Crisis of the Late Middle Ages

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Around the start of the 14th century a series of events began that brought centuries of European prosperity and growth to a halt. Three major crises would lead to radical changes in all areas of society - they were demographic collapse, political instabilities and lastly religious upheavals.

A series of famines and plagues, beginning with the Great Famine of 1315-1317 and especially the Black Death of 1348, reduced the population perhaps by half or more as the Medieval Warm Period came to a close and the 1st century of the Little Ice Age began. Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare. Soil exhaustion, overpopulation, wars, and epidemic diseases helped cause hundreds of famines in Europe during the Middle Ages, including 95 in Britain and 75 in France.^[1][2] In France, the Hundred Years' War, crop failures and epidemics reduced the population by two-thirds.^[3]

Popular revolts in late medieval Europe and civil wars between nobles within countries such as the Wars of the Roses were common, and there were international conflicts between kings such as France and England in the Hundred Years' War. The unity of the Roman Catholic Church was shattered by the Great Schism. The Holy Roman Empire was also in decline, in the aftermath of the Interregnum (1247-1273), the Empire lost cohesion and politically the separate dynasties of the various German states became more important than their common empire.

Demography

Some scholars^[who?] contend that at the beginning of the 14th century Europe had become overpopulated^{[citation needed]}. By the 14th century frontiers had ceased to expand and internal colonization was coming to an end, but population levels remained high. Then during the 14th century a number of calamities struck. Starting with the Great Famine in 1315, and then the Black Death of 1348-1350, the population of Europe plummeted.

The period between 1348 and 1420 witnessed the heaviest loss. In Germany, about 40% of the named inhabitants disappeared. The population of Provence was reduced by 50% and in some regions in Tuscany 70% were lost during this period.

Popular revolt

Before the 14th century, popular uprisings were not unknown, for example, uprisings at a manor house against an unpleasant overlord, but they were local in scope. This changed in the 14th and 15th centuries when new downward pressures on the poor resulted in mass movements and popular uprisings across Europe. To indicate how common and widespread these movements became, in Germany between 1336 and 1525 there were no less than sixty phases of militant peasant unrest^[4].

Most of the revolts were an expression of those who desired to share in the wealth, status and well-being of the more fortunate. They were almost always defeated in the end and the nobles won the day. A new attitude emerged in Europe: "peasant" became a pejorative concept, separate from those who had wealth and status, and seen in a negative light. This was a social stratification entirely different from that of earlier times when society was based on the three orders, those who work, those who pray and those who fight^{[citation needed]}.

Civil wars

• Wars of the Roses

International wars

• Hundred Years' War
• Polish–Teutonic Wars
• Mongol raids against Russia
• War of the Eight Saints
• Hussite Wars
• Burgundian Wars
• Byzantine–Ottoman Wars
• Ottoman wars in Europe

References

See also

• Renaissance of the 12th century
• Renaissance of the 15th century
• Late Middle Ages
• History of science in the Middle Ages

External links

• "The Waning of the Middle Ages": Crisis and Recovery, 1300-1450