For the period of the Middle Ages, Europe went through a great ruin in the duration of the 5th and 15th century. Europe faced great blows from both sides of spectrum. For instance, one of the greatest fatal blows was the Hundred Years War. The war not only caused famine, and starvation all around Europe, but also included around 20 million recorded deaths. About one third of the population was wiped out. Countless towns in Europe had a loss of more than 40% of their population. In fact Paris lost half of its residents and Venice, Hamburg and Bremen are projected to have lost at least 60% of their populations.
A popular belief in that time period was that the devastation was a punishment from God. With little hope, people desperately turned to the church for help. However, since the church could not squander up the explanations the dying population needed, the influence of the Catholic Church quickly deteriorated. The influence and reputations quickly began to fade as in desperate times the church only added to the confusion of the time.
Overall, the church was not able to live up to what it had promised over hundreds of years of teachings. The church was not able to save all the helpless dying souls with prayer and rituals, something the church relied heavily upon in earlier times. Meanwhile the church subsequently provided no explanations nor a cure for the plague, people started to seek answers elsewhere. The questioning of long practiced ideas and traditions was the rooting of a reformation in the process. Since, in that time the church was obviously not living up to the promises given, the people revolted and turned away.
The questioning of foundations based on the church quickly sprang into a growing movement. This movem...
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Faith in religion had fallen because the prayers of the people were not answered. The people even thought that it was god whom had unleashed this deadly disease. One piece of evidence that I used stated,” Some felt that the wrath of God was descending upon man, and so fought the plague with player (Document 6).” Another piece of evidence stated,” Faith in religion decreased after the plague, both because of the death of so many of the clergy and because of the failure of prayer to prevent sickness and death (Document 6).”
The living lost all sense of morality and justice, and a new attitude toward the church emerged. Medieval people could find no Divine reason for the four-year nightmare, and dissatisfaction with the church gave impetus to reform movements that eventually broke apart the unity of the Catholic Church.
The destruction and devastation caused by the 'Black Death' of the Middle Ages was a phenomenon left to wonder at in text books of historical Europe. An unstoppable plague swept the continent taking as much as eighty percent of the European population along with it (Forsyth).
Hartt, Frederick, and David G. Wilkins. History of Italian Renaissance art. 6th ed. of the book. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2006.
One of the groups that suffered the most was the Christian Church. It lasts prestige, spiritual authority, and leadership over the people. The church promised cures, treatment, and an explanation for the plague. They said it was God's will, but the reason for this awful punishment was unknown. People wanted answers, but the priests and bishops didn't have anything to say. The people abandoned their Christian duties and fled. People prayed to God and begged for forgiveness. After the plague ended, angry and frustrated villagers started to revolt against the church, this caused the churches to be abandoned.
Brucker, Gene A. & Co. Renaissance Florence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Mandelbaum, Allen. A.
What happens when people start to break away from the entity that bound an entire civilization together for over a thousand years? How does one go from unparalleled devotion to God to the exploration of what man could do? From absolute acceptance to intense scrutiny? Sheeple to independent thinkers? Like all revolutions preceding it, the Protestant Reformation did not happen overnight. Catholics had begun to lose faith in the once infallible Church ever since the Great Schism, when there were two popes, each declaring that the other was the antichrist. Two things in particular can be identified as the final catalyst: a new philosophy and simple disgust. The expanding influence of humanism and the corruption of the Catholic Church led to the Protestant Reformation, which in turn launched the Catholic Reformation and religious warfare.
The Renaissance can be considered an artistic period between the end of the Middle Age and the start of the Modern Age. The cultural movement touched every part of Europe but its origin and development are in Florence. This period is a synonym, a symbol of “change” in all the aspect of the humankind: it is the celebration of
The Protestant Reformation was a period of time (1500-1700) where there became a change in Western Christendom. This reformation was caused by the resentment from the people because the Catholic Church abusing their powers for political and economic advances. In this time the church was selling pardons for sin and indulgences to forgive sins, decrease days spent in purgatory and save the dead from damnation. The reformation was when people became more aware with the back hand dealings with the church and men like Martin Luther and John Calvin created their own churches to what they believed was not corrupt unlike the church. Unfortunately there many consequences as far at the Roman Catholic church attempting to bring people back to the church,
The Reformation occurred all over Western Europe. It was mostly set in Germany where various parts of corruption in the Church happened. Martin Luther started the process of the Reformation, he was German so he understood how the Catholic Church took advantage and didn't think this was fair. The Catholic Reformation took place between 1450-1650 which was the biggest revolution in Germany, although the understanding of Luther's actions weren't taken notice of until he put the 95 Theses on the Church's door. Luther felt that Bishops and Priests didn't understand the bible correctly. Luther wanted the Reformation to help fix this by helping the uneducated and powerless. Some of the movement of this was
The Black Plague, perhaps one of the worst epidemics in history, swept its evil across Europe in the middle of the 14th century, killing an estimated 20 million people. This major population shift, along with other disasters occurring at the time, such as famine and an already existing economic recession, plunged Europe into a dark period of complete turmoil. Anarchy, psychological breakdowns, and the dissipation of church power were some of the results. As time passed, however, society managed to find new ground and began its long path of recovery. The plague, as catastrophic as it was to medieval Europe, had just as many positive effects that came with this recovery as it did negative effects prior. An end to feudalism, increased wages and innovation, the idea of separation of church and state, and an attention to hygiene and medicine are only some of the positive things that came after the plague. It could also be argued that the plague had a significant impact on the start of the Renaissance.
The contemporary Church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the Church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the Church's silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are.”
The 14th century is ranked as one of the most distressing epochs in the history of Western culture. With the transformation of the Holy Roman Empire into a greatly destabilized elective monarchy, the transfer in political power from Germany to France and the escalation of England's power comes the end of the High Middle Ages in which Europe sank into a time of despair. Many events were responsible for this decline and loss of hope. Among them, three deserve special attention: the Great Schism, the Hundred Years War, and the Black Plague.
To make matters worse, over the course of just six years, seventy-five million people have died. There were about fifteen million in Southwest Asia. Even more about thirty-five million dead in China. Finally, there were about twenty-five million dead in Western Europe. The Middle Ages became so depopulated that the economy changed. In the economy laborers demanded more pay, meanwhile changing their work status. All over was widespread poverty because of the merchants raising their prices heavily.
The Reformation was a decisive period in the history not only for the Catholic Church, but also for the entire world. The causes of this tumultuous point in history did not burst on the scene all at once, but slowly gained momentum like a boil that slowly festers through time before it finally bursts open. The Reformation of the Church was inevitable because of the abuses which the Church was suffering during this period. At the time of the Reformation, a segment of the Church had drifted away from its mission to bring Christ and salvation to the world. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church had gradually become weaker because of abusive leadership, philosophical heresy, and a renewal of a form of the Pelagian heresy.