How the Black Death built the modern West
An image printed in the 1493 book the Nuremberg Chronicle shows Jews burned to death, accused of causing the Black Death.
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(OPINION) Historian Barbara Tuchman identifies the Black Death as the “unrecognized beginning of the modern man.” The Black Death killed upwards of half the population of Europe in the 14th century, leading simultaneously to a heightened religiosity in Europe and a growing frustration with a church and with a social order that was unable to stem the tide of this catastrophe. As the Black Death swept through Europe, it dissolved medieval certainties and social structures and created the conditions for the emergence of the Renaissance and the Reformation.
Religious Responses to the Great Mortality
In 1348, Europe’s leading theological center, the University of Paris, published a verbose treatise on the causes and remedies of the “great mortality” that was afflicting Europe. The doctors identified bad air (miasma) as the immediate cause of the plague. This lethal air was released on the earth because of a malalignment of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. The remedy for the plague was a “pocket full of posies,” herbs and flowers that people could wear around their necks to ward off the effects of the miasma. Plague doctors began wearing bird-like headgear stuffed with herbs and flowers to protect them from bad air when treating patients. They stuffed herbs and flowers into waxen beaks.
Pseudo-scientific theories of the origins of the Black Death proliferated alongside spiritual explanations. Pope Clement VI identified the source of the plague as human wickedness, and he encouraged able-bodied Europeans to make a pilgrimage to Rome for the remission of sins. Throughout the Jubilee year of 1350, thousands of pilgrims per day streamed into Rome to visit the Basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul by day, sleeping in flea-infested dormitories by night. Florentine historian Matteo Villani writes that during Lent and up to Easter, the pilgrims to Rome numbered 1.2 million. At the festivals of Ascension and Pentecost, they numbered 800,000. These pilgrims ensured that the plague spread to every corner of Europe.
The most shameful response to the plague was a vicious strain of anti-Semitism that has haunted Europe ever since. Roman and canon law had long accorded to Jews the right to freely practice their religion. But as rumors spread that Jews were disseminating the plague by poisoning the wells of Christians, hundreds of Jewish villages in the Rhine Valley were attacked, and thousands of European Jews were tortured and murdered. Pope Clement ordered a stop to these anti-Jewish pogroms. He wrote that those who blame Jews for the plague have been seduced by “that liar, the devil.” It made no sense to blame Jews for the plague because Jews and Christians were dying of the plague in equal numbers. He ordered clergy to offer protection for Jews, but in much of Europe, his orders fell on deaf ears.
The Black Death also decimated the ranks of European clergy. Clergy who ministered to the sick and dying died in much higher numbers than the general population, and the most faithful clergymen had the highest mortality rates. The few clergy who survived the Black Death tended to be self-protective opportunists who were not ministering to the sick and dying. In England, the shortage of clergy was so severe that the Bishop of Bath and Wells wrote: “We understand that many people are dying without the sacrament of penance… If they are on the point of death and cannot secure the services of a priest, then they should make confession to … a layman, or even to a woman.” Other bishops granted indulgences to dying people to confess their sins directly to God.
The thinning ranks of clergymen placed pressure on bishops to ordain people who lacked either the proper education or the proper moral qualifications to be priests. Pope Clement deplored the degraded state of the clergy. When a group of clergymen petitioned him to abolish the mendicant orders that had become more popular than parish priests, Pope Clement wrote:
“What can you preach to the people? If on humility, you yourselves are the proudest of the world, puffed up, pompous and sumptuous in luxuries. If on poverty, you are so covetous that all the benefices in the world are not enough for you. If on chastity--but we will be silent on this, for God knows what each man does and how many of you satisfy your lusts.”
John Wycliff was an Oxford professor who was 20 years old when the plague swept through England. He was especially exercised by the corruption of the English clergy. He supported the efforts of his colleagues at Oxford to translate the Bible into English, and he argued that the Bible rather than the papacy should be the supreme authority in the church. He claimed that there is no warrant in Scripture for transubstantiation, monasticism, the papacy, or clerical celibacy. He drew a distinction between the “invisible church of the elect” and the “visible” structures of the institutional church. He came to the conclusion that the priesthood should be disestablished as the necessary mediator between humanity and God.
The followers of Wycliff were derisively given the name of Lollards (mumblers) because they organized what we would today recognize as small-group Bible studies. They found spiritual nurture by reading the Bible in the vernacular, considering it rather than the Church to be the supreme authority in their lives. The Lollards persisted as an underground movement for decades. The Lollard idea that the king rather than the pope should be the head of the Church of England would inspire Henry VIII’s counselors. The Lollard practice of forming communities around the study of Scripture inspired the Puritans, both in England and in the New World.
Social Consequences of the Black Death
According to historian David Herlihy, the shock of the Black Death broke continuities of economic life and disrupted routines that might have held Europe in its traditional ways for an indefinite future. For most Europeans who survived the Black Death, life got considerably better. Depopulation meant that peasants and artisans could command much higher wages. Women who lost their husbands in the great mortality often took over their husband’s trades in order to provide for their families. Serfs whose families had for centuries eked out a subsistence living on a manor suddenly had the opportunity to leave their lords to search for higher wages elsewhere. Flush with new income, lower class Europeans began to send their children to school.
As peasants, artisans, and merchants rose in status, the medieval three-estate system, which divided European society into nobles, clergy, and workers, dissolved. Cash-strapped nobles, unable to pay the salaries of laborers, started to marry newly-wealthy members of other classes. For a while, the European nobility tried to resurrect a pre-plague social system and reimpose it on peasants and artisans. They froze wages at pre-plague levels and passed sumptuary laws that forbade people of lower classes from dressing like nobles. These laws led to bloody uprisings in England and in Italy. Nobles were forced to adapt to a new world in which they had to share their wealth, power, and prestige with lower classes.
The plague led to a restless search for new theories of medicine and disease. As medieval medical theories failed, Europeans began to question the Galenic principles of disease as an imbalance of the humors in the body. To many municipal officers in the 14th century, the contagious nature of the plague seemed obvious. They imposed quarantines on arriving ships and on plague-infected neighborhoods. Their experience of the plague began the process of formulating a modern contagion theory of disease.
The Black Death drove innovation in technology as Europeans struggled to create labor-saving devices to compensate for a decimated labor force. Mills, once used only to grind grain, were now put to use for sawing wood, operating bellows, and fulling wool. The shortage of monastic copyists in the wake of the plague may even have inspired the invention of the Gutenberg Press. Europeans began organizing a more rational agricultural system. They turned rocky farmland into pastureland and expanded the use of horses and oxen to aid in plowing. Those who survived the plague created more diversified economies, more efficient banking systems, and a host of technological innovations. These led to sharply higher standards of living. But the Black Death also brought to a close an age of submission to authority in Europe and marked the beginning of a new individual consciousness. No area of European life remained untouched by this transformation. The Black Death sowed the seeds of a world that gave birth to the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
Dr. Robert Carle is a professor of historical theology at The King’s College in Manhattan. Dr. Carle has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The American Interest, Religion Unplugged, Society, Human Rights Review, The Public Discourse, Academic Questions, and Reason.