Notes from class: Black Death

• Black Death(Bubonic Plague) took 20 million lives in only 2 years
• 1338 there was an earthquake and rats that had the Black Plague spread across Europe from Central Asia
• The disease was in black rats and their fleas, as they moved the plague spread along the trade routes and and after 8 years reached the Chrimea
• There was a war going on and there was a siege and the people were stuck inside the fortress and the soldiers were stuck outside. The soldiers began to die, they decided to leave but before that the prince made the soldiers make catapults and catapult the plagued dead bodies into the fortress walls. (GERM WARFARE)
• The bodies landed into the wall and within days people began to die because the disease had entered the water supply. The merchants who could left the city and took boats, where the rats, with disease, had boarded. The sailors started dying. The merchants reached sicily and the harbor masters tried to isolate the ships, but the rats got onto shore. This is how the plague reached Europe.
• A priest heard that the plague had reached Europe and prayed that it would not spread.
• Maceet, was a heavily populated city and when the disease reached there people started to die. The clothes of the disease were sold and when they were buried close friends of them followed them to bury them.
• The homes of the dead where closed off. Bodies where buried by the hundreds in clay pits because burial grounds soon became over crowded. Sometimes the corpses where left in their homes.
• When the pope heard that the plague was weeks away from Avignon, where he lived, a doctor had fires set about him, to keep the disease away, as the plague hit Avignon. The Pope sat there for weeks in the heat.
• The pope's doctor ended up surviving the plague when he came down with it. He had brought blood to the surface of him by heating glass. He came up with that there where two types of the plague, bubonic and pneumonic. Upon this the pope allowed the dissection of dead bodies.
• The pope had flagulents move across Europe praying to ask God for forgiveness.
• This new movement blamed the Church though for the disease, but then put blame on Jews and Jewish people where massacred all over. The pope had them stopped.
• by 1350 the plague had died down, it had killed 1/3 of Europe's population.
• After this though there was a shortage in labor and taxes and the people were unsure about the absolution of the Church.
• Dead bodies where hauled out of towns on wagons.
• As the wagon went through town someone would scream, "Bring out your dead"
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