The Black Death

Pandemic

Bubonic
Plague
 Facts to Recall

• Plague is a disease that affects humans and

other mammals.
• Bubonic plague is the most common form of
plague and is caused by the bite of an infected
flea and rodents.
• Plague is infamous for killing millions of people
in Europe during the Middle Ages. 
More facts……
 How did it start?
• The Black Death - an outbreak of plague caused
by the bacterium Yersinia pestis
• Thought to have started in China, it travelled
along the Silk Road and had reached the Crimea
by 1346.

Crimea is a peninsula in Eastern Europe.

It is situated along the northern coast of
the Black Sea.
• From Crimea, probably carried by Oriental rat fleas
[black rats] through the merchant ships that were
filled with regular passengers, THE PLAGUE arrived
and spread throughout the Mediterranean and entire
Europe.
• Today, many of us have been crushed by the blow of the
COVID – 19, and in the 14th century, people saw the
tragedy of the Black Death (another epidemic)

The plague arrived in western Europe in

1347 and in England in 1348. It faded away
in the early 1350s.
 Symptoms of the Black Death

• Swellings
• Dark patches
• Fatigue
• Coughing up
of Blood
 How many people died because
of the Black Death?

In Europe, it is thought that around 50 million

people died as a result of the Black Death over
the course of three or four years. The
population was reduced from some 80 million
to 30 million. It killed at least 60 per cent of
the population in rural and urban areas.
 What remedies were used to treat
the Black Death?

• Medieval people believed that the Black Death came

from God, and so responded with prayers and
processions.
• Some contemporaries realised that the only remedy for
plague was to run away from it.

There was no known remedy, but people wanted

medicines – Geoffrey Chaucer
 Where did the Black Death
originate, and what areas did it
affect?

• Breaking out in ‘the east’, as medieval people put

it, the Black Death came north and west after
striking the eastern Mediterranean and Italy,
Spain and France.
• It then came to Britain, where it struck Dorset and
Hampshire along the south coast of England
simultaneously. The plague then spread north and
east, then on to Scandinavia and Russia.
Who was most affected by the plague? Did the
Black Death mainly affect poor people?

• The plague played no FAVOURITES!

• All of society – royalty, peasants, archbishops,
monks, nuns and parish clergy – was affected.
No subset of people was immune to the Black
Death.
• Both artisan and artistic skills were lost or
severely affected, from cathedral building in
Italy to pottery production in England. 
• Contemporary chroniclers list important knights,
ladies, and merchants who died during the Black
Death. Many wealthy and well-fed convents, friaries,
and monasteries across Europe lost more than half of
their members, with some becoming extinct.

• By the third or fourth wave of plague in the last

decades of the 14th century, burial records and tax
registers suggest that the disease had evolved into one
that largely affected the poor.
 Which areas were worst hit by
the Black Death?
In 1348–49, some of the worst-hit regions were in mountainous
and in relatively isolated zones, such as in Snowdonia in Wales
or the mountain village of Mangona in the Alpi fiorentine, north
of Florence, whose communications with cities were less
frequent than places further down the slopes and closer to cities.

The Black Death was the largest demographic shock in European

history, killing approximately 40% of the region's population
between 1347 and 1352. Some regions and cities were spared, but
others were severely hit: England, France, Italy and Spain lost
between 50% and 60% of their populations in two years.
 How Did the Black Death Spread?

• 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.
• 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.
 Blaming on the Jews!
• Because the people then 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.)
Jews were herded into pits, fields or houses for the purpose

of burning them alive. Escape was virtually impossible.

 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, and a practice still used today. 
 Will the Black Death return?

In fact, the disease has

never gone away. An
outbreak in Surat in India
in the early 1990s
caused panic across
the world. The death
of a herdsman in
Kyrgyzstan in 2013 from
bubonic plague was
wildly exaggerated in the
media.
 References
• https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/black
-death
• Images have been taken from Google
• https://momentmag.com/why-were-jews-blamed-f
or-the-black-death/
• https://www.historytoday.com/archive/black-death
-greatest-catastrophe-ever
• https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/bla
ck-death-plague-epidemic-facts-what-caused-rats-
fleas-how-many-died/