The Black Plague and Pandemics

Everyone has heard of the ten plagues of Egypt from the Book of Exodus – blood, frogs, lice, flies, livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and first-born. Then there were the waves of the Black Death, the plague that encompassed most of Europe and it changed the face of Europe forever.

Albrecht Durer depicted the awfulness of the Black Death in one of his black ink etchings, bringing attention to the repenting frenzy of the strange penitents known as the Brotherhood of Flagellants.

The order included both men and women. They believed that, if they whipped themselves to bleeding or allowed a Master of Pilgrimage to do the whipping, ripping their flesh with a scourge of leather thongs and pointed metal studs, then the plague would be lifted. The penitents endured this horror for thirty-three and a half days during which time they were not allowed to clean or treat their wounds. They had hoped to appease God in this manner. Thankfully, Pope Clement VI outlawed this strange sect in October 1349.

To the people of fourteenth century Europe, the plagues were God’s punishment for their sins. Twenty-five million Europeans died within four years, 1347-1351. They believed that self-punished might appease God to relent this scourge.

Nobody understood that plague bacteria were carried in the fur of black rats and spread by flea bites and from bodily fluids of infected humans. The bacillus Pasteurella pestis lives in the bloodstream or the stomach of a flea. The fleas’ favorite rodent for residence is Rattus rattus, the black rat.

Trade caravans from Central Asia, where the plague was endemic, carried the plague to China then to Crimea, and then by ship to the Mediterranean coast via trade routes and finally across Europe. It was believed that the rats fled from droughts or floods to China.

Not many Europeans were spared. Isolation, segregation, and heat worked to stop the infection and its spread.

The Archbishop of Milan ordered the first three houses where the bubonic plague was walled in with all the sick, dead, and healthy entombed within. The city was spared and nobody else got sick.

In his Decameron, the author Giovanni Boccaccio described the isolation of ten young patricians in a palazzo to avoid contact with people in plague-stricken Florence. They kept themselves entertained by telling stories as written in the Decameron. Segregation worked for them and for the area of present-day Poland which was spared the plague because a quarantine was imposed. Quarantine was isolation for forty days.

Pope Clement VI isolated himself at Avignon, France. He sat for weeks in summertime between two large fires constantly stoked. It worked because fire and heat repelled the fleas.

An English nobleman ordered the nearby village to be burned to the ground. No fleas, rats, or disease reached his castle, and his property was safe. It seemed that overpopulation and overcrowding in unsanitary conditions contributed to the spread of the plagues.

The plagues came in three forms, bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic.

The bubonic variety appeared as swollen lymph nodes called buboes or boils in the armpits, groin, or the site of the flea bite.

The pneumonic variety infected the lungs, causing coughing and spitting of blood.

The deadliest was the septicemic plague where the bloodstream was invaded by bacteria and death occurred within hours.

Not everybody died of the plague. Many improved and their recovery was considered a miracle. Doctors prescribed bleeding, laxatives, enemas, burning of the buboes (sometimes it worked), aromatic woods burned to purify the air, rosewater and vinegar sprinkled on floors, special diets, and other strange concoctions.

The Black Death encompassed most of present-day Europe, all the way to Russia and the Black Sea, Constantinople, and Greece.

Following the loss of such a huge European population, the labor market changed; workers could ask for higher wages. Merchants had to sell grain and other commodities for lower prices.

As the population began to increase after the Black Death ended, new waves of plagues occurred centuries later. The epidemic of 1665 in London affected the population less as doctors learned better ways to control it. Still, thousands died. The 17^th century solution was to kill cats and dogs, the poor creatures that could have reduced the rat population carrying the fleas.

One of the famous plagues that hit the Roman Empire hard, the Antonine Plague, put an end to Pax Romana, according to Colin Elliott. Pax Romana represented two centuries of Roman domination of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia.

Millions died in the Empire, the population decline was so severe that a financial crisis followed, and borders were weakened. The 165 A.D. plague even killed one of the emperors. The pandemic lasted until 180 A.D., affecting the entire Empire. Marcus Aurelius could not save the Empire from pestilence, nor from the many other disasters of that time.

Interestingly, Marcus Aurelius only mentioned the Antonine plague once in all his twelve books of Meditations.

The second outbreak occurred in 251-266 A.D. which aggravated the effects of the earlier outbreak. Some historians are convinced that these plagues were the beginning of the ultimate fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. The pandemic was a huge source of social, economic, and political disruption within the Roman Empire.

Galen described the symptoms of this pandemic. Some of the symptoms resembled smallpox and others appeared like the buboes of the plague.

As we have experienced, even with modern medicine and aggressive government intervention, the world suffered immensely from the Covid-19 pandemic.