ABSTRACT

The history of Catholic Christendom in the fourteenth century is often seen as a catalogue of disasters. Undoubtedly the best known event of the period was the ‘Black Death’ of 1348 which wiped out about a third of the European population. It owed much of its impact to the series of famines which had broken out in Christendom after 1315. These are thought to have been the consequence of food supply failing to match the expanding population which was, thereby, weakened when the plague appeared. In Central and Eastern Europe, where the countryside was emptier and food resources greater, the population seems to have suffered less. There can be no doubt of the debilitating effect of the ‘Black Death’ in the west: the large armies raised by England and France at the very beginning of the ‘Hundred Years War’ in the 1340s were rarely equalled again. But horrific as the impact of the plague was, it was by no means the only disaster to afflict Europe. The papacy under Clement V (1305-14) was moved to Avignon and, partly as a result, the principality of Rome fragmented and this helped to worsen the general political chaos in Italy with warring city-states in the north and a decaying Neapolitan monarchy in the south still locked in a war to regain Aragonese Sicily. When the papacy tried to return to Rome in 1378 this only precipitated a great schism between the Roman and Avignonese popes. Germany was a divided land, a geographical expression rather than an entity, where the empty title of ‘Emperor’ was disputed by rival families each hoping to use it as a bargainingcounter in their conflicts. England and France were locked into the ‘Hundred Years War’ which became more and more destructive and sucked in more and more of the powers of Christendom. Scotland was usually in alliance with France and this spread the zone of devastation to both sides of the frontier with England. Where cities flourished there were tensions with the countryside around, particularly its nobility. Social unrest within the great cities of Italy and Flanders threatened the urban patricians, while there were peasant revolts, some of unprecedented savagery, in the countrysides of England and France. In 1357-58 the horrors of war, political hatred and class tension in Paris exploded in a revolution, albeit one which was short-lived. This is a rather one-sided picture and it must not be assumed that the people of Catholic Christendom, faced with this gloomy political and social landscape, became inward-looking and

preoccupied. Rather, the ruling elites were aware that the political environment within which Catholic Christendom subsisted was becoming more and more unfavourable to expansion at a time when they were more and more deeply preoccupied by the growing authority of monarchical states. In these circumstances crusading enthusiasm was episodic and largely confined to particular groups and areas. The rise of the Ottoman Turks whose advance threatened to engulf the ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’ and even to overwhelm Catholic Christendom itself transformed the crusade into a mechanism for the defence of Christendom. In effect the papal project of Urban II and Innocent III had been wrecked by a series of factors. The rise of the Mamluks created a great power dominating the Middle East. The outbreak of the ‘War of the Vespers’ wrecked the strategy of a grand alliance embracing Byzantium which would sweep away the Mamluk power. Underlying this, the rise of strong monarchies, and particularly the French power, eroded the fundamental assumptions of the whole papal project. The Roman pontiff was no longer a giant dominating petty rulers, but a power alongside powers. And these powers mediated papal authority over the aristocracy whose energies and ambitions were increasingly absorbed by the structure and manipulations of the monarchical state. The dream of Jerusalem’s liberation remained and it continued to have an enormous emotional appeal, but the practice of crusading became rarer and its objectives more defensive.