Black Death

The burial of the victims of the plague in Tournai. Fragment of a miniature from "The Chronicles of Gilles Li Muisis" (1272-1352), abbot of the monastery of St. Martin of the Righteous. Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 13076-77, f. 24v.

The Black Death was a pandemic (an epidemic spreading over a large area) that killed millions of people. It started in Europe in 1347, and lasted until 1351. Almost one out of every three people in Europe died from the disease, so about 25 million people.

Cause

Today, people think that the disease started in Asia. Most people think that the disease was the bubonic plague. This disease is carried and spread by fleas living on rats. Traders from the Silk Road may have brought the infected fleas to Europe. Another disease that could have been the Black Death is Anthrax. Anthrax could have been spread by cattle. Looking at the quick spread of the disease, Viral hemorrhagic fevers are other ideas for what specific disease the Black Death might have been.

Fleas started the problem; the infected fleas were carried by black rats. Rats that were carrying the fleas would go into cities. When the fleas bit somebody, they would inject a little bit of the bacteria into the wound. This would cause the person to be infected. Rats were often on ships. This meant the disease spread extremely quickly, all over Europe.

In humans, the disease caused swelling in the groin, under the arms and behind the ears. These swellings were a black and purple colour, hence the name 'The Black Death'. The dark swellings were called buboes. People were in pain and victims died a horrible death. The symptoms could be seen 3-7 days after victims were bitten by a flea.

Impact

It killed between a third and two-thirds of Europe's population. Including in the Middle East, India and China, it killed at least 75 million people.

The same disease is thought to have returned to Europe every generation with different degrees of intensity and fatality until the 1700s. Later outbreaks include the Italian Plague of 1629-1631, the Great Plague of London (1665–1666), the Great Plague of Vienna (1679), the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720–1722 and the 1771 plague in Moscow. There is some controversy over the identity of the disease, but in its virulent form seems to have disappeared from Europe in the 18th century.

The Black Death had a very big effect on Europe's population. It changed Europe's social structure. It was a serious blow to the Roman Catholic Church and resulted in widespread persecution of minorities such as Jews, Muslims, foreigners, beggars and lepers. The uncertainty of daily survival influenced people to live for the moment, as illustrated by Giovanni Boccaccio in The Decameron (1353).

The initial fourteenth-century European event was called the "Great Mortality" by contemporary writers and, with later outbreaks, became known as the 'Black Death'.

Media

The Black Death has been used as a subject or as a setting in modern literature and media. Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Masque of the Red Death (1842) is set in an unnamed country during a fictional plague that bears strong resemblance to the Black Death.

Albert Camus uses this theme too. His novel, The Plague is set against an outbreak of the plague, in Algeria and how people handle it. It was published in 1947.

„Doktor of Rome“ Artwork of Paulus Fürst 1656. With such clothing doctors in Rome wanted to protect themselves from getting the Black Death (in Rome, 1656).

Medical aspects

Sufferers of the bubonic plague develop fevers, severe flues and buboes that could swell to the size of an average apple. These buboes appear mainly in the groin, armpit and apparently sometimes on the thighs.

The medical knowledge of the time was based on Hippocrates' theory. According to Hippocrates, the body consists of different fluids. If they are in harmony, the person is healthy. If they are not, disease results. Very often, diseases were also seen as a punishment of God. Such a theory can of course not account for the spreading of a disease from one person to another one. Spreading of disease was said to occur from bad winds (called Miasma). The bad air could also come from within the earth, and thereby cause the disease. Remedies against the disease included to only open windows towards the north, to not sleep during the day, and not to work too hard. The Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris concluded that the Black Death was caused by a bad constellation of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. This constellation had occurred on 20 March, 1345. They had been asked by Philipp VI about the cause of the disease in 1348. Since the answer was scientifically founded, it was soon taken to be the real cause, and translated into many languages.

Therefore, the doctors often limited their actions to telling people to go to Confession, so that their sins would be forgiven if they died. In the long run, the pandemics caused the doctors to change their ideas on how the human body worked, to get away from the theories of Hyppocrates and Galenos, more towards empirical science. Only 200 years later did Girolamo Fracastoro discover that diseases spread through infection.

Related pages

• Great Famine of 1315-1317
• Great Plague of London

Other websites

Primary sources online

• Agnolo di Tura's account
• Gabriele de' Mussi's account
• Marchionne di Coppo di Stefano Buonaiuti's account
• A Petrarch account and More quotes from Petrarch

Secondary sources online

• The History Guide "Satan Triumphant: The Black Death"
• Symptoms, causes, pictures of bubonic plague
• Overview of the black death
• BBC news story on controversy over Black Death origins
• Examination of "Ring around the Rosy"'s relationship to the plague
• Black Death Overview from BBC history
• Plague and Public Health in Renaissance Europe. Primary source documents and analyisis
• Secrets of the Dead . Mystery of the Black Death PBS
• Pandemics in Eastern Europe