The Black Death: Europe in the Later Middle Ages

Hi everyone,

Before beginning this week's blog post I've been asked to pass along a message from Clare.

Dear Students,

You will have received en email from SETU (Student Evaluation of Teaching and Units), inviting you to evaluate ATS 1316. Please do so! We really want to know what you think.

These surveys are taken extremely seriously by the University. They are used when staff members apply for promotion, or for other jobs. They are also used to make changes to the units for next year, drawing on student comments. These blogs, for example, emerged out of comments by students that they sometimes felt disconnected during first year. Hence, we have tried to build community and encourage your readings by running these blogs.

So let us know what you think of the unit. YOU ARE VERY POWERFUL!

Many thanks, Clare

 ...

Week 11: Famine and Disease: The Calamitous 14th Century - Tutorial Discussion Post

By: Nastassia, Katie, Jessica, Tessa, Sean and Jake

Nastassia's thoughts,

Hey guys J So let's begin with this week's reading by Margaret King which describes the flourishing urban civilization in Italy prior to the Black Death.

King highlights two enterprises in Florence that generated enough wealth to ‘transform Florence from a minor center to one the leading cities.’ These were banking and wool. When I first read that wool was one of the two I was quite surprised! But with half the population involved in this industry its effect would obviously have been quite large. Also, the complexity of wool manufacturing opened a pathway for immense profits for entrepreneurs.

Question:

Who can explain the various roles involved in this enterprise and what they entailed? In what way did it help transform Florence into one of the ‘leading cities?’

Venice’s wealth derived from trade, which required a giant commitment to the construction of ships and the management of fleets (which was briefly touched upon in week 10, when we learnt about the Fourth Crusade.)

Venice is described by Frederick Lane as a ‘maritime republic’. The reading asserts that Venice’s system of trade ‘matched or exceeded the system of wool manufacture in Florence.’

Question:

Why had the Venetian boatmen begun to venture down coast? What did they sell and what did they receive in return? How did the boatmen benefit from trading?

As Venetian merchants grew wealthier they began to build bigger ships that carried more, and were able to travel for longer distances. In fact this became such a vital enterprise that from 1290 the state itself began to fund and organize fleets of merchant galleys, which traveled in convoy escorted by warships.

Question:

Why did the convoy system greatly increase the security and profitability of international trade?

The creation of the state-run Arsenal was a supplement for the many private boatyards and helped to organize the government’s own fleets. Being continually extended and revamped it also helped to ‘power Venice’s commercial success.’

I’ll end with a quote that I think really illustrates the positive effects of Venice’s success in trade. A Venetian wrote: ‘We live like lords. In this city nothing grows but whatever you want can be found in abundance’… sounds pretty impressive to me!

Florence in the later Middle Ages

Venice in the 14th Century

Tessa's thoughts,

Hello everyone! I hope you enjoyed this week's readings. The readings this week join medieval Italy in a time of great prosperity, at least that's what I found. The republics of Florence and Venice in particular were working very well on all the things they realized were needed for a great city, such as infastructure. Public buildings and that kind of thing. The fact that the government was Oligarchic, that is that the power was held in a small group of people as opposed to everyone as in a democracy seemed to work well for them, up to a point. What I really wanted to talk about though was how this environment was really profitable to the artists and intellectuals of the time, these people weren't looking to a lord to govern them and they also had no need for the pope to legitimize their power. While they obviously were still very religious their governing was much more secular. This meant that they needed to write up laws and who better to look to for that than the scholars of the Roman empire and also to the Greeks. The universities in Italy were much more focused on the law and medicine, things that were much more practical to the furthering of the republic's independence from the Church and the lords of the feudal system. This throw back to the ancient Greeks and Romans also paved the way for men such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarch to really consider what the old philosophers had said and to persue literature,and other art forms in new ways. While Christianity was still important to them, Boccaccio in particular believed a lot could be learned from the classics despite the pagan themes. Petrach was much more Christian, but is more interested in an exploration of the self within Christianity. 
Some questions for you to consider
Do you think, had it not been for the plague, the Renaissance would have occured much earlier? 
Had the merchants decided to go for a democratic government rather than an oligarchic one do you think the republics would have progressed in the same way?

Jake's thoughts,

Firstly, with the King reading it shows how thirteenth-century Italy was already on track for the Renaissance especially with the wealthy middle class that emerged with artisans and merchants, and generally the people that would emerge as the wealthy elite or partisans in the Renaissance period. As well as noting the wool guild that more or less became Florence’s most influential and powerful guild within the city whilst the banking merchants and guild would go on to become influential internationally, most notably the Medici Bank. As well, with the Wool Guild and the Plague, the Wool Guild was Florence’s largest guild and as a result had the most workers in Florence, so as a result it can be said that this had an affect on the city-state's growing economy and wealth.  Similarly the same could be said of Venice and its shipbuilding industry, during the plague the city’s population was ravaged as result there were fewer workers to build the ships, especially in terms of the minor yards because the government’s shipyard the Arsenal took precedence and they were able to take both ships and workers from the private sector.

Then, about the Petrach extract, although initially it is somewhat pessimistic, however, it does eventually appear far more balanced in its approach as though he was thinking ‘whatever happens, happens’. It could be because of the whole humanist movement that he was engaged with and what was growing through Europe, especially Italy or he really was a pessimist, but Petrach, in terms Middle-Ages autobiographies and our readings, seems to be far less egotistical than Abelard.

Meanwhile the primary extracts of the Black Death are quite useful in actually detailing the understandable fear that accompanied the pandemic. They help to display fear among the population, how the unknown cause was not only causing death but also a decline in willing social interaction, due the lack of knowledge as to what was exactly spreading the disease. Meanwhile the churchmen weren’t necessarily taking advantage of the situation but they were definitely claiming it was divine judgement and punishment for sins and whatever else they used to describe terrible events and deaths. 

Sean's thoughts,


Discussion Question 4 - How does King characterize the economic and social impact of the Black Death?

King begins by looking at the flourishing of a few of the major cities of Northern Italy before the Black Death. Florence, which housed banking and wool industries to become a wealthy and self-sustaining city and Venice, which used mainly shipbuilding and renting space on these ships for trade goods to do the same. Florence’s banking became a major industry because of the trading that occurred both inside and outside of the city, supported by the wool industry, and the wool industry became a major industry simply because of the quality and the ability to supply the demand for it. In Venice, many of its structures were built to support the shipbuilding economy, which evolved out of their sea trade industry to become the only truly major industry available in Venice. Both these cities grew in population steadily along with the economy, Florence housing around 90,000 people by 1300 and Venice, around 120,000.

With the advent of the Black Death in 1348, these numbers shrank dramatically. The population of Florence was down to around 30,000 and Venice, 84,000, a culling that would take nearly 200 years to recover from. King characterizes this as an “interruption” that luckily did not “choke off” the “movements and ideas that would soon blossom as the Renaissance”. King also uses an excerpt from Giovanni Boccaccio that explains the impact on social culture from the Black Death. It details that “One citizen avoided another … almost no-one cared for his neighbor”, the citizens were separated socially by the feeling that they would all be killed soon by the Black Death. Some “fathers and mothers neglected to (even) tend and care for their children”. 


These ideas could lead you to ponder such questions in your responses as:

 What extent of damage to the industries of Florence and Venice could the Black Death have caused?

How would society have been impacted after the Black Death’s disappearance knowing what we know about its ravenous rampage of Northern Italy?

The Black Death

Jessica's thoughts,


Q5: Do the documents relating to the Black Death reflect the King’s understanding of the impact of the Black Death? 

Hi fellow blog posters!

I’ve decided to make my blog post short-ish, so as not to bore you, and then to make my tute presentation unbearably long. This gives you time to do some of the following things;

1. Pick your nose (unsavoury, but I’m not judging)
2. Check your nails (more for the girls, but again, no judgement)
3. Play with your hair.
4. Rock on your chair (can be dangerous, proceed with caution)
5. Knit (my personal favourite)
6. Look out the window (cliche)
7. And all manner of other thought provoking and distracting things.

However, the Black Death to me is an extremely interesting subject, made slightly less so by the lack of buboes, spurting blood and general malaise in my question. More’s the pity.

Shall I proceed?

Perhaps.

My questions was interesting because none of the readings featured the King’s explicit thinking on the impact of the Black Death, thus I had to infer his opinion from countless unrelated (or scarcely related) documents. 

First, I’ll begin by quoting ‘A Chronicler of Rimini’, As well as being extremely brief, his was the only account that directly related to the ‘great lords’ as he saw it. He says, ‘First died the poor folk, and then the other great folk; except that no despot or great lord died’. While we cannot take this at face value because assuredly he would probably be quite jealous that while people dropped like flies around him, the Kings were living the life, I think his succinctness is something to ponder. 

If the King had been hidden away in a great palace, which he probably was, he might not have known the true effect of the Black Death, other than he kept having to have his servants replaced, how tiresome! Even the Church took some action, or at least sometimes provided funeral services, burial plots, last sacraments, and loosening the churchly rules for a time, allowing anyone to confess their sins to anyone, and many clerics died as a result. Along the same vein, the universities as well took some action, releasing ‘Protective and Preventative measures‘ which contained such gems of wisdom such as ‘olive oil with food is mortal‘, ‘intercourse with women is mortal‘ and finally (alarmingly actually), ‘the bowels should be kept open by a clyster’. I’m not sure what a ‘clyster‘ is, but I am sure I don’t want my bowels kept open by one... Especially if I have the plague. One can only bear so much injustice.

Here concludes my introductory blog post. I hope I have made you laugh, cry, fill with pride and fervor, and generally learn that during a plague, it is vital to keep your head up, chest out and ‘bowels open’. 

Plague Sufferers