Although the Catholic Church lost many people, the institution became richer through bequests of plague victims and by increasing the rates they charged for services such as saying mass for the dead. As the Church grew wealthier, its might and glory in the eyes of the people diminished. Learned priests had died just as quickly as anyone else, and the uneducated youths, widowers, and other assorted survivors who were quickly shuffled into parishes were ill-equipped for their holy duties. The parish priest was the common man's connection to God; that such a priest should be no wiser and no more educated than the common man was not a welcome concept.
Local clergy and the Church as a whole were increasingly looked on with scorn, and in some cases violent public crimes were perpetrated on priests and bishops. People remembered too clearly the failure during the plague of many clergy to perform the duties of providing comfort and giving last rites, and their resentment was sharpened by having to pay high mass rates to an obviously wealthy institution. When Pope Clement VI attempted to soothe troubled hearts with a jubilee in 1350, its success was overshadowed in the long run by the beginning of indulgences-for-sale. Though conceived in the spirit of mercy and forgiveness, indulgences instead became a source of corruption in the Church for years to come.
The medieval Christian was, or had been, firmly convinced that the world was under the absolute control of an all-powerful deity and that the Church was the sole interpreter of His will. Now, the Church's failure during and after the plague introduced widespread doubt. How could the Church flourish when it had so obviously failed in its duty to the people? Was this God's justice, or had fallible human beings taken a hand? As soon as people began to question the established order of things, the door was flung open for changes more radical than Europe had experienced in more than a thousand years.
Broken Future
A need for spiritual comfort still existed, yet people began to turn away from the Catholic Church and seek religious help through secular means. John Wycliffe, arguably the first reformer, used reason and realism to puncture the absolute power of the papacy. His followers, the Lollards, traveled throughout England, ministering to people in return for hospitality, and helping to fill the spiritual vacuum created by the failure of the Church.
Wycliffe's teachings were suppressed, and his writings had no printing press to help spread his ideas; yet Lollardy never died. It was much too soon, and the Church was much too powerful, for a full-blown reformation to come as quickly as the fourteenth century. Yet the seeds that Martin Luther and his contemporaries would nurture in the sixteenth century had been sown. Would the great division in the Catholic Church, which has never been and will never be healed, have happened at all were it not for the Black Death?
The Light of Learning
The growth of education was severely hampered by the loss of many monks and clerics, and most colleges suffered a dramatic drop in attendance. However, the cause of learning had a champion in Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, who founded the University of Prague and issued imperial accreditation to five other universities. New colleges were founded in Cambridge, as well. This included Corpus Christi, which was established by Cambridge guilds so its students would be required to pray for deceased guild members; the rates charged by clergy for performing mass for the dead had become so outrageously high that founding an entire college was a more economical alternative.
A bright future for education existed; yet it was not the proliferation of universities alone that brought about the explosion of learning we know as the Renaissance. Rather, it was a change in approach. Before the plague, learning was very much in the hands of the clergy, and the focus of art, architecture, music, languages and any other form of learning was all for the glory of the Church. After the plague, secularism grew, and the questions brought about by the horror of the Black Death had opened the medieval mind to a different way of thinking. Scholars began to search elsewhere than scripture and the traditions of the Church for the keys to life, ethics, and morality; and humanism, a defining movement in the Renaissance, was born.
Strange to think that the crowning achievement of the middle ages, the glorious Renaissance, could owe its existence to the Great Mortality.
Sources and Suggested Reading
- The Black
Death
by Philip Ziegler
The Great
Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most
Devastating Plague of All Time
by John Kelly
The Black Death:
Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe
by Robert S. Gottfried
The Renaissance and Reformation
by John F. H. New
Life in Medieval
Times
by Marjorie Rowling
