History
The 14th century has often been called the calamitous century. It included famine, disease, and war. Discuss how these events led to the waning of the Middle Ages including the end of feudalism, the loss of power of the Catholic Church, and explain the preoccupation with death that is so common in both paintings and literature.
ANSWER
Calamitous 14th Century
The 14th century 1300-1399 was a time of massive human calamities and sufferings as it was clouded by the Black Death spread across Europe. It devastated Britain’s whole population that eventually left the survivors in a new world, one in which the role of the church took a sharp turn. Many fundamental events led to the fall of feudalism in Europe from the 12th to the 15th centuries. In 1300, fatal ailments known as the bubonic outbreak or the Black Death went across Asia and reached Europe in the late 1340s.
Over the coming two centuries, this dangerous infection killed approximately a million people in Europe. It affected all groups of individuals, including the rich and the poor, and could kill people within few days. These kinds of deaths contributed to sweeping fiscal and communal alterations (Franchetti). Between 1337 and 1453, England and France fought several wars called the hundred years of war. The war altered how wars were fought and changed the feudal lord’s power to the ordinary people and monarchs. Political growth was widespread throughout the middle ages, and in England, expansions during the 12th and 13th centuries were essential in weakening feudalism.
Loss of Power of Catholic Church
There was a major effect on faith because several alleged the calamity was God’s castigation for sinful acts and ways. Church buildings and lands were unaltered; however, fewer priests left to keep the old service schedule. Approximately half the parish priests, who gave the last sacraments to the dying, also perished. The church tried to engage other people, but the procedure took time. Since the 14th-century healers were at a loss to describe the source of the infection, Europeans turned to astrological initiatives, earthquakes, and poisoning wells by Jews as part of the rise of the epidemic (Sussman). No person in the 14th century believed in rat control to stop the outbreak, and people started to believe only God’s rage could manifest such disastrous scenes. The spread of different rumors contributed to the destruction of the whole Jewish cities. Later on, Jews were killed, and years later, their communities of Cologne and Mainz were exterminated.
Paintings and Literature
From the late 14th to 16th-century, art was unpredictable because it affected racial increase, military emergence, and modifications in spiritual attitudes. After the renovation of Constantine, nearly all of Europe was free to Christianity, which had a massive consequence on art, going for over a thousand years. The medieval art struggled for practicality, while churches and monasteries were wrapped in paintings, sculptures, and inscriptions that highlighted biblical prospects or saints. In several early paintings and monuments, death was outlined as a way between life on earth and illumination. The Black Death left behind sadness which was highlighted in diverse cultural and artistic forms. Another widespread situation witnessed in religious pictures was the deathbed prospect, a dying man or woman bounded by a societal ritual. In the images of death scenes after the pestilence, the sick individual is left alone, and the room is vacated in the presence of death, consequently characterized by an angle or a decaying skeleton. By the end of the 16th century, pictures were an amalgamation of both living and demise imagery.
Works Cited
Franchetti, Cody. “Destruction or Persistence? New Perspectives on the Relationship between Feudalism and Capitalism.” (2014).
Sussman, George D. “Was the black death in India and China?.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2011): 319-355.
