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 Its gruesome symptoms and deadliness have fixed the Black Death in popular imagination; moreover, uncovering the disease's cultural, social, and economic impact has engaged generations of scholars. Despite growing understanding of the Black Death's effects, definitive assessment of its role as historical watershed remains a work in progress.  Depopulation and shortage of labor hastened changes already inherent in the rural economy; the substitution of wages for labor services was accelerated, and social stratification became less rigid. Psychological morbidity affected the arts; in religion, the lack of educated personnel among the clergy gravely reduced the intellectual vigor of the church. So much death could not help but tear economic and social structures apart. Lack of peasants and laborers sent wages soaring, and the value of land plummeted. For the first time in history the scales tipped against wealthy landlords as peasants and serfs gained more bargaining power. Without architects, masons and artisans, great cathedrals and castles remained unfinished for hundreds of years. Governments, lacking officials, floundered in their attempts to create order out of chaos. The initial 14th century European event was called the "Great Mortality" by contemporary writers, and with later outbreaks, became known as the Black Death. The name comes from a symptom of the disease, called acral necrosis, in which sufferers' skin would blacken due to sub dermal hemorrhages. Historical records attribute the Black Death to an outbreak of bubonic plague, an epidemic of the bacterium Yersinia pestis spread by fleas with the help of animals like the black rat. The result of the plague was not just a massive decline in population. It irrevocably changed Europe's social and economic structure and was a disastrous blow to Europe's predominant organized religion, the Roman Catholic Church. It caused widespread persecutions of minorities like Jews and lepers, and created a general morbid mood, which influenced people to live for the moment, unsure of their daily survival.