The Black Death

Here is some random info about the black death:

The Black Death

Right now in the world, we are experiencing the Coronavirus Pandemic. However, almost 300 years ago, an extremely large plague devastated medieval Europe. The Black Death.

 It arrived in October the year 1347 from 12 boats coming from Messina. The so-called “death ships” had mostly dead or gravely ill sailors. When the people saw that they had disease aboard, they ordered them out of the port but it was too late, the infected rats that were overrun with fleas had jumped off the boat and gotten onto land. Ghost ships became a common sight. If a crew was aboard a ship and the fleas were too, often the entire crew would die and their ship would drift around aimlessly.

The rats made good time, they were everywhere which meant so were the fleas. The fleas could hop off the rats onto a human, bite them and eventually, kill them. Where the fleas had bitten, large swollen bumps called buboes would show up, sometimes growing to the size of eggs or small apples. Along with the buboes, other symptoms were headaches, diarrhea, lots of pain and body aches. A lot of the time, you could discover the first bubo one evening and be dead by morning.

People initially thought that the plague was a punishment from God so they would go into the streets whipping themselves to prove their remorse. Others thought it was caused by Jews so they would torture them to try and get them to confess about poisoning the water. Another theory was that it was spread by cats. They began to kill cats which made the rat population go up so that idea definitely backfired.

When the plague started, people would die and be buried in their own, individual grave. When the death tolls kept on rising, they didn’t have enough time to bury them all individually. Instead, they made mass graves. A mass grave was a huge pit dug into the ground. They would just pile the dead people up into it until it filled up. Then, they would cover it. The people that never even got put into a mass grave would eventually turn into a bleached pile of bones. People didn’t want this “building material” to go to waste so they made buildings and cathedrals out of them.

The people back then also thought that a cure was blood letting. They would place one of your limbs over a bowl, cut it open and then let it drip. Not only did it make you suffer from blood loss but it also made it easier for bacteria to enter your body. 

Eventually people started self-quarantining, hoping that just being away from everything would solve this bubonic plague. And it did. The disease died slowly but over time the sickness stopped spreading so much.

Not many things from the Black Death still have an effect on people today, one thing that remains from it is the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie”. It was originally made up about the plague. The line that says “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down” is referring to everybody dying, or as the nursery rhyme says, falling down. The part about “Ring around the Rosie” is telling about people holding flowers and roses at people’s funerals. 

In conclusion, the Black Death was a terrible travesty that wiped out nearly half of medieval Europe. Thanks for reading!