è POLITICAL è ECONOMIC è RELIGIOUS è CULTURAL à SCIENCE/Tech

Medii Aevi…The Middle Age … between Rome an classical revival

Social Life: Church —  Church Assimilated Roman and Pagan Culture

Nicene Creed 325

Petrine Dooctrine:  Matthew 16: 18-19 ‘Thou art Peter and upon this rock…”

ST. AUGUSTIN –> ‘City of God’

Original Sin…lust a serious obstacle

Jews as special – no persecution

ST. BENEDICT (c.480-550) – monks, communal life – Monte Cassino

St. FRANCIS (1182-1226) – mendicant friars, poverty, preaching

St. Dominic c.1215 – learned mendicant friars, attack heresy

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) – Summa Theologia…. Scholasticism = Faith + Aristotelian Reason

Revelation + Scripture + Tradition + Reason

Fashioned the language of the Western Church

                Ranked w the 4 great Latin Fathers, Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory

 Donantion of Pepin c.756

Rome – Pope – St. Peter’s Bascilica

Holy Roman Empire:  Mainz, Trier, Cologne, Saxony, Bohemia, Palatinate, Brandenburg

 

The Aristocracy

FEUDALISM…feudum

KNIGHT

HOMAGE

CHIVALRY

BASTARD FEUDALISM

*organized for defense

1066 – Conquest of England

à first fully FEUDAL state

1095 – First Crusade

1204 – Third Crusade – Venice Sacks Constantinople (Bronze Horses)

1302 Unam Sanctam – Boniface VIII: resistance to pope = resistance to God

1305-78 Babylonian Captivity in Avingnon

Bishop of Bordeaux (Clement V)

1378-1417 Great Schism

Avignon à France, Scotland, Castile, Aragon, Navarre

Rome à HRE, Portugal, Italians, England

Economics

Before 1050:

–          local markets

–          slave trade to Islamic Spain and East

Between c.1050-1250:

revival of communications between communities.. /…  beginning of an urban trading class

increased security along roads and waterways (aided by strong men/kings)

increased manufactured items for trade à THE CLOTH INDUSTRY

only possible because increased security brought

…increased agricultur              …increased population

..provides necessary labor

FLANDERS — Bruges

SUMPTUARY LAWS – BLACK DEATH 1348 – Boccaccio’s ‘DECAMERON – Flagellant —

By 1300, in the more thickly populated portions of Europe, there was no new land suitable for farming, and there were indications of lower yields per acre because of land exhaustion or the use of marginal fields. New technological advances were necessary if food was to be found for a population that increased rapidly unless checked by war or disease. But medieval Europeans failed to meet the challenge. No new ways were found to improve agriculture and there were widespread famines. Not until the eighteenth century did technological progress and social change permit new advances comparable to those achieved during the high Middle Ages.

In the early 1330’s an outbreak of the bubonic plague started in China. In October 1347 Italian merchant ships carried the plague to Italy, and then to Europe.

bubonic variant (the most common) derives its name from the swellings or buboes that appeared on a victim’s neck, armpits or groin…the manifestation of these lesions usually signaled the victim had a life expectancy of up to a week. Infected fleas that attached themselves to rats and then to humans spread this bubo

 pneumonic plague – attacked the respiratory system and was spread by merely breathing the exhaled air of a victim. It was much more virulent than its bubonic cousin – life expectancy was measured in one or two days.

septicemic version of the disease attacked the blood system.

Such obvious symptoms as gangrenous inflammation of the throat and lungs, violent pains in the chest, vomiting and spitting of blood, pestilential odor from bodies and breath, tumors in the groin, arm pits and the neck, constipation or diarrhea, and purple spots (caused by subcutaneous hemorrhages), extreme thirst, convulsions marked the victims. Frequent stabs of pain gave rise to the conviction that the stricken were being shot with arrows by some invisible demon.

– 70,000 dead at Siena…40,000 at Parma

– 1000 per day dead in Avignon (4000 on one day/ 62,000 in all)

– 52,000 at Marseilles in a month

–          Givry in Burgundy had about l,600 inhabitants when the plague arrived in 1348, but between August 5 and November 19 there were 615 deaths.

–          Paris, at city of 270,000 was burying 1300 per day

–           Florence had 114,000 inhabitants in 1338, and only 45,000 to 50,000 in 1351.

Partial recovery followed in most localities, only to be halted by the return of the plague, so that the north German cities were at least 20% smaller at the end of the 15th century than they were at the beginning of the 14th.

Zurich had 12,375 inhabitants in 1350 and 4,713 in 1468.

England had 3,700,000 inhabitants when the Black Death struck in 1348, but only 2,000,000 in the early 15th century.

*  As high a percentage of the population lost their lives as is usually predicted if Europe were subjected to nuclear war

– at Newbury (Berks.) all the free tenants died

-at Bokeland all the villeins and cottars died

 THE BLACK DEATH / PESTIS

The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio lived through the plague as it ravaged the city of Florence in 1348. The experience inspired him to write The Decameron, a story of seven men and three women who escape the disease by fleeing to a villa outside the city. In his introduction to the fictional portion of his book, Boccaccio gives a graphic description of the effects of the epidemic on his city.

. When the plague struck a city, it moved rapidly, often taking a proportion of the population equal to that killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is difficult to evaluate the impact of the Black Death on European civilization. The modern world has not yet had to suffer so acutely either from Disease or war. Today, when epidemics strike, the suffering can be attributed to natural causes and mitigated by medical and social services. The 14th century man, on the other hand, often thought in terms of an angry God or of vengeful demons. To the horror of death was added the fear of the supernatural and inexplicable and inexpiable.

WHO DID IT EFFECT

• City population
• Care-workers –> priests (the better ones, Franciscans)
• Imuno-deficient/malnourished/old and young

EFFECTS: …. recovery underway by early 15^th c

• Labor shortage
• Higher wages –> improving conditions for lower class
• Higher Prices
• Cheap land
  • More land and less mouths to feed –> cultivation of high-value luxury crops
    • Dyes, wine, silk
• Serfdom disappears ….Nobles trying to keep their laborers à pay cash, give land
• Noble attempt to sharpen social distinctions –> extravagant fashions
• Decline in trade
  • Italian banking firms collapse –> Rise of New Families

MEDICI = Florence

FUGGERS = Augsburg

Banking and money economy stimulated an intensive search for specie = 15^th c mining boom!

• Profound Pessimism prevails…leads to  EXTREMISM     —> God’s punishment for sin??

• Flagellants
• Licentiousness
• Anti-Jewish Pogroms (communal scapegoats)
• Increase in popular religiosity (many priests dead….Church not fulfilling its role)

• Popular Uprisings
  • JACQUERIES 1358+
  • CIOMPI 1378 – Florence taken over for several months by wool-workers
  • 1379-85 Ghent weavers rise against Count of Flanders and hold out for six years

Poll Tax

STATUTE OF LABORERS 1351 – attempt to fix wages (but not prices)

• 1381 Peasant’s Revolt – WAT TYLER’S REBELLION

…demand end to serfdom

… against poll-tax

…fury directed against clergy as well and gentry   (Wat Tyler, Jack Straw)

‘when Adam delved and Eve span…who was then a gentleman?’

• 1382 Paris..the Jacqueries

….against taxes…literally hammered king’s tax collectors

• Feudal Nobility responded with brutal repression
• BUT…. Peasants gained in the long run

1. land tenures for fixed sums –> peasant landholding class emerges
2. salary instead of service

• Nobles forced to tax more because money was being devalued and increased spending on armies
• 14^th c = the ‘Golden Age’ of the Medieval Parliaments

THE CHURCH

The Babylonian Captivity 1304-1377 -@ AVINGNON

The Great Schism 1378-1408/1417 –> COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE

Pope Gregory XI moved back , dies … two popes elected…then three!

JOHN WYCLIFF (1329-84) – Oxford

• against the wealth of the church
• organized Church might not be necessary for salvation
• devout persons could do without priests and obtain salvation by reading the Bible
• trans Bible into English