[Ravensfort] The Black Death

[David R. Hoffpauir]

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi123.htm


Inspiration comes in strange ways.  Thanks goes to Xanthe on this one.....

(....hope the rash gets better soon!)   :)

In listening to this episode something jumped out that I'd not really thought about.  We tend to look at the Renaissance period as the starting point for all kinds of inventions, technologies, and human advances.  It's easy to overlook what drove those advances in the first place.  One of the underlying reasons the Renaissance was so prolific on so many fronts was the Black Death and the havoc it caused.  

Because so many people died in Medieval Europe durning the plauge times, manpower became a huge commodity*.  That is the amount of work that could be accomplished by one person in a day's time became a really precious thing.  Methods for multiplying that "bottom line" drove the development of technologies and lead to all kinds of crude inventions.  Guns, crossbows, clocks, harnesses, stirrups, hoists, mills, even the printing press are all Medieval inventions.  What is common between them?  Each seek to maximize human effort.  It was the Black Death that set in motion the realized need for such inventions and it was the Black Death which sparked off the quest for knowledge required to invent them.

regards,
dsd

*sources vary.  Some quote 40% dead to 3/4 dead of the TOTAL population.

1347 the population was around 75 million
1352 the population was around 50 million
.....that's 25 million people dead in 5 years!  The Plauge started around 1290 and didn't
receed until around 1430.
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