Transcript Mongol Eurasia and its aftermath, 1200-1500

CHAPTER XIV
THE LATIN WEST
1200-1500
Chapter 14 Quote
“The darkest places in hell are reserved for
those who maintain their neutrality in times
of moral crisis.”
Dante Alighieri
Dante’s Inferno
Chapter Objectives
• Analyze the causes/effects of Europe’s 14 th Century
demographic disaster
• Describe/explain the significance in world history of
technological development and urbanization in the Latin
West in the later Middle Ages.
• Understand the ways in which intellectual developments
of the later Middle Ages reflected Westerners’ views of
themselves & of their relationship to the past.
• Understand the ways in which the Hundred Years’ War
and the emergence of “new monarchies” laid the
foundations for the modern European state system.
Rural Growth & Crisis
• Peasants, Population, & Plague
•Most Europeans were stuck in serfdom
•15-30 heavily taxed families supported each noble
•Women labored in fields with men but were subordinate to them
•Population more than doubled between 1000 and 1445
•Warmer weather plus three-field system of crops
•New lands meant poor soil & poor growing conditions
• Decline in average crop yields began around 1250
•Population pressure eased by the Black Death (bubonic plague)
•1346: plague ravaged Europe for two years, returned periodically
in late 1300s & 1400s, caused substantial decreases in
population
• Social Rebellion
• Labor became more expensive in Western Europe - gave rise to series of
peasant & worker uprisings, higher wages, & the end of serfdom.
• Rural living standards improved, period of apprenticeship for artisans
was reduced, & per capita income rose
• Mines and Mills
• Between 1200 & 1500, Europeans invented and used a variety of
mechanical devices including water wheels and windmills. Mills were
expensive to build, but over time they brought great profits to their
owners
• Industrial enterprises, including mining, ironworking, stone quarrying, &
tanning, grew during these centuries. Results included both greater
productivity and environmental damage, including water pollution and
deforestation
Section Review
•Population growth stimulated improved farming methods
& agricultural expansion, but peasant life did not
significantly improve
•Famine & the Black Death reversed population growth,
resulted in social change throughout western Europe
•Improved mill designs & other technology stimulated
further industrial growth, which, in turn, changed the
landscape
Urban Revival
• Trading Cities
• Increase in trade & manufacturing led to growth of cities after 1200
• Venetian capture of Constantinople opened the Mediterranean
• Marco Polo spent 24 years abroad, opened Asian markets
• Increase in sea trade brought profits to Genoa (Mediterranean) & the
cities of the Hanseatic League (Baltic and North Sea)
• Flanders prospered from woolen textile industries, while the towns
of Champagne benefited from their position on the major land route
through France & a series of trade fairs sponsored by their nobles
• Textile industries also began to develop in England & in Florence
• Europeans made extensive use of water wheels and windmills in the
textile, paper, & other industries
Civic Life
• Autonomy of European city-states meant better ability to respond to changing
market conditions than Chinese or Islamic cities
• European cities offered citizens more freedom & social mobility
• Most of Europe’s Jews lived in cities and were subject to persecution
everywhere but Rome; they were blamed for disasters like the Black Death &
expelled from Spain
• Guilds regulated practice of & access to trades. Women rarely allowed to
join guilds, but did work in unskilled non-guild jobs in the textile industry &
in the food & beverage trades.
• Growth in commerce gave rise to bankers like the Medici of Florence and
the Fugger of Augsburg, who handled financial transactions for merchants,
the church, kings & princes of Europe
• The Church prohibited usury, many moneylenders were Jews; Christian
bankers got around the prohibition through such devices as asking for gifts in
lieu of interest
Gothic Cathedrals
• Gothic cathedrals were masterpieces of late medieval
architecture & craftsmanship
• Distinctive features include the pointed Gothic arch,
flying buttresses, high towers and spires, gargoyles &
large interiors lit by huge stain glass windows
• The men who designed & built the Gothic cathedrals had
no formal training in design and engineering; they
learned through their mistakes
Section Review
• After 1200 most cities grew through manufacture & trade
particularly: northern Italy, Flanders, & Baltic coast
• Expanding trade & technological innovation ultimately
reduced Europe’s dependence on eastern goods
• Cities fostered social mobility, but civic life was
dominated by guilds, wealthy merchants, & bankers
• Most urban residents lived in squalor without the
amenities of Islamic Middle Eastern cities
• Gothic cathedrals became signs of special civic pride &
prestige in European cities
Learning, Literature, and the Renaissance
• After 1100 Western Europeans got access to Greek and Arabic works on
science, philosophy, & medicine.
• Manuscripts were translated & explained by Jewish scholars & studied
at Christian monasteries, the primary centers of learning
• After 1200, Universities emerged as new centers of learning. Some were
established by students; most were teaching guilds established by
professors to oversee the training, control the membership, & fight for
the interests of the profession
• Universities generally specialized in a particular branch of learning;
Bologna, famous for its law faculty, others for medicine or theology
• Theology was the most prominent discipline of the period because
theologians sought to synthesize the rational philosophy of the Greeks
with the Christian faith of the Latin West in an intellectual movement
known as Scholasticism
Humanists and Printers
• Dante Alighieri & Geoffrey Chaucer were among the great writers of the
later Middle Ages. Dante’s Divine Comedy tells the story of the author’s
journey through the nine layers of Hell & his entry into Paradise, while
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a rich portrayal of the lives of everyday
people making fun of the Feudal System
• Dante influenced the intellectual movement of the Humanists, men such as
Petrarch and Boccaccio, who were interested in the Humanities & in the
classical literature of Greece & Rome. Humanists had tremendous influence
on the reform of secondary education
• Some of the humanists wrote in the vernacular. Most wrote in Latin; many
worked to restore original texts of Latin & Greek authors & of the Bible
through exhaustive comparative analysis of the many various versions that
had been produced over the centuries. As a part of this enterprise, Pope
Nicholas V established the Vatican Library, & the Dutch humanist Erasmus
produced a critical edition of the New Testament .
• The influence of the humanist writers was increased by the development of
the printing press. Johann Gutenberg perfected the art of printing in 1454;
his press & more than two hundred others had produced 10 million printed
works by 1500
Renaissance Artists
• 14 th & 15 th century artists built on the more natural paintings of
Giotto as they developed a style of painting that concentrated on
the depiction of Greek and Roman gods and of scenes from
daily life. The realistic style was also influenced by Jan van
Eyck’s development of oil paints. Leonardo da Vinci &
Michelangelo were famous artists of this period
• Wealthy merchant & clerical patrons like the Medicis of
Florence & the Church contributed to the development of
Renaissance art. The artistic and intellectual developments of
the Renaissance did not stop in Europe; the university, printing,
& oil painting were later adopted all over the world
Section Review
• Greco-Roman learning returned to the Latin West through a
series of revivals that culminated with the Renaissance
• An infusion of Greek & Islamic scholarship during the 11 th
century helped promote the revival of the 12 th and 13 th centuries
• Colleges and Universities grew, with theology as the preeminent
discipline
• Foreshadowed by Dante, Humanism, with its focus on classical
languages, literature, ethics, & education, emerged in Italy
• The influence of the Humanists spread through new print
technology
• Renaissance artists enlarged the thematic & technical resources
of painting, sculpture, & architecture
Political and Military Transformations
• Monarchs, Nobles, & the Church
• 13 th Century European states were ruled by weak monarchs whose power
was limited by their modest treasuries, the regional nobility, the
independent towns, & the church
• Two changes in weaponry began to undermine the utility, & therefore the
economic position of the knights: the armor-piercing crossbow & the
development of firearms
• King Philip the Fair of France reduced the power of the church when he
arrested the pope and had a new (French) one installed at Avignon, but
monarchs still faced resistance, particularly from their stronger vassals
• In England, the Norman conquest of 1066 had consolidated & centralized
royal power, but Kings continued to find power limited by the pope & by
the English nobles, who forced King John to recognize their hereditary
rights as defined in the Magna Carta
The Hundred Years War
• The Hundred Years War pitted France against
England, whose King Edward III claimed the French
throne in 1337 (Robin Hood, Joan of Arc)
• The war was fought with new military technology:
crossbows; longbows; pikes (for pulling knights off
their horses); & firearms, including an improved
cannon
• The French, whose superior cannon destroyed the
castles of the English and their allies, finally defeated
the English. The war left the French monarchy in a
stronger position than before
New Monarchies in France & England
• New monarchies that emerged after the Hundred Years War had stronger
central governments, more stable national boundaries, & stronger
representative institutions. Both the English & the French monarchs
consolidated their control over their nobles
• The new military technology: cannon & hand-held firearms, meant that
the castle & the knight were outdated. New monarchs depended on
professional standing armies of bowmen, pike men, musketeers, &
artillery units
• The new monarchs had to find new sources of revenue to pay for these
standing armies. To raise money, the new monarchs taxed land,
merchants, & the church
• By the end of the 15 th century, there was a shift in power away from the
nobility & the church towards the Monarchs. This process was not
complete, however, & monarchs were still hemmed in by the nobles, the
Church, & by new parliamentary institutions: the Parliament in England
& the Estates General in France
Iberian Unification
• Spain & Portugal emerged as strong centralized states through a process
of marriage alliances, mergers, warfare, & the reconquest of the Iberian
Peninsula from the Muslims. Reconquista offered the nobility large
landed estates upon which they could grow rich without having to work
• Reconquista took place over a period of several centuries, but it picked
up after Christians put Muslims on the defensive with victory in 1212
• Portugal became completely established in 1249. In 1415, the
Portuguese captured the Moroccan port of Ceuta, which gave them
access to the Saharan trade
• On the Iberian Peninsula, Castile and Aragon were united in 1469 and
the Muslims were driven out of their last Iberian stronghold (Granada)
in 1492. Spain then expelled all Jews and Muslims from its territory;
Portugal also expelled its Jewish population
Section Review
• Between 1200 & 1500, monarchs, nobles, & the church
struggled over political power
• Tensions between the French monarchy and the papacy
resulted in the Great Western Schism
• In England, royal power was checked by the papacy and
nobility, the latter imposing the Magna Charta on King John
• The Hundred Years War between the French monarchy and
its vassals introduced new military technologies
• This was also stimulated by the rise of the new centralized
monarchies of England and France
• Spain & Portugal continued the Reconquista of Muslim
Iberia, a process completed by Ferdinand and Isabella
Conclusion
• Ecologically, Latin Europe harnessed the power of wind & water &
mined & refined their mineral wealth at the cost of pollution &
deforestation. A demographic crisis climaxed with the Black Death
in the mid-fourteenth century.
• Politically, frequent wars caused kingdoms of moderate size to
develop exceptional military strength.
• Culturally, autonomous universities & printing supported the
advance of knowledge while new inventions underlayed the new
dynamism in commerce, warfare, industry, & navigation.
• Many of the tools that the Latin West used to challenge Eastern
supremacy originated in the East. From the 11 th century onward,
population pressure, religious zeal, economic enterprise, and
intellectual curiosity drove expansion of territory and resources.
Chapter 14 Thesis
Analyze how economic opportunities contributed
to continuities & changes in the political systems
& culture of the Mediterranean region during the
period circa 800 C.E. to 1500 C.E.