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Yersinia Pestis
magnified 2000 times
William of Ockham
John Wycliffe
Between the years 1000 and 1300 the availability of food in Christendom allowed its population to grow 2.5 times. Paris, Milan, Florence and Venice had become cities with more than 80,000 inhabitants. London, Cologne and Barcelona had more than 40,000. Rome, Naples, Vienna, Prague and Lisbon had more than 20,000, and Dublin had more than 10,000. But a decline in Europe's economy was on its way, and it would be followed by the worst of plagues.
By the year 1300 farm expansion in western Europe had come to an end, and marginally productive lands had been abandoned. Pastures, heaths and meadows had been converted to farming, and cattle raising had declined, reducing the amount of protein in diets and reducing manure for fertilizer, contributing to a decline in crop yields. This coincided with a climate change caused by the advance of polar and alpine glaciers, bringing longer winters, wetter weather and what is called a "Little Ice Age," which was to last for the next 400 years. The growing season shortened, and a major food source, herring, began to disappear.
Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Grain production failed in Iceland and diminished in Scandinavia. In the year 1315 rains were incessant and people talked of the return of the flood described in Genesis. Crops were ruined. With food shortages came a rise in food prices. People in cities were dependent on food grown no farther than one day's journey away - less than thirty miles. Between the years 1315 to 1317, famines developed in the poorer areas of Christendom. Hunger produced cannibalism. It is said that in Poland and Silesia the bodies of hanged criminals were taken down from the gallows as food for the poor.
Not helping matters was the beginning of the Hundred Years' War. The Norman-English king, Edward I (who ruled from 1272-1307, had married into France's royal family. The French king, Charles IV, died in 1328 and had no direct descendant to carry on the Capet line. Edward III, who became King of England in 1327, at the age of fifteen, was excluded from consideration as heir to France's throne based on a law which forbade those descended in the female line within the extended royal family to succeed to the throne. It was Philippe of Valois, at the age of thirty-five, who succeeded Charles IV, Philippe taking the title Philippe VI. It was the end of the Capet dynasty in France and the beginning of the Valois dynastry. Philippe intervened in a conflict in Flanders, on the channel coast, which was not yet a part of France and where the English were dominant. Edward of England retaliated and claimed again to be the legitimate ruler of France. Philippe countered by declaring that fiefs possessed by Edward in areas that he, Philippe, controlled were forfeited. This, in 1337, led to war between Edward and Philippe - with an alliance between Philippe and the Scots - the latter fighting the English monarchy's attempt to expand against them.
The increase in world trade within the last century or two had exposed more people to disease, and the increase in movement of people that came with war, exposed more people to disease. In December 1347 the disease was in the Crimea and Constantinople. That same month it spread to Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Marseille. By June, 1348, it was in Spain, Italy and as far north as Paris. By June 1349 it had advanced through London and central Europe. From there in the year and a half that followed it swung as if on a hinge in central Europe, through Ireland and through Scandinavia. It reached people weakened by decades of hard times and malnutrition.
The bubonic form of the disease was a bacterium (Yersinia pestis) spread by fleas from rats. The pneumonic form of the disease spread from one person to other people. This was made worse by crowding in the cities. Some cities lost from half to two-thirds of their population. Some small cities became ghost towns. Common folks were dying as well as the most pious. Perhaps a third of the Catholic clergy died, with priests who attended the afflicted being hit the hardest. The poor were hit harder than aristocrats because they were generally in poorer health and less able to resist the disease and because they were more crowded together. Wolves fared better and appeared in some capital cities.
People did not understand the source of the plague, and panic spread faster than the disease. The belief in witchcraft was revitalized. Believing that the end of the world was at hand, some groups engaged in frenzied bacchanals and orgies. People called the Flagellants believed that the plague was the judgment of God on sinful mankind. They traveled the country, men and women flogging one another. They preached that anyone doing this for thirty-three days would be cleansed of all his sins - one day for every year that Christ lived. The Church was still on guard against innovative religious proclamations, and in 1349 Pope Clement VI condemned the movement.
The wandering mobs focused their wrath upon clergy who opposed them, and they targeted Jews, whom they blamed for inciting God's wrath. In Germany rumors arose that Jews had caused the plague by poisoning the water. Pogroms followed. Jews were arrested. Their fortunes were seized by the lords under whose jurisdictions they lived, and Jews were put to death by burning. The attacks on Jews were condemned by Clement VI, and he threatened excommunication for those Christians who harmed Jews.
The success of this greatest of plagues was limited and destined to diminish. The body that the bacterium entered was its environment and source of life. It used up its environment and faded away but not completely.
It has been roughly estimated that a third of England died from the Black Death of 1348-49, and perhaps this figure is not far from the losses suffered in other areas of Europe through which the plague passed. Much farm land went into disuse, reducing the output of food. Farm animals died, further diminishing the food supply. With all the deaths, farms went into disuse. With all the deaths and drop in demand for food, the price of food dropped. In Western Europe the demand for labor rose, and, with fewer people around willing to work for less, wages rose. And in Western Europe the shortage of labor brought on by the plague increased the demand for slaves, cutting into the demand for free labor. Wealthy merchants vied for servants to staff their households. Craftsmen and shopkeepers felt that they had to keep slaves. Cobblers, carpenters, weavers and woolworkers bought men and women from the slave dealers to help in their industries. And more slaves were put on the market as hungry parents sold their children, preferring their children's enslavement to watching them starve to death.
In Western Europe, common folks were more inclined to rebellion. With labor in short supply they were aware of their added value as producers and eager to improve their situation. In response to rising wages, authorities started to fix wages at a low level - the opposite of a minimum wage. Hostility toward employers and authorities increased. Peasants and other workers tried to dodge these impositions. Peasants called for a reduction in service obligations. In cities, workers rose against the wealthy merchants who had been running city hall. Peasants and workers revolted in Spain, the Netherlands, southern Germany, Italy, and England.
In England, some asked why there was bondage when all were from one father and mother - Adam and Eve. Rebellion was mixed with religious fervor and a call for holding everything in common and for the abolition of differences between lord and serf. But in most of England were castles with soldiers enough to control local peasants, and the peasantry did not transform their questions into immediate and successful revolution.
While violent revolution was failing, social change by other means was taking place. Land had become cheaper to buy. With fewer people to labor in agriculture, serfdom was diminishing in western Europe. Landlords in need of people to work their lands had begun renting out their land to peasants for sharecropping, and great estates were being replaced by small farms.
But the opposite was happening in Eastern Europe. There, populations were less dense. Towns were smaller and more distant from one another. In Eastern Europe the availability of land had given peasants freedom and opportunity, and serfdom had all but disappeared. But, following the plague, this changed. The big landowners were unchecked by governmental authority, and they forced peasants to work their land under an added servitude that, except for slavery, was vanishing in the West.
Europe was enduring its longest economic depression. But linen production as an alternative to wool had arisen. Metal and glass industries were growing. The use of free labor - in contrast to slave gangs of ancient times - would in the 1300s contribute to inventions such as cogwheels, gears and suction pumps in mining. Power driven bellows were soon to make it possible to fully melt iron. Rare and expensive in ancient times, iron would soon become inexpensive and its use more widespread.
Europe was benefiting from geographical advantages. It had a variety of slow-moving rivers on which goods could be transported, which was easier and cheaper than transporting goods across land by pack animals as was done in some other parts of the world. Europe had just enough mountains for the slow moving rivers - rather than the higher mountains and faster moving rivers of India - useful in transforming water movement into mechanical power.
Europe also had no caste system to strangle initiative. And in Europe governments were uninterested in taking over or holding a monopoly on any industry. Industry in Europe was freer than in China. Instead of businessmen being dependent on government for favor, monarchs in Europe were dependent on businessmen. If a monarch repudiated his debts he was in effect killing the geese that laid the golden eggs.
Hard times did not diminish a passion for learning. And, as always, upheaval stimulated questions. The plague had caused people to question divine purpose, the nature of God and society. During these times the Franciscans defended their view that knowledge of God can come only through revelation and that the divine cannot be known through logic or reason. One of the more creative of such Franciscans was William of Ockham, who studied and taught at Oxford University.
Similar to Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham focused on the importance of specifics over Plato's abstranctions, and, unlike Aquinas, Ockham doubted that one could build from Aristotle's deductive logic to knowledge of the first cause of anything. He rejected abstractions hanging on to nothing concrete. There was no fatherhood, said Ockham, without fathers. He stated that what could be expressed in fewer words was expressed "in vain with more" - which came to be known as Ockham's razor. For William of Ockham it was back to apostle Paul, who based his Christianity on faith and scripture, not on Greek philosophy.
In scholastic circles Ockham's point of view gained wide popularity. But he was at odds with Pope John XXII, Ockham siding with those Franciscans that the Church condemned as heretics for holding onto the doctrine of apostolic poverty. The Inquisition was hunting down the rebel Franciscans, and Ockham fled to the court of the emperor Louis at Munich. The Pope dismissed Ockham from the Franciscan order in 1331. And Ockham died in Bavaria in 1349, a victim perhaps of the plague while he was trying to reconcile with the Church.
After Ockham's death, the intellectual movement to which he had founded grew, but while pursuing philosophical questions they still lacked interest in experimentation and quantification. They kept to the common belief that everything in nature operates in accord with the Divine Spirit [note] while their emphasis on the specific over the general was setting the stage for the scientific revolution of the 1500s.
The Church was interested in preserving its authority. That authority included supplying the masses with ritual and interpretation. Ritual was Latin, and the Bible was in Latin - a language for the priesthood, a tradition and holy. The Church felt threatened by some wanting to extend spiritual thinking to people who were not clergy. To protect its authority the Church considered such moves as heresy. More people were about to be burned at the stake.
John Wycliffe (1330-84) was a theologian at Oxford University wrestled with the question of authority. He saw authority as primarily in scripture, and he believed that everybody who could read should have access to it. He started a movement that translated the Bible from into English, copied by hand from the Latin Bible. In England, people hungering for spirituality became part of what was called the Lollard movement. Clerical wealth was rejected by many, including Wycliffe, who favored a return to the Christian asceticism.
The major occupation of nobles had been warfare. Among these nobles were the knights, who earned their knighthood through long and hard training on horseback from early childhood. The knights were vassals of some higher lord, or perhaps a king, whoever supplied him with the land that he was free to use - called a fief - in exchange for duty as a warrior. But on the field of battle knights on horseback were becoming an anachronism. Feudalism was in decline, with kings gaining over nobles and acquiring a monopoly on war-making and violence. England's King Edward III supported the trappings of chivalry, and during his reign the rise of heraldry, tournaments and banquets, courtly love and the writing of epic romances flourished. But in the place of knights, mercenaries were being hired. The English benefited from an army armed with the longbow, with arrows that hit effectively at a range of 250 to 300 yards and ten arrows shot per minute. There was also gunpowder and firearms, with less range and accuracy than the longbow, but greater range than the knights' weapons - the sword and lance.
England controlled the English Channel and the North Sea, and in 1346 the Hundred Years' War began in earnest. At the Battle of Crécy (pronounced cressy), Edward’s army of 12,000 faced a French army of 36,000 across a battle line 2,000 yards wide. Edward’s army had 7,000 archers, and they devastated the assaults attempted by France’s armored knights on horseback and foot soldiers with crossbows.
Ten years later, at Poitiers, the British defeated the French again, French knights and their horses falling in heaps. The English captured and held for ransom the French king, the successor of Philippe VI, John II (r. 1350-1364) and many French nobles - captivity and ransom a major goal and source of wealth for combatants.
Peasants near Paris disliked the increased tax burden that accompanied the Hundred Years' War, and they were fed up with being forced to labor on castles and fortifications and fed up with marauding English and French soldiers. Peasants near Paris called the Jacquerie went on a rampage in 1358, moving through the countryside, killing nobles, raping the wives and daughters of noblemen, setting fire to castle interiors and destroying estates. The aristocracy united against the rebels. They were better organized and had a larger army, and thousands of peasants were slaughtered - the guilty and the innocent alike.
In 1360 the first phase of the Hundred Years' War ended in a tenuous treaty - the Peace of Brétigny. In France, out of work mercenary soldiers, who had been hired by the English, were living off plundering the French. In England, knights idled by a truce in the Hundred Years' War were trying to keep up with the generosity and lavish style that had been a part of the culture of chivalry and resorting to their old habit of robbery and abuse against the poor. A group of vigilantes formed who would become known as Robin Hood and his band of followers, living in the Sherwood Forest. According to legend they were opposed to corruption and abuse by aristocrats, grasping landlords and wicked sheriffs. The governments under Henry IV and Henry V were dominated by aristocrats and reluctant to effectively combat robberies by the nobility. And those who were summoned to appear in court were inclined to intimidate witnesses, threaten jurors or bribe judges. [note]
In 1381 English peasants rose as they never had before. Peasants feared the lords would be taking back lands they had given them after the Black Death. Peasants were unhappy about having to work on Church land, sometimes twice in a week, making, as they saw it, the Church rich and leaving them unable to do needed work on their own land. The most pressing grievance was increased taxes - demanded by government to help pay for the Hundred Years' War. An incident regarding resistance to the poll tax that sparked the rebellion. Peasants marched from Kent to London, along the way burning to the ground buildings that housed tax records and tax registers. People in London opened that city's gates to them, and in London the king, Richard II, met the peasants at Mile End, gave them what they asked, and invited them to return home in peace. Some did not. Discipline among the rebels was lax. There was the drinking of alcohol. Some executed ministers, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sudbury, and they sacked the mansions of some bishops and lords.
Nobles in Gascony (south of Bordeaux) complained to the French king, Charles V (r.1364-80), about oppressive taxation by Edward III of England. Charles confiscated English holdings and Edward III reasserted his claim to the French throne. Warfare began again. Rather than confront the English in head-on battles, the French employed hit and run raids, wearing down the English. Stalemate, exhaustion and a slowing of warfare followed.
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