The Impact of the Plague in Europe
In the middle of the 1300s, Europe and Asia were both devastated by the bubonic plague epidemic known as the Black Death. In October 1347, 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina to bring the plague to Europe. A horrifying surprise befell those gathered on the docks. The majority of the sailors who were still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that gushed pus and blood. Over the course of the next five years, the Black Death would cause the deaths of more than 20 million people in Europe, or nearly one third of the continent’s population.
Many things happened as a result of this violent disaster. Both the cessation of wars and the sudden decline in trade that followed were brief. Due to the deaths of so many laborers, a more long-lasting and serious effect was the drastic reduction in cultivable land. Numerous landowners were ruined as a result of this. In an effort to keep their tenants, they were forced to substitute wages or money rents for labor services due to a lack of labor. Additionally, wages for artisans and peasants generally increased. The previously rigid stratification of society gained a new fluidity as a result of these alterations.
The economy underwent abrupt and extreme inflation. Since it was so difficult (and dangerous) to procure goods through trade and to produce them, the prices of both goods produced locally and those imported from afar skyrocketed. Because of illness and death workers became exceedingly scarce, so even peasants felt the effects of the new rise in wages. The demand for people to work the land was so high that it threatened the manorial holdings. Serfs were no longer tied to one master; if one left the land, another lord would instantly hire them. The lords had to make changes in order to make the situation more profitable for the peasants and so keep them on their land. In general, wages outpaced prices and the standard of living was subsequently raised.
Social distinctions sharpened as a result of the beginning of financial distinctions becoming less distinct. In order to emphasize the individual’s social standing, the nobility’s fashions became more extravagant. When the aristocracy attempted to resist the changes brought about by the plague, the peasants revolted, gaining a little more power. Northern French peasants rioted in 1358, and guild members who were denied voting rights revolted in 1378. Europe’s social and economic structure underwent profound and irreversible shifts.
The plague also caused an economic decline. The economic decline that reached its peak in the middle of the 15th century should probably be attributed more to the pandemic recurrence of the plague than to the immediate effects of the 1349 epidemic in England.’
The European economy at the end of the Middle Ages was fundamentally different from the economy before the plague. A more independent peasant made more money working in the countryside. Despite low grain prices, the peasant more readily fed himself and his family from his own land and produced a surplus for the market as a result of fixed rents, if not complete ownership of the land. Yields increased as a result of a decrease in population that made it possible to focus more on fertile land and conduct fallowing more frequently, which was good for the peasant. Peasants’ socioeconomic disparities became more pronounced as some, particularly the wealthier ones, took advantage of the new circumstances, particularly the availability of land. The lord lost out to the peasant. The lord was typically a pure rentier whose income was subject to inflation as the Middle Ages drew to a close.
