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