The end of the Middle Ages

In March 1455 a future pope wrote that he had seen pages of a new Bible from Mainz at the Frankfurt fair, printed so clearly that they could be read without glasses.

Where to draw the line

There is no single date when the Middle Ages ended. Textbooks pick 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans; 1492, when the last Muslim kingdom in Spain surrendered and Columbus crossed the Atlantic; or 1517, when Martin Luther’s protest began the Reformation. Each choice says something about what the writer thinks mattered most. The word Renaissance, rebirth, was made popular by 19th-century historians such as Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt for the art and learning of 15th-century Italy, and the Middle Ages became, by contrast, the age before it. What is clear is that between about 1350 and 1500 several old structures were breaking up at once: the power of knights on the battlefield, the authority of a single church, the last of the Roman empire in the east and the slow, expensive copying of books by hand.

The Hundred Years’ War

From 1337 to 1453 the kings of England and France fought a long series of wars, with truces in between, over English lands in France and the English king’s claim to the French throne. English longbowmen helped win great victories at Crécy in 1346, Poitiers in 1356 and Agincourt on 25 October 1415. By the 1420s the English and their Burgundian allies held Paris and much of the north. Then in 1429 Joan of Arc, a peasant girl from Domrémy who said she heard the voices of saints, persuaded the French heir Charles to send her with the army relieving Orléans. The siege was lifted in May 1429, and in July Charles was crowned at Reims as Charles VII. Joan was captured the next year, tried by a church court friendly to the English and burned at Rouen on 30 May 1431; a later church inquiry overturned the verdict in 1456. Over the next twenty years the French, using ever more effective cannon, drove the English out of everywhere except Calais by 1453.

A divided church

The papacy lost authority too. From 1309 the popes lived at Avignon in southern France rather than in Rome. After they returned, a disputed election in 1378 produced two rival popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon, each backed by different kingdoms; after a council at Pisa tried to settle the matter in 1409 there were briefly three. The Council of Constance ended this Western Schism in 1417 by electing a single pope, Martin V. The same council had the Czech reformer Jan Hus burned in 1415, although he had come with a promise of safe conduct, and his followers in Bohemia then beat off several crusades sent against them.

Cannon at Constantinople

By the early 1400s the Ottoman Turks had surrounded what was left of Byzantium. In April 1453 Sultan Mehmed II besieged Constantinople with a large army and huge bronze cannon, some cast by an engineer named Orban. The land walls that had held for a thousand years (unit 2) were battered for seven weeks, and on 29 May 1453 the city fell; the last emperor, Constantine XI, died in the fighting. Mehmed made the city his capital, and Hagia Sophia became a mosque. Greek scholars, some of whom had already moved to Italy, and Greek manuscripts carried west fed a growing interest in ancient Greek among Italian humanists.

Printing and new horizons

Around 1450 in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg brought together metal type cast in a hand mould, an oil-based ink that stuck to metal, and a screw press. His Latin Bible, set in 42 lines a page for most of its length, was being shown off by 1455. The letter that describes it gives both 158 and 180 as the number of copies, and 49 copies survive at least in substantial part. Printing made books cheaper and made every copy of a text the same, so errors could be corrected once and stay corrected. Within a few decades there were presses in most large towns of western Europe. In January 1492 Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella, and in October of the same year Columbus, sailing for them, reached the Caribbean. Europeans who read about that voyage were mostly reading printed pages.