by Ian Mortimer
As more people took to the roads, it became easier to do so. The bonds that bound serfs to their manors, meaning that they were unable to leave without the permission of their lords, started to break down as they journeyed to markets and fairs. Inns and monastic guest houses sprang up to cater for travellers. Wooden bridges were rebuilt in stone, securing river crossings. Roads were cleared of undergrowth on either side to prevent thieves from lurking there. The very fact that there were more travellers gave them greater security. For example, people would gather at an inn and set out together in a group, so that they could defend themselves if they were attacked. Obviously the further you travelled from home the greater the risks. But even merchants passing through foreign kingdoms could feel safer. The more thorough application of the law, discussed above, meant that they could take legal action if the worst came to the worst and they were robbed, assaulted or defrauded on their journey.
We cannot do justice to thirteenth-century travel fully without looking at the voyages to the Far East. Earlier geographical knowledge had been limited to what was preserved in the stories of Alexander the Great’s travels to India, the natural histories of Pliny and Solinus, and by the geographers of the classical world. The Hereford world map illustrates the knowledge of the world in this century, showing little detail east of Jerusalem apart from the Red Sea (with a passage marking Moses’s route through it), the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Ganges. Strange beasts adorn its further edges. However, this charming naivety masks a deep concern about the threat from the East. In the late 1230s Ogedai, the son of Genghis Khan, led the Mongol armies into Russia; soon afterwards, his kinsmen added parts of Germany, Poland and Hungary to their list of conquests. In 1243 the newly elected Pope Innocent IV decided to make contact with the Mongol leaders in an effort to convert them to Christianity. Two missions set out two years later, one led by Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, a Franciscan, and the other by the Dominican Ascelin of Cremona. Ogedai’s son, Guyuk Khan, responded by asking the pope to come and swear allegiance to him. Understandably, the pope declined, but two further missions to the East followed, led by the Dominican friar Andrew of Longjumeau and the Franciscan William of Rubruck. In 1254 William entered the Mongol capital of Karakorum – only to find the Hungarian-born son of an Englishman already ensconced there, as well as a Hungarian-born Frenchwoman and the nephew of a Norman bishop, hinting at all those unrecorded long-distance journeys that were undertaken but are hardly known to us.12
Ten years after these expeditions, the Venetian merchants Niccoló and Maffeo Polo set out on their first great venture into the Far East. On their second journey they took with them Niccoló’s son, Marco. But perhaps the most significant thirteenth-century expedition was that of the Franciscan friar Giovanni de Montecorvino, who was sent as an envoy to Kublai Khan, the conqueror of China, in 1289. He reached Peking in 1294, just after Kublai Khan’s death. He remained there and began to convert the Chinese to Christianity, becoming the first archbishop of Peking in 1307.
The thirteenth century was not only when travel became common for the majority of people; it was also when Christian travellers reached places that before had only been touched by ancient legends. By 1300, the furthest outposts of the Christian world were almost 5,400 miles apart – from Garar on Greenland in the west to Peking in the east. Neither of these would prove permanent: the Christians were ousted from Peking in the fourteenth century and the worsening weather put an end to Gar in the early fifteenth. But the change in the Western imagination would endure, and it is best exemplified in the travels of Marco Polo. Dictated in jail to a fellow prisoner, Polo’s book included eye-popping information about the massive populations and wealth of the cities in China and Indonesia. His vivid descriptions of their customs, so different from Western practices, left Christians agog. When these stories accompanied the silks and spices that could increasingly be found in the markets and fairs of Europe, people began to wonder about Asia and the rest of the world in an entirely new way. Travelling to the Far East when you believe it is full of dragons and monsters is unwise; going there when you know it to be full of riches, with a Christian archbishop already in place in Peking, is a much more alluring prospect.
Conclusion
There can be little doubt that the great shift of the thirteenth century is that of trade. Everyone took one step up the cosmopolitan ladder: the peasant became more familiar with the market town; the burgher from the market town visited the city more regularly, and the prosperous merchants from the major cities travelled further and more frequently, even to international fairs. It leaves me with an image of a humble man sitting in his cottage, carving a wooden bowl. Suddenly he hears a knock at the door. When he opens it, a merchant is standing there, offering him silver in return for his bowl. Another merchant is coming up behind the first, dragging a goat with him, which he wants to sell for the silver our humble man has just earned. There is a third merchant behind the second, carrying a metal bowl that is far more attractive than the wooden ones that our humble man has carved all his life; this he offers to exchange for the goat. Suddenly our humble man is inundated with people all offering goods to sell or asking to buy his wares. There is rabble and noise where before there was only silence. Above it all a preacher’s voice rings out, urging our man to relinquish his money-making ways and to follow the path of penury and self-denial. A clerk also arrives, presenting him with a list of his rights on the manor, and an account of the corn he has set aside against the winter. The outside world has intruded on his life and, very clearly, it is here to stay.
What is striking about these changes is their universality. Even in Moreton, everyone’s lives would have been affected. In 1207, the lord’s demesne land next to the church was laid out as a market square, with a dozen burgage plots located around its perimeter. The ancient house I now live in stands on a road that once marked the southern edge of this market square. In the 1290s it was inhabited by a chaplain, Adam de Moreton, who no doubt strolled out among the stalls with his servant to buy eggs and meat, cloth and candles. People would have come in from the surrounding villages on market days, and from further afield when the five-day fair was held here, on the feast of St Margaret. Friars would have preached in the marketplace. In 1300, after Adam de Moreton had been appointed vicar of St Marychurch, which is 19 miles away, he sold this house to a local man, Henry Suter. A deed was drawn up conveying the property, and although Suter was probably illiterate, his family kept that deed carefully until his descendants sold the house in 1525. In the twelfth century, such a transaction would not even have been written down, let alone kept.
The proceedings of the manorial courts in Moreton similarly started to be written down on court rolls from the 1280s, as they were in the adjacent manor, Doccombe (whose court rolls still exist). Moretonians guilty of moral crimes would have been summoned to make the 24-mile journey to Totnes to attend the archdeaconry court, taking a number of witnesses with them to swear an oath to attest to their innocence. Those guilty of felonies would have been forcibly marched to Exeter Castle to await trial. The bishop of Exeter would have visited the parish as he went around his diocese dedicating the altars of the churches, newly rebuilt with the proceeds of the wool trade. Even in such a quiet, remote place as Moreton, where no one would have heard of William of Rubruck or Marco Polo, daily life changed for ever.
The principal agent of change
If this book was about world history, there would be no doubt who was the principal agent of change. Genghis Khan’s reputation, floating on the ocean of blood that stretched from China to the Caspian Sea, has no rival. The devastation he caused, continued by his son and grandsons to the detriment of eastern Europe, led directly to the West forging links with the East for the first time. His genocides destroyed the ability of the East to take the initiative in bringing new trade to the West. He therefore inadvertently broadened the horizons of Christendom as well as creating new opportunities for its merchants. However, in our story of change
in the West, Genghis Khan is only a peripheral player. A more influential figure lurks at the heart of Europe in the person of Lotario dei Conti, otherwise known as Pope Innocent III.
Innocent III was one of the last popes to influence rulers and decision-makers at every level of society throughout Christendom. At the top end, he not only held firm against John of England; he forcibly annulled several European royal marriages and issued the decree ‘Venerabilem’ that finally established the relationship between the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope. At the lower end, he understood the inclinations of the masses over whom he spiritually ruled. His reception of Francis of Assisi is a good example: had he decided that the impoverished man was a ne’er-do-well, he could have sent him packing and thereby labelled a group of fervent preachers heretics. He would thus have deprived the Catholic Church of the Franciscan friars, who became one of its most powerful tools. Much the same can be said for his encouragement of Dominic de Guzman. Dominic had originally wanted to convert pagans on the fringes of Europe; it was Innocent who directed him to undertake the correction of heretics and thereby gave the Blackfriars one of their key purposes. Innocent’s exhortations to the Spanish kings to collaborate in the Reconquista bore fruit in the victory at Las Navas de Tolosa, which paved the way for the reconquest of almost all of Spain by the end of the century. His determination to make every major church in Christendom teach men to read and write further accelerated the spread of literacy. There can be no doubt that he was the most influential Christian of the century. On the other hand, in some respects he was hugely conservative: he was opposed to the erosion of royal absolutism, as his condemnation of Magna Carta reveals. But as we have already seen with Bernard of Clairvaux, a determination to resist change can end up causing it – a point to which we will return at the end of this book. Innocent’s role with regard to the Cathars is particularly telling in this regard: his firm stance against heretics in general and the Cathars in particular not only maintained the hegemony of the Catholic Church; it also led to the Inquisition. For all these reasons, therefore, I cannot see a rival to Innocent III as the principal agent of change for the thirteenth century.
1301–1400
The Fourteenth Century
Medieval people did not understand social history. When artists depicted scenes from the Bible or from Roman times in stained-glass windows, carved sculptures and illuminated manuscripts, they showed people wearing medieval clothes, living in medieval houses and sailing medieval ships. However, just suppose that an exceedingly well-informed and imaginative monk was consulting all the historical sources available to him in his cloister in the year 1300. This would no doubt have led him to believe that mankind had been fortunate over the last three centuries – or, to put it in the religious framework of his own time: that God had been good to Christendom. Economically, western Europe had gone from strength to strength. The population had increased enormously. Towns whose residents had once lived in fear of attack were now well defended, and rural areas were no longer under threat. Such a monk could quite reasonably have seen the Church as the principal architect and facilitator of these developments. The Church had acted as an agent for peace both by extending the borders of Christendom and by attempting to calm the warring factions within them, concentrating Christian violence on specific targets at the periphery and beyond. It had taught many people to read and write. It had developed a moral code for all Christians to follow, and encouraged courts to impose punishments should that moral law be broken. Our imaginary monk could have been confident that God was acting for the well-being of the whole of Christendom in almost every way possible. He would not have had such confidence a hundred years later.
By 1300, the situation was already changing. A succession of poor harvests in the last decade of the thirteenth century led to severe food shortages in northern France and the Low Countries. In 1309, excessive rainfall caused a major famine throughout Europe. And things then went from bad to worse. There had been many famines in the past, of course, but the population had always bounced back rapidly because of the high crop yields attainable. These were no longer the norm. Decades of intensive cultivation had steadily depleted the nitrogen in the soil to the extent that simply leaving a field fallow was no longer enough to reinstate its fertility. Wheat yields that in 1200 had been as high as 6:1 (six seeds harvested for every seed planted) had fallen to 2:1 by 1300; barley and rye yields had fallen from 4:1 to 2:1.1 When the productiveness of the land was so low it was not possible for the population to recover quickly. Suppose a peasant had the use of 25 acres – a large amount of land for a manorial tenant in early-fourteenth-century England. Let us say that he had sufficient corn from the previous year’s good harvest to plant 50 bushels and achieved a yield of 5:1, so he reaped 250 bushels from his 25 acres. At the end of that year, presuming he felt confident of another yield of 5:1 the following year, he could have set aside 50 bushels for seed corn, the same for his draught animals and 75 bushels for himself and his family: that would have left him 75 bushels to take to market.2 If the next year’s harvest turned out to be a bad one, however, yielding a return of just 3:1, he would have harvested only 150 bushels. That would have left him with nothing to take to market. After he had fed himself, his family and his animals, he would have had only 25 bushels of seed corn – half of what he needed to plant his land. Even a good harvest in the third year at a yield of 5:1 would have left him only just enough to feed his family and livestock, with no seed corn for the following year.
In reality, conditions were even harder than the above example suggests. Most peasants had less than 25 acres, yields dropped below 3:1, and the weather could cause far more damage than one slightly bad harvest in three years. When harvests failed completely due to early or late frosts – and the average temperature was decreasing at this time, with dire consequences for upland areas – people starved to death in their thousands. And when there were consecutive harvest failures, it was nothing short of a catastrophe. Europe’s population was thus suffering even before the terrible famines of 1315–19. It has been estimated that 10 per cent of the population was killed by these natural adversities, which means that more than 10 million people across Christendom either starved to death or died of illnesses arising from nutritional deficiency.3 It marked the end of three centuries of almost uninterrupted demographic and commercial expansion.
But that was nothing compared with what was to follow.
The Black Death
It is difficult to convey just what a shattering event the Black Death was. When I used to give lectures on fourteenth-century England, and stressed how catastrophic the years 1348–9 were, there would always be someone who insisted that it could not have been as terrible as the First World War, or as frightening as the Blitz. I would explain that the British mortality rate in the First World War was 1.55 per cent of the population over four years: an average rate of 0.4 per cent per year. The Black Death killed roughly 45 per cent of the population of England over a period of about seven months as it passed over the country like a wave: an annual mortality rate of 77 per cent.4 Thus the mortality rate in 1348–9 was about 200 times that of the First World War. Or, to put it in a way that compares with the bombing of the Second World War: to replicate the plague’s intensity of killing you would have had to drop not just two atomic bombs on Japan (each one killing about 70,000 people or 0.1 per cent of the population) but 450 such devices. That’s two atomic bombs every day on a different city over a period of seven months. Had that happened, no one would have doubted that it was the worst calamity in human history. But the plague struck such a long time ago, and we are so far removed from the culture of the victims, that we cannot appreciate death on such a scale. We find it much easier to comprehend the trauma of parents who lost their much-loved sons in the First World War than the fate of whole communities that were wiped out in the fourteenth century.
The Black Death was the first wave of the second pandemic of an enzootic disease, often called bubonic p
lague on account of the black buboes that grew in the groin and armpits of infected victims. Its pathogen is a bacillus, Yersinia pestis, which is carried by fleas that normally live on rodents but which can also be spread by human fleas. In certain circumstances it can spread via the breath of infected victims too. The current thinking is that if pneumonia occurs in the course of the disease’s development, the bacilli are exhaled and the airborne disease is communicated directly from human to human. In this form it is not correctly described as bubonic plague but rather becomes the far more dangerous pneumonic plague.
The first pandemic had taken place 800 years previously, breaking out in 541. That forerunner of the Black Death retained its virulence throughout the sixth century but gradually weakened as the years went by. It finally disappeared in the 760s. By 1347, no one had seen plague in Europe for almost 600 years. Thus no one was prepared for the consequences of its reappearance, which was first noted in China in 1331. Carried by the merchants travelling along the Silk Road, it arrived in the Crimea in the autumn of 1347, where its victims boarded the Genoese ships bound for Constantinople. From there it spread to Sicily, Greece, Egypt and North Africa, Syria and the Holy Land. By the end of 1347 it had arrived in the commercial heart of Christendom – the trading cities of Venice, Pisa and Genoa – in its most dangerous pneumonic form. The cities affected quickly saw the bodies mount up: mortality figures in excess of 40 per cent were normal.
