Chapter 12 - Famines and Plague

In the later middle ages (1300's or so) the church was still the biggest power in Europe, and the last book of the New Testament, the book of Revelation was popular, I don't know why, but it was. It contained information about the end of the world and death and destruction. People are just stupid sometimes. Early 1300's saw a spike in inflation, and everybody was all like oh shiz, we're gonna die. The the little ice age, which the history channel did a thing on a few months ago, came in and people were al cold, and it was raining, and life sucked. All this brought about less food in general, and hungry people don't work very well, so even less food was grown, and this all lead to the very unoriginally named "Great Famine". It was 7 years long (1315-1322), and is now thought of as a recurrence of the bible's seven lean years. People were starving to death, and even if they had some food, they were getting sick more often and died of that. Up til 1348 Europe kept getting bombarded by famines, and were suffering, death destruction, etc, etc, etc. People, like always, blamed the Jews, who were killed and stuff, and the incompetent kings tried and failed miserably to fix things. Then in 1348 the famines were replaced with, the black death. yay. It came from Asia, and somehow managed to get to the Crimea, Southern Russia. From there it got to some city on the northern tip of Sicily, Messina, that what it was. From there merchants, sailors, and travelers took it all around Europe and everybody died. Like, it makes a sizeable blip on any graph of the total human population throughout history. People were not very healthy to begin with because of the famines, so they were more likely to get sick and die from it. They weren't always very clean, because the poor, and lower middle class, probably didn't have the time to go use the public bath houses that could be found in the bigger cities. They spent a lot of time close together. Rich families often slept in one room ,so poor families must have slept in won bed, if they had a bed at all, and they would have slept close to each other in an attempt to keep warm. Hospital facilities were not exactly great. In Paris, a city of 200,000 (which is not much bigger than the suburb I live in , so 100,000 people dying back then, is worse than it is today (Tsunami, 100,000 dead, people have already forgotten about it, some had never heard of it in the first place.), there were only 60 hospitals, not big ones like we have today, but ones with one room of beds, and maybe one or two more for storage and such. They often kept multiple adults in a bed, and one quote talked about how a nurse was forced to put ten children in a bed in which somebody had just died. The aftereffects of the plague were not as bad as one would expect. Sure people became very scared of disease in general, and the work force was cut down, but that was not necessarily a bad thing. Europe had been suffering from overpopulation for a while, and though it was a very harsh method, the plague fixed the problem. The lower number of laborers brought salaries up, because land owners and guild masters no longer had an endless supply of people to rely on if somebody demanded too much money. Because the wages went up, the lower classes were generally happier, and the upper classes didn't take that great of a blow. The demand for food went down, and although the labor force was smaller, a greater percentage of the total was working, so the per capita production went up. So although the plague seems like some terrible bad and evil thing, it was good for those left afterwards.