Books: The Fourth Horseman

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Still, a patient render can find what he needs to know from Ziegler. He tells the grisly stories—how the Tartars besieged a Crimean port, for instance, catapulating the corpses of their own plague-stricken comrades over the city walls to infect the defenders. But he also writes clearly of dry demography. A deadly series of floods and bad harvests had left much of Europe's population ill nourished and more susceptible to plague. And he is able enough in suggesting some of the plague's historic results. It permanently helped weaken the authority of the Catholic Church in a way important to the Reformation: priests had proved unable to protect themselves or their people from what was widely assumed to be God's vengeance. By lowering the value of land —because there were few workers left to till it—and raising the price of labor, the death toll also helped bring to an end the old system of feudal villenage.