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Christianity would not have suffered so much.
    â€”Henry, Lord Bolingbroke (1678-1751) 1
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    P eople can’t decide when the Middle Ages ended. Personally, I think we’re still in them. After all, if this is the last age, then any quibbles about eras within it are rather pointless. However, there was one event of the middle of the fourteenth century that changed Europe and the Near East from being basically optimistic about the future to being frightened of it. The Apocalypse was no longer a distant event that one could laugh at in plays and stories. It walked the streets. Representations of the monsters no longer came from visions or nightmares but one’s own village.
    The plague had come.
    In the early twenty-first century, the fear of global pandemics returned with the advent of AIDS, followed by avian and swine flus, with a shadowy worry about Ebola. But, while the threat is there, the pandemic hasn’t actually happened yet. The response in Europe to the Black Death is a warning of how we might react.
    It is not certain that the plague that hit Europe in the 1340s was bubonic plague, as has long been assumed. But that isn’t important. People died between sunrise and sunset, along with their families, friends, and whole towns. It didn’t spare people who were rich or pious or kind. No one was certain how it was transmitted or what to do to prevent catching it.
    In their search for explanations of this disaster, it was natural to think that this disease was the first sign of the end that had been prophesied and ignored for centuries. In the twenty years after the plague, any number of supposedly ancient prophecies circulated, all showing that the plague was a harbinger of the coming of the Antichrist and the time of tribulation. 2
    I would argue that this was the end of the optimistic Middle Ages and the beginning of an age of uncertainty. While the economic recovery of Europe didn’t take that long, the emotional recovery never began. The fifteenth century saw much more questioning of the order of society, especially the validity of religious authority. In the past, most heretical movements, with the exception of the Cathars, who established their own church, were intended to reform the papacy, not destroy it. After the plague, the Catholic Church split into squabbling nationalistic factions, which each elected and followed their own pope. This Great Schism lasted from 1378 to 1415. Even after the matter had been settled and there was one agreed upon pope, the papacy had lost a lot of prestige.
    Added to the undermining of papal authority was the lessening of importance of the warrior class. Gunpowder had been introduced into Europe, and now it wasn’t necessary to spend years developing the skill to fight with sword and lance. Even though most early cannons had a good chance of blowing up as they fired, any idiot could load one and set it off to bring down a castle wall.
    Finally, the latter half of the fifteenth century, the Age of Exploration, resulted not only in the discovery of new ways to get to the wealth of India and China but in shocking revelations about the world itself. Each succeeding change in a worldview that had worked for five hundred years caused more people to wonder if this upheaval was what the Bible meant when it warned of a coming Armageddon.
    Then the sixteenth century rearranged the face of Europe. There was no longer one unified Christendom in which the secular rulers used the pope as a universal arbiter. Of course, that only ever existed in theory, but it was a nice, tidy theory that helped organize society and let people get on with day-to-day activities. Now the principalities were divided and subdivided, some staying in allegiance to the papacy, others following one or another of the new splinter groups, each of which claimed to be the only true, apostolic Christians. To make things worse, some cities had been taken over by the groups