Link to Chronology
England on top
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Eight
The European Crisis
(1300-1450)
The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War
Chapter II
The Hundred Years War
1. To the Death of Edward III (1377)
p418 ...A war so long and so bitterly contested was possible only between France and England. They alone had governments disposing of sufficient resources, and peoples endowed with a sufficient national unity, to endure such an ordeal without perishing... After all the shedding of blood, after all the misery and devastation, the two adversaries found themselves still more or less at the point of departure, so that the Hundred Years' War had been merely a futile and terrible calamity... they [the kings of England] had no urgent motive for going to war... For France was not threatening or incommoding England... It is quite comprehensible that France might have attacked England in order to recover... [Guyenne], the last remnant of the Angivin possessions... but it was not France, it was England that provoked the war... In short, from whatever point of view we regard it, the Hundred Years' War is seen to have been a useless war, a needless war... As a matter of fact, it must be regarded merely as a war of prestige. And this, precisely, explains the passion with which the English people followed its kings into this war.
...
p427 Hostilities began in 1337... In the following year... Edward III disembarked at Antwerp, with the intention of doing great things... in order to compel the Count of Flanders to come over to his side, he had... prohibited the export of wool, which was indispensable to the cloth trade of Gand, Bruge, and Ypres... the trade corporations and merchants of the cities had no intention of allowing themselves to be ruined or starved... Gand, where the corporations of the cloth trade had for some years been in power, took over the government of the country, under the direction of a wealthy burgess, Jan van Artevelde... Thus the solidarity of their interests brought about an alliance between Edward's monarchical and dynastic policy and the bourgeois and economic policy of the Flemish cities, an alliance to which Flanders was to show herself unshakably faithful. In this essentially industrial country, where the bourgeoisie was predominant, politics, sooner than anywhere else in the North of Europe, were subordinated to economic considerations.
...
p428 ...In 1346... [Edward III] suddenly landed in Normandy. This was the beginning of a complete change of policy. A new system of tactics, based on the role of the archers on the battlefield, gave the English a series of brilliant victories... The battle of Crecy... proved the quality of his army... The victor profited by this un-hoped-for success to besiege Calais, which was taken after a siege of eleven months, and was not restored to France until 1558... On the Pope's intervention a truce was concluded in September 1347. This, owing to the appearance of the Black Death, was prolonged into the following year, and... was terminated only in 1355.
p429 ...The new King of France, Jean II the Good (1350-1364), had decided to convoke the States-General, which had furnished him with the means of equipping 30,000 men. These he led against the Black Prince, who was ravaging Guyenne. The battle of Maupertuis... [Poitiers] on September 19th, 1356, ended in a catastrophe even more overwhelming than that of Crecy. Jean himself was taken prisoner and sent to England as a captive.
p430 In France this disaster immediately provoked the first of the crises with which the monarchy was repeatedly confronted until the middle of the 15th century. The States-General of 1355, in which the influence of the bourgeoisie was predominant, led by the Provost of the merchants of Paris, Etienne Marcel, had demanded, in return for voting the taxes required by the king, a considerable voice in the government. They had stipulated that they themselves must levy and administer the new taxes, and they demanded guarantees in respect of their right to assemble in the future, and the introduction of administrative reforms... Unassailed and undisputed for a century past, the monarchy was asked to share its power with the nation... [In France] the bourgeoisie -- that is to say, the commercial and industrial class -- headed the movement. Now between this bourgeoisie and the nobles no understanding was possible. [Unlike in England where all the classes had been united against John Lackland.] The privileges of the one class were opposed to those of the other, giving rise to a mutual hostility, which the disasters of Crecy and Poitiers, for which the bourgeoisie held the chivalry responsible, increased to a maximum... If a few grands seigneurs [like Charles the Bad, King of Navarre] supported the efforts of the Third Estate, this was only by reason of personal interest, resentment, or ambition, and on the first opportunity they abandoned the allies whom they despised. The same may be said of the clergy... the States-General, composed of three orders which debated and voted separately, constituted in reality three distinct assemblies of privileged persons, incapable of agreement... Every one of their convocations corresponded with a crisis of the Treasury: they were assembled only that they might be asked for money. And it was precisely this fact that gave the bourgeoisie the preponderant role in the States. For... it was the bourgeoisie above all that was called upon to make payment... And it was precisely this fact that gave the bourgeoisie the preponderant role in the States...
Peace of Bretigny May 9th, 1360 gives Gascony, Guyenne, Poitou, Calais and the County of Guines to Edward III.
p434 Charles V (1364-1380), who succeeded his father Jean II in 1364 could not hope to break the peace which had barely been concluded. The kingdom was exhausted... The Count of Flanders, Louis de Maele... consented to the marriage of his daughter (June 29th, 1369) with the King's brother, Philip the Bold, who in 1361 had received the Duchy of Burgundy as his appanage. It seemed that the "Flemish question" which had so greatly preoccupied the Crown since the reign of Philip Augustus was on the point of being solved, since the succession of the powerful County was assured to a royal prince.
This period ends with the deaths, in 1377, of both Edward III and new French King, Charles V, with children inheriting both crowns leasing to periods of Regency.
Link to Chronology
Bohemia in a passion
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Eight
The European Crisis
(1300-1450)
The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War
Chapter I
General Characteristics of the Period
2. The Religious Movement
Continued
p413 [Huss burned at the stake at the Council of Constance 1414] ... Hitherto the followers of Huss had confined themselves... to professing the ideas of Wycliffe. A certain number of them remained faithful to these ideas: these were the Utraquists, so called because they communicated "in the two elements." [Both bread and wine. ] But the mass of the people, under the spur of religious passion, suddenly pushed the doctrine to its extreme consequences. Since the Bible proclaimed the Word of God, it must be obeyed in everything not only in such matters as regarded the soul, but also in all that related to the body. Hence the ecclesiastical organization, no less than the civil organization, ought simply to disappear. The Kingdom of God must be established in this world, by reconstituting the whole of humanity in accordance with the Holy Scriptures. Such was the enthusiastic dream of a young people, [the Czechs] a people full of illusions, and history shows no pendant to their behavior save that of the Russian Bolsheviks of 1917. They set to work immediately, under the conviction that the Czech nation was the Chosen of the Lord. The Catholic clergy was dispersed, its property confiscated, and the churches and monasteries were destroyed. A partiarchal [patriarchal?] constitution, on the lines of the Old Testament, was given to the people, and on the site of the castle of Kozihradek... the Holy City of Tabor was built, from which the New Hebrews received their name of Taborites... The revolution was thus in full control of the country... from all parts of the world exalted mystics, members of the associations of Bogards, or the proletariat of the industrial cities, hastened toward this country in which the Kingdom of God had been proclaimed, and their communistic aspirations, or their paradisiacal visions, gave rise to some singular sects amidst the Biblical rigorism of the Taborites. The sect of the Adamites, founded by a Belgian weaver, affords the curious example of the exaltation of their adepts. The disciples of the new Adam, who settled on an island in the river Nezarka, professed to live there, in a state of the completest communism, the life of the Garden of Eden, Like the first of our race, they wore no clothes, and their morals were as primitive as their costume. They soon caused such a scandal that John Ziska, in 1421, had them massacred.
p415 The faith of the Hussites was too ardent to allow them to neglect the duty of propagating it...The adjacent Slav regions, Poland, Moravia and Silesia, where the language of its apostles was readily understood, and where the masses of the people were living wretchedly under the oppression of the nobles, immediately provided it with thousands of adepts. It even made some progress among the poorer inhabitants in the German regions of Austria. And its prestige appeared more dazzling than ever in the light of its triumphs. The victories of John Ziska and Procopius over the German chivalry sent against them by the Pope and Sigismond [King of Germany] inevitably reminded the faithful of the victories of David or of Gideon over the Amalekites.
...
p416 The religious and social radicalism of the Taborites ended by provoking a definitive rupture between them and the Utraquists. Almost the whole of the nobility had gone over to the side of the Utraquists, and at Lipan, on March 30th, 1434, they won a bloody victory for their cause. Bohemia, exhausted by the war, asked for nothing more than peace... The difficulties were evaded rather than solved. All the efforts, all the enthusiasm, all the bloodshed, profited, in the end, only the Czech nobles, who divided the property of the convents among themselves... They thereby acquired such power that little danger was to be feared henceforth from the discouraged sectators among the people...
...
Of the [reform] work of the Council [of "Basle"] nothing survived. The Church had preserved its monarchical form; after so much effort, so many hopes, everything was as it had been in the beginning.
p417 ...The Papacy remained supreme within the Church. But the Church was no longer what it had been in the Middle Ages. It no longer extended its authority over the temporal as over the spiritual domain. To a certain extent it turned inward upon itself, and... decided to specialize in its religious role. Following the Emperor, the Pope in his turn disappeared from the stage of the world as a universal power. From the middle of the 15th century there were to be no more Antipopes. However, after the deposition of the King of Bohemia, George Podiebrad, by Paul II, the quarrels of the kings would no longer be submitted to Papal arbitration.
I'm still trying to get my mind around the idea that it was the urban bourgeoisie driving the economic transformation of Europe from the 11th?? century and now I have to get used to the idea that, while it was the Third Estate starting to taking control of the political power in the 14th century, it was the petite bourgeoisie (recruiting spear carriers from the proletariat) who were behind the mystical religious tendency that led to centuries of mindless violence and sectarianism. It is always disquieting to see what "the people" get up to when left to their own devices.
I've always read the European Religious Wars as someone raised a Lutheran. I wonder how this will look as I approach it again not having a dog in the fight. Almaric may have been on to something after all when he (maybe) said "Kill them all and let God sort them out." (And I see that this quote comes from the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade. So the Crusaders, like the loyal Imperial Japanese soldiers of the Pacific War, might even have appreciated the privilege of dying for the cause.)
I think football (what we Americans call soccer) may be a good analogy for the religious wars of all denominations. And I have in mind the way football looks to an American who would prefer the fate of Sisyphus to having to actually sit through an entire soccer match. (Cricket might be even better as the rules appear to have been drafted by mad men.) I don't know the teams or the players and don't care who wins. Everyone but the goalies seem to get a good workout, but why am I watching them run about the field?
To be fair, I've written extensively about baseball and basketball, which are also pretty inane -- though at least things happen frequently. But, with the possible exception of hockey players, nobody thinks these games are worth dying for. And yet it seems that there is no religion crazy enough for people not to feel that it is worth dying for. Is it because you can't see the thing you worship? Is it that the religious idea is our greatest invention and so we will fight to the death for our particular version of that general idea?
And here's a spoiler, my Regieren blog will probably be returning this summer as I finally get around to blogging The Magic Mountain itself. (I've referred to it so often my book club has decided to give it a try.) I'm having trouble, reading this, imagining Naphta as the spokesman for the Catholic orthodoxy that is falling apart in the centuries we are now looking at. (Maybe Ivan Karamazov's Grand Inquisitor would be a better option.) It almost seems like the Church is protecting the people from religion. So is it the new level of oppression or just the brush with strange ideas that has opened Pandora's Box? I imagine most of the followers of Huss and Wycliffe and even our old friends the Albigensians were mostly illiterate. So there must be a small number of educated people who are preaching to the masses. Both Wycliffe and Huss would have been educated by the Church through the universities of the time.
I ran into a couple interesting quotes about Wycliffe in Wiki, "Thomas Bradwardine was the archbishop of Canterbury, and his book On the Cause of God against the Pelagians, a bold recovery of the Pauline-Augustine doctrine of grace, would greatly shape young Wycliffe's views,[8] as did the Black Death which reached England in the summer of 1348.[9] From his frequent references to it in later life, it appears to have made a deep and abiding impression upon him. According to Robert Vaughn, the effect was to give Wycliffe "Very gloomy views in regard to the condition and prospects of the human race."[10]" And then, "Wycliffe completed his arts degree at Merton College as a junior fellow in 1356.[11] That same year he produced a small treatise, The Last Age of the Church. In the light of the virulence of the plague that had subsided only seven years previously, Wycliffe's studies led him to the opinion that the close of the 14th century would mark the end of the world. While other writers viewed the plague as God's judgment on a sinful people, Wycliffe saw it as an indictment of an unworthy clergy. The mortality rate among the clergy had been particularly high, and those who replaced them were, in his opinion, uneducated or generally disreputable.[9]"
This would suggest that it was not anything to do with the cities, but people trying to make sense of the Black Death that was driving the religious feeling. Now this makes more sense to me. Though the logic is absurd.
The Church trades in the life after death, a perfect business model as dissatisfied customers can't really complain. But after the Black Death, people were bargaining for their lives in This World, and this was a competition that science would eventually win, but not for a long time. And even now there are plenty of people happy to believe any well presented magic solution.
Link to Chronology
Proto-Protestants
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Eight
The European Crisis
(1300-1450)
The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War
Chapter I
General Characteristics of the Period
2. The Religious Movement
p398 ...it is evident that about the middle of the 13th century the Church had attained the maximum of its power. It had ceased to grow, and presently began to decline... Without intention, without being really conscious of what they were doing, men were gradually turning away from the influence of the Church. [Toward their economic concerns.] And the Church was not aware of this desertion... The Defensor Pacis of Marsilius of Padua... expounded ideas of which we may note the first traces in the entourage of Frederick II and Philip the Fair. But only now were they fully developed, and they amazed the world by their boldness. For Marsilius the pretensions of the papacy were merely an intolerable usurpation, as incompatible with the interpretation of Holy Scriptures and the usages of the primitive Church as they were disastrous to the peace of the world. The Pope was merely a bishop like any other... All interference in the temporal domain, all jurisdiction over laymen should be refused him. And expatiating on this question, Marsilius defined the Church: the community of all those who believe in Jesus Christ. Before Wycliffe and before Huss, he declared that the layman belonged to the Church no less than the priest, and he categorically insisted that the "clerks" should be subject to the secular power in all temporal relations. Of course, we must not exaggerate the influence of these declarations... They had, as yet, only the importance of a symptom, and in religious as in social questions, contemporaries do not usually notice the symptoms which precede a crisis.
p399 ...In its profoundest and most spontaneous features the piety of the 14th century was essentially mystical. In its efforts to attain to God the Church no longer sufficed it. Without hesitation, it took flight towards Him; it sought to contemplate Him face to face in the intimacy of consciousness, without the intermediary of the priest. Moreover -- and this is a peculiarly characteristic innovation -- it no longer expressed itself in the tongue of the Church. Nearly all the mystics -- Eckhardt (1327), Tauler (1365), Ruysbroek (1381) -- wrote in the language of the people, thus for the first time giving religious thought a secular form, and so undermining the prestige of the clergy, who had hitherto enjoyed the sole monopoly of religious ideas... Mysticism took alarm at the fact that a conventual [relating or belonging to a convent] rule necessarily imposes constraint upon spiritual liberty. It preferred solitary contemplation, as a voluntary practice, or such congregations as were exempt from perpetual vows, like the beguinages, or the community of the Brothers of the Common Life, founded by Goert Groot (1384). Here piety could still expand beyond the boundaries which the Church had created to confine it. For neither the Beguines nor the Begards nor the Brothers of the Common Life were religious orders. They did not consider that the secular life was incompatible with devotion, or that it was necessary to flee the world in order to enter relations with God...
p401 This spread of mysticism in the lay community was doubly perilous for the church. To begin with, it represented a danger to orthodoxy... The danger was all the greater inasmuch as these naive zealots were without theological training, since most of them came from the ranks of the people or the petite bourgeoisie... During the Black Death of 1347-1348 bands of penitents, urged onward by a sort of ecstatic delirium, went from city to city, exciting the people, like Oriental fakirs, by their singing, their dancing, or their public flagellations. In Italy, France and Germany obscure sects appeared which seemed to have preserved something of the doctrines and the dreams of the Albigenses; they were known as "Spirituals, Apostolics, Friends of God." All these mystics -- and this was the second danger to the Church -- aspired to lead the world back to evangelical poverty. This question of poverty troubled the whole of the 14th century. Among the workers in the manufacturing cities, and the English rebels in 1384, it gave rise to communistic aspirations, which the secular power proceeded to stifle. But even more widespread, and even more difficult to contend with, was the criticism of the religious authorities, beginning with the highest of all, the papacy...
...
p403 Wycliffe was the first to tread the path which was to lead to the Reformation. He had nothing in common with the heretics who had troubled the Church before his time, and whose doctrines had their essential foundation, like that of the Albigenses, in the dualism of flesh and spirit. Wycliffe... did not rebel against Christian dogma nor against Christian morality, but simply against the Church, and even more... against the Papacy. The only head of the Church, he taught, was Christ. His word, recorded in the Bible, sufficed for the salvation of those who had faith... As for the Pope, far from being the representative of Christ on the earth, he was actually the Antichrist. Before the people could practice the true religion it must go back to the Bible, with which it was no longer familiar... He even went so far... as to deny the Transubstantiation of Christ in the Communion. The Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, might vainly accuse him of heresy... but the Parliament was so obviously favorable to Wycliffe that no one dared to persecute him, and in 1384 he died peacefully in his own parish of Lutterworth... It was only after the advent of Henry of Lancaster (Henry IV), that the king, desiring to obtain the support of the Pope for his new dynasty, turned against Wycliffism, or, to use the term employed by the adversaries of the reformers, against the sect of the Lollards. At the beginning of his reign -- 1399 -- he introduced the first law which ever condemned heretics to be burned at the stake in England, and which forbade the translation of the Bible into the national tongue... These violent measures hampered the movement without suppressing it. Until Protestantism made its appearance, the disciples of Wycliffe never ceased to influence the religious thought of England and to prepare it for the great transformation of the 16th century... Transplanted into Bohemia by John Huss, this doctrine... was to shake the very foundations of the Church and of Germany.
p405 ...[At this time] the Papacy... flung itself into the famous crisis which is known as the Great Schism, and which for forty years was to rend Western Christendom in twain (1373-1417)...
...
Link to Chronology
A new nobility
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Eight
The European Crisis
(1300-1450)
The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War
Chapter I
General Characteristics of the Period
1. Social and Economic Tendencies
p389 [continued] ...the cities...were acquiring a political importance in the outer world which they had never before possessed... now that bands of mercenaries and fleets were playing a greater part in warfare, it was becoming more costly than ever. The old sources of revenue were insufficient... the only thing to be done was to apply to the Third Estate -- that is, to the cities -- and to ask them to open their purses... From the beginning of the 14th century the necessity of taxation dominated the prince's policy, and compelled him to accede to the demands of the cities and the Estates, which wrested privileges from him, and would presently even claim the right to participate in his policy... The 15th century was the epoch in which the bourgeoisie began to play a political as well as a class role. It took its place beside the clergy and the noblesse... [Footnote: It was in the 14th century that the financiers began to acquire political importance.]
p391 The financial needs of the princes made the 14th century a century of parliamentarianism, or shall we say, a century of Estates... [Not long ago, "princes" was used to denote the powerful nobles the kings were in conflict with, but now "princes" seems to include the kings.] every assembly of Estates was always to the advantage of the Third Estate. It was the Third Estate alone which supported the institution and profited by it, because it disposed of the finances. And it was the Third Estate alone which made conditions and demanded guarantees.
But the Third Estate was itself merely a class of privileged persons, and beneath it was the majority of the nation, the Fourth Estate, which was never mentioned, though it bore the burden. Undoubtedly its condition was much less tolerable after the 14th century than it had been for two hundred years. We have seen how the rise of the cities... shattered the domainal system, releasing great expanses of territory and great numbers of rural inhabitants. At that time the rural classes gave evidence of unusual energy. They cleared uncultivated ground, they emigrated, and yet the population was rapidly increasing. But there was an end to all this during the first half of the century... the available land was occupied... and the cities were closing their gates. Meanwhile taxation was heavier than ever and still increasing. Moreover, there was a surplus of workers, so that the situation of the peasants was most unfavorable. The nobles took advantage of this, endeavoring to re-establish their old feudal rights, and, in a general manner, to exploit the peasants, for the old patriarchal relations of the domainal epoch no longer existed. In maritime Flanders a terrible rebellion broke out, which lasted from 1324 to 1328. The peasants hunted the chevaliers, and refused to pay their tithes. A true social hatred finds expression in the Kerelslied. [Subversive songs?] This rising ended in the massacre of Cassel, and in wholesale confiscations. In France, the so-called revolt of the Jacques in 1357... gave evidence of a profound hostility between the rural masses and the noblesse... The English rebellion of 1381, which is that concerning which we are best informed, was due to attempts on the part of the nobles to re-establish the old corvees, in order to avoid paying the higher wages which were one of the consequences of the Black Death...
p393 Generally speaking, people began to despise the peasants as a helot who stood outside society... The cities too oppressed the rural districts, taking care that no industries should be practiced there. All through the 14th century Gand was organizing expeditions which destroyed the looms and the fullers' vats in the villages and country towns. And the monasteries no longer extended the old social protection over the "villeins," but added to their wretchedness by their exaction of the tithe.
As for the nobles, they too were passing through a serious crisis... I cannot find that anything remained of the old idealism, apart from certain outward gallantry... The chief preoccupation of the chevalier was now his fief... What did survive was the military character of the noble class. But this often assumed the aspect of mercenary military service... Knights-errant began to make their appearance, fighting on all fronts and for all causes... These were professional soldiers, who were not very far removed from the condottiere -- leaders of bands, experienced captains to whom war was a lucrative calling... At heart these knights were adventurers: very valiant men, but also violent and greedy... Some also went to break a lance in Granada.
...
p394 ...it was no longer by this military noblesse that battles were won. Artillery, which was first heard at Crecy, still played only a secondary part in any campaign, but the infantry was gradually recovering the position which it had lost since the Carolingian epoch. At Cortrai it destroyed the French chivalry; the Swiss infantry had been winning battles since 1315; the foot-soldiers were the backbone of the English army, where they were formed into companies of archers; and the tactics of Johann Ziska, leader of the Hussites, was based on the infantry... And while, from the military point of view, the nobles were in retreat... They played no part in government, and they were not becoming more cultivated... The upper ranks of the clergy... became the monopoly of the younger sons of noble families. The democratic character of the Church was disappearing... In the upper ranks of the ecclesiastical hierarchy there was a stupendous moral and intellectual decadence; in accordance with the tastes of society, the clergy were becoming worldly.
If we examine them closely, shall we not see among the nobles... a tendency analogous to that which we may observe in the patriciate of the bourgeoisie? Neither class was undergoing any further development; they were digging themselves in... Their only care was to preserve their privileges and their property... Not one of them was distinguished for his piety or his beneficence. And here I am speaking of those who played some part in the life of the world. The others hunted, looked after their estates, and oppressed the peasants. It is surprising to discover how completely sterile were the nobles of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th century, despite their numerical strength.
p395 ...In the 14th century we see the first traces of what may be called the noblesse de cour. In the 13th century it hardly existed...
p396 ...the nucleus of this new court [which appeared as the monarchy regained power] consisted not of nobles, but of commoners: councillors, servants in charge of the king's plate and his wardrobe, etc., with a few clerks. But was the king to be surrounded by plebeians? The court is a resort of the nobility. Consequently the king proceeded to ennoble his officers and his functionaries. This was a new nobility, entirely different from the old military chivalry. It was now conferred for civil services, and intelligence or learning... And this new nobility was entirely dependent on the sovereigns... The king alone was the source of nobility, and so he remained until the end of the ancien regime. From the end of the 13th century, anyone who was ennobled was ennobled by the king alone. The nobles of the robe... took their place beside the nobles of the sword.
p396 Here was a novel factor of very great social importance. To my thinking, it saved the noblesse, which was decaying as a military caste, and could not enrich itself, because it constituted a juridical caste, which was becoming more and more a closed social category. In the person of these newcomers it received fresh recruits, and they were commonly very wealthy recruits, thanks to their participation in the government. It despised them, but it was they who saved it.
... In point of formation, and in respect of its occupation, the noblesse de robe was a kind of lay clergy. It had nothing in common with the old nobility in whose ranks it now installed itself. Why then did the new nobility enter the old? Because there was no other place for it in the society of those days. It could not, on coming to court, remain in the ranks of the bourgeoisie, which would have continued to influence it and to detach it from the prince... The social habits and interests of the new class merged themselves in those of the old. And with this the nobility acquired a more comprehensive status. Henceforth it included the entire elite of the nation. To be an homme convenable [I'm having a hard time finding a translation for this. In the context I would expect it to me "a man of consequence"] a man must be a member of the noblesse. The consequences of this fact were hardly perceptible in the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th. They were to be incalculable later, and even to this day there are many States which have not yet shaken them off. The Renaissance was powerless to dissolve this social block. This was reserved for the modern democracies. However profound the influence of the bourgeoisie might be in the State, the noblesse, during the whole of the ancien regime, retained its primacy of social rank, and every man who emerged from the bourgeoisie endeavored to enter it.
There's an idea I thought I had gotten from Fernand Braudel (though now I'm doubting everything but the information on camels and the importance of geography on the history of the Mediterranean basin), that the transition from middle class to upper class was based on the ownership of land. The successful merchant would eventually invest his capital in land and become, quite literally, a landlord. The best example I can think of for this is the case of Voltaire. He started his fortune with his writing, invested it in trade, and then bought substantial properties in France and Switzerland where he spent the end of his life tending his garden as a seigneur.
After a generation or two, the interests and manners of such landowners would be indistinguishable from those of the Guermantes.
Take 2: I love the idea that some family could trace their nobility back to the 14th century and still not be of the "true" Carolingian noblesse. Though we have already seen that even that noblesse was of mongrel parentage, with the only common denominator being land ownership on a large scale.
And were the descendants of this noblesse of the robe still distinguishable from the "true" noblesse by the 18th century? Or did they, like the Carolingians before them, blend into a new, equally bloody minded Second Estate?
Link to Chronology
The bourgeoisie at war with itself
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
In the preface, the author's son, Jacques, mentions that his father started writing in March of 1917 and always recorded the date in the margin of his manuscript. Unfortunately, I don't have access to those marginal dates, so I can only guess where, in time, he was as he wrote this. But I think it's very likely he would have been in 1918 by this point, and it's not impossible that he was writing this in March, so close enough to exactly one hundred years ago to claim that meaningless distinction.
The Indigo Girls' Emily Saliers wrote the following lines in her song Virginia Woolf,
If you need to know that you weathered the storm
Of cruel mortality
A hundred years later I'm sitting here living proof
I couldn't have said it any better.
Book Eight
The European Crisis
(1300-1450)
The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War
Chapter I
General Characteristics of the Period
1. Social and Economic Tendencies
p379 Nothing more involved and bewildering and more full of contrasts can be imagined than the period extending from the beginning of the 14th to about the middle of the 15th century. The whole of European society, from the depths to the surface, was as though in a state of fermentation... A spirit of restlessness was abroad, affecting men's minds as well as their policies; even religion was not immune; it was a restlessness that almost amounted to mental confusion. The world was suffering and struggling, but it was hardly advancing. For the only thing of which it was clearly conscious was the fact that all was not well with it. It longed to escape from its ills, but it did not know how... In their fundamental characteristics the Church, the State, and the social and economic constitution remained, throughout these hundred and fifty years, what they had been at the close of the 13th century. The same may be said of science. Gothic architecture and the Scholastic philosophy still had enough vitality to produce interesting work, but the period of masterpieces was past. Everywhere the world was in labor, but it produced only abortive births. There was a definite feeling abroad that it was waiting for a spiritual renewal...
p380 What is really new about this period... is its revolutionary tendencies. They were nowhere triumphant, but they were felt in every department of life. The State and the Church were not more secure against them than was society. All the traditional authorities were criticized and assailed: the popes and kings no less than the landowners and the capitalists. The great masses of the people, who had hitherto endured or supported the power of the State, were now rebelling against it...
p381 Venice in the South and Bruges in the North remained the two busiest commercial centers: Venice as the point of contact between East and West, and Bruges the connecting link between the trade of the North and that of Italy...
In Italy a true system of capitalism was evolving, though it was hampered by the more and more restricted economic demands of the cities.
The towns engaged in the Flemish weaving industry in the North, and Florence in the South, were still, as in the 13th century, the two great centers of industry and the export trade. Cotton was only beginning to make its appearance. No technical progress was manifested. Machinery and methods were still very much what they were in the days of ancient Egypt...
...larger ships were built, and they made longer voyages...
p382 The bill of exchange with acceptance made its appearance in the first half of the 14th century. Pegolotti wrote the Practica della Mercatura. Book-keeping by double entry seems to date back to 1394... [these developments] betray a tendency toward the development of capitalism and the improvement of trade and commerce, yet... we shall readily perceive that one of... [the period's] most obvious characteristics was its hostility to capitalism, except in Italy.
The explanation of this must be sought in the evolution of the bourgeoisie; that is to say, of the class responsible for the entire commercial and industrial activity in Europe. Apart from very rare exceptions... [Venice] from the end of the 13th century, the preponderance of the patricians in the cities was replaced, more or less completely, by that of the handicrafts, trades and professions.
...from being under the control of the great merchants... [the municipal economy] came under that of the small producers, and that henceforth the spirit which inspired it underwent a corresponding change.
I'm probably going to quote too much in this section, but I do find it fascinating.
In the beginning, the guilds or trade fraternities were free associations of artisans following the same calling, who combined for the defense of their common interests. As far as their aims were concerned, they could quite accurately be compared with the voluntary syndicates or trade unions of our own days; their most important function was to regulate competition. Every newcomer, under penalty of ostracism, had to affiliate himself to a guild... [To avoid] conflicts between the syndicated confraternities and those recalcitrant workers who refused to sacrifice their liberty... [it was necessary] to transform... [the trade organizations] from voluntary into obligatory syndicates recognized by the communal authority. The oldest examples of this transformation date back to the 12th century; by the beginning of the 14th century it was general... all over Europe. Henceforth, in every city, each trade was the monopoly of a privileged group of masters...
p383 Everywhere the trade corporation had its chiefs... who were clothed with official authority; everywhere it drew up professional regulations and saw to it that they were observed; everywhere it enjoyed the right of assembly; everywhere it constituted a moral personality, having a treasury and common premises, and everywhere the hierarchy of its members was the same...
p384 Generally speaking, we must envisage the master as the head and proprietor of a workshop, in which were employed, under his orders, one or two journeymen, and an apprentice. In him we have the most perfect type of the artisan -- that is to say, the small producer working in his own home. The raw material which he elaborated was his own property, and he sold the finished product at his own exclusive profit. The consumers on whom his livelihood depended were the burgesses of the city and the peasants of the surrounding countryside... If he was to live at all he had to be protected against competition; not only the external competition of the foreigner, but also the local competition of his fellow craftsmen. To prevent such competition was the first object of the corporation. In order to assure the independence of the masters it restricted their liberty, subjecting it to curious regulations. The economic subordination of each member guaranteed the security of all... He was forbidden to sell his wares at a price below the tariff fixed by the regulations; he was forbidden to work by artificial light; he must not use tools of unusual form, or modify the traditional technique, or employ more journeymen or apprentices than his neighbors, or allow his wife to work, or his children as were not of age; and lastly -- and this prohibition was absolute -- he must not advertise his wares or praise them to the detriment of those produced by others. Thus each worker was given his place in the sun, but it was a place very strictly delimited, and it was quite impossible for him to emerge from it. [Footnote: Capitalism is not in itself opposed to the tendencies of human nature, but its restriction is. Economic liberty is spontaneous. The trade corporation suppresses liberty because it threatens the majority. It presupposes, of course, that this majority exercises political power.] But no one ever dreamed of doing so. For when a man's livelihood is secure his desires are moderate. The corporation provided the petite bourgeoisie with a framework admirably adapted to its character. Without a doubt, it had never been so happy and contented as under their regime. For this class, but for this class alone, they had solved the social problem. By safeguarding it against competition they also protected it against the intervention of capitalism. Until the French Revolution the craftsmen and petty manufacturers were obstinately faithful to the corporations that so well safeguarded their interests. Few economic institutions have been so tenacious.
Living in an age when these safeguards have all been removed, when local manufacturing -- both on this scale and even on the capitalist scale -- has been almost entirely replaced by a Ricardoan dependence on distant inexpensive sources of goods, I have to say that this regime served more than just the petite bourgeoisie. In our day it is the lower classes you are suffering the most from unrestricted trade.
p385 The first half of the 14th century was the period when the handicrafts attained their apogee... A sort of industrial Malthusianism began to make its appearance, which surrendered the local market to a small number of masters, and the absence of competition among them simply meant that the consumer was exploited... in the cities themselves, in the ranks of the bourgeoisie, what complaints and protests were heard! What indignant reproaches were bandied about between the different trades, each condemning in the others the excesses of the monopoly which it felt to be justified in its own case alone! At the same time, the original spirit of fraternity was replaced, among the craftsmen, by an increasing opposition of interests between the masters and the journeymen, who were more and more reduced to the status of mere wage-earners. Riots broke out; there were strikes... from the beginning of the 15th century the abuses of the system were so evident that there were those who demanded the abolition of the corporations and the liberty of handicrafts.
p386 The situation was much more serious in those cities that were the centers of the textile industry... The kind of trade organization which was suitable for craftsmen... was obviously unable to satisfy the needs of workers engaged in mass production for an unrestricted market. It could not possibly afford protection against the influence of capital to the weavers, fullers and clothworkers, master or journeymen who crowded the lanes and alleys of Gand, Bruge, and Ypres. or the vicoli on the banks of the Arno. Here the artisan was necessarily subordinated to the rich merchant who provided him with wool, and to whom the manufactured product was delivered after the various manipulations which it had to undergo... in this case the employer himself was merely a wage-earner employing other wage-earners. Further, the workers in the cloth trade... numbered hundreds or even thousands... [This trade subject to the uncertainty of international affairs and wars.] Even in normal times there were incessant disputes as to wages... Thus, the condition of the workers in the cloth industry in those cities where the industry provided the basis of a considerable export trade was very like that of the modern proletariat. And they were an organized proletariat...
p387 The political result of these [proletarian] corporative organizations was naturally to wrest the government of the cities from the patrician oligarchies who were in power in the 13th century. It was no longer possible for a few "lineages" of landowners and merchants, sitting in the city council, to do precisely what they chose in the matter of regulating trade and commerce, and assessing taxes... They did not surrender their position without resistance. Their government had been, in the full force of the term, a class government, and they obstinately clung to their privileged position. The whole of the 14th century was filled with the conflict of the grandi and the piccolo for the possession of the municipal power... [As was the case in the 19th century struggle over the parliamentary franchise] the masses, refused the right to manage their own affairs, persisted in their demands. The fundamental cause of the two crises was the same... what the patricians were defending against the claims of the handicrafts was the same preponderance which the property-owners' Parliaments of our own time defended so long and so obstinately against the demands of universal suffrage. The whole of the 14th century, like the whole of the 19th century, was shaken by the struggles of democracy... In those petty States, the cities of the Middle Ages, the conception of democracy was proportionately restricted; it was as narrow as the limits of the city... Society was too subdivided, subject to too many clashes, too localized to permit the emergence of the concept of general liberty. The city was a little enclosed world, living for itself, indifferent to the feelings and the interests of classes which were alien to it. The artisan was as strictly bourgeois as the patrician, and quite as exclusive in his feelings toward all those who did not inhabit his commune. He knew nothing of the leveling spirit of proselytism, as indifferent to local groups as it is to juridical classes, which the spectacle of the modern democracies has accustomed us to regard as inherent in any popular regime. Fundamentally, democracy as he conceived it was merely a democracy of privileged individuals, since the bourgeois itself... was a privileged class.
Is this notion of democracy really so very different? Pirenne was writing before national socialism and before the nativist politics of our time. The politics of the medieval city state looks like the same old human smallish-group dynamic we seem to be most comfortable with.
p388 However, the pure democratic regime was triumphant in only a few cities. In most cases some sort of compromise was arrived at. The patriciate, voluntarily, or under pressure from the mob, made way for the corporations, and constitutions came into force of which we may say... that they organized a sort of representation of interests. Once the opposing interests had achieved equilibrium, these constitutions... became congealed into fixity... These democracies of privileged petits bourgeois were characterized by egoism and protectionism. Urban politics became even more exclusive than before where... it was not compelled to reckon with the State. [Flanders and Italy.] It's aim was the achievement of complete political liberty, of the free city, as it already existed in Germany... Capital, encompassed by suspicion and fumbling legislation, could develop only beyond its control, in the domain of inter-urban trade. Here men still made their fortunes, though less frequently than in the previous century. The local patricate no longer played a part in the development of capitalism, and became a class of rentiers. By the side of the patriciate new men were making their appearance, who taxed their ingenuity to evade the regulations of protectionism... [to be covered in the following period.]
... from 1282 onwards the nobili were excluded from the government of Florence by the constitution... This was a government of merchants and manufacturers, a government of the popolo grasso. But the popolo minuto was socially oppressed. [Description of the back and forth revolutions in Florence during the 14th century.]
p389 The same sort of thing happened in the Flemish cities... The patriciate looked to France for support, and the battle of Courtrai was in reality a social victory for the artisans... Gand... where the weavers were in greater strength than anywhere else, was distinguished by sullen violence... For six years... they held their own against the prince, the nobles, and all "good folk who had anything to lose." From all parts of Europe the suffering proletarians fixed their gaze upon Gand... It was felt that they were threatening the entire social order, at Roosebeke (1382) the King of France inflicted upon them a terrible defeat... all their energy could achieve nothing. It was impossible for them to escape from the capitalism under which they suffered... The other trades turned against them. The fullers, who were even poorer, and whom they oppressed, made common cause with their enemies. The result... was to make the merchants and business men look to the princes for support, and to take steps to remove the industry from the cities to the countryside.
Link to Chronology
England and France vs the Pope
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Seven
The Hegemony of the Papacy and of France in the Thirteenth Century
Chapter IV
Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII
2. The Crisis
p367 ...Having been on the point of waging war against each other, Philip the Fair and Edward I had vied with each other in the matter of military preparations, and the consequent expenditure. They had both imposed heavy taxes on the estates of the Church, as though they had been making preparations for a Crusade... Rome had been warned of what was happening, and Boniface VIII felt that he must take this opportunity of solemnly reminding the princes of the limits which theology assigns to the temporal powers. The Bull Clericis laicos (February 25th, 1296) strictly prohibited laymen from imposing taxes on the clergy without the consent of the Pope, annulled all dispensations which might have been accorded in this connection. and threatened all transgressors with excommunication...
In the conflict which was now beginning it was not the Pope but the kings who violated tradition... Now [as opposed to during the War of the Investitures] it was Boniface VIII who was defending his acquired prerogatives, while the revolutionary claims were made by Philip and Edward... The issue between Boniface and the two kings... was debated on political [not religious] grounds; the sovereign powers of the monarchy, the very existence of the State, and the most obvious interests of the nation were in question, so that this time public opinion, instead of supporting Rome, was bound to turn against the Papacy.
p368 It was evident that the Pope had not expected that his claims would arouse such opposition. His whole course of behavior goes to show that he was not aware that anything had changed in Europe since the days of Innocent IV and Frederick II, or that France and England, in 1296, were no longer what they had been a hundred years earlier. He had not realized that the prerogatives of the Crown were based on the consent of the peoples, and that the solidarity of the nation was so great, not only among the laymen, but also in the ranks of the clergy, that it was quite capable of defeating any attempt to intervene in the king's affairs, to paralyze his government, and imperil his finances or his military strength, in the name of the privileges of the Church...
Neither king saw fit to discuss the matter. Edward regarded the Bull as null and void, and continued to levy the prohibited taxes. Philip took measures calculated to show the Pope how dangerous it was to meddle in his affairs: since his financial resources were threatened, he himself threatened the finances of the Pope. He prohibited the export, beyond the frontiers of the kingdom, of monies or letters of credit. Immediately all the revenues which the papacy drew from France, and all those that were conveyed through France by the medium of the Pope's Italian bankers, were interrupted... A century earlier such a counter-stroke would have been impossible, for the means of delivering it were lacking. But the arm of the French monarchy was now so long, and its administration so complete and well-disciplined, that the order was punctually obeyed. The State, being attacked, defended itself with its own weapons, and Europe witnessed the novel spectacle of a sovereign resisting the orders of Rome and opposing them by simple administrative measure. The thing was so unexpected that Boniface VIII did not know where to turn... Without retracting the Bull he modified it to such an extent that it had no practical importance, and the canonization of St. Louis, pronounced in 1297, might be accepted as an act of homage to the House of France...
p370 Edward I, taking advantage of his peace with Philip, had once more marched against the Scots. The Scots having appealed to Rome, Boniface VIII intervened, accusing Edward of violence and injustice, and claiming the right to judge between the two parties. He had addressed himself only to the king; the king decided to address himself to the nation, and in January 1301 Parliament was convoked and required to pronounce upon the Papal claims. Thus this famous question of the temporal sovereignty and its limits, which had hitherto been discussed only by hermits, theologians, and legists, was now to be considered by the mandatories of a whole people.Their response was a categorical affirmation of the sovereign rights of the Crown. Prelates, barons, knights and burgesses were equally indignant with the Pope's interference in a war which was thoroughly popular, and which had been gloriously terminated by the battle of Falkirk (July 22nd, 1298). "Never," they replied, "shall we suffer that our king should submit to such unheard-of demands!"
...
Boniface is also having problems with Philip and France.
p371 ...[Boniface] personally addressed... [Philip the Fair] in the Bull Ausculta fili, in which he reminded him that God had placed the successor of St. Peter over the heads of princes and States. "For this reason." said the Pope, "give no credit to those who would persuade thee that thou hast no superior. Who thinks thus deceives himself, and he who persists in this error is an infidel." Innocent III would not have spoken otherwise, and St. Thomas, some fifty years earlier, had expounded at length the theory by which these words were inspired. But this time they evoked the most passionate contradiction in the ranks of the jurists and doctors... According to... [Pierre Dubois and Jean de Paris], his competence extended only to purely religious matters... Philip, like Edward a year earlier... resolved that his quarrel should be the quarrel of his people. France had no parliament. Never yet had the delegates of the whole nation been convoked to advise the Crown. This great debate, in which the very principle of the king's sovereignty was at stake, was the occasion of the first assembly of the States-General: the first, and a worthy, example of those assemblies of which the last, five hundred years later, was to proclaim the Rights of Man and inaugurate the Revolution.
p372 The delegates of the clergy, the nobless and the bourgeoisie assembled at Notre-Dame de Paris on April 10th, 1302... All the delegates, clergy and laymen alike, enthusiastically declared their approval of the king's attitude...
From this moment the Pope's was a lost cause. The States-General decided the question of sovereignty in favor of the Crown -- that is, in favor of the State -- and their verdict was delivered with much greater emphasis than that of the English Parliament of the preceding year...
...
p374 [The election of Clement V (1305-1314) follows the death of Boniface VIII] ... the new Pope was a Frenchman, and in electing him the Conclave had submitted to the will of Philip. It very soon realized that it had placed on the throne of St. Peter a pontiff who was incapable of forgetting that he was born a subject of the King of France... he was insensible to the majesty of Rome, and to the tradition of twelve hundred years which had made the city of the Emperors the city of the Popes... Clement V took up his residence in Avignon, and there his successors remained until 1378... the Popes derogated from the position which they had occupied for the past century, between God and the kings, and degraded themselves... at least in appearance, to the rank of proteges and instruments of the French Crown. This was the final consequence of the policy of Boniface VIII!...
p376 Thus the 13th century saw both the apogee of the Papal power and its decline. At the very moment when, triumphing over the Empire, it believed itself in a position to assume control over Europe, to unite the Continent against Islam, and to impose its tutelage on all the peoples, the economic and political transformations which had taken place, almost unnoticed by Rome, rendered the realization of the Papal designs impossible. The lofty ideal which the Papacy had conceived in a period of agricultural and feudal civilization no longer responded to the social realities... And yet, during the brief reign of St. Louis, [25 April 1214 – 25 August 1270] it had been possible to realize the Christian policy. This was the greatest moment of the 13th century, a moment of calm in the continual tempest into which the tumultuous forces of life were sweeping humanity.
