The Great Transformation ?

It was an unprecedented disaster. When the Black Death swept west and northwards through Europe in the dark days of 1347–1351, it brought with it unparalleled suffering and death. With the demographic collapse came social, psychological and economic shock as the survivors struggled to comprehend the enormity of what had befallen. Yet it was also a pivotal point in Western history, maintains David Herlihy in The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (, 1985). Not only did the Black Death break the Malthusian deadlock that had stifled medieval society but also it set off a series of economic, social, and cultural shifts that changed forever the face of European society. Analyzing medieval accounts of the pestilence, Herlihy challenges traditional plague epidemiology as well as setting out a case for the powerful consequences of the crisis. Established epidemiology asserts that the Black Death was an outbreak of plague caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis. Emerging out of the steppes of Mongolia, where it was endemic among wild marmot populations, plague moved west along the trade routes to Kaffa, a trading port on the Black Sea. There, Genoan merchants contracted the disease and, in their flight, brought it west to Constantinople and the Mediterranean. The growth in maritime trade over the previous century enabled the epidemic to spread beyond the Mediterranean northwards, reaching England late in 1348 and eventually circling around to Russia by 1351. William McNeill, analyzing the Black Death in Plagues and People, agrees with this model. Identifying the Black Death as only one of a series of epidemics that have afflicted human populations over the course of the millennia – albeit a particularly destructive one – he maintains that the domination of the Mongols shifted trade routes northwards to the steppes, first establishing the plague locus in Mongolia and then enabling its spread westwards. There, it met a “virgin” population,