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The Effects Of The Plague On Fourteenth Century Europe And Medieval Man

The 14th century was an era of catastrophes. Some of them were man-made, such as the Hundred Years' War. However, there were two natural disasters either of which would have been enough to throw medieval Europe into real "Dark Ages". The Black Death that followed on the heels of the Great Famine caused millions of deaths, and together they subjected the population of medieval Europe to tremendous struggles, leading many people to challenge old institutions and doubt traditional values. These calamities altered the path of European development in many areas.
In his essay called An Essay on the Principle of Population , the English political economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), stated that since production increased arithmetically (2,4,6,8,10) and population increased geometrically (2,4,8,16,32), in favorable conditions the population of a region will eventually increase until there are not sufficient resources to support it. From 800 to 1300, the total production of Europe had increased steadily. Although there had been scattered food shortages in which people died of starvation, for the most part, the standard of living in Europe had risen even while the population had steadily increased.
By the beginning of the Fourteenth Century, however, Europe was suffering from a Malthusian crisis. Europeans were just barley able to feed, clothe, and house themselves because the balance between the population and resources had become very tight. Europe's booming population, made possible by a long period of unusually warm weather, no epidemics, the production of an adequate food supply, and longer life was beginning to strain the available space for the increased need for agricultural production in order to keep up with the escalating population. There was no longer any margin for crop failures or even harvest shortfalls. At the same time, the European climate was undergoing a slight change, with cooler and wetter summers and earlier autumn storms. Conditions were...