The Black Death epidemic had run its course by the early 1350s, but the plague reappeared every few generations for centuries.
By Nazarul Islam | USA
The recent pandemic ‘Covid-19’ invaded our world in 2020. It was caused by an infectious disease which had quickly transformed into a catastrophe. It spread across the globe, taking away the lives of more than 7.0 million people.
Pandemics have repeated several times in recorded history. Between 1347 and 1352, a massive plague spread had across Europe, claiming the lives of nearly half its population.
Scientists at Public Health England in Porton Down, have argued that for the Black Death to have spread so quickly and killed so many victims with such devastating speed, it must have been airborne.
Therefore, rather than bubonic plague, which is transmitted to humans through bites from infected rat fleas and then can be transmitted between humans, according to some research they concluded this must have been a pneumonic plague that made its way into the lungs of the infected and spread through coughs and sneezes.
In most of the cities, the model that focused on fleas and ticks on humans was the most accurate model for explaining the spread of the disease. Though it may come as a surprise to most readers, previous studies have backed up these findings. The consensus seems to be that the plague spread too fast for rats to be the culprit carriers.
“It would be unlikely to spread as fast as it did if it was transmitted by rats,” Nils Stenseth, a professor at the University of Oslo and his co-author of the study, told BBC News. “It would have to go through this extra loop of the rats, rather than being spread from person to person.”
It’s not clear where the belief that rats spread the plague had come from, in the first place.
After all, the researchers write that “there is little historical and archaeological support for such a claim.” For example, if rats really were a main cause of the plague, there would be more archaeological evidence of dead rats.
Analysis registered in the medieval City of London has shown that 60 percent of Londoners were wiped out by the Black Death from the autumn of 1348 to spring of 1349. A comparable rate of destruction would today kill some 5 million people. According to Dr. Tim Brooks from Porton Down, transmission by rat fleas as an explanation for the Black Death “simply isn’t good enough.
The disease cannot spread fast enough from one household to the next to cause the huge number of cases that we saw during the Black Death epidemics.”
Archaeological analysis of the bones found under city of London’s Charterhouse Square also revealed that the individuals buried there were mostly poor people who had suffered from general ill health. Rickets, anemia and tooth decay were common, as well as childhood malnutrition, which was consistent with the “Great Famine” that struck Europe some 30 years before the plague. Many of the skeletons showed back damage, suggesting lives marked by hard physical labor.
Another interesting finding was that the remains in the square appeared to come from three different periods: not only from the original Black Death epidemic in 1348-1350, but from later outbreaks in 1361 and the 1430s. While the early burials at the site are orderly, including white shrouds around the skeletons, the ones from the 1430s show evidence of upper-body injuries, consistent with what appears to have been a time of increasing lawlessness and social chaos.
Traveling back in time, Six hundred years ago, in the era of history known as the early-modern period, most people had lived through the ‘plague’. In fact, they had experienced it more than once. The threat of plague was one of the defining characteristics of life in medieval and early-modern Europe.
Sometimes plague outbreaks were widespread. Others affected only particular cities. In London, the Great Plague of 1665-1666 was the worst plague outbreak since the Black Death. Around 15% of the population had died.
What was it like to live through a plague? What did people know about the disease, and how did they respond?
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, a statesman and naval administrator, provides some answers. Over an 8 month period, his diary gives us a day-by-day eyewitness account of how the plague unfolded.
Life during the bubonic plague was a time of overwhelming fear, societal collapse, and bizarre new customs as medieval people struggled to comprehend and survive the mass death surrounding them. Without a scientific understanding of disease, people attributed the plague to divine wrath, bad air, or supernatural forces. The resulting terror upended daily routines and social structures.
Fear, abandonment and societal collapse:
Deep-seated panic: The sudden and gruesome symptoms—including painful, swollen lymph nodes called buboes—sent people into a panic. Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio recorded how families abandoned the sick, with parents leaving their children and spouses fleeing one another.
Desperate reactions: The overwhelming sense of impending death led to varied and extreme behaviors. Some turned to frenzied religious atonement, with groups of flagellants whipping themselves in public processions. Others turned to hedonism, deciding to eat, drink, and be merry while they still could.
Disintegration of public services: As the death toll rose, basic services broke down. Priests died ministering to the sick, leading to a shortage of clergy. In many cities, bodies piled up in the streets because there were not enough people left to move them, forcing hastily dug mass graves.
Scapegoating and persecution: In their desperation to find an explanation, some communities blamed marginalized groups for the disease. Jews were falsely accused of poisoning wells, leading to horrific massacres in cities across Europe.
Ineffective medicine and public health:
Erroneous medical beliefs: Medieval physicians had no effective treatments and operated under the misconception that the plague was caused by “miasma” or bad air. Their remedies, often crude and unsanitary, were based on the unproven theory of the four humors.
Common “cures”: Popular but dangerous treatments included bloodletting with leeches, lancing the buboes, and applying poultices of herbs, animal parts, or even human waste.
Early public health measures:
Authorities in Italian cities like Venice and Milan were among the first to implement large-scale public health policies. This included:
Quarantine: Ships were forced to wait outside harbors for 40 days before disembarking—the origin of the word “quarantine”.
Isolation: The sick were isolated in separate facilities called “lazarettos,” providing care while containing the disease.
Social distancing: In some places, goods were passed via a lazy Susan-like device to avoid person-to-person contact, and money was washed in vinegar.
Survivors then had faced a new and changed world:
Economic upheaval: With 30% to 60% of Europe’s population dead, a massive labor shortage ensued. This collapse of the feudal system gave surviving peasants and artisans new bargaining power for better wages and living conditions.
Increased social mobility: The high mortality rate meant that land and inherited wealth became more available. This new mobility weakened traditional social hierarchies and created opportunities for some to rise in status.
Morbid art and literature: The constant presence of death deeply influenced culture. Artistic themes shifted to grim topics, notably the Danse Macabre, which depicted skeletons dancing with people from all walks of life to show that no one could escape death.
Seeds of change: The plague’s immense devastation led people to question the traditional authorities of the church and existing medical knowledge. For some, this questioning became an intellectual and artistic awakening that set the stage for the Renaissance.
Most of us have heard of the Black Death that ravaged Medieval Europe. However, less well known is the fact that the bubonic plague returned again and again in history of mankind.
After construction workers digging tunnels for the new Crossrail train line in 2013 discovered some 25 skeletons buried under Charterhouse Square in the Clerkenwell area of London, scientists immediately suspected they had stumbled on a plague cemetery.
The square, once home to a monastery, is one of the few London areas that have remained undisturbed for hundreds of years, and the location outside the walls of medieval London coincided with historical accounts. To test this theory, scientists extracted DNA from one of the largest teeth in each of 12 skeletons. Testing showed evidence of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague, which confirmed that the individuals buried underneath the square had likely been exposed to—and died from—the Black Death.
The plague still infects several thousand people every year around the world, though most patients recover if treated early enough with antibiotics. When they compared the strain of plague preserved in this medieval DNA with the strain that killed some 60 people in Madagascar in 2014, however, they found something surprising. The medieval strain was no stronger than the recent one; in fact, their genetic codes matched almost exactly.
Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread by a bacillus called Yersinia pestis. (The French biologist Alexandre Yersin discovered this germ at the end of the 19th century.)
They know that the bacillus travels from person to person through the air, as well as through the bite of infected fleas and rats. Both of these pests could be found almost everywhere in medieval Europe, but they were particularly at home aboard ships of all kinds—which is how the deadly plague made its way through one European port city after another.
Not long after it struck Messina, the Black Death spread to the port of Marseilles in France and the port of Tunis in North Africa. Then it reached Rome and Florence, two cities at the center of an elaborate web of trade routes. By the middle of 1348, the Black Death had struck Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon and London.
Today, this grim sequence of events is terrifying but comprehensible. In the middle of the 14th century, however, there seemed to be no rational explanation for it.
No one knew exactly how the Black Death was transmitted from one patient to another, and no one knew how to prevent or treat it. According to one doctor, for example, “instantaneous death occurs when the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy person standing near and looking at the sick.”
How did the citizens treat the Black Death?
Physicians had relied on crude and unsophisticated techniques such as bloodletting and boil-lancing (practices that were dangerous as well as unsanitary) and superstitious practices such as burning aromatic herbs and bathing in rosewater or vinegar.
Meanwhile, in a panic, healthy people did all they could to avoid the sick. Doctors refused to see patients; priests refused to administer last rites; and shopkeepers closed their stores. Many people fled the cities for the countryside, but even there they could not escape the disease: It affected cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens as well as people.
In fact, so many sheep had died that one of the consequences of the Black Death was a European wool shortage. And many people, desperate to save themselves, even abandoned their sick and dying loved ones. “Thus doing,” Boccaccio wrote, “each thought to secure immunity for himself.”
Black Plague: Was it truly, God’s Punishment?
Because the people did not understand the biology of the disease, many people believed that the Black Death was a kind of divine punishment—retribution for sins against God such as greed, blasphemy, heresy, fornication and worldliness.
By this logic, the only way to overcome the plague was to win God’s forgiveness. Some people believed that the way to do this was to purge their communities of heretics and other troublemakers—so, for example, many thousands of Jews were massacred in 1348 and 1349. (Thousands more fled to the sparsely populated regions of Eastern Europe, where they could be relatively safe from the rampaging mobs in the cities.)
Some people coped with the terror and uncertainty of the Black Death epidemic by lashing out at their neighbors; others coped by turning inward and fretting about the condition of their own souls.
Flagellants
Some upper-class men joined processions of flagellants that traveled from town to town and engaged in public displays of penance and punishment: They would beat themselves and one another with heavy leather straps studded with sharp pieces of metal while the townspeople looked on.
For 33 days, the flagellants repeated this ritual three times a day. Then they would move on to the next town and begin the process over again.
Though the flagellant movement did provide some comfort to people who felt powerless in the face of inexplicable tragedy, it soon began to worry the Pope, whose authority the flagellants had begun to usurp. In the face of this papal resistance, the movement disintegrated.
How Did the Black Death End?
The plague never really ended and it returned with a vengeance years later. But officials in the port city of Ragusa were able to slow its spread by keeping arriving sailors in isolation until it was clear they were not carrying the disease—creating social distancing that relied on isolation to slow the spread of the disease.
The sailors were initially held on their ships for 30 days (a trentino), a period that was later increased to 40 days, or a quarantine—the origin of the term “quarantine” and a practice still used today.
Does the Black Plague Still Exist?
The Black Death epidemic had run its course by the early 1350s, but the plague reappeared every few generations for centuries. Modern sanitation and public-health practices have greatly mitigated the impact of the disease but have not eliminated it.
While antibiotics are available today to treat the Black Death, according to The World Health Organization, there are still 1,000 to 3,000 cases of plague every year.
Read: Vision of learning, fifty years later
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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.
