What Is the Black Death?

Europeans had much to be thankful for by 1300: Good weather, good harvests, good fortune, and good business were all lifting them out of darkness and poverty. But the pathway to growth, innovation, and prosperity is often fraught with setbacks, and Europe was soon struck with a series of hammer blows. The first was self-inflicted, though unintended. Famine struck Europe about 1300. After several centuries of good weather and intensive cultivation of new land, the region’s population had grown significantly, fueling trade and production. But once the population pushed past the carrying capacity of the land, all it took was one bad harvest and millions faced starvation. Between 1315 and 1322 several years of bad weather led to multiple crop failures, and after 1350, colder weather patterns and too much rain in the north and droughts in the south had dire consequences. An underfed population was ripe for the effects of the new epidemics sweeping along trade routes.

Now Europe began to feel the harsh, punishing side of nature. It came in the form of bubonic plague. Here was another case where the very thing that had helped lift Europe out of its stagnation turned against it, in this case trade. The Silk Road and the China trade that had connected Europe to the East became the conduits for devastating diseases. On the ships and caravans that flowed between West and East were rats, and on the fur of rats, fleas, and in the blood of fleas, bacilli that caused bubonic plague. The plague, or Black Death as it was more commonly known, devastated Europe between 1347 and 1351, killing at least 30 percent of the population and in some cases as much as 60 percent. The Black Death also hit China, India, the Middle East, the whole Euro-Asian land mass, plus parts of North and East Africa. In the most concentrated cities of Italy, mortality rates are believed to have reached 80 percent. To combat the spread of this lethal contagion, Venetians implemented quarantine on ships arriving at its ports from infected areas. The word “quarantine” derives from the Italian words quaranta giorni, meaning 40 days. Although this practice had been employed for centuries in China, Byzantium, and Europe, the Venetians were the first in the world to institutionalize this important public health measure that would protect populations until the nineteenth century when the germ theory of disease revolutionized public health practices.

The waves of plague soundly knocked back European population levels, and with them, trade, commerce, and production. It took some two centuries for the region to recover. Diseases like the plague and starvation also had political repercussions, leading to peasant revolts that erupted across Europe. And as the poor and working classes challenged the authority of the master-landlord class, serfdom declined significantly by the fourteenth century, changing the structure of European society forever.

While Europe was convalescing from nature’s assaults it was hit yet again, this time by political and military turns of events. The Muslim world, itself in significant disarray and decline from its golden age, was invaded and taken over by Turkic people from Central Asia. They were Muslims too and they soon controlled the centers and capitals of Islamic civilization and established themselves as the new caliphs. These were the Ottomans, and by 1450 they had charge of a vast empire that stretched from India and Pakistan to Spain. They pressed into the Mediterranean, challenging the Italian city-states in a series of contests that did not finally end until the 1700s. When Ottoman troops captured Constantinople in 1453, overwhelming the Christian Byzantine Empire, they shut off European access to the Silk Road.

History can be fickle, though. Just as Europe suffered unexpected reversals from diseases coursing through the routes of trade, decimating hard-won population growth, adversity in the loss of trade led to unexpected innovations that proved highly favorable in the long run. So, if one danger a society faces in remaining innovative is an overabundance of easily available natural bounty—the so-called resource curse that has made parts of the Middle East too easily dependent on oil revenues—hard times can spur creative action. The resourceful response of Europe came from its non-natural resources: Its human capital and trade connections built up over the previous centuries. These proved invaluable in setting the region on a path of innovation, discovery, and, finally, large-scale economic revolution that produced the second great macro invention in human history—industrialization. It all started with winds, currents, and sailing ships.