Middle Ages

During the 13th century the achievements of the 12th were codified and synthesized. The monarchical Church had become the great European institution; trade and commerce had tied Europe into an economic unity. This was due particularly to the achievements of Italian merchant-bankers, whose activities penetrated France, England, the Low Countries, and North Africa, as well as the old imperial lands of Germany. Travel, whether for pilgrimage, trade, or study at a university, became relatively easy and common. This was also a century of Crusades. These wars, begun in the late 11th century, were called by the popes to free Christian holy places in the Middle East from the control of the Muslims. Conceived of in Church law as an armed pilgrimage, the Crusades nevertheless cut across the lines of class and profession in their appeal. These international religious expeditions were yet one more example of the European unity that was centred in the Church. The High Middle Ages culminated in the great cultural achievements of Gothic architecture, the philosophic works of St Thomas Aquinas, and the imaginative vision of the totality of human life in La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy) by Dante Alighieri.

If the High Middle Ages were marked by the achievement of institutional unity and intellectual synthesis, the late Middle Ages were characterized by conflict and dissolution. It was then that the secular state began to emerge—even though it often was no more than an incipient national feeling—and the struggle for supremacy between Church and State became a fixture of European history for the next few centuries. Towns and cities, continuing to grow in size and prosperity, began to strive for political self-control, and the urban conflict became internal as well, as various classes, guilds, and interests vied for control.

One result of this struggle, particularly in the seignorial corporations of the Italian towns, was the intensification of political and social thinking. This thought focused on the secular state in its own right, independent of the Church or community of believers.

The independence of political enquiry is only one facet of a major trend in late medieval thinking. The grand project of high medieval philosophy, the attempt to reach a synthesis of all knowledge and experience, both human and divine, was becoming impossible.

Although these philosophical developments were important, the spirituality of the late Middle Ages was the true register of the social and cultural turmoil of the age. Late medieval spirituality was characterized by an intense search for the direct experience of God, whether through the private, interior ecstasy of mystical illumination, or through the personal scrutiny of God's word in the Bible. In either case, the established Church—both in its traditional function as interpreter of doctrine and in its institutional role as conveyor of the sacraments—found itself not so much embattled as dispensed with.

Mystical experience was potentially available to everyone, lay or cleric, man or woman, learned or illiterate. Conceived of as a personal gift from God, it stood sharply removed from social rank or cultural attainment. It was unworldly, irrational, private, and authoritative. Devotional reading of the Bible, in its turn, brought an awareness of a Church strikingly different from the all-encompassing, worldly medieval institution. Christ and the Apostles represented an image of radical simplicity, and using the life of Christ as a model to be imitated, individuals began to organize themselves into apostolic communities. Movements such as the Brethren of the Common Life and the Spiritual Franciscans proliferated throughout Europe. Sometimes they endeavoured to reform the Church from within, to lead it back to apostolic simplicity and purity; at other times they simply disengaged themselves from all existing institutions.

In many instances such movements took on a millenarian or messianic fervour, particularly among the disenfranchised workers in the late medieval towns, who lived in a state of perpetual crisis. After the catastrophic appearance in the 1340s of the Black Death, which killed about one quarter of the population of Europe, bands of penitents, flagellants, and followers of new messiahs and charismatic “saints” could be found throughout Europe, hoping to prepare for the coming of a new apostolic age.

This process of spiritual unrest and innovation would end in the Protestant Reformation. The new national identities would lead to the triumph of the modern nation-state. The continual expansion of trade and finance would lay the groundwork for the revolutionary transformation of the European economy. Thus, in the dissolution of the medieval world, in its social and cultural turmoil, the seeds of the modern age may be found. See also Medieval Britain.