EUROPE, 1000 to 1500 CE

Europe, 1000 to 1500 CE

Rising Economies, Disease, Turmoil and Growing Towns

Europe's climate was warming, which helped in growing food, and more food was producing a growth in population. The years 1050 to 1300 have been described as Europe's "High Middle Ages." In Europe's northwest and England's southeast, people benefited from a topsoil in river valleys that was rich and deep. Forests in Western Europe were being cleared. Towns were giving the countryside a new market for crops. Rural estates gained confidence that they could abandon economic self-sufficiency. There was a spurt in mechanization and trade. In northern Europe an advance in technology came with the use of water wheels. Northern Europe had rivers that continued to run throughout the summer, providing power to water wheels that drove shafts, gears and cams. This power ground corn, sawed wood and operated bellows. Windmills also appeared. Winds were steadier than streams, which froze in winters. Windmills as a source of power appeared in Flanders and the Netherlands. And by now, Europeans were using cranks -- one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind

The downside of population growth was that towns were often densely packed with people, with no sewers, rain turning dirt streets into mud, and diseases spreading more rapidly than it did where people were less densely distributed. With the spread of diseases, more people in towns died than were born, the town populations being continuously replenished by migrations from the countryside.

A part of the rising population and increase in trade was an increase in people moving around. Merchants were seeking customers in more distant places. Nobles were traveling more from one of their estates to another. Clerics wandered in search of learning or to a place to begin an ascetic life. Young men went to Reims to study philosophy and some to Spain to study math. The roads of Europe were also traveled by peasants looking for land on which to settle. And on the road might be refugees from war, part-time soldiers or part-time bandits.

In the towns was a seeking of order. Merchants sought a charter for their town -- a guarantee of sorts -- from great landowners or from monarchs. The monarchs offered towns protection from the jurisdiction of a nearby lord, and the towns offered monarchs a source of wealth, through taxation, that freed them from reliance on the nobles with whom there were in competition for power. Charters offered merchants guarantees of personal freedom and freedom from arbitrary seizure of property. Runaways from serfdom to a town might be considered free if they could elude capture while living in the town for a year. Meanwhile, fraternal and political clubs called guilds in a town helped create local regulations and government that suited the interests of its members. Some clubs built their own chapels and created their own schools. The craft guilds buried members who had died, and they cared for the widows and orphans of those who had been their members. And some towns hired military men for the sake of order.

In places where the trend toward freedom was blocked, attempts were made to establish it through violence. In 1070 the people of Le Mans formed a commune and rose against their lord -- a rebellion that failed. In 1077 people of the town of Cambrai rebelled against an Episcopal overlord. And in 1112 a bishop in England who tried to suppress a commune was hacked to pieces.

Some towns were exceptionally successful in trade. Trade of the town of London extended to the European continent. The English town of York prospered. So too did Paris, Lyons, Marseille, Florence in Italy, Prague, Frankfort, Danzig, Cologne, Nuremburg and Krakow farther east, and Lisbon and Barcelona on the Iberian peninsula.

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