Black Death

• 1. Origins And Transmission Routes

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  In 1347, Genoese trading ships fled the siege of Kaffa in Crimea. The Golden Horde army of Jani Beg had catapulted infected corpses over the city walls to infect the inhabitants. This event marked the introduction of the plague into Europe. From there, fleas living on black rats traveled on these ships. They spread through the Mediterranean Basin and reached North Africa, West Asia, and the rest of Europe via Constantinople, Sicily, and the Italian Peninsula. Evidence suggests that once it came ashore, the Black Death mainly spread from person-to-person as pneumonic plague. This explains the quick inland spread of the epidemic, which was faster than expected if rat fleas were the primary vector. In 2022, researchers discovered a sudden surge of deaths in what is today Kyrgyzstan from the late 1330s. When combined with genetic evidence, this implies the initial spread may have pre-dated the 14th-century Mongol conquests previously postulated as the cause.

• 2. Scientific Discovery And Genetic Evidence

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  The bacterium Yersinia pestis was discovered by Alexandre Yersin during an epidemic of bubonic plague in Hong Kong in 1894. He proved this bacterium was present in rodents and suggested the rat was the main vehicle of transmission. Definitive confirmation arrived in 2010 with a publication in PLOS Pathogens by Haensch et al. They assessed DNA/RNA presence using polymerase chain reaction techniques for Yersinia pestis from tooth sockets in human skeletons from mass graves across northern, central, and southern Europe. These findings unambiguously demonstrated that Yersinia pestis was the causative agent of the epidemic plague that devastated Europe during the Middle Ages. In 2011, Bos et al. reported the first draft genome of Yersinia pestis from plague victims at the East Smithfield cemetery in England. This strain was ancestral to most modern strains of Yersinia pestis. DNA taken from 25 skeletons from 14th-century London showed that the plague is a strain almost identical to that which hit Madagascar in 2013. Further genetic evidence traces the source to the Tian Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan.

• 3. Demographic Catastrophe And Mortality Rates

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  The Black Death killed between 75 million and 200 million people in Eurasia according to some estimates. A study published in 2022 used pollen samples across Europe from 1250 to 1450 to estimate changes in agricultural output before and after the pandemic. The authors found great variability in different regions with high mortality in areas like Scandinavia, France, western Germany, Greece, and central Italy. However, uninterrupted agricultural growth occurred in central and eastern Europe, Iberia, and Ireland. Robert Gottfried notes that as early as 1351, agents for Pope Clement VI calculated the number of dead in Christian Europe at 23,840,000. With a pre-plague population of about 75 million, this accounts for a mortality rate of 31%. In Florence, the population dropped 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. Half of Paris' population of 100,000 people died. By the 18th century, the population of Cairo was halved from its numbers in 1347.

• 4. Economic Upheaval And Labor Shifts

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  Alongside population decline from the pandemic, wages soared in response to a subsequent labor shortage. In some places rents collapsed, such as lettings that used to bring in £5 but now brought only £1. Many laborers, artisans, and craftsmen suffered a reduction in real incomes owing to rampant inflation. Landowners were pushed to substitute monetary rents for labor services to keep tenants. Taxes and tithes became difficult to collect because many properties were empty and unfarmed. The trade disruptions in the Mongol Empire caused by the Black Death contributed to its collapse. Prior to the emergence of the plague, the continent was considered a feudalistic society composed of fiefs and city-states frequently managed by the Catholic Church. Survivors found not only that food prices were lower but also that lands were more abundant. Many inherited property from their dead relatives, which probably contributed to the destabilization of feudalism. To answer the increased need for labor, workers traveled in search of the most favorable position economically.

• 5. Social Persecution And Religious Response

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  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. 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. In the Strasbourg massacre of February 1349, about 2,000 Jews were murdered. By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed. During this period many Jews relocated to Poland where they received a welcome from King Casimir the Great. The word quarantine has its roots in this period though the practice of isolating people is older. In the city-state of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, Croatia, a thirty-day isolation period was implemented in 1377 for new arrivals from plague-affected areas. This isolation period was later extended to forty days and given the name quarantino from the Italian word for forty.

• 6. Cultural Legacy And Artistic Depictions

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  The 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. The Dance of Death or Danse Macabre became a common painting motif in the late medieval period as an allegory on the universality of death. Pieter Bruegel's The Triumph of Death reflects the social upheaval and terror that followed the plague which devastated medieval Europe. Survivors began to turn to other forms of spirituality while the power dynamics of fiefs and city-states crumbled. Commoners came to enjoy more freedom due to the drastic reduction in the populace increasing the value of the working class.