At some point in your high school history classes, you learned about the Black Death: a three-year plague between 1347-50 which killed roughly half of all Europeans, around a third of Middle Easterners and another ten million in China and East Asia. This plague was so deadly and severe that millions of observers believed that it was the apocalypse punishing them for their mortal sins. Now, with a plague (albeit far less deadly) of our own, we can look back with more perspective on the Black Death, how many of our ancestors coped and possibly come out feeling a little better about our current situation.
The death toll
The Black Death was one of the worst catastrophes in human history. It arrived in Europe via Silk Road trade and Mongol invaders from the Eurasian steppe, through the Middle East and finally to Italy, Greece, and Spain. The death toll among Europeans was like if today, 100-200 million Americans dropped dead by 2023. That’s a number so catastrophic that we’d likely never recover.
The disease
The disease that caused the Black Death, the bubonic plague, arrived in Europe via fleas that carried the disease. Close quarters, poor hygiene and people who typically owned only one or two sets of clothes made Europe the ideal place for the disease to spread. It’s a fairly terrible death–first, you develop a fever. Then painful pustules appear. After just a few days, you die. Nearly 80% of people who fell ill died within a week or so of contracting the disease–a figure so staggering and severe that entire cities could fall in a matter of weeks.
How doctors coped
The famous image of the plague doctor in a beak-like mask actually didn’t originate in the medieval era, but came about later during a 17th-century outbreak of the plague. At the time of the medieval Black Death, the Islamic world had a better understanding of health and medicine than Europe at the time, where the Church limited potential for scientific advancement and often killed or exiled scientists. Doctors had to work with what they had. Some actually figured out how to fight infection by bursting the pustules that developed on the skin of an infected person.
How people coped
In times of trauma, people have lots of strange ways to handle emotional pain. Some people simply ran away from civilization. Others became increasingly hedonistic and nihilistic, numb to the sheer destruction around them. Some survivors became increasingly and fanatically religious while others lost all faith in the Church. People stopped working entirely and gave up traditional daily routines. While some of these coping strategies may seem familiar, medieval peasants were probably not baking banana bread or holding Zoom happy hours to stay positive.
The positives
During COVID-19, no one would blame any of us for being nervous and scared about the future. But possibly the one good thing to come out of the most catastrophic plague in history is a little thing called the Renaissance.
Strangely enough, the Black Death ended up being great for those who survived. The crowded manors that existed prior to the plague began were depopulated and the surviving serfs had the opportunity to demand better wages and working conditions. This was the birth of a little thing called capitalism. The subsequent rise of the middle class allowed people to escape from the strict social hierarchy that had existed since the Roman Empire fell almost a thousand years prior. The rising merchant class created some very wealthy individuals such as the Medici family in Florence, who you may know from basically funding the entire Italian Renaissance. The trauma and lack of control millions of Europeans experienced during the Black Death also provided the catalyst for the break from the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation just a few centuries later.
Putting COVID-19 in perspective
The Black Death is so infamous for its destruction that it’s easy to forget that it made millions of people’s lives better in a bizarre, roundabout way. It was the symbolic death of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern era. So now, as we all sit around hoping that things don’t get worse, it’s helpful to think of our current situation in perspective.
Medieval Europeans had no hope of a vaccine in the near future. They had no idea how the virus actually spread. They couldn’t do anything to even remotely protect themselves from disease and there were no paramedics to call when a family member or friend got sick. And yet, somehow, millions of people made it through. So while I won’t deny that this new virus is scary and that the uncertainty we’re all dealing with is deeply upsetting, frustrating and traumatizing, many of our ancestors went through something objectively worse (and not to mention grosser) and made it out relatively okay. And it’s possible we have a Neo-Renaissance to look forward to in a few decades.