Late Middle Ages

• 1. Introduction

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  The Late Middle Ages began in 1300 and ended in 1500, spanning two centuries that remade Europe from the ground up. In February 1349, two thousand Jews were murdered in Strasbourg. That single act captures something essential about the period: a continent under such pressure that old structures cracked, old certainties dissolved, and violence became endemic. By around 1420, plague and famine had reduced Europe's population to perhaps no more than a third of what it had been a century earlier. What kind of society survives that? What new world grows from the wreckage? The Late Middle Ages is the story of how Europe answered those questions, and the answers were not simple. Crisis and creativity moved together. The Black Death and the printing press. The Western Schism and the Renaissance. The collapse of Byzantium and the voyage of Columbus. The two centuries between 1300 and 1500 were not a dark corridor between better ages. They were the making of the modern world.

• 2. Famine, Plague, and Collapse

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  The Great Famine of 1315-1317 was the first sign that the long medieval boom was over. The Medieval Warm Period, which had sustained centuries of agricultural expansion, gave way around 1300-1350 to the Little Ice Age, and the colder climate struck harvests hard. The famine's demographic damage was severe, but it paled against what followed. Estimates of the death rate from the Black Death, which arrived in 1347, range from one third to as much as sixty percent of those infected. The accumulated effect of recurring plagues and famines, hitting wave after wave through the following decades, pushed Europe's total population down to perhaps a third of its 1300 level by around 1420. It took 150 years for the population to recover to what it had been at the century's start.

  The English Parliament passed the Statute of Laborers in 1351, attempting to force wages back down after the death toll had made surviving workers scarce and expensive. Landowners across Europe tried similar measures, and they failed. The resentment they generated fed the French Jacquerie uprising of 1358 and the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The long-term consequence in Western Europe was the virtual end of serfdom. In Eastern Europe, the outcome was the opposite: landowners exploited the situation to tighten their hold, driving peasants into deeper bondage.

  The upheavals left certain groups acutely exposed. The Jews of Europe were blamed for the calamities of the plague years, and pogroms spread across the continent. England had expelled its Jewish population in 1290, France followed in 1306, Spain in 1492, and Portugal in 1497. Meanwhile, the social disruption opened unexpected space for women in commerce, learning, and religion, even as rising belief in witchcraft made them vulnerable to a different kind of persecution. The Black Death did not simply kill people. It rearranged the social order, often brutally, in ways that would outlast the disease itself.

• 3. War Without End

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  Henry V's victory at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 seemed to put England within reach of unifying the two kingdoms of England and France under a single crown. His son Henry VI managed to squander every gain his father had won. The Hundred Years' War, which had begun in 1337, finally ended in 1453, but not before consuming more than a century of intermittent fighting and devastating the French countryside. Joan of Arc's emergence as a military leader shifted the war's momentum toward France, and King Louis XI pressed the advantage home after her.

  The death of Alexander III of Scotland in 1286 had earlier thrown that kingdom into crisis, drawing in Edward I of England, who claimed overlordship and triggered the Wars of Scottish Independence. The English were eventually driven out, and Scotland consolidated under the Stewarts. Scarcely had the Hundred Years' War ended than England plunged into the dynastic Wars of the Roses, roughly between 1455 and 1485, with the House of Lancaster and the House of York contesting the crown. The conflict ended with Henry VII of the Tudor dynasty, who continued building the centralized monarchy that his Yorkist predecessors had begun.

  Battles such as Courtrai in 1302, Bannockburn in 1314, and Morgarten in 1315 demonstrated to Europe's princes that feudal cavalry had lost its military edge. A well-equipped infantry was preferable. The English adopted the longbow through the Welsh Wars and used it to devastating effect against the French. Firearms appeared as early as the Battle of Crecy in 1346 but initially changed little on the open battlefield; it was as siege weapons that cannons proved transformative. The spread of gunpowder eventually reshaped military organization and accelerated the formation of nation states. By the end of the period, mercenaries had largely replaced feudal levies, and the first permanent armies had taken shape in Valois France under the pressures of the Hundred Years' War.

• 4. Church in Crisis

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  Avignon became the seat of the papacy in 1309, a transfer driven by the growing dominance of the French crown over the Church. When the Pope returned to Rome in 1377, competing elections produced rival popes in both cities, and the Western Schism of 1378-1417 split European Christianity along political lines. France, Scotland, and the Spanish kingdoms backed Avignon; England, Portugal, Scandinavia, and most German princes stood behind Rome. The Council of Constance, meeting from 1414 to 1418, finally restored a single papacy in Rome. But the damage was lasting. The internal contest had weakened the Church's claim to universal authority and fed anti-clerical feeling among lay people and their rulers alike.

  The first serious demand for internal reform came from Oxford professor John Wycliffe in England. Wycliffe argued that the Bible alone should govern religious questions and attacked transubstantiation, celibacy, and indulgences. Despite support from powerful figures including John of Gaunt, his followers, the Lollards, were eventually suppressed. Their ideas traveled, however. The marriage of Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia carried Lollard thought to Central Europe, where the Czech priest Jan Hus built on it. When Hus was summoned to the Council of Constance in 1414 and burned as a heretic in 1415, a popular uprising broke out in the Czech lands. The Hussite Wars that followed weakened both the Catholic Church and the German element inside Bohemia, even though they did not deliver religious independence to the Czechs.

  On the 31st of October 1517, the German monk Martin Luther posted 95 theses on the castle church at Wittenberg. His immediate provocation was Pope Leo X's renewal of the indulgence for building the new St. Peter's Basilica in 1514. When Luther refused to recant at the Diet of Worms in 1521, the emperor Charles V placed him under the ban of the Empire. Under the protection of Frederick the Wise, Luther translated the Bible into German. For many secular rulers, the Protestant Reformation offered a welcome chance to expand wealth and power at the Church's expense, and Europe fractured into a Protestant north and a Catholic south whose religious wars would continue through the 17th century.

• 5. Commerce, Money, and the Commercial Revolution

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  Families like the Fuggers in Germany, the Medicis in Italy, and the de la Poles in England accumulated fortunes large enough to finance the wars of kings. Jacques Coeur in France achieved comparable political influence as an individual merchant. These were the beneficiaries of what historians have called a commercial revolution, a transformation in financial practice that unfolded primarily in Italy in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. The innovations included new forms of partnership, the issuing of insurance, the bill of exchange as a means of credit that skirted canonical prohibitions against usury, and double-entry bookkeeping, which gave merchants far greater accuracy and oversight.

  The Hanseatic League reached the peak of its power in the Baltic and North Sea during the 14th century but began declining in the fifteenth. Meanwhile English wool exports shifted from raw wool to processed cloth, hurting cloth manufacturers in the Low Countries. As Genoese and Venetian merchants opened direct sea routes with Flanders, the great Champagne fairs that had long served as northern Europe's commercial hub lost much of their importance. The Ottoman Empire's tightening grip on eastern Mediterranean trade routes pushed European merchants to seek alternatives, and it was this pressure, as much as any spirit of adventure, that drove the Portuguese and Spanish explorations outward.

  Portugal spent much of the 15th century, particularly under Henry the Navigator, exploring the African coast. Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, finding the sea route around Africa. The Spanish crown financed Christopher Columbus's western crossing, which reached the Americas in 1492. Both voyages strengthened the economies and military power of the kingdoms that backed them. By 1500, cities like Venice, Milan, Naples, Paris, and Constantinople each probably held more than 100,000 inhabitants, and twenty-two other cities exceeded 40,000, most of them concentrated in Italy and the Iberian peninsula.

• 6. Renaissance, Print, and Science

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  Giotto, working in the early 14th century, was the first painter since antiquity to attempt the representation of three-dimensional reality and to give his figures genuine human emotions. The most consequential artistic developments, though, came in 15th-century Florence, where the wealth of the merchant class funded extensive patronage. Masaccio worked out the principle of linear perspective; Brunelleschi later described it and designed the cathedral dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, a structure of unprecedented proportions. Donatello's sculptures drew on the scientific study of anatomy and on close observation of classical models. As the center of the movement shifted to Rome, the High Renaissance produced Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael.

  North of the Alps, Jan van Eyck was not the inventor of oil painting, as was once believed, but he championed the medium and used it to achieve a precision and realism that distinguished Netherlandish painting from the idealized compositions preferred in Italy. Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, written in the early 14th century, fused a medieval worldview with classical ideals. Boccaccio's Decameron promoted the Italian vernacular. Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales helped establish Middle English as a literary language. Together, these works pushed vernacular writing from the margins to the center, eventually reaching as far as Bohemia and the Baltic.

  From a single print shop in Mainz around 1440, the movable-type press spread to around 270 cities across Europe and had produced more than 20 million volumes by the end of the 15th century. Printing ended manuscript culture and replaced it with a system where documented facts proliferated rapidly. The first eyeglasses had been made in central Italy, most likely in Pisa or Florence, by about 1290; Venice formed a separate guild of spectacle makers in 1320 and in the mid-15th century developed cristallo, the exceptionally clear colourless glass used in windows, mirrors, and lenses. In natural philosophy, William of Ockham introduced the principle of parsimony now known as Occam's razor. Jean Buridan developed the theory of impetus as the cause of projectile motion, an important step toward the modern concept of inertia. The compass, combined with the mariner's astrolabe and advances in shipbuilding, made navigation of the open oceans possible and opened the early phases of European expansion beyond the continent.

• 7. Theatre, Drama, and Civic Life

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  Plays were produced in around 127 different towns across the British Isles during the Middle Ages. The Mystery play cycles varied widely in scope: York staged 48 plays, Wakefield 32, Chester 24. These vernacular productions drew on religious narrative but were far from solemn, mixing comedy, devils, villains, and clowns into their cycles. Similar religious drama appeared in nearly every European country during the late medieval period.

  Morality plays emerged as a distinct form around 1400 and flourished until 1550. In Everyman, one of the best-known examples, the protagonist receives death's summons and finds that Kindred, Goods, and Fellowship all desert him before the end; only Good Deeds accompanies him to the grave. The Castle of Perseverance depicts a full human life from birth to death. By the close of the period, professional acting companies had appeared; Richard III and Henry VII each maintained small troupes, who performed in the great halls of noblemen's residences.

  Henry VIII had a House of Revels built and established an Office of Revels in 1545 to organize court masques, which had become especially popular in his reign. The end came quickly. Elizabeth I forbade all religious plays in 1558, and the great cycle plays had fallen silent by the 1580s. Religious drama was banned in the Netherlands in 1539, in the Papal States in 1547, and in Paris in 1548. The Reformation and the weakening of Catholic institutional power dismantled the international theatrical culture that had existed across Europe, forcing each nation to develop its own secular tradition and creating the conditions in which a new kind of drama could take shape.