The High Middle Ages, 1000-1348

Renewal

A marginal agricultural surplus began to be pro­duced by at least the tenth century, and by the year 1000 the demographic profile of western Europe be­gan to improve dramatically.

Huge amounts of land were brought under cultiva­tion for the first time. Improvements in plows and crop rotations boosted agricultural yields (White 1962; Duby 1968). Gothic architecture arose at the hands of Suger of St. Denis and cast its magic light over Europe (Duby 1981). Partly because less effort was required for daily life, persons of means turned hungrily toward knowledge and found it on the inter­face of Christianity and Islam, mainly in Spain and Sicily. The vast storehouse of classical literature, along with the brilliant commentaries and original works of the great minds of Islam, was translated for the Latin world (Southern 1966; Lindberg 1978; Stock 1978). This fueled one of the most exciting intellectual flowerings in Western history. The uni­versity, which arose from the cathedral school, dates from the High Middle Ages and remains a founda­tion of intellectual life.

For the first time, western Europe began to expand against its neighbors. In Urban IΓs call for the First Crusade, there is an overt reference to an overpopula­tion of knights, who were creating internal violence. Thus aside from its religious content, the First Cru­sade was seen as a partial solution to overpopulation. This adventure involved not only knights but also thousands of peasants, who attempted to make their way to the Holy Land, only to perish en route. The Germanic kingdom began to expand to the East, and in Spain the reconquista to drive out the Moors was accelerated.

The recovery of classical and Islamic medical writ­ings permits, along with contemporary Western works, the identification of at least a few diseases. Smallpox and chickenpox were separated, and small­pox can occasionally be identified. Like most endemic diseases of humans that require direct contact, small­pox was a major killer of children (Hopkins 1983). Plague made its reappearance only to mark the end of the High Middle Ages, but leprosy was a near obses­sion in western Europe.

Leprosy in medieval Europe has produced an im­mense literature. (Probably the most complete and the most extensive bibliography to date is Brody 1974.) In recent years, it has become possible to speak of medieval leprosy as the same disease we know today, at least from around the year 1200 on (arguments summarized in Ell 1986). This state­ment is based mainly on the results of excavations of skeletal remains from the cemeteries of leprosaria (after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, a leprosy patient could not be buried in the same cemetery as a person not suffering from the disease), coupled with the writings of contemporary physicians (Ell 1986,1989b). In particular, the works of Theodoric of Cervia in the thirteenth century and Guy de Chauliac in the fourteenth show a clear acquain­tance with a disease that is readily recognizable as leprosy (usually the Iepromatous, or low-immunity type).

It has been claimed that leprosy was the most common disease in Europe before plague. Unfortu­nately, there is absolutely no ground for supporting such a claim. Very tentative and speculative work using skeletal remains, and a regression analysis of bone loss in the anterior maxilla as related to dura­tion of Iepromatous leprosy, have suggested that part of southern Denmark experienced an incidence of 20 cases per 1,000 population between the years 1250 and 1550 (Ell 1988). It is unrealistic at the current time to extrapolate any aspect of this study to the rest of Europe, and it is well to remember that Scandinavia was probably the highest-incidence area in Europe, and clearly the area in which the disease persisted longest.

If the study cited above is correct, however, the incidence in that region OfDenmark was in the high­est range classified today (Sansaarico 1981). Not only is it risky to extrapolate the proposed incidence in this part of Denmark to the rest of Europe, but it is well known that the incidence of the disease may vary significantly within a small geographic region. This pale glimpse of the possible prevalence of one disease in a small region is both speculative and isolated, for we have no information at all on other diseases. Tuberculosis, frequently mentioned in dis­cussions of medieval disease history, cannot readily be identified beyond the point of stating that the disease was present in medieval Europe, but at what level and significance we have no idea.

Premonitions of Disaster

Thomas Aquinas, the greatest philosopher of the High Middle Ages and one of the greatest synthesiz­ing authors of all time, when asked who would carry on to completion his reconciliation of classical and Christian sources, is reputed to have replied, on his deathbed, that the work could not be done.

High medieval thought and activity abound with optimism. Intoxicated with new knowledge and in­creasing material abundance, the prevailing expec­tations of the future were very high. Around 1300, this mood began to change, and it changed in many areas. Major defaults by important Italian banks, famines reappearing in a population freed from them for two centuries, overcrowded and over­worked farmland - all these reverses changed the mood of the fourteenth century to one of anxiety and foreboding. Although Dante would die in 1330, 18 years before plague struck the city in exile from which he composed the greatest work of the Middle Ages, he wrote, “Io non averei creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta” (“I would not have believed death had undone so many” - author’s translation of a 1981 edition of Dante). This line might stand as the motto for what was to come. Whatever stance historians may take regarding an economic depres­sion in the fourteenth century, it is clear that Eu­rope was in demographic decline before the plague struck.