ABSTRACT
In the course of the fifteenth century, Europe underwent momentous economic changes, after a period of prolonged depression. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a serious crisis had developed partly because the temperature on earth dropped slightly-the phenomenon of the ‘small ice age’. The climate had become cooler and wetter, with a sharp dip in the fourteenth century. The abandonment of settlements and the inundation of coastal plains were but a few of the visible manifestations. Then a succession of very wet years resulted in poor harvests, in famine and, soon, in widespread disease. All this caused long-term chaos in the still largely agricultural economy. In a spiral of undernourishment, child mortality and a lower birthrate, a demographic decline set in, not least because in this situation the Black Death and other epidemics caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.1
