The Black Death
The Black Death arrived in Europe with a form of biological warfare. In 1346, the Mongol army of the Golden Horde besieging the Genoese trading city of Caffa on the Crimean peninsula began to die of a mysterious plague. The Mongol commander, reportedly, ordered the corpses of plague victims catapulted over Caffa's walls. Whether this was truly the mechanism of transmission or an early example of wartime mythology, the Genoese merchants who fled Caffa by ship certainly carried the disease with them. By October 1347, twelve Genoese ships docking at Messina in Sicily brought plague to western Europe; the harbourmaster ordered them immediately back to sea, but it was too late. The disease — caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, transmitted primarily by fleas hosted on rats — spread at terrifying speed along trade routes both maritime and overland. It reached Marseille and Genoa by January 1348, Paris and southern England by summer 1348, Scandinavia and Poland by 1350, and Russia by 1352. Estimates of mortality have been debated for generations, but the best current scholarship suggests that between 30 and 50 per cent of Europe's population died within five years — somewhere between 25 and 50 million people. Some cities and regions lost two-thirds of their population. The psychological impact on survivors was almost incomprehensible. Medieval medicine could neither explain nor cure the plague. The dominant theory — miasmatic poisoning of the air — led to advice to burn aromatic herbs and flee to higher ground, useless against flea-borne infection. Some physicians recommended bloodletting, which killed the weakened patients more rapidly. The Church, unable to explain why a just God had sent such catastrophe, splintered: some clergy stayed at their posts and died; others fled. Flagellant movements — processions of men beating themselves bloody in public penance — swept across Germany and the Low Countries, terrifying to witnesses and carriers of the disease to new communities. Jewish communities across Europe were accused of poisoning wells and massacred in pogroms from France to Poland, despite the evident fact that Jews died of the plague at the same rates as Christians. The social and economic consequences were as transformative as the mortality. With a third to a half of the peasantry dead, surviving agricultural labourers found themselves in sudden possession of bargaining power they had never previously held. Lords who had extracted maximum rents and labour services from a surplus population now competed to attract and retain workers with wages, lower rents, and better conditions. Serfdom — the legal binding of peasants to the land — became increasingly difficult to enforce and began its long unravelling across western Europe. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 in England, the French Jacquerie of 1358, and similar uprisings across Europe were direct products of the social tensions the Black Death had unleashed: new expectations meeting still-entrenched elite resistance. The Dance of Death — Danse Macabre — emerged as a ubiquitous artistic motif: skeletal Death leading popes, emperors, merchants, and peasants in an equalising procession to the grave. The Church's failure to prevent or explain the plague damaged its moral authority in ways that would compound across the following century into the conditions that made Wycliffe, Hus, and ultimately the Reformation thinkable. Giovanni Boccaccio, who witnessed the plague in Florence, set his Decameron (1353) in a villa where ten young aristocrats flee the city and tell each other stories — the Black Death as the frame that makes literature both possible and necessary.
- Year: 1347 CE
- Category: Social
