Middle Ages: Truths and Myths (Part II) – Analysis
By Matija Šerić
Law and order
In the Middle Ages, for the most part, there was no organized police and most law enforcement was carried out by local people. In some areas, every male over the age of 12 had to join a group called the tithe and had to make sure that no one else in the group committed any wrongdoing.
If someone was a victim of crime, he had to shout and cry so that the organized villagers would go in search for the criminal. Some areas had guards or policemen patrolling the area to prevent crimes. Most minor crimes were solved by the local feudal lord. The judge, appointed by the king, traveled to the countryside to deal with serious crimes. If a jury could not decide whether a person was innocent or guilty, there was the option of trial by ordeal. The accused were subjected to painful tasks, such as: walking on hot coals, putting their hands in boiling water to remove a stone, holding a red-hot iron. If the wounds were completely healed after three days, the person was considered innocent in God’s eyes. If they did not, the person was considered guilty and was punished: fines, imprisonment or death.
High Middle Ages – economic, transport and cultural progress
From the Early Middle Ages onwards, Christian monasteries encouraged literacy and learning, and many medieval monks were patrons of the arts or were artists themselves. The invention of the heavy plow stimulated agriculture in northern Europe from the 10th century onwards. Another key innovation of the period was the horse collar, which was placed around the horse’s neck and shoulders to distribute the weight and protect it when pulling a cart or plow. Horses proved to be much more powerful and efficient than oxen, and the horse collar would revolutionize agriculture and transportation. The use of metal horseshoes also became common practice by the year 1000.
Cultural and economic development took place during the 12th century. Many historians trace the roots of the Renaissance to this time. The balance of economic power slowly began to shift from the area of the Eastern Mediterranean to Western Europe. The Gothic style developed in art and architecture. Cities began to flourish, travel and communication became faster, safer and easier, and trading posts began to develop.
Famous are the travels of the explorer and travel writer Marco Polo in Asia who traveled the Silk Road between 1271 and 1295. Polo described to Europeans the mysterious culture and inner workings of the Eastern world, including the wealth and great size of the Mongol Empire and China during the reign of the Yuan Dynasty. It gave Europeans their first comprehensive view of Persia, India, China, Japan and other Asian countries. From the 14th century, Polo’s travelogue served as a basis for geographical maps of Asia (Laurentine Portulanus from 1375), and the wealth and exoticism of the described world encouraged adventurers from maritime countries and cities (Portugal, Spain, Genoa) to search for sea routes to the countries of the Far East.
The High Middle Ages was a period of enormous population expansion. The population of Europe grew from 35 to 80 million between 1000 and 1347. The causes are the invention of the heavy plow, giving incentives to peasants to cultivate the land, the decline of slave ownership, a warmer climate and the absence of external invasion. During the 12th century, the cultivation of beans provided a balanced diet for all social classes for the first time in history. As much as 90% of the European population remained in the countryside.
Manorialism and feudalism were two systems of the Advanced Middle Ages. Manorialism was a system of organization of peasants in the villages who owed rent and the obligation to work to the nobles. Feudalism was a system whereby knights and nobles of lower status owed military service to higher nobles in exchange for the right to lease land and manors. This period also saw the formal division of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, with the schism between Rome and Constantinople in 1054.
Crusades
The Crusades, which began in the late 11th century, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Muslims. The Crusades, at least the main part of them, lasted between 1095 and 1291.
The Crusaders intended to conquer Jerusalem and other holy places from the Bible. Starting with the First Crusade, which resulted in the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, dozens of military campaigns were organized that left a significant mark in European history. In 1095, Pope Urban II announced the first expedition at the church council in Clermont. He encouraged giving military support to the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I. Komnenos against the Turks and called for an “armed pilgrimage” to Jerusalem. There was enthusiasm in almost all social strata of Western Europe. The participants came from all over Europe and had different motivations. For some it was religious salvation, for others it was the settlement of feudal obligations, for others it was an opportunity to gain reputation, and for others it was motivated by financial or political gain.
In later wars, expeditions were carried out by organized armed forces, sometimes led by the king. All received papal absolution. Initial successes established four crusader states: the Countship of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the District of Tripoli. European presence remained in the region in some form until the fall of Acre in 1291. After that, no major military campaigns were organized.
There were also crusades sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church against other Christians who disobeyed papal decrees as well as against the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The struggle between Christians and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula was declared a crusade in 1123, but eventually became known as the Reconquest, and ended only in 1492 with the fall of the Muslim fortress of Granada, freeing all of Spain from Muslim rule. From 1147, military campaigns in northern Europe against pagan tribes were considered crusades.
In 1199, Pope Innocent III began the practice of declaring crusades against what Rome considered heretical Christian communities. Crusades were launched against the Gnostic Cathar movement in Languedoc, the Bogomils in Bosnia, the Waldensians in Savoy and the Hussites in Bohemia, but also against the Ottoman Empire. Without the approval of the church, there were also several other crusades. The Crusades caused great suffering to many regions, and they did not achieve their intended goal, because they did not eliminate Muslim rule in the Holy Land, but led to the stratification of Christianity. They also contributed to the spread of Western Christianity in the Baltic region and the Iberian Peninsula. Kings became heads of centralized nation-states, reducing crime and violence but distancing the ideal of a unified Christendom.
Cultural flourishing between the High and Late Middle Ages
The 13th and 14th centuries were the peak of medieval civilization. Gothic architecture and painting (Giotto di Bondone) flourished, as did the poetry of poets such as Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer. Different types of social units were emerging, including guilds, associations, civic councils, each of which wanted a certain measure of autonomy. A key legal concept of representation developed, political assemblies/parliaments whose members had full power to make decisions for the communities that elected them.
Intellectual life, which was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, culminated in the philosophical method of scholasticism, whose prominent representative, Saint Thomas Aquinas, achieved one of the greatest syntheses in Western intellectual history in his writings on Aristotle and the Church Fathers. Scholasticism is a method of connecting religious teachings with reason and logic. Thanks to the Church, many universities were started. At the same time, the Islamic world leapt forward in mathematics and science, building on the foundations of Greek and other ancient texts translated into Arabic.
Late Middle Ages – plague and social changes
Climate changes, such as unusually rainy summers (mainly in western Europe) and severe droughts (primarily in eastern Europe) were no exception. They caused agricultural crises and famine, which culminated in the Great Famine of 1315–1317. While starving peasants slaughtered their livestock, those who survived had to make extraordinary efforts to revive agriculture.
These troubles were followed in 1347 by a plague pandemic that spread across Europe over the next three years, killing approximately one-third of the population (between 75 and 200 million people). Cities were particularly hard hit due to overcrowding and poor hygiene. Rapid and extremely high mortality destroyed the economy and trade, and recovery was slow and very laborious.
The trauma of the plague led to increased piety throughout Europe, which manifested itself in the establishment of new charities, but also in religiously motivated attacks on Jews for rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. Jewish communities were expelled from England in 1290 and from France in 1306. Although some were allowed to return to France, most were not, and many Jews emigrated to the east, settling in Poland and Hungary. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 and scattered in Turkey, Italy and the Netherlands.
Europeans were further troubled by the return of the plague during the rest of the 14th century, and the plague continued to periodically attack Europe well into the 15th century. Lands that were poorly productive were abandoned as the survivors could acquire more fertile areas. Although serfdom declined in Western Europe, it became more common in Eastern Europe as landlords imposed it on those of their tenants who were previously free.
Most of the peasants in Western Europe managed to exchange the labor obligation they previously owed to their landowners for cash rents. The percentage of serfs among the peasantry dropped from a high of 90% to close to 50% by the end of the era. The peasantry became more and more literate, and the urban population became more and more interested in chivalry. The rise of banking in Italy during the 13th century continued throughout the 14th century, fueled in part by the increasing wars of the period and the papacy’s need to move money between kingdoms. Many banks lent money to nobles, at great risk, as some went bankrupt when the kings defaulted on their loans.
Emergence of powerful nation-states
In the Late Middle Ages, strong nation-states based on royal families emerged throughout Europe. This happened in England, France and the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula: Aragon, Castile and Portugal. The Holy Roman Empire of the German People was dominant. The long wars of the period strengthened royal control over their kingdoms and were extremely difficult for the peasantry.
Kings profited from warfare that expanded royal legislation and increased the lands they directly controlled. Paying for wars required taxation methods to become more efficient, so the rate of taxation was often increased. The requirement to obtain the consent of taxpayers allowed representative bodies such as the English and French parliaments to gain power and authority.
During the 15th century, Portugal focused on overseas expeditions and exploration of the New World, while other kingdoms were torn by difficulties over royal succession and other concerns. There were frequent (civil) wars in England (War of the Roses), France (Hundred Years’ War) and in the north of Europe.
Legal and educational progress
During the Late Middle Ages, theologians such as John Duns Scots and William of Ockham led the reaction against scholasticism, opposing the application of reason to faith. Ockham’s insistence that reason operates independently of religion enabled the separation of science from theology and philosophy. Legal studies were marked by the constant advancement of Roman law into areas of jurisprudence that were previously governed by common law.
The only exception to this trend was England, where common law remained dominant. Many countries codified their laws: legal codes were passed in Castile, Poland and Lithuania. Education remained mainly focused on the training of future priests and religious.
Basic learning of letters and numbers remained the responsibility of the family or the village priest, but subjects such as grammar, rhetoric and logic were taught in church and town schools. Secondary commercial schools were expanding, and some Italian cities had more commercial enterprises. Universities also spread across Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. Lay literacy rates have increased but are still low. According to one estimate, the literacy rate in 1500 was 10% of men and 1% of women.
Great progress in art, literature and luxury
The publication of literary works increased, especially in vernacular languages, and the most popular authors were Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Langland, Villon, Pisan. Many books remained of a religious character and although a large part of them continued to be written in Latin, the demand for religious books in vernacular languages developed. The theater also developed under the guise of miraculous performances organized by the Church.
At the end of the period, the development of the printing press around 1450 led to the establishment of publishing houses across Europe by 1500. Around 1450, printed books quickly became popular even though they were expensive. There were about 30,000 different editions of incunabula or works printed before 1500. Very small woodcuts, almost all of religious themes, were available even to peasants in parts of northern Europe from the mid-15th century. More expensive engravings also appeared.
The Late Middle Ages in Europe as a whole corresponds to the early Renaissance cultural period in Italy. Northern Europe and Spain continued to use Gothic styles, which became increasingly complex in the 15th century. Across Europe, secular art continued to grow in quantity and quality. In the 15th century, the merchant classes of Italy and Flanders became important promoters of art as they commissioned oil portraits of themselves, but also bought luxury items such as jewelry, ivory coffins, and majolica objects. Italian silk production developed rapidly, so that Western elites no longer had to rely on imports from Byzantium or the Islamic world. In France and Flanders, tapestry weaving became a major luxury industry.
Technological progress
The main advance in military technology during the Late Middle Ages was the increased use of infantry and light cavalry. The English began to use longbows, but other countries could not create similar weapons. Armor continued to advance, fueled by the increasing power of crossbows, and plate armor was developed to protect soldiers from crossbows. Handguns began to be developed. The spinning wheel replaced the traditional wool spinning wheel, tripling production.
A technological improvement that greatly affected everyday life was the invention of buttons, which allowed clothes to fit better without binding. Windmills were perfected by creating a tower mill, allowing the top of the windmill to turn in the direction the wind is blowing. The blast furnace appeared around 1350 in Sweden, increasing the amount of iron produced and improving its quality.
Conclusion
The Middle Ages were not so dark after all. It is a time of European progress in every field from science, literature, art, technology to painting, architecture, etc. It is true that it was a time of many unpleasant processes such as migrations of peoples, plagues, crusades and countless wars, but Europe is on at the end of the 15th century was a far more pleasant and advanced place to live than Europe at the end of the 5th century.
Because of the knowledge of what happened in the Middle Ages, historians from the 20th century until today are against using the name Dark Ages for two reasons. First, it is questionable whether it is even possible to use the term in a neutral way. Scientists may be able to do this, but ordinary readers cannot. Second, recent research has increased the understanding of the history and culture of the period to the point that the period is no longer “dark”. To avoid making the value judgment implied by the term, many historians now avoid it altogether. In fact, it can be said that it is a time of sophisticated progress rather than something dark.
