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History Alive- The Medieval World and Beyond

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History Alive- The Medieval World and Beyond

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How Did the Black Plague Start?

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. Indeed, in the early 1340s, the disease had struck China, India, Persia, Syria and Egypt.

The plague is thought to have originated in Asia over 2,000 years ago and was likely spread by trading ships, though recent research has indicated the pathogen responsible for the Black Death may have existed in Europe as early as 3000 B.C.

Symptoms of the Black Plague

Europeans 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 Bubonic Plague attacks the lymphatic system, causing swelling in the lymph nodes. If untreated, the infection can spread to the blood or lungs.

How Did the Black Death Spread?

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 Yersinia 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 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, and no one knew how to prevent or treat it. 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."

How Do You Treat the Black Death?

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; and shopkeepers closed their 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."

Black Plague: 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.

Flagellants

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.

How Did the Black Death End?

The plague never really ended and it returned with a vengeance years later. But officials in the port city of Ragusa were able to slow its spread by keeping arriving sailors in isolation until it was clear they were not carrying the disease-creating social distancing that relied on isolation to slow the spread of the disease.

The sailors were initially held on their ships for 30 days (a trentino), a period that was later increased to 40 days, or a quarantine- the origin of the term "quarantine" and a practice still used today.

Does the Black Plague Still Exist?

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. While antibiotics are available to treat the Black Death, according to The World Health Organization, there are still 1,000 to 3,000 cases of plague every year.
Gallery: Pandemics That Changed History

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The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. Explore the facts of the plague, the symptoms it caused and how millions died from it.

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Fast and lethal, the Black Death spread more than a mile per day

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Fast and lethal, the Black Death spread more than a mile per day

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Sometime in 1347 a sailing ship moored in a Mediterranean port unwittingly unleashed one of the most destructive pathogens in history. Unloaded with its cargo and passengers were some deadly stowaways: flea-ridden black rats carrying the bubonic plague. It was a scenario played out many times in ports all around Europe, and the results were always the same: Sickness, suffering, and death on what seemed a cataclysmic scale. The years 1347-1351 saw Europe in the terrifying grip of the worst pandemic it had ever suffered: At least one-third of Europe's population died from what became known as the Black Death.

Most historians agree that it was bubonic plague, a bacterial disease that periodically flared up in Asia and Europe. The so-called Plague of Justinian devastated the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century, killing an estimated 25 million people. After the Black Death, it continued to strike large numbers of Europeans, most notably in London in 1665. The Third Plague Pandemic, the world's last major outbreak, began in the mid-19th century and lasted well into the 20th.

Medieval Europe was at the mercy of many infectious diseases, including dysentery, influenza, measles, and much feared leprosy. But it was the plague that struck the highest note of terror into people's hearts. During its peak years, the plague spread faster, farther, and with deadlier effect than ever before or since. Its impact fundamentally altered the social, economic, and religious lives of those who survived, scarring the collective consciousness of the entire continent. It seized victims with alarming speed and its horrific ravages were incurable. None were safe as the plague cut down peasants and princes alike, its leveling of social distinctions resonating in the written accounts of the time. It is little wonder that its medieval chroniclers often assume an extravagant and even apocalyptic tone.

Many explanations of the plague were proposed, most wrapped up in religious or superstitious assumptions. Those closest to scientific reality were based on classical Greek medicine, attributing the sickness to miasmas: The invisible corruption in the air emanating from decomposing matter and supposedly absorbed by the body either by breathing or through skin contact. Some accounts suggested astrological causes, blaming the plague on the conjunction of certain planets, eclipses, or the sighting of a comet. Others cited natural phenomena: volcanic eruptions and seismic tremors releasing deadly gases. But even these explanations were widely believed to have an underlying cause: divine wrath at the sinfulness of humankind. ( Here's why plague doctors wore strange beaked masks.)

Signs and symptoms

It was only during Third Plague Pandemic that the plague's supernatural origins were definitively discarded. Researchers were able to identify the pathogen causing the disease, and in 1894 two bacteriologists-Japan's Kitasato Shibasaburo and France's Alexandre Yersin-simultaneously discovered the plague's bacillus, or rod-shaped bacteria.

Later named Yersinia pestis, the bacteria was carried by fleas living as parasites on rats and other small rodents. The bacilli multiply in the gut of the flea. When it bites, it regurgitates the bacilli into the body, infecting it. Normally this takes place in a closed cycle between fleas and rodents. But under the right conditions the bacteria spreads at such a rate as to kill off its rodent hosts, forcing the fleas to find alternatives-humans. As such, the plague is a zoonosis, an illness that passes from animals to humans. Infection spread easily because the rats were drawn to human activity, especially the food supplies kept in barns, mills, and homes. ( Today the plague is spreading among mountain lions in Yellowstone.)

The bacteria could be present in people's homes for between 16 and 23 days before the first symptoms of illness emerged. Death came three to five days later. It was perhaps another week before a community became fully aware of the danger, and by that time it was too late. The nodules of a patient's lymphatic system became infected, showing as swellings in the groin and armpit. These were accompanied by vomiting, headaches, and a very high fever that caused sufferers to shiver violently, double up with cramps, and become delirious.

The inflamed lymph gland was widely known as a bubo, giving rise to the term bubonic plague. But this was only the most common form of the Black Death-two other variants of plague were also at work. Septicemic plague infected the victim's blood, causing visibly black patches beneath the skin, perhaps what gave the Black Death its name. Pneumonic plague affected the respiratory system, making the sufferer cough-the perfect mechanism for airborne infection. In the medieval world both septicemic and pneumonic plague had a 100 percent mortality rate. ( St. Anthony's fire was another sickness that plagued medieval Europe.)

Swift spread

In Europe the Black Death first appeared in the Mediterranean basin and spread to most of the corners of the continent in just a few years. But the initial outbreak is thought to have been in the Black Sea port of Caffa, now Feodosiya, on the Crimean Peninsula. In 1346 Caffa was an important commercial trading post run by Genoese merchants. That year it was besieged by the Mongol army, among whose ranks were a growing number of plague sufferers.

As the disease spread, one story has it, the Mongols deliberately hurled infested corpses over the walls. Even more likely is that the bacteria entered the city in fleas carried by the rats scampering between the siege lines. However it arrived, once the city realized it faced a plague epidemic, the Genoese merchants panicked and fled, carrying the sickness with them to Italy.

Historians and scientists have puzzled about how the Black Death took such a firm hold over such a vast area in such a short time. Some have suggested that the main plague variant was pneumonic rather than bubonic because airborne transmission seems to support its rapid spread. However, pneumonic plague kills so quickly-in a few hours-that it actually spreads slowly because the host rarely lives long enough to infect many people.

Most evidence points to the Black Death being the main bubonic strain of plague, spread far and wide by flea-ridden rats on boats and fleas on the bodies and clothes of travelers. In an age of growing maritime trade, food and goods were carried ever longer distances from country to country, and the rats and their bacteria traveled with them-at an estimated 24 miles a day. The unceasing flow of sea, river, and road traffic between commercial centers spread the plague across huge distances in what is known as a "metastatic leap." Big commercial cities were infected first, and from there the plague radiated to nearby towns and villages, from where it would spread into the countryside. The plague was also carried down the well-trodden paths of medieval pilgrims; holy sites became additional epicenters of regional, national, and international propagation.

Even without such help the plague is estimated to have moved inland more than a mile a day in the right conditions. In very cold and dry areas it slowed to a stop, explaining why Iceland and Finland were among the few places to escape its ravages. A popular refrain in cities of the time ran: "Get out soon, quick and far, and the later you return, the better." It was advice heeded by many who could afford to flee to the countryside. Yet this brought disastrous consequences. Evacuation did not necessarily save those fleeing, as some were already infected or traveling with plague carriers. However, it did help to spread the disease to new and ever more remote places as evacuees sought the safety of uninfected villages. ( Archaeologists have discovered rural mass graves of Black Death victims.)

Death tolls

Calculations of the fatalities caused by the Black Death are devastating and debated. Most agree that the population of Europe was estimated to be around 75 million people before the plague: It plummeted to just 50 million in the years between 1347 and 1351. Some scholars believe the fatalities could be higher.

The sharp decline was a result of both the disease itself and the widespread social breakdown it set in motion-not least that the deaths left fields and animals untended and family members uncared for. Even after the Black Death burned itself out, flare-ups continued to disrupt Europe's demographic recovery. Not until around the 16th century did Europe's population growth start to strengthen.

The effects of the catastrophe were apparent in every area of life. In the decades following the pandemic, wages soared because of the huge shortage of workers. Vast tracts of once productive farmland turned to pasture, and even whole villages lay abandoned-around a thousand in England alone. There was a major migration from the countryside to the cities, which recovered relatively quickly and were reinvigorated with commercial energy. The peasants who remained in the countryside were often able to take their pick of unused land, increasing the power of the landed peasantry and boosting the rural economy.

Indeed, historians have argued that the Black Death paved the way for a new wave of opportunity, creativity, and wealth from which would flourish the art, culture, and ideas of the Renaissance, and the beginnings of a recognizably modern Europe.

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Fast and lethal, the Black Death spread more than a mile per day

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Sometime in 1347 a sailing ship moored in a Mediterranean port unwittingly unleashed one of the most destructive pathogens in history. Unloaded with its cargo and passengers were some deadly stowaways: flea-ridden black rats carrying the bubonic plague.

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What Made the Black Death So Deadly? video

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What Made the Black Death So Deadly? video

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What Made The Black Death (The Plague) so Deadly?

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The Black Death-Worst plague in history video

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The Black Death-Worst plague in history video

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The Black Death - Worst plague in history

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The Triumph of Death by Peter Bruegel the Elder

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The Triumph of Death by Peter Bruegel the Elder

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How the Black Death Made the Rich Richer

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How the Black Death Made the Rich Richer

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In June 1348, people in England began reporting mysterious symptoms. They started off as mild and vague: headaches, aches, and nausea. This was followed by painful black lumps, or buboes, growing in the armpits and groin, which gave the disease its name: bubonic plague. The last stage was a high fever, and then death.

Originating in Central Asia, soldiers and caravans had brought bubonic plague - Yersina pestis, a bacterium carried on fleas that lived on rats - to ports on the Black Sea. The highly commercialised world of the Mediterranean ensured the plague's swift transfer on merchant ships to Italy, and then across Europe. The Black Death killed between a third and a half of the population of Europe and the Near East.

This huge number of deaths was accompanied by general economic devastation. With a third of the workforce dead, the crops could not be harvested and communities fell apart. One in ten villages in England (and in Tuscany and other regions) were lost and never re-founded. Houses fell into the ground and were covered by grass and earth, leaving only the church behind. If you ever see a church or chapel all alone in a field, you are probably looking at the last remains of one of Europe's lost villages.

The traumatic experience of the Black Death, which killed perhaps 80% of those who caught it, drove many people to write in an attempt to make sense of what they had lived through. In Aberdeen, John of Fordun, a Scottish chronicler, recorded that:
This sickness befell people everywhere, but especially the middling and lower classes, rarely the great. It generated such horror that children did not dare to visit their dying parents, nor parents their children, but fled for fear of contagion as if from leprosy or a serpent.
These lines could almost have been written today.

Although the death rate from Covid-19 is far lower than that of the Black Death, the economic fallout has been severe due to the globalised, highly-integrated nature of modern economies. Add to this our highly mobile populations today and coronavirus, unlike the plague, has spread across the globe in a matter of months, not years.

While the Black Death resulted in short term economic damage, the longer-term consequences were less obvious. Before the plague erupted, several centuries of population growth had produced a labour surplus, which was abruptly replaced with a labour shortage when many serfs and free peasants died. Historians have argued that this labour shortage allowed those peasants that survived the pandemic to demand better pay or to seek employment elsewhere. Despite government resistance, serfdom and the feudal system itself were ultimately eroded.

But another less often remarked consequence of the Black Death was the rise of wealthy entrepreneurs and business-government links. Although the Black Death caused short-term losses for Europe's largest companies, in the long term, they concentrated their assets and gained a greater share of the market and influence with governments. This has strong parallels with the current situation in many countries across the world. While small companies rely upon government support to prevent them collapsing, many others - mainly the much larger ones involved in home delivery - are profiting handsomely from the new trading conditions.

The mid-14th Century economy is too removed from the size, speed, and interconnectedness of the modern market to give exact comparisons. But we can certainly see parallels with the way that the Black Death strengthened the power of the state and accelerated the domination of key markets by a handful of large companies.
Black Death business
The sudden loss of at least a third of Europe's population led to a redistribution of wealth for everyone else. In the longer term, however, people responded to the devastation by keeping money within the family. Wills became highly specific and wealthy businessmen, in particular, went to great lengths to ensure that their patrimony was no longer divided up after death, replacing the previous tendency to leave a third of all their resources to charity. Their descendants benefited from a continued concentration of capital into a smaller and smaller number of hands.

At the same time, the decline of feudalism and the rise of a wage-based economy following peasant demands for better labour conditions benefited urban elites. Being paid in cash, rather than in kind (in the granting of privileges such as the right to collect firewood), meant that peasants had more money to spend in towns.

This concentration of wealth greatly accelerated a pre-existing trend: the emergence of merchant entrepreneurs who combined trade in goods with their production on a scale only available to those with significant sums of capital. For example, silk, once imported from Asia and Byzantium, was now being produced in Europe. Wealthy Italian merchants began to open silk and cloth workshops.

These entrepreneurs were uniquely positioned to respond to the sudden labour shortage caused by the Black Death. Unlike independent weavers, who lacked the capital, and unlike aristocrats, whose wealth was locked up in land, urban entrepreneurs were able to use their liquid capital to invest in new technologies, compensating for the loss of workers with machines.

In southern Germany, which became one of Europe's most commercialised areas in the late 14th and 15th centuries, companies such as the Welser (which later ran Venezuela as a private colony) combined growing flax with owning the looms on which workers span that flax into linen cloth, which the Welser then sold. The broad trend of the post-Black Death 14th and 15th centuries was a concentration of resources - capital, skills, and infrastructure - into the hands of a small number of large companies.
The age of Amazon
Rolling forward to the present, there are some clear similarities. Certain large organisations have stepped up to the opportunities provided by Covid-19. In many countries across the world, entire ecologies of small restaurants, pubs and shops have suddenly been closed down. The market for food, general retail and entertainment has gone online, and cash has pretty much disappeared.

The percentage of calories that restaurants provided has had to be rerouted through supermarkets, and much of this supply has now been taken up by supermarket chains. They have plenty of large properties and lots of staff, with the HR capacity to recruit more rapidly, and there are many underemployed people who now want jobs. They also have warehouses, trucks and complex logistics capacity.

The other big winner has been the giants of online retail - such as Amazon, who run a "Prime Pantry" service in the US, India and many European countries. High street shops have been suffering from price and convenience competition from the internet for years, and bankruptcies are regular news. Now, much "non-essential" retail space is closed, and our desires have been re-rerouted through Amazon, eBay, Argos, Screwfix and others. There has been a clear spike in online shopping, and retail analysts are wondering whether this is a decisive move into the virtual world, and the further dominance of big companies.

Keeping us distracted as we wait at home for our parcels is the streaming entertainment industry - a market sector which is dominated by large companies including Netflix, Amazon Prime (again), Disney and others. Other online giants such as Google (which owns YouTube), Facebook (which owns Instagram) and Twitter provide the other platforms that dominate online traffic.

The final link in the chain is the delivery companies themselves: UPS, FedEx, Amazon Logistics (again), as well as food delivery from Just Eat and Deliveroo. Through their business models are different, their platforms now dominate the movements of products of all kinds, whether your new Toshiba branded Amazon Fire TV, or your stuffed crust from Pizza Hut (a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, which also owns KFC, Taco Bell and others).

The other swing to corporate dominance has been the move away from state-backed cash towards contactless payment services. It's obviously a corollary of online marketplaces, but also means that the money moves though large companies that take their slice for moving it. Visa and Mastercard are the largest players, but Apple Pay, PayPal, and Amazon Pay (again) have all seen increases in their transaction volume as cash sits unused in people's purses. And if cash is still imagined to be a vector for transmission, then retailers won't take it and customers won't use it.

Small business has taken a really decisive hit across a wide range of sectors as Covid-19, like the Black Death, results in big companies gaining market share. Even those working at home to write pieces like this are working on Skype (owned by Microsoft), Zoom and BlueJeans, as well using email clients and laptops made by a small number of global organisations. Billionaires are getting richer while ordinary people lose their jobs. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, has increased his wealth by US$25 billion since the start of the year.

But this is not the whole story. The other big trend in the response to the virus has been the strengthening of the power of the state.
Governing pandemics
At a state level, the Black Death caused the acceleration of trends towards centralisation, the growth of taxation, and government dependence upon large companies.

In England, the declining value of land and consequent falls in revenue prompted the crown - the country's biggest landowner - to attempt to cap wages at pre-plague levels with the 1351 Statute of Labourers, and to impose additional taxes upon the populace. Previously, the government was expected to fund itself, only imposing taxes for extraordinary expenses such as wars. But the post-plague taxes set a major precedent for government intervention in the economy.

These governmental efforts were a significant increase in the crown's involvement in people's daily lives. In subsequent plague outbreaks, which occurred every 20 years or so, movement began to be restricted through curfews, travel bans, and quarantines. This was part of a general concentration of state power and the replacement of the previous regional distribution of authority with a centralised bureaucracy. Many of the men running the post-plague administration, such as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, were drawn from English merchant families, some of which gained significant political power.

The most outstanding example of this was the de la Pole family, who in two generations went from being Hull wool merchants to earls of Suffolk. With the temporary collapse of international trade and finance after the Black Death, Richard de la Pole became the crown's greatest lender and an intimate of Richard II. When Italian mega-companies re-emerged in the late 14th and 15th Centuries, they also benefited from the crown's ever-growing reliance upon merchant companies. The Medici family, who eventually came to rule Florence, are the most striking example.

Merchants also gained political influence by purchasing land, the price of which had fallen after the Black Death. Land ownership allowed merchants to enter the land-based gentry or even the aristocracy, marrying their children to the sons and daughters of cash-strapped lords. With their new status, and with the help of influential in-laws, the urban elites gained political representation within parliament.

By the end of the 14th Century, the government's extension of state control and its continued ties to merchant companies drove many nobles to turn against Richard II. They transferred their allegiance to his cousin, who became Henry IV, in the (vain) hope that he would not follow Richard's policies.

This, and the subsequent Wars of the Roses, generally depicted as a clash between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians, were actually partly driven by the nobility's hostility towards the centralisation of government power. Henry Tudor's defeat of Richard III in 1485 ended not only the war but also quashed any further attempts by the English baronage to regain regional authority, paving the way for the continued rise of companies and central government.
The state we are in
The power of the state is something that we largely assume in the 21st Century. Across the world, the idea of the sovereign nation has been central to the imperial politics and economy of the last few centuries.

But from the 1970s onwards, it became common among intellectuals to suggest that the state was less important, its monopoly of control within a given territory contested by multinational corporations. In 2016, of the largest 100 economic entities, 31 were countries and 69 were companies. Walmart was larger than the economy of Spain, Toyota larger than India. The capacity of these large companies to influence politicians and regulators has been clear enough: consider the effects of oil companies on climate change denial.

And since Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of the UK from 1979 to 1990, pronounced that she intended to "roll back the state", more and more parts of previously state-owned assets now operate as companies, or as players in state engineered quasi-markets. Roughly 25% of the UK's National Health Service, for example, is delivered through contracts with the private sector.

Across the globe, transport, utilities, telecommunications, dentists, opticians, the post office and many other services used to be state monopolies and are now run by profit-making companies. Nationalised, or state owned, industries are often described as slow, and in need of market discipline in order to become more modern and efficient.

But thanks to coronavirus, the state has come rolling back in again like a tsunami. Spending on a level which was mocked as "magic money tree" economics only a few months ago has been aimed at national health systems, addressed the problem of homelessness, provided universal basic income for millions of people, and offered loan guarantees or direct payments to a host of businesses.

This is Keynesian economics on a grand scale, in which national bonds are used to borrow money backed by future income from taxpayers. Ideas about balancing the budget appear to, for now, be history, with entire industries now being reliant on treasury bailouts. Politicians the world over have suddenly become interventionist, with wartime metaphors being used to justify gigantic spending.

Less often remarked is the astonishing restriction on personal freedoms. The autonomy of the individual is central to neoliberal ideas. "Freedom loving peoples" are contrasted with those who live their lives under the yoke of tyranny, of states that exercise Big Brother surveillance powers over their citizens behaviour.

Yet in the last few months, states around the world have effectively restricted movement for the vast majority of people and are using the police and armed forces to prevent assembly in public and private spaces. Theatres, pubs and restaurants are closed by fiat, parks have been locked, and sitting on benches can get you a fine. Running too close to someone will get you shouted at by someone in a high vis vest. A medieval king would have been impressed with this level of authoritarianism.

The pandemic seems to have allowed the fiscal and administrative powers of big government to bulldozer arguments about prudence and liberty. The state's power is now being exercised in ways that haven't been seen since the second world war, and there has been widespread public support.
Popular resistance
To return to the Black Death, the growth in wealth and influence of merchants and big business seriously aggravated existing anti-mercantile sentiment. Medieval thought - both intellectual and popular - held that trade was morally suspect and that merchants, especially wealthy ones, were prone to avarice. The Black Death was widely interpreted as a punishment from God for Europe's sinfulness, and many post-plague writers blamed the church, governments, and wealthy companies for Christendom's moral decline.

William Langland's famous protest poem Piers Plowman was strongly anti-mercantilist. Other works, such as the mid-15th Century poem the Libelle of Englysche Polycye, tolerated trade but wanted it in the hands of English merchants and out of the control of Italians, whom the author argued impoverished the country.

As the 14th and 15th Centuries progressed and large companies gained a greater share of the market, popular and intellectual hostility grew. In the longer term, this was to have incendiary results. By the 16th Century, the concentration of trade and finance into the hands of large companies had evolved into a near-monopoly upon royal and papal banking by a small number of companies who also held monopolies or near-monopolies over Europe's major commodities - such as silver, copper, and mercury - and imports from Asia and the Americas, especially spices.

Martin Luther was incensed by this concentration and especially the Catholic Church's use of monopolistic firms to collect indulgences. In 1524, Luther published a tract arguing that trade should be for the common (German) good and that merchants should not charge high prices. Along with other Protestant writers, such as Philip Melancthon and Ulrich von Hutten, Luther drew upon existing anti-mercantile sentiment to criticise the influence of business over government, adding financial injustice to their call for religious reform.

The sociologist Max Weber famously associated Protestantism with the emergence of capitalism and modern economic thought. But early Protestant writers opposed monopolistic companies and the commercialisation of everyday life, drawing upon anti-mercantile sentiment that had its roots in the Black Death. This popular and religious opposition eventually led to the break from Rome and the transformation of Europe.
Is small always beautiful?
By the 21st Century we have become used to the idea that capitalist firms produce concentrations of wealth. Whether Victorian industrialists, US robber barons or dot com billionaires, the inequalities generated by business and its corrupting influence over governments have shaped discussion of commerce since the industrial revolution. For critics, big business has often been characterised as heartless, a behemoth that crushes ordinary people in the wheels of its machines, or vampirically extracts the profits of labour from the labouring classes.

As we have seen, the arguments between small business localists and those who favour corporations and the power of the state date back many centuries. Romantic poets and radicals bemoaned the way that the " dark satanic mills " were destroying the countryside and producing people who were no more than appendages to machines. The idea that the honest craftsman was being replaced by the alienated employee, a wage slave, is common to both nostalgic and progressive critics of early capitalism.

By the 1960s, the idea that there was some fundamental difference between small and large forms of business added environmentalism to these longstanding arguments. "The man" in his skyscraper was opposed to the more authentic artisan.

This faith in local business combined with a suspicion of corporations and the state have flowed into the green, Occupy and Extinction Rebellion movements. Eating local food, using local money, and trying to tilt the purchasing power of "anchor institutions" like hospitals and universities towards small social enterprises has become the common sense of many contemporary economic activists.

But the Covid-19 crisis questions this small is good, big is bad dichotomy in some very fundamental ways. Large scale organising has appeared to be necessary to deal with the huge range of issues that the virus has thrown up, and the states that appear to have been most successful are those which have adopted the most interventionist forms of surveillance and control. Even the most ardent post-capitalist would have to admit that small social enterprises could not fit out a gigantic hospital in a few weeks.

And though there are plenty of examples of local businesses engaging in food delivery, and a commendable amount of mutual aid taking place, the population of the global north is largely being fed by large supermarket chains with complex logistics operations.
After coronavirus
The long-term result of the Black Death was the strengthening of the power of big business and the state. The same processes are happening much more rapidly during the coronavirus lockdown.

But we should be cautious of easy historical lessons. History never really repeats itself. The circumstances of each time are unique, and it simply isn't wise to treat the "lesson" of history as if it were a series of experiments that prove certain general laws. And Covid-19 will not kill a third of any population, so though its effects are profound, they will not result in the same shortage of working people. If anything, it has actually strengthened the power of employers.

The most profound difference is that the virus comes in the middle of another crisis, that of climate change. There is a real danger that the policy of bouncing back to a growth economy will simply overwhelm the necessity of reducing carbon emissions. This is the nightmare scenario, one in which Covid-19 is just a prequel to something much worse.

But the huge mobilisations of people and money which governments and large companies have deployed also shows that big organisations can reshape themselves and the world extraordinarily rapidly if they wish. This gives real grounds for optimism concerning our collective capacity to re-engineer energy production, transport, food systems and much else - the green new deal which many policy makers have been sponsoring.

The Black Death and Covid-19 seem to have both caused concentration and centralisation of business and state power. That is interesting to note. But the biggest question is whether these potent forces can be aimed at the crisis to come.
Eleanor Russell is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Cambridge, and Martin Parker is a professor of organisation studies at the University of Bristol.

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Eleanor Russell, University of Cambridge and Martin Parker, University of Bristol

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How the Black Death made the rich richer

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When a third of Europe's population was lost, wealth concentrated into tiny groups. Could Covid-19 trigger something similar?

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Analyzing the past and present...The Black Death, COVID...

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Analyzing the past and present...The Black Death, COVID...

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Analyzing the Past in the Present: The Black Death, COVID-19, and the Ursinus Quest

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History majors have been grappling with the history of the Black Death, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Ursinus Quest core questions. Here...

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On , the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the new coronavirus - which was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year - a pandemic.

As of May 31, there were more than 6.1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, while the number of registered deaths worldwide stood at nearly 371,000.

To date, there is no vaccine or known treatment for the new coronavirus, officially known as SARS-CoV-2. Some of the most basic defences against it include frequent and thorough handwashing with soap and water, physical distancing and self-isolation.

These recommendations have also been the prescribed measures to contain the spread of other highly contagious diseases in the past.

The practice of quarantine for contagious diseases was mentioned in the Canon of Medicine written by Persian polymath Ibn Sina (980-1037), better known in the West as Avicenna, and published in 1025.

The word quarantine comes from the Italian "quaranta giorni", which translates to 40 days.

Here is a brief look at some of those past pandemics.

The Plague of Justinian (541-549)

Death Toll: Approximately 30-50 million

This was the first-ever recorded incident of the plague. Named after the Byzantine emperor, Justinian I, who caught the disease but recovered, it was spread to humans by rodents harbouring fleas that carried the bacterium, Yersinia pestis. The rats travelled on grain ships and in grain carts.

As the political and commercial centre of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) was particularly hard hit. According to ancient historians, the pandemic killed up to 10,000 people a day there, although modern historians say the number may have been closer to 5,000.

But it was not limited to Constantinople. It spread throughout the empire, facilitated by war and trade, killing nearly 25 percent of the population.

It returned every 12 years or so until around 750, eventually wiping out half of Europe's population (around 100 million people).

The Black Death (1346-1353)

Death Toll: Approximately 75-200 million

Like the Plague of Justinian, it was also caused by the bacterium, Yersinia pestis , carried by rats. Ships carrying the rats enabled it to spread between continents.

It was supposedly named the Black Death because of the black spots that formed on the skin of the infected.

According to some accounts, the first outbreak of the Black Death in Europe took place in Caffa, on the Crimean Peninsula. In 1346, this important trading post was besieged by the Mongol army, which had conquered lands throughout Asia. Many of the soldiers, however, were infected with the plague. When they succumbed to it, the army catapulted their corpses over the city walls, causing people living inside the city to become infected.

The Third Cholera Pandemic (1852-1860)

Death Toll: Approximately 1 million

It originated in India before spreading through the rest of Asia and parts of Europe, North America and Africa.

Cholera is caused by eating food or drinking water contaminated with the bacterium, Vibrio cholera. It can result in acute diarrhoeal disease that can kill within hours if left untreated.

According to the WHO, there are still 1.3 million to four million cases of cholera each year, with between 21,000 and 143,000 fatalities .

Flu Pandemic (1889-1890)

Death Toll: At least 1 million

Cause: Influenza A subtype H3N8

Considered the last great pandemic of the 19th century, this particular strain of influenza was known as the "Asiatic Flu" or "Russian Flu", likely because it originated in the Central Asian region of the Russian Empire.

The pandemic spread quickly, aided by the existence of modern forms of transport, like railroads, and transatlantic travel by boat. In fact, it took just four months to circle the planet, peaking in the US 70 days after its original peak in St Petersburg.

The Sixth Cholera Pandemic (1899-1923)

It killed hundreds of thousands of people before spreading to various parts of the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and Russia.

Cholera transmission is closely linked to inadequate access to clean water and sanitation facilities. It takes between 12 hours and five days for a person to show symptoms after consuming contaminated food or water.

Flu Pandemic (1918-1919)

Death Toll: Approximately 20-100 million

Cause: Influenza H1N1- Avian origin

The first identified cases of this particular strain of influenza were recorded in the spring of 1918 among US soldiers during WWI, before spreading worldwide and infecting at least one-third of the global population.

Although the death toll is unknown, many estimates put it at more than 50 million and some as high as 100 million, making it the deadliest pandemic since the Black Death.

What was particularly significant about this outbreak was its effect on healthy adults, unlike prior outbreaks where the immunocompromised and juveniles had been more susceptible.

Without any vaccine, this pandemic had two waves. The initial wave being milder than the second. Returning soldiers contributed to the second wave.

Communities imposed quarantines, the wearing of masks and bans on public gatherings as a way of combatting the pandemic. It is thought that these measures, combined with people developing immunity to it, helped to end the pandemic, although there is also a theory that the virus mutated rapidly into a less lethal strain, resulting in a sharp drop in infections and deaths.

Asian Flu (1956-1958)

Death Toll: At least 1.1 million

Cause: Influenza A - H2N2 subtype

The first case of the Asian Flu was identified in China in 1956. From there, it travelled to Singapore, Hong Kong and the US . There were also reports of it spreading to India in 1957.

Studies suggested the pandemic originated from strains of avian and human influenza viruses.

Symptoms, which included weakness in the legs, chills, a sore throat, running nose and cough, appeared soon after exposure to the virus.

There were two waves of this outbreak, but the spread of the infection slowed following the development of a vaccine in August 1957.

Hong Kong Flu Pandemic (1968)

Death Toll: Approximately 1 million

Cause: Influenza A - H3N2, subtype of H2N2

The first reported case of this pandemic was in July 1968 in Hong Kong. Outbreaks occurred in Singapore and Vietnam and within 12 weeks spread to other parts of the world, as far as Africa and South America. In the US, an estimated 100,000 died .

The death rate was significantly lower than in previous influenza outbreaks, with a case-fatality ratio below 0.5 percent . It is possible that people who were exposed to the earlier pandemic became immune to this particular virus.

Improved medical care and the availability of antibiotics, for secondary bacterial infections, have also been cited as factors for the slower spread of the disease. The H3N2 virus is still in circulation today as the seasonal influenza A virus .

HIV/Aids Pandemic (1981-)

Cause: Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that attacks the cells that help the body fight infections. If left untreated, it can lead to the disease, AIDS.

HIV attacks and destroys a type of white blood cell in the immune system, called the CD4 cell or T-Helper, and makes copies of itself inside these cells. As it destroys more of these cells and makes more copies of itself, the immune system is gradually weakened - making it difficult for the body to fight off other infections. The last stage of a weakened immune system is AIDS.

AIDS was first reported in 1981.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) (2002-2003)

Death Toll: 774

SARS-CoV spread to at least 26 countries and infected more 8,000 people, although the death toll was considered very low compared to other pandemics.

Symptoms are influenza-like and include fever, headache, diarrhoea and shivering. Even at the height of the pandemic, in 2003, the overall risk of transmission was low.

Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan were hit the hardest, prompting them to establish medical protocols in anticipation of future pandemics.

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) (2012-)

Death Toll: 858

Cause: MERS-CoV

MERS-CoV, a strain of coronavirus, was first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012.

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that can cause diseases ranging from the common cold to SARS.

MERS is a viral respiratory disease with symptoms that include fever, cough and shortness of breath.

As of January 2020, 2,519 people have been infected with it. It has an extremely high fatality rate compared to other coronaviruses, with almost 35 percent of those who contract it dying.

Source: Al Jazeera News

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From the plague to MERS: A brief history of pandemics

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On , the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the new coronavirus - which was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year - a pandemic. As of May 31, there were more than 6.1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, while the number of registered deaths worldwide stood at nearly 371,000.

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When the Black Death arrived in London by January 1349, the city had been waiting with dread for months. Londoners had heard reports of devastation from cities such as Florence, where 60% of people had died of plague the year before. In the summer of 1348, the disease had reached English ports from continental Europe and begun to ravage its way toward the capital. The plague caused painful and frightening symptoms, including fever, vomiting, coughing up blood, black pustules on the skin, and swollen lymph nodes. Death usually came within 3 days.

The city prepared the best way it knew how: Officials built a massive cemetery, called East Smithfield, to bury as many victims as possible in consecrated ground, which the faithful believed would allow God to identify the dead as Christians on Judgment Day. Unable to save lives, the city tried to save souls.

The impact was as dreadful as feared: In 1349, the Black Death killed about half of all Londoners; from 1347 to 1351, it killed between 30% and 60% of all Europeans. For those who lived through that awful time, it seemed no one was safe. In France, which also lost about half its population, chronicler Gilles Li Muisis wrote, "neither the rich, the middling sort, nor the pauper was secure; each had to await God's will."

But careful archaeological and historical work at East Smithfield and elsewhere has revealed that intersecting social and economic inequalities shaped the course of the Black Death and other epidemics. "Bioarchaeology and other social sciences have repeatedly demonstrated that these kinds of crises play out along the preexisting fault lines of each society," says Gwen Robbins Schug, a bioarchaeologist at Appalachian State University who studies health and inequality in ancient societies. The people at greatest risk were often those already marginalized-the poor and minorities who faced discrimination in ways that damaged their health or limited their access to medical care even in prepandemic times. In turn, the pandemics themselves affected societal inequality, by either undermining or reinforcing existing power structures.

That reality is on stark display during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the disease has memorably struck some of the world's rich and powerful, including U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and actor Tom Hanks, it is not an equal-opportunity killer. In hard-hit New York City, Latino and black people have been twice as likely to die from COVID-19 as white people. Cases there have been concentrated in poorer ZIP codes, where people live in crowded apartments and can't work from home or flee to vacation homes.

"The ways that social inequalities are manifested ... put people at higher risk," says Monica Green, an independent historian who studies the Black Death. "We should all be learning in our bones, in a way that will never be forgotten, why [the coronavirus pandemic] has happened the way it has."

When the Black Death struck, many places in Europe were already beleaguered. The late 13th and 14th centuries were a time of climatic cooling and erratic weather. Harvests had failed and famines had struck in the century or so before the pandemic emerged. In the Great Famine of 1315-17, up to 15% of the population of England and Wales died, according to historical records. As wages fell and grain prices soared, more people were driven into poverty. Household account books and records of payments to workers on English manors show that by 1290, 70% of English families were living at or below the poverty line, defined as being able to buy enough food and goods to not go hungry or be cold. Meanwhile, the wealthiest 3% of households received 15% of the national income.

Sharon DeWitte, a biological anthropologist at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, investigates how those famines and rising poverty affected people's health by studying skeletons excavated from London's medieval cemeteries. People who died in the century leading up to the Black Death tended to be shorter and more likely to die young than people who died during the two previous centuries. Those who lived in the century before plague also had more grooves on their teeth from disrupted enamel growth, a sign of malnutrition, disease, or other physiological stressors during childhood.

DeWitte lacks samples from the decades immediately before the Black Death, but historical evidence of the Great Famine and low wages until the 1340s make it likely that those trends continued right up until the pandemic struck, she says.

To see whether ill health made people more susceptible to plague, DeWitte turned to hundreds of skeletons excavated from East Smithfield. She calculated the age distribution of people in the cemetery, as well as the life expectancies of people with markers of stress on their skeletons. Her rigorous models show older adults and people already in poor health were more likely to die during the Black Death. Contrary to the assumption that "everyone who was exposed to the disease was at the same risk of death ... health status really did have an effect," she says.

Skeletons don't announce their possessors' social class, so DeWitte can't be sure any particular person buried in East Smithfield was rich or poor. But then, as now, malnutrition and disease were likely more common among people at society's margins. And historical evidence suggests England's wealthiest may have gotten off more lightly than the growing ranks of poor. Perhaps 27% of wealthy English landowners appear to have succumbed to plague, whereas counts of rural tenant farmers in 1348 and 1349 show mortality rates mostly from 40% to 70%. DeWitte argues the unequal economic conditions that damaged people's health "made the Black Death worse than it had to be."

Four hundred years later and half a world away, smallpox struck Cherokee communities in what would become the southeastern United States. Elsewhere in the world, the disease-with its fever and eruption of pustules-killed about 30% of people infected. But among the Cherokee, the feared pathogen had help, and likely became even more devastating, says Paul Kelton, a historian at Stony Brook University.

Although a lack of acquired immunity often gets all the blame for Native Americans' high mortality from disease during the colonial period, social conditions amplified the impacts of biological factors. The mid-18th century smallpox epidemic in the Southeast, for example, coincided with escalated British attacks on Cherokee communities in what's called the Anglo-Cherokee War. The British used a scorched-earth strategy, burning Cherokee farms and forcing residents to flee their homes, causing famine and spreading smallpox to more Cherokee communities. Historians think by the end of the epidemic and the war, the Cherokee population had fallen to its smallest recorded size, before or since. War "created the conditions for smallpox to have a devastating effect," Kelton says.

Similar tragedies were repeated for hundreds of years in Indigenous communities across the Americas as colonial violence and oppression rendered Native Americans susceptible to epidemics, says Michael Wilcox, a Native American archaeologist of Yuman descent at Stanford University. Indigenous communities forced off their land often lacked access to clean water or healthy diets. People living on Catholic missions were forced to do grueling labor and live in crowded conditions that Wilcox calls "petri dishes for diseases." The skeletons of people buried on 16th century Spanish missions in Florida show many of the signs of ill health that DeWitte finds in London cemeteries from before the Black Death.

Such oppression and its biological effects "was not a 'natural' thing. It was something that could have been changed," Wilcox says.

The contrasting experience of Native American communities who managed to live outside colonial rule for a time supports his point. One such community was the Awahnichi, hunter-gatherers who lived in California's Yosemite Valley. According to an account from the late 19th century, an Awahnichi chief named Tenaya told an American miner and militia volunteer in the 1850s about a "black sickness"-likely smallpox-that swept through his community before they had direct contact with white settlers. The disease probably arrived with Indigenous people fleeing missions, says Kathleen Hull, an archaeologist at the University of California, Merced.

She excavated in the valley and analyzed data on the number of villages occupied, the amount of debris created by manufacturing obsidian tools, and changes in controlled burns as revealed by tree ring data. Those indicators suggested the Awahnichi experienced a 30% population decline around 1800. Before the epidemic struck, the Awahnichi numbered only about 300; the death of about 90 people would have been devastating.

Chief Tenaya told the militia volunteer that after the black sickness, the Awahnichi left their traditional home and moved to the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains, likely to the territory of the Kutzadika'a people. There, the Awahnichi found support and, in the longer term, an opportunity to rebuild their community through intermarriage. After about 20 years, they moved back to their valley homeland, their numbers bolstered and their culture preserved.

Hull's data support that account, showing the Awahnichi left their valley for 2 decades. She sees their departure and return to their way of life as a sign of resilience. "They persevered despite this really challenging event," she says.

The Awahnichi experience was rare. By the turn of the 20th century, many Indigenous communities had been forced to move to remote reservations with little access to traditional food sources and basic medical care. When another disease swept through-the 1918 influenza pandemic-Indigenous people died "at a rate about four times higher than the rest of the U.S. population," says Mikaëla Adams, a medical historian at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. "Part of the reason is that they were already suffering from extreme poor health, poverty, and malnourishment."

Some cases were particularly extreme. The Navajo Nation, for example, suffered a 12% mortality in that pandemic, whereas the mortality rate across the globe was an estimated 2.5% to 5%. Some Indigenous communities in remote Canada and Alaska lost up to 90% of their people in the pandemic, says Lisa Sattenspiel, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Today, during the coronavirus pandemic, the Navajo Nation has reported more per capita cases of COVID-19 than any state except New York and New Jersey, although the testing rate on the reservation is also high. Diabetes, a risk factor for COVID-19 complications, is common on the reservation, and many people there live in poverty, some without running water.

The coronavirus pandemic reveals the dangers caused by centuries of discrimination and neglect, says Rene Begay, a geneticist and public health researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and a member of the Navajo Nation. But she cautions against characterizing the Diné-the traditional name for the Navajo people-as passive victims. "We've gone through pandemics. We can get through this, too."

Although the 1918 flu hit the Diné particularly hard, few people outside the reservation realized it at the time. For those living through the pandemic, which killed 50 million people worldwide, flu gave the impression of being an indiscriminate killer, just as the Black Death had 600 years before. "This pesky flu's all over town! And white and black and rich and poor are all included in its tour," went a prose poem in the American Journal of Nursing in 1919.

But recent demographic studies have shown many groups on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, not just Native Americans, suffered disproportionately in 1918. In 2006, Svenn-Erik Mamelund, a demographer at Oslo Metropolitan University, published a study of census records and death certificates that reported a 50% higher mortality rate in the poorest area of Oslo than in a wealthy parish. In the United States, miners and factory workers died at higher rates than the general population, says Nancy Bristow, a historian at the University of Puget Sound.

So did black people, who already faced astonishingly high death rates from infectious disease. In 1906, the mortality rate from infectious diseases among nonwhite (at the time, mostly black) people living in U.S. cities was a shocking 1123 deaths per 100,000 people, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, has found. By comparison, in the heat of the 1918 pandemic, urban white people's mortality from infectious disease was 928 deaths per 100,000 people. Nonwhite urban mortality didn't drop below that level until 1921. "It's as though blacks were experiencing whites' 1918 flu every single year," Wrigley-Field says. "It's truly staggering."

The 1918 pandemic struck in a spring and an autumn wave, and black people were more likely than white people to get sick in the first wave, according to a study by Mamelund and a colleague of military and insurance records and surveys from the time. Then, in the deadlier autumn wave, black people were infected at lower rates, presumably because many had already acquired immunity. But when black people did get sick in the fall of 1918, they were more likely to develop pneumonia and other complications, and more likely to die, than white people. That may be because black people had higher rates of pre-existing conditions such as tuberculosis, Mamelund says.

Discrimination also played a role. "This time period is called the nadir of race relations," says Vanessa Northington Gamble, a doctor and medical historian at George Washington University. Jim Crow laws in the South and de facto segregation in the North meant black flu patients received care at segregated black hospitals. Those facilities were overwhelmed, and the care of black flu patients suffered, Gamble says.

Today in Washington, D.C., 45% of COVID-19 cases but 79% of deaths are of black people. As of late April, black people made up more than 80% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Georgia, and almost all COVID-19 deaths in St. Louis. Similar trends have been seen for black and South Asian patients in the United Kingdom. And in Iowa, Latinos comprise more than 20% of patients, despite being only 6% of the population.

In 1350, burials stopped in East Smithfield cemetery. But the Black Death's impact lingered, thanks to its extraordinary economic consequences, says Guido Alfani, an economic historian at Bocconi University. By studying more than 500 years of records of taxes on property and other forms of wealth, he found that economic inequality plummeted in much of Europe during and after the Black Death.

For example, in the Sabaudian state in what is now northwestern Italy, the share of wealth owned by the richest 10% fell from about 61% in 1300 to 47% in 1450, with a dramatic drop during the Black Death and a slower slide in the century after (see graph, above). Alfani found similar trends in the south of France, northeastern Spain, and Germany. Analyses of household accounts and manor records show a similar trend in England, where real wages nearly tripled between the early 1300s and the late 1400s and general standards of living improved.

Alfani says so many workers died of plague that labor was in demand, driving up wages for those who survived. And as owners died, great swaths of property went on the market. Many heirs sold plots to people who never could have owned property before, such as peasant farmers.

Plague didn't disappear after the Black Death; many countries, including Italy and England, suffered recurring outbreaks. Yet later bouts seem to have entrenched inequality instead of reducing it. Alfani thinks by the time later epidemics hit, the elite had found ways to preserve their fortunes and even their health. "Plague becomes a feature of Western societies. It's something you have to expect," he says.

Across Europe, wills changed so large estates could be transferred to single heirs instead of being broken up. The rich also began to quarantine in country estates as soon as an outbreak began. From 1563 to 1665, mortality during plague outbreaks declined dramatically in the wealthy parishes of London but remained roughly the same or increased in poorer, more crowded areas, according to burial and baptism records. During the 15th and 16th centuries, Italian doctors "increasingly characterize plague as a disease of the poor," Alfani says.

That class prejudice is "seen over and over again in history," Kelton says. For example, during 19th century cholera epidemics in the United States, elites "created this idea that somehow it's only going to hit people with a predisposition to the disease. Who was predisposed? The poor, the filthy, the intemperate." But it wasn't a moral failing that made poor people vulnerable: The bacterium Vibrio cholerae was more likely to contaminate their substandard water supplies.

The economic legacy of the 1918 flu is unclear. According to data gathered by economist Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, economic inequality in Europe fell dramatically beginning in 1918, a decline that lasted until the 1970s. But Alfani says disentangling the flu pandemic's effects from those of World War I is impossible. That war destroyed property in Europe, and the rich lost access to foreign property and investments, lowering inequality, he says.

In the United States, that pandemic did nothing to blunt structural racism. "The 1918 pandemic revealed the racial inequalities and fault lines in health care," Gamble says. At the time, black doctors and nurses hoped it would prompt improvements. "But nothing changed. After the pandemic there were no major public health efforts to address the health care of African Americans."

Could the COVID-19 pandemic, by revealing similar fault lines in countries around the world, lead to the kinds of lasting societal transformations the 1918 flu did not? "I want to be optimistic," Bristow says. "It's up to all of us to decide what happens next."
With reporting by Ann Gibbons.

doi:10.1126/science.abc7832

Lizzie is Science's Latin America correspondent, based in Mexico City.

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From Black Death to fatal flu, past pandemics show why people on the margins suffer most

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When the Black Death arrived in London by January 1349, the city had been waiting with dread for months. Londoners had heard reports of devastation from cities such as Florence, where 60% of people had died of plague the year before.

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Coronavirus:rumours and remedies from Black Death...

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Coronavirus:rumours and remedies from Black Death...

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When the Black Death swept across Asia and Europe in the 1340s, the upheaval was extraordinary. Up to half the population of Europe died over the course of four years, and bubonic plague continued to wrack the globe in the centuries that followed. The fear and confusion felt by communities prompted a range of reactions, and forced governments to take drastic measures in a bid to control the disease.

Some responses to the epidemics were pragmatic, others heartbreakingly inhumane. What is striking, though, is that as the globe faces a new pandemic in COVID-19, some of our actions are eerily similar to those of our ancestors.

Since the outbreak of coronavirus, there have been rumours of people intentionally spreading the disease. Some of these reports appear to be true: for example, several people in Britain have been arrested for maliciously coughing on others, especially the old and vulnerable.

Confirmed cases like these have given way to other rumours, including that post workers and delivery drivers have been intentionally spitting on packages to spread the virus. Many, if not all, have since turned out to be fake, but that hasn't stopped these tales spreading across the world like wildfire.

Wellcome Images

Though unnerving, fear of people maliciously spreading disease is not new. During a bout of plague in 16th-century Geneva, a rumour broke out that house-clearers and carers were trying to spread plague through the city. The method was different to now - and more disturbing. They were thought to be smearing the fat of plague victims over doorknockers and handles, hoping that homeowners would get infected as they entered and left.

There were two theories behind why anyone would do this. Some worried that carers resented putting their lives at risk - others were paranoid that workers were profiteering from the infection, by raiding the victims' houses after they died.

Publishing death tolls

The news cycle has rarely headlined anything but COVID-19 since it was declared a pandemic. A morbid fascination has developed around the rate of infection: Johns Hopkins University is keeping a tally of global infections, and the BBC has launched an interactive page where people can check infections in their area.

These are strikingly similar to a popular broadsheet that circulated across England's capital in 1665. Alongside documenting previous bouts of plague, Lord Have Mercy broadsheets supplied up-to-date figures of London's running death toll for the year, and what proportion had died of plague. They sometimes even showed the number of deaths in each parish.

Vanderbilt University

Besides demonstrating an all-absorbing fascination with epidemics, these broadsheets had a practical function. They helped gauge how virulent the outbreak was compared to previous ones, and could also act as a guide on which parts of the city to avoid. The Lord Have Mercies also tried to be helpful (and drive up sales) by publishing home remedies to help protect from the disease: some of which are still doing the rounds today. One iteration offered "A cheap Medicine to keep from infection":

Take a pint of new Milk, and cut two cloves of Garlick very small, put it in the milk, and drink it mornings fasting [(or breakfast], and it preserveth from infection.

Similar advice on the immune-boosting properties of garlic is being shared across social media platforms and health forums as we speak.

Blaming minorities

Acute stress can sometimes bring out the worst in humanity. Fear and panic brings pre-existing suspicions and vendettas to the surface, and can eventually boil over in devastating ways. Historically, plague outbreaks marked a spike in persecutions of already vulnerable and marginalised communities.

A frequent rumour across medieval and early modern Europe was that Jewish communities - already shunned in most Christian states - were to blame for plague, prompting mass arrests and executions. There was no evidence to support this theory - all confessions were given under torture - but scapegoating minorities continued throughout the period. Expelling Jews and other marginalised groups such as beggars and prostitutes from towns became common, making the most vulnerable even more so.

Unfortunately, we are seeing history repeat itself during the coronavirus pandemic. There have been reports of racially motivated attacks in the UK and across the world, particularly targeting people with an " Asian appearance ", due to the origin point of COVID-19 in Hubei province in China.

This article is part of a series tied to the Expert guide to conspiracy theories, a series by The Conversation's The Anthill podcast. Listen here, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or search for The Anthill wherever you get your podcasts.
Everyday heroism

Despite the panic, some of the best in humanity is shining through, too. Like the Peak District village which chose to shut itself off from the wider world to stop plague spreading in 1665, an Italian village is now in full quarantine and acting as a " human laboratory " for scientists to understand the coronavirus.

In the past, neighbours would drop food through the windows of quarantined houses and many doctors, priests and gravediggers risked their lives to deliver essential services. Today, the same selfless attitude can be seen in the community groups appearing across the world an organising via social media as well as and national services working round the clock to save lives.

As history repeats itself through this new pandemic, there are some important lessons we can learn from the past.

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Coronavirus: rumours and remedies from Black Death and other plagues show how little people have changed

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When the Black Death swept across Asia and Europe in the 1340s, the upheaval was extraordinary. Up to half the population of Europe died over the course of four years, and bubonic plague continued to wrack the globe in the centuries that followed.

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why is bubonic plague still a thing?   - cnn

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A local folk remedy thought to provide good health had the opposite effect for one Mongolian couple: After eating the raw kidney of a marmot, the pair died of bubonic plague.