This is a follow-up to the post "A Failure In The Grand Experiment In Democracy"
The demise of the feudal system in Europe can be attributed to three events: the black death, the invention of the printing press and the Reformation movement under Martin Luther.
The Black Death (black plague, bubonic plague) was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, peaking in Europe between 1348 and 1350. It is widely thought to have been an outbreak of bubonic plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, but this view has recently been challenged. Usually thought to have started in Central Asia, it had reached the Crimea by 1346. From there, probably carried by fleas residing on the black rats that were regular passengers on merchant ships, it spread throughout theMediterranean and Europe. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population, reducing the world's population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in 1400. This created a series of religious, social and economic upheavals which had profound effects on the course of European history. It took 150 years for Europe's population to recover. The plague returned at various times, resulting in a larger number of deaths, until it left Europe in the 19th century.
One of the significant repercussions of the black death was that it killed just as many Lords of the Manor as it did peasants. Almost overnight, peasants found themselves the beneficiaries of the towns within a Lordship in which they lived as well as the farmland surrounding the manor. When the Lord of the Manor perished, the people's business in the towns--the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, if you will--suddenly found themselves owners of their proprietorship. Farmers struggling on small acreages enjoyed the same. As more died, those who survived took their places or expanded their holdings. Towns flourished and farmers prospered, supplying wheat, barley, rye and cotton to the merchants to ply their trades.
The people, however, remained, for the most part illiterate, still tied strongly to the Catholic Church. The church had been hard hit, as many of its friars and priests in the monasteries died while ministering to the sick. The church, though wealthy itself and now the owner of huge tracts of land, continued to demand money from the peasants, promising them favor with God if they gave tribulation to Rome.
It had been the role of the priests and friars, among the few of the civilization of the time who could read and write, to transcribe the Bible and other manuscripts of the church as the hierarchy saw fit. They then passed on to the peasants the dictates of the church. After the plague eliminated so many of them, scribes copied and translated the Bible into various languages.
The invention of the printing press by the German Gutenberg was going to have a profound effect on that as well as every other aspect of life in the Middle Ages.
Previously, books were copied mainly in monasteries, or (from the 13th century) in commercial scriptoria, where scribes wrote them out by hand. Books were therefore a scarce resource. While it might take someone a year or more to hand copy a Bible, with the Gutenberg press it was possible to create several hundred copies a year, with two or three people that could read, and a few people to support the effort. Each sheet still had to be fed manually, which limited the reproduction speed, and the type had to be set manually for each page, which limited the number of different pages created per day. Books produced in this period, between the first work of Johann Gutenberg and the year 1500, are collectively referred to as incunabula.
The supplantation of hand copied manuscripts with printed works was not received with unanimous encomium. Not only did the papal court contemplate making printing presses an industry requiring a license from the Catholic Church (an idea rejected in the end), but as early as in the 15th century some nobles refused to have printed books in their libraries to sully their valuable handcopied manuscripts. Similar resistance was later encountered in much of the Islamic world, where calligraphic traditions were extremely important, and also in the Far East.
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Despite this resistance, Gutenberg's printing press spread rapidly across Europe. Within thirty years of its invention in 1453, towns from Hungary to Spain, and from Italy to Britain had functional printing presses. It has been theorized that this incredibly rapid expansion shows not only a higher level of industry (fueled by the high-quality European paper mills that had been opening over the previous century) than expected, but also a significantly higher level of literacy than has often been estimated.
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The first printing press in a Muslim territory opened in Andalusia (Muslim Spain) in the 1480s. This printing press was run by a family of Jewish merchants who printed texts with the Hebrew script. After the reconquista in the 1490s, the press was moved from Granada to Istanbul (a popular destination for thousands ofAndalusian Jews).
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Effects of printing on culture
The discovery and establishment of the printing of books with moveable type marks a paradigm shift in the way information was transferred in Europe. The impact of printing is comparable to the development of language, and the invention of the alphabet, as far as its effects on the society.
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Gutenberg's findings not only allowed a much broader audience to read Martin Luther's German translation of the Bible, it also helped spread Luther's other writings, greatly accelerating the pace of Protestant Reformation. They also led to the establishment of a community of scientists (previously scientists were mostly isolated) that could easily communicate their discoveries, bringing on thescientific revolution. Also, although early texts were printed in Latin, books were soon produced in common European vernacular, leading to the decline of the Latin language.
The Reformation began in October, 1517, when Luther protested a major abuse in the sale of indulgences in his Ninety - five Theses. These were translated into German, printed, and circulated throughout Germany, arousing a storm of protest against the sale of indulgences. When the sale of indulgences was seriously impaired, the papacy sought to silence Luther. He was first confronted at a meeting of his order held in Heidelberg on April 26, 1518, but he used the Heidelberg disputation to defend his theology and to make new converts. In August of 1518 Luther was summoned to Rome to answer charges of heresy, even though he had not taught contrary to any clearly defined medieval doctrines. Because Luther was unlikely to receive a fair trial in Rome, his prince, Frederick the Wise, intervened and asked the papacy to send representatives to deal with Luther in Germany. Meetings with Cardinal Cajetan in October, 1518, and Karl von Miltitz in January, 1519, failed to obtain a recantation from Luther, although he continued to treat the pope and his representatives with respect.
In July, 1519, at the Leipzig debate Luther questioned the authority of the papacy as well as the infallibility of church councils and insisted on the primacy of Scripture. This led his opponent, Johann Eck, to identify him with the fifteenth century Bohemian heretic, Jan Hus, in an effort to discredit Luther. After the debate Luther became considerably more outspoken and expressed his beliefs with increasing certainty. In 1520 he wrote three pamphlets of great significance.
Luther never viewed himself as the founder of a new church body, however. He devoted his life to reforming the church and restoring the Pauline doctrine of justification to the central position in Christian theology. In 1522, when his followers first began to use his name to identify themselves, he pleaded with them not to do this. He wrote: "Let us abolish all party names and call ourselves Christians, after him whose teaching we hold . . . I hold, together with the universal church, the one universal teaching of Christ, who is our only master." He died at Eisleben on February 18, 1546, while on a trip to arbitrate a dispute between two Lutheran nobles. He was buried in the Castle Church at Wittenberg.
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Though the old feudal system had died, the people were still in a feudal relationship with the ruler of the land, who was thought to be appointed by God; indeed, even God-like. One family arose, ruling Germany, Russia, Italy, England, the Scandinavian countries, and the smaller principalities of Europe. The various rulers were kings with complete autonomy, often imprisoning and beheading anyone who questioned their absolute power.
In the Eastern companies, the Muslim religion ruled the people through the church hierarchy. Church and government very much overlapped, as they continue to today. The government that angered the church soon found itself out of power.
to be continued
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