Flea powder would have been great idea then.
The Black Death: Bubonic Plague
In the early 1330s an outbreak of deadly bubonic plague occurred in China. The bubonic plague mainly affects rodents, but fleas can transmit the disease to people. Once people are infected, they infect others very rapidly. Plague causes fever and a painful swelling of the lymph glands called buboes, which is how it gets its name. The disease also causes spots on the skin that are red at first and then turn black.
Since China was one of the busiest of the world's trading nations, it was only a matter of time before the outbreak of plague in China spread to western Asia and Europe. In October of 1347, several Italian merchant ships returned from a trip to the Black Sea, one of the key links in trade with China. When the ships docked in Sicily, many of those on board were already dying of plague. Within days the disease spread to the city and the surrounding countryside. An eyewitness tells what happened:
"Realizing what a deadly disaster had come to them, the people quickly drove the Italians from their city. But the disease remained, and soon death was everywhere. Fathers abandoned their sick sons. Lawyers refused to come and make out wills for the dying. Friars and nuns were left to care for the sick, and monasteries and convents were soon deserted, as they were stricken, too. Bodies were left in empty houses, and there was no one to give them a Christian burial."
The disease struck and killed people with terrible speed. The Italian writer Boccaccio said its victims often "ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise."
By the following August, the plague had spread as far north as England, where people called it "The Black Death" because of the black spots it produced on the skin. A terrible killer was loose across Europe, and Medieval medicine had nothing to combat it.
In winter the disease seemed to disappear, but only because fleas--which were now helping to carry it from person to person--are dormant then. Each spring, the plague attacked again, killing new victims. After five years 25 million people were dead--one-third of Europe's people.
Even when the worst was over, smaller outbreaks continued, not just for years, but for centuries. The survivors lived in constant fear of the plague's return, and the disease did not disappear until the 1600s.
Medieval society never recovered from the results of the plague. So many people had died that there were serious labor shortages all over Europe. This led workers to demand higher wages, but landlords refused those demands. By the end of the 1300s peasant revolts broke out in England, France, Belgium and Italy.
The disease took its toll on the church as well. People throughout Christendom had prayed devoutly for deliverance from the plague. Why hadn't those prayers been answered? A new period of political turmoil and philosophical questioning lay ahead.
Black Death - Disaster Strikes
25 million people died in just under five years between 1347 and 1352. Estimated population of Europe from 1000 to 1352.
1000 38 million
1100 48 million
1200 59 million
1300 70 million
1347 75 million
1352 50 million
I’m not too sure I buy this assessment. People found in a mass grave were quite likely to have been of the poorer classes, and consequently have been more likely to be malnourished and live huddled together in squalid places where rats and fleas proliferated. Plague is a disease that overwhelms the immune system, and even good physical health is not much help once you’ve been infected.
...and the best way to be fit and healthy was not to be poor.
I have read that the black death killed off so many of the peasant serfs that it brought down the feudal system. There were just not enough peasants to work the land, and those that were left could bid up the price of their labor.
Economically, times were good for the peasants that weren't dead.
Economic Disruption
Cities were hit hard by the plague. Financial business was disrupted as debtors died and their creditors found themselves without recourse. Not only had the debtor died, his whole family had died with him and many of his kinsmen. There was simply no one to collect from.
Construction projects stopped for a time or were abandoned altogether. Guilds lost their craftsmen and could not replace them. Mills and other special machinery might break and the one man in town who had the skill to repair it had died in the plague. We see towns advertising for specialists, offering high wages.
The labor shortage was very severe, especially in the short term, and consequently, wages rose. Because of the mortality, there was an oversupply of goods, and so prices dropped. Between the two trends, the standard of living rose . . . for those still living.
Effects in the countryside were just as severe. Farms and entire villages died out or were abandoned as the few survivors decided not to stay on. When Norwegian sailors finally visited Greenland again in the early 15thc, they found in the settlements there only wild cattle roaming through deserted villages.
Whole families died, with no heirs, their houses standing empty. The countryside, too, faced a short-term shortage of labor, and landlords stopped freeing their serfs. They tried to get more forced labor from them, as there were fewer peasants to be had. Peasants in many areas began to demand fairer treatment or lighter burdens.
Just as there were guild revolts in the cities in the later 1300s, so we find rebellions in the countrside. The Jacquerie in 1358, the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381, the Catalonian Rebellion in 1395, and many revolts in Germany, all serve to show how seriously the mortality had disrupted economic and social relations.
“BRING OUT CHUR DEAD! BRING OUT CHUR DEAD! BRING OUT CHUR DEAD!”
“I’m not dead yet!”
CLONK!
“BRING OUT CHUR DEAD!”
People tend to think of The Plague as horrifying but just something from the Middle Ages. Not so. It is still around waiting to explode.
While serving in the Navy I received the plague immunization series several times. This was due to areas of the world I had a good chance of finding myself in on “official business”.
Nothing like possible exposure to the plague to bring things into focus ;-)
Odd that China seems to be the main source of the world’s worst plagues.
The black death. Influenza. And now, bird flu, sooner or later coming to a neighborhood near you.
Our ancestors who survived bequeathed us stronger, healthier genes.
(repost from a previous FR thread on The Black Death/Plague)
Link to the site for the Black Death episode on PBS’s “Secrets
of the Dead” series.
A good show about who lived, who died and maybe why.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/
HillaryCare. That is the ONLY answer. Our ONLY hope.
I thought this was going to be a thread about Obama.
Ah yes. Even the children remember.
Ring around the rosey
(the buboe or symtom of the plague)
A pocket full of poseys
( a nosegay of flowers to cover the smell of death)
Ashes, ashes, we ALL fall down.
(everyone dies)
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Thanks Blam. |
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The very best way was to have two parents that both had the Delta-32 mutation.
Bump
It was noted that the rich who drank out of and ate off from silver came down with the plague less often. Silver is a known germ killer.
I think it was during this period that a princess of England was going to marry a prince of Spain. They were going to meet at a French port controlled at that time by England.
This would have been a giant step uniting the two kingdoms against France. The princess and several of her entourage caught the plague and died in the port. End of power move.
It was also the plague that caused widow's dowry laws. Estates were going to the male heir and some were not supporting the wife/widow and in moat cases their own mother. I believe fewer women got the plague, because they primarily stayed at home. The laws were changed to provided for surviving widows.
There were some limited areas in Europe and Britain that either totally avoided the Black Death or had very few infected people die.
No one has yet come up with a convincing explanation for the anomaly