The reason for the plague was disastrous health and cleanliness standards.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Renaissance
it was not the first in history:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_centur...
There's a certain 'critical mass' of people and thinkers, as well as decent enough communications (roads, letters) to allow for collaboration, needed to achieve a flowering/growth of knowledge, and that was cut off by (amongst other things) the Black Death:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_late_Middle_Ages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libro_de_los_juegos
This would blow out lots of Anglo-Saxon minds with a very bad depiction of Middle Ages compared to the modern era from Newton. But, IRL, it was all about a gradual modernization of thinking.
People didn't just became modern with the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution. It happened tons of stuff in between.
There are very few X caused Y statements one can make about historical events in good faith or with good cause.
The punchline of that hypothetical was that the hail and the locusts lead to wet grain being pulled into storehouses. A fungus that locusts can carry that is poisonous mouldered in the storehouses. The cultural tradition of giving the firstborn son a double helping may have reached fatal levels of exposure to the toxin, killing enough children to become a myth.
stevenjgarner•1mo ago
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02964-0
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46151324