The Complete Idiot's Guide To European History - Part 2

This blog post completes Chapter 1. Due to the length most of the chapters my blog posts for each are two parted, to allow a slow and steady flow of posts to the web and information to my head. Previously I covered The Middle Ages, Bubonic Plague (Black Death), And The Hundreds Years' War. This post will cover the Church events and peasant revolts.

The Church and Christianity were central in The Middle Ages. The church hierarchy looked like the following: The Pope --- National Bishops --- Local Priests. But as Europe began to recover from The Middle Ages, people lost faith in the church. Mostly due to many events that could not all be explained as God's wrath.

Starting with the failed Crusades in the twelfth century, people began to think that the Church was no longer as powerful and connected with God as it had once been. The biggest blow to its power, which set off the early sparks of the Reformation was the Pope. In the 1300s, the Pope was named Boniface VIII. He tried to gain more power, which greatly angered leaders of other nations such as France. In reaction to this, Pope Boniface simply excommunicated (see word of the week on the blog side bars for the definition) these leaders as he did the French king Philip the Fair.

These events led to the capturing of Boniface VIII and the rise of Clement V, a Frenchman. As Pope, Clement V moved the Papacy to Avignon, France. This surprised Roman Catholics and ruined the Roman economy. Thus, the Church moved farther away, rather than closer to power.

As I am going on far to long about the early Church struggles I will wrap it up for you now and move on to the next hotspot of this post. In the end these struggles would lead to the Reformation of the Church. For now however after have two, then three, and then finally the one "true" pope came up as a man named Martin V. However, the Pope lost much of his authority, especially over countries like France who had previous conflicts with Papal authority.

Now onto the peasant revolts, specifically The Jacquerie in France and The Peasants Revolt Of 1381 in England. During the Hundreds Years' War, France and England forgot about the peasants and serfs and left them hanging, obvious a fatal mistake. The war destroyed much land and mercenaries pillaged it for surviving food, ammunition, and anything they thought they could find.

Peasants soon got angry for they were not receiving protection that the feudal system promised. North of Paris, a revolt broke out as peasants stormed their way towards the capital of the nation, but they were stopped by the kings forces, and luckily for France, did not destabilize the nation.

In England in 1381, the same conditions were taking their toll on the peasants. They soon revolted and marched towards their capital, London. As France had, England stopped the peasants and saved their national stability. However, the feudal system soon would meet it's demise due to fear of more revolts and new forms of national government.

In total and overall, the chapter and especially this aprt gave me knowledge to write a long summary of the events during these times and allowed me to set the stage for my next post that will come very, very soon. That concludes Chapter 1 and brings me to the next major topic of European History; The Renaissance.