Whether something like that happened in (say) Ethiopia too, will I guess be even harder to figure out than whether they had the plague at all.
Indeed, this is something I always found extremely fascinating. The plague destroyed the very rigid social and economic structures of medieval Europe. Simply put, they had to take anyone as a goldsmith's apprentice, even some poor farmer's kid, because everyone else was dead. I am quite sure it is no coincidence that the Renaissance appeared 1-2 generations after the black death, and always held the secret opinion that European culture was basically born in the fire that was the black death epidemic.
> The strange thing is that Europe recovered quite fast.
Easy answer: the plague was much, much, much more devastating in Ethiopia than in Europe, leaving no one behind to recover from anything, or to tell the harrowing story.
I disagree. There must have been some people left behind (assuming such a plague happened) because there are still people in Ethiopia and at least some of the culture from then still exists (I’m thinking of the Ethiopian church but I expect there is plenty more). If there were no people left then such things would have died out. Therefore I think we should conclude that either some people were able to recover (or the plague was localised to some regions which were completely destroyed whereas others survived). I think in either case one would still expect this plague to be known about and I would certainly expect such a large event to leave at least some clues behind in eg oral traditions or written records.
Secondly this answer is assuming that the question is reasonable (ie that Ethiopia recovered more slowly than Europe). I’m not sure that there is much evidence either way about it. There are two parts to this: one is recovering back to a similar state as before the plague, and another is recovering to the same level as each other. It is slightly unclear to me which the question means but I suppose I would guess the first.
In my opinion, any difference in recovery is going to be much more related to the differences of geography (and maybe politics) than differences of devastation. One caveat would be that maybe social structures could cause the plague to be more devastating in one place than another but I’m not sure I buy it. I expect most medieval social structures would soon be reacting quite similarly to a plague of such proportions.
I've heard that hypothesis from both popular and scholarly sources before. Pretty sure it's a broadly held theory.
The opposite - Black Death had delayed the Renaissance for circa 2-3 generations. It was already happening and then the plague came and the Renaisance have played out later in different times and with different people and ideas.
But economically, for sure it was huge... we can actually trace several such swings in pre-industrial England, plotting population against per-capita income (or calories!) and it walks back & forth along the same curve a few times over the centuries.
Mind you I’m not sure how much one can scale giving birth and raising children, perhaps the child mortality rate declined?
Failing that, run away to another region to work for higher rates as a labourer and hope your liege lord doesn't find you.
Little wonder that there were new laws trying to stop mere serfs profiting from this.
I suspect this has to do with Europe's water-dominated geography. Traveling between Ethiopia and Mali -- two of the largest sub-Saharan "countries" of antiquity -- requires taking a caravan through the desert and/or jungle. But going from England to Poland is a boat ride. So reestablishing communication between distant societies probably happened much faster in Europe, which supported knowledge-sharing and thus scientific progress.
That things did not completely fall apart when the plague hit may be due to having relatively strong institutions, but again I'd argue that what mattered here was at the parish level, not Rome.
Ethiopia was also quite a centralised state in medieval times (with a uniting church language playing a role like Latin's). But we don't actually know whether it suffered a larger or smaller plague at that time, it seems. We do know that it did not suffer collapse on the scale of pre-Colombian American civilisations, that we would certainly know about already.
Some parts even non-Christian.