By the middle of the 14th century, the largest cities of Europe were Paris, Florence, Venice, and Genoa. These were cities with populations in excess of 100,000 people. The plague, known as the Black Death, raged through all these cities killing anywhere between thirty and sixty percent. The death rate from the plague was erratic. In some cities, twenty percent of the people who got it died, while in other areas, one hundred percent died. Between thirty and thirty-five percent of Europe's population disappeared in the three years between 1347 and 1350. This meant about 20 million deaths out of an estimated population of 70 million. Then, the plague left nearly as quickly as it had appeared. By mid-1350, the plague had completed its devastation across the continent of Europe, wiping out whole villages, towns, and cities. Europe was in dire need of restructuring, replenishing, and restoring.

Europe's Economic and Social Decline

The economy was probably hit the hardest of all the aspects of Europe. The biggest problem was that valuable artis

Amid the accumulating death and fear of contagion, people died without being administered the last rites. Such an act terrified other victims since there seemed to be nothing worse in this "Age of Faith" than to be buried improperly. The plague forced people to run from one another. Lawyers refused to witness wills, doctors refused to help the sick, priests did not hear confessions, parents deserted their children, and husbands deserted their wives. In the words of the Pope's physician, "charity was dead." It seemed apparent: for almost everyone, the plague signified the wrath of God. A plague so sweeping and unforgiving could only be the work of some species of Divine punishment upon mankind for its sins. The widespread acceptance of this view created an enormous sense of collective guilt. If the plague had descended upon mankind as a form of divine punishment, then the sins that created it must have been terrible. A scapegoat was needed since anger and frustration had to be focused. On charges that they had poisoned the water with the "intent to kill and destroy all of Christendom," the extermination of European Jews began in the spring of 1348.

The arrival of the appalling and unfathomable Plague changed the way in which fourteenth-century man understood his relationship to the world around him. There were those who saw the vast human destruction as a sort of divine punishment and others who attributed it to the tyranny of chance – a dangerous hypothesis which held perilous theological implications. Some looked to the mass destruction of property and life as God's way of "wiping the slate clean," offering new beginnings while forcing the hands of Europe's citizens to regroup, rebuild, rethink, restructure, while understanding the near-death of a civilization. Perhaps economic changes were needed. With virtually 100 years behind on the economic curve, one can only surmise that our economics of today has benefited in that inflation is behind where it would have been had the plague not ravished Europe. Perhaps a restructuring of their society

Some topics in this essay:
Black Death, Social Decline, Years’ War, Age Faith, Years' War, Peasants Amid, European Jew, European Jews, Europe Beginning, Europe Throughout, black death, divine punishment, social economic, social economic structure, cities europe, changes brought, people died, europe's population, economic structure, economic structure europe, structure europe,