There are times in history when it is generally accepted that the changes that took place represent such significant developments as to amount to the end of one era and the beginning of another. The fifteenth century has commonly been accepted as such a period. While this was certainly not so true for the great nations of the east as it was for the states of the west, the consequences of the economic, social, cultural and political revolutions in Europe would quickly be felt across the whole world. We need only to list them, in no particular order: in the arts, the flowering of the renaissance; the invention of printing, with far-reaching social consequences; the opening up of the Americas and the arrival of Europeans by sea in Africa and Asia. Underlying it all, the growing economic weight of capitalism was undermining previously dominant feudal relations, and would over time begin to look to convert economic strength into political power. In this process, the example of powerful city states in Italy would be emulated in Germany and the Low Countries, where newly self-confident cities in which merchants were dominant would consolidate their effective independence, although usually not without a struggle. At the ideological level, the challenge to the monopoly of the Catholic church in most of Europe by the Protestant reformation of the sixteenth century was prefigured on a nation-wide scale by the Hussite movement based in Bohemia a century before. The complete extinction of the already defunct East Roman empire represented only a symbolic turning point. But greater long term significance attached to the repeated victories of the non-noble Hussites of Bohemia over the armies mobilised by the Holy Roman Empire, under princely and noble leadership.

By 1453 it was evident that older forms of defence had been transcended by the new form of attack. The second half of the interminable Anglo-French struggle would see, not once but twice in Normandy, how quickly whole provinces where the defence was based on old walls could be overcome. While Henry V's recapture of his ancestors’ homeland after Agincourt was remarkable for its speed, the reconquest by the French crown thirty years later was even faster.