Tag Archives: Black Death

Black Death

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Probably one of the most famous pandemics is the Bubonic Plague or the Black Death. I was most familiar with the plague that swept Europe in the 1340s (primarily from The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. One of my favorites and one I reread almost once a year.)

But recent scholarship has discovered Yersina Pestis in Bronze Age Samples. This is a very old disease. The oldest human sample is 5000 years old but it is now estimated that the organism is probably 7000 years old. Wow. It is thought that the disease originated in Northern Eurasia but one of the Bronze Age samples is from England so the disease was already traveling.

But most of the graves found so far are individuals, not mass graves. What happened?

Well, the theory put forth in BBC History, Vol 23, is that the spread of the disease coincided with the rise of the Mongol empire in the thirteenth century. As they spread out, reaching even Italy, they carried some of their own provisions with them. Guess what loves grain? Rodents.

It has been known for some time that rodents and fleas were the disease’s vectors.

One of the goods Italy was importing was grain.

COVID traveled via airplanes. The Black Plague traveled by ship as goods and people went from country to country. It returned in waves and one estimate posits that half the population in Europe died. Certainly entire villages were wiped out.

The disease is still around and still lethal without treatment.

Epidemics -The Black Death

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Although the Bubonic Plague was known prior to the outbreak in the Middle Ages, literature and art fully illustrates the effects of the global epidemic that hit Europe in 1347. The primary host for Yserina Pestis is rats. Climate change on the steppes sent the rats into populated area with the infected fleas. Even then, when travel was difficult, people traded with one another. The disease went westward along the Silk Road and onto the ships of the Italian merchants. From there, the disease traveled to Genoa, Italy and Europe at large.

In the epidemic of the fourteenth century, it is estimated 100 million people died. The population did not rebound to previous levels for 200 years. Entire villages disappeared as every single inhabitant perished. Waves of infection continued until the 1800s.

There were three forms of the disease. The type that created the swollen lymph nodes (buboes) and the pneumonic had a fatality rate of about 90 to 95%. The septicemia form was always fatal.

There were a number of consequences of the dramatic drop in population. Rapid reforestation led to a change in the climate with some historians tying the Little Ice Age to it. Another was the change in the society. With so few laborers, the survivors were able to fight for, and receive, higher wages. (The primary sources are almost funny as the nobles complain about the exorbitant wages being demanded. And this new class (the beginning of the middle class of tradesman and craft workers, actually had the temerity to wear gold and fur and ‘ape their betters.’

The plague is still around and every now and then a case pops up in the Desert Southwest. Antibiotics has changed the world, however. A bacterial disease, it falls to our new medicine. I shudder to imagine what might happen should Yserina Pestis become resistant.