The Black Death

“Whatever one’s thesis about the inevitability of the Black Death it cannot be denied that it found awaiting it in Europe a population singularly ill-equipped to resist.”

In the middle ages, medical science was in its infancy, public sanitation was largely non-existent, and a host of other factors in health and standards of living made the medieval peasant a ripe for infection as vicious and unforgiving as the Black Death bacterium Y. pestis.

“This description exemplifies the curious blend of sober eyewitness reporting and superstitious fantasy which is characteristic of so many similar chronicles.”

The medieval worldview was characterized by simultaneous naivety and realism—the products of, respectively, the lack of a scientific process and the wealth of lived experience. Honest and remarkably accurate information would be logged alongside fantastical conclusions, with equal weight given to both.

“Their efforts were as futile as their approach was fatalistic.”

The efforts of medical practitioners were almost entirely useless because of how little was known about the Black Death’s incubation period, transmission mechanism, and any possible cures. Once a patient reached the point of needing a doctor, it was already too late.

“The rich and privileged fled, the poor remained to drown their fear in looted liquor and die in their hovels.”

Epidemics typically separate the privileged and the marginalized based on access to resources. Medieval wealthy were able to sequester themselves or flee to lands deemed safer, while those without the means to do so had to resign themselves to riding out the storm wherever they happened to be. This added class resentment to the already complex social unrest that followed.

“To the more sophisticated the excesses of the Flagellants may have seemed distasteful; to the more prudent, dangerous.”

While the popularity of the Flagellants waxed and waned, they consistently had their critics. One such was the institutional Church, which eventually put the movement under interdict and excommunication. Another was a lay minority that considered the Flagellants’ extreme practices to be distasteful and dangerous to popular piety.

“Clement promptly interdicted public penance and prohibited their pilgrimages under threat of excommunication.”

The Flagellants eventually fell afoul of the Church, which declared the movement’s more extreme views heresy and proclaimed that its practitioners were developed a cult of personality rather than exercising true faith. Pope Clement’s administration worked towards stamping them out.

“The Jew had become a figure so hated in European society that almost anything might have served to provoke catastrophe.”

While the Jewish communities of medieval Europe were consistently marginalized and resented, the Black Death was the catalyst for more extreme antisemitism. Violence against Jews, who were massacred throughout the continent, was the result of baseless scapegoating.

“Even today the science of epidemiology cannot provide a fully conclusive answer—the problem of where and when a disease will strike next is still unsolved.”

Just as contemporary epidemiologist cannot predict epidemics, in the Middle Ages this was completely impossible—especially when medieval science could not even determine the means of disease transmission.

“The England of 1348, politically and economically, was not in so frail a state as some of the countries on the mainland of Europe.”

England suffered massive losses during the Black Death, but it was among the more prepared countries to face the plague. In many ways, England recovered more quickly than other parts of continental Europe due to its greater resources.

“[T]he arguments which suggest a higher death rate among priests than laics are more convincing.”

Secular reports of the death toll and ecclesiastical records show that there was a higher rate of death among the clergy than among the laity. This was due both to the more advanced age of the average priest and to the fact that priests often ministered to the sick and dying, thus exposing themselves to the plague at higher rates than the average person.

“The Black Death was the work of God, and against God they could not fight.”

One factor that made the plague so difficult to deal with was the blow to morale that it dealt everywhere. When a community fights an enemy, it can unite and find a meaningful common purpose. Seeing the plague as a divine judgment, however, meant experiencing it helplessly—it could not be opposed, but only suffered.

“Death had always been a preoccupation of medieval man; now it became an obsession.”

Medieval people were more accustomed to seeing death than modern readers in the absence of nursing homes, funeral parlors, and hospice care. However, the Black Death made dying an ongoing and pervasive psychological trauma that affected generations of Europeans.

“Sanitation equipment, it need hardly be said, was scarce and primitive.”

While the building up of cities advanced public health and sanitation somewhat, infrastructure was still quite primitive. In the time of the plague, even the best systems were completely overwhelmed, unable to deal with the conditions that contributed to the spread of illness and disease.

“Though, as everywhere, the poor suffered most, there were quite enough deaths among the rich and powerful to show that nobody was immune.”

Greater wealth in the Middle Ages meant greater access to health and wellbeing. The Black Death, however, leveled the mortality rate playing field by striking so hard, fast, and widely that typical avoidance practices were largely irrelevant.

“The sharp fall in moral standards which was noticed in so many parts of Europe in the years after the Black Death was nowhere more striking than in London.”

Many who survived the plague suffered severe emotional and psychological wounds. The plague awakened apathy and nihilism that made everything seem unimportant; morality took a backseat to a more hedonistic, short-term outlook.

“No rural economy, however resilient, could recover quickly from devastation on this scale.”

The medieval economy was based largely on rural activities and the ability work the land. Such a massive loss of life was an economic disaster that was unsolvable until individual communities could find the means to replace the labor pool or redesign agricultural work.

“In some cases, where the authorities lost their grip, the more prosperous citizens formed vigilance committees and took their protection into their own hands.”

While governments attempted to handle the epidemic as best they could, it was often impossible to continue normal function. As political power decentralized as a result, individual communities created local institutions to keep residents safe.

“To survive the Black Death was not to survive unscathed. Indeed, in some ways, the shock which it inflicted on the minds of men seemed even more significant than the fearful harvest which it had reaped among their bodies.”

The plague had a massive physical, mental, and emotional toll on its survivors, who faced the trauma and survivor’s guilt. They also had to rebuild a completely changed and devastated world.

“In every country the great majority of those who lived and those who died were village dwellers, dependent on agriculture for their existence.”

With the majority of people dependent on agriculture, the lack of labor endangered the land, which without proper maintenance could go to waste or ruin.

“The academic historian rightly distrusts, even if he does not despise, the work of imaginative reconstruction produced by the historical novelist.”

Using the facts of the historical record to create an “imaginative reconstruction” is a subtle balancing act that helps modern readers empathize with the lived experience of the past.

“The first and, in some ways, most perplexing problem is the size of the total population in the middle of the fourteenth century.”

Something that makes the precise impact of the Black Death difficult to ascertain is the vague data on the exact populations of various countries and communities. Though we have more accurate records of the numbers of the dead, it is difficult to ascertain the exact proportion of Europe’s population that died.

“As a rough and ready rule-of-thumb, therefore, the statement that a third of the population died of the Black Death should not be too misleading.”

Based on the best estimates of the populations of medieval Europe, it seems safe to hypothesize that one out of every three citizens succumbed to 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 in increase while those who had not yet achieved this status agitated to commute their services and share in the benefits enjoyed by freemen.”

With the sudden and drastic decline in available labor force, those who remained were able to demand higher wages; employers now needed to compete for laborers, creating the opportunity for social mobility that did not exist before.