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?

new regimes of patronage: avignon and italy

By one reading, the hallmark of the development of Gothic art in the later Middle Ages is not internationalism – the major pan-European styles, whether Romanesque, Byzantine or Gothic of the previous centuries all had an international dimension – but rather extraordinary diversity. The major factor behind this diversification was the emergence of new regimes of patronage, for while the courts of western Europe continued their signal role in commissioning major works of art and architecture, the role of patronage in the newly powerful cities was growing inexorably. Though we can point to significant urban centres in the thirteenth century, for example Paris, London and Rome, the plethora of urban patronage in such cities as Cologne, Prague, Siena and Bruges in the next century entailed both more vigorous art production and a wider range of stylistic possibilities. Ecclesiastical patronage also retained much of its vitality throughout the century. At Cologne, the archbishops presided over the completion of their new French-inspired cathedral with stained glass and Franco-Italian panel paintings, creating a distinctive urban idiom of Gothic art quite comparable to the achievements of civic Italy. In England the incomparably wealthy dioceses continued to see significant building activity in the new showy Decorated Style, itself summarised most splendidly by the Benedictines at Ely (plate 1). Throughout western Europe too, the impact of mendicant architecture as developed in the spacious churches of southern France, notably Toulouse, was now sensed further afield, as for example in Germany.

adolf of nassau, 1292–1298

rudolf of Habsburg died on 15 July 1291. Long before his death he had tried to win over the electors (who had been responsible for the election of the German king – that is the king of the Romans – since 1257) to the succession of his eldest son, Albert. After the failure of Henry VI’s plans to make the empire a hereditary monarchy on the pattern of France and England, Rudolf could only follow the old practice of having one of his sons crowned king in his own lifetime and thereby secure his succession. Although Pope Honorius IV had supported these plans, they were not to be realised because the death of Honorius postponed Rudolf’s coronation as emperor indefinitely once more and because they were opposed in the electoral college. The situation in itself was not unfavourable for Rudolf in the last years of his reign: the highest ecclesiastical prince in the empire, Archbishop Henry of Mainz, was a confidant of the king’s, Trier was vacant, and the lay electors – the Palatinate, Saxony, Brandenburg and Bohemia – were related to him by marriage. The archbishop of Cologne, Siegfried II of Westerburg, however, saw a threat to free election by the electors in these plans for contrlling the succession, and he found an ally in King Wenceslas II of Bohemia who, despite Rudolf’s ultimate recognition of his electoral vote, refused to support Albert, since the latter refused to cede Carinthia to him.

to fourteenth-century visitors from north of the Pyrenees the Spanish peninsula remained what it had always been, the land that persisted in disregarding western Europe’s familiar categories and disappointing its reasonable expectations. In 1341, when Philip of Evreux, king of Navarre, set out from northern France – the usual haunt of fourteenth-century kings of Navarre – to assist Alfonso XI of Castile in wresting Algeciras from the Moors, the authorities at Tudela – his authorities – naturally enough made a financial contribution. But they also spent money on ensuring that their Christian king’s crusading army should not disturb the peace and quiet of his Moorish subjects there. In the same spirit, in 1357 Philip’s son, Carlos II, petitioned Pere III of Aragon on behalf of two of his mudéjar subjects en route for Mecca. Although a flagrant breach of the prohibition decreed at the general council of Vienne, his intervention was not exceptional. Twelve years later, even further into Christian Spain, while the ‘crusading’ Enrique II was hunting down his half-brother Pedro I, the vicar-general of the bishop of Burgos had a group of non-tithepayers to deal with, which was not exceptional either – except that these defaulters were all reported to be ‘Moors of the said city’.

is it possible to write history centred on the reigns of individual kings sixty years after the first criticism by French historians of the factual and biographical methodology of political history? The answer must undoubtedly be, ‘yes’. Broadened by anthropological and sociological approaches, political narrative has been transformed into the history of power structures and of the developing state. And the figure of the king lies at the very centre of all these new fields of historical enquiry investigating the centres of power, its symbols and insignia, as well as the ceremonial and ritual of the state. As a result, the state itself is now viewed in a fresh perspective, but the king remains the primary focus.

Historical narrative, complete with dates and battles, has won back its place in this history of power structures, ever since the study of attitudes demonstrated that such historical facts provided a framework for corporate memories. In the 1420s and 1430s an advocate in the Paris parlement did not need to specify that he was talking of the battle of Agincourt in 1415 when he dated a fact to ‘the year of the battle’. The narrative approach has regained its place in historical studies, but its emphasis has changed dramatically since the days of Ernest Lavisse and the positivist historians of the nineteenth century.

the period of English history between 1307 and 1377 was one of striking and often violent contrasts. The great famines of 1315–22 and the Black Death of 1348–9 brought to an end the demographic and economic expansion of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and precipitated enormous changes in the structure of society. The advent of long-term warfare with Scotland and France created virtually unprecedented military, administrative and fiscal burdens which brought the English state and its subjects into more regular contact and more frequent political conflict. The increasing complexities of government were reflected in the development of a more refined judicial system and the emergence of parliament as a taxative and legislative assembly. Above all, these changes focused attention on the person of the king and required of him a greater sensitivity, subtlety and flexibility than ever before.

Much of the political agenda of the fourteenth century had been set during the reign of Edward I. In the 1290s Edward had been drawn into war on three fronts: in Wales, where his earlier conquests continued to arouse resentment and rebellion; in Scotland, where his attempts to resolve the succession dispute culminated in a full-scale war; and in France, where his refusal to accept Philip IV’s claims to feudal suzerainty over the duchy of Aquitaine produced an inconclusive round of hostilities between 1294 and 1298. The cost of these wars had been immense, and on two occasions the king had been forced to reissue Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forests as a means of placating political opposition to his fiscal and military policies.

if in April Chaucerian man longed to go on pilgrimage, his fellows, as described by the poet’s French contemporary Eustache Deschamps, also understood that by August ‘fault d’aler en Pruce …/ou en Yfflelent, à la rese d’esté’. The crusade (reysa) to Lithuania (via Prussia and Livonia), in which the fictional Knight of the Canterbury Tales took part, was established in the chivalric calendar throughout the Catholic world by 1350. In the late Middle Ages west European relations with the Baltic region thrived. The Bridgetine Order leavened religious life throughout northern Europe; the mission to the Baltic provoked questions of moral theology and recruited crusaders across the continent. These pilgrim-soldiers left monuments in Königsberg and at home to mark their achievement. Lithuanian motifs became fashionable in belles lettres and to ‘raise a pagan prince from the font’ was a sign of highest chic. Emperor Charles IV maintained a convert affine, Butautas-Henry, at court in Prague and endowed him with the imperial title of Herzog von Litauen as evidence of the breadth of Caroline jurisdiction.

the fourteenth century saw the union of the crowns of central Europe. One by one, the last Přemysls, the house of Anjou in Hungary and the Luxemburgs, attempted to construct states whose national identity might have appeared threatened by the collapse of the old indigenous dynasties and the diffusion of foreign influence. These dispositions were based upon a dynastic policy of marriages, which represented a middle way between the right of conquest and the popular sovereignty of the future. In 1301, the son of Wenceslas II of Bohemia was elected king of Hungary; but he was unable to maintain his position and abdicated in 1304: exchanging the Hungarian crown of St Stephen for those of Bohemia and Poland (which his father left him) in the following year. Wenceslas III was assassinated in 1306. He was the first to occupy – admittedly in succession – the three thrones of Hungary, Bohemia and Poland.

The fourteenth century was also a kind of apogee for these states, associated in each instance with the vigorous personality of an exceptional sovereign. People like to recall that Louis of Anjou was the only king of Hungary surnamed ‘the Great’; he shared this epithet with his predecessor in Poland, Casimir. As for the Emperor Charles IV, he was the ‘father of his country’ (pater patriae) of a Bohemia in full political and cultural expansion. In each case, after succession difficulties at the beginning of the century, these long and great reigns marked a period of clear equilibrium in all fields, whether in territorial matters, political and social institutions, economic and material life or cultural developments.

with the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, prince of Wales, on 11 December 1282 and the execution of his brother Dafydd the following October Welsh independence came to an end. The Principality recognised by the English crown in the Treaty of Montgomery of 1267 came into the hands of Edward I. Under the Statute of Wales of March 1284 counties and sheriffs were grafted on to the existing Welsh administrative structures and new courts were established. English criminal law and procedure were introduced, although Welsh law remained in civil and personal actions; in the south-west and in parts of the March it survived until the sixteenth century. Edward’s hold on the Principality was secured by the construction of a series of castles. Several had been built after the Treaty of Aberconwy in 1277, but the later ones, at Caernarfon, Conway, Harlech and Beaumaris, are among the outstanding monuments of medieval military architecture. Attached to each of these castles was a borough; the terms of their foundation charters were generous and they were intended as centres of English settlement which could reinforce the castle garrisons if necessary and where trade could be concentrated. The changes brought about in 1284 are usually described as the Edwardian Settlement of North Wales; a similar pattern prevailed in the southern counties of the Principality but it had evolved over a longer period.

as with nearly every other aspect of fourteenth-century history, the most important event affecting the medieval countryside was the Black Death along with the plagues that succeeded it periodically in the latter half of the century. Viewed from the safe distance of 650 years, the Black Death is usually presented in agrarian history as a demographic-economic event: a sudden radical diminution of population that produced a series of dislocations in the structure of medieval society. There are two contradictory ways that scholars have come to terms with this staggering example of historical accident. The first is to relate all subsequent developments to the plague. The agricultural depression, peasant revolts and ruin of much of the aristocracy can be seen as consequences of the epidemic and its renewed visitations. To what extent long-range changes can be ascribed to the Black Death (such things as the decline of servitude in England and its strengthening in eastern Europe, or the crisis of the Church) remains unclear, particularly as one moves into the fifteenth century.

Another approach is to minimise the impact of the Black Death by pointing to other factors that independently affected society. Population decline, agricultural stagnation and widespread peasant discontent, according to this view, antedate 1348 and so the ‘crisis’ of the fourteenth century was already manifested in its early decades. The Black Death would thus confirm or forward developments already underway, as opposed to destroying violently a stable economy and social structure.