THE BLACK DEATH
G'day folks,
Welcome to an awful time in history.
The Black Death arrived in Europe by sea in October 1347
when 12 Genoese trading ships docked at the Sicilian port of Messina after a
long journey through the Black Sea. The people who gathered on the docks to
greet the ships were met with a horrifying surprise: Most of the sailors aboard
the ships were dead, and those who were still alive were gravely ill. They were
overcome with fever, unable to keep food down and delirious from pain.
Strangest of all, they were covered in mysterious black boils that oozed blood
and pus and gave their illness its name: the “Black Death.” The Sicilian
authorities hastily ordered the fleet of “death ships” out of the harbor, but
it was too late: Over the next five years, the mysterious Black Death would
kill more than 20 million people in Europe–almost one-third of the continent’s
population.
“The Black Death”
Even
before the “death ships” pulled into port at Messina, many Europeans had heard
rumors about a “Great Pestilence” that was carving a deadly path across the
trade routes of the Near and Far East. (Early in the 1340s, the disease had
struck China, India, Persia, Syria and Egypt.) However, they were scarcely
equipped for the horrible reality of the Black Death. “In men and women alike,”
the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio wrote, “at the beginning of the malady,
certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits…waxed to the
bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more and some
less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils.”
Blood and pus seeped out of
these strange swellings, which were followed by a host of other unpleasant
symptoms–fever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible aches and pains–and then,
in short order, death. The Black Death was terrifyingly, indiscriminately
contagious: “the mere touching of the clothes,” wrote Boccaccio, “appeared to
itself to communicate the malady to the toucher.” The disease was also terrifyingly
efficient. People who were perfectly healthy when they went to bed at night
could be dead by morning.
Did You Know?
Many
scholars think that the nursery rhyme “Ring around the Rosy” was written about
the symptoms of the Black Death.
Understanding the Black Death
Today,
scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread
by a bacillus called Yersina pestis. (The French biologist Alexandre Yersin
discovered this germ at the end of the 19th century.) They know that the bacillus
travels from person to person pneumonically, or through the air, as well as
through the bite of infected fleas and rats. Both of these pests could be found
almost everywhere in medieval Europe, but they were particularly at home aboard
ships of all kinds–which is how the deadly plague made its way through one
European port city after another. Not long after it struck Messina, the Black
Death spread to the port of Marseilles in France and the port of Tunis in North
Africa. Then it reached Rome and Florence, two cities at the center of an
elaborate web of trade routes. By the middle of 1348, the Black Death had
struck Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon and London.
Today,
this grim sequence of events is terrifying but comprehensible. In the middle of
the 14th century, however, there seemed to be no rational explanation for it.
No one knew exactly how the Black Death was transmitted from one patient to
another–according to one doctor, for example, “instantaneous death occurs when
the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy
person standing near and looking at the sick”–and no one knew how to prevent or
treat it. Physicians relied on crude and unsophisticated techniques such as
bloodletting and boil-lancing (practices that were dangerous as well as
unsanitary) and superstitious practices such as burning aromatic herbs and
bathing in rosewater or vinegar.
Meanwhile,
in a panic, healthy people did all they could to avoid the sick. Doctors
refused to see patients; priests refused to administer last rites. Shopkeepers
closed stores. Many people fled the cities for the countryside, but even there
they could not escape the disease: It affected cows, sheep, goats, pigs and
chickens as well as people. In fact, so many sheep died that one of the consequences
of the Black Death was a European wool shortage. And many people, desperate to
save themselves, even abandoned their sick and dying loved ones. “Thus doing,”
Boccaccio wrote, “each thought to secure immunity for himself.”
God’s Punishment?
Because
they did not understand the biology of the disease, many people believed that
the Black Death was a kind of divine punishment–retribution for sins against
God such as greed, blasphemy, heresy, fornication and worldliness. By this
logic, the only way to overcome the plague was to win God’s forgiveness. Some
people believed that the way to do this was to purge their communities of
heretics and other troublemakers–so, for example, many thousands of Jews were
massacred in 1348 and 1349. (Thousands more fled to the sparsely populated
regions of Eastern Europe, where they could be relatively safe from the
rampaging mobs in the cities.)
Some
people coped with the terror and uncertainty of the Black Death epidemic by
lashing out at their neighbors; others coped by turning inward and fretting
about the condition of their own souls. Some upper-class men joined processions
of flagellants that traveled from town to town and engaged in public displays
of penance and punishment: They would beat themselves and one another with
heavy leather straps studded with sharp pieces of metal while the townspeople
looked on. For 33 1/2 days, the flagellants repeated this ritual three times a
day. Then they would move on to the next town and begin the process over again.
Though
the flagellant movement did provide some comfort to people who felt powerless
in the face of inexplicable tragedy, it soon began to worry the Pope, whose
authority the flagellants had begun to usurp. In the face of this papal
resistance, the movement disintegrated.
The Black
Death epidemic had run its course by the early 1350s, but the plague reappeared
every few generations for centuries. Modern sanitation and public-health
practices have greatly mitigated the impact of the disease but have not
eliminated it.
Clancy's comment: Yuk. Glad my relatives survived.
I'm ...
