Three Crises, One Century: Plague, War, and a Divided Church

The idea

The exam's late-medieval questions come from three crises that the anchor sets in one century, and the way to hold them is to see what each did to the order unit 11 built. The Mongols came first and stopped short: Russia destroyed by twelve forty, Hungary beaten in twelve forty-one, Europe spared by Ogodei's death, and Russia left under tribute for two centuries while the Silk Road ran quiet under Mongol peace, which is how the plague traveled. The plague struck a Europe already hungry. From thirteen forty-eight to fifty-one a third or more died, and the survivors found the manor's bargain reversed: labor scarce, wages rising, lords resisting with statutes, peasants rising in thirteen fifty-eight and thirteen eighty-one and losing, and wages rising anyway. Women gained rights for a century, and art learned to dance with skeletons. The war ran through all of it. A dispute over Aquitaine and a throne became a hundred years of raids, and the longbow at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt showed that a peasant could kill a knight, which feudalism had never allowed. Joan of Arc turned it, France won by fourteen fifty-three, and both crowns came out stronger, France with the gabelle and the taille, England with its own language. And the Church, which had made kings its vassals under Innocent III, lost to a king at Anagni in thirteen oh three, lived at Avignon for seventy years, split into two and three popes for forty more, and was reunited by a council whose claim to authority the popes then crushed. Wycliffe and Hus, whom the anchor omits, said scripture outranked them all, and Hus burned for it in fourteen fifteen. The anchor's conclusion: stronger states, a pessimistic culture, a Church that looked like a political institution, and northern Italy rising on trade, where the next unit begins.