TO SEE HOW JOHN of Gaunt epitomized the height of the Middle Ages, the flowering of the period just prior to modernity, requires an understanding of the conditions that produced his era. The political and social system that developed in the period 800-1100 was successful in providing a structure with which security, stability, and economic growth occurred. Legal relationships by and large preceded security and economic growth. Feudalism was stable in the twelfth century because a nexus of judicial relationships provided for a degree of balance and harmony and allowed other components of medieval society and culture to develop.
Climatic conditions were favorable as well. Europeans were fortunate in that a warming trend developed between 1150 and 1280, leading to a longer growing season for cereal crops and an increased food supply.
Europeans were also lucky that their society was free from pandemic disease in the period from the ninth century to the middle of the fourteenth.
Another factor in the rise of Europe was of the Europeans’ own making. At the Church’s urging they learned to keep their ambitions and aggression under control. The thirteenth century was the time of the longest era of peace before the nineteenth century. There were no major wars in Western Europe between 1214 and 1296. Widespread prosperity accompanied increasing legal order and political stability.
Then came the fourteenth century, the new age of war, disease, and colder climate.
A great American medieval historian, Joseph R. Strayer of Princeton, was fond of saying, “If Europe could survive the fourteenth century, it could survive anything.” Barbara Tuch-man, in her best-selling book A Distant Mirror (1978), likened the fourteenth century to the disastrous twentieth century.
What was this European civilization of the early fourteenth century? Part of the answer lies in how Europeans then referred to their civilization. They called it Latin Christendom. It had two international institutions: the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, stretching from the Rhine to the Elbe.
Behind this façade of internationalism, however, lay ethnic nationalism and an intense localism. The papacy, its seat relocated from Rome to Avignon since the first decade of the fourteenth century, was under the thumb of the French monarchy. Many bishops and some abbots were as rich as the pope.
The Holy Roman Empire, founded by Frederick I, called Barbarossa, in the 1160s, was not a political entity. It had broken up into many separate states. Whoever held the title of Emperor was only as strong as his family’s territorial resources allowed. He could be very strong in Bohemia (today the Czech Republic), like Charles IV, or in Austria, like the Hapsburg dynasty, but relatively weak a couple of hundred miles outside his own kingdom or duchy.
The Iberian Peninsula, once united under Roman rule, in 1300 stood divided into six principalities—five Christian and one (Granada in the southeast) Muslim. The division reflected the chaotic reconquest of Iberia from the Muslim lords between 1100 and 1300.
The three most important of the Iberian states were Aragon, on the Mediterranean; Portugal, on the west coast of the peninsula; and Castile, in the middle.
Portugal, a quiet land, is still independent of Spain and speaks a somewhat different Iberian dialect. Castile was famous for its fierce nobility, its dynastic quarrels, and the excellent wool its millions of sheep produced. It had an outlet to the sea but had done little to cultivate this advantage by 1300.
Aragon was the jewel of the peninsula. It was rich from its Mediterranean trade. Its great city of Barcelona is still by far the most beautiful in Spain. Aragon was closely tied to Sicily by trade, cuisine, and sometimes politics.
In 1300 the French Capetian monarchy centered in Paris effectively controlled 80 percent of what is today France. In 1314 the Capetian family that had ruled Paris since 987 died out and the crown passed to their Valois cousins. The sinews of royal administration and taxation, built up for a century and a half, were immediately loosened.
The early Valois kings were lazy, foolish, effete, or mad. Since the second half of the thirteenth century, princes of the royal family had been granted “appanages,” quasiautonomous territories, such as Burgundy. Some of these appanaged princes, such as the Duke of Brittany, traded off their loyalty to the French Crown and temporarily allied with the English king.
By Gaunt’s lifetime the Valois king in Paris controlled only the eastern two-thirds of what is today France, and that territory not very effectively because of the weakening of the bonds of royal administration. Even the burghers in Paris threatened the stability of the French monarchy. The monarchy’s courtly scene was glorious, its political situation precarious for many decades.
Italy had one large political entity, the kingdom of Naples and Sicily in the south. Northern Italy was divided among city-states—Venice, Florence, Milan, Genoa, Rome, and a couple of dozen smaller and weaker ones.
The British Isles, too, were divided. The King of England ruled Wales and some of eastern Ireland, but Scotland was independent. Scotland was an impoverished country given to endless battles over the crown among the leading families. Lowland Scotland had some agriculture, but the chief factor in the Scottish economy was incessant raiding of northern English cities and ranches. The Scots were a nation of cattle rustlers and horse thieves. There was no law north of Edinburgh and little below it until the English border was reached. The Scottish Crown was propped up by funding from the French monarchy, its traditional ally against England.
Europe was a highly fragmented political world. Latin Christendom was an ideal culture or a linguistic block. It was not an international political system. Furthermore, it was lacking in a common political vision. The drive that the mendicant friars had brought to the Church in the thirteenth century had spent its force by the fourteenth. The Franciscans, who had charmed and persuaded Europe in the thirteenth century, were now internally divided over the issue of poverty. The Spiritual Franciscans, the order’s radical wing, who sought solace in the poverty of the earliest church, were condemned by the papacy as heretics.
A force for change in Western Europe was the emergence of two highly urbanized areas, Belgium and northern Italy. Here, as well as in London and Paris, merchant princes exercised power and influence. But except in Venice and Florence these commercial capitalists had not yet developed a political consciousness or a plan of public action.
In Venice and particularly Florence, merchant families such as the Medici took over the running of government, often competing with one another for power in a highly factious situation. As a way of establishing their identity, the merchant families were strong supporters of scholars, philosophers, painters, and sculptors who were fashioning a revival of classical humanism, distinguishing themselves by slowly separating from the medieval scholastic world that prevailed in the north.
What this incipient Renaissance stressed was the opening of elementary and secondary schools that taught writing in the mode of imperial Rome, 50 B.C.-A.D.200, and the reading of the Latin literature of that era. Scholars under the patronage of the merchant families scoured the monastic, cathedral, and university libraries for better texts of Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil. In Florence Platonism became fashionable again and competed with university Aristotelianism. The long scholastic treatise was challenged by the short rhetorical essay. The more objective and naturalistic classical view of the human body was emulated by painters and sculptors.
When John of Gaunt died in 1399, this neoclassical humanism was just beginning to have an impact on English and French culture. By 1450 the impact would be highly visible.
Divisions within Christendom were not the only reason for the violence of the fourteenth century. A dark cloud looming over Latin Christendom was the Muslim Ottoman Turkish empire-sultanate in the eastern Mediterranean, including Asia Minor (the Asian part of Turkey today). The Turks bypassed besieged Constantinople, the Eastern Christian fortress on the Bosphorus—they did not take it until 1453—and had begun to penetrate the Balkans. That is how Bosnia became Muslim. In the mid-fourteenth century a group of Latin Christian nobles launched a Crusade against the Ottoman Turks to prevent their advance into Greece. In northern Greece, at Necropolis, the Turks decimated the Latin army, and Greece would be ruled by the Turks until the nineteenth century.
The Turkish army was a highly disciplined and well-armed company of mercenaries. The Turks struck fear into the hearts of the Europeans, who talked about another Crusade but did nothing. Instead, the Latin nobles joined a Crusade against the hapless pagan Wends (Slavs) in eastern Germany. In the early seventeenth century the tide of Muslim advance would reach the gates of Vienna before it was stopped with the help of a Polish king.
Poland in the late Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century was conjoined into a dual kingdom with Lithuania to form an important military and political entity. Poland became the golden land of the Jews, whose commercial, banking, and managerial skills were of great help to the monarchy and nobility.
Scandinavia was dominated by the militaristic, expansionist kingdom of Sweden and by the German commercial cities on the Baltic, like Rostock and Hamburg, that made up the autonomous Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic League built a maritime empire on the herring trade.
The most effective institution in the old Europe of Latin Christendom was the university. There were a dozen universities, headed by the University of Paris. Although the majority of students were seeking to become lawyers, the most distinguished faculty, and one that comprised the most intellectual resources, was that of theology and philosophy. It demanded of students a complete mastery of the Bible; of classical philosophy, especially Aristotle; and of the canon law of the Church. It took sixteen years to get a doctorate in theology at Paris.
The weakness of the university was that it was largely cut off from the concerns of society. It had nothing to say about the economy and very little about the class system. Its most applied discipline, medicine, relied exclusively on textbooks from the ancient world. The university had no perception that its faculty might do something to increase the low agricultural yield per acre. Even political theory was a collection of bromides about good kings and tyrants.
But the university did demand of its few advanced students (there were a great many dropouts) immense learning and a very high degree of literacy in Latin, normally demonstrated in scholastic dialectical argument.
There was an intellectual base in the university for what would become the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. There was interest and some progress in physics, but the development of the natural sciences was kept back by a limited knowledge of algebra—a deficiency that was not overcome until the sixteenth century.
Frustrated by this deficiency in mathematics, overwhelmed by the load of learning demanded of the students, by the mid-fifteenth century some Parisian masters were looking longingly at the humanistic movement in northern Italy, which stressed a simplifying rhetoric and ethics rather than the old scholasticism.
Just as the river valleys continued to sustain the lords and peasants who had been growing grain there since 800, scholasticism continued to provide most of the intellectual fare in the late medieval university.
Medieval universities were well attended. Oxford University had 3,000 students in 1310. In 1954 the student population had increased to only 7,500, of whom 20 percent were now women (a percentage unlike that in any medieval university).
Certainly not more than 5 percent of the student body endured until receiving the doctorate in theology or philosophy. Most students dropped out earlier, having mastered enough theology, philosophy, and canon law to qualify for a position as a cathedral canon (priest or official) with a prebend (tenured endowment).
Cathedral canons had the best jobs in the late medieval church—high-paying, secure for a lifetime, only moderately burdensome, and attainable after five to ten years of university education. No wonder the ranks of the cathedral canons were full of the sons of wealthy gentry and the bastard offspring of the aristocracy.
Every era gets the cathedral it deserves. The preeminent new cathedral of the fourteenth century was the immense, ugly, ungainly, overdecorated cathedral of Cologne. Its walls were so thick that centuries later it survived Allied bombing raids in the Second World War, when every building for miles around was leveled.
The cathedral canons of Cologne were well educated and leisured. They gave little or no thought to the problems of old Europe. They lived a cloistered, segregated, and selfish life, much like Ivy League professors today.
The hardest-working people in this old Europe, except for the peasants in the field, or the textile workers of Ghent or Florence, were the bureaucrats who worked for kings, dukes, and counts. Some of them had the same university education as cathedral canons. But the majority had been trained in one of three specialized secular law schools: Bologna, in northern Italy; Montpellier, in southern France; or the Inns of Court, in London. Bologna and Montpellier taught Roman law derived directly from the codex of the sixth-century Byzantine emperor Justinian I. The Inns of Court taught a mixture of English feudal law and Roman law.
Graduates of these law schools could always find work in the expanding bureaucracies of secular government. They were paid about the same as prebendary cathedral canons, but they worked much harder, surrounded by tons of parchment, smoky candles, and pounds of sealing wax (for documents).
They were faced with three persistent problems. First, the buzones (“big shots,” originally meaning crossbow bolts) they worked for were frequently lazy, ill, or mad, or were traveling somewhere. Second, no matter how assiduous the lawyers were in inventing, levying, and collecting taxes, they could never put together enough money to fight a protracted war. Third, they had to contend with a myriad of local loyalties, ethnicities, and dialects.
But they persisted. Historians nowadays claim that the medieval bureaucrats were engaged in something they call “state formation.” The aristocrats had no use for the bureaucrats, disliked them intensely, except for those that a great landed family itself employed.
The future lay with the cathedral canons and lawyer-bureaucrats. They were signposts pointing to the rise of a professional middle class, the existence of which distinguishes the modern as opposed to the medieval world. There were plenty of merchant princes and captains of commerce about, but outside northern Italy, and especially Venice and Florence and the Hanseatic League, they were not interested in political power and leadership in society. In northern Italy and some parts of Germany, a commercial revolution with political implications had begun. Elsewhere the old world of the predominance of landed aristocrats like John of Gaunt still prevailed.
The tectonic plates of society, moving away from the old Europe of the Middle Ages, were starting to vibrate in John of Gaunt’s lifetime. This was represented not so much by the rise of merchant princes—the traders of the Hanseatic League who might handle such commodities as pickled herring, or the bourgeois nobility of Florence with their boom-and-bust banks and their art collections—as in the emergence of a new intolerance for the “others,” the minorities in society.
These minorities were heretics, Jews, and gays. Previously they had been more or less ignored. Now they were subject to frequent persecution. The frustrations of the affluent peasants and lower middle class in the towns were let out against the minorities, the “others.”
Early medieval society had been a tolerant one and had done nothing against separated religious communities that offered closeness and assistance under one theological banner or another. Now the separated religious communities were deemed “heretical” and were attacked by ecclesiastical officials and courts and by so-called Crusades dominated by minor nobility wanting to seize the so-called heretics’ lands. This is what happened to the Albigensians in southern France in the thirteenth century. In the 1320s a zealous bishop was still pursuing them in the foothills of the Pyrenees, to which they had retreated.
There was a time, between 800 and 1100, when Jews (of whom there were 1.5 million in Christian Europe) were protected by kings and princes because of the commercial and banking services they provided. Occasionally a Christian scholar would even seek dialogue with Talmudic rabbis, drawing upon the latters’ Biblical learning. No longer. By 1300 the Jews were subject to persecution and exile. They were regarded as Christ-killers who engaged in the ritual slaughter of Christian children.
The Jews were excluded from England and most of France around 1300 and were the victims of pogroms in Iberia. The Jews were reduced to hazardous living in the Holy Roman Empire, seeking out princes or bishops who would give them temporary refuge and experiencing an enormous decline in wealth. Many rabbis retreated into a mystical and astrological world called the Kabbalah. Around 1500 the Jews found security and renewed prosperity in Poland.
The canon law of the Church contained prohibitions against sodomy, which included homosexual relations. But these were ignored until the thirteenth century. King William II of England, called William Rufus (r. 1087-1100), was openly gay and never married. In the same era an archbishop of Canterbury who was a prominent theologian cultivated a group of gay young monks in his cathedral. By contrast, when English kings in the fourteenth century were openly gay, they were forced to abdicate and were then killed, as was the fate of Edward II and Richard II.
There was a maniacal shift against gays after 1200. It was part of the intolerance of what was now a persecuting society. This intolerance toward “others” reflected the new feeling of collective action on the part of the lower middle class and the upper stratum of the working class. Intolerance and persecution were the outlets for their anger, envy, and insecurity. The high aristocracy rarely participated in the new intolerance.
The intolerance toward minorities of Jews, gays, and heretics was reflective of an expanding urban environment. The thirteenth century was an age of expansion of towns and cities. The urban environment was intensely competitive economically. Accosting anyone who could be suppressed, disfranchised, or expelled on grounds of being an “other” was a way of reducing the pressure. This persecution was often carried out at the behest of Franciscan or Dominican friars, who sought to gain the loyalty of the urban working class and lower middle class by cultivating their prejudices.
Medieval towns were physically crowded, medically unhealthy, and poorly sanitized sites that fostered anger, jealousy, and paranoia. The streets were replete with underemployed, unemployed, and ruthlessly exploited young men ready to demonstrate and riot over almost any political or religious issue.
John of Gaunt and some other aristocrats were often the object of the fury from the streets. Gaunt had to be very cautious in the tempestuous Parliament of 1376. In Paris, Ghent, Bruges, and Florence the noise and fury from the streets sometimes coalesced into revolutionary movements.
That never happened in London in the Middle Ages, but seething resentment in the streets was a continuing threat and would sometimes boil over into riots.
Old Europe in 1340, the year John of Gaunt was born, was an unfinished civilization. It would have been hard for any contemporary to predict where Europe was going.
The great promise of the long peace and prosperity of the thirteenth century had ended. The business cycle was heading downward and Europe would not enter another era of persistent prosperity until the sixteenth century, when silver and gold from the Americas and the discovery of gold mines in central Europe inflated the money supply. Europe, so fortunate in its climate since the tenth century, now experienced much more frigid conditions and shorter growing seasons. Pandemics spread by cattle and rats threatened the stability and strength of the population.
Above all lurked the constant threat of the Muslim Turks advancing through the Balkans, coupled with the inability of the medieval Western states to organize an effective counterattack. The future of Latin Christian civilization seemed perilous.
Once Roman armies had vanquished both the barbarian Arabs and the heathen Germans. Now that seemed like a forgotten dream. Once Alexander the Great, in the 320s B.C., had marched with fifty thousand faithful companions eastward through central Asia and into northern India. Now that seemed only a poetic fantasy.
Once, long ago, Europe had stood for strength, ambition, victory. Now such aggressive tracks were covered by the dust of centuries, and the roads that had proudly supported Alexander’s and Caesar’s armies were covered by sand and mud.
There were, however, three factors militating in favor of European survival. The first was the immensely rich legacy of ancient Rome and Greece, now being cultivated more deeply in Europe. The classical world’s achievements in philosophy, science, and literature were again laid bare by scholars. The merchants and bankers of northern Italy were prepared to fund research into a deeper understanding of the classical world, a recovery of the culture of Athens and Rome that had given Europeans confidence in themselves during their better days.
The second factor in Europe’s favor as it confusedly faced the indomitable Muslim Turks was the wealth and commercial enterprise of the northern Italian cities whose commercial companies and banks bulged with the cash to counter economic depression, cold, and disease and begin the transformation of the European economy into something structurally resembling capitalism. Italian merchants like Marco Polo followed the silk routes eastward through the dust and turmoil of Central Asia to China. (Among other benefits the Italian voyagers got from the Chinese was the idea of making pasta, a cheap and nutritious cereal food that improved the Italian diet.)
The third positive element in European life, one that provided prospective leadership against the Muslim threat and reinvigorated politics and society, were the scions of the great aristocratic families. They were lucky that the Muslim threat never got farther west than the gates of Vienna, as this gave the aristocracy a time to breathe and to cultivate a distinctive way of life. John of Gaunt, leader of one of the most prominent families in Europe, never had to go crusading. He could fight other battles, as well as take on more subtle struggles within a changing England.