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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
by 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 agoThese 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 ago2/5ths of Europe at the time were Orthodox and Greek based. Some parts even non-Christian.
- toasterlovin 8y agoI guess I should have specified Western Europe.
- dangerbird2 8y agoEthiopia at the time had pretty extensive trade and intellectual exchange with Christians in Europe and in the Arab world, particularly the Coptic Orthodox Church most Ethiopian Christians belonged to. Likewise, Muslim East African countries were very closely linked to the rest of the Islamic world.