History
The Black Plague
The Black Plague, also known as the Black Death, was a devastating pandemic that swept through Europe in the 14th century, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 25 million people. It was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which was transmitted through fleas infesting rats. The Black Plague had profound social, economic, and cultural impacts on medieval Europe.
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eBook - ePub- Irwin W. Sherman(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- ASM Press(Publisher)
4 An Ancient Plague, the Black DeathFigure 4.1 The Plague by Felix Jenewein (1900) shows a mother carrying a coffin with her child (Courtesy Wellcome Library, London, CC-BY 4.0)During the last 2,500 years, three great plague pandemics have resulted in social and economic upheavals unmatched by armed conflicts or any other infectious disease. In Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire in the East, it was the first plague pandemic (A.D. 542-543) that surely contributed to Justinian’s failure to restore imperial unity. In the year 1346 the second pandemic began, and by the time it disappeared in 1353, the population of Europe and the Middle East had been reduced from 100 million to 80 million people (Fig. 4.1 ). This devastating pandemic, known as the Black Death, the Great Dying, or the Great Pestilence, put an end to the rise in the human population that had begun in 5000 B.C., and it took more than 150 years for the population to return to its former size. Some believe this catastrophic crash in population to be Malthus’s prophecy come true, while others, such as the historian David Herlihy, consider the Black Death to be not a catastrophe promoted by “positive checks” (i.e., disease, war, and famine) but an exogenous factor that served to break a Malthusian stalemate. That is, despite fluctuations in population size, relatively stable population levels were maintained over prolonged periods of time due to “preventive checks” (i.e., changes in inheritance practices, delay in the age of marriage, and birth controls). The Black Death did more than break the Malthusian stalemate; it allowed Europeans to restructure their society along very different paths.Although those living in the medieval period recognized that plague was a contagious disease spread from person to person, its cause was not identified. Indeed, most believed it to be “a vicious property of the air” itself. The Black Death is most associated with Florence, one of the great cities of Europe at the time, and because it felt the full impact of the epidemic, it is sometimes called the Plague of Florence. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), who lived in Florence during the plague, described what he witnessed:
eBook - PDF- Jonathan L. Heeney, Sven Friedemann(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
The Black Death resulted in the deaths of between 25 and 50 million people in Europe, alone. It was the greatest demographic crisis of the medieval period and, in terms of the proportion of the population that was killed, the single most calamitous epidemiological event in all of human history. The term ‘Black Death’ was coined only much later, the word ‘black’ referring possibly to the sheer horror of the pestilence (from the Latin, atra mors, which can mean ‘terrible’ or ‘dreadful’ death, the connotation of which was the ‘black death’) or, as some have suggested, to the blackened bodies of its victims. Contemporaries called the epidemic the ‘Great Pestilence’, the ‘Great Mortality’ or the ‘Big Sickness’. They described a range of symptoms, including buboes – the size of eggs or even apples – on the groin and under the armpits, as well as blotches, boils, bruises, black pustules and the coughing up of blood, vomit and sputum. The poignant accounts writers left behind ring with the terrible sorrows it brought in its wake. The Italian poet Petrarch (1304–74) expressed the perplexity and loneliness that must have haunted those who survived: Where are our dear friends now? Where are the beloved faces? Where are the affectionate words, the relaxed and enjoyable conversations? What lightning bolt devoured them? What earthquake toppled them? What tempest drowned them? What abyss swallowed them? There was a crowd of us, now we are almost alone. 5 Giovanni Boccaccio (c. 1313–75), author of The Decameron (c. 1348–53) – set during the pestilence in Florence – also described its tragic consequences: How many valiant men, how many fair ladies . . . breakfasted in the morning with their kinsfolk . . . and that same night supped with their ancestors in the other world! 6 Plagues and History 37 Perhaps no other single ‘plague’ has so changed the world.
eBook - ePubEpidemics
The Impact of Germs and Their Power over Humanity
- Joshua S. Loomis(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
CHAPTER TWO Plague There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed that it was the end of the world. And no medicine or any other defense availed. —Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, 14th century, written after he had buried his five children 1 Some of the most devastating and influential epidemics in human history have been caused by the deadly disease known as plague. It is a disease that spread over vast areas of land and claimed the lives of 200 million people over the course of about 1,500 years. 2 In doing so, it wiped out as much as one-half of the population of some countries and left many believing that the world was nearing the apocalypse. Of the three major epidemics of plague that have been recorded throughout history, the one that struck Eurasia in the middle of the 14th century was by far the most extensive and historically significant. Termed the Black Death due to the terrifying symptoms it produced, the epidemic spread over the entire continent and killed almost half of the total population. The catastrophic loss of life sent Europe into a political, economic, and cultural tailspin that lasted for decades after the worst of the epidemic had subsided. Amazingly, some of the impacts of the Black Death are still being felt by our population some 650 years later. The causative agent of plague, Yersinia pestis, is a small bacterium that enters into the human body in one of two ways. The first and probably most well-known route of entry is through the bite of an infected rat flea. When a flea bites a rat or other rodent that is infected with Y. pestis, some of the bacteria move into the gut of the flea as it takes its blood meal and begin to replicate to very high levels. If the infected flea bites a human and takes a blood meal, its stomach becomes so overwhelmed with bacteria and blood that it throws up the contents of its gut onto the person’s skin
- Paul Chrystal(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Pen and Sword History(Publisher)
THE MIDDLE AGES Chapter 8 Bubonic Plague: the Black Death: 1346–1353 (Start of the Second Plague Pandemic) ‘First pray, then flee.’ – From Dr Alonso de Chirino’s practical guide to the plague for the layperson (c. 1431) ‘The year of 1348 has left us alone and helpless. Where are our dear friends now? Where are the beloved faces? Where are the affectionate words? the relaxed and enjoyable conversations?’ – Francesco Petrarca, (b.1304), Petrarch T o the Florentine poet plague was a disease ‘without equal for centuries’; it had ‘trampled and destroyed the entire world’. It may well have all started in India, spreading through Asia, North Africa and then to Europe. Plague probably came to England courtesy of an infected rat or flea at Melcombe Regis (now Weymouth) at the end of July or beginning of August, 1348. It then spread through the south-west to Bristol and then eastwards to Oxford and London, which it had reached by the beginning of November travelling at the rate of about 1½ miles per day. In Europe, it is estimated around 50 million people died as a result of the Black Death, also known as the Great Mortality or the Great Pestilence. The population fell from some 80 million to 30 million. It killed at least 60 per cent of the population in rural and urban settings. It took the world population 200 years to recover to the level at which it stood in the early 1340s. The 1347 pandemic plague was not referred to specifically as ‘black’ in the 14th or 15th centuries in any European language. In fact ‘Black Death’ was not used to describe the plague pandemic in English until 1755, when it translated the Danish: den sorte død, ‘the black death’. As is usual, the poor were worst affected: they tended to live in single-storey thatched wattle-and-daub hovels. Rats burrowed under their earth floors and climbed the walls to build their nests in the roofs, from which blocked fleas could fall to infect the residents below
eBook - PDF- Sheldon Watts(Author)
- 1997(Publication Date)
- Yale University Press(Publisher)
i The Human Response to Plague in Western Europe and the Middle East, 1347 to 1844 Introduction In the summer of 1347 rats and fleas infected with bubonic plague boarded Genoese merchant ships at Caffa on the Black Sea. Later that year some of these ships passed through the Dardanelles, touched down at Messina (Sicily) and then sailed to Pisa, Genoa and Marseilles: other Genoese ships sailed directly from Caffa to the mouths of the Nile in Egypt. Within a few months pestilence of a form unknown to contemporaries began killing men, women and children on both sides of the Mediterranean. As 1348 wore on, the plague began striking populations along the Atlantic and Baltic coasts. Then, travelling up rivers, along paths and across fields, it reached Europeans living deep in the interior. Though reliable information is scarce, it would seem that during the five years (1347-51) the Black Death was darting about, mortality varied from an eighth to two-thirds of a region's population. Overall it may have killed three Europeans out of every ten, leaving some 24 million dead. This remains the worst epidemic disease disaster in Europe since the collapse of the Roman Empire. 1 Also appallingly high was the casualty rate in the Muslim Middle East: between a quarter and a third of the population died. Writing in 1349, Ibn Khatimah, a medical writer from Andalusia (Muslim southern Spain), testi-fied that: This is an example of the wonderful deeds and power of God, because never before has a catastrophe of such extent and duration occurred. No satisfactory reports have been given about it, because the disease is new. . . . God only knows when it will leave the earth. 2 In the years after 1351, bubonic plague continued to make sporadic appearances, sparing neither lands to the north nor to the south of the Mediterranean. Though no category of person was immune, it seemed that on every second or third visitation the plague targeted a region's pregnant women and young children.
No longer available |Learn more- (Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Research World(Publisher)
________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ even higher percentage of Italy's population was likely wiped out. On the other hand, Northeastern Germany, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary are believed to have suffered less, and there are no estimates available for Russia or the Balkans. It is conceivable that Russia may not have been as affected due to its very cold climate and large size, hence often less close contact with the contagion. The Black Death contributed to the destruction of the feudal system in Medieval Time. As more serfs and workers died, there were fewer people to work for the nobles and they had to give higher wages to the workers willing to work on the nobles' lands. The Black Death also killed many great kings and nobles. In its aftermath, the Black Death may also have favoured the use of more advanced farming tools as a smaller workforce was available and plots grew larger as a result of the population loss. The plague continued to strike parts of Europe sporadically until the 17th century, each time with reduced intensity and fatality, suggesting an increased resistance due to natural selection. Some have also argued that changes in hygiene habits and efforts to improve public health and sanitation had a significant impact on the falling rates of infection. Nature of the disease In the early 20th century, following the identification by Yersin and Kitasato of the plague bacterium that caused the late 19th and early 20th century Asian bubonic plague (the Third Pandemic), most scientists and historians came to believe that the Black Death was an incidence of this plague, with a strong presence of the more contagious pneumonic and septicemic varieties increasing the pace of infection, spreading the disease deep into inland areas of the continents.
eBook - PDFPlague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World
The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600
- Nükhet Varlik(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Three years later, the authors have published a more popular version: Scott and Duncan, Return of the Black Death: The World’s Greatest Serial Killer (Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 2004). 7 Samuel K. Cohn, The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London: Arnold/Oxford University Press, 2002). Also see Cohn, “The Black Death: End of a Paradigm,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 703–38. 8 A corrective has recently been offered by Katherine Royer, “The Blind Men and the Elephant: Imperial Medicine, Medieval Historians, and the Role of Rats in the Historiography of Plague,” in Medicine and Colonialism: Historical Perspectives in India and South Africa, ed. Poonam Bala, 99–110 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014). 9 There were critical voices, however. See, e.g., John Theilmann and Frances Cate, “A Plague of Plagues: The Problem of Plague Diagnosis in Medieval England,” Journal of Interdisci- plinary History 37, no. 3 (2007): 371–93. Some effort has been made to offer a dialogue between these various voices. See, e.g., Nutton, Pestilential Complexities. For a revisiting of the differing and often controversial scholarly opinions on the subject, which are critically assessed as “alternative theories,” see Benedictow, What Disease Was Plague? 94 Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World the Black Death was a pandemic of plague caused by Y. pestis. 10 The effects of this controversy on the study of Ottoman plagues were rather indirect. While a general sense of reticence governed the field, 11 the lack of molecular archeological findings further aggravated the chasm between the new science of plague and the Ottoman sources. 12 Controversy over the Origins of the “Oriental Plague”: Proximate or Distant? With the Third Pandemic, the focus of scholarly attention shifted from the Ottoman plague ports of the Near East to the European colonies in South and East Asia.
eBook - PDFOn Our Way
The Final Passage through Life and Death
- Robert Kastenbaum(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- University of California Press(Publisher)
At a “tipping point,” as Malcolm Gladwell would say, 1 the number and type of deaths can lead large populations as well as individuals to feel that the too many deaths are prelude to the total destruction of life. Even young children—the proverbial innocents living in an enchanted T O O M A N Y D E A D / 2 2 1 and protected domain—may be chanting, “Ashes, ashes. All fall down!” We begin, then, by passing through the gate of time to revisit some of the most terrifying days in human history. PLAGUE The word plague (from the Latin plaga, a forceful blow) has been ap-plied to many contagious diseases but has become associated primarily with the bubonic plague. In its most devastating appearance this pesti-lence was known as the Black Death. Every major lethal epidemic in the last three hundred years or so has been compared to the plague, and people with a sense of history have an abiding fear that a new form of this disease might yet again emerge and carve an appalling trail of death throughout the global community. What of the disease itself? How did it spread, how many lives did it end, and what measures were taken to control this horror? What was the world in which the Black Death struck, and what was its impact? And did the memory of this catastrophe die with its survivors, or has the Black Death continued to influence us hundreds of years later? First, the disease itself. We begin with first-person accounts from a devastating re-turn of the plague in the seventeenth century. The Plague and Its Victims Florence, 1631. A resplendent and sophisticated city. A scorpion stung a housemaid just above her knee. At least, that was what seemed to have happened. The wound was a little strange, though, not typical for scorpions. Perhaps it was a carbuncle, the name given to a painful infection under the skin that could become a serious problem if not treated promptly. A deputation of physicians was sent by the Pub-lic Health Magistracy.
eBook - PDF- Joseph P. Byrne(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Greenwood(Publisher)
As opposed to that of the late medieval Black Death, the identity of the epidemic disease as true bubonic plague has not been contested. The waves of the plague certainly caused large-scale mortality and— especially in important urban centers such as Constantinople—a sharp demographic decline, but it is still difficult to translate this into more specific demographic terms. Figures estimating the overall loss of life at 20 to 30 percent of the pre-plague population are often cited, but their accuracy and value are questionable. Certainly, labor became sparse and more expensive, more and better land was available, and manpower shortages limited military operations, whereas on a spiritual level the scourge encouraged the intensification of religious ritual and may have affected the initial spread of Islam. 532 Plague of Cyprian There are abundant sources on the Plague of Justinian written in Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Latin, and Old Irish—mostly histories and chronicles and, to a lesser extent, nar- rations of saints’ lives. Several sixth-century authors were eyewitnesses to the pandemic, such as the historians Procopius (d. 565), Agathias (c. 536–582), and Euagrius (c. 536–600) writing in Greek; John of Ephesus (c. 505–585), a bishop writing in Syriac; and the bishop and historian Gregory of Tours (538–593) writing in Latin. Arabic authors such as al-Madaini wrote in the late eighth and ninth centuries, as did some of the Greek and Latin authors such as Theophanes (758/60–817) and Paul the Deacon (c. 720–799), who referred to plague waves in the seventh and eighth centuries. Several detailed descriptions of the disease enable us to identify it as bubonic plague. Procopius includes the longest account of the symptoms associated with the epidemic’s first visitation in 542. Its onset was sudden and accompanied by fever. In a few days at the most, swellings developed mainly in the groin, but also inside the armpit, beside the ears, or on the thighs.
eBook - PDFA History of the British Isles
Prehistory to the Present
- Kenneth L. Campbell(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
6 For example, geographical mobility, once thought to have been mostly a result of the plague, is now also known to have preceded it. Even before the plague, the authority that landlords held over their serfs or tenants varied according to individual personalities and circumstances; it was not uncommon for either free or unfree tenants to change residences multiple times in the course of a lifetime. Such geographical mobility, combined with the growing distinctions between free and unfree tenants, posed a threat to social harmony in country villages prior to the advent of the plague, but did not undermine it because social cooperation was still so important to the economic success of a village. Furthermore, as the earlier difficulties of Edward III indicate, expressions of political discontent did precede the arrival of the Black Death in England by several years. Nonetheless, it is hard to argue that a plague that swept away 40 to 50 per cent of the population (numbers that have been confirmed by recent archaeological research) was not the most significant development of the century, if not of the entire late medieval period. The plague had a tremendous psychological impact, providing a powerful reminder of the omnipresence and inevitability of death and bequeathing a burdensome emotional legacy to those who lost loved ones and survived the catastrophe. Kinship bonds remained important, while the general sense of community within medieval villages remained intact, if it did not get stronger, among the survivors of such a devastating epidemic. Support from family and neighbours took on added significance in changing economic times. Most people remained in their native villages and tried to carry on as best they could. Such geographical mobility as did exist merely brought people into an existing network of village relationships, as opposed to upsetting or overturning established communities.
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