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The Mortality changed society and power ‘like a pristine repeated creation’, wrote Ibn Khaldun, ‘a world brought into existence anew’. Boccaccio noticed the survivors’ exhilaration in ‘the looser morals of the women who survived’. Women became more independent and more pleasure-seeking, which Boccaccio celebrated with the first biographical work on the lives of 106 women, many of them mythical: De mulieribus claris – ‘Of Famous Women’. Even though deaths were lower among the rich who lived more spaciously and moved residence more easily, the plague reduced their control, creating a shortage of manpower that raised the status of ordinary people. The wool-processing workshops of Italy and Flanders, England and France were short of workers. The rise in wages and the fall in inequality led to higher spending power which doubled per capita investment, leading in turn to higher production in textiles and other consumer goods. Fewer mouths to feed meant better diets. Female wages – once half those of men – were now the same. Workers formed guilds. The new confidence felt by ordinary people empowered them to launch a spate of peasant revolts. The shortage of labour necessitated new sources of power – hydraulics were harnessed to drive watermills and smelting furnaces – and new unpaid workers were obtained from a new source altogether: African slavery. Demand for silk, sugar, spices and slaves inspired European men, bound by a new esprit de corps, to voyage abroad, to destroy their rivals, in the east and in Europe itself, so that they could supply these appetites. The competition intensified improvements in firearms, cannon, gunpowder and galleons. The paradox of the Great Mortality was not only that it elevated the respect for humanity, it also degraded it; it not only decimated Europe, it became a factor in Europe’s rise.

And of course pandemics change families: ever since Pope Gregory I at the end of the sixth century, the Church had tried to impose its own peculiar anti-kinship marriage policy. Now the Mortality helped it. Young workers, including women, worked for longer and saved more before they married later at around twenty, so that they could afford to live in their own homes, little production units, where they made homespun cloth to sell. In grander families, this concentrated the ownership of land in the eldest legitimate sons. The institution of the nuclear family thrived peculiarly in Europe.

No one expected kings and queens to solve the crisis. While in modern times pandemics empowered governments, then, initially, ‘It overwhelmed the dynasties at the time of their senility,’ wrote Ibn Khaldun, ‘and weakened their authority.’ The Mortality killed rulers from Semyon, grand prince of Moscow, to the khans of Asia.

In France, where the kings had seized most of the territories inherited by the English monarchs, half the population perished; order broke down. Insular England held together better: at seventeen, Edward III – one of the few English kings who might deserve the epithet ‘Great’ – had seized power from his mother and her lover in a nocturnal coup that he led personally with a posse of friends. Now he was in the middle of a successful but expensive campaign to seize the French throne, to which he had an excellent claim. Just before the Mortality hit, he defeated the French at Crécy, then captured Calais, threatening to swallow all of France aided by a network of European alliances.

As the plague struck, in 1348, he was dispatching his fourteen-year-old daughter Princess Joan to marry Prince Pedro of Castile, son of Alfonso XI the Avenger. When she landed at Bordeaux, however, the Mortality killed her and most of her retinue. While her body still lay in the castle, the plague raced through the port, killing so many that the mayor burned it down, cremating the body too. ‘See, with what intense bitterness of heart we have to tell you this,’ wrote Edward to Alfonso, ‘the Destructive Death (who seizes young and old alike, sparing no one and reducing rich and poor to the same level) has lamentably snatched from both of us our dearest daughter.’^* As the Destructive Death killed a third of the English population, pushing up wages, Edward tried to limit wages for labourers. Yet England recovered so fast that by 1356 he was again fielding a small army of 6,000 to attack France. At Poitiers, his son the Black Prince routed the French and captured their king, who died in British captivity.