A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [383]
Change in another sphere was registered in the Hussite wars, a movement fired by Czech nationalism and religious zeal to avenge the death of Hus. Its members were largely bourgeois and peasants (with some ambivalent support from the Czech nobility) and in their struggle against the warrior class, it was the bourgeois, not their opponents, who developed a new military tactic. They adopted the device of a “moving fort,” consisting of a square or circle of baggage wagons chained together for defense against the charge of mounted horsemen. Squads armed with pikes, hand-held guns, and flails protected each gap between the wagons, and as success in defense led to the offense, the squads charged through these gaps against the enemy. In 1420 they defeated the forces led by Sigismund in a “crusade” to reestablish orthodoxy and, gaining confidence from the fear they inspired, undertook raids into Hungary, Bavaria, and Prussia as far as the Baltic, raising the prospect of a dominion of heresy. They fired cannon from within the wagon square and were the first force to make hand-held firearms a major weapon. By the end of ten years a third of the Hussite force possessed these weapons.
Being human, they were afflicted with ideological conflict between moderates and radicals which ultimately broke their movement from within. At the Council of Basle, however, they were strong enough to compel the Church for the first time to conclude a treaty of peace with heretics. Like the Swiss, also largely an army of the non-noble class, they had learned to fight effectively because they were not wedded to glory nor bound to the horse.
During the 1420s and ’30s, Henry the Navigator, Prince of Portugal and grandson of John of Gaunt, launched annual voyages into the Atlantic, exploring and claiming the Azores, Madeiras, and Canaries, and venturing down the west coast of Africa until the great western bulge was rounded in 1433 and the coasts of gold and ivory reached for the opening of new trade. Even if Prince Henry’s initial motive was for the greater glory of the Order of Christ, of which he was General, his work and its impulse were modern. He took his place on the bridge between medieval and modern, where the humanists and scientists were crowding.
Change was uneven and erratic. The population of Europe had sunk to its lowest point by about 1440 and was not to rise for another thirty years. Rouen, which had a population of 15,000 before the Black Death, numbered only 6,000 citizens in the mid-15th century. The Cathedral of Schleswig, which made a comparison of its revenues of 1457 with those of 1352, found that rents and measures of barley, rye, and wheat were each down to about one third of what they had been. In many places, elementary schools had disappeared, not to return until modern times. In 1439 the Bourgeois of Paris, who kept a journal in these years, reported grass growing in the streets of the capital, and wolves attacking people in the half-populated suburbs. In the same year the Archbishop of Bordeaux complained that, owing to the curse of the écorcheurs, students could no longer seek the pearl of knowledge at universities, for “many have been taken on the way, imprisoned, stript of their books and goods and sometimes, alas! slain.” The cost of a hundred years of war in aids and subsidies, poll taxes and indirect taxes and devalued currency was incalculable. Yet the forced summoning of so many Estates and parliaments for grant of funds may have strengthened the functioning of representative bodies even while the financial burden caused misery and class antagonism.
Few in the first decade under Charles VII could see signs of progress ahead. Through continual wars, civil and foreign, wrote Thomas Basin, a Norman chronicler of the reign, through the “negligence and idleness” of the King’s officials, the “greed and slackness” of men-at-arms and the lack of military discipline, devastation