WI; Europe without the Black Death ?

Gonna be brief. One of her more important consequences were higher wages for your ordinary worker since there was obvious shortage of labor and mutual competition between landlords. Degradation of the Church in the eyes of the ordinary folk since their explanations proved all false, and rise of semi illiterate priesthood which gave speed to spreading of some heretical teachings.

How would the continent look like without her; stronger and longer lasting feudalism/serfdom?, no rise in city populations and stronger rural communities?, lack of Reinessance? earlier drive for new land to ease up overpopulation meaning faster colonization ? ...
 
Delayed Renaissance maybe by 150 to 200 years. With a larger population and work force no need for new technology to the workers lost in the Black Death. The Church would stay much strong without Black Death. Think colonization would be delayed without Black Death no release of energy that lead to the Renaissance in OTL.

Discover of the Americas likely delayed by only maybe 70 years because the viking had the technology to discover of the Americas by 1000 AD someone's ship is likely to get blown off course and find the Americas.
 
Forget modern Italian food based on different courses, with pasta at the center: without scarcity forcing people to make do with available food sources, it would be like in nearby areas.
Oh, and of course no Decameron
 
I'm not so sure about technology - the Europeans were pretty machine-minded in the thirteenth century, it was different kinds of technology. But there would certainly be social changes without the massive die-off (which, incidentally, could still happen through different factors).

Much of Europe would be looking at a long succession of lean years, with population pressures on marginal lands growing and almost no high-labour, high-yield crops available. It is quite possible that this will continue to fuel Western European expansion into neighbouring areas. In this world, I could see a serious attempt at an anti-Orthodox crusade taking off. Probably not work, but you never know.

The Church had plenty of critics in the 13th and early 14th centuries, that is not likely to change too much. However, without the massive destabilising effect of the fourteenth-century crises, personal piety might well take a very different direction, possibly sticking with the traditional critique of wealth and power and aiming for apostolic poverty rather than turning towards introspective mysticism. The intellectual side might be missing from it. Instead of a radical question about the existence of a divine plan, we might see an equally radical reformulation of the understanding of it - the idea that God could not possibly have intended THIS. Because without the Black Death, Europe is not going to be a nice place by a long shot.
 
I'm curious if the larger population will lead to a another migration period. Of course we couldn't call it that, but if the population continued to grow, with less and less food and land those people would have to go somewhere.
 
I'm curious if the larger population will lead to a another migration period. Of course we couldn't call it that, but if the population continued to grow, with less and less food and land those people would have to go somewhere.

Or kill each other.
 
Well this is still going to be an era of disasters and human tragedy even without the Black Death. Why? Well the era of the High Middle Ages corresponds to the Medieval Warm Period. This was the era when populations boomed and many innovations were made. This period lasted from circa 950AD to circa 1250AD. There after the climate started to deteriorate quite rapidly. From 1250AD Atlantic pack ice increased significantly, from 1300 summers became a lot less reliable and Europe was hit by the Great Famine between 1315 and 1317 due to relentless rain for 3 years. This was the start of the climatic trend that led to the Little Ice Age

All this meant that there was significant strain on European (indeed global) civilisation in this period. In Europe the Black Death turned disaster into catastrophe. Without it there would still be famine throughout Europe, indeed in the long term these could be worse as there would be more people depending on the limited food available. In any event, whether or not the Black Death happens, this period will be one of famine, plague (whenever famine hits, plague of some sort isn't far behind, famine weakens the immune system), war and death
 
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