La storia del venerdì: the plague and the economic crisis

It's the XIV century (from 1301 to 1400): the demographic growth has made hard to feed everybody, due to a lack of technological development in agriculture; European people's diet gets less varied, famines spread, denutrition comes back e people starve in the street like it didn't happen since centuries; the war becomes at low intensity, fought by mercenary groups that exploit friends' territories and make a tabula rasa of enemies'.

1347: on a Genoese mercantile, comes from Asia a new disease that nobody is capable to cure. It's the Black Death, the plague, which by 1350 exterminates half of the European population. Due to the permanent condition of war and denutrition, the plague becomes endemic in Europe for roughly a century. In London, it will last until the Great Fire of 1666. So, an economic crisis made worse by the demographic crisis. But also is crisis time, someone can take advantage. Those people are the administrators of the crisis themselves: public officials, notaries, scribes and treasurers who manage the tax collection and war payments. They move huge amounts of money and much of them remain in their hands. When the crisis is over, they realize that they have become incredibly rich, and many of them use that money to buy a peerage.

The contemporary European aristocracy descends from those officials who took advantage of war's misery and famine to make themselves rich.