The Late Medieval ‘Crisis’

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed serial crises and metamorphoses across Europe and beyond. For a brief period, the steppe corridor between east Asia and Europe – the ‘Silk Route’ – became fully open, with no intermediate power halting or diverting trade and diplomacy. Even when this ‘corridor’ closed, the momentum caused by the Mongol eruption from their homelands created perpetual instability in Asia, leading, eventually, to the Mogul seizure of power in South Asia, as well as maintaining the ‘Mongol yoke’ over the East Slav lands, thus instigating the rise of Poland-Lithuania as the major power of central and eastern Europe. While these principalities and lordships were consolidated, imperial power collapsed in Italy. France practically disappeared as an independent state but was reborn as the power-broker of western Europe by the end of the period. Scandinavia almost coalesced as a single state. Muslim power was entirely extinguished in the Iberian Peninsula, replaced by an intolerant and often paranoid homogeneity. In south-eastern Europe, on the other hand, Muslim rule – and Islam – spread at the expense of Christianity. In the second half of the period, in particular, changes in society, power differentials, politics and technology led to an expansion of European – particularly Iberian – knowledge of the lands bordering on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, in the end producing the irruption of Portuguese trade and military power onto the coasts of India in 1497–9 and the first tentative Spanish contacts with the Americas from 1492 on.

At the same time, the fourteenth century in particular witnessed considerable trauma for both societies and individuals. Dearth, and occasionally famine, was commonplace, perhaps due to outmoded agricultural practice, perhaps due to changes in the weather that involved a drop in average annual temperature, a shortening of the growing season, shifts in climatic zone and the abandonment as marginal of what had once been thoroughly cultivable land. More dramatically, Eurasia became subject to epidemics, often pandemics, after centuries where plague was practically unknown. The most notorious of these was the Black Death of 1347–51, although bubonic outbreaks continued for centuries, generally every generation; but other diseases made regular visitations. War between (often within) countries became commonplace, if not the norm. Very few places escaped the destabilisation and destruction. Europe recovered slowly from these changes and catastrophes.