The Black Death (1347-1351): Apocalypse or Eurasian Pandemic?

The Black Death came from Central Asia. It struck China first, then India, spreading west to the Middle East and Europe. It traveled along the trade routes inside fleas on rats and humans. In October 1347, when a Genoese galley full of dying men arrived in Messina, Italy from the Crimea, no one at first realized the danger. Then, people in the city began to take sick. They suffered swellings in the armpits and groin, dying within three days. Or they took a high fever, spitting blood, dying less than a day later. Some went to bed apparently well and never woke up.

The plague spread throughout Europe, sparing only a few areas, like Hungary, for reasons still unclear. No one knows the total death toll, though most historians agree that at least a third of the population of Europe alone died. Crowded areas where the plague could spread from human to human like towns, cities and monasteries suffered the worst, losing over half of their population. Entire villages and even regions were left desolate, their ruins sinking back into the earth before the plague finally abated in 1351.

Worse yet, the plague did not come unannounced. It followed a series of famines beginning in 1315, brought on by bad weather. This was the Little Ice Age which lasted from the mid-14th until the 19th century. During this cold period, the plague returned every generation (about twenty years) until the Great Plague of London in 1665.

Many have tried to explain the Black Death. Medieval physicians thought it "bad air" from earthquakes or living near swamps. Since the highest mortalities occurred in large cities, which were usually founded on rivers, this seemed to make sense. In the 19th century, scientists settled on Bubonic Plague, which struck Constantinople in the 6th century and is endemic in North Africa today, as the culprit. But recently, other scientists have suggested a hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola, a virus deadlier than bird flu. Either way, scientists and historians don't know why it started and, more importantly, why it left.

Jun 4, 2006 6:27 AM

Holly Ingraham :

Figuring out which disease was which ancient plague or death is always entertaining. Where, for example, do we put the English Sweats, that appeared and disappeared with the Renaissance, for all we can tell? Is it something we now know in a milder form? Did it appear before as, say, the Athenian plague of Pericles? Which plague sent the Huns back to Kazakhstan in 452 (very early Middle Ages)?

Bubonic at least has really distinctive symptoms.

A possibility for Hungary: We know that populations develop resistances as the more resistent members survive to breed. Bubonic came from Western Mongolia, through China, and the long way round southern Asia to Europe. The peoples that made up the population of Hungary (Sarmatians, Alans, Ongrians, Magyars, and even a few abandoned Huns) came from the borders of Western Mongolia long ago. Could bubonic have been so endemic there that they were pre-immune, even though the resistance hadn't been needed for centuries? The Magyars had only been there five hundred years, after all. They certainly had enough contact through the Adriatic with Italy to risk bringing it home.

(This wouldn't have helped the Huns, if their plague was bubonic. Don't get me going on the non-Asian onomaticon of major Huns. I currently think they were a cultural diffusion through largely Gothic tribes. I mean, "Attila" is sooo Goth, like "Totila.")

Jehanne la Pucelle next? :-D

Jun 4, 2006 11:23 AM

Paula Stiles :

Hi Holly! Welcome to the Suite101 board!

Interesting theory about Hungary. I had heard the idea that the fact that the area was so mountainous prevented a spread of rodent populations sufficient to infect those inside the Hungarian borders, but that does seem a bit arcane. There's also a possibility that they developed some kind of resistance from interacting with Constantinople after that city's only massive plague in the 6th century. But there's a problem, there--Constantinople wasn't spared in 1347. Of all places, they certainly should have had a resistance to bubonic plague, but they didn't. It could be that the genetic pool of the city had changed too much over six centuries to retain that immunity (since medieval and ancient cities always seem to have had a higher mortality rate than they did birth rate and made up for it in immigration from the countryside).

However, an equally chilling possibility is that the Black Death was not the same plague that struck Constantinople in the sixth century--either because it wasn't bubonic plague or because it had mutated. Either is possible, really, since the hemorrhagic fever that is now becoming popular as a rival culprit (see the links inside the article) can mutate *very* fast. So, it could have been either. Certainly, the range of symptoms and the variety of areas and populations that it struck would indicate that the strain of Whatever that was the Black Death could and did mutate very quickly. It could be that we ought to be looking harder at the possible correlation with the onset of the Little Ice Age. Perhaps there's a way to check the radioactivity of those sediments, for example, and see if there were any new mutagenic agents in the atmosphere during that period.

One thing that has always puzzled me about the Black Death was that expeditions to the Viking settlements in Greenland were still occurring when the Black Death first reached Europe and the pandemic was still recurring when Columbus and his successors (next week's article topic). Yet, I've never heard of the Black Death ravaging Native Americans or anybody else in the New World, even though it's certainly here now and has been for a while. Other diseases, certainly, but not the most obvious one. I suspect that if you look at the Black Death as a hemorrhagic virus with a 90%-plus mortality rate and an incubation period of less than two days instead of a bubonic-style bacterium with a mortality rate of around 50% and an incubation per