ABSTRACT
During the last century of the Middle Ages, between the beginning and end of the Hundred Years' War, a new Europe was created in the throes of long and painful birth-pangs. The different nationalities hurled themselves against each other from West to East, and grew strong by dint of their violent struggles. In the East and South-East, Asiatic barbarism once more began its assaults upon Christendom, and submerged a large part of Eastern Europe. Civil and religious wars increased the confusion and added their evils to those brought about by the conflicts of peoples and races. At the same time the political and social forces of the past broke up. The Church, corrupted by wealth and weakened by heresy, shut itself up in its selfishness and resigned itself to the role of a parasite, abandoning the leadership of the Christian commonwealth and ceasing to promote economic progress. Everywhere feudalism showed itself more and more devoid of the qualities indispensable to the art of government, and able only to renew and perpetuate anarchy. It lost its military prestige at Crécy, Poitiers, Nicopolis and Agincourt, and in the Hussite wars. It became a mere court nobility, vowed to the service of princes, and lived henceforth only by exploiting its tenants, or, worse still, by rapine and brigandage.
