Culture is Reality: Medieval Mind

• Film: Faith and Fear, 1-2-3

• Documents: Medieval World View

• Lecture: The Great Chain of Being and the Expansion of Europe

• Essay & FRQ: Continuity and Change ca. 1450

The Medieval World View: the Great Chain of Being

• All Europeans were what we call catholic and medieval thinkers used metaphor to describe society. The most comprehensive metaphor was the “Great Chain of Being”

• Started with a Ptolemaic universe with a series of concentric spheres with earth in the center and hell in absolute middle

• 5 Points to keep in mind:1. Hierarchical with god at the top and hell at the bottom2. As you ascend the chain you become closer to God

&Man is half-way3. Each rank can be further divided and subdivided – 9

kinds of angels4. Each rank resembles the whole – Lion was “King of the

Beasts”, King is God on Earth, Who’s King of the class?5. Chain not a ladder: every thing and being has a specific

place assigned by God• All about order: disobey, rebel, try to rise – Heresy one

and all• Why did people buy it

– Science and sermon of every person– Paternalism & Deference

• Aspirational and its inability to accommodating changing social realities will be a recurrent theme of our class

Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,Observe degree, priority, and place,Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,Office, and custom, in all line of order.

Church quote here

Social Organization: The Ancient Regime• Ancient Regime: Those who fight, those who pray,

those who work• Nobles are the governing class who power is based

on land ownership and who title would become inherited– Feudalism: King and the Political/Military Class– Classes of Nobles– Powers of Nobles: Seigniorial Privilege– Limits of feudalism, ties of personal oath and

obligation– Chivalry

• Clergy are of the same class as the former and/investiture conflict not withstanding, mutually dependent

• The Rest: Agricultural workers– Yeoman, cottagers, laborers– Manors manoralism

• Very poor

Growth of Towns and Cities•Towns formed around Bishop’s sees or seats of government

•Paris biggest at 200k, Venice and Naples 100k - London Amsterdam, Moscow, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, and Florence 50k – York, Milan Berlin 000’s – Cathedral cities and market towns like Antwerp Bruges Lyon would be several hundred

•Stadtluft macht frei nach Jahr und Tag – or – city air makes you free after a year and a day

•Towns had different corporate governmental organizations and ethos than the other 90% of society

– Dominated by Guilds who’s Burghers are the ancestors to the bourgeoisie (“bourg” is medieval French for a market town) of later times and their unique ideology, viz. capitalism

– Relation to the King, Land doesn’t belong to nobles so they can make no claim on the wealth the town generates

•Think of the ways the nascent capitalist does not conform to the feudal and chivalric code: How town life doesn’t comport with the Chain!

Commercialization• Agricultural specialization and

comercialization are of course linked and a catalyst to trade

• Fairs, leagues of cities, banking houses (Jacob Fugger), contract law, new accounting practices all advance trade

• Emerging power of central monarchies encourage and protect trade which becomes a source of wealth, power and a lever against the nobility

• Church relax rhetoric surrounding wealth and usury

• Italian city states create trade networks that integrate N. Europe with Islam and E. Asia

The Ghetto

Medieval Political Traditions

• England: Centrally administered state, national identy, in the direction of limmeted “constitutional” monarchy – how far can you go with this in 1450?

• France: Centrally administered state expanded to current boarders – in the direction of royal absolutism

• Ireland: Vikings and English

• Germany: Medieval Thicket

• Spain

• Italy

The Gunpowder Revolution

14th & 15th Century Warfare and the Emergence of the Modern “Gunpowder State”

Theodore Galle’s Nova Reperta

Medieval Warfare• The Mounted Knight was

the supreme offensive weapon– Agincourt &Longbow not

withstanding (1415)– Social Hierarchy that went

with it determined the political landscape

• Military was distinctly feudal (stop me here and define feudal with a few attributes)

• Castles lent defensive warfare overwhelming advantage– Siege Warfare– Political realities

Cannon

cannon video.wlmp

Gunpowder Revolution

• Introduction of Gunpowder cannon neatly reverses the previous equation– Offense now has advantage– Kings “decastle” their kingdoms

in the 50 years it takes architecture to adopt

• Reality reflected in the changed political landscape

• Cannon immensely expensive and require considerable industrial plant

• Musket Armies are the first and most important modern state institutions

– Taxation– Burocracy/rational origination

of governance grow from the appetite of gunpowder armies for money, men and expertise

Floating Castles – Trade Empires & Conquest

• Floating sovereignty – cannon and 200 ton ships immensely expensive yet could project power around the world

• Mediterranean Empires – shift West, Genoa Venice to Catalonia. State trade to conquest, gold, and slavery

• Portuguese caravels w. lateen sails• Portugal Azores by 1430, Cape

Good Hope 1488, DaGama in India 1498, 1511 in Malacca with a string of forts to make real their domination of the spice trade.

• Cape Verde Ils. & Slavery• Spain• Treaty of Tortisillas, 1494

16th Century “Castles”?

How did the “Gunpowder Revolution” change the political landscape of Europe in the 15th Century?

Putting these things Together = Decline of Aristocracy, Rise of Monarchy/Rise of the State

1. “As Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the foundations for a dynamic era of trading, global discovery, and statebuilding developed that would affect the lives of rich and poor alike for centuries.”

2. As previously mentioned “Burghers, town residents whose entrepreneurial activity made possible the economic dynamism of medieval Europe, despite their increasing importance,” were no respecters of the Great Chain & its three orders in society. Monarchs encouraged, taxed, and chartered their mini-constitutions and drew on towns to pry power from nobles.

3. Increasing value of peasant labor lead to an end to serfdom. A liberation movement which monarchs strongly supported (why? Merriman p.13)

4. Aristocrats increasingly engaged in commercial agriculture collecting rent and even beginning the process of enclosure– how does this shift political power to the monarch?

5. Gunpowder de-castles and changes the scale of military operations before the aristocracy has an opportunity adopt. By the time they do the fortification technology has been moved to what are essentially the national boundries of European states to this day.