The Black Death

The Plague is often considered the deadliest disease of all time, having killed between twenty-five and fifty percent of Europe’s population and countless more in Asia.

Gilles Li Muisis, a French abbot during the Middle Ages, once stated that “Every City, every settlement, every place was poisoned by the contagious Pestilence.” Although most medieval writers believed that the Black Death came from China, modern experts think that it came from the Middle East. From there, it was carried by rodents to Russia, Italian colonies, and Egypt.

The Plague made its way to Europe sometime during the 1340s. Once it arrived in Europe, it traveled along major trade routes to major cities like Florence, Rome, and Paris. Finally, Plague infected all of Europe when it arrived in England in June, 1348 . It only took about 5 years for the Plague to cover Europe, making it even more lethal because people had no time to leave town or create a medicine. Most people believe that the Black Death is simply another name for the bubonic plague. However, the truth is that the Black Death is made up of 3 contagions, each one having horrible consequences.

Also, if you become tainted with one of the maladies, it makes you much more likely to catch another form of the Black Death. The first and most widely known disease is the bubonic plague, whose name comes from foul smelling boil-like swellings on or near the lymph nodes on the neck, groin, and armpits. These unsightly sores ranged from the size of an egg to the size of an apple.

The life expectancy of a person who had contracted the bubonic plague was about one week. Rats carried this form of the Black Death. However, the ailment was not transferred directly from the rats to humans; fleas that sucked the blood of infected rats then bit the person, giving him or her the plague. Symptoms of the bubonic plague include fever, severe headaches, chills, weakness, and buboes.

Second, there is the pneumonic plague. The pneumonic plague attacks the respiratory system. The major concern of pneumonic plague was that the victim would catch pneumonia. Symptoms of this form of plague include fever, headache, weakness, pneumonia, coughing, and coughing up bloody mucus called sputum. Many medieval doctors believed that the coughing indicated a hole in the victims lung that was created by witchcraft. Life expectancy of a victim with the pneumonic plague is only 2 days.

A medieval writer named Boccaccio once wrote that the victims “ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise”. Because of this, most victims had no idea they had plague before they perished. The third and final form of the plague is the septicemic plague, which infected the blood stream. This plague was carried in the same way as the bubonic plague. Also, this plague could be a complication of the bubonic or pneumonia plague. These three plagues had a disastrous affect on society. Population decrease set of a long set of chain reactions that affected all of Europe.

One effect of population decrease is that small farming villages lost manpower to tend to crops. This caused villages to starve. When the villages starved, it caused cities to starve because villages were supposed to provide cities with food. Another problem was that of European peasants and lords. When the Black Death first came to Europe, most people believed God was punishing the poor, and people stopped hiring poor people for jobs because they believed it was God’s will.

As a result, peasants lost jobs and had no method to feed themselves. To help this, Lords allowed peasants to work their land, but when the peasants arrived, the lords refused to let them leave. When the peasants left, whole villages became empty, which upset the Feudal System. This is ironic because the lords, whose main objective is to enforce the Feudal System, are actually disrupting the Feudal System by allowing peasants to leave their villages. In response to the way the public treated the poor, the government in many countries formed new many new laws; some succeeded while failed miserably.

An example of a law that failed is the Statute of Laborers in 1351. This law stated that peasants must be paid what they were paid in 1346. This angered the peasants into revolt. After the government realized that their new laws had failed, they decided to remove them. It is said that the effects of the plague will live on forever. This is true because even though there have been no major outbreaks of the Black Death since the 1300s, the Plague was never and will never completely disappear. This means that the Great Mortality could unleash the same terror that was unleashed centuries ago…