The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century By the early fourteenth century, Europe’s economic expansion slowed down. This was due to three factors. In northern Europe, by the end of the thirteenth century the warm summers of the previous years had given way to bitterly cold summers. Seasons for growing crops were reduced by a month and it became difficult to grow crops on higher ground.
Storms and oceanic flooding destroyed many farmsteads, which resulted in less income in taxes for governments. The opportunities offered by favourable climatic conditions before the thirteenth century had led to large-scale reclamation of the land of forests and pastures for agriculture. But intensive ploughing had exhausted the soil despite the practice of the three-field rotation of crops, because clearance was not accompanied by proper soil conservation. The shortage of pasturage reduced the number of cattle.
Population growth was outstripping resources, and the immediate result was famine. Severe famines hit Europe between and , followed in the 1320s by massive cattle deaths. In addition, trade was hit by a severe shortage of metal money because of a shortfall in the output of silver mines in Austria and Serbia. This forced governments to reduce the silver content of the currency, and to mix it with cheaper metals.
The worst was yet to come. As trade expanded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, ships carrying goods from distant countries had started arriving in European ports. Along with the ships came rats – carrying the deadly bubonic plague infection (the ‘Black Death’). Western Europe, relatively isolated in earlier centuries, was hit by the epidemic between and .
The modern estimate of mortality in that epidemic is that per cent of the people of the whole of Europe died, with some places losing as much as per cent of the population. Stained-glass window, Chartres cathedral, France, fifteenth century. T HE T HREE O RDERS T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY ‘How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, (had) breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the