Originally, the noble were the only rich and therefore, arguably, successful class within the feudal system. However, as the system began to fall apart, wealth became less about who-you-are and more about what-you-do. The rise of the tradesmen was slow. After being ravaged by the Black Death, villagers found that they had surplus of items. So, they decided to sell their products in small, weekly local markets. This market eventually got bigger, as other tradesmen began to join in – however, a small city wasn’t entirely profitable. So, some tradesmen began to pack their things up in order to wander from city to city, selling their goods. Eventually, the number of tradesmen numbered so high that guilds began growing. Soon, tradesmen and manufacturing went from a small disorganized group of sellers to a highly organized market system.
After the Black Death, the average European found that his prosperity increased by a large percent margin. Because of the quick fall of competition, the tradesmen found that they had more power in what they did. They took advantage of the fact that they were a strong and budding class – they began to inject pieces of themselves into commissioned art. This demographic – tradesmen who began working after the Black Death – build numbers of projects for for churches and royals alike. they began to sculpt their masterpiece, they sculpted something important to them: the concept of death. After having dealt with the Black Death, which killed an estimated 1/3 of the population, a theme began to emerge in many pieces of medieval art: demise. This was reflected even in pieces of church art. Paintings like “The Man of Sorrow” depicted Jesus dying, bringing a heavy focus to his suffering. Paintings like “Dance of Death” and “Memento mori” (which translates to “remember you will die”) point out the shortness of human life, and how inevitable death seems to be.
The tradesmen who grew up surrounded by constant death and suffering thus reflected this in their artistic work. Their art, which became a personal reflection of their inner turmoil, shows the general mindset of their generation – intense fear and curiosity about death after the tragedy that was the Black Death. However, it also reflects a great prosperity that arrived from less competition – the sole reason the tradesmen class was able to bud and sprout so quickly and so efficiently.
In your synthesis you make an interesting point, that the growth of tradesmen came from the lack of competition. When our group did our research we found, as you did, the importance of the black death in the development of Medieval trade. But we also found that one of the reasons that the trading markets became so successful was because they were able to find new goods, like silk, from the Crusades. In that way you could make the argument that more competition over the trade routes lead to a growth of the trade-class. However when the trade guilds did become powerful they did limit competition because if someone wanted to be in a certain trade they had to be in the guild. This validates that the lack of competition lead to the redistribution of wealth and power that would lead to the Renaissance.
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