How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (26 page)

Blaming the Jews

Inevitably, the persistent question was, why had the plague struck? In response, the story began to spread that the Jews were poisoning the wells with plague. (Out of their concern for keeping kosher, Jews often maintained their own wells rather than drink from those maintained for the public.) This rumor seems to have originated in Spain, where the initial attacks on Jews took place—twenty Jews were killed in Barcelona, eighteen in Cervera, then a few in Catalonia and Aragon.
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But attacks on Spanish Jews were quickly suppressed by local bishops, armed with a bull issued by Pope Clement:

Mandate to Protect the Jews

October 1, 1348

We … are mindful of our duty to shelter the Jews, by reason of the fact that our savior, when he assumed mortal flesh for the salvation of the human race, deemed it worthy to be born of Jewish stock.… Recently, however, it has come to our attention … that some Christians out of rashness have impiously slain
several Jews … after falsely blaming the pestilence on poisonings by Jews, said to be in league with the devil, when in fact it is the result of an angry God striking at Christian people for their sins.… It does not seem credible that the Jews … are responsible … because this nearly universal pestilence … has afflicted and continues to afflict the Jews themselves.

We order all of you [bishops] by apostolic writing … to warn your subjects, both the clergy and the people, during the service of mass in your churches, and to expressly enjoin them on pain of excommunication, which you may then inflict in those who transgress, that they not presume to seize, strike, wound, or kill Jews.
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The papal order was obeyed nearly everywhere. Contrary to historians who allege many Jewish massacres that never happened,
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there were no more attacks on Jews in Europe except in a series of cities along, or near, the Rhine River. Perhaps as many as twenty thousand Jews were murdered in Erfurt, Mainz, Speyer, Strasburg, Augsburg, Cologne, Munich, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart.
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This was an area with a long history of bloody anti-Semitic outbursts, beginning in 1096.
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Here some families proudly claimed to be descendants of “
Judenbreter
” (Jew roasters),
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harking back to previous pogroms. Why here? Because the Rhine basin was, as the historian Shulamit Magnus put it, a “politically fractured area,”
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wherein neither church nor state had effective control. Consequently, there was little or no restraint on popular outbursts. For this same reason, heretical Christian movements were highly successful here too, as was Luther’s Reformation (see chapter 14). Unfortunately, the vicious anti-Semitic culture of these cities did not die out with the waning of medieval times, but lived on to support Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

Stagnant Demography

In the aftermath of the huge loss of life from the Black Death, Europe’s population became stagnant: pre–Black Death levels of population were not regained until well into the sixteenth century. This has puzzled many demographers whose theories suppose that such population catastrophes are followed by a rapid recovery due to an accelerated birthrate.
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This is the sort of controversy that only academics could sustain, and it has
prompted a deluge of interpretations of the dubious theories of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834).
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Nonetheless, the primary reason Europe’s population did not grow is obvious: the plague did not vanish after 1352! Instead, there were new outbursts, again and again. Nor were these minor outbreaks. In 1361 a new epidemic killed millions—anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of Europe’s population succumbed. A third outburst in 1369 probably killed another 10 percent all across Europe.
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“The best estimate,” according to Ziegler, “is that from 1349 to 1450 [the] European population declined between 60% and 75%.”
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It would have taken an impossibly high fertility rate to have made up these losses. In fact, during this era the fertility rate was unusually low. Here demographers have offered plausible explanations. Given that the fatality rate for the plague was higher for men than for women, far more women than usual never married and never had children. In addition, because the plague hit young adults especially hard, the surviving population was disproportionately elderly.
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But having a far smaller population was not entirely a misfortune for most of those who survived.

The End of Serfdom

Before the Black Death struck, serfs did most of the farming in Europe. A serf was a peasant to whom a landowner provided a parcel, as well as housing, in return for labor in the landowner’s fields. Serfs had a hereditary right to their land; in return they were bound to their land and their landlord—that is, they couldn’t be dispossessed, but they couldn’t leave. In addition to providing serfs with land, the seigneurs (as landowners were called in England as well as on the Continent) provided them with protection.
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Not all medieval peasants were serfs. Many freely rented their land without any additional obligations to a landlord. The
Domesday Book
showed that at the end of the eleventh century, 12 percent of the population of England consisted of free peasants, while 35 percent were serfs.
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The proportion of free peasants to serfs began to increase by the start of the fourteenth century, and the immense loss of life caused by the Black Death so accelerated this trend that serfdom soon disappeared in western Europe.
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A direct result of the Black Death was an immense amount of agricultural land having no surviving owners or heirs. Consequently, surviving landowners greatly expanded their holdings. As their fields doubled and tripled in size, they faced an immediate crisis: a serious shortage of labor. So landowners began to compete for labor, with the result that both wages and conditions of employment improved. In England, for example, a plowman’s average wage rose from 2 shillings a week in 1347 to 7 shillings in 1349 and to 10 shillings, 6 pence, in 1350.
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Similar increases occurred everywhere. Perhaps even more important, conditions of tenancy changed dramatically too. Unless freed from the rules binding them to the land, serfs simply deserted and signed on as free tenants elsewhere—to which their new landlords turned blind eyes. To keep their tenants, landlords had to emancipate them from serfdom. Moreover, new lease agreements increasingly favored the peasant farmer: landlords agreed to furnish seed, oxen or horse teams, and better housing, all for lower rents. Lack of tenants also prompted many landowners to abandon farming in favor of the far-less-labor-intensive grazing of livestock—especially sheep and cattle. This development, combined with the greater affluence of the laboring classes, increased the consumption of meat; the increase in protein intake was quickly reflected in growth and strength.

Rapidly growing opportunities in expanding industries and other forms of urban employment also improved the situation of the peasantry.
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In fact, the real wages of urban construction workers were as high in the mid-fifteenth century as at the end of the nineteenth century.
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In England in the late fourteenth century, the rapidly growing industry of woolen manufacturing offered wages that attracted many workers away from rural employment, thereby putting increased upward pressure on wages.
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It should be noted that the demand for woolen garments grew partly in response to the increasingly colder climate.

As a result of the financial and legal gains made by medieval workers, the financial circumstances of the elite declined substantially. With many fewer mouths to feed, prices for agricultural products declined, which reduced landowners’ incomes. As the distinguished A. R. Bridbury put it, “Members of the landed classes … were outstandingly the casualties of the movements of these momentous times.”
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Consequently, all across western Europe the aristocratic landowners attempted to prohibit higher wages by law. In France a 1349 statute limited wages to pre-1348 levels.
It was ignored. So in 1350 a new statute limited wage increases to 33 percent above the 1348 level. In England, an Ordinance of Labour in 1349 froze wages. Then in 1350 Parliament enacted a statute that attempted the same thing. But the market overruled them. “All of these efforts were for naught,” the historian Robert S. Gottfried wrote, “and landlords discovered that the only way to keep laborers was to pay the going rate.”
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Nevertheless, tensions between the peasants, who demanded greater freedom, and the aristocracy, who wanted a return to unchallenged serfdom, led to several peasant revolts—the Jacquerie in France in 1358, the Revolt of the Ciompi in Italy in 1378, and the English Peasants’ Revolt (or Wat Tyler’s Rebellion) in 1381. All these revolts were ruthlessly suppressed. But their goals were largely achieved by economic forces. As the historian Jim Bolton aptly put it: “Change came, almost inexorably, and it did so because the economic events of the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and especially those resulting from the sudden decline in population, gave peasant tenants an irresistible bargaining position. By the late 1380s, [aristocratic efforts to restore serfdom] had largely failed, in the face of tenant resistance and economic realism.”
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Innovations?

In a charming, posthumously published book,
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the twentieth-century historian David Herlihy proposed the plausible thesis that the labor shortages caused by the Black Death stimulated the invention and development of labor-saving technology. This hypothesis is especially attractive given that, as seen in previous chapters, societies often ignored innovations when labor was sufficiently cheap, as when Romans ignored watermills in favor of having slaves grind grain by hand. Indeed, Herlihy proposed that water and wind power were widely adopted subsequent to the Black Death to replace hand labor.

Printing was another innovation said to have received vital stimulus from the fourteenth-century labor shortage. According to Herlihy, “Numerous scribes were employed to copy manuscripts.… As long as wages were low, this method of reproduction based on intensive human labor was satisfactory enough.… But the late medieval population plunge raised labor costs.… The advent of printing is thus a salient example of the policy of factor substitution which was transforming the
late medieval economy.”
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In passing, Herlihy also suggested that labor shortages caused the development of larger ships with fewer crew members and the rapid adoption of firearms by western European armies.

It is an elegant thesis, and I must confess my disappointment that Herlihy’s hypotheses are not supported by the evidence. Water power was widespread across western Europe several centuries before the Black Death (as seen in chapter 4), and water-powered fulling mills were the basis for the explosive growth of the English woolen industry in the thirteenth century. The critical factor was that hand labor could not compete even if paid only a bare subsistence wage; the fulling machines were just too efficient.
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English woolens were so cheap that they quickly dominated the entire European market. The same is obviously true of printing presses versus scribes. The press did come into existence after the Black Death reduced the number of scribes, but so long as books were hand-copied they would have remained too expensive for any but the deepest pockets. Even an overabundant supply of scribes could not have kept the much-less-expensive printers from taking over the market. As for ships, they did not suddenly become much larger and crews smaller in the wake of Black Death labor shortages; the long-established trend in that direction merely continued. Finally, European armies adopted firearms to compensate not for a shortage of troops but for a shortage of troops who were bulletproof.

Thus far, no one has discovered any credible examples of labor-saving technologies prompted by the labor shortages resulting from the Black Death.

In contrast, a number of innovations can plausibly be attributed to the Little Ice Age: glass windowpanes, storm doors, skis, ice skates, sunglasses (first used for preventing snow blindness), distilled liquor, trousers, knitted clothing, buttons, and chimneys.
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To consider the widespread social impact such inventions had, consider the last example. The chimney did much more than keep rooms well heated and smoke free, important as those developments were. It fundamentally changed the way people organized their homes and lived their lives.

Evidence of human use of fire goes back at least 400,000 years, and some scholars date the first use of fire to much earlier. When humans took shelter in huts, they took their campfires with them, relying on openings in the roof to let out the smoke—an inefficient method that resulted in
smoky rooms and let in cold drafts and rain. Fireplaces improved safety by containing the fire in an inflammable hearth but did nothing to solve the smoke and draft problems. These were somewhat minimized by limiting structures to one great hall heated by a central hearth.

The chimney first appeared sometime in about the twelfth century and initially was adopted only by the very rich. Unfortunately, too many medieval historians
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assume that lower-class housing continued to lack chimneys until nearly modern times. They should have consulted art historians—many paintings from the early fifteenth century show chimneys on most buildings in rural areas as well on even very modest homes in cities.
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