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Medieval Medicine - Medicine stands still

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Medieval Medicine - Medicine stands still

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Useful starting point for research on Changes to Medicine - note the sub-pages for more detail.

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Medicine in medieval times was heavily influenced by the ideas and writings of ancient Greek and Roman doctors, especially Hippocrates and Galen.

Ancient ideas - the work of Hippocrates

was a doctor who was born in Kos, Greece, in about 460BC. He is known as the 'father of modern medicine'. He developed the a version of which is still used today. In this oath, doctors promise that they will do their best to treat their patients and keep information confidential.

Hippocrates also developed the idea of the This was the idea that the human body was made up of four substances: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. If the humours were out of balance, this was believed to cause illness. The humours were also thought to be linked to the seasons.

Hippocrates encouraged doctors to seek natural causes and cures of illness. He also developed the idea of clinical observation of the patient, rather than just of the illness.

The Hippocratic Corpus is a written collection of Hippocrates' work. It allowed doctors in other countries to learn from his knowledge.

Ancient ideas - the work of Galen

was a Roman doctor who was born in AD129. He developed the which concerned how people could be treated using the four humours.

Galen's work on was based on information gained by dissecting animals such as pigs and monkeys. Through this work, he discovered that the brain controls speech. However, he also made mistakes. He believed that blood passed from one side of the heart to the other through tiny holes in the septum - the dividing wall between the left and right sides of the heart - when blood instead passes around the heart through veins and arteries. He also said that the human jaw bone is two separate bones, when it is actually one.

Natural and supernatural treatments

Medieval treatments used a combination of natural and supernatural methods. Supernatural treatments included:

Hippocrates and Galen encouraged doctors to seek natural treatments. For example:

Treatments based on the four humours

Many treatments were based on the four humours, these treatments applied the 'theory of opposites'. Galen believed that if the humours were out of balance, doctors should intervene. For example, if someone has a cold, they have a runny nose, and Galen believed that this was the body's way of getting rid of excess phlegm.

When doctors gave treatments, they were attempting to support what the body tried to do itself. For example, nosebleeds were seen as the body's natural way of getting rid of excess blood. If it was thought that someone had too much blood, Galen believed in using a natural treatment such as bloodletting.

Medieval medicine, based on the four humours, encouraged doctors to observe symptoms closely; so they could apply what they thought was the most appropriate treatment. These ideas and treatments were used until the 19th century, when germ theory was developed in 1861 by Louis Pasteur and later expanded by Robert Koch.

Providers of treatment in medieval times

provided care for people in their local area. Treatments were based on prayer and herbal remedies.

Local wise women also provided herbal remedies. They often used ideas that had been passed down through generations.

Wealthy people could afford a private who had been trained at university. They usually practised the ideas of ancient doctors like Hippocrates and Galen.

More guides on this topic

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Medieval medicine - Medieval medicine - medicine stands still - AQA - GCSE History Revision - AQA - BBC Bitesize

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Learn about and revise how medieval medicine was influenced by ancient ideas, the Church, Islam and the Black Death with BBC Bitesize GCSE History - AQA.

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Good information about treatments & medicine, as well as Jewish persecution & religious viewpoints.

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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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Good information about weakening of Feudal Structure & other aspects relevant to the assignment.

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The outbreak of plague in Europe between 1347-1352 - known as the Black Death - completely changed the world of medieval Europe. Severe depopulation upset the socio-economic feudal system of the time but the experience of the plague itself affected every aspect of people's lives.

Disease on an epidemic scale was simply part of life in the Middle Ages but a pandemic of the severity of the Black Death had never been experienced before and, afterwards, there was no way for the people to resume life as they had previously known it. The Black Death altered the fundamental paradigm of European life in the following areas:

Socio-Economic

Medical Knowledge and Practice

Religious Belief and Practice

Persecution and Migration

Women's Rights

Art & Architecture

Before the plague, the feudal system rigidly divided the population in a caste system of the king at the top, followed by nobles and wealthy merchants, with the peasants (serfs) at the bottom. Medical knowledge was received without question from doctors who relied on physicians of the past and the Catholic Church was considered an even higher authority on spiritual matters. Women were largely regarded as second-class citizens and the art and architecture of the time reflected the people's belief in a benevolent God who responded to prayer and supplication. The bacterium Yersinia pestis, carried by fleas on rodents, and the actual cause of the plague, was unknown to the people of the time and so did not factor into this world view.

Life at this time was by no means easy, or even sometimes pleasant, but people knew - or thought they knew - how the world worked and how to live in it; the plague would change all that and usher in a new understanding which found expression in movements such as the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance.

Arrival, Spread, & Effect of the Plague

The death toll rose so quickly that the people of Europe had no time to grasp what was happening & what they should do about the situation.

The plague came to Europe from the East, most probably via the trade routes known as the Silk Road overland, and certainly by ship oversea. The Black Death - a combination of bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic plague (and also possibly a strain of murrain) - had been gaining momentum in the East since at least 1322 and, by c. 1343, had infected the troops of the Mongol Golden Horde under the command of the Khan Djanibek (r. 1342-1357) who was besieging the Italian-held city of Caffa (modern-day Feodosia in Crimea) on the Black Sea.

As Djanibek's troops died of the plague, he had their corpses catapulted over the city's walls, infecting the people of Caffa through their contact with the decomposing corpses. Eventually, a number of the city's inhabitants fled the city by ship, first arriving at Sicilian ports and then at Marseilles and others from whence the plague spread inland. Those infected usually died within three days of showing symptoms and the death toll rose so quickly that the people of Europe had no time to grasp what was happening, why, or what they should do about the situation. Scholar Norman F. Cantor comments:

The plague was much more severe in the cities than in the countryside, but its psychological impact penetrated all areas of society. No one - peasant or aristocrat - was safe from the disease, and once it was contracted, a horrible and painful death was almost a certainty. The dead and dying lay in the streets, abandoned by frightened friends and relatives. (Civilization, 482)

As the plague raged on, and all efforts to stop its spread or cure those infected failed, people began to lose faith in the institutions they had relied on previously while the social system of feudalism began to crumble due to the widespread death of the serfs, those who were most susceptible as their living conditions placed them in closer contact with each other on a daily basis than those of the upper classes.

The plague ran rampant among the lower class who sought shelter and assistance from friaries, churches, and monasteries, spreading the plague to the clergy, and from the clergy it spread to the nobility. By the time the disease had run its course in 1352, millions were dead and the social structure of Europe was as unrecognizable as much of the landscape since, as Cantor notes, "many flourishing cities became virtual ghost towns for a time" ( Civilization, 482) and crops lay rotting in the fields with no one to harvest them.

Socio-Economic Effects

Before the plague, the king was thought to own all the land which he allocated to his nobles. The nobles had serfs work the land which turned a profit for the lord who paid a percentage to the king. The serfs themselves earned nothing for their labor except lodging and food they grew themselves. Since all land was the king's, he felt free to give it as gifts to friends, relatives, and other nobility who had been of service to him and so every available piece of land by c. 1347 was being cultivated by serfs under one of these lords.

Europe was severely overpopulated at this time and so there was no shortage of serfs to work the land and these peasants had no choice but to continue this labor - which was in essence a kind of slavery - from the time they could walk until their death. There was no upward mobility in the feudal system and a serf was tied to the land he and his family worked from generation to generation.

Once the plague had passed, the improved lot of the serf was challenged by the upper class who were concerned that the lower classes were forgetting their place. Fashion changed dramatically as the elite demanded more extravagant clothing and accessories to distance themselves from the poor who could now afford to dress more finely than in their previous rags and blankets. Efforts of the wealthy to return the serf to his previous condition resulted in uprisings such as the peasant revolt in France in 1358, the guild revolts of 1378, the famous Peasants' Revolt of London in 1381. There was no turning back, however, and the efforts of the elite were futile. Class struggle would continue but the authority of the feudal system was broken.

Effect on Medical Knowledge & Practice

The challenge to authority also affected received medical knowledge and practice. Doctors based their medical knowledge primarily on the work of the Roman physician Galen (l. 130-210) as well as on Hippocrates (l. c. 460 - c. 370 BCE) and Aristotle (l. 384-322 BCE), but many of these works were only available in translations from Arabic copies and, often, poor ones. Even so, the works they had were put to the best use they possibly could be. Scholar Jeffrey Singman comments:

Medieval science was far from primitive; in fact, it was a highly sophisticated system based on the accumulated writings of theorists since the first millennium BCE. The weakness of medieval science was its theoretical and bookish orientation, which emphasized the authority of accepted authors. The duty of the scholar [and doctor] was to interpret and reconcile these ancient authorities, rather than to test their theories against observed realities. (62)

Doctors and other caregivers were seen dying at an alarming rate as they tried to cure plague victims using their traditional understanding and, further, nothing they prescribed did anything for their patients. It became clear, by as early as 1349, that people recovered from the plague or died from it for seemingly no reason at all. A cure that had restored one patient to health would fail to work on the next.

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After the plague, doctors began to question their former practice of accepting the knowledge of the past without adapting it to present circumstances. Scholar Joseph A. Legan writes:

Medicine slowly began changing during the generation after the initial outbreak of Plague. Many leading medical theoreticians perished in the Plague, which opened the discipline to new ideas. A second cause for change was while university-based medicine failed, people began turning to the more practical surgeons...With the rise of surgery, more attention was given to the direct study of the human body, both in sickness and in health. Anatomical investigations and dissections, seldom performed in pre-plague Europe, were pursued more urgently with more support from public authorities. (53)

The death of so many scribes and theoreticians, who formerly wrote or translated medical treatises in Latin, resulted in new works being written in the vernacular languages. This allowed common people to read medical texts which broadened the base of medical knowledge. Further, hospitals developed into institutions more closely resembling those in the modern-day. Previously, hospitals were used only to isolate sick people; after the plague, they became centers for treatment with a much higher degree of cleanliness and attention to patient care.

Change in Religious Attitude

the extravagant lifestyle of the clergy & the mounting deaths from the plague generated widespread distrust of the Church's vision & authority.

Doctors and theoreticians were not the only ones whose authority was challenged by the plague, however, as the clergy came under the same kind of scrutiny and inspired the same - or far greater - doubt in their abilities to perform the services they claimed to be able to. Friars, monks, priests, and nuns died just as easily as anyone else - in some towns, religious services simply stopped because there were no authorities to lead them - and, further, the charms and amulets people purchased for protection, the services they did attend, the processions they took part in, the prayer and the fasting, all did nothing to stop the spread of the plague and, in some instances, encouraged it.

The Flagellant Movement, in which groups of penitents would travel town to town whipping themselves to atone for their sins, began in Austria and gained momentum in Germany and France. These groups, led by a self-proclaimed Master with little or no religious training, not only helped spread the plague but also disrupted communities by their insistence on attacking marginalized groups such as the Jews.

Increased Persecution & Migration

The frustration people felt at their helplessness in the face of the plague gave rise to violent outbursts of persecution across Europe. The Flagellant Movement was not the only source of persecution; otherwise peaceful citizens could be whipped into a frenzy to attack communities of Jews, Romani (gypsies), lepers, or others. Women were also abused in the belief that they encouraged sin because of their association with the biblical Eve and the fall of man.

The most common targets, however, were the Jews who had long been singled out for Christian hostility. The Christian concept of the Jew as "Christ Killer" encouraged a large body of superstition which included the claim that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood in unholy rituals, that this blood was often spread by Jews on the fields around a town to cause plague, and that the Jews regularly poisoned wells in the hopes of killing as many Christians as possible.

Jewish communities were completely destroyed in Germany, Austria, and France - in spite of a bull issued by Pope Clement VI (l. 1291-1352) exonerating the Jews and condemning Christian attacks on them. Large migrations of Jewish communities fled the scenes of these massacres, many of them finally settling in Poland and Eastern Europe.

Women's Rights

Women, on the other hand, gained higher status following the plague. Prior to the outbreak, women had few rights. Scholar Eileen Power writes:

In considering the characteristic medieval ideas about women, it is important to know not only what the ideas themselves were but also what were the sources from which they spring...In the early Middle Ages, what passed for contemporary opinion [on women] came from two sources - the Church and the aristocracy. (9)

Neither the medieval Church nor the aristocracy held women in very high regard. Women of the lower classes could work as bakers, milkmaids, barmaids, weavers, and, of course, as laborers with their family on the estate of the lord but had no say in directing their own fate. The lord would decide who a girl would marry, not her father, and a woman would go from being under the direct control of her father, who was subject to the lord, to the control of her husband who was equally subordinate.

Women's status had improved somewhat through the popularity of the Cult of the Virgin Mary which associated women with the mother of Jesus Christ but the Church continually emphasized women's inherent sinfulness as daughters of Eve who had brought sin into the world.

After the plague, with so many men dead, women were allowed to own their own land, cultivate the businesses formerly run by their husband or son, and had greater liberty in choosing a mate. Women joined guilds, ran shipping and textile businesses, and could own taverns and farmlands. Although many of these rights would be diminished later as the aristocracy and the Church tried to assert its former control, women would still be better off after the plague than they were beforehand.

Art & Architecture

The plague also dramatically affected medieval art and architecture. Artistic pieces (paintings, wood-block prints, sculptures, and others) tended to be more realistic than before and, almost uniformly, focused on death. Scholar Anna Louise DesOrmeaux comments:

Some plague art contains gruesome imagery that was directly influenced by the mortality of the plague or by the medieval fascination with the macabre and awareness of death that were augmented by the plague. Some plague art documents psychosocial responses to the fear that plague aroused in its victims. Other plague art is of a subject that directly responds to people's reliance on religion to give them hope. (29)

The most famous motif was the Dance of Death (also known as Danse Macabre) an allegorical representation of death claiming people from all walks of life to come with him. As DesOrmeaux notes, post-plague art did not reference the plague directly but anyone viewing a piece would understand the symbolism. This is not to say there were no allusions to death before the plague, only that such became far more pronounced afterwards.

Architecture was similarly influenced, as noted by Cantor:

In England, there was a parallel increased austerity in architectural style which can be attributed to the Black Death - a shift from the Decorated version of French Gothic, which featured elaborate sculptures and glass, to a more spare style called Perpendicular, with sharper profiles of buildings and corners, less opulent, rounded, and effete than Decorated...The cause may have been economic - less capital to spend on decoration because of heavy war taxation and reduction of estate incomes because of labor shortage and higher peasants' wages. (Wake, 209)

Since peasants could now demand a higher wage, the kinds of elaborate building projects which were commissioned before the plague were no longer as easily affordable, resulting in more austere and cost-effective structures. Scholars have noted, however, that post-plague architecture also clearly resonated with the pervasive pessimism of the time and a preoccupation with sin and death.

Conclusion

It was not only the higher wages demanded by the peasant class, nor a preoccupation with death that affected post-plague architecture, however, but the vast reduction in agricultural production and demand due to depopulation which led to an economic recession. Fields were left uncultivated and crops were allowed to rot while, at the same time, nations severely limited imports in an effort to control the spread of the plague which only worsened their economies as well as those of their former trading partners.

The widespread fear of a death one had not earned, could not see coming, and could not escape, stunned the population of Europe at the time and, once they had somewhat recovered, inspired them to rethink the way they were living previously and the kinds of values they had held. Although little changed initially, by the middle of the 15th century radical changes - unimaginable only one hundred years before - were taking place throughout Europe, notably the Protestant Reformation, the agricultural shift from large-scale grain-farming to animal husbandry, the wage increase for urban and rural laborers, and the many other advances associated with the Renaissance.

Plague outbreaks would continue long after the Black Death pandemic of the 14th century but none would have the same psychological impact resulting in a complete reevaluation of the existing paradigm of received knowledge. Europe - as well as other regions - based its reactions to the Black Death on traditional conventions - whether religious or secular - and, when these failed, new models for understanding the world had to be created.

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The outbreak of plague in Europe between 1347-1352 - known as the Black Death - completely changed the world of medieval Europe. Severe depopulation upset the socio-economic feudal system of the time...

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Why Were Jews Persecuted During the Black Death?

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Why Were Jews Persecuted During the Black Death?

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A Brief History

Today, as the United States and the rest of the world continues to be ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic, we look back to a previous pandemic of enormously greater proportions, the infamous Black Death of Bubonic Plague that ravaged much of the world in the 14 th Century. Panicked populations, desperate for answers and solutions to the deadly plague, took to blaming Europe's Jewish population as the cause of the calamity, a scapegoating of Jews common throughout history. The pervasive theme of blaming various catastrophes on Jews made the scapegoating of the Black Death an almost foregone conclusion! ( Note: Muslim and African American anti-Semitism is not discussed in this essay.)

Digging Deeper

An example of the blaming of the Jews for the woes of the population during the plague pandemic is the February 14, 1349, massacre of Jews in Strasbourg, France, an incident we referred to as " The Other St. Valentine's Day Massacre" in a previous article. Located near the French-German border in the region known as Alsace, Strasbourg was not a stranger to anti-Semitism. Lest you think anti-Semitism was something invented by the Nazi's in World War II, pogroms against people practicing the Jewish faith go back a long time, even before the earliest settlement of Strasbourg in 12 B.C. In 1349, only a year after an epidemic of Bubonic Plague (Black Death) had devastated Strasbourg, a tide of hatred swept over the city, and public hysteria blamed Jews for "poisoning the wells." In "retaliation," about 1,000 Jews were burned to death! The systemic and pervasive anti-Semitism that made such a massacre possible as if the mass murder was not enough, is evidenced by local laws that were then enacted that forbade Jews from being within the city after dark, and the 10 o'clock p.m. curfew was sounded by a special horn to ensure compliance with this law. Incredibly, this policy lasted all the way until the French Revolution. And if that was not enough, a special tax was levied on Jews for any horse they brought into the city, supposedly for pavement maintenance. During World War II, the anti-Semitic monster again reared its ugly head in Strasbourg as the Jewish population of the city was evacuated to the West to avoid persecution by the invading Germans.

Another instance of European Christians blaming the Jews for the calamity of the Black Death occurred in Mainz, Germany, also in 1349, an event we also have previously discussed. On August 24, 1349, 6,000 Jews were massacred in Mainz, Germany by being burned alive. Blamed for so many ills, this time they were held responsible for spreading the Bubonic plague.

The history of the Jewish people prior to the Black Death was also replete with incidents of massacres and oppressive actions against Jews, largely by Christians and Muslims. The Jews found themselves to be in the minority wherever they lived, making them the "outsiders" and "different," practicing a "strange" religion and traditions, as well as babbling in a "strange" language, that is Hebrew and or Yiddish. Humans are notoriously leery of anyone that is "different," and the Jews fit that description, at least in the minds of the Gentiles. A notable example of such discrimination and persecution at a high level of authority was the Inquisition conducted by the Catholic Church, which began in the 12 th Century in France. While the "Holy Inquisition" investigated all sorts of alleged heresy and blasphemy, or other religious crimes, the crime of being a Jew was certainly on their agenda. Jews were singled out for persecution, and not rarely for extermination or expulsion, usually with their property and belongings seized by the Church or local Christian persecutors who stood to gain by the pogroms. Spreading through other European countries and lasting for centuries, the various Inquisitions offer proof of systemic and "legally" sanctioned anti-Semitic activity, giving us insight into the mind of European Christians. A quotation from an article on the subject of Europeans blaming Jews is most alarming, "Tens of millions of European Christians once believed - and tens of millions of Muslims believe today - that Jews kidnap and slaughter non-Jewish children before Passover to use their blood for baking matzo." As a quick note, the blood libel dates back to the Hellenistic Period, predating Christianity by two centuries. Another incident of an anti-Jewish European event prior to the Black Death is the Church imposed order of the enslavement of all Jews at Toledo, Spain, in 694. The inexorable will of the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages to gain converts and establish control over all European populations made Jews a natural "enemy" to the Church. Religious intolerance, being a pervasive and almost universal human trait, makes the scapegoating of Jews for the Plague and other ills as inevitable as it is wrong.

Jews have often been referred to as "moneylenders" by Christians, a pejorative term that highlights the difference between Jews, who are allowed by their religion to loan money and charge interest, and Christians that often were forbidden from engaging in the business of lending money for profit. Calling Jews "usurers" was also somewhat misleading, as the technical definition of usury means any profit derived from interest, while the commonly accepted connotation is one of excessive interest (today often called "loansharking"). Resentment against those to whom money is owed is another common human trait, regardless of who the person or persons are that are due the payments. By labeling an entire group of people with such a negatively charged accusation it became easier for European Christians to reinforce each others' core biases. Other examples of possible violent action against someone to whom powerful people were in debt was the situation with the Knights Templar. Destroying that order and seizing their assets alleviated the enormous debts owed the order by rich and powerful Europeans, including royalty. Bizarrely, perhaps, there were indeed Christian moneylenders in Europe during the Middle Ages, and usually those Christians lending money charged a higher rate of interest than did Jews! The "differentness" of the Jews, with the aforementioned religion, customs and language, probably made it easier to focus bitterness at having to pay back loans against a readily identifiable group. The disparaging of Europe's Jews as "moneylenders" was just plain wrong, but being wrong has never stopped people from maintaining strong opinions and prejudices!

Jealousy, envy, resentment, all worked together to create an anti-Semitic atmosphere. The much studied and demonstrable fact that Jews generally have a higher regard for education may have also contributed to at least some Jews' apparent wealth, another source of resentment from those less well off. Jews today reflect this bias toward education as evidenced by the statistic that shows Jews have an average of 13.4 years of education compared to the runner up group, Christians, at 9.3 years of education among religious groups. A cultural drive to steer children into occupations that are likely to result in better living conditions and remuneration results in envy, when it should result in emulation. As humans seldom willingly take the blame for their own relative failures, scapegoats are searched for and virtually always "found," whether those to blame are labeled "witches" or Jews.

Another major historical series of events that offer the implication of the inevitability of the blaming of the Jews for the Black Death can be found in the persecution of Jews in Europe during the period of the Crusades. During the various Crusades, starting with the First Crusade, (1096-1099), the Crusaders took out their religious fervor on Jewish populations in cities the Crusading throngs passed through on their way to the Holy Land. Not only did the Holy Warriors of the First Crusade terrorize, murder and rob Jewish settlements along the route to the Middle East, notably along the Rhine and Danube Rivers, once in the Holy Land Jews were treated as enemies to be eradicated. Although any substantial Jewish state had been gone from the Holy Land for centuries by the time of the First Crusade, many Jewish settlements and cities remained in the area. The Crusaders promptly besieged and attacked any Jewish city they came upon, and when Jerusalem was finally taken by the Crusaders in 1099, the Jews that had defended the city alongside Muslim occupants were rounded up, herded into a synagogue, and burned alive! While the report of the burning of the Jews may or may not be accurate, at a minimum the Jews of Jerusalem were forced into involuntary labor, slavery, or beheaded. Some lucky Jews were ransomed for their freedom, while others were merely executed. Other Jews saved their own lives by agreeing to conversion to Christianity. No doubt the robbing and murder was "justified" in the minds of the Crusaders by ascribing all sorts of alleged wrongs committed by the Jews, from "killing" Jesus Christ to financial misdeeds such as usury, to merely being unwilling to convert to Christianity. Such rationalization has been used by people throughout history on both a personal and a group level to allow people to engage in otherwise proscribed behavior such as killing and looting. One particular account of the persecution of Jews during the First Crusade, specifically in Mainz (in modern Germany), is an anonymous retelling written in Hebrew called Mainz Anonymous. Both Jewish and Christian authors have written extensively on the subject of the persecution of Jews during the Crusades. Subsequent Crusades did not always even reach the Holy Land, but still resulted in the massacre and robbing of Jews by Crusaders in their march toward Jerusalem. Europe seemed to be ever on the brink of "open season" on their Jewry.

The persistent and pervasive anti-Semitism displayed by European Christians has continued through the centuries since the Inquisition, the Crusades and the Black Death. The prejudice against and fear of Jews is deeply ingrained in Europeans, as is the European predilection for blaming Jews for every ill that befalls Europe. While anti-Jewish pogroms have taken place throughout European history, the most well documented and perhaps most massive anti-Jewish movement took place in Germany during World War II (1939-1945) when restrictive and oppressive anti-Semitic laws went a giant step further to attempted genocide of the Jewish population of Europe. Many German conquered or aligned countries found many willing participants among the local population to join the massive effort of rounding up and/or killing local Jews.

Sometimes this " blame the Jews" phenomenon reaches across the Atlantic to North America, and in 2020, the mayor of New York City and the Governor of New York have been accused of blaming Jews for the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in New York! Other American conspiracy theories about the culpability of Jews for all sorts of perceived problems have resulted in attacks and protests against Jewish Americans even today, often accompanied by chants of "They will not replace us," implying some sort of Jewish plan to take over and replace Gentiles. Jews are blamed for the mythical Illuminati campaign to run the world, and in the process keep "honest" hard working Christian people oppressed and virtual slaves to the aim of enriching the Jews. Various wealthy and powerful Jews are painted as conspirators to undermine Christianity and Christians. Jews get blamed for every war, every financial crisis, and many of society's ills in Europe and America. Since the early 20 th Century, Jews have largely been blamed for the communist movement, a rallying cry that unites the majority of European and European Americans against the perceived monolithic Jewry. The animosity and anti-Semitism has been ingrained in non-Jewish Europeans and Americans for centuries. It seems almost "natural" that Europeans would blame Jews for the Black Death!

With a history of blaming Jews for various problems prior to the catastrophe of the Black Death, and the evidence of pervasive anti-Semitism and Jew blaming in the centuries since, it should come not only as no surprise that Jews were blamed by European Christians for somehow causing the Black Death, but also for nearly every problem in Europe since.

We at History and Headlines find anti-Semitism and other forms of religious hatred and discrimination to be wrong. We welcome people to our site and channel regardless of your religious beliefs. Whether you are an atheist, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, etc., you are welcome to read our articles, watch our videos, and engage with them by commenting. We hope that you will subscribe to learn more about our world's diverse history and also that you will be kind to your fellow men and women even those who hold different opinions from yourself. The tragic story about religious persecution amidst a pandemic told in today's video does not have to be the story to be told generations from now about us in 2021. We all can do our part to make a positive difference in our world. Question for students (and subscribers): What can be done today to eliminate anti-Semitism? Please let us know in the comments section below this article and please feel welcome to donate to The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to help commemorate the victims of one of the worst genocides in human history while educating future generations about this tragedy in the hopes of preventing such horrors from occurring again.

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Historical Evidence

If you would like to learn more about Jewish history, I recommend the YouTube channels of Sam Aronow ( https://www.youtube.com/user/septentrionale) and UsefulCharts ( https://www.youtube.com/user/usefulchartsdotcom). Thank you to both channels for providing feedback on this article.

For more information, please see...

Kelly, John. The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time. Harper Perennial, 2006.

Stehr, Emily. Tragic (but Interesting) History of Anti-Semitism and Persecution of Jews. Amazon, 2017.

The featured image in this article, a representation of a massacre of the Jews in 1349, is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or fewer.

You can also watch a video version of this article on YouTube.

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Why Were Jews Persecuted During the Black Death?

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Today, as the United States and the rest of the world continues to be ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic, we look back to a previous pandemic of enormously greater proportions, the infamous Black Death of Bubonic Plague that ravaged much of the world in the 14th Century.

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A good resource looking at the persecution from a modern Jewish perspective

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In October 1347, a ship came from the Crimea and docked in Messina, Sicily. Aboard the ship were not only sailors but rats. The rats brought with them the Black Death, the bubonic plague.

Europe had heard of the bubonic plague, which had ravished central Asia in the early 1300s. It is hard to have an accurate description of numbers, because throughout the Middle Ages numbers are generally used poetically rather than accurately. Nevertheless, the reports that came to Europe were that 20 million people had died in Asia.

Knowing what happened in Europe, it was probably an underestimate, because there were more people in Asia than Europe. Our best estimates now are that at least 25 million people died in Europe over a period of 50 years (peaking between 1348 and 1350). This was almost 40% of the population (some estimates say as high as 60%). It was a disaster practically unequalled in the annals of recorded history and it took 150 years for Europe's population to recover.

The Fourth Horseman

What compounded the disaster was that no one knew what the disaster was. The Middle Ages was a time wracked with religious fanaticism, ignorance and superstition. A mysterious plague such as this took on much more awesome proportions simply because it was unknown.

The plague spread rapidly throughout Europe, but it was erratic: it skipped certain towns and areas. Furthermore, it abated in the cold weather of winter. By January 1348, many thought that the plague was over. But with the coming of spring and warmer weather, the plague started anew with greater ferocity. Therefore, it had within it a mysterious quality that compounded the suffering all that much more for the medieval mind.

The most common medical explanation today is that plague was spread by a bacterium ( Yersinia pestis) that lived within fleas, which in turn lived on the rat. It was spread in one of two ways. The first was through human contact. Sanitation in the 14 th century was primitive, worse than in the ancient world. The ancient world at least had a more advanced sewage disposal system. In Europe, the sewage disposal system was an open pit channeled through the middle of the street. This guaranteed the spread of the plague.

The second way the plague was spread was through the air. People were infected with it simply by inhaling.

No one at the time knew the medical reason for the plague, but certain ideas developed. The most common reason was that it was the wrath of God. The times were fanatically religious, and one of the ways God got even, so to speak, was by punishing man. This is especially confirmed in Christian mythology with the idea of the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, one of whom is pestilence. This Horseman of Pestilence was there interpretation of the plague.

Reasons for God's Wrath

Why should God be angry at Christian Europe? Some pointed to the corruption of the Church. Of course, the Church did not say that. It was impossible to preach such things in a sermon in church on Sunday morning.

Others said God's anger came as a result of the divisiveness that existed within Christian Europe. Indeed, England and France were fighting a war that would last 100 years. Germany and Italy and the papal states of Naples and Sicily were all at each other's throats constantly. Europe was continually at war, which always included massacre, robbery and pillage. Consequently, the plague was seen as the great leveler, the vehicle to restore peace between the nations.

Others said that the plague was the punishment for the Christians not pursuing the Crusades to the utmost, destroying the Muslims and evicting them from the Holy Land. By the 14 th century, it was clear that the Christians had little if no chance of evicting the Muslims from Palestine. In fact, the entire idea of the crusades had waned. There were no more stalwarts for new crusades.

After a short while, there arose a new idea among the European Christian masses why the Black Death was ravaging their land: because they allowed the Jews to live in their midst as Jews. This reason became widely accepted. Therefore, in many communities throughout Christian Europe the formula and prescription of saving the community from the plague lay in either converting, exiling or murdering the Jewish population.

From 1349 until about 1390, the Jewish communities of France, Germany and England almost disappeared completely. In 1350, Frankfurt had over 19,000 Jews. By 1400, not even 10 Jews were left. That typified the situation in many other communities throughout Western Europe.

Why Jews were Less Affected

In addition to Christian persecution, Jews were also dying from the Black Death. It is hard to tell whether proportionally more Jews died from the plague or the persecutions. The Christians claimed that the Jews died at only half the rate. Even if true, it would then be about 20% of the Jewish population who died from the plague.

And even if Jews died at a lesser rate, it can be attributed to the sanitary practices Jewish law.

For instance, Jewish law compels one to wash his or her hands many times throughout the day. In the general medieval world a person could go half his or her life without ever washing his hands. According to Jewish law, one could not eat food without washing one's hands, leaving the bathroom and after any sort of intimate human contact. At least once a week, a Jew bathed for the Sabbath. Furthermore, Jewish law prevents the Jew from reciting blessings and saying prayers by an open pit at latrines and at places with a foul odor. The sanitary conditions in the Jewish neighborhood, primitive as it may be by today's standards, was always far superior to the general sanitary conditions.

Jewish law also prescribes certain sanitary conditions related to burial of the dead. Leaving corpses unburied not only abetted the conditions that spread the bubonic plague but typhus and other diseases as well. The Jews, on the other hand, had a unique sense of community that not only led them to feel a responsibility to attend to the sick and dying, but caused them to always maintain a formal burial society ( chevrah kadisha), whose responsibility it was to make sure that any Jew who died was treated according to Jewish law, including washing the body before it was buried.

These are only a few examples how Jewish law preserved the Jewish people through this terrible dark period of plague. It imposed a sanitary standard on the Jew far above the ordinary sanitary standard that medieval Europe had. Nevertheless, even if the death rate from the plague among Jews was significantly less, it was still appalling.

A Distant Mirror

Barbara Tuchman's book, A Distant Mirror, devotes a whole chapter to the Black Death. The descriptions she supplies are taken from the writings of the time. Even if one makes allowances for exaggerations, it is so awful that it defies the imagination.

As she states:

There were many to echo the account of inhumanity and few to balance it, for the plague was not the kind of calamity that inspired mutual health. Its loatheness and deadliness did not herd people together in mutual distress, but only prompted their desire to escape each other.

A Franciscan friar in Sicily stated: Magistrates and notaries refused to come and make out the wills of the dying. What was worse, even the priests did not come to hear their confessions or hear last rites. A clerk of the Archbishop of Canterbury reported the same of English priests who turned away from the care of their children in the church because of fear of death.

Cases of parents deserting children, and children deserting parents were reported across Europe from Scotland to Russia. The calamity chilled the hearts of man, wrote Boccaccio in his famous account of the plague in Florence that serves as the introduction to the Decameron. One man shunned another; kinsfolk held aloof; brother was forsaken by brother; husband by wife. Nay, what is more and scarcely to be believed, mothers and fathers were found to abandon their own children to their fate, untended, alone, unvisited, as if they had been strangers.

Exaggeration and literary pessimism are common in the 14 th century, but the Pope's position was as a sober careful observer who reported the same phenomena: "A father did not visit his son, nor did a son visit his father. Charity was dead."

That effect upon Europe created a lasting effect, because the plague bankrupted Christianity. In its moment of trial, the Christian religion failed. Faced with this disaster, the veneer of civilization and religion disappeared. It is that failure that helped bring about after the plague the Renaissance and the Reformation - both events marking where the modern world begins.

Well Poisoning and other Canards

The official Church position during the Black Death was on the whole pro-Jewish. More than one pope - Boniface, Innocent and other popes (about four had to really contend with the problem) - issued proclamations that the Jews were not at fault and should be protected. The way to salvation did not lie in the destruction of the Jews.

But the situation was so out of hand that the official word of the pope did not carry much weight - especially considering that due to the great schism raging within the church at the time there were two popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome. The power of the pope was diminished.

There then arose a second theory regarding the Black Death: The origin of the plague was that the drinking water wells were poisoned. Who were the poisoners? Naturally, the Jews. Why would they do that? Because they took delight in destroying the Christian world. They were the agents of Satan, the anti-Christ. Therefore, it was nothing for the Jews to poison the well.

Massacres

Once the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells, a wave of pogroms ensued. In January 1349, the entire Jewish community in the city of Basel was burned at the stake. The Jewish communities of Freiburg, Augsburg, Nurnberg, Munich, Konigsberg, Regensburg, and other centers, all were either exiled or burned. In Worms, in March 1349, the entire Jewish community committed suicide. In Cologne, the Jews were forced to flee.

In Mainz, which had the largest Jewish community in Europe, the Jews defended themselves against the mob and killed over 200 Christians. Then the Christians came to take revenge. On one day alone, on August 24, 1349, they killed 6,000 Jews in Mainz.

Of the 3,000 Jews in Erfurt, none survived the attack of the Christian mobs. By 1350, those Jews that survived the Black Death itself were destroyed by the ravages of the mobs. The Jewish communities in Antwerp and Brussels were entirely exterminated in 1350. There were almost no Jews left in Germany or the Low Countries by 1351.

The impact of the Black Death on Jewish history cannot be underestimated. It accelerated the movement of from Western Europe to the east, especially Poland, which was almost exempt from the Black Death. Even though the Jews will eventually move back to Western Europe, it will never again be the center of Jewish life it had been for almost four centuries

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Although the Black Death devastated all Europe, for the Jews it is was compounded by Christian persecution that blamed them for the disaster.

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The Black Death Massacres And Persecutions Against Jews

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The Black Death Massacres And Persecutions Against Jews

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Burning of Jews during the Black Death epidemic, 1349. (Unknown author/Wikimedia Commons)

The 14th century was a dangerous time to be Jewish in Europe. Well, it almost always is, but that was the time of the Black Death, so in addition to avoiding the Plague, Jews in Europe had to contend with crazed and paranoid neighbors who blamed them for the state of affairs. A lucky few managed to escape to the safe havens of Poland and Lithuania, but many more were burned at the stake or otherwise killed en masse, thanks to the senseless prejudice that spread alongside the disease.

Poisoning The Well

Struggling to understand, in the time before germ theory, why their loved ones were dropping like flies, many Christians in Europe decided-like most things, as far as they were concerned-it was all the Jews' fault.Jews were already seen as enemies of Christianity, with attacks on them dating back to the Crusades of 1096, so unfortunately, violent antisemitism was old hat to many Christians. It didn't help that, i n the 12th and 13th centuries, the Talmud was destroyed for containing what was believed to be secret messages, so this particular faction of Christians was already primed to believe in a Jewish conspiracy.

Specifically, they came to believe in a network of Jewish communities plotting to literally frogs, lizards, spiders, and "Christians' hearts," but those confessions can be confidently dismissed. poison their wells. Their only evidence of the theory was that Jews rarely used the common wells that were said to have been poisoned and didn't seem to catch the disease as often as others, though this is probably because Jewish communities were largely segregated and their religious laws were strict about cleanliness. Jews who were detained and tortured also confessed to poisoning the wells with Pope Clement VI saw the writing on the wall and issued a statement that the Plague affected people of all races and religions, but not even he could stop the antisemitic train that was about to roll through Europe.

Pope Clement VI. (Mario Giovanetti/Wikimedia Commons)

The Black Death Massacres

The persecution of the Jewish people during the Black Death was as horrifying as it was prolific. Jewish people were rounded up by the hundreds and forced into pits, houses, and even fields that were then set aflame, and anyone who escaped was beaten to death with rocks and clubs. On Valentine's Day 1349, 2,000 Jews were murdered in the French city of Strasbourg. Shortly thereafter, a forced mass suicide was carried out in Frankfurt. Before long, entire villages were wiped out.

King Casimir III urged Jews to flee to Poland and Lithuania, but few made it out. Sometimes, victims escaped death by promising to convert, but it rarely worked unless children were involved. In many cases, babies were ripped away from their families and baptized as their parents burned. That doesn't mean, however, that the Jewish people just sat back and took the abuse of Christians. When the people of Mainz, Germany fought the mobs that came for them, they killed 200 of their attackers. During a counterattack, 6,000 Jews barricaded themselves in their homes, which were tragically set on fire moments later, roasting entire families alive.

We'll never know exactly how many Jews were murdered in Europe as a result of a prejudiced people's desperation for a scapegoat, but it numbers in the thousands. Thankfully, as the severity of the Plague waned, so did persecution of the Jewish community ... until 1492, when they were expelled from Spain completely. And then, you know, everything after.

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Burning of Jews during the Black Death epidemic, 1349. (Unknown author/Wikimedia Commons) The 14th century was a dangerous time to be Jewish in Europe. Well, it almost always is, but that was the time of the Black Death, so in addition to avoiding the Plague, Jews in Europe had to contend with crazed and paranoid neighbors who blamed them for the state of affairs.

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Useful resource about the Peasants' Revolt, outlining causes & consequences well.

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The Peasants' Revolt, also known as the Great Revolt, was a largely unsuccessful popular uprising in England in June 1381. The rebellion's leaders included Wat Tyler and they wanted massive social changes which included a removal of the poll tax, an end to the cap on labour wages, redistribution of the Church's wealth and the total abolition of serfdom.

The revolt began in the south-east of England and then spread to London and elsewhere. Although desiring social change, the rebels did not want to remove King Richard II of England (r. 1377-1399). It lasted only four weeks and was put down by Richard, first by negotiation and then through ruthless persecution of the ringleaders. The consequences of the revolt were, therefore, limited, but the poll tax was abandoned, restrictions on labour wages were not strictly enforced, and peasants continued the trend of buying their freedom from serfdom and becoming independent farmers.

Causes of the Revolt

The Peasant's Revolt of June 1381 was the most infamous popular uprising of the Middle Ages and it was caused by a simmering discontent in England that went as far back as the middle of Edward III of England's reign as king (1327-1377) and the arrival of the Black Death plague in 1348. It was, though, Edward's successor, Richard II of England, who had to deal with the chaos when the widespread discontent boiled over into all-out rebellion.

The principal causes of the Peasants' Revolt were:

a new poll tax imposed on all peasants irrespective of wealth (the third such tax since 1377).

the limit by law on wages after labour costs had risen dramatically following the Black Death plague.

unscrupulous landlords trying to turn free labourers back into serfs (aka villeins) to save money on wages.

a general feeling of exploitation by local authorities during a time of economic decline.

The poll tax of three groats (equivalent to a couple of days labour), was applied to anyone aged over 15 years (only beggars were exempt) and, unlike other taxes, it took no consideration of a person's ability to pay it. Just to add more woe, this third poll tax was three times higher than the two previous ones. The peasantry had been well-used to taxes, Edward III had imposed 27 of them during his reign, largely in order to pay for his hugely expensive military campaigns against the French during the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453). Richard similarly needed cash to carry on the war with France whose pirate ships were rampant in the English Channel, but now people had finally had enough. There were other problems, too.

The cost of labour had risen dramatically following a shortage of it after the Black Death struck in 1348, and this meant many serfs could now charge for their labour. Edward III had imposed laws restricting how much a labourer could earn each day, and there were strict punishments for those who did not comply. Many landlords attempted to get around the problem by making their labourers become serfs again, thus saving on their wages. The idea that one was not necessarily born into a life of servitude to another was a difficult one to quash, though, and people were well aware that large landowners, lawyers, and officials were conspiring in a system that kept the poor in their place while they themselves benefitted. There even spread a rhyme which expressed the commoner's discontent at not being treated equally as landowners:

When Adam delved, and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?

Christian beliefs were thus used to support the idea that all men were equal, or at least deserved to be treated with respect. Conversely, the medieval Church as an institution was also held responsible for many of the ills of society. Many commoners felt that church officials and institutions, especially the great abbeys, had not been very accommodating when the Black Death struck and were just as rapacious in extracting their duties and tithes as any other type of landowner.

The Black Death had killed between 30 and 50% of the population in areas it had struck, which meant that some peasants had been able to buy their own small piece of land to farm as land prices plummeted and there were not enough people to work it. These landed peasants were called yeomen. In addition, the drastic fall in population had hit small businesses and artisans as their customers evaporated. These developments may explain why it was in the better-off areas of the kingdom where the revolt broke out - East Anglia and Kent - and why it was a phenomenon not limited to the countryside.

Violence Erupts

The uprising began, then, in May-June 1381 in England's south-east where royal tax inspectors were investigating why tax returns had been surprisingly low. These inspectors suddenly met with opposition for their demands for payment of the poll tax which Parliament had passed in November 1380. Officials and sheriffs were kidnapped and murdered. Bands of rebels toured the countryside on horseback, torching manors and destroying their records - a clear indicator of the peasants' desire to overturn manorialism. The public records at Maidstone, Rochester, and Canterbury all went up in flames. The ringleaders seemed to be better-off small farmers and included in their number parish priests and village constables. This was not a revolt of the absolute poor but those commoners who had something to lose. The Crown sent men-at-arms to deal with the problem areas, but these were too few in number and many were killed.

Two leaders, in particular, came to the fore: Wat Tyler of Maidstone & the demagogue priest John Ball.

Two leaders, in particular, came to the fore. Wat Tyler of Maidstone, perhaps a former soldier but any certain details are lacking, and the demagogue priest John Ball, who radically sought for more equality in society. Ball had already seen the inside of a prison a few times for his extreme preaching. The medieval chronicler Jean Froissart, (c. 1337 - c. 1405) records that Ball noted with frustration that:

[The lords] are clad in velvet and camlet lined with squirrel and ermine, while we go dressed in coarse cloth. They have the wines, the spices, and the good bread: we have the rye, the husks, and the straw, and we drink water. They have shelter and ease in their fine manors, and we have hardship and toil, the wind and the rain in the fields. And from us must come, from our labour, the things which keep them in luxury.

(quoted in Gies, 198)

Consequently, with leadership, genuine grievances and an ideological framework to justify their actions, the disturbances developed into a full-scale rebellion with a mission: confront the King and get things changed. It is important to note, however, that the rebels did not want to topple the king and their members even swore an oath of loyalty to 'King Richard and the true Commons'. The rebels marched to London on 11 June - causing much havoc on their way - where they were joined by equally discontented townsfolk illustrating that the revolt was not simply one of feudal labourers. In London, there had long been rivalries between the rich and poor, factions of the Church, medieval guilds, native and foreign merchants, and apprentices and their masters, and all these divisions would be widened by the revolt. Some chroniclers noted the rebels now numbered over 60,000 people, and all this while the king's army was in Scotland.

The Peasants' Demands

When the mob got to London on 13 June they continued to loot, pillage, and murder. Lawyers, foreigners, and petty officials of the Crown were just some of the groups targeted as old grudges resulted in wanton acts of vengeance. Prisoners were freed while those thought to be guilty of crimes were hanged by peoples' courts. A mob burnt down the Savoy palace and murdered anyone they pleased.

Although only 14, King Richard emerged from the safety of the Tower of London and bravely promised to meet the protest leaders at Mile End, a field on the outskirts of London. There Richard listened to their demands and blithely promised to meet all of them, issue charters accordingly and even permitted Tyler to extract justice on any person he thought deserved punishment. Tyler then promptly ordered the storming of the Tower of London and had the hated Chancellor, Archbishop Simon of Sudbury, decapitated on Tower Hill. Another day of looting, murder, and mayhem followed in the capital. Meanwhile, news reached the king that rioting had spread as far north as York and there was, or would be, trouble in the counties of Cambridgeshire, Herefordshire, Suffolk and Norfolk.

To put an end to the chaos Richard once more called to meet the rebel leaders, this time at Smithfield outside London on 15 June to hear their grievances again. He also ensured troops were put on standby in case of a battle.

The participants of the Peasants' Revolt demanded the following changes:

the total abolition of serfdom

a repeal of labour laws limiting wage increases brought in after the Black Death

free fishing and hunting rights for all

more peasant participation in local government

the Crown should be the only authority in the counties, not local lords

the redistribution of the Church's riches, especially of the great abbeys

These demands were frankly ludicrous for the period but they did at least have some basis in reality. Serfdom had already been eradicated almost everywhere, but there were some pockets of the country where the practice still went on. Similarly, the redistribution of Church wealth was an idea championed by the theologian John Wycliffe (c. 1325-1384), one of the leaders of the movement whose followers became known as 'Lollards'. The movement of 'Lollardy', perhaps deriving its name from the Latin word for 'prayer' (or the derogatory Dutch word for 'mumble'), emphasised that anyone could pray in private, an idea which threatened the monopoly of the Church and its appointees as the bridge between humanity and God. Wycliffe even wanted people to be able to read the Bible for themselves, and so he made a translation from Latin into English, but he was prohibited from publishing his work in England.

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Richard's successor, Henry IV of England (r. 1399-1413) was anxious to preserve the status quo and persecuted the Lollards until the movement all but disappeared. Nevertheless, there remained a strong anti-clerical feeling amongst the Peasants' Revolt protesters as the Church was seen not only as grasping but as the provider of funds to the Pope, a foreigner who supported the great enemy France. Finally, there was some truth in the idea that local lords were extracting more than they should from their estates, and there was a feeling that the king was being misled and badly served by certain officials such as the Chancellor and dukes like John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (1340-1399).

At Smithfield, after the demands were presented, things could have taken a very ugly turn when William Walworth, the Mayor of London stepped forward and killed Wat Tyler, perhaps thinking Tyler was about to do the king harm. Tyler had, in any case, been disrespectful to the king by spitting water at his feet. As the crowd surged forward, Richard stepped amongst them and boldly declared:

Sirs, would you kill your king? I am your rightful captain, and I will be your leader. Let all those who love me, follow me.

(Quoted in Jones, N., 75)

Richard then employed the much-used tactic of making a load of extravagant promises he had no intention of keeping such as giving everyone involved royal pardons. These promises were enough to stave off more rioting, and the mob disbanded, escorted out of London by the city's militia.

Consequences of the Revolt

Utterly ruthless, Richard next ensured that around 150 of the rebels were hanged, so many that new gibbets had to be built for the purpose. Wat Tyler's head was displayed on London Bridge. There were other minor outbreaks of rebellion thereafter, but these were mercilessly quashed and their ringleaders executed as traitors. As the king boldly stated: 'villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain'. The whole affair was perhaps the high point of Richard's reign as things went downhill from then on, the once-admired young king turning out to be a major disappointment and ending his days with a short imprisonment and a mysterious death.

Ultimately, though, there were social changes in England, as had already be seen prior to the revolt. The poll tax was abandoned, the limits on labourers' wages were not rigorously enforced, and serfs continued to buy their freedom. Significantly, the law and legal records were now used not by landowners to enforce an obligation of labour but to demonstrate a labourer had legitimately bought their freedom and could pass on their land to their descendants.

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The Peasants' Revolt, also known as the Great Revolt, was a largely unsuccessful popular uprising in England in June 1381. The rebellion's leaders included Wat Tyler and they wanted massive social changes...

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Article examining changes following Black Death due to less labourers available.

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"[The] mortality destroyed more than a third of the men, women, and children ... such a shortage of workers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent unless for triple wages. ... As a result, churchmen, knights and other worthies have been forced to thresh their corn, plough the land and perform every other unskilled task if they are to make their own bread."

- Account of the Black Death in the cathedral priory chronicle at Rochester (written no later than 1350)

In its entry on the Black Death, the 1347-50 outbreak of bubonic plague that killed at least a third of Europe's population, this chronicle from the English city of Rochester includes among its harrowing details a seemingly trivial lament: Aristocrats and high clergymen not only had to pay triple wages to those toiling in their fields, but, even worse, they themselves had to perform manual labor. Curiously, the documentary record, which provides ample evidence that workers did demand and receive higher wages (on which more below), contains in contrast scant evidence that "worthies" ever dirtied their hands with fieldwork. Even if (or especially as) phantasms, however, these sickle-wielding lords reveal the importance of imagined possibilities in shaping pandemic responses.

The eminent refused to take on menial roles, not because they could not perform these "unskilled" tasks, but because to do so would be unworthy of their social rank, and it was unthinkable to abandon that social and labor hierarchy. Farm work was peasant work, whether performed by serfs bound to a particular manor, tenant farmers or wage laborers hired by the year or the season. But the staggering mortality of the Black Death reduced this previously sufficient peasant population sharply enough to create a severe labor shortage.

What happened next has been the subject of an enormous amount of scholarship, particularly in the case of England, where the large extant body of sources such as chronicles, legislation, court cases and manorial account books provides rich material for studying the social and economic changes in the wake of the Black Death. Scholars disagree about how and how much things changed, but they share a tendency to describe these changes in oddly passive terms: wages rose, inequality decreased, feudalism ended.

Yet there was a great deal of deliberate (in)action behind these developments. Rather than supply some of the needed labor themselves, landowners turned to solutions that might produce the kind of world they were capable of imagining. In England they created first the Ordinance (1349) and then the Statute (1351) of Labourers, which froze wages at pre-plague levels, compelled workers not otherwise engaged in fixed, long-term employment into year-long contracts with the first employer who demanded it, and established penalties to ensure compliance. As Jane Whittle has noted, in putting their efforts behind the control of waged labor rather than the retrenchment of (already declining) serfdom, rural landowners sought a "thinkable" resolution to this impasse: They would use the existing market for labor, but control the terms of exchange.

Many peasants, however, refused to play their assigned role of deferential wage earner. Court records from 1352, for example, show that "Edward le Taillour of Wootton, employee of the prior and convent of Bradenstoke ... left his employment before the feast of St Nicholas [6 December] without permission or reasonable cause, contrary to statute," and that John Death of Wroughton demanded an "excess" of six shillings eightpence for reaping John Lovel's corn. Recalcitrant laborers remained a problem in 1374, when "John Fisshere, William Theker, William Furnes, John Dyker, Gilbert Chyld, Alan Tasker, Stephen Lang, John Hardlad, Cecilia Ka, Joan daughter of Henry Couper, Matillis de Ely, Alice wife of Simon Souter, all of Bardney, labourers, refused to work [for the Abbot of Bardney at the stipulated wages], and on the same day they left the town to get higher wages elsewhere, in contempt of the king and contrary to statute."

With many state governments reducing unemployment benefits to push workers to fill open jobs, the aim, like England after the Black Death, is to reinstate and reinforce previous social and labor hierarchies, regardless of whose work has actually been "essential" over the past 16 months.

These records attest to some individuals' appreciation of the increased value of their labor in the new marketplace created by mass death. The number and geographical range of these individual acts of defiance, moreover, suggest a vibrant, if unrecorded, current of communal discussions, rumors and calculations that supported such individual agency. In the face of official intransigence, workers pushed for higher wages and greater mobility, which they received because "churchmen, knights, and other worthies" were willing to make these concessions, rather than have to work the fields and herd the sheep themselves. As a result, wages rose, inequality lessened ... and the social and labor hierarchies remained the same.

Thankfully, the current COVID-19 pandemic is vastly less lethal than the mid 14th-century bubonic plague, and we can hope that people around the world do not experience the loss of human life on the same scale. What the Black Death does share with our present moment is the issue of labor and the limits drawn by the negative space of the unthinkable.

The people who prospered under the pre-pandemic system are now deciding what "back to normal" looks like and how we get there. With many state governments reducing unemployment benefits to push workers to fill open jobs, the aim, like England after the Black Death, is to reinstate and reinforce previous social and labor hierarchies, regardless of whose work has actually been "essential" over the past 16 months. Workers in specific circumstances and with individual or collective determination might negotiate better labor conditions or higher wages, but these concessions' permanance remains in the hands of employers who saw no reason to implement them prior to the pandemic. As historians Ada Palmer and Eleanor Janega have argued, whatever gains peasants and artisans obtained in the decades after the Black Death did not survive the following centuries. Elites successfully reclaimed a greater share of wealth and income, hierarchies ossified, and laborers' power diminished.

Simply stating that English society was changed by the Black Death not only discounts the people who did the changing, but also ignores the insufficiencies of the changes they produced. The Rochester chronicler raised the specter of knights and churchmen toiling in the fields to evoke the unthinkable scale of the disaster, and then refused to contemplate this radically different social order any further. We are not the Rochester chronicler. How can we think the unthinkable - about safety and health, racial justice, gender roles, immigration status, access to childcare, and the dignity, autonomy and worth of labor - for our own post-pandemic future?
All quoted material from Rosemary Horrox, ed., The Black Death (Manchester University Press, 1994).
Headline image: Medieval illustration of men harvesting wheat with reaping-hooks, on a calendar page for August, circa 1310. Queen Mary's Psalter (Ms. Royal 2. B. VII), fol. 78v, The British Library.

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"[The] mortality destroyed more than a third of the men, women, and children ... such a shortage of workers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent unless for triple wages.

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Good starting point for information about the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

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The crowd burned down buildings and freed prisoners. King Richard and his advisors took shelter in the Tower of London. Richard agreed to meet the peasants at Mile End, and the peasants gave their demands. They wanted to be free to move around the country, and for some of Richard's more unpopular advisors to be handed over for execution. Richard, who was only 14 years old at the time of the uprising, said he would agree to their demands.

Shortly after the meeting at Mile End, peasants stormed the Tower of London and murdered Simon Sudbury, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury and also the . Robert Hales, who was , was killed as well.

Richard agreed to meet the peasants again, this time at Smithfield. There is some uncertainty as to what exactly happened when Richard met with Wat Tyler, though historians believe the following to be the most likely sequence of events: Richard told the peasants they should leave London as he had agreed to their demands, but Tyler said he wanted more reforms. Some chroniclers recorded that Tyler looked as though he was going to strike Richard, and the Mayor of London, William Walworth, stepped forward to protect him. Tyler was stabbed, either by the mayor himself, or by Richard's soldiers. Tyler managed to run away and was taken to a hospital. He was tracked down by the mayor of London, taken back to Smithfield and executed.

Richard rode his horse over to the crowd of peasants. The peasants demanded that he abolish . Richard agreed, told the peasants that he was their leader and that they should leave the city. Most of the peasants did leave, believing that the changes Richard had agreed to at Mile End would be put in place. However, Richard did not keep his promises: serfdom was not abolished.

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Find out about the Peasants' Revolt with BBC Bitesize History. For students between the ages of 11 and 14.

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The Black Death led to the Demise of Feudalism. Could this pandemic have a similar effect? 

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The Black Death led to the Demise of Feudalism. Could this pandemic have a similar effect? 

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Some good information regarding weakening of Feudal Structure & Labour shortages.

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In predicting the future, we often turn to our past experiences. Humanity has, after all, faced pandemics like this one before - many times, in fact - and few are as memorable and menacing as the Black Death. Arriving in Italy in AD 1347, the Black Death, now believed to be the bubonic plague, rapidly spread throughout Medieval Europe, wiping out between one-third and one-half of the entire European population.

The people of Medieval Europe were not unaccustomed to suffering, but this was unprecedented. Death would come within days or even hours of showing symptoms, and for those who fell ill, the mortality rate was probably upwards of 60%. Panic spread even faster, and the most sacred bonds of society began to unravel. Medieval chroniclers tell us of priests abandoning their flock, parents abandoning their children, husbands their wives, and vice versa - anything to escape the contagion. In some areas, Jewish communities were blamed and viciously attacked, while in others, throngs of penitent Christians publicly whipped themselves in imitation of Christ. For many, it was the end of the world.

What's often missing from this story, however, is the wider context and the lasting impact of the Black Death. This is a story not only of unfathomable tragedy, but also of transformation and rebirth. The plague, in combination with a host of other related and overlapping crises, delivered a death blow to Medieval Europe, ushering in a new age - the Renaissance and the rise of so-called agrarian capitalism - and ultimately setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution and the modern world. And the calamitous 14th century is not as far removed from our own experience as we would like to think.

Europe at the end of the 13th century was not so different from Europe today. Since the Second World War, we have experienced an unprecedented period of economic growth, and so it was for Medieval Europe on the eve of the Black Death. From AD 1000, Europe's population doubled or even tripled, and the economy became increasingly commercialized, underwritten by an increasingly sophisticated financial system, as new cities and towns emerged, universities were founded across the continent, and the magnificent Gothic cathedrals surpassed the Great Pyramid at Giza as the tallest man-made structures in the world.

But like the modern world, there were cracks in the façade - warning signs that the social and economic foundations of Medieval Europe were not as solid as they appeared. As the population grew, increasingly marginal land was turned over to agriculture, with diminishing returns, resulting in lower yields per capita and pushing the population dangerously close to subsistence levels. This left little slack in the economy to absorb a significant shock, and the 14th century would soon bring one shock after another.

First and foremost, the climate was changing. Sound familiar? Medieval Europe benefitted from several centuries of warmer weather, which boosted crop yields, but by the 14th century, the world was entering the so-called Little Ice Age. The changes were relatively minor when compared with our own climate crisis, but the impact was significant. Cooler and wetter weather depressed agricultural yields, at a time when there was already very little slack in the food supply. This contributed to a broader economic slowdown, as yields declined and prices rose, but it also brought Europe to the edge of famine.

Then, beginning in 1311, Europe began to experience a series of crop failures across the continent in what became known as the Great Famine. Reaching a peak in northern Europe in 1315-1317, the Great Famine may have killed 5 to 10% of Europe's population, less than a generation before the Black Death arrived in 1347.

At the same time, Europe entered a prolonged period of heightened geopolitical conflict, during which a dizzying array of kingdoms, principalities, sultanates and city-states waged innumerable wars, both large and small. Chief among these, in terms of social and economic impact, were the ongoing hostilities between England and France, culminating in the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453), and the fall of Acre in 1291, the last remaining crusader city in the Levant, which prompted a papal ban on trade with the Mamluk Sultanate. These conflicts inhibited trade between northern and southern Europe and between western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, further slowing the European economy and incurring a massive fiscal burden that would soon ruin the European financial system and provoke uprisings in both France and England.

Northern Italy was the heart of the financial system at this time, and a small number of very large Italian banks, often referred to as "super-companies," were lending huge sums of money across Europe. As was the case in the 2008 financial crisis, few banks actually had the cash recorded in their ledgers. All available money was loaned out or tied up in investments, leaving the banks severely under-capitalized and vulnerable to insolvency in the event of a sudden large withdraw or a major default on their loans.

Both of these eventualities soon came to pass, triggering cascading failures across the financial system. First, war broke out between England and France in 1294, prompting King Edward I to withdraw huge sums of money from the Riccardi of Lucca, approximately equivalent to several billion dollars today. The Riccardi simply did not have the money, and Edward seized whatever assets he could. Then, over the following decades, three more super banks, the Frescobaldi, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, all of Florence, were each ruined by successive English kings who refused to pay their debts. Most spectacularly, Edward III defaulted on billions of dollars-worth of loans from the Bardi and Peruzzi, triggering a run on Florentine banks in the 1340s, setting off an international debt crisis and effectively ending public borrowing for the English crown. This was now less than a decade before the onset of the Black Death.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, the cultural and epistemological bedrock of Medieval Europe, was facing the most significant legitimacy crisis in centuries. The ambitious King Philip IV of France, who also played a central role in the credit crisis of 1294, was embroiled in a high-stakes tit-for-tat with Pope Boniface VIII when the King's men attempted to arrest the elderly Pope, inadvertently killing him. Shortly thereafter, in 1305, a Frenchman, Clement V, was chosen to be the next pope, and the papacy was relocated to Avignon, France. This understandably cast a long shadow over the Holy See, and the Avignon Popes were widely disliked and distrusted. The crisis only deepened in 1378 when a second pope was elected in Rome and a third pope was briefly elected in 1409 before all three were deposed in 1417.

We might compare this crisis of faith with the current legitimacy crisis of science in the United States. Like the scientific method, the Church was a shared way of knowing - a pathway to common understanding, which was essential to the social order of Medieval Europe.

It was in the midst of this spiritual, economic and geopolitical crisis that the Black Death arrived, sweeping through Europe in 1347-1353 and upending the balance of power, almost overnight. The psychological effects are difficult to identify with any certainty, precisely because so many other calamities were already tearing at the medieval subconscious, but the economic effects of the plague were nothing short of earthshattering. By killing perhaps 50% of the labor force, the Black Death drastically altered the supply of labor, land and coin. Wages skyrocketed, as labor was in short supply, and rents declined, as the plummeting population density created a surplus of land. Both of these developments substantially benefitted commoners, at the expense of the elite, particularly in England.

To understand why, it's important to understand the structure of the medieval economy. Past societies are never as simple or homogenous as we make them out to be. But by and large, Medieval Europe operated on a feudal or manorial system, in which most of the rural population was essentially servile, owing rent and/or services to aristocratic landowners in exchange for the use of their land. Peasants could have myriad different statuses, but in general, the archetypal serf was legally bound to their lord - although they could buy their freedom (or run away). Serfs worked the lord's fields (called the demesne), and in exchange, the serf was given a home and their own plot of agricultural land, from which they could eke out a living.

The archetypal serf was not paid for their work in the lord's fields - that was their obligation to the lord in exchange for the use of the lord's land. The modern equivalent would be if your landlord was also your boss, and in order to live in your apartment, you had to sign away your freedom and that of your children, in perpetuity. Not only that, the medieval lord was also the primary unit of legal, civic and military power, often serving as the first stop for legal matters and the first defense against brigands and rival kingdoms.

In the wake of the Black Death, however, the shortage of labor and the abundance of land empowered peasants to negotiate better terms with their lord, and the lord, with no one to work his fields, was in no place to refuse. This was especially the case in England, where the aristocracy was more dependent on the cultivation of the demesne. With perhaps half the population gone, there were simply not enough peasants to work the land, and the average income of the English lord declined significantly. In response, the lord's wheat fields were increasingly turned over to livestock, or rented out to tenant farmers, who would pay the lord a fixed rent, keeping the agricultural produce for themselves.

The ambitious commoner could now acquire sizable tracts of land, and with the agricultural product of that land entirely at their disposal, commoners were incentivized to maximize the productivity of their land and sell the surplus at market for a profit. This transition is often referred to as the birth of Agrarian Capitalism.

Urban laborers and craftsmen also benefitted from rising wages. The average lifespan increased, and standards of living improved across the board. The shortage of skilled tradesmen even created new opportunities for urban women: the widows of merchants and craftsmen were encouraged to run their husbands' businesses, and the number of female apprentices in London increased significantly at this time.

The aristocracy, however, were predictably appalled by the newfound power of the common rabble, and the elite sought to maintain their position by imposing artificially low wages and by compelling laborers to accept any available work. Sumptuary laws, which restricted what commoners could wear and eat, also became common during the 14th and 15th Centuries. However, these laws do not appear to have been effective, and tensions continued to mount between the aristocracy and the wider populace, who were increasingly impatient for change.

This, combined with the soaring fiscal burden of near-constant war, set off a series of uprisings, most notably the French Jacquerie of 1358 and the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The aristocracy responded with force wherever they could, but they could not turn back the clock.

Even in war, their role was changing. While the medieval lord was renting out his fields, the knight was increasingly losing his place on the battlefield. This was, in theory, the primary purpose of the secular aristocracy: to be professional killers, to defend the realm and to protect the clergy and the peasantry. But starting in the 14th century, infantry units comprised of commoners, like the Swiss pikemen and English longbowmen, began to win a series of decisive victories against mounted knights, revolutionizing military tactics and hastening the obsolescence of the feudal aristocracy.

All the while, a new intellectual spirit was taking root across western Europe. Influential thinkers like John Wycliffe and Marsilius of Padua began to question the worldly authority of both the Church and the state, arguing that power rested ultimately with the populace rather than the ruler, and the unworthy ruler could lose their right to govern. Writers and philosophers were increasingly concerned with the here and now, the individual and the observable, rather than the abstract and the universal. The works of Chaucer, Petrarch and Christine de Pizan celebrate the uniqueness of the individual, savoring the moment and often drawing attention to the messiness of the human experience. William of Ockham directly challenged the tedious abstraction of medieval philosophy, famously advocating for more efficient and rigorous reasoning à la Ockham's Razor.

A new confidence in scientific thought began to blossom, as precocious scholars like Nicole Oresme and Jean Buridan postulated the rotation of the earth and the law of inertia, more than a century before Copernicus and Isaac Newton. In the wake of the Black Death, plague doctors were among the first to believe they had surpassed the knowledge of the Greek and Roman world; ironically, they were wrong, but the lower mortality of later outbreaks led many doctors to proclaim they had cured the disease, which instilled a new faith in scientific progress. This was the beginning of a paradigm shift, the repercussions of which have shaped our modern world, and the calamitous 14th century was the crucible through which this new paradigm came into being.

Now, seven-hundred years later, what, if anything, can we learn from this - what can the crises and consequences of the 14th century tell us about our own pandemic and the impending aftermath? On the one hand, the current pandemic pales in comparison to the Black Death. The Black Death killed at least 30% of Medieval Europe, whereas the new coronavirus is unlikely to kill more than 0.03% of the US population. There will be no labor shortage in the wake of the coronavirus; quite the opposite, there will likely be a labor surplus, due to the ensuing economic contraction. As for rents, the housing market is essentially frozen as people shelter in place, and housing prices are likely to decline in a recession, but the real cost of housing relative to income is unlikely to see the kind of seismic shift experienced after the Black Death.

However, if we take a wider view, there is more to the late medieval crisis than a shortage of labor and a surplus of land. The devastation of the Black Death may have been the straw that broke the camel's back, but Medieval Europe was already on course for social and economic upheaval. As is the case today, great-power conflict was brewing, and with large parts of France already under English control, the eventual showdown between England and France was probably inevitable. Inequality was also a source of stagnation and tension well before the Black Death, as the European economy was becoming increasingly commercialized, a new urban middle class was emerging, and the role of the aristocracy in war, in economic production, and in civic life was shifting. But most significantly, and most presciently for our own time, Europe was headed for a climate catastrophe, and regardless of the Black Death, the continent would have almost certainly faced a series of demographic shocks, like the Great Plague, until considerable changes were made to the existing socio-economic system.

The lesson we should take from this today is not the differences between the coronavirus and the Black Death, but rather the broader similarities between the 14th century and the 21st century. As we emerge from our makeshift bunkers - thankful and perhaps overly confident from averting a worst-case scenario - war between China and the US still looms ever larger, socio-economic inequality is reaching record levels, trust in institutions and our established epistemology is waning, and as we enter the worst depression since the 1930s, climate change once again threatens to throw us back into the Middle Ages. The coronavirus has exposed deep fissures in our society, but it has not been severe enough to force us to address these problems. We may feel as though we dodged a bullet, but if we continue business as usual, what happens next is likely to be much worse. The calamitous 21st century is just getting started, and a more apt parallel for the Black Death is probably yet to come.

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The Black Death led to the demise of feudalism. Could this pandemic have similar repercussions?

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We've been here before: a pandemic, income inequality, economic stagnation and climate change brought down Medieval Europe

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Black Death: Political and Social Changes

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Black Death: Political and Social Changes

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A useful resource about the changes to the class structure & Revolts following the Black Death

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Yeomen Revolt

Such words struck a deep chord among the men of Kent; more so than in other places like Durham, where feudal lordship still held strong sway. This was because the Kentish peasantry had been able to improve their lot considerably in the wake of the Black Death. Fired up by John Ball's strong words, and outraged by the demands of the new boy-king Richard II's government for a poll tax of 1 shilling from every man in the land. Kent rose up under the leadership of Wat Tyler and marched on London in 1381.

This was the outcome of simmering resentments and the surprising social shifts, in part caused in part by the Black Death. The Peasants Revolt is the only truly popular uprising in English medieval history. For, even the most fundamental attempts at social change, like the rebellion of Simon de Montfort in 1265, had previously been initiated and led by the English barony. The Peasants' Revolt was the first ever mass uprising of the common man in England. However, it was not led by the peasantry either. The Peasants' Revolt was, in fact, a revolt of the yeoman gentry. If their interests had not been threatened, it would never have occurred.

Of the three named ringleaders, Wat Tyler, John Ball and Jack Straw, little to nothing is known. It is more than likely that 'Jack Straw' was a nickname for Wat Tyler himself. Rebels and outlaws often took on such sobriquets in the wake of the popularisation of the Robin Hood legend. It is significant that this popularisation occurs at precisely this time, the first literary reference to Robin Hood actually occurs in Piers Plowman. Wat Tyler was probably a yeoman craftsman, as his name implies. John Ball, on the other hand, was probably the most lowly of the ringleaders; but as an itinerant heretic preacher, he can hardly be classed as a typical peasant.

A brief look at the escheator's inquisitions in the wake of the revolt add substance to this assessment. Out of c.180 inquiries, only 65 of the named people had goods valued at less than 20 shillings. 15 of them had goods valued at over £5, and the most well-to-do yeoman named in the rolls was the Suffolk rebel, Thomas Sampson whose assets were valued at some £65, without taking into account the price of his land.

It was people such as this who led the Peasants' Revolt. Sampson had co-ordinated the disparate rebel bands across several counties. To find the cause we must go back to the reign of Edward III and the Hundred Years War. In his desperate quest for money to fund this ruinously expensive war, John of Gaunt had turned to John Wycliffe and given the yeoman gentry the lever with which to mobilise the peasantry. Yet it was also this quest for money, and the taxation it induced which had so outraged them in the first place.

Taxation without Power

Taxation was levied through Parliament. As the cost of wars increased during the Middle Ages, the king increasingly needed to draw the money to fight them from the general populace, and Parliament was the mechanism through which this was done. In principle, the King agreed to hear the Commons' grievances in return for which they ratified his request for money. By 1376, serious cracks were showing in this system. Parliament was being used by the king and the richer landed gentry as a means of keeping the common people under control.

In 1334, it had slashed the property qualifications exempting the poorer gentry (and yeomen) from taxation; and after the Black Death, it had enforced reactionary labour laws designed to keep the cost of lordship down. Measures such as these alienated poor gentleman, yeoman and peasant alike: those whose livelihoods relied on hiring out their labour and who had no margins with which to cushion the increased tax burden.

By 1376, the Commons had had enough. In the famous 'Good Parliament' of that year, they elected Sir Peter de la Mere as the first ever Speaker of the House of Commons, and through him presented their grievances to the Lords. They refused to ratify any further taxation until the king's Inner Council was replaced and their economic grievances were heard. John of Gaunt had no choice but to give in.

Yet, for the lesser gentry in the Commons, this was not the victory that it seemed. In the very next year, John of Gaunt used the last Parliament of Edward III's reign to institute the most regressive tax ever witnessed in later medieval England. In response to a threatened French/Spanish armada menacing the realm, Parliament levied a one-off poll tax of 4 pence on every adult over the age of 14. This was followed up in 1379 by another poll tax, and then in 1380, a third poll tax was levied which sparked the Peasants' Revolt.

In fact, the third poll tax, despite being one shilling on every adult over the age of 15, was actually less burdensome than the 1377 tax, because of the way in which it was levied. Instead of extracting a shilling from every man in the land, the total assessment was calculated in every village by multiplying the number of eligible persons by 12d. and apportioning that total to individuals based on their ability to pay. The calculation was made by a group of commissioners appointed from among the county gentry and court officials; but it was precisely for this reason that it aroused such anger amongst those who instigated the revolt.

King and Government: Conclusion

The yeomen and lesser gentry, who formed the local village élites, found themselves both excluded from the administrative process which they saw to be their right, and hit with a graduated tax bill based on their relative wealth compared with the general peasantry; and their resentment boiled into open revolt. They were joined by a peasantry made militant by the collapse of villeinage and the rousing rhetoric of Lollard preachers such as John Ball.

Yet the Peasants' Revolt failed. In the end, it was just a flash in the pan; a brief conflagration which threw stark light on the shifting social attitudes of the general populace in the years following the Black Death. These changes had been occurring throughout the fourteenth century: Ambion was not the first medieval village to be deserted, nor was it the last, and like many others its abandonment had begun long before the Black Death, due to high rents, enclosure, lack of work and bad land.

The Black Death was never a cause, it was always a catalyst. All the things we have been talking about - labour problems, architectural change, the rise of the gentry and the growth of the English language - all had been developing throughout the century. What the Black Death did was throw them together into an unstable brew to which the king and his wars added the last spark of resentment.

Ironically, it was precisely the traditional lordship against which they had rebelled that ended the Peasants' Revolt. Wat Tyler was murdered whilst speaking to the young king at Blackheath, and his rag-tag army dispersed on that young king's promise to address their grievances. The ultimate result of the Peasants' Revolt was to elevate the personal importance of kingship to new heights, raising huge expectations which the new king, Richard II, was temperamentally incapable of fulfilling.

Vernacular Literature

In 1362, Parliament passed a statute decreeing that all pleas should hereafter be heard in English. This was undoubtedly an attempt to maintain some semblance of order in a system which had been severely dislocated by the death of so many of its educated clerks. From this time on, English replaced French as the official language of the country and many works were translated from Latin and French into the vernacular. At the same time, two great poets were writing in the vernacular: Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were written during the 1380s. William Langland, a priest from London, produced the first version of his great, alliterative poem The Vision of Piers Plowman, at the same time as the English declaration of Parliament in 1362.

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Black Death: Political and Social Changes

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Dr Mike Ibeji explores the legacy of the Black Death.

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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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This article examines the impact of Labour Shortages during the Black Death & compares them to the modern COVID Pandemic. Be sure to focus on material for the Black Death rather than more recent material in the article.

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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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NSW Department of Education resource on Black Death

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NSW Department of Education resource on Black Death

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This has many resources & links to resources that can be used for a variety of topics related to the Black Death. If you use something from here, make sure it is relevant to your specific topic & that your referencing of the source is correct.

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German exhibit on Black Death goes viral, then virtual; shows Jews were blamed

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German exhibit on Black Death goes viral, then virtual; shows Jews were blamed

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Introduction to German exhibition on the Plague, which has some useful information & exhibits.

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BERLIN - When the exhibition "Plague!" opened at the Museum of Archeology in the west German city of Herne last September, interest was largely limited to local audiences and media. By mid-March, when Germany adopted the first measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus, the exhibition was making headlines nationwide.

"This is understandable because parallels can be drawn - although the plague is caused by bacteria and is therefore curable, unlike COVID-19, which is caused by a virus," says the exhibit's curator, Stefan Leenen. "Although interest in the exhibition has increased enormously, most [potential] visitors, and especially school classes, could not come at all because of restrictions on travel."

Only a few hours after the interview with Leenen, the museum was closed. The new plague had triumphed over the old one. But now, a virtual tour of this highly interesting exhibition is online.

Via some 300 objects, "Plague" shows both the medical and the religious reactions to medieval plagues, especially the Black Death (or Great Bubonic Plague), which hit Europe in the 14th century. Doctors at the time believed that bad vapors or an unfavorable constellation of the stars were to blame for the mass extinction. Christians and the Catholic Church chalked it up to the wrath of God.

To allay this divine anger the Church launched a campaign of forced repentance. It tried to avert the impending doom by organizing mass processions, which probably only helped spread the bacteria even more, or by the cultish promotion of saints.

"Emperors or city councils took a vow to build a church or a pillar if the plague would stop or if it shunned the locals," says Leenen. "Such a famous pledge was made in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau: If the plague spares us, we will perform the Passion of Christ every 10 years."

That pledge was made in 1633 after 80 inhabitants had fallen victim to the plague. The first presentation took place a year later, and since then the villagers have kept their pledge, and the now-famous production runs on the first year of every decade, and involves a crew of 2,000 actors, musicians and technicians.

This year's performances were slated to begin on May 16 and run until October 4. The village expected almost half a million passionate guests, but due to the coronavirus outbreak local authorities delayed the presentation until May 2022.

Just like the Spanish Flu in the 20th century, which infected 500 million people, the Black Plague was helped spread by soldiers. In 1346, an army of Tatars were laying siege to the Genoese port of Kaffa in the Crimea. The besiegers were infected by the plague and threw their dead into the city to cause it to surrender.

Through Genoese galleys the plague reached the Roman Empire and Europe, where it affected at first the coastal cities - Constantinople, Genoa and Venice. In 1348 it reached Paris, London and Cairo, before it spread to Madrid, Cologne and Vienna and later to Warsaw and Moscow. Within seven years the Black Death caused the death of 25 million people, a third of the European population.

Medieval Europeans knew well in advance that the plague was approaching. "Various cities communicated well through an effective network of messengers," says Alexander Berner, scientific advisor to the exhibition.

But bacteria had yet to be discovered, and nobody knew the source of the outbreak. As panic grew, people looked for scapegoats among the weakest in society: accused witches, beggars and Jews.

The biggest genocide of Jews before the Shoah

Berner notes that the Jews suffered a history of discrimination. For generations they had been persecuted as the alleged murderers of Christ. During the Black Death, they were accused of poisoning the wells in order to take revenge on the Christians for their suffering, says Berner.

"As a result, almost all Jewish communities in what is today's Germany were annihilated," Berner says. "These were the biggest persecutions of Jews before the Shoah."

This anti-Semitic propaganda is reflected in a French woodcut: A bearded man holds a small sack in his hand, which he is about to drop into a well. A figure of a little devil urinating into the well hints at danger. A large crucifix placed next to the fountain identifies it as clearly Christian.

The wave of persecution began in April 1348 in Toulon in southern France, where 40 Jews were murdered, spelling the end of the city's Jewish community. From there it spread quickly to Spain and other French regions. In November 1348 the first pogroms reached the German-speaking cities of Bern and Stuttgart. In the summer of 1349, the violence reached Mainz, Trier and Cologne. The last documented pogrom related to the plague epidemic and alleged well poisoning took place in what is modern-day Poland in 1351.

But the persecution of Jews and the subsequent pogroms differed greatly from one town to another, as "Plague!" clearly illustrates.

"The pogroms were often initiated by families of merchants or traders who were in the red to the Jews," says Berner. "With the annihilation of the Jewish communities they got rid of their annoying creditors."

In the Bavarian city of Augsburg, the noble Portner family organized an uprising which was both a local power-grab and pogrom against the Jews. The coup failed, but the murder of nearly all the town's Jews enabled the Portners to get rid of their considerable debts.

Such pogroms usually took place on a Sabbath - for a practical reason. "At that time, the Jews were either at home in the Jewish quarter or in the synagogue, and it was logistically easier to find them gathered in one place and then make short work of them," says Berner. "It is often the case that the Jews were burned alive in their synagogues."

It is often the case that the Jews were burned alive in their synagogues

The city council of Regensburg is a positive exception during this period. The local nobility and administration protected "its" Jews and even offered asylum for expelled Jews from Augsburg, Nuremberg and Vienna.

This shouldn't be misunderstood, says Berner.

"It was not about protecting the Jews for the sake of the Jews. Mostly there were concrete economic interests behind it," he says.

"The so-called 'Jewish tax' was a royal privilege which guaranteed the protection of mostly wealthy Jews in exchange for a tax that the Jews had to pay the king. The king could pawn this privilege to high nobles or to municipalities. These cities and also the nobles had a significant interest that they shouldn't slaughter the Jews as their cash cow, but rather still milk them," Berner says.

Introducing: the quarantine

In the 14th century, the French Pope Clement VI who resided in Avignon prohibited the persecution of Jews in Avignon and in the areas belonging to the Church.

"In his circulars [Clement VI] used a logical argument to indicate that blaming the Jews is total nonsense," says Berner. "He reminded that the Jews died of the plague just as the Christians did. But his appeals went unheard."

Only decades after the Black Death, an effective instrument against further plagues was introduced: the quarantine. Visitors of the exhibition find out that the Venetian port of Ragusa (today Dubrovnik) introduced in 1377 the first specially designated isolated areas for sailors, passengers and goods coming from supposedly plague-contaminated areas. They were kept in isolation for 40 days. The name quarantine, which comes from quaranta, or "forty" in Italian, has continued to this day to be used to describe the segregation of people. With the coronavirus pandemic featuring so prominently in the news, the word has become a part of daily life.

Leenen says that through his work on "Plague!" he has become more sensitive to people's reactions to the coronavirus outbreak.

"I discovered that people threatened by a plague behave the same throughout time. Some of them panic, others become more religious," he says.

Historian Berner says his knowledge of previous epidemics doesn't necessarily make it easier for him to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. "What is important to me personally is that you make sure that you don't forget solidarity with your close friends and relatives," Berner says.

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German exhibit on Black Death goes viral, then virtual; shows Jews were blamed

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After the COVID-19 outbreak, a museum suddenly finds itself in the spotlight as its now-online display on the religious and medical reactions to medieval plagues spikes in demand

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Be careful when using videos from YouTube. I have tried to ensure that the ones listed here are from reputable sources, but always try to verify the information contained in a video with other sources to ensure accuracy & reliability.

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The Black Death - Professor Sir Richard J. Evans FBA

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The Black Death - Professor Sir Richard J. Evans FBA

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Academic lecture on the Black Plague - some useful information about the Black Death, but also contains information about later outbreaks.

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The Black Death - Professor Sir Richard J. Evans FBA

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The Black Death: A Digital Exhibit | eHISTORY

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This digital exhibit was created by students in Professor Alison Beach’s History of Medieval Europe 2 course in Spring of 2015 at The Ohio State University.

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Plague and poetry: How Middle East authors have written about disease

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Plague and poetry: How Middle East authors have written about disease

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Plague, pandemic and pestilence have long been themes for writers, historians and poets, from Giovanni Boccaccio's medieval The Decameron and Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year to, more recently, Blindness by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago.

Nowhere is this more true than the Middle East and North Africa, which has a centuries-old tradition of writing about illness and medicine.

One of the most famous works is The Plague, by French-Algerian writer Albert Camus. Published in 1947, it is set in the Algerian city of Oran and based on the cholera epidemic which engulfed the city in 1849 (Camus chose to set his novel in the modern age). Many have also interpreted the story as about resistance to the Nazi occupation during World War Two.

That same year, Nazik al-Malaika broke poetry convention with her account of cholera in Cairo; one thousand years earlier, Ibn al-Wardi railed against the plague through an ode, only to succumb himself to the disease two days later.

But epidemic-related work from the region is not just fictional, going beyond the artistic and impressionist to also include hygiene guidance, travel books and hadiths (sayings, actions or silent approval attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and used as guidance for everyday life).

Works by the ninth-century writer Ibn Abi al-Dunya, as well as later works by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani gave guidance on how to combat disease - much as we, in the 21st century, look to the World Health Organisation and other expert bodies for guidance.

1947: Cholera in Egypt

Cholera, by the Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika (1923-2007), depicts the death, grief and agony that shattered Egypt during the last months of 1947.

The outbreak, which hit the country hard, is considered one of the largest incidents of the disease in Egypt during the 20th century, killing around 10,276 people out of a 20,805 recorded cases. During this period Egypt was cut off from the rest of the world, amid restrictions on travel, and the forceful isolation of patients and communities.

Although the origin of the infection was never proven, many Egyptians believed it was bought in by English soldiers returning from India (Egypt, which was a British colony earlier in the century, was still heavily garrisoned with UK troops during the late 1940s).

Al-Malaika conjures up vivid images of carriages carrying dead bodies and the silence that befell Egyptian streets; she also uses colloquial phrases for the illness such as "al-Shota" and "al-Heyda", which translate as "swift" and "quick".

Her style was hailed by critics at the time as ground-breaking in its use of free verse rather than the traditional Arabic ode, a form which is now almost 1,500 years old. As such, Cholera heralded a new chapter in Arabic poetry and inspired a new wave of Arab poets - called the Pioneer Generation - to experiment with different forms. During the 1990s, al-Malaika moved to Cairo, where she spent her last years.
It is dawn.
Listen to the footsteps of the passerby,
in the silence of the dawn.
Listen, look at the mourning processions,
ten, twenty, no... countless.
...
Everywhere lies a corpse, mourned
without a eulogy or a moment of silence.
...
Humanity protests against the crimes of death.
...
Cholera is the vengeance of death.
...
Even the gravedigger has succumbed,
the muezzin is dead,
and who will eulogize the dead?
...
O Egypt, my heart is torn by the ravages of death. Translated by Husain Haddawy, with Nathalie Handal in Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology
1784: Plague in North Africa

The popular depiction of pandemics has focused on outbreaks such as the medieval Black Death or the influenza outbreak 0f 1917-1920, which is wrongly labelled "Spanish Flu". But epidemics can also be localised.

The volumes Ten Years' Residence at the Court of Tripoli were penned by a "Miss Tully", the sister-in-law of Richard Tully, the British consul in Tripoli, from 1784 onwards.

The port city, in modern-day Libya, was hit by the plague in 1785. Tully writes of how burning straw was used in homes as fumigation - along with what we would now recognise as social distancing:

"A friend is admitted only into a matted apartment, where he retires to the farther end of the room to a straw seat. No business is now transacted but with a blaze of straw kept burning between the person admitted into the house and the one he is speaking to."

But the situation was just as severe in what is modern-day Tunisia. On 29 April 1785, Tully wrote:

The last few weeks several couriers have crossed the deserts from Tunis to this city, disseminating the plague in their way; and consequently the country round us is everywhere infected.

The plague reached the Tunisian city of Sfax in 1784 and was to kill an estimated 15,000 people, this in a port city of 30,000, double that of Tripoli.

Sfax had previously been hit by plague in 1622 and again in 1688, but the outbreak almost a century later was even more lethal, wiping out many of the ruling classes, including officials, politicians, the legal profession - and poets.

It began when sea merchants arrived after escaping the plague in Alexandria to the east. They were refused entry to Sfax but some sailors managed to breach the order.

Later, war was to follow plague. A Venetian merchant vessel was set alight by forces under the bey - or ruler - of Tunis, amid fears it had been infected with the plague. From autumn 1784 onwards and the following year, the Venetian fleet bombarded cities including Sfax.

1349: Pestilence in Syria

Ibn al-Wardi (1292-1349), a Syrian historian, was born in Maarat al-Numan. He wrote vividly about the Black Death, which swept through the world during the mid 14th-century, from Asia into the Middle East and then on to Europe.

Al-Wardi was living in Aleppo when the plague reached there in 1349, devastating the city for 15 years and claiming around 1,000 lives every day. His An Essay on the Report of the Pestilence, is a historical account of its impact on the Levante.

The plague began in the land of darkness. China was not preserved from it. The plague infected the Indians in India, the Sind, the Persians, and the Crimea. The plague destroyed mankind in Cairo. It stilled all movement in Alexandria.

Then, the plague turned to Upper Egypt. The plague attacked Gaza, trapped Sidon, and Beirut. Next, it directed its shooting arrows to Damascus. There the plague sat like a lion on a throne and swayed with power, killing daily one thousand or more and destroying the population.

Oh God, it is acting by Your command. Lift this from us. It happens where You wish; keep the plague from us.

Al-Wardi also wrote two poetry verses about the pandemic:
I do not scare from Black Death as others
It is but a martyrdom or victory
If I died, I rested from the rivalries
And If I lived, my eye and ear heald
He died two days later from the Black Death, which causes inflammation of glands on the neck, armpit and groin.

10th century: Fever in Egypt

Night Visitor, the ode by Iraqi-Syrian poet al-Mutannabi (915-965) to fever, is widely considered one the masterpieces of classical Arabic poetry.

Born in Kufa, Iraq, as Ahmed bin al-Hussein al-Kindi, al-Mutannabi's nickname translates as "he who would be a prophet". He treated poetry with zeal and relied on senses and experiences rather than mere abstractions for his inspiration.

Night Visitor depicts the condition as a shy lover, sneaking into Mutannabi's bed after dark. The reader can viscerally feel and see this unwelcome guest, as the verse creates a sense of how fever makes its victim delirious, sweaty and fatigued.

Mutannabi's metaphors and play on language poem were unique at the time, not least the idea of the fever - which is never medically specified - as a night visitor.

Mutannabi was under stress when he wrote the poem in Egypt, having just fallen out with best friend Sayf al-Dawla, the ruler of Aleppo, after intellectual in-fighting at the royal court. He was killed by bandits in 965 while travelling from Ahvaz in modern-day Iran. His influence at the time was such that news of his death reverberated like thunder around the Muslim world.
For she does not pay her visits save under cover of darkness,
I freely offered her my linen and my pillows,
But she refused them, and spent the night in my bones. My skin is too contracted to contain both my breath and her,
So she relaxes it with all sorts of sickness.
When she leaves me, she washes me
As though we had retired apart for some forbidden action.
It is as though the morning drives her away,
And her lachrymal ducts are flooded in their four channels.
I watch for her time without desire,
Yet with the watchfulness of the eager lover. Taken from Arabian Medicine: The FitzPatrick Lectures Delivered at the College of Physicians in November 1919 and November 1920
9th century: Guidance in Iraq

One of the earliest scholars to write a book about the Black Death was the Iraqi Ibn Abi al-Dunya (823-894). Revered as a teacher, he tutored the Abbasid caliphs, who ruled territory extending across North Africa, the Arabian peninsula, the Levant and modern-day Iran and Afghanistan.

During the early centuries of Islam, little was written about pestilence: until the ninth century, no serious scholar had dedicated a book to the subject or suggested measures to take to avoid contagion.

Ibn Abi al-Dunya was the first to change that: that he had access to the most powerful rulers of the time meant that his word carried weight (he was, in effect, the closest that Baghdad had to the WHO).

In The Book of Pestilences he included a hadith about fever:

The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, entered the home of Umm Sa'ib and he said, "What ails you, O Umm Sa'ib? You are shivering."

She said: "It is a fever. Allah has not blessed it."

The Prophet said: "Do not curse fever. Verily, it removes the sins of the children of Adam, just as a furnace removes dirt from iron."

The Book of Illness and Atonements, meanwhile, gives examples of how people recovered from illness, including the Prophet Muhammad, during the early days of Islam.

His work was later cited by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (1372-1449), born in the Palestinian town of Askalan, who became a noted scholar in Cairo, one of the Middle East's major seats of learning.

His book Offering Almsgiving in the Grace of Pestilence, was to prove one of the most popular works on the Black Death, which had just swept the eastern hemisphere.

639: Hadiths in Palestine

The Palestinian village of Emmaus lies between Jerusalem and Ramleh. In 639 it was hit by a plague that spread across the Levant and claimed the lives of many of the Prophet Muhammad's companions.

Around 25,000 died in the plague of Emmaus, including the companions Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah, Muadh ibn Jabal, Shurahbil ibn Hasana and Yazid ibn Abu Sufyan. As a result, Muslim scholars wrote about what the plague was, steps that residents should take, the best food to eat, personal hygiene and how to move from city to city.

One of the widely cited hadiths of Prophet Muhammad in books about plagues, advises:

If you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; but if the plague outbreaks out in a place while you are in it, do not leave that place.

Another hadith read:

Those with contagious diseases should be kept away from those who are healthy

Isolation and staying at home: as relevant now as they were 1,400 years ago.
This article is available in French on Middle East Eye French edition.

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Plague and poetry: How Middle East authors have written about disease

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The current outbreak of Covid-19, a coronavirus, has reawakened memories of previous pandemics

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Useful resource about the origins of the Black Death in Asia & its early spread to Europe

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The Black Death, a medieval pandemic that was likely the bubonic plague, is generally associated with Europe. This is not surprising since it killed an estimated one-third of the European population in the 14th century. However, the Bubonic Plague actually started in Asia and devastated many areas of that continent as well.

Unfortunately, the course of the pandemic in Asia is not as thoroughly documented as it is for Europe-however, the Black Death does appear in records from across Asia in the 1330s and 1340s noting that the disease spread terror and destruction wherever it arose.

Origins of the Black Death

Many scholars believe that the bubonic plague began in northwestern China, while others cite southwestern China or the steppes of Central Asia. We do know that in 1331 an outbreak erupted in the Yuan Empire and may have hastened the end of Mongol rule over China. Three years later, the disease killed over 90 percent of the Hebei Province's population with deaths totaling over 5 million people.

As of 1200, China had a total population of more than 120 million, but a 1393 census found only 65 million Chinese surviving. Some of that missing population was killed by famine and upheaval in the transition from Yuan to Ming rule, but many millions died of bubonic plague.

From its origin at the eastern end of the Silk Road, the Black Death rode trade routes west stopping at Central Asian caravansaries and Middle Eastern trade centers and subsequently infected people all across Asia.

The Egyptian scholar Al-Mazriqi noted that "more than three hundred tribes all perished without apparent reason in their summer and winter encampments, in the course of pasturing their flocks and during their seasonal migration." He claimed that all of Asia was depopulated, as far as the Korean Peninsula.

Ibn al-Wardi, a Syrian writer who would later die of the plague himself in 1348, recorded that the Black Death came out of "The Land of Darkness," or Central Asia. From there, it spread to China, India, the Caspian Sea and " land of the Uzbeks," and thence to Persia and the Mediterranean.

The Black Death Strikes Persia and Issyk Kul

The Central Asian scourge struck Persia just a few years after it appeared in China-proof if any is needed that the Silk Road was a convenient route of transmission for the deadly bacterium.

In 1335, the Il-Khan (Mongol) ruler of Persia and the Middle East, Abu Said, died of bubonic plague during a war with his northern cousins, the Golden Horde. This signaled the beginning of the end for Mongol rule in the region. An estimated 30% of Persia's people died of the plague in the mid-14th century. The region's population was slow to recover, in part due to the political disruptions caused by the fall of Mongol rule and the later invasions of Timur (Tamerlane).

Archaeological excavations on the shores of Issyk Kul, a lake in what is now Kyrgyzstan, reveal that the Nestorian Christian trading community there was ravaged by bubonic plague in 1338 and 1339. Issyk Kul was a major Silk Road depot and has sometimes been cited as the origin point for the Black Death. It certainly is prime habitat for marmots, which are known to carry a virulent form of the plague.

It seems more likely, however, that traders from further east brought diseased fleas with them to the shores of Issyk Kul. Whatever the case, this tiny settlement's death rate shot up from a 150-year average of about 4 people per year, to more than 100 dead in two years alone.

Although specific numbers and anecdotes are hard to come by, different chronicles note that Central Asian cities like Talas, in modern-day Kyrgyzstan; Sarai, the capital of the Golden Horde in Russia; and Samarkand, now in Uzbekistan, all suffered outbreaks of the Black Death. It is likely that each population center would have lost at least 40 percent of its citizens, with some areas reaching death tolls as high as 70 percent.

The Mongols Spread Plague at Kaffa

In 1344, the Golden Horde decided to recapture the Crimean port city of Kaffa from the Genoese-Italian traders who had taken the town in the late 1200s. The Mongols under Jani Beg instituted a siege, which lasted until 1347 when reinforcements from further east brought the plague to the Mongol lines.

An Italian lawyer, Gabriele de Mussis, recorded what happened next: "The whole army was affected by a disease which overran the Tartars (Mongols) and killed thousands upon thousands every day." He goes on to charge that the Mongol leader "ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in hopes that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside."

This incident is often cited as the first instance of biological warfare in history. However, other contemporary chroniclers make no mention of the putative Black Death catapults. A French churchman, Gilles li Muisis, notes that a "calamitous disease befell the Tartar army, and the mortality was so great and widespread that scarcely one in twenty of them remained alive." However, he depicts the Mongol survivors as surprised when the Christians in Kaffa also came down with the disease.

Regardless of how it played out, the Golden Horde's siege of Kaffa certainly did drive refugees to flee on ships bound for Genoa. These refugees likely were a primary source of the Black Death that went on to decimate Europe.

The Plague Reaches the Middle East

European observers were fascinated but not too worried when the Black Death struck the western rim of Central Asia and the Middle East. One recorded that "India was depopulated; Tartary, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia were covered with dead bodies; the Kurds fled in vain to the mountains." However, they would soon become participants rather than observers in the world's worst pandemic.

In "The Travels of Ibn Battuta," the great traveler noted that as of 1345, "the number that died daily in Damascus (Syria) had been two thousand," but the people were able to defeat the plague through prayer. In 1349, the holy city of Mecca was hit by the plague, likely brought in by infected pilgrims on the hajj.

The Moroccan historian Ibn Khaldun, whose parents died of the plague, wrote about the outbreak this way: "Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out... Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed."

More Recent Asian Plague Outbreaks

In 1855, the so-called "Third Pandemic" of bubonic plague broke out in Yunnan Province, China. Another outbreak or a continuation of the Third Pandemic-depending upon which source you believe-sprang up in China in 1910. It went on to kill more than 10 million, many of them in Manchuria.

A similar outbreak in British India left about 300,000 dead from 1896 through 1898. This outbreak began in Bombay (Mumbai) and Pune, on the country's west coast. By 1921, it would claim some 15 million lives. With dense human populations and natural plague reservoirs (rats and marmots), Asia is always at risk of another round of bubonic plague. Fortunately, the timely use of antibiotics can cure the disease today.

Legacy of the Plague in Asia

Perhaps the most significant impact that the Black Death had on Asia was that it contributed to the fall of the mighty Mongol Empire. After all, the pandemic started within the Mongol Empire and devastated peoples from all four of the khanates.

The massive population loss and terror caused by the plague destabilized Mongolian governments from the Golden Horde in Russia to the Yuan Dynasty in China. The Mongol ruler of the Ilkhanate Empire in the Middle East died of the disease along with six of his sons.

Although the Pax Mongolica had allowed increased wealth and cultural exchange, through a reopening of the Silk Road, it also allowed this deadly contagion to spread rapidly westward from its origin in western China or eastern Central Asia. As a result, the world's second-largest empire ever crumbled and fell.

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Although the Black Death or bubonic plague is associated with medieval Europe, it actually began in Asia, devastating its population before spreading west.

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Does the Fourteenth-Century Black Death Hold Lessons for Today’s Pandemic?

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Does the Fourteenth-Century Black Death Hold Lessons for Today’s Pandemic?

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Useful resource about Labour shortages & economic change following the Black Death

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The Lasting Effects of the Black Death | Pandemics & the Economy | The Great Courses Plus

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The Lasting Effects of the Black Death | Pandemics & the Economy | The Great Courses Plus

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Useful source for the beginnings & course of the Black Death

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The Lasting Effects of the Black Death | Pandemics & the Economy | The Great Courses Plus

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Black Death: Political and Social Changes

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Black Death: Political and Social Changes

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A useful resource about the changes to the class structure & Revolts following the Black Death

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Yeomen Revolt

Such words struck a deep chord among the men of Kent; more so than in other places like Durham, where feudal lordship still held strong sway. This was because the Kentish peasantry had been able to improve their lot considerably in the wake of the Black Death. Fired up by John Ball's strong words, and outraged by the demands of the new boy-king Richard II's government for a poll tax of 1 shilling from every man in the land. Kent rose up under the leadership of Wat Tyler and marched on London in 1381.

This was the outcome of simmering resentments and the surprising social shifts, in part caused in part by the Black Death. The Peasants Revolt is the only truly popular uprising in English medieval history. For, even the most fundamental attempts at social change, like the rebellion of Simon de Montfort in 1265, had previously been initiated and led by the English barony. The Peasants' Revolt was the first ever mass uprising of the common man in England. However, it was not led by the peasantry either. The Peasants' Revolt was, in fact, a revolt of the yeoman gentry. If their interests had not been threatened, it would never have occurred.

Of the three named ringleaders, Wat Tyler, John Ball and Jack Straw, little to nothing is known. It is more than likely that 'Jack Straw' was a nickname for Wat Tyler himself. Rebels and outlaws often took on such sobriquets in the wake of the popularisation of the Robin Hood legend. It is significant that this popularisation occurs at precisely this time, the first literary reference to Robin Hood actually occurs in Piers Plowman. Wat Tyler was probably a yeoman craftsman, as his name implies. John Ball, on the other hand, was probably the most lowly of the ringleaders; but as an itinerant heretic preacher, he can hardly be classed as a typical peasant.

A brief look at the escheator's inquisitions in the wake of the revolt add substance to this assessment. Out of c.180 inquiries, only 65 of the named people had goods valued at less than 20 shillings. 15 of them had goods valued at over £5, and the most well-to-do yeoman named in the rolls was the Suffolk rebel, Thomas Sampson whose assets were valued at some £65, without taking into account the price of his land.

It was people such as this who led the Peasants' Revolt. Sampson had co-ordinated the disparate rebel bands across several counties. To find the cause we must go back to the reign of Edward III and the Hundred Years War. In his desperate quest for money to fund this ruinously expensive war, John of Gaunt had turned to John Wycliffe and given the yeoman gentry the lever with which to mobilise the peasantry. Yet it was also this quest for money, and the taxation it induced which had so outraged them in the first place.

Taxation without Power

Taxation was levied through Parliament. As the cost of wars increased during the Middle Ages, the king increasingly needed to draw the money to fight them from the general populace, and Parliament was the mechanism through which this was done. In principle, the King agreed to hear the Commons' grievances in return for which they ratified his request for money. By 1376, serious cracks were showing in this system. Parliament was being used by the king and the richer landed gentry as a means of keeping the common people under control.

In 1334, it had slashed the property qualifications exempting the poorer gentry (and yeomen) from taxation; and after the Black Death, it had enforced reactionary labour laws designed to keep the cost of lordship down. Measures such as these alienated poor gentleman, yeoman and peasant alike: those whose livelihoods relied on hiring out their labour and who had no margins with which to cushion the increased tax burden.

By 1376, the Commons had had enough. In the famous 'Good Parliament' of that year, they elected Sir Peter de la Mere as the first ever Speaker of the House of Commons, and through him presented their grievances to the Lords. They refused to ratify any further taxation until the king's Inner Council was replaced and their economic grievances were heard. John of Gaunt had no choice but to give in.

Yet, for the lesser gentry in the Commons, this was not the victory that it seemed. In the very next year, John of Gaunt used the last Parliament of Edward III's reign to institute the most regressive tax ever witnessed in later medieval England. In response to a threatened French/Spanish armada menacing the realm, Parliament levied a one-off poll tax of 4 pence on every adult over the age of 14. This was followed up in 1379 by another poll tax, and then in 1380, a third poll tax was levied which sparked the Peasants' Revolt.

In fact, the third poll tax, despite being one shilling on every adult over the age of 15, was actually less burdensome than the 1377 tax, because of the way in which it was levied. Instead of extracting a shilling from every man in the land, the total assessment was calculated in every village by multiplying the number of eligible persons by 12d. and apportioning that total to individuals based on their ability to pay. The calculation was made by a group of commissioners appointed from among the county gentry and court officials; but it was precisely for this reason that it aroused such anger amongst those who instigated the revolt.

King and Government: Conclusion

The yeomen and lesser gentry, who formed the local village élites, found themselves both excluded from the administrative process which they saw to be their right, and hit with a graduated tax bill based on their relative wealth compared with the general peasantry; and their resentment boiled into open revolt. They were joined by a peasantry made militant by the collapse of villeinage and the rousing rhetoric of Lollard preachers such as John Ball.

Yet the Peasants' Revolt failed. In the end, it was just a flash in the pan; a brief conflagration which threw stark light on the shifting social attitudes of the general populace in the years following the Black Death. These changes had been occurring throughout the fourteenth century: Ambion was not the first medieval village to be deserted, nor was it the last, and like many others its abandonment had begun long before the Black Death, due to high rents, enclosure, lack of work and bad land.

The Black Death was never a cause, it was always a catalyst. All the things we have been talking about - labour problems, architectural change, the rise of the gentry and the growth of the English language - all had been developing throughout the century. What the Black Death did was throw them together into an unstable brew to which the king and his wars added the last spark of resentment.

Ironically, it was precisely the traditional lordship against which they had rebelled that ended the Peasants' Revolt. Wat Tyler was murdered whilst speaking to the young king at Blackheath, and his rag-tag army dispersed on that young king's promise to address their grievances. The ultimate result of the Peasants' Revolt was to elevate the personal importance of kingship to new heights, raising huge expectations which the new king, Richard II, was temperamentally incapable of fulfilling.

Vernacular Literature

In 1362, Parliament passed a statute decreeing that all pleas should hereafter be heard in English. This was undoubtedly an attempt to maintain some semblance of order in a system which had been severely dislocated by the death of so many of its educated clerks. From this time on, English replaced French as the official language of the country and many works were translated from Latin and French into the vernacular. At the same time, two great poets were writing in the vernacular: Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were written during the 1380s. William Langland, a priest from London, produced the first version of his great, alliterative poem The Vision of Piers Plowman, at the same time as the English declaration of Parliament in 1362.

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Black Death: Political and Social Changes

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Dr Mike Ibeji explores the legacy of the Black Death.

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The Black Death led to the Demise of Feudalism. Could this pandemic have a similar effect? 

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The Black Death led to the Demise of Feudalism. Could this pandemic have a similar effect? 

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Some good information regarding weakening of Feudal Structure & Labour shortages.

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In predicting the future, we often turn to our past experiences. Humanity has, after all, faced pandemics like this one before - many times, in fact - and few are as memorable and menacing as the Black Death. Arriving in Italy in AD 1347, the Black Death, now believed to be the bubonic plague, rapidly spread throughout Medieval Europe, wiping out between one-third and one-half of the entire European population.

The people of Medieval Europe were not unaccustomed to suffering, but this was unprecedented. Death would come within days or even hours of showing symptoms, and for those who fell ill, the mortality rate was probably upwards of 60%. Panic spread even faster, and the most sacred bonds of society began to unravel. Medieval chroniclers tell us of priests abandoning their flock, parents abandoning their children, husbands their wives, and vice versa - anything to escape the contagion. In some areas, Jewish communities were blamed and viciously attacked, while in others, throngs of penitent Christians publicly whipped themselves in imitation of Christ. For many, it was the end of the world.

What's often missing from this story, however, is the wider context and the lasting impact of the Black Death. This is a story not only of unfathomable tragedy, but also of transformation and rebirth. The plague, in combination with a host of other related and overlapping crises, delivered a death blow to Medieval Europe, ushering in a new age - the Renaissance and the rise of so-called agrarian capitalism - and ultimately setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution and the modern world. And the calamitous 14th century is not as far removed from our own experience as we would like to think.

Europe at the end of the 13th century was not so different from Europe today. Since the Second World War, we have experienced an unprecedented period of economic growth, and so it was for Medieval Europe on the eve of the Black Death. From AD 1000, Europe's population doubled or even tripled, and the economy became increasingly commercialized, underwritten by an increasingly sophisticated financial system, as new cities and towns emerged, universities were founded across the continent, and the magnificent Gothic cathedrals surpassed the Great Pyramid at Giza as the tallest man-made structures in the world.

But like the modern world, there were cracks in the façade - warning signs that the social and economic foundations of Medieval Europe were not as solid as they appeared. As the population grew, increasingly marginal land was turned over to agriculture, with diminishing returns, resulting in lower yields per capita and pushing the population dangerously close to subsistence levels. This left little slack in the economy to absorb a significant shock, and the 14th century would soon bring one shock after another.

First and foremost, the climate was changing. Sound familiar? Medieval Europe benefitted from several centuries of warmer weather, which boosted crop yields, but by the 14th century, the world was entering the so-called Little Ice Age. The changes were relatively minor when compared with our own climate crisis, but the impact was significant. Cooler and wetter weather depressed agricultural yields, at a time when there was already very little slack in the food supply. This contributed to a broader economic slowdown, as yields declined and prices rose, but it also brought Europe to the edge of famine.

Then, beginning in 1311, Europe began to experience a series of crop failures across the continent in what became known as the Great Famine. Reaching a peak in northern Europe in 1315-1317, the Great Famine may have killed 5 to 10% of Europe's population, less than a generation before the Black Death arrived in 1347.

At the same time, Europe entered a prolonged period of heightened geopolitical conflict, during which a dizzying array of kingdoms, principalities, sultanates and city-states waged innumerable wars, both large and small. Chief among these, in terms of social and economic impact, were the ongoing hostilities between England and France, culminating in the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453), and the fall of Acre in 1291, the last remaining crusader city in the Levant, which prompted a papal ban on trade with the Mamluk Sultanate. These conflicts inhibited trade between northern and southern Europe and between western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, further slowing the European economy and incurring a massive fiscal burden that would soon ruin the European financial system and provoke uprisings in both France and England.

Northern Italy was the heart of the financial system at this time, and a small number of very large Italian banks, often referred to as "super-companies," were lending huge sums of money across Europe. As was the case in the 2008 financial crisis, few banks actually had the cash recorded in their ledgers. All available money was loaned out or tied up in investments, leaving the banks severely under-capitalized and vulnerable to insolvency in the event of a sudden large withdraw or a major default on their loans.

Both of these eventualities soon came to pass, triggering cascading failures across the financial system. First, war broke out between England and France in 1294, prompting King Edward I to withdraw huge sums of money from the Riccardi of Lucca, approximately equivalent to several billion dollars today. The Riccardi simply did not have the money, and Edward seized whatever assets he could. Then, over the following decades, three more super banks, the Frescobaldi, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, all of Florence, were each ruined by successive English kings who refused to pay their debts. Most spectacularly, Edward III defaulted on billions of dollars-worth of loans from the Bardi and Peruzzi, triggering a run on Florentine banks in the 1340s, setting off an international debt crisis and effectively ending public borrowing for the English crown. This was now less than a decade before the onset of the Black Death.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, the cultural and epistemological bedrock of Medieval Europe, was facing the most significant legitimacy crisis in centuries. The ambitious King Philip IV of France, who also played a central role in the credit crisis of 1294, was embroiled in a high-stakes tit-for-tat with Pope Boniface VIII when the King's men attempted to arrest the elderly Pope, inadvertently killing him. Shortly thereafter, in 1305, a Frenchman, Clement V, was chosen to be the next pope, and the papacy was relocated to Avignon, France. This understandably cast a long shadow over the Holy See, and the Avignon Popes were widely disliked and distrusted. The crisis only deepened in 1378 when a second pope was elected in Rome and a third pope was briefly elected in 1409 before all three were deposed in 1417.

We might compare this crisis of faith with the current legitimacy crisis of science in the United States. Like the scientific method, the Church was a shared way of knowing - a pathway to common understanding, which was essential to the social order of Medieval Europe.

It was in the midst of this spiritual, economic and geopolitical crisis that the Black Death arrived, sweeping through Europe in 1347-1353 and upending the balance of power, almost overnight. The psychological effects are difficult to identify with any certainty, precisely because so many other calamities were already tearing at the medieval subconscious, but the economic effects of the plague were nothing short of earthshattering. By killing perhaps 50% of the labor force, the Black Death drastically altered the supply of labor, land and coin. Wages skyrocketed, as labor was in short supply, and rents declined, as the plummeting population density created a surplus of land. Both of these developments substantially benefitted commoners, at the expense of the elite, particularly in England.

To understand why, it's important to understand the structure of the medieval economy. Past societies are never as simple or homogenous as we make them out to be. But by and large, Medieval Europe operated on a feudal or manorial system, in which most of the rural population was essentially servile, owing rent and/or services to aristocratic landowners in exchange for the use of their land. Peasants could have myriad different statuses, but in general, the archetypal serf was legally bound to their lord - although they could buy their freedom (or run away). Serfs worked the lord's fields (called the demesne), and in exchange, the serf was given a home and their own plot of agricultural land, from which they could eke out a living.

The archetypal serf was not paid for their work in the lord's fields - that was their obligation to the lord in exchange for the use of the lord's land. The modern equivalent would be if your landlord was also your boss, and in order to live in your apartment, you had to sign away your freedom and that of your children, in perpetuity. Not only that, the medieval lord was also the primary unit of legal, civic and military power, often serving as the first stop for legal matters and the first defense against brigands and rival kingdoms.

In the wake of the Black Death, however, the shortage of labor and the abundance of land empowered peasants to negotiate better terms with their lord, and the lord, with no one to work his fields, was in no place to refuse. This was especially the case in England, where the aristocracy was more dependent on the cultivation of the demesne. With perhaps half the population gone, there were simply not enough peasants to work the land, and the average income of the English lord declined significantly. In response, the lord's wheat fields were increasingly turned over to livestock, or rented out to tenant farmers, who would pay the lord a fixed rent, keeping the agricultural produce for themselves.

The ambitious commoner could now acquire sizable tracts of land, and with the agricultural product of that land entirely at their disposal, commoners were incentivized to maximize the productivity of their land and sell the surplus at market for a profit. This transition is often referred to as the birth of Agrarian Capitalism.

Urban laborers and craftsmen also benefitted from rising wages. The average lifespan increased, and standards of living improved across the board. The shortage of skilled tradesmen even created new opportunities for urban women: the widows of merchants and craftsmen were encouraged to run their husbands' businesses, and the number of female apprentices in London increased significantly at this time.

The aristocracy, however, were predictably appalled by the newfound power of the common rabble, and the elite sought to maintain their position by imposing artificially low wages and by compelling laborers to accept any available work. Sumptuary laws, which restricted what commoners could wear and eat, also became common during the 14th and 15th Centuries. However, these laws do not appear to have been effective, and tensions continued to mount between the aristocracy and the wider populace, who were increasingly impatient for change.

This, combined with the soaring fiscal burden of near-constant war, set off a series of uprisings, most notably the French Jacquerie of 1358 and the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The aristocracy responded with force wherever they could, but they could not turn back the clock.

Even in war, their role was changing. While the medieval lord was renting out his fields, the knight was increasingly losing his place on the battlefield. This was, in theory, the primary purpose of the secular aristocracy: to be professional killers, to defend the realm and to protect the clergy and the peasantry. But starting in the 14th century, infantry units comprised of commoners, like the Swiss pikemen and English longbowmen, began to win a series of decisive victories against mounted knights, revolutionizing military tactics and hastening the obsolescence of the feudal aristocracy.

All the while, a new intellectual spirit was taking root across western Europe. Influential thinkers like John Wycliffe and Marsilius of Padua began to question the worldly authority of both the Church and the state, arguing that power rested ultimately with the populace rather than the ruler, and the unworthy ruler could lose their right to govern. Writers and philosophers were increasingly concerned with the here and now, the individual and the observable, rather than the abstract and the universal. The works of Chaucer, Petrarch and Christine de Pizan celebrate the uniqueness of the individual, savoring the moment and often drawing attention to the messiness of the human experience. William of Ockham directly challenged the tedious abstraction of medieval philosophy, famously advocating for more efficient and rigorous reasoning à la Ockham's Razor.

A new confidence in scientific thought began to blossom, as precocious scholars like Nicole Oresme and Jean Buridan postulated the rotation of the earth and the law of inertia, more than a century before Copernicus and Isaac Newton. In the wake of the Black Death, plague doctors were among the first to believe they had surpassed the knowledge of the Greek and Roman world; ironically, they were wrong, but the lower mortality of later outbreaks led many doctors to proclaim they had cured the disease, which instilled a new faith in scientific progress. This was the beginning of a paradigm shift, the repercussions of which have shaped our modern world, and the calamitous 14th century was the crucible through which this new paradigm came into being.

Now, seven-hundred years later, what, if anything, can we learn from this - what can the crises and consequences of the 14th century tell us about our own pandemic and the impending aftermath? On the one hand, the current pandemic pales in comparison to the Black Death. The Black Death killed at least 30% of Medieval Europe, whereas the new coronavirus is unlikely to kill more than 0.03% of the US population. There will be no labor shortage in the wake of the coronavirus; quite the opposite, there will likely be a labor surplus, due to the ensuing economic contraction. As for rents, the housing market is essentially frozen as people shelter in place, and housing prices are likely to decline in a recession, but the real cost of housing relative to income is unlikely to see the kind of seismic shift experienced after the Black Death.

However, if we take a wider view, there is more to the late medieval crisis than a shortage of labor and a surplus of land. The devastation of the Black Death may have been the straw that broke the camel's back, but Medieval Europe was already on course for social and economic upheaval. As is the case today, great-power conflict was brewing, and with large parts of France already under English control, the eventual showdown between England and France was probably inevitable. Inequality was also a source of stagnation and tension well before the Black Death, as the European economy was becoming increasingly commercialized, a new urban middle class was emerging, and the role of the aristocracy in war, in economic production, and in civic life was shifting. But most significantly, and most presciently for our own time, Europe was headed for a climate catastrophe, and regardless of the Black Death, the continent would have almost certainly faced a series of demographic shocks, like the Great Plague, until considerable changes were made to the existing socio-economic system.

The lesson we should take from this today is not the differences between the coronavirus and the Black Death, but rather the broader similarities between the 14th century and the 21st century. As we emerge from our makeshift bunkers - thankful and perhaps overly confident from averting a worst-case scenario - war between China and the US still looms ever larger, socio-economic inequality is reaching record levels, trust in institutions and our established epistemology is waning, and as we enter the worst depression since the 1930s, climate change once again threatens to throw us back into the Middle Ages. The coronavirus has exposed deep fissures in our society, but it has not been severe enough to force us to address these problems. We may feel as though we dodged a bullet, but if we continue business as usual, what happens next is likely to be much worse. The calamitous 21st century is just getting started, and a more apt parallel for the Black Death is probably yet to come.

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The Black Death led to the demise of feudalism. Could this pandemic have similar repercussions?

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We've been here before: a pandemic, income inequality, economic stagnation and climate change brought down Medieval Europe

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This resource is particularly useful for comparing Christian to Muslim views & responses to the Plague

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The Black Death of 1347-1352 CE is the most infamous plague outbreak of the medieval world, unprecedented and unequaled until the 1918-1919 CE flu pandemic in the modern age. The cause of the plague was unknown and, in accordance with the general understanding of the Middle Ages, was attributed to supernatural forces and, primarily, the will or wrath of God.

Accordingly, people reacted with hopeful cures and responses based on religious belief, folklore and superstition, and medical knowledge, all of which were informed by Catholic Christianity in the West and Islam in the Near East. These responses took many forms but, overall, did nothing to stop the spread of the disease or save those who had been infected. The recorded responses to the outbreak come from Christian and Muslim writers primarily since many works by European Jews - and many of the people themselves - were burned by Christians who blamed them for the plague and among these works, may have been treatises on the plague.

The perceived failure of God to answer prayers contributed to the decline of the Church's power & the eventual splintering of a unified Christian worldview.

No matter how many Jews, or others, were killed, however, the plague raged on and God seemed deaf to the prayers and supplications of believers. In Europe, the perceived failure of God to answer these prayers contributed to the decline of the medieval Church's power and the eventual splintering of a unified Christian worldview during the Protestant Reformation (1517-1648 CE). In the East, Islam remained intact, more or less, owing to its insistence on the plague as a gift which bestowed martyrdom on the victims and transported them instantly to paradise as well as the view of the disease as simply another trial to endure such as famine or flood.

Although many of the religious ideas concerning the plague in West and East were similar, this one difference was significant in maintaining Islamic cohesion, even though it most likely led to a higher death toll than official records maintain. After the plague had run its course, religious response in both East and West was generally credited with appeasing God who lifted the pestilence but Europe would be radically changed while the Near East was not.

The Black Death Origin & Spread

The plague originated in Central Asia and spread via the Silk Road and troop movements throughout the Near East. The first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague is the Plague of Justinian (541-542 CE) which struck Constantinople in 541 CE and killed an estimated 50 million people. This outbreak, however, was simply the furthest westerly occurrence of a disease that had been stalking the people of the Near East for years before. The historian John of Ephesus (l. c. 507 - c. 588 CE), an eyewitness to the plague, notes that the people of Constantinople were aware of the plague for two years before it came to the city but made no provision against it, believing it was not their problem.

After Constantinople, the plague died down in the East only to appear again with the Djazirah Outbreak of 562 CE which killed 30,000 people in the city of Amida and even more when it returned in 599-600 CE. The disease maintained this pattern in the East, seeming to disappear only to rise again, until it picked up momentum beginning in 1218 CE, further in 1322 CE, and was raging by 1346 CE.

It was around this time that the Mongol Khan Djanibek (r. 1342-1357 CE) was laying siege to the port city of Caffa (modern-day Feodosia in Crimea) which was held by the Italians of Genoa. As his troops died of plague, Djanibek ordered their corpses catapulted over Caffa's walls, thereby spreading the disease to the defenders. The Genoese fled the city by ship and so brought the plague to Europe. From ports such as Marseilles and Valencia, it spread from city to city with every person who had had contact with anyone from the ships and there seemed no way to stop it.

Christian vs. Muslim View of Plague

Responses to the plague were informed by the dominant religions of West and East as well as the traditions and superstitions of the regions and presented as a narrative which explained the disease. Scholar Norman F. Cantor comments:

The scientific method had not yet been invented. When faced with a problem, people in the Middle Ages found the solution through diachronic (as opposed to synchronic) analysis. The diachronic is the historical narrative, horizontally developing through time: "Tell me a story". With their fervent historical imagination, medieval people were very good at giving diachronic explanations for the outbreak of bubonic plague. (17)

Reactions, then, were based on the religious narratives created to explain the disease and fall, generally, into three beliefs about the plague held, respectively, by medieval Christianity and Islam. Even empirical observation was informed by religious belief, as in the case of whether the plague was contagious.
Christian View:

The plague was a punishment from God for humanity's sins but could also be caused by "bad air", witchcraft and sorcery, and individual life choices including one's piety or lack of it.

Christians - especially in the early period of the outbreak - could leave a plague-stricken region for one with better air which was not infected.

The plague was contagious and could be passed between people but one could protect oneself through prayer, penitence, charms, and amulets.

Muslim View:

The plague was a merciful gift from God which provided martyrdom for the faithful whose souls were instantly transported to paradise.

Muslims should not enter nor should they flee from plague-stricken regions but should remain in place.

The plague was not contagious because it came directly from God to specific individuals according to God's will.

Again, these are general views held by the majority and not every cleric of Europe or the Near East agreed with them nor did every layperson. These beliefs, however, carried enough weight with believers to encourage responses which - again, generally - fall into five main reactions.
Christian Response:

Penitential processions, attending mass, fasting, prayer, use of amulets and charms

The Flagellant Movement

Supposed cures and fumigation of "bad air"

Flight from infected areas

Persecution of marginalized communities, especially the Jews

Muslim Response:

Prayer and supplication at mosques, processions, mass funerals, orations, fasting

Increased belief in supernatural visions, signs, and wonders

Magic, amulets, and charms used as cures

Flight from infected areas

No persecution of marginalized communities, respect for Jewish physicians

Christian Response in Detail

Since the plague was thought to have been sent by God as a punishment, the only way to end it was admission of one's personal sin and guilt, repentance of sin, and renewed dedication to God. To this end, processions would wind their way through cities from a given point - say the town square or a certain gate - to the church or a shrine, usually dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Participants would fast, pray, and purchase amulets or charms to keep them safe. Even after European Christians understood that the plague was contagious, these processions and gatherings continued because there seemed no other way to appease God's wrath.

The flagellants were a group of zealous Christians, who roamed from town to city to countryside whipping themselves for their sins & the sins of humanity.

As the plague raged and traditional religious responses failed, however, the Flagellant Movement emerged in 1348 CE in Austria (possibly Hungary also) and spread to Germany and Flanders by 1349 CE. The flagellants were a group of zealous Christians, led by a Master, who roamed from town to city to countryside whipping themselves for their sins and the sins of humanity, falling to the ground in penitential frenzy, and leading communities in the persecution and slaughter of Jews, gypsies, and other minority groups until they were banned by Pope Clement VI (l. 1291-1352 CE) as ineffectual, disruptive, and upsetting.

Cures were also often based on religious understanding, such as killing and chopping up a snake (associated with Satan) and rubbing the pieces on one's body in the belief that the "evil" of the disease would be drawn to the "evil" of the dead serpent. Drinking a potion made of unicorn horn was also considered effective as the unicorn was associated with Christ and purity.

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Bad air, which was thought to be the result of planetary alignment or supernatural forces (usually demonic) was driven out of homes by incense or burning thatch and by carrying flowers or sweet-smelling herbs on one's person (a practice referenced in the children's rhyme "Ring Around the Rosie"). One could also fumigate one's self by sitting near a hot fire or a pond, pool, or pit used for dumping sewage as it was thought the "bad air" in one's body would be drawn to the bad air of the sewage.

People in the cities, almost always the wealthy upper class, fled to their villas in the countryside while poorer people and farmers often left their lands in rural areas for the city where they hoped to find better medical care and available food. Even after the plague was understood to be contagious, people still left quarantined cities or regions and spread the disease further.

Persecutions of Jews by the Christian community did not start with the Black Death or end there but certainly increased in Europe between 1347-1352 CE. Scholar Samuel Cohn, jr. notes:

That the blind fury of mobs comprised of workers, artisans, and peasants was responsible for the Black Death annihilation of Jews derives from modern historians' musings, not the medieval sources. (5)

Even so, he concedes, "the Black Death unleashed hatred, blame, and violence on a more horrific scale than by any pandemic or epidemic in world history" (6). Although his claim regarding modern historians' interpretation of pogroms against Jews has some validity, it does not seem to fully take into consideration the long-standing animosity felt toward Jews by Christian communities. Jews were routinely suspected of poisoning wells, murdering Christian children in secret rites, and practicing various forms of magic in order to injure or kill Christians. Scholar Joshua Trachtenberg cites one example:

[The townspeople], petitioning for the expulsion of the Jews, affirmed that their danger to the community extended far beyond an occasional child murder, for they dry the blood they thus secure, grind it to a powder, and scatter it in the fields early in the morning when there is a heavy dew on the ground; then in three or four weeks a plague descends on men and cattle, within a radius of half a mile, so that Christians suffer severely while the sly Jews remain safely indoors. (144)

In 1348 CE, Jews in Languedoc and Catalonia were massacred and, in Savoy, were arrested on charges of poisoning the wells. In 1349 CE, Jews were burned en masse in Germany and France, but also elsewhere in spite of papal bulls issued by Pope Clement VI expressly forbidding these types of actions.

Muslim Response in Detail

Muslims also gathered in large groups at mosques for prayer, but these were prayers of supplication, requesting God lift the plague, not penitential prayers for the forgiveness of sins. Scholar Michael W. Dols notes that "there is no doctrine of original sin and man's insuperable guilt in Islamic theology" (10) and so religious responses to the plague took the same form as supplications for a good harvest, a healthy birth, or success in business. Dols writes:

An important part of [Muslim] urban activity in response to the Black Death was the communal prayers for the lifting of the disease. During the greatest severity of the pandemic, orders were given in Cairo to assemble in the mosques and to recite the recommended prayers in common. Fasting and processions took place in the cities during the Black Death and later plague epidemics; the supplicatory processions followed the traditional form of prayer for rain. (12)

Mass funerals were conducted along the lines of traditional burial rites with the addition of an orator who would request the plague be lifted but, again, there was no mention of the sins of the deceased nor any reason given why they died and another lived; these things happened according to the will of Allah.

Belief in supernatural visions and signs markedly increased. Dols cites the example of a man from Asia Minor who came to Damascus to inform a cleric of a vision he had been granted of the prophet Muhammad. In the vision, the prophet told the man to have the people recite the surah of Noah from the Quran 3,363 times while asking God to relieve them of the plague. The cleric announced the vision to the city and the people "assembled in the mosques to carry out these instructions. For a week the [people] performed this ritual, praying and slaughtering great numbers of cattle and sheep whose meat was distributed among the poor" (Dols, 11). Another man who received a vision from Muhammad claimed the prophet had given him a prayer to recite which would lift the plague; this prayer was copied and distributed to people with the instruction to recite it daily.

While the majority of Muslims believed that the plague had been sent by God, there were many who attributed it to the supernatural power of evil djinn (genies). Ancient Persian religion - pre- and post- Zoroaster (c. 1500-1000 BCE) - attributed various events and illnesses to the work of the malevolent deity Ahriman (also known as Angra Mainyu) or to spirits who sometimes advanced his agenda, such as djinn. This belief gave rise to an increase in folk magic and the use of amulets and charms to ward off evil spirits. The charm or amulet would be inscribed with one of the divine names or epithets of God and prayers and incantations would be recited to imbue the artifact with magical protective powers.

For the faithful Muslim, the plague was a merciful release from the world of multiplicity & change to the eternal, unchanging paradise of the afterlife.

As in Europe, those who could afford to do so left infected cities for the countryside and people from rural communities came to the cities for the same reasons as their European counterparts. Since the plague was not believed to be contagious, there was no reason for one to remain in one place or another except for a proscription attributed to Muhammad who forbade people going to or fleeing from plague-stricken regions. The reason for this proscription is unknown and it seems people ignored it because, whether the plague came from Allah or a djinn, it was not within an individual's power to escape the fate God had decreed. For the faithful Muslim, the plague was a merciful release from the world of multiplicity and change to the eternal, unchanging paradise of the afterlife; it seems only to have been considered a punishment for infidels outside the faith.

Even so, there is no evidence that minority populations - whether Christians, Jews, or any other - were persecuted in the Near East during the years of the plague. Jewish physicians, in fact, were highly regarded even though they could do no more for plague victims than any others.

Conclusion

As the plague raged on, people in Europe and the Near East continued their religious devotions which, after it had passed, were credited with finally working to influence God to lift the plague and restore a sense of normalcy to the world. Even so, the seeming ineffectuality of the Christian response to the people of the time caused many to question the vision and message of the Church and seek a different understanding of the Christian message and walk of faith. This impetus would eventually contribute to the Protestant Reformation and the change in philosophical paradigm which epitomizes the Renaissance.

Scholar Anna Louise DesOrmeaux notes that a significant aspect of the change in the religious model was the Christian belief that God had caused the plague to punish people for their sins and so there was nothing one could do but "turn humbly to God, who never denies His aid" (14). And yet, to the people of the time, it seemed as though God had denied his aid and this led people to question the authority of the Church.

No such dramatic change occurred in the Near East, however, and Islam continued on after the plague with little difference in understanding and observance than before. Dols comments:

The comparison of Christian and Muslim societies during the Black Death points to the significant disparity in their general communal responses...the Arabic sources do not attest to the "striking manifestations of abnormal collective psychology, of dissociation of the group mind," which occurred in Christian Europe. Fear and trepidation of the Black Death in Europe activated what Professor Trevor-Roper has called, in a different context, a European "stereotype of fear"...Why are the corresponding phenomena not found in the Muslim reaction to the Black Death? The stereotypes did not exist. There is no evidence for the appearance of messianic movements in Muslim society at this time which might have associated the Black Death with an apocalypse. (20)

A number of Christian European writers of the time, and afterwards, refer to the Black Death as "the end of the world" while Muslim scribes tend to focus on the death toll in emphasizing the magnitude of the pestilence; they do so, however, in the same way they write about deaths from floods or other natural disasters. In the aftermath of the Black Death, Europe would be radically transformed in social, political, religious, philosophical, medical, and many other areas while the Near East would not; because of a different interpretation of exactly the same phenomenon.

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The Black Death of 1347-1352 CE is the most infamous plague outbreak of the medieval world, unprecedented and unequaled until the 1918-1919 CE flu pandemic in the modern age. The cause of the plague...

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A comprehensive video of a discussion between historian Dan Snow & Professor Mark Bailey from the University of East Anglia about the Black Death & its impacts.

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#StayHome and Learn about The Black Death with Dan Snow | History Hit LIVE on Timeline

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In this first episode of History Hit LIVE on Timeline, Dan Snow is joined by Professor Mark Bailey, High Master of St Paul's School, London and Professor of ...

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Be careful to make use of videos relevant to the Black Death of the 14th century

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The Black Death, The Deadliest Plague in Human History

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The Black Death, The Deadliest Plague in Human History

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A video dispelling some myths about the Black Death, as well as some specifics from areas in the United Kingdom.

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The Black Death, The Deadliest Plague in Human History

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Infographics compilation about Black Death (and other pandemics)

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Infographics compilation about Black Death (and other pandemics)

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Be careful to make use of chapters relevant to the Black Death of the 14th Century

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What Made The Black Death (The Plague) so Deadly? And More Bubonic Plague Explanations (Compilation)

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The Black Death of Medieval Europe and Their Cures

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The Black Death of Medieval Europe and Their Cures

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Video examining some of the attempts to cure the plague in the 14th century.

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The Black Death of Medieval Europe and Their Cures

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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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How the Black Death Spread Along the Silk Road | HISTORY

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The Silk Road was a vital trading route connecting East and West—but it also became a conduit for one of history’s deadliest pandemics.

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Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa

Mark Wheelis*

Author affiliation: *University of California, Davis, California USA

Cite This Article

Abstract

On the basis of a 14th-century account by the Genoese Gabriele de' Mussi, the Black Death is widely believed to have reached Europe from the Crimea as the result of a biological warfare attack. This is not only of great historical interest but also relevant to current efforts to evaluate the threat of military or terrorist use of biological weapons. Based on published translations of the de' Mussi manuscript, other 14th-century accounts of the Black Death, and secondary scholarly literature, I conclude that the claim that biological warfare was used at Caffa is plausible and provides the best explanation of the entry of plague into the city. This theory is consistent with the technology of the times and with contemporary notions of disease causation; however, the entry of plague into Europe from the Crimea likely occurred independent of this event.

The Black Death, which swept through Europe, the Near East, and North Africa in the mid-14th century, was probably the greatest public health disaster in recorded history and one of the most dramatic examples ever of emerging or reemerging disease. Europe lost an estimated one quarter to one third of its population, and the mortality in North Africa and the Near East was comparable. China, India, and the rest of the Far East are commonly believed to have also been severely affected, but little evidence supports that belief (1).

A principal source on the origin of the Black Death is a memoir by the Italian Gabriele de' Mussi. This memoir has been published several times in its original Latin ( 2, 3) and has recently been translated into English (4) (although brief passages have been previously published in translation, see reference [ 5]). This narrative contains some startling assertions: that the Mongol army hurled plague-infected cadavers into the besieged Crimean city of Caffa, thereby transmitting the disease to the inhabitants; and that fleeing survivors of the siege spread plague from Caffa to the Mediterranean Basin. If this account is correct, Caffa should be recognized as the site of the most spectacular incident of biological warfare ever, with the Black Death as its disastrous consequence. After analyzing these claims, I have concluded that it is plausible that the biological attack took place as described and was responsible for infecting the inhabitants of Caffa; however, the event was unimportant in the spread of the plague pandemic.

Origin of the 14th-Century Pandemic

The disease that caused this catastrophic pandemic has, since Hecker (6), generally been considered to have been plague, a zoonotic disease caused by the gram-negative bacterium Yersinia pestis, the principal reservoir for which is wild rodents ( 7- 11). The ultimate origin of the Black Death is uncertain-China, Mongolia, India, central Asia, and southern Russia have all been suggested (see Norris [ 1] for a discussion of the various theories). Known 14th-century sources are of little help; they refer repeatedly to an eastern origin, but none of the reports is first-hand. Historians generally agree that the outbreak moved west out of the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and its spread through Europe and the Middle East is fairly well documented ( Figure 1). However, despite more than a century of speculation about an ultimate origin further east, the requisite scholarship using Chinese and central Asian sources has yet to be done. In any event, the Crimea clearly played a pivotal role as the proximal source from which the Mediterranean Basin was infected.

Historical Background to the Siege of Caffa

Caffa (now Feodosija, Ukraine) was established by Genoa in 1266 by agreement with the Kahn of the Golden Horde (15). It was the main port for the great Genoese merchant ships ( 16- 20), which connected there to a coastal shipping industry to Tana (now Azov, Russia) on the Don River. Trade along the Don connected Tana to Central Russia, and overland caravan routes linked it to Sarai and thence to the Far East ( 12, 19, 20).

Relations between Italian traders and their Mongol hosts were uneasy, and in 1307 Toqtai, Kahn of the Golden Horde, arrested the Italian residents of Sarai, and besieged Caffa. The cause was apparently Toqtai's displeasure at the Italian trade in Turkic slaves (sold for soldiers to the Mameluke Sultanate). The Genoese resisted for a year, but in 1308 set fire to their city and abandoned it. Relations between the Italians and the Golden Horde remained tense until Toqtai's death in 1312 (19).

Toqtai's successor, Özbeg, welcomed the Genoese back, and also ceded land at Tana to the Italians for the expansion of their trading enterprise. By the 1340s, Caffa was again a thriving city, heavily fortified within two concentric walls. The inner wall enclosed 6,000 houses, the outer 11,000. The city's population was highly cosmopolitan, including Genoese, Venetian, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Mongols, and Turkic peoples (21).

In 1343 the Mongols under Janibeg (who succeeded Özbeg in 1340) besieged Caffa and the Italian enclave at Tana (12), following a brawl between Italians and Muslims in Tana. The Italian merchants in Tana fled to Caffa (which, by virtue of its location directly on the coast, maintained maritime access despite the siege). The siege of Caffa lasted until February 1344, when it was lifted after an Italian relief force killed 15,000 Mongol troops and destroyed their siege machines (21). Janibeg renewed the siege in 1345 but was again forced to lift it after a year, this time by an epidemic of plague that devastated his forces. The Italians blockaded Mongol ports, forcing Janibeg to negotiate, and in 1347 the Italians were allowed to reestablish their colony in Tana (19).

Gabriele de' Mussi, born circa 1280, practiced as a notary in the town of Piacenza, over the mountains just north of Genoa. Tononi summarizes the little we know of him (3). His practice was active in the years 1300-1349. He is thought to have died in approximately 1356.

Although Henschel (2) thought de' Mussi was present at the siege of Caffa, Tononi asserts that the Piacenza archives contain deeds signed by de' Mussi spanning the period 1344 through the first half of 1346. While this does not rule out travel to Caffa in late 1346, textual evidence suggests that he did not. He does not claim to have witnessed any of the Asian events he describes and often uses a passive voice for descriptions. After describing the siege of Caffa, de'Mussi goes on to say, "Now it is time that we passed from east to west to discuss all the things which we ourselves have seen..."

The Narrative of Gabriele De' Mussi

The de' Mussi account is presumed to have been written in 1348 or early 1349 because of its immediacy and the narrow time period described. The original is lost, but a copy is included in a compilation of historical and geographic accounts by various authors, dating from approximately 1367 ( Figure 2). The account begins with an introductory comment by the scribe who copied the documents: "In the name of God, Amen. Here begins an account of the disease or mortality which occurred in 1348, put together by Gabrielem de Mussis of Piacenza."

The narrative begins with an apocalyptic speech by God, lamenting the depravity into which humanity has fallen and describing the retribution intended. It goes on:

"...In 1346, in the countries of the East, countless numbers of Tartars and Saracens were struck down by a mysterious illness which brought sudden death. Within these countries broad regions, far-spreading provinces, magnificent kingdoms, cities, towns and settlements, ground down by illness and devoured by dreadful death, were soon stripped of their inhabitants. An eastern settlement under the rule of the Tartars called Tana, which lay to the north of Constantinople and was much frequented by Italian merchants, was totally abandoned after an incident there which led to its being besieged and attacked by hordes of Tartars who gathered in a short space of time. The Christian merchants, who had been driven out by force, were so terrified of the power of the Tartars that, to save themselves and their belongings, they fled in an armed ship to Caffa, a settlement in the same part of the world which had been founded long ago by the Genoese.

"Oh God! See how the heathen Tartar races, pouring together from all sides, suddenly invested the city of Caffa and besieged the trapped Christians there for almost three years. There, hemmed in by an immense army, they could hardly draw breath, although food could be shipped in, which offered them some hope. But behold, the whole army was affected by a disease which overran the Tartars and killed thousands upon thousands every day. It was as though arrows were raining down from heaven to strike and crush the Tartars' arrogance. All medical advice and attention was useless; the Tartars died as soon as the signs of disease appeared on their bodies: swellings in the armpit or groin caused by coagulating humours, followed by a putrid fever.

"The dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster brought about by the disease, and realizing that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege. But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults 1 and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside. 2 What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many of the bodies as they could in the sea. And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army. Moreover one infected man could carry the poison to others, and infect people and places with the disease by look alone. No one knew, or could discover, a means of defense.

"Thus almost everyone who had been in the East, or in the regions to the south and north, fell victim to sudden death after contracting this pestilential disease, as if struck by a lethal arrow which raised a tumor on their bodies. The scale of the mortality and the form which it took persuaded those who lived, weeping and lamenting, through the bitter events of 1346 to 1348-the Chinese, Indians, Persians, Medes, Kurds, Armenians, Cilicians, Georgians, Mesopotamians, Nubians, Ethiopians, Turks, Egyptians, Arabs, Saracens and Greeks (for almost all the East has been affected)-that the last judgement had come.

"...As it happened, among those who escaped from Caffa by boat were a few sailors who had been infected with the poisonous disease. Some boats were bound for Genoa, others went to Venice and to other Christian areas. When the sailors reached these places and mixed with the people there, it was as if they had brought evil spirits with them: every city, every settlement, every place was poisoned by the contagious pestilence, and their inhabitants, both men and women, died suddenly. And when one person had contracted the illness, he poisoned his whole family even as he fell and died, so that those preparing to bury his body were seized by death in the same way. Thus death entered through the windows, and as cities and towns were depopulated their inhabitants mourned their dead neighbours." (Reproduced with permission from Horrox, pp. 16-20 [ 4])

The account closes with an extended description of the plague in Piacenza, and a reprise of the apocalyptic vision with which it begins.

Commentary

In this narrative, de' Mussi makes two important claims about the siege of Caffa and the Black Death: that plague was transmitted to Europeans by the hurling of diseased cadavers into the besieged city of Caffa and that Italians fleeing from Caffa brought it to the Mediterranean ports.

Biological Warfare at Caffa

de' Mussi's account is probably secondhand and is uncorroborated; however, he seems, in general, to be a reliable source, and as a Piacenzian he would have had access to eyewitnesses of the siege. Several considerations incline me to trust his account: this was probably not the only, nor the first, instance of apparent attempts to transmit disease by hurling biological material into besieged cities; it was within the technical capabilities of besieging armies of the time; and it is consistent with medieval notions of disease causality (22).

Tentatively accepting that the attack took place as described, we can consider two principal hypotheses for the entry of plague into the city: it might, as de' Mussi asserts, have been transmitted by the hurling of plague cadavers; or it might have entered by rodent-to-rodent transmission from the Mongol encampments into the city.

Diseased cadavers hurled into the city could easily have transmitted plague, as defenders handled the cadavers during disposal. Contact with infected material is a known mechanism of transmission ( 8- 11); for instance, among 284 cases of plague in the United States in 1970-1995 for which a mechanism of transmission could be reasonably inferred, 20% were thought to be by direct contact (24). Such transmission would have been especially likely at Caffa, where cadavers would have been badly mangled by being hurled, and many of the defenders probably had cut or abraded hands from coping with the bombardment. Very large numbers of cadavers were possibly involved, greatly increasing the opportunity for disease transmission. Since disposal of the bodies of victims in a major outbreak of lethal disease is always a problem, the Mongol forces may have used their hurling machines as a solution to their mortuary problem, in which case many thousands of cadavers could have been involved. de' Mussi's description of "mountains of dead" might have been quite literally true.

Thus it seems plausible that the events recounted by de' Mussi could have been an effective means of transmission of plague into the city. The alternative, rodent-to-rodent transmission from the Mongol encampments into the city, is less likely. Besieging forces must have camped at least a kilometer away from the city walls. This distance is necessary to have a healthy margin of safety from arrows and artillery and to provide space for logistical support and other military activities between the encampments and the front lines. Front-line location must have been approximately 250-300 m from the walls; trebuchets are known from modern reconstruction to be capable of hurling 100 kg more than 200 m (25), and historical sources claim 300 m as the working range of large machines (26). Thus, the bulk of rodent nests associated with the besieging armies would have been located a kilometer or more away from the cities, and none would have likely been closer than 250 m. Rats are quite sedentary and rarely venture more than a few tens of meters from their nest ( 27, 28). It is thus unlikely that there was any contact between the rat populations within and outside the walls.

Given the many uncertainties, any conclusion must remain tentative. However, the considerations above suggest that the hurling of plague cadavers might well have occurred as de' Mussi claimed, and if so, that this biological attack was probably responsible for the transmission of the disease from the besiegers to the besieged. Thus, this early act of biological warfare, if such it were, appears to have been spectacularly successful in producing casualties, although of no strategic importance (the city remained in Italian hands, and the Mongols abandoned the siege).

Crimea as the Source of European and Near Eastern Plague

There has never been any doubt that plague entered the Mediterranean from the Crimea, following established maritime trade routes. Rat infestations in the holds of cargo ships would have been highly susceptible to the rapid spread of plague, and even if most rats died during the voyage, they would have left abundant hungry fleas that would infect humans unpacking the holds. Shore rats foraging on board recently arrived ships would also become infected, transmitting plague to city rat populations.

Plague appears to have been spread in a stepwise fashion, on many ships rather than on a few ( Figure 1), taking over a year to reach Europe from the Crimea. This conclusion seems fairly firm, as the dates for the arrival of plague in Constantinople and more westerly cities are reasonably certain. Thus de' Mussi was probably mistaken in attributing the Black Death to fleeing survivors of Caffa, who should not have needed more than a few months to return to Italy (16).

Furthermore, a number of other Crimean ports were under Mongol control, making it unlikely that Caffa was the only source of infected ships heading west. And the overland caravan routes to the Middle East from Serai and Astrakhan insured that plague was also spreading south ( Figure 1), whence it would have entered Europe in any case. The siege of Caffa, and its gruesome finale, thus are unlikely to have been seriously implicated in the transmission of plague from the Black Sea to Europe.

Gabriele de' Mussi's account of the origin and spread of plague appears to be consistent with most known facts, although mistaken in its claim that plague arrived in Italy directly from the Crimea. His account of biological attack is plausible, consistent with the technology of the time, and it provides the best explanation of disease transmission into besieged Caffa. This thus appears to be one of the first biological attacks recorded (22) and among the most successful of all time.

However, it is unlikely that the attack had a decisive role in the spread of plague to Europe. Much maritime commerce probably continued throughout this period, from other Crimean ports. Overland caravan routes to the Middle East were also unaffected. Thus, refugees from Caffa would most likely have constituted only one of several streams of infected ships and caravans leaving the region. The siege of Caffa, for all of its dramatic appeal, probably had no more than anecdotal importance in the spread of plague, a macabre incident in terrifying times.

Despite its historical unimportance, the siege of Caffa is a powerful reminder of the horrific consequences when disease is successfully used as a weapon. The Japanese use of plague as a weapon in World War II (29) and the huge Soviet stockpiles of Y. pestis prepared for use in an all-out war (30) further remind us that plague remains a very real problem for modern arms control, six and a half centuries later (31).

Dr. Wheelis is Senior Lecturer in Microbiology at the University of California, Davis. He was trained as a bacterial physiologist and geneticist, but for more than 10 years, his research has focused on the history and control of biological weapons.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Christina Frei for translation from German (Henschel) and to Remo Morelli for translation from Italian (Tononi).

This research was supported by a grant from the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

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References

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5. Dennis DT , Gratz N , Poland JD , Tikhomirov E . Plague Manual: Epidemiology, distribution, surveillance and control. Geneva: World Health Organization; 1999.

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10. Alibek K , Handelman S . Biohazard: The chilling true story of the largest covert biological weapons program in the world-told from the inside by the man who ran it. New York: Random House; 1999.

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Figures

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Cite This Article
DOI: 10.3201/eid0809.010536
Table of Contents - Volume 8, Number 9-September 2002
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Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa

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Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa

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A good reference for information about when particular events happened during the Black Death

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Nearly 700 years after the Black Death swept through Europe, it still haunts the world as the worst-case scenario for an epidemic. Called the Great Mortality as it caused its devastation, this second great pandemic of Bubonic Plague became known as the Black Death in the late 17th Century.

Modern genetic analysis suggests that the Bubonic plague was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis or Y. pestis. Chief among its symptoms are painfully swollen lymph glands that form pus-filled boils called buboes. Sufferers also face fever, chills, headaches, shortness of breath, hemorrhaging, bloody sputum, vomiting and delirium, and if it goes untreated, a survival rate of 50 percent.

During the Black Death, three different forms of the plague manifested across Europe. Below is a timeline of its gruesome assault on humanity.

Black Death Emerges, Spreads via the Black Sea
1346
The strain of Y. pestis emerges in Mongolia, according to John Kelly's account in The Great Mortality. It is possibly passed to humans by a tarabagan, a type of marmot. The deadliest outbreak is in the Mongol capital of Sarai, which the Mongols carry west to the Black Sea area.

Mongol King Janiberg and his army are in the nearby city of Tana when a brawl erupts between Italian merchants and a group of Muslims. Following the death of one of the Muslims, the Italians flee by sea to the Genoese outpost of Caffa and Janiberg follow on land. Upon arrival at Caffa, Janiberg's army lays siege for a year but they are stricken with an outbreak. As the army catapults the infected bodies of their dead over city walls, the under-siege Genoese become infected also.
May, 1347
Both sides in the siege are decimated and survivors in Caffa escape by sea, leaving behind streets covered with corpses being fed on by feral animals. One ship arrives in Constantinople, which, once infected, loses as much as 90 percent of its population.
October, 1347
Another Caffan ship docks in Sicily, the crew barely alive. Here the plague kills half the population and moves to Messina. Fleeing residents then spread it to mainland Italy, where one-third of the population is dead by the following summer.
November, 1347
The plague arrives in France, brought by another of the Caffa ships docking in Marseille. It spreads quickly through the country.

A New Strain Enters Europe
January, 1348
A different plague strain enters Europe through Genoa, brought by another Caffan ship that docks there. The Genoans attack the ship and drive it away, but they are still infected. Italy faces this second strain while already battling the previous one.

Y. pestis also heads east from Sicily into the Persian Empire and through Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland, and south to Egypt, as well as Cyprus, which is also hit with destruction from an earthquake and deadly tidal wave at the same time.

Venice faces its own outbreak by pioneering the first organized response, with committees ordering ship inspections and burning those with contagions, shutting down taverns, and restricting wine from unknown sources. The canals fill with gondolas shouting official instructions for disposing of dead bodies. Despite those efforts, the plague kills 60 percent of the Venetian population.
April, 1348
The plague awakes an anti-Semitic rage around Europe, causing repeated massacres of Jewish communities, with the first one taking place in Provence, where 40 Jews were murdered.
June, 1348
The plague enters England through the port of Melcombe Regis, in Dorset. As it spreads through the town, some escape by fleeing inland, inadvertently spreading it further.

Violent Anti-Semitism Spreads
Summer, 1348
A group of religious zealots known as the Flagellants first begin to appear in Germany. These groups of anywhere from 50 to 500 hooded and half-naked men march, sing and thrash themselves with lashes until swollen and bloody. Originally the practice of 11th-century Italian monks during an epidemic, they spread out through Europe. Also known for their violent anti-Semitism, the Flagellants mysteriously disappear by 1350.

The plague hits Marseille, Paris and Normandy, and then the strain splits, with one strain moving onto the now-Belgian city of Tournai to the east and the other passing through Calais. and Avignon, where 50 percent of the population dies.

The plague also moves through Austria and Switzerland, where a fury of anti-Semitic massacres follow it along the Rhine after a rumor spreads that Jews had caused the plague by poisoning wells, as Jennifer Wright details in her book, Get Well Soon, History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them. In towns throughout Germany and France, Jewish communities are completely annihilated. In response, King Casimir III of Poland offers a safe haven to the persecuted Jews, starting a mass migration to Poland and Lithuania. Marseilles is also considered a safe haven for Jews.

Black Death Reaches London, Scotland and Beyond
October, 1348
Following the infection and death of King Edward III's daughter Princess Joan, the plague reaches London, according to King Death: The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late-Medieval England by Colin Platt. As the devastation grows, Londoners flee to the countryside to find food. Edward blames the plague on garbage and human excrement piled up in London streets and in the Thames River.
February, 1349
One of the worst massacres of Jews during the Black Death takes place on Valentine's Day in Strasbourg, with 2,000 Jewish people burned alive. In the spring, 3,000 Jews defend themselves in Mainz against Christians but are overcome and slaughtered.
April, 1349
The plague hits Wales, brought by people fleeing from Southern England, and eventually kills100,000 people there.

Vikings, Crippled by Plague, Halt Exploration
July, 1349
An English ship brings the Black Death to Norway when it runs aground in Bergen. The ship's crew is dead by the end of the week and the pestilence travels to Denmark and Sweden, where the king believes fasting on a Friday and foregoing shoes on Sunday will please God and end the plague. It doesn't work, killing two of the king's brothers and moving into Russia and also eastern Greenland.
March, 1350
Scotland, having so far avoided the plague, hopes to take advantage of English weakness by amassing an army and planning an invasion. While waiting on the border to begin the attack, troops became infected, with 5,000 dying. Choosing to retreat, the soldiers bring the disease back to their families and a third of Scotland perishes.

Black Death Fades, Leaving Half of Europe Dead
1351
The plague's spread significantly begins to peter out, possibly thanks to quarantine efforts, after causing the deaths of anywhere between 25 to 50 million people, and leading to the massacres of 210 Jewish communities. All total, Europe has lost about 50 percent of its population.
1353
With the Black Death considered safely behind them, the people of Europe face a changed society. The combination of the massive death rate and the numbers of survivors fleeing their homes sends entrenched social and economic systems spiraling. It becomes easier to get work for better wages and the average standard of living rises.

With the feudal system dying, the aristocracy tries to pass laws preventing any further rise by the peasants, leading to upheaval and revolution in England and France. Significant losses within older intellectual communities brought on an unprecedented opportunity for new ideas and art concepts to take hold, directly leading to the Renaissance and a more youthful, enlightened period of human history.

The Bubonic Plague never completely exits, resurfacing several times through the centuries.

Fact Check

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The Black Death: A Timeline of the Gruesome Pandemic

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The Black Death, also known as the Pestilence and the Plague, was the deadliest pandemics ever recorded. Track how it ravaged humanity through history.

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History of the Black Death - Flash Point History YouTube

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History of the Black Death - Flash Point History YouTube

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Good coverage of Black Death. Possible issue with Doctor clothing though?

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History of the Black Death - Full Documentary

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Provides some context to the Black Death & what was happening in the years before & after.

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In the absence of antibiotics, the disease had an 80% mortality rate, and in the 14th century, cities such as London with its poor hygiene practices and slum-like conditions, proved the perfect breeding ground for disease. Over the next two years the disease spread rapidly, with whole towns and villages laid waste.

Although the first phase of the pandemic ended by 1353, resurgences of the plague would be common in the decades to come.

Religious upheavals

The Black Death also had a devastating effect on the Catholic Church, not only from the failure of prayer to prevent sickness and death, but also from the priesthood suffering disproportionate deaths from the disease due to their frontline roles in attending to the dying and in providing what little palliative care there was.

The pandemic also contributed to the Western Schism - a split within the Catholic Church that lasted from 1378-1417 involving multiple claimants to the papacy. It began when rival factions supported different popes (bishops residing in Rome, Avignon and Pisa), leading to confusion and division among European nations. The Council of Constance in 1414-1418 eventually resolved the schism by electing Pope Martin V, reuniting the Catholic Church under a single papal authority.

The first signs of the Reformation were also starting to emerge, with John Wycliffe and his followers working on a translation of the Bible into English.

The Hundred Years' War (1337-1453)

Amidst the existing of the 14th century, Europe was engulfed by endemic wars, notably the Hundred Years' War between England and France. Triggered by a claim to the French throne by King Edward III of England after the death of Charles IV, the conflict started in 1337 and lasted until 1453 (aside from a pause during the Black Death when England did not fight any battles between 1349-1355).

In the first phase of the war, English forces pillaged peasant settlements in northern France to break the French spirit and disrupt agricultural production - the foundation of feudal societies - slowing the population recovery from the Black Death. This gave rise to nationalistic figures such as Henry V and Joan of Arc, but mercenaries and bandits also took advantage of the chaos, leading to the abandonment of many villages as peasants fled.

The concurrent deadly events make it challenging to determine the exact death toll of the Hundred Years War, but estimates range from 2.3 - 3.5 million casualties.The war, coupled with the Black Death, impeded population recovery, taking 200 years for Europe's population to return to its pre-plague levels.

Political instability

Amid ongoing wars, the 14th century witnessed widespread popular revolts and civil wars among nobles. This Crisis of the Late Middle Ages resulted in part from the hardships of the Great Famine and the Black Death. Having dealt with a challenges and instability of the first half of the 14th century, Europeans were stirred and angered, prompting a radical social shift.

By the 1380s, the substantial population decline resulted in a severe labor shortage. Surviving peasants gained significant bargaining power, commanding higher wages and the freedom to choose where they worked based on pay and conditions. For the first time, the balance of power was shifting in the direction of the poorest in society.

Economic disputes and excessive taxation contributed to near anarchy, leading to organised peasant uprisings across Northern Europe. The Holy Roman Empire experienced at least 60 instances of peasant unrest between 1336 and 1525. Notably, the Peasant's Revolt in England in 1381, one of the most significant events in Medieval England, underscored the societal upheaval during this period.

As we can see, the 14th century and its devastating events - including the Black Death, widespread famine, economic decline, political instability, and the Hundred Years' War - was a challenging and tumultuous era for many, gaining the century its dark reputation.

Nevertheless, it was these factors that also created the conditions leading to the breakdown of feudalism and set the scene for the Peasants' Revolt.

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Why Is the 14th Century Considered the Worst?

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Numerous centuries could vie for the unfortunate distinction oof being the worst time to have lived - take for example the 20th century with...

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Make sure to check sources for each of the points (links at end of article)

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With absolutely no knowledge of what was causing it, or how to treat it, millions of people would eventually be killed by what we know today to be the bubonic plague. As a result of the sheer scale of devastation (in both Europe and the rest of the world) the Black Plague was one of the most important and influential events in world history.

Here are 40 facts about the terrifying pestilence that once completely decimated the human population.

It's hard to say the exact beginning and end of the pandemic, but the Black Death was affecting the world between 1346 and 1353, with the most severe episode lasting between 1349 and 1351. The end of the major outbreak was hardly the end for the Black Death, though. For the next few centuries, particularly in Europe, outbreaks of the bubonic plague were relatively common.

By the estimates of some historians, a large spreading of the disease happened on the continent about once every ten years, up until the 19th century.

2. Death Comes Sailing In...

We can actually track the precise moment that the plague arrived in Europe: In October 1347, 12 Genoese trading ships docked in the Italian port of Messina after crossing the Black Sea. People greeting these ships found the crews dead or dying, covered in boils and with high fevers. The ships were immediately ordered to leave the harbor, but it was too late.

The Black Death had arrived.

3. What's in a Name?

The Black Death got its name from the black, pus and blood-filled boils that covered its victims' bodies.

To contemporaries, it was also known as "The Pestilence" or "The Great Mortality."

For centuries, the cause of the The Black Death was unknown, making it all the more terrifying. Insane theories spread like wildfire... almost as quickly as the disease itself. And that's hardly shocking: can you imagine what you would think was happening? Almost everyone you know is suddenly dying in horrific agony... and you've got absolutely no reason why.

You don't even have a basic understanding of what germs are, or how a common cold would spread. Suffice to say, to those alive at the time the Black Death was an absolute mystery. Today, though, we know that it was actually an outbreak of the bubonic plague. It was caused by a bacterium known as Yersinia pestis which traveled via fleas carried by infected rodents and rats.

Estimates regarding the number of people actually killed by the Black Death vary, but historians generally agree that it claimed somewhere between 75 and 200 million people in its first five years. Experts suggest the number of those killed represented 30% to 60% of the entire population of Europe. That amount of devastation is genuinely difficult to properly understand.

Entire towns were hit so hard they had to be left abandoned. They stayed unoccupied for years, for fear of recontamination. Across Europe, these previously lively settlements lay unguarded and unpopulated... ghostly reminders of the plague's ferocious power.

In the end, it would take 150 years for the continent to recover its population.

The Black Plague is usually associated with Europe, but it also killed around half of the population of China and one-eighth of the people in Africa.

It was a truly worldwide phenomenon, similar in scale to the World Wars in terms of the number of people affected.

Without treatment, the Bubonic plague kills 30-90% of the people who come in contact with it.

Today, it can be treated rather simply with antibiotics, but the people of the Middle Ages had no such option. They were forced to simply wait and pray, in the faint hope that the deathly pathogen left them alive...

People suffering from the Black Death in Italy were sent to the island of Poveglia in an attempt to stop the disease from spreading. As such, countless Italians died there. It's rumored that, to this day, 50% of the island's soil consists of human ash .

9. Back Where it All Began

The Black Death is over 2,000 years old and originated in China. Through gene sequencing, scientists have determined that it spread to the rest of the world through fleas that lived on the rats that stowed away in trading vessels.

In addition to the boils, the plague caused fever, chills, vomiting and uncontrollable diarrhea. Those afflicted also suffered through debilitating aches and pains and death would usually occur within two to seven days of infection.

11. Halted Construction

Since more than half of the population of the Italian city of Sienna succumbed to the plague, construction on its cathedral-one of the largest at the time-was halted. Building never resumed and you can still view the outer walls of the unfinished cathedral in the town.

It's hard to commit to a project that will outlive you when death seems to be around every corner.

12. Weapon of Mass Destruction

In 1345-46, just before the plague arrived in Europe, Mongol hordes were struck by the plague as they laid siege to the town of Kaffa. As their numbers quickly diminished, the Mongols began to hurl the bodies of those who had died from the plague into the walled city, in an attempt to turn the bodies into plague-carrying agents of mass destruction.

The brother of the famous poet Petrarch, named Gherardo, was one of only two to survive when the plague reached his Carthusian monastery in Italy. He was forced to bury 34 of his fellow monks who weren't so lucky. The other survivor? Gherardo's dog.

Many people were so terrified of the Black Death that they refused to help those who were sick. Doctors refused to attend to patients, priests refused to give last rites and even relatives would sometimes abandon their sick family members.

Humans weren't the only creatures to suffer during the plague. It also affected cows, pigs and sheep. In fact, so many sheep were affected that is caused a shortage of wool in Europe.

At the time, people didn't blame the fleas. Many believed that the plague was God's punishment for people's immorality. There were others who credited the alignment of the planets. Sadly, many others blamed the Jews.

Local religious leaders suggested that Jews had poisoned village wells, and this was causing the plague. As a result, numerous atrocities including forced conversions, exiles, torture, and mass executions took place. In Basel Switzerland, the entire Jewish population was herded into a building and burned to death in 1349.

The population wasn't the only thing to decline during the Black Death. The Catholic Church also lost a lot of its power and influence as it failed to protect people from the plague. This destabilization is seen as a major factor in the Protestant Reformation that would soon follow.

Another popular treatment for the Black Death had people pressing the shaved bottom of a live chicken against the boils of an infected person. The only problem was that the chickens then also became infected and helped spread the disease.

Also (and this is going to surprise you), it didn't work. Turns out shaved chicken bums are exactly 0% more medically useful than regular old people-bums.

The spread of the Black Plague was almost inconceivably rapid. According to some estimates, the disease traveled between populations (through being carried by hosts) at an average speed of 8 miles a day.

C ompare that to 20th century plagues which have been found to travel at a rate of eight miles per year or slower.

21. The First Quarantine

The idea of quarantining to prevent a highly contagious disease was not understood in medieval times. In fact, the word didn't even exist yet. However, the Mediterranean city of Ragusa did manage to establish a " trentino," which was designed to isolate infected people outside the city and to refuse entry to foreigners. The move effectively ended the plague in the city much earlier than throughout the rest of Europe.

This might seem to be an obvious solution to spreading illness, and it's easy to ask why the thought of isolating a population from infected people didn't occur to people earlier. But it's worth remembering: the concept of quarantine only makes sense to us because we know that germs and bacteria spread disease.

If a population hasn't discovered germ theory, it's difficult (if not impossible) to understand that contact with an infected host is what leads to contracting the illness. You're just as likely to think that infection is a case of bad luck. When it comes to the Black Plague, for example, the leading theories for what was happening centered around the movement of planets, or the wrath of an angry God... or even just "bad air".

All of which, if you believed them to be the cause of the Black Death, wouldn't exactly be solved by cutting yourself off from other people.

22. Penance and Punishment

In keeping with the idea that the Black Death was God's punishment for people's sins, some men joined groups called flagellants. They traveled from town to town beating themselves and each other with leather straps studded with metal three times a day, in the hope that their penance would spare them from God's wrath.

23. An Indiscriminate Killer

The Black Death made no distinction between rich and poor in its early days. In fact, many wealthy convents and monasteries lost more than half of their people, some even becoming completely extinct. However, by the end of the 14th century, outbreaks of the plague were largely confined to the poor due to their lack of access to anything approaching sanitary conditions.

In addition to covering themselves feces and urine (which they were encouraged to drink as well), medieval people also avoided the plague by avoiding the bathtub. It was commonly believed that bathing opened up the pores and would allow the plague easy entry into the body. Maybe the stench would also help keep it away?

Worth a shot, I suppose.

Trade routes that were established in the Middle Ages brought riches and new goods to Europe, Asia and Africa but it also provided a pathway for the Black Death to travel between these three continents.

The Black Death likely traveled to Norway via a ship that ran aground near Bergen harbor. Some rumors have flown saying that all the sailors were already dead from the horrifying disease, but a historical account relays a more gruesome truth: that when one plague-ridden ship arrived, the crew was still alive. They died soon after unloading a bit of the ship, and the disease began to spread through the town.

Y. Pestis, the type of bacteria that caused the Black Death, blocks the stomachs of the fleas it infects. The fleas attempt to feed voraciously but are unable to keep anything down and so they vomit their food back onto their host. Once the host dies, they jump to the next host and begin again.

While rats, cats and numerous other types of animals could contract the Black Death, dogs rarely did. This is because they have a natural resistance to the plague and could be exposed to the disease without being infected.

The Black Plague was probably the worst pandemic the world has suffered but it wasn't the first-there have many plagues noted earlier in history. The first was in Athens in Ancient Greece, which decimated the city's population. Justinian's plague, which struck Europe during the 6th century, occurred hundreds of years before the Black Death and killed upwards of 50 million people.

The Black Death ravaged the art world just like every other population, but following the plague arts and culture thrived. Wealthy nobles commissioned paintings and sculptures depicting the death, destruction and suffering that had occurred. The subject of artistic work also changed drastically and became much darker and more bleak.

One positive effect of the Black Death was a rise in wages and an improvement in working conditions since landowners were forced to compete for a much smaller workforce. Peasants no longer had to stay with a master as they could immediately find work elsewhere if they chose to leave.

The world hasn't seen anything quite like the Black Death, but the bubonic plague was never truly wiped out and there are still occasional outbreaks. The most recent, in Madagascar in October 2017, killed 124 people and infected 1200 others.

33. Places to Be (and Not to Be)

The Black Death did not hit every country equally, especially in Europe. It killed 70-80% of the population in southern Europe (Spain, France and Italy) but only 20% of the population of more northern countries like England and Germany.

The Black Death caused shortages and price increases in staples such as wheat. In fact, the price of wheat in Italy rose 200% in Italy in the winter of 1347. At least 4000 people died of malnutrition in the city of Florentine that year. By 1350 it had increased 400% in France.

35. London Plague

In 1348, the Black Death hit the city of London particularly hard, with the city's crowded conditions making it difficult to escape infection. On average they were burying 34 people every single day.

In 1349, taking advantage of an England already weakened by the plague, the Scots invaded the city of Dunham in England. Unsurprisingly, once they got there they too caught the plague. 5,000 Scottish soldiers died, and the survivors brought the plague back with them to Scotland, killing thousands more.

Though it caused immense suffering and death, the Black Plague ended up having one huge positive impact that not many people know about.

The shortage in labour lead to higher wages and peasants were free to leave for towns and higher paying jobs. With their cheap labour source gone and with land becoming far less valuable, nobles lost their tight control of the social strata and feudalism began to quickly disappear.

Some of the cures that were used by physicians actually made things worse: Physicians would burst plague boils, which only helped spread infection. Another treatment involved applying human excrement to the boils, which probably caused entirely new diseases in the victim, on top of the fact that they, you know, applied human excrement to plague boils.

As villages became overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead, religious leaders struggled with how to bury people according to Christian traditions. Mass graves were dug and Pope Clement VI consecrated the entire Rhone River so corpses could be thrown into it and still be assured a place in heaven.

40. Strength in Numbers

Yersinia pestis, the bacteria responsible for the Black Plague, is unable to survive outside the body of its victims and is unable to penetrate or hide on a body. But it has a secret weapon: it can disable its host's immune system. With nothing to oppose it, it can multiply quickly and overrun a victim within hours.

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40 Bubonic Facts About The Black Death - Factinate - Factinate

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Facts About The Black Death. Seemingly healthy, hardy people were almost instantly overcome with the awful, ugly sickness. Once infected, Death was swift, painful, and almost unavoidable...

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list of useful sources

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The past, present and future of the bubonic plague - Sharon N. DeWitte

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The past, present and future of the bubonic plague - Sharon N. DeWitte

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Note date of publication & relation to recent events

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The past, present and future of the bubonic plague - Sharon N. DeWitte

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Good source for a variety of aspects of the Black Death

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The long term effects of the Black Death were devastating and far reaching. Agriculture, religion, economics and even social class were affected. Contemporary accounts shed light on how medieval Britain was irreversibly changed.

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The long term effects of the Black Death were devastating and far reaching. Agriculture, religion, economics and even social class were affected. Contemporary accounts shed light on how medieval Britain was irreversibly changed.

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Good information about treatments & medicine, as well as Jewish persecution & religious viewpoints.

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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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Good source for a variety of aspects of the Black Death

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The long term effects of the Black Death were devastating and far reaching. Agriculture, religion, economics and even social class were affected. Contemporary accounts shed light on how medieval Britain was irreversibly changed.

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The long term effects of the Black Death were devastating and far reaching. Agriculture, religion, economics and even social class were affected. Contemporary accounts shed light on how medieval Britain was irreversibly changed.

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Plague 101 - National Geographic YouTube

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Plague 101 - National Geographic YouTube

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Note the time of publication - have recent events changed or added to the conclusions of the vidoe?