After three centuries of growth, the 1300s brought one disaster after another. The climate was cooling and population pressed hard on the land. In 1315 heavy rains ruined harvests across northern Europe, and the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317 killed a substantial share of the population in some regions. Cattle plagues followed. Then came something far worse.

The Black Death

Plague reached Sicily on Genoese ships from the Black Sea in 1347. Within four years it swept across Europe, from Italy and France to England, Scandinavia and Russia. Victims developed fever and painful swellings called buboes, and many died within days. Ancient DNA from victims' graves has confirmed that the Black Death was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, carried by fleas on rats and possibly spread between people by lice or breath. Death tolls varied by place, but the Black Death probably killed between a third and a half of Europe's population, and plague returned again and again for the next three centuries.

People searched for causes. Doctors at the University of Paris blamed a conjunction of planets and corrupted air. Many saw God's punishment, and bands of flagellants walked from town to town whipping themselves in penance. In many places Christians turned on their Jewish neighbors. Jews were falsely accused of causing the plague by poisoning wells, and communities were massacred across Germany and beyond; in Strasbourg in February 1349 hundreds of Jews were burned. Pope Clement VI issued bulls declaring the accusation false, pointing out that Jews were dying of plague too. Few listened. Cities also experimented with public health: Venice and Milan appointed health officials, and the port of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) ordered newcomers into isolation in 1377.

A world turned upside down

With so many dead, land was plentiful and workers scarce. Wages rose and peasants demanded better terms. Rulers tried to stop this. In England the Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and Statute of Labourers (1351) tried to hold wages at pre-plague levels, and lords tried to enforce old labor services.

Anger exploded. In France the rising known as the Jacquerie in 1358 saw peasants attack nobles who had failed to protect them during the war with England. In England the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was triggered by a harsh new poll tax. Rebels from Kent and Essex marched on London under Wat Tyler, burned palaces and killed the archbishop of Canterbury. The radical priest John Ball preached on a famous couplet: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" Ball's couplet questioned whether noble rank was part of God's original creation. The young King Richard II met the rebels and promised freedom; Tyler was killed, and the promises were revoked. Yet within a century serfdom had largely disappeared in England and much of western Europe, because lords could not hold on to workers who had other choices. In much of eastern Europe the opposite happened, and serfdom grew harsher.

War and a divided church

The Hundred Years War between England and France (1337 to 1453) brought English longbow victories at Crecy (1346) and Agincourt (1415), years of devastation by mercenary companies, and the remarkable career of Joan of Arc, a peasant girl who helped lift the siege of Orleans in 1429 and was burned by the English in 1431. France won in the end, and both kingdoms emerged with stronger royal governments and regular taxes.

The church suffered its own crisis. Popes lived at Avignon from 1309 to 1377, and soon after their return to Rome a disputed election produced rival popes. The Western Schism (1378 to 1417) divided Latin Christians between two, and later three, rival popes, until the Council of Constance ended the Schism by removing the rival claimants and electing Martin V as the one pope. Some thinkers argued that a general council held authority over the pope, an idea called conciliarism, and it would echo in the conflicts of the Reformation.

Historians once spoke of the waning of the Middle Ages, but this was also the age of Dante, Boccaccio and Chaucer writing in their own languages, and of the first stirrings of the Renaissance in Italy.

Worked example: Siena, 1348

Agnolo di Tura, a shoemaker and tax official of Siena, described the plague in his city in 1348. He wrote that fathers abandoned children and wives abandoned husbands, because the illness seemed to pass by breath and sight; that the dead were thrown into great pits and covered with a little earth; and that he himself buried five of his children with his own hands. So many died, he wrote, that everyone believed it was the end of the world.

Use the level's ideas to read the account. The fear of breath and sight reflects medical theories of corrupted air. The mass graves match what archaeologists have found and sampled for DNA. And the next part of Siena's story fits the pattern of the level: work stopped on the city's planned enormous cathedral extension, whose unfinished walls still stand, while survivors who inherited land or could demand higher wages lived, for a time, better than their parents had. Catastrophe brought both grief and a reshuffling of power.