matter what creed. In the long run, the appeal to reason was perhaps a mistake, but in the
thirteenth century it seemed highly successful.
The thirteenth-century synthesis, which had an air of completeness and finality, was destroyed by
a variety of causes. Perhaps the most important of these was the growth of a rich commercial
class, first in Italy, and then elsewhere. The feudal aristocracy, in the main, had been ignorant,
stupid, and barbaric; the common people had sided with the Church as superior to the nobles in
intelligence, in morality, and in capacity to combat anarchy. But the new commercial class were as
intelligent as the clergy, as well informed in mundane matters, more capable of coping with the
nobles, and more acceptable to the urban lower classes as champions of civic liberty. Democratic
tendencies came to the fore, and after helping the Pope to defeat the Emperor, set to work to
emancipate economic life from ecclesiastical control.
Another cause of the end of the Middle Ages was the rise of strong national monarchies in France,
England, and Spain. Having suppressed internal anarchy, and allied themselves with the rich
merchants against the aristocracy, the kings, after the middle of the fifteenth century, were strong
enough to fight the Pope in the national interest.
The papacy, meanwhile, had lost the moral prestige which it had enjoyed, and on the whole
deserved, in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. First by subservience to France during
the period when the popes lived at Avignon, then by the Great Schism, they had unintentionally
persuaded the Western world that an unchecked papal autocracy was neither possible nor
desirable. In the fifteenth century, their position as rulers of Christendom became subordinate, in
practice, to their position as Italian princes, involved in the complex and unscrupulous game of
Italian power politics.
And so the Renaissance and the Reformation disrupted the medieval synthesis, which has not yet
been succeeded by anything so tidy and so apparently complete. The growth and decay of this
synthesis is the subject of Book II.
The mood of thoughtful men, throughout the whole period, was one of deep unhappiness in regard
to the affairs of this world, only rendered endurable by the hope of a better world hereafter. This
unhappiness was a reflection of what was happening throughout Western Europe. The third
century was a period of disaster, when the