3 - The fourteenth century

Summary

Whatever its eschatological significance, 1300 did not bring major changes to the politics of Europe; nor, for that matter, did 1400, so it will be clear at once that there is something arbitrary and artificial about the organisation of this chapter and the next one. The political forms and themes of the fourteenth century typically began in the thirteenth century or earlier, and ended, or lost their clarity or their importance, in the fifteenth century or later. A positive argument for dividing things this way would be that a division at 1300 cannot have any causal implications, unlike most of the other divisions of time typically adopted by historians of this period. If the story of ‘the fourteenth century’ begins with the famine of the 1310s, for instance, then the economy of north-western Europe is placed centre stage in the explanation of events; if it begins with the attack on Boniface VIII at Anagni, in 1303, then the decline of the universal Church is established as the key process, together with the rise of the nation state, characterised, as it usually is, by Capetian France. In either version, the political history of the previous period comes to a natural stop, and the politics of the new period enjoy a natural start, but everything we have seen so far points, not surprisingly, to an absence of natural breaks in the course of politics: the politics of the early fourteenth century emerge seamlessly from those of the late thirteenth century.