There may not be a more fascinating a historical period than the late fourteenth century in Europe. The Hundred Years' War ravaged the continent, yet gallantry, chivalry, and literary brilliance flourished in the courts of England and elsewhere. It was a world in transition, soon to be replaced by the Renaissance and the Age of Exploration -- and John of Gaunt was its central figure. In today's terms, John of Gaunt was a multibillionaire with a brand name equal to Rockefeller. He fought in the Hundred Years' War, sponsored Chaucer and proto-Protestant religious thinkers, and survived the dramatic Peasants' Revolt, during which his sumptuous London residence was burned to the ground. As head of the Lancastrian branch of the Plantagenet family, Gaunt was the unknowing father of the War of the Roses; after his death, his son usurped the crown from his nephew, Richard II. Gaunt's adventures represent the culture and mores of the Middle Ages as those of few others do, and his death is portrayed in The Last Knight as the end of that enthralling period.

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The Last Knight
The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era

Chapter One

Old Europe

To see how John of Gaunt epitomized the heightof the Middle Ages, the flowering of the periodjust prior to modernity, requires an understandingof the conditions that produced his era. The political andsocial system that developed in the period 800–1100 wassuccessful in providing a structure with which security, stability,and economic growth occurred. Legal relationships byand large preceded security and economic growth. Feudalismwas stable in the twelfth century because a nexus of judicialrelationships provided for a degree of balance and harmonyand allowed other components of medieval society and cultureto develop.

Climatic conditions were favorable as well. Europeanswere fortunate in that a warming trend developed between1150 and 1280, leading to a longer growing season for cerealcrops and an increased food supply.

Europeans were also lucky that their society was free from pandemic disease in the period from the ninth century to themiddle of the fourteenth.

Another factor in the rise of Europe was of the Europeans'own making. At the Church's urging they learned tokeep their ambitions and aggression under control. The thirteenthcentury was the time of the longest era of peace beforethe nineteenth century. There were no major wars in WesternEurope between 1214 and 1296. Widespread prosperityaccompanied increasing legal order and political stability.

Then came the fourteenth century, the new age of war,disease, and colder climate.

A great American medieval historian, Joseph R. Strayer ofPrinceton, was fond of saying, "If Europe could survive thefourteenth century, it could survive anything." Barbara Tuchman,in her best-selling book A Distant Mirror (1978), likenedthe fourteenth century to the disastrous twentieth century.

What was this European civilization of the early fourteenthcentury? Part of the answer lies in how Europeansthen referred to their civilization. They called it Latin Christendom.It had two international institutions: the RomanCatholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire of the GermanNation, stretching from the Rhine to the Elbe.

Behind this façade of internationalism, however, lay ethnicnationalism and an intense localism. The papacy, its seat relocatedfrom Rome to Avignon since the first decade of the fourteenthcentury, was under the thumb of the French monarchy.Many bishops and some abbots were as rich as the pope.

The Holy Roman Empire, founded by Frederick I, calledBarbarossa, in the 1160s, was not a political entity. It hadbroken up into many separate states. Whoever held the titleof Emperor was only as strong as his family's territorialresources allowed. He could be very strong in Bohemia(today the Czech Republic), like Charles IV, or in Austria,like the Hapsburg dynasty, but relatively weak a couple ofhundred miles outside his own kingdom or duchy.

The Iberian Peninsula, once united under Roman rule, in1300 stood divided into six principalities -- five Christianand one (Granada in the southeast) Muslim. The divisionreflected the chaotic reconquest of Iberia from the Muslimlords between 1100 and 1300.

The three most important of the Iberian states wereAragon, on the Mediterranean; Portugal, on the west coast ofthe peninsula; and Castile, in the middle.

Portugal, a quiet land, is still independent of Spain andspeaks a somewhat different Iberian dialect. Castile was famousfor its fierce nobility, its dynastic quarrels, and the excellentwool its millions of sheep produced. It had an outlet to the seabut had done little to cultivate this advantage by 1300.

Aragon was the jewel of the peninsula. It was rich fromits Mediterranean trade. Its great city of Barcelona is still byfar the most beautiful in Spain. Aragon was closely tied toSicily by trade, cuisine, and sometimes politics.

In 1300 the French Capetian monarchy centered in Pariseffectively controlled 80 percent of what is today France. In 1314 the Capetian family that had ruled Paris since 987 diedout and the crown passed to their Valois cousins. The sinewsof royal administration and taxation, built up for a centuryand a half, were immediately loosened.

The early Valois kings were lazy, foolish, effete, or mad.Since the second half of the thirteenth century, princes of theroyal family had been granted "appanages," quasiautonomousterritories, such as Burgundy. Some of these appanaged princes,such as the Duke of Brittany, traded off their loyalty to theFrench Crown and temporarily allied with the English king.

By Gaunt's lifetime the Valois king in Paris controlled onlythe eastern two-thirds of what is today France, and that territorynot very effectively because of the weakening of the bonds ofroyal administration. Even the burghers in Paris threatened thestability of the French monarchy. The monarchy's courtly scenewas glorious, its political situation precarious for many decades.

Italy had one large political entity, the kingdom ofNaples and Sicily in the south. Northern Italy was dividedamong city-states -- Venice, Florence, Milan, Genoa, Rome,and a couple of dozen smaller and weaker ones.

The British Isles, too, were divided. The King of Englandruled Wales and some of eastern Ireland, but Scotland wasindependent. Scotland was an impoverished country given toendless battles over the crown among the leading families.Lowland Scotland had some agriculture, but the chief factorin the Scottish economy was incessant raiding of northernEnglish cities and ranches. The Scots were a nation of cattle rustlers and horse thieves. There was no law north of Edinburghand little below it until the English border was reached.The Scottish Crown was propped up by funding from theFrench monarchy, its traditional ally against England.

Europe was a highly fragmented political world. LatinChristendom was an ideal culture or a linguistic block. It wasnot an international political system. Furthermore, it waslacking in a common political vision. The drive that themendicant friars had brought to the Church in the thirteenthcentury had spent its force by the fourteenth. The Franciscans,who had charmed and persuaded Europe in the thirteenthcentury, were now internally divided over the issue ofpoverty ...

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The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era. Copyright © by Norman F. Cantor. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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