14 ms·

The strange thing is that Europe recovered quite fast. The survivors (or more, their children) ended up significantly better-off, for a century or so, basically

by iguy 8y ago

The strange thing is that Europe recovered quite fast. The survivors (or more, their children) ended up significantly better-off, for a century or so, basically because there was more land per person, so you could just farm the better parts. Whether something like that happened in (say) Ethiopia too, will I guess be even harder to figure out than whether they had the plague at all.

lqet 8y ago
> The survivors (or more, their children) ended up significantly better-off, for a century or so, basically because there was more land per person. Indeed, this is something I always found extremely fascinating. The plague destroyed the very rigid social and economic structures of medieval Europe. Simply put, they had to take anyone as a goldsmith's apprentice, even some poor farmer's kid, because everyone else was dead. I am quite sure it is no coincidence that the Renaissance appeared 1-2 generations after the black death, and always held the secret opinion that European culture was basically born in the fire that was the black death epidemic. > The strange thing is that Europe recovered quite fast. Easy answer: the plague was much, much, much more devastating in Ethiopia than in Europe, leaving no one behind to recover from anything, or to tell the harrowing story.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  > I am quite sure it is no coincidence that the Renaissance appeared 1-2 generations after the black death, and always held the secret opinion that European culture was basically born in the fire that was the black death epidemic. I've heard that hypothesis from both popular and scholarly sources before. Pretty sure it's a broadly held theory.
  - iguy 8y ago
    I'm not sure I would go this far, there was a lot else that went on. But economically, for sure it was huge... we can actually trace several such swings in pre-industrial England, plotting population against per-capita income (or calories!) and it walks back & forth along the same curve a few times over the centuries.
  - chewz 8y ago
    > I am quite sure it is no coincidence that the Renaissance appeared 1-2 generations after the black death, The opposite - Black Death had delayed the Renaissance for circa 2-3 generations. It was already happening and then the plague came and the Renaisance have played out later in different times and with different people and ideas. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_renaissances https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_renaissances
- hugh4life 8y ago
  Not the black death so much(though that may have facilitated some positive social changes... I'm not that familiar with the time period), but the trade that was facilitated by the mongol empire definitely facilitated Europeans desire to explore the world.
- dan-robertson 8y ago
  > Easy answer: the plague was much, much, much more devastating in Ethiopia than in Europe, leaving no one behind to recover from anything, or to tell the harrowing story. I disagree. There must have been some people left behind (assuming such a plague happened) because there are still people in Ethiopia and at least some of the culture from then still exists (I’m thinking of the Ethiopian church but I expect there is plenty more). If there were no people left then such things would have died out. Therefore I think we should conclude that either some people were able to recover (or the plague was localised to some regions which were completely destroyed whereas others survived). I think in either case one would still expect this plague to be known about and I would certainly expect such a large event to leave at least some clues behind in eg oral traditions or written records. Secondly this answer is assuming that the question is reasonable (ie that Ethiopia recovered more slowly than Europe). I’m not sure that there is much evidence either way about it. There are two parts to this: one is recovering back to a similar state as before the plague, and another is recovering to the same level as each other. It is slightly unclear to me which the question means but I suppose I would guess the first. In my opinion, any difference in recovery is going to be much more related to the differences of geography (and maybe politics) than differences of devastation. One caveat would be that maybe social structures could cause the plague to be more devastating in one place than another but I’m not sure I buy it. I expect most medieval social structures would soon be reacting quite similarly to a plague of such proportions.
- zeristor 8y ago
  Perhaps the infrastructure had been built for a large population, with quick enough growth people could reinflate society before things started decay Mind you I’m not sure how much one can scale giving birth and raising children, perhaps the child mortality rate declined?
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
For Europe, it also enabled rearrangement of tenancies for better use of land, and for some the chance to switch to being a free tenant in place of mere serf. Suddenly there was a chance to make money from what might be profitable to sell at market rather than what the lord required them to grow. Growing what they chose on land for coin, in place of being required to give x sacks of wheat, or y sheep every year, may have been the first real opportunity to make in excess of subsistence. Failing that, run away to another region to work for higher rates as a labourer and hope your liege lord doesn't find you. Little wonder that there were new laws trying to stop mere serfs profiting from this.
scythe 8y ago
>The strange thing is that Europe recovered quite fast. I suspect this has to do with Europe's water-dominated geography. Traveling between Ethiopia and Mali -- two of the largest sub-Saharan "countries" of antiquity -- requires taking a caravan through the desert and/or jungle. But going from England to Poland is a boat ride. So reestablishing communication between distant societies probably happened much faster in Europe, which supported knowledge-sharing and thus scientific progress.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  Europe also had a shared language of scholarship (Latin) and a political institution (Catholic Church) that made it easy for information and invention to travel across nation state boundaries.
  - iguy 8y ago
    These things are true, but it wasn't long-distance trade or scientific progress which made English people richer in 1400 than in 1350. It was more land per peasant. That things did not completely fall apart when the plague hit may be due to having relatively strong institutions, but again I'd argue that what mattered here was at the parish level, not Rome. Ethiopia was also quite a centralised state in medieval times (with a uniting church language playing a role like Latin's). But we don't actually know whether it suffered a larger or smaller plague at that time, it seems. We do know that it did not suffer collapse on the scale of pre-Colombian American civilisations, that we would certainly know about already.
  - cbnotfromthere 8y ago
    2/5ths of Europe at the time were Orthodox and Greek based. Some parts even non-Christian.
    - toasterlovin 8y ago
      I guess I should have specified Western Europe.
  - 8y ago
PavlikPaja 8y ago
There is a relatively strong correlation between immune function, intelligence and longevity. Maybe the epidemics made the population smarter on average?
toasterlovin 8y ago
> The survivors (or more, their children) ended up significantly better-off, for a century or so, basically because there was more land per person Really gives you something to ponder with regard to immigration policy.
- macintux 8y ago
  Unless/until we revert to an agrarian society where your livelihood depends on the amount of land you have to farm, I'm pretty sure there's not much to ponder here.
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    We’re all still constrained by resources of one kind or another. And we all still compete with each other for those limited resources. So it seems to me like the logic still holds. Or, more concretely, the reason why I get to enjoy a comfortable middle class lifestyle is because there aren’t many people who can do what I do. There isn’t much competition driving down software engineering wages, in other words. I can’t see how it would somehow not be better for lower class people to have less competition for the jobs they do.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- dang 8y ago
  "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    I do think there is an interesting discussion to be had along these lines (since I am having that discussion with a friend off of HN at the moment) but the way I went about things was not conducive to that. Sorry about that.

by iguy 8y ago

lqet 8y ago

> The survivors (or more, their children) ended up significantly better-off, for a century or so, basically because there was more land per person. Indeed, this is something I always found extremely fascinating. The plague destroyed the very rigid social and economic structures of medieval Europe. Simply put, they had to take anyone as a goldsmith's apprentice, even some poor farmer's kid, because everyone else was dead. I am quite sure it is no coincidence that the Renaissance appeared 1-2 generations after the black death, and always held the secret opinion that European culture was basically born in the fire that was the black death epidemic. > The strange thing is that Europe recovered quite fast. Easy answer: the plague was much, much, much more devastating in Ethiopia than in Europe, leaving no one behind to recover from anything, or to tell the harrowing story.

cimmanom 8y ago
> I am quite sure it is no coincidence that the Renaissance appeared 1-2 generations after the black death, and always held the secret opinion that European culture was basically born in the fire that was the black death epidemic. I've heard that hypothesis from both popular and scholarly sources before. Pretty sure it's a broadly held theory.
- iguy 8y ago
  I'm not sure I would go this far, there was a lot else that went on. But economically, for sure it was huge... we can actually trace several such swings in pre-industrial England, plotting population against per-capita income (or calories!) and it walks back & forth along the same curve a few times over the centuries.
- chewz 8y ago
  > I am quite sure it is no coincidence that the Renaissance appeared 1-2 generations after the black death, The opposite - Black Death had delayed the Renaissance for circa 2-3 generations. It was already happening and then the plague came and the Renaisance have played out later in different times and with different people and ideas. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_renaissances https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_renaissances
hugh4life 8y ago
Not the black death so much(though that may have facilitated some positive social changes... I'm not that familiar with the time period), but the trade that was facilitated by the mongol empire definitely facilitated Europeans desire to explore the world.
dan-robertson 8y ago
> Easy answer: the plague was much, much, much more devastating in Ethiopia than in Europe, leaving no one behind to recover from anything, or to tell the harrowing story. I disagree. There must have been some people left behind (assuming such a plague happened) because there are still people in Ethiopia and at least some of the culture from then still exists (I’m thinking of the Ethiopian church but I expect there is plenty more). If there were no people left then such things would have died out. Therefore I think we should conclude that either some people were able to recover (or the plague was localised to some regions which were completely destroyed whereas others survived). I think in either case one would still expect this plague to be known about and I would certainly expect such a large event to leave at least some clues behind in eg oral traditions or written records. Secondly this answer is assuming that the question is reasonable (ie that Ethiopia recovered more slowly than Europe). I’m not sure that there is much evidence either way about it. There are two parts to this: one is recovering back to a similar state as before the plague, and another is recovering to the same level as each other. It is slightly unclear to me which the question means but I suppose I would guess the first. In my opinion, any difference in recovery is going to be much more related to the differences of geography (and maybe politics) than differences of devastation. One caveat would be that maybe social structures could cause the plague to be more devastating in one place than another but I’m not sure I buy it. I expect most medieval social structures would soon be reacting quite similarly to a plague of such proportions.
zeristor 8y ago
Perhaps the infrastructure had been built for a large population, with quick enough growth people could reinflate society before things started decay Mind you I’m not sure how much one can scale giving birth and raising children, perhaps the child mortality rate declined?

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

For Europe, it also enabled rearrangement of tenancies for better use of land, and for some the chance to switch to being a free tenant in place of mere serf. Suddenly there was a chance to make money from what might be profitable to sell at market rather than what the lord required them to grow. Growing what they chose on land for coin, in place of being required to give x sacks of wheat, or y sheep every year, may have been the first real opportunity to make in excess of subsistence. Failing that, run away to another region to work for higher rates as a labourer and hope your liege lord doesn't find you. Little wonder that there were new laws trying to stop mere serfs profiting from this.

scythe 8y ago

>The strange thing is that Europe recovered quite fast. I suspect this has to do with Europe's water-dominated geography. Traveling between Ethiopia and Mali -- two of the largest sub-Saharan "countries" of antiquity -- requires taking a caravan through the desert and/or jungle. But going from England to Poland is a boat ride. So reestablishing communication between distant societies probably happened much faster in Europe, which supported knowledge-sharing and thus scientific progress.

toasterlovin 8y ago
Europe also had a shared language of scholarship (Latin) and a political institution (Catholic Church) that made it easy for information and invention to travel across nation state boundaries.
- iguy 8y ago
  These things are true, but it wasn't long-distance trade or scientific progress which made English people richer in 1400 than in 1350. It was more land per peasant. That things did not completely fall apart when the plague hit may be due to having relatively strong institutions, but again I'd argue that what mattered here was at the parish level, not Rome. Ethiopia was also quite a centralised state in medieval times (with a uniting church language playing a role like Latin's). But we don't actually know whether it suffered a larger or smaller plague at that time, it seems. We do know that it did not suffer collapse on the scale of pre-Colombian American civilisations, that we would certainly know about already.
- cbnotfromthere 8y ago
  2/5ths of Europe at the time were Orthodox and Greek based. Some parts even non-Christian.
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    I guess I should have specified Western Europe.
- 8y ago

PavlikPaja 8y ago

There is a relatively strong correlation between immune function, intelligence and longevity. Maybe the epidemics made the population smarter on average?

toasterlovin 8y ago

> The survivors (or more, their children) ended up significantly better-off, for a century or so, basically because there was more land per person Really gives you something to ponder with regard to immigration policy.

macintux 8y ago
Unless/until we revert to an agrarian society where your livelihood depends on the amount of land you have to farm, I'm pretty sure there's not much to ponder here.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  We’re all still constrained by resources of one kind or another. And we all still compete with each other for those limited resources. So it seems to me like the logic still holds. Or, more concretely, the reason why I get to enjoy a comfortable middle class lifestyle is because there aren’t many people who can do what I do. There isn’t much competition driving down software engineering wages, in other words. I can’t see how it would somehow not be better for lower class people to have less competition for the jobs they do.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
dang 8y ago
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  I do think there is an interesting discussion to be had along these lines (since I am having that discussion with a friend off of HN at the moment) but the way I went about things was not conducive to that. Sorry about that.