Full text of "A reader's guide to the choice of the best available books (about 50,000) in every department of science, art & literature, with the dates of the first. The word published is misleading and might induce a reader to suppose that. The Great Famine: Northern Europe in. Bois, Crisis of Feudalism, pp. 271–75; Kershaw, “Great Famine,” p. Daily life in Chaucer's England.pdf - Ebook download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read book online. The reader is constantly wondering.
The Late Medieval Age Of Crisis And Renewal 1. Author by : Books, LLCLanguange : en. Publisher by : Books LLC, Wiki Series. Format Available : PDF, e. Pub, Mobi. Total Read : 3. Total Download : 2. File Size : 5. 2,7 Mb. Description : Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Chapters: Feudalism, Angles, Danelaw, Late Middle Ages, High Middle Ages, Kingdom of Sicily, Feudalism in England, Scandinavian York. Excerpt: The Late Middle Ages was the period of European history generally comprising the 1. The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern era (and, in much of Europe, the Renaissance). Around 1. 30. 0, centuries of prosperity and growth in Europe came to a halt. A series of famines and plagues, such as the Great Famine of 1. Black Death, reduced the population to around half of what it was before the calamities. Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare. France and England experienced serious peasant uprisings: the Jacquerie, the Peasants' Revolt, as well as over a century of intermittent conflict in the Hundred Years' War. To add to the many problems of the period, the unity of the Catholic Church was shattered by the Western Schism. Collectively these events are sometimes called the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages. Despite these crises, the 1. Following a renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman texts that took root in the High Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance began. The absorption of Latin texts had started before the 1. Century Renaissance through contact with Arabs during the Crusades, but the availability of important Greek texts accelerated with the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, when many Byzantine scholars had to seek refuge in the West, particularly Italy. Combined with this influx of classical ideas was the invention of printing which facilitated dissemination of the printed word and democratized learning. These two things would later lead to the Protestant Reformation. By analogy the term “crusade” is also given to any campaign undertaken in the same spirit. The Meaning of the Crusades. The Crusades may be regarded partly as the decumanus fluctus in the surge of religious revival, which had begun in western Europe during the 1. East and West. Contemporaries regarded them in the former of these two aspects, as “holy wars” and “pilgrims' progresses” towards Christ's Sepulchre; the reflective eye of history must perhaps regard them more exclusively from the latter point of view. Considered as holy wars the Crusades must be interpreted by the ideas of an age which was dominated by the spirit of otherworldliness, and accordingly ruled by the clerical power which represented the other world. They are a novum salutis genus — a new path to Heaven, to tread which counted “for full and complete satisfaction” pro omni poenitentia and gave “forgiveness of sins” (peccaminum remissio). As such a novum salutis genus, the Crusades connect themselves with the history of the penitentiary system; as the foreign policy of the Church they belong to that clerical purification and direction of feudal society and its instincts, which appears in the institution of “God's Truce” and in chivalry itself. The penitentiary system, according to which the priest enforced a code of moral law in the confessional by the sanction of penance — penance which must be performed as a condition of admission to the sacrament of the Eucharist — had been from early times a great instrument in the civilization of the raw Germanic races. Penance might consist in fasting; it might consist in flagellation; it might consist in pilgrimage. The penitentiary pilgrimage, which seems to have been practised as early as A. D. 7. 00, was twice blessed; not only was it an act of atonement in itself, like fasting and flagellation; it also gained for the pilgrim the merit of having stood on holy ground. Under the influence of the Cluniac revival, which began in the 1. Jerusalem. Pilgrims who were travelling to Jerusalem joined themselves in companies for security, and marched under arms; the pilgrims of 1. Mainz, numbered some 7. When the First Crusade finally came, what was it but a penitentiary pilgrimage under arms — with the one additional object of conquering the goal of pilgrimage? That the Pilgrims' Progress should thus have turned into a Holy War is a fact readily explicable, when we turn to consider the attempts made by the Church, during the 1. Fehde). Since the close of the 1. France had been busily acting as legislatures, and enacting “forms of peace” for the maintenance of God's Peace or Truce (Pax Dei or Treuga Dei). In each diocese there had arisen a judicature (judices pacis) to decide when the form had been broken; and an executive, or communitas pacis, had been formed to enforce the decisions of the judicature. But it was an easier thing to consecrate the fighting instinct than to curb it; and the institution of chivalry represents such a clerical consecration, for ideal ends and noble purposes, of the martial impulses which the Church had hitherto endeavoured to check. In the same way the Crusades themselves may be regarded as a stage in the clerical reformation of the fighting laymen. As chivalry directed the layman to defend what was right, so the preaching of the Crusades directed him to attack what was wrong — the possession by “infidels” of the Sepulchre of Christ. The Crusades are the offensive side of chivalry: chivalry is their parent — as it is also their child. The knight who joined the Crusades might thus still indulge the bellicose side of his genius — under the aegis and at the bidding of the Church; and in so doing he would also attain what the spiritual side of his nature ardently sought — a perfect salvation and remission of sins. He might butcher all day, till he waded ankle- deep in blood, and then at nightfall kneel, sobbing for very joy, at the altar of the Sepulchre — for was he not red from the winepress of the Lord? One can readily understand the popularity of the Crusades, when one reflects that they permitted men to get to the other world by fighting hard on earth, and allowed them to gain the fruits of asceticism by the ways of hedonism. Nor was the Church merely able, through the Crusades, to direct the martial instincts of a feudal society; it was also able to pursue the object of its own immediate policy, and to attempt the universal diffusion of Christianity, even at the edge of the sword, over the whole of the known world. Thus was renewed, on a greater scale, that ancient feud of East and West, which has never died. For a thousand years, from the Hegira in 6. Vienna in 1. 68. 3, the peril of a Mahommedan conquest of Europe was almost continually present. From this point of view, the Crusades appear as a reaction of the West against the pressure of the East — a reaction which carried the West into the East, and founded a Latin and Christian kingdom on the shores of Asia. They protected Europe from the new revival of Mahommedanism under the Turks; they gave it a time of rest in which the Western civilization of the middle ages developed. But the relation of East and West during the Crusades was not merely hostile or negative. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was the meeting- place of two civilizations: on its soil the East learned from the West, and —perhaps still more — the West learned from the East. The culture developed in the West during the 1. Crusades, it grew upon materials which the Crusades enabled it to import from the East. Yet the debt of Europe to the Crusades in this last respect has perhaps been unduly emphasized. Sicily was still more the meeting- place of East and West than the kingdom of Jerusalem; and the Arabs of Spain gave more to the culture of Europe than the Arabs of Syria. Historical Causes of the Crusades. Within fifteen years of the Hegira Jerusalem fell before the arms of Omar (6. Mahommedan rulers till the end of the First Crusade. For centuries, however, a lively intercourse was maintained between the Latin Church in Jerusalem, which the clemency of the Arab conquerors tolerated, and the Christians of the West. Charlemagne in particular was closely connected with Jerusalem: the patriarch sent him the keys of the city and a standard in 8. Harun al- Rashid recognized this symbolical cession, and acknowledged Charlemagne as protector of Jerusalem and owner of the church of the Sepulchre. Charlemagne founded a hospital and a library in the Holy City; and later legend, when it made him the first of crusaders and the conqueror of the Holy Land, was not without some basis of fact. The connexion lasted during the 9th century; kings like Alfred of England and Louis of Germany sent contributions to Jerusalem, while the Church of Jerusalem acquired estates in the West. During the 1. 0th century this intercourse still continued; but in the 1. The fanaticism of the caliph Hakim destroyed the church of the Sepulchre and ended the Frankish protectorate (1. Holy Places, a source of strife between the Greek and the Latin Churches as late as the beginning of the Crimean War, passed to the Byzantine empire in 1. This latter change in itself made pilgrimages from the West increasingly difficult: the Byzantines, especially after the schism of 1. Victor II. But still worse for the Latins was the capture of Jerusalem by the Seljukian Turks in 1. Without being intolerant, the Turks were a rougher and ruder race than the Arabs of Egypt whom they displaced; while the wars between the Fatimites of Egypt and the Abbasids of Bagdad, whose cause was represented by the Seljuks, made Syria (one of the natural battle- grounds of history) into a troubled and unquiet region. The native Christians suffered; the pilgrims of the West found their way made still more difficult, and that at a time when greater numbers than ever were thronging to the East. Western Christians could not but feel hampered and checked in their natural movement towards the fountain- head of their religion, and it was natural that they should ultimately endeavour to clear the way. In much the same way, at a later date and in a lesser sphere, the closing of the trade- routes by the advance of the Ottoman Turks led traders to endeavour to find new channels, and issued in the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and the discovery of America. Nor, indeed, must it be forgotten that the search for new and more direct connexions with the routes of Oriental trade is one of the motives underlying the Crusades themselves, and leading to what may be called the 1. Asia. It was thus natural, for these reasons, that the conquest of the Holy Land should gradually become an object for the ambition of Western Christianity — an object which the papacy, eager to realize its dream of a universal Church subject to its sway, would naturally cherish and attempt to advance. Two causes combined to make this object still more natural and more definite. On the one hand, the reconquest of lost territories from the Mahommedans by Christian powers had been proceeding steadily for more than a hundred years before the First Crusade; on the other hand, the position of the Eastern empire after 1. Christian West, and proved, in the event, the immediate occasion of the holy war. As early as 9. 70 the recovery of the territories lost to Mahommedanism in the East had been begun by emperors like Nicephoras Phocas and John Zimisces: they had pushed their conquests, if only for a time, as far as Antioch and Edessa, and the temporary occupation of Jerusalem is attributed to the East Roman arms. At the opposite end of the Mediterranean, in Spain, the Omayyad caliphate was verging to its fall: the long Spanish crusade against the Moor had begun; and in 1. Roger de Toeni was already leading Normans into Catalonia to the aid of the native Spaniard. In the centre of the Mediterranean the fight between Christian and Mahommedan had been long, but was finally inclining in favour of the Christian.
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