The making of polities in later medieval Europe, 1300-1500 (completion of partly-written book).

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My research aims at the completion of a book on the politics of later medieval Europe, which is aimed at students and general readers as well as specialists in the field. Where we tend to think of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as an age of decline and chaos, in which the political institutions characteristic of the high middle ages - such as the papal monarchy, the Holy Roman Empire, the crusades and chivalrous knighthood, the communes of Italy and the Roman-law influenced kingships of the west - decayed amid a series of wars and revolts, famines and plagues, this book will argue for a more positive picture. It will propose an alternative account, emphasising processes of political development, and seeking to explain how they played a central part in causing the wars and disorders for which the period is so famous. Far from declining, the political and institutional forms of the high middle ages went on developing, enabling a wide range of power-holders and power-centres - popes and emperors, kings and princes, nobles, churches, military orders, cities and even peasants - to acquire jurisdiction, territory and/or other forms of power for themselves. The immediate result of this political creativity was a mixture of conflict and compromise, as potentially contending powers shifted between confrontation and the acceptance of hierarchy - and this is why the kingdoms, principalities and city-states of the period tended to fluctuate in coherence and peacefulness. But the long-term result, increasingly clear in the fifteenth century, was a transition towards larger, region- or nation-sized polities, whose more complex internal structures enabled the representation of the lesser powers and interests within their boundaries. While the account will not neglect the major demographic, economic and military developments of the period - the famines of the 1310s, the Black Death and succeeding plagues, the fluctuations in commerce and coinage, the Hundred Years War and the long sequences of conflict in Italy, Poland, Northern and Western Britain and the Balkans - it will restore a lost emphasis to the role played by political culture and process in shaping the politics - as well as the economy and the warfare - of the period.