"This is the End of the World": The Black Death

Source - A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, Chapter 5

"Ignorant of the cause...the actual plague bacillus, Pasturella Pestis, remained undiscovered for another 500 years. Living alternately in the stomach of the flea and the bloodstream of the rat who was the flea's host, the bacillus in its bubonic form was transferred to humans and animals by the bite of either rat or flea...small black rats lived on ships and were carriers as were the brown or sewer rats. The original outbreak occurred in Central Asia and was transmitted along caravan routes to Europe.

This much is known:

- in October, 1347, Genoese trading ships put into harbor
in Sicily with dead and dying men at the oars: ships
had come from the Crimea in the Black Sea.

- the diseased sailors showed strange black swellings
about the size of an egg or an apple in the armpits and
groin.

- the swellings oozed blood and pus and were followed by
spreading boils and black blotches on the skin from
internal bleeding. The sick suffered severe pain and
died quickly within five days of the first symptoms.

- as the disease spread, other symptoms appeared: these
victims coughed and sweated heavily and died even more
quickly, within three days or less.

- in both types, everything that issued from the
body--breath, sweat, blood--smelled foul.

- depression and despair accompanied the physical
symptoms and before the end "death is seated on the
face"

- the disease was bubonic plague, present in two forms:
one that infected the bloodstream causing buboes and
internal bleeding spread by contact: the second, a
more virulent pneumonic type that infected the lungs
and was spread by respiratory infection.

- the presence of both at once caused the high mortality
and speed of contagion.

- so lethal was the disease that cases were known of
persons going to bed well and dying before they woke,
of doctors catching the illness at bedside and dying
before the patient.

- although the mortality rate was eratic, ranging from
one fifth in some places to almost total elimination in
others...the overall estimates of modern demographers
is the same expressed by a medieval writer--"a third of
the world died.

- when graveyards filled up, bodies at Avignon were
thrown into the Rhone until mass burial pits were dug
for dumping the corpses. In London in such pits,
corpses piled up in layers until they overflowed (the
pits). Everywhere reports speak of the sick dying too
fast for the living to bury (them).

- in enclosed places such as monasteries and prisons, the
infection of one person usually meant that of all, as
happened in the Franciscan convents of Carcassone and
Marseille, where every inmate without exception died.

- the fear of contagion froze every other instinct.
Angelo di Tura, a writer from Siena, wrote "father
abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another, for
this plague seemed to strike through the breath and
sight...and I, Angelo di Tura, buried my five children
with my own hands, and so did many others likewise.

- flight was the chief recourse of those who could afford
it or arrange it: the urban poor died in overwhelming
numbers, as did the young.

- oxen and donkeys, sheep and goats, pigs and chickens
ran wild and they too, according to local reports,
succumbed to the pest; one English chronicler reported
5000 sheep dead in one field alone, "their bodies so
corrupted by the plague that neither beast nor bird
would touch them," and spreading an appalling stench.

- the mystery of the contagion was, "the most terrible
of all terrors."