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190 on the great cathedrals in the 1270's had to accept the change in fashion which substituted a pretty country girl with a baby for the majestic Virgin of the earlier period. Business men and landowners saw mild prosperity and economic stability give place to stagnation and erratic fluctuations in the value of the currency.

We can recognize this change more easily than we can account for it. None of the obvious and naïve explanations of decline apply to this case. At the beginning of the slump there were no invasions, no great wars, no plagues, no wide-spread shortages of food or of raw materials. The decay was internal, not external-spiritual, not physical. It was connected with that growing interest in worldly knowledge, power, and wealth which had been so noticeable from the early years of the thirteenth century. The Church had combatted this tendency, especially through the mendicant orders, but the Church itself had become infected. It had concentrated on law and administration, on finance and politics; it had lost much of its prestige in the long war against the Hohenstaufen. The leadership of the Church had weakened just at a time when it needed to be strengthened. It would have been difficult in any case to apply the old ideals to the new problems of an increasingly complex society; the task became impossible when the Church failed to realize the urgency of the problem. It is perhaps significant that no important new religious order was founded in the last medieval centuries. From the tenth century on, every new trend in secular society had been met and controlled by a new type of religious organization. But the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries produced no Cluny, no Franciscan Order; in fact, the officials of the Church rather frowned on new orders and suspected reforming leaders of dangerous radicalism.

As the leadership of the Church declined, due to its own weaknesses and to the growing worldliness of the laity, medieval society was left without guidance. Christian ideals had not been repudiated, but they seemed remote and unclear; no one was sure just how they should be applied in specific situations. The