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The schadenfreude of John de Cella’s critics would certainly have been shared by Abbot Samson of Bury (1182–1211), in whom even his biographer saw something of the night. Abbot Samson, Jocelin of Brakelond tells us, ‘was a serious-minded man and was never idle … [But] as the wise man [Horace] said, no one “is entirely perfect” – and neither was Abbot Samson.’ Always more manager than spiritual father of his community, Samson ‘appeared to prefer the active to the contemplative life, in that he praised good obedientiaries (office-holders) more highly than good cloister monks, and rarely commended anyone solely for his knowledge of literature unless he also knew about secular matters.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Those secular matters, to Abbot Samson’s mind, included the keeping of meticulous accounts. And the highly professional accounting practices of which Abbot Samson and his generation were the undoubted pioneers, helped extract the maximum profit from the land. Soon after his election, it was on Abbot Samson’s command that
A complete survey was made, in each hundred, of letes, suits, hidages, foddercorn, renders of hens, and other customs, rents, and payments, which had always been largely concealed by the tenants. Everything was written down, so that within four years of his election, no one could cheat him of a penny of the abbacy rents, and this despite the fact that no documents relating to the administration of the abbey had been handed on to him from his predecessors … This was the book he called his ‘Kalendar’. It also contained details of every debt he had paid off. He looked in this book nearly every day, as though it were a mirror reflecting his own integrity.
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It was under Abbot Samson’s sharp-eyed management that the great court at Bury echoed once again ‘to the sound of pickaxes and stonemasons’ tools’. And effective financial controls, from that time forward, would greatly ease the lot of the rebuilders. When Canterbury Cathedral’s choir was rebuilt after the fire of 1174, it owed at least some of its new glory to pilgrims’ offerings at the shrine of Archbishop Thomas Becket, murdered there just four years before. However, the greater part of the required funding, both of this and later works, was always less piety-driven than rental-led. While frequently in debt to Sienese bankers among others, the cathedral’s monk-custodians – the third richest monastic community (after Westminster and Glastonbury) in the kingdom – never stopped building at any time.
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Canterbury’s monks could handle debt more securely, and over a much longer term, because they were able to calculate very exactly what was owing to them. One of the cathedral-priory’s earliest rentals, dating to about 1200, brings together in one place all the information its obedientiaries might need for the resolution of future disputes. Not only, that is, did it record the names, rents, and payment-dates of the priory’s Canterbury tenants, but it gave locations and measurements also, beginning with the Northgate tenement of Roger fitzHamel’s sister, who paid sixpence at Michaelmas for ‘land lying behind our almonry wall; its breadth to the north 26 feet, length from the street towards the west 110 feet’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Nobody until that time had kept records of such precision. Yet so fast-developing was the economy, and so urgent was the need for new mechanisms of control, that within less than a generation of those first monastic rentals, almost every major landowner would keep the same.
It is the survival of such records that makes possible for the first time convincing estimates of growth in this century. Thus the estates of Christ Church Canterbury are thought to have almost doubled their net worth through the long thirteenth century; Westminster Abbey’s assets grew by more than twice in the same period; the monks of Battle and the bishops of Ely nearly trebled their receipts; and the income of the bishops of Worcester rose by four.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even allowing for inflation, such levels of growth are exceptional. And while it was the grander projects of the already rich which inevitably attracted the first funding, some residue trickled down to the localities. In the majority of English parishes, the rector was also a major landowner. And in clear recognition of the continuing affluence of his class, the chancels of many parish churches – widely acknowledged by that date to be the rector’s personal charge – were rebuilt on the most generous of scales. Not only were the new chancels of late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century England much larger than before, they were also conspicuously better furnished – with canopied piscina, triple sedilia and priest’s door in the south wall; carved reredos behind the altar; founder’s tomb and Easter Sepulchre to the north. In the post-Plague recession after 1349, such rectorial investment fell off sharply. And when, after a gap of half a century or more, building began again in many parishes, it was the parishioners’ nave rather than the rector’s chancel which claimed the rebuilders’ first attention, dread of Purgatory (not surplus wealth) being the spur.
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There was little, however, even just before the plague, to stop the rich growing exponentially richer. For while it is probably true that population growth was slowing before 1300, and although serious subsistence crises may already have developed as early as the 1260s in some regions, it was never the rich who paid the price.
(#litres_trial_promo) As the supply of labour went on growing, its cost fell still further; as the demand for land rose, so rents rose also; as husbandry intensified on overcrowded plots, tithable yields continued to increase. Some have seen Europe’s widespread famines of 1315–17 as the critical divide, when population advance turned into a retreat. And for Jacques Le Goff, ‘the combination of poor technological equipment and a social structure which paralysed economic growth meant that the medieval West was a world on the brink … constantly threatened by the risk that its subsistence might become uncertain … only just in a state of equilibrium’.
(#litres_trial_promo) But try telling that to a Sienese banker or to some wealthy prelate from the North. And many historians now take the view that it was the onset of the Black Death in 1347–9 – not overcrowding nor soil exhaustion, not a deteriorating climate nor a commerce-averse Church – which ended medieval Europe’s golden age. ‘France’, concludes James Goldsmith, ‘did not face a serious economic or demographic crisis in the half-century prior to the Black Death. France was not trapped in a Malthusian-Ricardian dilemma in which population increase outstripped food production. France was not overpopulated in terms of its economic structures and there was no shortage of land.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In practice, every circumstance still combined in the last half-century before the Pestilence to deliver yet more riches to the fortunate.
In the meantime, many had come to take prosperity for granted. There was never a time, for example, when skilled craftsmen lacked employment on the increasingly ambitious building programmes – three churches in two centuries – of the wealthy canons of Guisborough, in northern Yorkshire. Masons settled permanently in Guisborough township, they raised families to succeed them, were buried in the church’s shadow and left money to the priory’s fabric-fund in their wills.
(#litres_trial_promo) And while religious communities of every allegiance, confident in their rent-rolls, frequently took on greater projects than was prudent, very few came to grief as a result. Other wealthy Yorkshire houses where new construction never stopped included the near-neighbours, Cluniac Pontefract and Benedictine Selby. Both had contracted huge building debts before the end of the thirteenth century, as had the normally affluent canons of Augustinian Dunstable, forced to cut their commons to make ends meet:
We decided [Dunstable’s chronicler relates] that one portion of conventual dishes of every kind should be set before two brothers. Of the other economies made at that time [1294], as regards the number of dishes in the convent, as regards the almonry, the reception of guests, and the management of the household, you will find the particulars entered in the old book of obits [of this priory].
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Yet not one of these communities ever ran much risk of failure. And it was their still substantial wealth, over two centuries later, that made them such tempting targets for suppression.
What boosted building confidence – probably more in these pre-plague generations than at any other time – was an economic climate in which even the most feckless noble landowner could do no wrong. Few would ever match the hands-on farming skills of Walter de Burgo, custodian from 1236 of Henry III’s southern manors, who raised their value – through intelligent investment in marling, seed and stock – by as much as 70 per cent in just four years.
(#litres_trial_promo) However, agricultural regimes on England’s great demesnes would continue to improve throughout the thirteenth century, assisted by the circulation of such contemporary manuals of good practice as the Seneschaucy and Walter of Henley’s Husbandry. And every Western property-holder, great and small, obtained at least some benefit from the flow of German silver which had begun to run again more freely after the new discoveries at Freiberg in 1168, irrigating every economy through which it passed. Most particularly, all employers throughout this period shared easy long-term access to cheap labour. And not only were wages falling in proportion to landowner wealth, but new levels of skill were developing in many crafts and trades as greater specialization was driven by overcrowding. Good craftsmen are rare at any time. But much rarer is the situation where high skills and low rewards coincide with unfettered wealth-creation at patron level. When, from the 1250s or even earlier, this began to happen in the West, what resulted was affordable quality in every category of the arts, unleashing ingenuity and invention.
Of the extremes of that invention – always expensive and occasionally perverse – there is no better example than the multiple shafts and complex tracery of a big ‘Decorated’ cathedral like Exeter, in south-west England, rebuilt almost entirely between 1270 and 1340 at a time of unprecedented landowner prosperity. Walter Stapeldon (1307–27), twice Treasurer of England and the refurnisher of Exeter’s choir, was probably the wealthiest of the five bishops who oversaw these works during the seven decades they took to complete. However, it is to Bishop Peter Quinel (1280–91) that the costly sixteen-shafted ‘Exeter pillar’ is usually attributed; and it was Quinel’s pillar that set the standard for all that followed. Two centuries before, at Anglo-Norman Durham, single drum columns had supported the arcades; at Transitional Canterbury, after the fire of 1174, paired ‘Roman’ pillars were chosen for the renewal of the choir; the builders of Early English Salisbury, not otherwise shy of decoration, believed four-shafted piers ornate enough; and even Henry III, never one to spare expense, had settled on piers of just eight shafts for Westminster Abbey. Quinel doubled that number to sixteen.
Exeter Cathedral is provincial work, over-ornate and alarmingly top-heavy. More refined in every way was the king’s new choir at Westminster, in the Court Style of Louis IX’s Sainte-Chapelle. Other characteristically tall and slender churches in the French rayonnant tradition had included Suger’s Saint-Denis (rebuilt from 1231), with Beauvais and Amiens, Tours and Troyes, Clermont-Ferrand, Saint-Thibault and Carcassonne; in Germany, Cologne and Strasbourg; in Spain, Toledo and Leon. Such huge devotional spaces required furnishings of similar quality. And Walter Stapeldon’s enormous throne at Exeter – ‘the most exquisite piece of woodwork of its date in England and perhaps in Europe’
(#litres_trial_promo) – was a typical response to that challenge. But with no lack of cash-rich patrons, excellence spread out in all directions. Medieval England is not generally remembered for its art. Yet it was in these decades in particular that English wood-carvers and stonemasons were at their most inventive; that English tilers and potters worked at a standard never afterwards repeated; that English brasses and memorial sculptures were at their liveliest and most original; and that English Court Style painters, as in the Thornton Parva and Westminster retables or the De Lisle and Queen Mary psalters, were the equal of any in the West.
(#litres_trial_promo) Of the many English glazing schemes also commissioned in this period, none was more important than the glazing in 1305–40 of York Minster’s new rayonnant nave. Last to be completed were the cathedral’s three west windows. And so close were these in style and subject-matter to the best French paintings of their period that their makers were almost certainly Paris-trained.
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English miniature-painters are known to have worked in Paris in the early fourteenth century. And some would have learnt their art in the thriving atelier of Jean Pucelle (d.1334), illuminateur to Philip the Fair and his successors. Pucelle, in his turn, had learnt from the Italians, while the Italians themselves, including the great Sienese panel-painter Duccio di Buoninsegna (fl. 1278–1318), who was an important influence on Pucelle, took as much from the North as they gave back. For all, the common factor was extravagant commissions. Thus Duccio’s big Maestà, which took three years to paint, was commissioned in 1308 for the high altar at Siena Cathedral: the most prestigious location in the city. And the ingenuity and high invention of Pucelle and his assistants would have fallen far short of what they actually achieved had their virtuosity not been stimulated by the connoisseurship of Capetian kings and of the Valois who, from 1328, succeeded them.
Those increasingly sophisticated rulers of pre-plague France had owed their schooling in public patronage to Louis IX. And what St Louis did for the arts in thirteenth-century France had its closest parallel in the German empire of Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Frederick, as Holy Roman Emperor (1220–50), had only nominal suzerainty over Italy north of Apulia. He was never in total control of his German lands. Accordingly, it was in Frederick’s southern Italian kingdom, which he held absolutely from 1208, that he spent the greater part of his reign, creating a Court in Sicily and Apulia as brilliant as any that had surrounded the Norman ‘Great Count’, Roger I Guiscard, and his heirs. Apostrophized as Immutator Mundi (Transformer of the World), Frederick never lacked his admirers. He was a new David – claimed Henry of Avranches, one of the more extravagant of those – a new Charlemagne, a Caesar, or a Robert Guiscard; he was intellectually on a par with Plato and Cicero, Ptolemy, Euclid and Pythagoras.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Franciscan Salimbene, in contrast, stressed the downside of his rule, where ‘all these parties and schisms [between Guelf and Ghibelline] and divisions and maledictions in Tuscany as in Lombardy, in Romagna as in the March of Ancona, in the March of Treviso as in the whole of Italy, were caused by Frederick, formerly called emperor.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet like him or not, there was no denying the force of the Emperor Frederick’s example, whether in the revival of antique scholarship or in the arts. ‘O fortunate Emperor’, exclaimed another of his circle, ‘truly I believe that if ever there could be a man who, by virtue of knowledge, could transcend death itself, you would be that one!’
(#litres_trial_promo) And indeed Frederick, the classical scholar, was one of the first Western rulers to pay intelligent tribute to Antiquity in his buildings. There were Roman-style busts on Frederick’s great triumphal arch at Capua; at Castel del Monte, his Apulian hunting-lodge, the pediment of the big portal, supported by attached pilasters with neo-Corinthian capitals, is also Roman. Such overt imperial symbolism was hardly new. However, the Holy Roman Emperor was ruler also in the North, and what resulted at Castel del Monte – and probably at all of Frederick’s buildings, very few of which survive – was an eclectic mixture of the authentically Antique with northern Gothic and Apulian Romanesque.
It was the same merging of traditions in the sculptures of the Pisani (Nicola and Giovanni) and in the paintings of Duccio and Giotto, Simone Martini and Lorenzetti, which first breathed life into the Italian Renaissance. Nicola Pisano (fl. 1259–78) was an Apulian. And it was probably his familiarity with the Roman-derived work of the artists of Frederick’s Court that enabled him to bring a new understanding of classical sculpture to his adopted city, using it to good effect in the five pictorial panels of his pulpit for the Baptistery at Pisa. Another major influence on Pisano’s work was Gothic figure-carving, which he would have seen in portable form on the Via Francigena (the busy trade route south to Rome), even if – as seems likely – he never set foot in the North. Both Rome and the Gothic North were influential also on Giovanni Pisano, Nicola’s son: ‘not only equal but in some matters superior to his father’, wrote Giorgio Vasari (d.1574), architect and prosopographer of the Renaissance. And what most appealed to Vasari in the Pisani’s work was a new realism and truth to Nature lost (he believed) from Late Antiquity until their rediscovery by the Florentine painter Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337) ‘who alone, by God’s favour, rescued and restored the art [of good painting], even though he was born among incompetent artists’. It was Giotto, the barefoot country-boy of Vasari’s sometimes fanciful narrative, who soon after being brought to Florence by the established painter Cimabue ‘not only captured his master’s own style but also began to draw so ably from life that he made a decisive break with the crude traditional Byzantine style and brought to life the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years’. And it was just that break with tradition, earning Nicola and Giovanni a chapter of their own in Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors (1550), that he saw also in the sculptures of the two Pisani, who ‘very largely shed the old Byzantine style with its clumsiness and bad proportions and displayed better invention in their scenes and gave their figures more attractive attitudes’.
(#litres_trial_promo) What Vasari did not say was that much of that ‘better invention’ was not Italian at all, but had been learnt from the Gothic masters of the North.
Strikingly, for ‘invention’ has not always commanded such support among the rich, there was no lack of commissions for the new art. Giotto, in Vasari’s long account of his career, was pressed to work in Florence (repeatedly), in Assisi and Pisa, in Rome and Avignon (home of the exiled popes), in Padua and Verona, Ferrara and Ravenna, Lucca, Naples, Gaeta, Rimini and Milan. And, characteristically, it was not just among cardinals and princes that he found his patrons, but in a wealthy Paduan banker like Enrico Scrovegni, heir to one of the greatest private fortunes ever put together in the West, whose commissioning of Giotto’s masterpiece, the Arena Chapel frescos, is thought to have been intended as an act of expiation for the notorious usury of the super-rich Reginaldo, Enrico’s father.
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Generous funding also followed the Pisani. Nicola’s Pisan Baptistery pulpit had been much admired. And five years later, in 1265, an almost identical (but larger) pulpit was commissioned for Siena Cathedral, with seven pictorial panels in place of five. Then, shortly after the Siena pulpit was completed, it was again the Pisani’s workshop – largely Giovanni’s by this time – that was commissioned to make a civic fountain for Perugia, long a stronghold of the Guelfs, which had found itself at last on the winning side. It was following Charles of Anjou’s decisive victory over Conradin’s Ghibelline forces at Tagliacozzo in 1268 that the Perugians entered a new era of exceptional self-confidence and prosperity. One expression of that new confidence was the founding of a university; another, the completion of the long and costly aqueduct which would eventually debouch into Perugia’s Fontana Maggiore. Deliberately linking the two events, the Pisani’s sculptured fountain carries allegories of Philosophy and the Liberal Arts; there are political reminders – the eagles of the Empire, the griffon of Perugia, and the lion of the Guelfs; there are saints, kings and prophets; there is Eulistes (legendary founder of Perugia) and Melchizedek (Priest of the Most High God), with, between them, the two egregious civic dignitaries in office at the time: Matteo da Correggio, podestà of Perugia in 1278, and Ermanno da Sassoferrato, capitano del popolo. ‘And as Giovanni [Pisano] considered he had executed the work very well indeed, he put his name to it.’
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It was the unremitting feuding of Guelf and Ghibelline, still continuing in the 1280s, which caused Brunetto Latini to write: ‘War and hatred have so multiplied among the Italians that in every town there is division and enmity between the two parties of citizens.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But what perpetuated those enmities was never as much vendetta, however politically inspired, as the tensions of a society in which only money mattered – and mattered more because it was abundant. On the steps of the Virgin’s throne in Simone Martini’s Maestà, painted in 1315 for the Great Council Chamber at Siena, there are verses which read: ‘The angelic flowers, the rose and lily/with which the heavenly fields are decked/do not delight me more than righteous counsel./But some I see who for their own estate/despise me and deceive my land’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet it was precisely that pursuit of individual fortunes that had made the Sienese wealthy; and Simone Martini painted largely for the rich. Simone’s Maestà in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico was once thickly gold-encrusted; his St Louis of Toulouse (1317), painted for the Angevin Robert the Wise of Sicily, was embellished further with gold and precious stones; his Annunciation (1333) for Siena Cathedral has a ‘chocolate-chip’ richness which contrasts absolutely with the ‘plain vanilla’ of the Giottos at Assisi.
There are frescos by Simone also in the double basilica at Assisi, where his sumptuous St Martin Cycle, in the Montefiore Chapel of the Lower Church, recalls the particular devotion of an Italian cardinal, Gentile da Montefiore, for a Gallo-Roman bishop, Martin of Tours (d.397), whose following was principally in France. And while plainly influenced by Giotto’s art, Simone’s St Martin frescos have a distinctly Northern flavour, owing more to a contemporary Court Style miniaturist like Jean Pucelle. The distinguishing characteristics of that style were a bold use of brilliant colour (including much gold) and the repeated tiny brush-strokes of the illuminator. But such techniques are expensive, even on a manuscript’s much smaller scale. And when re-used in the 1320s on Simone’s frescos at Assisi, they could only have been realized with funding so unlimited that cost was no longer a consideration.
The times were certainly ripe for that expenditure. For in the long history of Western patronage there have been comparatively few such episodes of immoderate private wealth – industrializing America at the time of John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan was another – and none which have lasted quite as long. Then, towards the end of the 1340s, came the reckoning. ‘After great heat cometh cold’, warned a proverb of those years, ‘let no man cast his cloak away.’
(#litres_trial_promo) After the smiling summers, the drenching rains; after plenty, dearth; after centuries of remission, the return of Plague; and after boom, recession. ‘Even in Arcadia, I (Death) am … Et in Arcadia ego.’
CHAPTER THREE Recession and Renaissance (#ulink_73ce3699-d1ce-5fa0-b46e-ea5558fe166b)
‘Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague’, wrote Ibn Khaldun of the first onset of the Black Death, ‘which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out … The entire inhabited world changed.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He was right, of course. Yet he could not have known, as a contemporary witness of the Great Pestilence, just how long-lasting those changes would prove to be. Reduced by at least a third in 1347–50, Europe’s populations either stabilized at that level for the next 150 years or fell still further. And while some of that reduction was arguably inevitable – a necessary purge following centuries of growth, bringing people and resources back in balance – what followed was a recovery so sluggish and so unequal as to put a blight on the economy for generations. Downsizing a labour force is effective only if what is left provides a springboard for future growth. Yet there was to be little growth of any kind before the 1480s at earliest. And the real tragedy of the Black Death, in the longue durée, was Western society’s lamentable failure to rebuild.
That failure was more complete in some localities than in others. Norway, at one extreme, lost 64 per cent of its pre-plague population between 1348 and 1500; whereas England, over the same period, lost nearer 50 per cent, and others went down by just a third. These are estimates only, of which the accuracy has often been disputed. But even if wrong in detail, what the figures clearly show are conspicuously low replacement rates across the population as a whole, frequently barely adequate for survival. The most successful urbanized economies of the first half of the fifteenth century were Burgundian Flanders and Republican Florence. Both were especially attractive to skilled immigrants and, in part as a result, became the leading contemporary capitals of the arts. Yet the population of the Flemish cities, for all the magnetism of their wealth, continued to drift downwards through much of the fifteenth century, with no recovery of any substance before the end of it. And in Florence likewise, whereas population losses had bottomed out by the 1420s, there was then no upward movement for half a century at least, so that there were still markedly fewer Florentines in 1500 than there had been in 1347.
A severe and exceptionally long-lasting demographic collapse was thus the shared experience of almost all late-medieval communities in the West. And very little of what happened after the Black Death makes sense without reference to the pestilence. However, bubonic plague was just one element of a general retreat which, while certainly triggered by the Black Death in 1347–50, very rapidly developed its own momentum. That first outbreak of the disease had killed huge numbers, with some death-counts rising as high as 80 per cent even in remote rural communities. While increasingly an urban phenomenon, killer plagues then returned repeatedly for over three centuries before vanishing unaccountably in the 1700s. Yet plague was never the only – nor even the principal – population curb in the Western towns and cities it most afflicted. In late-medieval Europe, it was less bacteria that frustrated growth than full employment.
In practice, plague survivors were in great demand in every sort of occupation, and the jobs-for-all bonanza of the Black Death’s aftermath was self-perpetuating. Working women, in what is sometimes seen as their original ‘Golden Age’, were free at last to choose when to stop work and start a family. And in opting to marry later, only then setting up households of their own, they also cut the numbers of their children. Europe has many cultures, and neither the marriage patterns nor the household formation systems of North and South were then – or have ever been – the same. But whereas Mediterranean brides continued to find their partners before the age of twenty-one, post-plague northerners usually waited until their mid-twenties to make a match, and not infrequently stayed single out of choice. Where women married late and were prone to die in childbirth, where infant mortality was chronically high, where breast-feeding postponed conception for two years or more, and where life expectations, already low before the plague, fell still further, populations soon stopped growing. In short, the key demographic variable after the Black Death was arguably not mortality but nuptiality.
‘People are not poor because they have large families’, wrote a student of household systems in modern India. ‘Quite the contrary, they have large families because they are poor.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And, in contrast, it was the relative affluence of individual plague survivors – and particularly, in this context, of independent farmers and their wives – which enabled them to settle for smaller nuclear families with fewer children. Traditional extended family systems, while still very much alive in the Third World today, were dying out in north-west Europe by 1400. And those comfortably-off English yeomen and their womenfolk who built the solid oak-framed farmhouses of the fifteenth-century Kentish Weald, were never in the business of offering accommodation to all and sundry. In their big open halls – relics of a life-style once entirely led in common – the uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, grandparents, in-laws and cousins far and near, came together only, as it were, for Sunday lunches.
It was thus high levels of employment and good wages in the West which enabled that critical threshold to be crossed between a ‘situation where people cannot afford not to have children [and] one where they cannot afford to have many of them.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And paradoxical though it may sound, it was this new post-plague prosperity that, by discouraging large families, helped put off demographic recovery. Another token of private affluence, of which the outcome was the same, was the single-person household of the unmarried working woman or merry widow. In Florence in 1427, one in four adult women were widows, and many had doubtless chosen to remain in that condition, coming to view the death of older spouses as liberation: ‘as if a heavy yoke of servitude (un grave giogo di servitu) had been lifted from their backs’, observed Lodovico Dolce in the next century.
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Ensnared by Mamma’s cooking, Florence’s affluent bachelors had been reluctant to leave home before their early thirties, or even later. And fathers who had married tardily were another obvious reason why European city populations, even before the plague, had always found it difficult to replace themselves. Traditionally, the gap had been filled by immigration from rural areas. But whereas new recruitment remained steady in the half-century following the Black Death, as the smaller and more marginal settlements lost out to the towns, that pool was drying up by 1400. Newly prosperous peasant families, with too much land at their disposal and too little labour of their own, remained (and kept their children) in their localities. For if the populations of big cities risked extinction in post-plague times, so too – and often more so – did village communities. The Tuscan city of Pistoia was a near-neighbour and dependency of Florence. And Pistoia’s contado (rural territory) had been haemorrhaging population since the late thirteenth century, losing more than 70 per cent of its pre-plague maximum by 1400. That figure conceals huge differences between well-situated lowland villages, which continued to keep up numbers, and remote hill-top communities already in the advanced stages of disbanding. Nevertheless the fact remains that Pistoia the city – regular plague-trap though it was – held its strength marginally better than the contado. When surveyed in 1415, Pistoia’s population had fallen from around 11,000 shortly before the Black Death to just below 4000, or a loss of some 65 per cent.
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‘Death was everywhere’ in post-plague rural Normandy, of which fully half the population had disappeared by 1380.
(#litres_trial_promo) In Castile likewise, in the wake of ‘the Great Death’, settlement desertions gathered pace as bubonic plague returned again in 1363–4, in 1374, in 1380, in 1393–4, in 1399 and 1400.
(#litres_trial_promo) But while Castile shed many villages in the Black Death’s aftermath, Normandy lost rather few. And here it was the weather, rather than plague, that made the difference. The hot dry summers and mild wet winters of temperate Europe’s high-medieval warm epoch had begun to break up shortly after 1250. And what followed was a much lengthier cooling phase, starting with the great sea-storms and coastal inundations of the late thirteenth century and persisting through the rest of the Middle Ages. Characterized by wild temperature swings from cold to hot again, with their associated floods and droughts, it damaged most particularly those outlying farming communities which, in two centuries of increasing overcrowding before the Great Pestilence, had pushed out settlement into the more marginal territories on the hillsides, in the marshlands, and through the forests. Too hostile to allow survival, Castile’s parched and barren uplands were among the first to be deserted, as were the thin-soiled hill-top settlements of Mediterranean Pistoia, and the eroded slopes of Bray in the otherwise lush green pastures of Atlantic Normandy.
Imposed rather than created, plague and a deteriorating climate were the two principal exogenous factors in the Great Recession of the ‘long’ fifteenth century. No Western European economy was unaffected by them. Yet it was the endogenous factors – made by man himself – which were more likely to touch the arts directly. Chief among these was the weakness of money systems: a combination of politically-driven debasements (almost always to finance a war) and of chronic silver shortages in the West. Precisely because such crises were man-made, their incidence and fall-out could differ spectacularly between neighbours. Weak currencies and bullion famines were everywhere the norm in fifteenth-century Europe. But in Spain, whereas Aragon maintained a strong currency, Castile’s was one of the weakest; and while bullion in Aragon was in short supply, Castile’s location on the trade routes north from Africa kept gold flowing through the markets of Seville.
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For prince and people alike, Philip the Good concluded in 1433, ‘ung des principaulx poins de toutes bonnes policies … es davoir monnoye ferme et durable, tant d’or comme d’argent’.
(#litres_trial_promo) And it is perfectly true that a weak currency – the very reverse of une monnaye ferme et durable – was especially damaging to the receipts of great landowners, dependent on long-term leases and sluggish rents. Inflation, on the other hand, suited rent-payers very well, leaving fifteenth-century governments with the dilemma that if they devalued, the aristocracy rebelled, while every attempt to strengthen the currency was certain to be resisted by their tenants. In the event, it was the nobility who cried loudest, swinging the balance in favour of strong money. And the regular savage debasements which alone had enabled Philip VI of France to pay his troops in the opening campaigns of the Hundred Years War, were already largely over by 1360. For the next 350 years, interrupted only by such short-term wartime debasements as those of 1417–22 and 1427–9, France pursued the strong money policy, supported by taxation, which best suited its tax-exempt nobility. Yet the attractions of a stratagem which – explained Guillaume le Soterel (treasurer general of Navarre) – allowed the prince to ‘strike coin as feeble as he likes to have the means to pay his troops to defend him and his people and his land’, were too powerful to resist in a crisis.
(#litres_trial_promo) And nowhere was this more obvious than in post-Black Death Castile, where four ‘spectacularly awful’ debasements – starting in 1354, 1386, 1429 and 1463 – each paid for a war but cost the maravedi, or Castilian money of account, as much as 95 per cent of its value.
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In contrast, the post-plague Low Countries under their Burgundian dukes – Philip the Bold (1384–1404), John the Fearless (1404–19), Philip the Good (1419–67) and Charles the Bold (1467–77) – became a model of firm government and strong money. Yet precipitous debasement would return, if only briefly, at the start of Habsburg rule in the 1480s: again to pay for mercenaries. Nor had it been possible for the dukes, vastly wealthy though they were, to survive unscathed through the deeply disruptive bullion famines of the fifteenth century. The accompanying hiatus in Europe’s money supply imposed constraints of every kind on the economy. It had begun with the mid-fourteenth-century exhaustion and closure of the Central European silver mines, aggravated by hoarding and accumulations of plate, and by the steady drain of bullion towards the East. Severe by 1400, the famine was most complete in 1440–65, when so catastrophic were the silver shortages that every mint was empty and hardly a new coin was struck. Surrounded by a countryside in deep recession, mid-century Brussels (home of the Burgundian court) was one of only four Brabantine cities to ride the storm successfully, the others being Malines (the legal centre), Louvain (for its new university), and Antwerp (for its capture of the English cloth trade). Even so, for almost a generation from 1437 the Brabantine mint at Brussels struck no new silver coins, closing completely (i.e. for gold as well as silver) for rather more than half of that long period.
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Defaulting rulers, among them Edward IV of England, contributed to the crisis which, from the late 1450s, had enveloped even Florence, damaging the Medici and causing the collapse of several major banking families (the Baldesi, the Partini, the Banchi and their like) in the late autumn of 1464. ‘It is the greatest calamity that has happened in this city since 1339 [the bankruptcy of the Bardi and Peruzzi]’, reported Angelo Acciaiuoli, himself a banker, that December. However, Florence’s crisis proved short-lived, and of more general significance to the economies of the West was the all but total disappearance – ‘throughout the universe’, thought the councillors of Barcelona in 1447 – of an official silver coinage, along with the small change (petty currency or ‘black’ money) of everyday transactions in street and marketplace.
(#litres_trial_promo) Disadvantaged already by uncompetitive pricing and by the deflationary pressures of the Burgundians’ pursuit of hard money, the once famous Brabantine draperies, with their long-established German and French outlets, had only just survived the growing competition of English imports. Then, in the mid-fifteenth century, two decades of currency starvation wiped them out.
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A flexible economy – and Brabantine Malines had one of those – can survive just about anything. But whereas the weavers of Malines moved successfully into dyeing and leather-processing, gun-founding, furriery, embroidery and carpet-making, the more normal case was that of Flemish Ypres, unable to diversify or to make the required transition from the high-cost quality draperies of the traditional Low Countries industry to the cheaper cloths which alone could compete with English imports. There had been some 1500 looms at Ypres in 1311; by 1502, that number had fallen to just a hundred, while population had retreated by two-thirds.
(#litres_trial_promo) Flanders’ loss was England’s gain, with English cloth exports rising by as much as two and a half times between Edward IV’s debasements of 1464–5 and the early 1500s. However, England too had suffered devastating currency shortages in the mid-century. And the subsequent continent-wide success of English cloth – swamping the European markets in what would be likened thirty years later to ‘an immense inundation of the sea’ – was at least in part the product of a 1450s rationalization of the export trade, concentrating capital in fewer hands as those without access either to cash or to credit went out of business.
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‘I thank God and ever shall’, wrote John Barton (d.1491) of Holme, merchant of the Staple of Calais, ‘’tis the sheepe hath payed for all.’ And for a rich man like himself, obtaining credit held few terrors even in the worst of times, nor would he have been excluded, as lesser men might be, from those complex barter arrangements – exchanging wool for alum, cloth for wine or iron – which were all that the mid-century currency shortages allowed. By making the rich still richer, the post-plague bullion famine thus added another element to the already serious distortion of family inheritance histories created by exceptionally high mortalities and low birth-rates. If the generations are too compressed and wealth cascades too rapidly, and if a failure to reproduce, or the sudden death of heirs, brings unanticipated enrichment to distant kin, high levels of consumerism may result. In late-medieval Europe, such extraordinary windfall riches – a major factor, even then, in the funding of the arts – bore no more relation to the real health of the economy than the inflated lottery takings of today.
In those circumstances exactly, it was the deaths in quick succession of no fewer than six better-qualified heirs that catapulted John Hopton on 7 February 1430 into the spreading estates which enabled him to take a leading role in the rebuilding of his parish church at Blythburgh.
(#litres_trial_promo) And it was other swiftly acquired fortunes which made great church-rebuilders also of John Barton of Holme, of John Tame of Fairford, of John Baret of Bury, of Thomas Spring of Lavenham, and of the Cloptons (John especially) of Long Melford. These small-town English clothiers, protected from competition by the Low Countries slump, could expect to sell everything they produced. Nothing could prevent them getting richer. However, even in those Flemish cities which lost out most to English exports, there had been opportunities enough under Burgundian rule for the accumulation of considerable private fortunes. Mid-century Ghent – its looms fallen silent and its weavers out of work – was among the more prominent casualties of the recession. Yet just two decades earlier, a wealthy Ghent couple had nevertheless found the means to commission a high-quality painted altarpiece from the best artists of the day, pensioners of Philip the Good. Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s luminous polyptych, the Adoration of the Lamb (1432), was painted for the personal chantry at St John’s (now Ghent Cathedral) of Joos Vijd and Elizabeth Borluut. It was a ‘stupendous’ painting: huge and vastly detailed.
(#litres_trial_promo) And of course it was enormously expensive.
Other big commercial fortunes in the post-plague North included those of William Canynges, shipowning philanthropist of Bristol, and Jacques Coeur, merchant-financier of Bourges. Each would support an ambitious building programme – a cathedral-like preaching nave for St Mary Redcliffe (Bristol); a fabulous townhouse in Bourges – in which there is not the slightest evidence of economy. Likewise vast preaching naves, spectacular prodigy gatehouses, and big town halls characterized the more successful of the late-medieval German towns where, for example, by the early 1500s the taxable worth of some thirty-seven burghers of Nuremberg and fifty-three of Augsburg – each assessed at more than 10,000 Rhenish florins – would have ranked them among the top 1 per cent of Florentine taxpayers a century earlier.
(#litres_trial_promo) Meanwhile in Florence itself the number and scale of individual private fortunes continued growing. And it was the steadily increasing disposable wealth of Florence’s better-off citizenry which underpinned its continuing eminence in the arts.
By far the richest man in Florence in 1427 (the year of the great catasto or tax assessment) was Palla Strozzi. However, Palla’s son, Gianfrancesco, was to be among those brought down in the major banking debacle of 1464. And if even the greatest Florentine fortunes were thus so vulnerable to collapse, long-term investment in the arts in general – and in large-scale palace-building in particular – might have seemed in normal circumstances unlikely. In practice, the opposite was the case. New fortunes, unlike old, invite display; and Florence was awash with new money. By the 1490s another Strozzi, Filippo, had grown individually so rich that he was worth more than twice as much in real terms as the great Palla. It was Filippo who began building the huge Strozzi Palace, far exceeding his own family’s needs, which he then left unfinished on his death. Furthermore, Filippo and his contemporaries, as well as being distinctly richer than their early fifteenth-century counterparts, belonged also to a much larger group. There had been nobody in Florence in 1427 to equal Palla Strozzi. Just a century later, there were no fewer than eighty Florentine citizens at least as rich as Palla, of whom eight enjoyed fortunes twice as large.
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For many of these, public patronage of the arts was acceptably part of the price of Florentine citizenship. Pride in their city was motivation enough. However, a more general occasion for investment in the arts was provided by after-death soul-care. Palla Strozzi’s many works of public piety, for which he expected (and received) recognition, included the commissioning in 1423 of Gentile da Fabriano’s splendid and hugely popular Adoration of the Magi altarpiece for the fashionable church of Sta Trinità. Likewise big donor figures feature prominently in the foreground of Masaccio’s almost contemporary Holy Trinity (1425–7) at Sta Maria Novella, where Domenico Lenzi and his wife kneel in adoration of the Crucified Christ, of God the Father, the Virgin Mary and St John. It was of this highly original work, admired more by other painters than by the art-loving public of the day, that Vasari later wrote: ‘the most beautiful thing, apart from the figures, is the barrel-vaulted ceiling drawn in perspective and divided into square compartments containing rosettes foreshortened and made to recede so skilfully that the surface looks as if it is indented’.
(#litres_trial_promo) And it is true that neither Masaccio’s mastery of perspective nor his intuitive understanding of classical architecture had any parallel in Florentine painting of his time. Yet there is a more traditional moral message in Masaccio’s Trinity. Below his two donor figures is a skeleton on a sarcophagus, painted with as much care as the rest of the fresco and accompanied by the ancient warning legend: ‘Io fuga quelche voi sete … I was once what ye are now; and what I am now, so shall ye be.’
Almost identical memento mori texts occur on twelfth-century tomb-slabs. They are used again on pre-plague morality paintings of The Three Living and the Three Dead, where the Dead confront the Living at a crossroads, and have no necessary association with the pestilence. In contrast, the cadaver-bearing ‘transi’ tomb – always more common north of the Alps than in Mediterranean lands such as Italy – gained broad acceptance as a funerary convention only in the fifteenth century, when at least some of the cadaver’s realism and much of its immediate impact were unquestionably owed to the everyday experience of the dying and the dead shared by sculptor and public alike. Even so, it was less contemporaries’ morbid preoccupation with sudden death which inspired the style than their abiding dread of the punishments of Purgatory. At the turn of the century when the transi tomb began – most influentially with the cadaver effigy of Cardinal Jean de Lagrange (d.1402) at Avignon – the naked and corrupt figure of a great prince of the Church served chiefly to demonstrate humility: ‘Miserable one [runs the cardinal’s inscription], why are you so proud? You are only ash, and you will revert, as we have done, to a fetid cadaver, food and titbits for worms and ashes.’ However, as the style spread to laymen, other purposes were added: to attract attention, to awaken pity, and to elicit prayer.
(#litres_trial_promo) At John Barton’s rebuilt church at Holme by Newark, there is the customary inscription in the big east window over the altar, calling on the devout to ‘pray for the soul of John Barton … builder of this church, who died 1491’. Identical orate pro anima (pray for the soul of … ) texts are repeated all over Europe in similar contexts. Yet on Barton’s canopied monument – paired effigies above, single cadaver below – the appeal is both more personal and more affecting: ‘Pity me, you at least my friends, for the hand of the Lord has touched me.’
Barton’s words were original, but his concerns were not. And never have prayers for the dead been invoked more assiduously than in the century leading up to the Reformation. Purgatory – where the shriven soul is comprehensively cleansed by fire and ice – was already an ancient concept when accepted as Church doctrine at the Council of Lyons in 1274. However, what had not been made so clear until that time was the clergy’s power of intervention. How long a soul must remain in Purgatory – ‘some longer and some shorter’ – would depend, the Church taught, not just on ‘whether they have done good on Earth before they died’ but also on ‘whether they have friends on Earth to help’.
(#litres_trial_promo) And in the formal recognition of prayer’s supreme role in speeding release from torments so dreadful ‘that all the creatures in the world would not know how to describe their pains’, the first elements of a bargain were spelled out. ‘It is for the rich to pay, the poor to pray’, dictated the popular contemporary jingle. That implicit contract, once accepted by the wealthy, brought a flood of new investment to the arts.
‘For Jesus love pray for me’, urged John Tame (Barton’s contemporary) on his own founder’s monument at Fairford Church. ‘I may not pray, now pray ye, with a pater noster and an ave, that my paynys relessid may be.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And by 1500, when John Tame died, provision for personal soul-care – the earliest form of health insurance – had become so everyday that it would routinely absorb up to a third of a testator’s estate. John Tame was a rich clothier, and he built a big church. However, when the even wealthier nobility took out policies of their own, what resulted were huge factories of prayer. One of the greatest of these was the Burgundian tomb-church at Champmol, near Dijon, newly founded in 1378 by Philip the Bold (d.1404) for a double-sized community of Carthusians. The Champmol Charterhouse has gone. But among the fine sculptures preserved on its destruction is Claus Sluter’s highly original monument to Philip the Bold himself, where the duke’s recumbent effigy, hands raised in prayer, has hooded mourners processing round the tomb-chest.
As Adam Smith once wrote: ‘With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.’ (Wealth of Nations). And Philip of Burgundy’s sculptors – Jean de Marville, Claus Sluter and Claus de Werve in succession – were indeed the best that money could buy, while his monks were the most highly regarded. When other religious orders, condemned for lax observance and widely blamed for God’s wrath, were held in low esteem, the more ascetic Carthusians continued to attract patronage from those so rich that they could afford the high costs of the very best quality intercession. Carthusians were expensive. Rejecting the life in common, they lived out their silent lives in spacious private cells set about a great cloister, and only their little-used churches were ever small. Nevertheless, for all their expense, as many as seven of the nine English Charterhouses were to be of post-1340 foundation, including big double houses at London (1371) and Sheen (1414): the first owing its scale to great City fortunes sometimes dubiously acquired, the second to the free-flowing conscience-money of Lancastrian kings, troubled by the murder of an archbishop. ‘Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay’, boasts Henry V on the brink of Agincourt, ‘who twice a day their wither’d hands hold up toward Heaven, to pardon blood.’ (Henry V, iv:i:294–6). And while the prayers of the destitute had particular worth, to those were now added the even weightier prayer barrages of Henry’s forty Carthusian monks at Sheen, next to his new manor-house, and of another sixty Bridgettine nuns at Syon Abbey (1415) across the river, storming Heaven together.
If soul-masses were indeed, as many supposed, ‘highest in merit and of most power to draw down the mercy of God’, there was no absolute limit to their numbers. What resulted was serious inflation. Whereas the endowment of between 1500 and 5000 soul-masses was considered usual – if by normal standards excessive – in the mid-fourteenth-century nobility of Bordelais, Bernard d’Ecoussans left provision for 25,000 masses for himself and another 10,000 for his forebears, Jean de Grailly bought 50,000, and Bernard Ezi doubled that number.
(#litres_trial_promo) Prayer barrages of this density were clearly burdensome to heirs, as were the other works often associated with such programmes. It took, for example, very nearly half a century to wind up the personal soul-trust of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (d.1439). And among the causes of this delay, hugely damaging to Richard’s heirs, was the commissioning in 1451 of a tomb and effigy of superlative quality – ‘to cast and make a man armed, of fine latten garnished with certain ornaments, viz. with sword and dagger; with a garter; with a helme and crest under his head, and at his feet a bear musled, and a griffon, perfectly made of the finest latten’ – to be housed in a splendid new chapel dedicated to the purpose and attached to the family’s collegiate chantry at Warwick Church.
While the Beauchamp investment was heavy enough, it could scarcely compare with that of many of the royal families of late-medieval Europe, or even of the greater princes of the Church. Exclusive Carthusians were again the first choice of Juan II of Castile to be custodians of the royal dead at Miraflores (Burgos), where an over-sized church began rising in 1442, to be ready at last by the mid-1480s to receive the sumptuous tombs of Juan II and Isabella of Portugal and of the Infante Alfonso their son, commissioned by Isabella of Spain (Alfonso’s sister) from the workshops of Gil de Siloé. A generation earlier, João I (the Great) of Portugal had made similar provision for his new dynasty. Mindful of the Virgin’s help in granting him a decisive victory over the Castilians at Aljubarrota in 1385, João (after some hesitation) chose a Marian order – Dominicans on this occasion – to tend the family tomb-church at Batalha, north of Lisbon. And there he still lies, in the most enormous state, next to Philippa of Lancaster, his English queen.
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Philippa was the eldest daughter of John of Gaunt, son of one king (Edward III), uncle of another (Richard II), and father of a third (Henry IV). Her half-sister (by the duke’s second marriage to Constance of Castile) was Catherine, queen of Castile; and one of her half-brothers (by Gaunt’s third wife, Catherine Swynford) was the great priest-statesman Henry Beaufort (d.1447), ‘Cardinal of England’, Bishop of Winchester, and international diplomatist. In circles such as these, national frontiers had little meaning in the arts. Thus the architecture of Portuguese Batalha, in its primary phase, shows clear English influence, being an early demonstration of the close bond between the nations first established at the Treaty of Windsor in 1386. And when, in the 1430s, Cardinal Beaufort spent many months in the Low Countries on diplomatic missions to the Burgundians, he took the opportunity to have his portrait painted by Philip the Good’s most favoured artist, Jan van Eyck.
(#litres_trial_promo) Beaufort was an old man when the painting was done, and he may already have been pondering his death-plan. Certainly, over the next ten years he took every known precaution to guarantee the comfort of his soul. While plainly confident of his ability to translate the wealth of this world into high-ranking ease in the next, Beaufort nevertheless made provision for an instant barrage of 10,000 soul-masses on his death. He endowed perpetual chantries at three great cathedrals (Lincoln, Canterbury and Winchester); made major contributions, similarly recompensed by prayer, to Henry VI’s mammoth educational charities at Eton and King’s College (Cambridge); and invested heavily in the rebuilding of the ancient hospital of St Cross (Winchester) as an almshouse or refuge ‘of noble poverty’. Even after these and much else, the residue of Beaufort’s estate was still substantial. All was to be spent – the cardinal instructed his executors – in such ways especially ‘as they should believe to be of the greatest possible advantage to the safety of my soul.’
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It was this single-minded concentration on the soul’s repose which, whatever the announced purpose of the work in hand, inspired the great majority of fifteenth-century Grands Projets. Thus it was Archbishop Chichele’s clearly expressed desire in 1438 that the ‘poor and indigent scholars’ of his new Oxford college at All Souls should
