Before going on to the momentous events of the 14th Century, let’s look at what Europe and Asia were like in the late 13th. Life was soon to change.
Climate:
First, and at the largest scale, a climatic maximum—-a warm period—was ending. It’s not clear how much of the world had been affected, though it seems logical to say that all of the globe was involved, but “warmth” may not have been the experience of other regions. In Europe, it was warmer and drier for the centuries 950-1250, as it had been also from 250 BC to 400 AD. During the intervening period, 400-950, temperatures seem to have been mostly cooler. Since the period 400-950 was also the time when Europe experienced many large-scale migrations and invasions from Asia, it’s possible that the slight change in the climate made steppe life harsher and pushed people to move away. There is some evidence that China experienced the same climate fluctuations as Europe.
If you were an old man in 1299, the climate didn’t yet feel much different from earlier in your life, but it was soon to change. During the early 1300s, Northern Europe experienced abnormal rains that created widespread and severe famine. By the 1400s, it was palpably colder and we see artists depicting people huddling by fires or skating on rivers. The cold trend continued to worsen, until the time of America’s settling, when it was coldest of all. Since then, we have been in a warming trend, independent of possible human influence.
During the 1300s, the Bubonic Plague began circulating in a newly virulent form, and this may have been influenced by the cooling temperatures. We don’t know how large climatic changes influence life forms at the microscopic level but it’s possible that they do. In Asia, marmots on the northern steppe may have found it too cold, choosing to move a mile south—and pushing other marmots to do the same, until the marmot population around the Silk Road had shifted. This may be why, suddenly in 1330, disease crossed from marmots to humans.
It’s really hard to know how much climate affects human actions. Did the severe cold make the Reformation era’s civil wars harsher? Did the Medieval Warm Period encourage or discourage war? The end of the Warm Period coincided with growth in the iron industry so that by the late medieval years, Europe was deforested, and this pushed innovation toward finding coal.
Empires:
The Muslim world was between empires in 1299. Crusader states had ended, but so had the Baghdad-based Caliphate and its rival Egypt-based Fatimid Caliphate. The Mongolian lords were assimilating, losing touch with each other and becoming less powerful. A Turkish chief named Osman, born in 1280, was starting to dominate neighboring Turkish towns in the former Byzantine heartland. Of course, during the 1300s and 1400s, it grew steadily and became the Ottoman dynasty that would rule the entire Muslim world.
In Europe, a different sort of empire arose. The “Hanseatic League” was first mentioned by name in 1267 document. centered in Lubeck. It began when some merchants in northern Germany negotiated to be exempt from English import tolls in 1175. The League’s economic base was the abundance of cod and herring in the North Atlantic. It became as powerful as a government and maintained its own navy to guard merchant ships. But in 1299, it was still just a few cities seeking a trade advantage by not paying import taxes.
Pope Boniface dominated Europe’s political scene in 1299, having standardized canon law and excommunicated King Philip IV of France. But this would not continue: in the 1300s, Papal power was reduced to dependency on the King of France when the Pope’s residence moved to Avignon. Out of the long crisis of a fractured Papacy, Europeans began to consider how power should be handled, leading to their later studies of political science.
It’s worth noting that in 1299, the most powerful city in Russia was Novgorod, near Estonia and Lithuania. It was governed as a Republic, not as an autocracy. In 1299, nobody could foresee that the impoverished, forested area of Moscow would rise to dominate both Novgorod and Kyiv. In 1299, the Duchy of Muscovy was paying tribute to the Golden Horde based in their city of Sarai. The Duke of Muscovy at that time was the son of Aleksandr Nevsky, hero of Novgorod’s Battle on Ice.
Business
After 1299, the iron industry grew tremendously. In past centuries, they had been finding ways to use water and wind power for iron processing, for example, for the bellows that pushed furnace temperatures ever higher. Higher temperatures allowed more steel production, but they also required even more fuel. At that time, the only fuel was charcoal, made mostly from oak trees. Jean Gimpel, a French historian writing in 1976, estimated that for 50 kilograms of iron, 25 cubic meters of wood had to burn. To put this into more vivid terms, one iron furnace could wipe out 3 square kilometers of forest in one month.
Oak wasn’t used only for charcoal; it was the primary building wood, too. King Edward III’s expansions at Windsor Castle in the mid-1300s used about four thousand oak trees (Gimpel, 79). An average large house used twelve oaks. Ships used the tallest trees, of course, as did bridges and cathedral ceilings. And so wood became increasingly expensive, leading to funerals with rented coffins, houses and carts made from wicker, and a wider search for another fuel.
Coal could be picked up near the surface in some places; by 1299, London was experiencing its first coal smoke pollution. Miners in France were tunneling for deeper coal seams; Paris had already been extensively tunneled to dig out granite for its buildings. But really deep coal mines needed ventilation and water pumps, investments that didn’t come until later. In the 1300s, cities and industries got by on a mix of surface coal and wood.
Modern banking was invented in Italy, starting with the need to fund ships. By 1299, it included investment by shareholding, commercial insurance, and the buying of future crops. English wool was bought in bulk and brought to Northern Italy’s water-powered textile mills. This began to change the relationship of workers to the final product, since textile workers in Florence were specialized in just one step of the process. While Northern Europe was still operating on the feudal system of work-trading obligations, Italy had moved into a modern system of negotiating wages. Some Italian merchants were using Arabic numbers, but in 1299 the city of Florence banned their use, as did other cities.
Food
In 1299, Germans were only starting to export hopped beer. Hops had been just one of many herbal flavorings for ale, but then they found that this bitter herb preserved the ale for up to six months, instead of five days. When the Hanseatic League really got going with making barrels on a massive scale, they carried beer as well as salted herring, and this imported beer started displacing local ale. In 1299, most people still drank local ale flavored with pine needles or mint, or whatever the local “gruit” was.
Fava beans, chickpeas, and lentils were the main food of the poor, with cheap grains like barley and rye. Porridge for the poor was roughly ground and could contain peas, millet, barley, buckwheat, or even chestnuts. Like porridge, food for the poor tended to be boiled. Brewet was a stew of whatever was on hand; the rich didn’t add vegetables, but the poor lived much on cabbage, turnips, onions, carrots and beets. Carrots were purple, and beets could be yellow.
When people ate meat, it was likely to be wild game (deer, hare, boar), poultry (duck, goose), or the two main farm meats: pork and mutton. Cows were not often eaten; in earlier times they had been draft animals, but with more horses about, they could also be used for milk. Milk from cows, sheep, and goats tended to go straight into butter and cheese. A lot of organ meats and butcher’s scraps went into cheap pies.
Carp farming was popular all over France, Germany, and Poland, because the last two centuries of the Warm Period permitted carp to migrate up the Danube River. Carp could grow up to five feet long, a perfect cash crop for feasts. Chains of ponds for sorting the fish as they spawned and grew created artificial marshes in areas that had never had them. Malaria was more prevalent in Central Europe for a while—-but after the 13th century ended, the growing cold ended the carp fad.
By 1299, most of Europe’s farm and town poor considered it enough to have two meals a day. It’s clear that many people went a little bit hungry much of the time. The hearty foods we associate now with German or French country cooking were not yet part of the diet. In Muslim lands, food tended to be more varied, since the Muslim empire had imported eastern plants like dates, rice, sugar, and oranges. Later, these foods were imported to Northern Europe.
Clothing
Wool and linen had always clothed both Europe and the Middle East. During the 11th and 12th centuries, cotton had made its way from Muslim lands into Northern Italy, first as quilt padding, then as spun thread. By the 1100s, cotton fabric increased fashion options, still often appearing as padding, too. It didn’t wear well, compared to wool and linen. There was a higher turnover in weaving new cotton fabric and recycling it via rags into paper.
The Crusades had brought Eastern silk as a luxury into the cold castles and homes of Northern Europe. Silk was not often seen by any but the wealthiest, unless it was in the form of colored embroidery floss. European ladies sewed silk patterns onto woolen cloth. Jewish weavers from Spain and Sicily brought silkworms to Lucca, Italy, and in 1299, silk had not spread farther. Just a few years later, in 1314, war between Lucca and Pisa sent silk-workers to the cities of Florence and Venice as refugees. Gradually, after that, silk became more available and was eventually imported in raw form into other regions of Europe.
The clothing styles of the 1200s were not radically different from those of the 1100s. The basic plan was always a linen under-tunic, either a women’s gown or a men’s long shirt, with a colored wool or silk thing over it. Styles changed slowly and the basic concept of what it meant to get dressed never changed. But during the 1300s, with other aspects of social life shifting faster, styles changed faster. The 14th and 15th centuries had extremes in fashion like very short coats that barely went past the waist and long coats that dragged on the ground.
Hat fashion is a good example: until the 14th and 15th centuries, hats had been practical, like little coifs (shaped like baby bonnets) and basic hoods. But as fashion took over, hoods grew long narrow points that fell almost to the ground—and then someone had the notion of using the face hole as the hat brim, which left the shoulder cape flopping around and the long point wrapped about like a turban. The hat looks just plain silly that way, but paintings attest to its becoming the standard men’s hat for many decades. Women’s hats went to extremes, too, with steeples and horn-like yokes sticking out wider than the body.
Books
The era just ending had been one of conservatism in language. Although Latin out on the street was becoming the separate tongues we recognize today, in writing it was still always written as correct Roman Latin. In England, the court still spoke the Norman French of the Conqueror, 200 years after the Conquest. Schools devoted more time to Latin than to any other subject, in all countries, so that Latin still worked as a common tongue at the universities. English boys who wanted to work in the judicial courts or at the royal court learned French at school. In the Muslim world, of course, schooling was all about Classical Arabic.
Although paper was widespread in the Muslim world, it had not yet caught on in Europe by 1299. Even the very educated and progressive Emperor Frederick II had outlawed the use of paper for legal documents, because it was too easy to erase and change. This is probably why we still like heavy paper we call “parchment” for things like diplomas. But the first paper mill had gone up in Fabriano, Italy in 1270, and the first watermark was used in 1282. By 1350, paper was readily available in Italy but it was still somewhat uncommon in the rest of Europe.
Even so, there were many scribes who made a living copying books on parchment. Universities needed textbooks that were literally books with the text in them, perhaps by Aristotle or Avicenna, with wide margins for students to write lecture notes. Many of our conventions like capital letters, word and line spacing, punctuation, and the use of red ink for special words were developed at that time. And even before 1299, there were booksellers who sold door to door, sometimes to housewives who wanted to read medieval romances in the vernacular language (that’s apparently how Yiddish got its start).
Still, the next two centuries would, of course, see an explosion in paper, printing, and the creation of books in common languages. While the wealthy would still commission hand-painted prayer books, everyone else began to buy much cheaper practical books.
Castles and warfare
By 1299, the Cistercian Order of monks had 500 houses all through Europe. Cistercians tended to build with brick, instead of stone. Under their influence, brick became a dominant building material for houses in Northern Europe. This included the castles built by Teutonic Knights across Germany, Poland, and the Baltic countries they were conquering. Brick castles were actually just as strong as stone ones, and they were less vulnerable to fire if the brick had been kiln-fired to begin with. Similarly, kiln technology made possible tile floors and tiled roofs, which were also less vulnerable to fire in growing cities.
Most castles were built before 1299, but kings and lords continued to build them for the next century. Once gunpowder came into wide use after 1400, castles provided less protection. Then battles were fought in the field, not around the wall. Castles were still built after 1400, but more and more they were just fancy residences that were somewhat resistant to riot or break-in. Glass windows in brick castles were comfortable and beautiful but not effective for truly keeping an army out. Castles after 1299 increasingly had tiled floors, simple bathing rooms, and even carpets. Before 1299, they had plastered walls, tapestries, and fireplaces, but not much else for modern comfort.
Of course, gunpowder changed everything. In 1299, gunpowder was a scientific curiosity or, at most, a party trick. During the 14th century, simple cannons started shooting large rocks at castle walls, and from there, it was a rapid developmental line to large cannons and personal firearms. Knights’ armor from the 14th and 15th centuries is often found in museums because it ceased to be a practical fighting tool, and became instead a rich man’s luxury item. The only part of armor that was useful with firearms was a steel breastplate and helmet, similar to the tactical vests and helmets our soldiers still wear. In 1299, warfare was still very similar to the tactics of the Classical world, but by 100 years later, it was looking more like modern warfare.