What is Late Middle Ages?

The Late Middle Ages is a term used by historians to describe European history in the period of the 14th to 16th centuries (AD 1300–1500). The Late Middle Ages were preceded by the High Middle Ages, and followed by the Early Modern era (Renaissance).

Around 1300, centuries of European prosperity and growth came to a halt. A series of famines and plagues, such as the Great Famine of 1315-1317 and the Black Death, reduced the population perhaps by half. Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare. France and England experienced serious peasant risings (the Jacquerie and the Peasants' Revolt), and the Hundred Years' War. The unity of the Catholic Church was shattered by the Great Schism. Collectively it is sometimes called the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages.

On the other hand, the 14th century was also a time of great progress within the arts and sciences. The rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman texts led to what has later been termed the Renaissance – the rebirth. This process had started already through contact with the Arabs during the Crusades, but accelerated with the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, when many Byzantine scholars had to seek refuge in the West, particularly Italy. Meanwhile, the invention of printing was to have great effect on European society. This facilitated dissemination of the printed word and democratized learning, one end result of which for the Catholic Church would eventually be the Protestant Reformation. The growth of the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (incidentally also the year counted as the end of the Hundred Years' War), cut off trading possibilities with the east. But Columbus’s discovery of America in 1492, and Vasco da Gama’s circumnavigation of India and Africa in 1498, opened up new trade routes, strengthening the economy and power of European nations.

All these developments taken together make it convenient to talk of an end to the Middle Ages, and the beginning of the modern world. It should be noted that the division will always be a somewhat artificial one, since ancient learning was never entirely absent from European society, and therefore there is a certain continuity between the Classical and the Modern age. Also, some historians, particularly in Italy, prefer not to speak of the Late Middle Ages at all, but rather see the 14th century Renaissance as a direct transition to the Modern Era.

Historical events and politics

Britain

Main article: Britain in the Middle Ages

The Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 effectively ended English aspirations of subjugating Scotland, and the Scottish were able to develop a stronger state under the Stuarts. From 1337, England’s attention was largely directed towards France in the Hundred Years' War. Henry V’s victory at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 briefly paved the way for a unification of the two kingdoms, but his son Henry VI soon squandered all previous gains. Almost immediately upon the end of the war, in 1453, followed the dynastic struggles of the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485). The war ended in the accession of Henry VII, and the strong, centralized Tudor monarchy. While England’s attention was thus directed elsewhere, Ireland was allowed to develop virtual independence under English overlordship.

Scandinavia

Main articles: Denmark, Norway, Sweden

After the failed union of Sweden and Norway of 1319-1365, the pan-Scandinavian Kalmar Union was instituted in 1397. The Swedes were reluctant members of the Danish-dominated union, and broke away for good in 1523, after the Stockholm Bloodbath in 1520. Norway, on the other hand, became an inferior party, and remained united with Denmark until 1814.

The Norwegian colony on Greenland died out under mysterious circumstances in the 15th century.

Western Europe

Main articles: France in the Middle Ages, Burgundy, Burgundian Netherlands

The French House of Valois, which followed the House of Capet in 1328, was at its outset virtually marginalized in its own country, first by the English invading forces of the Hundred Years' War, later by the powerful Duchy of Burgundy. The appearance of Joan of Arc on the scene changed the course of war in favour of the French. Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy was killed during the Burgundian Wars at the Battle of Nancy in 1477; the Duchy of Burgundy was reclaimed by Louis XI of France, while the County of Burgundy and the wealthy Burgundian Netherlands came into the Holy Roman Empire under Habsburg control, setting up conflict for centuries to come.

Central Europe

Main articles: History of Germany, History of the Czech Lands

In Germany and Bohemia, the Holy Roman Empire passed to the Habsburgs in 1438, where it remained until its dissolution in 1806. The Empire, however, remained fragmented, and much real power and influence was held by financial institutions such as the Hanseatic League and the Fugger family. Other Central European states such as Hungary also saw growth.

Eastern Europe

In the north, the main development was the enormous growth of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a Baltic-Slavic polity ethnically, linguistically, and confessionally dominated by East Slavs. Further east, the defeat of the Golden Horde, at Kulikovo in 1380 established the Grand Duchy of Muscovy as a regional power, following the decline of the state of Kievan Rus'. Ivan III, the Great, annexed the vast Republic of Novgorod and laid the foundations for a Russian national state. Vlad III the Impaler, also known as Vlad Dracula, ruled Wallachia, a region of Romania, in the mid-15th century.

Byzantine Empire

The Byzantine Empire had for a long time dominated the Eastern Mediterranean in politics and culture. By the time of the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, it had almost entirely collapsed into a tributary state of the Ottoman Empire, centred on the city of Constantinople and a few enclaves in Greece. From this point on the area was firmly under Turkish control, and remained so until the tide turned at the Battle of Vienna in 1683.

Southern Europe

Main article: Italy in the Middle Ages

Avignon was the seat of the Papacy from 1309 to 1377. With the return of the Papacy to Rome in 1378, that city once more became a political and cultural metropolis. Florence grew to prominence among the Italian city-states through financial business. The dominant Medici family became important promoters of the Renaissance through their patronage of the arts.

Iberian Peninsula

Main articles: Spain in the Middle Ages, History of Portugal

The 1469 marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon led to the creation of modern-day Spain. In 1492 Granada was captured from the Moors, thereby completing the Reconquista. Portugal had during the 15th century gradually explored the coast of Africa, and in 1498 Vasco da Gama found the sea route to India. The Spanish monarchs met the Portuguese challenge by financing Columbus’s attempt to find the western sea route to India, leading to the discovery of America in the same year as the capture of Granada.

Climate and agriculture

Around 1300-1350 the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age. The colder climate resulted in reduced agricultural output; famine, plague and endemic warfare followed. Most notable are the Great Famine of 1315-1317, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years' War. As the population of Europe was reduced by perhaps as much as half, land became more plentiful for the survivors, and labour consequently more expensive. Attempts by landowners to forcibly reduce wages, such as the English 1351 Statute of Laborers, were doomed to fail. The result was the virtual end of serfdom over great parts of Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, there were few large cities with a viable bourgeoisie to act as a counterweight to the great landowners, and these were able to force the peasantry into even more repressive bondage.

Military developments

Main article: Medieval warfare

Through battles such as Battle of the Golden Spurs (1302), Bannockburn (1314), and Grandson (1476), it became clear to the great territorial princes of Europe that the significant but historical military advantage of the feudal cavalry was lost, and that a well equipped infantry was preferable. The English held a great advantage over the French in the Hundred Years’ War through the deployment of their highly efficient English longbows, originally a Welsh invention. In the long run this development, along with economic and political considerations, would lead to a preference for mercenary forces over the feudal levy. Swiss soldiers were in particularly high demand.

The introduction of gunpowder changed the conduct of war significantly: not through the use of firearms in the field of battle, where they would still long remain insignificant, but as siege weapons. The treatise on military engineering Bellifortis (ca. 1405) represents state-of-the-art technology of the time, showing surprisingly advanced constructions including hydraulic siege engines, diving suits and elaborate uses of gunpowder.

Religion

The Great Schism

Main article: Western Schism

From the early 14th century, the Papacy came more and more under the dominance of the French crown, culminating in its transference to Avignon in 1309. When the Pope decided to return to Rome in 1377, different popes were elected in Avignon and Rome, resulting in the Great Schism (1378-1417). The Schism was as much of a political as a religious nature; while England supported the Pope in Rome, her military opponents France and Scotland stood behind the Avignon Papacy.

At the Council of Constance (1414-1418) the Papacy was once more united in Rome. Even though the unity of the Western Church was to last for another hundred years, and though the Papacy was to experience greater material prosperity than ever before, the Great Schism had done irreparable damage. The internal struggles within the Church had promoted anti-clericalism among the people and their rulers, and the split had opened up the possibility of reform movements.

Reform movements

John Wyclif

Main article: John Wyclif

Though the Catholic Church had long fought against heretic movements, in the Late Middle Ages it started to experience demands for reform from within. The first of these came from the Oxford professor John Wyclif in England. Wyclif held that the Bible should be the only authority in religious questions, and spoke out against transubstantiation, celibacy and indulgences. He also made an English translation of the Bible. In spite of influential supporters among the English aristocracy, such as John of Gaunt, Wyclif’s supporters, the Lollards, were eventually suppressed in England.

Jan Hus

Main article: Jan Hus

The teachings of the Czech priest Jan Hus were based on those of John Wyclif, and had little originality. Yet his followers, the Hussites, were to have a much greater political impact than the Lollards. Hus gained a great following in Bohemia, and when he was burned as a heretic in 1415 it caused a popular uprising. The subsequent Hussite Wars did not result in religious or national independence for the Czechs, but both the Church and the German element within the country were weakened.

Martin Luther

Main article: Martin Luther

Though technically outside the time-period of the Middle Ages, the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther ended the unity of the Western Church - one of the distinguishing characteristics of the medieval period.

Luther, a German monk, started the Reformation by the posting of the 95 theses on the castle church of Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. The immediate provocation behind the act was Pope Leo X’s renewing the indulgence for the building of the new St. Peter's Basilica in 1514. Luther was challenged to recant his heresy at the Diet of Worms in 1521. When he refused, he was placed under the ban of the Empire by Charles V. Receiving the protection of Frederick the Wise, he was then able to translate the Bible into German.

To many secular rulers, the Protestant reformation was a welcome opportunity to expand their wealth and influence. The Reformation was met by the Catholic Counter Reformation. Europe was split into a northern Protestant and a southern Catholic part, resulting in the Religious Wars of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Economy

Several changes took place in the patterns of European trade in this period. While the Hanseatic League retained their control of the Baltic and North Sea, the Champagne fairs became less important in the north-south trade. Instead the sea route was preferred between Flanders and Italy. Furthermore, English wool merchants more and more started exporting cloth rather than wool, to the detriment of the Dutch cloth manufacturers. Most importantly, the replacement of the Byzantine Empire with the Ottoman Empire made the Levant trade more difficult. As an alternative, new trade routes were opened up – south of Africa to India, and across the Atlantic Ocean to America.

On the financial field, European nations saw the emergence of trading companies – corporations that would finance large-scale trade and manufacture, often receiving special privileges and monopolies from the state. The greatest financiers, a role previously often held by Jews, would finance the wars of the rulers. Families like the Fuggers in Germany, the Medicis in Italy and the de la Poles in England would achieve great political, as well as economic power.

Arts

Philosophy and science

Main articles: History of science in the Middle Ages and Medieval philosophy

Further information: Renaissance of the 12th century, Artes liberales, Artes magicae, Humanism

The beginning of the Late Middle Ages saw the continuation of the intellectual revitalization of Europe that was started in the 12th century from the birth of medieval universities and the rediscovery of Arabic and Greek philosophical texts, especially the works of Aristotle.

The first half of the 14th century saw much important philosophical and scientific work being done, largely within the framework of scholastic commentaries on Aristotle's writings.^[1] William of Ockham introduced the principle of parsimony: natural philosophers should not postulate unnecessary entities, so that motion is not a distinct thing but is only the moving object^[2] and an intermediary "sensible species" is not needed to transmit an image of an object to the eye.^[3] Scholars such as Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme started to reinterpret elements of Aristotle's mechanics. In particular, Buridan developed the theory that impetus was the cause of the motion of projectiles, which was an important step towards the modern concept of inertia.^[4] The Oxford Calculators began to mathematically analyze the kinematics of motion, making this analysis without considering the causes of motion.^[5]

In 1348, the devastation brought by the Black Death and other disasters sealed a sudden end to the previous period of massive philosophic and scientific development.^[6] Yet, the rediscovery of ancient texts (started in the 12th century) was improved after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, when many Byzantine scholars had to seek refuge in the West. By then the writings of Cardinal Nicholas Cusanus were anticipating Copernicus’ heliocentric worldview. New ideas and technologies also helped to influence the development of European science at this point: not least the invention of the printing press and the dissemination of Algebra. These developments paved the way for the Scientific Revolution, which may also be understood as a resumption of the process of scientific change, halted at the start of the Black Death.

Mechanical arts

Main articles: Medieval technology, artes mechanicae

Most European technical innovations of the 14th and 15th centuries were not original, but more often of Chinese or Arab origin. The revolutionary aspect lay not in the inventions themselves, but in their application. Though gunpowder had long been known to the Chinese, it was the Europeans who fully realized its military potential, allowing the European expansion and world domination of the Modern Era. Also significant in this respect were advances within the fields of navigation. The compass, astrolabe and sextant, along with advances in shipbuilding, enabled the navigation of the World Oceans. Gutenberg’s printing press made possible not only the Reformation, but also a dissemination of knowledge that would lead to a gradually more egalitarian society.

Visual art

Main article: Medieval art

The visual arts experienced a tremendous development in the Late Middle Ages; a precursor of the Renaissance can be seen already in the early 13th-century works of Giotto. In painting one speaks of a northern Renaissance, centred on the Low Countries, and an Italian Renaissance with Florence as its hub. While northern art was more concerned with textures and surfaces, as can be seen in the paintings of Jan van Eyck, Italian painters also explored such subjects as anatomy and geometry. The discovery of single-point perspective, attributed to Brunelleschi, was an important step towards optically realistic art. The Italian Renaissance reached its zenith in the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael.

Architecture

Main article: Medieval architecture

While the gothic cathedral very much remained in vogue in Northern European countries, this style of building never really caught on in Italy. Here, renaissance architects were inspired by classical buildings, and the crowning work of the period was Brunelleschi’s dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence.

Literature

Main article: Medieval literature

The most important development of late medieval literature was the ascendancy of the vernacular languages over Latin. A popular genre was the romance, mostly taking its themes from the legends of the Holy Grail.

The writer who more than any other heralds the new age is Dante Alighieri. His Divine Comedy, written in Italian, describes a medieval religious world-view, but does so in a style based on classical ideals. Other promoters of the Italian language were Petrarch, whose Canzoniere are considered the first modern lyric poems, and Boccaccio with his Decameron. In England Geoffrey Chaucer helped establish English as a literary language with his Canterbury Tales. Like Boccaccio, Chaucer was concerned with everyday life rather than religious or mythological themes. In Germany, it was Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible that was to serve as the basis for written German.

Music

Main article: Medieval music

In early fourteenth-century France emerged the music known as Ars nova. This represented the introduction of polyphony into secular music, and its main originators were the composers Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut. The most popular form was the chanson, which was poetry set into special patterns of music. In Italy, the corresponding period goes under the name of Trecento, led by composers like Francesco Landini and Jacopo da Bologna. The Italian madrigal of the Trecento, with its verse/refrain-like form, is not to be confused with its 16th century counterpart.

An important transition in music can be traced to England in the early 15th century; John Dunstaple and his use of the interval of the third can be seen as an important step towards the music of the modern period.

Timeline

Further information: Timeline of the Middle Ages

• 1315-1317 – Great Famine
• 1321 – death of Dante Alighieri
• 1325 – foundation of the Order of the Garter, setting the fashion of romantic chivalry
• 1337-1453 – Hundred Years' War
• 1347-1350 – Black Death
• 1355-1378 – rule of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor
• 1356 – promulgation of the Golden Bull fixing the election procedure of the Holy Roman Emperor
• 1374 – death of Petrarca
• 1380-1426 – rule of Charles VI of France
• 1378-1417 – Great Schism
• 1396 – Battle of Nicopolis
• 1410 – Battle of Grunwald
• 1414-1418 – Council of Constance
• 1415 – Battle of Agincourt
• 1415-1460 growth of the Portuguese Empire under Henry the Navigator
• 1420-1434 – Hussite Wars, rise of mobile artillery and gunpowder warfare
• 1429-1431 – campaign of Joan of Arc
• 1431-1448 – Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence
• 1434-1480 – rule of René d'Anjou
• 1440-1493 – rule of Frederick III
• 1450s – Invention of the printing press
• 1453 – Fall of Constantinople
• 1455-1485 – Wars of the Roses
• 1474-1477 – Burgundian Wars
• 1486 Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man
• 1486-1519 – rule of Maximilian I, the "last knight"
• 1487 – publication of the Malleus Maleficarum marks the wave of witch-trials
• 1488 – editio princeps of Homer by Demetrius Chalcondyles
• 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounds the Cape of Good Hope
• 1492 – completion of the Reconquista
• 1492 – 1st voyage of Columbus to the New World
• 1494 – Aldine Press
• 1494 – beginning of the Italian Wars, apex of Swiss pike warfare
• 1495-1500 – the Imperial Reform stabilizies the Holy Roman Empire
• 1498 – Vasco da Gama reaches India
• 1517 – start of Protestant Reformation
• 1519 – death of Leonardo da Vinci

References

Further reading

• The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 6: c. 1300 - c. 1415, Michael Jones (ed.) (Cambridge, 1998)
• The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 7: c. 1415 - c. 1500, Christopher Allmand (ed.) (Cambridge, 2000)
• C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe: A Short History (New York, 1964)
• Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000-1700 (London, 1976)
• M.H. Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1973)
• Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages

External links

• Original sources
• Collection of links

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