The calamitous fourteenth century?
The fourteenth century is often deemed a particularly disastrous era, as witnessed in part by Johann Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages (or, more accurately, The Autumn of the Middle Ages) and Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. It is true that during this period the Hundred Years War between France and England was born, as was a papal schism—and, of course, the Black Death wiped out a substantial percentage of the population of western Europe. Life was often hard, though Machaut’s position spared him some of its greatest difficulties.
Agriculture and population growth
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, improvements in agriculture combined with favorable weather conditions allowed for economic and population growth. (Baldwin) Economic growth, however, slowed during the second half of the thirteenth century, and populations appear to have stabilized as well. This was one of the factors that apparently led to the Great Famine of 1315-22, which would clearly have shaped young Guillaume.
The Great Famine, as William Chester Jordan describes it, was created by not only a crisis of production but also by wars in Scandinavia and among German-speaking states, as well as in the British Isles. Occasional conflicts in Flanders provided an additional strain on the economy both there and in France. War not only demanded huge resources, it also inhibited travel and trade.
The period between 1310 and 1320 was marked by both cold winters and rainy summers, making for a short growing season. Flooding not only prevented agriculture and destroyed crops, it also damaged buildings and other structures, making it even more difficult to try to regroup during the next growing season. The weather also inhibited trade, further exacerbating local shortages and damaging local economies.
As Jordan points out, while all these factors helped create the Great Famine, in the eyes of medieval people the ultimate cause was the sin of the age. Flooding was compared to that of Noah’s day, and apocalyptic connections were natural. This sense of punishment would color not only how ordinary people saw the world, but how writers spoke of it, and that in turn further colors our own views.
The Great Famine, as William Chester Jordan describes it, was created by not only a crisis of production but also by wars in Scandinavia and among German-speaking states, as well as in the British Isles. Occasional conflicts in Flanders provided an additional strain on the economy both there and in France. War not only demanded huge resources, it also inhibited travel and trade.
The period between 1310 and 1320 was marked by both cold winters and rainy summers, making for a short growing season. Flooding not only prevented agriculture and destroyed crops, it also damaged buildings and other structures, making it even more difficult to try to regroup during the next growing season. The weather also inhibited trade, further exacerbating local shortages and damaging local economies.
As Jordan points out, while all these factors helped create the Great Famine, in the eyes of medieval people the ultimate cause was the sin of the age. Flooding was compared to that of Noah’s day, and apocalyptic connections were natural. This sense of punishment would color not only how ordinary people saw the world, but how writers spoke of it, and that in turn further colors our own views.
The Black Death
Divine
punishment was again blamed for outbreaks of the plague, or the Black Death, starting
in 1347 in Italy. Officially known as yersina pestis, the plague is a
bacterium carried by fleas. It
originated in Asia, but shipboard rats carried diseased fleas to Europe and
beyond, as early as the sixth century, when there was a pandemic in the Roman
empire under Justinian. The disease
still can be found in some parts of the world, including the western United
States, though today it can nearly always be successfully treated with
antibiotics.
Three forms of plague exist. The bubonic plague is marked by pus-filled swellings in lymph glands. These buboes, which are especially common in the armpits and groin, can be extremely painful, and many infected with this form of plague died. Even more lethal, though, was the pneumonic plague, where fluid fills the lungs, and this form of plague was easily transmitted from person to person through sneezing and coughing. The third type, septicaemic, is a blood-borne infection that creates skin discoloration, leading to the term Black Death.
Some areas were not infected, but those that were often saw multiple outbreaks—Paris, for instance, had twenty-two between 1347 and 1596. Jordan estimates that as many as 25 million Europeans died between 1347 and 1351, nearly a third of the total population. Communities of religious such as monks and canons died at even higher rates, a reality that surely would have been abundantly clear to Machaut, whether or not he was permanently residing in Reims at the time. Moreover, subsequent waves of plague, war, other diseases, and so forth continued to have an impact on local populations: Jordan estimates that the population of Normandy had been reduced to about 75% of its former number in the 1350s, but by 1420 it had fallen still further, to about 25% of its pre-plague size, not returning to that earlier level until the seventeenth century.
No effective treatment was available before modern antibiotics. Those who could fled into the countryside, and such a voluntary exile underpins Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, written in the early 1350s. In that story, ten young people leave Florence to avoid the plague, settling in a villa in the outlying countryside. To pass the time, they tell stories, a hundred in all during a two-week span.
High death rates decreased labor pools, with resulting unrest between laborers seeking higher wages and better conditions on the one hand, and efforts by landowners and wealthy merchants to maintain their profits on the other. Despite what would appear to be a better bargaining position for peasants and the urban working class, the gap between rich and poor continued to increase.
Three forms of plague exist. The bubonic plague is marked by pus-filled swellings in lymph glands. These buboes, which are especially common in the armpits and groin, can be extremely painful, and many infected with this form of plague died. Even more lethal, though, was the pneumonic plague, where fluid fills the lungs, and this form of plague was easily transmitted from person to person through sneezing and coughing. The third type, septicaemic, is a blood-borne infection that creates skin discoloration, leading to the term Black Death.
Some areas were not infected, but those that were often saw multiple outbreaks—Paris, for instance, had twenty-two between 1347 and 1596. Jordan estimates that as many as 25 million Europeans died between 1347 and 1351, nearly a third of the total population. Communities of religious such as monks and canons died at even higher rates, a reality that surely would have been abundantly clear to Machaut, whether or not he was permanently residing in Reims at the time. Moreover, subsequent waves of plague, war, other diseases, and so forth continued to have an impact on local populations: Jordan estimates that the population of Normandy had been reduced to about 75% of its former number in the 1350s, but by 1420 it had fallen still further, to about 25% of its pre-plague size, not returning to that earlier level until the seventeenth century.
No effective treatment was available before modern antibiotics. Those who could fled into the countryside, and such a voluntary exile underpins Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, written in the early 1350s. In that story, ten young people leave Florence to avoid the plague, settling in a villa in the outlying countryside. To pass the time, they tell stories, a hundred in all during a two-week span.
High death rates decreased labor pools, with resulting unrest between laborers seeking higher wages and better conditions on the one hand, and efforts by landowners and wealthy merchants to maintain their profits on the other. Despite what would appear to be a better bargaining position for peasants and the urban working class, the gap between rich and poor continued to increase.
The Hundred Years War
Even in good economic times, war makes great demands on a nation’s resources. A series of small-scale conflicts erupted in the early fourteenth century in several different parts of Europe. Most formative on Machaut would be those in what is now northern France and the Low Countries, including an extended conflict between France and Flanders. Border conflicts between the French and English kings in turn-of-the-century Gascony foreshadowed the larger conflict to come.
The conflict known as the Hundred Years War was not really a single war but a series of conflicts and intervening periods of truce that together spanned over a century. The beginning of the war is dated to 1337, when the Valois king Philippe VI confiscated English territories in Aquitaine after the English king refused to swear homage to the king of France. This issue of homage had been a problem for centuries, really ever since the duke of Normandy became the king of England in 1066, and still more after the Angevin king Henry II acquired the rich duchy of Aquitaine by marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152. At the height of Angevin power, the English kings controlled more territory in what is now France than the French kings did. By the fourteenth century, this imbalance had shifted in favor of France, but English territories were still substantial, and memories of English power strong.
By 1340 Edward had asserted his own claim to the French throne. His father, Edward II, had been married to Isabelle of France, daughter of Philip IV (“the Fair”) of France, in order to cement the Anglo-French truce in 1308. When Louis X, son of Philip the Fair, died in 1316, for the first time in centuries a Capetian king left no direct male heir. (Louis left a pregnant wife, but the infant Jean I lived only five days.) The French throne passed to his brother Philip V, then at his death to his brother Charles IV, at whose death in 1328, a further problem arose: not only did Charles leave no male heir, there were now no male successors in the line of Philip the Fair. The closest heirs were Philip of Valois, son of Charles of Valois, younger brother of Philip IV, and Edward III, son of Isabelle of France and therefore grandson of Philip IV. While Edward’s was the more direct claim, the fact that it came through a woman was used as an excuse to deny it—the real reason, of course, was the seeming impossibility of giving the English king the French throne. It was at this time, then, that jurists attempted to apply the so-called Salic law to prevent a woman from either inheriting the throne or passing along a claim to her son. While Edward’s claim to the French throne was not a primary cause of the Hundred Years War, it provided a potent propaganda tool for the English.
War meant physical destruction for territories occupied by troops, a lack of adult males to work lands out of harm’s way, and heavy taxation, especially from the mid-fourteenth century. For ordinary people, the periods of nominal truce could be worse than the war, since soldiers out of work often took to plunder, further devastating the countryside. Popular unrest also continued, sometimes leading to violence.
If Machaut left the service of John of Bohemia in 1340, as many believe, and entered full-time residence at the cathedral of Reims, he would have missed much of the direct impact of war. In any case, in 1359-60 the English besieged the city in the hope of crowning Edward III king of France in its cathedral, where French kings had been crowned for centuries. The siege underpins Machaut’s motets 21-23, as most fully demonstrated by Anne Walters Robertson.
As William Chester Jordan points out, these wars were conceptualized as just and virtuous. In an age many saw as immoral, where divine punishment was meted out in the form of plagues and famines, rulers saw their battles as righteous acts against evil enemies that would in fact serve to appease an angry God. Ordinary people also often saw their suffering in terms of divine punishment, as we have already seen.
Ohio State has a good web site on the Hundred Years War: http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/archive/hundredyearswar.cfm
(image of Edward I swearing homage to Philip IV in 1286, from a manuscript of the Grandes Chroniques de France currently held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, from Wikimedia Commons)
The conflict known as the Hundred Years War was not really a single war but a series of conflicts and intervening periods of truce that together spanned over a century. The beginning of the war is dated to 1337, when the Valois king Philippe VI confiscated English territories in Aquitaine after the English king refused to swear homage to the king of France. This issue of homage had been a problem for centuries, really ever since the duke of Normandy became the king of England in 1066, and still more after the Angevin king Henry II acquired the rich duchy of Aquitaine by marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152. At the height of Angevin power, the English kings controlled more territory in what is now France than the French kings did. By the fourteenth century, this imbalance had shifted in favor of France, but English territories were still substantial, and memories of English power strong.
By 1340 Edward had asserted his own claim to the French throne. His father, Edward II, had been married to Isabelle of France, daughter of Philip IV (“the Fair”) of France, in order to cement the Anglo-French truce in 1308. When Louis X, son of Philip the Fair, died in 1316, for the first time in centuries a Capetian king left no direct male heir. (Louis left a pregnant wife, but the infant Jean I lived only five days.) The French throne passed to his brother Philip V, then at his death to his brother Charles IV, at whose death in 1328, a further problem arose: not only did Charles leave no male heir, there were now no male successors in the line of Philip the Fair. The closest heirs were Philip of Valois, son of Charles of Valois, younger brother of Philip IV, and Edward III, son of Isabelle of France and therefore grandson of Philip IV. While Edward’s was the more direct claim, the fact that it came through a woman was used as an excuse to deny it—the real reason, of course, was the seeming impossibility of giving the English king the French throne. It was at this time, then, that jurists attempted to apply the so-called Salic law to prevent a woman from either inheriting the throne or passing along a claim to her son. While Edward’s claim to the French throne was not a primary cause of the Hundred Years War, it provided a potent propaganda tool for the English.
War meant physical destruction for territories occupied by troops, a lack of adult males to work lands out of harm’s way, and heavy taxation, especially from the mid-fourteenth century. For ordinary people, the periods of nominal truce could be worse than the war, since soldiers out of work often took to plunder, further devastating the countryside. Popular unrest also continued, sometimes leading to violence.
If Machaut left the service of John of Bohemia in 1340, as many believe, and entered full-time residence at the cathedral of Reims, he would have missed much of the direct impact of war. In any case, in 1359-60 the English besieged the city in the hope of crowning Edward III king of France in its cathedral, where French kings had been crowned for centuries. The siege underpins Machaut’s motets 21-23, as most fully demonstrated by Anne Walters Robertson.
As William Chester Jordan points out, these wars were conceptualized as just and virtuous. In an age many saw as immoral, where divine punishment was meted out in the form of plagues and famines, rulers saw their battles as righteous acts against evil enemies that would in fact serve to appease an angry God. Ordinary people also often saw their suffering in terms of divine punishment, as we have already seen.
Ohio State has a good web site on the Hundred Years War: http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/archive/hundredyearswar.cfm
(image of Edward I swearing homage to Philip IV in 1286, from a manuscript of the Grandes Chroniques de France currently held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, from Wikimedia Commons)
The Avignon papacy (1305-77) and the papal schism (1378-1417)
One of the founding principles of the United States is the separation of Church and State, in turn a cultural product of the Deist or Puritan cultural background of many of the initial English colonists and their descendants. While medieval culture did have a strong thread of opposition between body and soul, in many ways it is marked by an inextricable intertwining of what we tend to separate as sacred and secular. The language of Marian devotion and that of fin’ amors or “courtly love” overlap to a great extent, and Anne Robertson has shown how Machaut’s French-texted amatory motets can be read in terms of a spiritual journey. Abbots and bishops are major property-owners owing fealty to kings and emperors, and the ceremonies used to crown monarchs bear a close relationship to ordination rites. Machaut received ecclesiastical benefices as a reward for his service to the king of Bohemia.
Given all this, and more, it should not be surprising to find in the fourteenth century political conflicts within the Church as well as among secular lords. An accusation of treason against a French bishop in 1301 led Boniface VIII (1294-1303) to promulgate a bull, Unam sanctam, that claimed the pope as the ultimate lord of the Christian world. Boniface was in turn kidnapped and briefly held by the French at Anagni, and he died soon after his release. After the brief reign of Benedict XI, Clement V (1305-14), a Frenchman, was elevated to the Papal See, and he set up his residence not in Rome but in Avignon, technically not in France but clearly in the French cultural sphere. The next seven popes remained in Avignon, a period later derided as the “Babylonian captivity.” Gregory XI moved back to Rome in 1377, motivated in part by Catherine of Siena, but he died in the following year; a successor, Urban VI, was elected amid great unrest in the city. The new pope soon alienated the cardinals who had elected him, and they removed to Anagni and promptly elected a new pope, Clement VII, who returned his court to Avignon, while Urban appointed a new college of cardinals in Rome. The resulting schism would continue into the next century, and while diplomatic efforts lasted through most of the period, a definitive end came only with the Council of Constance (1414-18).
The papal divisions clearly aligned with those of the Hundred Years War: the Avignon popes supported the French kings, while the Roman popes were allied with the English. While the broad divisions were relatively straightforward, though, the conflict led to confusion on a more local level: as in most civil wars, religious orders, dioceses, and even individual institutions could find themselves divided. Each side excommunicated many on the other, and this unseemly conflict among men of God not only threatened the authority of the Church in general and the papacy in particular, it increased the sense among many that they were living in an evil age.
Given all this, and more, it should not be surprising to find in the fourteenth century political conflicts within the Church as well as among secular lords. An accusation of treason against a French bishop in 1301 led Boniface VIII (1294-1303) to promulgate a bull, Unam sanctam, that claimed the pope as the ultimate lord of the Christian world. Boniface was in turn kidnapped and briefly held by the French at Anagni, and he died soon after his release. After the brief reign of Benedict XI, Clement V (1305-14), a Frenchman, was elevated to the Papal See, and he set up his residence not in Rome but in Avignon, technically not in France but clearly in the French cultural sphere. The next seven popes remained in Avignon, a period later derided as the “Babylonian captivity.” Gregory XI moved back to Rome in 1377, motivated in part by Catherine of Siena, but he died in the following year; a successor, Urban VI, was elected amid great unrest in the city. The new pope soon alienated the cardinals who had elected him, and they removed to Anagni and promptly elected a new pope, Clement VII, who returned his court to Avignon, while Urban appointed a new college of cardinals in Rome. The resulting schism would continue into the next century, and while diplomatic efforts lasted through most of the period, a definitive end came only with the Council of Constance (1414-18).
The papal divisions clearly aligned with those of the Hundred Years War: the Avignon popes supported the French kings, while the Roman popes were allied with the English. While the broad divisions were relatively straightforward, though, the conflict led to confusion on a more local level: as in most civil wars, religious orders, dioceses, and even individual institutions could find themselves divided. Each side excommunicated many on the other, and this unseemly conflict among men of God not only threatened the authority of the Church in general and the papacy in particular, it increased the sense among many that they were living in an evil age.
The calamitous fourteenth century?
Frederick Heer writes of an “open society” (1) that marked Europe in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In this world, borders were fluid, learning crossed political and confessional boundaries, and the Western Church was largely free of dogma. Heer contrasts this idealized world with the “closed Europe” (6) of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. While he admits that this view is an oversimplification, and that aspects of his more “open” world survive into the later one, his conclusion is consistent with that of many other scholars, ultimately influencing Tuchman’s popularizing subtitle.
But is it true? There is evidence to support it, of course, just as there is evidence to contradict it. Beside the topics outlined above we can place the artistic output of Machaut and many others; indeed, Heer suggests that the artistic and intellectual developments of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are more or less directly connected to the political and theological conflicts of the same period. The closing of borders and creation of centralized governments in France and elsewhere can be seen as positive developments as easily as negative ones. Indeed, it was the creation of an administrative class in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe that allowed Machaut to be educated, work, and travel. Similarly, the loss of Latin as a common language, bemoaned by Heer, happens alongside a flowering of vernacular literature, a development in which Machaut had a part.
Ultimately, how one interprets this world depends to a large degree on where one stands today. (Heer himself was a Nazi resister in Vienna, which may be one reason he so strongly favors what he sees as the “open Europe” of the twelfth century.) Every era builds on what came before and leads to what comes after, and historians inevitable draw parallels and contrasts in both directions. The idea of the fourteenth century as a period of unending crisis in some ways reflects a sense of our own time as similarly apocalyptic, and that answer may not be wrong—though, like any other, it is incomplete. Perhaps it is enough for us to conclude that many people in Machaut’s time saw the age as evil, and to some extent so did he. He lived through great difficulties, though largely from a place of protection, either as part of a royal retinue or as a senior churchman. Nevertheless, they affected his outlook on the world and therefore his work.
But is it true? There is evidence to support it, of course, just as there is evidence to contradict it. Beside the topics outlined above we can place the artistic output of Machaut and many others; indeed, Heer suggests that the artistic and intellectual developments of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are more or less directly connected to the political and theological conflicts of the same period. The closing of borders and creation of centralized governments in France and elsewhere can be seen as positive developments as easily as negative ones. Indeed, it was the creation of an administrative class in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe that allowed Machaut to be educated, work, and travel. Similarly, the loss of Latin as a common language, bemoaned by Heer, happens alongside a flowering of vernacular literature, a development in which Machaut had a part.
Ultimately, how one interprets this world depends to a large degree on where one stands today. (Heer himself was a Nazi resister in Vienna, which may be one reason he so strongly favors what he sees as the “open Europe” of the twelfth century.) Every era builds on what came before and leads to what comes after, and historians inevitable draw parallels and contrasts in both directions. The idea of the fourteenth century as a period of unending crisis in some ways reflects a sense of our own time as similarly apocalyptic, and that answer may not be wrong—though, like any other, it is incomplete. Perhaps it is enough for us to conclude that many people in Machaut’s time saw the age as evil, and to some extent so did he. He lived through great difficulties, though largely from a place of protection, either as part of a royal retinue or as a senior churchman. Nevertheless, they affected his outlook on the world and therefore his work.
For further reading
Baldwin, John. Paris, 1200. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Heer, Friedrich. The Medieval World: Europe from 1100-1350. Translated by Janet Sondheimer. History of Civilisation. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1990. (German originally published in 1961, English translation in 1962.)
Jordan, William Chester. Europe in the High Middle Ages. Penguin History of Europe. New York: Viking, 2001.
Jordan, William Chester. The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Robertson, Anne Walters. Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.