Historians

The Black Death/Plaque has been studied by historians since the outbreak. There are many theories, and as we learn more about science, some of the most widely held beliefs are being challenged. However, there still remains valuable historical evidence.

toc =Brief Lecture= From [|iHistory] media type="file" key="plague.mp3"

=Common Beliefs=

Lyle Svendsen
//University of Minnesota// October 1347, commercial ships sailed into Sicilian and Messianian ports, bringing goods from the far east, and something else. The ships were ridden with a mysterious disease, The Black Plague, which in a few short years decimated half the European population. The fact went unnoticed at the time that on the ships "the sea going" rats were also afflicted with a sickness. Because of the bad sanitation in Europe, the people were unable to "flea" from "The Black Death."

In the Early stages of the plague, the fleas bit the rats and then fleas passed it on the contaminated bood to human bite victims. In later stages the sickness was passed from person to person. The victims of the Bubonic plague had little chance of survival and very few came back from it. The afflicted had symptoms that were very distinctive. The main symptoms was a swelling of the lymph glands of the groin or armpits, filling with pus and turned black, accounting for the name "The Black Death." A high fever accompanied the swelling along with coughing up blood and a pink rash.

E.L. Skip Knox
//Boise State University//

Population
The best of many revised estimates still put the overall population loss in Europe at about one- third. This bears re-stating. The plague came to Europe in the fall of 1347. By 1350 it had largely passed out of western Europe. In the space of two years, one out of every three people was dead. Nothing like that has happened before or since.

These general numbers disguise the uneven nature of the epidemic. Some areas suffered little, others suffered far more. Here are some examples. Between 45% and 75% of Florence died in a single year. One-third died in the first six months. Its entire economic system collapsed for a time.

In Venice, which kept excellent records, 60% died over the course of 18 months: five hundred to six hundred a day at the height. Certain professions suffered higher mortality, especially those whose duties brought them into contact with the sick--doctors and clergy. In Montpellier, only seven of 140 Dominican friars survived. In Perpignan, only one of nine physicians survived, and two of eighteen barber-surgeons.

The death rate at Avignon was fifty percent and was even higher among the clergy. One-third of the cardinals died. Clement VI had to consecrate the Rhone River so corpses could be sunk in it, for there was neither time nor room to bury them.

Long-term population loss is also instructive. Urban populations recovered quickly, in some cases within a couple of years, through immigration from the countryside because of increased opportunities in the cities. Rural population though, recovered itself slowly, for peasants left their farms for the cities.

Hardest hit were special groups, such as the friars, who took a couple of generations to recover. In many areas, pre-plague population levels were not reached until the 1500s; in a few, not until the 1600s.

Economic Disruption
Cities were hit hard by the plague. Financial business was disrupted as debtors died and their creditors found themselves without recourse. Not only had the debtor died, his whole family had died with him and many of his kinsmen. There was simply no one to collect from.

Construction projects stopped for a time or were abandoned altogether. Guilds lost their craftsmen and could not replace them. Mills and other special machinery might break and the one man in town who had the skill to repair it had died in the plague. We see towns advertising for specialists, offering high wages.

The labor shortage was very severe, especially in the short term, and consequently, wages rose. Because of the mortality, there was an oversupply of goods, and so prices dropped. Between the two trends, the standard of living rose. . . for those still living.

Effects in the countryside were just as severe. Farms and entire villages died out or were abandoned as the few survivors decided not to stay on. When Norwegian sailors finally visited Greenland again in the early 15thc, they found in the settlements there only wild cattle roaming through deserted villages.

Whole families died, with no heirs, their houses standing empty. The countryside, too, faced a short-term shortage of labor, and landlords stopped freeing their serfs. They tried to get more forced labor from them, as there were fewer peasants to be had. Peasants in many areas began to demand fairer treatment or lighter burdens.

Just as there were guild revolts in the cities in the later 1300s, so we find rebellions in the countrside. The Jacquerie in 1358, the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381, the Catalonian Rebellion in 1395, and many revolts in Germany, all serve to show how seriously the mortality had disrupted economic and social relations.



Culture
As the chroniclers said, the plague touched everyone, rich and poor alike. The noted Florentine historian, Villani, wrote this: "And many lands and cities were made desolate. And the plague lasted until __" Villani left a blank at the end of the sentence, planning to fill in a date after the plague had abated. He never did. Villani died in 1348 from the plague.

The whole community of scholars suffered as universities and schools, usually located in regions hardest hit, were closed or even abandoned. Sixteen of the forty professors at Cambridge died.

Likewise in the institutions of the Church. The priests died and no one could hear confession. Bishops died, and so did their successors and even their successors.

The loss of life in such great numbers and to so gruesome a disease, brought despair everywhere. Why would God do this? and why could not His servants in the Church avert or mitigate His wrath?

"During this great epidemic of death [in Tuscany] more than eighty died of every hundred, and the air was so infested that death overtook men everywhere, wherever they might flee. And when they saw everybody dying they no longer heeded death and believed that the end of the world was at hand." The tone in this exerpt finds echoes throughout Europe. There were those indeed who believed this calamity marked the end of the world. Even after the crisis had passed, and the world remained, there were those who wondered why God should have so scourged the world.

Politics
The plague had no permanent effect on the course of politics, but it did take its toll. King Alfonso XI of Castile was the only reigning monarch to die of the plague, but many lesser notables died, including the queens of Aragon and France, and the son of the Byzantine emperor. Parliaments were adjourned when the plague struck, though they were reconvened. The Hundred Years' War was suspended in 1348 because so many soldiers died. But it started up again, soon enough.

The effect at local levels was more severe. City councils were ravaged. Whole families of local nobles were wiped out. Courts closed down and wills could not be probated.

But new courts were convened. The legal mess caused by so many deaths was eventually sorted out, and political life went on. Still, more than once you will read of a siege being lifted because of the plague, or of some principality falling into disarray because the prince died of the Black Death. =Alternate Theories=

David Herlihy
Brown University historian The European pestilence (dubbed the Black Death centuries later by northern European scholars) began in 1348 and ravaged the continent in intermittent waves for a century. In that time it killed millions; Herlihy estimates that in villages as far apart as England and Italy populations were reduced by as much as 70 or 80 percent. It is regarded as one of European history's watershed events. While not disputing that, Herlihy revisits much of the conventional wisdom about the demographic, cultural, and even medical impact of the plague. Indeed, he questions whether the Black Death even was plague: He notes that medieval chroniclers did not mention epizootics (mass deaths of rats or other rodents, which are a necessary precursor to plague) and did mention lenticulae or pustules or boils over the victims' bodies, which is not characteristic of plague. Herlihy observes that the illness showed some signs of bubonic plague, some of anthrax, and some of tuberculosis, and speculates that perhaps several diseases ``sometimes worked together synergistically to produce the staggering mortalities. Herlihy sees Europe before the Black Death as engaged in a ``Malthusian deadlock in which a stable population devoted most of its energy to production of food and subsistence goods. The precipitous population decline occasioned by the Black Death compelled Europe to devise labor-saving technologies that transformed the economy. In more controversial theories, Herlihy argues from the increased use of Christian given names that the Black Death caused the Christianization of what had formerly been a pagan society with a Christian veneer, and contends that in the wake of the pestilence Europeans turned to preventive measures such as birth control to check explosive population growth. A stimulating discussion of some rarely considered aspects of one of history's turning points.

Dr Thomas van Hoof
Utrecht University, Netherlands [|From BBC] Pollen and leaf data support the idea that millions of trees sprang up on abandoned farmland, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This would have had the effect of cooling the climate, a team from Utrecht University, Netherlands, says. The Little Ice Age was a period of some 300 years when Europe experienced a dip in average temperatures.

Dr Thomas van Hoof and his colleagues studied pollen grains and leaf remains collected from lake-bed sediments in the southeast Netherlands. Monitoring the ups and downs in abundance of cereal pollen (like buckwheat) and tree pollen (like birch and oak) enabled them to estimate changes in land-use between AD 1000 and 1500.

Dr Tim Lenton
Environmental scientist from the University of East Anglia, UK [|From BBC] "It is a nice study and the carbon dioxide changes could certainly be a contributory factor, but I think they are too modest to explain all the climate change seen."

And Professor Richard Houghton, a climate expert from Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, US, believes that the oceans would have compensated for the change.

"The atmosphere is in equilibrium with the ocean and this tends to dampen or offset small changes in terrestrial carbon uptake," he explained.

=Conspiracies=

The Jews are Burnt
On Saturday - that was St. Valentine's Day-they burnt the Jews on a wooden platform in their cemetery. There were about two thousand people of them. Those who wanted to baptize themselves were spared. [Some say that about a thousand accepted baptism.] Many small children were taken out of the fire and baptized against the will of their fathers and mothers. And everything that was owed to the Jews was cancelled, and the Jews had to surrender all pledges and notes that they had taken for debts. The council, however, took the cash that the Jews possessed and divided it among the working-men proportionately. The money was indeed the thing that killed the Jews. If they had been poor and if the feudal lords had not been in debt to them, they would not have been burnt. After this wealth was divided among the artisans some gave their share to the Cathedral or to the Church on the advice of their confessors.

Thus were the Jews burnt at Strasbourg, and in the same year in all the cities of the Rhine, whether Free Cities or Imperial Cities or cities belonging to the lords. In some towns they burnt the Jews after a trial, in others, without a trial. In some cities the Jews themselves set fire to their houses and cremated themselves.

The Jews Return to Strasbourg
It was decided in Strasbourg that no Jew should enter the city for a hundred years, but before twenty years had passed, the council and magistrates agreed that they ought to admit the Jews again into the city for twenty years. And so the Jews came back again to Strasbourg iii the year 1368 after the birth of our Lord.