Consequences of the Black Death
Symptoms of the Bubonic Plague included painful and enlarged or swollen lymph nodes, headaches, chills, fatigue, vomiting, and fevers, and within 3 to 5 days, 80% of the victims would be dead.
[not verified in body] From the perspective of many of the survivors, the effect of the plague may have been ultimately favourable, as the massive reduction of the workforce meant their labor was suddenly in higher demand.
[6][7] Even where the historical record is considered reliable, only rough estimates of the total number of deaths from the plague are possible.
[8] Contemporary chronicler Jean Froissart estimated the toll to be one-third, which modern scholars consider less an accurate assessment than an allusion to the Book of Revelation meant to suggest the scope of the plague.
[10] The Black Death hit the culture of towns and cities disproportionately hard although rural areas, where most of the population lived at the time, were also significantly affected.
Larger cities were the worst off, as population densities and close living quarters made disease transmission easier.
Cities were also strikingly filthy, infested with lice, fleas, and rats, and subject to diseases caused by malnutrition and poor hygiene.
In the town of Givry, in the Bourgogne region of France, the local friar, who used to note 28–29 funerals a year, recorded 649 deaths in 1348, half of them in September.
[14] Some places, including the Kingdom of Poland, parts of Hungary, the Brabant region, Hainaut, and Limbourg (in modern Belgium), as well as Santiago de Compostela, were unaffected for unknown reasons.
Joan of England, daughter of Edward III, died in Bordeaux on her way to Castile to marry Alfonso's son Pedro.
The 1348 outbreak in Gaza left an estimated 10,000 people dead, and Aleppo recorded a death rate of 500 per day during the same year.
In Damascus, at the disease's peak in September and October 1348, a thousand deaths were recorded every day, with overall mortality estimated at between 25 and 38 percent.
Because 14th-century healers were at a loss to explain the cause of the Black Death, many Europeans believed supernatural forces, earthquakes, and malicious conspiracies were credible explanations for the plague's emergence.
[20] No one in the 14th century considered rat control a way to ward off the plague, and people began to believe that only God's anger could produce such horrific displays of suffering and death.
Giovanni Boccaccio, an Italian writer and poet of the era, questioned whether it was sent by God for their correction, or if it came through the influence of the heavenly bodies.
[22] Where government authorities were concerned, most monarchs instituted measures that prohibited exports of foodstuffs, condemned black market speculators, set price controls on grain and outlawed large-scale fishing.
Malnutrition, poverty, disease and hunger, coupled with war, growing inflation and other economic concerns, made Europe in the mid-14th century ripe for tragedy.
The historian Walter Scheidel contends that waves of plague following the initial outbreak of the Black Death had a levelling effect, which changed the ratio of land to labour by reducing the value of the former and boosting that of the latter, which lowered economic inequality by making landowners and employers less well-off and improved the lot of the workers: "the observed improvement in living standards of the laboring population was rooted in the suffering and premature death of tens of millions over the course of several generations".
[23] On the other hand, in the quarter-century after the Black Death, many labourers, artisans, and craftsmen, those living from money-wages alone, suffer a reduction in real incomes in England from rampant inflation.
See medieval demography for a more complete treatment of this issue and current theories on why improvements in living standards took longer to evolve.
Furthermore, the plague's great population reduction brought cheaper land prices; more food for the average peasant; and a relatively large increase in per capita income among the peasantry, if not immediately, in the coming century.
The consumption of meat and dairy products went up, as did the export of beef and butter from the Low Countries, Scandinavia and northern Germany.
The rapid development of the use was probably one of the consequences of the Black Death during which many landowning nobles died and left their realty to their widows and minor orphans.
Instead, he says that the energetic local and royal measures to control labour and artisans' prices were responses to elite fears of the greed and the possible new powers of the lesser classes that had gained new freedom.
Some Europeans targeted "groups such as Jews, friars, foreigners, beggars, pilgrims"[35] lepers[35][36] and Romani, who were thought to have caused the crisis.
[42] The shortage of priests opened new opportunities for laywomen to assume more extensive and more important service roles in the local parish.
[47] Peire Lunel de Montech, writing about 1348 in the lyric style long out of fashion, composed the following sorrowful sirventes "Meravilhar no·s devo pas las gens" during the height of the plague in Toulouse: They died by the hundreds, both day and night, and all were thrown in... ditches and covered with earth.
[48]Boccaccio wrote: How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world!
[46]Although the Black Death highlighted the shortcomings of medical science in the Middle Ages, it also led to positive changes in the field of medicine.
[50] A theory put forth by Stephen O'Brien is that the Black Death is likely responsible by natural selection for the high frequency of the CCR5-Δ32 genetic defect in people of European descent.
