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What were the important effects of the Black Death upon Europe?
or even abandoned. Sixteen of the forty professors at Cambridge died. So did the institutions of the Church. The priests died and no one could hear confession. Bishops died, and so did their successors and even their successors. The loss of life in such great numbers brought despair everywhere. A noted Florentine historian, Villani, wrote this:
"During this great epidemic of death [in Tuscany] more than eighty died of every hundred, and the air was so infested that death overtook men everywhere, wherever they might flee. And when they saw everybody dying they no longer heeded death and believed that the end of the world was at hand."
There were those indeed who believed this calamity marked the end of the world. Even after the crisis had passed, and the world remained, there were those who wondered why God should have so scourged the world.
The plague had no permanent effect of politics but it did take its toll. King Alfonso XI of Castile was the only reigning monarch to die of the plague. Parliaments were adjourned when the plague struck, though they were reconvened. The Hundred Years War was suspended because so many soldiers died but it started up again, soon enough. The effect at local levels was more severe. City councils were destroyed, whole families of local nobles were wiped out, courts closed down and wills could not be probated but new courts were assembled and the legal mess caused by so many deaths was eventually sorted out and political life went on.
The Black Death also had an effect on the arts. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a group of young people fleeing the plague take refuge in a house outside of Florence where they entertain each other with colourful and irreverent stories. While these stories are often seen as a rejection of traditional medieval values, Boccaccio himself was critical of those who abandoned relatives and friends in the face of the plague. Like the artists of the day, Boccaccio continued to hold traditional social and religious values. The primary impact of the Black Death on painting and sculpture was the willingness of the newly rich to invest in religious art for churches and chapels. These contributions were often made in gratitude for being spared of the plague or with the hope of preventing future infection. Much of the art and literature in the years immediately following the Black Death dealt with death.
In conclusion, the Black Death had many effects on England. It ultimately affected the thinking of the people of England, the culture of England, the economy of England, the arts of England and the political structure of England. The weakening of the structures that existed in the medieval world probably helped men open their eyes to new ideas which accelerated the Renaissance in England.