The Plague
Most devastating natural disaster in European History
Bubonic Plague
Rats and Fleas
Yersinia Pestis
Spread of the Plague
Originated in Asia
Arrived in Europe in 1347
Mortality reached 50 – 60 percent in some areas
Wiped out between 25 – 50 percent of European population (19 – 38 million dead in
four years)
Plague returns in 1361 – 1362 and 1369
Life and Death: Reactions to the Plague
Plague as a punishment from God
The flagellants (attracted attention and created mass hysteria wherever they went)
Attacks against Jews - Pogroms were organized massacres against the Jews, as Jews were
accused of causing the plague by poisoning town wells.
The persecutions of European Jews in the High Middle Ages were frequently inspired by the
Christian Crusades, as Christians searched for enemies at home.
Violence - an increase in violence and murder due to a sense of life's cheapness
A key economic consequence of the plague was a decline in manorialism and weakening of
feudalism as noble landlords desperate for cash converted peasant labor service to market
rents, freeing their serfs.
Economically, the great plague and the crises of the fourteenth century raised wages because of
a scarcity of labor.
Other reactions to the plague also included morbidity and preoccupation with death in everyday
life; economic depression.
Culture and Society in an Age of Adversity
The Developments of Vernacular Literature
Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321)
• The Divine Comedy (1313 – 1321) - is considered a supreme summary of
medieval thought.
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340 – 1400)
• The Canterbury Tales
Christine de Pizan (c. 1364 – 1400) - France's "first woman of letters"
• The Book of the City of Ladies (1404)
Art and the Black Death
Giotto (1266 – 1337)
Ars Moriendi – the term means the art of dying.
Change & Invention
Economically, the great plague and the crises of the fourteenth century raised wages because of
a scarcity of labor.
Postplague socioeconomic relations between rich and poor in Europe got much worse as the
positions of landlords deteriorated, and they sought to limit the gains of the peasants.
Changes in Urban Life
Greater Regulation
Marriage
Gender Roles
• Male: Active and Domineering
• Women: Passive and Submissive
• Parents lavished considerable attention and affection on their offspring in
parent-child relationship in the Middle Ages.
• Women benefited from the Black Death because there were new employment
opportunities.
Inventions and New Patterns
The Mechanical Clock - The most revolutionary of thirteenth and fourteenth-century
invention
• New Conception of Time
Gunpowder
