THE BLACK DEATH

The Black Death arrived in Europe by sea in October 1347 when 12 Genoese trading ships docked at the Sicilian port of Messina after a long journey through the Black Sea. The people who gathered on the docks to greet the ships were met with a horrifying surprise: Most of the sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those who were still alive were gravely ill. They were overcome with fever, unable to keep food down and delirious from pain. Strangest of all, they were covered in mysterious black boils that oozed blood and pus and gave their illness its name: the Black Death. The Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of death ships out of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the mysterious Black Death would kill more than 20 million people in Europealmost one-third of the continents population. "The Black Death"
Even before the death ships pulled into port at Messina, many Europeans had heard rumors about a Great Pestilence that was carving a deadly path across the trade routes of the Near and Far East. (Early in the 1340s, the disease had struck China, India, Persia, Syria and Egypt.) However, they were scarcely equipped for the horrible reality of the Black Death. In men and women alike, the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio wrote, at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpitswaxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils. Blood and pus seeped out of these strange swellings, which were followed by a host of other unpleasant symptomsfever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible aches and pains and then, in short order, death. The Black Death was terrifyingly, indiscriminately contagious: the mere touching of the clothes, wrote Boccaccio, appeared to itself to communicate the malady to the toucher. The disease was also terrifyingly efficient. People who were perfectly healthy when they went to bed at night could be dead by morning.

Understanding the Black Death

Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread by a bacillus called Yersina 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 pneumonically, or 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 anotheraccording 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 sickand no one knew how to prevent or treat it. Physicians 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. Shopkeepers closed 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 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.

God's Punishment?
Because they did not understand the biology of the disease, many people believed that the Black Death was a kind of divine punishmentretribution 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 Gods 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. Some upperclass 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 1/2 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. 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.

Plague
The Black Death
Plague is a bacterial infection found mainly in rodents and their fleas. But via those fleas it can sometimes leap to humans. When it does, the outcome can be horrific, making plague outbreaks the most notorious disease episodes in history. Most infamous of all was the Black Death, a medieval pandemic that swept through Asia and Europe. It reached Europe in the late 1340s, killing an estimated 25 million people. The Black Death lingered on for centuries, particularly in cities. Outbreaks included the Great Plague of London (1665-66), in which one in five residents died. The first well-documented pandemic was the Plague of Justinian, which began in 541 A.D. Named after the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, it killed up to 10,000 people a day in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul, Turkey), according to ancient historians. Modern estimates suggest half of Europe's population was wiped out before the plague disappeared in the 700s. The cause of plague wasn't discovered until the most recent global outbreak, which started in China in 1855 and didn't officially end until 1959. The first breakthrough came in Hong Kong in 1894 when researchers isolated the rod-shaped bacillus responsibleYersinia pestis. A few years later, in China, doctors noticed that rats showed very similar plague symptoms to people, and that human victims often had fleabites. The animal reservoir for plague includes mice, camels, chipmunks, prairie dogs, rabbits, and squirrels, but the most dangerous for humans are rats, especially the urban sort. The disease is usually transmitted by the rat flea,Xenopsylla cheopis. Types of Plague Bubonic plague, the disease's most common form, refers to telltale buboespainfully swollen lymph nodes that appear around the groin, armpit, or neck.Septicemic plague, which spreads in the bloodstream, comes either via fleas or from contact with plague-infected body matter. Pneumonic plague, the most infectious type, is an advanced stage of bubonic plague when the disease starts being passed directly, person to person, through airborne droplets coughed from the lungs. If left untreated, bubonic plague kills about 50 percent of those it infects. The other two forms are almost invariably fatal without antibiotics. Yersinia pestis is extraordinarily virulent, even when compared with closely related bacteria. This is because it's a mutant variety, handicapped both by not being able to survive outside the animals it infects and by an inability to penetrate and hide in its host's body cells. To compensate, Y. pestis needs strength in numbers and the ability to disable its victim's immune system. It does this by injecting toxins into defense cells such as macrophages that are tasked with detecting bacterial infections. Once these cells are knocked out, the bacteria can multiply unhindered. Victims are so overwhelmed that they're more or less poisoned to death as the bacilli gather in thick clots under the skin, where a passing flea might pick them up. Other grim side effects can include gangrene, erupting pus-filled glands, and lungs that literally dissolve. Plague Today Plague still exists in various parts of the world. In 2003, more than 2,100 human cases and 180 deaths were recorded, nearly all of them in Africa. The last reported serious outbreak was in 2006 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa, when at least 50 people died. The United States, China, India, Vietnam, and Mongolia are among the other countries that have confirmed human plague cases in recent years.

Most people survive if they're given the correct antibiotics in time. Good sanitation and pest control help prevent plague outbreaks since they need crowded, dirty, rat-infested conditions to really get going. There are fears that plague bacteria possibly could be used for a bioterrorattack if released in aerosol form.

Causes of the plague

During the 14th century, people thought the plague might be caused by: * Harmful fumes and vapours emitted during earthquakes or volcanic eruptions * Supernatural influences, such as God's anger at people's sins * Astrology such as unlucky planet alignments or a comet * Contagion: the passing of disease by touching the body, clothing or goods belonging to the victim There were people in the time of the plague (the Black Death) who believed that they had sinned. They believed that the only way to show their true repentance was to inflict pain on themselves. These were the so-called flaggellants who whipped themselves to show their love of God and their true sorry at being a sinner. Clearly, this was no cure for the plague. (http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/MOLsite/learning/features_facts/viking_2.html)

Cures for the plague

Vinegar and water treatment If a person gets the disease, they must be put to bed. They should be washed with vinegar and rose water Lancing the buboes The swellings associated with the Black Death should be cut open to allow the disease to leave the body. A mixture of tree resin, roots of white lilies and dried human excrement should be applied to the places where the body has been cut open. Bleeding The disease must be in the blood. The veins leading to the heart should be cut open. This will allow the disease to leave the body. An ointment made of clay and violets should be applied to the place where the cuts have been made. Diet We should not eat food that goes off easily and smells badly such as meat, cheese and fish. Instead we should eat bread, fruit and vegetables Sanitation The streets should be cleaned of all human and animal waste. It should be taken by a cart to a field outside of the village and burnt. All bodies should be buried in deep pits outside of the village and their clothes should also be burnt. Pestilence medicine Roast the shells of newly laid eggs. Ground the roasted shells into a powder. Chop up the leaves and petals of marigold flowers. Put the egg shells and marigolds into a pot of good ale. Add treacle and warm over a fire. The patient should drink this mixture every morning and night.

Witchcraft Place a live hen next to the swelling to draw out the pestilence from the body. To aid recovery you should drink a glass of your own urine twice a day. (www.historylearningsite.co.uk )