Although historians count the Middle Ages as running through 1450, when Constantinople fell to the Turks, there’s a compelling argument for ending the era a century sooner, in 1350. By that year, Europe as it had been for the last 500 years was mostly dead. The shape of European culture struggled into new life over the next 50 years, and during that time, nearly everything I’ve written about medieval European diet ceased to be relevant.
Of course I’m referring to the pandemic plague known as the Black Death. At the time, it was called the Great Mortality or just the plague. Although the plague has been identified as Bubonic Plague, it was not fully the same as Bubonic Plague today. It was a new sickness at the time; it probably jumped from an animal species, the Central Asian marmot, around 1345. Traffic on the Silk Road was a big part of initial transmission, but we don’t know if they caught it directly from the marmots and their fleas. There’s strong evidence that it was airborne, both pneumonic and septic, during the early pandemics. The bacteria we know today as the cause of the Bubonic Plague is only spread through blood contact, by flea bites, and it does not mean certain death. Either we’ve developed immunities or the bacteria’s original form was more toxic.
The plague came to Europe in a particularly gory, gross way. 1347: Genoa had a trading colony, Caffa, on the Crimean Peninsula. Tatars and Mongols ruled in Russia and were besieging Caffa. As the plague spread to the Tatars across the central plains, the besiegers grew too sick to fight, so they catapulted dead bodies into Caffa. Terror-stricken plague survivors ran to their ships and put out for Genoa. In the days it took them to leave the Black Sea and cross the Mediterranean, most of them got sick and many died. The ships tried to stop at closer ports to get help, but the residents in each city realized the ships were contagious and drove them off. Even Genoa, which heard of their coming before they arrived, drove off the ships with flaming arrows.
But it was too late. Perhaps at their first stops, ports had permitted them some brief contact before sending them away in panic, and the plague immediately began to spread at those ports. It was like a bonfire lit in six different places; the plague spread outward from these port cities until all the coasts were infected by the end of 1347. In 1348, it spread inland to Florence, and then from port cities like Marseille into Spain. Paris had its first cases in June 1348. By fall, it was in London. In 1349, the Swedish were sick. The plague also spread north from Italy into Austria; Germany got it from both directions in summer 1349. It reached Poland in the fall and hit Scotland in 1350. Moscow, capital of the Tatars who had started it all, sickened via European routes in 1352.
In each place, the plague lasted about a year and then began to abate. At peak, people died too fast for gravediggers to keep up. Notaries who signed a dying man’s will found the executor and beneficiaries dead the next day, then died, themselves. In some places, the mortality rate may have reached 50%. Historians can only estimate based on indirect measures and contemporary claims, but a general average of 30% seems about right.
At first, manor farms still got in their harvests even as peasant workers were dropping dead. There seem to have been a lot of unemployed serfs in that time. Ten years later, the plague came back again, and in addition to taking out some who had survived in 1350, the disease hit children very hard. By the time the plague came back a decade later, it settled into an average 10% death rate. By this time, farms were short on plowmen and harvesters…on the other hand, there were not as many people to feed. When the food could be harvested and brought to market, its value dropped dramatically. The farm economy began to tumble, but survivors could buy food they’d only imagined before.