A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (20 page)

Reliance on reason did not mean that the new scholarship had to be remote from practical activity. It was the scholar Roger Bacon who wrote down the formula for gunpowder for the first time in the west, and explored ways of using mirrors and lenses for magnification. It was another scholar, Peter of Maricourt, who investigated magnetic properties and devised machines based on them.
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With the scholarly translations came information on the techniques discovered more than 1,000 years previously in Greece, Rome or Alexandria, and on the techniques which the Islamic societies of the eastern Mediterranean and central Asia had acquired from China. These added to the improvements which local millwrights, blacksmiths and builders were already making to tools and equipment and resulted in ‘a passion for mechanisation of industry such as no culture had known’.
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Water mills began to provide the motion for bellows for blacksmiths’ hammers, and for ‘fulling’ (beating cloth to finish it). The crank and the compound crank turned up-down motion into rotary motion (and visa versa), and the flywheel kept rotation at an even speed. The spinning wheel and the compass arrived from the Far East in the 12th century, and the rudder replaced the steering oar in the 13th, enormously increasing the reliability of sea transport. The discovery of the eyeglass meant declining eyesight no longer ended the careers of clerks and scholars. The horse stirrup, advances in armour-making, the crossbow, the stonethrower, and then gunpowder and the cannon (first used in 1320), transformed warfare. And the humble wheelbarrow, almost unnoticed, altered the character of much backbreaking work on the land.

Such technical advance underlay the full flourishing of medieval society and culture in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. By this time ‘communes’, self governing city states, dominated the political landscape of northern Italy and Flanders.
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Writers such as Bocaccio, Chaucer and, above all, Dante made a name for themselves by producing a secular literature written in their local idiom—and, in the process, gave it the prestige to begin its transition into a ‘national’ language. And towering above the medieval towns were those monuments to its culture, the great cathedrals. These were works of construction and art inconceivable without the agricultural, technical and ideological changes of the previous centuries.

The crisis of the 14th century

The period of economic growth and technical advance was not to last. For it occurred in a society dominated by a class of feudal lords whose way of life still centred around luxury consumption, preparation for war and notions of military honour, and over time this became a drain on, rather than a spur to, advance. Typically, medieval legend celebrated as ‘good kings’ those like Richard the Lionheart or ‘Saint’ Louis IX of France who spent vast sums on leading rampaging bands of brigands across Europe and Asia Minor to try and displace the Muslims from Palestine in the ‘Crusades’. Just as wasteful, and ruinous to the lands they passed through, were the wars waged by Norman kings as they attempted to subdue Scotland, Wales and much of France and Ireland as well as England, or the wars waged in 13th century Italy between German ‘Holy Roman’ emperors and French kings allied with the pope.
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At most, 1 or 2 percent of revenues went into new investment.
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The lords grew ever more remote from the practicalities of producing the wealth they consumed. The descendants of the warriors in rough fortresses resided in elaborate castles, cloaked themselves in silk and engaged in expensive courtly and knightly rituals which asserted their superiority over other social groups. They regarded themselves as a caste apart from everybody else, with hereditary legal rights sanctioned by sacred religious ceremonies. Within this caste an elaborate gradation of ranks separated the great aristocrats from the ordinary knights who were legally dependent on them. But all its layers were increasingly disdainful of anyone involved in actually creating wealth—whether wealthy merchants, humble artisans or impoverished peasants.

The popes, abbots and bishops were part of this ruling class and shared its attitudes, but had distinct interests of their own. In the late 11th century a series of ‘reforming’ popes had aspired to centralise the network of abbeys and bishoprics so as to impose a near-theocratic structure on the whole of Europe. One product of this was that the church attempted to establish peace between rival lords and make itself the dominant influence in society. Another was the utter waste and devastation of the Crusades. The popes used the call to ‘free’ Jerusalem from the ‘infidel’ Muslims (who had never stopped Christian pilgrimages), and the prospect of loot, to persuade kings, lords and knights to join massive armies under papal jurisdiction. It did not worry them that the exploits of these armies included the wanton sacking of cities, the slaughter of women and children, rape, pillage, pogroms of Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic Christians, and the conquest and pillage of Constantinople in 1204.
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The wars between the popes (allied with the French king) and the emperors which devastated Italy in the 13th century were another product of papal ambition.

The popes, bishops and abbots also devoted themselves to upholding the wider values they shared in common with the lords. The cathedrals, the greatest artistic creations of the period, were also the greatest symbol of the power of the ruling class, emphasising the God-ordained character of society, with heavenly hierarchies of angels, saints and humans corresponding to earthly hierarchies of kings, lords, abbots, bishops, knights and commoners.

The hold of the church over the minds of the masses depended on the superstitions and magical beliefs in holy relics and miracles which flourished in a society where life was often short and almost always insecure. This led the church leaders to fear the new ideas spreading in the cities. The faith in reason of people like Abelard and Bacon could undermine the hold of superstition, while the wandering monks who preached a gospel of poverty and humility could encourage the ‘heretical’ belief that the ‘holy poor’ were entitled to wage war on the ‘corrupt rich’. The church increasingly clamped down on new ideas. It gave official recognition to moderate Franciscans but persecuted the ‘extremist’
fratelli
. Then in 1277 it tried to ban 219 ‘execrable errors’ (some of which were held by the great apologist for late medieval Christianity, Thomas Aquinas) from the teaching of scholars. Roger Bacon seems to have been held under house arrest, and the followers of Averroës were forced to leave Paris for Padua. Finally, in the course of the 14th century, the Inquisition came into existence and, with it, the burning of people for heresy. In the new atmosphere scholars began to keep clear of ‘dangerous discussions’. After Thomas Aquinas recast Christian theology on the basis of Aristotle’s ideas—in the process justifying the hierarchy of aristocrats, knights, merchants, artisans and peasants—medieval thought entered its truly scholastic, sterile phase in which there was no questioning of the basics of church dogma or of the notions of the physical world that went with it.

By the year 1300 there was a vast contradiction at the heart of European society. Material and cultural life had reached a peak which bore comparison with that of the high point of Roman civilisation. It looked as if society was going forward, escaping, albeit slowly, from poverty, insecurity and superstition. Yet the top of society was increasingly freezing up, as the lords made the barriers separating them from other classes ever more rigid, as the church clamped down on dissent and rational thought, and as ever greater amounts of the surplus were used for luxuries, warfare and ritual.

The contradiction came to a head as famines spread across much of Europe and plague came in their wake, its virulence increased by the widespread malnutrition. Half the population was wiped out, vast numbers of villages were abandoned, and millions of hectares of cultivated land went to waste in the great crisis of the 14th century. As Guy Bois tells, ‘For more than a century…the greater part of the continent…suffered a massive decline in population and a regression in productive capacity. In scope and duration the phenomenon had no known historical precedent. It took place in an atmosphere of catastrophe: ceaseless epidemics, endemic war and its train of destruction, spiritual disarray, social and political disturbances’.
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As with the crises which plunged previous civilisations into ‘Dark Ages’, there have been attempts to explain what happened in terms of natural causes. Some historians blame a supposed cooling of Europe’s climate. But this does not explain why people could not adjust over the decades, turning to new and more hardy crops—for instance, planting barley where they had once grown wheat, and wheat where they had once grown vines. Others claim population growth used up all the land open to cultivation. But it seems unlikely that all waste land had, in fact, been used and, in any case, it does not explain why crop yields stopped rising as they had in previous centuries.

The real cause of the crisis lay in the increasing burden on society of sustaining the lifestyle of the feudal ruling class. On the one hand, as Georges Duby notes, ‘In the most advanced countries…the grain-centred system of husbandry began to be unsettled by the requirement of the gradual rise in aristocratic and urban living standards’ and increasing demand for luxury products.
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On the other, there was little new investment on technical improvement. As Rodney Hilton reports, ‘The social structure and the habits of the landed nobility did not permit accumulation for investment for production’.
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Class struggles and millenarial movements

The sheer scale of the crisis led to convulsions right across society. Even the ruling class faced difficulties. There was a ‘crisis of seigneurial incomes’
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brought on first by the problems of extracting the surplus from a starving peasantry, and then by the acute shortage of agricultural labour caused by the death toll from famine and plague. The lords turned even more readily than in the past to wars against each other—as in the seemingly endless ‘Hundred Years War’ between English and French monarchs. They also tried to replenish their revenues by taking more from the classes below them, the peasants and the burghers. Economic crisis bred bitter class struggles.

Battles between lords and peasants were not something new. Resistance to enserfment had led, for instance, to a great rising in 10th century northern France. As a later poem tells:

Once feudalism was fully established peasants found it more difficult to challenge a lord directly. He was armed in a way they were not, they relied on him to provide certain tools and to feed them in years when the crop failed, and his power was backed by the teachings of the church. But they could still put up resistance if his demands exceeded the customary level. They gained some strength from far outnumbering the lord and his retainers on each individual estate and from the ties that came from generations of living and intermarrying in the same villages.

In many areas the bitterness flared up as never before. In 1325 the free peasants of western Flanders took up arms, refusing to pay tithes to the church or dues to the feudal lords. They were not defeated until the King of France intervened in 1328. In 1358 a great
jacquerie
—rural uprising—in the Seine valley of northern France led to attacks on nobles and the burning of chateaux. In June 1381 the English ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ briefly gave control of London to rural insurgents led by Wat Tyler (who were hanged after they made the mistake of trusting the king). The rebellion saw the whole peasantry begin to unite to demand its freedom from the feudal lords: ‘The abolition of bondage and serfdom was the first of the articles of the peasant programme’.
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John Ball, the popular ex-priest who helped inspire the revolt, preached an unashamed attack on noble privilege: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’

Sections of the urban population gave their support to the Flanders peasants in 1320 and to the English revolt of 1381. It was townsfolk who opened the gates of London to the peasants, and the London poor joined the insurgent throng. But the 14th century also saw widespread urban revolts against the old order.

Some represented a continuation of previous struggles by the citizens of towns to establish their independence from local lords. There were repeated struggles of this kind in Flanders. In Paris in the late 1350s some of the richer burghers took advantage of the opportunity offered by the king’s imprisonment by the English to seize control of the city. Etienne Marcel, a member of a wealthy merchant family, led 3,000 artisans into the royal palace and forced the king’s heir, the Dauphin, briefly to wear the colours of revolt. In Florence in northern Italy revolt went a stage further in 1378 when the mass of ordinary artisans in the woollen trades, the
ciompi
, turned against the heads of its ruling merchant guilds and took effective control of the city for two months.
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Such direct displays of class militancy were not the only way people responded to the devastation of their lives. There was a long history of millenarial movements in medieval Europe, which combined popular bitterness against the rich with the religious expectation of the Second Coming of Christ and, often, hatred of outsiders. The official Crusades of the popes prompted unofficial Crusades of the masses—the ‘People’s’, ‘Children’s’ and ‘Shepherds” Crusades. Heretic preachers gained enormous support by proclaiming themselves the successors to Jesus. Typically, masses of people would march from town to town, looting and gathering popular support. They would direct their bitterness not against the feudal ruling class as such, but against corrupt priests and, especially, Jews. These were an easy target. They were the only non-Christian group in a society where Christianity was the all-pervasive religion; excluded from agriculture by the attitude of the church, they were forced to play a role as merchants and moneylenders on the margins of medieval society; and they lacked the power of the really wealthy classes to defend themselves. Jews would be given a choice between immediate conversion to Christianity and instant death. But the crowds would also drag priests through the streets and loot their churches.