ships, create new industries like mining, or set up offices abroad. Near the end of this chapter we will look at the most successful of these corporations, that of the Medici family in Florence.

The Italians also became producers in the textile trade. Before the 1220s, the cloth they made was only good for local sale. Gradually it got better, and by the 1320s Italian fabrics were of a quality that could compete with the best products of Flanders and the Levant. The raw materials had to be imported; wool from England, cotton from Egypt, and silk from Persia.⁽³⁾ Fortunately when the weavers were done, their Florentine woolens, Milanese fustians and Lucchese silks were worth enough to more than cover the cost. By itself, the Medici company produced enough cloth to employ 10,000 textile workers in 300 factories.

The disappearance of the pro-Christian Mongols in the 1330s and the arrival of the uncooperative Ottoman Turks made Mediterranean trade more risky and less profitable. The sea routes remained fairly safe, though, so long as Venice and Genoa had their string of island bases and Constantinople held open the Turkish jaws encircling the Black Sea. Each Turkish victory made the situation more precarious for Christendom, but Genoese and Venetians continued to fight each other bitterly; they never combined to stem the advance of Islam. Their long struggle reached a bitter climax in 1379-80, when the Genoese laid siege to Venice, only to be thrown back into the sea. Genoa had played her best card and never again did Venice come so near to defeat at the hands of her rivals. In the fifteenth century Venice annexed much of the north Italian plain, an enterprise that safeguarded her Transalpine route to Germany and provided enough farmland to keep her fed, but it also involved Venice in the perpetual and debilitating wars between the Italian city-states that she had previously sat out.

The picture painted so far in this section is a rosy one, but the late medieval economy did have some serious failings. First of all, the creation of the Italian textile industry caused the Flemish one to start declining around the same time. Second, they could do nothing about political instability to the east. The collapse of the Mongol Ilkhanate disrupted the silk trade, forcing the Venetians and Genoese to get their agents out of Persia in the late 1330s. Finally, England's King Edward III built up a mountain of debt when the Hundred Years War began; he refused to pay it, and that caused his main creditors, the Bardi and Peruzzi, to go bankrupt in 1343. This was a bitter blow to Florence, the soon-to-be headquarters of the Renaissance, but worse was to come.

Scotland vs. England

• 2 of the earliest had reigns so short that we know little besides their names--not a good sign.
• 15 were killed in battle, at the hands of Vikings, Englishmen or other Scots.⁽⁴⁾
• 4 were assassinated.
• 4 spent at least a year in prison, which could range from house arrest in a drafty castle to a hellish cesspit of a dungeon.
• 2 more, James III (1460-88) and Mary Queen of Scots (1542-67), were executed. Mary arguably had the worst biography of them all.
• 2, John Balliol and his son Edward, were defeated, deposed and forced into exile, which in those days didn't mean spending your last years in a fancy overseas hotel, as is the fate of today's ex-dictators.
• 2 died of natural causes, but at too young an age. Malcolm IV "the Maiden" (1153-65) lived to be 23, and Margaret "the Maid of Norway" (1286-90) checked out even sooner, when she was only eight.
• Constantine II (900-943) was so humiliated by the battle of Brunnanburh (see Chapter 7), that he eventually abdicated and became a monk.
• Edgar (1097-1107) was unmarried, childless and unpopular when he died at the age of 33. His submissive attitude to England, and his recognition of Norway's occupation of the Western Isles (the Hebrides and Isle of Man), led to an insulting nickname, "the Peaceable."
• Alexander III (1249-86) took back the Western Isles from the Norse in 1266, but all his children died before him, and at the age of 45 his horse carried him off a cliff. How embarrassing.
• Robert the Bruce saw most of his family killed by the English before the battle of Bannockburn, where he became Scotland's national hero (see below). Afterwards he suffered from poor health, and died of leprosy in 1329.
  However, Robert did manage an El Cid-style posthumous victory. What remained of his body was buried in Dunfermline Abbey, but he had always wanted to go on a crusade, so on his deathbed he told his friend James Douglas to take his heart on a war against the enemies of Christ. Douglas had the heart sealed in a silver box, and led a unit of soldiers to Spain, the nearest place that had Moslems to fight. Sure enough, they found a battle taking place between Christians and Moors; Douglas threw the box into the middle of the fracas, charged after it, and the rest of the troops followed. Though the Scots won the battle, Douglas was killed. The survivors recovered the heart, returned to Scotland, and buried the relic in Melrose Abbey, where it lay until a team of archaeologists discovered it in 1996.
• Robert II (1371-90) didn't get the short end of life's stick, but was boring and ineffective. When England invaded in 1384 and 1385, he was nearly seventy years old, and too ill to help the Scottish barons stop those invasions. Thus, he missed his best chance to be remembered as a heroic king like the first Robert, and after that, his son Robert III had to run the country for him.
• Robert III (1390-1406) was left crippled and bedridden by a horse's kick in 1388, and consequently was never healthy enough to rule alone; his brother, Robert Stewart the Duke of Albany, handled administration. His son and heir, David the Duke of Rothesay, was a murderous pervert who had to be imprisoned and executed in 1402. Fortunately, he had another son, James I, whom he sent to France to keep him safe from treacherous nobles at home. Unfortunately, James' ship was captured by the English, Robert died heartbroken, and James was held prisoner until 1423.
• James II (1437-60) saw a golden opportunity in the Wars of the Roses to take back Roxburgh Castle from the English. How did it go? Not too good--he was killed when the cannon he was standing next to exploded. He was only 29.
• James V (1513-42) became king when he was only 17 months old. When he grew up, he began a reign of terror, which only ended when he made the most common mistake of Scottish kings--he invaded England. His army was routed by Henry VIII at Solway Moss, James promptly went insane, and died a month later at the age of 30. John Knox described him thus: "he was called of some, a good poor man's king; of others he was termed a murderer of the nobility, and one that had decreed their whole destruction." In other words, he was called cruel in an age when all monarchs were expected to be brutal butchers.

Anyway, those grim statistics are meant to prepare the reader for the rest of this section. Returning to the narrative, relations between England and Scotland took a dramatic turn for the worse in the late thirteenth century. The trouble began with the extinction of the Canmore dynasty, caused by the aforementioned deaths of Alexander III and his granddaughter Margaret. Thirteen Scottish nobles subsequently put forth claims to the throne, and they sent a list of their names to England's King Edward I. Technically Scotland was no longer a vassal state of England, because a hundred years earlier, Richard I had allowed the Scots to buy their independence for ten thousand marks of silver. Still, Edward was happy to get involved, since his campaign against the Welsh had gone so well. The thirteen claimants were then reduced to three, all descendants of David I: John Balliol, Robert the Bruce and John Hastings. Edward chose John Balliol, thinking that he could rule Scotland through him. In November 1292, Edward led an army into Scotland and proclaimed Balliol as king.

Despite their initial request, many Scottish nobles and the overwhelming majority of the Scottish people bitterly resented English interference in their national affairs. Soon Balliol came under pressure to terminate English control, so in 1295 he formed an alliance with France (France and Scotland would be allied against England for the next three hundred years), and called for a revolt against the humiliations Edward I sought to impose on himself and the country. In response, Edward crushed Balliol’s army at Dunbar (April 1296), removed his former vassal, and decreed the annexation of Scotland to England. The Stone of Scone, the stone on which all previous Scottish kings had been crowned, was carried off to England as a war trophy, where it remained until 1996.

The next year saw two anti-British uprisings, led by Andrew Murray in the north and William Wallace in the south. Together they achieved a stunning victory at Stirling Bridge (September 11, 1297), where 5,000 English were killed, but Murray was also mortally wounded, so Wallace, now calling himself the agent of John Balliol, became the sole leader of the rebellion. In 1298 Edward personally led another army, and this time, reinforced with Welsh archers (this is the first time we see the longbowmen who would make such a difference in the Hundred Years War), they crushed the Scots in the battle of Falkirk. Wallace tried to continue the struggle as a guerrilla leader, and spent two years in France, trying to get the support of Philip IV, but in 1304 the other Scottish nobles submitted to English rule, and Wallace was declared an outlaw. In 1305 Wallace was betrayed to the English, convicted of treason, and given the execution of a traitor: he was tortured, hanged, cut down while still alive, and then finally disemboweled and beheaded. But in so doing, England turned Wallace into Scotland's official martyr, most recently remembered in the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart.

This wasn't the end of the matter, though. In March of 1306, Robert the Bruce, in a fit of rage, killed John Comyn, his hated rival; because he had done it in a church, he was now guilty of both murder and sacrilege. The only way to escape the law was to put himself above the law, so Robert rode as fast as he could to Scone and had himself crowned king. Most of the Scottish clergy and nobility soon rallied behind him, compelling Edward to march on Scotland one more time, but he was now sixty-seven years old and ailing, and died during the campaign. But at least he was a decent soldier; his son, Edward II (1307-27), was a disaster, more interested in sports than in war or matters of state, so Robert gained the advantage, both against pro-English nobles and against English garrisons in Scotland. Back in England, Edward II reminded people of Henry III by surrounding himself with foreign friends; the most notable of these, a French knight named Piers Gaveston, may have been the king's homosexual lover. In 1311 the alienated barons, led by Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, forced the king to appoint a committee of 21 nobles to manage the country; one year later they kidnapped and executed Gaveston.

By 1314, Robert had liberated nearly all of Scotland, and even Edward felt it was time to do something about him. However, the army he sent to relieve Stirling Castle only got as far as Bannockburn, where the English cavalry blundered into camouflaged pits and was slaughtered by Scottish pikemen. This was England's worst defeat since 1066, but Edward still refused to concede. Then Robert expanded the theater of war by sending his brother Edward to Ireland, hoping that an invasion of that island would keep the English from trying to invade Scotland again. As a diversion from the main front it worked, but as an expedition of conquest it failed; Edward Bruce knocked the Earl of Ulster out of the way, and marched around Connacht and up to the walls of Dublin, but he caused so much destruction that most Irish didn't see him as any improvement over their absentee English overlords. The adventure ended with Edward Bruce's defeat and death at the battle of Faughart (1318).

Meanwhile, Thomas of Lancaster was the real ruler of England. He and his council declared that the king could not appoint anyone or start a war without their permission. In response, Edward II made another despicable favorite, Hugh le Despenser, his chief advisor. The nobles couldn't stand Despenser, and they banished him and his son (also named Hugh) in 1321. However, they returned a year later, gathered an army with Edward, and defeated and killed Lancaster at the battle of Boroughbridge.

In 1325, Edward sent his queen, Isabella, and their son, Edward III, to pay homage to the queen's brother, King Charles IV of France; according to feudal law, the king of England was still a vassal of the French king, and this duty was required to keep the duchy of Aquitaine in English hands. While in France, Isabella had an affair with Roger Mortimer, one of Edward's disaffected barons, and they came back with an army to get rid of the Despensers and put Edward in his place. Parliament declared Edward II deposed in January 1327 (the first time they acted to remove a king), he was imprisoned, and was murdered in Berkeley Castle eight months later.⁽⁵⁾

Edward III (1327-77) was only a minor at this point, so his regents acted to end the war with Scotland. In 1328 they approved the Treaty of Northampton, which recognized Scottish independence. However, this Edward turned out to be a warrior king, and when he grew up he made his own attempt to reduce Scotland to vassalage. First he tried to install Edward Balliol as a puppet king (1332), but the Scots quickly threw the younger Balliol out. In response, Edward led an army northward, routed the Scots near Berwick-upon-Tweed, and occupied the southeastern part of the country. Then the Hundred Years War began, and Edward had to abandon both Balliol and his conquests, to go after a bigger prize, the chance to become king of France. With Edward gone, the Scots were finally left alone, and by 1341 they had recovered several important occupied areas, including Edinburgh.

The Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy

The fourteenth century was not a good time for the growth of Christendom. The Spanish Reconquista had halted in the mid-thirteenth century, because Christian Aragon, Castile and Portugal now paid more attention to each other than to Moslem Granada. The Finns and Lithuanians were converted in the northeast, but in the Balkans and Asia the Catholic Church retreated. Constantinople instantly lost its Latin patriarch when the Byzantines recaptured the city in 1261. The Bulgarian patriarch had gone back to Orthodoxy a generation earlier (1235), while the new Serbian patriarch, whose first job was to crown his patron, Stephen Dushan (1346), was Orthodox from the start. The Armenian patriarch remained faithful to the Papacy, but his state was squeezed out of existence by the Mameluke sultans of Egypt (1360-75). The Orthodox didn't have much to cheer about either; though they recovered ground in the Balkans, they lost their last towns in Asia Minor to the Turks. In the first half of the century the Russians and Georgians paid tribute to Moslem overlords; in the second half the Byzantines became Turkish puppets.

The Papal State in Italy was an attempt to set up a domain where the pope could rule like a real king. But the popes did not stop when they won their independence; they simply would not pass up any opportunity to meddle in secular matters. Their argument was that, since mankind was sinful, everything mankind did was under their jurisdiction. Thus the Papacy got involved in matters which should not have been any of its business, like claiming as Church doctrine the false idea that the sun and the planets all revolve around the earth.

The last of the great medieval popes, Boniface VIII, met his match in two strong-willed kings, Edward I of England and Philip IV of France. To finance their frequent and costly wars, both kings hit upon the same solution: tax the clergy. In 1296 Boniface signaled his opposition with the Clericis Laicos, a Papal bull (bulletin) threatening excommunication for any monarch who taxed the Church and any clergyman who paid the tax without Papal consent. But proclamations from Rome no longer carried the weight they used to; Europeans had seen enough abuses of Papal power to wonder if the pope really held the keys to the gates of Heaven; both Edward and Philip were confident enough of their own strength to do what they wanted, whether the Church was on their side or not. Edward answered with a decree that any clergyman who did not pay would no longer have legal protection, and all Church-owned land that did not have a house of worship on it would be confiscated by the king's sheriffs. Philip placed a complete embargo on all gold, silver and jewels going out of France, depriving the Papacy of income from the richest state in Christendom. Boniface soon gave in; he explained that he had not meant to keep priests and monks from contributing to their country's defense in times of dire need. Since the kings decided what constituted "defense" and "dire need," the royal victory was clear.

Despite this setback, the Papacy began the fourteenth century on an optimistic note. Everyday life had been steadily improving for centuries, and there was no reason to think this would not continue. In 1300 the pope celebrated the 1300th anniversary of the birth of Jesus by proclaiming a jubilee year. An estimated two million pilgrims poured into Rome to celebrate. So many gifts and offerings were heaped upon the altars that at St. Peter's, according to one chronicler, two priests were kept busy day and night "raking together infinite money."

The smashing success of the jubilee made Pope Boniface go over the top. In 1302 he issued the Unum Sanctum, a Papal bull which went farther than the others by declaring that the entire human race was under his authority. For Philip IV, this was going too far, and he replied with an equally uncompromising counterblast. The pope prepared his ultimate weapon, a bull of excommunication, but before he could publish it, Philip struck; he sent a squad of armed men to the Pope's hometown of Anagni with orders to bring Boniface back to France. Leading this delegation was a shrewd lawyer named William of Nogaret, a master of the trumped-up charge. William approved of any means used to get a desired testimony; his favorite technique was to strip a witness, smear him with honey and hang him over a beehive. For this case he brought a series of charges against the pontiff, which included an illegitimate election, simony, heresy, and immorality. They caught up with the eighty-six-year-old pope in his bedroom, heaped verbal abuse on him, and may have beat him up as well. Boniface was held prisoner for just over a day, until the locals rose up and rescued him. Numbed and humiliated, Boniface escaped to Rome and died a few weeks later, his bull of excommunication still unpublished.

It is worthy of note that only the people of the pope's native town cried out against this outrage. The king of France had acted with the full approval of his people; before he sent the expedition he called the Estates-General and got its consent for his rough handling of the head of Christendom.⁽⁷⁾ Nor was there any protest in England, Germany, or even the rest of Italy. The ideas of Christendom and Papal supremacy had lost their power over the minds of men. While popes and emperors quarreled over who had the ultimate authority, ordinary people had come to realize that they could get along fine without both.

The subsequent surrender of the Papacy to France was swift and complete. Boniface's successor was a short-lived, ineffectual ruler, and Rome slid into lawlessness. Because of that disintegration, a Frenchman, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, was elected next. This pope, Clement V (1305-14), accepted the Papal crown in Lyons and refused to go to Rome, so in 1309 the king of France set up a new headquarters for the Papacy at Avignon, which was as close to Rome as you could get without leaving France. After Clement the next six popes, also French citizens, stayed there as well. Avignon grew from a small town to a city of 80,000, with an immense clerical bureaucracy and a fine Papal palace. But during this 72-year period the popes seemed to be an administrative authority rather than a spiritual one; the voice of the Vicar of Christ just didn't sound the same when it was headquartered somewhere besides Rome. Later Martin Luther would appropriately call this time "The Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy." Meanwhile Europeans lost interest. They were weary of the church-state strife, and other problems were bothering them now.

The Hundred Years War: From Sluys to Crécy

In the early fourteenth century, there were several disputes between London and Paris: the two kings had argued and fought over French territory on the Continent; both nations had pirates in the English Channel; the French gave military aid to Scotland, England's perennial problem to the north; both sides competed to control the wool market in Flanders. The main issue, however, was the confusing relationship between the English and French kings, now brought to the forefront because of the extinction of the French royal family, the Capetians. Philip IV's eldest son and successor, Louis X, only ruled for two years (1314-16), and when he died he left behind a pregnant queen and a daughter named Jeanne. The French were not willing to give the throne to a female⁽⁸⁾, so the king's Great Council took charge and waited to see if the queen's baby would be a boy or a girl. It was a boy, and he is known to history books as either John I or John Posthumous. Unfortunately for the French, the infant king died five days later. The throne now passed to two short-lived brothers of Louis X: Philip V (1316-22) and Charles IV (1322-28). Neither one of them left a male heir, so with the death of Charles IV, the French picked a cousin, Philip of the House of Valois, and crowned him Philip VI. However, England's Edward III was a closer relative of the Capetians; his mother was a sister of Louis X, Philip V and Charles IV, making Edward a grandson of Philip the Fair. Now Edward put forth his own claim for the French crown. To the lions on his royal coat of arms he added the French fleur-de-lis.

Edward got off to a slow start; he sent an English force across the Channel to Flanders in 1338, though the first big battle didn't take place until 1340. In that year King Edward led the English fleet to the Flemish port of Sluys, where he encountered a larger French fleet, preparing to re-enact William the Conqueror's invasion of England. English archers fired a barrage of arrows at the French, making it impossible for them to attack or retreat until the English boarded them. The result was the first naval victory in English history. Most of the French ships were sunk or captured, giving England command of the Channel.

The English armies were also more effective than those of the French. With no thought of strategy, French knights charged the enemy at a mad gallop and then engaged in hand-to-hand combat. The English stopped this with the longbow; six feet long and made of yew or linden wood, the longbow shot steel-tipped arrows that were dangerous at 400 yards and deadly at 100. The usual English plan of battle called for the knights to dismount when they got to the battlefield. Protecting them was a forward wall of archers and a barricade of stakes, planted in the ground to impale enemy horses when the French launched their cavalry charges. By the time the enemy cavalry reached the dismounted knights, only a few remained for the English to take care of; the "feathered death" had done its work.

These tactics won a resounding victory for England when the two armies met at Crécy, at the mouth of the Somme River, in 1346. Again the French force was far larger (40,000 vs. 8,500), and this time the French had archers of their own--crossbowmen from Genoa--but both knights and archers were hopelessly outclassed. The English longbow could send five or six arrows per minute; during that time, the crossbowman could only load and fire one shot, which traveled half as far. The English poured so many arrows into the French that according to one witness, "they fell like snow." Meanwhile, the inept Philip VI worked hard to destroy his own army. When he saw the surviving crossbowmen retreating, the enraged king ordered his knights to kill them, though the longbowmen were still raining down arrows on both. Philip then ordered 15 cavalry charges against the English line, all of which were stopped by the arrows. The score at the end of the day: France lost 11,500, while killing only 200 Englishmen.

It was not only on the battlefield that the French got the worst of it; the war took place on French soil, leaving the homes of the English relatively unaffected by the conflict. Up to this time European wars had been well-behaved by our standards. All combatants followed the customs of chivalry and decrees laid down by the church, as if they were going to a football game rather than a life-and-death struggle. Civilians were never targets, and largely ignored by both sides. When fall arrived everybody went home for the winter and came back the following spring, to pick up where they had left off. Fighting did not take place on Sundays or holidays, nor would it begin until both sides said they were ready. The only battles which lasted more than a day were sieges, and a siege was something to avoid if at all possible, since the attacker often suffered more than the defender whose castle he was trying to take. But the logistics of shipping at that time meant that it was impractical to withdraw the English army across the Channel at the end of each campaign season, only to send them back to France a few months later, so the English soldiers and Genoese mercenaries learned to live off the land instead. In the process they wasted the countryside and acted like the barbarians of old. Crops and houses were burned, the land was picked clean of anything portable and useful, and the inhabitants were made penniless--if they were not simply killed.

The Black Death

Medieval writers blamed the plague on the Mongol hordes which had swept out of Asia and conquered Russia in the previous century. The first reported outbreaks were in Sarai and Astrakhan, the two main cities of the Golden Horde, in 1346. In early 1347 it reached the Genoese ports of Tana at the mouth of the Don, and Kaffa in the Crimea. The Mongols were attacking Kaffa at the time, and they employed the first known use of germ warfare; they loaded the corpses of those killed by the plague into catapults and flung them over the city walls. But microbes don't care about politics, and soon they infected both sides with glee.⁽⁹⁾ The Mongols were forced to abandon the siege, but the defenders wouldn't have been much worse off if the city had been taken. Rats carried the pestilence to Trebizond and Constantinople on homebound ships, and from Constantinople to Alexandria, Venice and Genoa. The first half of 1348 saw the plague rage across Italy, southern France, and Mediterranean Spain. By the end of the year it had swept through the Balkans, spread from Lower Egypt to Syria and the rest of North Africa, and got a foothold in the British Isles. England's turn came in 1349, Germany's and Scandinavia's in 1350. In 1351 it reached Poland, in 1352 Russia. The last major town to be hit was Moscow, where in 1353 the plague killed the Grand Prince, both of his sons and one of his brothers. This brought the epidemic back to the Volga, a few hundred miles upstream from where it started seven years earlier.

Normally bubonic plague is a disease of rodents; humans get it when most of the rodents die and their fleas, the real carriers of the plague bacterium, are forced to seek new hosts. The fourteenth century epidemic apparently got started among the jerboas (ground squirrels) of south Russia, whose furs were popular among traders. The epidemic became explosive when it reached the rats in the seaports of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Rats can stowaway easily in ships, but not in wagons, so inland the plague spread slowly, and sometimes missed a community altogether. On the other hand, the plague hit humans and rodents on the islands exceptionally hard.

The number of victims was clearly colossal. The Italian city of Sienna, for example, reported losing 70,000 of its 100,000 inhabitants. "No one wept for the dead," wrote a resident of that devastated city, "because everyone expected death himself." In most places survivors claimed a mortality rate of 50 to 75 percent, but they rarely produced documents to back this up. One institution that did was the Church of England, and its records show that in most of the country a third of the clergy perished. Until we hear otherwise, we'll guess that a third of the people died in the average community. Modern estimates of the body count range from 20 to 100 million, with 25 million as the most likely figure.⁽¹⁰⁾

The French and the English were forced to take time out from their war when the plague hit them, but a few years later they were beating up on each other again; the armies were smaller but the strategies were the same. Apparently most Europeans thought that life would go back to the way it had been before. In addition, the survivors found themselves with extra land and money, because the dead couldn't take it with them.

Unfortunately, they weren't going to recover that easily. The plague germs found new hiding places in the countryside, and in 1357 a second outbreak began in Germany. It advanced slower this time, but it spread across most of the Continent during the next eight years. In areas that had been hit before, the deadliest plague germs had died with their victims (unless they could find another host), so the combination of weaker bugs and people with some immunity to the disease meant that fewer deaths occurred. However, there were still heavy casualties in areas that had escaped the first epidemic, and a new outbreak would occur about once per decade for the rest of the century, with a really bad one striking in 1400. Instead of recovering, Europe's population bumped against a ceiling of 60 million. In the Far East, the plague reached China between thirty and forty years after its first appearance in Europe; Chinese bureaucrats reported thirteen million killed there.

The damage done to society by the Hundred Years War was trivial compared to what the Black Death inflicted. So many fell victim that there were scarcely enough alive to bury the dead, and the dumping of several bodies into a mass grave replaced the standard funeral service. Many places suffered from famine because there was no one left to work the fields or bring the harvest to market. Schools, universities and other institutions broke down because of the lack of trained personnel to run them. Crafts suffered irretrievable losses because guild masters died before they could teach all their skills to their apprentices. For decades afterward, lawyers and judges were not expected to be familiar with the old unwritten laws that their fathers and grandfathers had lived by.

Many saw the Black Death as God's punishment for the moving of the Papacy to Avignon, the lifestyle of the current pope (Clement VI lived like the more extravagant Roman emperors), the Hundred Years War, and various other sins of mankind. No conqueror, not even Genghis Khan, had taken this many lives. The fright and horror stirred by the plague encouraged extreme forms of behavior. Some lost faith in Christianity completely, and became Satanists. Others joined the Flagellants, a new religious order whose members believed they could purify themselves of sin, and avoid further punishment, by beating themselves with leather scourges tipped with iron spikes. Superstition and mysticism increased, and people at this time had a morbid fascination for dead things; pictures and statues of skeletons and wormy corpses were common art subjects. Literature about Ars Moriendi, the art of dying, became immensely popular.

The Hundred Years War: Reverses and Revolts

While the king was gone, the pent-up wrath of the lower classes exploded. The Dauphin (crown prince) of France had to flee Paris after a mob forced him to wear a red and blue cap, the colors of the rebel movement. The entire northern part of the country was engulfed in a peasant revolt called the Jacquerie, named after a peasant named Jacques who launched the uprising because the local lord had failed to protect his peasants from the war's destruction and mercenaries, while continuing to insist on his usual rents and services. Maybe the peasantry had a legitimate grievance, but their rebellion was doomed to fail because of a lack of planning and arms. The rebels set fire to manor houses and killed any lord they caught unguarded, but staves and scythes are no match for swords and lances. Brutal reprisals followed the crushing of the insurrection, known troublemakers were hanged outside their own cottages, and entire villages were razed.

The anarchy caused by the Jacquerie allowed a pretender to appear. When the rest of Europe heard about John II's capture, a merchant in Siena, Giannino di Guccio Baglioni, announced that he was he was the rightful king of France, John I. According to his story, it was not John the infant king that died forty years earlier, but the baby in the cot next to him; to keep John safe, the babies were switched and the living one was smuggled to Italy. Now Giannino announced his own claim to the French throne, though the only evidence he had for it was the fact that he was born at the same time as the real John. He got financial backing from a Jewish merchant in Venice, and after a fruitless trip to Hungary, he produced fake letters claiming that the Hungarian king backed him, too. Next he went to Avignon, but Pope Innocent VI wanted nothing to do with this business. The 1360 treaty between England and France left enough mercenaries unemployed for Giannino to recruit them as a small private army, but with King John II back, the opportunity to replace him had also passed. Instead of marching on Paris, Giannino was captured in Provence, and died in the pope's prison less than a year later.

Once the Jacquerie was over and the pretender was locked up, the French were able to renew the war, and this time they were on the winning side. In 1364 the same Dauphin who had been mocked by the Paris mob, now known as King Charles V (Charles the Wise), became the next king of France. To lead the war effort he found a brilliant general from Brittany, Bertrand du Guesclin. In 1369 the people in southwestern France, oppressed by the rule of the Black Prince, called on Charles for help, and he was happy to oblige. During the next ten years Bertrand wore down the English and drove them from all of the territory they held in France except for the ports of Calais, Cherbourg, Brest, Bordeaux and Bayonne. The secret behind his success was that he deliberately avoided battles with the English; whenever he heard where the English were, he sent his troops to take an unguarded castle somewhere else. He may have gotten away with this because he was a commoner; other French military commanders, having been brought up with the ideals of chivalry, attacked any enemy they could find and lost their battles, again and again.

Unfortunately Charles V profited little from Bertrand's victories; he felt compelled to give much of the recovered land to his brothers as extensive duchies. Once of those duchies in particular, Burgundy, was an independent state, for all practical purposes. The next French king, Charles VI, was a witless youth who suffered from frequent, recurring spells of madness. Since nobody made it clear who would run the country while the king was in "his malady," two factions fought for the job: one was headed by the duke of Orléans and the count of Armagnac, while the duke of Burgundy led the other. This delighted the English; the only thing they liked better than chaos across the Channel was dead Frenchmen across the Channel.

The military reverses brought forth the same spirit of rebellion in England that had triggered the Jacquerie in France. The Black Death had caused a critical shortage of labor, so those workers left alive felt important enough to demand higher wages; if they didn't get them, they deserted to new employers willing to pay their price. Parliament, composed largely of landholders, was so horrified that in 1351 it passed a law ordering imprisonment for any laborer who refused to work at pre-plague wages. But you can't legislate economics, and laws like these had little effect. Now it was England's turn to loathe the war and watch the common people challenge the government at home.

Edward III was a very popular king, even in his own family; while he was in charge there was peace at home. His fifty-year-long reign ended with his death in 1377. Edward the Black Prince had died a year earlier, so the Black Prince's ten-year-old son was crowned Richard II, and guided by a twelve-man council until he came of age. To finance the war, Parliament imposed a new head tax, which anyone but a certified pauper was required to pay.

For the lower classes, this tax was the last straw. Open revolt flared in 1381, and rebel armies recruited the unemployed soldiers who had just returned from France. Led by an ex-soldier named Wat Tyler, the rebels marched from Kent and Essex to London. Sympathetic Londoners opened the gates for the newcomers, who promptly went on an orgy of destruction. During the next three days they murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury and burned many mansions, including that of the king's uncle, John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and the richest man in England. King Richard went to meet with the rebel leaders and agreed to their demands, which included an abolition of serfdom along with lower rents and taxes. But at a second meeting the following day, one of the king's followers slew Wat Tyler, and the rebellion collapsed. As in France, the rebels went home with their demands unfulfilled and the prospect of retribution from the local lords when they got home.

Though Wat Tyler's revolt was a failure, the king got the message. The hated tax was eliminated, and serfdom began to die out. More important, the peasant and the townsman found they could work together to win more rights from the government. Never again in England would anyone allow an economic gap between the upper and lower classes to grow as great as it did in other countries. This also was the time when England produced one of the first known populists, a clergyman named John Ball. The nobility called him mad, but the common people listened as he fervently argued that those at the top of the social ladder were really no better than the masses they ruled over and profited from. John Ball's preaching was soon condensed to an easily remembered rhyme: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?"

A year after the Wat Tyler rebellion, Richard II married Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman emperor Charles IV, and began to assert himself against the great nobles who controlled Parliament and prevented him from acting independently. It took until 1389, and the help of his political friends ("The Lords Appellant"), but once he was in charge, Richard proved to be mentally unstable, cruel, and power-hungry. In 1394 he led 10,000 soldiers to Ireland, trying to reestablish his lapsed authority there (he was the first English king to visit Ireland in nearly two hundred years), and while away, his queen died. Two years later Richard got a peace treaty with France by marrying a French princess, Isabella. Though Isabella was only six years old, she came with 800,000 francs and a nice sized tract of land. That and a new circle of friends allowed him to turn against his old friends, who had kept him from ruling as an absolute monarch.

Among those he exiled was Henry Bolingbroke, his cousin and the son of John of Gaunt. Shortly after that John of Gaunt died, and Richard confiscated Henry's inheritance, something he had promised not to do previously. Henry raised an army in revolt, returned to England while Richard was on a second military expedition to Ireland, and when the king came back, Henry captured him in Wales and forced him to abdicate (September 30, 1399). One day later Parliament ratified the abdication, and Henry took the crown as Henry IV, bringing the 244-year-old Plantagenet dynasty to an end.

The Rise of the Hapsburgs

The anarchy in the Empire persuaded the pope and the princes to end the Great Interregnum with a new imperial election in 1273. Ottokar ran for the top job, but the electors instead voted for a minor Swabian prince, Rudolf of Hapsburg, whom they believed would be no threat to their power and independence. This marked the beginning of the Hapsburg dynasty's long fortune, which would last for more than six hundred years.

At first all Rudolf had to his name was a castle in northern Switzerland. Ottokar paid homage to him, but refused to give back the lands he had seized previously. The pope placed Bohemia under the Papal ban, until Ottokar was killed in the battle of Marchfeld (1278). Bohemia and Moravia remained in the hands of Ottokar's son, Wenceslas II, but Rudolf succeeded in claiming Austria and Slovenia for the Hapsburgs, enlarging his personal estate tremendously. After Rudolf I, the Habsburgs moved their seat of power to Austria and promoted it to an archduchy, which made the Hapsburg family equal to the noble families who had originally elected Rudolf because of his insignificance.

Under the Hohenstaufens the Holy Roman Empire failed as an empire; under the Hapsburgs it failed as a purely German state. In 1278 Rudolf signed a treaty which recognized the Papal State as completely independent, ending the old power struggle between emperors and popes. He didn't even try to govern most of Germany, let alone Italy. The next emperor, Adolf of Nassau (1291-98), was not a Hapsburg, and less successful. He was deposed and killed in the battle of Gollheim by Rudolf's son, Albrecht I, who in turn ruled as emperor for the next ten years (1298-1308).

When imperial elections took place again, the electors passed over the Hapsburgs and chose Henry of Luxemburg, a French vassal and brother of the Archbishop of Trier. Henry VII (1308-13), like Rudolf I, concentrated his attention on feathering the family nest. He succeeded in landing Bohemia by marrying his son John to Elisabeth, the daughter of Wenceslas II. Because Bohemia had Europe's largest reserves of gold and silver, it was much more desirable than Henry's original estate, the county of Luxembourg. This self-interest is a little alarming, but as we saw previously, attempts by the emperors to buy the favor of their peers with gifts of land never really worked, so now it seemed more sensible to let the ruling dynasty keep available tracts. In fact, one could argue that what was good for the Hapsburgs and the Luxemburgs was good for the whole Empire, because central Europe had enough weak states already.

After Henry most of the prince-electors wanted another Hapsburg, namely the duke of Austria, Frederick the Handsome. A minority, however, favored Louis the Bavarian, who came from the Wittelsbach family. Both Frederick and Louis claimed they won the imperial election of 1314, so a civil war broke out. At this time the Papacy itself was vacant, so no pope could decide the outcome; force of arms did the job. In 1322 Frederick was captured, and from prison he recognized his rival as emperor. Despite his apparent victory, Louis IV remained unpopular; Pope John XXII refused to acknowledge his right to govern, and Louis responded by saying he did not need any pope's approval, just that of a majority of nobles. Then Louis marched into Italy, captured Rome, and installed Nicholas V as an antipope (1327-28). Nicholas gave the emperor the Church-approved coronation he wanted, but then abandoned his illegal claim to the Papacy when the real pope excommunicated him from Avignon.

Louis IV was the last emperor who tried to rule Italy; after his campaign the Italian states found themselves on their own. In the course of the fourteenth century Milan grew to dominate the Lombardy plain; its main rival was Venice, not an emperor who lived north of the Alps. In the far south, Robert the Wise, king of Naples (1309-43), attempted to gain control over the whole peninsula, but he mainly succeeded in weakening his own kingdom; the dynasty of Anjou went into decline afterwards. The Empire also lost ground to a slow French advance. Bit by bit, France nibbled at the lands between the Rhone River and the southern Alps, including Lyons. In 1349 France purchased a district called Dauphine, and this became the personal domain of the crown prince; this was where the French got the title Dauphin for their heirs. All this had previously belonged to Burgundy; the rest of Burgundy was ceded to France in 1378. Avignon was surrounded, but this was the time when it was the Church's headquarters, so it joined the Papal State instead.

To prevent church-state conflicts in the future, the imperial electors decided in 1338 that henceforth the candidate receiving the majority of votes would be both king of the Germans and Holy Roman emperor, without any need for confirmation from the pope. Louis IV viewed this as another attempt to limit his power, so he tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with both the princes and the pope. Instead, Pope Clement VI sponsored Charles of Moravia, the Luxemburg king of Bohemia, as an imperial candidate, thinking he would be easy to control. Thus Charles was elected next when Louis died in 1347.⁽¹¹⁾

Despite Clement's hopes that Charles would reverse the electors' decision, the emperor diplomatically evaded the question of the papal role in imperial elections. In the Golden Bull of 1356, Charles put forth the rules for elections in writing, making the whole process more formal than it had been before. Charles limited the number of electors to seven, and specified that the electors would be three archbishops (of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne), the count Palatine of the Rhine, the duke of Saxony, the margrave of Brandenburg, and the king of Bohemia. Bavaria lost its vote, so it was always a second-rate member of the Empire after this, while the seven states containing electors became the strongest of all. Brandenburg and Saxony did particularly well; neither state had been important previously, but from this time onward they would be key players in German politics.

Like the other emperors at this time, Charles was most successful at enriching his personal domain. His base of power, Prague, was enlarged by many building projects, which included the first German university. The family realm grew in size, too; he acquired the Upper Palatinate in 1353, Lusatia and Silesia by 1368, and bought Brandenburg in 1373.⁽¹²⁾

The Luxemburg family fortunes reached their peak under Charles' son Sigismund (1378-1437). Sigismund got a lucky break early in his reign because the Hungarian king, Louis the Great, had no son. Mary, the eldest daughter of Louis, married Sigismund in 1385, bringing Hungary with her. However, the Hungarian dowry included a new enemy--the Ottoman Turks had recently invaded the Balkans, and were now subjugating Bulgaria, Serbia and Bosnia. King Sigismund, determined to stop the Turks at once, persuaded the pope to call for a crusade. As a result, he had a sizeable Franco-Hungarian force when he advanced down the Danube in 1396. Going on a crusade had never been this easy--Sigismund only had to cross his frontier to find infidels--but the leadership of it was no better than it had been in the past. They had the Bulgarian city of Nicopolis under siege when Bayezid, the Turkish sultan, arrived with his army. The French knights insisted on mounting a frontal charge against the Turkish position, for anything else would be less than chivalrous. They had done the same thing at Crécy, and here it got the same results; the Turks ambushed and annihilated the French. The Hungarians couldn't win on their own, so the last crusade was over almost as soon as it had begun. All it did was create an impression that the Ottoman Turks were unbeatable, which lasted until the late sixteenth century.

Sigismund had quite a collection of crowns: king of Bohemia, king of Hungary, king of Germany, and finally Holy Roman Emperor (the last was gained in 1410). This looked impressive on paper, but the more titles he had the less efficient he became. This especially was the case when he got involved in religious affairs. Sigismund successfully forced Pope John XXIII to convene the Council of Constance, which ended the Great Schism. However, he also used the council in a misguided attempt to suppress the popular Czech preacher and religious reformer, John Huss. The martyrdom of Huss provoked a blazing revolt, and the Hussites formed a Czech nationalist government that Sigismund could not overthrow. Finally in 1436, the year before his death, Sigismund was able to reach an agreement that allowed him to enter Prague and mount the Czech throne, but for twenty years Bohemia, which should have been a useful home base, brought him nothing but humiliation.

Sigismund had no son, so his death ended the game for the Luxemburgs. His daughter Elisabeth married the next emperor, Albrecht II (1437-39). Thus the imperial crown returned to the Hapsburgs, this time permanently, and the Hapsburgs gained most of the lands that had belonged to their rivals: Bohemia, Moravia, Lusatia, Silesia and Hungary. However, the Luxemburgs managed to retain Luxembourg for a few more years, and Sigismund had passed Brandenburg to one of his vassals, Burgrave Frederick I of Nuremberg, in 1415. Frederick was from the Hohenzollern family, so this marked the beginning of another great dynasty, one which would play a pivotal role in the politics of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Unfortunately for the Hapsburgs, the natives of their new territories were non-Germans who didn't care much for German rule. They were also elective monarchies, like the Holy Roman Empire, so they voted the Hapsburgs out at the next opportunity. This happened in 1457 when Ladislas, the Hapsburg king of Hungary and Bohemia, died suddenly, and his uncle Frederick III (the current Holy Roman emperor) tried to take his place. Instead the Hungarians elected one of their own nobles, Matthias Corvinus; the Bohemians also chose a native, and when their first choice died, they offered the throne to the crown prince of Poland. The result was a three-cornered war between Hapsburgs, Hungarians and Poles; the Hungarians came out on top, taking Lusatia, Silesia and Moravia from the Bohemian-Polish coalition. In 1485 Matthias Corvinus even grabbed eastern Austria, and he made Vienna his capital for the next five years. Thus, Hapsburg family fortunes were at a low ebb when Maximilian I ascended the throne in 1493.

This is a good place to talk about the birth of Switzerland. The inhabitants around Lake Lucerne were always threatened by the Hapsburg ancestral castle looking over them, so in 1291 the cantons (communities) of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden formed an "everlasting league," an alliance to keep them free from everybody else. This arrangement worked superbly; in 1315 the Swiss, with a force numbering only 1,500 men, ambushed a Hapsburg force that was ten times larger, while the invaders were strung out along an icy road beside Lake Aegeri (the battle of Morgarten). In 1339 the cantons, allied with Berne, defeated the Burgundians in the next major battle, at Laupen, and that allowed the league to live in peace for nearly fifty years. By 1353 five more cantons (Lucerne, Zurich, Glarus, Zug and Berne) had joined the original three, forming a confederation large enough to stand on its own. In 1415 they even conquered the Aargau valley, capturing Castle Hapsburg in the process. After several more defeats, the major powers chose to leave the Swiss alone, partly because of their country's spectacularly rugged scenery, and partly because of the Swiss practice of giving arms and military training to civilians. Swiss pikemen gained a reputation for being the best infantry force anywhere, and an admiring Machiavelli called the Swiss "the best armed and the most free people in Europe." The last attempt to conquer Switzerland was a short and vicious effort by Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, called the Swabian War (1499); after it failed he had to recognize the Swiss Confederation, now containing thirteen members, as an independent republic within the Holy Roman Empire. Later on, the Treaty of Westphalia declared Switzerland a completely independent country (1648). By this time Switzerland no longer got involved in the politics of its neighbors, so it became the ultimate neutral nation, long before the Congress of Vienna (see Chapter 13) put it in writing.

The Union of Kalmar

The normal rules for dynastic marriage and succession did not apply here, because Olaf died suddenly in 1387, before he came of age. This meant that Margaret was now queen of both Denmark and Norway, in name as well as fact. Meanwhile to the east, Sweden's King Albrecht was unpopular, so within a month Swedish nobles were asking Margaret to take over their country. The "Semiramis of the North" was glad to oblige; she marched into the country and captured Albrecht at the battle of Aasle (1389). However, a group of pirates supplied Stockholm with food, so she wasn't able to take the Swedish capital until 1395. To weld the three kingdoms more closely together, Margaret summoned a congress of the three councils of state (the Rigsraads) and other magnates to the Swedish town of Kalmar in June 1397. On Trinity Sunday, June 17, they crowned her great-nephew, Eric of Pomerania, king of all three Scandinavian nations, with Margaret as queen mother and Copenhagen as the capital.

As you might expect, some folks were nervous about letting a woman run an empire single-handedly. That is why Margaret used Eric as her front man; the old nobility were placated when they saw Eric's name above hers on the royal stationery. After he grew up, Eric did not assume power right away, but allowed Margaret to continue managing affairs until her death in 1412.

Despite his long apprenticeship under Margaret, when Eric got to rule on his own, he not only failed to hold the Union together, but didn't produce an heir who could. While he fought an unsuccessful war with the Hanse, there was an uprising in Sweden under Engelbrecht Engelbrectsson, who later became the Swedish national hero. Eric was assassinated in 1439, and a German nephew, Christopher III of Bavaria, took charge of the Union.

Upon Christopher's death, the Swedes tried to pull out a second time, crowning one Karl Knutson as King Charles VIII (1448-70). Back in Denmark, another German noble, Christian I of the Oldenburg dynasty, took the throne (1448-81). The common people of Sweden favored Charles, but the nobility still felt the Hanse was a more dangerous enemy than the Danes, so they called for continuing the Union. The clergy, which also disliked Charles, forced him to flee in 1457, allowing Christian to crown himself "king of Scandinavia." That wasn't the end of the story, though, because Christian couldn't get along with the Church, either, and he made many enemies with his heavy-handed tax and police policies. Consequently the rebels drove the royalist forces back into Stockholm, where the Danes surrendered, and they recalled Charles in 1464. He was defeated and forced to flee again just one year later, but Christian could not reassert his authority; this meant that the archbishop of Uppsala was now the most powerful man in Sweden. Sten Sture, Charles' successor, defeated Christian decisively at the battle of Brunkeberg, ending the war in a Swedish victory (1471). Although the Danes did not declare the Union of Kalmar dissolved until 1523 (the year when Gustav I founded Sweden's powerful Vasa dynasty), never again could they intervene in Swedish affairs.

Among minor adjustments, Christian I became duke of Schleswig and Holstein, the two nearest German states, in 1460. Those duchies would be under Danish rule for the next four hundred years. On the other hand, he had to cede the Orkney and Shetland Islands to Scotland in 1468. As for Norway, it was the biggest success of the Kalmar Union; it remained part of Denmark until the end of the Napoleonic era.

The Great Schism

Most of the faithful, not just the English, wanted the pope to return to Rome. Urban V tried it in 1367, but while the popes had been out of town their palace, the Lateran, had fallen into ruin, so he chose another one, the Vatican, as the new Papal residence. However, all of Rome, and not just the Lateran, was a run-down, unruly mess. Three years later Urban decided that the Church couldn't get its work done in such a place, and moved back to Avignon.

The next pope, Gregory XI, came to Rome in 1377. Unfortunately, conditions had not improved much, and he was getting ready to leave when he died. The Roman mob seized its chance and forced the College of Cardinals to elect Urban VI, a pope who favored a permanent reestablishment of the Papacy in Rome.

As it turned out, Urban VI had a bad attitude, and he constantly threatened the cardinals with physical violence. The cardinals escaped as soon as they could, repudiated the pope they had been forced to vote for, and elected another Frenchman, Clement VII. Clement had more manners than Urban, but he could be even tougher; he was only thirty-six years old, and a former footsoldier who was so strong that he could decapitate a man with one swing of a halberd. The Romans stuck by their man, and after a scuffle, Clement and the cardinals withdrew to Avignon. Back in Rome Urban VI set up his own College of Cardinals (later he murdered five of them), and celebrated the Papacy's "restoration" by making a promenade of Italy.

Thus began the Great Schism, which divided the allegiance of Catholicism and brought the Papacy to its lowest point yet. Neither Rome nor Avignon would give an inch, and whenever a pope died his cardinals promptly replaced him. The kings let politics decide which pope they would support. France, Christian Spain (but not Portugal), Scotland and southern Italy backed the pope of Avignon, while most of the other Catholic states lined up behind the pope of Rome; the Holy Roman Empire was so divided that its princes went both ways. Each pope declared a blanket excommunication on all Christians who did not follow him, so everyone in Christendom was damned one way or another.

Public opinion finally forced the cardinals to do what they had done in the past to resolve major disputes, call a general council of the Church. The council met at Pisa in 1409, declared both sitting popes deposed, and elected one of its own. However, it had no way to enforce its decrees, so all it did was add a third pope to the scene. The next council (held at Constance, Switzerland, 1414-17) did better. The pope of Rome stepped down voluntarily, the pope of Avignon withdrew to Spain, where his support gradually faded away, and the third, John XXIII, was forced out by a trial that must have convinced witnesses that anyone could become a pope.⁽¹³⁾ Thus ended the confusion over who was the pope and where his office should be. The council chose a Roman nobleman, Oddo Colonna, and three years after his election, he entered Rome as Pope Martin V (1420).

This time the move to Rome was a success. It coincided with one of history's most famous cultural upsurges, the Italian Renaissance (see below), and the Renaissance-era popes hired artists to make Rome a city any pontiff could be proud of. However, they were weak on spiritual matters, so the Papacy still had some bad moments. Sixtus IV (1471-84), for example, dabbled too much in local politics; he was involved in the plot to assassinate Lorenzo de Medici, and he made six of his nephews cardinals, including one who was only 17 years old at the time. On a positive note, Sixtus also began work on the Sistine Chapel in 1471, a Renaissance masterpiece that no Papal misdeed could tarnish.

Wycliffe and the Hussites

Wycliffe died a free man, but the Papacy would not let him rest in peace. The same Council of Constance that ended the Great Schism ordered that his remains be dug up and burnt, and this was finally carried out in 1428. This council also did away with another reformer, Jan Huss of Bohemia. Since 1396 Huss had taught the Czech congregations that only God can forgive sin, no pope or cardinal can establish a doctrine which is contrary to scripture, and no manmade clergy should be obeyed when their orders are plainly wrong; the sale of indulgences was cited as an example of the latter. In 1415 Huss went to the Council of Constance to defend his activities. He traveled under the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor, but upon arrival was arrested, tried and burned at the stake without being given an opportunity to explain his views.

Huss found among the Czechs eager support for his attack on papal authority, and after his death his followers succeeded in eliminating clerical corruption from the Bohemian Church. The pope then ordered the faithful to attack the Hussite heretics, but this crusade was a fiasco. The Hussites found a blind general named Jan Zizka who was a tactical genius. Since his forces were fewer in number and had little military training, Zizka converted the tools the local farmers had--scythes, clubs and grain flails--into weapons that could be used in close-quarter combat, and to deal with mounted knights. He even invented a portable fort by tying farm wagons in a circle and sticking crossbows and cannon out in all directions, a fifteenth-century forerunner to today's tanks. For twenty years (1419-39) the Bohemians lorded over southern Germany before both sides agreed to a compromise. By then another council had met at Basel (1431) to discuss the postponed reform of the Church, the need for which had been postponed for a century. A brisk quarrel started over who had the ultimate authority, the popes or the councils, and matters soon progressed to open rupture and another schism (1439-49). While such fiddling went on, the official reform movement collapsed and the Reformation became inevitable.

The Failure of Greenland

Modern Icelanders regard the eleventh and early twelfth centuries as a golden age, because that is when they wrote down most of the Norse sagas. However, this also was a time when the central government could not enforce its authority. As a result, the local lords raised private armies and threw them at each other, in a series of dynastic wars, shifting alliances, murder and betrayal (1230-64, this is sometimes called the "Age of Stone Throwing"). Peace did not come until the chiefs of both islands submitted to the king of Norway (1262-64).

The main problem for the colonies was a deteriorating climate. Part of this trouble was man-made; on both islands the settlers cut down the trees that grew near the fjords, for firewood or building material, and grazing cattle and sheep prevented the plants from growing back. Hills eroded, sand drifted over the best pastures, and eventually the wood supply ran out, except for the pieces that drifted ashore. Bog iron was available, but without wood for charcoal, it could not be forged; one thirteenth-century knife had been sharpened and resharpened, until the blade was nothing more than a stub, because the owner could not make a replacement. Archaeological digs at Greenland revealed that the typical settlement had buildings made mostly of sod and stones. The cattle were about the size of Great Danes, kept underground in unventilated stalls, and when spring arrived they were so weak that they had to be carried out to the pastures. Bones found in garbage pits show that after 1300 the Norse depended more on seafood, whereas in the past they got as much as 80 percent of what they ate from farming and herding.

What the settlers could not control was the arrival of the "Little Ice Age." After 1250 the weather grew colder, pack ice made sailing even riskier and the land became less forgiving for those who misused it. At the same time came a drop in trade. The Norwegian economy declined when forced to compete with the Hanseatic League, and when the Black Death struck Norway, cargo ships stopped traveling the northern sea lanes regularly. A trickle of commerce continued with Iceland, but sailing to Greenland ended completely. The last official trade voyage from Norway to Greenland took place in 1367; no bishop went to Greenland after 1378, though the Church kept appointing bishops to keep the post filled. As a result, Greenland's settlements died slowly; to most Europeans, the huge ice-covered island on the edge of the world just seemed to disappear.

In addition to the harsh weather, the Greenlanders faced a human rival: the Inuit (Eskimos). The Inuit had crossed to northern Greenland from Canada around the same time that Eric the Red colonized the south. As the Inuit moved south, they met the Vikings; some friendly contacts took place, but relations soured by the mid-fourteenth century. King Magnus Eriksson of Norway made a call for a military expedition against the Greenland heathens in 1355, which nobody heeded, while Inuit folktales talk about skirmishes with the Norsemen. Apparently the Inuit had the advantage in these conflicts, for they are geniuses at survival in the Arctic. Their Norse opponents may have been larger men, but they were careful not to learn anything from the Inuit, so size didn't help in the long run. The archaeologists who examined the graves of the Greenland settlements found the dead buried in up-to-date European fashions, instead of Inuit-style parkas; that, along with their refusal to use Inuit inventions like harpoons, dog sleds, and kayaks, is a testimony to the Greenlanders' inflexibility and failure to adjust to the changing climate.

The precarious Western Settlement failed at some point in the early fourteenth century. When a Norwegian priest, Ivar Bardarson, arrived from the Eastern settlement in 1350, he found "never a man, either Christian or heathen, merely some wild cattle and sheep." Bardarson's crew loaded the animals they caught on their ship, and the priest reported that the "Skraelings" now held the settlement. What caused the colony's disappearance is not certain; the most likely theories are that the colonists froze and/or starved to death after eating all their livestock, or that the Inuit wiped out the colony. However, no bodies were found in the ruins, nor were there any crucifixes, chalices, or chandeliers lying around--things that medieval Christians would find valuable. This suggests that they didn't die suddenly. It has also been suggested that the Norse "went native" and joined the Inuit, but recent genetic testing of the Inuit shows no evidence of European DNA among them. Now it looks like the last survivors buried those who died before them, and then simply packed their bags and left.

The last ship to visit the Eastern Settlement was an Icelandic one that had been blown there by a storm; its crew stayed for four years (1406-10) before returning home, possibly because of heavy ice on the seas. After that nobody came, and nothing was heard from the settlement. Like the Western Settlement, the final end is unknown to us; we can't say whether they were done in by an epidemic, the Inuit, or just plain hardship. Or maybe the end came less tragically. As with the Western Settlement, there may have been a day when an old Norseman showed his son a cold, wet field with some scrawny cattle, said, "One day, this will all be yours," and instead the son caught a ride on the last ship to Iceland. In 1540 an Icelander named Jon Greenlander sailed there; he found abandoned booths and houses, and "a dead man lying face down on the ground . . . clothed in frieze cloth and sealskin." Near the body lay a rusty iron sheath knife, which tells us this man was a European, not an Inuit (the last Norseman in Greenland?). Subsequent expeditions over the next two hundred years failed to find any survivors. When the present-day rulers of Greenland, the Danes, arrived in 1721, they had to build their colonies from scratch.

Iceland survived, but its fortunes went into such a tailspin that it took until the 19th century to recover. Part of the hardship, as with Greenland, came from the Little Ice Age. For example, a document written in the early 1700s describes the Bredamörk farm as "derelict . . . a little woodland, now surrounded by glacier." The document goes on to say that as late as 1698, "there was some grass visible . . . but the glacier has since covered all except the hillock on which the farmhouse . . . stood, and that is surrounded by ice so that it is of no use even for the sheep."

Iceland's worst years began when rule over it, along with Norway, passed to Denmark in 1380. As Denmark sought to expand its shipping and commerce, it did not want the lucrative Icelandic trade to flow to England or Germany, so the Danes gradually reduced the trading activities of these nations in Iceland; by the middle of the 16th century they had virtually ceased. At the same time, the royal authority greatly increased its interference in other spheres of Icelandic life. In 1550 Lutheranism was forced on the nation, a feat accomplished by the execution without trial of the last Roman Catholic bishop, Jón Arason, and two of his sons. Half a century later, in 1602, a trade monopoly was instituted. From that time until 1787, commerce with Iceland was permitted only to licensed merchants, who bought their charters from the Danish Crown for exorbitant fees and recouped their investment from their captive customers. Consequently, prices for necessities, such as grain, lumber, and metal goods, soared, while Icelandic products--mostly fish and wool--were undervalued because their prices were established by the same merchants. In the long run, this oppressive economic system reduced the island to utter destitution.

The Hundred Years War Resolved

Crossing the Channel with a new army, Henry met the French at Agincourt, not far from the site of his great-grandfather's triumph at Crécy; Henry used a similar strategy and the trusty longbow to annihilate the French (1415). The French knights wore full plate armor to stop the English arrows, but they had to march through a narrow, muddy valley that slowed them down and reduced their numerical advantage to a level the English could handle. Furthermore, the French armor was so heavy that once the wearer was unhorsed, he could not get up again; the English force included cutthroats who finished off the now-helpless knights with a dagger-thrust into the visor of each helmet.⁽¹⁴⁾ Henry also found a formidable ally in the count of Burgundy, who was both a relative and enemy of Charles VI. Together England and Burgundy conquered Normandy in 1419; in 1420 Charles signed the treaty of Troyes, which surrendered all of northern France, including Paris, to the allies. He guaranteed the treaty with a really odd performance: he disowned his own son, married his daughter to Henry and made him his heir.⁽¹⁵⁾

It now looked like the English would take over all of France. Much of France was devastated and depopulated; for the first time in a hundred years wolves roamed the streets of Paris. But Henry died in 1422, and Charles followed him a few months later. Henry's infant son, Henry VI, was confidently crowned king of both countries, while an uncle, the Duke of Bedford, laid siege to Orléans, an unsubdued stronghold on the Loire River.

It was here that one of history's most remarkable figures intervened to save the day for France. A seventeen-year-old peasant girl from Lorraine, Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc in English), became convinced that saints were calling her to lead the army that would save the country. Making her way through enemy lines, she caught up with the Charles the Dauphin (the disinherited son of Charles VI) at Chinon and told him her story. Charles was cautious, and had some theologians examine her for signs of witchcraft; they pronounced her a virgin, meaning that the "voices" that compelled her had to be pure spirits. That convinced Charles to let her go ahead--after all, everything else had failed to this point--and sent her to Orléans with a few troops.

What happened next was both a triumph and a tragedy. Wearing armor and riding a white horse, Joan so inspired the beleaguered soldiers and people of Orléans that they rose up and defeated the English attacking their city. Once the siege was raised, Joan led the army northeast. Four months after first meeting the Dauphin, she captured Rheims, and watched as the Dauphin was crowned King Charles VII in Rheims Cathedral, the traditional place for the coronation of all French kings (July 1429). But ten months later she was captured by the Burgundians while making a sortie on Compiègne, and sold to the English. Under English pressure, a Church court found her guilty of heresy and witchcraft, while the French king she had won the crown for made no effort to save her. On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in the marketplace of Rouen.

In 1456 the pope declared the verdict against Joan to be invalid, having been obtained by fraud and deceit; in 1920 she was formally canonized. But French patriots did not wait for the Church to clear her name. Emboldened by her example, the French recaptured Paris in 1436. In 1450 they took back Normandy, in 1451 Aquitaine. With the capture of Bordeaux in 1453, only Calais was left to the English, and the war was finally ended.⁽¹⁶⁾

The fate of Bordeaux was sealed by the battle of Castillon, where French artillery fire tricked the English into attacking at the wrong time. This was the first time firearms won a field battle. The war had seen guns in use as far back as the battle of Crécy, but the first guns took too long to reload, making them good for only one volley when used tactically. They did better in sieges, though, allowing an attacking army to reduce in a matter of weeks those castles and walled towns that used to hold out for months or even years. You may mark 1453 as the year when guns became the most important weapon of warfare, but Castillon isn't the only reason. In the same year at Constantinople, the Turks used cannon in their more familiar role, to batter down the famous wall of two hundred towers that had withstood virtually every attack during the previous 1,100 years.

The End of the Byzantine Empire

In the fourteenth century two new powers arose to take what the Empire had left. One was the Serbs, who under Stephen Dushan achieved the first empire run by the southern Slavs; this included twentieth-century Yugoslavia, Albania, Macedonia and about two-thirds of Greece. Dushan's decade of success did not produce a lasting state, though, because he failed to take Constantinople and give his realm a worthy capital. As with Guiscard, he died before he could attempt the siege (1355) and his empire split into half a dozen warring principalities.

The other newcomer finally finished off the Empire--the Ottoman Turks. When Genghis Khan's armies stormed out of Mongolia, many Turks fled west to escape the ravaging Mongol hordes. About eight Turkish tribes settled in western Turkey by 1300, and one rose to dominate the others, by virtue of its fighting skills and a good geographical location. This clan was originally led by a chief named Osman, so his name became that of the state he and his heirs founded--the Ottoman Empire.

Between 1326 and 1337 the Ottomans took the last Byzantine cities in Turkey: Brusa, Nicaea and Nicomedia. In 1354 they crossed the Dardanelles and seized the Gallipoli peninsula, giving them a foothold in Europe. From there they fanned out across the southern Balkans; Adrianople (modern Edirne) became their new capital in 1361; in 1389 they defeated the Serbs at the battle of Kosovo, and Serbia passed under Turkish rule. The Byzantines were isolated and surrounded in Constantinople, Salonika (ancient Thessalonica) and part of the Peloponnesus (Morea). Constantinople itself came under siege in 1394, and only survived because Timur (also called Tamerlane), the nastiest of Genghis Khan's successors, invaded Turkey in 1402 and carried off the Ottoman sultan in an oversized bird cage.

The Turks spent the first decades of the fifteenth century recovering from this defeat, so they didn't attack Constantinople again until 1422. This time the siege was abandoned when the troops had to leave to put down a revolt in Asia; Constantinople had survived for the last time. Then Emperor John VIII tried to enlist western aid by reuniting the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, which had been formally divided since 1054. He went to Italy with some bishops and theologians, and in 1439 they signed a document which accepted the authority of the pope in return for Western support. But this reunion was insincere, never accepted by the people of Constantinople, and denounced by most Orthodox clergymen. Anyway, the days when the Papacy could direct the armies of the West were over; Constantinople would fight and fall in the name of the Orthodox Church. An army of Hungarians and Crusaders tried to rescue Constantinople from the inevitable result of the next Ottoman attack, only to be totally defeated at the battle of Varna (1444). Meanwhile the Turks found time to annex Salonika (1430) and Morea (1446).

Constantinople, because it was such a formidable stronghold, and because it was in the heart of the Ottoman Empire, gave the Turks many compelling reasons for eliminating it. Consequently, when Mohammed II (1451-81) became the sultan, he spent two years preparing for a new siege, one that would be far more thorough than any attempted before. The army he gathered included 20,000 mercenaries (both Moslem and Christian) and 80,000 regulars, the finest of which were 12,000 ex-Christian slaves, the famous Janissaries. Because Constantinople had often survived in the past by virtue of its navy, Mohammed brought in 250 ships. The Turks never had much use for gunpowder weapons previously, but this time Mohammed saw they would need them to blast through Constantinople's walls, so he hired a Hungarian engineer named Urban to construct 100 heavy cannon. Urban's largest creation was a monster with a barrel twenty-six feet long, that could reportedly hurl a 1,500-pound stone ball more than half a mile; it took a cart pulled by 60 oxen and an escort of 200 men to bring it from its foundry at Edirne. Against this, Byzantium could only muster some 7,000 troops (2,000 of them foreign mercenaries) and 26 ships.

The 23rd and ultimately successful siege of Constantinople began on April 6, 1453. For weeks a tense competition took place; by night the defenders would come out and work overtime to repair the damage inflicted on the walls; by day the Turkish cannon would blast away as much of the repair work as possible. The main harbor of the city, known as the Golden Horn, kept Turkish ships out with a large chain stretched across the entrance. To get past this defense Mohammed had seventy ships dragged overland on greased logs, entering the harbor by going around the chain. Now they could attack Constantinople from both land and sea.

After that the war of attrition continued for the rest of April and most of May. The sultan was winning because he had the numbers and the defenders were almost out of food, but he had problems of his own. The cost of keeping his huge army active was phenomenal; every direct assault on the walls had been thrown back; casualties were mounting at an alarming rate; morale was dropping among his advisors, who started talking about a negotiated peace. Accordingly, the sultan ordered a day of rest, to prepare for a colossal assault on the following day (May 29, 1453). This time the city's defenses were at last penetrated. Constantine XI, the last emperor, was killed as the Janissaries led the way through the walls. Half the city's inhabitants were massacred, while the rest were enslaved.

The fall of Constantinople was long overdue, but when it happened it caused shock waves nonetheless. Like the fall of Rome in the fifth century, something that was never supposed to happen had come to pass. Western Christians were uneasily aware that they had contributed to Constantinople's fall, first by crippling it with the Fourth Crusade, and then by not giving it sufficient aid when new enemies appeared at its gates. Now they realized that they had not only lost the most important city of medieval Europe, but also the main gateway to the Orient. When the Ottoman sultan moved in, he guaranteed that Constantinople would rise again, but this time it would be Istanbul, the capital of the most formidable, best-run state in the Islamic world. Pope Pius II belately tried to rescue Constantinople from the Turks by calling for a crusade in 1463. But the desire to wage holy wars overseas was gone, and when no Christian head of state showed much interest in taking up the cause of the cross (they had the battles of Nicopolis and Varna to remind them of what could happen if they messed with the Turks!), Pius decided to lead the crusade himself. He traveled to the Italian port of Ancona to wait for the army of knights he expected, but few showed up, and because he was already ill, the pope soon died and the whole enterprise was abandoned. Today we use the fall of Constantinople to mark both the end of the Eastern Roman Empire and the end of the Middle Ages. A generation ago high school students remembered it with this rhyme:

"Who gave Constantinople the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks!"

Technically everything south of the Danube River had been under Turkish domination since the 1390s, but after Constantinople there were two centers of resistance, each centered around an individual: Skanderbeg in Albania and Vlad III, the original Dracula, in Wallachia. Skanderbeg's real name was George Kastrioti (1403?-1468), but nowadays we usually call him by the Albanian version of his Turkish nickname (Iskander Bey, meaning Alexander the Great). The son of an Albanian prince, he was sent to the Ottoman Turks as a hostage, where like the sultan's elite force of ex-Christians, the Janissaries, he was educated as a Moslem and enlisted in the army. His talent made him popular with the sultan, and he was given a command, but when he heard in 1443 that his native land was in revolt, he deserted, returned to Albania, renounced the Islam that had been forced on him, and became the leader of the Albanian chiefs. He held back the Turks so well that in 1463, with the help of the pope and the governments of Venice, Naples, and Hungary, he forced the Turks to accept a 10-year armistice. However, he broke the truce shortly after that, which meant that for the rest of his career he would have to fight without his former allies. Upon his death, Albania collapsed and was reconquered; the Albanians, who until now had been Orthodox Christians, converted to Islam without too much pressure over the course of the next century, and thus managed to secure for themselves a place as the sultan's favorite European subjects.

Today Albanians remember Skanderbeg as their greatest hero. Romanians feel much the same way about Dracula, but to others his very name became a symbol of horror. His father, Vlad II, had served as governor of Transylvania under King Sigismund of Hungary, and belonged to a secret fraternal order of anti-Turkish knights called the Order of the Dragon, so he was nicknamed Vlad Dracul, meaning "Dragon." However, he wasn't content with those titles, so in 1436 or 1437 Vlad killed Alexandru, a distant relative who happened to be prince of Wallachia, and took his crown for himself. The drawback to this seemingly successful coup was that it put Vlad in the camp of Hungary's enemy; now he had to pay tribute to the Ottoman Empire and send two of his sons, Vlad III and Radu, as hostages to the Turks. Vlad Dracul used his new position to sit out the 1444 war between the Hungarians and the Turks, but in 1447 he was murdered, most likely in a Hungarian plot. The Turks now let Vlad III, now known as Dracula ("son of the dragon") return with an army to rule as the new prince of Wallachia, while Radu, who was younger and more loyal, stayed with the sultan in Adrianople.

Vlad ruled Wallachia three times, for two months in 1448, from 1456 to 1462, and for a few months in 1475-76. The first time he was ousted by a Hungarian rival, but when he regained his throne in 1456 he stopped acting pro-Turkish. During his second and longest reign, he bravely resisted both the Hungarians and Turks, but was mainly known for his extreme cruelty. It is estimated that between 40,000 and 100,000 were executed on his command; he liked impalement best, because the victims could take hours, even days, to die on the stake, so today he is sometimes called Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler. In 1462, Sultan Mohammed II led a huge army against him, and Dracula responded with psychological warfare--he scared the Turks away with his greatest atrocity, surrounding Tirgoviste, his capital, with a "forest of the impaled." Chalkondyles, a Greek historian, described the terrifying scene that the invaders beheld:

"He [the Sultan] marched on for about five kilometers when he saw his men impaled; the Sultan's army came across a field with stakes, about three kilometers long and one kilometer wide. And there were large stakes on which they could see the impaled bodies of men, women, and children, about twenty thousand of them, as they said; quite a spectacle for the Turks and the Sultan himself! The Sultan, in wonder, kept saying that he could not conquer the country of a man who could do such terrible and unnatural things, and put his power and his subjects to such use. He also used to say that this man who did such things would be worthy of more. And the other Turks, seeing so many people impaled, were scared out of their wits. There were babies clinging to their mothers on the stakes, and birds had made nests in their breasts."

The sultan withdrew, but sent Dracula's brother Radu in his place with a new army. Vlad was forced to flee to Transylvania, and when he tried to get help from Matthias Corvinus, the new Hungarian leader, he was put under house arrest. He was allowed to leave and make another bid for the Wallachian throne after Radu died of syphilis in 1475, but in the following year he was killed, though it isn't clear whether he fell in battle against the Turks or was assassinated. More than four centuries later, when Bram Stoker needed a name and role model for his legendary vampire, he would choose Dracula, though he got the facts about him and Transylvania somewhat garbled.⁽¹⁸⁾

Burgundy's Bid for Glory

The old French royal family, the Capetians, held onto Burgundy for a generation after they lost control of the crown. The duchy passed to the House of Valois in 1363, when Philip the Bold, a son of the unlucky French king John II, was entrusted with it. At once Burgundian fortunes began to look upward. Philip bought a large piece of land across the German frontier, the future French province of Franche-Comté, and married the heiress of Flanders (both events took place in 1384). Like the other French dukes, Philip paid little attention to the fact that he was supposed to be a vassal of the king, so these moves made Burgundy a positive danger to the rest of France.

Some followers of the Dauphin managed to assassinate John, the next duke, in 1419, but John's successor, Philip the Good (1419-67), made even more spectacular gains. This Philip played a pivotal role in the Hundred Years War, as we saw previously, first supporting England, and later backing France. In 1430 Philip obtained Brabant and Limburg, two blocks of territory that had belonged to the Luxemburgs; in 1433 he took the Wittelsbach holdings in Holland; in 1435 he became lord over the French province of Picardy; in 1451 he got Luxembourg. Now the entire area we call the Low Countries was Burgundian, and because of the strong economy in this region, the dukes of Burgundy joined the wealthiest princes of Europe. The Burgundian court saw one of the last flowerings of medieval pageantry, and it was during this period that the realistic school of Flemish painting developed, starting with Jan Van Eyck (1386-1440) and Rogier Van Der Weyden (1400-64). All the dukes needed to do was gain control over Lorraine, the territory between Burgundy proper and the Low Countries, and they would have a solid block of land stretching from the Alps to the North Sea.

There was little the French king could do about Burgundian expansion, for of the seven tracts of land controlled by the duke--Burgundy, Artois, Picardy, Flanders, Franche-Comté, Wallonia and the Netherlands--only the first four were within the borders of France (the rest were part of the Holy Roman Empire). The next duke, Philip's son Charles (1467-77), was the most aggressive Burgundian of all; history books call him either Charles the Bold or Charles the Rash, depending on the author's point of view. Charles formed an alliance with England, Castile and Aragon to encircle his bitter enemy, King Louis XI of France. Meanwhile, the Hapsburgs offered to crown Charles as a real king, if he would promise to (1.) give his daughter Maria to the Holy Roman Emperor's son, and (2.) invade Switzerland. Charles agreed to these proposals, and moved to conquer Lorraine (1475). Then he went after the Swiss, but here he met his match; the Swiss pikemen defeated him in the battles of Grandson and Murten. In 1477 Louis sent a Swiss mercenary army into Lorraine, and this force killed Charles in a third battle, at Nancy.

Next Louis invaded the Netherlands, but the late duke's daughter refused to give up. Maria married Maximilian I, and the Hapsburg heir was strong enough to beat back Louis's armies and save the Netherlands for his wife. However, Maximilian also faced unrest; the Dutch resented losing much of their freedom when Maximilian took over, even though there was a war going on. This became an outright revolt in Flanders when Maria died in 1482. Maximilian couldn't deal with this problem and fight the French at the same time, so he signed the Treaty of Arras, which was basically on France's terms: Louis got all of the former Burgundian territories except Wallonia and the Netherlands. As a source of trouble Burgundy had been eliminated, and France now had the strong central authority she had previously lacked.

Besides solving the Burgundian problem, Louis XI (1461-83) succeeded in nearly every diplomatic venture he tried. Because of his complicated stratagems, many call him "the spider king" and the first Machiavellian, but his intellectual abilities were strictly limited; he tended to act first and think later, and his qualities, good and bad, were really those of a peasant. His best point was tenacity, and the only modern quality of his otherwise medieval mind was the recognition that whoever has money has power, too. He taxed his subjects hard and spent the money fast. To break up the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, he bought off the English, giving them a down payment of 100,000 ducats, and 10,000 a year thereafter. Louis also bought Rousillon, the bit of Aragon that lay north of the Pyrenees, for 300,000 ducats, and inherited Provence, adding both to the French royal domain.

The Wars of the Roses

To top this off, all three of England's Lancastrian kings (1399-1461) were incompetent, so the noble houses struggled among themselves to gain control over both Parliament and the crown. Henry VI, the third Lancastrian, went insane in 1453, and Richard, the duke of York, became his royal protector. Two years later his rivals ousted him; Richard raised an army in revolt, and full-scale civil war between the House of York and partisans of the Lancaster family began.

Duke Richard won the first round, and in 1460 he had himself proclaimed the royal heir, only to be killed in battle at the end of the year; Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick ("Warwick the Kingmaker") took command of the Yorkists. In March 1461 the Yorkists won a total victory at Towton, arrested Henry, and crowned Richard of York's son, Edward IV. As king, Edward succeeded in controlling the nobles and in winning the support of the middle class; both preferred one tyrant in London over a tyrant on every hilltop. Edward's power became practically absolute, foreshadowing the strong rule of the Tudors in the future.

The promise of the House of York started to fail because Edward and the earl of Warwick argued on many issues. The worst dispute involved marriage; Warwick wanted the king to marry a French princess, but instead Edward secretly wed Elizabeth Woodville. As the Woodvilles gained prestige and power, Warwick defected and fled to France, where many of the Lancasters were in exile. In 1469 he returned and restored Henry VI to the throne. Now it was Edward's turn to flee to the Continent, and two years later he also came back with an army. In the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, Warwick was slain, and Henry was imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he died (presumably murdered). The House of Lancaster became extinct, and its followers transferred their allegiance to Henry Tudor, a Welshman and 4th-generation descendant of Edward III.

For the next twelve years Edward IV ruled as undisputed king. The third and last phase of the wars began when he died in 1483, leaving two young sons (Edward V and Richard) as his heirs. Edward IV's brother, also named Richard, bribed and intimidated Parliament to declare his nephews illegitimate; then he took the throne as Richard III. He imprisoned the two boys in the Tower of London, where they were secretly murdered. The double murder was too scandalous for the nation to bear, and many of the king's nobles went over to Henry Tudor. At Bosworth Field in 1485, Richard III died fighting as his army deserted him. Afterwards, to make himself acceptable to everybody, Henry married Edward IV's daughter Elizabeth, the last claimant from the York family. According to tradition, Richard's crown was found in a bush on the battlefield and placed on the head of Henry; with that event, England was transformed from a medieval to a modern nation.⁽²⁰⁾

Showdown in Spain

Of those two, Castile was the land power, holding more than half of the interior, while Aragon had the east coast, the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, Sicily, and a fleet to go between those territories. The catalyst which brought them together was one of history's most successful political marriages; King Ferdinand V of Aragon married Queen Isabella I of Castile in 1469. Unlike similar unions in the past, like the ones involving the Hapsburgs and Luxemburgs in eastern Europe, this merger became permanent, guaranteeing that someday a child of Ferdinand and Isabella would inherit both kingdoms. Ferdinand seems to have had a modern attitude concerning women; the family motto was "They rule with equal rights and both excel, Isabella as much as Ferdinand, Ferdinand as much as Isabella."

The truce between Moors and Christians was broken when Muley Abul-Hassan, the second to last ruler of Granada, raided the Zahara fortress in December 1481, enslaving the Christians he captured. The marquis of Cadiz responded with his own surprise attack, taking Alhama, a town close to the city of Granada; then Ferdinand showed up with the main Christian army. After that it was a long war of attrition, with the Spanish army attacking on land, while the Spanish fleet stood offshore to prevent the Moors from receiving reinforcements from Africa, a move which would have delayed the final triumph of Christendom one more time (remember where the Almoravids came from). Queen Isabella managed the ships, and personally took part in some of the land battles, seeing the war as a latter-day crusade.

The war could have ended in 1483 when Abul-Hassan's son, Mohammed XI Abu-Abdullah (called Boabdil by today's Spaniards), was captured; he recognized Ferdinand as lord of Granada to gain his freedom, but Abul-Hassan rejected it. Abul-Hassan died in 1485, and Boabdil inherited a kingdom that was being ground out of existence, like Carthage in the Third Punic War.

Renaissance Italy

We have met most of these Italian states already; Florence was the newest player on the scene. There had been towns on the site of Florence for two thousand years--the Etruscans had one called Fiesole, the Romans had one called Florentia--but neither had been very important. Medieval Florence began its rise to greatness by replacing feudalism with capitalism in 1228, and by introducing a new constitution which declared that only the guilds would govern the republic. With the "Ordinance of Justice" (1293), all of the old-style nobles were excluded from politics. In 1409 Florence annexed Pisa, a move which eliminated a rival and gave it a port for its growing commerce.

At the same time, the city government engaged in a conscious program of urban renewal, replacing the congestion of dank, flimsy tenements with more open architecture, stone-paved streets, and a new city wall by 1299. Nor did the city's rulers stop there, for they had developed a taste for art and commissioned it on a scale previously unheard of. In the first thirty years of the fourteenth century, thirty-four statues of saints and prophets went up in squares and public buildings, all carved with the kind of skill that had not been seen in a millennium. Above everything else rose a new cathedral, begun in 1296 and completed in 1436 by Filippo Brunelleschi. The cathedral's red dome became the symbol of Florence; Florentines traveling abroad said they suffered from "dome-sickness" when they missed their home city.

Officially Florence was a republic, which in the Middle Ages meant an oligarchy, but the people of Florence talked about their government as if it was a democracy. In practice, however, just one family ran Florence during its best years--the Medicis. This unofficial dynasty began when its first patriarch, Giovanni di Bicci de Medici (1360-1429), founded the family firm in 1397. This was a holding company which controlled a major bank, several local industries, and various trade enterprises. Of these, industry was the least important, producing just ten percent of the profits. The traders did better, especially when they handled imports from the Orient and the Papal alum monopoly, and the bank was the biggest money generator of all. This bank did not grow as large as the fourteenth century banks of the Bardi and Peruzzi families, but it had very important political connections, especially with the court of France and the Papacy. Giovanni used his wealth to make the Medicis more popular than the ruling family, the Albizzis, but unlike his successors, he did not dive completely into the political arena for control of Florence.

Giovanni's son, Cosimo de Medici (1389-1464), was the first member of the clan to dominate Florence. A shrewd businessman, Cosimo greatly enlarged the Medici family firm, building branch offices all over Italy and beyond. In politics, he risked everything more than once; Rinaldo degli Albizzi had Cosimo exiled from Florence in 1433, but one year later Cosimo returned and got the Albizzi patriarch banished. Government loans were a favorite political tool of his; both Venice and Naples suffered military defeats after Cosimo refused to loan the money they needed to fund their armies. A large portion of his company profits were plowed back into the business, but Cosimo also spent a considerable amount on political patronage, bribes--and the arts. Like many other Florentine leaders, Cosimo was a cultured man, who realized that promoting art was a good long-term investment for the city. The Platonic academy he founded in 1440 attracted humanist writers (see below) to Florence, and Cosimo gave them the same toleration he gave to the painters, sculptors and architects: "One must treat these people of extraordinary genius as if they were celestial spirits, and not like beasts of burden." True to character, and to the dismay of his enemies, he lived to a ripe old age, and died peacefully while listening to a reading from Plato.

Cosimo's son Piero (1416-69) only ran the family fortune for five years, due to the chronic poor health that earned him the nickname "Piero the Gouty." His heir, Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-92), was the family's most talented member. He never held any noble title, but ruled Florence with almost regal power; once he even got away with dipping into public funds to restore the family's credit rating. Under him Florence experienced what some call a "second Periclean age," because Lorenzo was an extravagant patron of the best artists he could find, including Sandro Botticelli and Michelangelo. When he added up what the Medicis had spent between 1434 and 1471, for commissions to artists and architects, donations to charities, and taxes, it came to the astounding total of 663,755 gold florins, causing him to remark: "I think it casts a brilliant light on our estate and it seems to me that the monies were well spent and I am very well pleased with this."

Lorenzo's skill with statesmanship brought peace to Italy for most of the late fifteenth century, while his athletic and intellectual talents made him a perfect example of the "Renaissance man." His only weakness had to do with money; somehow he never learned the business education that his predecessors had, and his lavish spending on art and public spectacles drained the accumulated family fortune. Furthermore, he did not seem to have Cosimo's knack for choosing the right people to manage the Medici company's branch offices. Each office was largely autonomous, meaning that it had to be run with little or no direction from Florence, but the men Lorenzo appointed were too hesitant to function well on their own. The result was some bad business decisions. The London office, for example, agreed to bankroll the king of England; that office went bankrupt in 1472 because all hopes of repayment on the loan vanished in the Wars of the Roses. The office in Bruges suffered the same fate; despite stern warnings from Florence, it gave credit to Duke Charles of Burgundy, and we saw what happened to him! Thus, Lorenzo bequeathed a much smaller treasury to his son Piero di Lorenzo.

However, even Lorenzo had enemies. In 1478 the rival Pazzi family tried to assassinate him during a mass in Brunelleschi's cathedral; Lorenzo escaped, but his younger brother Giuliano fell victim to their daggers. Lorenzo showed no mercy in hunting down the perpetrators; within hours he had several of them hanging from the palace windows, and he commissioned Botticelli to do a picture of their dangling bodies. A few years later he had another conspirator dragged back from Constantinople, and a young artist named Leonardo da Vinci depicted that execution. The victims of Lorenzo's wrath included the entire Pazzi family, an archbishop and a teenage cardinal (the nephew of Pope Sixtus IV), resulting in a brief war with the Papacy and its ally, King Ferdinand of Naples. It was bribery, however, rather than a military victory, that decided this conflict; while the Florentine force slowly retreated to Florence, Lorenzo made a secret journey to Naples, and persuaded Ferdinand to drop out of the war with a generous gift of gold. Without his ally, the pope soon had to abandon the struggle.

Nobody in Italy had a large army at this time, so all wars were short. This was because the nature of warfare was changing rapidly, and the nations of the day had a hard time training men fast enough to keep up with it. Since the late fourth century, cavalry had been necessary for victory and usually dominated the battlefield. However, infantrymen now had weapons that allowed them to win battles without the support of knights: longbows, pikes, and (after 1500) guns. The medieval knight was nearly self-sufficient, once he had a horse, arms & armor, and training in their use; he needed only a few peasants and smiths to maintain his lifestyle. Now that feudalism was on the way out, knights were in short supply, and peasant levies were useless against a force the knights couldn't stop. The weapons that drove knights and armed peasants off the battlefield were more complicated than anything used before; they required supplies of gunpowder and shot, oxen and wagons for the movement of cannon, a camp of noncombatants to keep the equipment in good shape, and money to pay for everything. The new weapons also required more training and discipline to use properly, especially when defending against a cavalry charge. All this was too much for most nobles to handle, so they lost their ability to wage organized violence against their fellow barons and dukes. The end result of these changes was more military power concentrated in the hands of the head of state, and the same amount of resources going to support a smaller army.

In the case of Italy, it was hard to recruit soldiers when banking and trade offered more attractive ways to make a living. To fill the manpower gap, each Italian state hired bands of mercenaries, led by captains called condottieri ("contractors"). But mercenaries fight strictly for money, not for patriotism or glory. The condottieri had to be businessmen first and generals second, and they were reluctant to waste expensive men and equipment. Thus, a campaign usually saw more tactical maneuvering than battles, and was likely to end in a negotiated settlement before much bloodshed took place. Mercenaries were also a risky business because they would switch sides when somebody showed them enough gold, and a successful mercenary captain might try to overthrow his employer, as Francesco Sforza did when he seized power in Milan (1450).

Despite the shortcomings of this age, many Italians felt there had never been a better time to live. From their point of view, a great curtain had descended when the Roman Empire fell, and now they were the ones who were joyfully raising it up again. Matteo Palmieri echoed the feelings of many when he wrote in the mid-fifteenth century that every man should "thank God that it has been permitted to him to be born in this new age, so full of hope and promise, which already rejoices in a greater array of nobly-gifted souls than the world has seen in the thousand years which preceded it." And while we would say the political system left much to be desired, the common man had more opportunities for civic involvement in the republics than he did in any monarchy. Because Italian states were so small, the politically active citizen found it easy to keep up with the latest news, something not possible in large nations before the invention of mass media, and the variety of governments allowed political experimentation. All this activity at the end of the Middle Ages encouraged everyone to bring their talents into the open, whether for art or business--and competition sharpened those talents.

The Early Renaissance Men

Nowadays we put history in compartments marked by time and place, like Ming dynasty China, and the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms of Egypt. This makes learning the past more convenient for us, but we have to remember that most of the people who lived long ago did not see anything special about their lifetimes. This was especially the case during the Middle Ages, when the average peasant must have found it nearly impossible to imagine a way of life different from the one he had. The men of the Renaissance were the first to see themselves as being in a unique age. These were the inventors of the term "Dark Ages" to describe the period following the fall of Rome, and these people coined the name "Renaissance" (from Il Renascimento, meaning "rebirth") to describe their own time. They were also the first to identify a civilization by the culture it produced, instead of by its religion or system of government. However, they did not see civilization as an evolutionary process where life gradually got better, the way many people do today; rather they saw themselves as the ones who recovered the best things from ancient times. To them, the way to become "modern" was not by inventing something new, but by imitating the Romans.

Several factors worked together to ignite the Renaissance in Italy. We already mentioned the first one, wealth. The others were the re-discovery of classical literature, and memories of better times.⁽²²⁾ The Roman Empire may have been gone for nearly a millennium, but the Italian could still see Roman ruins wherever he went, so he knew that his people had once been great. When he read the works of Virgil or Cicero, he did not see them as the dry writings of long-dead authors, but as the voices of his own ancestors. And those writings were now becoming more available. Previously Greek and Roman literature was limited to what monks had copied and saved in monasteries, or Arabic translations from Spain. In the early fifteenth century this trickle of knowledge became a flood, as Byzantine scholars left the doomed city of Constantinople, taking their ancient Greek manuscripts with them.⁽²³⁾ Most of them went to Italy, because it was the nearest Christian-ruled land, and those Italians who understood the manuscripts couldn't get enough of them. They also noted that the ancient authors did not blindly accept authority, but argued among themselves; that was both shocking and invigorating. And because these authors were more interested in human affairs than they were in the gods, they encouraged their readers to revive the old philosophy of humanism.

One of the first writers to use the classics for inspiration was Francesco Petrarca (1304-74), known to us as Petrarch. Born in the town of Arezzo, he got his education first at the Papal court in Avignon, and then at the University of Bologna. Petrarch was both a talented scholar and poet, and traveled widely. His favorite hobby was collecting ancient manuscripts, and he told those he entertained that it was time to dispel "this slumber of forgetfulness" and to "walk forward in the pure radiance of the past." He behaved accordingly when he wrote his most famous book, Letters to Ancient Authors, an anthology of the letters he had written to classical authors like Homer and Plato, as if they were still alive. Petrarch had an immense following during his lifetime, and in the fifteenth century most libraries included copies of his works.

While writers tried to imitate the styles of the classics, artists ventured into new realms. The examples we have of ancient Roman painting, like the murals of Pompeii, show natural-looking figures, and we can believe real people posed for them. By contrast, most medieval painters imitated the style of the icon-makers in the Byzantine Empire, where symbolism mattered more than substance. Medieval art has a two-dimensional look; the figures are stiffly posed, and their feet do not touch the ground. They only look realistic when they cause an adult to imagine a certain scene, in the same way that a child can see people in the stick figures he draws. The artists got no respect, either; working in the shops of craft guilds, they were paid by the amount of work they put out, and had to follow strict guidelines on how paintings, armor, wooden chests, etc. should look. They couldn't even sign their creations. It would have been unthinkable for an artist to put a self-portrait in his work, the way Lorenzo Ghiberti did when he made the bronze doors for the baptistry of Florence.

As the artists' work improved, so did their social standing. Leon Batista Alberti came from an aristocratic family, Michelangelo's father was a city magistrate, and Brunelleschi and Leonardo had respectable middle-class backgrounds--but most of the rest were rank commoners, coming from families of barbers, butchers, farmers, tanners, poultry dealers and tailors. At first they didn't have much income, and they had to join a guild and follow its rules. In 1434 Brunelleschi was thrown into prison when he refused to pay the dues of his guild, and Church officials had to get him out so he could finish the cathedral of Florence. However, as their status changed from that of craftsman to that of genius, their expectations grew; some studied the classics and made it a point not to overindulge in drinking and chasing women, so that they would become still more respectable. Donatello, the great sculptor of Florence, was too embarrassed to wear the fine clothes that Cosimo de Medici gave him, but a century later, Titian, Donato Bramante and Raphael lived like princes. They also grew more confident. A goldsmith named Bernardo Cennini, for example, had no training as a printer, but designed, cut and cast the type for a superb edition of a commentary on Vergil. At the end of the book he wrote Florentinis ingeniis nihil ardui est--"nothing is beyond the powers of the Florentines." Such an attitude had not been spoken since the days of classical Greece.

The Middle Ages were still going strong when the artist who broke tradition appeared. This was Giotto di Bondone in Colle di Vespignano (1267-1337), Giotto for short. The son of a goatherd near Florence, he became an apprentice of Giovanni Cimabue, the greatest artist of the day, when he was twelve years old, but eventually the student outshone the teacher.⁽²⁴⁾ All of Giotto's paintings dealt with religious subjects; the difference was that he experimented with new techniques to portray people as realistic as possible. One legend asserts that he did this because he spent his childhood with livestock, rather than cooped up in a monastery. Thus, like the Cro-Magnon artists (see Chapter 1), he had a deep knowledge of how animals should look. Late in life, he was placed in charge of building and decorating the campanile (bell tower) of Florence; he did not live to see it completed, but it is still called Giotto's Tower in his honor.

Few of Giotto's works remain in good condition, because seven hundred years have passed since their creation. He rejected the bright, jewel-like colors and stiff poses of the Byzantine style, preferring a gradual shading of the faces and limbs of his characters, and he placed them in active, natural poses. Because nobody had discovered the techniques of perspective yet, Giotto's style still looks two-dimensional to us, but to fourteenth-century observers his work was marvelous. For example, when Pope Boniface VIII decided to employ Giotto in Rome, he sent a letter asking for a sample of his work. Giotto responded by dipping a brush in red paint, and made a perfect circle with a single stroke; he told the pope's messenger to take that, stating that someone with an eye for talent will recognize that a true master painted that circle. The pope did, and Giotto was hired.

Not much happened in Italian art for a century after that; the artists of those days mainly repeated what Giotto had done. As Leonardo da Vinci explained: "Afterwards this art declined again, because everyone imitated the pictures that were already done . . . until Masaccio showed by his perfect works how those who take for their standard anyone but nature--the mistress of all masters--weary themselves in vain." Masaccio (1401-28) did not live long, but he led the way in technical development. By adding the effects of light and shading (chiaroscuro), Masaccio successfully duplicated the effect of draping clothing and made his figures stand out from the background, which was now painted with less detail so that it would not distract the eye from the main subject. Meanwhile, Filippo Brunelleschi scientifically plotted the laws of linear perspective for the first time. Masaccio used perspective in his works right away, and other artists found the concept so interesting that they eagerly learned geometry, until even second-rate painters knew enough mathematics to draw the relative size of objects correctly. The same quest for realism also encouraged artists to study human anatomy; a few overcame their revulsion and dissected dead bodies, so that they would literally know their subjects inside and out.

The sculptors and architects had more classical-era examples to study than the painters did; their challenge was discovering how the ancients did it. Here the main pioneers were Ghiberti (1378-1455), Donatello (1386-1466, his real name was Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi) and Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-88). Ghiberti's main work was the set of bronze doors we mentioned previously; featuring twenty-eight panels decorated with New Testament scenes, this project took forty-four years to complete. Donatello, a student of Ghiberti, created the first nude statues since ancient times, and now is considered the first modern sculptor. Verrocchio was a master with both anatomy and technique, and he showed it by making a daring statue of a knight on horseback--with one of the horse's legs raised.

One reason why Florence produced so many artists was because the Florentines realized that great art could serve as propaganda. It gave their city a good press when Giotto was employed elsewhere, as far away as Naples. By the time of Lorenzo de Medici, artists were the city's cultural ambassadors. Lorenzo had that in mind when he recommended his favorite architect, Giuliano da Sangallo, to the king of Naples, and suggested that Domenico Ghirlandaio and Botticelli paint frescoes in the Sistine Chapel for Pope Sixtus IV; he probably also supported Leonardo da Vinci's application to work for the duke of Milan. The artists responded in kind; when Botticelli, for example, painted the Adoration of the Magi, he gave the Three Wise Men faces that matched his Medici patrons!

Economics at the End of the Middle Ages

All this sounds heartless in view of the suffering and grim mood among the survivors, but a considerable amount of evidence has been gathered to support the view that in per capita income the post-Black Death population was better off; the typical worker's wages had increased by 50 percent. Productivity gains allowed him to keep that raise. Now that there was less pressure on the land, farmers used their earnings to make themselves more efficient, usually by buying labor-saving machinery. Such devices were not limited to better farm tools; they also included pumps, ore-crushers, fulling and papermaking machinery, and any other device that allowed wind and water power to replace muscles as the main source of energy. This allowed working class incomes to remain high when the plague years ended and population figures began to creep up again. By the time numbers returned to the highest pre-Black Death levels (sometime in the sixteenth century), Europe could feed all its people and then some. In other words, the Black Death permitted the birth of an improved economy.

If this was true for the man behind the plow, it was equally true for the man in the street. The towns suffered worse from the plague than rural areas did, but most rebuilt their populations in a decade or two, because people never stopped moving into them; apparently they were willing to accept a lower life expectancy as the price for the opportunites the cities offered. By the end of the fifteenth century, the urban sector in western Europe had increased its share of the total population, from 2.25% at the time of the Black Death to 3.25%.⁽²⁵⁾

Not all towns did well. The Flemish market in textiles was still shrinking, in part because the English began weaving part of their wool into cloth before exporting it, forcing the weavers of Flanders to import wool of poorer quality from Spain and Ireland. The population of Ghent fell by a fifth and that of Bruges by a third. However, English cloth still went to the Low Countries to undergo a complicated process known as "finishing," a craft in which the Dutch had long been the masters. In Italy, Genoa was smaller because it had lost so much business to Venice and Florence. Sienna never recovered from the Black Death (today it still only has a little more than half of its early fourteenth-century population), malaria knocked Pisa out of the game completely, and we won't hear from Avignon again because it was only important while the pope lived there. Fortunately the successes outweighed the failures; the typical city at the end of the Middle Ages had more jobs and better wages than before.⁽²⁶⁾

While the individual European was richer, the European community was significantly poorer; worse than that, the growth from feudalism to capitalism had been interrupted, for a capitalist economy can only prosper while it can grow, and the Black Death put a stop to market growth by population increase. At the same time the other form of market growth--expansion into new markets--was failing, because the Poles and Lithuanians had halted Germany's drive to colonize the East, while the Turks, after a long interruption by the Crusades and the Mongols, were on the offensive again, making commerce between Europe and Asia risky at best. This meant that the post-Black Death era economy was generally contracted and sluggish, until the late fifteenth century.

Declining trade caused the Hanse to assume a defensive posture; it was the need to hang on to the gains of earlier days that transformed it from a trading cartel into a disciplined international organization. Before the Union of Kalmar took place, a war with Denmark had confirmed the Hanseatic League's domination of the Scandinavian economy; an English challenge in both the Baltic and North Seas, however, proved more difficult to beat off. However, it was a calamity at home, the Wars of the Roses, that eliminated the English as contenders, and in the end the Dutch were the ones who reopened the route around Denmark. After that the Hanseatic League was always in retreat, like its most powerful member, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights. Even the fish deserted the Germans; in 1420 the herrings of the Baltic migrated to the North Sea, resulting in a decline in the annual Baltic catch, while the North Sea haul, which the Hanse could not keep foreigners out of, steadily increased in value.⁽²⁷⁾

The main reason why the general European economy recovered and grew in the late fifteenth century was due to a steady string of technological innovations. The rate of technological advance in previous ages was painfully slow; often a new invention literally took centuries to win widespread acceptance. The replacement of the simple plow by the wheeled one and the use of the horse rather than the ox to draw it, were processes that began in the Dark Ages and underwent fine-tuning for the entire Middle Ages. Sometimes an invention was completely forgotten, like Greek fire (see Chapter 6). Against such a background, the innovations that appeared between 1250 and 1500 were numerous and revolutionary. Each decade of the fifteenth century produced significant changes.

A good example of this trend is the mechanical clock, which replaced the water clocks and sundials of ancient times. The first mechanical clock, built around 1300, was a large iron structure, placed beside church bells to strike them at the beginning of each hour. They quickly got popular, because a passerby looking at a bell tower had no idea whether a machine or a monk was ringing the bell inside. Gradually the mechanism underwent refinements. Craftsmen learned how to make smaller gears, meaning that their clocks could run with less ponderous weights. Clocks got small enough to fit in living rooms, and faces were put on them so that people could tell time between hours. In the early fifteenth century clockmakers started building clocks that could be powered by a steel spring, ending the need for weights completely. After that came some more miniaturization, and the machine that had once been too heavy for a man to lift became the pocket watch.

The gun saw a similar process. We first hear of firearms in 1326, from an Italian memo requesting them for a city's defense. The earliest guns were the so-called "hand cannons," metal tubes carried by themselves or on the end of a stick, which were hard to handle and too inaccurate to hit anything smaller than the broad side of a barn. They worked best when neither they nor their targets moved much, so they were put to work knocking down castle walls, and made big so they could do the job more quickly. However, while some gunsmiths made guns bigger, others made them smaller, adding improvements like shoulder stocks and triggers. This proved more important in the long run, for engineers could deal with the big cannon by building new forts strong enough to last through a prolonged bombardment. With the invention of the arquebus (early 16^th century), the first musket that had a better than a 1 in 20 chance of hitting a man-sized target, small arms transformed the battlefield forever. It was the arquebus, and not the bombard, that wrote a thunderous end to the age of chivalry.

Development of the gun and the clock required two hundred years and the ideas of half a hundred forgotten craftsmen. By contrast, the moveable type printing press was fully designed, developed and put into action within twenty years, and one man did it all, Johann Gutenberg. He invented the method of casting type that was essential to the whole process, modified press, paper and ink to work the way he wanted, and was printing books, starting with the Bible, in 1455. Singlehandedly he had created a new industry that would change Europe beyond recognition.⁽²⁸⁾

While Europe pulled ahead, the Middle East stagnated. Egypt, for example, had exported paper to Italy in the eleventh century, but now was importing paper in the fifteenth. The Egyptians did not let this bother them, though, because they still had a monopoly on the spice trade to keep them comfortably in the black. Since silver made up a full 50 percent of what European merchants brought to the nearest Moslem states, one could say that European mines, and not its manufactured goods, were what paid the bills.

This makes it look like geographical luck mattered more than anything else, with Egypt using the spice trade and Europe using its silver mines to keep the trade balance favorable. However, the European could be clever as well as lucky. By 1400 the mines of central Europe had been completely worked out; the shafts in the Alps became as quiet as the long-abandoned mines in the Caucasus and the Pamirs. New technology reversed that trend, making it possible to dig deeper tunnels, and to profitably extract metal from low-quality ore that had been ignored before. Heavy investment in such equipment brought the European mines back in production in the 1460s. In this case, the Europeans made their luck.

Finally, one other wealth-creating invention deserves mention, the three-masted ship. Known in various places as either a hulk, carrack, or nao, the three-master could carry 300 tons of cargo, twice as much as the single-masted cog. Trading on this scale caused a dramatic drop in shipping costs and changed the nature of commerce. Traditionally, merchants only carried things which their customers could not get at home, like Asian spices and African ivory. If there was a local source, the natives always preferred it, even if it was a very poor one. Shipping by carrack changed all this. For example, we noted earlier that the Hanseatic League had a good supply of salt near Lübeck, but the salt at the mouth of the Loire River was better. When the cost of bulk transport fell, even the Lübeckers found it cheaper to buy their salt from France than to mine it in Germany. Traders now also handled more Swedish iron and English coal than ever before. Finally, because carracks could carry more supplies than their predecessors, they could stay at sea longer, making it possible for the Age of Exploration to begin.⁽²⁹⁾

As discrepancies between the rigid dogma of the Church and schools and the actual nature of things became increasingly apparent, the old systems of logic fell into disrepute and modern science was born, a pattern of thought which is not afraid to ask new questions and do repeated testing to check the validity of its reasoning. Curiosity, bold theory and a desire to put knowledge to use were first melded in the Portuguese captains who explored the African coast in the fifteenth century, and paid for their expeditions by bringing back gold, slaves and ivory. The Cape of Good Hope was reached and rounded in 1488, and ten years later Vasco da Gama finally reached the rich Indian market. Before da Gama's epic voyage, however, another one was made by a Genoese native, Christopher Columbus, which opened up a whole new world for Europeans to explore and colonize. The walls that physically and mentally confined the medieval European were shattered, and thus the last half of the fifteenth century is usually considered the beginning of modern history.

1. The Grand Master also reserved for himself the right to deal in amber, still a popular Baltic commodity.

2. Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 83.

3. The wool came to Italy by land until the 1270s, when the Genoese discovered they could do just as well traveling by sea.

4. Having England for a neighbor was probably the main reason for Scotland's misfortune, as the Welsh, Irish and French will tell you. The Dutch are the only people who seem to have done well from having the English nearby, as we will see in the next two chapters.

5. Edward's killers shoved a red-hot iron up his rectum, to finish him off without leaving any obvious evidence that the ex-king had died violently. More than three centuries later, Sir Richard Baker wrote these choice words about him, in A Chronicle of the Kings of England (1660): "His [Edward I's] great unfortunateness was in his greatest blessing; for of four sons which he had by his Queen Eleanor, three of them died in his own lifetime, who were worthy to have outlived him; and the fourth outlived him, who was worthy never to have been born."

6. The Papal attitude toward innovations is well expressed in the initial reaction to firearms, which made their appearance some time in the early fourteenth century. To the medieval mind, black powder and black magic were one and the same. The gunners who operated the first cannon were viewed as sorcerers, whose unholy power did not spring from the might of manly arms. They did not use clean steel, and did not pillage, rape or loot like proper soldiers; instead they constantly tended their infernal machines, serving them as if they were demons. And like real sorcerers, who could be killed by the demons they claimed to control if a spell was cast incorrectly, the gunners were often destroyed when their cannon unpredictably blew up in their faces. Those gunners who lived long enough to become veterans were considered to be in league with the devil, and could be burned at the stake if captured by the enemy.
The hellish symbolism of black powder was most apparent when it was compared to the arrow. Arrows were clean products of the elements, had feathers and flew like the birds and angels. Lead balls, on the other hand, were propelled by fire and sulphur, certified ingredients from Hell. They flew by no human might of arm and with nary a feather to be seen--obviously, an invisible imp rode upon and directed the ball! Also, victims who weren't killed outright got lead poisoning and/or infected wounds, things a godly weapon would not do. Because of this the popes decreed the same thing for firearms as they did for crossbows--they could not be used against Christians. The fact that Moslems, heretics and pagans suffered just as badly as Christians when shot was apparently of no concern to them.

7. The Estates-General gave Philip unanimous support. As one of the king's ministers baldly put it, "My master's sword is made of steel. The Pope's is made of verbiage." The success of his venture against the pope must have encouraged Philip to launch his next anti-Church activity; a few years later he suppressed the most famous group of Crusaders, the Knights Templar, had their leaders tortured and executed, and confiscated their property (1307-12).

8. You don't have to feel sorry for Jeanne. In 1328 she married Philip, the king of Navarre. More than two centuries later a descendant of theirs would come back to claim the throne of France, but that's a story for the next chapter.

9. Let that be a lesson to anyone who thinks of using bacteriological weapons today. All you would-be Saddam Husseins, how do you plan on controlling your germs/viruses once you release them?

10. The areas that suffered the least were Poland and northeast Germany. This may have been because many of Europe's Jews, after being expelled from Western Europe, settled here. The Jews bathed regularly, whereas medieval Christians considered bathing a wasteful luxury at best, and of questionable morality at worst. Consequently Christians bathed as little as possible, and thus were more susceptible to the plague. When the Jews did not get sick as often, Christians accused them of poisoning the wells, and they inflicted massacres on those Hebrews who stayed behind, causing still more to flee to the more tolerant environment of Poland.

11. On an unrelated note, Louis gained Brandenburg for the Wittelsbachs in 1324, and Frisia in 1345.

12. Meanwhile the Hapsburgs continued to do well; they gained the Tyrol, the narrow district which now makes up western Austria, in 1363.

13. John had begun his career as a pirate, and then joined the clergy when he found he could steal more with a pen than he had stolen with a sword. Because the Church was very materialistic in the late Middle Ages, this talent allowed him to rise through the ranks quickly. He got to be pope by poisoning his predecessor, and then surrounded the College of Cardinals with soldiers until they were frightened enough to elect him. The election showed how fast he had risen, because his consecration ceremony as pope had to be delayed a day so he could take his priestly vows (one was allowed to become a cardinal in those days without first being ordained a priest). At the trial that removed him, he confessed to murder, adultery, incest, heresy, atheism, simony and sodomy. Remarkably, all these sins weren't enough to disqualify him from a career in the Church, so after serving a brief prison sentence, he became dean of the Sacred College, and held that job until his death in 1419. Because he was an anti-pope, and not an official pope of Rome, there was a second (and far more saintly) Pope John XXIII in the mid-twentieth century.

14. Normally we think of knights as mounted warriors in shining steel armor, but full plate armor was only in common use for about 150 years. For most of the Middle Ages the best available armor was chain mail, topped with a steel cap. Chain mail did a good job of stopping bladed weapons like swords, but was nearly worthless against arrows, so gradually blacksmiths developed armor with a more deflective surface. By 1300 they had invented a combination armor we call plate mail, which still used chain mail links around the joints but encased the parts of the body that didn't move as much in solid steel sections (helmets, breastplates, greaves, etc.). Through trial and error they worked out ways to put hinges between the armor pieces, and around 1400 the first full plate suits appeared. The best suits contained more than 200 pieces, and had joints so well made that a pin could not be inserted. A typical suit weighed around 50 pounds; armor used in jousting could weigh up to 130 pounds, because in a sport that dangerous, safety was more important than mobility.
Unfortunately for the armorers, the weapon that would put them out of business, the gun, was undergoing development at the same time. In the early sixteenth century they tried to stop the first muskets with thicker armor plates, but that added too much weight to be practical. Soon gunners had firearms that could penetrate even this, so during the sixteenth century soldiers gave up complete protection in favor of partial armor (usually just a helmet and a breastplate). The fancy gilded and embossed suits of armor made after 1550 were strictly body jewelry, worn only in parades or when kings and nobles posed for portraits.

15. The marriage between Henry V and Katherine appears to have been one of those rare cases where the participants in a royal marriage really loved each other. Unfortunately, it also brought the tainted genes of Charles into the royal family of England. Their son, Henry VI, had the same fits of madness that plagued his grandfather, which helped to cause the Wars of the Roses.

16. Burgundy switched sides in 1435, when the French king, looking for any allies he could get, recognized Burgundian independence. The English only had a serious chance of winning the war while the Burgundians were on their side, which helps to explain the collapse of the English position afterwards.

17. John V ruled for fifty years (1341-1391), and was deposed three times, by his father-in-law, son, and finally his grandson.

18. Transylvania doesn't really deserve its creepy reputation; the Transylvanian landscape of mountains, forest, farms and castles is quite attractive. However, if you're looking for somebody who acted like a real vampire, check out the biography of Erszebet Bathory, a Transylvanian countess who lived a century and a half after Vlad Dracula. Like they say, truth is stranger than fiction . . .

19. The name comes from the notion, not entirely correct, that the House of Lancaster painted a red rose on its shields while the House of York used a white rose as its symbol. Actually roses were a common symbol in the heraldry of many families, but the name stuck because nobody has come up with a better one.

20. Richard III has been a controversial figure ever since. Tudor writers portrayed him as a villain, and in the 1990s, William Shakespeare's play, Richard III, was made into a "politically correct" movie, with the king wearing a Nazi-style uniform. Even so, many feel he got a bad press, so today there is a Richard III fan club based in York, England.

21. Sicily was still under the rule of Aragon. Naples was conquered by Alphonso of Aragon in 1442, but sixteen years later he let go of it to provide a kingdom for his illegitimate son, Ferrante.

22. By this time the Italians no longer thought of themselves as one nation. In 1347 a young fellow named Cola di Rienzo seized control of Rome's government and proclaimed himself "Tribune of the People." Then he called himself Champion of Italy and Friend of the World, and invited the rest of Italy to join him in a new federation. Nobody else took him seriously; a historian in Florence, Giovanni Villani, echoed the feelings of most when he wrote that "Rienzo wanted to bring all Italy under the obedience of Rome in the way of long ago. The enterprise was fantastic and could not endure."

23. In 1439 Cosimo de Medici held a seminar on Greek culture. The Florentines knew a lot more about the ancient Romans than they did about the ancient Greeks (no surprise there), so he invited Greek scholars from Constantinople, and since Florence was the place to be, many of them stayed afterwards.

24. "In painting Cimabue thought that he
Should hold the field, now Giotto has the cry,
So that the other's fame is growing dim."--Dante, Purgatorio, XI.

25. Before the nineteenth century, medicine and sanitation in cities was practically non-existent (see Chapter 13), so a short life expentancy was the norm. Often the urban death rate exceeded the birth rate, so it was only the steady stream of immigrants from the countryside that allowed cities to grow. The typical urban immigrant was a young person seeking his fortune, and the high death rate tells us that most of them didn't find it. In other words, cities were a type of black hole, that drew people in and crushed them.

26. The growth of the shipping industry in the northern Netherlands partially offset the recession in the south. The Dutch learned to build and manage ships more efficiently than their German and Italian rivals; by 1500 forty percent of the ships in the Baltic were Dutch-owned.

27. In the fifteenth century, salt deposits near the mouth of the Loire River replaced Lübeck as Europe's main source of salt.

28. In 1999, Time-Life Books published a volume listing the 1,000 most important people of the preceding millennium. Despite all the activity of our own time, nobody from the twentieth century won a place in the top ten, though Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler made it in the top twenty. The top-ranked person of the second millennium A.D. was Johann Gutenberg; in the next two chapters we'll see the effects of his printing press.

29. However the carrack did not play a part in exploration until Vasco da Gama used them. The ships that Prince Henry sent to Africa were caravels, smaller vessels that also had three masts, but triangular sails for better maneuverability.

© Copyright 2001 Charles Kimball