The Great Plague
Before the Black Death struck Europe, this earlier crisis (1315–1322), caused by crop failures and heavy rain, weakened the population.
What is the Great Famine?
The death of millions led to this widespread economic condition, empowering surviving laborers to demand better wages.
What is a labor shortage?
From 1309 to 1377, the papacy was headquartered in this French city rather than in Rome.
What is Avignon?
This temporary state of purification after death became a focus of late medieval religious anxiety.
What is Purgatory?
This Dominican mystic practiced extreme asceticism, including prolonged fasting, and wrote fiery letters to popes calling for Church reform before dying at age 33.
Who is Catherine of Sienna?
The plague first appeared in western Europe at this Mediterranean island in 1347, likely brought by Genoese ships fleeing the siege of Caffa.
What is Sicily?
This 1381 English uprising was sparked by rising taxes and demands for an end to serfdom.
What is the Peasant's Revolt?
This 40-year period of rival papal claimants divided Europe along political lines and undermined the authority of the Church.
What is the Great Schism?
Originally granted for acts of piety, these remissions of temporal punishment became increasingly associated with money.
What are indulgences?
This German theologian emphasized union with the divine soul through detachment and inward stillness, later condemned for heresy.
Who is Meister Eckhart?
In many towns, these communities were scapegoated for poisoning wells and spreading the plague, leading to massacres and expulsions.
Who are Jews?
As landowners sought to convert farmland to pasture, this process displaced many peasants and reshaped rural economies.
What is enclosure?
This 1414–1418 council ended the papal schism by deposing multiple claimants and electing Pope Martin V.
What is the Council of Constance?
Published in 1487, the Malleus Maleficarum offered instructions for identifying, trying, and punishing these alleged servants of the devil.
Who are witches?
This Oxford scholar, condemned for heresy, criticized the wealth of the Church and translated the Bible into English.
Who is John Wycliffe?
This term refers to the wave of child victims that followed the main outbreaks, often due to weakened immunity and ongoing instability.
What is the Children's Plague?
In 1378, wool carders and other lower-class workers in this Italian city seized control of the government for a brief period during the Ciompi Revolt.
What is Florence?
This reform movement claimed that Church councils had more authority than the pope and could enact meaningful change.
What is the conciliar movement?
This widespread sentiment targeted corrupt or immoral clergy, often appearing in popular literature and sermons.
What is anticlericalism?
This Czech reformer was burned at the stake in 1415 after challenging papal authority and preaching in the vernacular.
Who is Jan Hus?
This German folktale, possibly rooted in plague trauma or a child migration, tells of a mysterious figure who lures away the children of a town in 1284 and was later linked in memory to the horrors of the Black Death.
What is the Pied Piper of Hamlin?
This violent 1358 uprising by French peasants, fueled by frustrations with war, taxation, and noble neglect, shocked the nobility.
What is the Jacquerie?
Known for nepotism, corruption, and fathering multiple children, this Renaissance pope became a symbol of Church decadence.
Who is Pope Alexander VI?
This radical Franciscan faction believed the Church had betrayed its vow of poverty and awaited a coming spiritual age.
Who are the Spiritual Franciscans?
Wycliffe’s followers, known by this name, continued to promote scriptural access and anticlerical reform well into the 15th century.
Who are the Lollards?