The Black Death was a plague pandemic that occurred in Europe from 1346 to 1353, killing as many as 50% of Europe's 14th-century population. This catastrophic event, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, spread through fleas and the air, creating one of the most fatal pandemics in human history. The disease originated from Central Asia, China, the Middle East, or Europe, with evidence pointing to a sudden surge of deaths in what is today Kyrgyzstan in the late 1330s. The pandemic was reportedly first introduced to Europe during the siege of the Genoese trading port of Kaffa in Crimea by the Golden Horde army of Jani Beg in 1347. From Crimea, it was most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats that travelled on Genoese ships, spreading through the Mediterranean Basin and reaching North Africa, West Asia, and the rest of Europe via Constantinople, Sicily, and the Italian Peninsula. There is evidence that once it came ashore, the Black Death mainly spread from person-to-person as pneumonic plague, thus explaining the quick inland spread of the epidemic, which was faster than would be expected if the primary vector was rat fleas causing bubonic plague. In 2022, it was discovered that there was a sudden surge of deaths in what is today Kyrgyzstan from the Black Death in the late 1330s; when combined with genetic evidence, this implies that the initial spread may have pre-dated, by nearly two decades, the 14th-century Mongol conquests previously postulated as the cause.
Origins And Transmission
The origin of the Black Death is disputed, with genetic analysis suggesting Yersinia pestis bacteria evolved approximately 7,000 years ago, at the beginning of the Neolithic, with flea-mediated strains emerging around 3,800 years ago during the late Bronze Age. The immediate territorial origins of the Black Death and its outbreak remain unclear, with some evidence pointing towards Central Asia, China, the Middle East, and Europe. The pandemic was reportedly first introduced to Europe during the siege of the Genoese trading port of Kaffa in Crimea by the Golden Horde army of Jani Beg in 1347. From Crimea, it was most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats that travelled on Genoese ships, spreading through the Mediterranean Basin and reaching North Africa, West Asia, and the rest of Europe via Constantinople, Sicily, and the Italian Peninsula. There is evidence that once it came ashore, the Black Death mainly spread from person-to-person as pneumonic plague, thus explaining the quick inland spread of the epidemic, which was faster than would be expected if the primary vector was rat fleas causing bubonic plague. In 2022, it was discovered that there was a sudden surge of deaths in what is today Kyrgyzstan from the Black Death in the late 1330s; when combined with genetic evidence, this implies that the initial spread may have pre-dated, by nearly two decades, the 14th-century Mongol conquests previously postulated as the cause.
Symptoms of the plague include fever of 38 to 40 degrees Celsius, headaches, painful aching joints, nausea and vomiting, and a general feeling of malaise. Left untreated, 80% of victims die within eight days. Contemporary accounts of the pandemic are varied and often imprecise. The most commonly noted symptom was the appearance of buboes (or gavocciolos) in the groin, neck and armpits, which oozed pus and bled when opened. Boccaccio's description: This was followed by acute fever and vomiting of blood. Most people died two to seven days after initial infection. Freckle-like spots and rashes, which may have been caused by flea-bites, were identified as another potential sign of plague. Lodewijk Heyligen, whose master Cardinal Giovanni Colonna died of plague in 1348, noted a distinct form of the disease, pneumonic plague, that infected the lungs and led to respiratory problems. Symptoms include fever, cough and blood-tinged sputum. As the disease progresses, sputum becomes free-flowing and bright red. Pneumonic plague has a mortality rate of 90, 95%. Septicemic plague is the least common of the three forms, with an untreated mortality rate near 100%. Symptoms are high fevers and purple skin patches (purpura due to disseminated intravascular coagulation). In cases of pneumonic and particularly septicemic plague, the progress of the disease is so rapid that there would often be no time for the development of the enlarged lymph nodes that were noted as buboes.
Economic And Social Upheaval
The Black Death killed, by various estimations, from 25 to 60% of Europe's population. Robert Gottfried writes that as early as 1351, agents for Pope Clement VI calculated the number of dead in Christian Europe at 23,840,000. With a preplague population of about 75 million, Clement's figure accounts for mortality of 31%-a rate about midway between the 50% mortality estimated for East Anglia, Tuscany, and parts of Scandinavia, and the less-than-15% morbidity for Bohemia and Galicia. And it is unerringly close to Froissart's claim that a third of the world died, a measurement probably drawn from St. John's figure of mortality from plague in the Book of Revelation, a favorite medieval source of information. Ole J. Benedictow proposes 60% mortality rate for Europe as a whole based on available data, with up to 80% based on poor nutritional conditions in the 14th century. According to medieval historian Philip Daileader, it is likely that over four years, 45, 50% of the European population died of plague. The overwhelming number of deaths in Europe sometimes made mass burials necessary, and some sites had hundreds or thousands of bodies. The mass burial sites that have been excavated have allowed archaeologists to continue interpreting and defining the biological, sociological, historical, and anthropological implications of the Black Death. The mortality rate of the Black Death in the 14th century was far greater than the worst 20th-century outbreaks of Yersinia pestis plague, which occurred in India and killed as much as 3% of the population of certain cities. In 1348, the disease spread so rapidly that nearly a third of the European population perished before any physicians or government authorities had time to reflect upon its origins. In crowded cities, it was not uncommon for as much as 50% of the population to die. Half of Paris' population of 100,000 people died. In Italy, the population of Florence was reduced from between 110,000 and 120,000 inhabitants in 1338 to 50,000 in 1351. At least 60% of the population of Hamburg and Bremen perished, and a similar percentage of Londoners may have died from the disease as well, leaving a death toll of approximately 62,000 between 1346 and 1353. Florence's tax records suggest that 80% of the city's population died within four months in 1348. Before 1350, there were about 170,000 settlements in Germany, and this was reduced by nearly 40,000 by 1450. The disease bypassed some areas, with the most isolated areas being less vulnerable to contagion. Plague did not appear in Flanders until the turn of the 15th century, and the impact was less severe on the populations of Hainaut, Finland, northern Germany, and areas of Poland. Monks, nuns, and priests were especially hard-hit since they cared for people ill with the plague. The level of mortality in the rest of Eastern Europe was likely similar to that of Western Europe in the first outbreak, with descriptions suggesting a similar effect on Russian towns, and the cycles of plague in Russia being roughly equivalent. In 1382, the physician to the Avignon Papacy, Raimundo Chalmel de Vinario, observed the decreasing mortality rate of successive outbreaks of plague in 1347, 1348, 1362, 1371 and 1382 in his treatise On Epidemics. In the first outbreak, two thirds of the population contracted the illness and most patients died; in the next, half the population became ill but only some died; by the third, a tenth were affected and many survived; while by the fourth occurrence, only one in twenty people were sickened and most of them survived. By the 1380s in Europe, the plague predominantly affected children. Chalmel de Vinario recognised that bloodletting was ineffective (though he continued to prescribe bleeding for members of the Roman Curia, whom he disliked), and said that all true cases of plague were caused by astrological factors and were incurable; he was never able to effect a cure. The populations of some Italian cities, notably Florence, did not regain their pre-14th century size until the 19th century. Italian chronicler Agnolo di Tura recorded his experience from Siena, where plague arrived in May 1348: The most widely accepted estimate for the Middle East, including Iraq, Iran, and Syria, during this time, is for a death toll of about a third of the population. The Black Death killed about 40% of Egypt's population. Egypt , Major Cities, U.S. Library of Congress In Cairo, with a population numbering as many as 600,000, and possibly the largest city west of China, between one third and 40% of the inhabitants died within eight months. By the 18th century, the population of Cairo was halved from its numbers in 1347. It has been suggested that the Black Death, like other outbreaks through history, disproportionately affected the poorest people and those already in worse physical condition than the wealthier citizens. But along with population decline from the pandemic, wages soared in response to a subsequent labour shortage. In some places rents collapsed (e.g., lettings used to bring in £5, and now but £1). However, many labourers, artisans, and craftsmen, those living from money-wages alone, suffered a reduction in real incomes owing to rampant inflation. Landowners were also pushed to substitute monetary rents for labour services in an effort to keep tenants. Taxes and tithes became difficult to collect, with living poor refusing to cover the share of the rich deceased, because many properties were empty and unfarmed, and because tax-collectors, where they could be employed, refused to go to plague spots. The trade disruptions in the Mongol Empire caused by the Black Death was one of the reasons for its collapse. A study performed by Thomas Van Hoof of the Utrecht University suggests that the innumerable deaths brought on by the pandemic cooled the climate by freeing up land and triggering reforestation. This may have led to the Little Ice Age. Renewed religious fervor and fanaticism increased in the wake of the Black Death. Some Europeans targeted various groups such as Jews, friars, foreigners, beggars, pilgrims, lepers, and Romani, blaming them for the crisis. Lepers, and others with skin diseases such as acne or psoriasis, were killed throughout Europe. Because 14th-century healers and governments were at a loss to explain or stop the disease, Europeans turned to astrological forces, earthquakes and the poisoning of wells by Jews as possible reasons for outbreaks. Many believed the epidemic was a punishment by God for their sins, and could be relieved by winning God's forgiveness. There were many attacks against Jewish communities. Black Death, Jewishencyclopedia.com In the Strasbourg massacre of February 1349, about 2,000 Jews were murdered. In August 1349, the Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne were annihilated. By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed. Jewish History 1340, 1349. During this period many Jews relocated to Poland, where they received a welcome from King Casimir the Great. One theory that has been advanced is that the Black Death's devastation of Florence, between 1348 and 1350, resulted in a shift in the world view of people in 14th-century Italy that ultimately led to the Renaissance. Italy was particularly badly hit by the pandemic, and the resulting familiarity with death may have caused thinkers to dwell more on their lives on Earth, rather than on spirituality and the afterlife. It has also been argued that the Black Death prompted a new wave of piety, manifested in the sponsorship of religious works of art. This does not fully explain why the Renaissance occurred in Italy in the 14th century; the Renaissance's emergence was most likely the result of the complex interaction of the above factors, in combination with an influx of Greek scholars after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. As a result of the drastic reduction in the populace the value of the working class increased, and commoners came to enjoy more freedom. To answer the increased need for labour, workers travelled in search of the most favorable position economically. Prior to the emergence of the Black Death, the continent was considered a feudalistic society, composed of fiefs and city-states frequently managed by the Catholic Church. The pandemic completely restructured both religion and political forces; survivors began to turn to other forms of spirituality and the power dynamics of the fiefs and city-states crumbled. The survivors of the pandemic found not only that the prices of food were lower but also that lands were more abundant, and many of them inherited property from their dead relatives, and this probably contributed to the destabilization of feudalism. The word quarantine has its roots in this period, though the practice of isolating people to prevent the spread of disease is older. In the city-state of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia), a thirty-day isolation period was implemented in 1377 for new arrivals to the city from plague-affected areas. The isolation period was later extended to forty days, and given the name quarantino from the Italian word for forty. All institutions were affected. Smaller monasteries and convents became unviable and closed. Up to half parish churches lost their priest, apart from the parishioners. Religious sensibilities changed.
Recurrences And Legacy
The plague repeatedly returned to haunt Europe and the Mediterranean throughout the 14th to 17th centuries. According to Jean-Noël Biraben, the plague was present somewhere in Europe in every year between 1346 and 1671 (although some researchers have cautions about the uncritical use of Biraben's data). The second pandemic was particularly widespread in the following years: 1360, 1363; 1374; 1400; 1438, 1439; 1456, 1457; 1464, 1466; 1481, 1485; 1500, 1503; 1518, 1531; 1544, 1548; 1563, 1566; 1573, 1588; 1596, 1599; 1602, 1611; 1623, 1640; 1644, 1654; and 1664, 1667. Subsequent outbreaks, though severe, marked the plague's retreat from most of Europe (18th century) and North Africa (19th century). Historian George Sussman argued that the plague had not occurred in East Africa until the 20th century. However, other sources suggest that the second pandemic did indeed reach sub-Saharan Africa. According to historian Geoffrey Parker, France alone, it is estimated that at least two million people died from the disease between 1600 and 1670, no fewer than 750,000 of them (almost five percent of the kingdom's population) during the severe epidemic of 1628, 1632. In the first half of the 17th century, a plague killed some 1.7 million people in Italy. More than 1.25 million deaths resulted from the extreme incidence of plague in 17th-century Spain. The Black Death ravaged much of the Islamic world. Plague could be found in the Islamic world almost every year between 1500 and 1850. Sometimes the outbreaks affected small areas, while other outbreaks affected multiple regions. Plague repeatedly struck the cities of North Africa. Algiers lost 30,000, 50,000 inhabitants to it in 1620, 1621, and again in 1654, 1657, 1665, 1691, and 1740, 1742. Cairo suffered more than fifty plague epidemics within 150 years from the plague's first appearance, with the final outbreak of the second pandemic there in the 1840s. Plague remained a major event in Ottoman society until the second quarter of the 19th century. Between 1701 and 1750, thirty-seven larger and smaller epidemics were recorded in Constantinople, and an additional thirty-one between 1751 and 1800. Baghdad has suffered severely from visitations of the plague, and sometimes two-thirds of its population died. The third plague pandemic (1855, 1960) started in China in the mid-19th century, spreading to all inhabited continents and killing 10 million people in India alone. The investigation of the pathogen that caused the 19th-century plague was begun by teams of scientists who visited Hong Kong in 1894, among whom was the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, for whom the pathogen was named. Twelve plague outbreaks in Australia between 1900 and 1925 resulted in over 1,000 deaths, chiefly in Sydney. This led to the establishment of a Public Health Department there which undertook some leading-edge research on plague transmission from rat fleas to humans via the bacillus Yersinia pestis. The first North American plague epidemic was the San Francisco plague of 1900, 1904, followed by another outbreak in 1907, 1908. Modern treatment methods include insecticides, the use of antibiotics, and a plague vaccine. It is feared that the plague bacterium could develop drug resistance and again become a major health threat. One case of a drug-resistant form of the bacterium was found in Madagascar in 1995. Another outbreak in Madagascar was reported in November 2014. In October 2017, the deadliest outbreak of the plague in modern times hit Madagascar, killing 170 people and infecting thousands. An estimate of the case fatality rate for the modern plague, after the introduction of antibiotics, is 11%, although it may be higher in underdeveloped regions.