Weatherstone Notes--Disasters of the Late Middle Ages

The Late Middle Ages I

I) 14th century disasters
A) famine (bad harvests 1315-1317)
    1) farmers forced to eat seed corn - left no planting material
    2) years get worse - never enough grain to eat
    3) very hard to recover
    4) led to widespread malnutrition
      i) life expectancy drops again
      ii) more vunrable to disease
B) Black Death 1347-1450
    1) takes 1/3 of Europe's population
    2) Impact on Medicine
      i) kills many doctors who cared most about their patients, killed the best doctors
      ii) false medicines become big - Charlatans - miracle cures
      iii) lasting negative impact on medicine due to false cures
    3) Impact on religion
      i) superstition begins to creep in to everyday life
      ii) best priests were killed during black death because they gave the victims the last rights and were exposed to the disease
      iii) with no good priests, no one is left to put down heretical teachings or guide people along the correct path of a religion
      iv) flagalent movement
        a) god is punishing people for being evil with the black death
        b) they went around whipping each other in big circles to punish themselves before god got the chance to
        c) they requested money and they would forgive your sins, or you could join them in the whipping
*Led people to irrational extremes
    4) Social Relations
      i) Jews/ Christians got along decently before the black death
      ii) Jewish community was not affected to greatly by the black death due to their cleanliness - they didn't have pigs = less rats = less fleas
*a major spreading source of the disease was through fleas
      iii) Christians thought the Jews were poising the water supply
      iv) Christians begin to poison the Jews wells to get even, or they just killed them
      v) Bad relations last all the way until the holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s
*People on the margins of society (widows, poor people)
- thought was that the fringe people were placing curses on people
- These people were burned at the stake, witch hunts became popular until Salem
    5) Impact on morality
      i) good, helpful people all start dying
      ii) the more selfish a person was, the better chance they had at surviving
      iii) people start to not care about others
C) War
    1) 100 years war 1337-1453
      i) people fighting over stupid reasons
        a) the issue was should France be ruled by an English king
        b) French nobles said NO because the English king would be way to strong
      ii) England could win battles but unable to clinch the war
        a) French people killed their own - very poor battle techniques
        b) not enough troops to dominate the whole of France
        c) French had Joan of Arc who was a 19 year old girl general
          1) she hears the voice of the Angel Michael and she learns how to win battles
          2) French give Joan her chance to prove herself
          3) France starts to win
          4) Joan stops hearing the voice and she is captured by the English
          5) English say the voice could not be from God because God favored the English
          6) The English conclude that she hears voices from Satan and the burn her at the stake
      iii) This war accomplished nothing