The Black Death in Europe

Downing 2

The Black Death in Europe is studied by the majority of students to at least some extent by the time they graduate from high school. Most of us know the basics behind the devastating event. We know that a large portion of the European population died, that the culprit was the bubonic plague and that it was spread by flea infested rats. What is not usually studied are the social and societal changes it may have caused, then and in the future.

How many people died in Europe during the Black Death?

The Actual number of people that fell victim to the Black Death is unknown and the estimates vary widely from one third to one half of the population and people from walks of life, ages and genders died. The city of Florence may have lost as much as 75 percent of their population. The estimate for all of Christian Europe given to Pope Clement VI in 1351 was 23,840,000. The large of number of deaths made burial difficult, the solution was to bury people in mass graves, some of these mass graves have been uncovered by archeologists in London. Giovanni Boccaccio in his work The Decameron gave this description of the dire situation:

It was the common practice of most of the neighbors, moved no less by fear of contamination by the putrefying bodies than by charity towards the deceased, to drag the corpses out of the houses with their own hands, aided, perhaps, by a porter, if a porter was to be had, and to lay them in front of the doors, where any one who made the round might have seen, especially in the morning, more of them than he could count; afterwards they would have biers brought up or in default, planks, whereon they laid them. Nor was it once twice only that one and

Downing 3

the same bier carried tw...

... middle of paper ...

...ns, Kristen Mossler Figg, Philip M. Soergel, and John Block Friedman, eds. "Famine, the Black Death, and the Afterlife." In Arts and Humanities Through the Eras, 366-68. Vol. 3: Medieval Europe 814-1450. Detroit: Gale, 2005. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE| CX3427400574 &v=2.1&u=sjvlstulareco&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&asid=2c8f9cebfa489a93076480 d14ea37df8.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. "The Introdution." Translated by M. Rigg. In The Decameron, 5-11. Vol. 1. London; David Campbell, 1921. Accessed April 19, 2014. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/boccacio2.asp.

Cantor, Norman F. In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made. New York: Free Press, 2001.

Gottfried, Robert Steven. The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe. New York: Free Press, 1983.

Ziegler, Philip. The Black Death. Wolfeboro Falls: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1991.