Stop 6: Crisis, movement, and renewal

Chapters 27–33 · Atlas year: 1400 CE (then 1492 CE)

Chapters in this stop

• The Black Death Strikes
• The Hundred Years' War
• The Wars of the Roses
• Medieval Inventions
• Traders and Explorers
• The Fall of Constantinople
• The Earliest Days of the Renaissance

First, find it

Start at 1400 for plague recovery and war, then jump to 1492 to see the transformed Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire, Atlantic routes, and changing European states.

Keep this lens while reading

Do not make the Renaissance appear from nowhere. Trace continuities in trade, scholarship, technology, migration, artistic patronage, and the movement of texts and people.

Family question

Does a historical period end because people living through it feel an ending, or because later historians draw a line?

Period voices and trustworthy context

Boccaccio describes the Black Death

Period voice · Internet History Sourcebooks, Fordham University

Read a witness's literary account of Florence in 1348 and separate observed details from explanation and storytelling.

The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1431

Primary record · Internet History Sourcebooks, Fordham University

The trial record preserves Joan's answers inside a hostile legal process. Ask how the setting shaped every surviving word.

Late medieval sources, including Constantinople in 1453

Source shelf · Internet History Sourcebooks, Fordham University

Compare accounts of political crisis, war, travel, and the Ottoman capture of Constantinople.