The Black Death Really is Bubonic Plague
After extracting DNA from 75 skeletons in mass graves or plague pits, scientists have recently confirmed definitively that the Black Death that consumed more than 1/3 the population of Europe from 1347 to 1353 was caused by Yersinia pestis, a bacterium that carries bubonic plague. Other possible causative agents were suspected, like viral hemorrhagic fever, but this recently uncovered evidence seals the debate.
The plague had its origins in the 1330's in China, which was the epicenter of world trade at that time, and which also is estimated to have lost about a third of its population at the time due to the plague and an associated famine (as many as 60,000,000 people). Several Italian ships had docked in Sicily after stopping in the Black Sea, one of the key way stations in the China trade. Many of the sailors on board were already dying of the plague, and its frightening spread on the ground led one eyewitness to describe the scene as follows:
"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 was horrifying not only because of the painful and disfiguring swelling of the lymph glands (the buboes from which bubonic disease got its name) and the red spots that quickly turned black on the skin (the reason the disease was called the Black Death), but the utter rapidity with which it grabbed its victims and turned healthy individuals into pustulating corpses in a matter of days: victims "ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise." Europe had a population of about 75 million at this time, and in 5 years, 25 million had perished.
The pneumonic version of the plague was the deadliest form that it took. Anyone could catch it simply by breathing the exhaled air of a victim. The horrible consequences were described in sordid detail by Giovanni Boccaccio in "The Decameron":
"The violence of this disease was such that the sick communicated it to the healthy who came near them, just as a fire catches anything dry or oily near it. And it even went further. To speak to or go near the sick brought infection and a common death to the living; and moreover, to touch the clothes or anything else the sick had touched or worn gave the disease to the person touching."
"One citizen avoided another, hardly any neighbour troubled about others, relatives never or hardly ever visited each other. Moreover, such terror was struck into the hearts of men and women by this calamity, that brother abandoned brother, and the uncle his nephew, and the sister her brother, and very often the wife her husband. What is even worse and nearly incredible is that fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children, as if they had not been theirs."
The disease was spread by infected fleas hitchhiking on rats, but the primitive state of medieval medicine, poor hygiene, religious hysteria and gross superstition led to the search for scapegoats. Jewish communities throughout Europe were decimated as Jews were blamed for poisoning the wells or otherwise conspiring to destroy their Christian neighbors. 60 major and 150 minor Jewish communities in Mainz, Cologne and elsewhere, many hundreds of years old, were utterly destroyed and their inhabitants massacred.
It took Europe 150 years to make up for the losses incurred in a few brief years. Recurrent, but less severe outbreaks continued for several hundred more years, and kept the fear of this dread disease in the consciousness of all sentient folk. A healthier and cleaner environment and modern medical science has wrought many miracles, but it hasn't eliminated the possibility nor the fear of another terrible pandemic breaking out in our own day and age, with all its attendant horrors and consequences.
About the Author:
Larry Isaacson is Vice President of Haskell New York Inc. and contributing author for http://www.officesalesusa.com that sells office supplies/furniture, better hygiene and safe for the environment products.
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