No, the Black Death Did Not Cause the Renaissance

With the world still mired in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, as of the time I am writing this, has already killed roughly 1.25 million people worldwide, optimists have written a whole flurry of op-eds trying to put a positive spin on this pandemic. They have tried to insist that the Black Death somehow caused the Renaissance and that COVID-19 may therefore result in a new Renaissance that will carry our world to new and even greater heights than ever before.

This argument, however, is loaded with fallacies and false assumptions. For one thing, there are legitimate reasons for thinking that the Renaissance may not have been such a good thing as it is often made out to be. Furthermore, while the Renaissance did come after the Black Death, but it would be a grave mistake to assume that the Black Death therefore caused it to happen.

Michael Oren’s op-ed published by NBC News

There have been a ton of op-eds promoting this silliness about COVID-19 causing a new Renaissance, but one example is this one published by NBC News on 20 August 2020, written by Michael Oren, titled “COVID-19’s death and suffering could lead us to rebirth, as the bubonic plague did in Europe.” The title is so irresponsibly ridiculous that, at first, you might suppose the article is a work of satire, but it’s not.

The op-ed includes a credential next to Oren’s name at the very beginning describing him as a “historian”; what is not mentioned is that his area of study is actually twentieth-century Middle Eastern history—not fourteenth-century European history.

In any case, Oren essentially argues that the Black Death led to the Renaissance, which led to the Enlightenment, which led to the modern world and that we should therefore be hopeful about our own society’s prospects after COVID-19. He writes at the beginning of his op-ed:

“First a technological innovation undermines the authority of governments, breaks down social structures and gives every person a power never before imaginable. Next, a pandemic claims millions of lives and devastates entire economies. Unrest rocks major cities — many flee to the countryside — and the darkest hatreds are released. People fear that the world will never be the same again, that uncertainty and danger will continue to afflict their lives. And yet, with upheaval comes change — social, economic and political — that’s potentially positive.”

“This is the way the world looks to many of us in the 21st century, but our sense of despair would surely feel familiar to 14th century Europeans. In a short period of time, from 1330 to 1380, they experienced not one but two seismic shocks that profoundly altered their reality. These transformations proved to be permanent, laying the foundations for the modern age. The result was rebellions, depressions, the collapse of power structures and war, but also scholarship, greater equality, prosperity and art.”

“As we wrestle with our contemporary challenges, it’s important that we look back and learn from those who survived and ultimately surmounted similar ones 700 years ago. Doing so may give us something we’re short on: hope.”

This is all complete codswallop. Anyone who is looking to COVID-19 for any kind of hope is clearly looking in the wrong place.

ABOVE: Photograph of workers burying victims of COVID-19 from New York City in unmarked mass graves on Hart Island at the western end of Long Island Sound

What the “Renaissance” actually was

Let’s start out by clarifying what the Renaissance actually was. You see, unfortunately, most people seem to incorrectly believe that the the Middle Ages were a time of scientific and technological stagnation and that the Renaissance was when people started doing science again. I’ve already thoroughly debunked the idea that the Middle Ages were a time without science in this article I originally published in May 2019, but I suppose I had better debunk this conception of the Renaissance all the same.

In historical reality, for the most part, the Renaissance wasn’t really about science or technology. It’s true that there were various scientific and technological advancements made during the Renaissance, but they weren’t substantially different from the advances made during the High and Late Middle Ages.

The Renaissance was really more about art, literature, and philosophy. It was not, however, a revival of art, literature, and philosophy, as it has often been described. As we shall see in a moment, people in western Europe had plenty of art, literature, and philosophy during the Late Middle Ages.

Instead, the Renaissance was a particular movement within these fields that deprecated the specific kinds of art, literature, and philosophy that people were doing during the Middle Ages and advocated a return to the specific kinds of art, literature, and philosophy that people were doing in classical antiquity. It was, in a very real sense, a reactionary traditionalist movement.

The Renaissance started out mostly in Italy and later spread across western Europe. From the very beginning, it was an inherently elite movement that had very little, if any, effect at all on ordinary people. If you were a wealthy Italian aristocrat, a Latin scholar, a pope, or a cardinal, then the Renaissance was a pretty big deal; if you were an ordinary villager, though, you probably would have had no idea that it was even happening.

Take, for instance, Raphael’s famous frescoes decorating the Stanza della Segnatura of the Apostolic Palace in Rome. These include The School of Athens, The Parnassus, The Disputation of the Holy Sacrament, and The Cardinal Virtues. These are all extraordinarily beautiful paintings, but they were originally created to decorate the private residence of Pope Julius II and they were not originally meant to be viewed by the general public.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Stanza della Segnatura in the Apostolic Palace

Renaissance artists broke away from the more abstract, less naturalistic artistic styles that prevailed during the Middle Ages and returned to more naturalistic styles inspired by classical Greek and Roman art. This is often assumed to have been a good thing, but I think it is worth questioning whether it really was. Personally, although I admire Renaissance artwork very much, I admire medieval art as well and I think that most people today recognize that more realistic art does not necessarily mean better art.

Meanwhile, Renaissance writers condemned the styles of Latin that people had written in throughout the later Middle Ages and declared that only the Latin of the ancient Romans—particularly the Latin of Cicero and Vergil—counted as real, proper Latin. They devoted themselves to the study of classical Roman literature and outright rejected the study of medieval literature, seeing it as barbaric and corrupted by vulgar stylistic accretions.

While the Renaissance did produce some great Latin literature, most of it is totally obscure to ordinary people today and much of it has never even been translated from Latin into English. Most people have heard of late medieval vernacular poems like Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but how many people today can honestly say that they’ve heard of Desiderius Erasmus’s Moriae Encomium? And how many people today are even aware that the word utopia comes from the title of a famous Latin novel by Sir Thomas More?

ABOVE: Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus (lived 1469 – 1536), a major scholar and writer of the Renaissance

The roots of the Renaissance in Italy before the Black Death

Even if we leave aside the entirely legitimate question of whether the Renaissance was really all that great, the popular claim that it was triggered by the Black Death requires a person to overlook an awful lot of historical evidence that seems to strongly indicate to the contrary. In particular, it requires people to overlook the degree to which elements of the Renaissance were already present in western Europe—particularly Italy—before the Black Death even struck.

The development of the Renaissance art style in the fifteenth century was actually in many ways a continuation of a trend that began in Italy in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries—before the Black Death. For instance, the Italian sculptor Nicola Pisano (lived c. 1220 – c. 1284) is known for creating works of sculpture clearly inspired by classical Greek and Roman styles that overtly prefigure Renaissance styles.

For instance, below are some photographs of the pulpit Nicola Pisano made for the baptistry of Pisa between 1255 and 1260. Apart from a few Gothic elements, it looks like something straight out of the Augustan Era Roman Empire. The figures in the panels closely resemble figures from Roman relief carvings. They are even wearing first-century CE Roman clothing!

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Nicola Pisano’s pulpit in the baptistry of Pisa, displaying obvious classical influence

ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons of the scene of the Nativity of Christ from Nicola Pisano’s pulpit in the baptistry of Pisa

Sculptors weren’t the only ones who broke with traditional medieval styles and began imitating older classical Greek and Roman styles; painters did much the same thing. One of the first medieval painters to begin producing more realistic, classically-inspired scenes was the Italian painter Pietro Cavallini (lived 1259 – c. 1330).

ABOVE: The Renunciation of Worldly Goods, probably painted by Giotto sometime around 1295

Pietro Cavallini was swiftly followed by other Italian painters, including Giotto di Bondone (lived c. 1267 – 1337) and Taddeo Gaddi (lived c. 1290 – 1366). Giotto notably died almost exactly ten years before the Black Death arrived in Italy, but yet he is widely seen as a seminal figure in Proto-Renaissance artwork.

ABOVE: The Flight into Egypt, painted by Giotto between c. 1304 and c. 1306

ABOVE: The Kiss of Judas, painted by Giotto between c. 1304 and c. 1306

ABOVE: The Lamentation of Christ, painted by Giotto between c. 1304 and c. 1306

ABOVE: The Angelic Announcement to the Shepherds, painted by Taddeo Gaddi between c. 1332 and c. 1338

The seeds of the Renaissance can also easily be spotted in the literature and philosophy produced in the years before the Black Death. Francesco Petrarca (lived 1304 – 1374), who is widely regarded as a founding figure of Renaissance humanism, was already writing and collecting works of classical Latin literature before the Black Death even struck.

Petrarca began writing his seminal Latin epic poem Africa in around 1337. By 1341, he had completed a draft version of it and, by 1343, he had fully completed the poem as we know it today. Although most people today haven’t heard of this epic, it is hard to exaggerate just how extraordinarily influential it was on later Latin humanist writers. It was in this very epic that Petrarca invented the notion that the Middle Ages were somehow a “Dark Age.”

One of the things Petrarca is famous for is his so-called “discovery” of a manuscript containing a collection of previously obscure letters written by the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BCE). The nature of this “discovery” is sometimes overblown, since, after all, Petrarca found the manuscript in a monastery in Verona, where it had been previously copied by monks, and one presumes that the monks who copied the text were aware of its existence. In any case, this event happened in 1345—two years before the Black Death’s arrival in Italy.

I think that it is true that the Black Death played a role in shaping the nature of the Renaissance, but I don’t think it is at all true that the Black Death caused the Renaissance in any sense. I think that some kind of Renaissance was clearly going to happen, regardless of whether there was a Black Death.

ABOVE: Fresco of the Italian writer Francesco Petrarch, painted in around 1450 by the Florentine painter Andrea del Castagno

What the Black Death really brought

The Black Death didn’t bring on the Renaissance, but it did bring on death, devastation, and misery on a scale that even we today in the midst of a global pandemic can hardly imagine. The disease swept across all of Eurasia and North Africa, killing between one and two thirds of the population wherever it went.

The disease spread extremely rapidly, it caused immense suffering for all those who caught it, there was no reliable cure or way of preventing it, and the vast majority of everyone who caught it died. Entire towns were wiped out in a matter of months.

The contemporary Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (lived 1313 – 1375) gives a detailed description of the signs and symptoms of the plague at the very beginning of his Decameron. He writes, as translated by M. Rigg:

“…but in men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumors in the groin or the armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg, some more, some less, which the common folk called gavoccioli. From the two said parts of the body this deadly gavocciolo soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, then minute and numerous.”

“And as the gavocciolo had been and still were an infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they shewed themselves. Which maladies seemed set entirely at naught both the art of the physician and the virtue of physic; indeed, whether it was that the disorder was of a nature to defy such treatment, or that the physicians were at fault—besides the qualified there was now a multitude both of men and of women who practiced without having received the slightest tincture of medical science—and, being in ignorance of its source, failed to apply the proper remedies; in either case, not merely were those that covered few, but almost all within three days from the appearance of the said symptoms, sooner or later, died, and in most cases without any fever or other attendant malady.”

The contemporary Sienese chronicler Agnolo di Tura del Grasso describes the devastation in a famous passage from his Chronica Maggiore. Here what he says, as translated by William M. Bowsky:

“The mortality in Siena began in May. It was a cruel and horrible thing. . . . It seemed that almost everyone became stupefied seeing the pain. It is impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful truth. Indeed, one who did not see such horribleness can be called blessed. The victims died almost immediately. They would swell beneath the armpits and in the groin, and fall over while talking.”

“Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through breath and sight. And so they died. None could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices.”

“In many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds, both day and night, and all were thrown in those ditches and covered with earth. And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug. I, Agnolo di Tura . . . buried my five children with my own hands. . . . And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.”

Imagine if half the people you have ever known died of a horrible illness within only a few weeks of each other. Imagine the streets piled high with the rotting corpses of all your friends and loved ones. Imagine living in constant fear that you will catch the disease and die. Imagine what it would be like if you did catch it and you found yourself dying in terrible pain, covered in massive black buboes, knowing that there is no one in the world who can possibly save you and not knowing what you have done to deserve this terrible fate.

That’s the world we’re talking about here. This isn’t a world that should make anyone hopeful. The Black Death and the other epidemics like it that swept across the Old World in pre-modern times represent humanity at its most desperate and broken.

ABOVE: Fourteenth-century manuscript illustration of a man and a woman dying of the Black Death

This is made all the more distressing by the fact that the world I’m describing isn’t nearly so far away as people today like to imagine. As I discuss in this article from April 2020, the reason the Black Death was able to cause so much devastation wasn’t because medieval people were in any way less intelligent or less creative than modern people. It wasn’t because they were religious or because they hated science either. Instead, it was simply because the information that is available to us now was not available to them back then.

Today, the plague can be treated with antibiotics, but medieval people didn’t have any way of knowing what antibiotics were, since they didn’t know what pathogens were. They had no way of knowing what pathogens were, since they didn’t have microscopes. Then, of course, they had no idea what a microscope was or why one would be useful, so they had no incentive to invent one.

It’s worth remembering that Alexander Fleming only discovered that penicillin was an antibiotic by accident in 1928; there are people who are still alive who can remember the time before that. It’s not reasonable to think that medieval people should have been able to discover something all on their own that wasn’t even known when most people alive today’s grandparents were born.

Even today, we still haven’t triumphed over disease. The devastation that diseases like the influenza, tuberculosis, and COVID-19 are still wreaking on the developed world even today in the twenty-first century clearly prove this. I don’t think that we will ever conquer disease. As medicine advances, viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens will only continue to evolve to evade the techniques we use to fight them, forcing us to develop new techniques. This is a Red Queen scenario; it takes all the running we can do just to stay in the same place.

ABOVE: Manuscript illustration by Pierart dou Tielt dated to c. 1353 depicting the people of the city of Tournai burying victims of the Black Death

Long-term impact of the Black Death

As a result of the Black Death, large parts of Asia, Europe, and North Africa were left massively depopulated. We don’t know exactly how many people died of the Black Death, but it was probably more than seventy million at the very least.

So many people died that, for about a century and a half afterwards, people in Europe became obsessed with death and mortality. They thought a lot about how death is a great equalizer; no matter who a person is, what background they come from, how powerful they are, or what things they own, in the end, every single person is going to die and there is absolutely nothing anyone can possibly do to escape it.

Medieval artists created an allegorical image to convey this fact, known today as the Dance of Death or Danse Macabre. In this allegory, Death is shown personified as a skeleton, summoning people from all walks of life—from the highest emperor to the lowliest serf—to join him in the dance of death. Artists produced countless versions of this allegory. Many versions of it still decorate the walls of old European churches and cathedrals.

The plague never totally went away either; the specific outbreak of the plague that we today know as the “Black Death” lasted until around 1353, but the plague continued to recur across Eurasia for centuries afterwards and there were many later outbreaks, which killed tens of millions of people over the course of their long history. It was in response to these later outbreaks of the plague that the plague doctor suit, which I discuss in this article from March 2020, was invented by a French doctor in 1619—over two and a half centuries after the Black Death’s first entry into Europe.

ABOVE: Fresco by the Istrian painter Johannes de Castua from 1490 showing all the peoples of the world united in the dance of death

The Renaissance leading to the Enlightenment and the modern world?

People like Michael Oren who go around promoting this absurd notion that the Black Death somehow brought on the Renaissance often also claim that the Renaissance brought on the Enlightenment and that the Enlightenment brought on the modern world. Oren writes at the very end of his op-ed:

“Yet as other historians have noted — most prominently, Jared Diamond in his famous work ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’ — technology and plague cleared the way for modernity to grow. Without them, the nation-state wouldn’t have developed, together with democracy, human rights and religious freedom.”

[…]

“It was the Renaissance that ultimately gave birth to the Enlightenment, to widespread literacy and the scientific revolution. From there a direct line leads to the advances in medicine and engineering that enable us to combat a vicious virus more rapidly than ever before.”

“We don’t know which outcome will prevail, the bleak or the favorable, in our current crisis. We don’t know how much short-term suffering could lead to a long-term reward. But we do know that without the twin traumas of pestilence and technological change, our 21st century would have looked much more like the 14th.”

I’ve already taken the notion that the Enlightenment was objectively a good thing severely to task in my article debunking Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature, but it keeps cropping up, so I’ll address it again here.

One thing that fans of the Enlightenment consistently fail to come to terms with is the fact that so many of the people we call “Enlightenment thinkers” worked obsessively to justify western European colonialism, racism, and the enslavement of people of African descent.

For instance, none other than the revered German philosopher Immanuel Kant (lived 1724 – 1804) himself expounded a highly elaborate racial hierarchy that placed white Europeans at the top and Black Africans and Native Americans at the very bottom. Here is a passage he wrote about Native Americans (as quoted in this chapter of the book Postcolonial African Philosophy):

“The race of the American cannot be educated. It has no motivating force, for it lacks affect and passion. They are not in love, thus they are also not afraid. They hardly speak, do not caress each other, care about nothing and are lazy.”

Similarly, he wrote this about Black people:

“The race of the Negroes, one could say, is completely the opposite of the Americans; they are full of affect and passion, very lively, talkative and vain. They can be educated but only as slaves, that is they allow themselves to be trained. They have many motivating forces, are also sensitive, are afraid of blows and do much out of a sense of honor.”

He also wrote rather extensively about how to punish enslaved Black people for disobedience, writing that they should be beaten with canes made of split bamboo instead of whips, because (according to him) their skins are so thick that, if you just whip them, they won’t feel enough pain to make them want to change their habits.

While there have always been Europeans who have been prejudiced against those whom they perceive as “other,” nothing like this kind of elaborate system of classifying people into a deterministic racial hierarchy existed in the fourteenth century when people like Giotto, Dante Alighieri, and Francesco Petrarca were alive. This system is, for the most part, an invention of the so-called “Enlightenment.”

ABOVE: Portrait of the revered German Enlightenment philosopher and notorious racist Immanuel Kant

Clearly, the so-called “Enlightenment” has blood on its hands. Jared Diamond, the popular historian whom Oren cites, is intimately associated with the process of justifying violent colonialism. You know the “guns,” “germs,” and “steel” that are referenced in the title of his famous book? He’s specifically referring to the “guns,” “germs,” and “steel” that enabled western Europeans to brutally conquer, enslave, and steal from Native American peoples.

Diamond and Oren, however, don’t see western European colonialism as nearly as problematic as they should. In his book, Diamond essentially accepts it as inevitable that, because Europeans had the ability to conquer and enslave other peoples, it was only inevitable that they would do so. He doesn’t pay nearly enough consideration to the fact that many Asian and African peoples were exposed to the same diseases and technologies as Europeans and yet they didn’t engage in the same kind of colonial activities.

Meanwhile, Oren euphemizes the violence and cruelty of colonialism by merely saying that “technology and plague cleared the way for modernity to grow.” It’s worth asking whose “modernity” he is talking about here. I suppose that Oren’s conception of “modernity” is a rather fine thing if you happen to be a white person; it’s maybe not so great if you happen not to be.

ABOVE: Image of the front cover of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond—a book which effectively seeks to justify western European colonialism

Conclusion

I think that anyone who studies history looking for things to make them hopeful about the future is probably studying history the wrong way. The purpose of history should never be to make people feel good about themselves or their place in the world.

If anything, history teaches us that suffering, catastrophes, plagues, and death are inescapable parts of human existence. These things have existed in every historical era and they will never go away, no matter how much our technologies may advance. This is the reason why we must prepare for the sufferings that will inevitably come our way and try to avoid or mitigate suffering whenever possible.