How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (25 page)

The Medieval Warm Period

No one benefited more from the warm conditions that prevailed from about 800 to about 1250 than did the Vikings. The lengthening growing season in Scandinavia greatly increased crop yields, and this, in turn, fed a larger population. The newly benign climate also enabled the Vikings to undertake voyages of discovery and settlement that had been impossible in colder times.
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The receding ice pack, the reduced prevalence of icebergs, and the reduction in the number and severity of storms at sea favored Viking voyaging across the North Atlantic.

First came the discovery and settlement of Iceland. The Vikings initially reached Iceland by accident, after getting lost while sailing from Norway to the Faroe Islands. Next, a boatload of Swedes accidentally reached the island and stayed for the winter. The first Viking to intentionally sail there, in the 860s, was Flóki Vilgerðarson, who stayed only one winter and named the island Iceland after seeing drift ice in the fjords. The first settler of Iceland was Ingólfr Arnarson, a Norwegian chieftain who arrived with his family in 874. Within the next sixty years
all the land on Iceland had been claimed by settlers and a government had been established. The first Christian bishop of Iceland was consecrated in 1056.

Although several Vikings had sailed to Greenland soon after the initial settlement in Iceland, it was not until 982 that someone settled in Greenland. The first settler was a Norwegian under a three-year exile from Iceland for killing several men. When his period of exile had passed, Eric the Red recruited settlers from Iceland to colonize the southern coast of Greenland, an area then quite suitable for farming. Trade with Scandinavia flourished—in 1075 a Greenlander shipped a live polar bear as a gift to King Ulfsson of Denmark. (The coat of arms of the Danish royal family still includes a depiction of a polar bear.) Even at its peak, however, the Viking population of Greenland was probably no more than three or four thousand.
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Finally came Vinland. Although this settlement is recorded in several Norse sagas, as well as in Adam of Breman’s eleventh-century
Description of the Northern Island
, for centuries historians dismissed the claim that Leif Eriksson had sailed his knarr from Greenland to the north coast of America as pure mythology. Then, in 1914, William A. Munn, after close study of the sources, proposed that the Vikings had landed and made their base at L’Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland. No respectable scholar took him seriously. But in 1960 Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad found extensive remains of a tenth-century Viking village at precisely the spot Munn had proposed.
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It is now accepted that this was the main Viking settlement in North America and that the Vikings had camped in many other coastal sites. None of this could have happened except for the Medieval Warm Period.

Meanwhile, it was golden days in Europe as well. Wine grapes grew so plentifully in England that local officials in various parts of the continent attempted to limit the import of English vintages. So much new land was cleared or reclaimed by pumping out marshes, especially along the coast, that it would be five hundred years before Europe matched the extent of land under cultivation.
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As food became abundant, the population of Europe soared from about 25 million in 950 to about 75 million in 1250.
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Given that the medieval economy rested primarily on agriculture, this was an era of considerable prosperity. Studies of coinage offer one window into this prosperity.
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Another comes from the nearly two centuries during which wealthy Europeans funded the Crusades
and subsidized the crusader kingdoms. But the most obvious manifestations of abundance are the great Gothic cathedrals constructed during this period: Notre Dame (1163), Canterbury (1175), Strasbourg (1190), Chartres (1194), Reims (1212), Amiens (1225), and dozens more. As the archaeologist Brian Fagan concluded, “Like the Norse conquests, cathedrals too were a consequence of a global climatic phenomenon, an enduring legacy of the Medieval Warm Period.”
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And then it ended—brutally.

The Little Ice Age

During the winter of 1310–11 Londoners danced around fires on the frozen Thames River—something that had never happened before. Then, starting in the early spring of 1315, rain poured down for weeks and weeks, making it impossible to farm. All across western Europe dikes were destroyed by floods, and new lakes and marshes appeared. In August the weather turned bitterly cold. Hunger began to spread. The next spring, heavy rains again prevented planting, and so again there was no harvest, nor was there fodder for the flocks. Famine became widespread. Meanwhile, intense gales battered the coastal areas. By 1317 all of northern Europe was starving—even the nobility.

Although the weather returned to normal that summer, the misery continued, because people had been so weakened, so much of the seed stock had been eaten, and even the horses and oxen used for plowing had been consumed. By the time the famine ended in 1325, perhaps 10 percent of the population had died of starvation and starvation-related diseases.
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Even then, although the famine was over, agricultural production continued to decline because of bad weather. Grain yields can be measured in terms of the ratio of seeds of grain harvested to seeds planted. In about 1200 the ratio for wheat was 5 to 1; by 1330 it had fallen to about 1.5 to 1. Barley fell from 10 to 1 to about 3 to 1 during the same period. Rye fell from about 4 to 1 to less than 2 to 1.
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It barely paid to farm until new, more productive varieties, better suited to shorter growing seasons, were developed. (By the sixteenth century the ratio for these three grains had risen to 7 to 1.)
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With colder weather came more severe storms. The worst were enormous gales that drove tidal waves onto the western Atlantic shores, drowning tens of thousands. In 1282 storm-driven waves broke through the barrier coastal dunes of Holland, creating an inland sea extending
about sixty miles from the coast and about thirty miles wide. Known as the Zuiderzee, it continued to expand during new storms. In 1287 a new immersion drowned an estimated fifty to eighty thousand Dutch; a flood in 1421 destroyed seventy-two villages and drowned another ten thousand.

Meanwhile, far fewer boats were reaching Iceland from Norway and Denmark, and no boats were going to or from Greenland—the last Viking boat visited Greenland in 1406, and then only because it had been blown off course. Since Greenland had no forests, the Greenland Vikings could not build boats or even repair them. Unable to leave, and unable to grow grain in the deteriorating climate, the Greenland Viking population was wiped out by the end of the fifteenth century.

Still another catastrophe arrived in October 1347, when a galley from Cairo docked in the Sicilian port of Messina. On board were a number of rats, all of them with fleas. The Black Death had come to Europe.
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The Black Death

The Black Death was the bubonic plague (
Yersinia pestis
). (Although this identification was long disputed, recent analysis of human skeletons settled the debate.)
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Bubonic plague is carried by fleas that are borne by rats; humans become infected when they are bitten by a flea with the disease. There has been a long controversy over whether the plague can be directly transmitted from one human to another or whether the disease always requires a flea bite. The consensus is that direct contact with bodily fluids of an infected person possibly can transmit the disease to another person, but almost always a flea bite is involved. Symptoms appear within several days of becoming infected, and most victims die after two or three days of intense pain and vomiting.

Of course, humanity had suffered many devastating plagues before. From 165 to 180 a plague had raged across the Roman Empire, with the famous emperor Marcus Aurelius among the victims. In 541–42 the plague of Justinian began somewhere near Constantinople and spread worldwide.

But the Black Death was far more deadly than these. It seems to have originated in China, perhaps in 1346. From there it traveled west, reaching the Middle East and North Africa in 1347.
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Europeans could do
nothing to prevent the Black Death from reaching them. Merchant ships brought cargoes of infected rats and dying crews not only to Messina but to most, if not all, of the other Mediterranean ports. And Europe had an enormous rat population ready to become hosts for infected fleas.

The plague raged across Europe for four years, 1348–51, beginning in the south and moving north. Although the mortality rate may have varied from one region to another, everywhere huge numbers died. In 1351 Pope Clement VI asked his staff to calculate the number killed by the plague in Europe. They arrived at a figure of 23,840,000, or about 30 percent of the total population.
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Apparently, this total was based on actual reports and was not influenced by the fact that Revelation 9:18 predicts that “a third of mankind” will be killed by plague. Many modern scholars accept the 30 percent estimate, although some have supported estimates as high as 60 percent.
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The latter is quite credible if one adds in the next outbursts of plague that took place in 1361 and 1369. The same range of rates is proposed for the world as a whole, yielding estimates that at least 100 million and perhaps as many as 200 million perished. Since even the lowest estimates are staggeringly high, there seems little point in quibbling as to which figure is best.

The horror of what took place is difficult to imagine. The great Italian philosopher and literary intellectual Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) wrote to a friend of “empty houses, derelict cities, ruined estates, fields strewn with cadavers, a horrible and vast solitude encompassing the whole world.”
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Parish registers from the Burgundian village of Givry show a population of about 1,200 in 1340, with deaths averaging about 30 a year; then, in a fourteen-week period in 1348, 615 deaths were recorded.
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There wasn’t room in the graveyard for such a number, and soon bodies were being pushed into trenches, layer upon layer.

Contemporary accounts from across Europe report the dedication of nuns and monks in caring for the afflicted and seeing to their burial, but there was no keeping up. Everywhere there were piles of putrefying corpses and many houses and cottages in which everyone lay dead. An agonized Italian father wrote about conditions in the city of Siena:

And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could.… And in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead.… And I … buried
my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city.
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Nowhere was there any safety, not even in remote villages. Not even in Iceland, where the fatality rate may have been as high as 60 percent.
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Reactions

It has become routine for historians to claim that the Black Death caused people to lose confidence in Christianity, and especially in the Church. Perhaps some people did, but quoting passages from the
Decameron
does not establish the state of popular opinion.
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Nor does it inspire confidence when historians claim that a lack of church attendance reveals a falling away in response to the Black Death. What this does reveal is that most historians are ignorant of the fact that church attendance was
always
low in medieval times, even in Italy.
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In fact, scattered data suggest that as the plague progressed, people became increasingly likely to bequeath legacies to the Church.
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The only reliable evidence of a widespread religious reaction to the Black Death concerns an intense, if somewhat grotesque, deepening of faith.

The Flagellants

The Flagellant movement began well before the outbreak of the Black Death, being first reported to have appeared in Italy in 1259 in response to a famine. But it burst into a mass movement in the earliest days of the Black Death as the belief spread that God had sent the plague to punish humanity. As King Magnus II of Sweden put it, “God for the sins of man has struck the world with this great punishment of sudden death. By it, most of our countrymen are dead.”
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Beginning in Hungary and spreading rapidly through Germany, tens of thousands of Christian men
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organized themselves into companies and began to travel from town to town, whipping themselves and one another in atonement for their sins. To join, a man had to agree to remain active for at least thirty-three and a half days (symbolizing Christ’s years on earth), make prior restitution of all his debts, gain permission from his wife (if married), and agree to obey the leaders absolutely. Flagellants
entered towns together, never stayed in one place more than one night, swore never to speak to a woman, and vowed not to sit on cushions or to shave or bathe.
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At first the Church supported the Flagellants—Pope Clement VI even invited a company of them to Avignon (where the papacy was in exile from Rome). The Flagellants often had pronounced moral effects on communities they visited, as guilt-stricken adulterers made public confessions and thieves returned stolen goods.
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Soon, however, leading Flagellants became blatantly heretical. Philip Ziegler recounted in his history of the Black Death: “Certain of the Brethren began to claim a measure of supernatural power. It was commonly alleged that the Flagellants could drive out devils, heal the sick and even raise the dead. Some members announced that they had eaten and drunk with Christ or talked with the Virgin. One claimed that he himself had risen from the dead.”
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Unordained leaders of the movement began hearing confessions, granting absolution, and imposing penances. Pope Clement responded in 1349 by condemning the Flagellants as a heretical sect, whereupon some leaders were seized and executed. Meanwhile the Black Death continued.