Cheery topic, I know. But ever since examining that catastrophic year in a graduate history class years ago, I have realized how much the Great Mortality, as many contemporaries called it, changed the western world forever.
First the facts. It's impossible to say how many people died of Bubonic Plague in 1348 and the three successive years it spread over Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, but estimates are that from 75 to 200 million people died. If we take the high number and extrapolate for today's 7 billion population, that would be like 2.8 Billion people dying over the course of four years. That's almost nine times the population of the entire U.S. So the obvious result is that all of a sudden, there were a lot less people around, especially in big cities. The plague is thought to have originated in China and come by way of the Silk Road to India, Arabia, North Africa, and Europe via Mediterranean ships.
But there were so many other consequences besides a cull on the population. First of all, attitudes towards life changed. Before, life was seen as being just the preparation for eternal life in heaven. If we had to suffer a little, so what? As long as we would get our eternal reward, it was worth it. Only the highest born and the clergy could read, so minds were a little bit closed. These were the Dark Ages, after all. But no one needed to read - they were born on a lord's land and grew up working the land. There was no need to ever move, and in fact, in the feudal system, it was illegal. You were pretty much stuck where you were born.
But then, suddenly, there were people dying all around for no apparent reason. They had no real idea of how disease spread, so many chalked it up to God's anger. Many thought it was how the world would end. (Just think, if it had killed everyone in the known world, a new era of history would have begun with the primitives of the Americas and Australia. They might have one day evolved civilizations of their own which might have sent boats across the ocean to discover Europe). So people began to live for today. They were freer in their thought and actions.
With everyone dying, it seemed like God had abandoned them. So why be good? If you were just going to die anyway, what was the point of doing anything for the future? Why bother to work the land? There would be no more harvests, and no more planting. Many people adopted very casual attitudes towards life. They began to work less, and as they died, the land and the animals (the backbone of their economy) suffered too. The lords weren't about to work their own land, nor could they. So survivors, who sometimes felt like they were in God's good graces, started to hire themselves out, demanding much more money and getting it. The lords had no choice. Capitalism had begun.
And with shortages of people came shortages of supplies. So barter became more popular. If I had chickens and you had wheat, we could make some kind of a deal that the lord wouldn't be party to. Free enterprise sprang up. Before, the feudal manor produced everything one needed. After, you had to get things where you could. With barter came marketplaces, which eventually turned into towns and then cities. The lords became less important and less powerful. People started to take their fates into their own hands. People started to become individuals. Of course, there were individuals before, but common people never thought beyond the walls of their manor.
If it weren't for the Black Death, the feudal system might never have ended, or would at least have been seriously delayed. The industrial age might never have needed to happen. The Enlightenment might never have come. No Renaissance. No Age of Reason. Our growth as a civilization would have been seriously stunted. No Magna Carta, no Rights of Man, No American Revolution. A European History without the Black Death would have been a much more peaceful affair. Eventually the peasants would revolt, as in the Peasant Rebellion of 1381 (I think) but they would be driven back, there leaders hanged. And life would continue. When the population got big enough and the peasants outnumbered the aristocrats by a significant enough margin, then the tables might turn. In Russia, it took until 1917.
So the Black Death was a good thing in the long run. Or was it? That depends on if you like the way things turned out. But one thing for sure, things would be very different if it had never happened.
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