The Black Death 1346-1353: The Complete History

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2004

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Bubonic or Pneumonic Plague?

While some scholars have questioned whether the pandemic known as the Black Death was plague at all, Benedictow gives little credence to this theory. He shows that the medieval pandemic is closely related to modern outbreaks of plague that are caused by the bacteria yersinia pestis. While some argue that the Black Death was devastating because of multiple carrier species—that is, both bubonic and pneumonic plague—Benedictow’s epidemiological evidence and written descriptions from the period suggest that pneumonic plague’s impact during the medieval pandemic was negligible.

For example, the fact that evidence shows the plague’s pace of spread consistently slowed during cold months and in mountainous regions where temperatures were lower confirms that this was bubonic plague. Pneumonic plague spreads regardless of the season. Bubonic plague flourishes in warm and damp conditions, which not only explains why the evidence shows it spreading more rapidly during the spring and summer months but also explains why ship transport was the major mode by which the Black Death moved. Conditions at sea are humid and, thus, foster the transmission of the bubonic plague. For example, Italian merchants fleeing the city of Kaffa on the Caspian Sea brought the plague westward on their ships. The disease proceeded to several southern European ports and leapt from those cities to others. Plague arrived in Spain and England from the epicenter of Bordeaux in France during the spring of 1347. Rapid spread in smaller towns and villages, in contrast to bigger cities, also serves to confirm this was bubonic plague. The Spanish cathedral city of Huesca was infected in the summer of 1348, and plague raged into November. Meanwhile, the neighboring town, Almudévar, which travel from Huesca contaminated, was overcome by September. The more rapid pace of the disease in the smaller town than in the nearby cathedral city is evidence of bubonic plague.

Chronicles and works of literature describes the plague’s varied symptoms, which some have taken to indicate that the Black Death was a pandemic of both bubonic and pneumonic plague. Yet, a closer analysis of this evidence suggests that bubonic plague was the primary form of the disease. Victims, however, did experience secondary pneumonic plague, which followed their infection with bubonic. A Russian chronicler, for example, described the plague’s symptoms as including coughing up blood for a number of days. This is an indication not of primary pneumonic plague but of secondary pneumonic plague. Primary pneumonic plague killed victims within approximately 19 hours. These victims must have contracted bubonic plague that later became pneumonic. Collectively, these varied types of evidence support Benedictow’s thesis that the Black Death was a pandemic of bubonic plague.

A New Mortality Rate

Benedictow revises previous estimates of the Black Death’s mortality based on epidemiological and demographic evidence. Previous estimates of the death toll range from one third of Europe to 40 or 45% of the population. However, Benedictow argues that approximately 60% of the population died during this outbreak. This estimate is controversial and based on incomplete evidence, and he acknowledges that it is an approximation. Nevertheless, this finding is transformative for plague studies as well as broader studies of the history of medieval Europe.

Historical demographers suggest that on the eve of the Black Death, Europe’s population was approximately 80 million. If 60% of this number died in the pandemic, that is 50 million people dead within a matter of a few years. The author arrives at this number through a painstaking analysis of surviving—and often incomplete—records that track populations just before and shortly after the Black Death. Sources survive for only certain areas of Europe, so Benedictow must rely on a series of local case studies and draw his conclusion by extrapolation. Rates fluctuate between regions, by social class, and by whether the records come from rural or urban areas. For example, in Spain, he estimates that population declined between 55 and 60%, although the island of Mallorca stands as a notable outlier with only a 16% reduction. In Italy, the city of Florence lost 55 to 65% of its populace, with the elite class’s mortality rate somewhere between 40 and 50%, thus lower than the total average. In France, the total mortality rate was approximately 60%, while the taxpaying populace might have experienced a death rate of 55 to 60%.

Reviewers of this monograph have critiqued Benedictow’s methods. Andrew Noymer, for example, writes that the author is “especially source-critical when it comes to data that does not fit into his picture of high mortality.” In other words, Noymer critiques Benedictow for excluding some data (such as the aforementioned Mallorca figures) that does not support his thesis. Similarly, in her 2005 review, published in the Journal of the History of Medicine, Shona Kelly Wray, criticizes Benedictow and suggests that some of his analysis is “forced.” She points out that “studies based on cohorts of individuals instead of households that result in mortality rates too low for Benedictow’s thesis are dismissed as too problematic because the researchers cannot identify the same cohort before and after the plague."

Nevertheless, the critics mentioned above agree that the mortality rate was high and that Benedictow’s contribution to the field is valuable and inspires further inquiry.

Social, Economic, and Cultural Changes

Such a swift and dramatic drop in the population had widespread social, economic, and cultural consequences that shaped not only the remainder of the Late Middle Ages but also the early modern period. Benedictow addresses these interconnected consequences throughout the book but especially centers them in his final chapter. This discussion places the Black Death within both a European and a global context.

Benedictow concurs with previous plague scholarship that the Black Death’s mortality rate caused a shortage of workers in the late medieval period that improved the lives of peasants who could now find work that had been difficult to come by before the pandemic. Not only did these peasants find employ, they also worked for higher wages than before the Black Death. Likewise, the shortages in the food supply that preceded the Black Death were no longer a problem. The price of grain, for instance, declined in the Black Death’s wake. According to Benedictow,

The great increase in real wages reflects a sudden dramatic deficit of labour. The concomitant fall in grain prices reflects that, as populations now were much smaller, poor agricultural lands were abandoned […], and productivity in grain production consequently increased, which put pressure downwards on prices. However, as people now had much better earnings than before, they would east less grain-based foodstuffs and use their extra money to purchase meat, butter, wine […], which would put additional pressure downwards on grain prices (220).

This phenomenon of falling grain costs appears across Europe.

Other changes include the following:

the development of new technologies to fill the labor void
warfare and imperialism as sources of supplemental income for elites, who now had to pay workers more and collected lower rents
an obsession with death and dying in late medieval art, reflecting the Black Death’s psychological impact
the creation of public health services, such as plague hospitals, which laid the foundation for modern European health care

Benedictow’s treatment of technological innovation is fleeting and not an entirely new observation. For example, in his 1997 monograph The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, David Herlihy suggests that higher wages encouraged some to look for ways to make labor easier and cheaper. This desire led Johann Gutenberg to invent the European printing press in 1453.

The development of the printing press allowed for lower cost of books and wide dissemination of Italian and Northern Renaissance thought. The catastrophe of the Black Death, thus, had unexpected and historically significant outcomes. Likewise, Benedictow suggests that as elites sought to supplement their loss of wealth as peasants demanded lower rents and increased wages, they looked not only to wartime taxation and the spoils of war to fill their coffers but also to sources outside Europe. The Spanish monarchs, for instance, agreed to fund Christopher Columbus’s exploratory mission in which he planned to sail across the Atlantic to East Asia, which was a source of valuable spices. Columbus, however, landed in the Caribbean, and soon the Spanish and others set out to colonize the American continents as parts of new, global European empires, thus exploiting new lands, resources, and peoples. The Black Death indeed had a transformative effect on Europe and the globe.