#100 Unit 1 - The Middle Ages Quick Review

Speaker 1 Buenos quesadillas, ages 13 and 14. The teenage years. Lots of change. Things are growing, hormones are flowing, lots of upheaval. Interestingly enough, ages 13 and 14 aren't all that different from what was going on in Europe in the 1300s and 1400s. Upheaval and change. You're listening to episode 100 of Unit 1. Lend Eurozone. Let's get started. Speaker 2 Welcome to the Lind Eurozone Euro Simplified podcast where we take the big ideas of the AP European History curriculum and make them easier to understand so that you can excel. My name is Robert Lind and I've been teaching European History for over 2 decades now and it is my mission to make my passion, European History and the AP Euro curriculum as easy to understand. Speaker 1 As possible remember you can. Speaker 2 Support the Lind Eurozone podcast by telling your friends about it and by also checking out the Lind eurozone.com website that's. Speaker 1 Lyn. Speaker 2 DEU. Speaker 1 Roz. Speaker 2 ONE. Speaker 1 Let's get moving. So, yeah, the big idea that I want you all to have today is that the 1300s and the 1400s are a time of great change. And, you know, it's considered to be the end of the Middle Ages. Technically, the AP Euro curriculum does not start until 1450. But if we were to just start teaching you here at 1450 what was going on out of nowhere and you had no context, it would kind of like being at a Star Wars film, a Star Wars movie, and not having that gold writing coming across the screen at the very beginning to give you the nature of what's going on. So what we're looking at today is historical context, and historical context is something you're going to have to get really familiar with if you're going to be successful in AP Euro. So we're going to start with it today. OK, So what were the Middle Ages roughly? It's a time period from when Rome falls in what most historians argue to be 476 AD, And it goes until about what we would say is 1450, which is essentially the the Renaissance. Now, it's not as if one day in 1450, everybody walked outside and went, Oh my God, thank goodness it's the Renaissance. Finally, it's here. Nobody knew it was happening, but we can look back and see that something different was definitely happening. And by 1450, the Renaissance had definitely taken root. So the Middle Ages, often known as the medieval era, sometimes inappropriately called the Dark Ages. OK. Its characteristics were a governing system called feudalism, which is basically a shared system of governing between the king and a noble or nobles, and, you know, kings, nobles, Knights, peasants. Catholicism was the only faith in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, and it wasn't even really called Catholicism. It was just called the church, you know, and it's not the church, the building, it's the church, the people, the religion. In fact, Europe wasn't even called Europe. It was a technically at this point called Christendom because Europe was for the most part, a Christian continent. So let's discuss feudalism a little bit more and kind of make sure we have a handle on it. Who were these kings? Who were these nobles? Who were these peoples? Rome falls in 476 AD, and Rome was an amazing empire, a huge, highly developed civilization, roads, military, massive economy, which is an early form of capitalism. It was an immense, immense empire that pretty much covered all of southern Europe and got all the way up into England. And in 476, for a number of reasons, for about 200 years, Rome had been weakening. And then in 476 roughly, and that's debatable too, but it falls. It falls to northern Germanic tribes who are coming in and we see the empire collapse and we see a regression within European civilization with the government collapse, the economy collapsed and everything had to kind of return to a more basic system of living, and feudalism was the governing system that will come about. Feudalism is basically structured around a king, but that king is not the most powerful person in the system. There actually isn't a most powerful person in the feudal system. A lot of movies will give you this notion that kings controlled all things in the Middle Ages, and that's just not true. What feudalism is, is a warrior culture that develops in order to maintain stability, collect taxes, and make certain that lands are protected. So basically a king, or the descendants of these kings of Europe that we're going to learn about are essentially these people, these men that ended up some, for some reason, controlling an area of land. But he needs protection. And how does he get that protection? He's going to put nobles around him. He's going to put nobles around him in castles. And from there, those nobles are going to each maintain their own small military band of warriors called Knights. And those nights are going to constantly be training, but there actually weren't that many of them. And then finally, there's going to be farming going on on that land, and that's going to be done by peasants. And then you're going to have a few skilled artisans living in small towns and performing more skilled activities that are needed, like butchers, bakers, Candlestick makers, you know, blacksmiths, that sort of thing. And that's essentially the feudal system and basically what a king would do if he were to get attacked. The noble is supposed to hold things together where the attack is coming until more nobles and their Knights and their peasants can come and fight. These armies were not professional armies. They were peasant armies. They were farmer armies, and everybody believed that they were meant to protect those who were above them. In fact, when a king gave noble land, in return, the noble gave an oath of fealty, saying that he would protect the king and be loyal to the king. And this agreement, this oath of fealty went on in perpetuity, meaning that noble, his son was going to be the next noble of that land, and his son was going to be the next noble of that land, and that king, his son, was going to be the next king of that land. This basically, this system basically leaves power resting in what could probably be safely estimated to be about 2% of the European populace. About 2% of the European populace control the economy, controlled the government, and everybody else was pretty darn poor, especially early on in the Middle Ages. We're going to see that change. We're going to see the economy develop. But for the sake of the day, and what you need to know, that is feudalism in a nutshell. It's basically a system that is meant to be a warrior economy, prevent invasions, and protect the king and the land. And about 9598% of the people were living pretty poorly in that system. The other system that we need to talk about is the church hierarchy, which was, interestingly enough, organized in a manner that was quite similar to the feudal system. We got to go back a little bit though, and understand a few things here. Roman Emperor Constantine chose the Pope, and the word Pope just means father in Latin to lead the Church of Rome before he left Rome to go live in Constantinople, which is Istanbul today. And that's going to happen in the three hundreds, early, three hundreds after the fall of Roman 476 AD. Later, popes continued on in the role of leading the faith from Rome, and popes and kings throughout this medieval time period often struggled for power. Who held more authority? Was it the earthly king that was more in power and more powerful? Or was it the godly Pope who is Christ's vicar or God's presence on earth? Who held more power and authority? Who were this people supposed to be loyal to, their king or the Pope? So during the Middle Ages, popes were very concerned with wealth, power and war. And still they were very, there were very devout Christians at this time period, even though the church leadership was not very focused on faith. So the big idea that we're looking at today is throughout the Middle Ages, the feudal system and church hierarchy maintained political, economic, religious, social, intellectual and artistic control of Europe. OK. For roughly 1000 years after the fall of Rome, the feudal system and the church maintained stability throughout Europe, and there wasn't any kind of real change. And the real reason there wasn't any kind of real change was because those two power structures controlled everything. What we're looking at today is trying to understand what happened in the 1300s and 1400s to bring about that change. Why did it change? How did it change? And if the Middle Ages were still going on today, what position would you be in society? Think about that. 98% of the people were pretty darn poor. It's not a good system, the Middle Ages. But hey, it worked for that time until we get to the Renaissance. OK. So these are the questions that we're looking to ask. So our guiding question is what were the major factors that brought an end to the Middle Ages and allowed for the beginning of the Renaissance? And it's going to start with basically three things. There's three things we're looking at today, and I'm going to go over each one here hopefully pretty darn quickly. So let's really get into these and let's understand what they are. So the first of these things is this war, interestingly enough, called the 100 Years War, which actually lasted 106 years. Trust me, the people who started this war, we're not the people who finished this war. It's basically between England and France. And the whole nitty gritty of it is, and you don't need to know this with any depth or complexity, but the nitty gritty of it is the king of England thinks he deserves the French throne. The French nobility don't want an English king, so they pick a noble to be their king. And so starts the 100 years war. Now a couple things to kind of remember here is that France looks nothing like what France does today. It was a very weak country, had a weaker military. They weren't really united. And the king wasn't really all that trusted by his own nobles because they picked him simply because they didn't want an English king. England at this time was much more powerful, and England had the safety of being an island nation. OK, a couple of factors about this war. It wasn't constant fighting for 106 years. In fact, they went many years, decades at a time without fighting. And separate issues and peace treaties would come about. They would fall apart. The fighting would start again. And it was just going on and on. And everybody thought it would end for a while, come back. So it's not so much the 100 Years War that you need to understand here. What you need to understand here are two developments in the 100 Years War that are going to forever change the feudal system. The first of those two things, this is item number one that we're looking at of the three things we're looking at today. But there were two technological developments, OK? The first one, weapons technology. Weapons technology is going to be the major change. The Longbow, OK, what was it? OK, it was an English device and you know, to kind of like highlight the thinking that was going on in the Middle Ages. It took them around 1000 years to figure out that if they made the arrows longer and the bow bigger, it was a more powerful weapon. I know. See, that's the problem with the Middle Ages. With only 2% of your population having power, the other 98% don't really get involved in things. And it's when we start educating more people that we get greater degrees of innovation. So nevertheless, the Longbow comes about and it shoots an arrow that flies so much further and so much more accurately. And more importantly, it can Pierce a Knight's armor from over 200 yards away. That is a really significant thing because if you remember the feudal system is a warrior culture, and now you've got a guy 200 yards away with a Longbow that can do nothing but practice that Longbow, shooting it, becoming accurate with it. And so there he is 200 yards away and he takes down the knight. And you know, I don't know if you know what happens when the knight gets taken down, but those peasant farmers, they look at their knight down on the ground and they run away. So England had the Longbow and that's going to automatically put them at an advantage. Most importantly about this is something just became obsolete because of the Longbow, and that's Knights, and Knights were in charge of warfare. The warfare system is going to need to change. If the warfare system is changing, then the feudal system needs to change because all feudalism is is a warrior culture, warrior government. OK, the second thing that came about technological weapons, technology advancement that came about in this time period was cannons. Cannons are going to come about, gunpowder is going to make its way to Europe, and cannons were not used on people. That's not what was going on at this time. Cannons were basically used to rolled up to a castle wall, the corner of a castle, and they just launched cannonballs into that corner until the castle came down. Now the whole purpose of the castle was for the noble and the people to run inside and wait for other nobles from other areas to come and support them in the war. It wasn't working anymore. Castles are now obsolete because of the Canon, Knights are obsolete because of the Longbow, and both of these things were basically the skeletal system of this feudal system. Things are changing and it wouldn't be too long from this point where those cannons got smaller and smaller and they became something known as a Harkabus, which then pretty much becomes a gun, which will later on become the rifle. OK, so it's making the feudal system obsolete. Interestingly enough, England's not going to win this 100 years war. France is going to rally around in an early form of nationalism around a 15 year old girl who's going to lead them to numerous victories, and that would be Joan of Arc. I'm not really going to go into too much depth on Joan of Arc today. Really cool story. Check it out on your own. She's not going to be on the AP test. She's not in the curriculum, but it is a pretty neat story. So what is the significance of this 100 years war? First of all, France won. England's claim to power in France was ended in England held no political power in continental Europe from that point forward. That's not the most significant though. Here they are the most significant things. The development in the use of the longboat weaken the role of Knights and medieval warfare. The development of the Canon weaken the role of the castle in medieval warfare. So changes in medieval warfare weaken the feudal system and allowed for more change in the coming centuries, which are things that you're going to see. So let's now move on to the second major thing that will bring about an end to the Middle Ages, and that is going to be a number of crises within the late medieval church in Christendom. Essentially, it's going to boil down to two things, 2 developments, and the first one was the corruption of the clergy. At this time, the priesthood had become very, very unfocused on the main tenants of Christianity. The main tenants of Christianity, and this is open to some interpretation, but if we were to look at the life of Jesus, the ideas were to spread the faith, heal the sick and feed the poor. That was what the main mission of the church was. And the church got very unfocused on from that mission in this thousand years known as the Middle Ages. Clergy, the priesthood, it kind of became if you could get into the priesthood, you lived an easier life. Priests always had food because people gave food to the poor by giving it to the priest with the idea that the priest would give it to the poor. Priests were often in this time period. We have a lot of documents talking about priests being drunk. You can look at some of them by Desidarius Erasmus and see his whole take on this problem. Countless popes. Two were very focused on power. They wanted to be more powerful than kings. Also in this time, we see numerous popes having children and I don't know if you know anything about the Catholic Church, but priests aren't allowed to get married. They take a vow of celibacy. And so the Pope's were very far removed from this. Many of the Pope's of this time period were they often claimed that these these children that were running around the Vatican were their nephews. So that's the first main issue with Christendom at this time period is that the leadership had just become very removed from the mission of, of Christianity, which again, spread the faith, heal the sick, feed the poor, and they weren't really engaging in that anymore. Now, that's not to say that there weren't good followers of the faith out there. You just weren't necessarily finding them within the higher ranks of the power structure of the religion. And that leads us to the second one here. And that would be the great Schism. And this is the greatest example of church power and corruption. There's only supposed to be 1 Pope at a time. And in 1378, the Italian Cardinals in the Vatican elected an Italian Pope, but the French Cardinals claimed that it was a fraudulent vote. So the French Cardinals are going to pack up and leave and they're going to go to a southern French city known as Avignon and hold another vote. And they elected a French Pope. So we've got a Pope in Rome, we've got a Pope in Avignon, 2 popes. At the same time, neither Pope was interested in the church. They wanted power and access to the church wealth. And this is basically going to split at split Europe up, you know, Ireland and England and and what is now Germany and Italy. Of course they went with the Pope in Rome, but. What is now Spain today, France, Scotland, they followed the Pope in Avignon. And so we see Europe fragmented following two different popes at this time. And it led to a major awakening to a lot of followers like how is this? How is this? This isn't really what was supposed to be going on and everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people really began to see the church as corrupt and started realizing it. And I do want to point out there were, like I said already, there were some great examples of very devout Christian faith going on at this time period, especially amongst the the laypeople, the regular people within Christianity. And we saw some really good priests too, priests like priests like John Wickliffe, Johann, who's they were staying very devout to the faith and actually pointing out the corruption and saying something needed to be done and they're going to pay a price for it too. So the first thing we looked at was the changes in weapons technology that are going to weaken the feudal system. The second thing that we were looking at were the changes within Christendom, in the Catholic faith at this time period. Let's make sure we understand the significance of that one, OK? The corruption of the clergy was causing many to feel that they could not trust the clergy. And then you get the great schism that showed that the papacies was not focused on the mission of feeding the poor, healing the sick, and spreading the faith. Most Christians went to church because they had to, not because they wanted to. They didn't understand the services because they were conducted in Latin, and this motivated them to turn to educated laypeople for spiritual guidance and understanding. And the overall big picture here is we are just seeing the followers of Christianity looking to people other than the priesthood for guidance, and that's going to eventually be something that erodes the Middle Ages and allows for something new to develop. Finally, the last one and the Big 1 arriving in Italy in 1347, we are going to see a disease show up and that disease is the Black Death, the bubonic plague. The culprits of this were the bacteria, fleas and rats. Rats can go for a while with having the bubonic plague and they probably came on ships that were traveling from Asia, coming into the ports in Italy. And then the rats get off the ships. Please bite the rats, fleas bite the people, and there you go. There was a couple of things that kind of made you're a very susceptible to the bubonic plague prior, in the decades prior to the 1350s, we saw a number of famines which brought down the food supply, weaken the people of Europe in many ways. But in 13 Fourty 7, the plague reaches Constantinople and then pretty quickly it's in Italy. And basically it's spreads just highly, highly contagious. And nobody really understood what was going on in medicine at this time, wasn't really prepared for anything. It was a horrible, horrible time. There became this massive obsession with death. Doctors at this time period didn't know what to do. There's a phrase in a book by Boccaccio, and it says the victims ate lunch with their friends and dinners with their ancestors. In fact, the little childhood game Ring Around the Rosy is not actually a childhood game. It's a story about kids whose parents had died from the Black Plague and they were going out into a field and holding hands in a circle and saying that they they were praying for death. Ring around the Rosy pocketful of posies. Ashes, ashes we all fall down. We'll ring around the rosy. You get a rosy rash with the ring around it. You know, you've got the plague pocketful of posies. They kept, you know, potion pedals and and other little things. They thought these, these little potions that they carried with them will protect them from the fleas and the disease didn't work. And then finally, last but not least, ashes. Ashes. We all fall down. Well, the ashes are from all of the bodies that are being burned. That's what was going on. Yeah. It's kind of funny. We, we, we do that with our kindergarteners today. OK, So what is the real significance of the plague, though? I mean, it was a horrible time and we see a major, major change out of it because what's essentially going to happen is 35% to 70% of the European population was taken out. And I always just tell my students, it's best just to say around 50% of the European population was taken down. Well, what happens to the economy today if we take 50% of the population out? The economy is going to falter. And that's essentially what happened in Europe. And with much fewer people, you don't have enough people to farm. So you're going to have ensuing famines that develop after that. And we're actually going to see the plague return a number of times, and it's going to happen again and again. So the Black Death played a major role in bringing down the European economy. It it weakened governments. They didn't have soldiers, they didn't have means in order to collect taxes, and they didn't have people to collect the taxes from. It also had a huge effect on religion and spirituality, because a lot of people just sort of lost their faith in that whole event. A lot of people thought it was the end of times and it didn't end up being the end of times. So what effect did the Black Death have on peasants? Well, it actually had a good effect on them. It didn't have a good effect on the ones that went through it, but it had a really good effect on them in terms those peasants who survived or now worth a whole lot more. There were not enough peasants to do the work that needed to be done. And when you don't have enough people to do the work that you needed to be done, you're going to have to raise wages in order to entice people. And this is exactly what we are going to see happen with those peasants. So let's go ahead and let's look at what we talked about today. We looked at the three major things. They're going to bring an end to the Middle Ages. And we what we saw was #1 changes in weapons technology, specifically the Longbow and the Canon, which are going to change that feudal system of governing. Change is going to need to be developed, which you will see because of those two weapons technologies. The second thing we looked at were the problems within Christianity at this time. We saw corrupt clergy and we saw the greatest example of that corruption, which was the Great Schism. Finally, the third thing and probably the greatest factor in this time period was the Black Death, which decimated the European population. And for those that survived, they had more bargaining power in the future, which meant further change to the economy. And that's in a lot of ways what the Renaissance is really about. the Renaissance is about a change to the economy, which brings around new wealth, it brings around new learning and new art and new ways of doing things. So this time period kind of like being 1314 years old, the 1300s and 1400s in Europe or a time of difficult change. All right, that about does it. Today we're just under 30 minutes, which I consider to be too long of a podcast, but the future ones will be shorter. We need to delay the groundwork today so that you could be successful in European history. Speaker 2 Thanks for joining us today. Check out my lendeurozone.com website to find out more about. Speaker 1 How you can? 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