By the middle of the fourteenth century a European lived within an order that seemed to him the eternal arrangement of the world itself. The estates stood like tiers of stone: those who plow, those who fight, those who pray. The Church gave a guarantee of meaning — it explained life, death, and the fate of the soul beyond the grave, and held in its hands the keys of salvation. But the idol of this age was built by hands. Europe had drawn the continent together with an unprecedentedly dense web of trade routes — from the colonies of Crimea to the ports of Flanders; cities had grown faster than their sanitation; and the explaining of the world was held by a single institution — which is why its failure would bring down not only health but meaning.
Catastrophe arrived on merchant ships. In 1347, by way of a Genoese colony in Crimea, plague spread into Europe and within a few years rolled across the entire continent. By various estimates, the Black Death carried off from a third to a half of the population — whole villages died out, there was no one left to bury the dead, and economic and family ties were torn apart. Neither estate, nor wealth, nor prayer availed against it: it mowed down peasant and knight, monk and bishop alike. The way of life that men had thought indestructible collapsed not from an enemy's sword but from an invisible contagion, before which all proved equal.
The captivity was not only bodily but spiritual. People sought meaning in the horror — and found it in extremes. Along the roads moved processions of flagellants, scourging themselves until they bled, to atone for the common sin and turn aside the punishment. Others searched for the guilty: rumors spread that the Jews had poisoned the wells, and pogroms swept through the German cities — in Nuremberg, Brussels, and dozens of other places whole communities were destroyed. And beneath all this smoldered a deep breach in trust toward the Church, which had been able neither to explain nor to halt the disaster. The order, stripped of its eternity, turned into panic, self-flagellation, and a hunt for the "guilty."
Yet out of this very ruin grew a shift toward a different society. People had become few, while land and work had become plentiful: the price of labor rose sharply, and for the first time the peasant gained the power to bargain over his freedom and his wages. The old bonds of serfdom began to crack; the lords tried by law to keep the worker in his place, but the genie was out of the bottle. The accumulated tension broke out in revolts — the French Jacquerie and the English uprising of Wat Tyler. The attitude to death and the body was changing too: the danse macabre in art, memento mori, the first quarantines of the port cities. A world that had lost faith in its own permanence began to rebuild itself: the catastrophe that had wiped out half the people involuntarily raised the value of each one who remained — and pushed Europe toward the end of the medieval order.