Week 11: Black Death

BLOG POST CONTRIBUTIONS

1: Europe: A General Picture Before the Black Death (Erica)

2: Timeline of the Black Death (Maia)

3: Political/Economic Effects of the Black Death (Sarah)

4: Religious/Social Effects of the Black Death (Tor)

5: Quarantine: From the Middle Ages to the Modern (Emma)

1. EUROPE BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

The 1300s before the Black Death was a time of relative prosperity. The money economy had started up again and urban centers like Florence and Venice were flourishing in trade, politics, talent, and wealth enough to begin laying the foundations for the Renaissance. The growth of guilds, the demands for quality goods, and a new search for talent and beauty, for example, led to humanist Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) exclaiming “What in the whole world is so splendid and magnificent as the architecture of Florence?” (see Margaret L. King’s ‘The Renaissance in Europe’)

In Venice, the scattered islands were united into a powerful trading kingdom, so much that the Merchants of Venices’ palaces doubled as warehouses. “Iron, salt, gold and treasure, timber and wine, meat and fish” – these were just some of the goods that passed hands. Venice had the extraordinary position of being accessible to both Western Europe and the Islamic world, and thus it is little surprise that it became so wealthy.

This wealth allowed for much artistic and architectural works to be done, with beautiful buildings, poets, and famous writers abounding such as Dante, Boccacio and Petrarch. And reigning above it all were the despots and tyrants that had gradually seized control after these cities first attempted to become republics.

While many cities at the time were not nearly as wealthy as Florence or Venice, as a whole, the Europe in the years before the Black Death at least generally had strong governance and better trade routes than the decades before. It would be these that would influence the Black Death for better or worse.

Erica Chan

2. TIMELINE OF THE BLACK DEATH

1346-47: Italian rural population already weakened by famine

1347: Bubonic plague, the Black Death, arrives in Messina, Sicily, brought by merchant galleys that had traded in Byzantium and the Crimea

1347-48: Plague travelled in the winter, then flared up again for the summer of 48

1348: Plague sweeps through Italy

The plague returned with decreasing ferocity each generation after 1348. Epidemics recurred in 1361-63, 1371, 1373-74, 1382-83, 1390, 1400, and afterwards with less frequency. The plague occurred in Europe as late as 1720.

Maia Coghlan

3.      POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF THE BLACK DEATH

Prior to the Black Death, Italy was an economically prosperous place to live.

Florence and Venice

Florentine bankers became the most famous, and wealthy bankers in all of Europe, profiting on the exchange of money. (In connection with the Church- they collected money for the Pope).

Wool making was the largest part of the Florentine economy, and thus there were two major wool guilds or ‘arti maggiori’. There were many guilds in Florence including; bankers and judges etc. There were also ‘lesser’ guilds, of the less glamorous professions. The individuals in these guilds were elected to maintain the governing body of Florence.

The wealthy merchants of Venice were in charge of the government in the time prior to the Black Death. This merchant class was turned into the hereditary nobility in the late 1200‘s. The state had a great interest in trade, and thus spurred on the mass construction of ships. These ‘factories’ had assembly line efficiency and matched, even exceeded the size of the wool-making industry in Florence.

The Black Death

The Black Death arrived in Italy in 1348. Populations rapidly declined, by rates of two thirds. Florence shrank from approximately 100,000 to 30,000; and Venice went from 120,000 to 84,000. The people had no idea how to treat infections or disease, and thus doctors’ work increased because people were willing to pay large sums of money to be treated, yet some refused to work because they were fearful. Some governments identified households with the plague and declared quarantine for anything crossing into the cities.

Sarah Bland

4.      RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL EFFECTS OF THE BLACK DEATH

When the Black Death struck, for the people affected, it was an almost total breakdown of society. The author Giovanni Boccaccio describes the plague effects on human and spirit with a passage from the reading.  “The fact was that one citizen avoided another, that almost no-one cared for this neighbour”. This avoiding of others shows that the commandment of “love thy neighbour” which can be argued is what Western society is built on, was discarded due to people’s fear of the illness. Boccaccio also describes that families would abandon each other, that parents would neglect children “as if they were not their own”.

From a total physical perspective, the plague decimated Europe’s population, with estimates putting the death toll between one and two thirds of the continents population. This loss of population meant that there was a lack of labour shortage, but some authors have put his diminished population as a positive because of the land and food shortages that existed in areas before the plague.The plague also changed how people saw their own life, in the portrait by Francesco Traini in the reading, it shows Death as a skeleton, taking lives at will, highlighting people’s sudden realisation with their own fragile morality. Authors and other sources have also claimed that the moral crisis brought upon by the plague was the catalyst for the beginning of the Renaissance and the end of the Middle Ages.

People thought that perhaps the plague was God’s wrath, and sources from the reading describe the coming of the plague as God’s will. The Church gave aid sporadically, sometimes priest would stay, while others would flee the plague affected areas. The death toll was so high that many people went without Last Rites; one of the sacrament’s of Catholicism. Losing a priest in a village meant that either the people went without the services of the church, or the successor lacked experience or the calling of the previous priest. The Church was also said to have lost some authority as the behaviour of clerics at times were seen as lowly for a man of God

Tor Clough-Good

5.      QUARANTINE: FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE MODERN ERA

Quarantine was introduced after the devastating effects of the Black Death that wiped out 30% of Europe’s population. When first introduced, any person coming to the city was left on a nearby island for 30 days to ensure that they did not develop plague-like symptoms during this time. Eventually they increased this to forty days, and this is where the word “quarantine” comes from; it is Italian (quarantena) meaning forty-day period. Eventually Quarantining became a regular event used to prevent lots of diseases such as Leprosy, Yellow Fever, Asiatic cholera and others, with all shipments being quarantined. Crews were left on island for 40 days, and a ships cargo was unpacked and left to air for days.

The Quarantine Act 1710 ensured that the Black Plague would not again deplete Europe’s population. Other countries especially those around England followed in their footsteps and set up their own Quarantine measures.  Today, Australia has the strictest Quarantine policies in the world, as we, as a county have so much more to loose than other countries. We are a fairly new country and many diseases and illnesses have not invaded our shores, our strict quarantine laws insure that this continues.

Emma Gavin

Blog Question

What do you think was the most important impact of the Black Death out of those outlined by King?