A conversation with a medieval historian about plagues, pandemics, imperial decline — and whether the U.S. is too broken to be fixed
Crises like these — whether it’s a crisis of political legitimacy, or a pandemic that demands response, or some kind of major external war that crops up out of nowhere — the chances are good that whatever snaps under the pressure of that crisis was probably straining already, was probably barely chugging along already. There’s some kind of deep problem that a crisis is going to expose, bring to the fore, and then break very dramatically for everybody to see.
Put on a slightly different scale, if you have an economy that’s set up such that having to reduce consumer spending in order to preserve public health places such a massive strain on it, there’s probably something underlying that’s unhealthy about that system as a whole. If your system of political economy is not healthy enough to withstand a shock like that or respond to that, something’s wrong.
There’s a climate element, too. Part of the reason for this long economic efflorescence was that it was a period of really good, warm, stable weather. It’s less important for farmers that the weather be good than that it be predictable, because what you need to know is when to sow your crops and when to harvest them. But over the late [1200s] and into the [1300s], the weather gets much worse. It’s much less predictable — it’s wetter, colder.
There’s something sort of depressing and deterministic about all this, to be honest. If you’re a peasant born in 1330, you’re going to grow up poor and then, as likely as not, die of the bubonic plague before turning 25. If you’re born in 1360, you have a much brighter set of possible outcomes. Are we all just sort of spinning on the wheel? Do you ever worry we’ll tell our grandkids about how good life used to be, and they’ll just look at us in disbelief.
Yeah! To keep to the Roman context, there are at least two. There was the end of the Roman Republic, and there was nothing to say the struggle between Augustus and Mark Antony that followed [Julius Caesar’s death] had to end with their world intact, but it did.
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