Vicissitudes of Colonization and Agricultural Production.— Changes in the Distribution of Landed Property and in the Condition of the Rural Classes at the Close of the Middle Ages.—The Peasant Revolts.

The end of the Middle Ages was a period of marked contrasts in the domain of agriculture. Certain regions, such as the old Eastern Empire, Bohemia, and Hungary, grew poorer and more depopulated, and others, such as Sweden, Ireland, and Scotland, were unable to emerge from their condition of poverty. France, the most prosperous country in the West, became, in Petrarch's words (1360), "a heap of ruins"; from Loire to Somme nothing was to be seen but "uncultivated fields, overgrown with brambles and bushes," as Bishop Thomas Basin said in 1440, when a third of her territory lay uncultivated. But other more favoured regions continued to exploit their soil to its utmost value. In Italy the embankment of the Po was carried on from the place where it joined the Oglio; a number of marshes (polesine, corregie) were converted into cultivated "polders" in Lombardy and Tuscany, irrigation canals or trenches fed from the Naviglio Grande and the Naviglio Interne, besides tnose of Martesana, Panarello, and Chiaro, fertilized the fields of Lombardy and Modena. A similar work was being carried out in Eastern Spain.