In the popular imagination, the Middle Ages have a bit of a dour reputation, associated with hardship, scarcity, filth, violence, and religious fanaticism. In truth, what historians generally consider to be the Middle Ages lasted a millennia and as a result the fortunes of the peoples living in it vary wildly from region to region and era to era.
However, if there was a period in time when the medieval world was true to its gratuitously squalid stereotype, it would be the 1300s, an era of utter calamity and one of the worst periods to be alive in all of human history. In this blog post, we will explore the landscape of medieval Europe during the inauspicious 14th century, and navigate through famine, plague, war, and the moral unraveling of society as we demonstrate exactly what made the 1300s stand out from the rest of the Middle Ages in suffering and despair.
Before we dive into the calamities of the 1300s, we should first contextualize the era of burgeoning growth that preceded it. For centuries after the fall of Rome, life in Europe had often been capricious and brutal, from the tumult of the great migrations immediately following the collapse of the Western Empire, to the cataclysmic outbreak of the Bubonic Plague in the 7th century, to the devastating raids of Vikings, Arabs and Magyars in the later 8th to 10th centuries.
However, by the turn of the first millennium, frontiers had begun to stabilize, making Europe, for the most part, a much more stable place to live. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, the population of Europe nearly doubled from 38.5 million to 73.5 million. The reasons for this demographic boom can be broadly attributed to the beginning of a climactic epoch known as the Medieval Warm Period, which brought about longer growing seasons and made more land viable for agriculture.
This forward march was precipitated by technological innovations such as the windmill, watermill, and horse collar. As Europe became more agriculturally productive, its urban centers grew as well, and a surge of innovation in art, technology, architecture, banking, and higher learning took place in Europe's great metropolises. From the 11th century onwards, Christendom was experiencing a commercial revolution, with wealthy Italian maritime cities like Pisa, Venice, and Genoa leading the charge in spreading the Catholic world's trade connections farther east than ever before.
Indeed, much of Europe's cultural and technological innovations during this era were influenced by direct contact with the culturally flourishing Islamic world. With all that said, wealthy merchants, educated elites, and specialized artisans still made up a minority of people in the high middle ages. Although slavery had largely fallen out of fashion after the fall of Rome, a new form of unfree labor, serfdom, had become the norm. Serfs were bonded tenants who worked on a lord's land.
Although they often had some meager legal protections, they still had very little in the way of personal freedoms. Serfs were forbidden from leaving the land they worked for, so if their lord was cruel or exploitative, there was usually nothing they could do to improve their lot. In the 14th century, 300 years of economic and demographic growth came to a screeching, ruinous halt.
In the years 1303 and 1306, the Baltic Sea froze over, while communication was gradually being lost with the community of Norse settlers in Greenland. These prophetic events heralded the end of the medieval warm period and the beginning of the Little Ice Age. In 1315, an unseasonably cold spring led to incessant rains bucketing down upon northern Europe. As unending rainstorms akin to Noah's flood battered down upon the land, a massive catastrophic famine ensued, with places like Ireland, Scandinavia, Poland, and the princedoms of Rus being hit extremely hard.
Hundreds of thousands died and in some areas the desolation was so dire that people grew desperate enough to resort to cannibalism, feeding off the rotting corpses of hanged criminals and even their own children. As can be expected, the prices of food rose astronomically during the Great Famine, a scarcity exacerbated by the mass death of crucial livestock in their pens.
Another byproduct of hunger was desperation, and as a result, throughout Europe crime skyrocketed, with thievery, assault, and the violent seizure of others' property becoming an everyday occurrence, as people did whatever they had to to secure food, after all, if the alternative was starvation, what did they have to lose? The catastrophic and far-reaching consequences of this environmental desolation affected even the highest levels of society.
When King Edward II of England visited St. Alban's Cathedral in August of 1315, no bread could be found for him or his court, a dire statement of affairs if even the king, the most important man in the realm, had nothing to eat. That same year, King Louis X of France marched an army into the region of Flanders to assert his royal authority there. He found the entire country to be flooded and the land turned into a muddy bog.
Completely immobilized by the swampy wasteland, with his men wasting away in the freezing wet conditions, the French king had to abandon the campaign, his army having literally been stopped cold in its tracks. This great famine lasted until 1317, and it would not be an isolated event. Famines and deluges of unforgiving weather were nothing new to the medieval world, but the 1300s saw them occur more frequently than ever before.
This served to drive home the point that, more so than any century that came before it, the 1300s was a century of frigid air, desolate fields, bare cupboards, and emancipated, bony corpses. In the 14th century, famine was not the only macabre companion to the common folk of Christendom, for as the hand of God flooded their fields, so too did the hand of men run them through with spears and set their homes ablaze. War, of course, has long been a staple of human history.
Nevertheless, even by pre-modern standards, the 1300s was an especially tumultuous age, as the economic and social stresses brought about by environmental and agricultural calamity brought upon intense geopolitical instability. In Britain, the borderlands between England and Scotland had once more become a bloody battleground by 1332, with the death of Alba's legendary warrior king Robert the Bruce leading to a succession crisis which Edward III of England sought to exploit to re-establish overlordship over the northern half of his island.
Five years later, Edward's expansionist ambitions would send his armies across the English Channel to France, beginning the aptly titled Hundred Years' War. In the 14th century, war was changing. In 1337, at the Battle of Crecy, the flower of French nobility, adorned in shining steel and rainbow heraldry, was cut down nearly to a man by peasants wielding longbows, and not just any peasants, Welshmen from the far marches who had not even the decency to speak a civilized tongue.
Here the idea of chivalry and knightly virtue was reborn. Henceforth, landed knights needed to find new theatres to display their chivalric valour. For that theatre was no longer the battlefield, where a peasant armed with a bow of yew could unceremoniously punch them right off their barded steed. The continued raging of war necessitated yet more innovations in military technology, and as early as 1375 gunpowder artillery, capable of shooting stone balls weighing over 100 pounds, found grim purchase in the bloody castle sieges and killing fields of France.
For the rest of the century, the countrysides of Flanders, Brittany, Gascony and beyond were subject to mass brutalities time and again, as royal armies battled on the land regularly practicing a scorched earth policy, burning crops and poisoning wells so as to deny their enemy use of the land, callously and carelessly condemning the serfs who worked said land to death. Another consequence of the constant, relentless war on the Western European mainland was the creation of an entire generation of violent men whose only means of making a living was through death and pillaging.
During brief periods of truce between the two belligerent dynasties, these men, in lieu of having an active war to participate in, banded into mercenary groups known as Free Companies and began pillaging the countryside. These bands were soon popping up in the kingdoms of Iberia, Germany and Italy as well, turning vast swathes of the Western European hinterland into what was essentially mafia-esque territory, where local strongmen looted, exploited and ran protection rackets with relative impunity.
The Catholic West was not the only part of the world whose lands were steeped in violent trauma. Indeed, the 14th century was a time of tumultuous transition across the globe. Indeed, the 14th century was a time of tumultuous transition across the globe. In the Balkans and Anatolia, Serbs, Bulgarians, Turkic Beys, and the descendants of Latin Crusaders tore chunks off the decrepit remnant of what had once been the mighty Eastern Roman Empire, only in later decades to all be superseded by the House of Osman.
Throughout Eastern Europe and Asia, land which was ruled by the divided descendants of Chinggis Khan was being plunged into turmoil as rising powers like Lithuania, Muscovy, and China's ascended Ming Dynasty brought an end to Mongol dominance throughout much of Eurasia. Suffice it to say, in all these conflicts, crops were burned, farms desolated, and millions of people already wasting away from hunger and cold were put to the sword. Between the three horsemen of war, conquest, and famine, the picture of the 1300s looks decidedly bleak.
Thus, it is lachrymose indeed that we have not yet touched upon what was arguably the most cataclysmic ingredient in this stew of despair. In the 1330s, an outbreak of the bubonic plague began in China. Travelling in the form of infected fleas on the backs of rats who hid in ships and merchant caravans, the pandemic spread along the Silk Road, through the Persianate trading hub of Samarkand, then to the Black Sea coast.
By 1348, unwitting traders had brought it to Italian shores, and within two years, the whole of the Catholic world would fall victim to an apocalypse of fever, necrosis, and pus. Contemporaries struggled to comprehend why this blight had come upon them, with theories ranging from the alignment of celestial bodies to the ever-popular wrath of God. The wisdom of the Church and the medicines of the time were useless in preventing the disease.
As such, anywhere between one quarter and one half of Europe's population died, as villages were abandoned, entire chapters of monks perished in their monasteries, and walled cities became mass tombs. Much like war, disease was nothing new to the average medieval person, but the 14th century was especially terrible. Europe had not seen a pandemic as utterly devastating as the bubonic plague since nearly a millennium earlier, when the very same bacteria had eviscerated Byzantium and Persia during the reign of Roman Emperor Justinian.
The reason for this was likely environmental, for it was likely the global cooling temperatures of the Little Ice Age which compelled the flea-ridden brown rats of Asia to shelter in places inhabited by humans. Moreover, sickness spreads quickest through the week and emaciated, so the people of Europe, suffering from decades of famine, were hit when they were the most vulnerable. Throughout Eurasia and the Mediterranean world, anywhere between 75 to 200 million people died.
For all that, the numbers, as horrifying as they are, do little to contextualize just how traumatic the Black Death was on a cultural level. Much like it had during the Great Famine, desperation and fear manifested into cathartic violence, with the principal victims being the people on society's margins, namely Jewish communities. Antisemitism had been prevalent in the Christian world for centuries, engendered largely by the teachings of the Catholic Church.
Thus, as bodies continued to pile on the streets, Christian mobs began scapegoating their Jewish neighbors, and throughout Europe, massacres ensued. On Valentine's Day of 1349, 2000 Jews were burnt alive in the city of Strasbourg, one of many similar atrocities which would see over 510 Jewish communities destroyed in just a two-year span.
Throughout Christendom, the moral fabric of society broke down, as traditional virtues people had once lived by, such as selflessness and piety, failed to protect them. After all, no amount of monks parading sacred relics around brought an end to God's wrath, and anyone compassionate enough to tend to the sick and dying simply caught the plague by proximity and died themselves. Thus, many people turned away from God, and instead embraced the flesh, deciding that if fatality was inevitable, then they would rather die drowning in ale and carnal pleasures than on cold stone in quiet prayer before an altar.
Inversely, others saw the calamity as an opportunity to get closer to God through self-inflicted suffering. The practice of self-flagellation had been condemned by the church in earlier centuries, but the plague brought it back into fashion. Throughout Italy, Germany, and France, bands of up to 1,000 near-naked men roamed from town to town, usually followed by gangs of prostitutes, pickpockets, and other ne'er-do-wells. In the middle of town squares they lashed themselves until their skin was eviscerated and bloody, crying out to Christ and the Virgin for pity. These displays were visceral and erotic, and in many cases these orgies of pain became orgies of a more traditional sort, as flagellant performances became a twisted mix of blood and carnal satisfaction.
Naturally, these displays attracted crowds of entertained gawkers, and of course, wherever crowds gathered, so too did the plague spread. Under pressure from Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, the flagellants were eventually declared heretics by the Pope, but this did little to stop the movement. Overall, between the rains, the famines and the plague, the credibility of the Catholic Church was thrown into turmoil in the 14th century.
As generations of clergymen failed to appease the wrath of God, and bishops and priors lived lavishly at the expense of the poor, even in times of hardship and famine, people began to doubt in the spiritual guidance the Church provided. The fact that there were currently two popes, one in Rome and another in Avignon, both of whom declared the other to be a false pontiff, did not help with the legitimacy of the Catholic institution either.
As a consequence, it can hardly be considered a surprise when at the tail end of the century, extremely influential intellectuals like the English philosopher John Wycliffe and the Bohemian rector Jan Hus began condemning the Catholic Church and its successes, ushering in the first movement in an era of religious turmoil which would ultimately lead to the extremely bloody Reformation Wars of the 1500s and 1600s.
By 1351 the plague had subsided and much of the countryside was left depopulated. Even as late as 1470, some estimates claim that the population of most European villages was only half what it had been in 1300, and even today, some parts of rural France are still less populated than they were in the 14th century.
Nevertheless, for those who survived, there was light on the horizon. Huge swathes of productive land were now bereft of people to work on them, and labor was scarce. With their services now in high demand, the serfs of Western Europe managed to secure rights to property, good wages, movement, and other fundamental freedoms from the lords who had once all but owned them. Nevertheless, for each peasant who benefited from the end result of the plague, there were many more who did not. Those forgotten bulbous corpses were afforded not even a burial and left for the crows.
As has been thoroughly demonstrated, the 1300s was perhaps the most disastrous century of medieval Europe, or at the very least, the most calamitous century in hundreds of years. Europe, or at the very least, the most calamitous century in hundreds of years. Inhospitable weather patterns, prolonged scarcity, and the catastrophic invasions of ruthless armies would each on their own have put immense strain on society.
So, the fact that these things all overlapped one another in a grotesque melting pot of despair, all while sharing the spotlight with the single most deadly outbreak of plague in all of human history, helps to really hammer home just how tragic the fortunes were of those who lived during the inauspicious 14th century.
