The great leveler, p.41
The Great Leveler, page 41
Further corroboration of these dynamics comes from the territory of Luca, where inequality underwent both a sharp drop and a swift recovery during and after the plague (Fig. 10.7). There is now also evidence of growing wealth concentration in Lombardy and Veneto from around 1500 to 1600, but as yet preplague data are lacking.29
Figure 10.5Gini coefficients of wealth in Poggibonsi, 1338–1779
Figure 10.6Top 5 percent wealth shares in Tuscany, 1283–1792
Figure 10.7Top 5 percent wealth shares and Gini coefficients of wealth distribution in Lucca, 1331–1561
The Italian experience of the seventeenth century highlights the significance of factors other than demographic change as such. Abortive attempts to stabilize wages at preplague levels have already been mentioned. Elites had a powerful incentive to contain the leveling effects of the Black Death and its recurrences. The success of such measures varied widely between different societies depending on their power structure and even their ecology. In western Europe, workers benefited because gains from labor scarcity were usually passed on to them. Not only did restrictions on wages and mobility fail, but the demographic shock of the plague also largely killed off the earlier medieval institution of serfdom. Peasants asserted their mobility, moving to other manors if they offered better work conditions. This drove down rents and led to the commutation and eventual elimination of labor services that had been a standard feature of the manorial economy. Tenants ended up paying only rent and had the opportunity to work as much land as they could manage. This fostered upward mobility and led to the creation of a yeoman class of prosperous peasants. In Redgrave Manor in England, to give just one example, holdings averaged twelve acres in 1300, twenty acres in 1400, and more than thirty acres by 1450. All over western Europe similar adjustments occurred. By 1500, what is known as copy-hold had become the dominant tenancy arrangement in Western, Southern, and Central Europe: contracts stipulated fixed annual rent payments based on the best deal that tenant-farmers could obtain through bargaining.30
On occasion workers resorted to violence in resisting elite attempts to deny them their newfound gains. As we saw in chapter 8, popular rebellions in the form of peasant uprisings such as the Jacquerie in France (1358) and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in England were the result. The latter was triggered by the imposition of poll taxes designed to offset diminished state revenue but was effectively motivated by the desire to preserve gains from higher incomes that had accrued to workers against lords who wanted to maintain their own privileged economic position: one rebel demand was for the right to freely negotiate wage labor contracts. In the short term, the uprising was put down by force, but although new restrictive statutes were passed and Richard II famously promised the peasants that “you will remain in bondage, not as before but incomparably harsher,” the movement did deliver concessions to peasants: poll taxes were abandoned, and peasant bargaining expanded over time. Conservative poets of the period bemoaned “vagabond laborers” who “see the world in need of their services and labor, and . . . are arrogant because there are so few of them”: “for the very little they do they demand the highest pay.” By and large workers managed to benefit from labor scarcity, at least while it lasted.31
Yet in other regions landlords were more successful in suppressing worker bargaining. In eastern European countries—Poland, Prussia, Hungary—serfdom was introduced after the Black Death. The classic description of this process goes back to Jerome Blum, who observed in 1957 that central and eastern Europe faced the same problems of depopulation, abandoned land, and falling land and grain prices as were experienced farther west. The landed nobility resorted to legal measures to stem a decline in revenue, imposing ceilings on wages and the price of urban goods. Unlike in western Europe, the powerful strove mightily to increase labor obligations instead of reducing them, especially labor dues, cash payments, and restrictions on freedom of movement. In various countries, such as Prussia, Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Russia, Lithuania, Poland, and Livonia, tenants were prohibited from leaving without permission or without paying a large fee or all arrears, or except at a certain time, or in some cases at all. Poaching of workers was forbidden by law or lordly agreement; cities could be ordered to reject migrants, and rulers entered treaties for their return to their native countries. Tenant debt was a powerful instrument of retention. Obligations and restrictions continued to expand in the sixteenth century. A number of factors conspired to constrain workers, perhaps most important the growing political power of the nobility who held increasing jurisdictional sway over the peasants on their manors, alongside unfavorable developments in commercialization and urbanism. As nobles expanded their powers at the expense of the state and cities failed to provide a counterweight, workers were trapped in increasingly coercive arrangements. Although revisionist scholarship on this issue has come a long way in casting doubt on this classic reconstruction, the fact remains that outcomes for workers differed much from those in western Europe.32
A different set of constraints applied to Mamluk Egypt. As already noted, the country had been hard hit by the Black Death, and urban real wages and consumption levels had indeed risen as they did elsewhere, at least at first. However, an unusual configuration of political and economic power enabled the elite to resist worker demands. As a foreign conquest class, the Mamluks controlled land and commanded other resources in a centralized and collectivist fashion. Members of the Mamluk ruling class drew income from their individual iqta‘, revenue assignments from land and other sources. When profits fell as a result of labor scarcity and disruptions in farming, the state’s default response was to raise entitlements by squeezing a shrinking number of taxpayers harder. In urban settings, this led not only to higher taxes but also to confiscations, forced purchases, and the establishment of monopolies. These coercive responses help explain the short-lived nature of wage gains documented in late medieval Cairo.33
Repression was even more severe in the countryside. The Mamluks were absentee rentiers disconnected from their estates, unable and unwilling to act as responsible landowners prepared to bargain in order to address changing circumstances. Maintaining rent flows was the responsibility of a centralized bureaucracy that formed an intermediate layer separating Mamluks from agrarian producers. These managers readily put pressure on peasants, resorting to violence if expedient. Peasants responded with migration to the cities and even revolts. Bedouins infiltrated abandoned land, a process that further reduced the revenue base. Moreover, owing to the peculiarities of the Egyptian environment, manpower losses caused by plague and flight were bound to disrupt an elaborate irrigation system that relied on ongoing maintenance. This rendered agricultural assets more vulnerable than they were in Europe. The shift in the land/labor ratio may thus not have been as great as in Europe if the amount of arable decreased apace. The combination of these features—the overwhelming collective bargaining power of Mamluks who relied on collectivist exploitation and controlled the state, their detachment from the land by intermediate management, the lack of technological upgrading to substitute capital for labor, producers’ evasion of raised demands, and the consequent deterioration of the overall resource base—depressed production and incomes in rural areas. The contrast to the rise of contractualism in western Europe that delivered both higher real incomes to workers and significant leveling effects could hardly have been more pronounced.34
The different welfare outcomes of the Black Death and the persistence of inequality during the Italian plague resurgence of the seventeenth century show that even the most devastating epidemics cannot by themselves equalize the distribution of wealth or income. Institutional arrangements were capable of blunting the force of demographic shocks, manipulating labor markets by coercive means. One form of violence could be offset by another: if microbial assaults were met with sufficient human force to suppress bargaining, elites were able to maintain or quickly restore high levels of inequality. This means that the leveling effects of plagues were constrained in two ways: in time, inasmuch as they were almost invariably gradually unmade as population numbers recovered, and by the social and political environment in which they unfolded. It was thus only in some cases and for some time that epidemic disease substantially reduced inequality.
1 Quoted from Malthus 1992: 23 (book I, chapter II) using the 1803 edition.
2 Responses: the work of Ester Boserup is a classic (Boserup 1965; 1981). See esp. Boserup 1965: 65–69; Grigg 1980: 144; Wood 1998: 108, 111. Models: Wood 1998, esp. 113 fig. 9, with Lee 1986a: 101 fig. 1. Malthusian constraints: e.g., Grigg 1980: 49–144; Clark 2007a: 19–111; Crafts and Mills 2009. Inputs: see Lee 1986b, esp. 100 for the exogeneity of the Black Death and its seventeenth-century resurgence in England.
3 I mainly follow Gottfried 1983, still the most systematic study, and Dols 1977 for the basic narrative and Horrox 1994 and Byrne 2006 for primary sources.
4 Gottfried 1983: 36–37.
5 Byrne 2006: 79.
6 Gottfried 1983: 33–76.
7 Gottfried 1983: 45.
8 Horrox 1994: 33. Mass graves: the Black Death Network, http://bldeathnet.hypotheses.org. Cf. also herein, chapter 11, p. 231.
9 Horrox 1994: 33.
10 Gottfried 1983: 77; cf. also 53 (35–40 percent in the Mediterranean); unpublished work cited by Pamuk 2007: 294; Dols 1977: 193–223.
11 Quoted by Dols 1977: 67. Gottfried 1983: 77–128 discusses the plague’s manifold consequences.
12 E.g., Gottfried 1983: 16–32; Pamuk 2007: 293. See herein, pp. 331–332, for the crises of the early fourteenth century.
13 Horrox 1994: 57, 70.
14 Horrox 1994: 287–289.
15 Horrox 1994: 313, 79.
16 Gottfried 1983: 95.
17 See esp. Allen 2001; Pamuk 2007; Allen et al. 2011. Fig. 10.1 from Pamuk 2007: 297 fig. 2.
18 Fig. 10.2 from Pamuk 2007: 297 fig. 3.
19 Population and income: Pamuk 2007: 298–299. Fig. 10.3 compiled from Clark 2007b: 130–134 table A2; see also 104 fig. 2.
20 Rapid rise: Dols 1977: 268–269, and cf. 255–280 on the regional economic consequences of the plague in general. Europe: Pamuk 2007: 299–300, and see herein, Fig. 5.9. Quote from Dols 1977: 270. Endowments: 269–270. Diet: Gottfried 1983: 138, derived from work by Eliyahu Ashtor.
21 Byzantium: Morrison and Cheynet 2002: 866–867 (wages), 847–850 (slaves). Istanbul: Özmucur and Pamuk 2002: 306.
22 Gottfried 1983: 129–134 gives a succinct summary.
23 Pamuk 2007: 294–295 (luxury goods); Dyer 1998 (changes in living standards); Gottfried 1983: 94 (ale and pies); Turchin and Nefedov 2009: 40 (Norfolk); Gottfried 1983: 95–96 (laws).
24 Gottfried 1983: 94, 97, 103. Tenant contracts: Britnell 2004: 437–444. Land incomes: Turchin and Nefedov 2009: 65. Heirs: Gottfried 1983: 96. Elite numbers and fortunes: Turchin and Nefedov 2009: 56, 71–72, 78.
25 Alfani 2015. Fig. 10.4 from 1084 fig. 7, using the data at http://didattica.unibocconi.it/mypage/dwload.php?nomefile=Database_Alfani_Piedmont20160113114128.xlsx. For breakdowns by cities and villages, see 1071 figs. 2a–b and 1072 fig. 3.
26 Decline in share of wealthy households: Alfani 2016: 14 fig. 2 [recte fig. 3]. For this measure, see herein, chapter 3, 92.
27 See esp. Alfani 2015: 1078, 1080, and see also Alfani 2010 for a case study of the plague effects in the city of Ivrea in Piedmont, where postplague immigration of the poor immediately raised urban wealth inequality. Figs. 10.1–2 show that the seventeenth-century plague did not have a consistent effect on urban real wages. These differences between the late medieval and seventeenth-century plague phases underline the need for more systematic comparative study.
28 Alfani and Ammannati 2014: 11–25, esp. 19 graphs 2a–b, 25 fig. 2. They also demonstrate why David Herlihy’s earlier claims of rising Tuscan inequality after the Black Death are incorrect (21–23). Figs. 10.5–6 are from 15 table 2 and 29 table 4.
29 Fig. 10.7 from Ammannati 2015: 19 table 2 (Ginis), 22 table 3 (top quintiles). Lombardy and Veneto: Alfani and di Tullio 2015.
30 Gottfried 1983: 136–139.
31 Gottfried 1983: 97–103; Bower 2001: 44. See also Hilton and Aston, eds. 1984, also for France and Florence.
32 Blum 1957: 819–835. Revisionism has now culminated in Cerman 2012.
33 Dols 1977: 275–276. See herein, Fig. 11.2. However, Borsch’s argument that certain urban real wages had fallen precipitously between 1300/1350 and 1440/1490 seems hard to sustain: see Borsch 2005: 91–112, with Scheidel 2012: 285 n. 94 and, more generally, Pamuk and Shatzmiller 2014.
34 Dols 1977: 232; see 154–169 for rural depopulation, and see 276–277 for revolts in the late fourteenth century. Combination: Borsch 2005: 25–34, 40–54. Contrast: Dols 1977: 271, 283.
Chapter 11
PANDEMICS, FAMINE, AND WAR
”WE WERE BORN TO DIE”: THE NEW WORLD PANDEMICS
The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, together with its periodic recurrences that lasted until the seventeenth century in Europe and well into the nineteenth century in the Middle East, may be the best known of history’s big pandemics but was by no means the only one. By the time it had finally begun to abate in Europe, the Spanish crossings of the Atlantic unleashed a similarly massive, and arguably even more catastrophic, series of pandemics in the New World.
Ever since rising sea levels had severed the Beringian connection between Alaska and Siberia at the end of the last Ice Age, the populations and disease environments of the Old and New Worlds had developed independently. Interacting with a wider range of pathogen-infested animals than their American counterparts, the inhabitants of Afroeurasia had increasingly been exposed to often fatal infectious diseases such as smallpox, measles, influenza, plague, malaria, yellow fever, and typhus. By the end of the medieval period, the gradual merging of the Old World’s regional disease pools in the wake of commercial and eventually military contacts had ensured maximum coverage, causing many of these killer diseases to become endemic. By contrast, indigenous Americans enjoyed a less severe disease environment and lacked any prior exposure to these Old World scourges. Exploration and conquest opened up what Alfred Crosby called the “Columbian exchange,” transatlantic contacts that swiftly introduced a plethora of lethal infections to the Americas. And although the New World returned the favor by sending syphilis the other way, the European pathogen contribution to the Americas was much more diverse and vastly more catastrophic.1
Smallpox and measles were the most devastating of the diseases introduced by Europeans: long endemic as early childhood diseases in the Old World, they struck the Americas in epidemic outbreaks. Although most sailors would have been exposed to these diseases in childhood and enjoyed protection as adults, occasional active carriers joined expeditions across the Atlantic. Influenza, the third big killer, provided no adult immunity at all. Those three were the most communicable of the novel infections thus introduced, transmitted as they were by droplets or bodily contact. Others such as malaria, typhus, and plague required suitable vectors to be introduced as well—mosquitoes, lice, and fleas, respectively. But this was only a matter of time.
Within a year of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, infections began to ravage the first European foothold, the island of Hispaniola. Its indigenous population dwindled from possibly hundreds of thousands to 60,000 by 1508, 33,000 by 1510, 18,000 by 1519, and fewer than 2,000 by 1542. Multiple epidemics swept through the Caribbean and soon reached the mainland. The first pandemic of smallpox struck in 1518, devastating the islands, and in 1519 caused enormous mortality among the Aztecs and Maya of Mesoamerica. Its impact was such that Aztec survivors would later count dates from its appearance, recognizing it a momentous event that ushered in a new era of terrors. Transmitted on contact and lacking remedies, it hit virgin populations with the utmost force. In the words of an Aztec observer,
Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our bellies; we were covered with agonizing sores from head to foot. The illness was so dreadful that no one could walk or move. The sick were so utterly helpless that they could only lie on their beds like corpses, unable to move their limbs or even their heads. They could not lie face down or roll from one side to the other. If they did move their bodies, they screamed with pain.
In its unchecked ferocity, the epidemic paved the way for Spanish conquest: as Bernardino de Sahagún noted about the capture of the mighty Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan,
the streets were so filled with dead and sick people that our men walked over nothing but bodies.2
Within a few years, in the 1520s, smallpox reached the Andean empire of the Inca, where it cut down vast numbers, probably including the ruler, Huayna Capac. The second great pandemic commenced in 1532, this time caused by measles. Once again, losses were enormous, and they extended from Mexico to the Andes. A particularly severe epidemic, probably typhus, devastated central Mesoamerica from 1545 to 1548. In later events, several diseases appeared side by side, as in the late 1550s and early 1560s, when influenza seems to have played a major role. More and more disasters were reported, culminating in the compound pandemic from 1576 to 1591, when a whole salvo of outbreaks decimated the remaining population, first typhus and later a combination of smallpox and measles (1585–1591), one of the most violent events to date. Epidemics continued throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, possibly with lessened force and great regional variation yet nonetheless highly disruptive. Even though mass mortality and attendant dislocation aided the Spanish advance, the new rulers soon sought to stem the tide and by the late sixteenth century deployed more physicians and imposed quarantines in the hope of preserving an indigenous labor force they could exploit. The effects of such measures would have been small at best: epidemics occurred in waves, about once a generation, and for the first 150-odd years, death tolls declined only moderately. Moreover, the violence of conquest itself, through the manifold economic, social, and political shocks it inflicted on indigenous populations, could hardly have failed to exacerbate the overall mortality crisis.
