Crisis and change (c1300–1400)

Roughly 75–80 million — the most it had ever held, after tripling since the year 1000.

The point where population has grown as large as the food supply can support, so any bad harvest brings famine and death.

A long cooling of Europe's climate beginning around 1300, bringing colder, wetter weather that ruined harvests.

1315–17. Relentless cold, wet weather (the Little Ice Age) ruined the grain harvest three years running.

It killed an estimated 5–10% of northern Europe and left survivors weakened and malnourished.

1347–51. It began in Central Asia and spread west along trade routes, reaching Sicily by ship in 1347.

Bubonic spread through rat-flea bites and caused buboes; pneumonic attacked the lungs and spread person to person.

An estimated one-third to one-half — the greatest mortality in European history.

People who marched between towns whipping themselves in public, believing the plague was God's punishment to be begged away.

Violent massacres of Jewish communities, falsely blamed for causing the plague by poisoning wells.

So many priests died that the Church struggled to hold services and funerals; manors lost peasants and the social order broke down.

Because Europe was at its Malthusian limit with no spare food, the climate shock and disease became far more catastrophic.

It killed about a third of people, making labour scarce, so peasants could demand higher wages and better terms while lords lost bargaining power.

A system in which an unfree peasant was legally bound to a lord's land, owing labour and dues and unable to leave the manor.

Wages rose sharply because workers were scarce, and rents fell as lords competed to keep tenants on their land.

An English law that froze wages at pre-plague levels and made it a crime to demand or pay more, forcing people to work.

A flat tax charged on every adult head, so it hit the poor far harder than the rich — a trigger of the 1381 revolt.

A third flat-rate poll tax, on top of frozen wages and hated labour laws, sparked the rising in Essex and Kent.

Wat Tyler led the 1381 rebels' march on London; John Ball was the radical priest who preached equality between rich and poor.

Wat Tyler was killed at Smithfield, King Richard II broke his promises, and the leaderless revolt was crushed — but the poll tax was dropped.

A short, violent peasant rising north of Paris against the lords, in the context of the Hundred Years' War and noble weakness after Poitiers.

1381 was triggered by the poll tax; the Jacquerie by war taxes and noble weakness after Poitiers — but both flowed from post-plague social tension.

Though the revolts were crushed, labour scarcity meant lords could not re-tie peasants to the land, so serfdom faded in Western Europe over the next century.

In towns and cities, where craftsmen and the urban poor revolted against rich elites trying to hold wages and prices down.

It caused a severe labour shortage, making surviving workers scarce and valuable, so wages rose and serfdom declined.

The medieval system in which land was held in return for service and loyalty, binding lords and vassals in a hierarchy.

The estate system in which peasants worked a lord's land in exchange for their own plots and protection.

An English law trying to freeze wages at pre-plague levels; it failed and helped spark the 1381 Peasants' Revolt.

From the 900s, as distant provinces broke away and military strongmen seized real power, leaving the caliph a figurehead.

The Mongols under Hülegü Khan sacked Baghdad, killed the last caliph, and ended over 500 years of Abbasid rule.

It spread along trade and pilgrimage routes, causing huge death tolls in cities like Cairo and Damascus and slowing recovery.

Western kingdoms survived the crisis, while the Abbasid Caliphate had already been destroyed by the Mongols in 1258.

In the West plentiful land plus scarce labour gave peasants leverage; the East faced collapsed unity and slower recovery.

Economic momentum tilted toward reviving Western Europe, with Italian cities like Venice and Genoa gaining trade dominance.

Both economies stayed fundamentally agrarian, and religion remained central to social and political life.

1258 (Mongol sack of Baghdad), 1348–49 (Black Death peaks in the West), 1351 (Statute of Labourers).