The European Middle Ages (Part 2 of 2)

28:56The first major action in this war occurs in 1209 in the city of Bézières, where thousands are massacred. For the next two decades, crusade armies fight to exterminate Catharism in the south of France. Especially in later years, this action is enthusiastically supported by the French king, who uses it as an opportunity to extend royal power over the largely independent lords of the south.

29:23As the crusade continues, the Church's stance on heretics and unbelievers is formalized. The Fourth Lateran Council, Lateran IV, one of the most important church councils in medieval history, convened by Pope Innocent III in 1215 in Rome at the Lateran Palace, played a key role in taking forward the system and the structure and the content of church life. Some 70 canons or laws, a very large and comprehensive set for its time, began to regulate heresy, condemning groups considered heretical, Cathars, Waldensians, and also strengthened inquisitorial processes to try to enforce uniformity of ideology.

30:06In particular, Pope Innocent attempts to redirect crusading energies elsewhere within Europe. By the end of the 13th century, the crusader states had collapsed. But the crusader movement had not ended. And in many ways, it was refocused on conflicts closer to home. Campaigns in the Baltic by, for example, the Teutonic Knights and the Sword Brethren targeted still pagan communities in the Eastern Baltic in states that we now call Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. So this saw a refocusing of the crusading movement against people closer to home who were regarded as not being part of the overall community of Christendom.

31:00The Fourth Lateran Council is also Innocent III's response to the spiritual currents embodied by groups such as the Valdensians and Franciscans. Steps are taken to reform the church, tackling clerical misconduct and the buying and selling of church offices, a perennial problem never fully eradicated despite the best efforts of the 11th century Gregorian reformers. Yearly confession of sins is mandated for all, and improvements are sought in the education of priests. The council is still viewed today as a watershed moment in the history of Western Christianity. But in addition to these positive reforms, the Fourth Lateran Council also represents a key moment in what one historian termed the formation of a persecuting society.

31:51Violence against those considered different in the Christian European imagination had always existed in some form. Jews in Eastern Europe, for example, had been massacred by crusaders on their way to the Middle East in 1096. But from the year 1200, the persecution of a variety of groups, including Jewish people, sex workers, homosexual men and heretics, becomes systematized across many European countries. There were processes of othering and control of marginalised groups. Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306 and Spain in 1492 in what we could only describe as institutionalised religious intolerance that saw Jews increasingly marginalised from the economy, removed from their role within finance and often forced to wear badges and other uniform in order to identify them within the Christian community.

32:53Lepers also were often accused of being behind outbreaks of disease and were subject to significant control. And it does remind us that the drive for medieval Europe's unity and cohesion, which we see increasing in this time, often also depended on exclusion as well. And this is the dark underside of the late medieval period.

33:20Yet, despite this move by many towards persecution, not all European Christians in the Middle Ages are opposed to contact with those of different creeds and cultures. The High and Late Middle Ages are marked by increased connections across Eurasia. This is not the beginning of this. This has been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years, but what we see is an acceleration of connectivity in which things like the so-called Silk Roads see increased trade between Central Asia and further east with Western Europe, and accompanied voyages of discovery that also saw European activities more in the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.

34:13Italian city-states dominate this ever-expanding trade with Asia and the Middle East, and none more so than Venice. After the success of the First Crusade in 1099, Venice expands its trade outposts far beyond its borders. for example, in the Middle Eastern port city of Acre. From there, further connections are made. In 1173, the Muslim leader Saladin grants the Venetians a trading complex in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. And after the Fourth Crusade captures Constantinople in 1204, its new rulers grant Venice unprecedented access to the Black Sea trade. Exporting grain and wine overseas, they bring silk and spices into Western Europe, much of it exchanged for silver from European mines.

35:06By the mid-13th century, the Venetians and others find new trading partners in the Mongols. Under their famous leader Genghis Khan and his descendants, the Mongols consolidate a vast territory between the Caspian and China Seas. They even threaten Europe, attacking modern-day Poland and Hungary. The relatively stable and safe land empire of the Mongols encourages merchants from Europe to set out in search of new trading opportunities. But trade is not the only motivation for journeying east. In 1253, French Franciscan friar William of Rubrook embarks on a mission to convert non-Christians in the Mongol domains.

35:48On his return, Rubrik writes an account of his voyage, detailing everyday Mongol life, including their hairstyles, dresses, and food. He also recounts his meeting with the great Khan at his court at Karakoram in modern-day Mongolia. In his ornate golden throne room, the leader hears Rubrik's intention to spread God's word. Draped in furs, the Khan instructs him to publicly debate Muslims, Eastern Christians and Buddhists on the merits of his beliefs. This greater connectivity between East and West enriches the city of Venice, facilitates Christian missionary activity and brings exotic goods into the markets of Europe.

36:32But dark clouds are gathering on the horizon, and in the 1340s, these trade routes bring terror and death to the west.

36:53It is autumn, 1346, and the fortified Genoese outpost of Kaffa on the Crimean Black Sea coast is under fire.

37:05A Genoese captain races up a set of stone steps to the walkway that runs along the top of the town's defensive wall. They have been besieged by the Mongol army camped below for weeks. But in recent days, the enemy has been silent, and though he can't be certain of the cause, the captain has noticed bodies piling up on the outskirts of their camp. But as the captain reaches the top of the wall, it is immediately clear that Mongols have once again set up their catapults. They are preparing to fire. A guard stationed further down the wall shouts a warning, and the captain instinctively ducks, shielding his head with his arms.

37:46He hears the sound of a heavy object sailing high overhead, but as the missile lands somewhere But below him, inside the town, it does so with an unusually soft thump. Peering over the edge of the walkway, the captain sees a body lying splayed on the rocky ground. It is dressed in a Mongol-style tunic. A shiver runs down his spine as he realizes their enemies are using corpses as projectiles. Calling two men to him, he hastens back down the steps. They hear the catapults release another volley and flatten themselves against the wall to avoid being struck Two more bodies hit the ground and lie there motionless Reaching the site of impact, the captain instructs his men to turn one of the corpses over As they do, he claps a hand over his face at the stench A foul odor of rot coupled with the iron tang of dried blood Taking a deep breath of fresh air, he kneels down to better inspect the body.

38:55From his hair and beard, this is clearly a Mongol soldier, dead for at least a day. Holding his coat sleeve over his nose, the captain leans in for a closer look. The skin is covered in purple blotches. Frowning, he notes the dark stains on the silk clothing, concentrated under the arms. Gesturing for someone to pass him a knife, the captain slices through the fabric. But when the body beneath is revealed, he immediately recoils. One of his men turns and retches, bile splattering the ground. An enormous swelling, the size of a fist, is nestled in the dead man's armpit. It is deep, blackish blue, and the skin has started to split like an overripe plum.

39:46The captain gasps, knowing what this means. It seems the Mongols are trying to break the siege by spreading the very plague that has devastated their own number. Shouts of warning echo from overhead, before more bodies strike the ground. The captain makes a decision. Standing, he orders guards to gather as many men as possible and cart the bodies away to throw them into the sea. They need to keep the unknown pestilence out of the city. As they hurry off to do as he says, he notices a flea crawling up his arm. Absent-mindedly, he smacks it away before heading back to his post.

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41:33See you this summer. When Genoese sailors flee the besieged trading post at Caffer, they carry with them one of history's most feared diseases, the bubonic plague. The devastating pandemic in the mid-14th century is at the time given various names, including the Pestilence and the Great Mortality. It will later be known better as the Black Death.

42:02Trade products were not the only items that travelled these trade routes. Diseases travelled them as well, and the most famous of these, of course, was the infamous Black Death, which began, we're now pretty sure, in Central Asia, probably somewhere around Lake Baikal or into Mongolia, and yet moved through the trade systems into China, into South Asia, and eventually across the whole of Eurasia until it reached Europe in the 1340s. Caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, it had reached Western Europe by 1347, we think initially arriving via Genoese ships who were trading into the Black Sea.

42:52Though the Mongols' early foray into biological warfare is certainly noteworthy, it is likely flea-infested rats who spread the plague from the Mongol camp to Khafer weeks before the first cases in humans are discovered. And while bubonic plague is primarily spread by flea bites, the most lethal and contagious form spreads via infected droplets in the air. Sailors escaping Kaffir take the disease westwards, first to Constantinople. It's then carried to Italy, hitting Genoa, Venice, and Pisa in 1347. From there it spreads into Spain, Portugal, and France, with the first cases in England reported the next year.

43:33Within five years, Germany, Scotland, Scandinavia, and Russia are all affected. It is a spectacularly cruel disease. Symptoms include a dangerously high fever, headaches, painful joints, and nausea. As the illness progresses, large, painful growths, known as buboes, appear in the groin and armpits. In severe cases, victims suffer internal bleeding, sometimes coughing up blood, and the skin may darken as tissue begins to die. No one is safe. Those in towns fare worse than those in the countryside, but otherwise the plague kills indiscriminately, from the poorest in society to royalty. The death toll is staggering.

44:21Within four years, it had killed perhaps one-third to perhaps one-half of Europe's population, and it continued to reoccur for the next 200 years in explosions of lethality. It came in various forms, making it very, very hard to identify it as one disease. And anyway, in the absence of germ theory, Europeans, as others, had no real systematic way of both avoiding it or of treating it, which is why the death toll was so high.

45:04Few sources offer an insight into what life is like during these years Flashes of religious zealotry are visible in the historical record As people attempt to understand why this calamity has befallen them Social trauma, the trauma of mass deaths, encourage religious movements Flagellants hoping to take upon themselves the punishment they believe was being visited by God on the world apocalyptic visionaries who believed they were in the end times, and the scapegoating, especially of Jews accused of well poisoning, thousands being murdered in the Rhineland and elsewhere, and clearly would have been killed in England too, had they not been expelled from England in the 13th century.

45:51The worst of this wave peters out within a few years. But given the devastation it wreaks, the Black Death, astonishingly, has little long-lasting effect on Europe's economy For many of those who survive, the years after the pandemic bring an upswing in living standards There is more land for the peasants that remain A shortage of labour means that workers can demand higher wages And with greater material wealth comes an improvement in diet And though in Eastern Europe systems of unfree labor persist or even intensify, towards the West this shift in the balance of power contributes to the gradual decline of serfdom.

46:33By the early 15th century many peasants are no longer legally unfree, though poverty and dependence on landlords remain common. These changes are naturally resisted by those at the top of the social pyramid. Elites try to push back. Sumptuary laws try to restrict what clothing can be worn. The statute of labourers in England, for example, tries to turn wages back to pre-pandemic levels. These are impossible to enforce. And the explosion of violence of the so-called Peasants' Revolt in this country is also accompanied by explosions of extreme violence, That's often against landed gentry, aristocracy, which you see across France as well in the same period.

47:24Those people who have found their economic status as improved as an unexpected consequence of the population collapse are not about to see their rights rolled back, not without a fight anyway. Women are a key part of the social changes in the decades after the Black Death, although not without significant backlash. There's evidence that the later 14th century saw women more active than before in trade, crafts and property management, especially after the population decline of the Black Death. But by the 15th century, patriarchal authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical, pushed back against this increased prominence of women within the economy.

48:11Guilds restricted women's participation, sermons and laws emphasised female subordination and attempted to push women out of roles where they come to dominate, for example, in brewing and in ale housekeeping, to try to return these to masculine control again. By now, another period of artistic reinvigoration has begun across Europe. The realistic paintings of Giotta, for example, and the Tuscan poetry of Dante Alighieri help lay the groundwork for the cultural flourishing of the later Renaissance. In England, though Latin has long dominated literature and academia, Geoffrey Chaucer is one of the first to write poetry in Middle English in the 1370s, popularizing it as an appropriate language in which to compose great works.

49:02His Canterbury Tales, about a group of pilgrims sharing stories on the road, is still widely read to this day. Middle English also flourishes thanks to the first Bibles written to appear in the vernacular tongue. Around the same time that Chaucer is writing, Oxford University theologian John Wycliffe and colleagues produce handwritten translations in Middle English. His work, however, is seen by many in the church as heretical, and after his death it is decreed that his bones are exhumed, burned, and thrown into a river. After the biological devastation of the 14th century, the late Middle Ages play host to a series of man-made conflicts.

49:47The most famous of these is a series of wars between England and France. The French king has never had complete control over the entirety of his kingdom. Much of it is controlled by powerful lords, who swear loyalty to him, but are largely independent. When Charles IV of France dies in 1328 with no sons or brothers, one of those claiming the right to the crown is none other than England's Edward III, Charles' nephew. But the French nobility throw their support behind Charles' cousin Philip instead. The ensuing fight over succession, beginning around a decade later, becomes known as the Hundred Years' War, though it in fact lasts for 116 years, albeit with significant periods of truce.

50:33From the English point of view, but also from the French, of course, as well, it is famous for battles such as Crecy, 1346, Poitiers, 1356, Agincourt, 1415. But although these are very often lauded and focused on as chivalric victories, from the English point of view, the simple reality is the English lost the Hundred Years' War. But what this war did was it solidified both English and French national identity, and it helped centralize monarchy and the professionalization of armies.

51:10On the Iberian peninsula, Christian kings in the north had been attempting to conquer the Muslim kingdom of Al-Andalus for centuries. Portuguese territory is largely under Christian control as early as the 1240s. In Spain, what becomes known as the Reconquista, or reconquest, also comes to a climax at the very end of the Middle Ages. It advanced rapidly in the 13th century with the capture of Córdoba in 1236, Seville in 1248, and was completed when Ferdinand and Isabella took Granada in 1492. The same year, they sponsored Columbus's voyage, marking Europe's expansion overseas. These wars helped to create the modern map of Europe and many of the institutions of the modern nation-state.

52:03We see an increasingly united France. We see an increasingly united, under Christian rule, Spain and Portugal. A precociously united, since the 10th century, England. we see a Germany that has some degrees of unification under the imperial control, but is largely a patchwork of different states, principalities, bishoprics, etc., and is more of a geographical expression. Italy, too, is more of a geographical expression. So what's interesting is that these periods of significant extended warfare fostered alongside terrible suffering for many people, particularly in the rural classes, who are often forgotten, who suffer terribly in the depredations of knights and armies sweeping backwards and forwards over them.

52:56But alongside these terrible suffering, these wars also fostered administrative centralisation, standing armies, and patriotic sentiments.

53:09Historians still disagree about the exact end point for the Middle Ages. As a defined period in European history, it is an invention of later centuries. Renaissance intellectuals, immersed in Greek and Roman texts, identify the period they are living through as a revival and continuation of classical times. The millennium from 500 to 1500 is seen as just an inconvenient middle period. Yet this does not mean that what we now call the medieval age lacks coherence or a distinct identity. The European world changed forever with the fall of Rome And was on the brink of yet more seismic changes 1 ,000 years later There's no one bookend to a period of time as long and complex as the Middle Ages If one had to identify some key contenders One might cite the 15th century invention of printing Accelerating the distribution of knowledge and challenging contemporary society The 16th century reformation fracturing Christendom and initiating two centuries of violent turbulence.

54:15The European voyage is a discovery which began in the 15th century, but themselves had deep roots, opening up a new era of colonialism. Either way, while we may not find a bookend that sums it up completely, something very significant is happening that will be the basis of the modern world at the end of the Middle Ages.

54:42By 1500, a new age is dawning across the continent. Though the writers of this new age might see the medieval period as no more than the span of time between themselves and the Greeks and Romans they idolized, it is the epoch that created the world in which they lived. And there is no doubt that the Middle Ages laid the foundations for the way we live today. I would say that in several significant ways, the Middle Ages are the foundation for what we now are and our self-understanding in a way that we need to recognize. the concept of europeanness of christendom of something that is bigger than the nation state that's a product of the middle ages the concept of the emerging nation states themselves the idea of the challenge of how communities should live together and work together both religiously and ethnically, and our contested and complex global world also has its roots in the voyages of discovery, with their positive and terribly negative effects too, which are also products of the late medieval period.

56:07The Middle Ages are still very much with us, whether we like it or not.

56:20Next time on Short History of, we'll bring you a short history of Ernest Hemingway. I'm accused of sometimes standing up too much for Hemingway. I'm proud to say I'm guilty of that. I think he was on a strange quest for his sainthood, and he destroyed it at every turn. But you can't deeply read Hemingway without seeing the decency and the goodness in him. And it's covered up so much by his boorishness, his macho demand that he is the alpha male in every situation, in every moment. You scrape all that away, there's a bookish man in glasses trying to get his work done. That's next time.

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