Second Serfdom

The Second Serfdom was the renewed and intensified subjection of Eastern European peasants to landlords after the Black Death. It developed as Western Europe’s demand for eastern agricultural goods grew: landlords used their greater control over land and weaker rural populations to compel more labor, while western workers moved toward freedom from feudal dues. By 1600 the two regions, once marked by only modest institutional differences, had followed sharply divergent paths.

Origins in the Black Death

The Black Death disrupted labor relations across Europe. The plague struck Eastern Europe with a demographic impact comparable to that in England and Western Europe, leaving labor scarce and creating pressure for higher wages and greater freedom. In England, workers had enough power to resist landlords’ efforts to preserve an extractive labor market. Eastern Europe faced the same tension, but landlords there were better placed to counter it: they were more organized, held larger and more consolidated estates, and operated in a countryside where towns were weaker and peasants less organized. The imbalance enabled landlords to restrict freedoms rather than concede them.

The plague therefore did not dictate a single European outcome. It upset an existing balance, and local differences shaped who could make use of the resulting scarcity. Eastern landlords began taking over large tracts of land and expanding holdings that were already larger than those in Western Europe. The episode illustrates how a major disruption could open the way to greater inclusion in one setting but strengthen extraction in another.

Grain demand and expanding control

The divergence sharpened after 1500, when Western Europe’s demand for grain and livestock produced in the East increased. Eighty percent of Amsterdam’s rye imports came from the Elbe, Vistula, and Oder river valleys; soon, half of the Netherlands’ booming trade was with Eastern Europe. That expanding market did not bring eastern peasants the freedoms associated with a more inclusive labor market. Instead, landlords tightened their command over the workforce to increase agricultural supply and capture more of its returns.

The Second Serfdom was distinct from, and more intense than, the form of serfdom that had existed in the early Middle Ages. Landlords raised taxes on tenants’ own plots and took half of their gross output. Commercial expansion thus connected eastern agriculture more closely to western markets while strengthening coercive labor relations at the point of production: the goods moved through a growing market, but the people who produced them were not free participants in it.

Regional forms of forced labor

The changing obligations can be traced in specific places. In Korczyn, Poland, work for the lord was paid in 1533; by 1600, nearly half had become unpaid forced labor. In Mecklenburg, workers owed only a few days of unpaid service each year in 1500. By 1550 the obligation had become one day a week, and by 1600 it had risen to three days a week. Their children, too, had to work for the lord without pay for several years.

Hungary followed a similarly restrictive course. In 1514 landlords took complete control of the land and legislated one day of unpaid labor each week for every worker. The weekly obligation rose to two days by 1550 and three days by the end of the century. By then, people subject to such rules made up 90 percent of the rural population. These examples show the Second Serfdom not as a uniform rule applied identically everywhere, but as a broad regional movement toward heavier, legally reinforced demands on peasant labor.

A divided European market

By 1600, Western and Eastern Europe had become worlds apart institutionally. In the West, workers had escaped feudal dues, fines, and regulations and were becoming an important part of a booming market economy. In the East, peasants also produced for that market, but as coerced serfs growing the food and other agricultural goods demanded in the West. Market participation did not itself guarantee inclusive institutions: the same commercial connections that increased demand could give landlords greater incentive and means to extract labor.

The divergence began from differences that had once appeared small. Eastern landlords were somewhat better organized and possessed somewhat greater rights and more consolidated holdings; eastern towns were smaller and weaker, and peasants less organized. The book emphasizes that these modest contrasts became consequential when the Black Death unsettled the feudal order. Its account, drawing on scholarship on the distribution of political power and the Second Serfdom, presents the regional outcome as an interaction between demographic disruption, existing institutional differences, and later commercial demand—not as an inevitable consequence of the plague alone.

Historical significance

The Second Serfdom became a durable part of the larger divergence between Eastern and Western Europe. The Habsburg domains included lands where serfdom prevailed, and Hungary and Poland stood at the heart of this eastern system. The persistence of such labor relations formed part of a political economy in which landlords retained extensive power over rural workers, while absolutist governments could preserve a narrow distribution of authority.

As a case in the book’s account of critical junctures, the Second Serfdom demonstrates the double edge of crisis. The Black Death created an opening in which labor scarcity might have supported greater freedom; in Eastern Europe, however, landlords’ stronger position helped turn that opening into deeper coercion. The outcome was an expanding European market with sharply unequal terms: western workers increasingly entered it as free laborers, while eastern serfs produced many of its agricultural goods under obligations that restricted their freedom and economic opportunity.