From the Margins to the Mainstream: Dutch History to 1384 - Fourteenth-Century Crisis - Unprecedented Natural Disasters

7 important questions on From the Margins to the Mainstream: Dutch History to 1384 - Fourteenth-Century Crisis - Unprecedented Natural Disasters

What meteorological problem emerged in the Netherlands?

  • To make the food crisis worse, the so-called medieval warm period came to an end; the climate again turned colder by the turn of the new century.
  • The first serious indication of this for all of northwestern Europe came in the spring of 1315, when it began to rain incessantly. The following fall and winter it rained daily for months, and it was not until the summer of 1317 that the weather returned to normal.

What consequences did the rain have for the Netherlands?

  • After the first winter the majority of the population had depleted their reserves, and grain prices skyrocketed - if grain could be had at all.
  • Only the desperate search for new foodstuffs, including the slaughter of horses and cattle, saved some from starvation.
  • The famine was accompanied by reports of a dysentery-like disease that struck a particularly vulnerable populace.

What deadly threat appeared in 1349? Who did it strike most?

  • The Black Death seems to have hit Flanders in the summer of 1349 and moved north in the course of the following year.
  • The pandemic, though striking deeply into all segments of the population, struck at the poor with their worse diets more than the rich, and people in the countryside more than in towns.
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Where did the first Jews settle? How were they received?

  • The first Jews in the region seem to have settled mostly in the river towns of the eastern Netherlands such as Maastricht in the course of the thirteenth century.
  • Frequently condemned as the killers of Christ, the Jews were easily regarded with suspicion; in 1309 over 100 of them were reportedly killed by a mob near Born in Limburg as they sought protection from the local lord in his castle.

What inhibited Jews from settlement in the Netherlands?

  • In 1349 the need to identify and punish scapegoats during the Black Death led to the extinction of many of these communities, especially in Brabant. Their members were robbed of their property, imprisoned or expelled; hundreds were killed.
  • For a generation this inhibited further Jewish settlement in the Netherlands.

What effects did the Black Death have?

  • The Black Death had a myriad of negative effects; some institutions, for example, simply broke down because of the lack of people to run them.
  • In the long run, though, the plague also brought about positive benefits, and arguably encouraged the tendency toward capital and property accumulation that had already begun. 

How did more expensive labor and declining agricultural output cause economic growth?

  • Although declining agricultural output made grain more expensive, labor shortages, caused by the plague, often had the effect of increasing real wages. As the standard of living rose, so did the demand for luxury goods, stimulating trade.
  • More expensive labor in turn prompted new cost-cutting measures, such as larger ships that improved profit margins, and larger, more efficient farms that made use of contract labor.
  • This also reduced the share of people working in agriculture, and the relatively small percentage of people working in this sector became a lasting characteristic of the region.

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