January 24, 2020 ▸ Disaster, History

Episode 449: The Black Death: Disease and Disaster

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On this episode of the world famous Sofa King Podcast, we travel back in time and look at one of the worst disasters in the history of human civilization, The Black Death. The Black Death is commonly thought to be a horrible epidemic of the Bubonic Plague, though some doctors think it was a different virus entirely. Either way, it killed. A lot. Historical records are weak from the time, but modern experts estimate that somewhere between 70 and 200 million (roughly a third of Europe’s population) was killed in only three horrible years.

So where did it come from? The safe money is on China. It spread from Mongol invaders and traders using the silk road. Before it hit Europe, kings had heard of its spread through China, Egypt, and other remote areas. But in 1347, twelve ships docked in Messina, Italy, and the dock workers founds scores of dead, all covered in boils and black flesh. They tried to turn the ships away, but it had already gotten ashore. The Black Death was here.

It spread like ink through water—Germany, France, England, Spain. Scores dead everywhere it went. Village after village was completely killed or abandoned. Larger cities faired differently, but death was everywhere.

Nobody knew how it spread. The doctors blamed evil being floating from the infected people’s eyes. They blamed bad blood. They blamed sinners. They even blamed the Jews and murdered them by scores. The Italian poet Boccaccio describes the death toll in detail, discussing the piles of bodies in every city, the paranoia, the families abandoning each other.

Most modern experts agree that the major vector for this spreading dealt with fleas on rats and mice. They’d drink blood from an infected rodent and then bite a human, spreading the infection. This made it especially deadly on ships and in large, port towns. But doctors knew nothing of sanitation or how disease spread, so things like beating yourself with a leather whip or killing all the cats and dogs seemed a good way to cure it.

The Black Death completely changed Europe. The way land lords used to have peasants work their farms was no longer sustainable because there weren’t’ enough peasants left to grow food. Famine came next. So, royals had to let poor people own their own land for the first time, and in some countries women were first given the ability to own land thanks to the Black Death.

The plague is still with us. It pops up in India and China (and even California), and in spite of all of our best confidence in modern medicine, nobody can even agree on which disease the Black Death was. Also, if it came back, would it be resistant to antibiotics? If so, get ready for round two, and think about becoming a prepper!

Visit Our Sources:

https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/black-death

https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-Death

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/plague.htm

https://www.livescience.com/what-was-the-black-death.html

https://www.ancient.eu/Black_Death/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/middle_ages/black_01.shtml

https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/black-death-plague-epidemic-facts-what-caused-rats-fleas-how-many-died/

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17223184-000-did-bubonic-plague-really-cause-the-black-death/

https://www.genome.gov/27546229/dissecting-the-cause-of-the-black-death

https://www.dkfindout.com/us/history/black-death/

https://www.factretriever.com/black-death-facts