For reasons involving water and sewage and the capacity to encircle urban enclaves with high defensive walls, no city in the thirteenth century had more than 125,000 people. But the heartland areas were also dotted with small towns of 5,000 to 20,000 people and innumerable villages holding 500 to 2,000 souls.
In many respects the Europe of the thirteenth century, whose total population probably came close to the 50 million level of the Roman Empire at its peak, was a remarkably creative society and culture. Governmental agencies were instituting modern bureaucratic and legal systems. Well-endowed and heavily enrolled universities were the sites of brilliant theorizing about philosophy and theology as well as providing professional schools for training lawyers and teachers.
Magnificent Gothic churches were erected and the visual arts in general—sculpture, painting, and colored-glass blowing—attained a level of ingenuity never to be surpassed. The vernacular national literatures of Europe were in the course of formation, and the texts invented by medieval poets and narrators are still intensely scrutinized today in all university literature departments for their subtle psychology and intrinsic aesthetic value.
The Latin Europeans were afraid of neither the Muslim Arabs to the south nor the Greek Orthodox Slavs to the East and were pushing out their frontiers in those directions. It was a thriving, productive, and creative society and it was astonishingly peaceful—there was no major war fought in Europe between 1214 and 1296. In many ways the Europe of the thirteenth century resembled that of the nineteenth century.
But there was one important difference. Europe of the nineteenth century, at least in the second half, invested heavily in scientific research and laid the basis thereby for first The New Physics of the early decades of the twentieth century and then the biomedical revolution after 1940. Thirteenth-century Europe, aside from research on optics, which led to introduction of eyeglasses, and improvement in mechanical clocks, made no scientific progress.
Short of algebra before the sixteenth century, prohibited by Church restrictions and popular attitudes from undertaking dissection of the body so that even the blood-pumping function of the heart was not known, and lacking professorships in natural science in the universities, the intellectual realm attained wonders in theological and philosophical speculation but in understanding nature barely advanced beyond classical antiquity.
Microscopes and telescopes did not appear before 1600. The favorite science textbooks of the thirteenth century were those of Aristotle, written in the fourth century b.c. Aristotle was an overachieving genius but he was fundamentally in the wrong about scientific essentials and until Aristotle was discredited around 1600 Europe was stuck in an intellectual cul-de-sac.
This Latin Christendom of the thirteenth century was an immensely creative but amazingly one-sided culture. It fatally did not apply its resources to scientific research, whether physics or biology. It had some knowledge of chemistry but wasted it on alchemy, trying to turn base metals into gold. It had a little knowledge of astronomy but wasted it on a rage for astrology and fortune-telling.
Europe was weakest in biomedical areas. Except for a few eccentrics like Roger Bacon, the Oxford Franciscan, it was an arrogant, heedless culture that could build a magnificent church and develop a new legal system as well as any culture, including our own, that has ever existed. But it had no understanding of disease, neither its nature nor its cure, and it was extremely vulnerable to epidemics. Essentially it had only nonbiomedical responses to devastation of a breakdown in societal health—pray very hard, quarantine the sick, run away, or find a scapegoat to blame for the terror.
The rarest attribute in any society and culture, when things are generally going well, and peace and prosperity reign, and bellies are full of good food, and the sun shines and the rain falls appropriately, is to notice certain cracks in the edifice, some defects and problems, which if not attended to could in time undermine the happy ambience and bring on distress and terror.
We are today not as good at this self-scrutiny as we ought to be, but thirteenth-century Europe was far worse.
This was partly due to unbroken political and economic progress since about 950 and partly due to the Christian outlook embraced by the intellectuals and power-brokers: the almost universal belief that Latin Christendom was on direct route to ever happier days culminating in the Second Coming of Christ, which was only postponed until all peoples of the earth joined the Church.
What pessimists there were in the thirteenth century mainly expressed their doubts about constant felicity in an apocalyptic format called Joachimism, after a south Italian abbot and preacher who died in 1200, Joachim of Flora. The Joachimists claimed that the world was entering an era in which Satan would sit on the throne of Peter, no less, in Rome, and there would be darkness and terror before the Second Coming. This pessimistic view developed from the biblical Book of Revelation and possibly the Jewish mystical Kabbalah. It was condemned by the holders of power and by most intellectuals and combated by the papacy and was confined to a small minority. Since it was an entirely religious projection, it would not have been much help in analyzing the defects in Europe’s material infrastructure and remedying them.
Thirteenth-century Europe was suffering from a classic Malthusian situation (named after the gloomy nineteenth-century economist). Its booming population, made possible by a long period of unusually warm weather and no epidemics, producing an adequate food supply and with it improved nutrition and longer lives, was beginning to strain at the limits of the food supply and the available space for increasing agricultural production to keep pace with the escalating population. Every premodern society has at one time or another experienced this Malthusian crunch.
Medieval Europe could do nothing about it except to turn its slash and burn methods of clearing forests against the steadily shrinking wooded areas, or to bring under the plow hilly and rocky countryside not suitable for cereal crops and hitherto used exclusively for pasturage. Real estate prices rocketed upward along with the population boom, and the price of grain and meat, the staple of the food chain, by the mid–thirteenth century was becoming an obstacle to the comfortable life of the peasantry and urban working class.
In premodern societies there was no agricultural chemistry to improve crop yields. The only ways out of the Malthusian maelstrom were a physical disaster, in the form of bad weather and crop failure generating widespread mortality from famine, and man-made terror in the form of warfare and massacre of the civilian population. Europe in the first half of the fourteenth century experienced both of these cruel correctives, enervating health and engendering a general feeling of pessimism and lassitude toward secular problems, and thereby providing a particularly adverse context for the outbreak of the Black Death.
Around 1290 Europe’s good times ended, and historians debate when they returned—some say around 1500 but more recently it is claimed not until 1700. In the same quarter of a century Europe was hit by the end of the long peace, and by bad agricultural weather. It grew colder and wetter and for two summers in the second decade of the fourteenth century there was widespread crop failure in Western Europe and a great famine that began to reduce the population. Historians wonder whether this deteriorating weather was a natural cyclic change that occurs every two or three centuries in the northern hemisphere or if it was brought about by a specific natural disaster—volcanic eruptions in the East Indies that within two years had blocked out the sun in Europe for months at a time with an ashen cover in the atmosphere. Possibly both events occurred simultaneously.
Compounding the climatic changes were the man-made disasters of the very long and ruinous war between Europe’s two powerful monarchies, those of France and England. While conventionally known as the Hundred Years War that began around 1340 it was more like a 150-year war that commenced in 1296. France and England plunged into a century and a half of imperialistic conflict over the textile cities of Flanders (Belgium) and wine-growing regions of Gascony (Bordeaux). Ther
e were long truces and interruptions, but the general effect was wasting of the French countryside in the western third of that country.
The war also generated organized rural crime in England headed by the heavily armed and well-trained demobilized soldiery who attacked England’s civilian population when they were not sacking the French villages and towns. Warfare erupted in other places—the English and Scottish border, Spain, and parts of Germany and Sicily.
The good times were over. Hunger and violence stalked Europe on the eve of the Black Death of the late 1340s. But the new cataclysm immensely exceeded the already prevailing disasters. The deterioration of the food supply due to bad weather and war had weakened the resistance of Europeans to infectious diseases.
CHAPTER TEN
Aftermath
BEAUTY CAME IN THE late morning under the warm sun and reached fulfillment in the afterglow of the late afternoon. Then darkness fell and the cold bleak wind rustled the landscape under a chilly moon.
It is impossible to get this picture of the European Middle Ages, or some similar metaphor drawn from nature and climate, as in Johan Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), out of our heads. It is ingrained in our stereotype of the medieval historical arc—the early, high, and late Middle Ages. In the metaphorical construct, of course, the Black Death stands as the moon of cold darkness, or the onset of harsh bared-tree autumn passing into winter.
The Dance of Death, macabre skeletons rising en masse from murky graveyards, was a favorite motif of art and literature in the century following the Black Death of the 1340s. Huizinga never doubted that artistic motifs were a screen on which were projected the ideological anxieties of a society. For him the Dance of Death exhibits pessimism, lassitude, and loss of confidence on the part of the courtly culture of the late medieval aristocracy unable to confront and control the realities of life.
We can at least go this far with the incomparable Huizinga (who wrote Autumn in a few months after his department head reminded him it was publish or perish time). The chaotic morbidity that the era of the Black Death featured would give artists the idea for the Dance of Death. It was, after all, not a very subtle motif.
And then what followed? How did Western society advance from the meanness and turmoil of the Black Death era, when bodies piled high in the streets, and mass graves were thinly covered by hastily piled earth, leading to the horrid stench of the simultaneous decay of thousands of bodies? What if anything has all this death and destruction to do with the onset of the Renaissance, the golden glow of neoclassical courtly and artistic creation at the end of the fifteenth century?
This question has challenged the wit and imagination of historians, inspiring answers all the way from nothing to everything. The Black Death came and went and left barely a trace of anything, said David Knowles in 1962. It made possible the Renaissance and proto-modern world, by breaking up the old culture, according to David Herlihy in 1995. The Black Death was the trauma that liberated the new.
It can be readily seen that the Black Death accelerated the decline of serfdom and the rise of a prosperous class of peasants, called yeomen, in the fifteenth century. With “grain rotting in the fields” at the summer harvest of 1349, because of labor shortage, the peasants could press for higher wages and further elimination of servile dues and restrictions. The more entrepreneurial landlords were eventually prepared to give in to peasant demands. The improvement in the living standard of many peasant families is demonstrated by the shift from earthenware to metal cooking pots that archeologists have discovered.
The Black Death was good for the surviving women. Among the gentry, dowagers flourished. Among working-class families both in country and town, women in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries took a prominent role in productivity, giving them more of an air of independence. The beer- and ale-brewing industry was largely women’s work by 1450. The growth of a domestic wool-weaving industry allowed working-class women to become industrial craftsmen in the textile industry. The graphic picture of farm women churning butter in their kitchens that George Eliot gave us in Adam Bede (set in the 1790s) was certainly occurring by 1400.
As in all primarily rural societies during times of economic upheaval, there was a flocking of “misdoers”—criminals, beggars, and prostitutes—to London from the countryside. It was like many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America today.
The biomedical devastation had a strange and complex impact on the Church. It may have reinforced a trend away from optimism to pessimism, from a God who could be partly encapsulated in reason and was a mighty comfort and fortress, to one whose majesty and planning and rationale were impenetrable, although that pessimistic inclination was already rising in intellectual circles thirty years before the Great Pestilence.
The century after the Black Death was marked—in England, France, the Low Countries, and Germany—by what may be called the privatization of medieval Christianity. This took both organizational and spiritual forms. Organizationally there was a rush by the affluent upper middle class to found chantries, private chapels supported by one family or a small group of families. The great lords and millionaire gentry and merchants had always had private chapels. Along with the capability of having three hundred people for dinner in your household, it was the signal conspicuous consumption of great wealth.
In the more plebeian chantries, the rising middle class imitated their betters. Even the workers organized into craft guilds got into the act. The labor corporations also became confraternities that sustained private chapels and provided burial benefits to their members.
Spiritually and intellectually, the century after the Black Death in England and elsewhere in northern Europe was marked by the rise of intense personal mysticism and separately by a privatist kind of bourgeois behavior in elaborate spiritual exercises.
The most remarkable mystical text was the anonymous The Cloud of Unknowing of late-fourteenth-century England. A reasonable guess would attribute authorship to some Carthusian monk. What is remarkable is The Cloud comes close to the concept of nirvana in Oriental religion. This is negative rather than positive mysticism, which was heretofore the main-line medieval form. The Cloud offers not a reaching out to God in the twelfth-century Neoplatonic manner, which was now assumed to be impossible, but an emptying out of all intellect, imagination, and feeling from consciousness; a nirvanic condition of total negativity and depersonalization that allows the inrushing of God’s love and majesty into individual souls.
The other shift in late medieval religious sensibility was compulsive focus on the body of Christ. This inspired the elaboration of the Corpus Christi festivals and procession in the late medieval town and countryside. It drove the new fashion of taking the sacramental wafer as often as possible, instead of the old prescribed minimum communion of once a year. Eating Jesus in the Mass became the self-help mode of late medieval Christianity.
It is, however, impossible to answer the question of whether these departures in the institutional and emotional sides of medieval Christianity were a reaction to the pessimism, loneliness, and despair of the plague years.
Probably these changes would have happened anyway. They were built into late medieval social trends, the expression of the middle class, and attitudes of the yeoman class. They are examples of “asceticism in the world” that Max Weber associated with the Protestant Reformation of the early sixteenth century but that antedated the Reformation by more than a century.
The Black Death provided an activating psychological context for privatization of late medieval religions. It did not create it.
Its direct impact on the Church was more in the way of affecting personnel. At least 40 percent of the parish clergy, equal to the mortality rate among the peasants and workers they ministered to, were in the late 1340s carried off. Some cathedrals’ chapters were close to being wiped out, and many abbeys were similarly devastated, even though these were privileged precincts.
This meant a shortage of per
sonnel to maintain staffing levels and gravely threatened institutional stability and continuity. The solution was to recruit and appoint much younger men, after petitioning the archbishop and pope to relax age requirements set down in canon law during the population explosion of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
During and immediately after the Black Death, priests were ordained at twenty rather than twenty-five. Monastic vows could be administered to adolescents at age fifteen rather than twenty. Priests took over parish churches at age twenty instead of twenty-five. It was a younger, much younger Church that came suddenly into being, and one now staffed heavily with undereducated and inexperienced people.
University graduates previously redundant in their numbers and underemployed, like humanities Ph.D.’s today, were strongly in demand in the post-Death years. They disturbed the surviving older generation of church officials by bargaining for higher pay and greater privileges. Almost immediately the excess employment pool of university graduates was drained to zero.
This had the unanticipated effect of driving the spread of the Lollards, the feared radical heretics whose founders came out of Oxford seminars, especially John Wycliffe’s, to attack church leadership, and ecclesiastical morality, and to question even the efficacy of the Sacrament of the Mass. The Lollards also aroused fear and anger in the established Church by allowing women to preach in their communities. The Lollards could point to the inadequate quality and quantity of ecclesiastical staffing, the ignorance of the parish priests, and the greed and selfishness of the monks. These complaints were echoed in the writings of the contemporary poets.
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