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See all the wonderful things Kimberlee Haldane has made

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Europeans in the fourteenth century were looking at the world in a new way, seeing far-off places as desirable, worth finding out about, maybe worth acquiring. Yet before Europeans really got out and started taking over that world, there had to be enough personal wealth back home to make a decent-sized market for foreign luxuries. Oddly, it took a horrible disease and mass-scale death for that market to find a foothold.

The Black Death (also called the Black Plague), a devastating epidemic of bubonic plague and its variants, probably started in the foothills of Asia's Himalayan mountain range. But in the fourteenth century something happened to make disease spread - perhaps the rise of trade. The disease lived in fleas carried by rats. Where people go, especially people carrying food, so go rats and their parasites.

When a rat died, the fleas jumped to another rat. When no other rat was handy, the fleas tried less desirable hosts. When those hosts were human, the people got terribly sick and most of them died quickly. An even more deadly version of the disease, pneumonic plague, spread through the air from person to person.

The blackish bruises that appeared beneath their skin were called buboes. That's where the name bubonic plague comes from. (Think of that next time you hear a child call a bruise a "boo-boo.")

Killing relentlessly

In 1333, the plague killed thousands of Chinese. The disease spread west. By 1347, it reached Constantinople, where it was called "The Great Dying," and it continued rapidly west through the Balkans, Italy, France, and Spain. Then year by year, the disease advanced northward. Within a few years the Black Death reached Russia, Scandinavia, and beyond, following the Viking trade routes to Iceland and completely wiping out Norse settlements in Greenland.

As many as 25,000,000 people died in Europe. Maybe a third of the people in England fell. Periodic outbreaks followed for centuries after, but the Black Death had an impact even beyond the horror and sorrow and the morbid fascination it inspired. (Many examples of art from this time focus on disease and death.)

The children's rhyme "Ring Around the Rosie" is much older, and much more morbid, than many modern parents realize. It goes back to plague times, when the "rosie" was a rash that appeared as victims first came down with the disease. "Pocket full of posies" refers to the erroneous belief that flower petals were a defense against sickness. The posies did sometimes help with the overwhelming smell of death. "Ashes, ashes," is from the funereal "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." And the final line, "all fall down" originally carried the understanding that few, if any, would get back up again.

Doing the math: Fewer people equals more wealth

Plague so drastically reduced Europe's population that a smaller labor pool changed the economy. Ironically, this improved many Europeans' lives - creating disposable income, which spurred a demand for eastern luxuries and even eastern ideas. (The intellectual and cultural result of this reduction in population and eastward focus was called the Renaissance.)

With so many dead, fewer people were left to work the land. A few workers had the spunk to stand up to the nobles and landowners and point out that they weren't about to give more work for the same money - not when the supply of workers had become smaller and thus more valuable. The most famous of these uprisings was led by Wat Tyler, an English rabble-rouser who got himself killed for his trouble in 1381.

Post-plague economics forced some large landholders to split their estates into smaller plots. Instead of remaining tenants who turned over the bulk of their crop to the landlord, some laborers actually began earning pay for their work.

Though there were fewer people overall, more people had land, income, and the potential to buy goods. This stimulated a rise in merchants, craftspeople, and skilled traders who could supply goods. Up until that time, you were either rich or poor, usually poor. Now there was a middle class.

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Europeans in the fourteenth century were looking at the world in a new way, seeing far-off places as desirable, worth finding out about, maybe worth acquiring. Yet before Europeans really got out and started taking over that world, there had to be enough personal wealth back home to make a decent-sized market for foreign luxuries.

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Between 1328 and 1351, the bubonic plague, commonly known as the Black Death, killed approximately one third of the population of Europe. The widespread nature of the disease, along with its horrific symptoms, inspired Europeans to go to any lengths to avoid it.

A number of superstitious and pseudo-scientific beliefs arose surrounding the causes of the spread of the bubonic plague. In their efforts to avoid the disease, people went to outrageous extremes, including living in sewers, barricading themselves from society, and flagellating one another with whips.

One widely used trick to avoid the plague was an early form of aromatherapy. Doctors instructed patients to carry flowers on their person, thinking that the sweet odor would keep the plague at bay. Herbal packets were also used as an alternative. Those in the upper classes began using balls of perfume called pomander, a custom which continued after the plague was wiped out.

Catholics believed that the plague was God's punishment for evil in society, spurring some to take extreme actions, such as self flagellation, in an attempt to gain forgiveness. Others believed that the disease was the will of God, and that they were powerless to resist or try to prevent its spread.

Some people moved into sewers, having heard that the plague was airborne. They believed that the unclean air would prevent the fresh, plague-ridden, air from entering the sewers. Those who subscribed to this idea often became infected, either with the bubonic plague or with a disease from the unclean conditions of the sewers.

A more outrageous remedy involved shaving a live chicken and strapping the chicken to an infected person's swollen lymph nodes. The chicken would get sick, and then get washed for the process to happen again until one of the two became healthy.

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How Did People Try to Avoid the Black Death?

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Between 1328 and 1351, the bubonic plague, commonly known as the Black Death, killed approximately one third of the population of Europe. The widespread nature of the disease, along with its horrific symptoms, inspired Europeans to go to any lengths to avoid it.

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Writing Ninjas: How To Write A Five-Paragraph Essay

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How To Write In Grades 2 - 5 & Now Middle School

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7.2 How To Write in Middle School - The 7th grade informational essay

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A thesis statement:

Tells the reader your opinion / point of view / interpretation of the subject under discussion.

Indicates the direction the essay will take by stating the main points.

Makes a claim that others might dispute. This aspect makes your thesis debatable, which is key to writing an analytical essay. Theses that aren't debatable tend to be descriptive, summarizing a text rather than formulating an opinion from textual evidence.

How do I write a thesis?

A thesis is a product of thoughtful close reading, analysis, and brainstorming.

Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize detailed textual evidence.

Once you close read and interpret the text, you will probably have a "working thesis," an argument that you think you can support with evidence (but may need adjustments as you write).

When reviewing your working thesis, ask yourself the following:
Do I answer the question?
Re-reading the question after constructing a working thesis helps you focus and make sure that you're on the right track.
Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose?
If your thesis simply states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it's possible that you are simply providing a summary or describing the text, rather than making an argument.
Is my thesis statement specific enough?
Thesis statements that are too vague often do not have a strong argument. If your thesis contains words like "good" or "successful," see if you could be more specific: why is something "good"; what specifically makes something "successful"?
Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering off topic?
If your thesis and the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them has to change. Your thesis statement should be like a thread that is weaved in throughout your entire essay.
Does my thesis answer "how" or "why"?
If a reader's first response is "how?" or "why?" your thesis may be too general. Answering these questions will help you be more specific and as a result will outline your main points to the reader.

For Example:

Suppose your topic is asking you to write an essay that makes an argument about the importance of one of the primary themes of the "Story of An Hour" by Kate Chopin.

Your immediate thought might be:
"The story of an hour" is about how a woman feels when her husband dies.
This thesis simply summarizes the story without providing the theme. A reader might think, "How does she feel? And why does she feel that way?" Ask yourself these same questions!

As you think about these 'hows' and 'whys,' you should begin recalling specific examples from the text.
The woman in "the Story of an Hour" feels relieved and liberated when she learns that her husband died, because she was in an unhappy marriage.
Next, push your thesis towards an interpretation. Look for detailed, textual evidence to explain the how and the why.
The theme of "The Story of an Hour" focuses on a woman's freedom from a male-dominated relationship.
Notice how the above statement still does not answer the 'how' question. Perhaps you would like to discuss how the language of the story indicates that the woman was indeed oppressed by her husband, and that as a result of this oppression she became ill.
The theme of "The Story of An Hour" focuses on a woman's lack of freedom from a male-dominated relationship, and we see this theme played out in the oppressive language, the illness of the character, and the imagery of life and nature only seen through a window.
Compare the above thesis to the original working one. This final thesis presents a way of interpreting evidence that reflects the significance of the question. Keep in mind that this is just an example of many possibilities you can write about!

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A thesis statement: Tells the reader your opinion / point of view / interpretation of the subject under discussion. Indicates the direction the essay will take by stating the main points. Makes a claim that others might dispute. This aspect makes your thesis debatable, which is key to writing an analytical essay.

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Published online 25 October 2011 | Nature 478, 444-446 (2011) | doi:10.1038/478444a
Corrected online:

News Feature

The genome of a 660-year-old bacterium is revealing secrets from one of Europe's darkest chapters.

As word of a brutal pestilence raging across Europe reached London, its residents started digging. In 1348, Ralph Stratford, Bishop of London, dedicated acres of land that had been purchased to bury the legions of Black Death victims who would overwhelm existing churchyard cemeteries. Within two years, one-third to one-half of the city's 40,000-100,000 residents succumbed, and many thousands were buried in two newly dug cemeteries at East and West Smithfield. At the height of the scourge, 200 bodies were interred each day.

East Smithfield, originally called the Churchyard of the Holy Trinity, is one of a handful of burial sites known to have been used only during the Black Death. In the 1980s, excavation of this 'plague pit' turned up nearly a third of the 2,400 bodies estimated to be buried there, some piled five deep. Despite the urgency of the time, the bodies were placed purposefully, oriented east to west, some with charcoal, possibly to absorb the fluids released during putrefaction, and many with coins and trinkets of their former lives. Such foresight not only helped keep corpses from piling up in the streets, but also, it seems, afforded some Black Death victims a dignified Christian burial. Six-and-a-half centuries later, it would also give scientists the opportunity to dissect the disease that laid waste to Europe (see 'Death on the march').

Click for full map

This month, geneticists reported that they have reconstructed the genome of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague, recovered from remains at East Smithfield.

The sequence - the first from an ancient bacterial pathogen - may help to explain how a disease could wreak so much havoc. It also marks a renaissance in genetic studies of ancient diseases, a field that has suffered a controversial history but that is now being revitalized. "There will be a race now for all the ancient pathogens," says Hendrik Poinar, a palaeogeneticist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who co-led the sequencing efforts.

Plagued with disbelief

When Alexandre Yersin linked Y. pestis to bubonic plague in 1894, many scientists surmised that the pathogen was behind not only the Black Death, but also a spate of earlier mass die-offs. The sixth-century Justinian plague devastated Constantinople and killed millions in Europe and the Near East. Plagues reared their heads periodically for the next two centuries. Black Death itself reappeared several times, even into the nineteenth century.

Clues tying Y. pestis to these outbreaks came largely from historical accounts of their symptoms, such as Giovanni Boccaccio's description of the Black Death in The Decameron, written around 1350: "It first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or the armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg."

But some modern historians and scientists came to doubt that Y. pestis caused these ancient outbreaks. Bubonic plague epidemics known to have been caused by Y. pestis in the past century seemed too mild to have been caused by the same culprit as the Black Death: they killed fewer people and spread more slowly. Some 'plague revisionists' have argued that fleas, which spread Y. pestis to humans, would have struggled to survive the cold temperatures reported during the Black Death. And there was the speed with which it killed - Boccaccio reported that death often occurred within three days of the first symptoms appearing. Anthrax or a haemorrhagic-fever-causing virus similar to Ebola would be more likely than plague to cause such a rapid demise, say critics.

DNA evidence would seem to offer a definitive answer. In 2000, a team led by Didier Raoult, a microbiologist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseilles, France, said it had proved the link between the bacterium and the disease. The researchers reported2 that they had successfully recovered Y. pestis DNA from the teeth of a child and two adults dug up from a fourteenth-century mass burial site in Montpellier. The team identified the bacterium using a sensitive technique called the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify a portion of a gene from Y. pestis called pla. "We believe that we can end the controversy," the team wrote. "Medieval Black Death was plague."

But several critics raised concerns about contamination. The PCR might instead have amplified DNA from modern Y. pestis used previously in the lab, or possibly the sequences from a closely related soil-dwelling bacterium. "I could never, ever replicate it," says Thomas Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. In 2004, Gilbert and his colleagues reported no trace of Y. pestis DNA in 108 teeth from 61 individuals found in plague pits in France, Denmark and England (including East Smithfield).

Raoult says that there was no contamination and that Gilbert's methods did not accurately replicate his. Still, those who were already sceptical of the suggestion that Y. pestis caused the Black Death latched on to Gilbert's study.

Other studies of microbial DNA extracted from ancient human remains - including those affected by tuberculosis, syphilis and malaria - were also being scrutinized. In several cases, researchers could not replicate results, or they found methodological shortcomings. Critics said that DNA from these samples was too degraded by heat, moisture and time to detect, and the field soon divided into believers and sceptics.

"There was a complete schism," says Ian Barnes, a palaeogeneticist at Royal Holloway University of London, who says he spent two-and-a-half years trying - unsuccessfully - to find DNA evidence of syphilis or tuberculosis in bones dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "People largely ignored each other," he says.

Digging up answers

Although Poinar was dubious of claims about ancient microbial DNA, he was intrigued by the bones from East Smithfield. Nearly all of the remains are from Black Death victims, many of whom were cut down during the prime of their lives.

In a bright ground-floor laboratory of the Museum of London, a short walk from East Smithfield, osteoarchaeologist Jelena Bekvalac examines the nearly complete skeleton of one of the plague pit's former residents. Wearing a black silk scarf dotted with white skull-prints, Bekvalac handles a pelvic bone and determines that it belonged to a man who died in his late teens or early twenties. Apart from some plaque on his teeth and a gash in his skull that shows some signs of healing, the man's skeleton offers no outward evidence of Black Death.

His remains, and those from hundreds of others, represent a snapshot of life and death in London during the epidemic. Since the site's excavation, researchers have descended on the bones in search of information.

In the late 1990s, Poinar met Sharon DeWitte, then a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University in State College, who was working on a demographic analysis of the remains suggesting that Black Death preferentially killed those who were already frail. The two considered drilling into teeth and bones to find Y. pestis DNA, but Poinar wasn't satisfied with the available detection tools, which were still based on PCR. "We sort of sat on the samples for a few years waiting for all the stars to align," says DeWitte, now at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

That alignment came from next-generation DNA sequencers, machines that read short snippets of DNA. The technology was perfect for sequencing DNA that has been damaged by spending hundreds of years underground.

Historical descriptions of the Black Death have helped link Yersinia pestis with the disease.

The sequencers allowed Svante Pääbo, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his team to sequence a draft of the Neanderthal genome. But finding and sequencing ancient pathogens in a human skeleton is much harder - like finding "needles in the football field", Poinar says - because their genomes are 1,000 times shorter than that of the Neanderthal and closely resemble those of soil microbes that have infiltrated the bones.

Another technology helped narrow the search. Pääbo and his team developed a technique, called targeted capture, in which they used lab-synthesized 'bait' DNA to snag ancient DNA strands from a bone sample, leaving soil-microbe and other sequences behind. "It's pretty much like fishing in a pond," says Johannes Krause, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, who worked with Pääbo on the Neanderthal genome and co-led the Black Death project with Poinar.

In a proof-of-principle experiment published in August of this year, Krause and Poinar's team used sequences from a contemporary plague strain to fish out Y. pestis DNA from the teeth of victims buried at East Smithfield. From this, they sequenced a short loop of DNA, called the pPCP1 plasmid, that is partially responsible for bubonic plague's ability to infect humans.

Their results, along with a paper published last year that found Y. pestis sequences in different Black Death bone samples, have convinced most scientists that bubonic plague was involved in the Black Death.

In their most recent paper, Poinar and Krause completed the ancient genome and showed that it sits at the root of an evolutionary tree that comprises 17 contemporary strains of Y. pestis. This indicates that the Black Death strain spawned many of the forms of Y. pestis that infect humans today.

This strain, Krause adds, probably emerged not long before the Black Death started its rampage across western Asia and Europe in the fourteenth century. "That, for me, was the biggest surprise," he says. It suggests, the authors argue, that earlier plagues were caused by either a now-extinct strain of Y. pestis or by an entirely different pathogen.

Mark Achtman, a plague-evolution expert at University College Cork in Ireland, calls this interpretation "absolute nonsense". Krause and Poinar's team did not consider a number of modern plague strains found in central and east Asia, which are thought to have earlier origins than the East Smithfield strain, Achtman says. Genome sequences for these strains were not available to his team, says Krause, but he is eager to see how they are related.

Mysterious scourge

Just as puzzling, however, is that Y. pestis seems to have changed very little over the past 660 years. The genome of the Black Death strain differs from that of the modern Y. pestis 'reference' strain by about 100 nucleotides, but each of these genetic differences can be found in at least one contemporary strain. "We can't find anything that makes the Black Death special," Krause says.

The team is now looking for other genetic changes that could account for the Black Death's ferocity, such as rearrangements in the genome, which are difficult to determine from the short fragments of DNA available. To better understand how the plague worked, researchers could try to resurrect the Black Death pathogen by modifying the genomes of contemporary Y. pestis strains. Although this might sound alarming, research on Y. pestis is already carefully controlled, and even an accidental infection with such a strain could be easily treated with modern antibiotics.

Moreover, Poinar says, the Black Death was not just about the bacterium. Environmental and epidemiological factors must have aided in its vicious tear through Europe. Sick soldiers returning to Europe from Caffa, the Black Sea port that was the plague's gateway from Asia, unleashed the disease on a population that would have been weakened by malnourishment and years of cold, wet weather, he says.

Achtman says that it is possible that Black Death was not spread by rat-dwelling fleas, as Y. pestis is today, but by other animals, which could have enhanced transmission. Or another circulating pathogen could have contributed, as in the 'Spanish flu' pandemic that killed up to 100 million people worldwide in 1918-19, often with the help of bacterial pneumonia.

Whatever questions remain about the Black Death, scientists are now keen to apply the latest sequencing methods to other ancient epidemics. "I've completely gone from thinking, 'ancient pathogens are a load of crap,' to 'hold on, maybe some of this stuff works'," says Gilbert, whose team has started to sequence DNA from pathogens that plagued ancient crops. Researchers could identify ancient microbes and chart their spread and their evolutionary relationships with contemporary strains. For example, Europeans who travelled to the New World may have introduced new forms of tuberculosis to North America and brought syphilis back to Europe.

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Ancient pathogens may help scientists understand current and future outbreaks, says Terry Brown, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Manchester, UK. He and Charlotte Roberts, of Durham University, UK, are charting the evolution of tuberculosis strains in Britain and Europe. "By looking over the past 1,000 years of disease in British cities, we can understand problems occurring in the Third World, where more and more people are crowding into cities," he says. Similarly, the sequencing and resurrection of the influenza strain responsible for the 1918 pandemic has helped researchers to interpret the sequences of contemporary flu strains.

For all its ferocity, the Black Death left few visible marks on London. Today, the plague pit at East Smithfield is in the heart of London's financial district, buried under modern office suites and the old Royal Mint building. The only visible remnants are the crumbled ruins of St Mary Graces, a Cistercian abbey built near the site in 1350.

London may have seen its last significant bubonic plague outbreak, but catastrophic epidemics are a rule of human history, not an exception. Centuries from now, what traces will the next great scourge leave? Future archaeologists chronicling its history may find memorials, graves and probably even the bodies of victims. But another story will also lurk in its DNA, just waiting to be read.

Ewen Callaway writes for Nature from London.

This story wrongly located Sharon DeWitte at the State University of New York. In fact, she is at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. The text has been changed to reflect this.

Commenting is now closed.

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Published online 25 October 2011 | Nature 478, 444-446 (2011) | doi:10.1038/478444a Corrected online: News Feature The genome of a 660-year-old bacterium is revealing secrets from one of Europe's darkest chapters. As word of a brutal pestilence raging across Europe reached London, its residents started digging.

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Coming out of the East, the Black Death reached the shores of Italy in the spring of 1348 unleashing a rampage of death across Europe unprecedented in recorded history. By the time the epidemic played itself out three years later, anywhere between 25% and 50% of Europe's population had fallen victim to the pestilence.

The plague presented itself in three interrelated forms. The bubonic variant (the most common) derives its name from the swellings or buboes that appeared on a victim's neck, armpits or groin. These tumors could range in size from that of an egg to that of an apple. Although some survived

the painful ordeal, the manifestation of these lesions usually signaled the victim had a life expectancy of up to a week. Infected fleas that attached themselves to rats and then to humans spread this bubonic type of the plague. A second variation - pneumonic plague - attacked the respiratory system and was spread by merely breathing the exhaled air of a victim. It was much more virulent than its bubonic cousin - life expectancy was measured in one or two days. Finally, the septicemic version of the disease attacked the blood system.
Having no defense and no understanding of the cause of the pestilence, the men, women and children caught in its onslaught were bewildered, panicked, and finally devastated.

The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio lived through the plague as it ravaged the city of Florence in 1348. The experience inspired him to write The Decameron, a story of seven men and three women who escape the disease by fleeing to a villa outside the city. In his introduction to the fictional portion of his book, Boccaccio gives a graphic description of the effects of the epidemic on his city.

"The symptoms were not the same as in the East, where a gush of blood from the nose was the plain sign of inevitable death; but it began both in men and women with certain swellings in the groin or under the armpit. They grew to the size of a small apple or an egg, more or less, and were vulgarly called tumours. In a short space of time these tumours spread from the two parts named all over the body. Soon after this the symptoms changed and black or purple spots appeared on the arms or thighs or any other part of the body, sometimes a few large ones, sometimes many little ones. These spots were a certain sign of death, just as the original tumour had been and still remained. No doctor's advice, no medicine could overcome or alleviate this disease, An enormous number of ignorant men and women set up as doctors in addition to those who were trained. Either the disease was such that no treatment was possible or the doctors were so ignorant that they did not know what caused it, and consequently could not administer the proper remedy. In any case very few recovered; most people died within about three days of the appearance of the tumours described above, most of them without any fever or other symptoms.

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. "

"...Such fear and fanciful notions took possession of the living that almost all of them adopted the same cruel policy, which was entirely to avoid the sick and everything belonging to them. By so doing, each one thought he would secure his own safety.

Some thought that moderate living and the avoidance of all superfluity would preserve them from the epidemic. They formed small communities, living entirely separate from everybody else. They shut themselves up in houses where there were no sick, eating the finest food and drinking the best wine very temperately, avoiding all excess, allowing no news or discussion of death and sickness, and passing the time in music and suchlike pleasures. Others thought just the opposite. They thought the sure cure for the plague was to drink and be merry, to go about singing and amusing themselves, satisfying every appetite they could, laughing and jesting at what happened. They put their words into practice, spent day and night going from tavern to tavern, drinking immoderately, or went into other people's houses, doing only those things which pleased them. This they could easily do because everyone felt doomed and had abandoned his

property, so that most houses became common property and any stranger who went in made use of them as if he had owned them. And with all this bestial behaviour, they avoided the sick as much as possible.
In this suffering and misery of our city, the authority of human and divine laws almost disappeared, for, like other men, the ministers and the executors of the laws were all dead or sick or shut up with their families, so that no duties were carried out. Every man was therefore able to do as he pleased.

Many others adopted a course of life midway between the two just described. They did not restrict their victuals so much as the former, nor allow themselves to be drunken and dissolute like the latter, but satisfied their appetites moderately. They did not shut themselves up, but went about, carrying flowers or scented herbs or perfumes in their hands, in the belief that it was an excellent thing to comfort the brain with such odours; for the whole air was infected with the smell of dead bodies, of sick persons and medicines.

Others again held a still more cruel opinion, which they thought would keep them safe. They said that the only medicine against the plague-stricken was to go right away from them. Men and women, convinced of this and caring about nothing but themselves, abandoned their own city, their own houses, their dwellings, their relatives, their property, and went abroad or at least to the country round Florence, as if God's wrath in punishing men's wickedness with this plague would not follow them but strike only those who remained within the walls of the city, or as if they thought nobody in the city would remain alive and that its last hour had come."

"Brother
abandoned
brother"

"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.
Thus, a multitude of sick men and women were left without any care, except from the charity of friends (but these were few), or the greed, of servants, though not many of these could be had even for high wages, Moreover, most of them were coarse-minded men and women, who did little more than bring the sick what they asked for or watch over them when they were dying. And very often these servants lost their lives and their earnings. Since the sick were thus abandoned by neighbours, relatives and friends, while servants were scarce, a habit sprang up which had never been heard of before. Beautiful and noble women, when they fell sick, did not scruple to take a young or old man-servant, whoever he might be, and with no sort of shame, expose every part of their bodies to these men as if they had been women, for they were compelled by the necessity of their sickness to do so. This, perhaps, was a cause of looser morals in those women who survived."

"The plight of the lower and most of the middle classes was even more pitiful to behold. Most of them remained in their houses, either through poverty or in hopes of safety, and fell sick by thousands. Since they received no care and attention, almost all of them died. Many ended their lives in the streets both at night and during the day; and many others who died in their houses were only known to be dead because the neighbours smelled their decaying bodies. Dead bodies filled every corner. Most of them were treated in the same manner by the survivors, who were more

concerned to get rid of their rotting bodies than moved by charity towards the dead. With the aid of porters, if they could get them, they carried the bodies out of the houses and laid them at the door; where every morning quantities of the dead might be seen. They then were laid on biers or, as these were often lacking, on tables.
Such was the multitude of corpses brought to the churches every day and almost every hour that there was not enough consecrated ground to give them burial, especially since they wanted to bury each person in the family grave, according to the old custom. Although the cemeteries were full they were forced to dig huge trenches, where they buried the bodies by hundreds. Here they stowed them away like bales in the hold of a ship and covered them with a little earth, until the whole trench was full."

References:
Boccaccio, Giovanni, The Decameron vol. I (translated by Richard Aldington illustrated by Jean de Bosschere) (1930); Gottfried, Robert, The Black Death (1983).

How To Cite This Article:
"The Black Death, 1348," EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2001).

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Coming out of the East, the Black Death reached the shores of Italy in the spring of 1348 unleashing a rampage of death across Europe unprecedented in recorded history. By the time the epidemic played itself out three years later, anywhere between 25% and 50% of Europe's population had fallen victim to the pestilence.

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Explore National Geographic. A world leader in geography, cartography and exploration.

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What was the Black Death?

In the Middle Ages, the Black Death, or 'pestilencia', as contemporaries called various epidemic diseases, was the worst catastrophe in recorded history. Some dubbed it 'magna mortalitas' (great mortality), emphasising the death rate.

It destroyed a higher proportion of the population than any other single known event. One observer noted "the living were scarcely sufficient to bury the dead". No one could be sure what caused the deadly plague.

When was the Black Death?

The plague arrived in western Europe in 1347 and in England in 1348. It faded away in the early 1350s.

What were the symptoms of the Black Death?

Symptoms of the Black Death included swellings - most commonly in the groin, armpits and neck; dark patches, and the coughing up of blood.

Medieval observers - and their modern counterparts in 19th-century China and 20th-century Vietnam, observing more recent outbreaks - noted that different strains of the disease took from five days to as little as half a day to cause death.

How many people died because of the Black Death?

In Europe, it is thought that around 50 million people died as a result of the Black Death over the course of three or four years. The population was reduced from some 80 million to 30 million. It killed at least 60 per cent of the population in rural and urban areas. In fact, in some places such as a village on an estate in Cambridgeshire manorial rolls attest that 70 per cent of its tenants died in a matter of months in 1349, and the city of Florence tax records drawn up shortly before and after the Black Death suggest that its toll may have been about the same in 1348.

Some communities such as Quob in Hampshire were wiped out; many rural communities went into decline (and were in time deserted). We know that some populations survived, but medieval people had no such knowledge - all they believed was that everyone would certainly die.

The plague skipped over or barely touched some European villages, and may not have infected at all vast regions (such as ones in northern German-speaking lands). Given the state of record-keeping and preservation, we will probably never be able to estimate the Black Death's European toll with any precision.

What remedies were used to treat the Black Death?

Medieval people believed that the Black Death came from God, and so responded with prayers and processions. Some contemporaries realised that the only remedy for plague was to run away from it - Boccaccio's Decameron is a series of tales told among a group of young people taking refuge from the Black Death outside Florence.

There was no known remedy, but people wanted medicines: Chaucer commented that the Doctor of Physic made much 'gold' out of the pestilence. The plague bacteria were identified in Asia in the 1890s, and the connection with animals and fleas established.

Modern antibiotics can combat plague, but these are under threat from mutating diseases and immunity to antibiotics' effects.

Where did the Black Death originate, and what areas did it affect?

Breaking out in 'the east', as medieval people put it, the Black Death came north and west after striking the eastern Mediterranean and Italy, Spain and France.

It then came to Britain, where it struck Dorset and Hampshire along the south coast of England simultaneously. The plague then spread north and east, then on to Scandinavia and Russia.

How did the Black Death spread? Was it because of black rats transmitting the plague to humans via fleas?

Not only textbooks but serious monographs on the Black Death and its successive waves of plague into the early 19th century in Europe go on about rats (usually "black ones") and fleas without qualification. But what is the evidence?

No contemporary observers described any epizootic [animal epidemic] of rats or of any other rodents immediately before or during the Black Death, or during any later plagues in Europe - that is, until the 'third pandemic' at the end of the 19th century. Yet in subtropical regions of Africa and China, descriptions of 'rat falls' accompanying a human disease with buboes in the principal lymph nodes reach back at least to the 18th century.

As for fleas, unlike during the 'third pandemic', when plague cases and deaths followed closely the seasonal fertility cycles of various species of rat fleas, no such correlations are found with the Black Death or later European plagues before the end of the 19th century.

The lethality of the Black Death arose from the onslaught of three types: bubonic, pneumonic and, occasionally, septicaemic plague.

Who was most affected by the plague? Did the Black Death mainly affect poor people?

Old and young. Men and women. All of society - royalty, peasants, archbishops, monks, nuns and parish clergy - was affected. No subset of people was immune to the Black Death.

Contemporary chroniclers list important knights, ladies, and merchants who died during the Black Death. Many wealthy and well-fed convents, friaries, and monasteries across Europe lost more than half of their members, with some becoming extinct.

Both artisan and artistic skills were lost or severely affected, from cathedral building in Italy to pottery production in England. Artists such as the Lorinzetti brothers of Siena were victims, and the English royal masons, the Ramseys, died. There were shortages of people to till the land and tend cattle and sheep.

By the third or fourth wave of plague in the last decades of the 14th century, burial records and tax registers suggest that the disease had evolved into one that largely affected the poor.

Which areas were worst hit by the Black Death?

In 1348-49, some of the worst-hit regions were in mountainous and in relatively isolated zones, such as in Snowdonia in Wales or the mountain village of Mangona in the Alpi fiorentine, north of Florence, whose communications with cities were less frequent than places further down the slopes and closer to cities.

The experiences of these isolated villages may have been similar to small mining villages in Pennsylvania or in South Africa, or Inuit settlements in Newfoundland under attack by another highly contagious pandemic, the Great Influenza of 1918-19, in which they experienced mortalities from 10 to 40 per cent - many times higher than in New York City or London.

For reasons that are difficult to explain, cities such as Milan and Douai in Flanders, both major hubs of commerce and industry, appear to have escaped the Black Death in 1348 almost totally unscathed.

In the case of Milan, only one household fell victim to the disease, at least according to chronicles, and the plague was successfully contained. Meanwhile, Douai chronicles, monastic necrologies, and archival records (recording, for example, the deaths of magistrates, and last wills and testaments) show no certain signs of the plague entering that city until the plague of 1400.

Did the Black Death result in the massacre of Jews or the blaming of other minorities?

In German-speaking lands, France along the Rhine, and parts of Spain, municipal governments, castellans, bishops, and the Holy Roman Emperor accused Jews of spreading the Black Death by poisoning foodstuffs and water sources, and massacred entire communities of men, women, and babies for these supposed crimes.

The accusations and massacres, however, were not universal between 1348 and 1351. Massacres did not arise in the British Isles (where, at least in England, Jews had been expelled in 1290 by Edward I), and no clear evidence pinpoints any such violence in Italy (except for the Catalans in Sicily). Nor are any massacres recorded in the Middle East.

Where did the first 'quarantine' take place?

The phrase 'quarantine' (the exclusion and isolation of those coming from infected regions, or of others suspected of carrying plague, to avoid them mixing with uninfected populations for a certain number of days) was coined in Venice in the early 15th century, based on a 40-day period of isolation (with Biblical resonances). But the city of Ragusa [present-day Dubrovnik] had beaten the Venetians to the punch in 1377 with a plague 'quarantine' of 30 days.

By the early modern period, 'quarantine' often had been curtailed further. The period deemed necessary to isolate suspected carriers in Milan during its plague of 1557-75, for instance, had dropped to eight daysfor certain categories of suspicion.

Were efforts to reduce the spread of the Black Death in vain?

Cities that managed to keep plague beyond their borders were those that devised and implemented quarantine: border controls at city gates, harbours, and mountain passes; individual health passports (which identified a person and certified where he or she came from), and other related measures such as spy networks to signal when a plague had erupted in a foreign city or region.

Ragusa was a pioneer in this regard, with its earliest 'quarantine' and its increasingly sophisticated measures to isolate the infected and control its borders during the late 14th and 15th centuries. Its last plague was in 1533, while in England it was 1665-56, in the Baltic region 1709-13, and Northern Africa and the Middle East the 19th century. Many Italian regions followed Ragusa's lead, and after them, other regions of western and central Europe.

Did the church recognise anyone who sacrificed their lives to help those afflicted during the Black Death?

From October 1347 in Sicily to the early 1350s further north, contemporary chroniclers decried the abandonment of sick family members, and criticised clergymen and doctors who were 'cowardly' in reneging on their responsibilities to escape the plague's vicious contagion. However, occasionally contemporary writers also praised those who stayed on to nurse the afflicted, and who often lost their lives in so doing.

Curiously, the church did not recognise any of these martyrs during the Black Death with elevations to beatitude or sanctity.

The first to be so recognised did not appear until the 15th century, and those who intervened to help those afflicted by the plague (that is, during their own lifetimes and not as post-mortem miraculous acts) remained rare even during 16th and 17th centuries.

How quickly did the Black Death spread?

It is thought that the Black Death spread at a rate of a mile or more a day, but other accounts have measured it in places to have averaged as far as eight miles a day. It is thought that the Black Death travelled 30 to 100 times faster over land than the bubonic plagues of the 20th century; indeed, Scientists in South Africa, New Orleans, and other places affected by bubonic plague in the early 20th century devised experiments to clock their plague's spread, and found it moved no faster than eight miles a year. It spread so slowly because modern bubonic plague was a rodent disease - and often one dependent on the house rat.

These extreme differences in the spread of the Black Death and the bubonic plagues of modern times are seen despite the revolutions in transport with steam power, railway, and, by the early 20th century, automobiles.

Was the Black Death a one-off occurrence?

No. There have been three identified so-called 'pandemics'. First, there was a significant international epidemic in the sixth century AD.

Second, starting with the Black Death - its deadliest attack - plague later returned to Britain in 1361 (when it affected especially younger and elderly people); 1374, and regularly until it disappeared shortly after the Great Plague of 1665.

Third, the disease broke out once more in Asia in the 1890s, and established new foci, where it is still found in animal populations today.

Will the Black Death return?

In fact, the disease has never gone away. An outbreak in Surat in India in the early 1990s caused panic across the world. The death of a herdsman in Kyrgyzstan in 2013 from bubonic plague was wildly exaggerated in the media.
Samuel Cohn is professor of medieval history at the University of Glasgow and author of Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2010). Tom Beaumont James is a professor of archaeology and history at the University of Winchester. This article is an amalgamation of two articles published on HistoryExtra in October 2015 and November 2014

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Black Death facts: your guide to "the worst catastrophe in recorded history"

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The Black Death of October 1347 to c1352 was one of the worst catastrophes in recorded history - a deadly bubonic plague that ravaged communities across Europe, changing forever their social and economic fabric. But how much do you know about the Black Plague? How many died?

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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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Black Death | Definition, Cause, Symptoms, Effects, Death Toll, & Facts

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Black Death, pandemic that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, taking a proportionately greater toll of life than any other known epidemic or war up to that time. The Black Death is widely thought to have been the result of plague, caused by infection with the bacterium Yersinia pestis.

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The disastrous mortal disease known as the Black Death spread across Europe in the years 1346-53. The frightening name, however, only came several centuries after its visitation (and was probably a mistranslation of the Latin word 'atra' meaning both 'terrible' and 'black)'. Chronicles and letters from the time describe the terror wrought by the illness. In Florence, the great Renaissance poet Petrarch was sure that they would not be believed: 'O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.' A Florentine chronicler relates that,

All the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried [...] At every church they dug deep pits down to the water-table; and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shovelled it down on top of them; and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth, just as one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese.

The accounts are remarkably similar. The chronicler Agnolo di Tura 'the Fat' relates from his Tuscan home town that

... in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead [...] And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city.

The tragedy was extraordinary. In the course of just a few months, 60 per cent of Florence's population died from the plague, and probably the same proportion in Siena. In addition to the bald statistics, we come across profound personal tragedies: Petrarch lost to the Black Death his beloved Laura to whom he wrote his famous love poems; Di Tura tells us that 'I [...] buried my five children with my own hands'.

The Black Death was an epidemic of bubonic plague, a disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis that circulates among wild rodents where they live in great numbers and density. Such an area is called a 'plague focus' or a 'plague reservoir'. Plague among humans arises when rodents in human habitation, normally black rats, become infected. The black rat, also called the 'house rat' and the 'ship rat', likes to live close to people, the very quality that makes it dangerous (in contrast, the brown or grey rat prefers to keep its distance in sewers and cellars). Normally, it takes ten to fourteen days before plague has killed off most of a contaminated rat colony, making it difficult for great numbers of fleas gathered on the remaining, but soon- dying, rats to find new hosts. After three days of fasting, hungry rat fleas turn on humans. From the bite site, the contagion drains to a lymph node that consequently swells to form a painful bubo, most often in the groin, on the thigh, in an armpit or on the neck. Hence the name bubonic plague. The infection takes three-five days to incubate in people before they fall ill, and another three-five days before, in 80 per cent of the cases, the victims die. Thus, from the introduction of plague contagion among rats in a human community it takes, on average, twenty-three days before the first person dies.

When, for instance, a stranger called Andrew Hogson died from plague on his arrival in Penrith in 1597, and the next plague case followed twenty-two days later, this corresponded to the first phase of the development of an epidemic of bubonic plague. And Hobson was, of course, not the only fugitive from a plague-stricken town or area arriving in various communities in the region with infective rat fleas in their clothing or luggage. This pattern of spread is called 'spread by leaps' or 'metastatic spread'. Thus, plague soon broke out in other urban and rural centres, from where the disease spread into the villages and townships of the surrounding districts by a similar process of leaps.

In order to become an epidemic the disease must be spread to other rat colonies in the locality and transmitted to inhabitants in the same way. It took some time for people to recognize that a terrible epidemic was breaking out among them and for chroniclers to note this. The timescale varies: in the countryside it took about forty days for realisation to dawn; in most towns with a few thousand inhabitants, six to seven weeks; in the cities with over 10,000 inhabitants, about seven weeks, and in the few metropolises with over 100,000 inhabitants, as much as eight weeks.

Plague bacteria can break out of the buboes and be carried by the blood stream to the lungs and cause a variant of plague that is spread by contaminated droplets from the cough of patients (pneumonic plague). However, contrary to what is sometimes believed, this form is not contracted easily, spreads normally only episodically or incidentally and constitutes therefore normally only a small fraction of plague cases. It now appears clear that human fleas and lice did not contribute to the spread, at least not significantly. The bloodstream of humans is not invaded by plague bacteria from the buboes, or people die with so few bacteria in the blood that bloodsucking human parasites become insufficiently infected to become infective and spread the disease: the blood of plague-infected rats contains 500-1,000 times more bacteria per unit of measurement than the blood of plague-infected humans.

Importantly, plague was spread considerable distances by rat fleas on ships. Infected ship rats would die, but their fleas would often survive and find new rat hosts wherever they landed. Unlike human fleas, rat fleas are adapted to riding with their hosts; they readily also infest clothing of people entering affected houses and ride with them to other houses or localities. This gives plague epidemics a peculiar rhythm and pace of development and a characteristic pattern of dissemination. The fact that plague is transmitted by rat fleas means plague is a disease of the warmer seasons, disappearing during the winter, or at least lose most of their powers of spread. The peculiar seasonal pattern of plague has been observed everywhere and is a systematic feature also of the spread of the Black Death. In the plague history of Norway from the Black Death 1348-49 to the last outbreaks in 1654, comprising over thirty waves of plague, there was never a winter epidemic of plague. Plague is very different from airborne contagious diseases, which are spread directly between people by droplets: these thrive in cold weather.

This conspicuous feature constitutes proof that the Black Death and plague in general is an insect-borne disease. Cambridge historian John Hatcher has noted that there is 'a remarkable transformation in the seasonal pattern of mortality in England after 1348': whilst before the Black Death the heaviest mortality was in the winter months, in the following century it was heaviest in the period from late July to late September. He points out that this strongly indicates that the 'transformation was caused by the virulence of bubonic plague'.

***

Another very characteristic feature of the Black Death and plague epidemics in general, both in the past and in the great outbreaks in the early twentieth century, reflects their basis in rats and rat fleas: much higher proportions of inhabitants contract plague and die from it in the countryside than in urban centres. In the case of English plague history, this feature has been underlined by Oxford historian Paul Slack. When around 90 per cent of the population lived in the countryside, only a disease with this property combined with extreme lethal powers could cause the exceptional mortality of the Black Death and of many later plague epidemics. All diseases spread by cross-infection between humans, on the contrary, gain increasing powers of spread with increasing density of population and cause highest mortality rates in urban centres.

Lastly it could be mentioned that scholars have succeeded in extracting genetic evidence of the causal agent of bubonic plague, the DNA-code of Yersinia pestis, from several plague burials in French cemeteries from the period 1348-1590.

It used to be thought that the Black Death originated in China, but new research shows that it began in the spring of 1346 in the steppe region, where a plague reservoir stretches from the north-western shores of the Caspian Sea into southern Russia. People occasionally contract plague there even today. Two contemporary chroniclers identify the estuary of the river Don where it flows into the Sea of Azov as the area of the original outbreak, but this could be mere hearsay, and it is possible that it started elsewhere, perhaps in the area of the estuary of the river Volga on the Caspian Sea. At the time, this area was under the rule of the Mongol khanate of the Golden Horde. Some decades earlier the Mongol khanate had converted to Islam and the presence of Christians, or trade with them, was no longer tolerated. As a result the Silk Road caravan routes between China and Europe were cut off. For the same reason the Black Death did not spread from the east through Russia towards western Europe, but stopped abruptly on the Mongol border with the Russian principalities. As a result, Russia which might have become the Black Death's first European conquest, in fact was its last, and was invaded by the disease not from the east but from the west.

The epidemic in fact began with an attack that the Mongols launched on the Italian merchants' last trading station in the region, Kaffa (today Feodosiya) in the Crimea. In the autumn of 1346, plague broke out among the besiegers and from them penetrated into the town. When spring arrived, the Italians fled on their ships. And the Black Death slipped unnoticed on board and sailed with them.

***

The extent of the contagious power of the Black Death has been almost mystifying. The central explanation lies within characteristic features of medieval society in a dynamic phase of modernisation heralding the transformation from a medieval to early modern European society. Early industrial market-economic and capitalistic developments had advanced more than is often assumed, especially in northern Italy and Flanders. New, larger types of ship carried great quantities of goods over extensive trade networks that linked Venice and Genoa with Constantinople and the Crimea, Alexandria and Tunis, London and Bruges. In London and Bruges the Italian trading system was linked to the busy shipping lines of the German Hanseatic League in the Nordic countries and the Baltic area, with large broad-bellied ships called cogs. This system for long-distance trade was supplemented by a web of lively short and medium-distance trade that bound together populations all over the Old World.

The strong increase in population in Europe in the High Middle Ages (1050-1300) meant that the prevailing agricultural technology was inadequate for further expansion. To accommodate the growth, forests were cleared and mountain villages settled wherever it was possible for people to eke out a living. People had to opt for a more one-sided husbandry, particularly in animals, to create a surplus that could be traded for staples such as salt and iron, grain or flour. These settlements operated within a busy trading network running from coasts to mountain villages. And with tradesmen and goods, contagious diseases reached even the most remote and isolated hamlets.

In this early phase of modernisation, Europe was also on the way to 'the golden age of bacteria', when there was a great increase in epidemic diseases caused by increases in population density and in trade and transport while knowledge of the nature of epidemics, and therefore the ability to organise efficient countermeasures to them, was still minimal. Most people believed plague and mass illness to be a punishment from God for their sins. They responded with religious penitential acts aimed at tempering the Lord's wrath, or with passivity and fatalism: it was a sin to try to avoid God's will.

Much new can be said on the Black Death's patterns of territorial spread. Of particular importance was the sudden appearance of the plague over vast distances, due to its rapid transportation by ship. Ships travelled at an average speed of around 40km a day which today seems quite slow. However, this speed meant that the Black Death easily moved 600km in a fortnight by ship: spreading, in contemporary terms, with astonishing speed and unpredictability. By land, the average spread was much slower: up to 2km per day along the busiest highways or roads and about 0.6km per day along secondary lines of communication.

As already noted, the pace of spread slowed strongly during the winter and stopped completely in mountain areas such as the Alps and the northerly parts of Europe. Yet, the Black Death often rapidly established two or more fronts and conquered countries by advancing from various quarters.

Italian ships from Kaffa arrived in Constantinople in May 1347 with the Black Death on board. The epidemic broke loose in early July. In North Africa and the Middle East, it started around September 1st, having arrived in Alexandria with ship transport from Constantinople. Its spread from Constantinople to European Mediterranean commercial hubs also started in the autumn of 1347. It reached Marseilles by about the second week of September, probably with a ship from the city. Then the Italian merchants appear to have left Constantinople several months later and arrived in their home towns of Genoa and Venice with plague on board, some time in November. On their way home, ships from Genoa also contaminated Florence's seaport city of Pisa. The spread out of Pisa is characterized by a number of metastatic leaps. These great commercial cities also functioned as bridgeheads from where the disease conquered Europe.

In Mediterranean Europe, Marseilles functioned as the first great centre of spread. The relatively rapid advance both northwards up the Rhône valley to Lyons and south-westwards along the coasts towards Spain - in chilly months with relatively little shipping activity - is striking. As early as March 1348, both Lyon's and Spain's Mediterranean coasts were under attack.

En route to Spain, the Black Death also struck out from the city of Narbonne north-westwards along the main road to the commercial centre of Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast, which by the end of March had become a critical new centre of spread. Around April 20th, a ship from Bordeaux must have arrived in La Coruña in northwestern Spain; a couple of weeks later another ship from there let loose the plague in Navarre in northeastern Spain. Thus, two northern plague fronts were opened less than two months after the disease had invaded southern Spain.

Another plague ship sailed from Bordeaux, northwards to Rouen in Normandy where it arrived at the end of April. There, in June, a further plague front moved westwards towards Brittany, south-eastwards towards Paris and northwards in the direction of the Low Countries.

Yet another ship bearing plague left Bordeaux a few weeks later and arrived around May 8th, in the southern English town of Melcombe Regis, part of present-day Weymouth in Dorset: the epidemic broke out shortly before June 24th. The significance of ships in the rapid transmission of contagion is underscored by the fact that at the time the Black Death landed in Weymouth it was still in an early phase in Italy. From Weymouth, the Black Death spread not only inland, but also in new metastatic leaps by ships, which in some cases must have travelled earlier than the recognized outbreaks of the epidemic: Bristol was contaminated in June, as were the coastal towns of the Pale in Ireland; London was contaminated in early August since the epidemic outbreak drew comment at the end of September. Commercial seaport towns like Colchester and Harwich must have been contaminated at about the same time. From these the Black Death spread inland. It is now also clear that the whole of England was conquered in the course of 1349 because, in the late autumn of 1348, ship transport opened a northern front in England for the Black Death, apparently in Grimsby.

***

The early arrival of the Black Death in England and the rapid spread to its southeastern regions shaped much of the pattern of spread in Northern Europe. The plague must have arrived in Oslo in the autumn of 1348, and must have come with a ship from south-eastern England, which had lively commercial contacts with Norway. The outbreak of the Black Death in Norway took place before the disease had managed to penetrate southern Germany, again illustrating the great importance of transportation by ship and the relative slowness of spread by land. The outbreak in Oslo was soon stopped by the advent of winter weather, but it broke out again in the early spring. Soon it spread out of Oslo along the main roads inland and on both sides of the Oslofjord. Another independent introduction of contagion occurred in early July 1349 in the town of Bergen; it arrived in a ship from England, probably from King's Lynn. The opening of the second plague front was the reason that all Norway could be conquered in the course of 1349. It disappeared completely with the advent of winter, the last victims died at the turn of the year.

The early dissemination of the Black Death to Oslo, which prepared the ground for a full outbreak in early spring, had great significance for the pace and pattern of the Black Death's further conquest of Northern Europe. Again ship transport played a crucial role, this time primarily by Hanseatic ships fleeing homewards from their trading station in Oslo with goods acquired during the winter. On their way the seaport of Halmstad close to the Sound was apparently contaminated in early July. This was the starting point for the plague's conquest of Denmark and Sweden, which was followed by several other independent introductions of plague contagion later; by the end of 1350 most of these territories had been ravaged.

However, the voyage homewards to the Hanseatic cities on the Baltic Sea had started significantly earlier. The outbreak of the Black Death in the Prussian town of Elbing (today the Polish town of Elblag) on August 24th, 1349, was a new milestone in the history of the Black Death. A ship that left Oslo at the beginning of June would probably sail through the Sound around June 20th and reach Elbing in the second half of July, in time to unleash an epidemic outbreak around August 24th. Other ships that returned at the end of the shipping season in the autumn from the trading stations in Oslo or Bergen, brought the Black Death to a number of other Hanseatic cities both on the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. The advent of winter stopped the outbreaks initially as had happened elsewhere, but contagion was spread with goods to commercial towns and cities deep into northern Germany. In the spring of 1350, a northern German plague front was formed that spread southwards and met the plague front which in the summer of 1349 had formed in southern Germany with importation of contagion from Austria and Switzerland.

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Napoleon did not succeed in conquering Russia. Hitler did not succeed. But the Black Death did. It entered the territory of the city state of Novgorod in the late autumn of 1351 and reached the town of Pskov just before the winter set in and temporarily suppressed the epidemic; thus the full outbreak did not start until the early spring of 1352. In Novgorod itself, the Black Death broke out in mid-August. In 1353, Moscow was ravaged, and the disease also reached the border with the Golden Horde, this time from the west, where it petered out. Poland was invaded by epidemic forces coming both from Elbing and from the northern German plague front and, apparently, from the south by contagion coming across the border from Slovakia via Hungary.

Iceland and Finland are the only regions that, we know with certainty, avoided the Black Death because they had tiny populations with minimal contact abroad. It seems unlikely that any other region was so lucky.

How many people were affected? Knowledge of general mortality is crucial to all discussions of the social and historical impact of the plague. Studies of mortality among ordinary populations are far more useful, therefore, than studies of special social groups, whether monastic communities, parish priests or social elites. Because around 90 per cent of Europe's population lived in the countryside, rural studies of mortality are much more important than urban ones.

Researchers generally used to agree that the Black Death swept away 20-30 per cent of Europe's population. However, up to 1960 there were only a few studies of mortality among ordinary people, so the basis for this assessment was weak. From 1960, a great number of mortality studies from various parts of Europe were published. These have been collated and it is now clear that the earlier estimates of mortality need to be doubled. No suitable sources for the study of mortality have been found in the Muslim countries that were ravaged.

The mortality data available reflects the special nature of medieval registrations of populations. In a couple of cases, the sources are real censuses recording all members of the population, including women and children. However, most of the sources are tax registers and manorial registers recording households in the form of the names of the householders. Some registers aimed at recording all households, also the poor and destitute classes who did not pay taxes or rents, but the majority recorded only householders who paid tax to the town or land rent to the lord of the manor. This means that they overwhelmingly registered the better-off adult men of the population, who for reasons of age, gender and economic status had lower mortality rates in plague epidemics than the general population. According to the extant complete registers of all households, the rent or tax-paying classes constituted about half the population both in the towns and in the countryside, the other half were too poor. Registers that yield information on both halves of the populations indicate that mortality among the poor was 5-6 per cent higher. This means that in the majority of cases when registers only record the better-off half of the adult male population, mortality among the adult male population as a whole can be deduced by adding 2.5-3 per cent.

Another fact to consider is that in households where the householder survived, other members often died. For various reasons women and children suffer higher incidence of mortality from plague than adult men. A couple of censuses produced by city states in Tuscany in order to establish the need for grain or salt are still extant. They show that the households were, on average, reduced in the countryside from 4.5 to 4 persons and in urban centres from 4 to 3.5 persons. All medieval sources that permit the study of the size and composition of households among the ordinary population produce similar data, from Italy in southern Europe to England in the west and Norway in northern Europe. This means that the mortality among the registered households as a whole was 11-12.5 per cent higher than among the registered householders.

Detailed study of the mortality data available points to two conspicuous features in relation to the mortality caused by the Black Death: namely the extreme level of mortality caused by the Black Death, and the remarkable similarity or consistency of the level of mortality, from Spain in southern Europe to England in north-western Europe. The data is sufficiently widespread and numerous to make it likely that the Black Death swept away around 60 per cent of Europe's population. It is generally assumed that the size of Europe's population at the time was around 80 million. This implies that that around 50 million people died in the Black Death. This is a truly mind-boggling statistic. It overshadows the horrors of the Second World War, and is twice the number murdered by Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union. As a proportion of the population that lost their lives, the Black Death caused unrivalled mortality.

This dramatic fall in Europe's population became a lasting and characteristic feature of late medieval society, as subsequent plague epidemics swept away all tendencies of population growth. Inevitably it had an enormous impact on European society and greatly affected the dynamics of change and development from the medieval to Early Modern period. A historical turning point, as well as a vast human tragedy, the Black Death of 1346-53 is unparalleled in human history.

Ole J. Benedictow is Emeritus Professor of History at the Universtiy of Oslo, Norway.
Further Reading:

The Black Death, 1346-1353. The Complete History (Boydell & Brewer, 2004)

Ole J. Benedictow, 'Plague in the Late Medieval Nordic Countries', Epidemiological Studies (1996)

M.W. Dols,The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, 1970)

J. Hatcher,Plague, Population and the English Economy 1348-1530 (Basingstoke, 1977)

J. Hatcher 'England in the Aftermath of the Black Death' (Past & Present, 1994)

L.F. Hirst, The Conquest of Plague (Oxford, 1953).

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The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe Ever

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The disastrous mortal disease known as the Black Death spread across Europe in the years 1346-53. The frightening name, however, only came several centuries after its visitation (and was probably a mistranslation of the Latin word 'atra' meaning both 'terrible' and 'black)'. Chronicles and letters from the time describe the terror wrought by the illness.