The Great Famine and the Black Death | 1315-1317, 1346-1351 | Lectures in Medieval History (2023)

The 14th century was an era of catastrophes. Some of them man-made, such asthe Hundred Years' War, the Avignon Papacy, and the Great Schism. These werecaused by human beings, and we shall consider them a bit later. There were twomore or less natural disasters either of which one would think would have beensufficient to throw medieval Europe into a real "Dark Ages": the Great Famineand the Black Death. Each caused millions of deaths, and each in its waydemonstrated in dramatic fashion the existence of new vulnerabilities in WesternEuropean society. Together they subjected the population of medieval Europe totremendous strains, leading many people to challenge old institutions and doubttraditional values, and, by so doing, these calamities altered the path ofEuropean development in many areas.

By the beginning of the 14th century, however, the population had grown tosuch an extent that the land could provide enough resources to support itonly under the best of conditions. There was no longer any margin for cropfailures or even harvest shortfalls. At the same time, however, the WesternEuropean climate was undergoing a slight change, with cooler and wettersummers and earlier autumn storms. Conditions were no longer optimum foragriculture.

We have noted that there had been famines before, but none with such alarge population to feed, and none that persisted for so long. A wetSpring in the year 1315 made it impossible to plow all of the fields thatwere ready for cultivation, and heavy rains rotted some of the seed grainbefore it could germinate. The harvest was far smaller than usual, andthe food reserves of many families were quickly depleted. People gatheredwhat food they could from the forests: edible roots, plants, grasses,nuts, and bark. Although many people were badly weakened by malnutrition,the historical evidence suggests that relatively few died. The Spring andSummer of 1316 were cold and wet again, however. Peasant families now hadless energy with which to till the land needed for a harvest to make upfor the previous shortfall and possessed a much smaller food supply inreserve to sustain them until the next harvest.

By the spring of 1317, all classes of society were suffering, although,as might be expected, the lower classes suffered the most. Draft animalswere slaughtered, seed grain was eaten, infants and the younger childrenwere abandoned. Many of the elderly voluntarily starved themselves todeath so that the younger members of the family might live to work thefields again. There were numerous reports of cannibalism, although one cannever tell if such talk was not simply a matter of rumor-mongering.

You might remember the story of Hansel and Gretel. Abandoned in thewoods by their parents during a time of hunger, they were taken in by anold woman living in a cottage made of gingerbread and candy. They saw thatthe old woman was bringing in wood and heating the oven, and theydiscovered that she was planning on roasting and eating them. Gretel askedthe woman to look inside the oven to see if it was hot enough, and thenpushed her in and slammed the door. Like most of Grimm's FairyTales, this is a rather late tale, but it is illustrative of the grimpossibilities with which the old tales for children are fraught.

The weather had returned to its normal pattern by the summer of 1317,but the pople of Europe were incapable of making a quick recovery. Animportant factor in this situation was the scarcity of grain available tobe used as seed. Although historians are still unsure of the validity ofthe figures, records of the time seem to indicate that a bushel of seedwas needed in order to produce four bushels of wheat. At the height of thehunger in the late Spring of 1317, starving people had eaten much of thegrain normally set aside as seed, as wall as many of their draftanimals.

Even so, any of the surviving people and animals were simply too weak to work effectively. But about ten to fifteenpercent of the population had died from pneumonia, bronchitis,tuberculosis, and other sicknesses that the starving sufferers' weaknesshad made fatal, and there were consequently fewer mouths to feed. SoEurope was able to recover, although only slowly.

It was not until about 1325 that the food supply had returned to arelatively normal state, and population began to increase again. Europeanswere badly shaken however. The death rate had been high, and even noblesand clergy had perished from hunger. The world now seemed a less stableand "gentle" place than it had before the Great Famine. Another folk talethat arose about this time suggests a new and more violent attitude amongthe populace, the story of The Mouse Tower of Bingen

The land of the prince-bishop of Bingen, a district on the Rhine riverabove Cologne, had suffered a severe short-fall in its harvest, and foodwas in very short supply. Nevertheless, the bishop demanded that everyonepay him their full rents and taxes in money and in kind. He then used themoney to buy up what food remained in the market, and stored all of it inthe fortress tower in which he lived. He dismissed all of his dependentsand servants, and then shut and locked all of the gates and doors to thetower in order to be sure that people would not try to enter and steal thefood he had hoarded there. But he need not have worried about that -- thepeople were all gone. They had eaten every blade of grass and every kernelof grain in the land. Some had died, while others had fled and left thebishop as the only living person in Bingen. Just as he was congratulatinghimself on having been clever enough to have survived the great hunger incomfort, he heard noises outside and at the doors. He rushed to the top ofthe tower and saw a terrible sight. All of the starving rats and mice fromthe entire region had smelled the food and were hurrying toward his tower.

There is an old stone tower in the German city of Bingen, and it isstill pointed out to visitors as the famous Mouse Tower of the Bishop ofBingen.

During the next few years, the European economy slowly improved, andagricultural and manufacturing production eventually reached pre-faminelevels. This return to normalcy was suddenly ended in the year 1347 by adisaster even worse than the Great Famine.

Since the failure of Justinian's attempt to reconquer the lands of theWestern Empire in 540-565, Europe had been relatively isolated, itspopulation sparse, and intercommunication among its villages slight. Itwas as if the continent were divided up into a number of quarantinedistricts. Although many diseases were endemic (that is, they were alwayspresent), contagious diseases did not spread rapidly or easily. So thelast pandemic (an epidemic that strikes literally everywhere within ashort time) to strike Europe had been the one brought to the West byJustinian's armies in 547. By the 14th century, however, the revival ofcommerce and trade and the growth of population had altered thatsituation. There was much more movement of people from place to placewithin Europe, and European merchants travelled far afield into many moreregions from which they could bring home both profitable wares andcontagious diseases. Moreover, the diet, housing, and clothing of theaverage men and women of Western Europe were relatively poor, and ashortage of wood for fuel had made hot water a luxury and personal hygienesubstandard.

Contrary to popular belief, medieval people actually liked towash. They particularly enjoyed soaking in hot tubs and, as late as themid- thirteenth century, most towns and even villages had public bathhouses not unlike the Japanese do today. The conversion of forest intoarable land had reduced the supply of wood, however, and the bath housesbegan to shut down because of the expense of heating the water. They triedusing coal, but decided that burning coal gave off unhealthy fumes (Theywere right, by the way) and abandoned the use of the stuff. By themid-fourteenth century, only the rich could afford to bathe during thecold Winter months, and most of the population was dirty most of thetime, even if they did not enjoy being so

The Black Death seems to have arisen somewhere in Asia and was broughtto Europe from the Genoese trading station of Kaffa in the Crimea (in theBlack Sea). The story goes that the Mongols were besieging Kaffa when asickness broke out among their forces and compelled them to abandon thesiege. As a parting shot, the Mongol commander loaded a few of the plaguevictims onto his catapults and hurled them into the town. Some of themerchants left Kaffa for Constantinople as soon as the Mongols haddeparted, and they carried the plague with them. It spread fromConstantinople along the trade routes, causing tremendous mortality alongthe way.

The disease was transmitted primarily by fleas and rats. The stomachsof the fleas were infected with bacteria known as Y. Pestis. Thebacteria would block the "throat" of an infected flea so that no bloodcould reach its stomach, and it grew ravenous since it was starving todeath. It would attempt to suck up blood from its victim, only to disgorgeit back into its prey's bloodstreams. The blood it injected back, however,was now mixed with Y. Pestis. Infected fleas infected rats in thisfashion, and the other fleas infesting those rats were soon infected bytheir host's blood. They then spread the disease to other rats, from whichother fleas were infected, and so on. As their rodent hosts died out, thefleas migrated to the bodies of humans and infected them in the samefashion as they had the rats, and so the plague spread

The disease appeared in three forms:
bubonic [infection of the lymph system -- 60% fatal]
pneumonic [respiratory infection -- about 100% fatal], and
septicaemic [infection of the blood and probably 100% fatal]

The plague lasted in each area only about a year, but a third of adistrict's population would die during that period. People tried toprotect themselves by carrying little bags filled with crushed herbs andflowers over their noses, but to little effect. Those individuals infectedwith bubonic would experience great swellings ("bubos" in the Latin of thetimes) of their lymph glands and take to their beds. Those withsepticaemic would die quickly, before any obvious symptoms had appeared.Those with respiratory also died quickly, but not before developingevident symptoms: a sudden fever that turned the face a dark rose color, asudden attack of sneezing, followed by coughing, coughing up blood, anddeath.

It is a popular (although incorrect) belief that this latter sequenceis recalled in a children's game-song that most people know and have bothplayed and sung:

Ring around the rosie,
A pocketful of posie,
Ashes, ashes
All fall down!

According to this conception, the ring mentioned in the verse isa circular dance, and the plague was often portrayed as the dansemacabre, in which a half-decomposed corpse was shown pulling anapparently healthy young man or woman into a ring of dancers that includedman and women from all stations and dignities of life as well as corpsesand skeletons. The rosie is believed to represent the victim withhis or her face suffused with blood, and the posie is thesupposedly prophylactic bag of herbs and flowers. Ashes, ashes isthe sound of sneezing, and all fall down! is the signal to reenactthe death which came so often in those times.

The disease finally played out in Scandinavia in about 1351 [see IngmarBergman's film TheSeventh Seal], but another wave of the disease came in 1365and several times after that until -- for some unknown reason -- the BlackDeath weakened and was replaced by waves of typhoid fever, typhus, orcholera. Europe continued to experience regular waves of such mortalityuntil the mid-19th century. Although bubonic plague is still endemic inmany areas, including New Mexico in the American Southwest. it does notspread as did the Black Death of 1347-1351.

The effects of that plague and its successors on the men and women ofmedieval Europe were profound: new attitudes toward death, the value oflife, and of one's self. It kindled a growth of class conflict, a loss ofrespect for the Church, and the emergence of a new pietism (personalspirituality) that profoundly altered European attitudes toward religion.Still another effect, however, was to kindle a new cultural vigor inEurope, one in which the national languages, rather than Latin, were thevehicle of expression. An example of this movement was Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, a collection of tales written in 1350 and set in acountry house where a group of noble young men and women of Florence havefled to escape the plague raging in the city.

These were natural disasters, but they were made all the worse by theinability of the directing elements of society, the princes and clergy, tooffer any leadership during these crises. In the next few lectures we willexamine the reasons for their failure to do so.

It was once the custom to follow every drama with a farce or ballet. Isuppose that the theory was that the emotions of the audience were soexhausted by the passions that had been enacted, that they (the audience,not the emotions) needed a bit of good clean fun to restore the balance oftheir humors (I really should tell you about humors sometime). Followingthis venerable tradition, The Management now offers you a bit ofdoggerel.

"A sickly season," the merchant said,
"The town I left was filled with dead,
and everywhere these queer red flies
crawled upon the corpses' eyes,
eating them away."

"Fair make you sick," the merchant said,
"They crawled upon the wine and bread.
Pale priests with oil and books,
bulging eyes and crazy looks,
dropping like the flies."

"I had to laugh," the merchant said,
"The doctors purged, and dosed, and bled;
"And proved through solemn disputation
"The cause lay in some constellation.
"Then they began to die."

"First they sneezed," the merchant said,
"And then they turned the brightest red,
Begged for water, then fell back.
With bulging eyes and face turned black,
they waited for the flies."

"I came away," the merchant said,
"You can't do business with the dead.
"So I've come here to ply my trade.
"You'll find this to be a fine brocade..."

And then he sneezed.