EPISODE · May 31, 2026 · 19 MIN
1347: What the Plague Built — Act 1
from Pulse: Origins
The Black Death did not create the pressure that broke medieval Europe — it revealed pressure that had been building for three centuries inside a social order built on surplus labor. The cities that organized Jewish massacres in 1348 to 1350, researchers found, showed measurably higher Nazi Party vote shares in 1928 and higher deportation rates after 1933, even where the Jewish community had been absent for six hundred years. Roman and Austin trace the load-bearing assumptions of feudal society from the heavy plow to the Statute of Laborers, and the question the episode leaves open is which of those lines are still holding. 0:21 — the material cause of feudal hierarchy, agricultural technology circa 1000 CE 4:22 — the Church's spiritual economy and why it required chronic suffering 5:36 — Genoese ships at Messina, the spread mathematics of the plague 6:32 — Strasbourg, administrative violence, and the Voigtländer and Voth finding 13:13 — canon law, debt cancellation, and the economic function of the massacre 14:34 — the Statute of Laborers and the wage revolution that followed New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN singularitypulse.news
What this episode covers
The Black Death did not create the pressure that broke medieval Europe — it revealed pressure that had been building for three centuries inside a social order built on surplus labor. The cities that organized Jewish massacres in 1348 to 1350, researchers found, showed measurably higher Nazi Party vote shares in 1928 and higher deportation rates after 1933, even where the Jewish community had been absent for six hundred years. Roman and Austin trace the load-bearing assumptions of feudal society from the heavy plow to the Statute of Laborers, and the question the episode leaves open is which of those lines are still holding. 0:21 — the material cause of feudal hierarchy, agricultural technology circa 1000 CE 4:22 — the Church's spiritual economy and why it required chronic suffering 5:36 — Genoese ships at Messina, the spread mathematics of the plague 6:32 — Strasbourg, administrative violence, and the Voigtländer and Voth finding 13:13 — canon law, debt cancellation, and the economic function of the massacre 14:34 — the Statute of Laborers and the wage revolution that followed New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN singularitypulse.news
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1347: What the Plague Built — Act 1
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