especially under Maximilian I ( 1493-1519). The Hussite wars brought war and devastation to many parts of central Europe and defence against the fanatical armies raised by the Bohemian heretics was a primary preoccupation of both the Emperor Sigismund and many German princes before the Hussite extremists were crushed by the more moderate nobility at Lipany in 1434. The different regions of northern Europe came to terms with endemic warfare, and societies that were particularly badly affected had developed means to combat its worst effects, such as the Landfriede of Germany or the local truces of southern France. War was a terrible affliction to the peasantry but it was the nobility's raison d'ĂȘtre. The resilience with which certain regions (Bordelais, Quercy, Lower Normandy), however, emerged from the damaging effects of endemic warfare is striking and the rebuilding of villages, repopulation of the countryside, and immigration of labour must be set against an excessively gloomy picture of fifteenthcentury rural society.

Plague and its Effects

We must also consider the devastating effects of epidemics and sudden demographic change. The great age of northern European demographic expansion was coming to an end by the early fourteenth century. There is some evidence for population decline from the 1290s onwards-onwards--vacant agricultural holdings, a scarcity of tenants, cessation in new town foundation, and rural depopulation in areas affected by warfare--but the European harvest failures and famine of 1315-17 are normally taken to mark the beginning of a period of economic contraction. There was recovery in some regions and the demographic crisis of the later Middle Ages came only in 1348-9, when bubonic plague struck most of western Europe, carrying off something in the region of a third of its inhabitants. Some areas were extremely badly affected, and towns and religious communities of monks and friars bore a particularly heavy burden, but there were apparently pockets, such as the kingdom of Bohemia, which largely escaped both the Black Death and

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