The Black Death peaked in Europe in 1348-1350 and by the time it was over, the "Great Mortality" had killed something like 25 million people--one-third of Europe's population at the time. In some places, it wiped out so many people that the authorities had to outlaw the ringing of church bells at funerals because the ringing never stopped. Entire villages disappeared into plague pits and bishops were sometimes forced to consecrate rivers so they could be used to dump the bodies. The exact number of fatalities is still a matter of conjecture, but there's no doubt that the Black Death was one of the worst natural disasters in human history.
Image: detail from The Triumph of Death (1562) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
"According to the Foster scale, a kind of Richter scale of human disaster, the medieval plague is the second greatest catastrophe in the human record. Only World War II produced more death, physical destruction, and emotional suffering, says Canadian geographer Harold D. Foster, the scale's inventor." --"The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time," by John Kelly. P.11.
No one knows where the Black Death came from exactly, but it's generally agreed that it "originated somewhere in inner Asia and spread westward to the Middle East and Europe and eastward to China along the international trade routes." (The Great Mortality, p.7) In other words, the spread of the pestilence was accelerated by a medieval form of globalism which brought Europe into contact with a lot of different cultures--something to keep in mind these days when air travel and open borders make it possible to spread diseases from one corner of the world to another in a matter of hours.
The Mongols picked up the disease on the steppes of Asia and brought it to Europe through trade and war. In 1346, during their siege of the Crimean city of Caffa, they were said to have catapulted the bodies of their own plague victims into the city--an early example of biological warfare if it actually happened. Once the Black Death caught hold, Genoese merchant ships--the notorious "plague ships"--carried it to ports throughout Europe, their holds full of merchandise, infected sailors and rats crawling with the fleas which carried the plague bacillus: Yersinia pestis, aka Y. pestis. No one understood the connection between fleas, rats and plague at the time, however. They thought the Great Mortality was the result of astrological alignments, foul air, the wrath of God and Jews poisoning their wells.
The pestilence itself apparently consisted of three different types of plague: bubonic plague -- transmitted by flea bites with a two-to-six-day incubation period; pneumonic plague -- a fast-acting and highly contagious form of the disease which attacks the lungs and can be spread like the common cold through the air; and the lethal septicemic plague, which floods the bloodstream with plague bacilli and kills everyone who gets it. According to Kelly, "during one outbreak of septicemic plague in the early 20th century, the average survival time from onset of symptoms to death was 14.5 hours." (The Great Mortality, p.22)
The Black Death spread so quickly--modern plague is fairly slow--that some scientists have speculated that it wasn't plague at all, but a form of anthrax or hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola, or some kind of extinct disease unknown to science. The consensus view, however, is that it was a particularly virulent ancestor of the modern bubonic plague. Whatever it was, it raced through Europe in an incredibly short period of time, wiping out millions and creating massive social upheavals.
The effects of this calamity were enormous.
Before the Black Death, medieval Europe was in a state of decline and stagnation. The feudal system was locked in place, the church corrupt and despotic, medicine and science crippled by religion and superstition. The population was very low by today's standards, but the number of people had grown to the point where it was putting a strain on available resources. The Black Death broke this stalemate by killing off a third of the population, driving up labor costs and forcing social reforms and technical innovations that played a large role in the Reformation.
"In the fifty years after the Black Death, the medieval world's traditional economic winners and losers exchanged places. The new losers, the landed gentry, began to see their wealth shredded by the scissors of low food prices and high labor costs; the new winners, the people at the bottom, saw their one marketable asset--labor--increase dramatically in value, and with it their standard of living rise." The Great Mortality, p. 285.
The depopulation brought about by the Black Death led to technological innovations like the invention of the printing press. The shortage of men for the armies led to new developments in firearms like the musket and cannon. The church's inability to respond to the crisis seriously damaged its prestige, leading to the emergence of new "heretical" movements like the anti-clerical Lollards and a general longing for a more personal religious experience. Medicine started using more scientific methods. Public health systems were created. New colleges were founded. Women began to move into the work force, taking over businesses previously run by their husbands who had died in the outbreak. The disaster played a huge role in the rejuvenation of Europe.
And that's the secret of the Black Death. Demographic collapses like this can be beneficial. "Mortality has its advantages," according to The Plague, a great documentary from the History Channel. For example, if you want to improve wages for the lower class, one of the most direct ways to accomplish this is to kill off a third of them. This will drive up wages for the survivors by creating a major labor shortage and turn the social system on its head. Natural catastrophes are one of the main engines of historical transformation. In the final analysis, the Black Death was a good thing because it helped to destroy a corrupt, dead-end culture dominated by the Catholic Church, facilitating the rebirth of Western Civilization.
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