What If the Black Death Never Reached Europe?

The Reformation, when it came in the following century, arrived into a church that had never been forced to confront its own mortality in the brutal, personal way a losing third of its clergy to plague had done elsewhere. Parish priests in this timeline were, on average, older, more entrenched, and more numerous relative to their congregations — a clergy class that had never experienced the labor-market leverage of being suddenly, catastrophically scarce.

Martin Luther still nailed his theses to the door at Wittenberg in 1517, driven by theological conviction that owed nothing to demographic accident. But the religious and political fracturing that followed moved through a society with a notably different texture: more rigid, more hierarchical, slower to absorb the shock, because the hierarchy itself had never been forced to bend once already and discover that it could survive the bending.

A reformist pamphleteer in Strasbourg, writing in 1525, complained bitterly in a letter that survives in a university archive that "the old men cling to their benefices like men who have never once been reminded how quickly a church can empty." He did not know, writing it, how literally true that sentence was — nor how different his own continent might have looked, just a few generations back, if a harbor official in Sicily had made a different decision on a single October morning.