I have always been interested in the end of the Middle Ages. My question is: the emergence into “Modern Times” was not uniform-the Renaissance started in Italy, and (slowly) moved north. So while the Italian city-states moved away from feudalism, armored knights, etc., and got into trade with the Far east, banking, etc.; places like Germany, Denmark, Sweden, etc. were still mired in the older customs. Were jousts and the like still going on when Columbus was setting sail? Are there any good books relating to this? I imagine the clothing styles in the northern countries wold have seemed hugely ot of date, to a Florentine traveler of the 1490’s-is this true?
I’m unclear what aspect of the Middle Ages you mean. The style of clothing matters little except as potential indicators of more important phenomena.
You mention feudalism. Feudalism is based on the lord giving the vassal land and the vassal in exchange providing labor, especially military labor. It’s an exchange of military benefit for economic benefit. What ended the Middles Ages were military and economic changes.
Militarily: Cannons made fortifications much less effective which made strategic attack more advantageous than it used to be.
Guns made cavalry and other forms of skilled fighters less effective. It was less about having a small amount of high quality troops and more about having large quantity of gunmen trained quickly. You need years to be a good archer of cavalryman. You need weeks to be a good gunman. And knights are quite vulnerable to gunmen; even during the English civil war in the mid 1600s, much of the cavalry was dragoons; infantrymen who travel by horse and wear little armor.
Hence, the noble vassals had less to provide to the lord since the lord could rely on lots of cheap and quickly-trained gunmen. You can see a centralization of power take place, the best example of which perhaps being Louis XIV. The map of Europe goes from showing the land holdings of noble families to showing nation-states.
Economically: From around the 1500s onward, first in the UK and Belgium, the proportion of farmers goes down. This indicates increases in agricultural productivity. Land was quite important because food was the primary economic good and land is how you produce food. With agricultural productivity increases, landholders are less powerful than they used to be because what they provide is less scarce. From the 1700s and especially the 1800s, tools and machines become more important than land.
Once you no longer have a class of expensively, lengthily trained warriors (nobles, originally) and once land is not the overwhelmingly important economic asset, feudalism has much less reason to be. Instead, you have countries which use the financial system to trade consumption for productivity increases to through mechanization and which rely on conscripted infantry and artillery.
I think one thing that helped kick-start a change was that after the recurrent sweeps of the Plague (in the late 1300s?) labor became in great demand and the surviving people could choose whose lands they wanted to work and for what compensation.
I’m not so sure I’d call the process “slow.” Slow compared to 2013, perhaps; pretty fast compared to 900 AD.
I agree that the Black Death, (1347+) was influential on many levels (not just labor shortages – diminished authority of the Church is another notable change). I’ll add that the reintroduction of currency (as opposed to barter/debt of service) was an enormous influence. I also think the discovery (by Europeans) of the New World had a large psychological impact.
From a lightly later date (the French Revolution, 1789) comes a similar sentiment: “The rifle made all men tall.”
The fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks and subsequent influx of refugees to Italy and elsewhere in Europe also helped jumpstart the Renaissance; the displaced brought with them a wealth of Eastern culture and knowledge that slowly spread and mingled with the local cultures to produce something new.
I’d suggest that there were two prime factors: the Black Death, and the invention of the printing press. The former changed the dynamics of labour and the latter enabled far greater dissemination of information and thus education.
It’s entertaining to speak to “horse collar” enthusiasts, who say that the invention of the horse collar allowed a significant increase in the amount of work that could be obtained from horses. This vast new supply of energy (they say) jolted the economy forward. A huge quantum leap.
(Er…no, it was one ingredient among many.)
There were also advance in ship construction. Shipbuilders developed techniques like carvel planking, multi-mast rigging, and stern rudders. Plus there were navigational techniques using compasses and Mercator projections. These ideas made long-distance oceanic travel possible.
As others have said, there were a great many innovations in science, technology and culture during the time period that we think of as the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. On the interesting question of why it began in Italy before spreading to northern Europe, I’d recommend The Victory of Reason, by Rodney Stark. His argument is that Italy’s advantage in the 13th and 14th centuries was advanced government, economic freedom, and property rights.
In government some Italian city-states experimented with democratic forms as early as the 1200’s. Of course this didn’t mean that everyone could vote, but even if only the wealthy landowners could influence the government, it still meant a much more responsive and less corrupt government than the monarchies that ruled most of Europe.
Economic freedom and property rights were the most important factor. For one, lending money at interest was illegal in most places, owing to religious objections to usury, but such laws were gradually removed in the late medieval period. To understand the big change, though, one needs to understand how economics worked in most ancient civilizations. In places like China and the Ottoman Empire, there was no guarantee of private property. If anyone became rich, the King/Emperor/Sultan could simply swoop down and steal that person’s money. It was not illegal to do so, because there was no law above the King/Emperor/Sultan. The King/Emperor/Sultan was the law. If you couldn’t get rich by working hard, than there wasn’t much motivation to work hard, and there certainly wasn’t much motivation to innovate. It was like this in most of medieval Europe too, more or less.
In the late Middle Ages, some Italian city-states began securing property rights and allowing people to keep whatever money they earned. Gradually the idea spread to northern Europe. Once people were allowed to earn and keep money, they had a strong motivation to earn as much as possible by whatever means they could come up with. This unleashed the blizzard of innovation that we now call the Renaissance.
It wasn’t just labor relations that changed after the Black Death. The millions who died left behind untold volumes of cash and property, giving the survivors a level of wealth and material prosperity they had never dreamed of. This laid the foundations for Capitalist society.
Political processes for the consolidation of the modern nation-state had also been underway for some time, particularly in England, Scotland, France, and Spain. It was no coincidence that Columbus’s first voyage came hard on the heels of the Spanish reconquista.
As I understand it, the collar enabled horses to pull larger loads at faster speeds, than similar-sized teams of oxen. This allowed farmers to plow larger fields and produce more grain, and allowed teamsters to transport more goods to market. Not a quantum leap, but small improvements add up.
There’s a good book about this introduction of knowledge called The Physician by Noah Gordon.
Wiki says the last jousting in England was in 1602 during Elizabeth I’s reign. (How can it know what was going on in outlaying areas or in woods practiced by boys?) But by then I’d say it was stylized. But yeah, it was still kind of going on when Columbus set sail.
Several factors others have mentioned (decreased military advantage of knights, increasing importance of cities, skilled labor and capital, rise of powerful banking families) all served to move power away from feudal vassals to the central authority of the kings. Central authority provided security for trade, banking, cities, etc., leading to a virtuous cycle.
Spain and France were each unified at about the same time as the other changes mentioned, and about when the New World was discovered. What are the cause/effect relationships? Precious metals from the New World fed Spanish power. Kings of England and France depended on borrowing. (But Western European kings had been borrowing for centuries before this era – was there some key 16th-century change in banking that affected the balance of power?)
According to Mankind – The Story of All of Us, a single mountain in the Spanish New World, Potosi, produced 80% of the world’s silver output for the next 400 years. That kind of wealth transformed the world. Silver “pieces of eight” became the world’s first international currency. Among other things, the Taj Mahal was funded by Potosi silver (earned through the spice trade).
Protestantism. Or rather, Catholicism no longer having as much power as it used to to forbid charging interest. Interesting is rather important to banking.
Before then, interest could be charged but you had to be stealthy about it and take roundabout ways which likely cut down on how much interest was charged and therefore how much financial instruments were used. That made it more difficult to transform potential consumption into capital.
And in the end, France and England prospered, while Spain crashed and burned at a high rate of speed, cratering so badly that they effectively remove themselves from history for the next 350 years.
Growth of population would be my primary pick.
Population growth is THE force of nature, so to speak, that seeks more of the natural riches to be found, divided and utilized by more people.
Transportation progress called for viable alternative to real estate being the primary asset of rich people or people who had ability to create wealth.
Enter money.
No, it went on after her reign into her successor’s.