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IN THE MIDDLE AGES contraception was not practiced, so women usually had many children. But the high birth rate was also accompanied by high mortality - both female and child: medicine and hygiene were at the most primitive level. As a result, families were small: usually with two or three representatives of the next generation. It was a brutal struggle for survival: every second child died before the age of seven. And although the medieval world was full of children - more than half the population was under 14 years old - a lucky few lived to adulthood. Life expectancy in medieval Europe in those days was approximately 30 years in more successful periods, and even then not everywhere, but in unsuccessful periods, when there were epidemics and wars, it was only 20.
The demographic curve of the Middle Ages cuts off the abyss in the middle of the 14th century. Until that time, despite the high mortality rate, the population was growing slowly but steadily. New villages appeared in place of cut down forests and drained swamps; the size and total number of cities increased. But then came the Black Death, an epidemic of bubonic plague and similar diseases that raged from 1347 to 1350 and killed between a third and half of the entire population of Europe. The plague returned regularly in subsequent times, until the end of the 17th century it became part of the life of Europeans, but the scope of the epidemics gradually weakened. Dirty, overcrowded cities - the death traps of the Middle Ages - suffered the most. As a result, there were noticeably fewer Europeans in 1500 compared to 1300, and life expectancy also decreased.
Women married earlier than men. In Tuscany of the 13th-14th centuries, the bride was usually about 19 years old, and the groom almost ten years older, although the difference could be much greater and, conversely, insignificant. The poet Dante, born in Florence in 1265, was married by age 20, which was probably more typical. Due to the high mortality rate, one of the spouses could quickly become widowed and remarry. Therefore, the relationship of a child with his stepfather, stepmother, half-brothers and half-sisters was an important component in the life of a medieval family, reflected, in particular, in the plot schemes of fairy tales.
Women who did not die during childbirth could achieve the most independent position, becoming rich widows. They often had to remarry (noble widows in England often paid the king a lot of money for the right not to remarry). And if they managed to avoid marriage, then they gained independence, which is usually unattainable for a woman in any level of society. The 12th-century poets who created the ideal of courtly love extolled the “lady,” addressed as “my lady,” but in real life, a woman was almost always subject to the authority of her husband or male relatives.
Despite the general increase in the number and size of cities, the bulk of the population in the Middle Ages continued to live in villages. Even in lands rich in cities, such as Italy, the number of city dwellers never exceeded a quarter of the total population. In the rest of Europe, the share of the urban population was even less - about 10 percent. Most people were small peasants who lived and worked on the land. Their position was determined by the size of the plot and the conditions under which he owned it, that is, the degree of dependence on the feudal lord. Landless peasants and those who only had a vegetable garden made up the rural poor, working for others.
Rich peasants, on the contrary, could hire workers and, increasing production, sell surplus crops on the market. The degree of dependence also played an important role. Most peasants had their own master, sometimes just a landowner to whom they paid rent, but there could also be a master who had complete control over them. In the most severe form of dependence, peasants did not have the right to leave their village, were obliged to work half the week on the owner’s land, providing him with food and money, ask his permission even for marriage, and seek court only from him or his associates. It is not surprising that in times of economic or political crises, peasant uprisings often broke out, sometimes developing into real wars, such as the French Jacquerie (1358), Wat Tyler's uprising in England (1381), and the revolts of peasants in Catalonia, which resulted in the abolition of serfdom. (1486).
The windmill is one of the most useful inventions of the Middle Ages. But the peasants had to pay a constant fee for using the landowner's mill. Miniature. England, XIV century.
Depiction of peasants: a rare subject for stained glass painting. Cathedral in Ili. OK. 1340-1349.
The rural population was engaged in hard work all year round - whether on the clay fields of Central England, where barley was grown for bread and beer, or on the olive and grape plantations of Tuscany. Food and climate may differ from each other, but the endless backbreaking work to maintain life was the same everywhere. There was almost no technology in agriculture: the only mechanism - a mill for grinding grain - used the power of water or wind. Water mills existed in Europe even under the Romans, and windmills became the most important technical invention of the Middle Ages. They first appeared in the 12th century in England and France, and then quickly spread throughout Europe. However, people had to plow, sow, weed, thresh and harvest the crops manually or with the help of oxen, which were gradually replaced by work horses. In the Middle Ages, the fate of society directly depended on the vagaries of nature - crop failure meant hunger and death. Several years of poor harvests in a row, such as the Great Famine of 1315 - 1317, could sharply reduce the population.
Medieval cities, by modern standards, were small. In a medium-sized city, the population was only a few thousand people, and even in the largest ones, such as Venice, Florence, Milan and Paris, the number of inhabitants did not exceed 100 thousand. Despite this, a medieval city could not be called a “large village”: it usually had a certain legal status and performed special functions. The cities were centers of trade and manufacturing. Blacksmiths lived in villages (this is where the most common European surname Smith/Schmidt/Lefebvre and its derivatives came from), and the workshops of artisans who produced things necessary for everyday life - shoes, clothing, furniture, dishes and leather goods - were almost always located in cities . People of intellectual work also lived there: lawyers, doctors, teachers, as well as bankers and merchants. Although there were markets in many villages, the weekly trade fair was held in the city. A special place was certainly allocated for her on the outskirts, which then became the center of the city's public life. Merchants and artisans united in guilds - not only economic, but also social organizations. Guild members feasted together, prayed together, and provided dignified funerals for their deceased colleagues. The rules of the guilds stipulated who should conduct trade and how.
The rapid development of means of transportation gradually established strong connections between cities. We usually traveled by water - it was much cheaper. Italian merchants in the south and the Hanseatic League in the north established maritime trade routes from Egypt and the Black Sea to England and northern Russia. In 1277-1278, the Genoese first traveled directly to Northern Europe, and from 1325, caravans of ships began to depart annually from Venice to Flanders and England. Even though there was less travel on the land, the roads were not empty. On them one could meet merchants, pilgrims going to Santiago, and those moving to Rome and back on judicial or diplomatic business. During the Middle Ages, communications improved: new bridges and inns eased the burden of travel, but traffic speeds remained low.
The first thing that would strike a modern person if he were in the Middle Ages would probably be the silence and abundance of natural smells. It was a world of natural materials and non-standard forms. Both wooden thatched houses and stone buildings, erected where there was a lot of stone, blended organically into the environment. Medieval cities and villages did not seem like foreign bodies, but a natural extension of nature. Instead of man-made noise, we would hear the voices of people and animals, and the absence of sewage systems and waste removal would immediately remind us of ourselves with specific smells. In small medieval dwellings, where peasants often lived with their livestock, there was no “personal” space left.
This is what Cologne looked like in the Middle Ages. The majestic choir of the unfinished cathedral rises above the city. To his left is the southwest tower, half erected, with a wooden crane hanging over it.
Jacques Coeur, a successful French merchant and banker, was engaged in mining, paper production and textiles. In 1451, his enormous fortune aroused the envy of Charles VII. A pretext was found to deprive the subject of his possessions. The luxurious house of Jacques Coeur in Bourges, where the royal court was then located, has been preserved. Its architecture is full of interesting curiosities, like these decorative figures above the fireplace, as if looking out from the windows.
In the Middle Ages, death was a natural part of everyday life. In a large village with a hundred houses, funerals took place on average every 18 days. Christians going to another world did not even take clothes with them - only bishops were buried in full vestments, and priests with a chalice in their hands. The dead were buried in coffins or in shrouds alone. Cemeteries were located interspersed with residential buildings (contrary to ancient and Islamic customs). It was important for the deceased, buried naked in a church cemetery, to be helped in the afterlife journey, which was served by funeral masses, which made it easier for the deceased to stay in purgatory. The rich could afford tombstones, but the monuments were more symbols of death and the frailty of the flesh than of the earthly power of the deceased. For many commoners, only bare ground or a crypt was accessible. The main thing that death gave after 20-30 years of hard life was “the beginning of peace, the end of labor.”
Formation and evolution of medieval civilization
The Middle Ages in historical science
Lecture 3. State and society in the Middle Ages
1. The Middle Ages in historical science. The concept of “Middle Ages” arose in the 15th century, when Italian humanists, realizing the past as history divided into periods, identified the era of Antiquity (antiquity) and their era - Modern Time, and the millennium lying between these two eras, they called the “Middle Ages”. century." The first systematic presentation of the history of the Middle Ages in Western Europe as a special period of history was given by the Italian humanist Flavio Biondo in his work “History since the Fall of the Roman Empire.”
The baton was taken over from the humanists educators. It was during this era that the “sentence” of the Middle Ages took shape. The most vivid expression of hostility towards the Middle Ages was given by Voltaire. “The history of this time,” he says, “needs to be known only in order to despise it.” Thus, for the humanists of the Renaissance and the leaders of the French Enlightenment, the concept of the Middle Ages was synonymous with savagery and gross ignorance, and the Middle Ages - a time of religious fanaticism and cultural decline. Nevertheless, it was during the Enlightenment that a special branch of historical knowledge emerged - “medieval studies”. The term itself is etymologically of Latin origin, as is the expression “Middle Ages”; it comes from the combination "medium aevum". Morphologically it is of French origin: medievistique, medieviste.
Historians so-called "romantic" school beginning of the 19th century They called the Middle Ages the “golden age” of humanity, sang the virtues of chivalric times and the flowering of cultural Christian traditions. An interesting example of an attempt to synthesize the historical concept of romanticism and the ideas of the Enlightenment and thereby reconcile them is the work of the great German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. The history of the Middle Ages for Hegel is a period of dominance of contradictions and “endless lies.” But, understanding the world-historical process as an endless dialectical development, he believed that “...change, which is death, is at the same time the emergence of new life.” Before us is a philosophical justification for the regularity and fruitfulness of the existence of the medieval period.
With distribution in historical science Marxist theory formations, the Middle Ages were increasingly identified with the concept of feudalism. Moreover, for Marx himself, the pre-capitalist formation assumed the parallel development of slave, feudal and Asian modes of production. Late Marxists introduced the term “socio-economic formations” as a definition of individual stages of human history. In accordance with this theory, a tradition of understanding the Middle Ages as an antagonistic class feudal socio-economic formation developed in Soviet historiography.
In the second half of the nineteenth century. century there is some reconciliation of different points of view. This became possible thanks to the already ingrained idea that history is not a kaleidoscope of events, but is subject to certain laws, which are possible and necessary to know. The regularity and fruitfulness of the feudal period of European development was proven and the first attempts were made to create a universal, i.e. a global picture of human history.
The developing evolutionism, that is, the idea of development as a gradual quantitative change without abrupt transitions. Evolutionism took a more balanced approach to the history of the Middle Ages than previous points of view. The Middle Ages are considered a time of development, although it was characterized by slowness, traditionalism and the corporate structure of society.
The conditions of rapidly developing capitalism stimulated the interest of historians in economic and social issues. As a result, a number of theories appear that are directly related to medieval studies. One of them - Markov (community) theory, the main provisions of which explain the specifics of the Middle Ages through the concept of brand. Its supporters believe that the social (mark) system, based on private land ownership, was preceded by a system based on collective ownership of land and collective cultivation of the land. Private land ownership and social inequality arise in the countryside due to the gradual decline of communal land ownership. After the collapse of the Roman Empire and the cessation of the movements of the Germanic tribes, a transition was made to the constant cultivation by individual families of the plots of communal land allocated to them, while maintaining jointly used undivided land. During the process of social differentiation of free community members that has begun, a fiefdom develops. The main problem of the entire socio-economic history of the Middle Ages is the problem of the relationship between the fiefdom and the community-mark. While the mark system maintained its position as a counterweight to the patrimonial system, harmony of interests of various classes was maintained in society, while the state played an important mediating role in the relationship between the patrimonial estate and the village.
Patrimony theory reveals the essence of the Middle Ages through the concept of “patrimony”. According to it, feudalism is a society in which subsistence farming dominated. The patrimony arose in the conditions of the disintegration of the primitive communal organization. The fiefdom developed through the seizure of communal lands and peasant allods and the enslavement of peasants. Within the framework of the estate until the XIII - XIV centuries. There was a general harmony of interests between feudal lords and peasants. It was the activities of patrimonial owners that contributed to the improvement of agricultural technology, the development of crafts and the emergence of medieval cities.
All trends in medieval studies of the 19th century. were also typical for the first half of the twentieth century. The views of the Belgian historian had a very great influence on historians of that time Henri Pirenna. Since 1922, he developed and propagated a unique theory, called the “Pirenne thesis.” Pirenne did not deny the qualitative change between antiquity and the Middle Ages and the natural nature of the economy of the early Middle Ages, but suggested looking for it at a different time. From his point of view, the economic and social life of Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire for a long time proceeded in the rhythm of the ancient world. The “Great Migration of Peoples” and the settlement of Germans on Roman territory did not change anything in the previous order. The Germans appropriated rather than destroyed Roman civilization. The kingdoms they founded, such as the Frankish one, were a direct continuation of the empire. Therefore, according to Pirenne, the transition to the Middle Ages in Western Europe occurred only in the 8th century. The advent of Islam changed everything. The Arabs, who essentially captured three of the four shores of the Mediterranean Sea, changed the direction of the Mediterranean economy, generally destroyed the unity of Mediterranean ancient culture and created a new economic and cultural world, opposite and hostile to the Roman-Christian one.
The French historian also belonged to the circle of medievalist historians who left a deep mark on science Mark Block. In his classic work “Apology of History,” he advocated the objective reality and knowability of the historical past, defended the idea of the natural development of society and called for studying not only the actions of people, but also the socio-economic and natural conditions of their lives. He considered the economic categories themselves as a reflection of certain views of people and therefore called feudalism “a set of ideas and images.” M. Blok proclaimed the requirement for a comprehensive study and understanding of feudal society as an integral social type.
Thus, the question of understanding the essence of the Middle Ages is closely related to the problem of periodization of this era.
The problems of periodization of the Middle Ages have long been of concern to medievalist historians. J. Le Goff, one of the largest researchers of European history until the 80s. XX century defined the concept of “Middle Ages” as the period from the 5th to the 15th centuries, from the birth of the barbarian kingdoms in Europe to the crisis and transformation of medieval Christian civilization. In the 1970s Fernand Braudel put forward the idea of a “long Middle Ages,” which was later shared by Jacques Le Goff. The “Long Middle Ages” covered history from the first centuries of the Christian chronology until the end of the 18th or even the beginning of the 19th century, when the mentality of medieval society was completely destroyed.
Soviet historians dated the “Middle Ages” (feudal formation) from the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476) to the English bourgeois revolution (1640), which opened the way to the formation of capitalism.
Modern foreign and domestic experts most often understand the “Middle Ages” as the era from the Great Migration of Peoples, which gave birth to many civilizations of the West and East, to the Great Geographical Discoveries, which contributed to the formation of a global oceanic civilization and the interpenetration of Eastern and Western cultures.
The famous orientalist L.S. Vasiliev notes that the concept of the “Middle Ages” is more suitable for Europe. In the East, the development of societies and states until the 19th century. retained significant traditional features. Only the colonial policy of Western states set in motion a stable and largely static system of civilizations in the East.
2. Formation and evolution of medieval civilization. Barbarians who settled in the 5th century. According to the Roman Empire (the era of the “Great Migration”), they were not wild tribes that had just emerged from their forests and steppes. By the 5th century They have come a long way of evolution, have seen a lot and learned a lot. Directly or indirectly, most European peoples were influenced by Asian cultures, the Iranian world, as well as the Greco-Roman one, especially its eastern, Byzantine provinces. In the IV–V centuries. Christianity spread among the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Lombards, Franks and other tribes. Already at the beginning of the 5th century. The first early states were created in Europe. The island of Britain was conquered by the Germanic tribes of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who created several states there; Clovis created the Frankish kingdom on the territory of Gaul, Germany and Burgundy (486); the kingdoms of the Vesti and Suevi were located on the Iberian Peninsula (418); in Italy in 493 the Ostrogothic kingdom of Theodoric arose, etc.
Initially, European states were characterized by mixed, Western and Eastern, development features. The state was built on the principles of a strict hierarchy. The king had the highest military, legislative, administrative and judicial power, and sought recognition of the religious and sacred nature of his power. The Catholic Church began to play a major role in all spheres of society (Catholicism is the Western branch of Christianity). Meanwhile, in economics and property issues, in the V-VII centuries. The influence of Roman traditions was obvious. According to the laws of the Visigothic, Ostrogothic and Frankish kingdoms, land, other movable and immovable property was sold, bought, given and bequeathed. Thus, private property existed and developed freely.
In the VIII–X centuries. medieval European civilization enters the next period of development. In 800, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne with the imperial crown. The emperor became a symbol of the unity of German traditions, the Roman imperial past and Christian principles. The ideas of unifying the Christian world became decisive for several generations of Europeans. Charlemagne created a huge power, which, in addition to Gaul, included the Spanish March, Northern and Central Italy, the territories of Bavaria and Saxony, Pannonia (Hungary). The existence of the Carolingian state (mid-8th – early 10th centuries) was the time when a number of social institutions and the main features of the cultural and historical type inherent in medieval European civilization were formed.
Land plots of free communities and monasteries gradually, as a result of direct seizures, violence, purchases, etc. passed into the hands of the nobility. This is how the feudal form of land use is formed. Feud or flax - a special hereditary form of land ownership associated with mandatory military or civil service. A feature of feudal land ownership is its conditional nature. The property of the feudal lord was not private and depended on a system of personal citizenship, which was hierarchical in nature. The feudal lord's ownership of the land and the dependence of the peasants on him was expressed in feudal rent (corvée, tribute, food or cash rent). Private property was represented by a narrow circle of large landowners (princes, dukes, counts, barons), with whom the state (the king) waged a constant struggle, trying to bring them under control and limit their independence.
The social system of medieval civilization was based on the principles vassalage. A free lord had the right to respond to an insult from the king by declaring war. Vassal relations provided for mutual rights and obligations. Vassalage implied some decentralization of power by delegating a number of powers to the lord to the vassals. The set of certain rights of vassals and the territories in which these rights were valid was called “immunity”. Vassal relations and their inherent immunity are a feature of medieval European civilization.
The village was the center of economic and social life. Land was revered as the main value, and peasants were the bearers of the main spiritual and cultural traditions. Medieval Europe was distinguished by its communal-corporate structure: guilds, guilds, knightly orders, church and rural communities. Corporations of the same level were united into an estate. The complex social structure of feudal society, in which there is both class and estate division, serves as one of its characteristic features. The fact of class division, conceptualized in medieval ideology already at the turn of developed feudalism, was associated with the difference in social functions. In the triple scheme of society, developed at the beginning of the 11th century, each class - praying (oratores), fighting (bellatores) and working (laboratores) - was declared to be part of a single body, and the service of each was a condition of the service of the other. At the same time, the workers were called servas, destined for the sake of the common good to work and suffering.
VIII-X centuries became a period of Europeans repelling the onslaught of the Vikings, Scandinavian warrior-seafarers, and nomads (Avars, Turkic Bulgarians, Hungarians, Pechenegs, Polovtsians). In northern France, the Vikings created the virtually independent Duchy of Normandy. People from this duchy conquered Anglo-Saxon England in 1066. Nomads seize the southwestern territories of Europe and found the Bulgarian and Hungarian states. A feature of such conquests was the assimilation of the invaders with the indigenous peoples and, in fact, their “dissolution” in the common European cauldron of peoples.
In the middle of the 10th century. Otto I the Great attempted to recreate a single powerful state in Europe. In 962, he captured Italy and declared himself emperor of the “Holy Roman Empire.” For some time, peace was established in Europe.
The third period of development of medieval civilization in Europe, the 10th–13th centuries, was full of very important and internally contradictory events. Let us highlight the main factors in the development of civilization at this time.
-Agrarian revolution and demographic rise. The peace that followed a long period of conquest led to the settlement of the nobility on the land and the encouragement of agricultural production. The spread of three-field crop rotation made it possible to increase the sown areas and change crops. The use of an asymmetrical wheeled plow with a moldboard and iron tools ensured deeper plowing. Increased yields and the production of a variety of products improved nutrition and contributed to an increase in population. In the period between the X and XIV centuries. the population of Western Europe more than doubled (from 22.5 million by 950 to 54.4 million by the mid-14th century).
–Internal and external expansion of the Christian world. The demographic boom was critical to the expansion of Christendom. The feudal mode of production, based on extensive methods, required expansion of areas to meet the growing needs of the population. Internal expansion consisted of the development of new virgin European lands and drainage of swamps. In parallel with internal expansion, the Christian world also resorted to external expansion. By the XI–XIII centuries. became a period of aggressive crusades in the Muslim countries of the East and pagan European states.
–The rise of European medieval cities. In the Roman world, cities were primarily political, administrative and military centers and only then economic. Europe's medieval cities were born of reawakening trade and the rise of Western agriculture, which better supplied urban centers with supplies and people. Migration from rural areas to cities between the 10th and 14th centuries. was one of the most important factors in the development of the Christian world. It was the city, consisting of various social elements, that created the new society. And although it was still feudal, in its depths the seeds of the future were born - commodity-money relations, division of labor, specialization of crafts. In the X–XIII centuries. cities are turning into cultural centers. Evidence of the growing political and economic influence of cities in Medieval Europe was the appearance in the 11th–13th centuries. communal movement, as a result of which the townspeople gained freedom and self-government rights.
– Formation of modern states. The most important element of the civilizational development of Europe in the X-XIII centuries. became the formation of modern states. On the way to the formation of unified national states there was a period of fragmentation. Among the reasons for feudal fragmentation, the following can be identified: the dominance of subsistence farming; expansion of large land ownership and vassal immunity; internal cohesion and external isolation of the feudal nobility, living by the principle: “The vassal of my vassal is not my vassal”; the growth of cities and their political influence.
The formation of national states in Europe began at the end of the 11th–13th centuries, and in a number of cases ended in modern times. A feature of the formation of national states was the emergence of estate-representative institutions. So in England in 1215 the first constitution was adopted - the Magna Carta, and in 1265 a parliament appeared. In France, under Philip the Fair (1285–1314), the Estates General, endowed with legislative functions, was first convened, in Germany under Maximilian I in the 15th century. The Imperial Diet - Reichstag was created.
In the XIV–XV centuries. medieval Europe entered the last period of its existence, which meant a crisis in the Christian world, mutation and transformation of the foundations of civilization.
By the end of the 13th century. The internal and external expansion of European nations ended. Plowing and development of new land ceased, and even the outlying lands, cultivated under the pressure of population growth and in the heat of expansion, were now abandoned because they were unprofitable. Crusades towards the end of the 13th century. practically ceased, and in 1291 Acre fell, the last stronghold of the Crusaders in the East, and the history of Christian states in Palestine ended. On the other hand, the invasions of nomads also stopped. Mongol invasions 1241–1243 left terrible traces in Poland and Hungary, but they were the last.
Along with these major general phenomena, in the XIV - XV centuries. other events occur that clearly indicate the beginning of the crisis. Firstly, coin devaluation and deterioration began almost everywhere in Europe. Secondly, a whole series of speeches, city riots, uprisings against the feudal and urban nobility struck Europe (in Rouen, Orleans, Provence in 1280, in Toulouse in 1288, Reims in 1292, Paris in 1306, Belgium in 1302). Thirdly, in 1315–1317. inclement weather led to poor harvests, rising prices, and famine. Fourthly, the decrease in the physical resistance of the human body due to constant malnutrition played a role in the devastation that the Great Plague caused from 1348. Fifthly, feudalism, struck by the crisis, resorted to war as a means of alleviating the situation of the ruling classes. The most significant example of this is the Hundred Years' War of 1337–1453. between France and England over the County of Flanders and English claims to the French throne.
Meanwhile, the wars did not solve the problems of feudal society, but created new ones. The alliance of the king with the cities made it possible to create and maintain a permanent mercenary army, and the need for serving knighthood disappeared. And with the advent of firearms and artillery, knighthood lost its monopoly on military affairs. The events of the Hundred Years' War demonstrated the advantages of mercenary troops, which undermined the authority of the entire class system.
To summarize, we note: the medieval society of Europe was traditional, because The agricultural sector predominated in the economy, manual labor was used everywhere, strict adherence to tradition and Christian commandments was observed, in society there was a desire for internal unity and external isolation, corporatism. Meanwhile, civilization developed by the end of the 15th century. approached a certain point, behind which unknown horizons were hidden.
3. Phenomenon of medieval culture. Everyday life of a person in the Middle Ages. The most important feature of the culture of the Middle Ages is the question of its roots. By type of production, Antiquity and the Middle Ages represent one, agricultural culture. But in other spheres of culture there was a break with the ancient tradition: urban planning technology deteriorated, the construction of aqueducts and roads stopped, literacy fell, etc. Thus, the Middle Ages, developing its historical cultural tradition, selectively refers to the culture of Antiquity, including the culture Roman civilization.
Medieval European culture had many sources, but the most important of them were those springs that emerged from its own, still barbaric, soil. French researcher J. Le Goff noted that the consciousness of the Middle Ages was “anti-technical.” And the ruling class, chivalry, is to blame for this. Knighthood was interested in the development of military technology, and not in its productive application. But the working population was not interested in using technology. The surplus product produced by the farmer came at the complete disposal of the feudal lord, who was not interested in the equipment of labor. And the farmer did not have enough time or knowledge for the technical re-equipment of agricultural production.
The eclecticism of the culture of the Middle Ages is its characteristic feature and the second important problem.
Here two cultures coexist, struggle, influence each other:
1. The dominant culture of the elite: church and secular nobility. This culture is Christian, biblical, it was mainly widespread in the church, monastic environment, and at the court of the king and in the castles of feudal lords. She used Latin.
2. Another culture - folk, lower society - pagan, preserved since barbarian times, using their native language - the dialect of this or that people.
The aesthetic and artistic taste of that time was rough in some ways and subtle in others. Everyday “criteria” of beauty are naively spectacular: shine, bright color, rich sound (especially the ringing of bells). Physical beauty, however, was rather hidden. It was the Middle Ages that gave birth to the so-called “frame” type of clothing, which did not emphasize the shape of the body, did not open it and did not free it for movement, but created artificial forms.
The art of the Middle Ages was almost entirely crafts and applied, closely related to life. His task was to fill the forms in which life took place with beauty, and also to help strengthen the Christian faith. As art, in our understanding, it has not yet been realized and appreciated.
The first shoots of love for art itself appeared at that time among the nobility, in connection with the increase in artistic production, already “useless” but valuable objects, luxury items, and in connection with the complication of forms of everyday communication and entertainment of the nobility. Among the common people, however, something similar was observed in line with the so-called “folk art”, with songs, dances, and farcical performances.
Among the types of art in the Middle Ages, in addition to purely applied ones, architecture, along with sculpture and icon painting, as well as literature, developed especially actively. The architecture of the Middle Ages began to develop powerfully sometime after the year 1000. In any case, by the 11th–12th centuries. refers to the flowering of her “Romanesque” style. This very epithet “Romanesque” appeared in the 19th century, when connections between medieval architecture and ancient Roman architecture were discovered. Romanesque architecture developed when Europe entered a period of relatively stable life, when feudal relations, the Christian Church had already strengthened, and some economic revival had occurred. The influence of the church during this period was enormous. She has accumulated large financial resources. She acted as the main customer of architectural structures.
Romanesque temple buildings were distinguished by thick walls made of stone or brick, reinforced on the outside with special devices (buttresses). The shape of the temple was simple, rectangular in outline, and the roof was gable. Narrow window openings were made in the powerful walls. The temple was massive, dimly lit from the outside, with a modest interior. Everything created an impression of majesty, severity, often to the point of severity.
Secular architecture of this period was even more modest. Castles and city buildings adopted something from church buildings.
On the walls of Romanesque churches, with an abundance of free surfaces, monumental fresco painting and sculpture in the form of reliefs developed. The subjects of the images were religious and instructive, for the edification of those entering the temple. The artists did not strive to create the illusion of the real world, did not look for verisimilitude in the depiction of figures, placed events from different times side by side, and made very little use of three-dimensionality. But there were correctly captured, artistically expressive details. Although in general the images were distinguished by naive spontaneity.
A fundamental change in style, not only architecture, occurred in the 13th–14th centuries, when “Gothic” flourished. The term, again, is conditional, arose when this art seemed barbaric (the art of the Goths). But this style, northern in origin, had nothing to do with the real tribe.
The main distinctive features of Gothic architecture were the presence of pointed arches in the building and the uncontrollable upward thrust of all forms and structural elements. Gothic architecture (and not only it, but also the fashion in clothing of the period) expressed the feeling of the religious impulse of the era, which survived the mass fanaticism of the crusades for the possession of the sacred land. The huge windows of these cathedrals were filled with light stone frames, at intervals of which colored glass was inserted. It was like a stone lace formed. Streams of differently colored light poured into the building through the stained glass windows.
Frescoes and reliefs, for which there was no place on the walls, were replaced by sculpture that decorated both the interior of the temple and its facades. Each of the temples had a huge number of sculptures; in some - more than 2 thousand. The theme of the sculptural images remained religious with elements of mysticism and fantasy. But the role of secular subjects also increased, the verisimilitude of details increased, and the volume of sculpture was actively used.
Castle architecture began to adopt much from the Gothic cathedral with its main motif - aspiration to God, to heaven, upward. The verticality of medieval culture has finally found an adequate architectural, and generally stylistic, embodiment.
So, medieval culture manifested itself in the processing, design, ennoblement of both nature (the human environment) and man himself. As for nature, it took shape both in peasant labor (nature management) and in craft labor, which created a unique aesthetics of everyday life, in the construction of temples, castles (and other structures), and saturating them with works of art.
The processing of a person concerned his appearance, behavior, and spiritual world. The variety of clothes, hairstyles, jewelry, the development of personal hygiene towards the end of the Middle Ages - all this and much more were moments that civilized and cultivated life.
If the life of a man in the Middle Ages was more or less public and connected with his class, then the life of a woman is much less covered in literature. The position of women in medieval society was determined and regulated by existing law. In particular, canon law stated: “It is quite clear that wives must obey their husbands and be almost servants to them.”
The class hierarchy that existed in medieval society also applied to women. The social status of a woman, like that of a man, was determined by birth. It was believed that the blood flowing in the veins of the nobility was different from, for example, that of a peasant; a woman shared the status of father and husband, and therefore men of low birth were expected to show respect to a woman of higher social status. And yet the distance between the status of noble and ignorant men was much greater than between the status of noble and ignorant women.
A woman could not enlist in the military, serve as a priest, be a doctor, lawyer, judge, or engage in any other job requiring a university degree. Note that, not having the rights of a man, a woman did not have his responsibilities in the public sphere. Tax payments for a married city or peasant woman were paid by the husband (the nobility, as is known, were exempt from taxes altogether); the woman was not responsible for all services associated with land ownership; the husband was responsible for his wife's debts and for her unworthy behavior.
The life of city residents in the Middle Ages was the most dynamic. The occupations of the townspeople were varied; many people changed their occupation several times throughout their lives, which could not have happened in other medieval classes. Urban artisans and merchants knew how to rally against the feudal lords in defense of their interests, and therefore the cities soon defended a certain freedom and self-government. The townspeople, growing richer, gradually sought greater and greater independence from the feudal lords. A careful attitude towards time and one's freedom is a distinctive feature of the inhabitants of the medieval city. The townspeople imagined the world to be very complex and constantly changing.
Townspeople | Burghers
The bulk of the urban population were burghers (from the German "burg" fortress). They were engaged in trade and craft. Some traded in small things what the residents of the city and surrounding villages needed. And those who were richer were engaged in trade with other regions and countries, where they bought and sold large quantities of goods.
For such trade operations, considerable funds were needed, and among these merchants the main role was played by wealthy people. They owned the best buildings in the city, often made of stone, where their warehouses for goods were located.
The rich had great influence in the city council that governed the city. Together with knights and noble people, some of whom settled in the city, the rich formed the patriciate - this ancient Roman term denoted the city's ruling elite.
Townspeople | Urban poor
Complete equality of all towns n during the Middle Ages was not achieved anywhere. Not the entire population were full-fledged burghers: hired workers, servants, women, the poor, and in some places the clergy did not enjoy the rights of citizens, but even the last beggars remained free people.
The poor in a medieval city were all those who did not have their own real estate and were forced to work for
yum. During the training period, the master's students represented a low-income segment of the population. But they had hope, after completing their studies, to buy a craft workshop, become craftsmen and receive the status of full-fledged burghers. More than
The first was the fate of the apprentices, who worked all their lives as hired workers for the master and received a pittance for this, which was barely enough for food.
The environment was also characterized by extreme poverty
day-long students, whose universities were most often located in urban areas. The poor segments of the urban population include traveling actors, troubadours, and minnesingers. Among the poor there were those who did not work anywhere, but lived off alms that they begged on the church porch.
Reasons for urban growth
1. Agriculture in the X-XI centuries. became more productive, the yields of the peasant farm increased, so the peasant could sell part of the harvest. This allowed people who were not involved in farming to buy food from peasants.
2. The craft improved and became such a complex occupation that only a specially trained person who did not waste time on agriculture could do it. Thus, the separation of crafts from agriculture occurred, and artisans began to create separate settlements, which were cities.
3. Population growth leads to land shortage. Therefore, some people were forced to engage in other activities other than agriculture and move from the village to the city.
City government
At first, power in cities was usually in the hands of the richest citizens: merchants, moneylenders, city landowners and homeowners. This layer was called the patriciate. Patriciate is a narrow layer of the richest and most influential people, a kind of city nobility (in large cities there are usually several dozen families).
But since cities usually stood on the land of some lord, it was this lord who was considered the supreme lord of the city. Therefore, the patricians fought with the feudal lords for their sovereignty in the city. The patriciate used popular movements against the feudal lords to their advantage. But in some cities in the 13th century. in a number of Western European countries, especially in Italy and Germany, the guilds waged a struggle against the patriciate. Historians sometimes call this struggle between the guilds and the local patriciate “guild revolutions.”
The result of the guild movements was that the patriciate was forced to share their power in the city with the most influential guilds (in fact, with the wealthy elite of these guilds). “In those cities where foreign trade was highly developed, the patriciate did not even make this concession, retaining power exclusively in their hands. Such were, for example, the urban patrician republics - Genoa and Venice in Italy, the largest Hanseatic cities - Hamburg, Lubeck and others in Germany.
Food for the townspeople
The townspeople ate a lot of vegetables; the basis of their food was porridge and bread from various types of grains, as well as numerous jelly.
The food of rich townspeople was close to the diet of the nobility. A distinctive feature of the diet of city residents was the consumption of a fairly large amount of imported food, both from rural areas and from other countries. Therefore, exotic products such as sugar, tea or coffee were more often seen on the tables of townspeople.
Cloth
The clothing of the townspeople corresponded to the general direction in the development of clothing in medieval society.
However,since residents of medieval cities more often than villagers communicated with representatives of the nobility and with
merchants who had seen a lot in different parts of the world, their clothes were distinguished by greater elegance and they followed the influences of fashion more closely. the unsanitary conditions of the medieval city also affected his clothesresidents: high wooden shoes were common among townspeople, which allowed city residents not to get their clothes dirty on dirty and dusty city streets.
Culture
Among medieval townspeople, the opinion spread that the most important values in life are:
1 - person's personality
2 - service, position, profession
3 - property, wealth
4 - time of his life
5 - love for neighbors, other Christians
The townspeople believed that the social system should remain unchanged, and no one should try to move to the highest social rank.
In their opinion, earthly life and heaven were not opposed as sharply as they were in the teachings of the monks of the early Middle Ages. On the contrary, the need to perform service, work and get rich was considered the first duty of a Christian before the Lord God.
Harsh living conditions, heavy labor, systematic malnutrition were combined with holidays - folk ones, which dated back to the Pagan past, and church ones, partly based on the same Pagan tradition, but transformed and adapted to the requirements of the church. However, the attitude of the church towards folk, especially peasant, festivals was ambivalent and contradictory.
On the one hand, she was powerless to simply ban them - the people stubbornly clung to them.
It was easier to bring the national holiday closer to the church holiday. On the other hand, throughout the Middle Ages, the clergy and monks, citing the fact that “Christ never laughed,” condemned unbridled fun, folk songs and dances. dancing, the preachers claimed, was invisibly ruled by the devil, and he carried those having fun straight to hell.
And yet, fun and celebration were ineradicable, and the church had to take this into account. knightly tournaments, no matter how askance the clergy looked at them, remained the favorite entertainment of the noble class.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages, a carnival took shape in cities - a holiday associated with seeing off winter and welcoming spring. Instead of unsuccessfully condemning or banning the carnival, clerics chose to take part in it.
During the carnival, all bans on fun were lifted and even religious rituals were ridiculed. At the same time, the participants in the carnival buffoonery understood that such permissiveness was permissible only during the days of the carnival, after which the unbridled fun and all the excesses accompanying it would cease and life would return to its usual course.
However, it happened more than once that, having begun as a fun holiday, the carnival turned into a bloody battle between groups of rich merchants, on the one hand, and artisans and the urban lower classes, on the other.
The contradictions between them, caused by the desire to take over city government and shift the burden of taxes onto opponents, led to the fact that the carnival participants forgot about the holiday and tried to crack down on them. there is with those whom they have long hated.
The Middle Ages in Europe lasted a whole millennium and included a lot - the crusades and the growth of cities, the miracles of saints and the fires of heretics, the songs of troubadours and the grandeur of Gothic cathedrals. In this kaleidoscope of facts and events, it is difficult to discern how ordinary people of that era lived, what they believed in, what made them commit those cruel, merciful and extravagant acts that still surprise us today. The book of the historian and philosopher Leonid Petrushenko is dedicated to this, describing how the worldview of a medieval man was reflected in his behavior - in church and in war, at school and at a knightly tournament.
MIDDLE AGES AND MODERNITY.
History is not exhausted by a certain set of facts and is not reduced to them, as in general to the material and economic life of society - the so-called “social existence”. Although both lie at the basis of history, you don’t think about it when you understand the kaleidoscopic, fascinating diversity of historical figures and events. So, someone who enjoys the taste of ruddy juicy apples does not care about the old gnarled apple tree on which they grew, much less about its root system, the quality of the soil and fertilizers, although without the apple tree and the land on which it grows there would not be these apples. Likewise, we are usually interested in historical events, persons, laws, not in themselves in isolation from the historian who sets them out (which is generally impossible), but in his approximately correct assessment, in his subjectively foreseeing, prognostic and, standing above them, therefore, the moral attitude towards them.
Of course, the real life of people and the whole society is the “root theme” of the historical process. However, we should neither limit ourselves to it nor discount it, because, despite its diversity and diversity, historical awareness and perception of social reality are not only relative and chaotic. They are by their nature personal, associated with man as a cognizing subject, and therefore necessary and natural.
CONTENT
Vadim Erlikhman. Journey to the Middle Ages
Preface. Middle Ages and modern times
Part one. HUMAN
Chapter first. Human. Time. Story
"Man-Estate"
Time and eternity
History in the Middle Ages
Chapter two. Land and city
Middle Ages man
The earth, its owner and his wealth
City and citizen
Chapter three. Renaissance and Reformation
On the eve of change
Renaissance: Economics and Personality
From Renaissance to Reformation
Part two. POWER
Feudal staircase
Ideology of chivalry
Knight and soldier
Part three. CHURCH
Church and monasticism
Transition to its opposite
God and the Devil, the Church and Heretics
Inquisition and inquisitors
Part four. SCHOOL
Church and education
School and students
University and students
Studying at the University
Medieval thinking
Notes
Brief bibliography.
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