1340-е годы: Десятилетие потрясений и перемен

Decade

The 1340s was a decade that began on 1 January 1340 and ended on 31 December 1349. It was in the midst of a period in human history often referred to as the Late Middle Ages in the Old World and the pre Columbian era in the New World. In Asia, the Mongol Empire and its breakaway states were in a state of gradual decline. The Ilkhanate had already fragmented into several political territories and factions struggling to place their puppet leaders over the shell of an old state; the Chagatai Khanate was undermined by religious unrest and fell to rebellion. The Black Plague swept through the Kipchak Khanate in 1346, and also affected the Genoese colonies under Mongol siege, thence spreading into Europe. The Yuan dynasty in China was struck by a series of disasters, including frequent flooding, widespread banditry, fires in urban areas, declining grain harvest, increased civil unrest and local rebellion – the seeds of resistance that would lead to its downfall. Southeast Asia remained free from Mongol power; two major regional powers, the Tran dynasty and Majapahit thrived in the 1340s, after each defeated Mongol attacks in the 1280s and 1290s respectively. In Europe, the decade continued the period of gradual economic decline, often mistitled the "depression" of the 1340s. This followed the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the start of the Little Ice Age in the 14th century, and affected most of Western Europe, with the exception of a few Italian city states. The state increasingly interfered in the socio economic status of its commoners in the decade. Europe entered a period which saw almost continuous war for the next century. The Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) between France and England continued, and Edward III of England led an invasion resulting in notable victories at the Battles of Sluys and Crécy in 1340 and 1346 respectively. The medieval crusading spirit continued in Spain, with a Castilian victory at the Battle of Río Salado and the recommencement of the Reconquista in 1340; and in the Baltic, with King Magnus II of Sweden's Northern Crusades against Novgorod in 1347–1348. In the east, the Byzantine Empire, then under the Palaiologoi, saw the disastrous Byzantine civil war of 1341–1347. Meanwhile, a crisis of confidence in the Florentine banks caused many of them to collapse between 1341 and 1346. The Black Plague which struck Europe in 1348 wiped out a full third of the population by the end of the decade. In Africa, the two great empires were the Christian Ethiopian Empire in the east and the Muslim Mali Empire in the west. Amda Seyon I, who had brought Ethiopia to its height, was succeeded in 1344 by Newaya Krestos, who continued to foster trade in East Africa. Mansa Suleyman assumed office in the Mali Empire in 1341, and similarly took steep measures to reform Mali's finances. Songhai, which had emerged in this decade, was conquered by Mali for the time being. In the Americas, cities of the Mississippian culture such as Cahokia, Kincaid and Moundville went into an accelerated state of decline in this decade. Factors such as depletion of resources, climatic change, war, disease, social unrest and declining political and economic power have been suggested, although the sites were not fully abandoned until the 15th century. Central America saw the decayed Maya civilization ruled from their capital Mayapan in the Yucatán Peninsula, while the Mexicas from their capital city of Tenochtitlan were on the rise.

In China, the Mongol Yuan dynasty was in a gradual state of decline, due to complex and longstanding problems such as the "endemic tensions among its ruling elites". Toghon Temür had been installed as emperor at age thirteen in 1333, and was to reign as the last Yuan emperor until 1368. In Bayan's overthrow by the younger generation, the movement to restore the status quo from reign of Kublai Khan effectively died. Bayan's purges were called off; his supporters dismissed; positions he had closed to the Chinese were reopened; the meritocratic system of examinations for official service was restored. By this time, Temür had just begun to participate in the formal functions of state, and assisted in the "anti Bayan coup": he issued a posthumous denunciation of his uncle Tugh Temür; he exiled the grand empress dowager Budashiri and his cousin El Tegüs; and entrusted the upbringing of his infant son Ayushiridara to Toghto's household. Toghto's first term exhibited a fresh new spirit which took a predominantly centralist approach to political solutions. Toghto's replacement as chancellor was Berke Bukha, an effective provincial administrator who took the opposite, decentralised approach to Toghto. Bukha had learned firsthand from the great Hangzhou fire of 1341 that central regulations had to be violated to provide immediate and effective relief. From 1348 on, they continued only when permitted by a major piratical operation led by Fang Kuo chen and his brothers, which the authorities were unable to suppress. Additionally, the Yellow River was repeatedly swelled by long rains, breaching its dykes and flooding the surrounding areas. He was received in an audience with Toghon Temür, to whom he presented some large European horses — their bulk, according to JJ Saunders, "surprised Chinese and Mongols alike, accustomed as they were to the small, wiry animals of the steppes".

The poet Zhang Xian wrote the Iron Cannon Affair in 1341, detailing the destructive use of gunpowder and the cannon.

In Rome, the general despair brought on by the Plague and the absence of the Pope have been cited as possible causes for the rise of the Roman notary Cola di Rienzo: in 1347, he assumed the title of censor and claimed to restore the Roman Republic. He utilised popular rhetoric, and invited the men of Trastevere to sack the palaces of the fleeing Roman nobility. Castile and León surrounded Granada by land, and Alfonso advanced the Christian Reconquista. By 1343, Aragon had acquired the Balearic Islands, and in 1344 Peter deposed James III of Majorca to become King of Majorca himself. Navarre was ruled by Philip III until 1343, his Capetian wife Joanna II until 1349, and finally Charles II the Bad ruled into the late 14th century. The Kingdom of Portugal was meanwhile ruled by Afonso IV, from 1325 until his death in 1357. In 1341, Saluzzo sacked by Manfred V of Saluzzo. In 1342, Louis "the Child" became King of Sicily and Duke of Athens. An earthquake and tsunami of 1343 devastated the Maritime Republic of Amalfi.

To finance the continuing wars of the 1340s, Edward III of England granted to a small group of merchants a monopoly on the export of wool. In return, they agreed to collect the "poundage", or wool tax, on his behalf. Therefore, a monopoly on salt, an essential commodity, was established in 1341; monopolies in salt had already been established in Kingdom of Castile and Venice in the 1330s. The French salt tax or gabelle itself never amounted to more than 2%. The Italian city states were booming at the start of the decade. In 1340, Francesco Balducci Pegolotti wrote his Practica della mercatura. Meanwhile, rulers such as the Neapolitan princes had begun withdrawing massive funds from Florentine banks. and between 1341 and 1346, many of the most important of the Florentine banks collapsed. Strikes or grèves occurred in Ghent in 1337–1345 and in Florence in 1346. In 1349–1350, the fullers and weavers of Ghent and Liège massacred each other. The failures in the food supply in the regions of Provence and Lyon, in 1340 and 1348 respectively, affected contemporaries particularly harshly. This was not just because these generations were unused to them, but because they were accompanied by war and followed by epidemic in this decade. It was actually three related diseases: bubonic plague and septicaemic plague, carried by fleas hosted by the black rat, and pneumonic plague, the especially fast and lethal airborne variant. Hungary, Rouergue in France, and by January 1348 it was in Genoa. According to the French monk Guillaume de Nangis:

blockquote|Victims were only ill for two or three days and died suddenly, their bodies almost sound They had swellings in the armpits and groin, and the appearance of these swellings was an unmistakable sign of death Soon, in many places, of every twenty inhabitants only two remained alive. The mortality was so great at the hospital of Paris that for a long time more than 500 bodies were carried off on wagons each day, to be buried at the cemetery of the Holy Innocents. when it was passed on into Germany and Austria, and in winter it was in Scotland, Scandinavia and Spain. Norman Davies generalises that "No pope, no kings were stricken." The Italian humanist Giovanni Boccaccio records a loss of 100,000 in Florence, exceeding the total population of the city. Heaviest hit were the clergy, who were brought into direct contact with plague victims. Guillaume de Nangis records that "some monks and friars, being braver, administered the sacraments", and that the sisters at the hospital of Paris, "fearless of death, carried out their task to the end with the most perfect gentleness and humility. These sisters were all wiped out by death " Villages were deserted, herds were untended, wool and grain markets were crippled and land values plummeted. The plague would strike periodically in subsequent decades. Wages rose, and the peasantry benefited from a more open, fluid society. Mecheln Cathedral, then a collegiate church, was started with the choir in 1342. In 1344, Prague was made an archbishopric, and the foundation stone was laid on the new St. Vitus Cathedral. Cathedrals completed in this decade, excluding later alterations, include Notre Dame de Paris and the Cathedral of the Theotokos, Vilnius, completed around 1345 and 1346 respectively. In Ely Cathedral, the last part of the repairs to the structure was finished with the richly decorated Lady Chapel in 1345. In Venice, the Venetian Gothic Palazzo Ducale, or Doge's Palace, was erected on top of older buildings in 1340. In Switzerland, the walls of the Old City of Berne were extended up to the Christoffelturm, from 1344 to 1346. Berne's Käfigturm was erected from 1256 to 1344 as the second western city gate. In Siena, the Torre della Mangia of the Palazzo Pubblico was completed in 1348. That same year, land in the English town of Charing held by the Archbishop of Canterbury was redeveloped as an episcopal palace. The Scuola della Carità, one of the six Scuole Grandi of Venice, was built in 1343. Two medieval universities were established in the 1340s: the University of Pisa (1343) and the University of Prague (1347). The University of Valladolid was also granted a licentia ubique docendi by Pope Clement VI in 1347, during the reign of Alfonso XI. Queen's College, Oxford, was founded by the chaplain Robert de Eglesfield in 1341, and Queen Philippa secured the lands of a small hospital in Southampton for the college in 1343. Meanwhile, Bablake School was founded in Coventry in 1344 by the Queen Mother, Isabella of France, while Pembroke College, Cambridge, was completed in 1347.

It was around this decade that medieval cannon began to be used more widely in Europe, appearing in small numbers in several European states by the 1340s. "Thunder jar" weaponry utilizing gunpowder and other firearm technology spread to Spain in 1342 and to the city of Aachen in Northern Germany in 1346. "Ribaldis" were first mentioned in the English Privy Wardrobe accounts between 1345 and 1346, during preparations for the campaign in France. Thirteen days later, the cardinals elected Benedictine cardinal and theologian Pierre Roger de Beaufort as Pope Clement VI. During this time, he wrote exclusively on political matters, as an advocate of secular absolutism against papal authority, for which he had previously been excommunicated. Among the followers of Ockhamism — condensed as the omnipotence of God and Occam's Razor — were John of Mirecourt (fl. c. 1345) and Nicholas of Autrecourt (fl. c. 1347), both of whom taught at the University of Paris. The trial, under Pope Benedict XII and his successor Clement VI, lasted until his conviction in 1346.

In Egypt, the Mameluk sultans were constantly changing. In 1347, the Blue Mosque was completed in Cairo. In the Horn of Africa, the 1340s were part of the century and a half (1314–1468) that comprised "the crowning era of medieval Ethiopia", which began with the reign of Amda Seyon I. The crusading spirit of Amda's conquests in the previous decades had established an effective Ethiopian hegemony over his divided Muslim neighbours, but the chief concern of his conquests had been above all to maintain trade for both Muslims and Christians. On Amda's death in 1344, the size of his Christian Empire was double what it had been in 1314. Trade flourished in ivory and other animal products from the western and southwestern border regions, while food products were exported from the highlands to the eastern lowlands and coastal ports. He was succeeded as emperor by his eldest son Newaya Krestos, who followed his father's policies toward the Mulisms in the east, most of whom continued to be tributaries of Ethiopia. In the Mali Empire of West Africa, Mansa Souleyman, who had assumed office in 1341, took steep measures to put Mali back into financial shape, developing a reputation for miserliness. Mansa Souleyman's generals successfully fought off the military incursions, and the senior wife behind the plot was imprisoned. Mali was at this time the dominant empire of West Africa, having conquered Songhai Empire. The Songhai Empire would not regain independence for another three decades.

Very little is known of the Americas in this period, save what can be determined from archaeology. In North America, the Mississippian culture was in a continued state of decline. The city of Cahokia had experienced gradual decline since the 1200s, possibly due to contributory factors such as depletion of resources, climatic change, war, disease, social unrest and declining political and economic power. The final abandonment of the city may have taken place some time between this decade and 1400. Radiocarbon dating of wash material from Mound 55 give a date of around 1350, which can be taken as the time the mound was last used. Other Mississippian sites which went into decline after this decade, from about 1350 on, include the Kincaid Mounds and the Moundville site. In the case of the latter, the decline was marked by a loss of the appearance of a town and a decrease in the importation of goods. Although the site retained its ceremonial and political functions, some of the mounds were abandoned while others lost their religious importance altogether. In Central America, the Mayans, who centuries earlier had suffered a serious decline, were ruled from a capital in the Yucatan Peninsula called Mayapan. Other pre Columbian civilisations, however, were on the rise. The precursors to the Aztecs, the Mexicas, had recently founded their capital city of Tenochtitlan. They also had occasional skirmishes with the nearby Mixtec civilization.