French and Italian Music in the Fourteenth Century

French and Italian Music in the Fourteenth Century

After the comparative stability of the thirteenth century, the fourteenth century experienced terror and turmoil. The Hundred Years’ War (1337– 1453) between France and England disrupted agriculture, manufacturing, and trade, and prolonged an economic decline initially caused by bad weather, famine, and floods. From 1348 to 1350, the Great Plague (also known as the Black Death) marched across Europe, wiping out a third of the population; almost everyone who became infected died in agony within days, while others fled the cities and towns to escape illness. Poverty, war, taxes, and political grievances combined to spark peasant and urban rebellions in France, England, Flanders (modern-day Belgium), Germany, Italy, and Spain.

The Church was also in crisis. In the thirteenth century, Europeans viewed the Church as the supreme authority not only in matters of faith, but also in intellectual and political affairs; now its authority, and especially the supremacy of the pope, was widely questioned. Early in the century, King Philip IV (“the Fair”) of France had engineered the election of a French pope, who never went to Rome because of the hostility there to foreigners. Instead, from 1309 until 1378, the popes resided in Avignon, in southeastern France, under the virtual control of the French king. The papacy in Avignon was more like a princely court than a religious community, and it is not surprising that the surviving music from this period is almost entirely secular. The political situation became even more complicated when Italian factions elected their own pope and between 1378 and 1417, there were two—and sometimes three—rival claimants to the papal throne. This state of affairs, compounded by the often corrupt life of the clergy, drew sharp criticism, expressed in polemical writings, in motet texts of the time, and in the rise of popular heretical movements. When the papacy finally moved back to Rome, it...