I | INTRODUCTION |
Black
Death, outbreak of bubonic plague that struck Europe and the
Mediterranean area from 1347 through 1351. It was the first of a cycle of
European plague epidemics that continued until the early 18th century. The last
major outbreak of plague in Europe was in Marseilles in 1722. These plagues had
been preceded by a cycle of ancient plagues between the 6th and 8th centuries
AD; they were followed by another cycle of modern, but less deadly, plagues that
began in the late 19th century and continued in the 20th century. The term
“Black Death” was not used to refer to the plagues of 1347 through 1351 until
much later; contemporaries usually referred to it as the Pestilence, or the
Great Mortality.
Plague is a bacterial infection that can take
more than one form. Victims of bubonic plague usually suffer from high fevers
and swellings under the armpits or in the groin. Unless treated with modern
antibiotics, usually 60 percent of the infected will die, often within the first
five days. Other forms of plague include pneumonic plague and septicemic plague
(see Plague). The disease is carried by a variety of rodents—rats,
marmots, and prairie dogs, among others. It can pass into a human population
when fleas carrying infected rodent blood attach themselves to a human
host.
II | ORIGINS OF THE BLACK DEATH |
Scientists and historians are still unsure
about the origins of plague. Medieval European writers believed that it began in
China, which they considered to be a land of almost magical happenings.
Chroniclers wrote that it began with earthquakes, fire falling from the sky, and
plagues of vermin. Like medieval travel literature, these accounts are based on
a number of myths about life in areas outside of Europe. It now seems most
probable that infected rodents migrated from the Middle East into southern
Russia, the region between the Black and Caspian seas. Plague was then spread
west along trade routes. There were epidemics among the Tartars in southern
Russia in 1346. Plague was passed from them to colonies of Italians living in
towns along the Black Sea. Merchants probably carried the disease from there to
Alexandria in Egypt in 1347; it then moved to Damascus and Libya in 1348, and
Upper Egypt in 1349. Venetian and Genoese sailors are known to have brought the
plague to Europe.
Plague moved quickly along the major trade
routes. From Pisa, where it had arrived early in 1348, it traveled to Florence
and then on to Rome and Bologna; from Venice it moved into southern Germany and
Austria; and from Genoa it crossed the Tyrhennian Sea to Barcelona in Spain and
Marseilles in France. It continued through the towns of southern France,
reaching Paris by early June 1348. From there the contagion spread to England by
late June 1348 and the Low Countries by the summer of 1349.
Parts of Europe were initially spared the
epidemic. Milan was almost unique among the major Italian towns. The lord of the
city closed the gates to travelers coming from plague areas, and few people
died. Many parts of Germany and eastern Europe also escaped the epidemic in 1348
through 1351. Probably because of their relative isolation, Bohemia, Poland, and
central Germany experienced no plague before the 1360s and 1370s.
III | BELIEFS ABOUT THE CAUSES OF PLAGUE |
Contemporary doctors and theologians agreed
that the epidemic had both religious and physical causes. The first and most
important was God’s judgment on a sinful humanity; the second was a lack of
balance in the body’s humors, or fluids. As with earthquakes, floods, and fires,
medieval Christians assumed illness was a call to repentance. In response, some
Christians, known as flagellants, began to ritually beat themselves as penance
for their own and for others’ sins. Although groups of flagellants had existed
since the 10th century, the outbreak of the plague radically increased their
numbers.
These new groups of flagellants appeared
first in Hungary and Germany and then spread throughout the rest of northern
Europe. They held processions through towns that lasted for as long as 33 days,
each day representing one year in the life of Jesus Christ. These processions
varied in size from just a handful of people to perhaps thousands in the largest
processions. Flagellants traveled as a group and were led by a cleric. They went
from town to town and at each stop, after a short sermon by the leader, the
penitents would whip or flog themselves before moving on to the next town. Town
officials were suspicious of these religious enthusiasts; towns in southern
France and the Low Countries eventually closed their gates to these people, and
the groups were forced to disband. During later plagues individuals did travel
to local shrines and invoke the help of saints who they believed could aid the
sick, but fewer people were involved than in the flagellants’ processions.
Medieval physicians inherited their medical
ideas from the Greeks and Romans, who believed that health involved a balance of
bodily humors. Imbalance caused by emotional, dietary, or external factors like
noxious odors could result in sickness or even death. Contemporary writers
associated plague with the influence of planets and stars, or with earthquakes,
which were thought to cause the release of noxious gases from the center of the
earth. Physicians thus suggested that individuals eat moderately and avoid
anything that could upset the body’s delicate balance. Governments regulated
trades thought to produce dangerous odors or potentially corrupt matter.
IV | PREVENTATIVE MEASURES |
The epidemics that occurred late in the 14th
and 15th centuries were not as virulent as the first plagues. Contemporaries
began to see patterns and to sense what they might do to limit the impact of
plague. It was clear that plague was most likely to arise in summer or early
autumn. Further, after initially striking everyone, observers noticed that
plague most often settled in the poorest, most crowded neighborhoods. Thus when
Italian Girolamo Fracastoro first explained the theory of contagious disease, he
assumed it was the poor who spread the disease. It was clear that flight or
avoiding contact with the sick was the best defense. Those who could moved from
infected towns to country villages or towns away from the contagion. Families
often hired special servants to watch their sick even as the rest of the family
moved away. Or in other cases a single member of a large family might agree to
take care of purchasing food and all other public activities. This had the
effect of reducing the impact of plague on the well-to-do, those most likely to
be able to isolate themselves; and in turn it reinforced the idea that the poor
were morally and physically predisposed to sickness.
Some of the most effective measures taken
against plague were the quarantines first used in 15th-century Italy. By the
16th century, quarantines were common throughout Europe. It was in response to
plague that urban governments, first in Italy and then in other parts of Europe,
developed systems of public health services to deal with epidemics. Towns began
by simply investigating any suspicious illnesses or deaths; some created special
plague hospitals to hold the ill; and almost all restricted movements of people
during times of plague. Travelers were expected to carry certificates of health
indicating that they had not been exposed to epidemic disease. By the 16th
century it was virtually impossible to move out of areas under quarantine.
Beginning in the late 17th century,
governments created a medical boundary, or cordon sanitaire, between
Europe and the areas to the east from which epidemics came. Ships traveling west
from the Ottoman Empire were forced to wait in quarantine before passengers and
cargo could be unloaded. The Holy Roman Empire created a similarly effective
medical border along the Danube River and elsewhere on its border with the
Ottoman Empire to the east. Those who attempted to evade medical quarantine were
shot. The cordon sanitaire seems to have been effective. While bubonic plague
continued to affect the areas of the eastern Mediterranean, it disappeared in
the West.
V | DISAPPEARANCE OF PLAGUE |
Plague became less common in Europe after the
1530s. The last plague in England was in 1665, the last in Western Europe in
1722. Numerous theories have been offered to explain the disappearance of
plague. It has been argued that black rats, the primary carriers of plague, may
have been replaced by larger brown rats that do not carry the infection. A
second theory suggests that increased immunity among the rodents that carried
the disease or changes in the disease itself broke the cycle of transmission.
The most likely explanation, however, is human intervention. Although it wasn’t
until the 19th century that doctors understood how germs could cause disease,
Europeans recognized by the 16th century that plague was contagious and could be
carried from one area to another.
VI | EFFECTS OF THE PLAGUE |
The Black Death and the other epidemics of
bubonic plague had many consequences. One was a series of vicious attacks on
Jews, lepers, and outsiders who were accused of deliberately poisoning the water
or the air. The attacks began in the south of France, but were most dramatic in
parts of Switzerland and Germany—areas with a long history of attacks on local
Jewish communities. Massacres in Bern were typical of this pattern: After weeks
of fearful tension, Jews were rounded up and burned or drowned in marshes.
Sometimes there were attacks on Jews even where there was no plague. The Pope,
the leader of the Catholic church, and most public officials condemned the
massacres and tried to stop them. In the face of mob fury, however, they were
often unsuccessful. Persecutions only ended when the deaths from the plague
began to decline. There were occasional local persecutions during later plagues,
but never with the violence of those that occurred from 1348 through 1351.
Contemporary chroniclers of the Black Death
called the epidemic “a horrible and cruel thing.” It seemed to them that the
towns of Europe were nearly deserted in the aftermath of the plague. Overall,
European population declined by about one-third. In many European cities
population may have declined by up to 50 percent or more. Bremen in Germany lost
almost 7,000 of its 12,000 inhabitants. The prosperous city of Florence, Italy,
may have lost 40,000 of its nearly 90,000 inhabitants. Nearby Siena probably
lost two-thirds of its urban population. Paris, the largest city north of the
Alps, lost more than 50,000 of its 180,000 inhabitants. Most major cities were
quickly forced to create mass graveyards where the dead could be buried. Many
towns and villages lost almost all of their populations, and some eventually
disappeared altogether. Larger towns declined drastically, as their workforces
and merchant classes either died or fled. The initial population losses could
have been quickly made up, but new epidemics prevented a return to the high
population levels of the period before 1348. European population only began to
grow again in the last decades of the 15th century.
The plagues also brought economic changes.
The death of so many people concentrated wealth in the hands of survivors. In
many cases those workers who remained alive could earn up to five times what
they had earned before the plague. In the towns, plague had the effect of
consolidating wealth somewhat, especially among the middle class. As plague
destroyed people and not possessions, the drop in population was accompanied by
a corresponding rise in per capita wealth. Large increases in spending in the
towns at this time are well documented. Profits, however, for landlords and
merchants declined as they found themselves having to pay higher wages and
getting less when they sold their products.
Governments were forced to adjust to the
social disruption caused by plague. First local governments, and then in the
case of England, the monarchy, attempted to regulate the movement and price of
foodstuffs as well as wages paid to laborers. The English Statute of Laborers of
1351 tried to hold wages at preplague levels. Similar statutes were passed in
various parts of France, Germany, and Italy.
Landlords tried to collect higher fees from
tenant farmers as a way to increase declining incomes. Unrest among the peasants
was one of the major causes of the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The English
rebels objected to high payments to landowners and legal limitations on the
rights of some peasants. Economic and political unrest occurred in most parts of
Europe during the second half of the 14th century.
The Black Death also had an effect on the
arts. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a group of young people fleeing
the plague take refuge in a house outside of Florence where they entertain each
other with colorful and irreverent stories. While these stories are often seen
as a rejection of traditional medieval values, Boccaccio himself was critical of
those who abandoned relatives and friends in the face of the plague. Like the
artists of the day, Boccaccio continued to hold traditional social and religious
values. The primary impact of the Black Death on painting and sculpture was the
willingness of the newly rich to invest in religious art for churches and
chapels. These contributions were often made in gratitude for being spared the
plague, or with the hope of preventing future infection. As was natural, much of
the art and literature in the years immediately following the Black Death dealt
with death.
Plague brought few changes in religious life
or to medical practices. Europeans continued to visit religious shrines. Saints
like St. Roch, who was thought to protect against plague, were especially
popular. It was common to paint images of St. Roch, or other famous plague
saints, protecting individuals from arrows symbolizing the pestilence. Finally,
although Europeans often complained that physicians were of little help against
the plague, traditional medical ideas and practices did not change. In fact, the
same ideas about humors, contagion, and quarantine were also at first used to
fight cholera when that disease appeared in Europe in the 1830s.
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