The First Truly GLOBAL Experiment? Part III
“Today the large organization is lord and master, and most of its employees have been desensitized, much as were the medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs.” Ralph Nader
“In this present civilization, man’s happiness is lost because technological knowledge is being used for the psychological glorification of power. Power is the new religion, with its national and political ideologies; and this new religion, the worship of the State, has its own dogmas, priests and inquisitions. In this process, the freedom and the happiness of man are completely denied, for the means have become a way of postponing the end. But the means are the end, the two cannot be separated; and because we have separated them, we inevitably create a contradiction between the means and the end.
As long as we use technological knowledge for the advancement and glorification of the individual or of the group, the needs of man can never be sanely and effectively organized. It is this desire for psychological security through technological advancement that is destroying the physical security of man.” Jiddu Krishnamurti
For some historical context:
“By the thirteenth century, the Roman Curia (bureaucracy) was a robust and efficient institution, and the papacy was at the height of its influence. Powerful popes such as Innocent III and IV operated much like kings of powerful nations. The Church maintained its power amid the growing strength of Europe’s monarchies. People were Christians first, before they were French, English, or Saxon, and therefore, still answered to the Church’s authority. While most kings compromised as necessary in their dealings with the papacy, those who did not “were likely to find that the spiritual power of the pope was accompanied by earthly power asserted with force of arms.” Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages
From their existence in the early 14th century, the Inns of Court were any of a sizeable number of buildings or precincts where lawyers traditionally lodged, trained and carried on their profession. Over the centuries, barristers were trained there while the more numerous Inns of Chancery — initially affiliated to the Inns of Court — trained solicitors.
(All barristers today belong to one of the four Inns of Court.)
“At the beginning of the fourteenth century Florence was a city state, with a dependent territory somewhat less in extent than the county of York. Its merchant companies or societies had their agents in every important centre of population throughout Western Europe, and finding ample opportunity for the negotiation of loans, they had extensive dealings with the Papacy, the Plantagenets, the Valois, and the Angevins of Southern Italy. In fact, most of the business of Europe of this particular type was in their hands, and in many places their remarkable success procured for them cordial hatred.
Everybody in Florence, from its merchant nobles downwards, is said to have been more or less engaged in the production of wealth. The mainstays of its prosperity were the extensive transactions in banking and moneylending already mentioned, and a flourishing cloth industry embracing manufacturing, dressing, and dyeing The silk industry was probably not of first-rate importance till somewhat later. The gilds of the “Exchangers” or “Bankers,” of the “wool merchants,” and of the “merchants in foreign cloth” were the chief of the seven “Arti Maggiori” of the city.
The “Arte del Cambio” seems to have been first concerned with the collection and transmission of dues from various princes to the Roman Pontiff, and it is probable that whilst thus engaged the merchants first realised the possibilities of this branch of their activities The Societies of the Mozzi and Spini of Florence were famous papal bankers of the thirteenth century and farmers of the papal revenues; in the fourteenth century they had largely given place to the Bardi and Peruzzi, whose agencies were by then scattered widely throughout Western Europe.” British History Online
Hindsight is 20/20, but the times were also different even if the forms, labels/names, etc. have changed amid the many “Hegelian dialectical” power struggles to enslave humanity.
Are we living the first truly GLOBAL experiment where these early centuries paved the way for normalizing tyranny so “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy?”
I didn’t study history and I use the bewildering 21st century’s Tower of Babel (aka internet) as my key source of research so it’s really important you keep an open mind, not take anything personally and try to see patterns that emerge as you do your own research. Any boo-boos, my bad but let’s not forget that history is often rewritten by the winners.
Let’s explore whether these earlier experiments were power struggles to recreate Plato’s Republic …
14th Century (1300–1399)
1300s: Venetian lenders carrying slates with information on the various issues for sale and meet with clients, much like a broker does today. They began to sell debt issues to other lenders and to individual investors.
“The moneylenders of Europe filled important gaps left by the larger banks. Moneylenders traded debts between each other; a lender looking to unload a high-risk, high-interest loan might exchange it for a different loan with another lender. These lenders also bought government debt issues. As the natural evolution of their business continued, the lenders began to sell debt issues to the first individual investors. The Venetians were the leaders in the field and the first to start trading securities from other governments.” Investopedia
“Europe was in great conflict at the time. In Germany, Albrecht I, son of former German king Rudolph I, was trying to regain the throne from Adolf of Nassau. England and France were threatening each other in what would eventually become the Hundred Years War.
There was also conflict over the papal throne, which the powerful (Ghibelline) Colonna family of Italy had hoped to obtain.
“Boniface VIII was a skilled and experienced player of power politics, however, and he went rapidly to work. He was able to overthrow the Colonna family and seize their lands by calling a crusade. He also obtained a favorable peace with Albrecht of Hapsburg, but he was not so fortunate in France.” Christian History
1302: Concerned about kings taxing church property, the 1294-elected Pope Boniface VIII, born of an old and influential Roman family, and perhaps the most absolutist Pope in history, issued a papal decree, Unam Sanctam — the 1st Trust of the world — to maintain the Church’s authority over all. The first express trust deed claimed that every soul is a registered property of the Roman Pontiff:
“Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”
“The Trust was set up to allow then lords and knights to go off to fight in the crusades. What they did was to hand over in Trust, the care of their estates and property to a trusted friend. The new owner became the Trustee of the holding on behalf of the knight or lord, etc. Upon return from Crusade many knights found that their trusted Trustee refused to hand the titles back, and then found the courts would back the new Trustee’s claim over that of the knights. The Holy See controls the courts through the Canon Law.” The Bridge
In The Crisis of Church and State: 1050–1300, historian Brian Tierney calls Unam Sanctam “probably the most famous” document on church and state in medieval Europe.
Historian Barbara W. Tuchman in A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century describes that as “the most absolute statement of papal supremacy ever made.”
Was that the initial attempt to establish top-down control over all land, souls, rights, titles and people?
The original document is supposedly lost, but a version of the text can be found in the registers of Boniface VIII in the Vatican Archives. The bull was the definitive statement of the late medieval theory of hierocracy, which argued for the temporal as well as spiritual supremacy of the pope.
1303: Boniface VIII’s decree and various measures angered King Philip IV of France, aka Philip the Fair.
“… In the midst of a losing battle, Boniface resorted to his strongest weapon, excommunication.
Philip found out about this … using an alliance with Boniface’s enemies in the Colonna family, sent a party in to kidnap the pope.
Their intention was to force the pope to resign. He refused, even at threat of death. So his captors sat him backwards on a horse and paraded him through his home town.
Boniface’s political failures meant he had few defenders, even in his native Italy. The battle with Philip was over.” Christian History
Boniface died not long after.
“It was later alleged that he had persuaded his predecessor Celestine to resign thereby preparing the way for his own election. His successor Benedict IX died after a year. At his death the cardinals who were divided into many factions agreed upon one thing, that the next Pope should not be a strong personality like Boniface VIII.” Isaac Padinjarekuttu
“On the pope’s death the Colonna recovered their lands and influence, and for many years subsequently Rome was harassed by their struggle for power with the (Guelph) Orsini, which divided the nobility into two contending factions. These conditions gave rise to Cola di Rienzo’s popular dictatorship …” Britannica
(Cola was a popular Italian leader who tried to restore the greatness of ancient Rome.)
1305: After Benedict IX’s death, “Napoleone Cardinal Orsini, partly for family reasons, sided with the Colonna and the French, and it was he who promoted in 1305 the election of a French pope, Clement V, the first of the ‘popes of Avignon’.” Britannica
Instead of moving to Rome, Clement V chose to remain in Avignon, a small provincial town next to the Rhone River in France. His refusal was supposedly because of the conflict between Boniface VIII and Philip IV.
“Beginning with Clement V, elected 1305, all popes during the residence of the papacy in Avignon were French. However, this simple fact tends to overestimate this influence. Southern France at that time had a quite independent culture from Northern France, where most of the advisers to the King of France came from. Arles was at that time still independent, formally a part of the Holy Roman Empire. The literature produced by the ‘troubadour’ age in the Languedoc area, is unique and strongly distinguishes its culture from that of the Royal circles in the north. Even in terms of religion, the South produced its own variant, the Cathar movement, which was ultimately declared heretical, as it clashed with doctrines of the Church. But this merely demonstrated a strong sense of independence in Southern France.
A stronger source of influence was the move of the Roman Curia from Rome to Avignon in 1305.
Following the impasse during the previous conclave and to escape from the infighting between the powerful families that produced former Popes, such as the Colonna and the Orsini, the Church looked for a safer place and found it in Avignon, which was surrounded by the lands of the papal fief of Comtat Venaissin and by a small papal enclave to the east. They remained part of the Pontifical States up to the French Revolution, becoming part of France in 1791. Italy at the time was in a state of ‘anarchy’ and Rome itself was a vulnerable place to live for the leader of the Christian world. Formally it was part of Arles, but in reality it was under the strong influence of the French king.” Matthew A. McIntosh
1306–07: Antonio (di) Pessagno, a Genoese merchant and administrator, was well established in England as an exporter of wool:
“By 1310, he was supplying the royal court with luxury goods, such as spices, and modest loans. By 1311 no Italian merchant in England had more money on hand: 12,000 florins of Florence. In that year he became the first foreigner to take possession of the English crown jewels, including the Eagle Crown, as security on his loans. When the Lords Ordainers forced the Florentine firm of the Frescobaldi into bankruptcy before the end of the year, Pessagno was in a position to become, as a royal document of 5 April 1312 styles him, “the king’s merchant” (mercator regis). At that time, the king already owed him £2,086. On 10 October 1312, he returned the crown jewels to the treasury. On 16 February 1313, a Frescobaldi agent could write that Pessagno “fears nobody … and is so generous in the court … that everybody likes him”. By 1313 the king’s debt had grown to £7,380.
In 1313–14, Pessagno received on behalf of Edward II the loans advanced by King Philip IV of France and Pope Clement V. He himself then loaned the king £21,000. These monies were used to finance the invasion of Scotland in June 1314. Pessagno also provided more than half the supplies used by the army. For his part in the Scottish war, Edward II knighted him on 1 November 1315.” Wikipedia
(Was this an initial debt experiment of a wealthy merchant controlling royalty?)
Between 1312 until 1319, Pessagno was the chief financier of King Edward II of England.
1307: On October 13th, Philip IV instructed his officials to list Templars in the region to be arrested for heresy, and their assets to be confiscated. On the site of what is now the Temple stop on the Paris Metro, Philip launched a raid on the Paris Temple — the first of a series of attacks across Europe. Hundreds were arrested and later tortured into admitting heresy in the Order.
Being international, the Templars were supposedly only answerable to the Pope. Did Philip IV ordering Pope Clement V to arrest and disband the remaining Templars destroy the Knights Templar’s foundation outside of France?
“Pope Clement, successor to Boniface, worked with Philip the Fair to destroy the Cabalistic Templars and thus the challenge to the Claim of Right made by the Holy See. The Claim of Right and the first Express Trust named Unum Sanctum, is the core of the Holy See’s ownership of your soul. The Birth Certificate is the Title to your soul and proof of ownership by the Holy See. This Trust is the first Crown. In the first Claim of Right the Holy See had become the owner of your soul. Having reduced powerful people into slaves to the Vatican through rulings of court the second Claim of Right was formed to give the Holy See ownership of your property.” The Bridge
1308: King Dinis I of Portugal signed the first Portuguese commercial agreement with England.
(In a royal charter dated February 1st, 1317, he appointed Sir Antonio (di) Pessagno’s merchant sailor brother Manuel Pessanha as Admiral of Portugal to reform the new Portuguese Navy. Pessanha then employed twenty men from Genoa to be captains of the vessels.
1309–1378: Clement V moved to Avignon, and seven successive Popes also established their court there. The Avignon papacy, sometimes called the “Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” was when the seat of the Papacy was moved from its traditional base in Rome (since the first century AD) to Avignon, France.
“The issues that separated Boniface and Philip concerned the prerogative power of the pope over secular matters that involved the church and her agents as well as taxation of the clergy and church lands. These disputes arose simultaneous to a growing national identity as political, social, and cultural events in Europe were transforming societies into early modern nation states.
Kings and princes resisted papal claims that were rooted in earlier centuries and began to assert a higher degree of independence, often at the expense of papal political authority and immense ecclesiastical wealth.” World History
1311–1312: The Council of Vienne was the fifteenth ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church. Held in Vienne, France, one of its principal acts was to withdraw papal support for the Knights Templar.
Unable to decide, the Council tabled the discussion. In March, Philip arrived and pressured the Council and Clement to act. Clement passed papal bulls dissolving the Templar Order, confiscating their lands, and labeling them heretics.
Church reform was represented by the decision concerning the Franciscans, allowing abbots to decide how to interpret their Rule. The Beguines and Beghards of Germany were condemned as heretics, while the council forbade marriage for clerics, concubinage, rape, fornication, adultery, and incest.
The Council addressed the possibility of a crusade, hearing from James II of Aragon and Henry II of Cyprus, before deciding to assign Philip of France as its leader.
Pope Clement V then issued an edict officially dissolving the Order. Many kings and nobles who had been supporting the Templars up until that time, finally acquiesced and dissolved the orders in their fiefs in accordance with the Papal command. Most were not so brutal as the French. In England, many Knights were arrested and tried, but not found guilty.
The papal bull Ad Providum on May 2, 1312, granted all of the Order’s lands and wealth to the Knights of Malta/Hospitallers to meet its original purpose, despite Philip’s wishes that the lands in France be passed to him.
The Pope transferred much of the Templar property outside France to the Hospitallers who accepted many of the surviving Templars. In the Iberian Peninsula, the king of Aragon was against giving the heritage of the Templars to the Hospitallers (as commanded by Clement V) so the Order of Montesa took the Templar assets.
(“Montesa was the only order in the Spanish kingdoms not to be absorbed by the Crown at the time of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. As an Aragonese institution, it posed more difficulties to incorporation than its Castilian counterparts.” Erenow
In Portugal, the Order continued to exist as King Dinis I changed its name to the Order of Christ in 1319. This group was believed to have contributed to the first naval discoveries of the Portuguese. The Order of Christ accumulated great riches and power during the Age of Discoveries.)
1312: After establishing friendly relations with the great Kublai Khan, Marco Polo and entourage eventually returned to Venice as his ambassadors, carrying letters asking the pope to send Kublai 100 intelligent men “acquainted with the Seven Arts.” They also bore gifts and were asked to bring back oil from the lamp burning at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
1312/13: Dante Alighieri composed Monarchia, often called De Monarchia.
“(On) Monarchy” is a Latin treatise on secular and religious power. The poet attempted to refute the Pope’s claim that the spiritual sword had power over the temporal sword as both the Pope and Roman Emperor were equally human.
The two “equal swords” were given power by God to rule over their respective domains. Dante fought to defend the autonomy of the city-government of Florence from the temporal demands of Pope Boniface VIII.
(Dante’s work was banned by the Catholic Church in 1585.)
1314: The Knights Templar supposedly abolished, the Knights of Malta/Hospitallers gained much of their lands and wealth. The London Temple, between London and Westminster, was rented out to two colleges of lawyers.
(The two organizations, set up similar to the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, shared the Temple Church between them as their private chapel.)
“On April 20, 1314, the 54-year old Pope Clement V died of an illness. Cardinals from Gascony, Provence, and Italy came together in Avignon to elect a new pope. Among them was Jacques Duese who belonged to the Provence faction. Three of his nephews, meanwhile, belonged to the Gascony faction, and they outnumbered the Italians and Provençals. The Italians and the Provençals had no choice but to make an alliance so that their candidate would be elected. The cardinals could not agree, so the papal seat remained vacant for another two years.” Amazing Bible Timeline
Louis IV, first of the Wittelsbach line of German emperors, became King of the Romans. He was King of Italy from 1327, and the Holy Roman Emperor from 1328. His 1314 election as king of Germany was controversial as his Habsburg cousin Frederick the Fair of Austria was simultaneously elected king by a separate set of electors.
1315: The Great Famine and then the Bubonic Plague claimed a quarter of Western Europe’s population. People began looking outside of the Roman Church for meaning and spiritual understanding.
1316: Louis X, the Capetian king, died without leaving a male heir and his pregnant widow gave birth to a son who died after five days. His brother as King Philip V of France summoned the cardinals to Lyon and forced them to elect a pope:
“They elected Jacques Duese as the new pope in the July of the same year. The fact that he was supported by influential backers such as Philip V himself, Robert of Naples and Cardinal Napoleone Orsini definitely helped his election on August 7, 1316. He was crowned at Lyon less than one month later, and adopted the name John XXII.” Amazing Bible Timeline
Like his predecessor, Clement V, Pope John centralized power and income in the Papacy and lived a princely life in Avignon.
1317: Philip V “convened the Estates-General, which established the principle that women would be excluded from succession to the French throne. During the same period the corollary principle also came to be accepted — i.e., that descent from a daughter of a French king could not constitute a claim to royal succession.” Britannica
Wanting to restore the papal claim to power, Pope John XXII was dependent on the French royal House of Capet. Instead of acknowledging Louis IV as king of Germany, he installed Robert of Naples from the Capetian House of Anjou as “Senator of Rome” and regent of the Imperial Kingdom of Italy in 1317.
But Louis IV was the Ghibellines’ choice, including the House of Wittelsbach, the Bohemian Luxembourgs and the Milanese Visconti. Pope John XXII accused Louis of being crowned by the “wrong” archbishop. Louis’ reign was marked by incessant diplomatic and military struggles to defend the right of the empire to elect an emperor independent of the papacy, to consolidate his own position, and to improve the status of his family.
1320: The production of paper began in Germany.
1321: Dante visited Venice in “his capacity as diplomatic representative of the nearby city of Ravenna, whose overlord was for a time his protector. He died shortly after leaving Venice. The two explanations of his death converge on murder … (but) “Venetian records regarding this matter have conveniently disappeared.” Webster Griffin Tarpley
1322: Louis IV defeated Frederick but the cousins eventually reconciled. John XXII, born of a wealthy bourgeois family and the second and longest-reigning Avignon pope, forbade Louis to exercise imperial authority until he, as pope, settled the dispute.
1324: On May 22, Louis responded with the Sachsenhausen Appellation which denied papal authority over imperial elections and attacked John’s condemnation of the Spiritual Franciscans.
In Defensor pacis (“Defender of the Peace”), political philosophers Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun further declared the authority of an ecumenical council was superior to that of the pope.
John XXII retaliated by excommunicating Louis.
1328: Louis IV, now the Holy Roman Emperor, had John deposed on April 18. The Franciscan Peter of Corbara (Pietro Rainalducci) was elected antipope as Nicholas V, and Michael of Cesena, general of the Franciscan order, appealed to the authority of a church council against John.
Pope John excommunicated Peter and deposed Michael.
(When Louis returned to Germany in 1329, Peter submitted to John and was subsequently imprisoned at Avignon. The Emperor attempted to effect a reconciliation with the Pope, and the Franciscans but their philosopher ally Marsilius continued to carry on a vigorous antipapal propaganda from the imperial court in Munich.)
1328: King Charles IV — King Philip IV’s last son — died with no surviving male heir. Among others, two of his cousins laid claim to the throne:
Philip of Valois was nephew, son of Philip IV’s brother Charles, the count of Valois. The other claimant was grandson, the Plantagenet King Edward III of England. Edward had the stronger claim through Isabelle, Philip IV’s only surviving daughter.
Typically, this would have been recognized by the inheritance laws of both France and England but France was not keen on having their king also reign as the king of England:
“In response to these competing claims, French jurists insisted that the crown could not be alienated from France by descent through the female line. As the oldest and thus most venerable precedent sustained the most authoritative legal argument, jurists looked back to a legal code written for the Salian Franks at the time of Clovis (476–496) to ground their argument. This new piece of legal reasoning was explicitly designed to support the claims of the Valois (the name of the branch of the royal family now claiming the throne). But the term came to refer to a particular clause, added in 1413 by Jean de Montreuil, that distinguished male from female inheritance:
Men inherited landed property, while women only inherited personal property and thus could not inherit the crown. The exclusion of women from ruling became the essential tenet referred to as the Salic law, instantly imbued with august antiquity and cited thereafter as a fundamental French law.” Kathleen Wellman, Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France
This manipulation of the law disbarring women from the French throne created a long lasting state of warfare between England and France as Philip IV’s nephew became the king of France. Continuing the work begun by the Capetian dynasty, Philip VI began the Valois dynasty, the royal house of France that ruled until 1589.
As Edward III insisted on pressing his claim to the French throne, the Hundred Years’ War (1337 to 1443) that ensued was one of the most significant conflicts of the Middle Ages. It left France fractured and economically devastated.
1332: “Commencing in 1332 the numerous Holy Leagues were a new manifestation of the Crusading movement in the form of temporary alliances between interested Christian powers … the Holy Leagues retained both the spirit and the language of the Crusades” while in practical terms being quite different. The initiative for a holy league often came from a secular power, not the pope, but papal involvement was inevitable if it was to have the same spiritual benefits to participants as a crusade.
Several factors encouraged the transition away from supranational crusades to state alliances, including the rise of the great powers in Europe and the unification of the Muslim enemy in the form of the Ottoman Empire.” Arnaud Blin, French-American historian and political scientist
1334: Robert III of Artois went to England and began to foment trouble between Edward III and Philip VI, hastening the deterioration of Anglo-French relations.
1337–1443: Philip VI intervened in a dispute in English-influenced Flanders where Edward III owned property. Edward declared he was King of France by right of birth and family connections while Philip cited Edward’s unwillingness to expel Robert as the reason for confiscating the Duchy of Aquitaine in May 1337.
1338: At the Diet assembly in Frankfurt, the Holy Roman Empire decreed that the empire’s emperor may be chosen without papal participation. The Diet of Frankfurt refers to sessions of the Imperial Diet, Imperial States, or the prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire which took place in the Imperial City of Frankfurt.
1339/1340: “Edward III of England invaded France, thereby triggering the Hundred Years War, in which both sides were manipulated by the Venetian controlled Guelph banking families.” William F. Wertz, Jr., The Birth of the Sovereign Nation-State: How the Platonic-Christian revolution of the Fifteenth century created the modern world
“King Edward III of England sent an embassy to Doge Gradenigo announcing his intention to wage war on France, and proposing an Anglo-Venetian alliance. Gradenigo accepted Edward III’s offer that all Venetians on English soil would receive all the same privileges and immunities enjoyed by Englishmen.
The Venetians accepted the privileges, and declined to join in the fighting. Henceforth, English armies laying waste to the French towns and countryside would do so as Venetian surrogates.
France was in no position to interfere in the final phase of the rivalry between Venice and Genoa, which was decided in favor of Venice. The degeneracy of English society during these years of Venetian ascendancy is chronicled in the writings of Chaucer — the greatest English writer of the age — who was an ally of the anti-Venetian Dante-Petrarca-Boccaccio grouping.
The Venetians concocted myths to enhance their influence on English society. For the nobility and the court, there was the anti-Christian myth of King Arthur and his Round Table of oligarchs seeking the Holy Grail. For the mute and downtrodden masses, there was the myth of Robin Hood, who by robbing from the rich to give to the poor combined plunder with class struggle.” Webster Griffin Tarpley
1343: “The Bardi and Peruzzi … (were) the two largest Florentine merchant-banking companies of the fourteenth century. They were manufacturers, traders, and bankers with widespread operations throughout the Mediterranean and western Europe — in many ways an ancestral form of the modern multinational corporation. The collapse of these firms, the Peruzzi in 1343 and the Bardi in 1346, followed a run of severe reverses in virtually all of their businesses …” Edwin S. Hunt
“When Edward (III) could not repay the usurious loans he borrowed from the Peruzzi bank in Florence to finance the war, the bank failed in 1343; the Bardi bank failed a year later. Although triggered by Edward’s default, the collapse was the result of a huge international bubble of currency speculation created by the Venetians between 1275 and 1350. The banks, which operated free of any national regulation, progressively looted the real economy to feed the speculative debt bubble.” William F. Wertz, Jr.
“The 1343 collapse of the Venetian-controlled banking houses of Bardi and Peruzzi, on top of a physical breakdown of the productive economy which was already underway, weakened the population for the spread of disease. The bubonic plague, carried by rats in the urban areas, quickly became pneumonic plague, which passes easily from human to human.
Marauding bands of armed men, known as ‘ecorcheurs’, or strippers, representing various militias of French warlords, laid waste to the land and looted and killed those who had been fortunate enough not to have been killed by the plague. Entire regions, towns, and villages were pillaged, and ultimately disappeared.” Pierre Beaudry
Cola Di Rienzo was sent to Pope Clement VI, the fourth pope to reside in Avignon, to plead the case of the popular Roman party. The Pope appointed him notary of the Roman civic treasury, and Cola returned to Rome in 1344 where he began to plot a revolution to restore the city to the glory of ancient Rome. Four years later, the pontiff excommunicated him.
(After absolving Queen Joan I of Naples of her husband’s murder, Clement VI purchased Avignon from her.)
1346–1353: The Black Death, a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague, wiped out almost a third of Europe’s population.
“Beginning in 1346, the plague killed an estimated one-third of the inhabitants of Europe. The Black Death arrived among the invading Mongols of the Golden Horde. It spread along the trade routes to the lower Volga and the Black Sea, and from there it moved quickly across the Mediterranean and into Europe by way of merchants, sailors, and travelers. Avignon, the seat of the papacy at the time, succumbed in 1348. The coming of the plague was part of a series of events that reduced the papacy from the height of its power to its lowest point in centuries. The plague came at a critical moment for the Church, and the papacy at Avignon did not adequately rise to the challenge. Inevitably, the poor response led to intense criticism, general distrust of the Church, heretical movements, and eventually, the Reformation. Perhaps the papacy was headed along that road already, but the Black Death certainly sped it on its way.” Medievalists
“France’s devastating defeat by the English at Crécy (1346) gave rise to another crisis. To conciliate opponents, the government was obliged to entrust finances to three abbots. A new meeting of the estates in November 1347 again forced the King to recast his council. The spread of the Black Death in 1348 and 1349, however, overshadowed all political questions.” Britannica
1347: Initially, Cola di Rienzo’s popular dictatorship as the “tribune of the Roman people” was a check on all the Roman magnates and notably, the Colonna:
“After declaring reforms of the tax, judicial, and political structure of Rome, Cola conceived the grandiose idea of reestablishing Rome as the capital of a “sacred Italy,” an Italian brotherhood whose mission would be to spread peace and justice to the world. At a conclave held on Aug. 1, 1347, he conferred Roman citizenship on all the cities of Italy and proceeded to prepare for the election of a Roman emperor of Italy the following year.
The Roman nobles, led by the Orsini (Guelph) and Colonna (Ghibelline) families, rose against Cola, who repelled their attack on Nov. 20, 1347. But his triumph was short-lived; the populace became disaffected, the aristocrats continued to organize against him, and the Pope issued a bull denouncing him as a criminal, a pagan, and a heretic. A fresh uprising forced his resignation on Dec. 15, 1347, but he took refuge for two years among hermits in the Maiella Mountains of the Abruzzi region.” Britannica
1348: Edward III founded The Most Noble Order of the Garter as a noble fraternity. Deemed the most prestigious order of chivalry at the English court, it was limited in number — there could only be the Sovereign King, the Prince of Wales, and 24 Knight Companions at any given time.
1350: “Venice had control over world finance through its monopoly of gold and silver bullion, maritime trade and the most sophisticated intelligence network on earth. Venice’s mastery of manipulating wars among potential allies while financing all sides was not limited to Europe. This ‘new Rome’ had even spread its tentacles through Asia gaining a monopoly of trade in Mongol-controlled territories in exchange of offering political intelligence to the Khans whose success penetrating Russia, Kiev, Bulgaria, Hungary and beyond was made possible through such Venetian agents as Marco Polo and his father (Polo even became the Advisor to Kublai Khan).” Matthew Ehret
1356: To ensure the candidate elected by the majority as the German ruler succeeded without dispute, Charles IV, the last of the direct line of the Capetian dynasty, issued the Golden Bull to place the royal election firmly in the hands of seven electors. Since 1273, the electoral college had consisted of three ecclesiastical and four lay princes but it was not always clear who these seven were.
No longer subject to papal approbation, the monarch became increasingly dependent on the electors.
1363: King John II of France, Philip VI’s son, granted his son Philip the Bold the Duchy of Burgundy which swiftly grew into a significant power block between France and the German territories of the Holy Roman Empire.
(Captured by the English on Sept. 19, 1356, John was forced to sign the disastrous treaties of 1360 during the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England. John’s ransom was 3,000,000 gold écus and he was to surrender most of southwestern France to Edward.
On Oct. 9, 1360, John was released to raise a ransom that France could not afford to pay, and hostages were accepted in his place. When one of the hostages (John’s own son) escaped, John, feeling dishonoured, returned to England on his own volition as a prisoner.
The Hundred Years’ War weakened the authority of the French monarchy. The Dukes of Burgundy allied themselves with England against the French crown to become a power in their own right.)
1377: Clement VII, original name Robert of Geneva, the son of Amadeus III, Count of Geneva, became Archbishop of Cambrai and was made a cardinal in 1371.
As papal legate to northern Italy (1376–78) during the War of the Eight Saints, he is said to have authorized the massacre of 3,000–8,000 civilians, an atrocity even by the rules of war then. This earned him the nickname “butcher of Cesena.” The following year, the French cardinal became the first antipope to reside in Avignon.
John Wycliffe, one of the forerunners of the Protestant Reformation, was saved from prosecution by an uprising of the London mob. The English theologian was philosopher, church reformer, and promoter of the first complete translation of the Bible into English.
Persuaded by two women saints, Catherine of Sienna and Bridget of Sweden, Gregory XI who was Pope from 1370, returned to Rome. He died the next year.
1378: Fearing another French Pope might prefer returning to Avignon, the Italians forced the election of Urban VI, an Italian cardinal. Once made Pope, Urban VI went from being a devout and competent official to being a harsh and ill-tempered reformer. He soon enraged the cardinals.
Fearful a new promotion of Italians would turn the majority in the Sacred College against them, 13 French cardinals left Rome. At Anagni four months later, they declared Urban’s election as “null because it was not made freely but under fear.”
On September 20th at Fondi, Papal States, they elected French Clement VII to become antipope. Thus began the Western Schism that wracked the Roman Church for 40 years. Both Popes claimed legitimacy and excommunicated each other. The whole Western Church was divided into two camps leading to the longest lasting Papal schism in history.
For the first time in history, there were two “legitimate” claimants to be head of the church in Rome.
“Europe was divided over which pope to back. Their decisions were almost purely partisan political ones. If you were for France, you supported Clement VII. If you were against France, you supported Urban VI.
No solution would be coming through politics or war.” Christian History
“By the end of that year, France favoured Clement over Urban, whom England supported. European countries then split over the papal claimants, and the Eastern church generally sided with Clement. He hoped to dislodge Urban from the Vatican with help from French mercenaries who were occupying the castle of Sant’Angelo, Rome. After Sant’Angelo fell in April 1379, Clement retired to Naples, where Queen Joan I recognized him as pope. But the Neapolitans favoured Urban, and Clement soon settled at Avignon.
The church’s dual papacy caused profound confusion in territories that were uncertain which pope to obey; the difference on this issue between England and France prolonged the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).” Britannica
Over in Spain, Ferrand Martínez, archdeacon of Écija, initiated and directed a 13-year anti-Semitic campaign. Using provocative sermons, he openly rallied non-Jews against the Jews.
The Jewish community of Seville was then Spain’s richest and most important community.
(Martínez’s efforts led to a series of outbreaks in 1391 as several synagogues in Seville were burned to the ground and churches were erected in their place, leading to the largest forced mass conversion of Jews in Spain.)
1380: Gerhard Groote, son of wealthy parents, established a teaching order known as the Brotherhood of the Common Life, approved by Pope Gregory XI and was a major influence in the development of German humanism. Fundamentally, it’s the idea that all men are created in the image of God with creative capabilities that must be developed and educated. This method was known as the Devotio Moderna.
Coupled with Joan of Arc’s political and military actions, it was the core of what King Louis XI used to create the experiment of founding France as a nation-state model. (Perhaps, aka Plato’s Republic?)
Numerous schools were set up across Germany, Switzerland, Burgundy, Flanders, the Netherlands and parts of France to teach poor boys a method of learning that went back to the Greek Renaissance.
Tremendous opposition erupted and Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa himself rose to defend the Brotherhood. Source
“… shortly before his death on August 20, 1384, Groote directed the Brotherhood to adopt the Rule of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, as a means to overcome the opposition of the mendicant orders … the reform efforts of the Brotherhood were never divisive, but rather for the purpose of the Church’s inner renewal. In this spirit, the Brotherhood referred to itself as ‘The New Devotion’.” William F. Wertz, Jr.
1381: Peasants’ revolt in England.
“… saw an uprising in London and southeast England on a program of abolishing feudal dues, free use of forests, and an end to the tithes or taxes collected by the church. This was called Wat Tyler’s rebellion, which ended when Wat was killed by the Mayor of London. Contemporary with this was the rise of Lollardry, the prototype of English Protestantism promoted by John Wycliffe, the Oxford scholastic.
Wycliffe’s anti-clerical campaign had many easy targets, but his theology was inferior and his stress on every person’s right to read and interpret the Bible was designed to spawn a myriad of fundamentalist fanatics.
Lollardry as a social phenomenon had a specific Venetian pedigree, best seen through the prevalence among the Lollard rank and file of the belief that the soul is not immortal and dies with the body. This is the mortalist heresy, and can more accurately be called the Venetian heresy, because of its deep roots within the Venetian oligarchy. Later, beginning in the early sixteenth century, the University of Padua and Pietro Pomponazzi were notorious for their advocacy of mortalism …
Lollardry kept going for centuries as an underground religion for the disinherited kept going by itinerant preachers … Lollardy contained a strong dose of primitive socialism; Lollard leaders like John Ball and “Jack Straw” preached social revolution with slogans such as, “When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?”
This is the ultimate source of that communism which David Urquhardt taught Karl Marx five centuries later. Finally, Lollardry spread into central Europe through the medium of the Hussites of Bohemia and caused a series of wars of religion there. In seventeenth-century England there was a slogan to the effect that Wycliffe begat Hus, Hus begat Luther, and Luther begat truth. There is every reason to view the Lollards as a Venetian pilot project for Luther’s 1517 launching of the Reformation during the war of the League of Cambrai.
The English defeat in the Hundred Years’ War (1453) left English society in a shambles. This was the setting for the oligarchical chaos and civil war known as the Wars of the Roses, which pitted the House of York with its symbol the white rose against the House of Lancaster with its red rose. Both groupings derived from quarrels among the seven sons of the pro-Venetian Edward III, who had started the wars with France. The Wars of the Roses, fought between 1455 and 1485, brought English society to the point of breakdown.” Webster Griffin Tarpley, How the Venetian System Was Transplanted Into England
1384: John Wycliffe’s Bible was completed the year he died.
(In the medieval world, the Roman Catholic Church held universal power as the Holy Scriptures were hand-written and only available to those who understood Latin (i.e., those with the privilege of a university education). Ordinary people could not read the Bible for themselves. Educated at Oxford University, Wycliffe realized the church’s teachings did not match his reading of the Bible and he made it possible for ordinary people to read the Bible so they could discover how astray the church was from the faith and beliefs of Jesus Christ. But ten years earlier, the theologian had begun to show an interest in politics when Edward III appointed him to the rectory of Lutterworth.)
1388: On November 2nd, 20-years old Charles VI declared he wanted to rule France alone as he saw the kingdom’s treasury, painstakingly accumulated by his father Charles V, squandered by self-serving regents. Since ascending the throne at eleven, France was ruled by his uncles, the Dukes of Burgundy, Anjou, Berry, and Bourbon and their creation, the administrative Council of 12. Philip the Bold of Burgundy led the council from 1382 and in 1385, arranged Charles VI’s marriage to Isabella of Bavaria.
His nickname was the Beloved and later, the Mad.
(Charles visited antipope Clement VII in Avignon to discuss plans to install him as pope in Rome as a way to enhance French power in Italy. England’s king Richard II favoured the Roman pope, Boniface IX.)
1391: On June 4, Martínez’s anti-Semitic efforts led to the largest forced mass conversion of Jews in Spain — many converted to Christianity, fled the country, or were sold to Muslims.
Since most new converts were forced, their large numbers led to the creation of a new group that was neither completely Catholic nor Jewish.
(As fully privileged citizens, these conversos competed in all aspects of the economic sphere. In 1449, small and large riots erupted in Toledo between old and new Christians. To test the loyalty and purity of the newly baptized Christians (conversos), the Crown established a National Inquisition in 1478. Some Jews and conversos fled Spain but others outwardly practiced Christianity to ensure the survival of Judaism in the Iberian Peninsula.)
1392: While leading a military expedition against the Duchy of Brittany, King Charles VI had his first attack of delirium, attacking his own men. In January 1393, after he narrowly escaped death from burning, Charles was again placed under the regency of his uncles, the dukes of Berry and Burgundy.
Until his death in 1422, Charles VI alternated between periods of mental instability and lucidity. Power was held by his influential uncles and his wife, Queen Isabeau of Bavaria.
(As his younger brother, Louis d’Orléans, also aspired to the regency, the enmity between Louis and John the Fearless, successor of Philip the Bold as Duke of Burgundy, plunged France into the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War of 1407–1435. The king found himself successively controlled by one or the other party.)
1394: “Theologians at the University of Paris suggested three solutions to the Western Great Schism:
1. Both popes resign and another be elected in his place
2. Conduct negotiations with a moderator
3. Call a general council, and let them decide the matter
Charles VI of France decided he liked option 1. Confident for some reason that he could get the pope in Rome to resign, he tried to persuade Pope Benedict XIII to resign as well.
Benedict wasn’t interested, so Charles sent an army to lay seige to Avignon.” Christian History
Antipope Clement VII died at Avignon on 16 September 1394.
1397: Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici established Medici Bank, the most famous Italian bank on which the Medici fortune was built. 14th-century Florence had emerged as an important center for banking and the city’s gold coin, the florin, had became a standard currency across Europe.
“Before the Renaissance started about 1400, there was a discouraging sameness in most known forms of human society … they were generally two-class systems: ruling elite and mass. The mass made up 95% of the population. They were peasants, serfs, and slaves, almost always laboring on the land, almost always illiterate and benighted. Their lives were nasty, brutish, and short. Over these peasants and serfs commanded a feudal aristocracy. Monarchy is bad enough, but most of the pre-Renaissance societies were something worse: they were small ruling classes called oligarchies. The aristocrats had military retainers, priests, scribes, and lackeys, making up at most 5% of the population. Under these conditions, world population potential was measured in the hundreds of millions, and even these were decimated by frequent plagues and famines.” Webster G. Tarpley, The Venetian Conspiracy
By the end of the 14th Century: Church and state had emerged as clearly defined entities that operated within their own spheres. The Great Enlightenment subsequently fueled the very French Revolution that supposedly put an end to papal authority in 1806.
15th Century 1400s (1400–1499)
Giovanni’s son, Cosimo, grew the Medici bank into the most powerful house in Europe, with branches in Rome, Venice, Naples, Milan, London, Geneva, etc. The Vatican was a major client, and the bank was also involved in the textile and alum trades. Cosimo used his wealth to influence Florentine politics and to launch the Medici political dynasty. Most of the bank’s branches were closed by the end of the 15th century but the Medici dynasty continued — family members served as dukes of Florence and grand dukes of Tuscany from the early 1530s to 1737.
1407–1435: The Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War was a conflict between two cadet branches of the French royal family — the House of Orléans (Armagnac faction led by Louis d’Orléans) and the House of Burgundy led by John the Fearless, successor of Philip the Bold as Duke of Burgundy (Burgundian faction). It began during a lull in the Hundred Years’ War against the English and overlapped with the Western Schism of the papacy.
(King Charles VI found himself successively controlled by one or the other party.)
1407: Casa di San Giorgio, the first government-owned deposit bank, was created in Italy as a 100% publicly owned reserve bank to settle large transactions using a ledger to replace coins.
In The Making of the Modern Corporation, Carlo Taviani traces the origins to Genoa and reconstructs the diffusion in England, the Netherlands and France.
“At its inception, the Casa di San Giorgio (1407–1805) was entrusted with managing the public debt in Genoa. Over time, it took on powers we now ascribe to banks and states, accruing financial characteristics and fiscal, political, and territorial powers. As one of the earliest central banks, it ruled territories and local populations for almost a century.
It controlled strategic Genoese possessions near and far, including the island of Corsica, the city of Famagusta (in Cyprus), and trading posts in Crimea, the Black Sea, the Lunigiana in northern Tuscany, and various towns in Liguria. In the early sixteenth century, in his Florentine Histories (Book VIII, Chapter 29), Niccolò Machiavelli was the first to analyze the relationship between the Casa di San Giorgio’s financial and territorial powers, declaring its possession of territories as the basis of its ascendancy.
Later, the founders of some of the earliest corporations, including the Dutch East India Company (1602), the Bank of England (1694), and John Law’s Mississippi Company (1720) in France, referenced the model of the Casa di San Giorgio.”
The primary mission of one of the oldest chartered banks in the world was to facilitate the management of the San Giorgio shares (luoghi). The Bank’s headquarters at the Palazzo San Giorgio was built in the 13th century by order of Guglielmo Boccanegra, uncle of Simone Boccanegra, the first Doge of Genoa.
According to Damien Perrotin:
“The Casa delle compere e dei banchi di San Giorgio was founded in 1407 by a number of Genoese oligarchs, among whom the Grimaldi and Serra families (yes, those Grimaldis). The Republic of Genoa was a merchant republic, under the control of a handful of noble and trading families. It had been a major power in the Western Mediterranean during the crusade era but had lost most of its positions to Venice, then to the nascent Ottoman Empire, and was progressively becoming a French and Milanese protectorate …
The bank’s influence was such that Niccolò Machiavelli could write: ‘On the other hand, as the city had at first conceded the customs, she next began to assign towns, castles, or territories, as security for moneys received; and this practice has proceeded to such a length, from the necessities of the state, and the accommodation by the San Giorgio, that the latter now has under its administration most of the towns and cities in the Genoese dominion. These the Bank governs and protects, and every year sends its deputies, appointed by vote, without any interference on the part of the republic.
Hence the affections of the citizens are transferred from the government to the San Giorgio, on account of the tyranny of the former, and the excellent regulations adopted by the latter. Hence also originate the frequent changes of the republic, which is sometimes under a citizen, and at other times governed by a stranger; for the magistracy, and not the San Giorgio, changes the government. So when the Fregosi and the Adorni were in opposition, as the government of the republic was the prize for which they strove, the greater part of the citizens withdrew and left it to the victor.
The only interference of the Bank of St. Giorgio is when one party has obtained a superiority over the other, to bind the victor to the observance of its laws, which up to this time have not been changed; for as it possesses arms, money, and influence, they could not be altered without incurring the imminent risk of a dangerous rebellion.
This establishment presents an instance of what in all the republics, either described or imagined by philosophers, has never been thought of; exhibiting within the same community, and among the same citizens, liberty and tyranny, integrity and corruption, justice and injustice; for this establishment preserves in the city many ancient and venerable customs; and should it happen (as in time it easily may) that the San Giorgio should have possession of the whole city, the republic will become more distinguished than that of Venice.’
… The Genoese bankers provided therefore the Habsburgs with fluid credit and a dependably regular income. In return, they took the lion’s share of American silver and accumulated, quite predictably, an indecent amount of money in the process.
The Bank used this money to invest in colonial ventures, competing with Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company, and was a major player in European economy up to the end of the XVIIIth (18th) century despite the decline of Spain … then evaporated overnight.
Genoa happened indeed to lie uncomfortably close to revolutionary France. It was invaded in 1797 by a French general called Napoleon Bonaparte. Bonaparte turned Genoa into a French client, the Ligurian Republic. In 1805, the same Bonaparte, who had become an emperor in the meantime, annexed the area. Bonaparte had also created what would become the Bank of France in Paris, and given it a monopoly on money printing. The idea was to create a stable currency and a reliable source of cash for France’s foreign ventures.
Bonaparte happened to be a major shareholder and, being practically-minded, he quickly understood that concurrence was bad for business–his own anyway. The Bank of Saint-George was therefore told, politely but firmly, to please cease operations as soon as possible, which it did — French emperors tend to be very convincing, especially when their words are backed by an indecent number of infantry divisions.
It was not, however, French military power that enabled Napoleon the First to annex Genoa and dissolve the Bank of Saint-George, but the fact he was not a traditional monarch and was not bound by the traditional rules of statesmanship. The problem, indeed, with owing one’s throne to tradition, was that you had to obey traditional laws, lest you undermine your own legitimacy. The French kings could boast as much as they wanted about being the State, their actual power was fairly limited. They couldn’t, for instance, raise new taxes without the assent of the États Géneraux.
Napoleon, on the other hand, was the heir of a violent revolution. He based his power on military force, but also upon a variant of the enlightenment which emphasized equality, rationality and national sovereignty — albeit not freedom of the press and electoral democracy. It was not founded on tradition and therefore was not bound by it. Of course, that also meant he was not protected by it either and could be only as strong as his last victory.”
1407: Christian Rosenkreutz founded a secret society called The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross but its existence did not become public knowledge until two centuries later, when its pamphlets were scattered across most of Germany.
The publication of the Fama Fraternitatis and the Confessio Fraternitatis tells the story of Rosenkreutz as a monk who followed in the footsteps of the Knights Templar, journeying to the East in search of wisdom.
He sought the source of the Disciplina Arcani, the arcane discipline or secret teaching of the Hidden Church of the Graal, the rose upon the cross. After being initiated and instructed by the ancient Hermetic brotherhood of the Magi, Rosenkreutz was charged with establishing a branch in Europe to perpetuate the ancient wisdom and mysteries. In time, the Brotherhood came to be called Rosicrucians, The Rosicrucian Order, or The Knights of the Rosy Cross.
Many historians believe the Father of Rosicrucianism to be Francis Bacon. His The New Atlantis describes a utopia in which the crippled and frail are healed by knights bearing a symbol described in a similar fashion as the Rose Cross. “Christian Rosenkreuz” also literally means “Christian Rose-Cross,” a fun pen name Bacon could have used to hide his identity.
(Over 2,400 years ago, Plato was the first to mention Atlantis. In his dialogues, ‘Timaeus’ and ‘Critias,’ the Greek philosopher shares that his grandfather was told the tale by the Athenian statesman Solon, who apparently had been told by the Egyptians.)
1408: The Church banned the unauthorized translation of the Bible into English.
1409: Another council of the Roman Catholic Church, the Council of Pisa was convened to end the Western/Great Schism. Rival popes, each with his own Curia, set up — Gregory XII in Rome and Benedict XIII in Avignon. Through the concerted efforts of cardinals of both obediences, the council was well attended.
Alexander V was elected as the third pope but he “died mysteriously, some professing — though without proof — that he was poisoned by his successor, the antipope John XXIII.” Britannica
1410: The Salic Law (of Succession) was first mentioned in a treatise against the claims to the French throne by Henry IV of England.
1415: The Austrian Habsburgs family reigned over the Holy Roman Empire until its final day, and were also simultaneously kings of Bohemia.
“It was under Habsburg rule that the Holy Roman Empire experienced an era of great religious strife, making it one of its darker periods. Whereas the imperial family was staunchly Catholic, in the north of the empire the Protestant Reformation exploded in 1517 when Martin Luther officially broke with the pope and fractured Western Christianity.” World History
1414–1418: Following the election of two rival popes (in Rome and in Avignon) in 1378 and the attempt at the 1409 Council of Pisa to resolve the Great Schism, the church found itself with three popes instead of one.
Pressured by the Holy Roman emperor Sigismund, John XXIII, the successor of the Pisa pope, summoned the Council of Constance, the 16th ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church, principally to reunite Christendom and to examine the teachings of John Wycliffe and Jan Hus and to reform the church.
The three contending popes were forced to resign and Oddone Colonna, a Pisan cardinal, was elected as Pope Martin V on Nov. 11, 1417.
“Political rivalries so divided the large number of council delegates that a revolutionary system of voting was adopted, whereby each of the four power blocs (Italy, England, Germany, and France) was granted a single vote; later the cardinals were given a vote as a group, and still later Spain was empowered to vote.
John XXIII, after being threatened with an investigation of his life, promised to resign if his rivals would do the same. Shortly after, however, he fled from Constance, hoping that this act would deprive the council of its power and lead to its dissolution. The emperor insisted that the council continue, and it issued the decree Sacrosancta, affirming that a general council of the church is superior to the pope. It further decreed that frequent councils are essential for the proper government of the church.” Britannica
At the Council of Constance, John Wycliffe was declared a heretic. The Council decreed that all his works be burned and his remains exhumed. The church passed a ruling that anyone who read the scriptures in English “would forfeit land, cattle, life and goods from their heirs forever.”
1417–31: During his pontificate, Martin V “obtained the grant of fiefs for his (Colonna) family in southern Italy and enriched them with vast estates in papal territory, including Frascati, Paliano, Genazzano, and many other places … he asserted papal supremacy in all matters ecclesiastical.” Britannica
1420: Crushed by the English at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, Charles VI “the Mad” agreed in the Treaty of Troyes to wed his daughter Catherine of Valois to Henry V of England on May 20th. Besides making his future son-in-law the regent of France, he also acknowledged that Henry, along with his future sons, would inherit the French throne upon his death.
The Dauphin Charles VII of France was disinherited from the succession.
1422: The treaty was undermined by the deaths of both Charles VI and Henry V within two months of each other. The infant Henry VI of England became King of both England and France, but the Dauphin Charles also claimed the throne of France.
(The terms of the Treaty of Troyes were later confirmed once again at the Treaty of Amiens (1423), when Burgundy and Brittany confirmed the recognition of Henry VI as King of France and agreed to form a triple-defensive alliance against the Dauphin Charles.
However, following the appearance of Joan of Arc in 1429 to command the Valois forces, the course of the war shifted dramatically. They lifted the siege of Orléans and then fought their way to Reims, traditional site of French coronations, where the former Dauphin was crowned as Charles VII of France. In 1435, Charles signed the Treaty of Arras with the Burgundians, in which they recognized and endorsed his claims to the throne.
The military victory of Charles VII over Henry VI rendered the treaty moot.
A final attempt at the French throne was made by Edward IV of England in 1475, but he agreed to peace with Louis XI in the Treaty of Picquigny. The kings of England continued to nominally claim the crown of France until 1801, though this was never again seriously pursued. Their last territory on the French mainland, the city of Calais, was lost to France in 1558.)
Various English kings tried to establish their claims to the French throne. In 1453, the latter phase of the Hundred Years’ War was finally won by the French at the Battle of Castillon.
1428: At Pope Martin V’s command, Wycliffe’s corpse was exhumed and burned, and the ashes cast into the River Swift, which flows through Lutterworth where he had preached.
1429: Six years old Louis XI “began his formal education based upon a program of instruction designed by Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, who was otherwise known for his defense of the Brothers of the Common Life against charges of heresy at the Council of Constance.
Louis was fifteen years old at the time of the Council of Florence. Louis was not to become King of France until 1461 at age 38. However, in 1447 at age 24 he assumed control of the state of Dauphine and began to implement policies there that foreshadowed the measures he would later take to create the first modern sovereign nation-state. He abolished a hodge-podge of administrative subdivisions and reorganized the province. He established a Parliament, sped up the process of litigation, established an official register of documents, and set up a government postal service, the first in Europe. (This is something Benjamin Franklin would do in the United States before independence.)
He founded a university at Valence with faculties of theology, civil and canon law, medicine, and liberal arts. He curbed the power of the feudal lords and stimulated the growth of towns. He encouraged agriculture by putting a tax on wheat coming into Dauphine. He offered financial inducements to enterprising merchants, ennobled them, took their sons into his service, and encouraged skilled foreign artisans to settle in Dauphine.
Louis abolished private warfare, a privilege enjoyed by the nobles, demanded that all nobles do homage to him, required them to furnish military service at their own expense. He succeeded in establishing his authority over prelates as well as nobles.
He transformed his backward province into a state, gave it a cohesion it had never known, and organized an administration that was probably more efficient than any other in Europe. He enacted in all more than a thousand decrees, ranging from broad reforms to minute regulations for the welfare of individuals and towns … Over the course of his reign from 1461–1483, Louis XI succeeded against great domestic and foreign opposition in unifying France as a sovereign nation-state by effecting the same kinds of reforms in France as he earlier implemented in Dauphine.” William F. Wertz, Jr.
Late 1420s: Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa was introduced to Plato’s writings through the works of the Spaniard Raymond Llull housed at a Carthusian monastery outside Paris. Llull, along with his contemporary Dante Alighieri, had led the Platonist offensive against medieval Aristotelianism.
Cusa’s collaborators were all part of the effort to actualize the 15th-century city-state of Florence as King Louis XI’s Commonwealth model. By the mid-sixteenth century, Louis had transformed a depopulated scorched France into the world’s most productive nation-state. Spain, England and then America eventually built on that model experiment.
1429: French peasant girl Joan of Arc took charge of a broken down French army — demoralized from decades of fighting England. Under her leadership, the French were able to retake Rheims and crown the French Dauphin as king. Joan’s intervention was crucial to Louis XI founding the French nation.
She was part of the same circles which later launched Louis XI on his revolutionary course. These circles included the teaching order of the Brotherhood of the Common Life, the Augustinian Order of Hermits, and the faction of the Church around Nicolaus of Cusa. By backing Joan and the Brotherhood of the Common Life, these circles in the Church managed to birth the nation-state model. Source: Pierre Beaudry
1430: On 10 January, to celebrate marrying Isabella of Portugal, Philip III ‘the Good,’ Duke of Burgundy, founded the Order of the Golden Fleece in Bruges. The Catholic order of chivalry was initially restricted to 24 knights (the number increased to 30 in 1433, and 50 in 1516), plus the sovereign. Jean Le Fèvre de Saint-Remy was the order’s first king of arms.
(Isabella’s maternal great grandfather, Edward III of England, had established the Order of the Garter in 1348.)
“… whilst Christianity and chivalry are supposed to be at the core of the Order of the Golden Fleece, its name, ironically, appears to refer to the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, a pagan myth centered around a hero with questionable morals.” Ancient Origins
(Today, two branches of the order exist, namely the Spanish and the Austrian Fleece; the current grand masters are Felipe VI, King of Spain and Karl von Habsburg, head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, respectively. The Grand Chaplain of the Austrian branch is Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna.)
1434: In a book-length treatise entitled The Catholic Concordance, Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa presents the concept of a state to the Council of Basel.
By proving the so-called Donation of Constantine (the ninth-century assertion that the Roman Emperor Constantine had ceded the temporal power of the empire to the papacy) to be a total fraud, Cusa argued that the only basis for the emergence of the sovereign nation-state resides in the elective principle of the king based on the enrichment of the nation as a whole, and with the consent of the people.
He establishes how the Holy Empire does not depend on the pope, but rather derives its authority from God by means of the consent of the governed.
His political theory:
“[A]ll legitimate authority arises from elective concordance and free submission. There is in the people a divine seed by virtue of their common equal birth and the equal natural rights of all men so that all authority — which comes from God as does man himself — is recognized as divine when it arises from the common consent of the subjects. One who is established in authority as representative of the will of all may be called a public or common person, the father of all, ruling without haughtiness or pride, in a lawful and legitimately established government. While recognizing himself as the creature, as it were, of all his subjects as a collectivity, let him act as their father as individuals. This is that divinely ordained marital state of spiritual union based on a lasting harmony by which a commonwealth is best guided in the fullness of peace toward the goal of eternal bliss.’’
“Nonetheless, for Cusanus the fundamental principle of philosophy is that unity is prior to plurality. Therefore, as expressed in the same book, On Catholic Concordance, he believed all reforms should be carried out within the Church, and, notwithstanding his work for reform, it would be false to portray his role as that of a forerunner of the later Reformation, which split the institution of the Catholic Church both politically and theologically. Cusanus became a Cardinal of the Catholic Church in 1449 and at the end of his life was appointed General Vicar of Rome. The same may be said of the Brotherhood.” William F. Wertz, Jr.
1438: The final acquisition of the royal throne by the Habsburg dynasty.
1438–1445: Continuing from the 1438 Council of Basel (Switzerland), Latin and Greek churches tried to reach an agreement on their doctrinal differences at the Council of Ferrara-Florence. On July 6, 1439, Pope Eugene IV issued Laetentur Coeli, a papal bull to officially end the East–West Schism and to reunite the Catholic Church with the Eastern Orthodox Church. The agreed decree was short-lived.
Although the Bible never teaches that the church, as an entity, is to hold political power, political strength seemed to be the most compelling driver as issues raised and dealt with included the doctrine on purgatory, the primacy of the Pope and the Filioque controversy.
“… convened under the sponsorship of the Medici rulers of Florence … this council embraced the theology of the filioque. In political terms filioque meant that each and every human being is made in the image of God, similar to God, by virtue of possessing God-like qualities of intellectual creativity in the form of a human soul. Therefore the dignity of the human person had to be respected. The human mind was capable of scientific discovery, and also capable of creating the modern nation-state.” Webster G. Tarpley, The Venetian Conspiracy
“Through their cooperation with the best representatives of Medici Florence in the time of the Council of Florence of 1439, (Cardinal) Nicolaus and Aeneas Silvius saved western civilization from the Dark Age that had begun with the defeat of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen at the hands of the Black Guelph oligarchs.
During that Dark Age, the Roman Catholic Church had been substantially destroyed by the Avignon captivity and the Great Schism, both against the backdrop of such events as the Hundred Years’ War, the Wars of the Roses, and the advance of the Ottoman Empire. Without Nicolaus and Aeneas Silvius, there would have been no Europe and no church by 1500; Venice opposed both through the Morosini agent Gregory von Heimburg [Gilbert, 191] …
The essence of Venice is oligarchism, usury, slavery, and the cult of Aristotle. The traditional rate of interest was above 20% — a Volcker prime rate. The Venetians were the first in western Europe to read Aristotle directly in the Greek text — first at the School of the Rialto, where leading patricians lectured on Aristotle, and later, after about 1400, at the University of Padova, where the Venetian nobles studied.” Webster G. Tarpley, The Role of the Venetian Oligarchy
The USA “is the highest expression thus far of the development of the modern sovereign nation-state republic, which originated from Europe between the time of the Council of Florence in 1438–39 and the establishment of the first modern nation-states: Louis XI’s France and Henry VII’s England, during the later Fifteenth century. In fact, the idea for the colonization of the Americas, as a way of outflanking the enemies of the Fifteenth-century Golden Renaissance, was first developed as a global strategy by the circles of Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa during the Council of Florence.” William F. Wertz, Jr.
“Global Elite families control the Vatican and the Corporation (the incorporation of the Apostle Peter). They also control the US Military, and the London Financial District — all three of which are independent city/states. The control center is the Crown Temple Syndicate. The Washington DC private corporation Federal Estate is actually owned and controlled by the London Crown Temple Syndicate. The Syndicate, through the House of Windsor, owns approximately 1/6 of the Earth’s land surface.” Justin Taylor
1438: After an assembly examined the decrees of the Council of Basel, King Charles VII of France issued the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges on July 7. It approved the decree Sacrosancta of the council, which asserted the supremacy of a council over the pope, and established the “liberties” of the Gallican Church, restricting the rights of the pope and in many cases making his jurisdiction subject to the will of the king.
(Revoked by Louis XI in 1461 but reasserted from time to time, the Pragmatic Sanction was ultimately superseded by the Concordat of Bologna, negotiated by Francis I and Pope Leo X in 1516.)
1439–1440: Lorenzo Valla wrote De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione declamation while employed in the court of Alfonso V of Aragon, then engaged in a territorial conflict with Pope Eugene IV over the Papal States. Valla exposed the Donation of Constantine — an important document justifying the papacy’s claims to temporal power in the High Middle Ages — as a forgery.
1440: The rebirth of Platonist learning became institutionalized in Florence, Italy with the founding of Cosimo de’ Medici’s Platonic Academy.
Around 1440: Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in Germany. This technology played a key role in the development of the Scientific Revolution and the Renaissance to spread top-down thinking to the masses.
Little-known texts from early humanist authors like Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio promoting a renewal of traditional Greek and Roman culture and values were printed and distributed to the masses.
(Many scholars believe advances in international finance and trade impacted culture in Europe and set the stage for the Renaissance.)
1441: The voyage by Antão Gonçalves, a young Portuguese ship captain, to western Africa is widely considered to mark the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade.
(Writing a biography of Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator, Gomes de Zurara first proposed terminology relating to the hierarchy of difference races to justify slavery.)
1444: Nicholas of Cusa again argued for the rotation of the Earth and of other heavenly bodies, but it was not until the 1543 publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI (“Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs”) that heliocentrism began to be reestablished.
1445: The Council of Florence officially ended. When news of the union between East and West reached Constantinople, emissaries who had attended were treated as traitors and heretics, and were shunned or arrested. Because of the political pressure against uniting with Rome, the schism between East and West continued until 1453.
1447: The Guelphs (aka Welfs) and Ghibellines (aka the Hohenstaufen faction/Staufer) cooperated to create the Golden Ambrosian Republic, a short-lived Milanese government, to restore Italy to a republic state.
1447: Even before becoming king, Louis XI had begun experimenting with building the commonwealth of France in the Dauphine region, after several clashes with his father, Charles VII.
His main concern was to develop a lot of jobs in infrastructure and industry.
Since textile manufacturing could employ “church people, nobility, nuns, and others who are now unemployed and would have an honest and profitable occupation,” he created extensive textile plants.
As a general policy, Louis protected and then capitalized on the initiatives of entrepreneurs and inventors in agriculture, industry and commerce. He adopted protectionist and anti-dumping measures to protect grain growers, linen producers and other agricultural enterprises, and exempted traders from provincial tariffs while imposing tariffs on foreign merchandise. He encouraged skilled laborers from other countries to settle in Dauphine with their families, guaranteeing them tax exemptions proportional to their productivity.
The mining industry was another major project. Throughout France, Louis ordered large-scale mining of gold, silver, lead, tin, copper, iron and coal, and confiscated the land of any feudal lord who refused to exploit the natural resources under his responsibility. German and Italian engineers and miners were considered the most developed and skilled miners and metallurgists in the world. He brought them in to train the locals in the various skills. Engineers, printers, miners, farmers, armor manufacturers, designers, artillery specialists, iron workers, copper workers, caldron makers, glass makers, weavers, etc. — all specialties of workers from all over Europe — were encouraged to move to France. Source: Pierre Beaudry
1452: Pope Nicholas V, founder of the Vatican Library, issued to King Afonso of Portugal the bull Dum Diversas that considered all non-Christians to be enemies of the Catholic faith and therefore less than human. Afonso was authorized to “capture, vanquish, and subdue the saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ,” to “put them into perpetual slavery,” and “to take all their possessions and property.”
On March 19, Frederick III, the last Holy Roman emperor to be crowned in Rome, laid the foundations for the greatness of the House of Habsburg in European affairs.
“Lasting fifty-three years, Frederick’s reign was the longest of any king or emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. He was tenacious rather than decisive — he succeeded in overcoming many of his political adversaries simply by surviving them.” The World of the Habsburgs
He began three straight centuries of emperors from the same royal Austrian family. During the reign of Maximilian I, the Habsburgs greatly expanded their influence through political marriages, acquiring Burgundy, Spain, Bohemia and Hungary.
1453: The Byzantine Empire (Roman Empire) collapsed after the Ottomans besieged Constantinople for 55 days.
“The ultimate sabotage was the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, which was assisted by Venetian agents and provocateurs. Venice refused to respond to Pope Pius II (Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini) when he called for the recovery of Constantinople.” Webster G. Tarpley
The fall of Constantinople kicked off the Renaissance period as artisans, artists, merchants and bankers who fled Westward brought knowledge and skills that were lost for a millennium. Backed by the powerful Medici family which had ruled Florence for more than 60 years, the Renaissance took off there before expanding to other Italian city-states like Venice, Milan, Bologna, Ferrara and Rome. During the 15th century, Renaissance ideas spread from Italy to France and then throughout western and northern Europe.
“All empires since the Renaissance have been driven by the search for foreign resources, and nearly all — including the British, the French, and the Dutch — used drugs as a cheap way to pay for the overseas expansion. When the United States decided to preserve Western influence in Southeast Asia, it inherited a social structure of former colonial regimes that had coexisted in one way or other with powerful Chinese Triads engaged in the drug traffic.” Peter Dale Scott
1455–1485: In the four-decade long Wars of the Roses, the nobility and monarchs of England (the two cadet branches of the house of Plantagenet) intermittently battled over wealth/power, disagreements over relations with France and the impoverished economy. It brought English society to the point of breakdown.
1455: Pope Nicholas V issued the Papal Bull Romanus Pontifex, a Testamentary Trust , which extended Portugal’s authority to conquer the lands of infidels and pagans for “the salvation of all” to “pardon … their souls.” The bull also granted Portugal a specific right to conquest in West Africa and to trade with Saracens and infidels in designated areas.
This Trust conveyed into it all the rights of the first Claim of Right the Holy See made upon your soul. It was only one of three papal bulls that included “for a perpetual remembrance.” This conveyed the right of use of the land as real property from the Express Trust Unam Sanctam to the control of the Pontiff and his successors in perpetuity.
Created when a child is born, this 1st Crown is represented by the 1st Cestui Que Vie (CQV) Trust:
“This Trust is the foundation to Monarchy, it is the Crown Trust to which all monarchs have Title, they do not have ownership, that resides with the first Claim of Right by the Holy See over your soul. Monarchs are administrators. This is the first Crown. This Crown removes your real estate rights.” The Bridge
A 2019 New York Times article declares how a new form of slavery came into being pre the arrival of the various royalty-chartered East India Companies:
“In the 15th century, the Roman Catholic Church divided the world in half, granting Portugal a monopoly on trade in West Africa and Spain the right to colonize the New World in its quest for land and gold. Pope Nicholas V buoyed Portuguese efforts and issued the Romanus Pontifex of 1455, which affirmed Portugal’s exclusive rights to territories it claimed along the West African coast and the trade from those areas. It granted the right to invade, plunder and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” Queen Isabella invested in Christopher Columbus’s exploration to increase her wealth and ultimately rejected the enslavement of Native Americans, claiming that they were Spanish subjects. Spain established an asiento, or contract, that authorized the direct shipment of captive Africans for trade as human commodities in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Eventually other European nation-states — the Netherlands, France, Denmark and England — seeking similar economic and geopolitical power joined in the trade, exchanging goods and people with leaders along the West African coast, who ran self-sustaining societies known for their mineral-rich land and wealth in gold and other trade goods. They competed to secure the asiento and colonize the New World. With these efforts, a new form of slavery came into being.
It was endorsed by the European nation-states and based on race, and it resulted in the largest forced migration in the world: Some 12.5 million men, women and children of African descent were forced into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The sale of their bodies and the product of their labor brought the Atlantic world into being, including colonial North America. In the colonies, status began to be defined by race and class, and whether by custom, case law or statute, freedom was limited to maintain the enterprise of slavery and ensure power … The slave trade provided political power, social standing and wealth for the church, European nation-states, New World colonies and individuals.” Mary Elliott and Jazmine Hughes
1456: Pope Calixtus III reiterated the bull with Etsi cuncti, renewed by Pope Sixtus IV in 1481 and Pope Leo X in 1514 with Precelse denotionis.
1458: The first recorded history of the description of double-entry bookkeeping was made by Benedetto Cotrugli in the Book on the Art of Trade.
1461–1483: Three days after the death of his father, Charles VII on July 22, 1461, Louis XI — “Louis the Prudent” — became King of France.
“The scientific idea of a nation-state, as opposed to the territorial looting of an empire, is based entirely on the willful purpose of fostering the common good of a population, and this commonwealth can only be achieved by means of improving the productive powers of labor of that population. In this fashion, the nation-state must be ruled in a dirigistic fashion, from a centralized government which commits itself to fostering man’s ability to reflect this general purpose through works in art and science. In turn, the elevated individual soul will ennoble the nation-state by bringing a contribution to its advancement and progress.” Pierre Beaudry
Was Louis even aware of Plato’s Thirty Tyrants’ paradigm? Was that how good intentions were initially hijacked so the road to hell is now paved with them?
During his 22-year reign, his most significant political change was to bankrupt the feudal landed aristocracy:
“He created a new base for society and the economy with the establishment and defense of industries throughout the cities of France, and with the opening of reciprocal trade with England, and treaty agreements with Genoa, Florence, Naples, Sicily, and Calabria.
Louis guaranteed the expansion of industries by subsidizing the cities, including the medieval cities; such subsidies came from income taxes, which were levied in inverse proportion to the productivity of the earner.
Accordingly, the feudal princes were taxed higher than the villagers and the villagers more than the townspeople. While salaries doubled during Louis’s reign, income taxes tripled in a period of 20 years:
The total tax collected was 1,200,000 pounds in 1462, and had reached the level of 3,900,000 pounds in 1482. While the majority of the people and the cities never complained, however, the historical records are filled with complaints from the aristocracy, which had been frustrated in its privileges.
But the crucial change was the creation of new humanist schools and universities under the king’s authority. Louis XI presided over the establishment of the first Renaissance humanist studies by creating two new universities, one in Valence and the other in Bourges, in 1464.
By 1471, he opened the printing house of the Sorbonne in Paris, which began the dissemination of Plato, Sallustre, Virgil and Juvenal, and Xenophon, commissioned by the king himself. Louis brought from Germany Martin Krantz, Ulrich Gering, and Michel Friburger to set up the Sorbonne printing house with state subsidies. Very quickly, France had major printing houses in 37 cities. In 1515, the Sorbonne press printed the first complete edition of Cusa’s work in Europe, under the editorship of the humanist Jacques Lefévre d’Etaples.
Louis used the Sorbonne press as a political weapon as well as an educational one. In 1477, the king commissioned the first book in French, La Chronique by Saint Denis which recounted the building of the French nation from the Roman times to the death of his father, Charles VII. This was used widely to discredit Charles the Bold of Burgundy as an enemy of France. Thus, the first French language book is the history of how France became a nation!” Matthew Ehret
He also abolished the Pragmatic Sanction his father had instituted to establish a French Gallican Church free of the controls of the popes in Rome.
As a leading “civil reformer,” King Louis XI’s nation-state model attracted attention from England and Spain.
“The War of the League of Cambrai proved that Louis XI’s modern French nation-state was a threat to the survival of Venice. The Venetians wanted to destroy France. But how? Direct military force was out of the question. The Venetians therefore decided on a strategy of cultural and political subversion.
This subversion of France between 1500 and 1800 by the Venetians has few parallels in modern history.
Of all the national cultures of the modern age, the French is the most prestigious.” Webster G. Tarpley, The Venetian Conspiracy
“Over the course of 20 years, Louis XI and his closest associates formed a strong alliance called the League of Constance, involving several key duchies whose leaders would remain faithful to the King. France at the time had 14 feudal duchies and 94 major cities, which Louis XI unified on the basis of the common good and common development opportunities. This ``commonwealth’’ idea was conveyed throughout the country in the slogan: ``One law, one weight, one currency.’’ The king also expanded the standing army established by his father Charles VII.” Pierre Beaudry
1462: Louis’ relationship with the city of Florence was pivotal to the creation of a unified France: He had to have a single currency and a unified investment plan that prioritized the physical economy, a dirigist program which included a tax-incentive program for investment in manufacture and infrastructure.
The organization of the Medici banks was the only one in the world that was oriented toward that kind of economic development then.
Early on, Louis had established a national banking policy. In 1462, he released an ordinance establishing a bank with branches in Paris, Lyons and Montpellier, which with the agreement of the Church would use 900,000 ecus a year of lendable money as state credit for infrastructure and agriculture.
The Medicis took charge of his national bank policy as they agreed to secure and guarantee depositors the way Louis intended.
Their general view: Banks were at the service of the nation and not the nation at the service of the banks.
Louis had the personal guarantee that all the loans from the Medici banks would be interest-free. Indeed, all loans made by Medici bank branches were interest-free contracts. It was against the law of the land and against Christianity to incur interests on loans, and usury was prohibited in France. Bankers who were oriented toward fat profits had to resort to other means to get it, such as “bills of exchange, or currency exchange, and the like.
According to accounts of the time, Louis won a major trade war in favor of the city of Lyon, the second-largest city in France, against Genoa, which was then controlled by the Venetians. To lure international merchants to Lyon, Louis organized major international fairs in Lyon and systematic operations against Genoa. To convince foreign merchants that their operations would be safer in France than Genoa, he renounced his privilege of assuming control of the possessions of any foreigner who died on French territory. Source: Pierre Beaudry
Around 1462: Cosimo de’ Medici, founder of a main line of the Medici family that ruled Florence from 1434 to 1537, decided to re-found Plato’s Academy in Florence.
About then, financial difficulties had compelled Marsilio Ficino, scholar, astrologer and Catholic priest, to move to Bologna. On a visit to his father, a physician raised in the Medici Court under Cosimo’s patronage, Ficino met Cosimo who decided to make him his protégé, house him in a villa close to his in the Florentine countryside, and let him lead his new informal Academy.
Cosimo provided Ficino with a Greek version of Plato’s works, supposedly secured from Georgius Gemistus Pletho, an adviser to the Greek delegation at the Council of Ferrara-Florence. A Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, scholar, and senator from Constantinople who had written extensively on Plato and the Alexandrian mystics, Pletho also influenced Cosimo’s establishment of the Platonic Academy. He planted the seeds that would mature into the Platonic movement in Renaissance Italy.
As Ficino’s teacher and mentor in Platonic ideology, John Argyropoulos also imparted late pagan philosophy. Ficino published the first Latin translation of Plato’s Republic in 1484, and was in many ways, “the father of modern Hermeticism.”
1463: The struggle between England and France was a dynastic competition between Plantagenet and Valois. To destroy the Geneva fairs Charles the Bold of Burgundy (his enemy) was using to finance war against him, Louis XI created four fairs in Lyon. Each fair lasted two weeks.
(Since the 15th century, a global clearing takes place during the week after the fair closing. Under the leadership of Florentine merchant-bankers, its process is akin to present-day futures markets.
“Following the downfall of the Templars, Lyon’s fair became the greatest market for international trade in all Europe. With just a desk and an inkstand, an Italian merchant bought and sold debt and made a fortune, using a form called a bill of exchange. Essentially, it was a credit note, an IOU, expressed in the ecu de marc, a private currency used by an international network of bankers.
“Every few months, agents of this network of bankers would meet at the great fairs such as Lyon’s, go through their books, net off all the credit notes against each other and settle any remaining debts.
Our financial system today has a lot in common with this model …
By turning personal obligations into internationally tradable debts, these medieval bankers were creating their own private money, outside the control of Europe’s kings. Rich, and powerful, they had no need for the coins minted by the sovereign.” Tim Harford )
Was this initial template evolved for the “debt to finance perpetual wars” model?
1464: Louis XI developed the system of royal postal roads in modern France. As this communications network spread across France, the king acquired the nickname, “Universal Spider.”
1465: “Louis XI had been king of France for four years. The French aristocrats didn’t think King Louis XI acted like a king. He didn’t preside over a traditional court like his predecessors. He constantly rode around his kingdom in shabby clothes on horseback, sometimes hunting, sometimes working, sometimes both at once. But most importantly, the nobles didn’t like his diplomacy and intrigue. He was obviously trying to consolidate his authority by bringing together all the noble’s fiefs. They decided to band together to fight the king to hold on to their power. They named their confederation the “League of the Public Weal,” and gathered their armies together.” Susan Abernethy
The princes used the excuse of helping the people of France when they were really only fighting for their own interests.
1467: Charles the Bold had taken charge of the duchy of Burgundy three years earlier, just as permanent professional armies were starting to become an option in Europe. Burgundy only had a small army so Charles relied on mercenaries to bolster its numbers. He employed condottiere, the famed mercenary companies of the Italian Peninsula.
1469: Unification of the Christian kingdoms of Aragon, Navarre, and Castile began when Princess Isabel of Castile married Prince Fernando of Aragon. In 1480, they established the Holy Inquisition to enforce orthodox Christian belief and practice. In the very year of Columbus’ first voyage, the monarchs conquered the last Muslim kingdom of Granada and expelled all Jews who refused to convert to Christianity.
1473–1477: Cola de Montforte brought 400 English mounted archers, 1,600 horsemen and 300 infantry to serve Charles.
1474: The Treaty of Utrecht was signed after the Anglo-Hanseatic (Naval) War between England and the (German) Hanseatic League. Bankrupt after years of war and mismanagement, the war was against increasing English pressure on the trade of the Hanseatic cities of the southern coast of the Baltic sea.
Negotiated by Lübeck’s mayor Hinrich Castorp, the treaty restored the Hanseatic privileges in the Port of London. The Hanseatic League gained ownership of the London Steelyard premises, guaranteed access to the ports of Hull, Lynn, and Boston and a claim on customs dues to the sum of £10,000 per annum.
1475: Louis XI signed the Treaty of Picquigny with Edward IV of England to isolate Charles the Bold from his English allies. This treaty formally ended the Hundred Years’ War.
1477: “On Jan. 5, outside the city of Nancy, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy and the last remaining powerful foe of Louis, gambled what was reputedly the largest army in all of Europe, against the forces and of the king and his allies, under command of René II, duke of Lorraine. On that day, remembered as the “Battle of Nancy,” Charles the Bold met a Shakespearean death, and the unified nation-state of France was born.” Pierre Beaudry
Frederick III was concerned about Burgundy’s expansionist tendencies on the western border of his Holy Roman Empire. To forestall military conflict, he secured the marriage of Charles’ only daughter, Mary of Burgundy, to Maximilian, his only surviving son, after the Siege of Neuss.
On her father’s death, Mary inherited the large Burgundian domains in France and the Low Countries but the Duchy of Burgundy was also claimed by the French crown under Salic law, with Louis XI of France vigorously asserting his claim by means of military force.
Maximilian at once undertook the defence of his wife’s dominions.
Mary’s marriage to Maximilian saw “the Order of the Golden Fleece passed into the House of Habsburg. The House of Habsburg reached its zenith during Maximilian’s grandson’s reign. During Charles V’s reign, the Habsburgs were in control of Spain and its overseas empire, the Netherlands, parts of Italy, Austria, and Germany. Towards the end of his life, Charles gradually abdicated from his various thrones, and the domains of the Habsburgs were divided between a Spanish branch of the house, and an Austrian one. Since the former lands of Burgundy went to the Spanish Habsburgs, so too did the Order of the Golden Fleece.” Ancient Origins
1478–1479: Without support from the Empire and a treasury emptied by Charles the Bold’s campaigns (Mary had to pawn her jewels to obtain loans), Maximilian carried out a campaign against the French to reconquer Le Quesnoy, Conde and Antoing. On 7 August 1479, he defeated the French forces but had to abandon the siege of Thérouanne and disband his army. The battle was an interesting point in military history as the Burgundian pikemen were the precursors of the Landsknechte (Germanic mercenaries), while the French side derived the momentum for military reform from their loss.
1478–1834: The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition aka the Spanish Inquisition was established by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. The Catholic monarchs wanted to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms and to replace the Medieval Inquisition under Papal control.
Originally, the Inquisition was primarily to identify heretics who had converted from Judaism and Islam to Catholicism. Regulation of the faith of the newly converted Catholics was intensified after royal decrees issued in 1492 and 1502 ordered Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism or leave Castile.
(After a period of declining influence in the preceding century, the Inquisition was abolished in 1834, during Isabella II’s reign.)
1481: A third Claim of Right and second Trust was created by Sixtus IV, the Pope who created the Vatican archives. Called Aeterni Regis — Regis meaning Crown and Aeterni meaning eternal — this Third (Eternal) Crown removes your personal property rights.
“In the Incipit of this Bull, the Testament of the Holy See it says: ‘For a perpetual remembrance.’ This is the second testamentary deed, Trust and will the second crown of the people which makes people slaves, this is the Trust over the Commonwealth, so not an English ideology at all. The current British structure is exactly a Holy See Trust.” The Bridge
1482–1491: During the Granada War, soldiers of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain were divided into three classes: pikemen (modelled after the Swiss), swordsmen with shields and crossbowmen supplemented with the first portable firearms.
As shields disappeared and firearms replaced crossbows, Spain won victory after victory in Italy against powerful French armies, initially under the leadership of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba aka El Gran Capitán (The Great Captain), in cahoots with the Venetians.
The military organizational and tactical changes Córdoba made to the armies of Spanish monarchs are seen as the precursors of the tercios and their methods of warfare.
Initially, the tercio was an administrative unit under a general staff, commanding garrisons throughout Italy for battles on various distant fronts. This peculiar character was maintained when it mobilized to fight the Protestant rebels in Flanders.
Command of a tercio and its companies of soldiers was granted directly by the king.
(By the mid-17th century, tercios began to be raised by nobles at their own expense, patrons who appointed the captains and were effective owners of the units, as in other contemporaneous European armies.)
The conquest of Granada in 1492 and El Gran Capitán’s campaigns in the kingdom of Naples in 1495 also laid the foundations of Spanish military administration.
1483: On Louis XI’s passing, his son, Charles VIII became King of France at 13. Until he turned 21 in 1491, his elder sister Anne de Beaujeu was co-regent with her husband Peter II, Duke of Bourbon.
“On the death of Louis XI, the nobility rose up to regain the power they had lost under the reign of the “universal spider”. They assumed that this power was their right as a matter of history rather than as a matter of law. Thus began a pattern that was to be seen again in C16 France: a period of strong royal leadership which lead to a major decline in noble power, followed by the reign of a minor which stimulated an outbreak of noble disloyalty to reclaim this lost power. This was to culminate in the French Wars of Religion.
In the reign of Charles VIII, the nobles were helped by the Duchy of Brittany which was still an independent power, England and Spanish Netherlands. Under Louis both areas had feared the rise in French military might and both did what they could do in an effort to reduce this perceived threat.” History Learning Site
“As soon as Louis XI was dead, the Venetians invited his unworthy and inferior heir Charles VIII to conquer Milan. The French conquered Naples, Florence, and Milan, but their presence also drew in the forces of Spain. It was a time of rapidly shifting alliances. Before long, the main powers had all been antagonized by Venetian perfidy and geopolitics. For the Venetians had been filching territory on all sides, grabbing for every fly that flew by them.
What followed was the War of the League of Cambrai, the great world war that marked the opening of the modern era. If Venice had been destroyed in this war, the European oligarchy would have been deprived of its command center and is likely to have perished. Without Venice, we would have been spared the wars of religion, including the Thirty Years’ War; we would have been spared the British Empire and most of its wars, including the American Civil War and the two world wars of this century. The same goes for most of the depressions and economic crises of these years.
At the heart of the League of Cambrai was the joint commitment in 1508 by King Louis XII of France and Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, to divide the territory of Venice between them. The King of Spain joined in because he wanted to take Venetian possessions in southern Italy. A little later Pope Julius II della Rovere also joined the League. Julius II della Rovere was a professional soldier and an oligarch. He was called the papa terribile.” Webster Griffin Tarpley
1485–1488: During Anne’s co-regency, a coalition of feudal lords led an open revolt against the French monarchy. Principal lords involved were Louis II of Orléans, (the future Louis XII of France was the King’s cousin); Francis II of Brittany; René II, Duke of Lorraine; Alain d’Albret; Jean de Châlon, Prince of Orange; and Charles, Count of Angoulême.
Their supporters were the foreign enemies of the King of France: England, Spain, and Austria.
Essentially, they were “magnates, who had suffered under Louis XI’s callous oppressions. Concessions were made: many of Louis’ favourites were sacrificed; lands were restored to hostile nobles … When the Beaujeus ignored that assembly’s demand to control taxation and hold regular meetings, the “Mad War” broke out between, on the one side, the crown and, on the other, the Duc d’Orléans and Francis II of Brittany, which ended in a royal victory.” Britannica
As the Estates General had sided with Anne, the principal outcome was the absorption of Brittany into the French kingdom.
1485: With Anne’s support, Henry Tudor finally won the Wars of the Roses to become Henry VII of England. Half the lords of England’s 60 noble families had been killed.
“The War of the Roses had shown Henry that by and large the people of England were prone to obedience when government was seen as just and prone to violence when pushed to it. What Henry wanted to achieve was the right balance — fair to his people and harsh to those who challenged him.” Chris Trueman, History Learning Site
Having spent thirteen years in France as Louis XI was creating the first modern sovereign nation-state, the first Tudor king proceeded to develop his version of the nation-state:
“A number of laws enacted and enforced by Henry VII parallel those of Louis XI: For example, Henry imposed a heavy duty upon wool shipped to Europe, in order to prevent the raw material being carried out of the country, and to encourage the home manufacture of cloth. He enacted an early form of capital controls with a law that no money, nor gold or silver plate, could be carried out of England without being subject to a very heavy penalty. Also, of importance in respect to the question of justice for all, Henry VII issued a proclamation commanding justice for “all manner of men, as well the poor as the rich (which be to him all one in due ministration of Justice),” and if he have no remedy, then he who is grieved shall “come to the King’s highness, or to his Chancellor.”
Like the government of Louis XI, that of Henry was also influenced by the Brothers of the Common Life. Henry chose as his chancellor, Bishop John Morton, who had been one of the chief architects of the victory over Richard III. Morton remained in office until his death in 1500. Sir Thomas More, a friend of Erasmus of Rotter dam, who was educated by the Brothers of the Common Life, was a young associate of Morton’s. Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, had also sponsored a translation of the first three books of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis.” William F. Wertz, Jr.
Coming from years of exile, Henry VII had few loyal followers. He did not want a situation where anyone could become overly powerful so he centralized control/government around himself:
“He wanted to extend his rule through the use of three things: exploitation of Crown lands, more frequent use of the Royal Council and by increasing the power of Justices of the Peace. The more efficient use of Crown lands would give Henry a greater income which he could use to enhance his authority. His lands were also throughout his kingdom and if they were effectively run, this by itself would make the king the dominant authority in that region.” Chris Trueman, History Learning Site
“Specialised committees, mostly populated with lawyers, were set the task of ruling the kingdom, all personally supervised by the king …
Through a mixture of taxes, feudal dues, rents, and fines, Henry was able to double state revenues during his reign. The latter tactic, that is, imposing fines, proved particularly lucrative as the king charged misdemeanours ranging from bad behaviour at court to possessing too many armed retainers. One fiendish financial strategy was to issue a penal bond (recognisance) to anyone already caught guilty of a financial misdemeanour or fine. If a person failed to meet any of his existing financial obligations, then under this second signed declaration, the king could confiscate their property and ruin them. Many nobles were kept under the king’s thumb in this way with a financial guillotine perpetually hovering over them. The number of nobles also went down as the new position of Surveyor of the King’s Wards sought out money that was owed the king and confiscated lands to bolster Henry’s ever-growing estates.” World History
“Henry had far more control over the nobility than previous monarchs … (he) also used money as a way of maintaining loyalty …” Chris Trueman
“Justices of the Peace (JP’s) owed their offices to the king. By the reign of Henry VII, Justices of the Peace had superseded the local power of Sheriffs and were the chief local government officers. JP’s were responsible for the maintenance of public order in their area of jurisdiction. They were also responsible for executing legislation that had been introduced in London. JP’s were appointed from local land owners and they therefore had a vested interest in implementing legislation that ensured greater social cohesion at a local level … JP’s relied on knights and squires to enforce decisions that had been made by JP’s and once every three months all JP’s in a county met at Quarter Sessions. It was at Quarter Sessions that serious court cases were dealt with. This would include everything except any cases involving treason. The criminal cases that were considered too difficult for JP’s to deal with went to the Assize Courts. An Assize Court was held in each county every six months. These were controlled by judges under special commission from the Crown.
JP’s did not receive an income for their work as it was felt that part of the responsibility of being a land owner was to maintain law and order and social order. It was also believed that merely being a JP was honour enough.
Henry VII preferred to select his JP’s from the second tier of a county’s landowners … Henry wanted his JP’s to be responsible to him and not to the magnates in their counties … Probably the greatest hold Henry had over a JP was the simple fact that they served for a year. He would then be put up for reappointment — something the king did. Any JP who fell from grace would also fall from grace socially within his region as his failure to be reappointed would be seen as a sign of his incompetence. Therefore, all JP’s had a very good incentive to do as well as they could for the king and clearly Henry himself benefited from this. The king was also responsible for social advance and a successful and loyal JP could expect to advance up the social ladder if only by being awarded a title.” Chris Trueman
1485–1486: The Navigation Act was implemented to forbid English merchants from loading their goods onto foreign ships if English ships were available. An English merchant ship had a crew made up of at least 50% Englishmen.
(In 1489, a law was introduced that stated only English ships were allowed to be used to import goods and a foreign ship could only be used when an English ship was not available.)
1486: Maximilian I became King of the Romans.
(In 1508, he self-proclaimed himself as the elected Holy Roman Emperor (Pope Julius II later recognized this) at Trent. He was never crowned by the Pope as the Venetians had blocked his journey to Rome. This broke the long tradition of requiring a papal coronation for the adoption of the Imperial title.)
1486: On June 15th, Henry VII passed the Act of Resumption to reclaim all the Crown lands that had been lost in the Wars of the Roses. Although crown lands were the most important source of ordinary revenue, he didn’t immediately take the land as he used that to tame the noble families.
January 1487: Henry renewed a treaty with Maximilian I, King of the Romans and heir to the Holy Roman Empire.
1487: Henry decided to restore the Chamber to its former position “as the most important institution of financial administration.” (Caroline Rogers). At the end of the century, revenue from royal estates was in excess of £100,000 a year … The Treasurer of the Chamber became the most important financial figure for Henry. Two men held this post under Henry VII — Sir Thomas Lovell (1485 to 1492) and Sir John Heron (1492 to 1509) … Henry personally signed each page of accounts at the bottom — presumably to make it clear to both Lovell and Heron that he had personally gone through the accounts to check them. Both men owed their elevated position to Henry, so it was very unlikely that they would do anything to betray his trust. Regardless of this, Henry still felt the need to scrutinise his accounts.” Chris Trueman
1489: To forge an Anglo-Spanish alliance against France, England and Spain agreed in the March 27th Treaty of Medina del Campo that Henry’s eldest son, Prince Arthur, would marry Catherine of Aragon when both were of marriageable age. Catherine’s dowry would be 200,000 crowns.
(A follow-up treaty on March 8th 1493 agreed that Catherine would come to England in 1498 when she was twelve. On October 1st 1496, a new treaty was drawn up to be followed by yet another treaty on 18th July 1497 that stated that Catherine would come to England in 1500 when Arthur was fourteen and her dowry would be paid in two instalments. In November 1501, Ferdinand and Isabella paid the first instalment of Catherine’s dowry 100,000 crowns but Prince Arthur died the following year.
Catherine’s subsequent marriage to Arthur’s younger brother, King Henry VIII, eventually led to the separation of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church.)
1490: The Vosge Gymnasium was founded — an ecclesiastic school directly under the control of Rome staffed by the networks from the Deventer school of the Brotherhood of the Common Life, students of the Alsacian humanist current of Geyser de Kaysersberg, friends of the mathematician Lefevre d’Etaples, and collaborators of Leonardo da Vinci and Pico della Mirandola, in Italy.
“Later, this would be followed by the school of the Oratorians, the Royal Academy of Sciences, the Ecole Polytechnique of Gaspard Monge and Lazare Carnot, and the Ecole des Arts et Métiers [Arts and Trades]. Finally, this outlook would ultimately be exported to Germany’s Göttingen University, and into the United States’ West Point Military Academy. In each and every case, the key to developing scientific method would be modeled on Nicolaus of Cusa’s teaching at the Council of Florence, and would be reflected in the rigorous approach of resolving paradoxes, especially the paradox of the One and the Many, by means of constructive projective geometry.” Pierre Beaudry
Aside from being a “Latin school” in the tradition of “modern devotion,” the Vosge Gymnasium ran an important printing house for the dissemination of scientific works in geography, music and geometry.
1491: On December 21st, Henry VII agreed to a peace treaty with James IV of Scotland. He wanted the Truce of Coldstream to last for five years but James would only agree to one year.
Charles VIII married Anne of Brittany to become administrator of Brittany. He established a personal union that enabled France to avoid total encirclement by Habsburg territories. To secure his rights to the Neapolitan throne René of Anjou had left his father, Charles made a series of concessions to neighbouring monarchs and conquered the Italian peninsula without much opposition.
1492: Negotiated by Richard Foxe, the Peace of Étaples was signed on 3 November between Charles VIII of France and Henry VII of England. Charles agreed to stop supporting any pretenders to the English throne in return for Henry VII accepting French rights to the Duchy of Brittany.
“Henry also received a total of 745,000 crowns — the cost of the venture — to be paid at 50,000 crowns a year. This amounted to about 5% of Henry’s total annual income.” Chris Trueman
The agreement ended an English invasion of France. The agreement was ratified in December.
(In July 1498, Louis XII renewed the treaty prior to his invading Italy in 1499. In 1510, the councillors of Henry VIII renewed the treaty for a continuation of peace.)
Henry also negotiated an extension of the peace with Scotland for a further two years.
The last Muslim ruler was thrown out of Spain in the year that Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. As Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella finished taking back all of Spain from the Muslims, the era of Spain as a global power began.
Columbus had presented his plan to officials in Portugal and England, but it was not until 1492 that he found a sympathetic audience in Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. The Spanish monarchs promised Columbus that he could keep 10 percent of whatever riches he found, along with a noble title and the governorship of any lands he should encounter.
On August 3, Columbus and his crew set sail from Spain in three ships: the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. On October 12, the ships made landfall — not in the East Indies, as Columbus assumed, but on one of the Bahamian islands, likely San Salvador.
1492: “As the power and wealth of the papacy grew, cardinals lusted after the papal tiara with ever greater fervour, and elections rapidly became dominated by rampant simony. None, however, was worse than the conclave of 1492. The ferociously ambitious and worldly Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia would stop at nothing in his quest to become the next pope, and was reputed to have offered four mule-loads of silver and benefices worth over 10,000 ducats a year to Ascanio Sforza alone. Rome was said to have been awash with Borgia money while the election was going on. But, from Borgia’s perspective, it was all worth it: he was duly chosen as Pope Alexander VI.” History Today
1493: Following a dispute between Portugal and Spain over the discovery of non-Christian lands in the Americas, Pope Alexander VI issued Inter Caetera which drew a north-south line 100 leagues West of the Cape Verde Islands and gave the Spanish Crown exclusive rights to travel and trade west of that line, and to “bring under your sway the said mainland and islands with their residents and inhabitants and to bring them to the Catholic faith.”
The concept of the consignment of exclusive spheres of influence to certain nation-states was also extended to the Americas.
1494: Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci’s mathematics teacher, published his 615-page mathematical compendium, Summa de Arithmetica Geometria Proportioni et Proportionalità, where his 27-page treatise on the double-entry system set in motion what would come to be known as the Renaissance.
(529 years later, the forms have changed as data is now digital and the ledger is in the cloud but globally, the same double-entry system remains at the heart of financial management.)
1494: The Medici were exiled from Florence on November 9th until 1512, after which the “senior” branch of the family — those descended from Cosimo the Elder — were able to rule until Alessandro de’ Medici, first Duke of Florence, was assassinated in 1537. The power then passed to their “junior” branch — those descended from Lorenzo the Elder, the youngest son of Giovanni di Bicci, starting with his great-great-grandson Cosimo I “the Great.”
1494: Portugal and Spain signed the Treaty of Tordesillas so any new discovery of lands east of Cape Verde island would be under Portuguese influence and in the west, under Spanish, then the Crown of Castile. Colonial Spain looted the Americas and their gold, with no presence in the Eastern hemisphere.
(The was eventually endorsed by Pope Julius II in the 1506 bull Ea quae pro bono pacis.)
1494–1498: King Ferdinand I of Naples refused to pay feudal dues to the papacy so Pope Innocent VIII excommunicated and deposed him by a bull of 11 September 1489. Innocent then offered the Kingdom of Naples to Charles VIII of France as his grandfather, Charles VII had married Marie of Anjou of the Angevin dynasty, the ruling family of Naples until 1442. Innocent later settled his quarrel with Ferdinand and revoked the bans before dying in 1492, but the offer to Charles remained an apple of discord in Italian politics.
After Ferdinand died on 25 January 1494, his son Alfonso II (who also laid claim to Milan) succeeded him.
A third claimant to the Neapolitan throne was René II, Duke of Lorraine, the only surviving child of René of Anjou (died 1480), the last effective Angevin King of Naples until 1442. The Neapolitans had already offered the crown of Naples to René II in 1488 but Charles VIII argued that he had a closer connection to the crown through his grandmother Marie of Anjou.
1494 to 1559: Responding to an appeal for assistance from Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494 to protect the Duchy of Milan — one of the most prosperous regions of Europe then — from the threats of the Republic of Venice. Louis, the current Duke of Orleans and future King Louis XII, joined Charles VIII on this campaign.
Aka the First Italian War, or Charles VIII’s Italian War, it was the opening phase of the Italian Wars, primarily between the Habsburgs and France, over various territories and their respective inheritance, most notably: Milan, Naples and Sicily. This would continue on and off for more than 60 years, and effectively ended imperial rule in Italy.
Charles died in 1498 after accidentally striking his head on the lintel of a door. He was succeeded by his second cousin once removed and brother-in-law at the time, Louis XII from the House of Valois.
Preparing to invade Italy to enforce his claim on the Neapolitan kingship, Pope Alexander VI formed the League of Venice with the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I, and an alliance of Italian powers (Aragon’s Ferdinand II, Venice, and Milan), to protect Italy. The allies forced the French out of Italy in 1496.
1495: The Council Learned in the Law — the brainchild of Sir Reginald Bray, was introduced to defend Henry VII’s position as a feudal landlord. It dealt with the king’s fiscal matters and enforced payments of debts. It proved to be much more efficient than the Exchequer but became highly controversial and was abolished after Henry’s death in 1509.
Its most prominent councilors, Edmund Dudley and Sir Richard Empson were imprisoned. Even though evidence was scarce, they were convicted of treason, attainted and executed in 1510. In the Tower, Dudley confessed to having issued harsher penalties than lawful in several cases.
1496: England belatedly joined the Holy League formed to force France out of northern Italy. Henry’s condition was that England did not have to go to war with France as he had also signed a commercial treaty with France. The League of Venice had initially united the Papal States, Venice, Naples, Spain, Milan, the Holy Roman Empire, Florence and Mantua against France.
1496: The Intercursus Magnus was a February 24th trade treaty between England and the Netherlands that included customs duties. Negotiated by Richard Foxe, neither country would aid the other’s rebels. Under this clause, if Margaret of Burgundy continued to aid Henry’s enemies (namely Perkin Warbeck), Philip of Burgundy would take action.
1496: Through the marriage of his son Philip the Handsome to eventual queen Joanna of Castile, Maximilian helped to establish the Habsburg dynasty in Spain, which allowed his grandson Charles to hold the thrones of both Castile and Aragon. Historian Thomas A. Brady Jr. describes him as “the first Holy Roman Emperor in 250 years who ruled as well as reigned” and also, the “ablest royal warlord of his generation.”
1497: In May, England and France agreed on a commercial treaty.
On July 7th, England and Netherlands agreed to terms for a partial reinstatement of trade between the two countries. A conference was planned for April 1498 in Bruges but it accomplished little.
1497: Pedro de Ayala, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain’s diplomat to England and Scotland, brokered the September Treaty of Ayton but hostilities continued intermittently throughout the 16th century.
“It was binding not only on the kings who signed it, but also on their successors in perpetuity.
The agreement actually consisted of three parts. One was a practical, administrative measure for the extradition of robbers and murderers on the Anglo-Scottish border, an obvious effort to contain the raids of the bothersome Border Reivers. The second was a treaty of perpetual peace, the first permanent peace treaty between England and Scotland since 1328. The terms provided England would not make war on Scotland and Scotland would not attack England. The third treaty was the solemnization of the agreement with a marriage between James and Henry VII’s eldest daughter, Margaret. According to historian Polydore Virgil, it was James who brought up the possibility of marrying Margaret.” Susan Abernethy
(The Marriage Alliance treaty for Princess Margaret to James IV of Scotland was concluded in July 1499.
Peace between the two countries was to last for the lifetime of each king and their legitimate heirs and successors. Allies of both countries could be included as per the Treaty of Perpetual Peace in 1502.
James IV married Margaret in August 1503 but ten years later, James declared war on England to support the French who were attacked by the English. He was fulfilling Scotland’s obligations to France under an older mutual defence treaty, the Auld Alliance.
Excommunicated for breaking the treaty with England, James was killed on 9 September 1513 at the Battle of Flodden in Northumberland.
In 1603, at the Union of the Crowns, King James VI of Scotland — the great-grandson of James Stewart and Margaret Tudor — succeeded to the English throne.)
1498: The Westminster Conference was held between England and the German states to discuss the Treaty of Utrecht signed in 1474 to give the merchants of Venice and the Hansa privileges in England. Henry VII urged the Germans to accept his interpretation of the treaty.
1498/9: In 1499 the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama became the first European to sail directly from Europe to India. In the course of his voyage, he rounded the Cape of Good Hope (today’s South Africa).
Gama’s original voyage brought back cargo sixty times the cost of the expedition. The Portuguese controlled these routes until the other seafaring nations of Spain, France, England and the Netherlands competed with them for bases in Asia to control the lucrative spice trade. Ultimately the English and the Dutch would be the most successful in controlling trade with the East (essentially Asia and the Indian Subcontinent).
For the earlier two articles in this mini-series: Part I ; Part II
I hope chronologically listing long ago events helps to emerge some patterns for you, and you will mull over whether treaties/papal bulls/trusts/etc. that happened before we were even born still shape our lives. No one person knows everything so any mistakes, please let me know at crowdpowers@gmail.com
References
The Inns of Court and Chancery
A history of the Inns of Court and Chancery
Tales of Inns and Temples: In the Footsteps of the Knights Templar
The Papacy and the Italian States
War and Religion: Europe and the Mediterranean from the First through the Twenty-First Centuries
A Not So Distant Mirror The Lessons of the Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age
Condottiere 1300–1500: Infamous Medieval Mercenaries
Acquiring Empire by Law: From Roman Doctrine to Early Modern European Practice
The Italian Wars: Volume 1 — The Expedition of Charles VIII into Italy and the Battle of Fornovo
Mercenaries and Their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy
The Salic Law and the Valois succession to the French crown
Venice’s War Against Western Civilization
The Modern Anglo-Dutch Empire: Its Origins, Evolution, and Anti-Human Outlook
Henry VII and the Creation Of Shakespeare’s England
Henry VII, France and the Holy League of Venice: The Diplomacy of Balance
Commentaries on the Laws of England. Vol. I.
