Black death
Black deathBlack Death
A Outside Essay
What were the principal economic and social consequences of the Black Death?
"The most striking and immediate effect of the mortality was to bring about nothing less than a complete social revolution,"4
"It seemed as if the agriculture of the country was completely ruined."5
"The Black Death was not the sole cause of what was a major crisis in western civilization, for evidence of the changes can been seen well before 1347. But the Plague exacerbated problems and added new ones,"1
Origins of the Plague
The Black Death erupted in the Gobi Desert in the late 1320s. No one really knows why. The plague bacillus was alive and active long before that; indeed Europe itself had suffered an epidemic in the 6th century. But the disease had lain relatively dormant in the succeeding centuries. We know that the climate of Earth began to cool in the 14th century, and perhaps this so-called little Ice Age had something to do with it.
Whatever the reason, we know that the outbreak began there and spread outward. While it did go west, it spread in every direction, and the Asian nations suffered as cruelly as anywhere. tn China, tbr example, the population dropped from around 125 million to 90 million over the course of the 14thc.1
The Arrival in the West
It reached Cyprus late in summer 1347. In Oct. 1347, a Genoese fleet landed at Messina, Sicily. By winter it was in Italy.
January 1348, the plague was in Marseilles. It reached Paris in the spring 1348 and England in September 1348.
Moving along the Rhine trade routes, the plague reached Germany in 1348, and the Low Countries the same year. 1348 was the worst of the plague years.
It took longer to reach the periphery of Europe. Norway was hit in May 1349. The eastern European countries were not reached until 1350, and Russia not until 1351.
Because the disease tended to follow trade routes, and to concentrate in cities, it followed a circuitous route: the Near East, the western Mediterranean, then into northern Europe and finally back into Russia. The progress of the plague very neatly describes the geography of medieval trade.1
About the Disease
What was this disease? Bubonic plague is the medical term. It is a bacillus, an organism, most usually carried by rodents. Fleas infest the animal (rats, but other rodents as well), and these fleas move freely over to human hosts.
The flea then regurgitates the blood from the rat into the human, infecting the human. The rat dies. The human dies. The flea lives a long and happy life. Nature has a morbid sense of humor.
Symptoms include high fevers and aching limbs and vomiting of blood. Most characteristic is a swelling of the lymph nodes. These glands can be found in the neck, armpits and groin. The swelling protrudes and is easily visible; its blackish coloring gives the disease its name: the Black Death.
The swellings continue to expand until they eventually burst, with death following soon after. The whole process, from first symptoms of fever and aches, to final expiration, lasts only three or four days. The swiftness of the disease, the terrible pain, the grotesque appearance of the victims, all served to make the plague especially terrifying.1
Official Reactions
Contrary to what you might think, the reaction from public officials, and from many churchmen, was that this calamity was not the vengeance of God upon a sinful world but was a disease. Authorities took what steps they could to deal with it, but of course their effectiveness was limited.
Cities were hardest hit and tried to take measures to control an epidemic no one understood. In Milan, to take one of the most successful examples, city officials immediately walled up houses found to have the plague, isolating the healthy in them along with the sick.
Venice took sophisticated and stringent quarantine and health measures, including isolating all incoming ships on a separate island. But people died anyway, though fewer in Milan and Venice than in cities that took no such measures.1
The Flagellants
If the plague was a manifestation of divine anger, then Christians should do all they could to assuage that anger. From this simple impulse came the flagellants: bands of people who wandered through towns and countryside doing penance in public. They inflicted all sort of punishments upon themselves, trying to atone for the evil of the world, sacrificing themselves for the world's sins in imitation of Jesus.
Society generally wondered at them and did not approve. The flagellants showed a tendency to kill Jews they encountered, and even killed clergymen who spoke against them. In October 1349 the pope condemned them and ordered all authorities to suppress them. But flagellants reappeared in times of plague well into the fifteenth century.1
Some believed the plague was God's way of chastising a sinful world and sought to save themselves by confessing their sins. In (early) 1349, bands of men wearing tattered clothes, marching in pairs, carrying flags, and following their own leaders appeared in southern Germany. When they reached a town or village they visited the local church and, to the great astonishment of the congregation and the alarm of the clergy, sang hymns while publicly whipping themselves, according to strict rituals, until blood flowed. The flagellants, as they soon became known, cried out to God for mercy and called upon the spectators to repent their sins.2
Population Loss
Froissart's estimate of the population loss was about right, which is ironic because Froissart wildly exaggerated numbers in almost all his accounts. But the best of many revised estimates still put the overall population loss in Europe at about one- third.
This bears re-stating. The plague came to Europe in the fall of 1347. By 1350 it had largely passed out of western Europe. In the space of two years, one out of every three people was dead. Nothing like that has happened before or since.
These general numbers disguise the uneven nature of the epidemic. Some areas suffered little, others suffered far more. Here are some examples.
Between 45% and 75% of Florence died in a single year. 1/3 died in the first six months. Its entire economic system collapsed for a time.
In Venice, which kept excellent records, 60% died over the course of 18 months: 500-600 a day at the height.
Certain professions suffered higher mortality, especially those whose duties brought them into contact with the sick--doctors and clergy. In Montpellier, only seven of 140 Dominican friars survived. In Perpignan, only one of nine physicians survived, and two of 18 barber-surgeons.
The death rate at Avignon was fifty percent and was even higher among the clergy. One-third of the cardinals died. Clement VI had to consecrate the Rhone River so corpses could be sunk in it, for there was neither time nor room to bury them.
Long-term population loss is also instructive. Urban populations recovered quickly, in some cases within a couple of years, through immigration from the countryside because of increased opportunities in the cities. Rural population though, recovered itself slowly, for peasants left their farms for the cities.
Hardest hit were special groups, such as the friars, who took a couple of generations to recover. In many areas, pre-plague population levels were not reached until the 1500s; in a few, not until the 1600s.
This is one reason why the Black Death marks a dividing line between the central Middle Ages, with medieval culture in full bloom and at its greatest strength, and the later Middle Ages. The later period was one of chronically reduced population.1
Economic & Social Effects
Cities were hit hard by the plague. Financial business was disrupted as debtors died and their creditors found themselves without recourse. Not only had the creditor died, his whole family had died with him and many of his kinsmen. There was simply no one to collect from.
Construction projects stopped for a time or were abandoned altogether. Guilds lost their craftsmen and could not replace them. Mills and other special machinery might break and the one man in town who had the skill to repair it had died in the plague. We see towns advertising for specialists, offering high wages.
The labor shortage was very severe, especially in the short term, and consequently, wages rose. Because of the mortality, there was an oversupply of goods, and so prices dropped. Between the two trends, the standard of living rose... for those still living.
Effects in the countryside were just as severe. Farms and entire villages died out or were abandoned as the few survivors decided not to stay on. When Norwegian sailors finally visited Greenland again in the early 15thc, they found in the settlements there only wild cattle roaming through deserted villages.
Whole families died, with no heirs, their houses standing empty. The countryside, too, faced a short-term shortage of labor, and landlords stopped freeing their serfs. They tried to get more forced labor from them, as there were fewer peasants to be had. Peasants in many areas began to demand fairer treatment or lighter burdens.
Just as there were guild revolts in the cities in the later 1300s, so we find rebellions in the countrside. The Jacquerie in 1358, the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381, the Catalonian Rebellion in 1395, and many revolts in Germany, all serve to show how seriously the mortality had disrupted economic and social relations.1
Although the Black Death took a horrible human toll, the disaster actually profited some people. In an overpopulated society with limited resources, massive death opened the ranks for advancement. For example, after 1350, landlords had difficulty acquiring new tenant farmers without making con-cessions in land contracts; the vast army of priests found more benefices to support them; and work-ers received much higher wages because the supply of laborers had dwindled. The Black Death and the resulting decline in urban population meant a lower demand for grain relative to the supply and thus a drop in cereal prices.
For the peasantry and the urban working population the higher wages generally meant an improvement in living standards. To compensate for the lower demand and price for grain, many peasants and landlords turned to stock breeding and grape and barley cultivation. The reduced cereal prices also stimulated sheep raising in place of farming, so that a portion of the settled population, especially in the English midlands and in Castile, became migratory.
Because of the shrinking population and thus less of a demand for food, cultivating marginal fields was no longer profitable, and in areas settled during the previous centuries of demographic and geographic expansion, many settlements were simply abandoned. In the hundred years following the Black Death, for example, some four hundred fifty large English villages and many smaller hamlets disappeared. In central Europe east of the Elbe River, where German peasants had migrated, large tracts of cultivated land reverted to forest. Estimates suggest that some 80 percent of all villages in parts of Thuringia vanished.2
Thorold Rogers, a great medievalist, wrote a theory on the effects of the plague with limited but plausible information. 'The effect of the Plague,' he wrote, 'was to introduce a complete revolution in the occupation of the land.' His contention, in grossly over-simplified form, was that commutation, that is to say the substitution of wages and rent in monetary terms for the labour services owed by the villein (an unfree peasant standing as the slave of a feudal lord but free in legal relations with respect to all others) to the lord, was already well advanced by the time of the Black Death. The sudden disappearance of so high a proportion of the labour force meant that those who already worked for wages were able to demand an increase while those who had not yet achieved this status agitated to commute their services and share in the benefits enjoyed by freemen. If the landlord refused, conditions were peculiarly propitious for the villein to slip away and seek a more amenable master elsewhere.
The landlord was thus in a weak position. Finding himself forced to pay higher wages and obtaining lower prices for his produce because of the reduced demand, he increasingly tended to break up his demesne (manorial land actually possessed by the lord and not held by tenants) and let it off for a cash rent to the free-men or villeins of his manor. But he did not succumb without a fight and Parliament came to his rescue with legislation designed to check increased wages and the free movement of labour. The landlords sought to put back the clock and not only to hold on to the relatively few feudal services which still existed but to exact others which had been waived in the period before the Black Death while labour was cheap and plentiful. The result was resentment on the part of the serfs which simmered angrily for thirty years and finally erupted in 1381 in the shape of the Peasants' Revolt.
'The immediate effect of the Plague,' wrote Rogers, 'was to double the wages of labour; in some districts to raise the rate even beyond this.'
But even though Rogers's estimate may be on the generous side as an average for the whole of England, it is clear that wages rose rapidly and substantially and imposed a heavy burden on any landlord who depended largely on paid labour to farm his demesne.
Professor Rogers and the other proponents of his theories are also undoubtedly right in saying that prices of agricultural pro-ducts fell steeply during and directly after the Black Death; thus making still more troublesome the life of the landlord. Lack of demand was, of course, the prime cause.
Poultry seem more or less to have main-tained their prices and corn did reasonably well because of a poor harvest in 1349, but the price of wool was lower than at any other time in the fourteenth century. Against this, the cost of manufac-tured products, many of which the landlord would have had to buy, tended to rise steeply because of difficulties of transport and of the death rate among the skilled artisans who, unlike the agricultural workers, had no pool of surplus labour ready to fill the gaps. Every one knew how to cut hay but few indeed were competent to make a nail.
Professor Rogers's third point is no less valid. There was un-doubtedly greater mobility of labour during and directly after the Black Death and any landlord unready to make concessions to his tenants might well find that they had vanished to seek a kindlier master.
The proof that labour was on the move is provided by the energetic efforts which the Government made to check it. The Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 and the subsequent Statute of Labourers in 1351 were, inter alia, a direct attempt to prevent workmen trans-ferring their loyalties from one employer to another.
It is no more possible to dispute that these phenomena existed than it is to doubt Rogers's contention that the landlord -- unable to hire labour except at greatly increased wages, unable to get a good price for his products or to buy what he needed for the farm except at exorbitant cost; unable to enforce his manorial rights because the villeins fled when he attempted to--was sorely tempt-ed to abandon the struggle altogerber. His remedy was to let off the demesne to the tenants for a cash rent in units small enough for them to farm themselves. The Black Death introduced a situation in which land was plentiful and labour scarce. The scales were thereby tipped against the land owner.
We can thus safely agree with Rogers that the Black Death must have led to important changes in the social and economic structure of the country.3
Persecution of the Jews
As ever in Europe, when a crisis arose, the Jews were easy targets of blame. They were not the only group accused of poisoning water or practicing witchcraft and hence bringing on the plague, but they suffered the anger of mob violence over a wide area.
There were massacres, especially in the cities along the Rhine River, and many more cases of the Jews being expelled from the town. On one day in Strasbourg in 1349, nearly 200 Jews were burned to death by an angry mob.
These actions were outbursts of popular anger and fear, not the instigation of the Church or even of the civil authorities. Pope Clement VI issued two bulls in the summer of 1348 forbidding the plunder and slaughter of the Jews. He pointed out that Jews were suffering as severely as Christians. Yet in September 1348, Zurich closed its gates to the Jews.
A few towns actually protected their Jews, with the city authorities or the bishop coming to their defense. But the Jews were being expelled generally from western Europe during the 14th century, and they were tolerated in Poland and Lithuania. So when the persecutions associated with the Black Death arose, some Jews simply migrated eastward and did not return.1
In some communities the religious fervor the flagellants aroused spawned violence directed at the Jews. From 1348 to 1350, antisemitic persecutions, beginning in southern France and spreading through Savoy to the Holy Roman Empire, destroyed many Jewish communities in central and western Europe. Between November 1348 and February 1351 violence against Jews erupted in at least one hundred German cities. Thousands of German Jews were slaugh-tered. Many fled to Poland, where the incidence of plague was low and where the authorities wel-comed Jews as productive taxpayers. In western and central Europe, however, the persecutions of 1348 to 1350 destroyed the financial power of the .Jews, who had benefited from the commercial rev-olution of the thirteenth century, and culminated in waves of expulsions in the fifteenth century.2
Cultural Effects
As the chroniclers said, the plague touched everyone, rich and poor alike. The noted Florentine historian, Villani, wrote this: "And many lands and cities were made desolate. And the plague lasted until ________" Villani left a blank at the end of the sentence, planning to fill in a date after the plague had abated. He never did. Villani died in 1348 from the plague.
The whole community of scholars suffered as universities and schools, usually located in regions hardest hit, were closed or even abandoned. Sixteen of the forty professors at Cambridge died.
Likewise in the institutions of the Church. The priests died and no one could hear confession. Bishops died, and so did their successors and even their successors.
The loss of life in such great numbers and to so gruesome a disease, brought despair everywhere. Why would God do this? and why could not His servants in the Church avert or mitigate His wrath?
"During this great epidemic of death [in Tuscany] more than eighty died of every hundred, and the air was so infested that death overtook men everywhere, wherever they might flee. And when they saw everybody dying they no longer heeded death and believed that the end of the world was at hand."
The tone in this excerpt finds echoes throughout Europe. There were those indeed who believed this calamity marked the end of the world. Even after the crisis had passed, and the world remained, there were those who wondered why God should have so scourged the world.1
Art
The tone of despair appears eventually in the art of the times, though not immediately. By the later 1300s, when many parts of Europe had been visited two or three times by the disease, there appears a strain of grisly morbidity that is still compelling.
One striking example can be seen in tomb sculptures. A great lord was buried in a sarcophagus: the body was in a coffin, which in turn was in a larger stone casing that was usually decorated. The sides might be decorated with religious carvings, but the lid of the tomb often held the likeness of the one entombed.
Where previously these sculptures showed the lord in his armor with his sword and shield, or the lady in her best clothes, and both in full bloom of health, around 1400 we begin to see a disturbing change. The sculptures of some (only some -- this was never the dominant style) show half-decomposed bodies with parts of the skeleton clearly visible. The clothes draping the body were rags, and some showed worms and snails burrowing in the rotting flesh.
It was and is a ghastly sight. The knight's tomb is a reassuring denial of death; the face composed and well-featured, the accoutrements of busy life all about. But the cardinal's tomb tells the brutal truth: all flesh is grass. Normally, we prefer to close our eyes to this, but this sculptural style will not let us. It's disturbing to see, but equally disturbing is the thought that such grimness could find a place as an artistic style.1
The danse macabre
A similar brutality appeared in paintings, too. Here the style has a name: the danse macabre, the Dance of Death. The motif shows skeletons mingling with living men in daily scenes. We see peasants at a harvest festival, or workmen at a construction site, or hunters in a forests. And in each scene, mingled with the living, are skeletons: skeleton horses carry corpses to the hunt; peasant girls dance with death; a skeleton receives an infant from its baptismal font.
The juxtapositions are shocking, for they catch us at our merriest moments and remind us of horror and loss. It's a cruel sort of art. It is even more striking when you realize that these works were commissioned. These are no paintings wrung out by tortured souls in isolation. These are works specifically requested by churches or monarchs or city councils, and they were displayed in public places. Not only did artists render these frightening images, their patrons paid for them, displayed them, and ordered more.1
Political Effects
The plague had no permanent effect on the course of politics, but it did take its toll. King Alfonso XI of Castile was the only reigning monarch to die of the plague, but many lesser notables died, including the queens of Aragon and France, and the son of the Byzantine emperor. Parliaments were adjourned when the plague struck, though they were reconvened. The Hundred Years' War was suspended in 1348 because so many soldiers died. But it started up again, soon enough.
The effect at local levels was more severe. City councils were ravaged. Whole families of local nobles were wiped out. Courts closed down and wills could not be probated.
But new courts were convened. The legal mess caused by so many deaths was eventually sorted out, and political life went on. Still, more than once you will read of a siege being lifted because of the plague, or of some principality falling into disarray because the prince died of the Black Death.1
Historical Timing of the Plague
The plague itself was disastrous enough, especially in the appearance of more than one form during the sarne epidemic. But coming when it did was as catastrophic as its form. The middle 14th century was not a good time for Europe.
The European economy was already in difficulties. It was approaching the limits of expansion, both on its frontiers and in reclaiming land from forest and swamp. The arrival of the Mongols and thc Ottomans had disrupted trade routes, and certain areas of Europe were edging into depression.
Worse, the overall climate was changing, with cooler and wetter weather creating lower crop yields even as the population was increasing. By the early 1300s we begin to hear of great famines.
The Church was in poor shape as well. The popes resided at Avignon, not at Rome, to the scandal of many. Heresy could be found in England and Bohemia and southern France, and the Church seemed unable to control it. The Holy land had been lost in the 1290s and efforts to recover it had been dismal failures.
The Hundred Years' War added war to plague and famine. Just two years before, at Crccy, the English had inllicted a great defeat on France. Soon would appear the routiers, mercenary armys that served one king or the other or, when neither king could pay, would roam the countryside in search of plunder.
The d fficulties created by war and a constricted economy were exacerbated by the Black Death. There is a relationship here, of course. The effects of the plague were made worse because of thesc other problems. And the problems themselves were redoubled because of the plague.1
Information Sources
1 Dr. E. L. Skip Knox, "HWC, The Black Death,"
(http://history.idbsu.edu/westciv/plague)(Aug. 18, 1995)
2 Lynn Hunt, et al., The Challenge of the West
(Toronto: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995), 440-441
3 Philip Ziegler, The Black Death
(St. James Place, London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1969), 233, 237-239
4 Gasquet, The Great Pestilence, 2nd ed., p.227.
5 Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 5th ed., vol. i, p.332