Key Takeaways:
The Sheer Horror of the Black Death Defies Comprehension
The Labor Shortage Caused by the Black Death Set the Stage for Modern Economics
The Black Death Broke the Intellectual Dominance of the Roman Catholic Church
The Sheer Horror of the Black Death Defies Comprehension
The most infamous plague in history arrived in Europe during the autumn of 1347. In October of that year, a dozen Genoese merchant galleys made port in Sicily with deathly ill crews. Their lymph nodes were swollen into the painful black pustules of the Bubonic plague.
The Black Death went on to kill half the population of Europe. The survivors left behind grim accounts of a total collapse in social order. One such chronicler described the horrific scene in his Italian hometown of Siena:
Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices ... great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds both day and night ... And as soon as those ditches were filled more were dug ... And I, Agnolo di Tura ... buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.
That account reads like the most terrifying passages in the book of Revelation. It evokes the raw despair that gripped Europe in its icy fist during the Black Death.
But the traumatized survivors could not know that a drastic labor shortage left by the pandemic would catalyze a momentous transition away from the feudal economic system of lords and peasants, ushering in a new era where labor was instead performed by employers and employees.
The Labor Shortage Caused by the Black Death Set the Stage for Modern Economics
The Black Death killed half the European peasantry between 1347 and 1351, creating a drastic labor shortage. With so many formerly productive fields laying fallow for want of laborers to till them, it slowly dawned on the surviving peasantry that they could play one feudal lord off against another in bidding wars for their labor.
But the nobles were politically well-connected. And they were used to making demands, not entertaining them. So the feudal lords of the late Middle Ages leveraged their political connections to introduce laws capping wages.
The result was total chaos. In 1381, a hundred thousand enraged peasants marched on London. King Richard II was only 14 years old when he rode out to meet the rebel leader Wat Tyler on June 15th of the year.
Richard almost died that day after an argument erupted during the negotiations and Wat Tyler was abruptly killed. But as the rebels moved to hack their king and his retinue to pieces, Richard galloped his horse directly into the mob screaming, “Captains, will you kill your King? I am your leader! Follow me into the fields, and you shall have all that you ask!”
Awed by this show of royal courage, the peasant army stood down and followed him out of the city, where Richard agreed to the total abolition of serfdom in England. But Richard later went back on his promise. Instead, he hunted down the ringleaders of the Peasant’s Revolt and had them brutally murdered.
But the Black Death had set in motion a chain of events that couldn’t be stopped. The labor shortage it created swung the balance of economic power in favor of the peasantry. Feudal lords desperate for laborers had no choice; they begrudgingly paid the higher wages demanded, even when forbidden by law.
Slowly but surely, a new economic paradigm emerged. As workers across Europe won the right to offer their labor to the highest bidder, new production roles of employer and employee gradually replaced the old Medieval roles of lord and peasant. That’s how the horror of the Black Death gave birth to the modern world we recognize today.
The Black Death Broke the Intellectual Dominance of the Roman Catholic Church
The Black Death pushed Western Europe away from the feudal economic system of the Middle Ages and toward modern capitalism. Simultaneously, it also shattered an intellectual monopoly held by the Roman Catholic Church.
Prior to the outbreak of the plague, few questioned the teachings of the Church. The public passively accepted it as the sole conduit for God’s grace on Earth. But as huge swathes of the population succumbed to the pathogen, it became clear that the Church was utterly powerless to stop the dying.
Before the advent of a germ theory of disease, Europeans could only interpret the catastrophic loss of life as some kind of divine judgement. It appeared that the Church had fallen out of favor with God. This perception was reinforced by the uncomfortable fact that priests died in even greater numbers than the laity—as their performance of Last Rites brought them into disproportionate contact with infected persons.
Doubts about the Church’s supposed connection to God began to fester like the painful pustules that tormented the afflicted. Bold characters like John Wycliffe and Jan Huss took it upon themselves to break long-standing taboos against questioning Church doctrine. They grumbled about the naked corruption of that institution, paving the road to the Protestant Reformation and beyond.
The horror of the plague demolished the intellectual monopoly enjoyed by the Roman Catholic Church throughout the Middle Ages. The rise of Protestantism was only the beginning. Eventually, a Scientific Revolution overturned the religious cosmology endorsed by the Church.
While a labor shortage caused by the Black Death created a new economic paradigm, the dismal performance of the Church during that pandemic opened up space for a new intellectual paradigm to take root. Today, scientists—rather than priests—separate myth from fact on behalf of the public.
Conclusion
Economic systems have lifecycles. They arise well-suited to a certain set of historical circumstances, but as those circumstances evolve, new systems inevitably arise to take their place. Pandemics are a hallmark of turbulent transition periods when old systems break down. The Roman Empire was struck by multiple plagues as it declined. A thousand years later, the Black Death caused a labor shortage that disrupted the feudal economic system and undermined the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. These terrifying events seemed like the end of the world, as depicted in the book of Revelation. But in the fullness of time, they set the stage for new systems to arise. While the mortality of the recent COVID-19 pandemic was not on the scale of the Roman plagues or the Black Death, it mirrored earlier pandemics in that it disillusioned the public and eroded faith in authority. It’s a sure sign that we’re currently embarking on a new historical transition period.
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Further Materials
The epidemic had effects in every sphere of life. As the poor died in greater proportion than the rich, a shortage of labor followed; thousands of acres were left untilled, millions of herring died a natural death. Labor enjoyed for a while an improved bargaining power; it raised its wages, repudiated many surviving feudal obligations, and staged revolts that kept noble teeth on edge for half a century; even priests struck for higher pay. Serfs left farms for cities, industry expanded, the business class made further gains on the landed aristocracy.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Reformation, 1957, page 65
Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, 1978, page 188