¶ … intellectual and mathematical complexities, as well as merchantry innovations and other technical changes is what transitioned the world in the 1300s from the actual Middle Ages to what we have come to recognize as particularities of modernity. Politically, the state existed as a merging of ideas spanning from late medieval concepts but it did however possess characteristics of a modern state. Let us bear in mind first and foremost that boundaries differed vastly in the fourteenth century and, separated from our vision of a state, there existed territorial states which were not always under the emperor's sovereignty. Thus, refusal to acknowledge the universality of the emperor and the preponderant desire to treat independent kingdoms relatively similar to an actual empire takes us further away from medieval thinking and closer to a modern state concept. In the fourteenth century, civilian settlements were mostly concentrated in rural areas and depended on agriculture to support themselves. However, production suffered due...

Sanitation was already poor by the time the Black Plague stroke in 1347/1348, further nourishing the nidus of infection and clearly underlying the life conditions of people in the fourteenth century and societies' minimum capacity to meet such challenges. Peasants, who represented the majority of the population in the Middle Ages, were most affected by these conditions and indeed, their well being depended each year on the outcome of crops, whether or not these failed. Their regular diet consisted of merely basic nutrient and not so nutrient elements with fruits being expensive and some vegetables very rare, whereas meat was preponderantly non-existent. Bearing these in mind, clearly, the living conditions were more medieval than modern, knowing that modernity marked the span to urbanization and capitalism which, in late medieval times, these merely represented concepts. However, the gradual increase in wealth of towns…