The Black Death Or The Bubonic Plague

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The Black Death The Black Death, known as the Black Plague, or the Bubonic Plague killed one third of the population of Europe during the 13th and 14th centuries. The beginning of this plague set the scene for years suffering. It left the social and economic world in pause. The Black Death became a subject of art, music and folklore and it influenced the mind of the people. The impact of this mass killer caused disorder to the medieval society because of its unknown origin, the unknown causes and preventions, its deathly symptoms and its breakdown of life. Religion was greatly affected and changed. In 1347, a Tartar army under Kipchak khan Janibeg had been trying to take the Genoese cathedral city and trading ports of Caffa on…show more content…
First, it starts in unsanitary conditions where it can spread by fleas, who are carriers of the disease. It starts when they bite an infected rat. The bacteria then blocks their digestive system, making them regurgitate the infected blood into a human when the bite. Second, in crowded, unsanitary urban areas where the disease is widespread, it can be passed from man to man through microscopic drops of saliva when a person coughs or sneezes. This leads to the before mentioning lung infection. When people think of the plague, they usually think of the plague which devastated Europe in the mid 1300's, but the history of the plague goes much further back than that. There were accounts of the plague in the Old Testament, and then again in Athens in 430B.C. The plague was dormant for many years, but then reappeared in China in the 1330's. It finally hit Europe in 1347 when Genose trading ships whose sailors were infected. It stayed in Europe and swept through for many years until it finally reached England in 1664 and caused what is known as the Great Plague of London. Europe had heard of the plague, but didn't know how bad it really was until it got there, and when it did, it had huge effects on the economy and the communities in Europe. The effects of the Bubonic plague had on the economy are these. Since there was a greater number of a death in the city than in the country because of the crowded conditions, there was a labor shortage, and many…show more content…
The Jews were suspected of causing the plague by poisoning wells. Comparatively fewer Jews died from the Black Death, in part due to Kashrut that called for a lifestyle that was cleaner than that of a typical medieval villager, and because of isolation in Jewish ghettos. This difference in mortality rate raised the suspicion of people who at that time had no concept of bacterial transfer. Jews were sometimes believed to have invoked the anger of God and it was believed that their sins were the main reason for the plague. By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed, and more than 350 separate massacres had occurred. This persecution was often not merely out of religious hatred, but also as a way of attacking the kings or Church who protected the Jews and as a way of lashing out at the institutions that had failed them. An important legacy of the Black Death was to cause the eastward movement of what was left of north European Jewry to Poland and Russia. From 1944-1993, 362 cases of human plague were reported in the United States. 90 percent of these occurred in four western states- Arizona, California, Colorado, and New Mexico. The Plague was confirmed in the United States from nine states during 1995. SOURCES http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Black_Death http://www.deathreference.com/Bl-Ce/Black-Death.html
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