introduction

richard II slipped quietly into his kingship although his reign was to end much more decisively. Richard became obsessed, in a way that Edward III had not been, with the fate of his great-grandfather who had been deposed and murdered in 1327. In his attempts to prevent history from repeating itself, Richard provoked his great magnates into taking exactly that course which he most feared. Yet, in spite of their comparable ends, the reigns of Edward II and Richard II were very different. Unlike his great-grandfather, Richard had a strong character which included some attractive attributes such as bravery and loyalty. Moreover he developed and pursued policies which had long-term objectives and made sense nationally as well as personally. But Richard also lacked certain qualities which were essential for medieval kings: he did not enjoy real war and he got on badly with the English nobility as a group, although he was able to develop individual friendships with some of them. He was not ‘one of the lads’ in a way that Edward I or Edward III had been, nor as Henry IV and Henry V were to be later, and he had a suspicious and secretive nature which bred unease and insecurity in those around him. Medieval monarchy depended for its success upon the abilities of individual kings: the institution of kingship was not yet sufficiently developed to carry incompetent kings. Richard II had the wrong abilities for his inherited task.

the Rus’ principalities in the fourteenth century were not ‘Russia’, although their history in this century is often subsumed into that rubric. The state centred at Moscow that became Russia emerged from one of the Rus’ principalities over the course of the century. During the 1300s political and cultural diversity was the dominant feature of these lands in the eastern reaches of the forested European plain. The territory with which we will be concerned lies east of Poland and Prussia, stretching to the Urals and extending from the Baltic to the steppe north of the Black Sea. Ethnically East Slavs predominated, gradually displacing the Finno-Ugric peoples native to these forests. Finno-Ugric peoples remained the dominant population in Estonia and the lands north of Moscow and Novgorod, reaching to the White Sea. Balts (Letts, Lithuanians) lived on the Baltic littoral south of Estonia and somewhat inland. Indigenous Siberian peoples lived on the far northern shores of the White Sea. By 1300 only the East Slavs were officially Christian, belonging to the Byzantine Orthodox faith. Surrounding this large area were peoples of different religions, ethnicities and historical heritages: polytheistic Tatars and Turks in the steppelands to the south and east, Catholic Poles to the west.

during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Scotland’s history is a striking success. Five themes stand out. The first is general economic growth: developing agriculture sustained a population rise to around the million mark, while flourishing wool and leather exports through the east-coast burghs boosted the money supply to over 40 million silver pennies (some £180,000), circulating interchangeably with England’s in a medieval ‘sterling area’. The second is political expansion: from its eastern heartland between the Forth and the Grampians, the kingdom spread north, south and west, reaching virtually its modern boundaries when the Western Isles were annexed from Norway in 1266. The third is the consolidation of political authority behind a clearly defined royal line, which established the principle of succession by primogeniture, and introduced ‘modern’ governmental and religious institutions, like those of France and England (if less bureaucratised). The fourth is the establishment of a simple but effective system of local power, in which a network of sheriffdoms added a layer of crown authority to an older landowning structure consisting of large ‘provincial’ earldoms and lordships (see map 6) interspersed with smaller baronies (mostly held by ‘Norman’ families brought in from England by twelfth-century kings). And the fifth is the maintenance, none the less, of a ‘balance of New and Old’: Gaelic families and practices survived even at the highest levels, so that, although Scotland had become a fairly typical European kingdom, it was ethnically hybrid, defined simply by its people’s allegiance to their king.

‘the Netherlands’ or ‘the Low Countries’ is a collective name for a group of provinces which since the early Middle Ages formed a strong socio-economic and cultural unity in which, in these respects, the mutual ties binding them were stronger than those with the outside world. In the politico-institutional field, however, that unity was missing. The various principalities had dynasties of their own, which none the less were not sovereign. Most of these ruling houses (Brabant, Liège, Holland, Zeeland, Guelders, etc.) came under the feudal jurisdiction of the German emperor. Others (e.g. Walloon-Flanders) came under the French king. The Flemish dynasty was subject for the greater part of its territory to the French crown, except for a minor portion east of the river Scheldt (the district of Aalst), which was subject to the German empire. A number of principalities in the Netherlands were intermittently combined by joint rulership, such as Flanders and Namur or Holland, Zeeland and Hainault.

In the ecclesiastical sphere,Flanders came completely under the jurisdiction of bishoprics, the seats of which were all situated outside the county (Cambrai, Tournai and Thérouanne), whereas Brabant and Liège and the north of the Low Countries belonged to Utrecht. The bishop of Liège was simultaneously head of a secular principality of the same name, as was the bishop of Utrecht.

for the purposes of discussing European commerce, the fourteenth century is a very difficult unit. Most of the first half of the century had much in common with the thirteenth century, and in many ways trading patterns in these years are the fruition and culmination of the so-called ‘commercial revolution’ of the long thirteenth century. In the same way trading patterns in the second half of the century exhibited the beginnings of many of the changes which accelerated in the fifteenth century. I will therefore treat the century in two halves, at the risk of some overlap with the chapters in the previous and succeeding volumes.

Throughout the first half of the century the patterns of short-distance trade remained much as they were around 1300. The extensive network of markets and market towns already established in many parts of Europe remained virtually unchanged. Few attempts were made to create additional markets, and those few that were chartered were generally unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the medieval market economy already generally established in most parts of rural western Europe remained unimpaired and was consolidated. Most rural producers continued to be able to sell at least a part of their produce for money without difficulty, to meet such money obligations as rents and taxes. The overall European money supply probably reached its medieval maximum towards the middle of the century.

in the fourteenth century the Crown of Aragon’s external policy focused mainly on islands in the western Mediterranean and on the Iberian peninsula itself, and it was in these areas that most of its military activity was centred. At the beginning of his reign James II (1291–1327) ruled not only the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia and the county of Barcelona, which made up the lands of the Crown of Aragon in the Iberian peninsula, but also the Balearics and Sicily. Mallorca had been conquered from the Muslims in 1229 by James’s grandfather, James I (1213–76), although the latter had used it, together with Roussillon, Cerdagne and Montpellier, to constitute a kingdom for his second son. Pedro III of Aragon (1276–85) had, however, asserted overlordship over the Mallorcan kingdom in 1279, and in 1285 his eldest son Alfonso, shortly to become Alfonso III (1285–91), had taken Mallorca by force from his uncle, though not the mainland parts of the Mallorcan kingdom; Alfonso later also asserted direct rule over Minorca, which until then had been a dependent Muslim state. Sicily had been brought under Aragonese rule in 1282, when Pedro III had occupied the island following the rebellion of the Sicilian Vespers against Charles of Anjou. This action led to ecclesiastical censure by the French pope Martin IV and the award of the kingdom of Aragon to Charles of Valois, the younger son of Philip III of France; and this in turn occasioned an unsuccessful French invasion of Aragon in 1285.

at a date which cannot be pinpointed in the year 1325, King Charles-Robert of Hungary founded the Society of St George, an elite band of fifty knights who were to be entitled to wear a special habit, were to meet three times a year for the ‘chapter’ of their society (on St George’s day, on the feast of the nativity of the Virgin and at Epiphany) and who were sworn to observe a series of religious knightly obligations laid down in the founder’s statutes. This, as far as we know, was the first instituted of the princely secular orders of chivalry, whose appearance was one of the most striking novel features of the history of knighthood in the fourteenth century. The foundation of the Society of St George was followed by that of the Order of the Band in Castile (1330), of the Garter in England (1349), the Star in France (1351), the Golden Buckle in the empire (1355), the Collar in Savoy (1364) and the Ermine in Brittany (1381); there were others too. The statutes of all these societies bear a family resemblance to one another. They detail the obligations of the companions to the sovereign or ‘master’ of the order and to one another, provide for regular chapter meetings (usually on the feast of the patron saint of the order, to be followed by High Mass in its chapel and a lavish banquet) and set out rules about the cut and wearing of the robes and insignia of the company.

Since the Muses began to walk naked in the sight of men some writers have employed them in high style for moral discourse, while others have enlisted them in the service of love. But you, my book, are the first to make them sing of trials endured in war, for these have never yet been treated in the Italian mother tongue.

This is how Boccaccio, at the end of the Teseida (later 1330s), describes the subject of his poem. Like Dante before him, he frequently invoked and referred to the Muses, particularly at points of departure and closure. This passage, however, also shows an acute awareness of the uses of the vernacular, the identity of the author and the status of poetry – three of the issues with which this chapter will be concerned.

The Teseida passage also alludes to Dante’s views on the uses of the vernacular. In the first decade of the century Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia had identified the three subjects for ‘illustrious’ vernacular writers as: ‘prowess in arms, the flames of love, and the direction of the will’. Dante had also anticipated Boccaccio’s ‘naked Muses’ to some extent by referring to his vernacular prose commentary on the poems in his Convivio as being like a woman in a state of natural bellezza (Conv. I, x, 13). Boccaccio’s identification of Latin with clothing, however, is interesting as a reflection of the complicated relationship – the rapprochement, to use Auerbach’s term – between Latin and the vernacular in Italy during the two centuries after Dante.

the main determinant of religious thought in the fourteenth century, which would eventually affect every aspect of public worship and private prayer, was the concentrated effort, in the previous century, to marshal, state logically and resolve questions according to an agreed theological language, establishing thereby a coherent method of religious education. The enduring issues of God’s relation to the world, the human soul and the nature of redemption were not resolved, but they had been successfully contained within an abstract and largely Aristotelian language, and were generally discussed by a trained and conscious elite at Paris or its satellites in Oxford, Cambridge and the schools of the friars. The attempt to resolve them had created and continued to create philosophical syntheses of greater or less cohesion. That of Thomas Aquinas, promoted by the Order of Preachers and universally known after his canonisation in 1323, was matched in the first decades of the century by the more amorphous body of ideas associated with the Franciscan doctors Duns Scotus, Peter Auriol and François de Meyronnes: among whom the influence of current logic brought about, some twenty years later, a critical reexamination of theological language, associated with William of Ockham, and as the moral and social aspects of religious thinking began to dominate debate, a vigorous return to Augustinian ideas. These bodies of ideas did not create distinct schools of thought: virtually all theologians of the fourteenth century were independent thinkers who can be classified as Augustinians, Thomists, Scotists or followers of the via moderna – only in a broad sense.

the historical setting

the Ottomans emerged around 1300 and, after a century of continuous territorial enlargement and institutional development, their enterprise almost came to a premature end in 1402 when their army was defeated and their rule was shattered by Timur’s (Tamerlane) formidable blow. Thus the fourteenth century exactly framed the first phase in the evolution of the Ottoman state when a small band of frontiersmen succeeded in establishing a sizeable regional state in Anatolia and in the Balkan peninsula.

The origins of the state are obscure because, at first, it was such an insignificant entity. Histories written in the cultural and political centres of the Islamic world, in Tabriz and Damascus and Cairo, did not take notice of the distant frontier zone in western Anatolia. Ottomans themselves did not put their own history in writing until the mid-fifteenth century, though there is evidence of a lively oral tradition. Some modern historians, in fact, consider these later histories practically worthless in explaining Ottoman origins. Archival evidence, too, is scant; few of the documents purporting to be from the fourteenth century but preserved as copies in later collections have been authenticated by rigorous scrutiny. The historian’s task, however, is not hopeless: recent research tends to corroborate the accounts of later Ottoman chronicles; modern historiography has also successfully integrated historical traditions with evidence from diverse sources, Byzantine and Islamic.

political development under charles iv (1346–1378)

in view of the complex political situation that prevailed in the empire (on both an international and a domestic level) towards the end of the reign of Lewis IV of Bavaria, it seemed likely that the transfer of power from the Wittelsbac hs to the Luxemburgs would be a very turbulent process, if indeed it took place at all. The young Charles, son of the Bohemian King John of Luxemburg and grandson of Henry VII, was elected king of the Romans at the direct instigation of the papal curia, which was implacably opposed to the ageing Wittelsbach. Matters having been brought to a head by the intrigues of the Luxemburg side at Avignon, the election of Charles represented an attempt to resolve the situation. During negotiations, the Bohemian delegation made a whole series of far-reaching promises (of a political and military nature) to the pope. These were mainly concerned with concessions to France, as well as various prerogatives of the papacy with regard to its involvement in imperial affairs. The participants thus had every reason to denounce Charles as a papal stooge (Pfaffenkaiser).

in the fourteenth century two kingdoms of Sicily vied for influence in Italian affairs, and one, that based on the mainland, also sought again and again to reabsorb its island rival. Such conflicts were a severe drain on the resources of the combatants; they also necessitated increasing reliance on powerful regional nobles and on foreign banking houses. The dissolution of political power was accompanied, as a result, by economic dislocation, particularly in the countryside. The fourteenth century saw, therefore, a significant change in the character of the southern realms; the open question is how permanent the damage was, the more so since the calamity of war was compounded by the mortality of plague. In Sicily, recovery was stimulated by the arrival at the end of the century of the royal house of Aragon-Catalonia, which took advantage of the extinction of the cadet Aragonese dynasty of Sicily to reimpose its authority, with growing success and with beneficial effects on the island’s economy. On the mainland, recovery was hindered by the persistence of weak government, characterised by serious internal strife within the ruling Angevin dynasty itself.

This discussion lays emphasis on the role of the Angevin kings of Naples and the Aragonese kings of Sicily in the wider political conflicts within Italy and the Mediterranean. Particular attention has to be attached to Robert of Naples, whose reign marks the culmination of Angevin attempts to act as the arbiters of Italian politics.

when in 1394 Richard II led an army to Ireland, he was the first ruler of England to visit the lordship since John in 1210. Richard’s expedition did, however, have recent precedents, most notably that of his uncle, Lionel, earl of Ulster and duke of Clarence, who had been Edward III’s lieutenant there from 1361 to 1366. In a great council held at Kilkenny in 1360 the English of Ireland had told Edward of the perilous state of the country, portraying themselves as assailed on all sides by the Irish, and the justiciar as hampered by shrinking revenues and faced by attacks on so many marches that he could no longer cope. The despatch of Lionel with a large retinue paid mostly from English sources was in part an answer to this plea for assistance. Likewise in 1385, the prelates, lords and commons of Ireland had predicted an imminent conquest of the land and had asked Richard II to ‘prepare in his own person to survey and visit his said lordship for its rescue and salvation’. A not dissimilar message was sent by the citizens of Dublin in 1392.

Such appeals, and the English responses to them, would have amazed Edward I, who had taken his authority in Ireland largely for granted. In his day the Dublin government had been financially self-sufficient; it had regularly sent cash to England, raised supplies for the Welsh and Scottish wars and recruited expeditionary forces for royal campaigns in Flanders and Scotland.

around 1300, it seemed that the population, to some degree everywhere in Europe, had attained its maximum and reached a ceiling. There were still few signs allowing one to foretell the slowing-down of the expansion begun almost three centuries before; these signs were to multiply in the first half of the fourteenth century. It was then, in the very middle of the century, that the terrible knell of the Black Death sounded. Thus a period opened characterised by the deadly and repeated attacks of what contemporaries interpreted as a sign of divine anger provoked by human depravity. The century closed, in fact, with another major epidemic of the terrible illness and the fifteenth, begun in an atmosphere of mourning, was to bear its ineradicable stigmata. The plague henceforth accompanied medieval man as ineluctably as, to use the words of Alain Chartier, ‘the abominable sum of infinitely wicked evils’: hunger, war, death.

No historian doubts that the brutal irruption of a scourge which was to become a pandemic and affect the European population for centuries stimulated profound upheavals in modes of production, living and feeling. An evaluation of the precise effects of the epidemic, of its place in the period’s procession of evils, is more difficult. Did the plague, falling upon Europe, operate autonomously to subvert or renew the structures of feudal society? Was the terrifying skeleton which led an entire society in the Dance of Death the model on which historians should base their analyses?