Double Apocalypse

On The Twin Cataclysms that Ended the Medieval World

This essay recounts two disasters that marked the end of the Middle Ages and set the stage for the modern world we recognize today. The first apocalypse is the Black Death, which killed a significant portion of the population of Europe and undermined the total authority of the Church. The second apocalypse is the fall of Constantinople, which finally, in 1453, marked the end of the Eastern Roman Empire. Some of its displaced Greek-speaking scholars fled to Florence. Among the Florentines, their access to pre-Christian, Greek literature stirred up curiosity in the paganism of Antiquity, which ultimately led to the dawn of the Italian Renaissance.

The Black Death

The arrival of the Black Death was the first apocalypse that ended the Middle Ages. During that time, the ability to read and write was a rare skill; the only literate person in any given town or village was often its priest. These were generally the most consistently and formally educated individuals of that era.

The fact that priests were responsible for administering Last Rites to plague victims disproportionately exposed them to the pathogen, making them much more likely to become victims themselves. During just a few short years in the mid-1300s, many towns and villages across Christendom simultaneously lost their most intelligent and literate citizens to the horror.

In the aftermath of the plague, the Church busily recruited replacements for the fallen clergy. However, these recruits were dramatically less educated than their predecessors. This further tarnished the reputation of the Church, whose exclusive connection to God had already been called into question by its inability to stop the dying.

Lacking a germ theory of disease, the Church’s contemporary “wrath of God” theory proved wholly ineffective; no amount of praying affected the deadly bacterium behind the contagion. The Church never regained the unquestioned moral and intellectual authority it enjoyed before the coming of the Black Death.

Not only did the plague seriously damage the credibility of the Church, but it also dealt a mortal blow to the economic institution of feudalism, the economic model of the Middle Ages. With half of European peasants moldering in early graves, the fields formerly plowed by the dead lay fallow with no one to till them. The surviving peasantry quickly realized they could play one lord off against another in bidding wars for their labor. So they stopped swearing fealty to any particular feudal lord, instead demanding the right to work for whoever paid the most.

In 1351, the English parliament attempted to fix the wages of the peasantry by law, just as the Roman Emperor Diocletian had done a thousand years before, after the Antonine and Cyprian plagues ravaged the Roman Empire. This attempt by the English aristocracy to fix class divisions through legislation resulted in a massive popular uprising. In 1381, tens of thousands of enraged peasants marched on London. The end of the Medieval world was at hand.

The Siege of Constantinople

Some consider the Fall of Rome to have occurred in 411 AD, when Alaric the Visigoth sacked the Eternal City. Others believe the date to be 476 AD, when the German Odoacer deposed an 11-year-old Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman Emperor in Italy.

But the Eastern half of the Roman Empire carried on for another thousand years after these dates, with Constantinople as its capital. That city sits on the edge of the Sea of Marmara, sandwiched between the Bosphorus Straight and an estuary called the Golden Horn. These geographical features create an easily defensible peninsula.

Around the same time Alaric sacked Rome, the Christian Emperor Theodosius II completed a curtain of thick double walls that sealed off that peninsula and the city of Constantinople from the rest of Asia Minor. These walls proved impregnable until 1453, when gunpowder arrived on the battlefield and the cannons of the Turkish Sultan finally rendered superfluous the old Theodosian walls.

In 1876, the French painter Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant dramatized this turning point in history with his painting The Entry of Mahomet II into Constantinople. It hangs today in the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, France, and it serves as the title card for this essay.

The Sultan renamed the city Istanbul and significantly increased taxes and duties on Christian merchant ships. This action incentivized the crowned heads of Christendom to finance expeditions westward across the Atlantic Ocean, searching for an alternate sea route to the Orient. Christopher Columbus set sail on his fateful voyage just 19 years after Constantinople fell.

The Greek-speaking people who called Constantinople home lived through a Fall of Rome in 1453, when their city fell and they dispersed to the four corners of the compass. To them, it seemed like the end of the world. But Constantinople's siege and conquest also bookended the Medieval era for the rest of Europe. It eventually led to the Age of Exploration and the discovery of two new continents.

Florence

Before the Black Death, Florence had already produced the brilliant Dante Alighieri. But, a century after he died in exile, that city cemented a starring role in the great drama of humankind by receiving Greek scholars and ideas from Constantinople.

Sultan Mehmed II's father laid siege to Constantinople in 1422 but found that his cannons were not quite powerful enough to breach the legendary Theodosian walls. It was up to his son to return with bigger cannons and finish the job 31 years later, in 1453. The Council of Florence was convened between these two sieges, where Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian delegates from Constantinople visited Florence hoping to reforge an alliance with the Italian Catholics against the Sultan.

Greek scholars like Gemistos Plethon found a warm reception in Florence. His command of pre-Christian Greek literature, mostly lost to Western Europe since the days of Theodosius, found receptive ears among the Florentines. After its performance during the Black Death, some of them were growing wary of the powerful papacy just to the south in Rome.

In particular, Plethon's lectures on Platonism profoundly affected Cosimo de’ Medici. Cosimo was the patriarch of the Medici banking family, whose star was ascendant in Florence at that time. Cosimo eventually used his wealth to found a new Platonic Academy in his home city, headed by Marsilio Ficino. He and his descendants also patronized local artists to see how closely they could emulate the pre-Christian, pagan artwork of ancient Greece and Rome.

Gemistos Plethon ignited the Medicis' fascination with all things pre-Christian. The artists they bankrolled not only emulated the masters of Antiquity but surpassed them. Today, we recognize their efforts as the Italian Renaissance and venerate names like Michelangelo and Raphael as some of the greatest artists who ever lived. If the Black Death and the Siege of Constantinople were apocalypses that marked the end of the Medieval period, then the closely related blossoming of the Italian Renaissance heralded the dawning of a fresh new age.

Conclusion

The cataclysmic Black Death sowed the first seeds of doubt about the authority of the Church. It broke the moral and intellectual monopoly enjoyed by that institution for a millenia. Intellectual currents began flowing again, as if a great frozen river had finally started to thaw. Almost a century later, the siege and fall of Constantinople revived the cross-pollination of ideas between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. Pre-Christian, pagan ideas from Antiquity, that had lain dormant under the intellectual regime of the Church, began to bloom like spring flowers. Though the twin apocalypses that ended the Middle Ages were deeply disturbing for those who lived through them, they nonetheless set the stage of history for our own modern era.

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. Public sanitation was goaded into moderate improvements. The immensity of the suffering and the tragedy weakened many minds, producing contagious neuroses; whole groups seemed to go mad in unison, like the Flagellants who in 1349, as they had done in the thirteenth century, marched through the city streets almost naked, beating themselves in penitence, preaching the Last Judgment, utopias, and pogroms. People listened with more than customary eagerness to mind readers, dream interpreters, sorcerers, quacks, and other charlatans. Orthodox faith was weakened; superstition flourished. Strange reasons were given for the plague. Some ascribed it to an untimely conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars; others to the poisoning of wells by lepers or Jews. Jews were killed in half a hundred towns from Brussels to Breslau (1348-49). Social order was almost destroyed by the death of thousands of police, judges, government officials, bishops, and priests. Even the business of war suffered a passing decline; from the siege of Calais to the battle of Poitiers (1356) the Hundred Years' War dallied in reluctant truce, while the decimated ranks of the infantry were replenished with men too poor to value life at more than a few shillings above Death.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Reformation, 1957, page 64