The spread of the Black Death coincided with the beginning of a smaller, more connected and integrated world, thanks in part to the Silk Road. Additionally, as Science magazine reported in 2016, researchers found that a strain of the disease that developed in Europe eventually made its way eastward, and killed millions of people in China in the 1800s. Different strains of the same bacterium returned to ravage Europe and again and again until the 1700s. “The waning of the Plague occurred because of the combined use of quarantine, lazarettos, plague hospitals and rudimentary use of masks by medics, the establish of health-cordons and the shutting of borders, and use of health spies to forewarn countries of impending plague surges,” Welford explains.īut the Black Death wasn’t completely over. Without modern scientific knowledge and antibiotics, Europeans struggled by trial and error to find ways to fight the bacterium’s wrath. Newly Connected World Is Forced to Quarantine Grand palaces and stately homes where the nobility and their servants had dwelled were left empty, so that the city was “well-nigh depopulated.” Victims first developed a swelling in their groins and armpits, after which the disease “soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, then minute and numerous.”īetween March and July of that awful year, Boccaccio noted that more than 100,000 of the city’s inhabitants died, their bodies piled outside doorways. In The Decameron, written in 1352, Giovanni Boccaccio describes the Black Death, which reached Florence in 1348. “I think a good argument can be made that hit at a time when the health of the poor was compromised by the stress of famines, poverty and the very nature of serfdom,” Welford says. In any case, when the Black Death reached Europe, it attacked a population that already was weakened and malnourished by the brutal nature of the feudal economy. It’s estimated that the Black Death killed 25 million people in Asia and North Africa between 13, in addition to the carnage in Europe.Ī 2019 study by German researchers genetically linked the Black Death to an outbreak that occurred in 1346 in Laishevo in Russia’s Volga region, raising the possibility that the disease may have spread from Asia by multiple routes. Beckwith, a distinguished professor at Indiana University Bloomington, and author of the 2011 book Empires of the Silk Road. “It killed off many of the Mongol rulers and other elite, and weakened the army as well as the local economies,” explains Christopher I. Whether that actually happened, the plague eventually became a disaster in the East as well as in the West. Black Death Spreads East to West, And Then Back Again One famous 14th-century account claimed that plague was introduced to Kaffa deliberately, through a Mongol biological warfare attack that involved hurling plague-infected corpses over the city’s walls. But I suspect also made it to Constantinople via an overland route.” “Genoese or Venetians left Kaffa by boat, infected Constantinople and Athens as they made their way to Sicily and Venice and Genoa. Kaffa, a Crimean Black Sea port now known as Feodosia, “seems to be the jumping off point for the primary wave of the medieval Black Death from Asia to Europe in 1346-7,” Welford says. After several years of flea relocation, as the scientists’ theory goes, it took another decade for the caravans to gradually advance the plague westward, until it reached the edge of Europe. That, in turn, may have forced fleas that carried the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which causes plague, to leave their rodent hosts and find new places to live, such as camels and their human owners. In a 2015 study, Norwegian and Swedish scientists proposed that fluctuations in the climate of the Central Asian steppes caused the region’s rodent population-probably gerbils and marmots in particular-to crash. A couple suffering from the blisters of the Black Death, the bubonic plague that swept through Europe in the Middle Ages.
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