Medieval Europe: Crash Course European History #1

Hello and welcome to Crash Course European history, I'm John Green,

and as you may know medieval Europe has a terrible reputation.

We often hear that it was disease and famine-ridden (which it was).

Children were supposedly forced to marry at six or eight or ten years old, which was not common,

although people did start marrying younger,

in part because they were also dying younger.

We hear that knights in shining armor slaughtered wantonly, albeit with good manners called chivalry, which is partly true,

although the chivalric code was in decline.

And we also hear that it wasn't safe to drink the water, so they drank beer exclusively,

which more on that in a moment. But yeah, today we're turning our attention to these so-called "Middle Ages."

But right, so about beer. In those days, people did drink beer and ale.

The were nutritious (and still are), but they also drank other things: milk, other beverages, and especially water.

There were wells with safe and delicious drinking water.

Still, it's true that a lot of bad things did happen in the 14th and 15th centuries:

The Black Death, the Great Schism in the Catholic Church, and the Hundred Years War.

Also, in the 14th century,

the Little Ice Age began, which meant cooler temperatures and declining harvests,

and that contributed to stunting and starvation.

But let's begin with the Black Death, a huge pandemic of a disease called Bubonic Plague,

which spread to Europe from Asia. Many experts believe the plague originated in Tibet as a localized epidemic

but then spread carried by rats and mice and fleas.

And those animals were able to travel widely because humans were traveling, and the fleas and rats hitched rides with us,

so in that sense,

the plague was a product of growing human interconnectedness.

Bubonic plague is a horrible disease. After infection with the bacterium Yersinia Pestis,

lymph nodes swell and sometimes burst; victims often get high fevers and vomit blood;

gangrene can cause extremities and facial features to turn black with necrosis,

hence "the Black Death";

and depending on the strain, somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of people infected died.

These days, bubonic plague is treatable by antibiotics,

But such treatments have only been around for a few decades. As recently as the 20th century, outbreaks in India and China

killed more than 12 million people.

But the 14th century's Black Death was even worse.

Around 25 million people had died in Asia by the time the plague reached Constantinople in 1347,

and within four years, a staggering number of Europeans had died from it,

often within two days of becoming infected.

People faced a heartbreaking decision: whether to risk caring for their ailing loved ones,