World History up to 1500: Climate Change and Plague in the Fourteenth Century Q&A

Question: Why did the Yuan leaders select China as the center of their empire?
Answer: China had a well-established bureaucratic structure that made centralized government effective. It was also a prosperous country as a result of its location at the terminus of the Silk Roads and high level of agricultural development. It had a long-established history of regional leadership.
 

Question: What events weakened the power of the papacy in western Europe in the fourteenth century?
Answer: During the Avignon papacy, the pope lived in the French town of Avignon instead of in Rome, which effectively gave the king of France control over papal actions. During the Great Western Schism, which began in 1378, three men simultaneously claimed the right to the papacy.
 

Question: What are some key differences between fourteenth-century and modern travel patterns?
Answer: Due to the cost and difficulty of travel, most people in the fourteenth century took one-way trips, with the exception of merchants and those making religious pilgrimages. The cost of travel was far beyond the reach of the vast majority of people in the fourteenth century. The modes of transportation were limited to horses, camels, carts, ships, and walking.

Question: What role did trade and commercial networks play in the spread of the bubonic plague?
Answer: The Silk Roads enabled the rats that carried fleas harboring plague bacteria to travel simultaneously to many different regions. Other trade routes carried the plague down the Nile valley. European ships brought the plague from ports like Caffa to others in Italy and France, from which the disease spread to the rest of Europe.

Question: What conditions made populations more vulnerable to infectious disease?
Answer: Malnutrition and stress caused by famines and climate change rendered people’s immune systems vulnerable to opportunistic infections like the bubonic plague. The growth in population and the decrease in wages in the years preceding the arrival of the plague in Europe also contributed to malnourishment. Finally, the increasing spread of long-distance travel—whether by conquering armies, merchants carrying goods, or refugees desperate to escape famine—also contributed to the spread of contagion.

Question: How did the calamities of the fourteenth century affect religious life in Afro-Eurasia?
Answer: In Christian Europe, uncertainties about the medieval church’s leadership after the Avignon papacy and the privations of the Black Death laid the foundations for the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Islamic traditions in much of North Africa and central Asia increasingly solidified into institutional forms that helped develop a sense of common identity across a broad territory.