War and peace and war, p.25
War and Peace and War, page 25
Looking at the history of France and other Western European countries from a bird’s eye view, the Wheel of Fortune is clear. Periods of national prosperity and strong states alternate with periods of economic decline and social disintegration in a cyclical fashion. The High Middle Ages were followed by the calamitous fourteenth century. But then Europe experienced the Renaissance, a period of prosperity and cultural brilliance in many ways similar to the High Middle Ages. The Renaissance was followed by the “crisis of the seventeenth century,” but again, the times of trouble were eventually over. The last complete cycle began with the Age of Enlightenment and ended with the Age of Revolution (1789-1849). There is a peculiar rhythm of history, forcing societies to alternate between secular (century-long) periods of prosperity and crisis. And such secular cycles were not peculiar to the European history—we find them in all agrarian empires about which we know enough to quantify their economic, social, and political changes.
The Wheel of Fortune is simply an allegory for any cyclical process of rise and fall. One problem with this metaphor, however, is that it offers a too mechanical view of history—that rise and fall are somehow imposed by an external force. It is natural for us to think in terms of simple cause-effect explanations of this kind. Thus, the most popular explanation of why the fourteenth century was the time of decline and disintegration in Europe invokes climatic change. During the medieval times, the explanation goes, climate was warm and harvests abundant. In the fourteenth century, however, temperatures fell, crops suffered, and complex societies could not sustain themselves any longer and went into collapse. However, this explanation cannot be right. During the past few years, climatologists made great strides in refining their estimates of how temperatures fluctuated over the last two millennia. With these better data, we now see that there is no correlation between spells of cold weather and times of trouble. Cooling climate sometimes coincides with crisis periods, but most often not. Climatic change, thus, cannot be the real reason for the secular cycles, although it can contribute to trouble—causing crop failures or aiding the spread of disease.
An alternative way of thinking about rise and fall looks to the internal workings of states and societies, rather than some external agent, be it the goddess of Fortune or climatic change. This way of thinking originated within physical sciences during the days of Newton and Leibnitz and was, in large degree, responsible for the brilliant successes of such fields as classical mechanics and thermodynamics. During the last two or three decades, it spread to biology and social sciences under the guise of “the science of nonlinear dynamics.”
The gist of the approach was admirably expressed by George Puttenham in 1589: “Peace makes plentie, plentie makes pride, pride breeds quarrel, and quarrel breeds warre: Warre brings spoile, and spoile povertie, povertie pacience, and pacience peace: So peace brings warre and warre brings peace.” What is important here is not the specific details of how one thing leads to another, but the absence of a simple, linear causal relationship. What causes “warre”? Peace. But peace itself is caused by war. So there is no cause and effect, or rather each is both the cause and the effect. War brings peace, and peace brings war, and so on, cycle after cycle, ad infinitum. The causation is not linear, but circular.
How does this insight help us understand why agrarian societies experience periodic crises every two or three centuries? By itself it doesn’t, but it points to how we can gain understanding. Measurements of things that change with time need to be done, variables can then be quantified, equations connecting them composed, and then those equations can be tested against the data of historic and current realities. This grand process of the making of the science of world history has begun, and many results are in. Unfortunately, these results do not read like narratives. Only specialists can get excited about technical papers with titles such as “Dynamical Feedbacks Between Population Growth and Sociopolitical Instability in Agrarian States,” and I admit to sharing this kind of pleasure. Here, however, I will strip all the mathematical and statistical scaffolding away and focus on the main edifice. Specifically, we will trace economic and social changes in France during the medieval cycle and observe “how one thing led to another,” so that in the end a brilliant and powerful state collapsed in ruins.
ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING historical trends in France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was massive population growth. In 1100, about six million people inhabited the territory within the modern national borders of France. By 1300, the population more than tripled and reached a level between 20 and 22 million. The rest of Western Europe experienced a similar population buildup. We are on firm ground when it comes to tracing the dynamics of the population of England. In 1086, William the Conqueror, who wanted to know just how many new subjects he had acquired by his conquest of England, conducted a massive census whose results were preserved in the Domesday Book. Using this information, modern historians estimate that there were around two million people in England at the end of the eleventh century Two centuries later, there were close to six million.
The population increase put the productive means of the medieval society under a collossal strain. All land that could be cultivated was turned into fields. In the process, more than 30 million acres of forests—one quarter of the modern area of France—were destroyed to make room for agriculture. Land was worked more intensively by shifting from the two-field to the three-field system. Instead of letting land rest every other year, each field was cultivated every two years out of three. As a result of increases in cultivated area and the switch to the three-field system, the amount of food produced in France probably doubled during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the number of mouths to be fed increased threefold, with the inevitable result that the per-capita food consumption declined.
In An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, the English economist Thomas Robert Malthus argued that when population increases beyond the means of subsistence food prices increase, real wages (that is, wages expressed in terms of purchasing power) decline, and per-capita consumption, especially among the poorer strata, drops. By the early fourteenth century, France found itself in a classical Malthusian trap. A clear indicator of increased Malthusian pressures was thirteenth-century inflation. The price of the main staple, wheat, more than doubled between 1200 and 1300. Similar price increases took place in England and Italy. Other commodities were also affected. For example, in the twelfth century, an ox could be bought in England for three shillings. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the average price was already six shillings. Toward the end of the century, the price of oxen doubled yet again.
Wages paid to carpenters and masons or for performing agricultural works, such as threshing, also increased, but did not keep pace with inflation. Scholars in the multivolume compendium Agricultural History of England and Wales estimated that during the thirteenth century the real wage of English laborers declined by one third. This means that if in 1200 a worker’s daily wage could buy three loaves of bread, by 1300 he had enough money only for two.
These economic trends were the result of an inexorable operation of the laws of economics. The law of supply and demand says that if demand for some commodity increases and is not matched by increased supply, the price of the commodity must go up. Conversely, if the supply goes up, the price declines. Increased population meant greater demand for food, whereas food production lagged—therefore food prices went up. Greater number of people also meant an increased supply of labor, therefore the price of labor (wages) went down. Another commodity in limited supply was agricultural land, and its price was also driven up by the greater demand resulting from population growth. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, an acre of land in Normandy cost 2 livres; a century later it went for 20 livres. Much the same trend was observed in Picardy. Land rents paid by peasants to landowners also increased drastically. Around Lille in Picardy, rents grew fivefold in just 40 years between 1276 and 1316. In England around 1250, a peasant could rent an acre for between 2 and 4 pence. By 1300, he could not find it for less than 12 pence. In the early fourteenth century, land rents in many English shires shot up to 30 pence per acre and above.
Using information on medieval yields, economic historians have calculated that the minimum amount of land needed to a French peasant family for comfortable living was 15 acres; incidentally, working with independent sources of data the English historians arrived at the same estimate. After paying the tithe to the Church and the tax to the crown, and reserving enough seed grain for the next year’s planting, the peasant would have enough left to feed and clothe a family of four or five. In a year of a bad harvest, the family would have to tighten their belts, but it did not have to starve. The problem is that by 1300 only one peasant household in five had 15 or more acres. Thus, the majority of rural households did not have enough land to feed themselves, and their very survival critically depended on securing outside employment. The result of this process was a vast and growing rural proletariat. But there was not enough work for everybody. In a vain hope of finding employment, many of the landless peasants migrated to towns, where they swelled the ranks of the urban unemployed, beggars, and vagrants.
By 1300, the massive population increase strained the economic system of France and other Western European countries to the breaking point. The majority of peasants lived on the edge of starvation. Even a mild deficit in the amount of annual crops brought in spelled disaster for a certain segment of population. Unfortunately, during the fourteenth century, the climate began changing for the worse. A series of cold and wet years between 1315 and 1322 brought on disastrous crop failures and livestock epidemics and triggered the kind of famine that Europe had not known for centuries.
“In the year of our Lord 1315,” wrote the medieval annalist Johannes de Trokelowe, “apart from the other hardships with which England was afflicted, hunger grew in the land.... Meat and eggs began to run out, capons and fowl could hardly be found, animals died of pest, swine could not be fed because of the excessive price of fodder. A quarter of wheat or beans or peas sold for 20 shillings [four times the price before famine] ... The land was so oppressed with want that when the king came to St. Albans on the feast of St. Laurence [August 10] it was hardly possible to find bread on sale to supply his immediate household....
“The dearth began in the month of May and lasted until the feast of the nativity of the Virgin [September 8]. The summer rains were so heavy that grain could not ripen. It could hardly be gathered and used to bake bread down to the said feast day unless it was first put in vessels to dry. Around the end of autumn the dearth was mitigated in part, but toward Christmas it became as bad as before. Bread did not have its usual nourishing power and strength because the grain was not nourished by the warmth of summer sunshine. Hence those who ate it, even in large quantities, were hungry again after a little while. There can be no doubt that the poor wasted away when even the rich were constantly hungry....
“Considering and understanding these past miseries and those that were still to come, we can see how the prophecy of Jeremiah is fulfilled in the English people: ‘If I go forth into the fields, behold those slain with the sword, and if I enter into the city behold them that are consumed with famine’ (Jeremiah 14.18). Going ‘forth into the fields’ when we call to mind the ruin of our people in Scotland and Gascony, Wales and Ireland ... Entering the city we consider ‘them that are consumed with famine’ when we see the poor and needy, crushed with hunger, lying stiff and dead in the wards and streets....
“Four pennies worth of coarse bread was not enough to feed a common man for one day. The usual kinds of meat, suitable for eating, were too scarce; horse meat was precious; plump dogs were stolen. And, according to many reports, men and women in many places secretly ate their own children.... Thieves who had been imprisoned, but given no food, ferociously attacked new prisoners and devoured them half alive.” Cannibalism was widespread everywhere in northern Europe. In Livonia and Estonia, starving mothers ate their children. Another chronicler confirms the stories of cannibalism and also reports that famished men often died on graves while digging up bodies for food. The effects of dearth were particularly terrible in Brabant. Jan Boendale wrote that in Antwerp the moans of famished could almost move a stone to pity. In the streets lay their emaciated forms, groaning in heartrending fashion. Several chroniclers claimed that a third of the population perished, although modern historians tend to reduce their estimates. When normal harvests returned, it is estimated that France was missing a tenth of its population.
The terrible famines of the fourteenth century left a deep imprint on the European psyche. One of the most famous fairy tales begins like this. “Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor woodcutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and once when great dearth fell on the land, he could no longer procure even daily bread. Now when he thought over this by night in his bed, and tossed about in his anxiety, he groaned and said to his wife: ‘What is to become of us? How are we to feed our poor children, when we no longer have anything even for ourselves?’” Everybody knows what happened then. The children were abandoned in the forest and eventually found their way to a gingerbread house, where lived an old woman who wanted to cook and eat them.
THE NEXT DISASTER TO STRIKE WAS the arrival of the Black Death. In 1348-49 various regions of France lost between one quarter and a half, and in some cases up to 80 to 90 percent, of their population. The plague returned in 1361 and 1374, followed by smaller outbreaks roughly once every 10 years. By the end of the fourteenth century, the population of France was less than half of what it had been in 1300.
The Black Death was a tremendous shock to fourteenth-century Europe. In addition to its direct consequences, resulting from brutally killing between one third and one half of the population, it psychologically scarred the survivors. Yet it would be too facile to blame the troubles and miseries of the succeeding hundred years on the plague alone. A particularly naïve version of this explanation (which unfortunately is still found in some history books) is that the Black Death appeared seemingly from nowhere (the medieval Europeans thought it was sent by God as punishment for their sins) and changed the course of European history.
The bubonic plague was the most spectacular cause of the plunge in population, but by no means the only one. After all, the population decline began even before the plague struck in 1348. The other causes of population decline were famine, warfare, and falling birth rates. Furthermore, the Black Death was not a unique, unprecedented event in world history. Other spectacular epidemics, such as the Plague of Athens in 430 B.C., the Antonine plague (A.D. 165-180), and the plagues of Justinian (A.D. 542-546), always strike during the same phase of the secular cycle—at, or just past, the population peak. Less spectacularly, the bubonic plague staged a comeback during the next secular cycle in Europe, and played an important role in the population declines of the seventeenth century (for example, the Great Plague of London of A.D. 1665). In general, epidemics almost always play a role in secular population declines. The most important factor explaining the spread of epidemics during this phase of the cycle is increased mobility of people, resulting from the migration of landless peasants to towns and cities, increased vagrancy, and the movement of rebel bands and troops. Additionally, large segments of population are undernourished, or on the brink of starvation, and therefore become susceptible to disease agents. Thus, the conditions of overpopulation create a fertile ground for the spread of epidemics, and also ensure a high death toll.
From the point of view of Western Europeans, the Black Death appeared as an exogenous and inexplicable event. But Europe was not an island; it was affected by Eurasia-wide processes. In the thirteenth century, the huge core region of Eurasia was unified by the Mongol Empire of Chinggis Khan. One consequence of the Mongol conquest was an increased density and speed of traffic, trade, raids, and communications across Central Asia. The increase in traffic made it possible for the plague bacteria to survive and spread over large distances. In the 1330s and 1340s, the Mongol dynasties ruling China, Turkestan, and Persia experienced simultaneous political disintegration, throwing the great steppe into turmoil. Large numbers of people moved back and forth in a chaotic manner, and thus spread the Black Death to both ends of the continent. The plague appeared in China first (in 1331). Fifteen years later, the disease broke out among the Tatar army besieging Caffa, and from there it spread to the rest of Europe.
just as the causes of the Black Death are complex, so were its consequences. By relieving population pressure, no matter in how horrific a manner, the Black Death had a beneficial effect on the survivors. The drop of population set in motion the Malthusian machinery, but now working in reverse. When the short-term disruptive effects of the catastrophe worked themselves out, food prices declined, real wages increased, and land rents decreased. Formerly landless peasants inherited land from a deceased relative, or took over vacant farms whose owners succumbed to the plague. Landowners were suddenly confronted with a severe labor shortage, and had to drastically lower rents. In some cases, landlords were so desperate that they let land for free, simply asking that the tenant keep land productive and maintain structures on it. Shortage of labor drove wages up. In 1320, a building worker in Rouen earned 1.5 sou per day. In 1380, after the third visitation of the Black Death, he commanded a daily wage of 4 sou. The real wage in England doubled or even tripled between the beginning of the fourteenth century and the middle of the fifteenth century. Except for periods of intensive warfare, real wages and consumption levels of ordinary people improved handsomely.
Lands of marginal value for growing crops were abandoned or turned to pasture, which resulted in an overall increase in agricultural productivity. Overall food production declined, but the population plunged even faster, so that there was suddenly more than enough food to go around. People ate more meat and drank more beer and wine. The relative importance of bread in a person’s diet declined, and what bread was consumed was of higher quality. The French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie relates how in 1338 the Provençal drovers working on their lord’s reserve ate a very crude kind of bread made mainly with barley. After the great plague, barley bread was considered to be good enough only for the sheep-dogs, whereas the laborers were entitled to wheat bread.
