Then, around the start of the fourteenth century, the weather and even the climate changed noticeably. Winters were colder and longer. Heavy rains poured down summer after summer on France, Germany, the Low Countries, and England, depriving crops of warmth and sunlight. The seasonal changes peasant farmers relied on to determine when to sow their crops grew undependable. Cities on the coastlines of northern Europe experienced severe flooding. In the North Atlantic, sheets of ice permanently covered Greenland, so named when its land had been green, not white. The inhabitants of England and the Low Countries turned to brewing beer instead of making wine once the colder weather put an end to grape cultivation there. The Little Ice Age had descended on northern Europe.
To make matters worse, much of the previous century’s increase in agricultural production had occurred in regions with rocky, unsuitable soil. Signs of soil exhaustion appeared early in the fourteenth century. Because it now took more seed to yield the same amount of crops as before, peasants had to put aside a larger share of their grain for the next year’s sowing. Meager harvests in the years when rains did not wash away the entire crop meant less food for the peasant family and less to sell at market. A ten-acre plot of land would have fed a peasant family a generation earlier, but no longer. The land was overworked.
By 1315, rain, colder weather, and soil exhaustion had created the conditions for a severe famine across much of northern Europe. Failed crops and the difficulties of transporting food from where it could be found to where it was needed meant that most people experienced the pain of hunger, and thousands starved to death. Those who lived were weak and malnourished. The famine lasted three years, faded, and then recurred intermittently in succeeding decades whenever harvests were poor. Livestock, too, declined, and peasants resorted to eating whatever they could find: cats, dogs, rodents, and horses. By the middle of the fourteenth century, northern Europe’s population increases had been reversed.
Fear of starvation set people in motion. From the northern English city of York to the trading posts of Poland, rain, flooding, and perpetual winter turned thousands of people into refugees. Villages became ghost towns, while cities became temporarily overcrowded, until their populations, too, succumbed to starvation. Entirely dependent on grain imports to feed its inhabitants, the population of the manufacturing city of Ypres in the Low Countries fell drastically in 1317. Bands of beggars roamed the countryside, while in cities most crimes involved theft of food. Municipal authorities ordered the town gates locked at night. Like the Frankish kings of the early Middle Ages, secular rulers could offer little protection to their subjects. Disorder prevailed, and for most people, the situation could not have gotten much worse.
And then it did. In the summer of 1347, a deadly plague, later called the Black Death, swept across western Europe. The symptoms were unlike any seen before. Swollen, bruised lumps on the lower abdomen, in the armpits, or on the throat were the first indicators.
Lymph glands swelled to the size of an egg or larger in the groin and armpits. If the glands burst, causing internal hemorrhaging, the suffering was unbearable and death was inevitable. If they did not, then the victim might survive, but most often they burst. Someone retiring to bed in the evening with a slight fever might never wake up. An airborne form of the bubonic and pneumonic plague affecting the lungs could bring death within hours. Other symptoms— bruises and spots appearing all over the body—led some physicians (and a few modern historians) to wonder if more than one disease was at work.
Most historians agree that the disease that made death a daily, if not hourly, possibility was the bacillus Yersinia pestis, or bubonic plague, so called for the inflamed swellings, or buboes, of the lymph glands.
Beginning in Central Asia, spreading westward into the Byzantine and Turkish territories, the plague was carried—though its victims did not know it at the time—by fleas on rats. Rats hidden on vessels heading west carried the disease to the Aegean Islands and then to Sicily, where it was first seen in September 1347. Six months later, the disease had spread north to Florence, where it killed half the population between March and September 1348. Over the course of 1349, the plague spread across Spain and northern Europe, reaching eastern Europe in 1350. Between a third and a half of the people of Europe died.
The cities and towns of Italy were hardest hit, for they had the greatest concentrations of population. In Florence, the devastation was reported in The Decameron by the poet and storyteller Giovanni Boccaccio: “Many dropped dead in the open streets, both by day and by night, whilst a great many others, though dying in their own homes, drew their neighbours’ attention to the fact more by the smell of their rotting corpses than by any other means. And what with these, and the others who were dying all over the city, bodies were here, there and everywhere.” After the first wave, the plague repeatedly flared up and then died down again. It recurred every ten years or so until the early fifteenth century, when the number of outbreaks increased even more.
Physicians had few remedies for the suffering taking place around them. Weakened immune systems made people vulnerable to other diseases, such as smallpox and influenza, the symptoms of which complicated understandings of what they observed in their patients. Because the number of deaths in heavily populated areas was so high, physicians believed the disease spread by contact between persons. Because everyone, not just physicians, lacked an understanding of germs, poor hygiene and filth contributed to the spread of disease.
The only option open to medical men and the women who worked more informally as healers was to fall back on methods familiar to them: astrology, bloodletting, and herbal medicine. Inadvertently, some of these methods may have helped in certain situations, but in general, physicians proved to be as helpless as the rest of the population in the face of the plague’s virulence. Mostly, they simply urged people to flee the congested areas where the plague was rampant. But the working poor and the destitute had nowhere to go, and so the plague claimed more victims among the humble than among the rich, who fled to their country estates. Parents abandoned their children, children abandoned their parents, and priests deserted their flocks.
In the face of so much suffering and death, the people of Europe searched for spiritual comfort and some means of understanding the disasters. Rulers could do little for their people; nor could the church offer much in the way of physical relief. Locally, the comfort church services and rituals could provide depended largely on the survival and courage of local priests. Many laypeople sought a deeper involvement in religious life. Others, believing that God had abandoned humanity because of its sins, assumed a despairing, cynical attitude toward life. In the face of so much inexplicable death, it took fortitude to survive Death preoccupied everyone everywhere. Poets personified death in their poems, and writers such as Boccaccio described the devastation. In The Canterbury Tales, the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer created characters who were hardened by the deaths of so many around them.
Some felt the need to take responsibility for the catastrophe by joining penitential groups. Believing that the plague represented God’s punishment for their sins, people living mainly in cities flocked to join confraternities, associations dedicated to the performance of acts of charity and whose processions through city streets were now meant as public penance.
A few groups went to extremes by ritually whipping themselves in public. When the flagellants, as they were called, drew blood with their scourges, they drew the admiration of some and aroused the revulsion of others. Groups of flagellants had existed in the thirteenth century, but their popularity waned after the church condemned their activity in 1261. After the plague hit, flagellants went from town to town in processions, scourging themselves as they walked, until, in 1349, Pope Clement VI again condemned the activity. Others felt the need to blame someone else, and Jews proved to be convenient scapegoats.
Across Europe, whole communities of Jews died at the hands of rioting Christians who believed that the Jews had poisoned the water supply or in some other mysterious way introduced the disease. Such persecutions caused some Jews to leave western Europe, migrating east toward Poland and Russia, where they remained in large numbers until the twentieth century, or southeast toward Muslim lands, where they received a slightly warmer welcome.
By Frank L. Kidner (San Francisco State University), Maria Bucur (Indiana University), Ralph Mathisen (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Sally McKee (University of California- Davis) and Theodore R. Weeks (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) in the book 'Making Europe- People, Politics and Culture' Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston & New York, 2009, chapter 11 (Reversals and Disasters 1300-1450), p.295-299. Edited and adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa
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