The Bubonic Plague
The bubonic plague was a horrifying plague that wiped out about 1/3 of the world’s population. The bubonic plague travelled very quickly but some question what it was that caused it to travel so quickly. In analyzing the fact that infectious droplets, human choices and trade were all major factors of the spread, one can conclude that humans had a major impact on the spread of the Bubonic Plague.
Humans had a major impact on the spread of the bubonic plague, one example would be infectious droplets. Not just humans, animals too. People that hunted infected animals and ate them also got the disease. Humans that were crowded in the same medieval city were coughing and getting their saliva onto other peoples skin. “the epidemic, which is reckoned to have claimed 75 million lives worldwide, spread from person to person in crowded medieval cities.” This quote supports the information because it explains how quickly it spread from person to person and why
…show more content…
People were hunting animals that were infected and eating them. They didn’t think it would do any harm. “transmission can also occur from handling infected animal tissues.” This quote supports the statement because it explains how the plague can spread if someone is in direct contact with infected tissue. Wars were a major factor as well. In 1347, a town called Genoese was under attack by a tartar army, when the tartars were killed by the plague, their infected corpses were launched over the walls by tartars who were not dead yet. The Genoese were exposed and they panicked, they fled to Europe and brought the disease with them. “The Genoese fled by ship to Sicily, taking the deadly disease with them to Europe.” This quote is an example because it explains how the deadly disease affected them and how it got to Europe. Another thing that helped cause the spread of the bubonic plague was
Sweeping through Western Europe during the fourteenth century, the Bubonic Plague wiped out nearly one third of the population and did not regard: status, age or even gender. All of this occurred as a result of a single fleabite. Bubonic Plague also known as Black Death started in Asia and traveled to Europe by ships. The Plague was thought to be spread by the dominating empire during this time, the Mongolian Empire, along the Silk Road. The Bubonic Plague was an infectious disease spread by fleas living on rats, which can be easily, be attached to traveler to be later spread to a city or region. Many factors like depopulation, decreasing trade, and huge shifts in migrations occurred during the Bubonic Plague. During Bubonic Plague there were also many different beliefs and concerns, which include fear, exploitation, religious and supernatural superstition, and a change of response from the fifteenth to eighteen century.
In 1347, Europe began to perceive what the Plague had in store. Terrible outcomes arose when the citizens caught the Plague from fleas. The transfer of fleas to humans caused the outbreak of the Black Death. Infections that rodents caught were passed on to fleas, which would find a host to bite, spreading the terrible disease (“Plague the Black Death” n.pag.). When Genoese ships arrived back to Europe from China, with dead sailors and...
From 1347 to 1350, the Black Death hit Northern Europe. Although, this was not the first time this type of disease was record. The plague was documented to have affected North Africa and the Middle East during the Classical Time. There are several speculations that this certain type of virus had been the cause of other epidemics, such “the pestilence described as striking the Philistines in the biblical book of 1 Samuel” (plague 9) although this is not verified. When it hit Europe in the 14th century, the main cause was black rats and fleas that carried the virus, as well as the disease being spread by poor sanitary. During this time period, about “one-fourth to one-third of the total population of Europe, or 25 million persons” (plague 10) died. The infected black rats were believed to have been carried over by Central Asian trade routes, fleas are believed to have become infected by biting an already infected rat. How a person would get infected was in two ways; either, normally one was bitten by a tainted flea or rat and unfortunately, the virus could live in the host indefinitely. Once a person became infected, it wouldn’t take too long for those around them to also become infected. Not only was the plague spread by rats and fleas, but the disease was insa...
(SIP-A) The plague had many ways in spreading its disease making more and more people get sick very rapidly (STEWE-1) .The plague killed roughly half of the population of Europe, In crowded areas people could receive the Plague from fleas that had bitten wild black rats. Once transferred from flea to human it became fatal in days. (S3 27). (STEWE-2) In 1347 many sailors that were dying from the plague were on Italian merchant ships from the Black Sea, which is on the trade route between Europe and China. Within days the sailors on the ship had spread the plague from the port cities to the surrounding countryside, within a year the disease spread as far as England. (S14). (SIP-B) Because of the rapidly spreading disease the mortality rate and decrease of population was very high and greatly affected those who survived. (STEWE-1) Over half of the population had died and extremely quickly, there were so many bodies that there was no more room to bury them, the brutal depopulation is almost unimaginable for those who lived through such a painful time. (S1
The church also helped the spread of the plague. The priests, from the catholic church, went from house to house visiting the sick. The priest would visit the sick person to anoint them before they died. This was a catholic belief and is still done today. It is called anointing of the sick, it is a sacrament in the catholic faith. This caused the disease to spread rapidly because the priest would visit a sick person and become infected. He then would ...
The Black Death, better known as the Bubonic Plague, greatly decimated the population of Europe during the Middle Ages. The Black Death was spread through fleas on rats brought in by trade ships. Because trade was so heavy among various parts of Europe, the plague spread quickly and was almost always fatal to the victim. The Black Death spread so quickly that few places had any time to prepare or any knowledge of how to prevent the it. However, certain measures could have been taken to keep the plague from spreading to certain towns.
The Bubonic plague did not affect the lower classes as much because they consisted of peasants which there was a large quantity of, and when people from the lower class usually died they had enough people to fill their job. Lower classes still had freedoms when the plague was around, and better pay that was driving the revolts (Whipps). When the plague first struck about a quarter and a half of Europe's population had decreased because everybody had died, this caused jobs to open up and for other people to find a job and move there way up the social ranks (Frey 57). Moving up the social ranks was a difficult task, but while the population decreased people's jobs had changed power to go to different people easier than ever at this point. Wendy Frey cited “There was a shift in power from nobles to the common people” (57). This caused people to either move up in the social class or to move down because people do not need them any more because they are not that important anymore. Also a lot of serfs that owned farmland depended on their manors, but because of the plague they could not depend on them anymore so they tried to sell their land or most of the serfs that owned the farmland ran away (Dunn 18). This happened to almost every single farmer, and the effect of this caused not enough food to be grown and people in Europe now did not have enough food to eat. Europeans were affected by the Bubonic Plague negatively in a political way by job, rank, and social
The Bubonic Plague, otherwise known as the Black Death was the major epidemic that swept across Asia and Europe and changed the course of human history. Believing to have been started in Yunnan province around 1320, the plague would then spread to all parts of China and beyond causing a widespread devastation unlike anything ever seen before. It is said that rodents of Central Asian Steppes were the first ones to have carried the disease. From there, it spread from rodent to rodent and then moved on to fleas. And from there, it moved to the human populace causing widespread panic and
In 1347, Europe was swept with one of the most devastating human catastrophes recorded in history, the Black Death. During the late 1340s and early 1350s, the lethal pandemic affected parts of western Asia and North Africa and it is believed to have begun in Central Asia in the early 1330s. Historians estimate that “the Black Death killed anywhere from 33 to 60 percent of Europe’s total population—roughly 25 million to 45 million men, women, and children.” (7) The Black Death that swept through Europe during the 1340s was an important event in history because it showed how a plague could easily spread through an unprepared population and the consequences it created.
History has been filled with many disasters. The Bubonic plague has been responsible for three of those disasters. The first disaster, The Plague of Justinian, occurred in Constaniople in 542. This specific outbreak killed an estimated 70,000 people in two years. At its peak, 1,000 people died each week, and many more were infected but recovered successfully. This was the first time Bubonic plague became known to society. This would not be the last time the plague would strike.
As you may figure viral deadly diseases such as malaria, HIV, and Lung Cancer have killed millions within the years of Human existence, but the one in particular to cause a major impact in the world’s history of sicknesses is The Black Death, formally known as the Bubonic Plague. The Bubonic Plague wasn’t the longest epidemic. The timeline that the disease was present, single handedly slaughtered 25 million people of the vulnerable population in Europe. The childhood nursery rhyme song “Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies”, discreetly demonstrates the red rash symptomatic of infection and holding flowers under one's nose to combat the smell of sickness and dead bodies.(Ainsworth 64) The symptoms of the disease were airborne and highly contagious and could spread viciously to whomever that came in touching distance of an infected individual. The Black Death put SARS and AIDS in a lower caparison inquiring that they all have caused a death domino effect.(Ainsworth 64) The year of 1333 is when the plague originally geared up into severe sweeps starting in China with the international trading route occurring between constantinople and the mediterranean near the black sea. The living conditions people lived under helped the spread of the disease greatly.
The plague was spread by fleas, which were not effected by the disease. Fleas first infected the rats, which lived off garbage and sewage. The rats then spread the infection to the humans. Rats were a common sight in the cities, due to the poor sanitary conditions, so no one suspected them (www.tartans.com). In the winter the plague seemed to disappear, but only because fleas were dormant then. Each spring, the plague attacked again, killing new victims (www.byu.edu). The effects of the plague were devastating. After just five years, twenty-five million people were dead - one third of Europe's population. Once people were infected they infected others very rapidly. As a result, in order to avoid the disease, many fled to the countryside where the lower population density helped to decrease the speed at which the disease spread (www.tartans.com). From a person's time of infection to his or her death was less than one week (www.home.nycap.rr.com). The plague became known as "The Black Death" because of the discoloration of the skin and black enlarged lymph nodes that appeared on the second day of contracting the disease. The term "The Black Death" was not invented until after 1800. Contemporaries called it "the pestilence" (Cantor 7).
The appearance of the Bubonic Plague in Europe in the 14th century was the cause of a disastrous period of change in European culture and lifestyle. The Bubonic Plague ravaged Europe, killing over 60 percent of the population and is the cause of a series of political, economic and social upheavals. The effects of the plague on the decimated populations in Europe was the cause of a mass questioning of the effectiveness of political and religious authority leaders, a dramatic shift in the wealth of the lower class, and increased persecution and discrimination of Jews and other outlying groups in society.
In Middle Age of Europe, people traded in crowded towns by ships. Because ships and towns were filled with infected rodents bubonic plague began to spread faster and wider (Ollhoff 3~4). Getting bitten by infected fleas was not the only cause of the transmission of bubonic plague. Contact with contaminated fluid or tissue or infectious droplets also caused bubonic plagues ("Ecology and Transmission").
The bubonic plague, too, was a spontaneous epidemic. The Black Death occurred because a bacillus was carried by fleas that fed off the blood of humans and transmitted the deadly bacillus in the process (Packer). It began in China and spread by