Unforeseen Consequences of the Black Death

SOURCE:  "This Pandemic Will Change Us. We Just Don’t Know Quite How Yet," by Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg File. March 27, 2020. https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/this-pandemic-will-change-us-we-just?

KEYWORDS:  unintended consequences, change, habit,

This pandemic is nothing like the Black Death in terms of its lethality, and the world today is nothing like that of the 14th century. But it’s worth recalling how much that pandemic changed the world—sometimes for the better (at least for the survivors, though not the Jews). For starters, we owe the plague credit for giving us the word “quarantine.” “During the Black Death, the Italians devised a 40-day isolation period for the sick, likely inspired by biblical events that lasted 40 days (the great flood, Lent, etc.),” notes the website Ranker. “The concept of isolating the sick pre-dates the Black Death, but the term ‘quarantine’ originates from that time.”

The plague killed a lot of people—estimates vary between 75 and 200 million in Europe and Asia. That’s something like one- to two-thirds of the global population at the time. The peasants left behind were left with a lot of land, and a lot of demand for their labor. Wages grew enormously and working conditions improved in order to attract labor. One lasting benefit of this new prosperity was that beer became less of a luxury and more of a commodity, giving rise to one of mankind’s greatest inventions: The British pub.

When aristocrats later tried to turn back the clock, waves of peasant revolts shook Europe, laying the groundwork for future uprisings.

The Catholic Church was forever wounded by the plague. First and foremost, the plague undermined the legitimacy of the church because it dealt a grievous blow to faith in God. It had more corporeal consequences as well: So many priests died—often the best ones—that the church was left with worse and more selfish leaders, and it grew more corrupt as a result. Bereft of quality manpower and with weakened credibility, the church retreated literally and figuratively from much of Europe.

Had this not happened, the Protestant Reformation may never have happened. That might be overstating things, but it’s a safe bet that it wouldn’t have happened the way it did.

Another—admittedly conjectural—benefit was that America didn’t become a Nordic country. The Vikings in Greenland were wiped out by the plague, making their eventual conquest of North America impossible.