The Late Middle Ages

The period of which this volume treats differs fundamentally both from that which precedes and from that which follows it. In each of those periods we are able to fix our attention upon a certain well-defined set of institutions which completely control its activities. In the former, the strictly mediæval, we see Europe wholly under the sway of two vast ideas, feudalism and the Roman church system. In the latter, the purely modern period, Europe has almost wholly lost those ideas and has come out into the familiar political structure of a family of independent national states and into the freer air of religious toleration, if not yet of religious liberty. In the earlier transition – that from Rome to the Middle Ages – the shock of change is the greater because there is a change also in the race which is to be the bearer of the world’s civilization. That whole transition may be summed up dramatically in the contrast of Roman and Teuton. Not only do institutions disappear, but the very race which created them disappears also as a historical unit. A new Europe is brought into the ken of history by a new race actually, in physical fact, emerging out of the darkness and taking its place in the great procession of historic peoples. In the present transition there is no such dramatic moment. The nations which make the modern world are the same that had brought mediæval culture to its height. They have simply been going through a process of education and are now just beginning to see the meaning of it. The new succeeds the old through the silent working of development. Not that this period is without its great conflicts. There is enough of the dramatic in the sharp contrast of ideas and in the clashing of ancient rights with newly asserted claims to make every chapter of this transition alive with vivid interest.