The worst pandemic in the history of mankind. Black Death has decimated the world

Although infectious diseases have accompanied man since the dawn of time, it was only the transition to a sedentary lifestyle that catalyzed the emergence of epidemic outbreaks. And as cities expanded and the network of trade routes expanded, the likelihood that local epidemics would cross borders and turn into a pandemic – a scourge that would bring death, ruin social order, and change history. This was the case with the bubonic plague raging in Europe and Asia in the mid-fourteenth century, known as the Black Death, and in Poland as plague or plague air.

1. During the Justinian plague pandemic in 541, between 5 and 10 people died in Constantinople every day. people
2. In the Middle Ages, the plague was believed to be transmitted by miasmas, i.e. fumes from the corpse or breath of an infected person
3. Between 1347 and 1350, the Black Death killed a quarter of Europe’s population, more than 25 million
4. Currently, the American CDC lists bubonic plague as a factor of bioterrorism
5. You can find more such stories on the TvoiLokony home page

The plague is making itself felt

The first major pandemic to show the characteristic symptoms of the disease was the plague of Justinian in AD 541.Named after the then reigning Emperor Justinian I in Byzantium, the epidemic arose in Ethiopia and crossed the Mediterranean Sea on merchant ships, reaching Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the fall of 541.

It climaxed in the spring of 542. In Constantinople, 5 died a day. people, and some estimates even point to 10 thousand. The plague took over a third of the inhabitants. The burials were not kept up, the bodies were placed in high piles in churches and city towers, as the Christian doctrine made cremation impossible.

For the next three years, the plague raged in Italy, southern France, the Rhine Valley and the Iberian Peninsula. It spread north as far as Denmark and west to Ireland, then to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia Minor. Between 542 and 546, epidemics in Asia, Africa and Europe claimed nearly 100 million lives. The Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea wrote that “all mankind was on the verge of annihilation”.

The pandemic permanently changed the Western world, contributing to the fall of Justinian. Food production collapsed and the eight-year period of starvation began. The agrarian system also changed, a new form of cultivating the land appeared – the three-field farm.

Over the next 200 years, outbreaks of plague appeared in Europe and the Middle East. On the European continent, on the other hand, a serious epidemic developed again in the XNUMXth century.

The plague arrived there in October 1347, when 12 ships sailed from the Black Sea and docked in the Sicilian port of Messina. Their interior held a terrifying secret – most of the sailors were dead, and those who had not yet moved to the other world were gravely ill. Black ulcers covered their bodies, oozing blood and pus. Sicilian authorities hurriedly ordered the “ships of death” to leave port, but it was too late.

1. Editors recommend: Which pandemic claimed the most lives?

Plague: How Did the Black Death Begin?

Even before the ships entered Messina, rumors circulated in Europe of a great plague that was taking its toll on the trade routes of the Near and Far East. Indeed, in the early XNUMXs, the disease hit China, India, Persia, Syria and Egypt.

She was brought to Crimea from Asia Minor by Tatar troops besieging the city of Kaffa (now Feodosia in Ukraine), located on the Black Sea coast. The merchants fled in panic by galleys to Constantinople and across the Mediterranean to Messina. The siege was unsuccessful, but the Tatars, before departing, catapulted through the walls of the corpses of the victims of the Black Death.

We currently believe that the plague appeared in Asia over 2. years ago and possibly spread thanks to merchant ships, however, there are studies showing that the pathogen responsible for the infection already existed in Europe 3. years bc

What are the symptoms of Black Death?

The symptoms of the disease were described by an eyewitness to the epidemic by the eminent Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio. In “Decameron” we find this description:

The disease did not appear in us as it did in the East, where the usual symptom of inevitable death was the loss of blood from the nose (…) both in men and women, there were tumors in the groin or under the arms, some the size of a small apple, others large like eggs then there were purple spots all over the body – sometimes large and in small numbers, otherwise much smaller, but more numerous – both, however, foreshadowing death. Neither medical knowledge nor drugs helped to cure the disease (…) almost everyone died on the third day after the first symptoms appeared

In fact, the disease can occur in three forms: bubonic, sepsis and pulmonary. Most often we deal with bubonic plague.

After entering the blood vessels, the bacteria migrate to the lymph nodes, which increase in size (the so-called bubo). First, the sick develop a fever, chills, general weakness, and headaches appear. The lymph nodes (most often inguinal) then enlarge and become painful, soft and burst to form fistulas. Untreated bubonic form in about 60 percent. cases end in death.

The septic (septic) form has an electrifying course. There is a systemic infection, i.e. sepsis. In the blood vessels of the fingers, toes and nose, bacterial micro-embolisms are formed, tissue necrosis occurs. Sepsis is accompanied by fever, enlargement of the liver and spleen, symptoms of shock or delirium. Untreated sepsis is usually fatal.

In the pulmonary form, hemorrhagic pneumonia occurs, accompanied by coughing, shortness of breath, hemoptysis, cyanosis, and high fever. Death occurs even within two days, and the disease is fatal if left untreated.

Plague: How Did You Get Infected?

Fourteenth-century Europeans were terrified of how infectious the new disease was. Boccaccio wrote: “Simply touching the clothes was enough to transmit the disease by touching”. People went to bed healthy, and they might be dead in the morning. The plague was believed to be transmitted by miasms, i.e. fumes from the corpse or breath of an infected person.

Today we know that Black Death, or plague, is a bacterial contagious disease caused by Yersinia pestis, a gram-negative stick discovered by French biologist Alexandre Yersin in Hong Kong during the 1894 pandemic.

Fleas transmit the disease from rats to humans. Once infected, the flea stomach becomes clogged with a mass of bacteria. The insect, trying to remove the obstacle, returns the accumulated blood along with the Yersinia pestis sticks directly to the host’s bloodstream. Fleas reproduce abundantly on their host, and when the host dies, they immediately leave it, infecting the new ones, thus laying the foundation for an epidemic.

In bubonic plague, infection occurred only when a person was bitten by a flea that had previously bitten a sick rat or another sick rat. Meanwhile, in the case of pulmonary plague – pestis pneumonica – the bacteria in the aerosol excreted by the sick person entered the lungs of healthy people with the inhaled air.

How was the Black Death engulfed in Europe?

Not long after the plague hit Messina, it reached Marseilles and Tunis in North Africa. Then it touched Rome and Florence, cities lying at the crossroads of trade routes. In mid-1348, it was already ravaging Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon and London. In 1349 it spread to Germany, Spain, England and Norway, and in 1350 it hit eastern Europe.

Today this tragic sequence of events is understandable, but by the mid-XNUMXth century there seemed to be no rational explanation. Nobody knew how the Black Death spread between people, nobody knew how to prevent it. Hence the absurd explanations that sound today: “immediate death occurs when the spirit of air escaping from the eyes of the sick person strikes a healthy person standing nearby and looking at the sick person”.

1. See also: What Should You Know About the Plague?

How was plague treated in the Middle Ages?

The doctors of that time had very primitive methods of treatment. They drew blood and ordained inhaling the aromatic vapors of flowers and herbs such as rose, theriaca, aloe, thyme and camphor, and baths in rose water or vinegar.

The powerlessness of doctors led to an increase in the number of healers selling useless medicines and amulets that were supposed to provide magical protection.

Later, in the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries, doctors began to wear peculiar costumes to protect against the plague. They came to patients dressed from head to toe in leather or oiled robes, gloves and a wide-brimmed hat, and a beak-like mask with glass eyes and nostrils filled with herbs and flowers to ward off mias. They avoided contact with the patient, measuring the pulse with a stick, and they hammered the bubo with knives over a meter long.

Those who were still healthy did their best to avoid the infected. The sick and dying relatives were left to their fate. “Everyone thought only of himself,” wrote Boccaccio.

Doctors refused to admit patients, priests did not administer the last rites, and shopkeepers closed their shops. Many people fled the cities to the countryside, but the plague was right behind them. She did not miss even livestock: cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens. The plague killed so many sheep that one of the consequences of the pandemic was the shortage of wool in Europe.

Black death is the penalty for sins

The terrible toll of the Black Death made it a divine punishment for the sins of greed, blasphemy, heresy, and fornication. So the only way to end the plague was to beg forgiveness. To deserve them, heretics and troublemakers had to be exterminated. Thus the Jews became indirect victims of the Black Death. Thousands were murdered between 1348 and 1349, and thousands fled persecution to Eastern Europe.

It has also been pointed out that the plague is the result of natural phenomena or astrology. Earthquakes, comets, and planetary conjunctions were at stake. People turned to patron saints like St. Roch and St. Sebastian or to the Virgin Mary.

The nobility recruited participants in a procession of flagellants who traveled from town to town and held public demonstrations of penance, during which they flogged themselves with heavy leather belts studded with sharp nails. They repeated this ritual three times a day for 33 and a half days. Then they moved to the next city and started over.

According to reports, when a procession of flagellants – also known as brothers of the cross and bearers of the cross – entered a town or village, it was accompanied by the ringing of bells, singing and crowds of people.

It got to the point that the flagellants became more popular than the Pope himself, who, fearing for his own authority, put an end to the bloody processions.

Endless pandemic and quarantine

The plague has come back many times, but in that time people have already learned something.

In 1374, when the Black Death was back at the gates of Europe, Venice introduced public health controls such as isolating the sick from the healthy and prohibiting ships from harboring the sick from entering the port. In 1377, the Republic of Ragusa on the Adriatic (now Dubrovnik) established a harbor for ships away from the city and the port. Suspected travelers had to spend thirty days there – trentena – to make sure they were healthy and able to go ashore. Trenten turned out to be too short, and in 1403 in Venice, travelers from the Levant in the Eastern Mediterranean were isolated for forty days – quarantine or a good quarantine – from which the term quarantine derives. Extending isolation to forty days may also be linked to Lenten references or the ancient Greek doctrine of “critical days” according to which an infectious disease develops within 40 days of infection. In most European countries, quarantine was introduced in the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries.

The Effects of the Black Death in XNUMXth-century Europe

Plague victims varied from city to city, but in Florence, Boccaccio noted, half the population died. People were dying en masse, there was no possibility of burial, so the bodies were thrown into large pits. Decomposing bodies lay in houses and in the streets. People were terrified of both physical and spiritual death because there were no priests to perform the funeral rites:

The churches and chapels were open, but neither the priest nor the faithful were there – they were all in the morgue. Church man and doctor thrown into a deep and wide grave; the testator, his heirs and executors of the will, thrown from one cart to the same pit

Whole families died, villages emptied. Nobody harvested crops, travel and trade were limited, food and industrial goods were scarce. And because there was also a shortage of labor, the remaining villagers forced the landowners to pay high wages. The plague broke the divisions between the upper and lower classes. Peasants acquired land and property.

Between 1347 and 1350, the Black Death killed a quarter of Europe’s population, over 25 million people. Mortality rates were highest in cities such as Florence, Venice and Paris, where more than half of the population died.

The second serious epidemic broke out in 1361. As a result, 10 – 20 percent of them died. population. There were other epidemics at that time: smallpox, childhood diarrhea and dysentery. As a result, the population of Europe was lower in 1430 than in 1290 and did not recover to pre-pandemic levels until the XNUMXth century.

The third plague pandemic of 1894

The plague returned in the remote Chinese province of Yunnan in 1855. From there, it spread along the tin and opium trade routes, reaching the provincial capital of K’unming and the Gulf of Tonkin, and the port of Pakhoi (now Pei-hai) in Kwangtung Province. In 1894, the plague was observed in Guangzhou and then Hong Kong. From there it reached Bombay. By 1900, it appeared in ports on all continents, transmitted by infected rats traveling on steamboats.

The third pandemic increased and disappeared over the next five decades, and only ended in 1959. During that time, it caused more than 15 million deaths, most of which occurred in India. Later plague outbreaks occurred in China and Tanzania in 1983, Zaire, and India, Mozambique and Zimbabwe in 1994. In Madagascar in the mid-90s, a multi-drug resistant strain of plague bacilli was identified. Modern sanitary practices and antibiotic therapy have significantly alleviated the effects of the disease, but have not completely eliminated it. WHO reports that we are currently dealing with about 2. cases per year, mainly in Africa, Asia and South America, with a global mortality rate of 5 to 15%.

Yersinia pestis is classified as a pathogen that can be used as a biological weapon, which results from the high infectivity and mortality of the infected and the rare occurrence of the disease in developed countries (highly sensitive population). So bubonic plague has a military significance, and the American government agency CDC lists it as a factor of bioterrorism of the highest category A.

This you need to know:

1. History repeats itself? “We can treat the Spanish epidemic as a warning”
2. The “Black Death” was one of the greatest epidemics in human history
3. The biggest epidemics in recent years. These diseases have killed thousands of people

The content of the medTvoiLokony website is intended to improve, not replace, the contact between the Website User and their doctor. The website is intended for informational and educational purposes only. Before following the specialist knowledge, in particular medical advice, contained on our Website, you must consult a doctor. The Administrator does not bear any consequences resulting from the use of information contained on the Website. Do you need a medical consultation or an e-prescription? Go to halodoctor.pl, where you will get online help – quickly, safely and without leaving your home.