The Mongols are not always incorporated into the narrative of European history, because despite the enormous breadth of their empire under Chinggis (also Anglicized as Genghis) Khan and his descendants, most of the territories held by the Mongols were in Asia. The Mongols, however, are entirely relevant to European history because they ultimately set the stage for the history of early modern Russia.<\/p>\n
In 1206 the Mongols elected a leader named Temujin (b. 1167) as Khan, which simply means \u201clord\u201d or \u201cwarlord.\u201d The election was the culmination of years of battles and struggles between Temujin and various rival clan leaders. By the time he united the Mongols under his rule, he had already overcome numerous setbacks and betrayals, described years later in a major history commissioned by the Mongol rulers, the Secret History of the Mongols<\/em>. After his election as Khan, he set his sights on the lands beyond Mongolia and eventually became known as Chinggis Khan, meaning \u201cuniversal lord.\u201d He united both the Mongols and various Turkic clans, then launched the single most successful campaign of empire-building in world history.<\/p>\n Where this concerns Europe is in 1236, after years of careful planning, the Mongols attacked Russia. At this time, Russia was not a united kingdom. Instead, each major city was ruled by a prince, and the princes often fought one another. When the Mongols arrived, the Russian principalities were divided and refused to fight together, making them easy prey for the unified and highly organized Mongol army. By 1240, all of the major Russian cities had been either destroyed or captured, with the level of brutality typical of the conquests of the Mongols\u2014the city of Vladimir was burned with its population still inside.<\/p>\n In 1241 the Mongols invaded Poland and Hungary simultaneously. Here, too, they triumphed over tens of thousands of European knights and peasant foot-soldiers. Both kingdoms would have been incorporated into the Mongol empire if not for the simple fact that the Great Khan Ogodei (Chinggis's third son, who had become Great Khan following Chinggis) died, and the warriors were recalled to the Mongol capital of Karakorum. This event spared what very well could have been a Mongol push into central Europe itself. The pope at the time called an anti-Mongol crusade and those Europeans who understood the scope of the threat were terrified of the prospect of the Mongols marching further west. As it happens, the Mongols never came back.<\/p>\n The Mongols were finally stopped militarily by the Mamluks, the rulers of Egypt as of the thirteenth century, who defeated a Mongol invasion in 1260. By then, the inertia of the Mongol conquests was already slowing down as the great empire was divided between different grandsons of Temujin. The Mamluk victory did not represent the definitive defeat of the Mongols as a whole, just a check on Mongol expansion in one corner of the vast Mongol empire. Similar defeats would hold further Mongol expansion in check elsewhere as well. The Mongol Empire was only truly united under Chinggis himself and his third son, Ogodei. By the time Chinggis\u2019s grandsons were of age, the empire was divided into four territories.<\/p>\n Figure 12.1<\/strong> The Mongol Empire at its height, under Temujin\u2019s grandson Kublai Khan, was the largest land empire in world history.<\/em> Credit: Mongol Empire<\/u><\/a> by Spesh531<\/p>\n Historians have now arrived at a consensus that the deadliest epidemic in medieval and early modern history began in the Mongol khanates and spread west: the Black Death, or simply \u201cthe plague,\u201d of the fourteenth century. The plague devastated the areas it affected, none more so than Europe. That devastation was in large part due to the vulnerability of the European population to disease thanks both to poor harvests and the lack of practical medical knowledge.<\/p>\n A series of bad harvests led to periods of famine in Europe starting in the early fourteenth century. Conditions in some regions were so desperate that peasants reportedly resorted to cannibalism on occasion. When harvests were poor, Europeans not only died outright from famine, but those who survived were left even more vulnerable to epidemics because of weakened immune systems. By the time the plague arrived in 1348, generations of people were malnourished and all the more susceptible to infection as a result.<\/p>\n One of the issues is that Europeans did not understand contagion\u2014they knew that disease spread, but they had absolutely no idea how to prevent that spread. The prevailing medical theory was that disease was spread by clouds of foul-smelling gasses called \"miasmas,\" like those produced by stagnant water and decay. Thus, people sincerely believed that if one could avoid the miasmas (which of course never actually existed), they could avoid sickness. Over the centuries, doctors advocated various techniques that were meant to dispel the miasmas by introducing other odors, including leaving piles of onions on the streets of plague-stricken neighborhoods and, starting in the seventeenth century, wearing masks that resembled the heads of birds, with the \u201cbeaks\u201d stuffed with flower petals.<\/p>\n Figure 12.2<\/strong> A later depiction of a doctor in the midst of a plague epidemic.<\/em> Credit: Plague Doctor<\/u><\/a> by Ian Spackman<\/p>\n Not surprisingly, given the lack of medical knowledge, epidemics of all kinds regularly swept across Europe. When harvests failed, the poor often went to the cities in search of some kind of respite, either work or church-based charity. In 1330, for instance, the official population of the northern Italian city of Florence was 100,000, but a full 20,000 were paupers, most of whom had come from the countryside seeking relief. The cities became incubators for epidemics that were even more intense than those that affected the countryside.<\/p>\n Thus, a vulnerable and, in terms of medicine, ignorant population fell victim to the virulence of the Black Death from 1348 to 1351. Scholars believe that the main contagion was the bacterium yersinia pestis<\/em> which was transmitted by fleas, both those carried by rats and transmitted to humans, and on fleas exclusive to humans. In the unsanitary conditions of medieval Europe, there were both rats and fleas everywhere. Bites from infected fleas led to the appearance of buboes, a swelling of the lymph nodes which over time turns into black lumps. It is from this that both the terms bubonic and the more descriptive Black Death are derived. In turn, many victims of bubonic plague developed the \u201cpneumonic\u201d form of the disease, spread by coughing, which made it both incredibly virulent and lethal (about 90% of those who developed pneumonic plague died).<\/p>\n The plague exploded across Europe starting at the end of the 1340s. All of Southern Europe was affected in 1348; it spread to Central Europe and England by 1349 and Eastern Europe and Scandinavia by 1350. It continued to fester until about 1351, when it seems the surviving population of Europe had developed a resistance to it. The death toll was astonishing: in the end, the Black Death killed about one-third of the population of Europe in just three years (that is a conservative estimate\u2014some present-day historians have calculated that it was closer to half!). Some cities lost over half of their population; there are even cases of villages where there was only a single survivor. This was an enormous demographic shift in a very short amount of time that had lasting consequences for European society, thanks mostly to the labor shortage that it introduced.<\/p>\n Figure 12.3<\/strong> The plague\u2019s spread, from south to north, over the course of just a few years. The section marked in gray is incorrectly labeled \u201cminor outbreak\u201d: in fact, while data is difficult to come by for that region, it seems clear that the plague hit just as hard there as elsewhere in Europe.<\/em> Credit: Plague Map<\/u><\/a> by Bunchofgrapes<\/p>\n The only somewhat effective response to the Black Death was the implementation of quarantines. The more fast-acting city governments of Europe locked those who had plague symptoms in their homes, often for more than a month, and sometimes whole neighborhoods or districts were placed under quarantine. In the countryside, people refused to travel to larger cities and towns out of fear of infection. Even though quarantines slowed the spread of the plague in some cases, overall they did little but delay it.<\/p>\n More common than practical measures like quarantines, however, was prayer and the search for scapegoats to blame for the devastation. The spiritual reaction to the plague was, among Christian Europeans, to implore God for relief, beg for forgiveness, and to look to outsiders to blame. Building on the murderous anti-Semitism that had begun in earnest during the period of the crusades, Jews were often the victims of this phenomenon. There was a huge spike in anti-Semitic riots during plague outbreaks, as Jews were blamed for somehow bringing the plague (a frequent accusation was that Jews had poisoned wells), and thousands of Jews were massacred as a result.<\/p>\n Religious movements like the Flagellants emerged in response to the plague as well. These groups of penitents roamed the countryside, villages, and towns whipping themselves and begging God for forgiveness. Many people sincerely believed that the Black Death was the opening salvo of the End Times, since the history of Europe in the fourteenth century so clearly involved both famine and pestilence\u2014two of the four \"horsemen\" that were to accompany the end times according to the Bible (the others, war and death, were ever-present as well).<\/p>\n The Black Death ended in 1351, but the plague returned roughly every twenty years in some form. Some cases were as devastating, at least in limited areas, as the Black Death had been. The plague did not stop entirely until the early eighteenth century\u2014to this day it is not clear what brought an end to large-scale plague outbreaks, although one theory is that a species of brown rat that was not as vulnerable to the plague overwhelmed the older black rats that had once infested Europe.<\/p>\n Ironically, the immediate economic effects of the plague after it ended were largely positive for many people. The demographic consequences of the Black Death, namely its enormous death toll, resulted in a labor shortage across all of Europe. The immediate effect was that lords tried to keep their peasants from fleeing the land and to keep wages at the low levels they had been at before the plague hit, sparking various peasant uprisings. Even though those uprisings were generally bloodily put down in the end, the overall trend was that laborers had<\/em> to be paid more; their labor was simply more valuable. In the decades that followed many peasants benefited from higher prices for their labor and their crops. Interestingly, the overall health of the population of Europe raised as well due to the availability of cheap meat. Fewer people working the fields meant that less produce could be harvested, not only for human consumption, but also for livestock. This meant more of that livestock was slaughtered, leading to prices plummeting.<\/p>\n Another group that benefited was women. For roughly a century after the plague, women had more legal rights in terms of property ownership, the right to participate in commerce, and land ownership, than they had enjoyed before the plague\u2019s outbreak. Women were even able to join certain craft guilds for a time, something that was almost unheard of earlier. The reason for this temporary improvement in the legal and economic status of women was precisely the same as that of peasants: the labor shortage.<\/p>\n The plague also ushered in a cultural change that came about because of the prevalence of death in the fourteenth century. Europeans became so used to death that they often depicted it graphically and quite terribly in art. Paintings, stories, and theatrical performances emerged having to do with the \u201cdance of death,\u201d a depiction of the futility of worldly possessions and status vis-\u00e0-vis the inevitability of death. Likewise, graves and mausoleums came to be decorated with statues of grotesque skeletons and writhing bodies. When people were dying, their families and friends were supposed to come and view them, inoculating everyone present against the temptation to enjoy life too much and encouraging them to greater focus on preparing their souls for the afterlife.<\/p>\n Figure 12.4<\/strong> The dance of death, with this image produced decades after the Black Death had already run its course.<\/em> Credit: Dance of Death<\/u><\/a> by Il Dottor<\/p>\n The plague happened near the beginning of the conflict between England and France remembered as the Hundred Years\u2019 War, which lasted from 1337 \u2013 1453. That conflict was not really one war but instead consisted of a series of battles and shorter wars between the crowns of England and France interrupted by (sometimes fairly long) periods of peace.<\/p>\n The war began because of simmering resentments and dynastic politics. Since the reign of William the Conqueror, the noble lines of England and France were intertwined, and as marriage often took place across French - English lines, the inheritance of lands and titles in both kingdoms was often a point of contention. The culture of nobility in both countries was so similar that the \u201cEnglish\u201d nobles generally spoke French instead of English in day-to-day life.<\/p>\n This confusion very much extended to the kings themselves. The English royal line (the Plantagenets) often enjoyed pledges of fealty from numerous \u201cFrench\u201d nobles, and \u201cEnglish\u201d kings often thought of themselves as being as much French as English\u2014the English King Richard the Lion-Hearted, for instance, spent most of his career in France battling for control of more French territory. Likewise, a large region in southwestern France, Aquitaine, was formally the property of the English royal line, with the awkward caveat that, while a given English king might be sovereign in England, his lordship of Aquitaine technically made him the vassal of whoever the French king happened to be. Thus, hundreds of years after William\u2019s conquest, the royal and noble lines of England and France were often hard to distinguish from one another.<\/p>\n The war began in the aftermath of the death of the French King Charles IV in 1328. The king of England, Edward III, was the nephew of Charles, and as such was the closest living male relative to the deceased king. As such, Edward believed that he should be next in line for succession to the French crown. However, powerful members of the French nobility rejected his claim and instead pledged to give the crown to a French noble and cousin to Charles named Philip VI. When Philip began passing judgments concerning the English-controlled territory of Aquitaine, Edward went to war, sparking the Hundred Years\u2019 War.<\/p>\n The war itself consisted of a series of raids by English forces punctuated by the occasional large battle. They were not primarily concerned with conquest, rather they kept the war going because it was a way to enrich themselves by looting and pillaging. English forces would raid inland and then immediately race back to the coast with their spoils to avoid a pitched battle with the French. Even when they were caught, the English forces tended to be better organized than their French counterparts. This led to a series of victories over much larger French forces. The most famous of those victories was the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, in which a smaller English force decimated the elite French cavalry through effective use of longbows, a weapon that could transform an English peasant into more than the equal of a mounted French knight. The aftermath of Agincourt saw most of the French nobility accept the English king, Henry V, as the king of France. Henry V promptly died, however, and the conflict exploded into a series of alliances and counter-alliances between rival factions of English and French nobles (one French territory, Burgundy, even declared its independence from France and became a staunch English ally for a time).<\/p>\n Decades into the war, the French received an unexpected boost in their fortunes thanks to the intervention of one of the future patron saints of France itself: Joan of Arc. Joan was a peasant girl who became part of the conflict in 1429 on the side of the French Dauphin (heir) Charles VII. Joan declared that she had received a vision from God commanding her to help the French achieve victory against the invading English. French forces rallied around Joan, with Joan herself leading them in several battles. Remarkably, despite being a teenage peasant with no military background, she proved capable of aiming catapults, making tactical decisions, and rallying the French troops to victory. Buoyed by the sense that God was on their side, French forces prevailed. Even though she was soon captured and handed over to the English for trial and execution as a witch, Joan became a martyr to the French cause and, eventually, one of the most significant French nationalist symbols. When Henry V died in 1422, he left behind an heir that was only eight months old. The only thing keeping the English fighting was the king\u2019s brother, John of Bedford. In 1435 when John of Bedford died the English alliance with Burgundy fell apart and they made their peace with Charles at the Treaty of Arras in the same year.\u00a0 Abandoned by the Burgundians and without a competent leader the English fell apart, and the French were able to win everything back piece by piece.\u00a0 On October 19th, 1453, Bordeaux surrendered, leaving Calais as the last English possession in France and bringing the war to an official end.<\/p>\n Figure 12.5<\/strong> An illustration of Joan of Arc from 1505, just under 60 years after the end of the war.<\/em> Credit: Joan of Arc<\/u><\/a> by Public Domain<\/p>\n The war had a devastating effect on France. Between the fighting and the plague, its population declined by half. Many French regions suffered economically as trade in luxury goods shut down and whole regions were devastated by the fighting. The French crown introduced new taxes, such as the Gabelle<\/em> (a tax on salt) and the Taille<\/em> (a household tax) that placed a further burden on commoners. On the cultural front, the English monarchy and nobility severed their ties with France and high English culture began to self-consciously reshape itself as distinctly English<\/em> rather than French, leading among other things to the use of the English language as the language of state and the law for the first time since the Norman Conquest.<\/p>\n Even as the French and English were at each other\u2019s throats, the Roman Catholic Church fell into a state of disunity. The cause was one of the most peculiar episodes in late medieval European history: the \u201cBabylonian Captivity\u201d of the popes in the fourteenth century. The term originally referred to the Biblical story of the Jews\u2019 enslavement by the Babylonian Empire in the sixth century BCE, but the late-medieval Babylonian Captivity refers instead to the period during which the popes no longer lived in their traditional residence in Rome.<\/p>\n The context for this strange event was the state of the Roman Catholic Church as of the early fourteenth century. The Church was a very diverse, and somewhat diffuse, institution. Due to the simple geographical distance between Rome and the kingdoms of Europe, the popes did not exercise much practical authority over the various national churches, and high-level churchmen in European kingdoms were often more closely associated with their respective kings than with Rome. Likewise, there were many times during the Middle Ages when individual popes were weak and ineffectual and could not even command obedience within the Church hierarchy itself.<\/p>\n This meant that over the centuries the papacy struggled, and often failed, to assert its control over the Church as an institution and to hold the pretensions of kings in check. Those weaknesses were reflected in a simple fact: there had been a number of times over the centuries in which there were popes, generally appointed by compliant Church officials, who answered to kings instead of being a power onto themselves. Obviously, this undermined the central claim of the papacy to complete authority over the Church itself and over Christian doctrine.<\/p>\n The Babylonian Captivity began when Pope Boniface VIII issued a papal bull (formal commandment) in 1303 to the effect that all kings had to acknowledge his authority over even their own kingdoms, a challenge he issued in response to the taxes kings levied on Church property. Unfortunately for Boniface, he lacked both influence with the monarchs of Europe and the ability to defend himself. Infuriated, the French king, Philip IV, promptly had the pope arrested and thrown in prison; he was released months later but promptly died.<\/p>\n A new pope, Clement V, was elected in 1305. Usually, Clement is shown as a flunky of Philip, but this really was not the case.\u00a0While he did speak French, he was from Bordeaux, a region that was under English control at the time.\u00a0At the time of his election Clement was still in Bordeaux and so left for the nearest territory held by the Papacy, which was in Avignon, a territory at this time in the Holy Roman Empire. This created enormous concern among non-French Church officials (most of them Italian), who feared that the French king, then the most powerful ruler in Europe, would have undue influence over the papacy. Their fears seemed confirmed when Clement started appointing new cardinals, a pattern that saw 113 French cardinals instated out of the 134 who were appointed in the following decades. Clement was a pretty powerful man and did not give in to a lot of Philips demands.\u00a0However, when he tried to leave Avignon in 1309 to finally take up residence in Rome, Philip would not let him leave claiming that he had more pressing issues to take care of north of the Alps and surrounded the castle Clement was in with an army.\u00a0In 1311-1313 Clement called the Council of Vienne where he finally gave in to most of Philips demands, including allowing Philip to attack and disband the Templars, so that he could collect their riches for himself.<\/p>\n From 1305 to 1378, the popes continued to live and work in Avignon (despite the English invasions of the 100 Years\u2019 War). They were not directly controlled by the French king, as their opponents had feared, but they were definitely influenced by French politics. They also came to accept bribes and kickbacks for the appointment of priests and bishops, along with shady schemes with Church lands. Throughout this time there were constant calls, especially in Rome, to return the papacy to where it belonged.<\/p>\n Finally, in 1377 Gregory XI made a successful trip back to Rome. Unfortunately for him, he died shortly after his arrival.\u00a0This was actually good news for the Italians, because they claimed that since Gregory had died on Italian soil, the next papal election had to be held there. They did worry though that due to the College of Cardinals being made up of a majority of Frenchmen, that they would choose a French pope and return to Avignon.\u00a0To counteract this, the Italian clergy encouraged the citizens of Rome to mob the election and demand that an Italian be chosen pope, if not they would not allow the cardinals to leave the city alive.\u00a0The cardinals promptly elected an Italian who took the name Urban VI. However, once the French cardinals were safely away from the city, they declared the election invalid since they had been under duress, and elected another Pope, Clement VII, who then returned to Avignon. Europe was thus split between two rival popes, both of whom excommunicated each other as a heretic and impostor (the term used at the time was \u201cantipope.\u201d) This led to the Great Western Schism, a period from 1378 to 1417 during which there were as many as three<\/em> rival popes vying for power. For almost forty years, the Church was a battlefield between both rival popes and their respective followers, and laypeople and monarchs alike were generally able to go about their business with little fear of papal intervention.<\/p>\n The Great Western Schism finally ended after a series of Church councils, known as the Conciliar Movement, succeeded in establishing the authority of a single pope in 1417 when the movement elected a new pope, Martin V. They also made the claim that Church councils could and should hold the ultimate authority over papal appointments. This concept, known as the via consilii,<\/em> called for the creation of a great council with binding powers over the Church\u2019s leadership. This, however, undermined the very concept of what the papacy was<\/em>. The \u201cDoctrine of the Keys\u201d held that the pope\u2019s authority was passed down directly from Christ, and that even if councils could play a role in the practical maintenance of the Church, the pope\u2019s authority was not based on their approval. Ultimately, a powerful pope, Eugene IV, reconfirmed the absolute power of the papacy in 1431. Thus, this attempt at reform failed in the end, inadvertently setting the stage for more radical criticisms of papal power in the future.<\/p>\n The most important consequence of the Babylonian Captivity and the Great Western Schism was simple: the moral and spiritual authority of the Church hierarchy was seriously undermined. While no one (yet) envisioned rejecting the authority of the Church altogether, many people regarded the Church\u2019s leadership as just another political institution.<\/p>\n Over the course of the fourteenth through fifteenth centuries, the Black Death decimated the population of Europe, the 100 Years War destabilized the region, and the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was in decline. However, amidst this decline and while European culture was becoming more pessimistic and xenophobic as a whole, one region was rising to wealth and prominence: Northern Italy. It was there that the Renaissance began.<\/p>","rendered":" From a very “high level” perspective, the years between about 1000 CE – 1300 CE were relatively good ones for Europe. The medieval agricultural revolution sparked an expansion of population, urbanization, and economics, advances in education and scholarship paid off in higher literacy rates and a more sophisticated intellectual life, and Europe was free of large-scale invasions. Starting in the mid-thirteenth century in Eastern Europe, and spreading to Western Europe in the fourteenth century, however, a series of crises undermined European prosperity, security, and population levels. Historians refer to these events as the “crises of the Middle Ages.”<\/p>\n The Mongols are not always incorporated into the narrative of European history, because despite the enormous breadth of their empire under Chinggis (also Anglicized as Genghis) Khan and his descendants, most of the territories held by the Mongols were in Asia. The Mongols, however, are entirely relevant to European history because they ultimately set the stage for the history of early modern Russia.<\/p>\n In 1206 the Mongols elected a leader named Temujin (b. 1167) as Khan, which simply means \u201clord\u201d or \u201cwarlord.\u201d The election was the culmination of years of battles and struggles between Temujin and various rival clan leaders. By the time he united the Mongols under his rule, he had already overcome numerous setbacks and betrayals, described years later in a major history commissioned by the Mongol rulers, the Secret History of the Mongols<\/em>. After his election as Khan, he set his sights on the lands beyond Mongolia and eventually became known as Chinggis Khan, meaning \u201cuniversal lord.\u201d He united both the Mongols and various Turkic clans, then launched the single most successful campaign of empire-building in world history.<\/p>\n Where this concerns Europe is in 1236, after years of careful planning, the Mongols attacked Russia. At this time, Russia was not a united kingdom. Instead, each major city was ruled by a prince, and the princes often fought one another. When the Mongols arrived, the Russian principalities were divided and refused to fight together, making them easy prey for the unified and highly organized Mongol army. By 1240, all of the major Russian cities had been either destroyed or captured, with the level of brutality typical of the conquests of the Mongols\u2014the city of Vladimir was burned with its population still inside.<\/p>\n In 1241 the Mongols invaded Poland and Hungary simultaneously. Here, too, they triumphed over tens of thousands of European knights and peasant foot-soldiers. Both kingdoms would have been incorporated into the Mongol empire if not for the simple fact that the Great Khan Ogodei (Chinggis’s third son, who had become Great Khan following Chinggis) died, and the warriors were recalled to the Mongol capital of Karakorum. This event spared what very well could have been a Mongol push into central Europe itself. The pope at the time called an anti-Mongol crusade and those Europeans who understood the scope of the threat were terrified of the prospect of the Mongols marching further west. As it happens, the Mongols never came back.<\/p>\n The Mongols were finally stopped militarily by the Mamluks, the rulers of Egypt as of the thirteenth century, who defeated a Mongol invasion in 1260. By then, the inertia of the Mongol conquests was already slowing down as the great empire was divided between different grandsons of Temujin. The Mamluk victory did not represent the definitive defeat of the Mongols as a whole, just a check on Mongol expansion in one corner of the vast Mongol empire. Similar defeats would hold further Mongol expansion in check elsewhere as well. The Mongol Empire was only truly united under Chinggis himself and his third son, Ogodei. By the time Chinggis\u2019s grandsons were of age, the empire was divided into four territories.<\/p>\n Figure 12.1<\/strong> The Mongol Empire at its height, under Temujin\u2019s grandson Kublai Khan, was the largest land empire in world history.<\/em> Credit: Mongol Empire<\/u><\/a> by Spesh531<\/p>\n Historians have now arrived at a consensus that the deadliest epidemic in medieval and early modern history began in the Mongol khanates and spread west: the Black Death, or simply \u201cthe plague,\u201d of the fourteenth century. The plague devastated the areas it affected, none more so than Europe. That devastation was in large part due to the vulnerability of the European population to disease thanks both to poor harvests and the lack of practical medical knowledge.<\/p>\n A series of bad harvests led to periods of famine in Europe starting in the early fourteenth century. Conditions in some regions were so desperate that peasants reportedly resorted to cannibalism on occasion. When harvests were poor, Europeans not only died outright from famine, but those who survived were left even more vulnerable to epidemics because of weakened immune systems. By the time the plague arrived in 1348, generations of people were malnourished and all the more susceptible to infection as a result.<\/p>\n One of the issues is that Europeans did not understand contagion\u2014they knew that disease spread, but they had absolutely no idea how to prevent that spread. The prevailing medical theory was that disease was spread by clouds of foul-smelling gasses called “miasmas,” like those produced by stagnant water and decay. Thus, people sincerely believed that if one could avoid the miasmas (which of course never actually existed), they could avoid sickness. Over the centuries, doctors advocated various techniques that were meant to dispel the miasmas by introducing other odors, including leaving piles of onions on the streets of plague-stricken neighborhoods and, starting in the seventeenth century, wearing masks that resembled the heads of birds, with the \u201cbeaks\u201d stuffed with flower petals.<\/p>\n Figure 12.2<\/strong> A later depiction of a doctor in the midst of a plague epidemic.<\/em> Credit: Plague Doctor<\/u><\/a> by Ian Spackman<\/p>\n Not surprisingly, given the lack of medical knowledge, epidemics of all kinds regularly swept across Europe. When harvests failed, the poor often went to the cities in search of some kind of respite, either work or church-based charity. In 1330, for instance, the official population of the northern Italian city of Florence was 100,000, but a full 20,000 were paupers, most of whom had come from the countryside seeking relief. The cities became incubators for epidemics that were even more intense than those that affected the countryside.<\/p>\n Thus, a vulnerable and, in terms of medicine, ignorant population fell victim to the virulence of the Black Death from 1348 to 1351. Scholars believe that the main contagion was the bacterium yersinia pestis<\/em> which was transmitted by fleas, both those carried by rats and transmitted to humans, and on fleas exclusive to humans. In the unsanitary conditions of medieval Europe, there were both rats and fleas everywhere. Bites from infected fleas led to the appearance of buboes, a swelling of the lymph nodes which over time turns into black lumps. It is from this that both the terms bubonic and the more descriptive Black Death are derived. In turn, many victims of bubonic plague developed the \u201cpneumonic\u201d form of the disease, spread by coughing, which made it both incredibly virulent and lethal (about 90% of those who developed pneumonic plague died).<\/p>\n The plague exploded across Europe starting at the end of the 1340s. All of Southern Europe was affected in 1348; it spread to Central Europe and England by 1349 and Eastern Europe and Scandinavia by 1350. It continued to fester until about 1351, when it seems the surviving population of Europe had developed a resistance to it. The death toll was astonishing: in the end, the Black Death killed about one-third of the population of Europe in just three years (that is a conservative estimate\u2014some present-day historians have calculated that it was closer to half!). Some cities lost over half of their population; there are even cases of villages where there was only a single survivor. This was an enormous demographic shift in a very short amount of time that had lasting consequences for European society, thanks mostly to the labor shortage that it introduced.<\/p>\n Figure 12.3<\/strong> The plague\u2019s spread, from south to north, over the course of just a few years. The section marked in gray is incorrectly labeled \u201cminor outbreak\u201d: in fact, while data is difficult to come by for that region, it seems clear that the plague hit just as hard there as elsewhere in Europe.<\/em> Credit: Plague Map<\/u><\/a> by Bunchofgrapes<\/p>\n The only somewhat effective response to the Black Death was the implementation of quarantines. The more fast-acting city governments of Europe locked those who had plague symptoms in their homes, often for more than a month, and sometimes whole neighborhoods or districts were placed under quarantine. In the countryside, people refused to travel to larger cities and towns out of fear of infection. Even though quarantines slowed the spread of the plague in some cases, overall they did little but delay it.<\/p>\n More common than practical measures like quarantines, however, was prayer and the search for scapegoats to blame for the devastation. The spiritual reaction to the plague was, among Christian Europeans, to implore God for relief, beg for forgiveness, and to look to outsiders to blame. Building on the murderous anti-Semitism that had begun in earnest during the period of the crusades, Jews were often the victims of this phenomenon. There was a huge spike in anti-Semitic riots during plague outbreaks, as Jews were blamed for somehow bringing the plague (a frequent accusation was that Jews had poisoned wells), and thousands of Jews were massacred as a result.<\/p>\n Religious movements like the Flagellants emerged in response to the plague as well. These groups of penitents roamed the countryside, villages, and towns whipping themselves and begging God for forgiveness. Many people sincerely believed that the Black Death was the opening salvo of the End Times, since the history of Europe in the fourteenth century so clearly involved both famine and pestilence\u2014two of the four “horsemen” that were to accompany the end times according to the Bible (the others, war and death, were ever-present as well).<\/p>\n The Black Death ended in 1351, but the plague returned roughly every twenty years in some form. Some cases were as devastating, at least in limited areas, as the Black Death had been. The plague did not stop entirely until the early eighteenth century\u2014to this day it is not clear what brought an end to large-scale plague outbreaks, although one theory is that a species of brown rat that was not as vulnerable to the plague overwhelmed the older black rats that had once infested Europe.<\/p>\n Ironically, the immediate economic effects of the plague after it ended were largely positive for many people. The demographic consequences of the Black Death, namely its enormous death toll, resulted in a labor shortage across all of Europe. The immediate effect was that lords tried to keep their peasants from fleeing the land and to keep wages at the low levels they had been at before the plague hit, sparking various peasant uprisings. Even though those uprisings were generally bloodily put down in the end, the overall trend was that laborers had<\/em> to be paid more; their labor was simply more valuable. In the decades that followed many peasants benefited from higher prices for their labor and their crops. Interestingly, the overall health of the population of Europe raised as well due to the availability of cheap meat. Fewer people working the fields meant that less produce could be harvested, not only for human consumption, but also for livestock. This meant more of that livestock was slaughtered, leading to prices plummeting.<\/p>\n Another group that benefited was women. For roughly a century after the plague, women had more legal rights in terms of property ownership, the right to participate in commerce, and land ownership, than they had enjoyed before the plague\u2019s outbreak. Women were even able to join certain craft guilds for a time, something that was almost unheard of earlier. The reason for this temporary improvement in the legal and economic status of women was precisely the same as that of peasants: the labor shortage.<\/p>\n The plague also ushered in a cultural change that came about because of the prevalence of death in the fourteenth century. Europeans became so used to death that they often depicted it graphically and quite terribly in art. Paintings, stories, and theatrical performances emerged having to do with the \u201cdance of death,\u201d a depiction of the futility of worldly possessions and status vis-\u00e0-vis the inevitability of death. Likewise, graves and mausoleums came to be decorated with statues of grotesque skeletons and writhing bodies. When people were dying, their families and friends were supposed to come and view them, inoculating everyone present against the temptation to enjoy life too much and encouraging them to greater focus on preparing their souls for the afterlife.<\/p>\n![\"World](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/70\/2026\/05\/image61.png\")
<\/p>\nThe Black Death<\/h2>\n
![\"Doctor](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Mongol_Empireaccuratefinal.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\nEffects of the Plague's Aftermath <\/h3>\n
<\/p>\nThe 100 Years\u2019 War<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\nThe Babylonian Captivity and the Great Western Schism<\/h2>\n
Conclusion <\/h2>\n
Eastern<\/mark> Europe <\/h3>\n
<\/p>\nThe Black Death<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n<\/p>\nEffects of the Plague’s Aftermath <\/h3>\n
<\/p>\n
![Joan of Arc<\/u><\/a> by Public Domain<\/p>\nThe war had a devastating effect on France. Between the fighting and the plague, its population declined by half. Many French regions suffered economically as trade in luxury goods shut down and whole regions were devastated by the fighting. The French crown introduced new taxes, such as the Gabelle<\/em> (a tax on salt) and the Taille<\/em> (a household tax) that placed a further burden on commoners. On the cultural front, the English monarchy and nobility severed their ties with France and high English culture began to self-consciously reshape itself as distinctly English<\/em> rather than French, leading among other things to the use of the English language as the language of state and the law for the first time since the Norman Conquest.<\/p>\nThe Babylonian Captivity and the Great Western Schism<\/h2>\nEven as the French and English were at each other\u2019s throats, the Roman Catholic Church fell into a state of disunity. The cause was one of the most peculiar episodes in late medieval European history: the \u201cBabylonian Captivity\u201d of the popes in the fourteenth century. The term originally referred to the Biblical story of the Jews\u2019 enslavement by the Babylonian Empire in the sixth century BCE, but the late-medieval Babylonian Captivity refers instead to the period during which the popes no longer lived in their traditional residence in Rome.<\/p>\nThe context for this strange event was the state of the Roman Catholic Church as of the early fourteenth century. The Church was a very diverse, and somewhat diffuse, institution. Due to the simple geographical distance between Rome and the kingdoms of Europe, the popes did not exercise much practical authority over the various national churches, and high-level churchmen in European kingdoms were often more closely associated with their respective kings than with Rome. Likewise, there were many times during the Middle Ages when individual popes were weak and ineffectual and could not even command obedience within the Church hierarchy itself.<\/p>\nThis meant that over the centuries the papacy struggled, and often failed, to assert its control over the Church as an institution and to hold the pretensions of kings in check. Those weaknesses were reflected in a simple fact: there had been a number of times over the centuries in which there were popes, generally appointed by compliant Church officials, who answered to kings instead of being a power onto themselves. Obviously, this undermined the central claim of the papacy to complete authority over the Church itself and over Christian doctrine.<\/p>\nThe Babylonian Captivity began when Pope Boniface VIII issued a papal bull (formal commandment) in 1303 to the effect that all kings had to acknowledge his authority over even their own kingdoms, a challenge he issued in response to the taxes kings levied on Church property. Unfortunately for Boniface, he lacked both influence with the monarchs of Europe and the ability to defend himself. Infuriated, the French king, Philip IV, promptly had the pope arrested and thrown in prison; he was released months later but promptly died.<\/p>\nA new pope, Clement V, was elected in 1305. Usually, Clement is shown as a flunky of Philip, but this really was not the case.\u00a0While he did speak French, he was from Bordeaux, a region that was under English control at the time.\u00a0At the time of his election Clement was still in Bordeaux and so left for the nearest territory held by the Papacy, which was in Avignon, a territory at this time in the Holy Roman Empire. This created enormous concern among non-French Church officials (most of them Italian), who feared that the French king, then the most powerful ruler in Europe, would have undue influence over the papacy. Their fears seemed confirmed when Clement started appointing new cardinals, a pattern that saw 113 French cardinals instated out of the 134 who were appointed in the following decades. Clement was a pretty powerful man and did not give in to a lot of Philips demands.\u00a0However, when he tried to leave Avignon in 1309 to finally take up residence in Rome, Philip would not let him leave claiming that he had more pressing issues to take care of north of the Alps and surrounded the castle Clement was in with an army.\u00a0In 1311-1313 Clement called the Council of Vienne where he finally gave in to most of Philips demands, including allowing Philip to attack and disband the Templars, so that he could collect their riches for himself.<\/p>\nFrom 1305 to 1378, the popes continued to live and work in Avignon (despite the English invasions of the 100 Years\u2019 War). They were not directly controlled by the French king, as their opponents had feared, but they were definitely influenced by French politics. They also came to accept bribes and kickbacks for the appointment of priests and bishops, along with shady schemes with Church lands. Throughout this time there were constant calls, especially in Rome, to return the papacy to where it belonged.<\/p>\nFinally, in 1377 Gregory XI made a successful trip back to Rome. Unfortunately for him, he died shortly after his arrival.\u00a0This was actually good news for the Italians, because they claimed that since Gregory had died on Italian soil, the next papal election had to be held there. They did worry though that due to the College of Cardinals being made up of a majority of Frenchmen, that they would choose a French pope and return to Avignon.\u00a0To counteract this, the Italian clergy encouraged the citizens of Rome to mob the election and demand that an Italian be chosen pope, if not they would not allow the cardinals to leave the city alive.\u00a0The cardinals promptly elected an Italian who took the name Urban VI. However, once the French cardinals were safely away from the city, they declared the election invalid since they had been under duress, and elected another Pope, Clement VII, who then returned to Avignon. Europe was thus split between two rival popes, both of whom excommunicated each other as a heretic and impostor (the term used at the time was \u201cantipope.\u201d) This led to the Great Western Schism, a period from 1378 to 1417 during which there were as many as three<\/em> rival popes vying for power. For almost forty years, the Church was a battlefield between both rival popes and their respective followers, and laypeople and monarchs alike were generally able to go about their business with little fear of papal intervention.<\/p>\nThe Great Western Schism finally ended after a series of Church councils, known as the Conciliar Movement, succeeded in establishing the authority of a single pope in 1417 when the movement elected a new pope, Martin V. They also made the claim that Church councils could and should hold the ultimate authority over papal appointments. This concept, known as the via consilii,<\/em> called for the creation of a great council with binding powers over the Church\u2019s leadership. This, however, undermined the very concept of what the papacy was<\/em>. The \u201cDoctrine of the Keys\u201d held that the pope\u2019s authority was passed down directly from Christ, and that even if councils could play a role in the practical maintenance of the Church, the pope\u2019s authority was not based on their approval. Ultimately, a powerful pope, Eugene IV, reconfirmed the absolute power of the papacy in 1431. Thus, this attempt at reform failed in the end, inadvertently setting the stage for more radical criticisms of papal power in the future.<\/p>\nThe most important consequence of the Babylonian Captivity and the Great Western Schism was simple: the moral and spiritual authority of the Church hierarchy was seriously undermined. While no one (yet) envisioned rejecting the authority of the Church altogether, many people regarded the Church\u2019s leadership as just another political institution.<\/p>\nConclusion <\/h2>\nOver the course of the fourteenth through fifteenth centuries, the Black Death decimated the population of Europe, the 100 Years War destabilized the region, and the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was in decline. However, amidst this decline and while European culture was becoming more pessimistic and xenophobic as a whole, one region was rising to wealth and prominence: Northern Italy. It was there that the Renaissance began.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-176","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/176\/revisions\/177"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/176\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/Jeanne_d%27Arc#\/media\/File:Joan_of_Arc_on_horseback.png\"){kind=link}