Transcription
[Music]
All right class, welcome back. We're going to start in on our next big lecture topic: Christendom in Turmoil. This will be a lecture on the various ways in which the stability of Christian Europe, that is principally Western Europe, was under severe threat from multiple directions in the 1300s, principally into the 1400s.
As always, there's one central question that is our focus. My lecture is an attempt to answer the question, and then when you proceed with the module, you more often than not will be asked to attempt to answer the question yourself. Never fear, you never have to mention every last thing I mentioned or your book covers; you just have to make a good faith effort to answer the question fully.
So for this week, we're talking about how from the mid-14th century to the mid-15th century, the stability of Christian Europe was under threat biologically, spiritually, and politically. I'm going to ask how and in what ways specifically was the stability of Christian Europe threatened during this period? Assess the nature, severity, and effects of each threat in your answer. How did these threats transform European society?
My lecture will follow the biological, spiritual, and political threats to Christian Europe as we go along. It would be good if you come to grips with these key terms as well. So you're going to need to understand the bubonic plague, the Ottoman Empire, the importance of Constantinople, the Council of Constance, the Great Schism, and a couple of key reformers: Jan Huss and John Wycliffe. Their names you'll see spelled any number of different ways; those are modern English adaptations of very old names.
So the secret here is if you can answer that central question by deploying these key terms, you're golden. That's it, that's all you need to know. In every lecture I give in this course, you'll see this as we go on. I tried to build off exactly where we left off last time.
Last time, we were talking about the connectivity of medieval Europe to the larger world, specifically Afro-Eurasia. We talked about the trading hubs of Venice, Genoa, and a little bit about the northern European seaports. Europe was not an island unto itself; metaphorically, it was very much connected to North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
We even saw, or have seen, around the year 1000, Vikings or Norsemen establish colonies in Iceland, Greenland, and even North America briefly. We also talked about the Mongol Empire, perhaps the greatest conquering civilization the world has ever known. They created the largest contiguous land empire, and once the bloodshed was done, as we talked about, we get this great Pax Mongolica, a Mongol peace connecting East Asia to the eastern frontiers of Europe.
We also briefly discussed how Europe itself was kind of a hot mess during this period. Politically, there were no empires or even dominant kingdoms in Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries, save for perhaps the emerging kingdoms of England, Castile, Aragon, and the Holy Roman Empire. The map of Europe is broken in this period into hundreds of many kingdoms, city-states, free states, duchies, principalities, and so on.
If you're looking to amass political influence and wealth in medieval Europe during this period, there are principally three ways to do it. You can go into the church. The church, as we will see, is the dominant source of authority, wealth, and power in Christian Europe. Joining the clergy gave you a chance to rise up the ranks, gain quite a bit of local influence, and quite a bit of income.
The second path to power and wealth in medieval Europe was to amass huge productive agrarian estates. The large expanse of kingdoms we'll see coming are principally agrarian kingdoms: England, Poland, Lithuania, France, Castile. Their power is measured in acres of productive farmland and the serfs and peasants working it. If you own lots of productive farmland, you have lots of wealth.
The third way to amass power, influence, and wealth is a new way. We saw it briefly talked about last time, but this is investing heavily in commerce and trade. If you're a merchant in Venice, Genoa, or Antwerp, or maybe emerging centers in London, Amsterdam, and elsewhere, you had a path to power and wealth. Though this we would call a new path, it didn't get very much respect.
Probably the most respected way to accrue wealth and power is, again, as I said, the church. Christianity remained the ultimate source of power in Europe. It governed the daily lives and worldviews of most every European. Even many kings and queens legitimated or enhanced their secular authority by championing their religious credentials.
Of course, any person claiming a divine authority to rule could never be outranked. If they've got the thumbs up from God himself, nobody can outrank that. So many kings and queens were scrambling to be more holy or more pious than their neighboring monarch.
The center of Christian authority, quite literally, was the papacy in Rome. It was believed that the pope, the head of the Catholic Church in Western Europe, could trace a lineage of authority all the way back to Saint Peter, who received the keys of Saint Peter.
So there's a long lineage of power and authority flowing through the papacy down through cardinals, cardinals to bishops or archbishops, bishops to priests, all the way down to your local clergymen. Your textbook has this photo; this really says it all about how far monarchs, that is, secular rulers, non-religious rulers, were willing to go to appear at least to their subjects religious.
This room is known as the container for the crown of thorns. This is in Sainte-Chapelle, built by Louis IX of France. This is a huge reliquary for the display of one religious artifact: the crown of thorns believed to have been worn by Jesus Christ during his execution. This is a massive room; it's many stories tall, adorned with stained glass windows and ornate gold decoration everywhere. It cost vast sums of money.
Why would a king, a secular ruler, invest so much in building and maintaining such an edifice? Well, you could say one, it's a means to display one's wealth. I mean, check out this huge room I built. Secondly, you could say it's a means to display one's piety or religiousness. I mean, look at this contribution I'm making to God here, this room I built for this holy relic.
You could argue third, less cynically, maybe King Louis IX of France actually believed he had a genuine relic and he actually believed in Christianity, and this is all just an effort to fulfill his true beliefs.
Anyway, that's the end of the intro. Let me just sum that up by saying Christianity is critically important to political power in Europe, social stability, and cultural identity. It is everything.
The first threat to the stability of Christian Europe is microscopic; it's a bacteria: Yersinia pestis. It shows up on the doorstep of Europe in the mid-1300s. People did not know it at the time, but this bacteria is carried in fleas, fleas that typically reside in the skin of small ground-dwelling mammals like rats.
No one knew what it was then, but that's what it was: Yersinia pestis, a bacteria. When it makes the jump to humans, which can happen when people are living in poor sanitary conditions with lots of rats and other small rodents nearby, it can infect the human body in three forms. Your textbook covers these at length, but there's the bubonic form, bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis. When it makes people sick, we call this plague.
Bubonic is an infection of the lymphatic system. There's septicemic plague; that's an infection of the blood. And there's pneumonic plague; it's an infection of the lungs and respiratory system. All three are incredibly deadly. We're talking 70, 80, 90 percent fatality rates if you're infected, and you get all the classic signs of a fever plus more: aches, pains, fever, chills, fatigue, and then ultimately death.
Now, what ended up happening here is the bubonic plague had been around for centuries, perhaps thousands of years. We know of at least one other major outbreak of plague in the late Roman Empire during the reign of Justinian. But what happened here is that the Mongols ended up creating a super connected highway across Afro-Eurasia, linking East to West.
Entering this great Mongol peace, we have merchants, missionaries, sojourners, travelers, people like Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta crisscrossing Afro-Eurasia back and forth under the safety and security of the great Mongol Khan. So people are traveling further, more easily than ever before. This is a perfect recipe for, on the one hand, commercial prosperity, but on the other hand, a perfect recipe for the spread of infectious disease.
What we see in the beginning of the 1330s is the spread of plague traveling these very same Silk Roads. Bubonic plague, according to modern research, originated in the Tibetan Plateau. The Mongols conquered this area, or at least portions of it. They were unfamiliar with the seasonal ebb and flow of plague outbreaks, which the local inhabitants were.
With Mongol conquest, things got disrupted. People were forced in and out of this territory, and the plague breaks out and gets on the Silk Roads. The first thing it does is tear through the Mongol Chinese territories, and then it gets out on the Silk Roads proper, going this way, this way, this way, all the way down to the doorstep of Europe, right here on the Crimean Peninsula.
It's the exact same Crimean Peninsula that Ukraine and Russia are fighting over at this moment, coincidentally. Excuse me, the plague shows up here, the Crimean Peninsula, the trading port of Kaffa, in the year 1347. I believe it's a funny little story; we don't need to know all the ins and outs of it, but Kaffa, here on the Crimean Peninsula, at the very end of the Silk Roads, was operated by Italian merchants from Venice and Genoa.
But they were operating within Mongol territory. In this year, 1347, I believe is that the right year? Actually, let's see. Yeah, 1347. During this year, there was a conflict between the local Italian traders and their Mongol overlords. Somebody was killed, arrests were attempted, the Mongols began laying siege to the town of Kaffa.
For whatever reason, the Italian traders refused the Mongols entrance, and the siege goes on. It was during the siege that many of the Mongol forces outside Kaffa began falling ill of this mysterious new disease. So many Mongols died that they had to withdraw. But before they withdrew, the Mongols lobbed over the walls of Kaffa, using their trebuchets and catapults, pictured here, the dead bodies of their fallen brothers and sisters, plague victims.
So these infected bodies come plopping into the city of Kaffa, a nice farewell present from the Mongols. As soon as the Mongols are out of sight, the Italians flee. They get on their ships and they get the heck out of there, and they go back to the ports that are familiar to them from Kaffa, which you can see pictured here.
Again, we're talking about the Crimean Peninsula. Right there from Kaffa, they go through Constantinople, right there. They go out through the Greek Isles and they go back to Venice, Genoa, and Marseille. All we know for sure is at least one of them was infected with the plague because later that very same year, 1347, we see the very first outbreaks of plague in this region in Southern Europe.
So here's another example of how these highly interconnected passageways, this time maritime links, were not all that good for Europe's prosperity. They helped circulate infectious disease rather quickly. In fact, if we switch to this view, you can see the spread of plague follows those trade routes exactly, spreading also into North Africa and Ottoman territories.
Death rates were massive. When the plague showed up in regions, it killed at least a third to a half of the population. Some regions were good at quarantining, and they were spared some of these losses. But generally speaking, many of your key interconnected regions of Europe suffered around a 60 percent death rate.
There are other regions of the world you can see here in this chart. You don't need to know all these numbers, by the way, but Japan, Korea, and India, these outlying areas of Afro-Eurasia that aren't all that well connected to the Silk Roads, they didn't really suffer from plague losses. In fact, you see there they have positive population growth.
This is because Japan, Korea, and India are not directly connected to the Silk Roads and the Mongol Empire. In fact, India is protected by the Himalayas; Japan is protected by the Sea of Japan. So connectivity spells death here.
All right, so that's how the plague was and how it spread. What was the impact? The impact was massive. The Mongol Empire collapses as a result of the Black Death or the bubonic plague. Mongol rule in China, Persia, Russia, and Central Asia collapses within the space of just a few years. We're talking huge demographic collapse from China to Europe.
I know most everything we read in the West about the Black Death is just Europe, Europe, Europe, but keep in mind the Black Death is affecting the entire East-West corridor of Afro-Eurasia. We see widespread blame, fingers being pointed everywhere in these societies. A lot of blame went to religious leaders and the church because, after all, if your job is the salvation of humanity and a plague breaks out, you've obviously failed.
Perhaps God is angry; many people wondered perhaps a religion is false. Many more people wondered. We see a general failure to understand the plague. So let's look at some of these instances.
One development that will play a big factor later in this lecture is the collapse of the Mongol Ilkhanate, or the Persian sector of the Mongol Empire, shaded here in grey. From the 1330s to the 1340s, when the plague showed up, this area of the Mongol Empire collapsed almost overnight. Within a year, the plague had entered Egypt, Syria, Cyprus, and much of the Islamic world.
The ruling Khan and every one of his sons or heirs died with the plague, and almost overnight we see a relatively centralized, homogeneous Mongol Khanate devolve into this map of fragmented warring states, regional warlords, and many kingdoms. It's political chaos. We will see one group emerge out of this chaos very quickly; more on that later.
In Europe, there was no empire to collapse, as we noted. The political map of Europe is, quote unquote, a hot mess during this period. But that doesn't mean nobody dies. Up to 50 million people died in the initial years of the plague, and the plague flares up every 7 to 10 years or so with the ebb and flow of the seasons well into the 1600s. The plague is a threat.
The plague, I'm not going to say, in a beneficial way, but in a strange way, was also a great equalizer because it didn't discriminate based on class, race, or gender or anything like that. Rich and poor died in equal proportions, devastating all social classes.
Imagine what that must have been like living through a plague where you didn't know what was causing the widespread death. You didn't know where it had come from, how it was operating, how it was being transmitted. We see all sorts of ideas. We see religious explanations, explanations rooted in morality for the plague, ethnic or cultural conspiracies.
Maybe this is a Jewish plot or a Muslim plot against Christian Europe. We had many, quote unquote, scholars arguing that the plague had been precipitated by a certain alignment of the planets. More and more, a corruption of the air was another popular one, that the air was bad. They weren't far off on that because a lot of places the plague spread were unsanitary.
If you walked down those certain areas of town or those streets, the air did smell quite bad. But it wasn't the air itself that was getting you sick; they were kind of off the mark there.
So the plague gets even worse as humans interpret it. We see widespread accusations against Jewish communities in Europe. Jewish communities are almost always a minority; they're spread all throughout Europe. They're kind of communities unto themselves; they marry only within themselves, they have their own religion, their own customs. They're very conspicuous that way; therefore, they get a lot of blame.
They're made the scapegoat quite often. Here we see a common occurrence, unfortunately, in medieval Europe: a wide mass execution of Jews. It was believed they had deliberately spread the plague amongst Europe to wipe out Christians. That's patently ridiculous, but it was widely believed at the time.
Medicinal understandings were well off the mark. People had no idea about germ theory, how communicable these diseases spread, or anything like that. But most, quote unquote, doctors during this period fell into the belief that it was a corruption of the air.
So we see the widespread use of these plague masks. You often see them; they usually have this long beak that existed because they'd cram that beak filled with kind of like a pulpery or perfumes and filters. The idea being the doctor can breathe and breathe and breathe through this thing, and it would somehow filter out the disease. You know, incorrect, but a good effort.
Another backlash, as I mentioned, many people throughout Europe—and this holds true in other regions of Africa as well for other religions—many people lost faith in their church in Europe. This was the Catholic Church. People believed that God had clearly failed them.
So from the 1300s to the 1400s, we see a widespread emergence of all these breakaway sects from Christianity. People saying, well, the pope failed us, God failed us, our local priests failed us, clearly because of the devastation wrought by the plague.
So we see people like the Beggars, for example, who kind of go back to original doctrines of Christianity, own no material possessions, wear no comfortable clothing. They all wore these itchy wool black robes, and they tried to live off the charity of others. Even more extreme were the Flagellants. These were people that tried to atone for whatever sin humanity had committed to deserve the plague by publicly beating themselves, whipping themselves, and cutting themselves.
Kind of an image like a reenactment of the Passion of the Christ. Where was the pope in all of this? He was pretty helpless. I mean, he didn't know what the plague was either. He tried his best, though. This was Pope Clement VI. He was on watch during the plague's arrival in Europe.
He issued decrees or papal bulls ordering Christians to stop persecuting Jews for the plague. He reminded European Christians that Jews were fellow people of the book; they believed in many of the same religious tenets as Christianity. He tried to consecrate as many burial grounds and bodies as he could. He went so far as to consecrate the entire Rhône River because so many people had dumped their dead plague bodies in that river that by consecrating the entire river, perhaps we could save these souls.
Nobody was going to stop the spread of plague. It tore through Europe over the space of about five to ten years, flaring up every several years thereafter for several centuries. But the one silver lining you can point to is that for the survivors, you could say in some strange ways life got better after the plague.
The masses of laboring poor that made up the foundation of European feudal society had more leverage. There were now vastly fewer workers to work agricultural lands, which means wages go up because labor is scarce. This also means peasants and serfs kind of now have the ability, if they're not being paid enough or given enough benefits or privileges and want a state, they will pack up and move to one that will give them better benefits and privileges.
We also see cities rebounding very quickly after the plague, becoming larger than they ever were before and containing a greater percent of a kingdom's population than ever before. Before the plague, Europe was about 5 percent urban. After the plague, Europe was about 20 percent urban. That is, 20 percent of the population in the cities. That's a huge leap, a huge transformation.
When elite nobles tried to clamp down on the rising income, wages, and rights of the surviving working poor in masses, they were usually overwhelmed by popular revolts and rebellions. So society is in flux and is changing as a result of the bubonic plague.
Okay, let me stop there. I'm going to end part one right here. We will deal with the ways in which Christian Europe was under threat spiritually and politically in part two. That was the biological threat.
All right, thanks for hanging in there. I'll see you in part two.