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Unusual Historic Crises and Calamities

Khalid Elhassan April 16, 2020 34 min

31. Immediate Consequences of the Black Death

Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death reflects the social upheaval and terror that accompanied the Black Death. Museu del Prado

The shock of a plague that wiped out up to two-thirds of the population was great, to say the least. Take the experience of the world’s reaction to the current crisis, and multiply it many times over, to get an idea of how contemporaries felt about and reacted to the Black Death. The economy contracted sharply, as trade came to a standstill, and wars came to a halt.

However, astonishing as it might seem to us today, medieval people soon adjusted to the Black Death, grew accustomed to the plague, and took its frequent recurrences in stride. The immediate reaction to the first and deadliest wave were only temporary: many died, but life went on for the survivors. Within a few years, trade had resumed, the economy picked up, and the survivors went back to waging wars and settling their disputes and differences by killing each other.

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.