A Time of 'Incredible Violence' Historian Gives Readers Glimpse of Medieval Life

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Yes, I've seen similar things with regard to happenings in medieval Japan

The high school-like scheming among the court ladies, the pointless wars of the samurai. When you read the literature of the period, you realize that the court ladies and the emperor and empress are at most in their early twenties (because emperors were forced to abdicate after fathering a couple of sons who could then be controlled by their maternal grandfathers) and that many of the samurai are between 14 and 18.

Of course, not everyone died young. The oldest people lived as long as our oldest people. What kept life expectancy low were infectious diseases, injuries that couldn't be healed with existing techniques, and childbirth. Those three things killed a lot of young people in a way that doesn't happen in industrialized countries today. If you got cancer, all you could do was to start planning your funeral. If you had a heart attack, you died.

If you could survive into middle age, you had a good chance of living to be quite old, because you were obviously tough and resilient. My great-grandmother was one of the five out of sixteen of her parents' children who lived to adulthood, and she and her youngest brother both lived well into their eighties. There's no way of how long her other surviving siblings might have lived, because they stayed in Germany and were killed during World War II when they would have been in their fifties and sixties.