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A very interesting line of thought I encountered some time ago sufpggested western civillization was the direct result of the black death and it's after effects. It helped break the power of the church over society and helped break the time of feudal lrds and serfs by killing so many peolle that the lords no longer had overwhelming force of men at arms to impose their will, and making human labor a scarce, therefore valuable commodity that commanded higher wages. One way to offset the reduced number of workers was to let peolle specialize in what they had natural aptitudes for, which created trades men who we're far more productive at a specific task than a number of unskilled peolle would be. They commanded higher wages and more respect therefore.

Secialized trades lead to specialized tools and trainings which lead to more education, higher degrees of literacy, etc. One fact cannot be denied, the rennisance followed the black plague.

Here are a couple articles which might make you think this issue over, itcs quite interesting to wonder if the black plague created western culture as it was later known. Maybe we all owe papa nurgle some begrudging thanks...


https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071206072342AA3UDPo


https://www.philforhumanity.com/Black_Death.html

It's pretty well explained and demonstrated in the above discussions the black plague empowered the lower and working classes, created a new socio economic paradigm and lead to an age of abundance and leisure time that very likely created the rennisance.

Not really.
-The power of the catholic church over Western European society wasn't broken until the Reformation hundreds of years after the Black Death, and even then it remained incredibly powerful in catholic countries unto the 1800s-1900s.

-Feudal lords did not rely on large numbers of men-at-arms to impose their will. They did have retinues of professional warriors, but those retinues were generally rather small. The vast majority of their forces were composed of levies (common people who were conscripted). Since feudal retinues were already small groups, it doesn't really matter whether there is a whole lot less people to recruit from. On the other hand, the fact that there are now less people actually makes it a lot easier for a lord to impose his will. And in the period after the Black Death we do indeed see lords grow more and more powerful with more centralised realms and ever greater authority all the way up to what is called 'the age of absolutism' when despots ruled "by divine right" with near god-like authority (as epitomised by France's 'Sun King'). If anything, the Black Death empowered the high nobility at the cost of the rights of the common people and low nobility, not the reverse. In the earlier Middle Ages, common people in Western Europe generally enjoyed a lot more freedoms and rights than they did during the later Middle Ages and beyond. Western society in 500 was a lot more egalitarian than Western society in 1000, which in turn was a lot more egalitarian than Western society in 1500. The Middle Ages sees a very slow but continual process of society becoming more stratified with increasingly powerful lords.

-Specialisation was already a thing long before the Black Death. Both before and after the Black Death, people did generally not specialise in what they had an aptitude for, but in the job they had been expected from birth to take (usually the same job your father did). Until the 1700s-1800s jobs were generally hereditary. For example in many cities (where most specialised labour occurred), you could not practice a trade unless you were a member of the relevant guild. And to become a member of the guild you had to have been apprenticed to and approved by a master of your trade. And a master would generally only take on apprentice who were the sons (or rarely daughters) of other guild members, he would not waste his time on educating some peasant kid. Basically, in the Middle Ages people's jobs were based on their family, with certain families being associated with certain jobs and those jobs being passed on from one generation to the next. People started working in a specific trade basically from birth or at least early childhood. There wasn't any room for discovering "natural aptitudes" (and besides, if you are trained to do something from childhood you generally become really good at it anyways, so medieval people probably did have a great deal of aptitude for their work). This did not change with or after the Black Death until centuries later.

-The Renaissance followed the Black Plague, but a connection is doubtful. It is doubtful whether there is a direct connection. And in either case, the Renaissance was a cultural movement limited solely to the high elites of society. For 99% of society, nothing really changed from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period. The Renaissance started specifically in the city of Florence, which was hit hard by the Black Death, but so was almost every city not just in Italy or Western Europe but in all of Eurasia from Iceland to China. If the Black Death really was a significant cause of the Renaissance, we would have expected to see similar movements all across Eurasia, not just in a single city. Rather it seems that the Renaissance was the result of specific cultural conditions in late Medieval Florence, on which the Black Death, while highly disruptive in the short term, had little discernible long-term impact.

-Now it is not that the Black Death was without impact or all, or that it did not contribute to the formation of modern Western society. It definitely did. People generally became wealthier in the aftermath of the Black Death because there was a lot of free land and cheap food available, the lower nobility, being heavily dependent on income from agriculture, was robbed of much of its wealth and power which meant that the high nobility, being less dependent on income from agriculture could increase its power at their cost. This increased power allowed them to increasingly centralise their domains eventually leading to the early-modern states and later modern nation-states. Power and land now being concentrated mostly in the hands of the high nobility also led to a breakdown of the manorial system, and its eventual replacement by the capitalist system. Meanwhile, the increased prosperity led to increased trade, which meant that merchants became more numerous and more powerful, eventually contributing to the spread of a money and market-based economical system gradually replacing the exchange-based manorial economical systems. However, these were all processes that were already slowly going on before the Black Death hit, so the Black Death should probably not be seen as a cause but rather a contributing factor to these processes. And of course, Western civilisation was created by a whole lot more factors than just these changes. The Stone and Bronze Ages, The Ancient Greeks, Ancient Romans, Celtic, Germanic (and other) tribes, the adoption and spread of Christianity, the Catholic Church and the Reformation, the voyages of discovery and globalisation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the World Wars and a million other developments all were essential in shaping Western civilisation. Western civilisation is the sum of all of Western European history. The Black Death is a contributing element in that, but it certainly did not "create" Western civilisation in any way. It just helped shape it along with millions of others of events and developments.

A good analysis.

Iron Captain is mostly right.

The only expansion on it I can offer is that while there were some meaningful changes brought about as part of the death.

Socially, it is notably that while Feudalism as a political system grew stronger if anything, the plague did end serfdom in Western Europe. The manor system of economics was already collapsing, but the plague basically killed it. Many rural villages were abandoned and there was a shift of population to cities oddly enough. Wage labor started to emerge as urban laborers grew in number. Lords needed to replace the dying, so they started paying more, housing improved, and terms of service got more favorable. This went hand in hand beginnings of industrialization in Western society, motivated by a sudden shortage in laborers and needing to get creative to make up the shortfall. New techniques that were less labor intensive were pioneered in carpentry, masonry, metallurgy. Basically anything that was labor intensive started finding ways to do things with fewer people. It's notable though that many of these effects reversed after the plagues. Inflation and laws freezing wages basically left the common man poorer after the plague than before.

As people moved to cities, there were fewer in rural areas to farm. Significant amounts of agricultural land shifted from crops to animals. The Black Death coincided roughly with the emergence of the pig as a regular meat stuff. Prior to the 14th century pigs were not particularly common as a source of meat in Europe (old prejudices against the noble swine, and not just because of religion). But pigs are extremely efficient sources of meat, and Europeans who survived the Black Death found themselves with plentiful food not just because there were fewer people to buy it but because there was a lot more of it and their diets became more balanced as a result. This was probably the most significant change during the plague years. Food surpluses helped the European population recover, nutrition improved health, and the new industrial innovations helped pave the way for the Early Modern Period.

Arguably, the increasing power of the Church in the period partially benefited from paranoia. Jews and other minorities faced increasing persecution in Europe during the plague, and the Church grew more centralized compared to earlier periods and much more deeply connected to the nobility. This would lead to events that helped spawn the Reformation.

Obviously the Black Death changed things, but it's a stretch I think to say it created Western civilization. Western civilization was already a couple thousand years old by then

I read something similar once, but it suggested that a lower population density combined with a lower birth rate (at least of surviving children) meant that each child received a higher proportion of their parents' time.

In retrospect I should have asked if the black plague helped create modern western civillization. There seems to be agreement it helped.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
In retrospect I should have asked if the black plague helped create modern western civillization. There seems to be agreement it helped.

By that standard any significant event helped, because it's part of the causal chain that led to what we have today. So yeah, it makes your claim true, but it also makes it a pretty meaningless one.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also:

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
created a new socio economic paradigm and lead to an age of abundance and leisure time that very likely created the rennisance.

No. Not at all. Remember, what you think of as the art of the renaissance (largely a marketing term created by people of that particular region) is not the result of a bunch of lower-class people suddenly having leisure time and creating stuff for fun. It's work created for wealthy patrons, just like the wealthy and powerful of previous eras would pay artists to create things for them. Average lower-class people without wealthy and powerful patrons sure as hell weren't doing that stuff.

Paringrine i'm not even reading your post sanymore all you've done since you started replying to my posts is treadcrap them and I'm sick of it and you. I can for see nothing you could post I'd want to read. I'm sure you just took a pompous dump on my post and am not interested in seeing it.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
Paringrine i'm not even reading your post sanymore all you've done since you started replying to my posts is treadcrap them and I'm sick of it and you. I can for see nothing you could post I'd want to read. I'm sure you just took a pompous dump on my post and am not interested in seeing it.

So, rather than consider the possibility that you might be wrong you'll just post more insults and complaining, just with more typos this time. Ok.

If you don't want to see criticism then perhaps you should stop posting ideas that are poorly thought out at best? I mean, this is the better of your threads and it's still a pretty superficial analysis of a huge subject that doesn't seem to show much understanding of the history involved. Your other discussion is a trainwreck of tinfoil hattery about the elites breeding a sub-race of idiots they can use to play real-life RTS games for fun. The problem is you, not the criticism.

Man, the anti-vaccer apologists are finding really interesting new angles

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Man, the anti-vaccer apologists are finding really interesting new angles

Nooo, I'm no anti vaxxer. Plus do we even have a vaccine for the black plague today? If so, GIMME!

I'm not saying the plague was good, it had side effects that created what may be a positive result by many views. Sometimes terrible events do have positive after effects. A terrible forest fire can clear out old, choked growth and pave the way for new and more vital ecosystems to take it's place. Still sucked for the old forest.

The devastation of europe and japan in ww2 allowed new cities to be built with solid, forward looking planning rather than being haphazard growths that were unplanned and chaotic like old cities sometimes were. Wouldn;t want t go thru the blitz tho...

it's an interesting idea to consider ,but the plague is still not anything we should give thanks for.

Yes, there is a vaccine against Y. pestis.

There are still outbreaks of Plague around the world, but it's usually treatable with antibiotics. it's endemic in Madagascar, for example (there was a reasonably severe outbreak in the capital when I was there last year ).

I find many people are often quite surprised that the plague is something that still exists

 LordofHats wrote:
I find many people are often quite surprised that the plague is something that still exists

Yeah, though it doesn't appear to be as virulent or deadly as the Y. pestis strain that caused the Black Death. Modern plague is still a deadly disease, but thanfully it doesn't have the mortality rates or high speed of transmission that it had in the past.
And people are also often surprised to learn that the Black Death wasn't the first major plague epidemic. The Plague of Justinian in the 6th century AD killed an estimated 13-26% of the entire world population. And there actually was a third major epidemic as well in the 19th century which killed tens of millions of people in Asia but did not spread to Europe as much as the earlier two.

Of course, a more deadly and virulent strain could evolve again. But I think with modern medical knowledge we would be able to deal with it pretty easily, at least in Europe and other developed areas.

It's interesting note regarding Y. Pestis is it's impact in other eras. The Justinian Plague of the Eastern Roman Empire that swept around every generation for a couple hundred years contributed massively to a fall in tax revenue and crippling the ability of the empire to recover losses and field armies, with effects that reverberate today.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I find many people are often quite surprised that the plague is something that still exists

Yeah, though it doesn't appear to be as virulent or deadly as the Y. pestis strain that caused the Black Death. Modern plague is still a deadly disease, but thanfully it doesn't have the mortality rates or high speed of transmission that it had in the past.
And people are also often surprised to learn that the Black Death wasn't the first major plague epidemic. The Plague of Justinian in the 6th century AD killed an estimated 13-26% of the entire world population. And there actually was a third major epidemic as well in the 19th century which killed tens of millions of people in Asia but did not spread to Europe as much as the earlier two.

Of course, a more deadly and virulent strain could evolve again. But I think with modern medical knowledge we would be able to deal with it pretty easily, at least in Europe and other developed areas.

Well the main reason its not as deadly today is because most people today have some level of immunity to it, being that almost everybody is descended from people who survived it in the first place. Plus being a bacterial disease it is easy to treat with modern medicine.

Plague is also transmitted via Fleas, something which our modern society takes offense to on our pets and ourselves, meaning we defeat the plague on several levels.

Nutrition helps. A commonly undersung aspect of fighting disease is being healthy in the first place.

A typical meal for serfs and laborers in the middle ages lacked sources of a lot of nutrients and vitamins. Some people basically lived on gruels and broths based on grain and whatever happened to be around and edible. Even actual bread wasn't that common in some parts of Western Europe. Diets among commoners weren't very balanced. It didn't help that during the period there was a real cultural aversion to eating "too much." Most people only ate two meals a day. Breakfast was seen as extravagant and wasteful, and depending on where in Europe you lived you might have no access to dairy or meats because they were too expensive.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Yes, there is a vaccine against Y. pestis.

There are still outbreaks of Plague around the world, but it's usually treatable with antibiotics. it's endemic in Madagascar, for example (there was a reasonably severe outbreak in the capital when I was there last year ).

Its endemic in the US too, particularly in the south west and west. Its common in the prairie dog population (among others), and when urbanization pushes outwards, there are usually a couple cases from contact before the rodents are pushed out or adapt to urban living.

But yeah, treatment is easy with common antibiotics so it isn't a big deal anymore.

Currently we're more at risk from stuff like ebola (insufficient vaccines and treatments), another major flu outbreak like the 'spanish flu' of 1918, or a mass case of whatever it is that's causing paralysis in kids (~125 cases every other year for the last 4 years, scattered in random groupings across the states in late summer).

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

Currently we're more at risk from stuff like ebola (insufficient vaccines and treatments), another major flu outbreak like the 'spanish flu' of 1918, or a mass case of whatever it is that's causing paralysis in kids (~125 cases every other year for the last 4 years, scattered in random groupings across the states in late summer).

Ebola isn't really a pandemic risk. It sounds bad because it has a high mortality rate. However, it only transfers from contact with bodily fluids so is easy to contain (just don't go out). If it evolved to be air borne then yes it becomes more of an issue, but at this stage we can manage it with good hygiene practice.

As for a flu outbreak, it is true we are due for another one statistically. It won't be the world killer calamity but might knock off 5% of the worlds population. This might be enough to put the world into a huge global recession with potential implications for global and local security. The real risks at the present time are unknown viruses (for example SARS could have fallen into this category) or a serious bug gaining antibacterial resistance. At that point even the basic scrape or operation becomes a risk, TB would become prevalent again and so forth. Of course this last item is entirely in our control but in the name of profit we continue to dose animals with antibiotics just in case and are handed out like candy at the first sign of a runny nose. This is on top of that investment in new antibacterial drugs is not invested in compared to things like hayfever tablets.