Posted on 05/19/2022 10:48:22 AM PDT by DallasBiff
The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. People gathered on the docks were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of “death ships” out of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the Black Death would kill more than 20 million people in Europe—almost one-third of the continent’s population
(Excerpt) Read more at history.com ...
How did the people go about their lives when death was all around them?
Did the local squire demand lockdowns, or did they pray to god every morning and went about their business, to be alive at nightfall?
The same disease goes back to at least the Plague of Justinian, right?
To me the amazing part is the hysteria over warming. Historically the cool eras were the ones that killed the most people. We ought to be glad we live in the Modern Warm Period instead of the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1800’s), Dark Age (300-900) or Greek Dark Age (about BC 1100 to BC 300). It’s during the cool eras that crop yields go way down, rain patterns are harder to predict, and deaths by plague go way up.
I believe so.
Yes at one time England had vineyards that rivaled France.
Did the ships get anywhere near Wuhan?
“Did the local squire demand lockdowns...”
Well, quarantines more than lockdowns. Sometimes the infected cities were quarantined to keep the sick in, and sometimes the uninfected cities were quarantined to keep the sick out. But since the infection was spread by rats and fleas which were everpresent in any city, those measures were mostly ineffective either way.
“Yes at one time England had vineyards that rivaled France.”
And once upon a time Newfoundland was called Vinland by the Vikings. The land of wild grapes.
Crazy, idn’it.
“12 ships from the Black Sea”
One interesting fact about this is that the ports on the Black Sea in what is now Ukraine/Crimea were a traditional vector for plague to reach Europe from Asia, which is the reason that Russia set up the first “biolabs” in the Ukraine, back in the 1890s, to detect and combat the plague specifically.
Not the ships themselves; they were probably picking up goods from Crimea, but many of those goods were carried to Crimea by overland caravan routes from Asia.
Dat’s RACIS!........................
The answer is to be found in Daniel Defoe's novel, A Journal of the Plague Year, written in 1772 and describing the London Plague of 1664.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376-h/376-h.htm
A weird allegory, John Lennon's song "whatever get's you through the night", is not about having nookie with Yoko(ewwww), but a song about living in plague times.
History is a set of lies agreed upon — Napoleon Bonaparte
He was right about that. It’s essentially certain that death estimates for the Black Plague are far, far lower than reality. An examination of population growth of mankind throughout all history shows only one period of decline. Not WWI, not WWII, not the late 1940s Chinese civil war.
Plague in the 1300s. Plague took global population down sharply, and it’s best to remember the North/South American hemisphere was untouched. Had it been involved, the numbers might have gotten low enough to threaten genetic scarcity and eventual extinction.
The Yuan Dynasty was smashed by Plague. Entire provinces suffered 100% casualties.
Population growth in Europe ended via plague. It did not resume until Columbus brought the potato back in the late 1400s. Most plague deaths were actually not from the disease. What killed people was the lack of farmers. It killed farmers because rats were in the fields looking for food. No farmers, no cities.
Oxen Ford, Oxford’s original name, was home to religious academics and they focused on record keeping of the surrounding villages. The numbers are very clear. 5 deaths in a week, then 8, then 10, then 15, relentlessly. And then suddenly, 100, 300, 500 and then . . . no more records. Medicine explains this. Flea bites, infection, bateria progresses and kills. But eventually, statistically, some patient who was stronger than others would last long enough for the bacteria to reach the lungs. And then, a cough. People who breathed it in saw their first point of infection in the lungs and they coughed too.
Explosion of numbers, and then the record keepers die.
We(all male) were put into a room and played cards for 8 hours. The "guardians" were history majors if you needed to go to the bathroom.
Well anyway, I got lunch and dinner, and caught the mild cold, but I was paid $300, which was a lot back in the 80's
When it arrived in Europe in the fourteenth century, the disease was called the pestilence or simply the plague. It was not called the Black Death until the eighteenth century, when it had largely disappeared.
bkmk
There have been five major pandemics that can be laid at Y. Pestis feet.
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