In October 1347, a ship with a crew of dead and dying sailors slipped into the harbor at Messina, Sicily. The infected sailors were covered with stinking, oozing sores and they were delivering an unexpected cargo, the Black Death.
The Black Death had two varieties. One strain infected the bloodstream causing swelling (buboes) in the lymph nodes and internal bleeding. It killed within a few days. The other strain was pneumatic, infecting the lungs. There were no government mandates requiring masks, so coughing people spewed their infection on everyone in their vicinity. The respiratory version could kill within 24 hours.
Europeans had been hearing stories for more than a year about a dreadful disease with hideous symptoms that killed almost instantly. The stories that passed along the Silk Road and other trade routes were so horrifying they sounded like a fairytale. Most Europeans thought death on such a scale was impossible.
The disease spread faster than a wildfire across Europe, as more ships with infected crews arrived at European ports. International trade shut down as port cities began refusing ships permission to dock in a doomed effort to stop the spread of the disease.
The Black Death gyrated around Europe, infecting one region, then moving to another region. During winter, it seemed to disappear only to start killing again the following spring. As dead bodies piled up, officials had difficulty finding volunteers sufficiently healthy and willing to dig the graves. In Avignon, France, bodies were simply tossed into the Rhone River.
Jean Froissart, the medieval French chronicler, claimed that a third of the world died from the disease. Tax rolls indicate that about half the people died in many places. Major cities suffered the most thanks to the wretched sanitary conditions. (The modern equivalent of medieval city life are the slums around great cities in Africa, India and South America; places full of small businesses and entrepreneurial people who are neglected by the politicians living in gated communities with guards and flushing toilets.)
As people died, the medieval social contract collapsed. The medieval world was hierarchical, with a king (or sometimes a queen), sitting atop a pyramid of land-owning aristocrats which included the Catholic church, and agricultural workers who were literally owned by their liege lords. Everyone owed allegiance to the tier above them. But with so much death, allegiance meant nothing.
Those who didn’t die were left in a fog of anxiety and gloom. To alleviate their fears of death, many people stopped working and indulged in a frenzy of partying, fornicating, and thievery. (Thucydides records similar behavior during the great plague of Athens in 430 B.C. Another example is Berlin in 1945 when Nazi functionaries drank, fornicated, and stole whatever they could before the Russians arrived.)
Farmers stopped farming as they sank into a numbed apathy caused by the death of friends and family. As much as half the arable land was abandoned because there was no one to work in the fields. Since the harvest of one year was critical for winter food supplies and the seed needed for the following year’s crops, much of Europe faced the threat of famine.
After a couple of years, the Black Death subsided and a new “normal” took over. The new normal looked a bit like the aftermath of the covid pandemic with bargaining power swinging to the workers. Nothing helps to raise wages like killing off half the workforce.
In 1349, the tanners of Amiens demanded huge wage rises to compensate them for the extra work caused by staff shortages. Textile workers in northern France received three pay raises within a year after the Black Death laid waste to their region. It wasn’t just labor shortages; the price of everything was rising.
At first, merchants had taken a huge hit as they marked down excess inventory. Then goods became scarce due to slow production caused by a lack of workers and supply chain interruptions. Prices soared leaving many people unable to afford necessities, like food.
When the Black Death arrived, Europe was already transitioning to a new economic model based on money rather than barter. The new economy shifted power to the cities and their guilds. The Italian banking houses were amassing vast sums of money that greased the wheels of commerce. Now, with a shortage of workers and peasants transitioning to paying jobs in the cities, the relative losers were kings who collected taxes from fewer taxpayers and aristocrats who had land but no money. (Fans of Downton Abbey will recognize the theme of genteel poverty.)
The kings and aristocrats naturally objected to their relative loss of power and passed laws suppressing wage rises. England’s Statute of Laborers issued in 1345 was used until the 20th century as the basis for “conspiracy” charges against union organizers. The reactionary laws caused rising resentment and friction between rich and poor, aristocrats and peasants. Aristocrats may have lacked cash, but they were still one-percenters in the eyes of the peasants.
In 1381, rising taxes in England and France led to open revolts. The kings and aristocrats eventually won, but at the cost of many more lives and vast stretches of ruined land and cities. It was an exercise in futility. The old Medieval social contract was gone for good. After the Black Death, cities steadily gained power as everyone transitioned to a money-based economy.
This account is based on A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara W. Tuchman (1978). For those wanting a deeper dive into the transition to a money-based economy try Feudal Society, by Marc Bloch (1939). In the public TV series Secrets of the Dead, (Season 3, 2002), a geneticist studied an English village which escaped the Black Death due to a genetic mutation. Interestingly, the mutation seems to also create an immunity to the modern scourge of HIV/Aids.
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