Craftsmen and the revolutionary 14th century

The ”communes” established in the 11th and 12th centuries were soon incorporated into the transnational economy of the High Middle Ages, and large-scale merchants, the transnational capital of the time, seized power politically and economically. The pedestrians of the towns’ artisan companions, like the middle class, the artisan masters, stood mostly outside.

But in connection with the great economic crisis in the middle of the 14th century, when the Chinese made their revolution and took their country out of the global economy and when the great plague epidemic ended the reserve labor force, chaos was created in the power structures and the craftsmen were given an opportunity to assert themselves.

In two waves of strikes and revolts – around 1350 and around 1380 – the artisans rose up against the merchant regimes in the cities of Western Europe. It was mainly in the most industrially developed areas of Flanders and northern Italy that the conflicts were greatest. Usually such a movement was strictly limited to each city separately, but in Flanders the weavers could organize a provincial movement that challenged the king’s authority and for a few years around 1380 control the province militarily and force a compromise in 1385.

Most often, it was the artisan companions who took the initiative for the conflicts, and the goals were always primarily economic. Those who profited from them in the long run, however, were the artisan masters who, thanks to the militancy of their employees, were able to intimidate the merchants into political concessions to establish themselves as rulers. It was only in the most advanced industrial city, Florence, that journeymen and unskilled workers dared to challenge the master craftsmen’s regime, in 1378, and in an uprising where they burned the palaces and archives and liberated the prisoners, they could appoint their own regime which promptly carried out very moderate reforms, demobilized its own movement and quickly handed over power to merchants and master craftsmen.

But as a whole, the movement contributed to the popular gains of the late Middle Ages. Wages rose. The journeymen’s organizations survived and would, after the revolutions around 1800, end up in the labor movement.

Reading
Michel Mollat & Philippe Wolff: The popular revolutions of the late middle ages, Allen & Unwin 1973