Western Christendom

Unlike the Ming or Islamic cultures, Europe struggled to regain stability after the devastation of the Black Death. Rulers tried to rebuild their states, but they failed to fully consolidate power, leaving chaos and disruption.

Crises and Reactions During the Fourteenth Century

In 1300, most of Europe’s population of some 80 million still lived in small communities in the countryside. Urbanization, however, was increasing. Universities helped to spread knowledge, and inventions, such as the clock, began to appear. With the fourteenth century, however, these positive developments gave way to disaster. Cooling temperatures, exhausted soils, and heavy taxation crushed the peasantry, leading to failed harvests and famine that killed millions. Weakened by hunger, Europe’s population was then set upon by the Black Death. People avoided each other. Crowded cities were decimated. Between 25 and 50 percent of Europe’s total population died within five years. Outbreaks continued to the end of the century. Three centuries passed before the population recovered to pre-plague numbers.

The disease greatly impacted all aspects of European life. The church, in particular, struggled. Many people turned to pleasure-seeking before they died. Others turned to extreme spirituality. For many, rational Christianity could not account for the losses to the plague. Others struggled with the loss of clerics, the representatives of church authority, many of whom died or simply fled. As religious leaders moved to reestablish their authority, some challenged the church, prompting church-led inquisitions that persecuted heretics, Jews, witches, and others. Raising money for its campaigns and other ventures, church leaders turned to selling indulgences, a practice that prompted the Protestant Reformation.

Popular dissatisfaction also grew with the feudal system. Peasant rebellions broke out, protesting both the failure of lords to defend them from marauders and the imposition of feudal restrictions. French peasants rose up and killed lords and high clergy. In England, rioting peasants were ruthlessly crushed.

State-Building in Europe

Leaders tried to reconstruct a stable society but never achieved the successes of Asia. No common language unified the political realms of Europe. In France, several different languages thrived. Similarly, few models of centralized government inspired emulation. Rulers of local regions thus began to rise. Like dynasts elsewhere, they claimed divine legitimacy by performing sacred rituals and demanding that priests teach obedience to the king. They used marital alliances with other kings to gain support. Kings sponsored an official language for their state that all administrators were required to know. Military force was also employed as nobles and peasants alike resisted the court’s efforts to tax or control them. Kings also instituted strict social hierarchies that extended from themselves, at the top, down through the nobles and clergy, learned lawyers, great merchants, artisans, and peasants, at the bottom. Family life reflected these hierarchies, with fathers governing mothers and children.

These efforts gave some control to the king, but people continued to rebel and organize themselves in defiance of the king’s laws. Despite their efforts, European kings failed to approach anywhere near the success of the Asian rulers. Europe’s communities were still very small and fragmented.

   Portugal:

Under the House of Aviz, the Portuguese began to consolidate power. Promoting trade and religious tradition, the crown built unity and pitched the country into a search for a direct sea route to Asia, especially after the primary land route—which led through Constantinople—fell to Ottoman control. Pressing into the Atlantic and down the coast of Africa, and attacking Muslim strongholds that threatened the way, Portuguese seamen gradually worked south. The crown won support of the nobles by granting them Atlantic islands like the Canaries on which sugar could be grown for profit. Threatened by outside rivals, the people of Portugal pulled together and eventually succeeded in sending a ship (under Bartholomeu Diaz) around the tip of Africa. This and other successes helped Portugal to remain united in the chaotic period after the Black Death.

   Spain, France, and England:

Spain, France, and England followed suit, but struggled with fragmentation even more than Portugal. In Spain, noble houses quarreled incessantly until marital alliances began to unite various regions in Spain. Unity was acheived by the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469. This union brought Spain’s wealthiest province together with that hosting the country’s most ambitious traders. The crown then began to unite other regional lords, attack heretics, and reclaim lost lands from Muslims, culminating in the conquest of Granada in 1492. Isabella and Ferdinand also married their children into other reigning families, strengthening Spanish power.

France and England spent most of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries at war with each other. After finally ousting the English from the continent, France sought to rebuild power. Marriage alliances helped, although the French nobles in the various regions remained quite powerful for the next two centuries. After warring with France, civil war divided England before the Tudors took control. Even as kings rose to take power, they first emerged as merely the greatest of the nobles and could be challenged by members of the noble class. Nobles advised the king, governed their territories with autonomy, and pursued their own interests. Centralization, in short, still had a long way to go.

Trade in Europe

During the Black Death, people did not trust merchants or gather in large groups, lest they catch the plague. Trade, therefore, suffered. With time, it began to recover. In Italy, trading centers like Genoa and Venice suffered huge losses but then rebounded quickly to broker the flow of goods between Europe and the Islamic world. To trade, however, Europeans needed precious metals since so few European goods were sought by trading partners outside Europe. In search of silver and gold, Europeans conquered new lands or imported them from Africa. Like their kingly lords, merchants intermarried to strengthen their connections and avoid competition, thus centralizing economic control.

European Identity and the Renaissance

Rising stability also contributed to a cultural flowering in Europe. The Renaissance represents the expansion of knowledge and a renewed interest in the ancient culture of the Greeks and Romans, which had been largely ignored as "pagan" before the Renaissance. Scholars showed new interest in ancient societies for insights into geography, arts, philosophy, medicine, and natural history. Moving beyond sacred, church-dominated theology, Renaissance thinkers began studying the secular humanities and using their discoveries to judge Europe’s current conditions.

Printing spread ideals of wealth, knowledge, and cultivation. Kings began to follow these ideals by purchasing paintings and sculpture, patronizing artists, and supporting scholars. Merchants followed suit, and even the church began to support the new movement in limited ways. Renaissance scholars and artists used their new influence to advocate political changes modeled on political structures of the ancient Greeks. Other thinkers defended the church and the secular authorities. In Florence, a political movement featuring commercial interests and Renaissance values, like patriotism, liberty, and civic virtue, emerged as a new model for government. Machiavelli challenged these ideas, claiming that virtue meant nothing without raw power to back it up.

Rivalries between Renaissance thinkers, commercial interests, and political authorities ensured that no consensus or unifying rule could emerge. Nevertheless, the ideals of good government, freedom of thought, civilization, and stability that eventually came to characterize parts of the world had been born.