Demographic pressure, famine and plague
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Flip to reveal answersHow large was Europe's population by around 1300?
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Question
How large was Europe's population by around 1300?
Answer
Roughly 75–80 million — the most it had ever held, after tripling since the year 1000.
Question
What is the Malthusian limit?
Answer
The point where population has grown as large as the food supply can support, so any bad harvest brings famine and death.
Question
What was the Little Ice Age?
Answer
A long cooling of Europe's climate beginning around 1300, bringing colder, wetter weather that ruined harvests.
Question
When was the Great Famine, and what caused it?
Answer
1315–17. Relentless cold, wet weather (the Little Ice Age) ruined the grain harvest three years running.
Question
How deadly was the Great Famine?
Answer
It killed an estimated 5–10% of northern Europe and left survivors weakened and malnourished.
Question
When was the Black Death, and where did it come from?
Answer
1347–51. It began in Central Asia and spread west along trade routes, reaching Sicily by ship in 1347.
Question
What was the difference between bubonic and pneumonic plague?
Answer
Bubonic spread through rat-flea bites and caused buboes; pneumonic attacked the lungs and spread person to person.
Question
How much of Europe's population died in the Black Death?
Answer
An estimated one-third to one-half — the greatest mortality in European history.
Question
Who were the flagellants?
Answer
People who marched between towns whipping themselves in public, believing the plague was God's punishment to be begged away.
Question
What were the pogroms during the Black Death?
Answer
Violent massacres of Jewish communities, falsely blamed for causing the plague by poisoning wells.
Question
How did mass death disrupt medieval institutions?
Answer
So many priests died that the Church struggled to hold services and funerals; manors lost peasants and the social order broke down.
Question
Why link overpopulation to the famine and plague in an essay?
Answer
Because Europe was at its Malthusian limit with no spare food, the climate shock and disease became far more catastrophic.
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Topic 6.3 hub
Crisis and change (c1300–1400)
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