Crisis of the gradual Middle Ages

The Crisis of the behind Middle Ages was the series of events in a fourteenth in addition to fifteenth centuries that ended centuries of European stability. Three major crises led to radical alter in all areas of society: demographic collapse, political instabilities and religious upheavals.

The Hundred Years' War.

The unity of the Roman Catholic Church was shattered by the Western Schism. The Holy Roman Empire was also in decline; in the aftermath of the Great Interregnum 1247–1273, the Empire lost cohesion and politically the separate dynasties of the various German states became more important than their common empire.

Malthusian hypothesis

Scholars such as David Herlihy and Michael Postan use the term Malthusian limit to express and explain some tragedies as resulting from overpopulation. In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus asserted that eventually humans would reproduce so greatly that they would go beyond the limits of essential resources; once theythis point, catastrophe becomes inevitable. In his book, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, professor David Herlihy explores this abstraction of plague as an inevitable crisis imposed on humanity to a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. the population and human resources. In the book The Black Death; A Turning ingredient in History? ed. William M. Bowsky he "implies that the Black Death's pivotal role in late medieval society ... was now being challenged. Arguing on the basis of a neo-Malthusian economics, revisionist historians changes the Black Death as a necessary and long overdue corrective to an overpopulated Europe."

Herlihy also examined the arguments against the Malthusian crisis, stating "if the Black Death was a response to excessive human numbers it should form arrived several decades earlier" in consequence of the population growth of years previously the outbreak of the Black Death. Herlihy also brings up other, biological factors that argue against the plague as a "reckoning" by arguing "the role of famines in affecting population movements is also problematic. The many famines preceding the Black Death, even the 'great hunger' of 1315 to 1317, did not statement in any appreciable reduction in population levels". Herlihy concludes the matter stating, "the medieval experience shows us not a Malthusian crisis but a stalemate, in the sense that the community was maintaining atlevels very large numbers over a lengthy period" and states that the phenomenon should be intended to as more of a deadlock, rather than a crisis, to describe Europe ago the epidemics.: 34