The crisis of the Late Middle Ages was a series of events in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that brought centuries of European stability to a halt.
Three major crises led to radical changes in all areas of society:
demographic collapse, political instabilities and religious upheavals.
A series of disasters, beginning with the Great Famine of 1315–17 and especially the Black Death of 1347-1351, reduced the population perhaps by half or more as the Medieval Warm Period came to a close and the first century of the Little Ice Age began. It took 150 years for the European population to regain the levels of 1300.
The expression "Crisis of the Late Middle Ages" is used commonly in western historiography,
especially in English and German, and somewhat less among other western
European scholarship to refer individually or collectively to different
crises besetting Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. The expression
often carries a modifier to refer more specifically to one or another
aspect of Late Middle Age crisis, such as the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, or the Cultural, Monastic, Religious, Social, Economic, Intellectual, or Agrarian crisis of the Late Middle Ages, or a national or regional modifier, e.g. Catalan or French crisis.
By 1929, French historian Marc Bloch was already writing about the effects of the crisis of the Late Middle Ages, and by mid-century there were academic debates being held about it.
In his 1981 article Late Middle Age Agrarian Crisis or Crisis of Feudalism?, Peter Kriedte reprises some of the early works in the field from historians writing in the 1930s, including Marc Bloch, Henri Pirenne, Wilhelm Abel, and Michael Postan.
Referred to in Italian as the "Crisis of the 14th Century", Giovanni
Cherubini alluded to the debate that already by 1974 had been going on
"for several decades" in French, British, American, and German
historiography.
Arno Borst (1992) says that it "is a given that fourteenth
century Latin Christianity was in a crisis", and goes on to say that the
intellectual aspects and how universities were affected by the crisis
is underrepresented in the scholarship hitherto: "When we discuss the
crisis of the Late Middle Ages, we consider intellectual movements
beside religious, social, and economic ones", and gives some examples.
Some question whether "crisis" is the right expression for the
period at the end of the Middle Ages and the transition to Modernity. In
his 1981 article The End of the Middle Ages: Decline, Crisis or Transformation?
Donald Sullivan addresses this question, claiming that scholarship has
neglected the period and viewed it largely as a precursor to subsequent
climactic events such as the Renaissance and Reformation.
In his "Introduction to the History of the Middle Ages in
Europe", Mitre Fernández wrote in 2004 that "[t]o talk about a general
crisis of the Late Middle Ages is already a commonplace in the study of
medieval history."
Heribert Müller, in his 2012 book on the religious crisis of the late
Middle Ages, discussed whether the term itself was in crisis, saying,
No
doubt the thesis of the crisis of the late Middle Ages has itself been
in crisis for some time now, and hardly anyone considered an expert in
the field would still profess it without some ifs and buts, and
especially so in the case of German Medieval historians.
In his 2014 historiographical article about the crisis in the Middle
Ages, Peter Schuster quotes historian Léopold Genicot's 1971 article
"Crisis: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times" where Genicot wrote,
"Crisis is the word which comes immediately to the historian's mind when
he thinks of the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries."
Demography
Some scholars contend that at the beginning of the 14th century, Europe had become overpopulated.
By the 14th century frontiers had ceased to expand and internal
colonization was coming to an end, but population levels remained high.
The Medieval Warm Period ended sometime towards the end of the 13th century, bringing the "Little Ice Age" and harsher winters with reduced harvests. In Northern Europe, new technological innovations such as the heavy plough and the three-field system were not as effective in clearing new fields for harvest as they were in the Mediterranean because the north had poor, clay-like soil.
Food shortages and rapidly inflating prices were a fact of life for as
much as a century before the plague. Wheat, oats, hay and consequently
livestock, were all in short supply.
Their scarcity resulted in malnutrition,
which increases susceptibility to infections due to weakened immune
systems. In the autumn of 1314, heavy rains began to fall, which were
the start of several years of cold and wet winters. The already weak harvests of the north suffered and the seven-year famine ensued. In the years 1315 to 1317 a catastrophic famine, known as the Great Famine, struck much of North West Europe. It was arguably the worst in European history, perhaps reducing the population by more than 10%.
Most governments instituted measures that prohibited exports of foodstuffs, condemned black marketspeculators, set price controls
on grain and outlawed large-scale fishing. At best, they proved mostly
unenforceable and at worst they contributed to a continent-wide downward
spiral. The hardest hit lands, like England, were unable to buy grain
abroad: from France because of the prohibition, and from most of the
rest of the grain producers because of crop failures from shortage of
labour. Any grain that could be shipped was eventually taken by pirates or looters to be sold on the black market.
Meanwhile, many of the largest countries, most notably England and Scotland, had been at war, using up much of their treasury and exacerbating inflation. In 1337, on the eve of the first wave of the Black Death, England and France went to war in what became known as the Hundred Years' War. This situation was worsened when landowners and monarchs such as Edward III of England (r. 1327–1377) and Philip VI of France (r. 1328–1350), raised the fines and rents of their tenants out of a fear that their comparatively high standard of living would decline.
The European economy entered a vicious circle
in which hunger and chronic, low-level debilitating disease reduced the
productivity of labourers, and so the grain output was reduced, causing
grain prices to increase. Standards of living fell drastically, diets
grew more limited, and Europeans as a whole experienced more health
problems.
When a typhoid epidemic emerged, many thousands died in populated urban centres, most significantly Ypres (now in Belgium). In 1318 a pestilence of unknown origin, sometimes identified as anthrax, targeted the animals of Europe, notably sheep and cattle, further reducing the food supply and income of the peasantry.
Climate change and the Great Famine
As
Europe moved out of the Medieval Warm Period and into the Little Ice
Age, a decrease in temperature and a great number of devastating floods
disrupted harvests and caused mass famine. The cold and the rain proved
to be particularly disastrous from 1315 to 1317 in which poor weather
interrupted the maturation of many grains and beans and flooding turned
fields rocky and barren.
Scarcity of grain caused price inflation, as described in one account
of grain prices in Europe in which the price of wheat doubled from
twenty shillings per quarter in 1315 to forty shillings per quarter by
June of the following year.
Grape harvests also suffered, which reduced wine production throughout
Europe. The wine production from the vineyards surrounding the Abbey of Saint-Arnould in France decreased as much as eighty percent by 1317.
During this climatic change and subsequent famine, Europe's cattle were
struck with Bovine Pestilence, a pathogen of unknown identity. The pathogen began spreading throughout Europe from Eastern Asia in 1315 and reached the British Isles by 1319.
Manorial accounts of cattle populations in the year between 1319 and
1320, places a sixty-two percent loss in England and Wales alone.
In these countries, some correlation can be found between the places
where poor weather reduced crop harvests and places where the bovine
population was particularly negatively affected.
It is hypothesized that both low temperatures and lack of nutrition
lowered the cattle populations' immune systems and made them vulnerable
to disease.
The mass death and illness of cattle drastically affected dairy
production, and the output did not return to its pre-pestilence amount
until 1331.
Much of the medieval peasants' protein was obtained from dairy, and
milk shortages likely caused nutritional deficiency in the European
population. Famine and pestilence, exacerbated with the prevalence of
war during this time, led to the death of an estimated ten to fifteen
percent of Europe's population.
Climate change and plague epidemic correlation
The
Black Death was a particularly devastating epidemic in Europe during
this time, and is notable due to the number of people who succumbed to
the disease within the few years the disease was active. It was fatal to
an estimated thirty to sixty percent of the population where the
disease was present. While there is some question of whether it was a particularly deadly strain of Yersinia pestis that caused the Black Death, research indicates no significant difference in bacterial phenotype.
Thus environmental stressors are considered when hypothesizing the
deadliness of the Black Plague, such as crop failures due to changes in
weather, the subsequent famine, and an influx of host rats into Europe
from China. The Black Death was so devastating that a comparable plague in terms of virulence had not been seen since the Justinian plague,
before the Medieval warm period. This gap in plague activity during the
Medieval Warm Period contributes to the hypothesis that climate
conditions would have affected Europe's susceptibility to disease when
the climate began to cool during the arrival of the Little Ice Age in the 13th century.
Before the 14th century, popular uprisings were not unknown, for
example, uprisings at a manor house against an unpleasant overlord, but
they were local in scope. This changed in the 14th and 15th centuries
when new downward pressures on the poor resulted in mass movements and
popular uprisings across Europe. To indicate how common and widespread
these movements became, in Germany between 1336 and 1525 there were no
less than sixty phases of militant peasant unrest.
Almost constant warfare caused taxes to rise to crippling levels. The unity of the Roman Catholic Church was shattered by the Western Schism. The Holy Roman Empire was also in decline in the aftermath of the Great Interregnum
(1247–1273); the Empire lost cohesion, and politically the separate
dynasties of the various German states became more important than their
common empire.
Scholars such as David Herlihy and Michael Postan use the term Malthusian limit to express and explain some tragedies as resulting from overpopulation. In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus
asserted that eventually humans would reproduce so greatly that they
would go beyond the limits of necessary resources; once they reach this
point, catastrophe becomes inevitable. In his book, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West,
professor David Herlihy explores this idea of plague as an inevitable
crisis imposed on humanity to control the population and human
resources. In the book The Black Death; A Turning Point in History? (ed. William M. Bowsky) he "implies that the Black Death's pivotal role in late medieval society ... was now being challenged. Arguing on the basis of a neo-Malthusian economics, revisionist historians recast the Black Death as a necessary and long overdue corrective to an overpopulated Europe."
Herlihy also examined the arguments against the Malthusian
crisis, stating "if the Black Death was a response to excessive human
numbers it should have arrived several decades earlier"
in consequence of the population growth of years before the outbreak of
the Black Death. Herlihy also brings up other, biological factors that
argue against the plague as a "reckoning" by arguing "the role of
famines in affecting population movements is also problematic. The many
famines preceding the Black Death, even the 'great hunger' of 1315 to 1317, did not result in any appreciable reduction in population levels".
Herlihy concludes the matter stating, "the medieval experience shows us
not a Malthusian crisis but a stalemate, in the sense that the
community was maintaining at stable levels very large numbers over a
lengthy period" and states that the phenomenon should be referred to as
more of a deadlock, rather than a crisis, to describe Europe before the
epidemics.
Citizens of Tournai
bury plague victims. Detail of a miniature from "The Chronicles of
Gilles Li Muisis" (1472–1552). Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS
13076-77, f. 24v.
The consequences of the Black Death have short and long-term
effects on human population across the world. They include a series of
biological, social, economic, political and religious upheavals which
had profound effects on the course of world history, especially the History of Europe. Often referred to as simply "The Plague", the Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics
in human history, peaking in Europe between 1348 and 1350 with an
estimated one-third of the continent's population ultimately succumbing
to the disease. Historians estimate that it reduced the total world population
from 475 million to between 350 and 375 million. In most parts of
Europe, it took nearly 80 years for population sizes to recover, and in
some areas more than 150 years.
From the perspective of many of the survivors, the effect of the
plague may have been ultimately favorable, as the massive reduction of
the workforce meant their labor was suddenly in higher demand. R. H. Hilton
has argued that those English peasants who survived found their
situation to be much improved. For many Europeans, the 15th century was a
golden age of prosperity and new opportunities. The land was plentiful, wages high, and serfdom had all but disappeared. A century later, as population growth resumed, the lower classes again faced deprivation and famine.
The spread of the "Black Death" through Europe from 1347 to 1351
Death toll
Figures for the death toll
vary widely by area and from source to source, and estimates are
frequently revised as historical research brings new discoveries to
light. Most scholars estimate that the Black Death killed between 75 and
200 million people in the 14th century, at a time when the entire world
population was still less than 500 million.
Even where the historical record is considered reliable, only rough
estimates of the total number of deaths from the plague are possible.
Europe
Europe
suffered an especially significant death toll from the plague. Modern
estimates range between roughly one-third and one-half of the total
European population in the five-year period of 1347 to 1351, during
which the most severely affected areas may have lost up to 80 percent of
the population.
Contemporary chronicler Jean Froissart,
incidentally, estimated the toll to be one-third, which modern scholars
consider less an accurate assessment than an allusion to the Book of Revelation meant to suggest the scope of the plague.
Deaths were not evenly distributed across Europe, with some areas
affected very little while others were all but entirely depopulated.
The Black Death hit the culture of towns and cities
disproportionately hard, although rural areas (where most of the
population lived at the time) were also significantly affected. Larger
cities were the worst off, as population densities and close living
quarters made disease transmission easier. Cities were also strikingly
filthy, infested with lice, fleas, and rats, and subject to diseases caused by malnutrition and poor hygiene. Florence's population was reduced from 110,000–120,000 inhabitants in 1338 to 50,000 in 1351. Between 60 and 70 percent of Hamburg's and Bremen's populations died. In Provence, Dauphiné, and Normandy,
historians observe a decrease of 60 percent of fiscal hearths. In some
regions, two-thirds of the population was annihilated. In the town of Givry, in the Bourgogne
region of France, the local friar, who used to note 28 to 29 funerals a
year, recorded 649 deaths in 1348, half of them in September. About
half of Perpignan's
population died over the course of several months (only two of the
eight physicians survived the plague). Over 60 percent of Norway's
population died between 1348 and 1350. London may have lost two-thirds of its population during the 1348–49 outbreak;
England as a whole may have lost 70 percent of its population, which
declined from 7 million before the plague to 2 million in 1400.
Some places, including Kingdom of Poland, parts of Hungary, the Brabant region, Hainaut, and Limbourg (in modern Belgium), as well as Santiago de Compostela, were unaffected for unknown reasons. Some historians have assumed that the presence of resistant blood groups
in the local population helped them resist infection, although these
regions were touched by the second plague outbreak in 1360–63 (the
"little mortality") and later during the numerous resurgences of the
plague (in 1366–69, 1374–75, 1400, 1407, etc.). Other areas which
escaped the plague were isolated in mountainous regions (e.g. the Pyrenees).
Estimates of
the demographic effect of the plague in Asia are based on population
figures during this time and estimates of the disease's toll on
population centers. The most severe outbreak of plague, in the Chinese province of Hubei in 1334, claimed up to 80 percent of the population. China had several epidemics and famines from 1200 to the 1350s and its population decreased from an estimated 125 million to 65 million in the late 14th century.
The precise demographic effect of the disease in the Middle East is very difficult to calculate. Mortality was particularly high in rural areas, including significant areas of Gaza and Syria.
Many rural people fled, leaving their fields and crops, and entire
rural provinces are recorded as being totally depopulated. Surviving
records in some cities reveal a devastating number of deaths. The 1348
outbreak in Gaza left an estimated 10,000 people dead, while Aleppo recorded a death rate of 500 per day during the same year. In Damascus,
at the disease's peak in September and October 1348, a thousand deaths
were recorded every day, with overall mortality estimated at between 25
and 38 percent. Syria
lost a total of 400,000 people by the time the epidemic subsided in
March 1349. In contrast to some higher mortality estimates in Asia and
Europe, scholars such as John Fields of Trinity College
in Dublin believe the mortality rate in the Middle East was less than
one-third of the total population, with higher rates in selected areas.
Social, environmental, and economic effects
Because
14th-century healers were at a loss to explain the cause of the Black
Death, many Europeans ascribed supernatural forces, earthquakes and
malicious conspiracies, among other things, as possible reasons for the
plague's emergence.
No one in the 14th century considered rat control a way to ward off the
plague, and people began to believe only God's anger could produce such
horrific displays of suffering and death. Giovanni Boccaccio,
an Italian writer and poet of the era, questioned whether it was sent
by God for their correction, or that it came through the influence of
the heavenly bodies.
Christians accused Jews of poisoning public water supplies in an effort
to ruin European civilization. The spreading of this rumor led to
complete destruction of entire Jewish towns, and was simply caused by
suspicion on part of the Christians, who noticed that the Jews had lost
fewer lives to the plague due to their hygienic practices. In February 1349, 2,000 Jews were murdered in Strasbourg. In August of the same year, the Jewish communities of Mainz and Cologne were exterminated.
Where government authorities were concerned, most monarchs instituted measures that prohibited exports of foodstuffs, condemned black marketspeculators, set price controls
on grain, and outlawed large-scale fishing. At best, they proved mostly
unenforceable. At worst, they contributed to a continent-wide downward
spiral. The hardest hit lands, like England, were unable to buy grain
abroad from France because of the prohibition and from most of the rest
of the grain producers because of crop failures from shortage of labour.
Any grain that could be shipped was eventually taken by pirates or looters
to be sold on the black market. Meanwhile, many of the largest
countries, most notably England and Scotland, had been at war, using up
much of their treasury and exacerbating inflation. In 1337, on the eve of the first wave of the Black Death, England and France went to war in what would become known as the Hundred Years' War.
Malnutrition, poverty, disease and hunger, coupled with war, growing
inflation and other economic concerns made Europe in the mid-14th
century ripe for tragedy.
Europe had been overpopulated
before the plague, and a reduction of 30 to 50 percent of the
population could have resulted in higher wages and more available land
and food for peasants because of less competition for resources. Historian Walter Scheidel
contends that waves of plague following the initial outbreak of the
Black Death had a leveling effect that changed the ratio of land to
labour, reducing the value of the former while boosting that of the
latter, which lowered economic inequality
by making landowners and employers less well off while improving the
lot of the workers. He states that "the observed improvement in living
standards of the laboring population was rooted in the suffering and
premature death of tens of millions over the course of several
generations." This leveling effect was reversed by a "demographic
recovery that resulted in renewed population pressure." In 1357, a third of property in London was unused due to a severe outbreak in 1348–49.
However, for reasons that are still debated, population levels declined
after the Black Death's first outbreak until around 1420 and did not
begin to rise again until 1470, so the initial Black Death event on its
own does not entirely provide a satisfactory explanation to this
extended period of decline in prosperity. See Medieval demography for a more complete treatment of this issue and current theories on why improvements in living standards took longer to evolve.
Effect on the peasantry
The
great population loss brought favourable results to the surviving
peasants in England and Western Europe. There was increased social
mobility, as depopulation further eroded the peasants' already weakened
obligations to remain on their traditional holdings. Seigneurialism
never recovered. Land was plentiful, wages high, and serfdom had all
but disappeared. It was possible to move about and rise higher in life.
Younger sons and women especially benefited. As population growth resumed, however, the peasants again faced deprivation and famine.
In Eastern Europe,
by contrast, renewed stringency of laws tied the remaining peasant
population more tightly to the land than ever before through serfdom.
Sparsely populated Eastern Europe was less affected by the Black Death
and so peasant revolts were less common in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, not occurring in the east until the sixteenth through
nineteenth centuries.
Furthermore, the plague's great population reduction brought
cheaper land prices, more food for the average peasant, and a relatively
large increase in per capita income among the peasantry, if not
immediately, in the coming century.
Since the plague left vast areas of farmland untended, they were made
available for pasture and put more meat on the market; the consumption
of meat and dairy products went up, as did the export of beef and butter
from the Low Countries, Scandinavia and northern Germany. However, the
upper class often attempted to stop these changes, initially in Western
Europe, and more forcefully and successfully in Eastern Europe, by
instituting sumptuary laws.
These regulated what people (particularly of the peasant class) could
wear, so that nobles could ensure that peasants did not begin to dress
and act as a higher class member with their increased wealth. Another
tactic was to fix prices and wages so that peasants could not demand
more with increasing value. In England, the Statute of Labourers 1351 was enforced, meaning no peasant could ask for more wages than in 1346.
This was met with varying success depending on the amount of rebellion
it inspired; such a law was one of the causes of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England.
The rapid development of the use
was probably one of the consequences of the Black Death, during which
many landowning nobility died, leaving their realty to their widows and
minor orphans.
Effect on urban workers
In
the wake of the drastic population decline brought on by the plague,
wages shot up and labourers could move to new localities in response to
wage offers. Local and royal authorities in Western Europe instituted
wage controls. These governmental controls sought to freeze wages at the old levels before the Black Death. Within England, for example, the Ordinance of Labourers, enacted in 1349, and the Statute of Labourers, enacted in 1351, restricted both wage increases and the relocation of workers.
If workers attempted to leave their current post, employers were given
the right to have them imprisoned. The Statute was poorly enforced in
most areas, and farm wages in England on average doubled between 1350
and 1450, although they were static thereafter until the end of the 19th century.
Cohn, comparing numerous countries, argues that these laws were
not primarily designed to freeze wages. Instead, he says the energetic
local and royal measures to control labor and artisans' prices was a
response to elite fears of the greed and possible new powers of lesser
classes that had gained new freedom. Cohn says the laws reflect the
anxiety that followed the Black Death's new horrors of mass mortality
and destruction, and from elite anxiety about manifestations such as the
flagellant movement and the persecution of Jews, Catalans (in Sicily),
and beggars.
Labour-saving innovation
By
1200, virtually all of the Mediterranean basin and most of northern
Germany had been deforested and cultivated. Indigenous flora and fauna
were replaced by domestic grasses and animals and domestic woodlands
were lost. With depopulation, this process was reversed. Much of the
primeval vegetation returned, and abandoned fields and pastures were
reforested.
The Black Death encouraged innovation of labour-saving technologies, leading to higher productivity.
There was a shift from grain farming to animal husbandry. Grain farming
was very labor-intensive, but animal husbandry needed only a shepherd
and a few dogs and pastureland.
Plague brought an eventual end of Serfdom in Western Europe. The
manorial system was already in trouble, but the Black Death assured its
demise throughout much of western and central Europe by 1500. Severe
depopulation and migration of the village to cities caused an acute
shortage of agricultural labourers. Many villages were abandoned. In
England, more than 1300 villages were deserted between 1350 and 1500.
Wages of labourers were high, but the rise in nominal wages following
the Black Death was swamped by post-Plague inflation, so that real wages
fell.
Labor was in such a short supply that Lords were forced to give
better terms of tenure. This resulted in much lower rents in western
Europe. By 1500, a new form of tenure called copyhold became prevalent
in Europe. In copyhold, both a Lord and peasant made their best business
deal, whereby the peasant got use of the land and the Lord got a fixed
annual payment and both possessed a copy of the tenure agreement.
Serfdom did not end everywhere. It lingered in parts of Western Europe
and was introduced to Eastern Europe after the Black Death.
There was change in the inheritance law. Before the plague, only
sons and especially the elder son inherited the ancestral property. Post
plague all sons as well as daughters started inheriting property.
Persecutions
Renewed religious fervor and fanaticism came in the wake of the Black
Death. Some Europeans targeted "groups such as Jews, friars,
foreigners, beggars, pilgrims", lepers and Romani, thinking that they were to blame for the crisis.
Differences in cultural and lifestyle practices also led to
persecution. As the plague swept across Europe in the mid-14th century,
annihilating more than half the population, Jews were taken as scapegoats, in part because better hygiene among Jewish communities and isolation in the ghettos meant that Jews were less affected. Accusations spread that Jews had caused the disease by deliberately poisoning wells.
European mobs attacked Jewish settlements across Europe; by 1351, 60
major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed, and more
than 350 separate massacres had occurred.
According to Joseph P. Byrne, women also faced persecution during the Black Death. Muslim women in Cairo became scapegoats when the plague struck.
Byrne writes that in 1438, the sultan of Cairo was informed by his
religious lawyers that the arrival of the plague was Allah's punishment
for the sin of fornication
and that in accordance with this theory, a law was set in place stating
that women were not allowed to make public appearances as they may
tempt men into sin. Byrne describes that this law was only lifted when
"the wealthy complained that their female servants could not shop for
food."
Religion
The Black Death hit the monasteries
very hard because of their proximity with the sick who sought refuge
there. This left a severe shortage of clergy after the epidemic cycle.
Eventually the losses were replaced by hastily trained and inexperienced
clergy members, many of whom knew little of the rigors of their
predecessors. New colleges were opened at established universities, and
the training process sped up.
The shortage of priests opened new opportunities for laywomen to assume
more extensive and more important service roles in the local parish.
Flagellants
practiced self-flogging (whipping of oneself) to atone for sins. The
movement became popular after the Black Death. It may be that the
flagellants' later involvement in hedonism was an effort to accelerate
or absorb God's wrath, to shorten the time with which others suffered.
More likely, the focus of attention and popularity of their cause
contributed to a sense that the world itself was ending and that their
individual actions were of no consequence.
Reformers rarely pointed to failures on the part of the Church in dealing with the catastrophe.
The Black Death had a profound effect on art and literature. After 1350, European culture
in general turned very morbid. The general mood was one of pessimism,
and contemporary art turned dark with representations of death. The
widespread image of the "dance of death" showed death (a skeleton)
choosing victims at random. Many of the most graphic depictions come
from writers such as Boccaccio and Petrarch. Peire Lunel de Montech, writing about 1348 in the lyric style long out of fashion, composed the following sorrowful sirventes "Meravilhar no·s devo pas las gens" during the height of the plague in Toulouse:
They died by the hundreds, both day
and night, and all were thrown in ... ditches and covered with earth.
And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug. And I, Agnolo di Tura ... buried my five children with my own hands ... And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.
Boccaccio wrote:
How many valiant men, how many fair
ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with
their ancestors in the next world! The condition of the people was
pitiable to behold. They sickened by the thousands daily, and died
unattended and without help. Many died in the open street, others dying
in their houses, made it known by the stench of their rotting bodies.
Consecrated churchyards did not suffice for the burial of the vast
multitude of bodies, which were heaped by the hundreds in vast trenches,
like goods in a ship's hold and covered with a little earth.
Although
the Black Death highlighted the shortcomings of medical science in the
medieval era, it also led to positive changes in the field of medicine.
As described by David Herlihy in The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, more emphasis was placed on “anatomical investigations” following the Black Death.
How individuals studied the human body notably changed, becoming a
process that dealt more directly with the human body in varied states of
sickness and health. Further, at this time, the importance of surgeons
became more evident.
A theory put forth by Stephen O'Brien says the Black Death is likely responsible, through natural selection, for the high frequency of the CCR5-Δ32 genetic defect in people of European descent. The gene affects T cell function and provides protection against HIV, smallpox, and possibly plague,
though for the last, no explanation as to how it would do that exists.
This, however, is now challenged, given that the CCR5-Δ32 gene has been
found to be just as common in Bronze Age tissue samples.
Architecture
The
Black Death also inspired European architecture to move in two
different directions: (1) a revival of Greco-Roman styles, and (2) a
further elaboration of the Gothic style.
Late medieval churches had impressive structures centred on
verticality, where one's eye is drawn up towards the high ceiling. The
basic Gothic style was revamped with elaborate decoration in the late
medieval period. Sculptors in Italian city-states emulated the work of
their Roman forefathers while sculptors in northern Europe, no doubt
inspired by the devastation they had witnessed, gave way to a heightened
expression of emotion and an emphasis on individual differences.
A tough realism came forth in architecture as in literature. Images of
intense sorrow, decaying corpses, and individuals with faults as well as
virtues emerged. North of the Alps, painting reached a pinnacle of
precise realism with Early Dutch painting by artists such as Jan van Eyck
(c. 1390–by 1441). The natural world was reproduced in these works with
meticulous detail whose realism was not unlike photography.
Spread of the Black Death in Europe and the Near East (1346–1353)
The Black Death, also known as the Pestilence, Great Bubonic Plague, the Great Plague or the Plague, or less commonly the Great Mortality or the Black Plague, was the most devastating pandemic recorded in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia, peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351. The bacteriumYersinia pestis, which results in several forms of plague (septicemic, pneumonic and, the most common, bubonic), is believed to have been the cause. The Black Death was the first major European outbreak of plague and the second plague pandemic.
The plague created a number of religious, social and economic
upheavals, with profound effects on the course of European history.
The Black Death probably originated in Central Asia or East Asia, from where it travelled along the Silk Road, reaching Crimea by 1343. From there, it was most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats that traveled on Genoese merchant ships, spreading throughout the Mediterranean Basin, reaching the rest of Europe via the Italian peninsula.
The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population. In total, the plague may have reduced the world population from an estimated 475 million to 350–375 million in the 14th century. It took 200 years for Europe's population to recover to its previous level, and some regions (such as Florence) only recovered by the 19th century. Outbreaks of the plague recurred until the early 20th century.
Names
The phrase "black death" (mors nigra)
was used in 1350 by Simon de Covino or Couvin, a Belgian astronomer,
who wrote the poem "On the Judgment of the Sun at a Feast of Saturn" (De judicio Solis in convivio Saturni), which attributes the plague to a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.
In 1908, Gasquet claimed that use of the name atra mors for the 14th-century epidemic first appeared in a 1631 book on Danish history by J. I. Pontanus: "Commonly and from its effects, they called it the black death" (Vulgo & ab effectu atram mortem vocitabant).
The name spread through Scandinavia and then Germany, gradually
becoming attached to the mid 14th-century epidemic as a proper name.
However, atra mors is used to refer to a pestilential fever (febris pestilentialis) already in the 12th-century On the Signs and Symptoms of Diseases (Latin: De signis et sinthomatibus egritudinum) by French physician Gilles de Corbeil. In English, the term was first used in 1755. Writers contemporary with the plague described the event as "great plague" or "great pestilence".
Chronology
Origins
The plague disease, caused by Yersinia pestis, is enzootic (commonly present) in populations of fleas carried by ground rodents, including marmots, in various areas, including Central Asia, Kurdistan, Western Asia, North India, and Uganda. Due to climate change in Asia, rodents began to flee the dried-out grasslands to more populated areas, spreading the disease. In October 2010, medical geneticists suggested that all three of the great waves of the plague originated in China. Research in 2017 concerning Nestorian graves dating to 1338–1339 near Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan that have inscriptions referring to plague, has led many epidemiologists to think they mark the outbreak of the epidemic; from which it could easily have spread to China and India.
Research in 2018 found evidence of Yersinia pestis in an ancient Swedish tomb, which may have been the cause of what has been described as the Neolithic decline around 3000 BC, in which European populations declined significantly. In 2013, researchers confirmed earlier speculation that the cause of the Plague of Justinian (541–542 AD, with recurrences until 750) was Yersinia pestis.
The 13th-century Mongol conquest of China
caused a decline in farming and trading. Economic recovery had been
observed at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In the 1330s, many
natural disasters and plagues led to widespread famine, starting in
1331, with a deadly plague arriving soon after.
Epidemics, that may have included the plague, killed an estimated
25 million across Asia during the fifteen years before it reached Constantinople in 1347.
The disease may have traveled along the Silk Road with Mongol armies and traders, or it could have arrived via ship. By the end of 1346, reports of plague had reached the seaports of Europe: "India was depopulated, Tartary, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia were covered with dead bodies".
Plague was reportedly first introduced to Europe via Genoese traders from the port city of Kaffa in the Crimea in 1347. During a protracted siege of the city by the Mongol army under Jani Beg, whose army was suffering from the disease, the army catapulted infected corpses over the city walls of Kaffa to infect the inhabitants. The Genoese traders fled, taking the plague by ship into Sicily, then the Italian mainland, whence it spread north.
Whether or not this hypothesis is accurate, it is clear that several
existing conditions, such as war, famine, and weather, contributed to
the severity of the Black Death. Among many other culprits of plague
contagiousness, malnutrition, even if distantly, also contributed to
such an immense loss in European population, since it weakened immune
systems.
European outbreak
The seventh year after
it began, it came to England and first began in the towns and ports
joining on the seacoasts, in Dorsetshire, where, as in other counties,
it made the country quite void of inhabitants so that there were almost
none left alive.
... But at length it came to Gloucester, yea even to
Oxford and to London, and finally it spread over all England and so
wasted the people that scarce the tenth person of any sort was left
alive.--Geoffrey the Baker, Chronicon Angliae
There appear to have been several introductions into Europe. The
plague reached Sicily in October 1347, carried by twelve Genoese
galleys, and rapidly spread all over the island. Galleys from Kaffa reached Genoa and Venice in January 1348, but it was the outbreak in Pisa
a few weeks later that was the entry point to northern Italy. Towards
the end of January, one of the galleys expelled from Italy arrived in Marseille.
From Italy, the disease spread northwest across Europe, striking
France, Spain (which was hit due to the heat – the epidemic raged in the
early weeks of July),
Portugal and England by June 1348, then spread east and north through
Germany, Scotland and Scandinavia from 1348 to 1350. It was introduced
into Norway in 1349 when a ship landed at Askøy, then spread to Bjørgvin (modern Bergen) and Iceland.
Finally, it spread to northwestern Russia in 1351. The plague was
somewhat more uncommon in parts of Europe with less developed trade with
their neighbours, including the majority of the Basque Country, isolated parts of Belgium and the Netherlands, and isolated alpine villages throughout the continent.
According to some epidemiologists, periods of unfavorable weather
decimated plague-infected rodent populations and forced their fleas
onto alternative hosts, inducing plague outbreaks which often peaked in the hot summers of the Mediterranean, as well as during the cool autumn months of the southern Baltic states.
However, other researchers do not think that the plague ever became
endemic in Europe or its rat population. The disease repeatedly wiped
out the rodent carriers, so that the fleas died out until a new outbreak
from Central Asia repeated the process. The outbreaks have been shown
to occur roughly 15 years after a warmer and wetter period in areas
where plague is endemic in other species, such as gerbils.
Middle Eastern outbreak
The plague struck various regions in the Middle East during the pandemic,
leading to serious depopulation and permanent change in both economic
and social structures. It may have spread from Central Asia with the Mongols to a trading post in Crimea, called Kaffa, controlled by the Republic of Genoa.
As infected rodents infected new rodents, the disease spread across the
region, including South Africa entering also from southern Russia. By
autumn 1347, the plague reached Alexandria in Egypt, through the port's trade with Constantinople, and ports on the Black Sea. During 1347, the disease travelled eastward to Gaza, and north along the eastern coast to cities in modern Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Palestine, including Ashkelon, Acre, Jerusalem, Sidon, Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo. Within two years, the plague had spread throughout the entire Muslim empire from Arabia across North Africa. In 1348–1349, the disease reached Antioch. The city's residents fled to the north, but most of them ended up dying during the journey.
Mecca became infected in 1349. During the same year, records show the city of Mosul suffered a massive epidemic, and the city of Baghdad experienced a second round of the disease.
Muslim religious scholars taught that the plague was a “martyrdom
and mercy” from God, assuring the believer's place in paradise. For
non-believers, it was a punishment.
Some Muslim doctors cautioned against trying to prevent or treat a
disease sent by God. Others adopted many of the same preventive measures
and treatments for the plague used by the Europeans. These Muslim
doctors also depended on the writings of the ancient Greeks.
An inguinal bubo on the upper thigh of a person infected with bubonic plague. Swollen lymph nodes (buboes) often occur in the neck, armpit and groin (inguinal) regions of plague victims.
Contemporary accounts of the plague are often varied or imprecise. The most commonly noted symptom was the appearance of buboes (or gavocciolos) in the groin, the neck and armpits, which oozed pus and bled when opened. Boccaccio's description:
In men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours
in the groin or armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple,
others as an egg ... From the two said parts of the body this deadly gavocciolo soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the malady
began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many
cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now
minute and numerous. As the gavocciolo had been and still was an
infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on
whomsoever they showed themselves.
The only medical detail that is questionable in Boccaccio's
description is that the gavocciolo was an "infallible token of
approaching death", as, if the bubo discharges, recovery is possible.
This was followed by acute fever and vomiting of blood. Most victims died two to seven days after initial infection. Freckle-like spots and rashes, which could have been caused by flea-bites, were identified as another potential sign of the plague.
Some accounts, like that of Lodewijk Heyligen, whose master the Cardinal Colonna died of the plague in 1348, noted a distinct form of the disease that infected the lungs and led to respiratory problems and is identified with pneumonic plague.
It is said
that the plague takes three forms. In the first people suffer an
infection of the lungs, which leads to breathing difficulties. Whoever
has this corruption or contamination to any extent cannot escape but
will die within two days. Another form ... in which boils erupt under
the armpits, ... a third form in which people of both sexes are attacked
in the groin.
Causes
The Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) engorged with blood. This species of flea is the primary vector for the transmission of Yersinia pestis, the organism responsible for spreading bubonic plague in most plague epidemics. Both male and female fleas feed on blood and can transmit the infection.
Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) infected with the Yersinia pestisbacterium which appears as a dark mass in the gut. The foregut (proventriculus) of this flea is blocked by a Y. pestisbiofilm; when the flea feeds on an uninfected hostY. pestis is regurgitated into the wound, causing infection.
Yersinia pestis (200× magnification), the bacterium which causes bubonic plague
Medical knowledge had stagnated during the Middle Ages. The most authoritative account at the time came from the medical faculty in Paris in a report to the king of France that blamed the heavens, in the form of a conjunction of three planets in 1345 that caused a "great pestilence in the air".
This report became the first and most widely circulated of a series of
plague tracts that sought to give advice to sufferers. That the plague
was caused by bad air became the most widely accepted theory at the
time, the miasma theory. The word plague
did not at first refer to a specific illness, and only the recurrence
of outbreaks during the Middle Ages gave it the meaning which persists
in modern medicine.
The importance of hygiene
was recognised only in the nineteenth century; until then streets were
commonly filthy, with live animals of all sorts around and human
parasites abounding, facilitating the spread of transmissible disease. One early medical advance as a result of the Black Death was the establishment of the idea of quarantine in the city-state of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia) in 1377 after continuing outbreaks.
Today, the dominant explanation for the Black Death is the plague theory, which attributes the outbreak to Yersinia pestis,
also responsible for an epidemic that began in southern China in 1865,
eventually spreading to India. The investigation of the pathogen that
caused the 19th-century plague was begun by teams of scientists who
visited Hong Kong in 1894, among whom was the French-Swiss
bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, after whom the pathogen was named. The mechanism by which Y. pestis is usually transmitted was established in 1898 by Paul-Louis Simond and was found to involve the bites of fleas whose midguts had become obstructed by replicating Y. pestis
several days after feeding on an infected host. This blockage starves
the fleas and drives them to aggressive feeding behaviour and attempts
to clear the blockage by regurgitation,
resulting in thousands of plague bacteria being flushed into the
feeding site, infecting the host. The bubonic plague mechanism was also
dependent on two populations of rodents: one resistant to the disease,
which act as hosts, keeping the disease endemic,
and a second that lack resistance. When the second population dies, the
fleas move on to other hosts, including people, thus creating a human epidemic.
The historian Francis Aidan Gasquet wrote about the Great Pestilence in 1893
and suggested that "it would appear to be some form of the ordinary
Eastern or bubonic plague". He was able to adopt the epidemiology of the
bubonic plague for the Black Death for the second edition in 1908,
implicating rats and fleas in the process, and his interpretation was
widely accepted for other ancient and medieval epidemics, such as the Plague of Justinian that was prevalent in the Eastern Roman Empire from 541 to 700 CE.
An estimate of the case fatality rate for the modern bubonic plague, following the introduction of antibiotics, is 11%, although it may be higher in underdeveloped regions. Symptoms of the disease include fever of 38–41 °C (100–106 °F), headaches, painful aching joints, nausea and vomiting, and a general feeling of malaise. Left untreated, of those that contract the bubonic plague, 80 percent die within eight days. Pneumonic plague has a mortality rate of 90 to 95 percent. Symptoms include fever, cough, and blood-tinged sputum. As the disease progresses, sputum becomes free-flowing and bright red. Septicemic plague is the least common of the three forms, with a mortality rate near 100%. Symptoms are high fevers and purple skin patches (purpura due to disseminated intravascular coagulation).
In cases of pneumonic and particularly septicemic plague, the progress
of the disease is so rapid that there would often be no time for the
development of the enlarged lymph nodes that were noted as buboes.
A number of alternative theories, implicating other diseases in
the Black Death pandemic, have also been proposed by some modern
scientist.
DNA evidence
Skeletons in a mass grave from 1720–1721 in Martigues, France, yielded molecular evidence of the orientalis strain of Yersinia pestis,
the organism responsible for bubonic plague. The second pandemic of
bubonic plague was active in Europe from 1347, the beginning of the
Black Death, until 1750.
In 1998, Drancourt et al. reported the detection of Y. pestis DNA in human dental pulp from a medieval grave. Another team led by Tom Gilbert cast doubt on this identification
and the techniques employed, stating that this method "does not allow
us to confirm the identification of Y. pestis as the aetiological agent
of the Black Death and subsequent plagues. In addition, the utility of
the published tooth-based ancient DNA technique used to diagnose fatal
bacteraemias in historical epidemics still awaits independent
corroboration".
Definitive confirmation of the role of Y. pestis arrived in 2010 with a publication in PLOS Pathogens by Haensch et al. They assessed the presence of DNA/RNA with polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques for Y. pestis from the tooth sockets
in human skeletons from mass graves in northern, central and southern
Europe that were associated archaeologically with the Black Death and
subsequent resurgences. The authors concluded that this new research,
together with prior analyses from the south of France and Germany, "ends
the debate about the cause of the Black Death, and unambiguously
demonstrates that Y. pestis was the causative agent of the epidemic plague that devastated Europe during the Middle Ages". In 2011, these results were further confirmed with genetic evidence derived from Black Death victims in the East Smithfield
burial site in England. Schuenemann et al. concluded in 2011 "that the
Black Death in medieval Europe was caused by a variant of Y. pestis that may no longer exist."
Later in 2011, Bos et al. reported in Nature the first draft genome of Y. pestis
from plague victims from the same East Smithfield cemetery and
indicated that the strain that caused the Black Death is ancestral to
most modern strains of Y. pestis.
Since this time, further genomic papers have further confirmed the phylogenetic placement of the Y. pestis strain responsible for the Black Death as both the ancestor of later plague epidemics including the third plague pandemic and as the descendant of the strain responsible for the Plague of Justinian. In addition, plague genomes from significantly earlier in prehistory have been recovered.
DNA taken from 25 skeletons from 14th century London have shown the plague is a strain of Y. pestis almost identical to that which hit Madagascar in 2013.
Alternative explanations
The plague theory implicating Y. pestis was first
significantly challenged by the work of British bacteriologist J. F. D.
Shrewsbury in 1970, who noted that the reported rates of mortality in
rural areas during the 14th-century pandemic were inconsistent with the
modern bubonic plague, leading him to conclude that contemporary
accounts were exaggerations.
In 1984, zoologist Graham Twigg produced the first major work to
challenge the bubonic plague theory directly, and his doubts about the
identity of the Black Death have been taken up by a number of authors,
including Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (2002 and 2013), David Herlihy (1997), and Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan (2001).
It is recognised that an epidemiological
account of the plague is as important as an identification of symptoms,
but researchers are hampered by the lack of reliable statistics from
this period. Most work has been done on the spread of the plague in
England, and even estimates of overall population at the start vary by
over 100% as no census was undertaken between the time of publication of
the Domesday Book and poll tax of the year 1377. Estimates of plague victims are usually extrapolated from figures for the clergy.
In addition to arguing that the rat population was insufficient
to account for a bubonic plague pandemic, sceptics of the bubonic plague
theory point out that the symptoms of the Black Death are not unique
(and arguably in some accounts may differ from bubonic plague); that
transference via fleas in goods was likely to be of marginal
significance; and that the DNA results may be flawed and might not have
been repeated elsewhere or were not replicable at all, despite extensive samples from other mass graves.
Other arguments include the lack of accounts of the death of rats
before outbreaks of plague between the 14th and 17th centuries;
temperatures that are too cold in northern Europe for the survival of
fleas; that, despite primitive transport systems, the spread of the
Black Death was much faster than that of modern bubonic plague; that
mortality rates of the Black Death appear to be very high; that, while
modern bubonic plague is largely endemic as a rural disease, the Black
Death indiscriminately struck urban and rural areas; and that the
pattern of the Black Death, with major outbreaks in the same areas
separated by 5 to 15 years, differs from modern bubonic plague—which
often becomes endemic for decades with annual flare-ups.
McCormick has suggested that earlier archaeologists were simply
not interested in the "laborious" processes needed to discover rat
remains.
Walløe complains that all of these authors "take it for granted that
Simond's infection model, black rat → rat flea → human, which was
developed to explain the spread of plague in India, is the only way an
epidemic of Yersinia pestis infection could spread", whilst pointing to several other possibilities. Similarly, Green has argued that greater attention is needed to the range of (especially non-commensal) animals that might be involved in the transmission of plague.
A variety of alternatives to Y. pestis have been put forward. Twigg suggested that the cause was a form of anthrax, and Norman Cantor
thought it may have been a combination of anthrax and other pandemics.
Scott and Duncan have argued that the pandemic was a form of infectious
disease that they characterise as hemorrhagic plague similar to Ebola.
Archaeologist Barney Sloane has argued that there is insufficient
evidence of the extinction of numerous rats in the archaeological record
of the medieval waterfront in London and that the plague spread too
quickly to support the thesis that Y. pestis was spread from fleas on rats; he argues that transmission must have been person to person.
This theory is supported by research in 2018 which suggested
transmission was more likely by body lice and human fleas during the second plague pandemic.
However, no single alternative solution has achieved widespread acceptance. Many scholars arguing for Y. pestis
as the major agent of the pandemic suggest that its extent and symptoms
can be explained by a combination of bubonic plague with other
diseases, including typhus, smallpox and respiratory infections.
In addition to the bubonic infection, others point to additional
septicemic (a type of "blood poisoning") and pneumonic (an airborne
plague that attacks the lungs before the rest of the body) forms of the
plague, which lengthen the duration of outbreaks throughout the seasons
and help account for its high mortality rate and additional recorded
symptoms. In 2014, Public Health England
announced the results of an examination of 25 bodies exhumed in the
Clerkenwell area of London, as well as of wills registered in London
during the period, which supported the pneumonic hypothesis.
The historian George Hussman claimed that the plague had not
occurred in East Africa until the 1900s. However, other sources suggest
that the Second pandemic did indeed reach Sub-Saharan Africa.
There are no exact figures for the death toll; the rate varied widely
by locality. In urban centres, the greater the population before the
outbreak, the longer the duration of the period of abnormal mortality. It killed some 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia. According to medieval historian Philip Daileader in 2007:
The trend
of recent research is pointing to a figure more like 45–50% of the
European population dying during a four-year period. There is a fair
amount of geographic variation. In Mediterranean Europe, areas such as
Italy, the south of France and Spain, where plague ran for about four
years consecutively, it was probably closer to 75–80% of the population.
In Germany and England ... it was probably closer to 20%.
A death rate as high as 60% in Europe has been suggested by Norwegian historian Ole Benedictow:
Detailed
study of the mortality data available points to two conspicuous features
in relation to the mortality caused by the Black Death: namely the
extreme level of mortality caused by the Black Death, and the remarkable
similarity or consistency of the level of mortality, from Spain in
southern Europe to England in north-western Europe. The data is
sufficiently widespread and numerous to make it likely that the Black
Death swept away around 60 per cent of Europe's population. It is
generally assumed that the size of Europe's population at the time was
around 80 million. This implies that around 50 million people died in
the Black Death.
Half of Paris's population of 100,000 people died. In Italy, the population of Florence was reduced from 110,000–120,000 inhabitants in 1338 down to 50,000 in 1351. At least 60% of the population of Hamburg and Bremen perished, and a similar percentage of Londoners may have died from the disease as well. In London approximately 62,000 people died between 1346 and 1353.
While contemporary reports account of mass burial pits being created in
response to the large numbers of dead, recent scientific investigations
of a burial pit in Central London found well-preserved individuals to
be buried in isolated, evenly spaced graves, suggesting at least some
pre-planning and Christian burials at this time. Before 1350, there were about 170,000 settlements in Germany, and this was reduced by nearly 40,000 by 1450.
In 1348, the plague spread so rapidly that before any physicians or
government authorities had time to reflect upon its origins, about a
third of the European population had already perished. In crowded
cities, it was not uncommon for as much as 50% of the population to die.
The disease bypassed some areas, and the most isolated areas were less
vulnerable to contagion. Monks, nuns and priests were especially
hard-hit since they cared for victims of the Black Death.
The most widely accepted estimate for the Middle East, including
Iraq, Iran and Syria, during this time, is for a death toll of about a
third of the population. The Black Death killed about 40% of Egypt's population.
Economic
With such a large population decline from the plague, wages soared in response to a labor shortage. Landowners were also pushed to substitute monetary rents for labour services in an effort to keep tenants.
Environmental
Some historians believe the innumerable deaths brought on by the plague cooled the climate by freeing up land and triggering reforestation. This may have led to the Little Ice Age.
Persecutions
Inspired by the Black Death, The Dance of Death, or Danse Macabre, an allegory on the universality of death, was a common painting motif in the late medieval period.
Renewed religious fervour and fanaticism bloomed in the wake of the Black Death. Some Europeans targeted "various groups such as Jews, friars, foreigners, beggars, pilgrims", lepers, and Romani, blaming them for the crisis. Lepers, and others with skin diseases such as acne or psoriasis, were killed throughout Europe.
Because 14th-century healers and governments were at a loss to explain or stop the disease, Europeans turned to astrological forces, earthquakes, and the poisoning of wells by Jews as possible reasons for outbreaks. Many believed the epidemic was a punishment by God for their sins, and could be relieved by winning God's forgiveness.
There were many attacks against Jewish communities. In the Strasbourg massacre of February 1349, about 2,000 Jews were murdered. In August 1349, the Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne were annihilated. By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed. During this period many Jews relocated to Poland, where they received a warm welcome from King Casimir the Great.
The plague repeatedly returned to haunt Europe and the Mediterranean throughout the 14th to 17th centuries. According to Biraben, the plague was present somewhere in Europe in every year between 1346 and 1671. (Note that some researchers have cautions about the uncritical use of Biraben's data.) The second pandemic
was particularly widespread in the following years: 1360–1363; 1374;
1400; 1438–1439; 1456–1457; 1464–1466; 1481–1485; 1500–1503; 1518–1531;
1544–1548; 1563–1566; 1573–1588; 1596–1599; 1602–1611; 1623–1640;
1644–1654; and 1664–1667. Subsequent outbreaks, though severe, marked
the retreat from most of Europe (18th century) and northern Africa
(19th century). According to Geoffrey Parker, "France alone lost almost a million people to the plague in the epidemic of 1628–31."
In England, in the absence of census figures, historians propose a
range of pre-incident population figures from as high as 7 million to
as low as 4 million in 1300, and a post-incident population figure as low as 2 million.
By the end of 1350, the Black Death subsided, but further outbreaks
occurred in 1361–1362, 1369, 1379–1383, 1389–1393, and throughout the
first half of the 15th century.
An outbreak in 1471 took as much as 10–15% of the population, while the
death rate of the plague of 1479–1480 could have been as high as 20%. The most general outbreaks in Tudor and Stuart England seem to have begun in 1498, 1535, 1543, 1563, 1589, 1603, 1625, and 1636, and ended with the Great Plague of London in 1665.
In 1466, perhaps 40,000 people died of the plague in Paris. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the plague was present in Paris around 30 percent of the time.
The Black Death ravaged Europe for three years before it continued on
into Russia, where the disease was present somewhere in the country 25
times between 1350 and 1490. Plague epidemics ravaged London in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625, 1636, and 1665, reducing its population by 10 to 30% during those years. Over 10% of Amsterdam's population died in 1623–1625, and again in 1635–1636, 1655, and 1664. Plague occurred in Venice 22 times between 1361 and 1528. The plague of 1576–1577 killed 50,000 in Venice, almost a third of the population. Late outbreaks in central Europe included the Italian Plague of 1629–1631, which is associated with troop movements during the Thirty Years' War, and the Great Plague of Vienna in 1679. Over 60% of Norway's population died in 1348–1350. The last plague outbreak ravaged Oslo in 1654.
In the first half of the 17th century, a plague claimed some 1.7 million victims in Italy, or about 14% of the population. In 1656, the Naples Plague killed about half of Naples' 300,000 inhabitants. More than 1.25 million deaths resulted from the extreme incidence of plague in 17th-century Spain. The plague of 1649 probably reduced the population of Seville by half. In 1709–1713, a plague epidemic that followed the Great Northern War (1700–1721, Sweden v. Russia and allies) killed about 100,000 in Sweden, and 300,000 in Prussia. The plague killed two-thirds of the inhabitants of Helsinki, and claimed a third of Stockholm's population. Western Europe's last major epidemic occurred in 1720 in Marseille. The 1770–1772 Russian plague killed up to 100,000 people in Moscow. An estimated 60,000 people died during the Caragea's plague in 1813–1814, 20–30,000 of them in Bucharest.
The Black Death ravaged much of the Islamic world. Plague was present in at least one location in the Islamic world virtually every year between 1500 and 1850. Plague repeatedly struck the cities of North Africa. Algiers lost 30,000–50,000 inhabitants to it in 1620–1621, and again in 1654–1657, 1665, 1691, and 1740–1742. Plague remained a major event in Ottoman
society until the second quarter of the 19th century. Between 1701 and
1750, thirty-seven larger and smaller epidemics were recorded in Constantinople, and an additional thirty-one between 1751 and 1800. Baghdad has suffered severely from visitations of the plague, and sometimes two-thirds of its population has been wiped out.
Social
One theory that has been advanced is that the devastation in Florence
caused by the Black Death, which hit Europe between 1348 and 1350,
resulted in a shift in the world view of people in 14th-century Italy
and led to the Renaissance.
Italy was particularly badly hit by the plague, and it has been
speculated that the resulting familiarity with death caused thinkers to
dwell more on their lives on Earth, rather than on spirituality and the afterlife. It has also been argued that the Black Death prompted a new wave of piety, manifested in the sponsorship of religious works of art.
However, this does not fully explain why the Renaissance occurred
specifically in Italy in the 14th century. The Black Death was a
pandemic that affected all of Europe in the ways described, not only
Italy. The Renaissance's emergence in Italy was most likely the result
of the complex interaction of the above factors, in combination with an influx of Greek scholars following the fall of the Byzantine Empire.
The plague was carried by fleas on sailing vessels returning from the
ports of Asia, spreading quickly due to lack of proper sanitation: the
population of England,
then about 4.2 million, lost 1.4 million people to the bubonic plague.
Florence's population was nearly halved in the year 1347. As a result of
the decimation in the populace the value of the working class
increased, and commoners came to enjoy more freedom. To answer the
increased need for labor, workers traveled in search of the most
favorable position economically.
The demographic decline due to the plague had economic
consequences: the prices of food dropped and land values declined by
30–40% in most parts of Europe between 1350 and 1400.
Landholders faced a great loss, but for ordinary men and women it was a
windfall. The survivors of the plague found not only that the prices of
food were cheaper but also that lands were more abundant, and many of
them inherited property from their dead relatives, and this probably
destabilized feudalism.
The spread of disease was significantly more rampant in areas of poverty. Epidemics
ravaged cities, particularly children. Plagues were easily spread by
lice, unsanitary drinking water, armies, or by poor sanitation. Children
were hit the hardest because many diseases, such as typhus and
congenital syphilis, target the immune system, leaving young children
without a fighting chance. Children in city dwellings were more affected
by the spread of disease than the children of the wealthy.
Father abandoned child, wife
husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through
the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury
the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their
dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine
offices ... great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of
dead. And they died by the hundreds both day and night ... And as soon
as those ditches were filled more were dug ... And I, Agnolo di Tura ...
buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those
who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth
and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept
for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all
believed it was the end of the world.
The Black Death caused greater upheaval to Florence's social and
political structure than later epidemics. Despite a significant number
of deaths among members of the ruling classes, the government of
Florence continued to function during this period. Formal meetings of
elected representatives were suspended during the height of the epidemic
due to the chaotic conditions in the city, but a small group of
officials was appointed to conduct the affairs of the city, which
ensured continuity of government.
Third plague pandemic
Worldwide distribution of plague-infected animals, 1998
The third plague pandemic (1855–1859) started in China in the
mid-19th century, spreading to all inhabited continents and killing 10
million people in India alone.
Twelve plague outbreaks in Australia between 1900 and 1925 resulted in
well over 1,000 deaths, chiefly in Sydney. This led to the establishment
of a Public Health Department there which undertook some leading-edge
research on plague transmission from rat fleas to humans via the
bacillus Yersinia pestis.
Modern treatment methods include insecticides, the use of antibiotics, and a plague vaccine. It is feared that the plague bacterium could develop drug resistance and again become a major health threat. One case of a drug-resistant form of the bacterium was found in Madagascar in 1995. A further outbreak in Madagascar was reported in November 2014. In October 2017 the deadliest outbreak of the plague in modern times hit Madagascar, killing 170 people and infecting thousands.
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