The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [25]
It was to be a hundred years before the memory of those two decades passed, and nearly three centuries before the population reached pre-plague levels again. Those like Petrarch, the Italian poet, who survived felt that posterity would never believe it had happened.
After it was over, towards the end of the fourteenth century there was a new air abroad, a feeling of reckless joy at being alive. The survivors were rich, having inherited what the dead had left, so they went on a gigantic spending spree in an effort to wipe out the memory of those horrific years.
The citizens of Tournai, France, in 1349 burying their dead during the height of the Black Death. In depopulated Europe ‘there was a vast and dreadful silence’.
In the years after the Black Death parties such as this, attended by aristocratic Burgundians, were held all over the Continent as people tried to forget the horror they had lived through.
But it was the change in the status of labour that had the greatest effect. The Black Death had killed half the workforce, and those that remained were desperately needed if enough food and raw materials were to be produced to help Europe recover. Their entire condition of life was altered. No longer helpless bonded serfs, the farm-workers became a commodity that could command any price for its efforts. All over the Continent the workers flexed their new-found industrial muscle, in displays of political insurrection that would have been unthinkable a generation before. With the general breakdown of authority came heresies. In England the Lollards, who preached political egalitarianism, were burned at the stake. In Czechoslovakia the radical reformer Jan Hus and his followers sparked civil war that was to end in devastation and a stream of refugees to the West, giving modern Europe a word for the anarchic and the unconventional: Bohemian. Everywhere it seemed that order had deserted society. In Scotland at the battle of Flodden, common men using longbows felled mounted aristocrats from their saddles with impunity.
Of all the countries ravaged by the Black Death, Italy made the fastest recovery - whether for climatic and agricultural reasons, or through early sanitary precautions such as the introduction of health certificates for travellers, it is hard to say. The coalescence of rural power in the hands of a few major surviving landowners brought the country dwellers thronging to the cities. Around the northern Italian towns, whose citizens were spending their Black Death inheritance on fine new buildings of marble and stone, rose shanty towns filled with discontented urban poor.
In an attempt to stem the tide of revolution and hold down the trouble (such as the savage riots and disturbances in Burgundy, the Continent’s richest state), the Franciscan friars preached a new, individual form of salvation. In the Predicant churches, built wide and aisleless so that the congregation had a better view of the pulpit, there was little of the shadowed mystery of Gothic architecture. The northern style had never really taken root in Italy; and without the influence of conservative theological centres such as existed in France, but rather a university tradition already strong in the mathematical and medical fields, Italian intellectual life was more open, more enquiring in nature than that of her neighbours to the north.
This detail of a fourteenth-century fresco in the Spanish Chapel, Florence, shows the theological unconcern for realism. Saints are bigger than the good people of their flock (bottom), who are, in turn, bigger than sinful dancers (top).
Enquiry, however, remained academic in nature, as it had been for over two centuries. The view of the times was still medieval.