HIST-338 Lecture Notes - Lecture 33: Scholasticism, Mendicant Orders, Social Revolution
24 Nov 2020
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Document Summary
The new military tactics significantly hastened the demise of feudalism. From the eleventh century onward, what had justified a permanent, privileged aristocracy who controlled the lives of the peasantry that served it was the fact that the nobles provided the basic services that upheld social order: They defended the realm with their own lives; they oversaw the prosperous work of the rural economy, which was the backbone of economic life; they provided the essential government services that maintained order. For the cost of maintaining a single mounted knight, a ruler could instead arm several hundred infantrymen, any one of whom could, with a good shot, eliminate the knight in a moment. The economy, civil administration, and military, in other words, had been revolutionized. Although hereditary aristocrats retained their influence for centuries to come, their place in western europe had changed significantly by the end of the fourteenth century. Several important new developments appeared in western religious life at this time.
