[chajin]

What had been keeping the labor market in check throughout the European Middle Ages were the Crusades. To oversimplify the picture, every generation or so starting around 1095, perhaps 100,000 Crusaders were sent off to the Holy Land, where most of them either died or stayed (and then died), allowing feudal Europe to perpetuate itself. After the Black Death, Europe is never again overpopulated, except in one demographic: by the 1600s, there were too many nobility to allow them all to be landed gentry, which is why so many of them migrate to the Americas.

[jjotto]

Crusades. Hundred Years War. The Catholic Church was a real paragon in the 14th century. A miracle Islam didn’t take over all of Europe then.