The Black Death: the greatest catastrophe ever
La Peste Negra, uno de los mayores desastres que
asolaron la Europa medieval y, sin duda alguna, el que mayor número de muertos
causó. Siempre nos acuden a la mente las mismas preguntas, ¿qué la produjo? y
¿cómo se propagó tan rápido por Europa? A través de algunos fragmentos
escogidos de un artículo de la revista londinense History Today ofrezco al ocioso lector las respuestas a tales
interrogantes. Por supuesto, el texto está extraído directamente del original
en inglés –previa lectura y estudio concienzudo de este humilde escritor-.
Source: Ole J. Benedictow: The Black Death: the greatest catastrophe ever, In History Today Volume 55 Issue 3 March 2005.
Inspired by the Black Death, The Dance of Death or
Danse Macabre, an allegory on the universality of death, is a common painting
motif in the late medieval period
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The disastrous mortal disease known as the Black Death
spread across Europe in the years 1346-53 [...] Chronicles and letters from the
time describe the terror wrought by the illness. In Florence, the great
Renaissance poet Petrarch was sure that they would not be believed: ‘O happy
posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our
testimony as a fable.’ A Florentine chronicler relates that:
All the citizens did little else except to carry dead
bodies to be buried [...] At every church they dug deep pits down to the
water-table; and thus those who were poor who died during the night were
bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a large number
of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shovelled it down on
top of them; and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer
of earth, just as one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese.
The accounts are remarkably similar. The chronicler Agnolo di Tura ‘the
Fat’ relates from his Tuscan home town that:
... in many
places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead
[...] And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that
the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city.
The tragedy was extraordinary. In the course of just a few months, 60
per cent of Florence’s population died from the plague, and probably the same
proportion in Siena [...]
The Black Death was an epidemic of bubonic plague, a disease caused by
the bacterium Yersinia pestis that circulates among wild rodents where they
live in great numbers and density. Such an area is called a ‘plague focus’ or a
‘plague reservoir’. Plague among humans arises when rodents in human
habitation, normally black rats, become infected. The black rat, also called
the ‘house rat’ and the ‘ship rat’, likes to live close to people, the very
quality that makes it dangerous (in contrast, the brown or grey rat prefers to
keep its distance in sewers and cellars). Normally, it takes ten to fourteen
days before plague has killed off most of a contaminated rat colony, making it
difficult for great numbers of fleas gathered on the remaining, but soon-
dying, rats to find new hosts. After three days of fasting, hungry rat fleas
turn on humans. From the bite site, the contagion drains to a lymph node that
consequently swells to form a painful bubo, most often in the groin, on the
thigh, in an armpit or on the neck. Hence the name bubonic plague. The
infection takes three–five days to incubate in people before they fall ill, and
another three–five days before, in 80 per cent of the cases, the victims die.
Thus, from the introduction of plague contagion among rats in a human community
it takes, on average, twenty-three days before the first person dies.
When, for instance, a stranger called Andrew Hogson died from plague on
his arrival in Penrith in 1597, and the next plague case followed twenty-two
days later, this corresponded to the first phase of the development of an
epidemic of bubonic plague. And Hobson was, of course, not the only fugitive
from a plague-stricken town or area arriving in various communities in the
region with infective rat fleas in their clothing or luggage. This pattern of
spread is called ‘spread by leaps’ or ‘metastatic spread’. Thus, plague soon
broke out in other urban and rural centres, from where the disease spread into
the villages and townships of the surrounding districts by a similar process of
leaps.
Illustration
of the Black Death from the Toggenburg Bible (1411)
In order to become an epidemic the disease must be spread to other rat
colonies in the locality and transmitted to inhabitants in the same way. It
took some time for people to recognize that a terrible epidemic was breaking
out among them and for chroniclers to note this. The timescale varies: in the
countryside it took about forty days for realisation to dawn; in most towns
with a few thousand inhabitants, six to seven weeks; in the cities with
over 10,000 inhabitants, about seven weeks, and in the few metropolises with
over 100,000 inhabitants, as much as eight weeks.
Plague bacteria can break out of the buboes and be carried by the blood
stream to the lungs and cause a variant of plague that is spread by
contaminated droplets from the cough of patients (pneumonic plague). However,
contrary to what is sometimes believed, this form is not contracted easily,
spreads normally only episodically or incidentally and constitutes therefore
normally only a small fraction of plague cases. It now appears clear that human
fleas and lice did not contribute to the spread, at least not significantly. The
bloodstream of humans is not invaded by plague bacteria from the buboes, or
people die with so few bacteria in the blood that bloodsucking human parasites
become insufficiently infected to become infective and spread the disease: the
blood of plague-infected rats contains 500-1,000 times more bacteria per unit
of measurement than the blood of plague-infected humans.
Importantly, plague was spread considerable distances by rat fleas on
ships. Infected ship rats would die, but their fleas would often survive and
find new rat hosts wherever they landed. Unlike human fleas, rat fleas are
adapted to riding with their hosts; they readily also infest clothing of people
entering affected houses and ride with them to other houses or localities. This
gives plague epidemics a peculiar rhythm and pace of development and a
characteristic pattern of dissemination. The fact that plague is transmitted by
rat fleas means plague is a disease of the warmer seasons, disappearing during
the winter, or at least lose most of their powers of spread. The peculiar
seasonal pattern of plague has been observed everywhere and is a systematic
feature also of the spread of the Black Death.
This conspicuous feature constitutes proof that the Black Death and
plague in general is an insect-borne disease. Cambridge historian John Hatcher
has noted that there is ‘a remarkable transformation in the seasonal pattern of
mortality in England after 1348’: whilst before the Black Death the heaviest
mortality was in the winter months, in the following century it was heaviest in
the period from late July to late September. He points out that this strongly
indicates that the ‘transformation was caused by the virulence of bubonic
plague’.
It used to be thought that the Black Death originated in China, but new
research shows that it began in the spring of 1346 in the steppe region, where
a plague reservoir stretches from the north-western shores of the Caspian Sea
into southern Russia. People occasionally contract plague there even today. Two
contemporary chroniclers identify the estuary of the river Don where it flows
into the Sea of Azov as the area of the original outbreak, but this could be
mere hearsay, and it is possible that it started elsewhere, perhaps in the area
of the estuary of the river Volga on the Caspian Sea. At the time, this area
was under the rule of the Mongol khanate of the Golden Horde. Some decades
earlier the Mongol khanate had converted to Islam and the presence of Christians,
or trade with them, was no longer tolerated. As a result the Silk Road caravan
routes between China and Europe were cut off. For the same reason the Black
Death did not spread from the east through Russia towards western Europe, but
stopped abruptly on the Mongol border with the Russian principalities. As a
result, Russia which might have become the Black Death’s first European
conquest, in fact was its last, and was invaded by the disease not from the
east but from the west.
The epidemic in fact began with an attack that the
Mongols launched on the Italian merchants’ last trading station in the region,
Kaffa in the Crimea. In the autumn of 1346, plague
broke out among the besiegers and from them penetrated into the town. When
spring arrived, the Italians fled on their ships. And the Black Death slipped unnoticed on board and
sailed with them.
The extent of the contagious power of the Black Death
has been almost mystifying. The central explanation lies
within characteristic features of medieval society in a dynamic phase of
modernisation heralding the transformation from a medieval to early modern
European society. Early industrial market-economic and capitalistic
developments had advanced more than is often assumed, especially in northern
Italy and Flanders. New, larger types of ship carried great quantities of goods
over extensive trade networks that linked Venice and Genoa with Constantinople
and the Crimea, Alexandria and Tunis, London and Bruges. In London and Bruges the Italian trading system was
linked to the busy shipping lines of the German Hanseatic League in the Nordic
countries and the Baltic area, with large broad-bellied ships called cogs.
The strong increase in population in Europe in the
High Middle Ages (1050-1300) meant that the prevailing agricultural technology
was inadequate for further expansion. To accommodate
the growth, forests were cleared and mountain villages settled wherever it was
possible for people to eke out a living. People had to opt for a more one-sided
husbandry, particularly in animals, to create a surplus that could be traded
for staples such as salt and iron, grain or flour. These settlements operated
within a busy trading network running from coasts to mountain villages. And with tradesmen and goods, contagious diseases
reached even the most remote and isolated hamlets.
Much new can be said on the Black Death’s patterns of
territorial spread. Of particular importance was the
sudden appearance of the plague over vast distances, due to its rapid
transportation by ship. Ships travelled at an average speed of around 40km a
day which today seems quite slow. However, this speed meant that the Black
Death easily moved 600km in a fortnight by ship: spreading, in contemporary
terms, with astonishing speed and unpredictability. By land, the average spread was much slower: up to 2km
per day along the busiest highways or roads and about 0.6km per day along
secondary lines of communication.
As already noted, the pace of spread slowed strongly
during the winter and stopped completely in mountain areas such as the Alps and
the northerly parts of Europe. Yet, the Black Death often rapidly established
two or more fronts and conquered countries by advancing from various quarters.
Italian ships from Kaffa arrived in Constantinople in
May 1347 with the Black Death on board. The epidemic
broke loose in early July. In North Africa and the Middle East, it started
around September 1st, having arrived in Alexandria with ship transport from
Constantinople. Its spread from Constantinople to European Mediterranean
commercial hubs also started in the autumn of 1347. It reached Marseilles by
about the second week of September, probably with a ship from the city. Then
the Italian merchants appear to have left Constantinople several months later
and arrived in their home towns of Genoa and Venice with plague on board, some
time in November. On their
way home, ships from Genoa also contaminated Florence’s seaport city of Pisa.
These great commercial cities also functioned as bridgeheads from where the
disease conquered Europe.
In Mediterranean Europe, Marseilles functioned as the
first great centre of spread. The relatively rapid advance both
northwards up the Rhône valley to Lyons and south-westwards along the coasts
towards Spain – in chilly months with relatively little shipping activity – is
striking. As early
as March 1348, both Lyon’s and Spain’s Mediterranean coasts were under attack.
En route to Spain, the Black Death also struck out
from the city of Narbonne north-westwards along the main road to the commercial
centre of Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast, which by the end of March had become
a critical new centre of spread. Around April
20th, a ship from Bordeaux must have arrived in La Coruña in northwestern
Spain; a couple of weeks later another ship from there let loose the plague in
Navarre in northeastern Spain. Thus, two northern plague fronts were opened less than two months after
the disease had invaded southern Spain.
Detailed study of the mortality data available points
to two conspicuous features in relation to the mortality caused by the Black
Death: namely the extreme level of mortality caused by the Black Death, and the
remarkable similarity or consistency of the level of mortality, from Spain in
southern Europe to England in north-western Europe. The
data is sufficiently widespread and numerous to make it likely that the Black
Death swept away around 60 per cent of Europe’s population. It is generally
assumed that the size of Europe’s population at the time was around 80 million.
This implies that
around 50 million people died in the Black Death.
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article here: http://www.historytoday.com/ole-j-benedictow/black-death-greatest-catastrophe-ever
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