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The Black Death and Justinian’s Plague: History’s Worst Pestilences

Khalid Elhassan January 8, 2025 13 min

Plague - Illustration from the medieval Liber Chronicarum 1, depicting skeletons rising for the dance of death — Illustration from the medieval Liber Chronicarum 1, depicting skeletons rising for the dance of death. Live Science

4. A Plague That Changed the World

The shortage of labor was also a boon to surviving laborers. Faced with a labor scarcity, landowners and employers were forced to compete for workers by offering them better wages and working conditions. Those changes brought new fluidity to a hitherto rigidly stratified society. The land economy survived, but was weakened, as a new money economy – which ultimately replaced it – emerged. Psychologically, the shock of the Black Death caused more people to ask more questions to which the Catholic Church had few answers. That served to speed up and fuel the budding Renaissance. The world would never be the same.

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.