The 14th century killed tens of millions and still launched new empires
Between 1301 and 1400, plague, famine, war and conquest are estimated to have taken more than 45 million lives across Europe and the Mongol world. Yet the same hundred years saw Tenochtitlan founded, the Mali Empire at its richest, and the first stirrings of the Italian Renaissance and the Ottoman state.
Europe was hit from every side. A cooling phase that some experts date from about 1300, the start of the Little Ice Age, shortened growing seasons and cut harvests; the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317 killed millions. Then, between 1347 and 1351, the Black Death carried off about a third of Europeans, roughly 25 million people. When a strong earthquake struck northern Italy in 1348, many contemporaries read it, alongside plague and famine, as a sign of the Apocalypse.
Politics was just as turbulent. The popes left Italy for Avignon from 1309 to 1377. In 1337 Edward III of England claimed the French crown, opening the Hundred Years' War, and his victory at Crecy in 1346 showed the power of the longbow. The century is remembered as the height of chivalry and as the point where England and France began forming strongly separate identities.
Further east, Timur built the third largest empire ever assembled by one conqueror; scholars estimate his campaigns killed some 17 million people, around 5 percent of the world's population, even as a cultural flowering took hold at his court. Mongol power receded: the court was driven from China back to Mongolia and the Ilkhanate in Persia collapsed. In India, the Vijayanagara Empire was founded in 1336, and the Bengal Sultanate broke away from Delhi to become a trading power Europeans described as the richest country to deal with.
Elsewhere the story was one of growth. West Africa prospered, and Mali, a vast gold producer, peaked under Mansa Musa, possibly the wealthiest person who ever lived. In the Americas the Mexica founded Tenochtitlan in 1325, while the mound city of Cahokia was abandoned. In Southeast Asia, Majapahit entered a golden age under Hayam Wuruk from 1350.
Source: 14th century
