Black Death
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Black Death was an epidemic (a disease that goes over a large area) that killed millions of people in the Old World during the Middle Ages. It started in Europe in 1347, and lasted until 1351. Almost one out of every three people in Europe got the disease and died. Many people now think the disease was the bubonic plague, which was spread by fleas that were carried by rats. It spread all over Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia. It caused swelling on the neck, groin, and under the arms. People were in pain and then they died a horrible death. The symtoms could be seen 3-7 days after being infected.
It killed between a third and two-thirds of Europe's population and, including Middle Eastern lands, India and China, it killed at least 75 million people.
The same disease is thought to have returned to Europe every generation with varying degrees of intensity and fatality until the 1700s. Later outbreaks include the Italian Plague of 1629-1631, the Great Plague of London (1665–1666), the Great Plague of Vienna (1679), the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720–1722 and the 1771 plague in Moscow. There is some controversy over the identity of the disease, but in its virulent form seems to have disappeared from Europe in the 18th century.
The Black Death had a drastic effect on Europe's population, changing Europe's social structure. It was a serious blow to the Roman Catholic Church and resulted in widespread persecution of minorities such as Jews, Muslims, foreigners, beggars and lepers. The uncertainty of daily survival influenced people to live for the moment, as illustrated by Giovanni Boccaccio in The Decameron (1353).
The initial fourteenth-century European event was called the "Great Mortality" by contemporary writers and, with later outbreaks, became known as the 'Black Death'.
The Black Death has been used as a subject or as a setting in modern literature and media. Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Masque of the Red Death (1842) is set in an unnamed country during a fictional plague that bears strong resemblance to the Black Death.
Black Metal band 1349 are named after the year Black Death spread through Norway.
Sufferers of the bubonic plague develop fevers, severe flues and buboes that could swell to the size of an average apple. These buboes appear mainly in the groin, armpit and apparently sometimes on the thighs.
[edit] Primary sources online
- Henry Knighton's account
- Agnolo di Tura's account
- Gabriele de' Mussi's account
- Marchionne di Coppo di Stefano Buonaiuti's account
- A Petrarch account and More quotes from Petrarch
[edit] Secondary sources online
- The History Guide "Satan Triumphant: The Black Death"
- Symptoms, causes, pictures of bubonic plague
- Overview of the black death
- BBC news story on controversy over Black Death origins
- Examination of "Ring around the Rosy"'s relationship to the plague
- Black Death Overview from BBC
- Plague and Public Health in Renaissance Europe. Primary source documents and analysis.
- Secrets of the Dead . Mystery of the Black Death PBS
- Pandemics in Eastern Europe
- Biologists discover why 10% of Europeans are safe from HIV infection. Computer modeling demonstrates that epidemics of viral haemorrhagic fever slowly raised the frequency from the original single CCR5-Δ32 mutation (that prevents HIV from entering the cells of the immune system) to about 1 in 20,000 in the 14th century and, because of the Black Death, to values today of 1 in 10. "Bubonic plague is a bacterial disease rather than a virus and is not blocked by the CCR5-Δ32 mutation."
[edit] See also
- Great Famine of 1315-1317
- Great Plague of London