0:10 in all of human history only a few
0:12 events are watershed
0:15 moments when everything can be
0:19 identified as either coming before or
0:23 after the Black Death is one of
0:27 these when in European history has there
0:30 ever been an event where possibly 50% of
0:32 the entire population died in such a quick
0:33 quick
0:36 time it's an event like this which we
0:39 can barely wrap our minds around how is
0:41 it that you can wake up one morning and
0:47 evening the hot six survivors have no
0:50 choice but to go forward for pain and
0:53 loss have shattered the
0:57 past I've often wondered whether the
1:01 sense of Despair and the sense of
1:03 irrationality with regard to what has
1:07 happened opened up Minds to
1:10 questioning questioning Authority but
1:13 questioning how we understand God and
1:15 questioning to what degree there is an
1:18 authority that we can all turn
1:21 to the plague cracks the church's
1:24 Thousand-Year old strangle hold on
1:27 religion many Nobles decide to take
1:31 their faith into their own hands
1:33 some families began to hire private
1:36 chaplain so that there seems to be a
1:38 kind of privatizing of religion that takes
1:43 place while the plague turns some
1:47 survivors closer to God others look for
1:49 new anwers in [Music]
1:58 science in Avenue France plague Survivor
2:01 galak is driven to write his Masterpiece
2:06 the Kia magna or great
2:08 surgery the authoritative text of
2:12 Western medicine for the next 300 years
2:14 he bases it not on Ancient philosophy
2:17 and astrology but upon his own firsthand
2:20 observations of
2:22 disease the plague had an important
2:23 impact in the in the practice of
2:26 medicine because when the plague arrived
2:28 the university trained physician who was
2:31 basically an internist and didn't do
2:33 real any any clinical
2:35 medicine his knowledge of medicine was all
2:37 all
2:39 theoretical after the debacle of the
2:47 practical in the Italian Countryside
2:49 another transformation is taking
2:53 place prior to the plague famine is
2:57 common though every inch of land is swed
2:59 Supply never catches up to the soaring demand
3:00 demand
3:03 land now even with much of the land gone
3:06 fallow there is food to
3:09 spare for the first time in centuries
3:11 farmers can grow not just grain but
3:14 luxury crops and so Italy becomes a
3:24 [Music]
3:27 fruit Italy's Orchards underline a
3:31 Grizzly fact a sudden drop in population
3:33 has its
3:38 advantages as people died wages Rose and
3:42 as people died and lands were
3:45 vacated uh people who in the past were
3:48 relatively poor could afford to begin to
3:50 invest in
3:52 land and what that meant was that all of
3:55 a sudden people who had been peasants
3:58 were now what we might call kulak class
4:02 they were now land owners they had
4:03 decent sized farms and they could
4:05 actually live independent lives rather
4:07 than working in the fields of
4:09 others one of the interesting things is
4:11 to look in the diet their diet which is
4:15 almost strictly grain-fed diet uh ale uh
4:18 bread pudding bread now has quite a bit
4:27 it but as the fortunes of peasants rise
4:30 the lot of the ruling class plummets
4:32 for centuries Nobles have depended on
4:36 surfs to work the Estates now with
4:38 better jobs drawing peasants elsewhere
4:40 Nobles are left without a labor force
4:45 forcing them to gather their own bitter
4:48 Harvest a clergyman gleefully notes how
4:50 the mighty have
4:53 fallen churchmen Knights and other
4:56 worthies have been forced to thresh
4:59 their corn plow their land and perform
5:02 every other their unskilled task if they
5:05 are to make their own [Music]
5:16 [Music]
5:20 bread many impoverished Nobles refuse to
5:22 lower themselves to
5:25 farmwork instead they seek their Fortune
5:29 the oldfashioned way at the point of a sword
5:34 you have a lot of military types running
5:37 around sometimes they're employed by
5:40 France or England or Spain or Catalonia
5:42 or someone in which case they're drawing
5:45 a salary and looting cities for pay
5:46 sometimes are unemployed and they're
5:49 looting cities uh to feed
5:52 themselves to make up for the shrinking
5:55 size of their armies Knights create new
5:59 rules for an old Game Gorilla Warfare is
6:01 born and
6:04 worse have all these demilitarized men
6:07 roaming the land uh looking for
6:09 opportunities to pillage and that's
6:10 really where things like scalping for
6:13 example come from it was these the
6:16 terror tactics of these groups of
6:19 military men seeking to extort from
6:22 villagers and from city Folk [Applause]
6:39 the repercussions of a smaller Workforce
6:41 Ripple into the more peaceful Pursuits
6:44 of Commerce and Industry as
6:47 well simply the destruction of so many
6:50 people forced uh the survivors to come
6:52 up with labor saving devices such as the printing
6:53 printing [Music]
6:54 [Music]
6:57 press industries that used to rely
6:59 heavily on Surplus manual labor like the
7:01 cloth industry which used to be able to
7:04 count on lots of dislocated peasants who
7:05 didn't have land because there were so
7:07 many people and land was fixed they
7:09 can't rely on that labor so they start
7:11 to turn to other kinds of solutions
7:20 Mills less than a century after the
7:23 Black Death The Fabulous illuminated
7:26 manuscripts of the Middle Ages become
7:29 relics gutenberg's printing press has
7:36 business all the industries that we
7:40 really associate with later processes of
7:42 industrialization start to emerge in the
7:44 late 14th century and you could argue
7:47 that they emerge partly as a response to
7:50 the labor crisis precipitated by the [Music]
7:51 [Music]
7:55 plague still the greatest impact of the
7:58 plague is not in the battlefields or
8:01 factories but in the human
8:04 heart I can't even imagine the anguish
8:07 that would have occurred from a
8:11 parent uh or a child watching a parent get
8:17 sick take young people who may have seen
8:21 their parents die surviving in the 1350s
8:24 but with that memory of death all around
8:30 them so that death became a common sight
8:33 I think there is lots of evidence that
8:36 uh there was a psychological
8:39 transformation affected by uh by the
8:42 plague and by the sudden dramatic
8:49 people death clings to their
8:52 imaginations like a menacing Shadow and
8:55 creeps into the late medieval art known
9:02 the kind of Dutch paintings you see with
9:05 skeletons dancing and with a kind of MTO
9:09 Mori just remember death death is
9:13 everywhere in time the social upheaval
9:16 of the post-plague years the questioning
9:18 attitudes and increased individualism
9:21 all lead to the greatest flowering of
9:24 culture and knowledge in European
9:27 history the
9:29 Renaissance the Renaissance in Italy
9:32 shows the extraordinary resilience of
9:35 human society a tenacity and creative
9:38 energy that sustained it to the plague's darkest
9:40 darkest
9:46 years it was as if Europe had suddenly
9:50 switched off and then back on again and
