Other Casualties of the Black Death

The deaths of between one fourth and one third of the Old World’s people were not the only casualties of the Black Death. Another casualty was the fate of European Jews. For example, in Spain there was a large and successful Jewish population. These Jews were treated better than anywhere else in Christian Europe and they had prospered by serving as tax collectors, physicians, pharmacists, and estate managers. With the coming of the Black Death this tolerance came to an end and an era of “virulent anti-Semitism” began. By the time the plague had run its course in Southern Europe, whole communities of Spanish Jews no longer existed. In Germany it was much worse.

...the Jews were suddenly and violently charged with infecting the well and water, and corrupting the air. The whole world rose up against them cruelly on this account. In Germany... they were massacred and slaughtered by Christians, and many thousands were burned everywhere, indiscriminately.

Jean de Venette

In Switzerland, Jews were expelled, burned, and massacred. The violence against the Jews in Europe waned as the plague waned but by 1351, 60 major and 159 smaller Jewish communities were extinct, over 350 massacres had taken place, and the many of the remaining Jews immigrated to Eastern Europe, into Poland and Russia.

The psychological terror of the plague’s devastation not only led to scape-goating but it also left many of the survivors with a lost faith in themselves and in their institutions. The optimism of the High Middle Ages was replaced by pessimism. Art and literature reflected the gloom and doom of the time.

..the gay light, individualistic themes (in art) begun in the thirteenth century (1200’s)... were replaced by a new conservatism and moralizing tone brought by the Black Death.

Generally...themes of youth, exuberance, happiness and joy were played down. The dance of death became a common literary motif. Mystery plays with religious themes also became common, and they usually told of human decay and the torments of hell. There was much written about the ages of life mostly in the form of calendars, with analogies to the seasons of the year. In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (1200-1330’s), the calendars emphasized spring and summer; in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (1350-1500), they turned to themes of autumn and winter.

R. S. Gottfried

The faith in the clergy of both the Islamic and Christian religions, the very foundation of Middle Age society, was weakened by their response to the plague. Muslim clerics rejected the idea that the plague was a contagious disease transmitted from person to person and told their faithful not to flee. Instead the faithful were told it was God that disseminated the disease and they should stay and accept Allah’s will. This martyrdom did not sit well with many of the faithful. Other Muslim leaders told their followers that the plague was punishment for wrong-doing and that true believers would not be harmed. This, as many true believers found out, was not true.

Christians, on the other hand, listened to their physicians, who were trained and licensed by the Church. Unfortunately the advice these learned men of the cloth gave on how to avoid the plague proved useless. In addition, many of the parish priests fled leaving no one to comfort the sick or deliver the last rites to those that died. When the plague subsided, the Church no longer had as powerful a hold on its subjects as it had before the outbreak of the plague. While most still believed in the teachings of the Church, they questioned whether the clergy were necessary to attain salvation. Many post-plague Christians felt they could communicate with God through a saint or directly themselves without the intervention of the clergy. Years of famine and pestilence had changed the attitude of the people from one of dependence to one of individualism and self-reliance.

Older ineffective methods and traditional authorities were cast away.

R. S. Gottfried

Dissatisfaction with the clergy, coupled with depopulation, also began to pull apart the social order of medieval society. Before the subsistence crisis and the return of the plague, medieval society was theoretically divided into three classes. The first class was the clergy. Their role was to obtain divine grace for all through prayer and good works. Because they were well educated, they also served as the society’s clerks and bureaucrats (this lead to corruption that added to the dissatisfaction over their inability to deal with the plague). The second class was the local king, the nobles, and military elite. The first and second classes owned the land. The third class was the agricultural workers, the peasants or serfs. In return for a place to live and the protection of the military, the serfs tilled the soil of the elite and grew the crops. In time this class also included the workers and merchants in the towns. These were the taxpayers of the society. (Sound familiar?) This societal structure is called feudalism.

When the plague ended, the first class, seen as corrupt and not to be doing their jobs, was discredited. The depopulation of Europe, which continued until the 1500’s due to recurrences of the plague and other infectious diseases, ended Europe’s subsistence crisis and turned the economics of the feudal system on its head. Before the plague the land-owners and hunger held complete control over the serfs. After the plague, food prices plummeted and there was shortage of labor. Land-owners had to hire wage laborers to farm their land. These laborers demanded higher wages and better food. They got both. The living standards of the third class rose while the income of the aristocracy fell (20 % between 1337 and 1353).

For the peasants who farmed the land, depopulation, providing they survived the plague, was a great boon. Yet for those who held the land as lords -- the aristocracy and the clergy-- it was disastrous. ... Land was no longer as valuable has it had been, but the laborers were worth much more than before. ... High wages and low prices were ruining the lords, while members of the third order (class) were embarking on 150 years of comparative prosperity.

R. S. Gottfried

When the aristocracy tried to reinstate the old order though legislation, there was a series of peasant revolts between 1358 and 1381. These revolts reflected the sharp conflicts between the classes that developed after the plague as the ruling classes attempted to deny the lower class the better fortune depopulation had brought.

The labor shortage also brought a boom in the slave trade. The Black Death depopulated the areas that were the traditional source of European slaves. Italian slave traders looked to new areas from which to obtain slaves. One place they looked was the plague-free Sahara Dessert of Africa. The slavery of Africans was also a casualty of the Black Death, a casualty that would have future ramifications in a place soon to be rediscovered, the New World.

Let’s check out what happened to those rediscovers – the Vikings. (The American Indians found it first! )

Next Post: The Vikings

By the way: One thing that was not a casualty of the depopulation of the Old World was the environment of Europe. Depopulation had a positive effect on the land. Fields lay fallow because the villagers that once farmed them were either dead or had fled. Forests and pasture-land were restored and over-cropping ended. The raising of animals was once again profitable and agriculture diversified. Instead of a monoculture of wheat, farmers began to grow grapes for wine, sugar and fruits, oats to feed livestock, barley to make ale and beer, and crops of hemp and flax for the one of the new industries of the time, the textile industry (underpants were all the rage). By the early 1400’s, the soil exhaustion of the 1300’s came to an end and yields began to rise.

Take home message ?....

Overpopulation which leads to environmental degradation is also an important factor affecting the ability of humans to feed themselves via agriculture. Climate change is very important but when it is compounded by overpopulation and environmental degradation, civilizations are in really big trouble. This is because the carrying capacity of the environment decreases even more – the ability of a civilization to feed itself diminishes.