WI: No Black Death

What exactly do you mean by no Black Death? As in, it never spread to Europe, it never existed, it never reached the size it did, or what?
 
Hardly. The effects of the Black Death changed Europe for the better.
In any case, something else similar would probably have happened. Europe had entered a major population crisis before the Plague came through and relieved it.

Yes, I know that their was a major population crisis... but I want to keep the majority of the Anglo-Norman nobility alive.
 
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I mean, you'd just be replacing mass death from disease with mass death from famine (and some disease too). With the little consolation of the clergy and nobility riding along nicely with few losses. Which would probably result in a lot of uprisings and peasant revolts. It'd be a much messier period in history.
 
So lets say their is no black death, what would the butterflies be?

The larger population and larger economy would produce some of the problems others suggested such as more famines etc but nothing on the scale of a Black Death kill off. When the population had recovered by the end of the 15th/early 16th century the economy and farming methods were not dramatically different from 1350.

It is possible that Constantinople survives as a Greek city and America is colonized by Europeans in the early 1400's. The Anglo Norman nobility in England have already become English.

The Black Death was a catastrophe that scarred the people for centuries so I don't see how it was beneficial. Otherwise you could say that AIDS in Africa is good but I haven't heard many serious people suggest that.
 

Typo

Banned
The Black Death was beneficial in the sense that it really provided a catalyst to weaken the old feudal order, and to improve the bargaining power of the peasants labor vis the nobility simply by decreasing the supply of them.
 
Well, there was one odd side-effect of the Black Death, namely an increase of trouble within the Church. For the moment defining "good" priests as those who minister to their congregations and "bad" priests as those who held their offices through some sort of appointment but who didn't seek to do their duties (and making no judgment on monasteries and the like), those areas with good priests had their clergy overwhelmingly devastated while those areas with priesthoods more filled with those not ministering to the public didn't see this effect. A result was an increase in corruption in the church as often, good priests got replaced with lousy ones while bad ones were more likely to remain in office, and as the clergy in some areas got wrecked in general. IIRC, Germany was among the areas most affected by this.

To avoid rambling too much, this shift likely played a role in the coming of the Protestant Reformation.
 
I seem to remember a lot of the Anglo-Norman nobility was killed off during the Plague so without those deaths, it would still be more or less stratified. English might be slightly more influenced by Anglo-Norman and Law French.
 

Lusitania

Donor
Could a Europe free from the Black Plague then use their overabundance of serf as a folder to their armies to beat back the Ottoman Empire and push the muslims back?

Would it of mean a faster re-conquest of the Iberian Peninsula?

There surely would of been many more bodies to throw at the walls. Thats for sure.

Anyway a larger population might of triggered a earlier colonization, remember once Europe was filled uo they needed some where to go. You could of had Anglo following the Norse to Vinland.
 
The population would have continued to grow, at least for a another few decades with favorable climate conditions. However with the advent of the Little Ice Age around 1400 or so, deep famine would have spread across Europe.

As evidence, in the High Middle Ages wine grapes were commonly grown in regions which are still too cold for them today. Just as a guess, a population crash at least as bad as the plague, and very possibly worse. Famine on that scale would have been international in scale, with political consequences at least as great as the last time it happened, around 400 AD, helping to trigger the migrations of the Germanic tribes and the fall of Rome.
 
Slightly off topic but concerning the Black Death, I have been reading a book entitled "Biology of Plagues. Evidence from Historical Populations" by Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan. It make a very convincing case that the modern-day Bubonic Plague and the Black Death are two entirely different diseases, with similar symptoms (most famously the swellings of the lymph nodes called "buboes") but very different causes and epidemiology.

The Bubonic Plague is a bacterial disease caused by Yersinia pestis, carried by fleas. It is rather difficult to catch, was mainly localized to urban areas, and has a relatively low mortality rate. On the other hand, the detailed epidemiology of the Black Death strongly supports a viral vector, with a long latency period (over a month) before overt symptoms very rapidly appear. The epidemiology in no way supports a bacterial vector -- in fact it would be completely unheard of among bacterial diseases. In addition, genetic evidence among the survivor populations (the CCR5-D32 mutation, relating to the viral immune response) suggests that the mutation gave a survival advantage during a series of heavy mortality events starting roughly 700 years ago.

The authors come to the conclusion that the Black Death was a viral hemorrhagic disease, most probably caused by a filovirus (the same family as Ebola), since the symptoms are a close match for Ebola fever, including the internal organ liquefaction that is the primary killing mechanism of Ebola fever (this was described by several doctors of the time). The main difference in the epidemiology is the much longer latency period of the Black Death, compared to the modern forms like Marburg or Ebola. The modern forms have a sufficiently short latency period that the disease tends to flare up in localized epidemics, but then die down from lack of living hosts before it can spread into a pandemic. Otherwise, the mortality rates are similar to that of the Black Death.

What we now call the Bubonic Plague appears to be an entirely separate disease, that first rose to prominence in the 18th century (1722 Marseilles), half a century after the viral disease last caused a major epidemic, with similar superficial symptoms, but with very different epidemiology.

This is a simplified description of the author's conclusions, but in my opinion they make a quite convincing case.

edit -- I should add that a possible reason that the Black Death caused the nymph nodes to swell and become necrotic could be that it appears that the white blood cells in particular were vulnerable to attack, and the lymph nodes are where several types of white blood cell are produced. The evidence for this conclusion includes the remarkable fact that patients who had been very heavily bled (to the point of fainting) as soon as symptoms started to appear had a much higher survival rate than the general population, perhaps indicating that white blood cells were among the early hosts for the virus, and reducing their number by heavy bleeding reduced the viral load in the bloodstream to a point where survival was more likely.
 
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