25 facts about Medieval world
Many people imagine the Middle Ages as a time of total asceticism, lack of education and extreme piety. In reality, it was a time of political intrigu ...
Although the disease produced black necrotic tissue, people living at the time of the pandemic referred to it as "the great plague," "the great scourge," or "the great mortality. The term "Black Death" did not appear until the 16th century, some two hundred years after it first struck Europe.
A mistranslation of the Latin name for the epidemic, atra mors, may also have contributed to the name.
The exact toll of the disease is unknown, with estimates ranging from 75 to 200 million people killed.
The first was the Justinian Plague, which broke out in 451 and continued in successive waves until the 8th century, killing a total of about 60% of the European population. From the last wave of plague in the 50s of the 8th century until the outbreak of the Black Death, no major epidemics occurred in Europe.
The final argument in favor of this theory was provided by a 2010 study published in PLOS Pathogens, which analyzed proteins and DNA from mass graves from the time of the pandemic. The results clearly pointed to Y. pestis.
The plague is thought to have arrived in Europe from eastern or central Asia. The first documented cases were recorded in Crimea in 1347, where the plague most likely came via the Silk Road. The bacterium was spread by fleas that fed on the blood of rats that traveled aboard Genoese ships carrying slaves from Crimea to Europe.
Increasing droughts caused the rodents living there to seek food sources closer to human settlements. Along with the rodents came oriental rat fleas (Xenopsylla cheopis), which were the primary vectors of the disease.
The blockage of the digestive tract increased the insect's hunger and activity. While feeding on the host, the plague bacilli entered its system and the infection spread.
From there, it spread to central and northern Europe in the following years, mainly via flies. In the final years of 1352-1353, the plague raged in the areas of present-day Estonia, Finland, and northwestern Russia.
The plague arrived there in the summer of 1347 and killed, among others, the 13-year-old son of the then Byzantine Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos.
Poland and Bohemia were not isolated places, so both insects and travelers moved through these areas just as they did in other regions. This misunderstanding may have been caused by the lack of written sources from this time. Since the plague reached Germany between 1348 and 1350, infections in the Polish and Czech areas surely began a few weeks later.
After Africa, it probably spread from the port of Alexandria, rolling through areas of Syria, Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula to Yemen, which it reached in 1351. In 1348, it reached Mecca with infected pilgrims.
The first was swollen lymph nodes in the groin area, the second was a lung disease that caused difficulty breathing and instant death. The third manifestation of the plague was the appearance of blisters under the armpits. In each case, the disease was extremely deadly. Every variant of the disease was accompanied by a high fever that could reach 41°C (106 °F).
After the period of great geographical discoveries, the range of the Black Death also increased, causing local outbreaks of the disease around the world as late as the early 19th century.
It was theorized that "bad air," contaminated by the conjunction of planets, was responsible for the plague. Muslim scholars, on the other hand, claimed that the pandemic was a "martyrdom and mercy" from God, guaranteeing the faithful a place in paradise, although it was considered a punishment for infidels.
Although the first isolations were used in ancient times, the term trentine appeared in 1377 near Ragusa, when the crews of arriving ships were forced to wait in isolation for 30 days before going ashore. In 1448, the Venetian Senate passed a law extending the isolation period to 40 days (quarantine).