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The Black Death was the name given to a pandemic of different types of plague that swept across Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century killing millions of people. Its social and economic consequences were devastating.

In October 1347 a Genoese ship entered the port of Messina in Sicily carrying a deadly cargo. Its crew was infected with the plague and within a short space of time the disease spread throughout the town. The ship was ordered to leave immediately, but it was too late: the damage had been done. ‘Soon men hated each other so much,’ said a contemporary account, ‘that if a son was attacked by the disease his father would not tend him.’ As more and more people died, ‘many desired to confess their sins to the priests and draw up their last will and testament. But ecclesiastics, lawyers and notaries refused to enter the houses of the deceased.’ The Black Death had arrived in Western Europe.

The ship had come from Caffa, a port belonging to Genoa on the Black Sea. The Genoese had bought the town from its Mongol owners at the end of the thirteenth century and built it into a prosperous commercial centre that dominated Black Sea trade. It was also the home of a big slave market. In 1347 the Mongols tried to capture it back, but their siege withered as their army was reduced by plague. In a last desperate attempt at victory they catapulted dead infected bodies over Caffa’s walls and then withdrew. Their siege might have been a failure, but they left behind forces of destruction far greater than they ever imagined. By the beginning of 1348 the Black Death had reached Genoa itself. From there it crossed northern Italy into France. In 1349 it entered Britain and a year later spread through Scandinavia and the Baltic. It is difficult to be precise about how many people it killed across Europe. Thirty million is not an unreasonable estimate.

‘Soon men hated each other so much that if a son was attacked by the disease his father would not tend him.’

This number, in a population the size of medieval Europe’s, is a huge proportion – possibly a quarter of the total. The disease that brought such destruction had three variants. The most common was bubonic plague, carried by fleas hosted by black rats. The other two were septicaemic plague, which affects the blood, and pneumonic plague, which is a disease of the lungs. Other illnesses doubtless played their part as well – typhus and smallpox were both common – adding to the general feeling of overwhelming catastrophe. Bubonic plague is particularly horrifying. In medieval Europe black rats lived in houses and other inhabited areas, breeding profusely and never travelling far from their nests. Humans caught the disease from flea bites, or from bites from the rats themselves. Once a person had been bitten by a diseased creature the skin around the infected area grew dark and the body carried the germ to its nearest lymph node, the usual place for filtering foreign particles out of its system. The areas around the groin, armpit or behind the ear began to swell and became intolerably painful; this was followed by internal haemorrhaging. One of the clearest accounts of the plague was written by Gabriele de Mussis, a lawyer from Piacenza in Italy, who described how people died:

They felt a tingling sensation as if they were being pricked by the points of arrows. The next stage was a fearsome attack that took the form of an extremely hard, solid boil … As it grew more solid, its burning heat caused its patients to fall into an acute and putrid fever with severe headaches. In some cases it gave rise to an intolerable stench. In others it brought vomiting of blood … The majority died between the third and fifth day.

With no medical knowledge to explain the causes of this rampant slaughter in their midst, the people of medieval Europe turned to heaven and hell for their answers. The clergy in fact were particularly badly hit because they inevitably became infected if they tried to minister to those who were ill. In England their numbers were reduced by nearly a half. Saint Sebastian was declared the patron of plague sufferers because his body full of arrows seemed to represent the onset of the disease. Many pictures of him began to decorate churches and cathedrals: one of the most famous was painted by Giovanni del Biondo for the cathedral in Florence just after the Black Death in the early 1350s. Charitable foundations sprang up as people looked for new ways to expiate the holy anger that had visited such death on the world. There were also scapegoats, particularly Jews. Thousands of them were massacred in Germany as people looked for someone to blame for the disaster. God had to be appeased, but as piety increased so did cruelty towards heretics. But the real effect of the Black Death was felt not in the bitter blows of flagellants as they tried to thrash evil spirits from their bodies, or in the exhortations of priests who claimed that the disease was part of ‘God’s command’, but in the economic life of the people of Europe.

The people turned to heaven and hell for their answers.

The commercial activity of Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century was prosperous, conservative and confined. Its trading routes had reached a limit beyond which they would not significantly expand until Christopher Columbus sailed to America 150 years later. To the south, the Italian city-states controlled the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. To the north the German ports of the Hanseatic League, particularly Lubeck, dominated the Baltic. European towns tended to be run by powerful merchants’ guilds that kept a tight rein on the activities of their craftsmen and artisans. The countryside was still in the grip of the nobility who expected service from their peasants in return for providing them with land to cultivate. It was a carefully protected, feudal world that had developed just enough to introduce the first fruits of capitalist enterprise into its system. But it was also an age of dreadful calamity, the worst of which was the Black Death, and it was this that brought about or accelerated a process of change. In the early part of the century there was a terrible famine. The European population had been growing steadily but a series of poor summers and hard winters destroyed crops and brought about mass starvation in the years 1315–17. The Hundred Years’ War between England and France exhausted the energies and drained the resources of both countries. Edward III’s victory over the French at the Battle of Crécy at which his son, the Black Prince, fought heroically and ‘won his spurs’, took place only two years before the Black Death carried all before it.

Thousands of Jews were massacred as people looked for someone to blame for the disaster.

Disease, war and famine began to corrode Europe’s social structure. In the towns, craftsmen rebelled against the restrictions imposed on them. In Flanders between 1323 and 1328, city workers and peasants rose up and challenged the authority of their masters. In France the depredations of disbanded mercenaries from the French army who roamed around trying to live off the land contributed to a rebellion in the Ile de France in 1357. In England, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was the most serious challenge to the authority of the Crown and the ruling nobility throughout the whole of the Middle Ages. All these uprisings were crushed with rapid brutality. Europe in the fourteenth century did not succumb to revolution, but it did not escape from upheaval altogether. A catastrophe like the Black Death so reduced the total labour force that those who were left behind felt themselves to be in a stronger position than they had been before; a scarce labour force is always a valuable one.

Although manufacturing and trade were very important, land remained Europe’s principal source of wealth. Land belonged to the Crown, the Church and the nobility. In this organisation the nobility furnished the monarch with military support in return for being given valuable estates which the peasants farmed in return for the service they gave to their lords and masters. By the middle of the fourteenth century, however, the nature of the relationship between landowner and peasant had begun to change. The old system of labourers being tied to the manor by bonds of duty and obligation had developed into one that was more similar to a straightforward relationship between landlord and tenant. With labour scarce the tenants had more bargaining power and in some cases were able to move from one manor to another in search of work. Some estates broke up as their owners decided to lease the land to peasant farmers rather than own and manage it all themselves. A nation’s wealth, once the exclusive preserve of a small ennobled governing class, began to be shared more widely. This was a gradual but significant process. The Flemish, French and English peasants who marched in anger and desperation against those who ruled them won no immediate victories, but the underlying causes of their grievances began a slow transformation that would ultimately move Europe out of feudalism and into the modern world.

The plague remained a constant feature of European life after the Black Death of 1348–50 finally died out. It has been estimated that Europe suffered an outbreak somewhere every eleven years in the hundred years that followed. It continued after that: its last great manifestation was the Plague of London in 1665 which killed about twenty percent of the city’s population. In the middle of the seventeenth century people were rather more organised about coping with an outbreak of disease than they had been three hundred years earlier, but they still had no idea what caused it. The author Daniel Defoe wrote an imaginary diary of the London Plague more than fifty years after it happened. It was based on parish records and the recollections of citizens who had been there at the time: ‘So the Plague defied all medicines; the very physicians were seized with it, with their preservatives in their mouths; and men went about prescribing to others and telling them what to do till the tokens were upon them, and they dropped down dead, destroyed by that very enemy they directed others to oppose.’

Man cannot fight the things he does not understand. His greatest achievements can be destroyed by the unexpected. The Black Death terrified Europe, descending like a threatening cloud that brought it to a halt and left it groping for a new direction. Its effects were devastating. The population in many places declined by as much as thirty or forty percent – and stayed there, failing to recover even when the epidemic had long passed. The population of Toulouse, for instance, stood at 30,000 in the early fourteenth century: a hundred years later it was only 8,000. The Italian poet and author Boccaccio witnessed the effects of the disease in Florence and wrote about it in his book, The Decameron. He described the mass burials and claimed that some women developed loose morals because of the need to ‘expose’ their bodies as they investigated their illness. ‘The authority of human and divine laws almost disappeared,’ he wrote. ‘Every man was able to do as he pleased.’ The Black Death fundamentally changed people’s attitudes towards wealth, and left behind a world very different from the one upon which it inflicted such horror.