The Black Death
Everyone knows about the Black Death of the 14th Century; here we are nearly 700 years later, and cultural references to the catastrophe still abound. Arguments still rage, however, about just what kind of disease this was and what brought it about. In this session, we’ll investigate the probable origins and course of this most destructive of medieval pandemics, along with some thoughts about how that same destruction helped lead to a revolution in politics and economics.
Welcome once again to our wi lecture series um with our favorite Professor um just a couple housekeep things to start off with um I know I know a lot of you but I’m Richard caligan I’m the library direct benord and the first thing I always want to do
Is thank the friends of Al for sponsoring this program as they sponsor almost all of our programs through all their hard work um selling books and all the book sales um really pays off so with all the things we can do um and hopefully they’ll have another good book
Sale in April too um the this series is five uh this be five Sundays the next four Sundays we’re skipping President’s Day and the last Sunday I think will be February 25th um that’s we’ve done in the last few years work out pretty well
Um I will introduce Dan I know a lot of you have seen Dan before but just the Dan background Dan is Professor of uh in the legal studies department at Grandy University um he has a ba from University of Wisconsin a JD from University of Georgia and a PhD in
History from Boston College um he has lecture here a whole number of subjects so uh which actually if you go to our website um they all the we have whole list of the uh subjects that uh that he has done in the past um I am doing a webinar
Today um so people people could tune in to do this but the main thing we’re actually doing that for is so we can put it up on our website people miss this and come and watch and watch it later so um and I think we also had a question of
How do we come up with the subject of pandemics was actually a member of the friends who had suggested this I think last year you want to take credit so uh it was great so I think this will recover yeah I was happy that was the topic suggestion thank you and make sure
If you haven’t seen this coffee and tea and brown the delicious brownies all kinds of good things over there provided Again by the friends and uh we really appreciate that yes uh and I did want to say that if anybody does feel like getting up and getting a brownie and
Some coffee that’s okay uh you distracting or anything some people are so filled with easy and Joy by hearing about Matt die offs please be my guest I do that whenever you like and I I do want to say that I was happy to be given this topic
I’ve uh done a lot of research on diseases and their effect on history and I’m I’m looking forward to sharing some of those findings with you over the next few weeks this is probably the most complicated topic here right now the black de because as I’ll bring out in a
Little while the consequences of Black Death the causes of it are all in great academic dispute and what I’m going to share with you is as close to a consensus on this matter as we could get but all of this is still under some discussion and controversy so that’s
Just a disclaimer before we can get started uh and the other thing I wanted to say is that I’m on sabatical this semester so I haven’t been in front of live people for a while since early December so I’m a bit Rusty at the moment
But I think we the time to get to malaria I’ll my old next week put malaria so we so we begin uh with our very first slide uh and I think probably the the way to introduce this topic is by way of contrast the Black Death occurred in the
Middle of the 14th century the century before that was the 13th century and that was the century where things were more or less pretty good in Western Europe there was a general warming of the climate at the time growing seasons were increasing many people who worked the land were increasing production
Extending acreage into more marginal areas of Western Europe that had not been cultivated before a great deal of food was being and in addition to Rising population it may be partly because of it there was a larger demand for goods and services so uh people who were in
All manner of Pursuits in production began to do better in the 13th century universities were growing there was more philosophy this was the great age of Thomas aquinus in the articulation of Catholic philosophy that is still going strong today all of that had its roots in the 13th century all was pretty good
Until we go to the first Slide the year 1315 and in that year all of a sudden for reasons we still don’t quite understand it began to rain and it rained a lot and the rain was so awful and so continuing that crops at the being planted typically rotted in the
Ground during the Spring planting season but also in the late summer planting season acreage in production as much of it as there was was next to useless because so many CRS were unusable couldn’t be harvested in the first place wine if you were able to grow The Grapes
Began to acquire this nasty buzz on the grapes which meant that you work on to get decent wine out of that and in addition to that we go to the next Slide the because there was so much rain and so little sunshine the Great Salt panss along the coast of Northern Europe began
To be completely unproductive because you need sun in order to heat the salt in order to make sure that it evaporates properly to give you usable salt and if you don’t have usable salt you can’t season food you can’t preserve food you can’t make cheese all of that was
Increasingly impossible with 1315 and to make matters worse it was just the same in 13 16 these were the two Worst Years in terms of rainfall in the last 700 years a more rainfall than those two years that an comparable two-year period uh since the the late 13th century and
The consequence was people began to die and we don’t know how many people died of starvation it could be as much as 15% of the European population during this Great Famine of 1315 through 1317 if you survived it and this is why I bring it
Up at the moment chances Sor if you were young during the Great Famine you would be a person with less of a positive strong immune response to various conditions maybe without malnutrition would be be weakened for the rest of your life and many people have brought
Up the theory at least that the reason so many Europeans died beginning in 1347 of the Great Plague is that their immune responses many of them were weak to begin with because of this terrible malnutrition and if you go to the next slide one of the results of this uh in
Folklore I at least According to some people is the experience that so many parents have of watching their children die and in some cases letting their children go into the forest to pend for themselves maybe Gathering acorns or whatever they can find because there was nothing at home to feed them the pain
The trauma of that memory may have given rise to the fol tail Handel and brittle which was written down finally by various sources most memly by the Grims in the 19th century uh that’s a matter of conjecture at least but to me it seems fairly likely so what we’re
Dealing with by the 14th century is what may have been weakened population going into the middle of 14th century and you were also dealing with a cooling climate uh shorter growing Seasons beginning in 1300 and the recipe was there for what could be a very serious demographic situation indeed if something should
Make that worse and of course what made it worse was the greatest pandemic uh of our time uh at least in the last Thousand Years uh and that was the Black Death now how did this happen well nobody really knows for sure this is a matter of some dispute as we’ll get back
To in a little while but what we do know is this we got a lot in common with those people in the 14th century who began to die in such great numbers from the famine and one of the things we have in common is that our bodies are
Inhabited uh if we go to the next slide which we may not be able to do because the laptop is not inhabited but that’s okay because it’s not an essential slide uh it just shows a bacteria uh now a lot of you can probably guess the number of
Bacteria it Happ in the human body but when anybody care to take a stab at it how many bacteria at this moment are flourishing in your bodies trillion yeah 39 trillion about 39 trillion bacteria are living very contentedly in your bodies and these are one celled organisms of course the most
Successful of all organisms in the history of Life on this planet by a wide mark our bacteria and viruses and we’ve got all of them in our bodies 39 trillion bacteria and way more than that in terms of viruses so as far as viruses go uh we got 380 trillion viruses in our
Bodies so what that means is all human bodies our bodies as well as those in the 14th century are really great Battlegrounds between bacteria and viruses the latter making war on the former every moment every second of Our Lives from the day we’re born until the
Day we die and even afterwards they keep it up for a while on our corpses which is kind of a nice thought we don’t die completely the bacteria are still there for a little while longer uh and now some of those bacteria as you know uh do
Good things for our bodies some of them do not so good things but the upshot of it is that when you talk about the the human body our body mass about half of that is in us it’s bacteria and viruses and 99% of the genes that inhabit our
Bodies are not our genes they’re in bacteria in viruses and that’s just the fact of the matter that we all live with and it was that way in the 14th century as well but there’s one kind of bacterium that does not naturally inhabit the human body and that is the
Next bacterium we’re about to show on the next slide uh and that is of course the next slide and that as we’re about to see is a very special bacterium indeed and that is your CIA pesus named after the man who first identified it in the late 19th century it goes without
Saying that nobody in the 14th century knew anything about bacteria obviously you couldn’t see them so this particular bacterium was identified by a French scientist it’s named after him Yia pesus or W pesus and this is one of many many many many millions of different kinds of
Bacteria and it happens to live quite naturally and quite contentedly over the course of many generations in various animals it’s not native to us but it’s native to other animals and one of the animals is on the next Slide oh this is the original home of yourap pesus look how beautiful that is that’s the tanan valley of Kyan and we traced wine pestes to that area which is where a lot of its host also there conveniently enough so to see our first host the natural home of white pest the
Bacterium we go to the next slide and that is the great Asian Geral some of you have about Geral in your life uh those are just DBL this is the great Jal it’s tce as large as the kind of JAL you might have on your home and
They live in Burrows on the ground all over Central Asia including pistan so why pesus would live in the the bodies of this Jal and in the next slide why pest also live uh in a very beautiful animal that’s the Marmet uh enjoying a contemplated moment here somewhere in
Central Asia so white pestil could live in the Marmet and in the Geral and also in other animals as well and based upon what we know about modern populations this bacterium white pesus can live for many many generations in these animals without necessarily killing them over many thousands of years they’ve
Developed some resistance to the worst effects of white pesus and that’s how white pesus can inhabit these bodies just as so many bacteria inhabit our bodies and normally there wouldn’t be much of a problem until periodically what might happen is that for some reason these animals marids Geral also
Other animal as well where white Petes can live find some reason to need to leave their native homes uh and for example if they got to leave the values of Kyan what might happen is those rodents begin to live among other populations other rodents that over time
Have not had a chance to build up resistance to White pesus and when that happens you might have rodent die offs now if we go to the next slide uh the reason these die offs happen is because why pest can travel and it travels very efficiently via this
Animal here and that is a Zeno Kus or xenops xenops kopus and that’s a flea and as you know fleas are remarkable creatures I’ll just give you some reason to admire please not that you need you already do but this particular flea xenop Pius can jump 150 yards imagine
That this Fleet can jump 150 yards and your average flee can jump 2 feet in the air uh so if we could jump with that kind of skill basic upon our body weight and our height uh 2 feet for the flea uh would be something like
Like a mile for us that’s how brilliant they are and how effective they are and this particular flea Zsa kopus also happens to be a fairly good home for a white pest it’s the same bacterium that lives in the rodents and what happens typically is if you got rodents who are accustomed
To white pus where white PES live for a long time if they come in contact with populations of rodents that have no experience of white pesus this flea uh bringing in the white pest from the bloodstream of its host can very efficiently jump from dead host to new
Live host and if those new live hosts have not been infected yet then those new live hosts can die very quickly what happens with the xops kopis is as they drink in the wus from the bloodstream of the host the wus congregates in the gut of zenopa kopice to flea and white
Pestes will secrete a Kind of Blue like substance which binds other white pestis other bacteria to different bacteria of why of Y pesus and the consequence is they become a glutenous mass andsa kopus the rle as it came to be called cannot live live very long if that mass is in
Its gut they can’t get any nutrition they begin to ravenously become hungry they need to feed and feed and feed and the more they feed the more they regurgitate of course why pesus into the bloodstream of its new host after jumping off from an old one that had
Died and that new host will now be infected with w pesus and if it doesn’t have much resistance over time very quickly the new hostes will die in the select office the poli’s got to find a new they’ll infected new host so on and so on and what you happen what you have
Happened it’s a great die off of rodents and that’s going to happen if the population used to it where white white pen is emic has to leave its home and become immersed in a population of of non-infected white pesus rodents those populations become infected now you’ve
Got Dio and the consequence of course is that if you too many roads dying off maybe some of those hosts where where the plea have was still been living uh will give rise to a jumping up of the plea from a dead host on to human beings
Where they can in fact live for a while and where they’ll do the same thing regurgitate wi pesus into the bloodstream of its new human host now we’ll go to our and of course the next slide will depict an animal you’ve been waiting forly and there is an example of a host
Where the flea lives pretty well uh until of course why peasant was injected and the host dies and they need to find the fle do’s new host and that’s the Asian black rat ratus ratus which is native to the subcontinent native to India but spread many many thousands of
Years ago to Western Europe and also parts of Africa so by the time the 14th century came around there were not only populations of black rats in Central Asia our ratest ratus the black rat also lived in Europe w with great uninfected populations to be infected as rodents began to live leave
Kyan in Central Asia to live among uninfected black rats and that’s how the infection began to spread to them uninfected populations now why did all these rodents leave K stand in Central Asia where they had long been and where life peses have long lived endemically we don’t know for sure but probably the
Leading theory is there was terrible drought and many of these rents couldn’t live as they had been accustomed to living there that’s where they began to migrate and that’s how the infection began to spread from endemic populations to populations that have not been infected yet and those populations died
And the fleet had to jump and jump and jump in more and more rodents and eventually people began being infected rates rattis is not what you see on your walks around Boston and Somerville uh if you’re like me and you normally see Rats from time to time what
You see as you walk around it’s not ratus ratus it’s our ratus rigus uh the Norway rat the brown rat so when you see that rat don’t get angry at it that’s not the plague rat this is the plague rat rat rat now here’s what I wanted to
Point out we go to the next slide uh this of course is Joe E Ross and Fred Gwyn uh and they start in car 54 Where Are You and uh I bring that up because there was no academic dispute about car 54 Where Are You uh that was a
Show that we all know we all agreed was on television between 1961 and 196 AG we all agreed that was hly funny and we all agreed that Fred Gwyn uh became a star with that show and went on to be a Herman Monster uh Following the show so
There’s no dispute about any of that uh but the same is not true about the black de uh everything I’ve just said is disputed as I said there people have different theories about it but I still think that’s the best theory about how this happened so sometime in the 1330s
Roden populations had to leave and they began to follow the trade routes especially ratus ratus which does very well living among humans really loves human grain uh there’s a theory that maybe the R Le also began to flourish on camels which would mean they could spread pretty quickly along trade routs
As the time went on but certainly ratus ratet became a very very effective vector and probably it’s true that when it comes to infecting human beings the immediate responsible Vector with the flea was from ratus ratus so now that we know that all of this is still in
Dispute we can go to the next slide and we can see how this began to spread elsewhere so from uh the trade routs of Central Asia if you follow the the spreading Black Mass here uh it spreads South it spreads to the uh East and it also began to spread to the West
Beginning in the late 1330s and into the 1340s and wherever wi pesus began to infect human beings human beings began to die in great numbers there was no defense against this there was no experience with it at least for the past Thousand Years nobody knew what to do
And the consequence was that literally millions of people died in China they got in South Asia and by the early 1340s word began to spread to Western Europe that something was killing people they didn’t know what it was they couldn’t explain it but rumors of mass death
Began to spread into the cities of Western Europe nobody knew if it would get there nobody knew what it was nobody knew how we would get there but it did arrive and the leading EXP if we go to the next slide for how it did arrive has
To do with the Gans who had a trading fort on the Crimean Peninsula by which they would trade with the tatars often called the Mongols to the north they’ve been there a while and periodically they gotten in very hostile circumstances with the tatars and the year
1347 was no exception so late 1346 early 1347 a Mongol Army began to besiege The Fortress of kafa now fed roia on the Crimean Peninsula and The Siege went on four months and the genuine Garrison these Italians began to notice that Mongols were dying in front of their
Walls the Great Plague had spread to these Mongols in the Crimea and they had to lift The Siege a lot of you have probably heard that the Mongols catapulted infected bodies from myus Over the walls we don’t know if that’s true that might have been something made up
Over time there that would have been completely unnecessary for the spread of the plague all you needed were rats to penetrate The Garrison of Kaa which would have been very easy for rats to do why pesus now that it was lurking among rats would have flourished among them
The black rat ratus ratus doesn’t live much more than a year but in the course of a year I I think a female rat could have as many as eight liters with a couple dozen rats in each lit they could liberate so as many of them would die from White pesus there
Were still plenty of living posts for white pesus in barle to Jump onto and any of those rats that got into Kaa would begin to infect The Garrison and people in the Garrison began to get sick and they got sick because of the bite of csilla kavis the flea none of them would
Have felt the bite but as soon as the bite happened although they couldn’t see the flea they couldn’t experience it they began to notice tragically after maybe about a week to two days of being bitten great inflammations sometimes bulis sometimes the size of an apple in extreme cases those came to be called
Bbos they were horribly painful almost as if you were being stabbed wherever they appear and associated with that would be excruciating headaches fever chills would be impossible to move after a while you’d have to take to your bed you’d have no choice and after those fos began to appear death would often follow
Within a week maybe a little bit more once you receive this play came be call bubonic play the chances of survival little less than 50% if the plague struck your lungs and you began coughing among other people now you’ve got pneumonic plague that could spread through the air through
Coughing and if you got the plague that way your chance of survival was effectively zero you were going to die and that’s still True to this day to get pneumonic plague without antibiotics it’s no hope ponic plague you might live pneumonic plague you wouldn’t but whatever was happening to those men in
Kaa in the Garrison they now knew they had to get away so the living the healthy and the sick all together piled on the ships well over a dozen ships left Crimea began to go to the Black Sea passing through the streets of the bosur the Dells where Constantinople was
Infecting the dardel along the way and it seems very likely that wherever those ships went beginning in Kaa wherever they knocked on the way black rats would have join the crew as they always did to go to the next Slide the way to prevent that would be simply to have a R guard
On the ropes leading up from the warf to the ship these are very common in ships around the world today they didn’t hug them in the 14th century so right up the ropes the rfts would go and men who had have been infected before might be infected who knows how many were
Infected in these Crews by the time they got into the aan sea and then into the Eastern Mediterranean maybe half maybe more than half it would have been terrifying to be on those ships you see people around you begin to die and begin to die in extreme cruciating ways
Horrible ways inexplicable to anybody but they had to get home they had to get back to Italy and so they did the best they could to make sure the ship could go not knowing that in each one of those bodies wherever white pesus went white blood cells would do what they were
Supposed to do go to the point of infection go to near where the Boos would eventually form and try to kill this new toxin that had enter the body through white pesus the white cell white blood cells did their best but the membrane of the white pesus bacterium is
Resistant to white blood cells so instead of Killing Them White pesus was allowed to spread into the lymphatic system by which it would go throughout the body and this was happening to infected people on all of those ships what they were becoming were no longer Sailors no longer people they were
Becoming effectively plague tissue simple reservoirs for the plague and there was a little hope for them antibiotics will kill all this nothing they had and so by the time they got to missina probably most of the people on those ships were sick or dead some got off the ships very quickly
People in massina and Sicily and the other Italian ports where the ships would went knew that they had to keep people on the ships but they could never do that with 100% accuracy uh people left the ships rats left the ships and the consequence was missina which struck
The first city in Western Europe by the terrible black death and they began to die and Masina began to empty out and by late 1347 early 1348 cities along the Italian Coast wherever the ships would go from Points East began to die as well craze dogs began to run wild on deserted
Streets as death struck and death came quickly a six stragglers from the city trying to save themselves would crawl off into the country country side if they were already infected they would die in the woods if they weren’t they would hope for the best somewhere beyond the cities where the rats were
Effectively congregated and where the disease spread more effectively but going into the countryside was not full proof he could still die that way the black rat ratus ratus enjoys living among us it’s not like ratus nigus the brown rat Brown R likes to live off to
The side they like to dig little holes by human houses live there our ratus ratus thing among us and the closest the black rat was D the more likely the infection was going to spread and there seem to be no stopping it we go to the
Next slide uh this is an example imagine scene of 1348 in Italy or Sicily as people began to die in the very streets now I want to read to you now an account given by a notary somebody who be responsible for a will for example taking somebody’s last Testament or
Registering a contra cont and this was a notary in mesina who happened to get off one of those ships I think while he was still healthy and he talked about what it was like in mesina as the plague first struck this is Gabriela deusi alas
He said our ships enter the port but of a thousand Sailors hardly 10 are spared some of us reached our homes our Kindred woe to us for we cast at them the darts of death all death cruel bitter death lamenting our misery we feared to
Fly yet we dared not remain there was no hope there was nothing to do and so it spread it spread into Florence one of the great cities of the 14th century we think maybe 80% of the people in Florence died of the Black Death 80% people were living so closely together
Infection was so easy there uh maybe 20% of the population survived uh and in Florence uh about to say we get one of the most memorable descriptions of the play this comes from agnolo theur Florence in Sienna and here nearby Sienna and here he is describing the
Plague in Sienna where he happened to be at the time uh and I aolia oh here begin here father abandoned child wife husband one brother abandoned another brother and so they died and none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship and they died by the hundreds day and
Night and I agnolia detura buried my five children with my own hands what was to be done beside fleeing and hoping for the best very little you go to the next slide speaking of Sienna where agnolia gura happened to be uh this is the unfinished Nave of the great
Cathedral of Sienna that Cathedral had been being built by the time the Black Death struck in 1348 for about 150 years they were still laboring on an addition to the Nave but there were too few workmen to complete it or even go to work every day so they sto work on the
Nave uh that was in 1348 and they never begun to finish it it was left almost as it was uh in the 14th century if you go to Sienna you can see that the plague didn’t seem to play favorites it killed rich and it killed poor among those it kill was the young
Princess of England only 14 and she had been sent to Spain to marry and I can’t believe she would have looked forward to this the prince of Castile named P theu so she’s on a way to marry Pedro the Cru she lands in Bordeaux she had an entire ship filled with her possessions
For truso it’s all in the ship and they get to Bordeaux and the rumors of the plague by then had reached England they didn’t know it had gotten to Bordeaux but it had gotten to Bordeaux uh it was all over the city and everybody’s word we have to save the princess she’s got
To go to Castile so they took her out of Bordeaux they put her up in the countryside alas it wasn’t enough she was one of the last in the neighborhood to be infected by the plague and she died at the age of 14 among those who were infected
Happened to be P the tr’s father I think he was Alonso the 11th he died of the plague uh other Lords other rulers did so too one who did not die if you go to the next slide was a very special figure um that’s Clement I 6 he’s the pope and
Remember this is 1348 by the time the play gets to Marseilles in southern France and places like Leon and so it got to Avignon and that’s where the pope happened to be this is still the middle of the 14th century and cl the 6 did not
Want to get sick a quarter of the papal Court died very quickly of the bonic plague in the pneumonic variety that sometimes followed in it way the way he survived was he famously sat day after day after day after day during the Great infection in front of two fires and that
Actually seemed to work if you had a fire going all the time that would probably take care of the R Le uh probably ratus ratus wouldn’t want to be around too much and he did survive the plague would have been an uncomfortable summer in 1348 he been hot all the time
But he did survive another thing that seemed to work although nobody knew was to make sure that if the plague struck your city that anybody in a household where the plague had struck ought to be kept inside and not allowed to roam around and that it wasn’t tried in many
Places but it was tried for a while in Milan and it’s no accident that the death Tolen Milan was much less than Sienna Florence and Rome uh fewer died there and it was because even in the Black Death even in 1348 they adopted rather rudimentary quarantine techniques and they perfected those techniques so
By 1377 which was another terrible plag outbreak much fewer died because they actually took steps in any port any major trading Depot to make sure that any ship approaching stayed in the port without getting aore and they eventually settled on 40 days and that’s how we got the word quarantine from
1377 the idea was PIR in Milan and the very first quarantine was regusa now dnik part of the Venetian possessions in 1377 venz adopted it and that would work if you were willing to do that if you have the city measures and the pracy in
Place to enforce it uh but that was a bit of the future this is still 1348 1349 and none of them was going to have a chance among those who died we think probably 60% of the Western European population the numbers keep going up the more research we do but among those who
Died was the semi mythical Laura for whom Petra invented a Sonet form and he wrote his famous son for Laura we don’t know exact who Laura was but the evidence leads to the conclusion that the main candidate for Laura did die during the black death and she was a
Noal woman and so it struck rich and poor alike but intriguingly there was a population of people who faed better if they got Bubonic plague nothing was going to help if you got pneumonic plague but Bubonic plague spread by the bite of the ratle and resulting in those
Boos would give you a better chance of survival if you happen to have a particular genetic marker that was only identified last year in 2022 so what researchers did in England was they went into burial grounds and they found pre-plague burials they found plague burials and post-plague burials
And they found that there was a big difference uh that there’s a particular marker called ER 2 and if you had both alals of those of that particular marker you were more likely to survive than those who didn’t based upon the DNA profiles of people in those burial sites
Uh and what they found was that before 1347 maybe 40% of the population had uh both markers or at least one marker but after 1347 over 50% of the population did it’s one of the most breathtakingly quick examples of naal selection in history and it seem to show that that
Has something to do with your chances of survival if you think get bonic plague your chances probably work much better than 50% probably worse than 50% but that genetic Mark heal and we know that much but we still have a great deal of research to do all we know is that the
Death toll was absolutely horrible now nobody could explain it nobody knew about the rley nobody knew about why of course but they had various theories and one Theory probably you’ve been thinking of is that right before the Black Death 1345 just two years before Kaa was struck by the rats coming from the
Mongol Invaders who were laying Siege to the city 1345 it happened that the planet Saturn was in the constellation of Aquarius along with Mars and Jupiter and you’re all thinking the same thing well if that happens then that probably cause the air they become deadly as Jupiter Drew up
Evil Vapors and Mars ignited them causing noxious hair to spread over the earth that could have been it that was one Theory but it was one thing to have a theory what caused it what do you do if it happens now as the pet and by the way
They never called the black de going be calling that for another 300 years uh but they call the great pum so the great death now what you could do uh if you were struck by it and a doctor was willing to visit you maybe you take the
Doctor’s advice uh and what the doctor might say is well bad air caus this inflame bad air then the thing to do is probably just go out and breathe more bad air maybe that will help so they sometimes would advise you to get out of
Bed and go breath in front of a latrine uh so maybe that would help you a little bit uh if that didn’t help and sometimes it didn’t strangely enough what they might do is find with the booos were and they would Lance the Boos which be indescribably painful and probably would
Do nothing but let the infection spread probably would do nothing at all uh they they were very much concerned with trying to prevent further spread they couldn’t do much about the victims although they tried but in order to make sure that she wouldn’t get the plague
One piece of advice was make sure you don’t have open windows so the bad air doesn’t get in the first place probably that would do a little more good than harm but it certainly would have stopped the spread that the rats would get in one way or another and
Unless with a real quarantine probably that was going to be much more effective than doing nothing and uh unfortunately medical advice at the time was probably not much better than doing nothing and in fact probably a lot worse than doing nothing there wasn’t much they could do
The best thing that anybody ever did as far as I’m concerned what pope clth six burning the fires uh that would seem to work but not everybody could do that and we’re going to get around one thing they did say though was that oh once you if
You wanted to make sure you didn’t get the plague uh make sure that you didn’t take a bath because if you took baths what that would mean is the pores in your skin would open and that would let the bad air in be more likely you get
Sick that way uh so there wasn’t much of a customer taking baths frequently before the Black Death became even less frequent taking baths frequently after the black death and that would that would change really until the 19th century so uh out of all this advice Burnie fires probably was the best but
Uh I only know one person who adopted that Clement the 6 more about him in a little while so the next question is what are going to be the consequences of this well if you go to the next slide one thing that a lot of people I think
Wrongly assume is that when people died of the black death and tens of millions did maybe as much as 60% of the population all people would do is take the bodies and just talk them in a grave they wouldn’t do that if they could possibly help it there were Mass plague
Fits we find them all the time Mass plague pits all over Western Europe where the bodies would go but they were very careful to bury the bodies as they would if they were getting decent individualized burials and that is east to west so the head the the feet to the east uh the
Head facing this way towards the east um and and that that essentially is the way European bodies had always been buried and that’s the way they tried to do it so you notice all these bodies are buried in the same direction uh they weren’t just tossed in so there was
Still human decency there was still a sense of reverence for passing even at the height of this epidemic they did the best they could they couldn’t always do things as well as they like to have done there would get to be a point where there weren’t as many people who wanted
To engage in this sort of activity bearing the dead people feared infection of course from dead bodies so they have to pay people to come in and do this specially and in Florence they were called the bikini b e c h h i n e I think and these
Were very poor people of from the countryside and they’d be brought in and they were responsible for bearing the dead at Great risk to themselves and a lot of people in Florence were just as afraid of the bikini as they were of the plague because some of them with no
Police no kind of order everything have broken down would feel free to engage with bvery uh after bearing the bodies any way you look at it these are horrific times to be alive in so the next slide we’ll show you the worst of it so talking about how you prevent the
Plague and what you do about it with no knowledge of antibiotics and no effective means at their disposal to deal with this completely unprecedented situation there hadn’t been a great plague like this since the 6th Century ad the days of Emperor Justinian uh when all too many Western European Christians
Did would blame Jews and you began to see that especially in 1348 and especially in France the idea would be that if Jews were accustomed as many Western Europeans Christians thought they were to needing human infant blood for the Passover ceremony to make sure that uh the matu was prepared properly
If that was the custom if that was the belief then it wasn’t a big step from there to believing that Jews were responsible for this contagion or that God was angry at Christians for tolerating Jews and that’s why this had happen so one theory was Jews were
Poisoning the wells and that’s how the plague was spreading nobody was blaming the rats they were blaming Jews uh in the other theory was God is angry and so this is happening to us we must punish Jews to earn God’s favor so whichever one of those you believe the consequence was
Devastating for the Jewish community of Western Europe it began in Chalo and in southern France where Jewish neighborhoods the customary pollute getto was burned To The Ground by Christians and it spread from there to uh basil in Switzerland where the Jews of the city in January of 1349 were all
Taken to an island in the Ry a special structure was built the structure was burned with all the Jews in the city in it uh burn to death and it continued ultimately in Strasburg one of the largest cities in South uh Eastern France and in Strasburg the meran community was quick to point
Out that there’s no plague here the pthos doesn’t spread here maybe we’ll Escape it but conversely by pred reasoning the city fathers and especially the Bishops in Strasburg decided if you want to make sure the plague doesn’t get here the thing to do is kill the Jews burn them and so what
They did was that gathered the Jews together gave them a choice conversion or death some Tove themselves and their family chose to convert most didn’t some chose to burn themselves or kill themselves rather than convert but those who didn’t do either one of those choices to go to the next slide were
Taken to a point that is now right outside the Strasburg opera house which you see there uh and there another winess structure was burnt the Jews were gathered together over 1500 them and they could actually see the structure being built the P being built in front
Of them where they would burn and all of them were burned burned to death and the idea was this will save us and two weeks later the plague came to statur killed thousands of them Clement the 6 the pope to his eternal credit spoke up and said murdering Jews is senseless they’re
Dying like we are and anybody with their eyes open could see that CL the 6 wasn’t listen to and all too often Bishops and Cardinals cooperated with this some who stood up for Jews happened to be Merchants who were doing business with them and sometimes princes who like taxing their Jewish population were
Afraid of losing their taxes but too often they were drowned out and it didn’t help matters that the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV announced at the highly the pandemic the end of 1348 as it began to spread into Germany that property left by dead Jews could be
Taken by anybody who showed up enough to claim it in time to claim it and that only added to the problem this was the most horrible series of prams in Western Europe against Jews uh until the Holocaust until the middle of the 20th century and speaking of that by a Savage
Horrible tragic irony one of the very few places in Europe that wasn’t badly hit by the plague happened to be Poland because what happened was the plague kind of went in a cycle like a circle so up Italy Southern France England where it struck very hard uh the low
Countries Scandinavia then into Germany and it didn’t quite Miss Poland but it didn’t hit Poland very hard so many Jews were suffering anyway in Germany uh many of them were welcomed into Poland which was preserved from the plag and their descendants would be there practically 600 years later when the
German Army showed up uh of the Polish population Millions I descent up from people who left Germany during the plague and in other parts of the Middle Ages that was one response another response we go to the next slide to tr to trigger some favor from God was one
Of the more famous responses of the black de and those were the flatulence this happened in various ways in various parts of Western Europe but if you wanted to be a flatulent one common thing to do was to ritually clil yourself for 333 days approximating the
The lifetime of Christ 33 and a thir days and the way it would work is for 33 and A3 days you would follow a leader somebody who would gather you together town after town after town and wherever you stop you would strip like these men out so that your chest and back were
Bear and the first thing you do when you got to the town is kneel begin flailing yourself and then at some point sometime there be hundreds of them in one group you’d all spray Eagles on the ground and one person at the end of the line would
Start uh whipping the people all down the line then that person would stop and the next person would whip the next people down the line and eventually you’d all be whipped about the same number of times as you were spreading up on the ground and yet either before this
Happened or after it happened from town to town to town where you would get there the leader the person who was orchestrating this would read a letter that had supposedly come from God in 1345 to instruct the people around who are watching why this was happening uh a
Letter in which God had said that medieval men and women which might out to be punished uh in the text of the letter said your hands above your heads uplift that God the plague May from us shift raise up your arms that God’s Mercy On Us Fall Maybe by this kind of
Pain God’s anger would be assuaged and the plague would stop and this was disastrous of course wherever the flatulence went they spread the infection rats were very effective in following human populations and this was no exception and wherever they would go anti-semitic acts would also go along
With them and the result is there’s no cver lining here at all the result was death on an unprecedented horrific scale for which there was no president and no effective treatment and for many people it was the end of the world many people decided why bother observing the old
Rules many people gave themselves over to drinking and and carousing to whatever they wanted to others heroically stayed with the sick cared for them it depended upon who you were depended where you were but whatever the case was it was completely beyond their experience and finally it ended uh it
Played itself out as these pandemics ultimately do uh by the beginning of 1351 and here’s where the Silver Lining is so after all this St and all this is destruction if we go to the next slide what happened and here I’m making use of res research by historian named James
Bayor who’s written a book about the effects of the plague what happened was that literally there were fewer people in his Testament he’s one of those who estimated a 60% fatality rate during the black de so what’s going to happen if 60% of the population is
Gone in the short term there not going to be much production not much demand that’s going to be true for a few years but after that according to Bay what happened was this phenomenon where production did go down it had to go down there’s so much fewer people but it
Didn’t go down proportionately to numbers so what that meant was uh more people had more of what left over more people had more resources than they had before because production wasn’t commen with de uh death was was actually uh not outpaced by lots of production which me
There was more stuff to go around for fewer people and the result was wages went up and the average laborer will be working on an estate who is accustomed to giving goods and services at part of the rent special services for which they wouldn’t be paid now were in a position
To expect payment now they were in a better bargaining position and in addition the land they were farming would be better more productive because all that marginal land the land that wasn’t so good that was put into cultivation during the Great warming of the 13th century now
They could let that go for a while and they could concrate on the better land and they had more land for pasturage more sheep more cattle and that meant more beef more cheese more milk more fertilizer land became more productive so that if you were around 20 years
After the Black Death you can look around you and more people have more than their fathers and grandparents did and the consequence was this to me there was now and Bay believes this as well a real emphasis on labor saving devices because if you were an employer or a
Lord now you needed cash to pay for things that otherwise you might be expected as a service that was just part of your manorial dues part of the fuel system so where were you going to get the cash to pay for things and how are
You going to make a go of it well one aspect was that they needed labor saving mechanisms and if you look at this slide over here you may not recognize that but that’s the famous white ship and 11:20 that ship carried the air to the English Throne uh Prince William Adeline
Entire crew got drunk uh in Normandy they got on the ship William was with them they hit a rock and they went down the air air to the throne died there was only one Survivor one of the most famous shipwrecks of the Middle Ages and that
Gave rise to the great civil war between Matilda and Steven that’s 11:20 now look at this uh they were on the North Sea uh but they’ve got ORS and your typical ship even crossing the North Sea with have ores we’re all familiar with biking long ships that usually had
Ores G of the menit training always had ores for example and but ores take a lot of crew well if you got fewer people you don’t really want to be paying large Crews for these ships and so there was now an emphasis on perfecting sails and sailing ships that were larger could
Carry more cargo and wouldn’t need as much crew just natural if there are fewer people to go around and it’s those ships to go to the next slide great sailing ships that in the next Century the 15th century would eventually begin rounding the the great BS of West Africa and then
Ultimately got into the Indian Ocean and why would they need to do that and to me the answer is that if there’s more demand for goods and more demand for money to pay the people making the goods then the thing you really need more than anything else is was more cash literally
More gold and silver and where could you get more gold and silver there was only one source that they knew about and that was West Africa and to get there to trade with West Africa getting into the slave trade in the process they needed those ships ultimately to get around the great bulge
And into the gold areas now Ghana Nigeria and places like that and that was the beginning of the great age of European exploration and it was that process that overally made Europeans the masters of much of the world uh beginning especially in the 16th century but that wouldn’t happen if there hadn’t
Been an appetite for cash cash to pay new salaries cash to pay Rising wages and if you didn’t need a very Nimble class of capitalists to try to figure out how that was going to happen probably these developments wouldn’t have occurred when they did and what
Precipitated it what led to it was this great di this diminishing of the population and if you go to the next slide speaking of Labor saving devices it’s no that the 15th century early 16th century even beginning of the late 14th you began to have new developments that
Made mining more efficient to get into the ground to uh produce iron precious metals like silver that were present at some extent in Western Europe so those are labor saving devices as well which you need if the population is less and you got to pay people more so now you
Can produce more with less more iron more silver and the more iron you can produce the better ship fittings you would have the more seagoing vessels you could have and the more trade goods you would have when ultimately you arrived in the new world as the Spanish
Ultimately did at the end of the 15th century so the the connection between the black death and what came after has everything to do with labor shortages higher wages of an appetite for cash occasioned by all that which may have led ultimately to the Grand developments
Disastrous for some of the 15th and 16th centuries it’s certainly put a lot of pressure on the feudal system maybe help the beginning of the end of that and probably helped me to the Age of Exploration so that’s the Silver Lining although it depends who you were wasn’t
A silver lining for the aexs that’s for sure uh but to some it was and there’s no way they could have seen it then and the last thing probably to be said about it is when you talk about the black de historians could look back on it and draw these kinds of
Connections all of which are controversial but what strikes one more than anything is is the sheer Oceanic misery of it uh the loss of a imagine watching loved ones one after one after one after one dying in nothing to do and the guilt you would have of
Abandoning them if you thought that was the only way to save yourself and there’s no way to to estimate that in any way that makes sense to anybody but a moral philosopher or just a thinking person a historian stop there because that’s what we all have in common trying
To imag what that was like uh misery Beyond Comprehension and then we go to malaria malaria is next week and malaria really wasn’t a pandemic so I’m cheating a little bit but I’m going to get into some really really interesting things that happened in history because of malaria beginning with the strangest of
All Colonial schemes uh I think in the human record and that was a decision by the Scots to become a colonial power and how malaria put an end to that but that’s all for our next week so that’s all for this week now if you have any questions go
Ahead um I mean I’ve always Associated Black Death with Europe oh yeah and that’s what you’ve been talking about but there was a slide you had early on showing that it it actually encompassed a great deal of the old world and are there any sort of generalities you can
Say about what was going on elsewhere like um yeah yeah sure level second U the one controversy is what accounts for the terrible loss of population in China which happened at the same time and traditionally probably so the majority of you is the bana clay clay spread the
Same way by trade roots to China as it did to Western Europe was responsible for by some estimates a loss of onethird of the population of China and maybe more and that help lead to the beginning of the Ming Dynasty uh they in the middle of the
14th century there are are records of the die off the records of how people died um in the main results there are political I think more than economic but it also spread into South Asia killed many many there uh provided some of the dislocation that ultimately led to the
Growth of the Mogul Empire there putting an end to a lot of the Native States but less of an influence on Africa it’s mostly India China and Western Europe there’s still some Theory though that what killed so many people in China was plague plus something else they’re
Not really sure about that because we don’t have the DNA of it from China that we do from Western Europe uh we we know why pesus killed that many people in Western Europe you know that as of DNA it wasn’t what some people thought some sort of human l it wasn’t Ebola which
Was a theory a few years ago wasn’t anything like that you know it’s why pesus why pesus causes all forms of the plague ronic pneumonic and sepic uh so that’s the culprit West Europe but we’re not quite as sure about China yes go back here yes uh I had
Always heard that one of the reasons that the Jews were blame was because the incidence of the plague was less among the Jewish people because of their rules of friendliness well I’ve heard that too yeah there’s some anecdotal evidence of that that you might be in a community
Where some people would think Jews weren’t suffering as much as anybody else but uh the statistics that we have the tale they tell is that any difference was was minimal uh that all populations were struck and Jews were living closely together in those cities like everybody else it would have been unusual if
Habits of clim so they they surely help would have provoked a significant difference in mortality we we don’t think there was yes how about why is it called the black death oh it’s called the the Black Death because uh especially the pneumonic variety uh there’s a a noticeable discoloration of the
Skin uh just before you die death happens very quickly to pneumonic blade uh but that’s one of the symptoms of it also in u the bubonic variety there can be a d greenish look that’s more black than yellow among the bbos but the name itself like I said is is
Doesn’t go back to for that that’s why it was called black yes um you would mention like about where the word quarantine comes from or the possible origin of the the Grim tails and I was wondering if there’s anything else from the Black Plague or the black out that
We still live with today any like changes our lifestyle our daily lives anything popular culture well I think probably the the main thing that stuck with us is that erra genetic sequence and that has stuck with us the bad thing about that is those who have that in both the Le are
More susceptible to Crohn’s disease than others who don’t have it uh so that’s the bad lining to the Silver Lining but as far as folklore goes the biggest result was in the short term when you began to have a lot more L pictures of death in medieval art and we’re all
Familiar with boal and scenes like that around the 16th century and even before people go to 15th century Cathedrals often the uh great alter pieces will devils and figures of death skeletal Reapers that that was much more common after 1347 than it was before but as far as
Fol that’s stuck with us about the black Deb really nothing special no it’s mostly short-term developments in art and culture that are noticeable to Art historians but as far as the rest of us the Renaissance was such a huge influence that uh a lot of it I think
Was swallowed by that and more optimistic times after the 16th century yes is the reservoir of the pneumonic PL the same as the reservoir of the Bubonic plague in other words could you have pneumonic plague without bubonic plag uh well you yeah you could uh pneumonic plague can spread from person to person
Without the intervention in people down the line on bubonic PL so in other words if you have a few people bubonic PL the bubonic PL strikes the lungs and a lot of people would die before it got that far but if it struck the lungs and then
You start coughing people are in close proximity now that person was pneumonic plague and they can spread it without getting Bubonic plague first they can spread the pneumonic plague now the reason we don’t think that happened very often is that if it did happen then conversely the plague wouldn’t have
Spread as fast because so many people would have died all at once that it wouldn’t get to another Community that’s how bad demonic plague is now the only way it spreads a could be of the day spread like one mile a day at sight sometimes a bit more quickly what
Probably Bubonic plague following the trade rots and especially up the rivers uh and we know as far as rats go and people living among rats one mile a day spread wouldn’t be surprising but if it was neonic plague you get to a place now it’s pneumonic plague and
Everybody’s just dead and there’s no way to spread it further there the God so that’s why we think most of the death was bonic with pneumonic making it works and this or that by not accounting for the great spread yeah yeah one of the most intriguing programs of Secrets of the
Dead several years ago offered an alternative theory of bubonic plue and it was that it was a uh it was because of volcanic eruptions that the uh there was a volcanic explosion in like 12 50 or something which preceded the 1340 and the theory was it it clouded out the
Atmosphere so much lowered the temperature and it brought upon a mini ice age and get ready for this line of reasoning that the temperature caused the congealing of the blood in the tip more readily inside and so he the tip couldn’t rgit as you pointed out was was
One of the triggering things for the spread of the disease and that that was one of the reasons now in support of that theory the plague of Justinian also was preceded by a volcanic yeah so your theory is this all BS or is there is it
A viable Theory well I I think the plag of Justinian very likely did have a lot to do with famous volcanic erup was a Tambora what I’m not sure 6th Century but the eruption you’re talking about that I’m familiar with happened in 1258 yes and that did cause a terrible dying
Time cause a terrible famine uh in Western Europe as well as elsewhere in Eurasia but that’s 1258 that’s that’s 80 years before people began to Die the Black Death so I’ve always thought that although the climate did cool it began to cool around 1300 that that proba meant that people
Were eating as well it might have been more susceptible but it wouldn’t be related directly to anything going on in xenop Silla that’s at least the way I yes um I Rec heard a theory about why the plague spread so quickly and it had to do with
Um a fear of Witchcraft and people were would kill black cats and because they would kill black cats black cats weren’t eating the rats and therefore the rats were able to get around more I’ve heard that too I don’t see much evidence for that that that’s a
Theory that makes some surface sense but I don’t think too many smallers cllean to that but one thing people do say is that we shouldn’t blamed raptus raptus and one reason we shouldn’t blamed them for being the primary Vector of the CL is that nobody in the 14th century
Reported a mass rat di so if if the rat flea is killing rats and then having to go from dead rats to people which is how Bubonic plague is going to spread what do you expect to see an awful lot of dead rats what do people comment on that
And the answer to that is probably that they they wouldn’t bother commenting on it uh ratus ratus lives Among Us I don’t think You’ notice dead rats around too much and probably that they would have seen nothing they weren’t used to seeing uh they would have used they wouldn’t see black rats a
Lot they’re good at concealing themselves so they wouldn’t see dead black rats a lot so James B at least think that that theory that we can’t blame Rus ratus probably doesn’t hold a lot of water but that’s in dispute that’s something else of people argue about by the way the
Norway rat our friend who we see like Boston com you’ll see the Norway rat walking around you should thank them because the rat pleases can live on the Norway rap but not very well because their fur is much thicker so they can’t find into the blood streams effectively
So they really like Norway rat they’ll do it if they have to but they don’t really like Norway rats they like ratus rats so the more the Norway rats spread in Europe which they did the more the black rat was kicked out the Norway rats hate black rats they don’t get
Along so they so the ratchet ratchet began to go out nor rats began to come in and maybe that’s one reason why although plag epidemics would recur until the early 18th century Never After 1718 that was the last one and plague epidemic in Western York since elsewhere
Uh the plague is on Madagascar for example but we have actobotics now and and let just water PL that will save you yes go ahead I remember are there reservoirs inwestern Us in the groundh population uh repeat your question please I so the reservoirs of why p isting now in the
Southwest I think I I did see something about that but I I can’t B for the accuracy of that um we know we know people now and then do get played but that might be one reason but they but now they recover yes go ahead did they try any
Herbal Remedies well yeah well what they did very often we Herbal Remedies the the notion that breathing bad air was probably what caused this would lead you to walk around with clothes and sweet smelling herbs apples something like that that would smell nice and maybe that was one way that you could prevent
It so you’ve all seen the plague doctor image where someone’s got this really long nose that’s the plue doctor so the reason the long nose is there is because uh you want to keep out the bad smells and just concentrate on the the nights aromatic smell that you got closer to your
Nose go yes go ahead um I’m thinking of the nursery r um bring Around the Rosie and in my mind it had something to do with Clay yeah it doesn’t take from the black de it takes from later later plue off breaks but the idea was if you
Have a pocket pull of something that smelled nice you go pull right up and smell it as you walked around and that way maybe you wouldn’t get the B so how would that become a nursery r i mean that like little kids would we treat
This yeah was it more like a prayer or a mantra to oh I I I don’t I know how it would have spread and how would have been experienced I I just know it as a record of a practice that people would resort to they wanted to
Try against alls start from being sickal oppos yes go ahead well I heard about that ver yeah and that the um ring around Rosie was the mo from you know the polies were for the people that went in to bury the dead and they would put the uh sweet smelly um flowers and
Go into a dead body well you want it yeah as often as you possibly could but probably especially NE sure yeah that’s right the ring around the rosie I did help it do with the inflammation around the goo that’s right anything you know and then it goes on to hop scotch hop scotch
All yeah Che yes uh but I promise I promise uh malaria you you’re really going to like that yeah so I I hope hope to see a lot of you back for that go ahead I’m wondering what February have you decided which those three are going to be oh
Yeah we’re gonna have cha and we’re gonna have yellow fever and the great uh influenza pandemic of 1990 which uh killed more people than the black de so so I call the black de the greatest pandemic of all time because of percentage of population which the worst but in terms of broad
Numbers that great more people thank