ABSTRACT
The fifteenth century saw a changing world in Europe, which experienced momentous economic progress, 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 cruel famines, in malnutrition and, soon, in widespread disease – typhus and malaria. All this caused long-term chaos in the still largely agricultural economy. In a spiral of undernourishment, growing child mortality and a decreasing birthrate, a demographic decline set in, not least because in this situation the Black Death – first attested in Messina, in 1347 – and other epidemics caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, which many, not knowing any of these causes and effects, simply blamed on divine anger at human depravity.1
