Lessons from the Black Death

good evening and welcome to our weekly history theology and philosophy lecture series we've been doing these lectures for several years every week normally we would have been doing them as an in-person meet up here at Toronto Centre Place but during the duration of the sheltering in place of course we aren't having any in-person gatherings but we want to keep presenting the content and keep gathering as a community online because it's part of our mission to do so I background and training academically as a medievalist a medieval historian and so one of the things that I've been thinking about in the course of our current pandemic is some of the ancient and medieval precedents for that and that has led to the lecture we produced for this evening my name is John Hamer and I serve as the pastor here at Toronto Centre Place and the coordinator of the media we always begin with our mission which is to invite everyone into community to continually learn and grow to abolish poverty and suffering to promote peace and justice and to live life meaningfully together and we continue to do that virtually even if we can't be doing that in person next week you might start to identify a a theme our upcoming lectures but next week we're going to have a lecture on biblical plagues from exodus to Revelation and so anyway we'll look at how the Bible or the different authors of the Bible view these plagues and things happening like this in terms of their theological claims but tonight we are going to talk about lessons learn and from the black death couple when this first got going at the beginning of March a graphic started making its rounds and I would see this quite regularly on social media on Facebook as people were reprinting this apparently it's by an outfit that I wasn't otherwise aware of called visual capitalist and the idea of it is it's in two parts here on the left let's see if I can make my thing here work on the left here is a timeline looking back from the present and the the current these are by size in terms of deaths of all the pandemics start looking from the present Coby pandemic in terms of these going backwards to AIDS HIV the Spanish flu and so on and so forth from smallpox to here's the black death and pandemic stretching back in time and then on the right side it just has them next to each other again with the the big one here being the black death the bubonic plague of the 14th century smallpox Spanish flu the plague of Justinian which you might not have even heard of before but which is a previous bubonic plague that strepek swept across Eurasia at the time of the Emperor Justinian towards the end of the Roman Empire AIDS and so on and so forth and then right here as of March 11th deaths that had taken place because of the corona virus the kovat 19 epidemic so when we're doing this infographic as we just kind of look at a little more closely here it correctly illustrates the fact that the black death was really the most deadly pandemic in history that's why we're going to look at it tonight this is a pretty horrific and really it's a unique moment in terms of the the total destruction so rapidly and death but I thought right from the start when I saw this graphic that it gave actually quite a misleading implication that lets say the kovat 19 is essentially just a speck in relation to all of these other things like SARS we remember not much happening maybe during that some of these others that we may not have even ever heard of the Hong Kong flu the Asian flu you maybe didn't know that Antonine plague and so on and so forth the Japanese smallpox occurred epidemic of the eighth century AD anyway as a result of that I felt like when I saw this this was almost saying to people hey we've there's so much more that's been more important than this and yet we're obviously taking this so much more seriously or we're having much more of a massive response in scale globally than anything we did for Ebola or anything like that ok so if we are to correct now the dates I'm sorry the the correct now where this would be as I've done I've modified the graphic here and we just add to what the deaths were so bad of the time before there had only been what does it say four point seven thousand deaths as of March early middle March now of course there have been two hundred and eleven thousand deaths which ranks the current pandemic in terms of total deaths above things like yellow fever swine flu and below the Great Plague of the 18th century in that Japanese smallpox epidemic but in other words although still deadly it's still here in the low rungs and it still makes it as the seemed as if the threat is is rather small however I've corrected this one now if we were to add the kovat 19 and the projections of what might have happened you know if we hadn't taken all of these measures if we hadn't done the social distancing if we hadn't taken so many precautions globally experts we're projecting that it could have as many as 40 million deaths over the course of the year next couple years and so if that's the case that would have made anyway the threat here of the kovat 19 pandemic you know right in the same kind of range here that's still tied almost with the Spanish flu functionally for number three and not that far really frankly behind the smallpox still getting dwarfed by the bubonic plague the black death of the 14th century but nevertheless it's a pretty big threat if we see it in those kind of proportions and that I think wasn't made clear at all in this infographic you know and so what one of the takeaways that we're gonna have I think of this lecture tonight when we look at what we're doing now in contrast to the historical perspective on pandemics is because we've been able to have this global collective response and so radically hopefully we're not done with it yet but I mean anyway hopefully limiting deaths if it turns out at the end of this through heroic measures that our global civilization is able to dramatically reduce the number of deaths then the current pandemic will be historic for an all new reason it'll be amazing because in the past there was no there were no real responses to fast spreading pandemics anyway obviously in the whole course of the very much slower moving AIDS epidemic there has been a very dramatic response and the use of modern medicine to do find all kinds of different ways to really arrest aids and treat it but in the past before with fast-moving pandemics that are more like like the Spanish flu or the Black Death and so on so forth there was very little response and indeed only almost the only thing that everyone did was simply let it run its course and however many millions of people died that's what what essentially happened we have not done that and this is a new thing in this particular historical circumstance so what I would like to propose is that we really should to look at this chart as a call to action to keep Kovac 19 on that bottom row if we can it's not gonna stay at just two hundred and eleven thousand deaths there's going to be morning more deaths in the course of this pandemic but we do not want it obviously to get up the rungs by failing to continue our strong response to it so that brings us to tonight's topic the Black Death so the most deadly pandemic in recorded history so it took place largely between 1347 and 1350 one so the middle of what sometimes called the calamitous 14th century and said towards the end of the Middle Ages so first off I want to say one thing about the Black Death is the scale is essentially unimaginable I think if you weren't person want somebody who lived through it it's one of those things that are experiences that unless you were there you just are never going to be able to conceive of what it would have been like to be doing it the scale for one thing is we can't we don't have exact numbers of what the scale even was there was no census in the 14th century so all the numbers are estimated in England for example nobody had done anything approaching a census since William the Conqueror and the Doomsday Book which had been what was you know three centuries earlier so one thing that is that these are all estimates and so it's estimated that somewhere between 70 million on the low end it may be as many as 200 million or kind of the more extreme possibilities died across Eurasia and North Africa that higher number would be it's depending on if the world population was actually a lot larger than some people estimated that it was and in any event it lowered the global population maybe from 475 million people on the whole planet to maybe 350 to 375 million people on the planet so a big drop in just a couple years you know in the whole global population at least a third of the people in Europe and some people argue as much as 60% of people in Europe died certainly a very depending place to place if it was a third of Europe that's perhaps 20 million or people or more died between 1347 and 1351 again if you can imagine everybody you know everyone in your family and take it for every three people one to die is already just incalculable and unimaginable it took Europe 200 years for its population to recover to pre plague Peaks so the next 200 years there were fewer people in Europe than there had been in 1345 cities were especially hard-hit as you can imagine because when as we now know how diseases are spread when people are in close proximity and there's overcrowding and you're working together and every other thing the transmission comes much faster and of course we also are aware of you know modern germ theory and so cities in antiquity in the Middle Ages and really up through the early modern times were just filthy and so as a result they were just filled with just disease transmission so during the Black Death 800 people per day were dying in Paris and that was reducing the overall population of the city from 100,000 so it was probably and that seems like a small City these days because of our modern scale and sensibilities it may have been though essentially the largest city in in Western Europe hundred drops from a hundred thousand down to 50,000 people perhaps 80% of Florence's population died two-thirds of the people in Venice and even other smaller cities like Hamburg and other places in Germany lost 2/3 of their population half was not unusual when it came to towns and cities cities have multiple chronicles where they talk about how they simply buried their dead in mass graves this is an illumination from a manuscript showing the citizens of tournay in France burying their dead the images from about 13 53 there are all sorts of accounts where as quickly as the citizens of a town were able to dig a big ditch that ditch would be filled with bodies and that have to dig another ditch because of how fast how rapidly the deaths were occurring we do have the remnants of that so archaeology has spent a lot more time working on antiquity so digging up the really ancient remains nevertheless there's been a much more work in medieval archaeology more recently and so for example this is a mass grave from the Black Death that was dug up in Toulouse France and one of these is one I think where they were able now to do some genetic testing and genetic studies that help with the epidemiology of understanding that what actually was happening what the disease was in terms of the black death although the cities were most affected or affected a lot more the plague also actually spread spread quickly across the countryside so the vast majority of people in the Middle Ages actually were rural peasants and while the outbreaks hit the cities first and very deadly the pestilence also quickly spread across the countryside and accounts talk about how peasants died as they worked in the fields how whole fields would just be full of peasants and stinking from the corpses because there would be nobody to come along afterwards and bury anyone so also affecting that there is a rapid depopulation of much of the countryside one study shows that in in Germany prior to 1346 there were a hundred and seventy thousand settlements all across the countryside and then after in a century after after the first round of the plague and the subsequent recurrences some forty thousand or almost a quarter of all of the settlements in Germany were abandoned the plague was highly contagious and deadly so if you had an enclosed community like a prison and like a monastery and you know we have seen this in Kovac 19 with prisons again with factories in certain circumstances that are continuing to be open and especially unfortunately in in senior facilities and nursing homes it turns out at the time though back then when they didn't understand what was going on if one person contracted the plague it generally spread to everybody in that that community so for example every friar in the Franciscan convent at Carcassonne died of the hundred and forty Dominican friars at Montpellier only seven of them survived off you know it's spread across everywhere so off in Ireland we have the account of the plague by a certain friar John Klein who wrote the whole world is in the grasp of the evil one he felt and he himself as he was writing it was the lone survivor in his monastery that was otherwise simply filled with the bodies of his dead companions in Kilkenny Ireland as he kept a record of the experience he wrote I leave parchment to continue the work if perchance any man survived and any of the race of Adam escaped this pestilence and carry out the work that I have begun as is noted on the parchment by someone who came along later and in a later hand brother John also died of the pestilence the plague was no respecter of persons so in addition to the peasants in the countryside and the merchants in the town that plague also killed Royals and nobility so the pestilence killed king alfonso xi of castile it doesn't also killed Joanna who was the daughter of King Edward the third of England she died on the way to Mary Alfonso's son and heir the Queen's of France Aragon and Navarre all died as did the Dons wife so the the heir to the throne of France's wife more Queens it seems died than Kings women especially in the first round were perhaps a little more susceptible or died in greater numbers than did men possibly because of being in homes and homes being a source of where fleas were as we'll see John Canty Kuzon a the emperor of byzantium lost his son to the plague and there were many many more examples of nobles succumbing this is also true in the princes of the church the papacy had relocated in this area of the Middle Ages to southern France to Avignon this is a photograph of the palace of the popes in Avignon and so a third of the Cardinals the princes of the church in Avignon died in England there was a quick succession of Archbishop's so John Stratford the Archbishop of Canterbury died at the plague in August of 1348 jonov offered his successor died of the plague the next year in May of 1349 and then his successor Thomas Brad were Dean survived only three months dying of the plague in August of 1349 so three Archbishop's of Canterbury all dying of the play within the space of one year the physicians in clergy died in especially large numbers so they had a very high mortality rate proportionally especially the good ones who did their jobs so some noble clergymen especially ran off to the countryside and self isolated and that some doctors refused to go and see patients and in those cases they probably had a much better chance of surviving than the ones who went and helped people in need and so there was an especially large mortality among parish priests the church members who let's say did the most work and were the most help to parishioners who died in very large numbers as it of course like we mentioned of the the Friars and monks often in Avignon again the the papal City guide the schwa iakh who is a physician there he admitted in his notes that he only made medical visits to avoid infamy so the people just didn't say he was a coward and he was a terrible doctor because he wasn't going around and helping people but he confessed in his own account that he was in continual fear whenever he went to treat any one of 24 physicians in the city of Venice only four survived the plague and although the physicians might have helped in terms of comforting people in fact they had no remedy for the disease and no effective treatment what was the plague like as its described by contemporaries it was gruesome painful and quick in its most common form the pestilence was bubonic plague whose symptoms included the appearance of swellings or buboes in the groin neck and armpits and when lanced these would booze blood and pus they're caused by internal bleeding other symptoms included headaches painful joints nausea vomiting and a general feeling of malaise Giovanni Boccaccio the celebrated Italian humanists who lived through the plague described its symptoms the plague he says first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumors in the groin or armpits some of which grew as large as a common apple others as an egg from the two said parts of the body this deadly Givat geo low or Bubo soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions and differently after which the form of the malady began to change black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or thigh or elsewhere now if you enlarge now minut and numerous as the go Vecchio Givat Yolo the Bubo had been and was still an infallible token of approaching death such also were these spots on whomsoever they showed themselves so after those symptoms it was followed by acute fever vomiting blood and then most victims died two to seven days after their initial infection just as a mention of this there's a little bit of a we can see in boccaccio some of the immediate influence that the plague had on the survivors so boccaccio had direct experience his his mistress Theo Mehta who was the illegitimate daughter of the King of Naples died of the plague and then boccaccio himself his famous work that Decameron written just after the plague is ending has it has as its its overall narration so the setting for the story has seven young women and three young men flee plague written Florence for the countryside and then each of them tell a series of stories and so that's the framing device for the de Cameron and that of course is a model for later works like Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales where all the pilgrim going on pilgrimage to Canterbury also Telltale's in that way in addition to that bubonic forum of the plague there were additional types of plague presence as recorded by contemporaries so contemporaries noted a pneumonic plague and a septicemia plague so both of these although rarer were more deadly so you know the but bonny play was already quite deadly but some people maybe 20% of victims could have recovered from the bubonic plague that's probably the most of that could have possibly only 5% at most survive pneumonic and with septicemia plague death is essentially you know absolutely get a certainty the pneumonic plague infects the lungs causing a fever a cough and blood-tinged butum people spit up blood septicemia plague infects the blood and the symptoms include purple patches the result from tiny blood clots forming throughout the body these both are a lot faster than the bubonic plague with the buboes take a little while to grow and have all that happen the pneumonic plague though can kill within 36 hours the septicemia within 24 hours or less of contraction and so these fit with the descriptions the contemporaries have of people catching sick and just almost immediately dying it's a just a anyway an amazingly scary time for anybody to be around we now know that the cause of all three of these types of plague that was observed in the 1347 251 pandemic the Black Death they're caused by a bacterium which has been identified as Arsenio pestis so unlike our present pandemic The Cove at 19 which is Fred by a virus coronavirus bacterial diseases like the three forms of plague can be treated with antibiotics which kill bacteria I thinks they kill bacteria until we have successfully bred super bacteria that are resistant to penicillin and that sort of thing but anyway for now anyway the plague is under control or mostly wiped out because of our modern invention of antibiotics and that's why the plague no longer returns at least not as a as a pandemic that threatens the planet ever we find found that the bacteria is itself spread by fleas and it also can be spread by lice anyway little bugs that are infected with the bacteria and then they bite humans and animals and regurgitate the bacteria into the wound infecting animals and humans since the early 20th century it's been theorized that the infected fleas spread with the rat population and that was based especially on some studies of plague that occurred in the early 20th century in India where that was the way it was being transmitted modern epidemiologists are questioning whether that that fits or that model fits how we see the plague spreading in the 14th century it's also completely possible that other animals were involved the humans and are living with all kinds of animals and in the Middle Ages in very close quarters and it's also quite possible that human fleas that are just living on people themselves or humans lice that are living on people that those are potentially also responsible for transmitting the disease person-to-person as the people were in quite close proximity however in the 14th century although we understand that true cause now that true cause was fully unknown at all to contemporaries so in contrast to how we are able to feel right now in the 21st century during the Kobey's 19 pandemic when we have all sorts of expertise and science and we have a great understanding of what's happening and how we can also slow and in some cases prevent transmission of the virus the black death at the time was all the more frightening for the people living since it's actual cause was completely unknown no matter what people might have speculated or the theories they weren't necessarily able to they weren't able to be proven and they actually were not any of them correct they didn't understand what it was where it came from was known so they were able to understand based on what areas were hit first that the pandemic had come from the east so it had come from somewhere in the Mongol Empire and it had first made its way to the West in the Crimea in the Black Sea which is kind of in Ukraine in a part of Ukraine that is occupied by Russia nowadays but back then it was part that mostly part of the mongol empire of which except for there were colonies that were owned by genoa and it was one of the merchants italian republics that had had rise in the central Middle Ages and had spread European wealth and economy through this rise of this mercantile class so Genoese ships returning from trading with trading partners that go ahead across the Mongol Empire the Silk Road that ultimately connected Western Europe to China brought the plague then back in their ships to Constantinople and from their events to Pisa and other places Sicily other places in Italy one of the reasons that this was able to happen was in the preceding century at the end of the 13th century Genghis Khan and his successors had conquered all of Central Asia and indeed the steps and the middle and middle a lot much of the Middle East including Iran and and Iraq and then also had conquered China had created just one of the fastest empires that had ever resist it because of Mongol what became then after an initial it was initially very devastating to be conquered by the Mongols but after you were conquered by the Mongols and you were part of their empire for a whole long time you were exposed to what is functionally a much larger trading zone a much larger economic zone that had existed I guess any time in history so now because of the Mongol peace because the Mongol Emperor's were allowing trade caravans to cross all across Asia connecting really China and the West almost very quite directly for the first time in centuries it allowed this kind of disease transmission to happen much more easily in the same way frankly that our easy travel that we have in the 21st century of people flying around in jet planes is really what caused the global transmission of the corona virus from China to everywhere so the black death began in China as well and spread west across those trade routes you can kind of see the transmission lines that are going right along there the two trade routes the one hitting the Muslim Near East and the going north to kapha there in the Crimea so if we can make this there's across Central Asia on the Silk Road to kapha and from there to Italy Genoa so the pandemic spread along those trade routes and then from there to Europe and these are dots or all the different cities that eventually everybody gets it so 14th century Europe and retrospect was especially vulnerable to plague so a lot of times we think of the Middle Ages is a time of decline and certainly the end of the Roman Empire there was a whole long period of time in late antiquity where it can't at the economic ahna me and the population and the capacity of the state were all radically declining in Europe and that continued for a certain amount of time in the earliest part of the Middle Ages that are sometimes called the Dark Ages but from the central Middle Ages on through here to the 14th century there was actually a big population uptick in Europe and indeed a significant increase in wealth and economy in the course of that and so as of the middle of the 14th century Europe had actually grown to be overpopulated in regards to how much food it was able to produce for itself and as a result the populations were subject to regular famine if there was a bad crop year and so there had been several great famines in the beginning of the 14th century and it had left survivors not everybody dies in a famine but sometimes when you lived through a famine and you were malnourished through a whole long period of time you were left as a result with a weakened immune system that makes you more susceptible to later threats such as plague 14th century Europeans also lacked some of the immunities if we go back to this history of the pandemic charts it's hard to see it in the timeline but the you know the Black Death is here it was many a long time before that didn't you get back to the plague of Justinian which would have been the last major outbreak of the this plagues caused by the Y pestis bacteria and so that again was on that top top list of the overall killers in the middle of the 6th century that killed maybe 30 to 50 million people as the Roman Empire was declining and was falling so after centuries without plague Europeans therefore had less immunity than they would have had in the immediate aftermath of the plague of Justinian they had been too many years without a major occurrence of these plagues also as I mentioned they had no effective treatment they did have physicians and the physicians were trained and they were university trained often but medieval medicine was based entirely on ideas of ancient Greek natural philosophers especially Hippocrates so the of the haen't famous Hippocratic oath theme and the doctor physician Galen and Aristotle and others they created a very elaborate system that taught that humans had for natural humors or biological systems that needed to be imbalance in order to maintain proper health and if any one of those systems got out of balance that caused disease so humoralism as it's sometimes called was the basis for Western medicine traditional Western medicine really for centuries after people were still actually trained in this essentially that kind of philosophy into let's say the early 19th century although it was being displaced at that point by the emergence of modern Western medicine so we'll look at what these four humors are just to kind of understand the system essentially the humors are your different felt to be your different kind of fluid systems that are inside so if your blood is an obvious one but they also identify your phlegm and then black bile and yellow bile which is less science-based and so each one of those according to according to ancient Greek philosophy and Noah and again the training of humoralism is resides in a Kem organ so the liver for blood the gallbladder for the yellow bile black bile in the spleen the phlegm in the brain and the lungs each one of these is associated with the ancient Greek ideas of the four elements air earth fire and water and therefore are associated with their associated qualities so moist and warm warm and dry dry and cold cold and moist and so essentially if you have an excess of blood in your mat humor one of those things that will show is that you'll be moist and warm that might seem like therefore you have like a fever and you're sweating and your temperament then that that is expressed from that imbalance is that you're going to be sanguine and so the the four of these are sanguine choleric melancholic and phlegmatic and these are still words that we use even if we no longer identify melancholy that we have with having an excess of black bile in our spleen so humoralism unfortunately and when it came to treating the plague was often worse than nothing so the general adaptation of humoralism would have been quite fine because just teaching people to be healthy and lead a healthy balanced life and to eat a balanced diet the sort of thing there was nothing wrong with that as preventive or general health however the kinds of invasive treatments that are based on humoralism include rebalancing your your bodily fluids by doing such things as if you have too much if you're too sanguine bloodletting and so that's one of the more famous ones you know cutting some making a cut and removing some of the blood draining some of the blood out of out of a sick person you can imagine that that's not going to be particularly helpful despite the philosophical theory in treating an actual plague victim same thing a medics which is to say cutting causing people to vomit laxatives and so on are often worse than nothing so the papal physician in Avignon recognized in the course of all of this activity all of the treatments that he was doing that bloodletting was completely ineffective against the plague although apparently he continued to prescribe it for people and having on eden-like so so he he didn't he didn't tell them that that wasn't it wasn't how gonna help so what was the cause then if you were a natural philosopher in the 14th century they realized through experience that bloodletting didn't do anything it didn't help but the idea that they had about humoralism their commitment to that ancient Greek philosophy philosophical ideal was so strong it did not cause them actually to abandon the system of humoralism which as I mentioned continued to hold sway for many centuries afterward instead that papal physician who I mentioned and actually many other contemporary natural philosophers physician scientists in the Middle Ages at the time concluded that the plague actually was incurable and that it was the result of a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn so in other words there had been a cosmic astrological result that was affecting everybody and that there was absolutely nothing that anybody could do about it as you can imagine the explanation of a planetary conjunction wasn't particularly compelling to the masses so the masses don't look up in the sky and say oh I guess those two planets have moved too close together and that's what caused our entire world to be turned upside down so instead for common folk especially the plague was very clearly an obvious sign of God's displeasure for the sins of humanity and one the popular results here in this image is of stewing public penance public self-flagellation mortifying the body in order to atone for those sins according to darker popular sentiments unfortunately there were people who looked for scapegoats and who reached the all-too-familiar bigoted conclusion that the other the person who is not like me they must be responsible and so all across Europe beginning in Spain bits across France and the Low Countries and then kind of with a lot of intensity in Germany Jews were blamed for the plague and were massacred in in popular riots so that's kind of an overview of the what happened in the plague and the Black Death why it happened and how it was experienced I want to look at some of the results of the Black Death and then I want to talk about a couple of the lessons I think we can draw from it so some of the results of the Black Death were that after those massacres Jewish people and communities who survived they largely started leaving from the West and they started to emigrate in quite large numbers to Poland and Eastern Europe so the contemporary king of Poland offered sanctuary in part because there were so few people living in his land and he saw the need to have these very useful members of potential members for a society to relocate to towns and the countryside in his country and so that began this long chapter in Jewish history of homeland not really but anyway in Eastern Europe another result was sort of a morbid outlook that expressed itself in art and in other ways so we already saw for example Boccaccio and his Decameron and how that played out in literature it also the imagery of death made its way as a frequent component now in artwork and so here's an example that is pretty amazing it's a century from a century later a fresco in Palermo called the triumph of death and you can kind of see in the middle of it death is riding as a is a skeletal warrior here riding on a horse through the middle of people unawares there's a close-up of that another example this painting is really amazing by Pieter Bruegel the elder it's even essentially again after that it's also called the triumph of death I have I ever since I found this I made this image actually had this be that my back my desktop background on my computer because it's such an amazing image it's probably too morbid for me to have that I should have happier picture on my on my on my computer to me this looks like it's the inspiration for the episode in Game of Thrones where the zombies the zombie army comes and attacks the town and they just barely able to they don't fight them off they're just barely able to escape Jon Snow is this able to escape on the boat as the zombies overwhelm the entire town and so you can kind of see as they close in out of here there's death again on the on the horse like that and then as the people are all in here dying and some among them are some of the other skeleton warriors there's in fact just this whole armies of these skeletal warriors as the people are being making their way here into the realm of the Dead another frequent image is this image of the dance of death at dance macabre and the idea of it here is that death has become a leveler and so this is a painting on a fresco in a church in Slovenia and you can kind of see once again death is dancing along with mortals and everyone's immortal so including the peasants including queens and kings and Cardinals bishops as we saw death takes everyone unawares and unexpectedly and it can happen at any moment because the plague can always relapse so there's sort of a a morbid sense that overtakes in a way the the culture of the survivors nevertheless for some survivors death was sort of a leveler in the sense that economic conditions do seem to have improved over the decades so after recovering from the initial devastation which was no certainly terrible economic conditions that may have improved for survivors so in a relative sense if a third of the people died then there is in fact a lot more land for everybody that's left in an agricultural society it is in that sense a zero-sum game if there is no increase in technology and there wasn't anywhere near as rapid of that kind of increase this is we've been experiencing the last couple centuries so that meant that per peasant rents would decrease and indeed land prices of the ability to buy land all of those went down and then labour because it was so much more scarce became more valuable and so as a result many landowners felt that kind of crunch they had - generally speaking and the obligations of serfdom so the serfs could just run away and go to a different employer and serfdom in the West anyway largely disappear as peasants became free peasants as in in the end of that kind of long trend in the end of the feudal age other results then there's a continuing emphasis on creating labor saving techniques so that higher cost of labour continued what had already been a long-standing trend in the Middle Ages which was focusing on labor technology labor saving technology so labor we've had always been a little more scarce but it got scarce again now it'd be as a result of the plague and labor saving technology would had been more or less unnecessary in antiquity in antiquity when you have an empire like Rome that just has this massive amount of slave labor then necessity doesn't ever get you - even if you understand the principle of a windmill like this medieval representation you don't bother to make them because you simply have people to do the work of grinding grinding wheat and so on and so forth now there is an increasing reliance you know a using number of windmills this becomes and other kinds of labour saving techniques in other words technology that ultimately that trendline leads to the modern era which his focus has really been on ongoing technology and ongoing elimination of the need for labor that trend line has gotten again perilous into the 21st century as there's so many different ways that we can eliminate people and the need for people from the economy that there's way less capacity to have jobs and that's still something that we're looking have to be looking to grapple with as a society going forward but we can see the trend line going here there were some results that in terms of capacity to treat pandemics so although the black death didn't immediately lead to a revolution in as I mentioned the philosophical basis the humoralism continued for centuries nevertheless the experience with the pandemic did cause people to learn and develop certain techniques that were actually useful and effective so as the plague continued to recur again and again what observers noticed so doctors noticed was that the first time it went through everybody died the second time it went through the people who had already survived the first time were way less likely to get it so much many fewer got it especially the second time through it affected especially the children the people who had not been survivors and who didn't necessarily weren't necessarily immune and so on and so forth where there was more and more natural immunity as the centuries went on than there had been before so that got the gears rolling in terms of understanding that and it also quite early when people saw how the plague was spreading from city to city the practice of quarantine exit yz4 reagents where the plague broke out was already developed in the 14th century during recurrences of the plague so for example in 1377 and during a recurrence the city-state of Ragusa which is now the city of dubrovnik in the on the adriatic coast croatia I think it's in Croatia you slobby it was anyway the dubrovnik is the was quarantined because of repeated outbreaks of plague so what are some of the lessons learned one thing that the people at the time felt was even though even though they felt that they finally had had ended the plague after the first round of its died went through the whole population unfortunately for them there were recurrences that Bend and in some cases the recurrence is as I mentioned the next time it came broke out it was somehow even more cruel because it it killed people the children that they needed to replace the rest of the population so anyway that original outbreak was followed by recurrences 1360 1374 1414 38 and again and again and again so on up until the 1600s when when it largely stopped being pandemic in pandemic form in Europe and but continued to affect other regions until the early 20th century so that was one unfortunately less than that the people at the time learned I think a critical lesson that we can learn in retrospect is not to give in to our base instincts to give in to our worst nature's so when there are extreme conditions when it the whole world is being turned upside down society is more flexible you can unleash extraordinary reactions at this time and we certainly have done that here in a 21st century where we've shut down the vast global economy so big things are able to happen however this is not a moment to give in to base bigotry as Christians in the medieval West did by scapegoating by massacring their neighbors their Jewish neighbors and expelling them from their lands this isn't the time to do our the thing we might wanted to do ourselves for again a base instict reason and say oh well while the pandemics happening let's let's scapegoat the Chinese and call it the Chinese virus or let's use this as an opportunity to just ban all immigration that's obviously taking the wrong strain in the wrong direction another lesson that we can look is even though there may have been some economic benefits for some of the peasants who survived certainly not for the people who died the reality is those took a long time to realize and so although when we do this thing as historians and we can telescope the whole story it turns out that when you're talking about a pandemic that is going on for like four years and then the recovery which is another 20 30 40 50 years after that in the hindsight of history that seems like Oh while that was a really wonderful thing for all the people that survived nevertheless if you were living through it in in actual human years this these benefits such that they were took a long time to realize and I think we can only say that whatever comes out of this experience that we're having right now as a positive result will also take a long time to realize another lesson of that is very clear I think is that the survivors to have a kind of trauma and so people that are exposed to so much mortality can't help but be changed by this in the case of medieval Europeans this kind of led to morbid sensibility to fatalism in some cases it there were different responses some people theorize that this might have led to more focusing on this life and living this life to its fullest certainly in Italy soon thereafter this is the time period when the Renaissance is actually sparked nevertheless lots of places throughout the West and certainly the Middle East and everywhere experienced this trauma and the Renaissance only what happened in Italy so it's not necessarily a direct consequence of pandemic leads to you know a has X&Y result but in any event whatever the positive results are again one of the lessons we can learn is that you're just gonna we we can't help people can't help but come out of such an experience being quite changed and so that's something also to be thinking about as we look forward and so those are for me anyway some of the lessons I think we can look learn from the Black Death thank you very much and so Landro I don't know if we have got questions or comments no well that is just fine because it has been a long day for me so I really appreciate that you've been with us and you've been watching along with us I hope this was interesting and it may be that I brought out some things that you weren't aware of from this particular chapter in history and and maybe it gets us thinking about where we are where we are now and we'll continue with our series next week on the similar topic and we look to plagues in the Bible Exodus to revelation

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 6,860

Keywords: covid19, covid-19, coronavirus, pandemic, back death, pandemic lecture, middle ages, history, history lecture, medieval, dark ages, bubonic plague, plague, history of pandemics, lecture

Id: -gMmur2FDqM

Length: 59min 14sec (3554 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020