Illustration of the Black Death from the
Toggenburg Bible (1411)
The
Black Death was one of the most devastating
pandemics in
human history, killing an estimated
75 to 200 million people and peaking in Europe in the years 1348–50
CE.
[1][2][3] Although there were several competing theories as to the
etiology
of the Black Death, analysis of DNA from victims in northern and
southern Europe published in 2010 and 2011 indicates that the pathogen
responsible was the
Yersinia pestis bacterium, probably causing several forms of
plague.
[4][5]
The Black Death is thought to have originated in the arid plains of central Asia, where it then travelled along the
Silk Road, reaching the
Crimea by 1346
[6]. From there, it was most likely carried by
Oriental rat fleas living on the
black rats that were regular passengers on
merchant ships. Spreading throughout the
Mediterranean and Europe, the Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60% of Europe's total population.
[7] All in all, the plague reduced the
world population from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million in the 14th century.
The aftermath of the plague created a series of religious, social,
and economic upheavals, which had profound effects on the course of
European history. It took
150 years for Europe's population to recover. The plague reoccurred occasionally in Europe until the 19th century.
Overview
Inspired by the Black Death,
The Dance of Death or
Danse Macabre, an allegory on the universality of death, is a common painting motif in the late medieval period.
Major outbreaks
There have been three major outbreaks of plague. The
Plague of Justinian in the 6th and 7th centuries is the first known attack on record, and marks the first firmly recorded pattern of
bubonic plague. From historical descriptions, as much as 40% of the population of
Constantinople
died from the plague. Modern estimates suggest half of Europe's
population died as a result of the plague before it disappeared in the
700s.
[8] After 750 CE major epidemic diseases did not appear again in Europe until the Black Death of the 14th century.
[9] The
Third Pandemic hit China in the 1890s and devastated India, but was confined to limited outbreaks in the west.
[10]
The Black Death originated in or near China and spread by way of the
Silk Road or by ship.
[10] It may have reduced
world population from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million by the year 1400.
[11]
The plague is thought to have returned at intervals with varying
virulence and mortality until the 18th century.
[12] On its return in 1603, for example, the plague killed
38,000 Londoners.
[13] Other notable 17th-century outbreaks were the
Italian Plague (1629–31); the
Great Plague of Seville (1647–52); the
Great Plague of London (1665–66);
[14] and the
Great Plague of Vienna (1679). There is some controversy over the identity of the disease, but in its virulent form, after the
Great Plague of Marseille in 1720–22,
[15] the
Great Plague of 1738 (which hit Eastern Europe), and the
Russian plague of 1770-1772,
it seems to have gradually disappeared from Europe. By the early
19th century, the threat of plague had diminished, but it was quickly
replaced by a new disease. The
Asiatic cholera was the first of several
cholera pandemics to sweep through Asia and Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries.
[16]
The 14th-century eruption of the Black Death had a drastic effect on
Europe's population, irrevocably changing the social structure, and
resulted in widespread persecution of minorities such as
Jews, foreigners,
beggars, and
lepers (see
Persecutions).
The uncertainty of daily survival has been seen as creating a general
mood of morbidity, influencing people to "live for the moment," as
illustrated by
Giovanni Boccaccio in
The Decameron (1353).
[17]
Naming
Medieval people called the catastrophe of the 14th century either the "Great Pestilence"' or the "Great Plague".
[18]
Writers contemporary to the plague referred to the event as the "Great
Mortality". Swedish and Danish chronicles of the 16th century described
the events as "black" for the first time, not to describe the late-stage
sign of the disease, in which the sufferer's skin would blacken due to
subepidermal hemorrhages and the extremities would darken with a form of
gangrene,
acral necrosis, but more likely to refer to black in the sense of glum or dreadful and to denote the terror and gloom of the events.
[19] The German physician and medical writer
Justus Hecker suggested that a mistranslation of the Latin
atra mors (terrible, or black, death) had occurred in Scandinavia when he described the catastrophe in 1832
[18] in his publication
"Der schwarze Tod im vierzehnten Jahrhundert". The work was translated into English the following year, and with the
cholera epidemic happening at that time,
The Black Death in the 14th century gained widespread attention and the terms
Schwarzer Tod and
Black Death became more widely used in the German- and English-speaking worlds, respectively.
Migration
Populations in crisis
Spread of the black death in Europe (1346–53)
In Europe, the
Medieval Warm Period ended some time towards the end of the 13th century, bringing the "
Little Ice Age"
[20] and harsher winters with reduced harvests. In northern Europe, new technological innovations such as the heavy
plough and the
three-field system were not as effective in clearing new fields for harvest as they had been in the
Mediterranean because the north had poor
clay soil,
[18]
and the potato, otherwise ideal for Northern Europe, was an American
crop unknown in Europe at the time. Food shortages and rapidly inflating
prices were a fact of life for as much as a century before the plague.
Wheat, oats, hay and consequently livestock were all in short supply.
Their scarcity resulted in
malnutrition, which increases susceptibility to infections due to weakened immunity. Consistently high
fertility rates,
at five or more children per woman throughout Europe, resulted in high
population growth rates and contributed to food shortages. In the autumn
of 1314, heavy rains began to fall, followed by several years of cold
and wet winters.
[18] The already weak harvests of the north suffered and the seven-year famine ensued. In the years 1315 to 1317, a catastrophic
famine, known as the
Great Famine,
struck much of northwest Europe. It was arguably the worst in European
history, reducing the population by perhaps more than 10 percent.
[18]
Infection and migration
The plague disease, generally thought to be caused by
Yersinia pestis, is
enzootic (commonly present) in populations of fleas carried by ground
rodents, including
marmots, in various areas including Central Asia, Kurdistan, Western Asia, Northern India and Uganda.
[21] Nestorian graves dating to 1338–9 near
Lake Issyk Kul in
Kyrgizstan
have inscriptions referring to plague and are thought by many
epidemiologists to mark the outbreak of the epidemic, from which it
could easily have spread to China and India.
[22] In October 2010, medical geneticists suggested that all three of the great waves of the plague originated in China.
[10] In China, the 13th century
Mongol conquest
caused a decline in farming and trading. However, economic recovery had
been observed in the beginning of the 14th century. In the 1330s a high
frequency of natural disasters and plagues led to widespread famine,
starting in 1331, with a deadly plague arriving soon after.
[23]
The 14th-century plague killed an estimated 25 million Chinese and
other Asians during the 15 years before it entered Constantinople in
1347.
[24] However, according to George Sussman, the first obvious medical description of plague in China dates to 1644.
[25]
The disease may have travelled along the Silk Road with
Mongol armies and traders or it could have come via ship.
[26]
By the end of 1346, reports of plague had reached the seaports of
Europe: "India was depopulated, Tartary, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia
were covered with dead bodies".
[27]
Plague was reportedly first introduced to Europe at the trading city of
Caffa in the
Crimea in 1347. After a protracted siege, during which the Mongol army under
Jani Beg was suffering the disease, they catapulted the infected corpses over the
city walls to infect the inhabitants. The
Genoese traders fled, taking the plague by ship into
Sicily and the south of Europe, whence it spread north.
[28]
Whether or not this hypothesis is accurate, it is clear that several
existing conditions such as war, famine, and weather contributed to the
severity of the Black Death.
European outbreak
'The seventh year after it began, it came to England and first began
in the towns and ports joining on the seacoasts, in Dorsetshire, where,
as in other counties, it made the country quite void of inhabitants so
that there were almost none left alive.
... But at length it came to Gloucester, yea even to Oxford and to
London, and finally it spread over all England and so wasted the people
that scarce the tenth person of any sort was left alive.' (Geoffrey the Baker, Chronicon Angliae) |
There appear to have been several introductions into Europe. It
reached Sicily in October 1347 carried by twelve Genoese galleys,
[29]
where it rapidly spread all over the island. Galleys from Caffa reached
Genoa and Venice in January 1348 but it was the outbreak in Pisa a few
weeks later that was the entry point to northern Italy. Towards the end
of January one of the galleys expelled from Italy arrived in
Marseille.
[30]
From Italy the disease spread northwest across Europe, striking
France, Spain, Portugal and England by June 1348, then turned and spread
east through Germany and Scandinavia from 1348–50. It was introduced in
Norway in 1349 when a ship landed at
Askøy, then spread to Bjørgvin (modern
Bergen) but never reached Iceland.
[31] Finally it spread to northwestern Russia in 1351. The plague spared some parts of Europe, including the
Kingdom of Poland and isolated parts of Belgium and the Netherlands.
[citation needed]
Middle Eastern outbreak
The plague struck various countries in the Middle East during the
pandemic,
leading to serious depopulation and permanent change in both economic
and social structures. As it spread to western Europe, the disease
entered the region from southern Russia also. By autumn 1347, the plague
reached
Alexandria in Egypt, probably through the port's trade with
Constantinople, and ports on the
Black Sea. During 1347, the disease travelled eastward to
Gaza, and north along the eastern coast to cities in
Lebanon,
Syria and
Palestine, including
Ashkelon,
Acre,
Jerusalem,
Sidon,
Damascus,
Homs, and
Aleppo. In 1348–49, the disease reached
Antioch.
The city's residents fled to the north, most of them dying during the
journey, but the infection had been spread to the people of Asia Minor.
[citation needed]
Mecca became infected in 1349. During the same year, records show the city of
Mawsil (Mosul) suffered a massive epidemic, and the city of Baghdad experienced a second round of the disease. In 1351
Yemen experienced an outbreak of the plague, coinciding with the return of
King Mujahid of Yemen from imprisonment in
Cairo. His party may have brought the disease with them from Egypt.
[citation needed]
Symptoms
An inguinal bubo on the upper thigh of a person infected with bubonic plague. Swollen lymph glands (buboes) often occur in the neck, armpit and groin (inguinal) regions of plague victims
Contemporary accounts of the plague are often varied or imprecise. The most commonly noted symptom was the appearance of
buboes (or gavocciolos) in the groin, the neck and armpits, which oozed pus and bled when opened.
[32] Boccaccio's description is graphic:
| “ |
In men and
women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours
in the groin or armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple,
others as an egg...From the two said parts of the body this deadly
gavocciolo soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions
indifferently; after which the form of the malady began to change, black
spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the
thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now minute and numerous. As the
gavocciolo had been and still was an infallible token of approaching
death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they showed themselves.[33] |
” |
Ziegler comments that the only medical detail that is questionable is
the infallibility of approaching death, as if the bubo discharges,
recovery is possible.
[34]
This was followed by acute fever and vomiting of blood. Most victims
died two to seven days after initial infection. David Herlihy identifies
another potential sign of the plague: freckle-like spots and rashes
[35] which could be caused by flea-bites.
Some accounts, like that of Louis Heyligen, a musician in
Avignon who died of the plague in 1348, noted a distinct form of the disease which infected the lungs and led to respiratory problems
[32] and which is identified with
pneumonic plague.
| “ |
It is said
that the plague takes three forms. In the first people suffer an
infection of the lungs, which leads to breathing difficulties. Whoever
has this corruption or contamination to any extent cannot escape but
will die within two days. Another form...in which boils erupt under the
armpits,...a third form in which people of both sexes are attacked in
the groin.[36] |
” |
Causes
Oriental rat flea (
Xenopsylla cheopis) infected with the
Yersinia pestis bacterium which appears as a dark mass in the gut. The foregut (
proventriculus),of this flea is blocked by a
Y. pestis biofilm; when the flea attempts to feed on an uninfected
host Y. pestis is regurgitated into the wound, causing infection.
Medical knowledge had stagnated during the Middle Ages. The most
authoritative account at the time came from the medical faculty in Paris
in a report to the king of France that blamed the heavens, in the form
of a conjunction of three planets in 1345 that caused a "great
pestilence in the air".
[38]
This report became the first and most widely circulated of a series of
"plague tracts" that sought to give advice to sufferers. That the plague
was caused by
bad air became the most widely accepted theory. The word
plague
had no special significance at this time, and only the recurrence of
outbreaks during the Middle Ages gave it the name that has become the
medical term.
The importance of hygiene was recognised only in the nineteenth
century; until then it was common that the streets were filthy, with
live animals of all sorts around and human parasites abounding. A
transmissible disease will spread easily in such conditions. One
development as a result of the Black Death was the establishment of the
idea of
quarantine in
Dubrovnik in 1377 after continuing outbreaks.
[39]
The dominant explanation for the Black Death is the
plague theory, which attributes the outbreak to
Yersinia pestis,
also responsible for an epidemic that began in southern China in 1865,
eventually spreading to India. The investigation of the pathogen that
caused the 19th-century plague was begun by teams of scientists who
visited Hong Kong in 1894, among whom was the French-Swiss
bacteriologist
Alexandre Yersin, after whom the pathogen was named
Yersinia pestis.
[40] The mechanism by which
Y. pestis was usually transmitted was established in 1898 by
Paul-Louis Simond and was found to involve the bites of fleas whose
midguts had become obstructed by replicating
Y. pestis
several days after feeding on an infected host. This blockage results
in starvation and aggressive feeding behaviour by the fleas, which
repeatedly attempt to clear their blockage by
regurgitation,
resulting in thousands of plague bacteria being flushed into the
feeding site, infecting the host. The bubonic plague mechanism was also
dependent on two populations of rodents: one resistant to the disease,
which act as hosts, keeping the disease endemic; and a second that lack
resistance. When the second population dies, the fleas move on to other
hosts, including people, thus creating a human epidemic.
[40]
The historian
Francis Aidan Gasquet, who had written about the 'Great Pestilence' in 1893
[41]
and suggested that "it would appear to be some form of the ordinary
Eastern or bubonic plague" was able to adopt the epidemiology of the
bubonic plague for the Black Death for the second edition in 1908,
implicating rats and fleas in the process, and his interpretation was
widely accepted for other ancient and medieval epidemics, such as the
Justinian plague that was prevalent in the
Eastern Roman Empire from 541 to 700 CE.
[40]
More recently other forms of plague have been implicated. The modern
bubonic plague has a
mortality rate of 30–75% and symptoms including fever of 38–41 °C (100–106 °F), headaches, painful, aching joints,
nausea and vomiting, and a general feeling of
malaise. If untreated, of those that contract the bubonic plague, 80 percent die within eight days.
[42] Pneumonic plague has mortality rate of 90 to 95 percent. Symptoms include fever, cough, and blood-tinged
sputum. As the disease progresses, sputum becomes free flowing and bright red.
Septicemic plague is the least common of the three forms, with a mortality rate near 100%. Symptoms are high fevers and purple skin patches (
purpura due to
disseminated intravascular coagulation).
In cases of pneumonic and particularly septicemic plague the progress
of the disease is so rapid that there would often be no time for the
development of the enlarged lymph nodes that were noted as buboes.
[43]
"Many modern scholars accept that the lethality of the Black Death
stemmed from the combination of bubonic and pneumonic plague with other
diseases and warn that every historical mention of 'pest' was not
necessarily bubonic plague...In her study of 15th-century outbreaks, Ann
Carmichael states that worms, the pox, fevers and dysentery clearly
accompanied bubonic plague."
[44]
Alternative explanations
Plague victims being blessed, shown with symptoms from a late 14th-century manuscript
Omne Bonum by James le Palmer
This interpretation was first significantly challenged by the work of
British bacteriologist J. F. D. Shrewsbury in 1970, who noted that the
reported rates of mortality in rural areas during the 14th-century
pandemic were inconsistent with the modern bubonic plague, leading him
to conclude that contemporary accounts were exaggerations.
[40]
In 1984 zoologist Graham Twigg produced the first major work to
challenge the bubonic plague theory directly, and his doubts about the
identity of the Black Death have been taken up by a number of authors,
including Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (2002),
David Herlihy (1997), and Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan (2001).
[40]
It is recognised that an
epidemiological
account of the plague is as important as an identification of symptoms,
but researchers are hampered by the lack of reliable statistics from
this period. Most work has been done on the spread of the plague in
England, and even estimates of overall population at the start vary by
over 100% as no census was undertaken between the time of publication of
the
Domesday Book and the year 1377.
[45] Estimates of plague victims are usually extrapolated from figures from the clergy.
In addition to arguing that the rat population was insufficient to
account for a bubonic plague pandemic, sceptics of the bubonic plague
theory point out that the symptoms of the Black Death are not unique
(and arguably in some accounts may differ from bubonic plague); that
transference via fleas in goods was likely to be of marginal
significance and that the DNA results may be flawed and might not have
been repeated elsewhere, despite extensive samples from other mass
graves.
[40]
Other arguments include the lack of accounts of the death of rats
before outbreaks of plague between the 14th and 17th centuries;
temperatures that are too cold in northern Europe for the survival of
fleas; that, despite primitive transport systems, the spread of the
Black Death was much faster than that of modern bubonic plague; that
mortality rates of the Black Death appear to be very high; that, while
modern bubonic plague is largely endemic as a rural disease, the Black
Death indiscriminately struck urban and rural areas; and that the
pattern of the Black Death, with major outbreaks in the same areas
separated by 5 to 15 years, differs from modern bubonic plague—which
often becomes endemic for decades with annual flare ups.
[40]
Walløe complains that all of these authors "take it for granted that
Simond's infection model, black rat → rat flea → human, which was
developed to explain the spread of plague in India, is the only way an
epidemic of
Yersinia pestis infection could spread", whilst pointing to several other possibilities.
[46]
A variety of alternatives to the
Y. pestis have been put forward. Twigg suggested that the cause was a form of
anthrax and
N. F. Cantor
(2001) thought it may have been a combination of anthrax and other
pandemics. Scott and Duncan have argued that the pandemic was a form of
infectious disease that characterise as
hemorrhagic plague similar to
Ebola.
Archaeologist Barney Sloane has argued that there is insufficient
evidence of the extinction of large number of rats in the archaeological
record of the medieval waterfront in London and that the plague spread
too quickly to support the thesis that the
Y. pestis was spread from fleas on rats and argues that transmission must have been person to person.
[47][48] However, no single alternative solution has achieved widespread acceptance.
[40] Many scholars arguing for the
Y. pestis
as the major agent of the pandemic suggest that its extent and symptoms
can be explained by a combination of bubonic plague with other
diseases, including
typhus,
smallpox
and respiratory infections. In addition to the bubonic infection,
others point to additional septicemic (a type of "blood poisoning") and
pneumonic (an airborne plague that attacks the lungs before the rest of
the body) forms of the plague, which lengthen the duration of outbreaks
throughout the seasons and help account for its high mortality rate and
additional recorded symptoms.
[32]
DNA evidence
Skeletons in a mass grave from 1720–1721 in
Martigues, France, yielded molecular evidence of the
orientalis strain of
Yersinia pestis,
the organism responsible for bubonic plague. The second pandemic of
bubonic plague was active in Europe from AD 1347, the beginning of the
Black Death, until 1750.
In October 2010, the open-access scientific journal
PLoS Pathogens published a paper by a multinational team who undertook a new investigation into the role of
Yersinia pestis in the Black Death following the disputed identification by Drancourt & Raoult in 1998.
[49] Their surveys tested for DNA and protein signatures specific for
Y. pestis
in human skeletons from widely distributed mass graves in northern,
central and southern Europe that were associated archaeologically with
the Black Death and subsequent resurgences. The authors concluded that
this new research, together with prior analyses from the south of France
and Germany
- "...ends the debate about the etiology of the Black Death, and unambiguously demonstrates that Y. pestis was the causative agent of the epidemic plague that devastated Europe during the Middle Ages."[50]
The study also found that there were two previously unknown but related
clades (genetic branches) of the
Y. pestis genome
associated with medieval mass graves. These clades (which are thought
to be extinct) were found to be ancestral to modern isolates of the
modern
Y. pestis strains
Y. p. orientalis and
Y. p. medievalis, suggesting the plague may have entered Europe in two waves. Surveys of
plague pit remains in France and England indicate the first variant entered Europe through the port of
Marseille
around November 1347 and spread through France over the next two years,
eventually reaching England in the spring of 1349, where it spread
through the country in three epidemics. Surveys of plague pit remains
from the Dutch town of
Bergen op Zoom showed the
Y. pestis
genotype responsible for the pandemic that spread through the Low
Countries from 1350 differed from that found in Britain and France,
implying Bergen op Zoom (and possibly other parts of the southern
Netherlands) was not directly infected from England or France in 1349
and suggesting a second wave of plague, different from those in Britain
and France, may have been carried to the Low Countries from Norway, the
Hanseatic cities or another site.
[50]
The results of the Haensch study have since been confirmed and
amended. Based on genetic evidence derived from Black Death victims in
the
East Smithfield
burial site in England, Schuenemann et al. concluded in 2011 "that the
Black Death in medieval Europe was caused by a variant of
Y. pestis that may no longer exist."
[51] A study published in
Nature in October 2011 sequenced the genome of
Y. pestis
from plague victims and indicated that the strain that caused the Black
Death is ancestral to most modern strains of the disease.
[5]
Consequences
Death toll
Citizens of
Tournai bury plague victims
Figures for the
death toll vary widely by area and from source to source as new research and discoveries come to light. It killed an estimated
75 to 200 million people in the 14th century.
[1][2][3] According to medieval historian
Philip Daileader in 2007:
The trend of recent research is pointing to a figure more like 45–50%
of the European population dying during a four-year period. There is a
fair amount of geographic variation. In Mediterranean Europe, areas such
as Italy, the south of France and Spain, where plague ran for about
four years consecutively, it was probably closer to 75–80% of the
population. In Germany and England ... it was probably closer to 20%.[52]
The most widely accepted estimate for the Middle East, including
Iraq,
Iran and
Syria, during this time, is for a death rate of about a third.
[53] The Black Death killed about 40% of Egypt's population.
[54] Half of Paris's population of 100,000 people died. In Italy,
Florence's population was reduced from 110–20 thousand inhabitants in 1338 down to 50 thousand in 1351. At least 60% of
Hamburg's and
Bremen's population perished.
[55] Before 1350, there were about 170,000 settlements in Germany, and this was reduced by nearly 40,000 by 1450.
[56]
In 1348, the plague spread so rapidly that before any physicians or
government authorities had time to reflect upon its origins, about a
third of the European population had already perished. In crowded
cities, it was not uncommon for as much as 50% of the population to die.
Europeans living in isolated areas suffered less, whereas monks and
priests were especially hard hit since they cared for the Black Death's
victims.
[57]
Persecutions
Renewed religious fervor and fanaticism bloomed in the wake of the
Black Death. Some Europeans targeted "various groups such as Jews,
friars, foreigners, beggars, pilgrims",
[58] lepers
[58][59] and
Roma, thinking that they were to blame for the crisis.
Lepers, and other individuals with skin diseases such as
acne or
psoriasis, were singled out and exterminated throughout Europe.
Because 14th-century healers were at a loss to explain the cause,
Europeans turned to astrological forces, earthquakes, and the poisoning
of wells by Jews as possible reasons for the plague's emergence.
[18]
The governments of Europe had no apparent response to the crisis
because no one knew its cause or how it spread. The mechanism of
infection and transmission of diseases was little understood in the 14th
century; many people believed only God's anger could produce such
horrific displays.
There were many attacks against
Jewish communities.
[60] In August 1349, the Jewish communities of
Mainz and
Cologne were exterminated. In February of that same year, the citizens of Strasbourg murdered 2,000 Jews.
[60] By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities were destroyed.
[61]
In culture
The Black Death had a profound impact on art and literature
throughout the generation that experienced it. Many of the most useful
manifestations of the Black Death in literature, to historians, comes
from the accounts of its chroniclers. Some of these chroniclers were
famous writers, philosophers and rulers such as
Boccaccio and
Petrarch.
Their writings, however, did not reach the majority of the European
population. Petrarch's work was read mainly by wealthy nobles and
merchants of Italian
city-states. He wrote hundreds of letters and vernacular poetry, and passed on to later generations a revised interpretation of
courtly love.
[62] There was one
troubadour, writing in the
lyric style long out of fashion, who was active in 1348.
Peire Lunel de Montech composed the sorrowful
sirventes "Meravilhar no·s devo pas las gens" during the height of the plague in
Toulouse.
They died by the hundreds, both day and night, and all were thrown in
... ditches and covered with earth. And as soon as those ditches were
filled, more were dug. And I, Agnolo di Tura ... buried my five children with my own hands ... And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.
—The Plague in Siena: An Italian Chronicle
[63]
How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their
kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next
world! The condition of the people was pitiable to behold. They sickened
by the thousands daily, and died unattended and without help. Many died
in the open street, others dying in their houses, made it known by the
stench of their rotting bodies. Consecrated churchyards did not suffice
for the burial of the vast multitude of bodies, which were heaped by the
hundreds in vast trenches, like goods in a ships hold and covered with a
little earth.
Recurrence
The Great Plague of London, in 1665, killed up to 100,000 people
The plague repeatedly returned to haunt Europe and the Mediterranean throughout the 14th to 17th centuries.
[65] According to Biraben, plague was present somewhere in Europe in every year between 1346 and 1671.
[66] The
Second Pandemic
was particularly widespread in the following years: 1360–63; 1374;
1400; 1438–39; 1456–57; 1464–66; 1481–85; 1500–03; 1518–31; 1544–48;
1563–66; 1573–88; 1596–99; 1602–11; 1623–40; 1644–54; and 1664–67.
Subsequent outbreaks, though severe, marked the retreat from most of
Europe (18th century) and northern Africa (19th century).
[67] According to Geoffrey Parker, "
France alone lost almost a million people to plague in the epidemic of 1628–31."
[68]
In England, in the absence of census figures, historians propose a
range of preincident population figures from as high as 7 million to as
low as 4 million in 1300,
[69] and a postincident population figure as low as 2 million.
[70]
By the end of 1350, the Black Death subsided, but it never really died
out in England. Over the next few hundred years, further outbreaks
occurred in 1361–62, 1369, 1379–83, 1389–93, and throughout the first
half of the 15th century.
[71]
An outbreak in 1471 took as much as 10–15% of the population, while the
death rate of the plague of 1479–80 could have been as high as 20%.
[72] The most general outbreaks in
Tudor and
Stuart England seem to have begun in 1498, 1535, 1543, 1563, 1589, 1603, 1625, and 1636, and ended with the
Great Plague of London in 1665.
[73]
Plague Riot in Moscow in 1771: During the course of the
city's plague, between 50 and 100 thousand people died, comprising
⅙ to
⅓ of its population.
In 1466, perhaps 40,000 people died of plague in Paris.
[74] During the 16th and 17th centuries, plague visited Paris for almost one year out of every three.
[75]
The Black Death ravaged Europe for three years before it continued on
into Russia, where the disease hit somewhere once every five or six
years from 1350 to 1490.
[76] Plague epidemics ravaged London in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625, 1636, and 1665,
[77] reducing its population by 10 to 30% during those years.
[78] Over 10% of
Amsterdam's population died in 1623–25, and again in 1635–36, 1655, and 1664.
[79] There were 22 outbreaks of plague in
Venice between 1361 and 1528.
[80] The plague of 1576–77 killed 50,000 in Venice, almost a third of the population.
[81] Late outbreaks in central Europe included the
Italian Plague of 1629–1631, which is associated with troop movements during the
Thirty Years' War, and the
Great Plague of Vienna in 1679. Over 60% of Norway's population died in 1348–50.
[82] The last plague outbreak ravaged
Oslo in 1654.
[83]
In the first half of the 17th century, a plague claimed some 1.7 million victims in Italy, or about 14% of the population.
[84] In 1656, the plague killed about half of
Naples' 300,000 inhabitants.
[85] More than 1.25 million deaths resulted from the extreme incidence of plague in 17th-century
Spain.
[86] The
plague of 1649 probably reduced the population of
Seville by half.
[87] In 1709–13, a
plague epidemic that followed the Great Northern War (1700–21,
Sweden v. Russia and allies)
[88] killed about 100,000 in Sweden,
[89] and 300,000 in Prussia.
[87] The plague killed two-thirds of the inhabitants of
Helsinki,
[90] and claimed a third of
Stockholm's population.
[91] Europe's last major epidemic occurred in 1720 in
Marseille.
[82]
Worldwide distribution of plague-infected animals 1998
The Black Death ravaged much of the
Islamic world.
[92] Plague was present in at least one location in the Islamic world virtually every year between 1500 and 1850.
[93] Plague repeatedly struck the cities of North Africa.
Algiers lost 30 to 50 thousand inhabitants to it in 1620–21, and again in 1654–57, 1665, 1691, and 1740–42.
[94] Plague remained a major event in
Ottoman
society until the second quarter of the 19th century. Between 1701 and
1750, thirty-seven larger and smaller epidemics were recorded in
Constantinople, and an additional thirty-one between 1751 and 1800.
[95] Baghdad has suffered severely from visitations of the plague, and sometimes two-thirds of its population has been wiped out.
[96]
Third plague pandemic
The Third plague pandemic (1855–1959) started in China in the middle
of the 19th century, spreading to all inhabited continents and killing
10 million people in India alone.
[97] Twelve plague outbreaks in Australia in 1900–25 resulted in well over
1,000 deaths,
chiefly in Sydney. This led to the establishment of a Public Health
Department there which undertook some leading-edge research on plague
transmission from rat fleas to humans via the bacillus
Yersinia pestis.
[98]
The first North American plague epidemic was the
San Francisco plague of 1900–1904, followed by another outbreak in 1907–08.
[99]
From 1944 through 1993, 362 cases of human plague were reported in the
United States; approximately 90% occurred in four western states:
Arizona, California, Colorado, and New Mexico.
[100] Plague was confirmed in the United States from 9 western states during 1995.
[101] Currently, 5 to 15 people in the United States are estimated to catch the disease each year—typically in western states.
[102][103]
The
plague bacterium could develop
drug-resistance and again become a major health threat. One case of a drug-resistant form of the bacterium was found in
Madagascar in 1995.
[104]
See also
