People dying of "poor health" way too young

[Mithradates]

This is my promising, Midas-touched heir, whom I managed to marry to a Sardinian princess so I could get a claim on Sardinia and Corsica (something I've been wanting for a long time but was never able to achieve until now), dropping dead randomly of "poor health" at the ripe old age of 17.

Is this even supposed to happen? I know it happens to random lowborn courtiers all the time (and it's annoying then too), but it isn't supposed to happen to my son and heir. I've been getting stuff like this all the time lately. Earlier today another, more distant member of my dynasty, whom I had been planning to use as a beneficiary in a crusade, randomly dropped dead in his 20s of "poor health". I also received a randomly generated lowborn courtier with spectacularly high learning, whom I promptly made into my court chaplain and physician, after which he proceeded to drop dead of "poor health" after just a few years, in his 30s.

It's really driving me nuts. It's getting to where I can't rely on any characters being around long enough to be of use. But my heir? Really? If it was cancer or some other disease, fine, $%^& happens. But "poor health"? On a 17-year-old? Come on. And my character is a woman who's just about at menopause and has no other sons, only a daughter, so I hope something like this isn't about to happen to her too.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

mneh. in 1417 a 17 year old would have been in the middle of his expected lifespan. i'd say PDS have tried not to be too realistic about life expectancy so there are not too many 'game overs' for this reason

 

[DmUa]

mneh. in 1417 a 17 year old would have been in the middle of his expected lifespan. i'd say PDS have tried not to be too realistic about life expectancy so there are no too many 'game overs' for this reason

- short medieval lifespans are a myth caused by some peoples inability to understand statistical data.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

- short medieval lifespans are a myth caused by some peoples inability to understand statistical data.

shorter medieval lifespans are not a myth

 

[Mithradates]

mneh. in 1417 a 17 year old would have been in the middle of his expected lifespan. i'd say PDS have tried not to be too realistic about life expectancy so there are no too many 'game overs' for this reason

People in the Middle Ages didn't just randomly die as teenagers. A large part of why the life expectancy was shorter than today was because of the very high infant mortality rate. People did also die somewhat younger than today, once they got into their 50s and 60s and began experiencing all the little health problems that are a nuisance today but could have become more serious back then, and there was a higher chance of people of any age dying of an infection or virus or injury with the primitive medical care available at the time, but that doesn't mean people would just randomly drop in their teens and 20s for no apparent reason. People didn't naturally die younger. They died a little younger because it was a less healthy world with less advanced medical care, but a 17-year-old in the 11th century was no more likely to just randomly die of "natural causes" than a 17-year-old in the 21st century.

If my heir got food poisoning or camp fever or something, I wouldn't complain because that could happen. The character's brother died of rabies as a child. It sucked but I shrugged it off because it happens. But a 17-year-old just dying for no apparent reason, that bugs me.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

But a 17-year-old just dying for no apparent reason, that bugs me.

fair enough. it's no doubt a function of your poor late heir's health score that he was given at birth. i've sometimes thought that these hidden variables (ike remaining food when you've 'shut the gates', or health) should be visible to the player

 

[DmUa]

shorter medieval lifespans are not a myth

- yes it is a myth. Human biology didnt changed since medieval. Medicine improved and overall life become much less violent, but human organism stayed the same. Short lifespans is one of most idiotic and persistent myths about medieval.

 

[Mithradates]

A big part of why this is annoying me is because I feel like a feature of the game isn't working right. I admit, the courtier culling has some merit; courts did used to get way too full. I remember when I was first playing CK2 I'd sometimes have upwards of a hundred randos in my court. But when random courtiers started dying of "poor health", important characters started doing it too. We've been assured many times that courtier culling only happens to random lowborns who aren't connected to any other character, don't hold any office, etc. But I have way too many people in my games dying prematurely for no reason. Whenever I would generate a random noble, priest or debutante, I'd have to rush to do whatever I planned to do with them because often within literal seconds that character would just die. I'd generate a noble and then try to arrange a marriage for them before giving them a county (so they don't end up marrying into an already-existing dynasty right away and potentially creating inheritance issues, have them start from scratch instead), and the character would die before I even got an answer on the marriage request.

Now it's happening to my heir. I wouldn't complain if he had "weak" or "frail" or something like that, because then it would be plausible. But he had no visible health issues, no reason why this should happen. And there goes my chance of getting Sardinia anytime soon.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

Medicine improved and overall life become much less violent

so don't you think this had the effect of increasing life expectancy?

 

[Vokasak]

so don't you think this had the effect of increasing life expectancy?

Everyone knows that improvements in medicine have nothing to do with whether or not people die of poor health

 

[mrinku]

It's correct that the low average lifespan of medieval people was mostly due to the high child mortality rate dragging the average down, and lots of people lived to ripe old ages...

HOWEVER

People definitely dropped dead from all sorts of issues at all ages. The chance of a 17 year old without health maluses just dying like this is quite low in the game. But it's not unrealistic. Here's the fates of Edward I of England's kids:

(1) Stillborn daughter; (2) Katherine, died about 6mo; (3) Joanna, died about 9mo; (4) John, died 5yo; (5) Henry, died 6yo; (6) Eleanor, died 29yo; (7) Juliana, died about 4mo; (8) Joan, died 35yo; (9) Alphonso, died 11yo; (10) Margaret, died 58yo; (11) Berengaria, died about 18mo; (12) Daughter, died about 1mo; (13) Mary, died 53yo; (14) Possible son, died as infant; (15) Elizabeth, died 28yo; (16) Edward, died 43yo; (17) Thomas, died 38 yo; (18) Edmund, died 29yo; (19) Eleanor, died about 4yo. Average age at death about 18yo. But if we exclude deaths under 1yo it's a more representative average of 26yo, and if we exclude deaths under 10, it's 36yo.

(There's a case there for his first wife - Eleanor of Castile - perhaps not passing on the most robust genes to her kids, despite DEFINITELY having a solid fertility rate... And worth noting that these were well treated, loved children that had everything going for them as far as nutrition, comfort and state of the art medical treatment went.)

He may have gotten a minor cut and died of septicemia within days. He may have been living with a virus or bacterial infection that wasn't major enough to count among the game's deadly diseases, and had a bad run. He may have had an allergic reaction to some food and choked to death. He may have fallen off a horse and broken his neck. He may have been asthmatic and had a bad run with smoke. There are a host of common ways to die that the game does not actively represent, so these random death chances fill in.

Would also note that while he appears to have no health maluses, he also appears to have no health bonuses - which means he relied on his inherent, hidden health rating. My guess would be that this happened to be low, and thus he was vulnerable to any random health effect. Deceased portraits also do not show temporary modifiers or symptoms, so he may well have been suffering from something that carried him off.

By any chance, was he a sickly child when born?

 

[Karlington]

Short average medieval lifespans are a fact, but it was partly caused by very high infant and child mortality, which skews the number downward. If you grew to adulthood, though, you'd rarely see people just drop dead at age 25.

However, even among adults, the average lifespan was significantly lower than today's. This has a host of reasons, like poor hygiene, poor nutrition, poor health care, poor understanding of how to prevent, diagnose, and treat diseases, no antibiotics (a simple infection that you just slap an ointment on and forget about today could be fatal back then), poor dental health (decaying teeth in adulthood were more or less the norm), and so on.

So there's a bit of truth to both sides.

 

[mrinku]

Oh, yeah, the dental thing. I forgot about that. Tooth infections carried off a lot of 'em.

And famine. That was a BIG one, though much less likely to affect the upper crust we're playing directly... although if there weren't enough people able enough to deal with the dead, disease could and did set in.

(I'm a little surprised famine hasn't really had much focus in CK2)

 

[viola]

Another thing that should be pointed out is that it's not Medieval short lifespans, it's Pre-Industrialization short lifespans.

All societies before industrialization share the traits of high infant mortality and high fecundity: Prehistoric, Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern ones. In all of these society the average lifepan is somewhere in the 20s because most people die either immediately after birth or in their early childhood or at some point after their 50s, but most people definitely didn't drop dead at 30 years in any age.

Only with industrialization and the evolution of medicine infant mortality started to decrease significantly while the rates of fecundity stayed the same for a while, resulting in the population boom of the 19th century and of every successive nation that underwent industrialization.

 

[Karlington]

All societies before industrialization share the traits of high infant mortality and high fecundity: Prehistoric, Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern ones. In all of these society the average lifepan is somewhere in the 20s because most people die either immediately after birth or in their early childhood or at some point after their 50s, but most people definitely didn't drop dead at 30 years in any age.

Most men who made it past childhood appear to have died in their 40s according to the article Longevity of popes and artists between the 13th and the 19th century:

Longevity has increased steadily through history. Life expectancy at birth was a brief 25 years during the Roman Empire, it reached 33 years by the Middle Ages and raised up to 55 years in the early 1900s. In the Middle Ages, the average life span of males born in landholding families in England was 31.3 years and the biggest danger was surviving childhood. Once children reached the age of 10, their life expectancy was 32.2 years, and for those who survived to 25, the remaining life expectancy was 23.3 years. Such estimates reflected the life expectancy of adult males from the higher ranks of English society in the Middle Ages, and were similar to that computed for monks of the Christ Church in Canterbury during the 15th century.

Doing the math, men who made it to 25 were expected to die at 48.3 years old.

So while only a minority of those who made it into adulthood went on to live to 50, it wasn't some incredibly small amount either. Any village of a decent size ought to have had a couple of men in their 50s.

(Note that this only refers to males. I don't know if the Middle Ages had the same trend the modern world does with women outliving men by a few years on average.)

 

[mrinku]

Most men who made it past childhood appear to have died in their 40s according to the article Longevity of popes and artists between the 13th and the 19th century:



Doing the math, men who made it to 25 were expected to die at 48.3 years old.

So while only a minority of those who made it into adulthood went on to live to 50, it wasn't some incredibly small amount either. Any village of a decent size ought to have had a couple of men in their 50s.

(Note that this only refers to males. I don't know if the Middle Ages had the same trend the modern world does with women outliving men by a few years on average.)

I read a good book on the subject of the population explosion recently that covered some of this. As @viola says, it's not medieval per se but pre-industrial; even into modern times areas that had yet to industrialise retained the older demographics. Women living longer than men is a tricky one to study because of sketchy records on women in many era. Generally men died of violence more often but women had pregnancy related health issues to cope with. What is certain is that we are dealing with a MUCH younger demographic, which colours how they thought and acted as much as we being in an era of a much older demographic think and act.

https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-human-tide-paul-morland/book/9781473675148.html

However, there's one misconception... lower birthrate is very much a post-industrial phenomenon and strongly linked with the education of women and their access to external employment. There is typically a jump in the birthrate at the beginning of industrialization, which later declines sharply to below pre-industrialization levels. Increased life expectancy will often submerge this (it's normal to have a growing population even with a birth rate declining well below 2.0 children per woman, or immigration. Japan is a good case study there). So I'd not overstate "fecundity" when comparing pre-industrial and industrial societies... the latter likely has a higher one.

 

[Metanetwork]

Death from "poor health" is the result of culling. Normally heirs are not supposed to be culled, but maybe it still happens if the court is way above limit?

With the patch that comes with Holy Fury, characters have a hidden corpulence variable that changes over time and change their raw health value. Temperate is one trait that affects this, but if that was the cause, it should have said "natural death".

 

[LeSingeAffame]

so don't you think this had the effect of increasing life expectancy?

Lifespan and life expectancy are not the same.
It was possible to live up to 80 in the middle ages. It was rare, but possible. That's the lifespan.
However, your life expectancy at birth was much lower, because the first years of your life were the most dangerous ones. Once you achieved adulthood, most people could reasonably expect to live up to 60.

 

[Serenity84]

Most men who made it past childhood appear to have died in their 40s according to the article ...

By taking a closer look at artists and popes it also shows that with good enough nutrition and a non-violent lifestyle there was a 50% chance to live into the 60s. Which is about what you'd expect.

 

[Rydelfox]

While death from poor health can be the result of culling, characters that are heirs to titles are immune to culling.
It is possible that he was simply unlucky and had a very low natural health - I'm not sure how low that can go. If you aren't playing ironman or bronzeman, using charinfo in the console then checking his tooltip might tell you, though it might have changed since he is dead. Also, I think temporary modifiers go away when you die and don't affect your cause of death, so if he had a bunch of health penalties there, that could affect it.