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Oddities, Misconceptions, and Facts About the Middle Ages that Made it So Delightfully Strange

Khalid Elhassan April 6, 2022 36 min

Middle Ages Facts - Disposal of Black Death victims — Disposal of Black Death victims. Science

26. The Middle Ages Were Pretty Rough

Europeans in the Middle Ages were 50 times more likely to murder or get murdered than modern Europeans. Quora

The Middle Ages were not a great time to be alive. Especially for commoners in feudal Europe. There, society was divided into de facto castes or layers, with peasants, serfs, and other manual workers – most of the population – at the bottom. They were ruthlessly exploited by those in higher layers up the social structure, who benefitted from the commoners’ labor, in exchange for “protection”. There was a twist, though: the protection offered was often from fellow members of the upper castes.

Although higher-ups were not as screwed as the commoners at the bottom, life was no bed roses for them. Violence was rife across all classes. Even discounting deaths in wars or bullying knights rampaging against peasants, the homicide rate was 50 times greater in medieval Europe than in the modern EU. Put another way, Europeans were 50 times more murderous back then than they are today. However, as seen below, it was not violence, but diseases, that did the most to keep life expectancy low. High mortality rates, especially in childhood, kept the average life expectancy around 35 years.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.