Crisis, Unrest, and Opportunity, 1300-1500

Was the Black Death the most important event of the last millennium?

Actually, a group of historians in the year 2000 were polled and asked, "What was the most important person of the last millennium?" They ended up voting not for a person - Hitler, Shakespeare - they ended up voting for Yersinia pestis, the plague Bacillus - they ended up voting that the Black Death was the most important event.

This conclusion is fascinating but if we were going to answer this question, we'd have to then say, first of all, certainly measured in terms of the dramatic loss of life of a group of people, the magnitude of the Black Death was unparalleled and even compares to the massive loss of life that was incurred by the Native peoples of the Americas after the arrival of the Europeans. It is comparable in scope, in some sense, to the Holocaust if you think about numbers - I'm not making any kinds of judgments here. So, absolutely, it was an incredibly traumatic event.

We would also need to then think about the aftereffects for the survivors. Obviously, for the people who died, it was traumatic but for the survivors it was also extremely traumatic. Like the other events I've mentioned, the Black Death really transforms people's worldview. They think about the world in different ways; their traditional ideas about their duties and their relationships to their neighbors and their relatives were radically transformed by this massive loss of life.

The other thing that would make this the most important event, arguably, of the millennium is the fact that the world after the Black Death was a depopulated world. One-half to one-third of the population not just of Europe, but also of the Near East, has died. That means that for the survivors, for the first time there is open land ready to be settled and colonized, which had not happened for centuries. For the people who survived who were enterprising, they could increase their holdings. It meant that farmers were no longer under pressure to produce staple foodstuffs like wheat and corn, but that they were able to diversify. The diet of the surviving Europeans become diversified and people are eating meat for the first time, eating vegetables, and so their nutrition is better, they're living longer, and people generally are healthier. Europe's cities, which had been massively overpopulated, now have smaller populations, living space becomes more available and so disease is more easily controlled.

Probably the most important effect is the social effect, the fact that workers in Europe for the first time are valuable. And they know it. The workforce is no longer flooded with artisans and laborers and plowmen and serfs, and, in fact, governments know this. In England, Parliament passes a law called the Statute of Laborers that was intended to keep workers on the land, to keep them from moving around looking for better jobs and wages. It doesn't work. There is a wave of rebellions all over Europe, both in urban and rural areas as workers unite together in ways that are more familiar to us from the 19th and 20th centuries because they recognize that through solidarity they might actually be able to push forward some form of rights.

My favorite event in all of these is the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381 where tens of thousands of peasants, most of them illiterate, march on London demanding that all the lawyers be killed, managing to capture and behead the Archbishop of Canterbury, and holding King Richard II hostage. While their rebellion fails, it's an extraordinary expression of, for that first generation after the Black Death, the sort of social mobility that is potentially going to be possible in this brave new world.

Did Europe's nation states begin to emerge in the later Middle Ages?

Many historians have asked the question this way: Did the modern states of Europe, the states that we associate with the 19th century, really begin to emerge in the Middle Ages? In order to answer this question, we have to think of the features that we associate with the modern state.

We think of the modern state as being something with fixed borders that can be defended. We think about the modern state as having sovereignty, that being a difficult thing to define but essentially it's a question of whether people respect the fact that your state exists. Do they not try to invade it? Does the state have credible political institutions that can survive over time and that can survive incompetent leadership or changes of leadership? Most importantly, does the state have the loyalty of its citizens? Do the citizens owe their primary loyalty and sense of identity to the state or do they owe it to some other group of people?

Many historians have made the argument that, absolutely, we can see these features beginning to emerge in the territorial monarchies of the Middle Ages in the 12th and 13th centuries. We can see the emergence of stable institutions - Parliament, for example, in England or the Parlement in France - and that these institutions change but that they manage to maintain a certain amount of power. The office of the king himself becomes something that is institutionalized.

Now, do we see states start to have recognizable borders? Well, yes and no, but that is something that is emerging in this period. Do we see the states as having a sense of sovereignty? Well, again, the idea that a ruler's territory is sacrosanct and should not be invaded by another ruler is an idea we see emerging in the Middle Ages.

What the question really comes down to is, do we actually have a sense of group identity that is tied to this thing, the state, and not to some other entity? In the Middle Ages, this is a very hard thing to find, this idea of, dare I say, national identity, identity that is tied to being a Frenchman or an Englishman or the subject of an English or French king, as opposed to, say, your identity as a Christian, which is extremely important to medieval people.

This is one of those questions that many medieval historians want to answer, "yes," because that makes the Middle Ages look modern and medievalists - I'm one of them - like to be relevant to the modern world. On the other hand, we have to recognize that many of the features of nationalism are not present in the medieval state. For example, the idea that the nation consists of a body of citizens who themselves have the right to choose their government is not something we can locate in the Middle Ages.

So while there are fundamental features of the modern state that we begin to see emerging in the Middle Ages, it is not the same as the nation state of the 19th century.