Hello and welcome to today's history lesson.

My name's Mr. Merrett and I'll be guiding you through today's lesson.

So let's get started.

Today's lesson is looking at the impact of the Black Death in Europe, and by the end of today's lesson, we'll be able to explain the social and economic impact of the Black Death in Europe.

In order to do that, we need to use some key terms. And our key terms for today are population and disease.

The population refers to all the inhabitants of a particular place, and a disease is a condition that impairs the proper function of the body or part of the body.

Our lesson today will consist of three separate learning cycles, and our first learning cycle is looking at the Black Death in Italy and France.

Let's get going.

So the Black Death reached Western Europe in October 1347 when 12 ships from the plague infested city of Kaffa, which is in modern day Crimea in the Black Sea, arrived in Messina in Sicily.

The people onboard the ships were dead or dying of the Black Death.

And the brief contact they had with the residents of Messina was enough to transmit the disease to the city, and soon enough, the whole island of Sicily.

Other ships from Kaffa looked for refuge in different cities.

Central Italy was exposed to the plague when ships landed near Pisa in January 1348.

In Siena, all of the city authorities died, leaving no one to enforce law and order, resulting in large-scale looting and theft.

Parents abandoned their sick children.

Siena lost up to 50% of its population and never recovered its position as a major city.

It's Grand Cathedral, begun before the Black Death struck, remains unfinished to this day.

There are reports of the people in Siena at the time just living their lives to the absolute maximum, partying, drinking all day, drinking all nights because they believe that they will die very, very soon.

And for many people, they lost their faith in God at this point in time because they saw not only peasants falling sick and dying of the Black Death, but also the city authorities and the clergy as well.

Members of the church were dying just as cruelly of the same disease.

So for many people, they lost their faith and they believed that they need to make the most of their lives that they had left.

So there was a complete breakdown of authority in Siena, as well as many other cities.

In Florence, laws were introduced to try and stop the plague from entering the city.

So they saw what had happened to other cities and yet they made an effort prior to the Black Death arriving to try and prevent it from coming in.

Streets were cleaned, ill travellers were forbidden entry and public prayers were held asking for God's forgiveness.

In Venice, a quarantena, or quarantine or 40-day isolation period was enforced on ships entering the city.

So once again, this is our first real example of quarantine measures coming into play, and all of these are designed to try and stop the plague from entering these new cities.

Unfortunately, none of these measures worked.

In these, and almost all Italian cities, roughly 50% of the population died.

Of all the great Italian cities affected by the plague, Milan suffered the least, only losing 15% of its population, which is still obviously terrible, but significantly lower than what we are seeing elsewhere in Italy.

And perhaps that is due to the strict response that city authorities had too encounters with the plague.

Infected families were bricked up inside their homes.

So if one member of your family showed symptoms of the plague, you and the rest of your family would be bricked up inside your house.

So I mean, realistically, those families are going to die, but the hope was that when doing so, they wouldn't then spread the plague on elsewhere.

Okay, let's have a quick check for understanding.

What percentage of the population was killed by the Black Death in Italy? Was it 30%, 50%, or 70%? All right, if you chose B, 50%, then congratulations, that is the correct answer.

France was the most highly populated country in Europe in the 14th century with somewhere between 15 to 20 million people.

Paris was also the largest city in Europe with more than 100,000 people living there.

The Pope also lived in France at this point in time.

So he was out of Rome.

He was living in southern France in a city called Avignon.

So he was in France as well.

So France was an incredibly important country in Europe at this point in time.

The Black Death reached France in December 1347 when one of the plague-bearing ships in the Black Sea docked at Marseilles.

It was very quickly ordered out of the harbour, but not before infecting the city.

Unfortunately, in desperation, the crew of this ship then made their way along the southern coast of France looking for help from each town that they encountered, but just spreading the plague as they were doing so.

So when the plague spread to Avignon, which isn't too far from the south coast of France, so many people died that its cemeteries ran out of space for more bodies.

And this was a very common feature of the plague, the fact that people just weren't prepared for this number of people dying in such a short amount of time.

Cemeteries regularly ran out of space.

In Christian Europe, you want to be buried in what's called consecrated ground.

So grounds a priest are blessed, and generally speaking was in a churchyard as well.

But quite simply, there wasn't space for all of these.

In many cities, plague pits were dug, so just huge holes in the ground where hundreds of bodies could be thrown in and just piled on top of each other.

In Avignon, the pope actually blessed the river instead, and they just quite simply threw the plague infested bodies into the river.

Now, although the Pope survived the plague, he holed up inside his palace.

It was believed at the time that.

One of the beliefs at the time was that the plague was spread by bad air.

So in order to try and combat that, the Pope sat between two burning fires at all times, and it was hoped that that would kind of get rid of all the bad air, prevent it from reaching him.

That wouldn't have worked.

But the fact that he was in isolation during this time certainly helped to prevent him from catching the plague.

So the Pope did survive the Black Death.

However, many leading church figures did not, and many leading church figures in Avignon died of the disease as well.

In Paris, the capital of France, between November and December 1348, roughly 800 people died every single day, so that's 800 on average every day was dying between those two months.

Paris lost roughly 50% of its population to disease, as did pretty much the rest of France as well.

Ships were the fastest form of transport in the 14th century, and the Black Death spread quickly to ports, but more slowly over land.

So generally speaking, port cities and the surrounding areas in any country would contract the plague first, and then the plague would kind of spread slowly inwards from there.

And as a result of this, some inland parts of France didn't actually experience the Black Death until 1352.

So it took about five years in some cases for the plague to reach the more isolated reaches of inland France.

Right, so another quick check for understanding.

How long did the Black Death take to make its way through France? Was it at least two years, from 1347 to 1348? Was it at least five years, from 1347 to 1352? Or was it at least 10 years, from 1347 to 1357? Make your choice now.

Okay, if you chose B, at least five years, then congratulations, that is the correct answer.

Okay, let's go for our first task of the day then.

So what I would like you to do is try and identify five key impacts of the Black Death in Italy and France, and record those on that wheel that you have on the screen in front of you there.

Now, ideally, I'd like you to try and use as few words as possible and instead try and think about how you can get the message across just by using symbols or images instead.

Now, if you're stuck for ideas about what you could include in each of those five segments, you could think about when it first struck how people responded, both in Italy and in France, how many people died both in Italy and in France.

If you've got different ideas you want to record instead, that's absolutely fine.

It's up to you to decide what those five key bits information are.

But pause the video whilst you have a go on this, and I'll see you in just a moment.

Okay, welcome back.

Hopefully you got on okay with that task.

So here's what you could have done.

So here's some that I came up with.

So in that first segment, in the upper right, I've got a picture of Italy and Sicily down at the bottom is in red, and I said that it was October 1347.

That's when the plague struck Sicily.

I then thought about how they tried to combat it, and I thought about Venice, the fact that they quarantined people.

They didn't allow ships into the city for 40 days.

So I've recorded that there.

I said that in Italy, about 50% of the population was killed.

So I've got that 50% and the down arrow trying to show that.

In France, I've thought about how they responded to the plague in Avignon where dead bodies were thrown into the river.

So I've got a face there, a dead face with the river underneath it.

And again, in France, I thought about how they suffered from the plague, and I got the fact that about 50% of the population died.

It's got 50% on that down arrow as well.

If you've got something similar to me, that's great, but I hopefully, your drawings are better than mine.

Right, let's move on then to our second learning cycle of today, which is the Black Death in the Holy Roman Empire and Poland.

Now, the Holy Roman Empire, the largest country in Europe by area, so not the largest population, but geographically the largest country in Europe, had more time to prepare for the oncoming plague.

They received reports about what was happening in Italy and in France, so they knew what was coming and they had time to prepare themselves for it.

These preparations reflected mediaeval attitudes to disease.

In many parts of the empire, groups of flagellants walked from town to town, whipping themselves in order to try and gain God's favour.

In reality, all they were doing was creating open wounds on themselves, and they were then flicking blood from these open wounds onto people and walls and floors in the new towns that they came to.

So they were increasing the likelihood that they would gain some sort of secondary infection, and they were also increasing their likelihood if they've picked up the plague or any other disease of spreading that to these new areas as well.

So the whole thinking behind the flagellation was that if the plague, the Black Death is a punishment from God, if we punish ourselves first, then God won't need to punish us again.

So that was the thinking behind it.

But in reality, it did not help at all.

It was quite the opposite.

It was really quite awful.

In many towns, the local Jewish population was blamed for the Black Death.

Religious rules around hygiene meant that Jewish communities contracted the disease less frequently than their Christian neighbours.

So Jewish people had much stricter rules regarding keeping themselves and their homes clean in comparison to Christians.

And as a result, because they lived in cleaner communities, there were less rats with plague-bearing fleas in those areas.

So the Jews just didn't catch the plague to the same extent that Christians did.

They still did catch the Black Death, and they still did die from it, but not to the same extent that the Christians did in the same communities.

Because of this, a lot of their Christian neighbours suspected them of spreading the disease.

Remember, people didn't know why this disease was spreading and where it came from.

And so the belief amongst some community was that Jewish people were spreading it themselves.

And as a result, some Jewish people were tortured into confessing that they poisoned town wells, which obviously is completely untrue.

These people were just trying to say anything they possibly could to try and stop being tortured.

But that was enough for many people to blame the Jews and say that it's obviously them doing it and they've confessed to it.

This then led to massacres of more than 200 Jewish communities in the Holy Roman Empire.

On the 14th of February in 1349, 2,000 Jewish people were executed by being burned alive in Strasbourg.

And this was the common method of executing Jewish people at this point in time for this particular crime that they supposedly committed.

What's unusual about Strasbourg is that the plague hadn't actually reached the city at that point.

So their argument might have been that if they get rid of the Jews now, then it won't come because it's the Jews that are poisoning the worlds, but obviously, it's complete rubbish.

And that was kind of proven when it did reach the city later in that year when 60,000 people died.

The reality is, in Strasbourg, there's more to it than that.

A lot of the Jewish people were very wealthy, and a lot of the Christian community owed them money.

So this is a way of not having to pay their debts.

So it's just taking advantage of a horrific situation, a lot of the people in Strasbourg were doing but to no end.

I mean, they may not have had to paid off their debts, but 60,000 of them died anyway.

So just a really, really awful situation all round.

Right, let's have a quick check for understanding now.

So true or false? Jews in the Holy Roman Empire were blamed for causing the plague.

Is that true or is that false? Okay, if you answered true, then congratulations, that is the correct answer.

But let's justify that statement now.

Why is it a true statement? Is it true because Jews were sent to prison to punish them for spreading the plague? Or is it true because Jews were publicly killed to punish them for spreading the plague? All right, if you chose B, then congratulations, that is the correct answer.

Now, Poland had a very different response to the Black Death compared to the Holy Roman Empire and indeed, many places in Europe.

Poland was a landlocked country, so there were no ports in Poland for the Black Death to come quickly to their country.

And the cities within Poland were generally spread further apart than in other areas of Europe.

So there's more land in between the big cities within Poland.

The king at the time, who was King Casimir III, who was called Casimir the Great, he welcomed Jewish refugees from the Holy Roman Empire into his lands.

So whereas the Holy Roman Empire blamed the Jewish population for spreading the plague, King Casimir actually said, "No, you are safe in my lands." And he welcomed a lot of them into Poland.

This also made Poland the home of the largest Jewish population in the world.

Casimir III also banned foreign trade.

So during this period in time, Poland refused to trade with any other countries, and as well as that, it enforced quarantines for merchants trading between Polish cities.

So trade took a massive hit in Poland at this point in time.

There's no foreign trade, and internal trade is incredibly slow because any merchant travelling between cities has to wait outside of each city for a period of several weeks before they're allowed in the city, just in case they exhibit signs of the plague in that time.

Now, as a result of these measures, Poland's population showed no decline in numbers in this period.

So the rest of Europe is showing, on average, around about 50% decline in their population.

Poland shows no evidence of any decline.

This is not to suggest that the plague did not reach Poland.

It almost certainly did affect some communities in Poland, but the Black Death did not have anywhere near the kind of impact that it had in Poland, compared to the rest of Europe.

Now, let's have a quick check for understanding again.

It's a quick discussion question this time.

I want you to think, how did the response to the Black Death differ between the Holy Roman Empire and Poland? So pause the video whilst you consider that question, and I'll see you again in just a moment.

Okay, welcome back.

Hope you got on okay with that task.

So let's think what you could have said then.

So you could have said that the Holy Roman Empire blamed and killed Jews, whereas Poland welcomed, and provided safety for Jews.

There were no deliberate quarantine efforts in the Holy Roman Empire.

There were some areas, Bavaria, for instance, a particular part of the Holy Roman Empire at the time, it experienced a kind of accidental quarantine.

It was landlocked, and people just stopped trading with Bavaria.

And as a result, Bavaria actually experienced very little population decline for the Black Death, certainly in comparison to the rest of the Holy Roman Empire.

But in any case, there were no deliberate quarantine efforts in the Holy Roman Empire, whereas Poland stopped external trade and introduced quarantine for internal trade.

The Holy Roman Empire suffered population loss similar to elsewhere in Europe, whereas Poland exhibited next to no population loss at all.

So really stark differences in the response and effects of the Black Death between the Holy Roman Empire and Poland.

Right, let's move on to our next task now then.

So I'd like you to explain two reasons why Poland didn't suffer the effects of the Black Death to the extent that other mediaeval European countries did.

So you need to identify two reasons and actually explain them.

So how is this helping Poland not receive the same death toll as in comparison to other areas in Europe? So pause the video whilst you do this, and I'll see you in just a moment.

Okay, welcome back.

Hopefully you got okay with that task.

So let's think about what you could have written then.

So I said one reason why Poland didn't suffer the effects of the Black Death to the extent that other mediaeval European countries did was because they had the largest Jewish population in the world living in their country.

Jewish people had strict rules regarding cleanliness, so they were more hygienic than many Christians at this time.

This meant there was less chance of disease in general from spreading as diseases spread best and dirty, crowded places.

Another reason is because Polish cities were more spread out than cities in other mediaeval European countries, and quarantine measures were put in place to prevent diseases like the Black Death from being able to spread easily from one city to another.

This helped because travellers from one Polish city to another, which showed signs of the plague on their long journeys between cities and will be unable to enter a city until they had recovered from it or died.

So hopefully, you've got something similar to what I've got there.

If you've got different reasons to me, that's absolutely fine as long as you've explained them.

That's the key aspect of this task.

Let's move on now then to our third and final learning cycle for today, which is looking at the Black Death in later years.

So up to 50 million people are estimated to have died of the Black Death in Europe between 1346 and 1353, and it would take more than 150 years for the population to return to pre-plague levels.

So it had a dramatic impact on the population of Europe for a very long time afterwards.

With fewer people to farm the land, fields reverted back to woodlands.

Even so, the remaining farmers produced more food than was needed.

So the price of grain reduced dramatically in many countries.

Trade between nations declined as people grew nervous of dealing with outsiders and grand building projects, things like cathedrals, were scaled back or halted all together.

The church lost a great deal of its authority as the common people had seen God's representatives on Earth suffer and die just as terribly as the lowliest peasants.

It's all well and good believing that the Black Death is a punishment from God, but when it's God's messengers that are also dying of the same disease, then maybe they're not as holy as they claim to be as was the thinking at the time.

The focus of art changed from glorifying God to emphasising the theme of human mortality, the inevitability of death.

This became a very, very common motif in art for a long time afterwards.

And there are some examples on the screen in front of you there as well.

Waves of plague swept through Europe for centuries after the Black Death, regular reminders that death could come at any time.

Generally speaking, in most European countries after the Black Death, around about once in a generation, about every 30 years or sometimes less than that, there'd be another major plague epidemic.

But the reality is is that they were plague deaths every single year in pretty much every single country as well.

Every now and then it would spring up and be particularly nasty again.

So plague and therefore, sudden and inevitable death was just always around from this point onwards.

However, there were some positives that resulted from the Black Death.

Those workers that survived were able to demand higher wages as their labour was worth more as there were fewer people to perform the work.

And previously, peasants had not been allowed to move to find better work, work that would earn them more money.

But this now became more possible.

There's an understanding that you can't necessarily keep the peasants in place anymore because they're gonna have better offers and the protection of other lords elsewhere.

Women also gained more rights, such as the right to own property and run businesses as there were fewer men alive to fulfil these roles.

Many of Europe's ruling elites push backed against these changes, and that's understandable because they had it good before the plague and things are changing and not necessarily in their favour.

But generally speaking, these pushbacks were unsuccessful.

The tide had turned and the situation in Europe is changing, and for those that survived the plague, those common people that survived the plague, things actually are looking up, things are improving for them.

The Black Death was undoubtedly a dark cloud in the history of Europe, but it did hold a silver lining.

Let's have a quick check for understanding now.

So true or false? The plague never returned to Europe after the Black Death subsided.

Is that true or is that false? Okay, if you answered false, then very well done, that is correct but let's justify the answer now.

Why is it false? Is it false because the plague returned once more after the Black Death? Or is it false because the plague returned repeatedly after the Black Death? So choose your justification now.

Okay, if you chose B, then very well done, that's the correct answer.

Let's have one more check for understanding.

I'd like you to pick out two ways in which the lives of people in Europe improved after the Black Death.

So was it because some women could own property? Was it because survivors became immune to disease? Was it because taxes were abolished for all peasants? Or was it because workers could demand higher wages? So choose two of those options now.

Okay, if you chose A and D, then congratulations, those are the correct answers.

Let's go for our next task.

So I'd like you to describe two ways in which Europeans try to limit the spread of the Black Death.

So pause the video whilst you have a go on this, and I'll see you in just a moment.

Okay, welcome back.

Hopefully you got on okay with that task.

Let's think about what you could have written then.

So I've said one way that Europeans tried to limit the spread of the Black Death was by introducing quarantine measures.

This prevented people from entering a city for a certain amount of time, 40 days for Venice, who first introduced this measure, and that's where we get the word quarantena from.

Quarantena come from the 40 days.

To see whether they would show signs of the disease.

Another way was to respond without mercy to anyone showing signs of the plague in order to stop it spreading.

Milan bricked up infected people in their houses, meaning they would die whether or not they recovered from the Black Death, but at least not spread the disease any further.

If you've got two different ways to me, that's absolutely fine, as long as you've got a couple down, that's what we're looking for here.

Let's go for our last activity in this lesson then.

So I'd like you to describe one short-term impact of the Black Death and also one long-term impact as well.

So pause the video whilst you do this task, and I'll see you again in just a moment.

Okay, welcome back.

Hopefully you got along fine with that task.

So let's think about what you could have written then.

So I've said one short-term impact of the Black Death was that the population of many European countries declined by roughly 50%.

One long-term impact of the Black Death was that the population of Europe remained low for a very long time.

It would take 150 years for the population of Europe to return to what it had been before the Black Death struck.

And again, if you've got two different impacts compared to me, that's absolutely fine, as long as you've described two.

It's what we're looking for here.

Let's summarise today's lesson.

So in many countries in Europe, roughly half the population died from the Black Death.

The Black Death affected how people treated each other.

Families abandoned infected family members, and there were massacres of Jewish communities in the Holy Roman Empire.

The impact of the Black Death was felt for hundreds of years after the events.

Trade declined, and the population of Europe took 150 years to recover to pre-plague levels.

Thank you very much for joining me today.

Hopefully you've enjoyed yourself.

Hopefully you've learned something, and hopefully I'll see you again next time.

Bye-bye.