8th grade history @AISWEST CAMPUS

1. 1347 and on - - -

2. • Introduction
• Forms of Disease and Transmission
• Path of the Plague
• Recurrences
• Efforts to stop the Plague
• Quotes on the Black Death
• Consequences:
Economic
Social and Psychological
Religious
Music and Art

3. • Epidemic Disease
• Divider between Central
and late Middle Ages
Illustration
From the
Toggenburg
Bible, 1411

4. • Bubonic Plague.
• painful lymph node swellings, buboes
• Septicemic Plague.
• also called “blood poisoning”,
attacked the blood system
• Pneumonic Plague.
• attacked the respiratory system

5. • Painful lymph node
swelling, called buboes
• In groins and armpits
• Oozing pus and blood
• Damage to the skin and
underlying tissue
• Dark blotches = acral
necrosis  Black Death!

6. A plague victim reveals
the telltale buboe on
his leg. From a 14th
Century illumination.

7. • Swellings “egg  apple”
• Fever of 101-105 degrees F
• Headaches and Aching joints
• Nausea and vomiting (of blood)
• General feeling of malaise
• Swellings expanding until they burst  death following
soon after
• Whole process: 3-5 days
• NB: People who didn’t develop swellings invariably
died. People with swellings might have a chance.
• Mortality Rate: 30-75 %
• If 40% of population was getting infected, and 80% of them
died = mortality rate of 32%

8. • Second most commonly seen form of the Black
Death

9. The Pneumonic Plague
Infected the lungs.
Symptoms:
Slimy sputum tinted with blood
(Sputum = saliva mixed with mucus excreted
from the respiratory system)
Sputum became free flowing
1-7 days for symptoms to appear
Mortality Rate : 90-95%

10. The Pneumonic Plague
• Airborne transmission –
added to its danger!
• Through bacteria in
droplets of saliva coughed
up by sick persons
• Inhaled by bystanders
• New infection starts
directly in the lungs or
throat.

11. • Attacked the blood
system (Blood
Poisoning)
• Fevers
• Skin turns deep
shades of purple
due to DIC
(disseminated
intravascular
coagulation)

12. In its most deadly form, DIC causes a victim’s
skin to turn dark purple, almost black = The
Black Death.
Victims died the same day symptoms
appeared.
Mortality Rate: close to 100%.
No treatment even today

13. • Direct contact with a Flea
• The Bacteria (Yersinia pestis)
carried by rodents
• Fleas infest animals,
primarily rats
• Then move to human
hosts
• The oriental rat flea,
Xenopsylla cheopis

14. • The flea drinks
rat’s blood
• The bacteria
multiplies inside
the flea
• The flea’s stomach
is blocked
• The flea is very
hungry
• The flea
voraciously bites a
host = a human
• The flea is unable
to satisfy its
hunger
• The flea continues
to feed
• Infected blood
carrying the plague
bacteria is flowing
into the human’s
wound
• The rat dies
• The flea dies of
starvation

15. • Erupted in Gobi
Desert, late 1320’s
• Epidemic in Europe in
6th
century but
dormant since then
• Reached the shores of
Italy in 1348
• Spread in every
direction, primarily
westward
• Lasted 3 years

17. • Traveled on trade routes and caravans
• Generally from south to north
• And east to west
• Passing through
– Italy
– France
– England
– Germany
– Denmark
– Sweden
– Poland
– Finland
– Greenland

18. • War – Civil War in China 1205-1353
• Little Ice Age at beg. Of 13th
century
• The Great Famine 1315-1322 in Northern
Europe
• Typhoid Epidemic
• Pestilence, maybe anthrax, hit the animals of
Europe in 1318
• Unemployment, famine, disease

19. • The progress of the
plague coincides with
the medieval trade
routes
• Iceland, North Finland,
and North Sweden had
no plague
• Norway 1348 (Oslo,
Bergen)
• Denmark 1348, from
Jutland to the islands,
and then on to Sweden

20. The Black Death
• The disease appeared in India as well in the 1340’s and reached Mecca, deep inside the Muslim lands, in
1329.

21. The Black Death
• Mecca - The most populated province of Saudi Arabia, Its capital is the sacred city of Mecca, which is
extremely important within the Islamic faith.

22. • Every 5-7 years
• Next plague: 1360 = The Pest
of the Children
• Italian Plague 1629-1631
• Great Plague of Vienna in
1679
• Great Plague of London
1665-1666 – one of the last
major outbreaks
• Resembles modern day Ebola

23. • Cities were hardest hit
• Isolation – healthy and
sick
• Quarantine
• Isolation of incoming
ships
• Here: a reproduction
of a peasant’s hovel

24. • Scents -
incense
and
aromatic
oils
• Sound –
church
bells
• Sound –
cannons
• Talismans
• Here: burial
in coffins

25. • Quarantine was the best method
• Avoiding the sick
• The wealthy fled to the countryside (Isaac
Newton)
• Pope Clement VI in Avignon sat between two
large fires to breathe pure air. The plague
bacillus is destroyed by heat, so this worked!

26. • Flagellants –
• self-flogging to
atone for sins.
• Popular after
disillusionment with
the church’s
reaction to the Black
Death
• Outside the Church

27. • Christians - and an
angry Deity.
• Bands wandering
through towns and
countryside
• Public penance.
Inflicted all kinds
of punishment
upon themselves
• Sacrifice for the
sins of the world –
like Jesus

28. BURNING OF JEWS ACROSS EUROPE

29. • Society
disapproved
• Tendency to kill
Jews and
clergymen who
opposed them
• Condemned by
the Pope in 1349
• Reappeared in
times of plague
into the 15th
century

30. • Boccacio: The victims “ate lunch with their friend and
dinner with their ancestors in paradise”
• Samuel Pepys: “Realizing what a deadly disaster had
come to them the people quickly drove the Italians from
their city… Fathers abandoned their sick sons. Lawyers
refused to come and make out wills for the dying. Friars
and nuns were left to care for the sick…Bodies were left
in empty houses, and there was no one to give them a
Christian burial.”

31. • Approx. 25 million deaths in
Europe
• Between one third and one
half of European population
died 1348-1350
• 25% of villages depopulated
• 45-75% of Florence died in
one year
• In Venice, 60% died over 18
months

32. • Urban populations recovered quickly
• Rural populations recovered slowly
• Friars took a couple of generations to recover
• Pre-plague population reached in the 1500s or
1600s
• Later period of Middle Ages was characterized
by chronically reduced population

33. • 1348:
• Gaza: 10.000 dead
• Aleppo: 500 dead per day
• Damascus: 1000 dead per day
• Syria: total of 400.000 dead
• Lower mortality rate in the Middle
East of less than one third of
population

34. • Shortage of laborers rising wages for
peasants and artisans
• Valuable artisan skills disappeared
• Oversupply of goods  prices dropped
• For the living, standard of living rose!
• Landlords stopped freeing their serfs serfs
revolting and leaving the land
• The oppressed demanded fairer treatment

35. • The great
equalizer
• Lack of
sufficient law
enforcement
personnel
• Promoted
lawlessness
• People tried
their luck

36. • Persecutions of the Jews –
scapegoats
• Massacres and burnings
• By 1351, 60 major and 150
smaller Jewish communities
had been exterminated
• Lepers were also targeted
• Jews expelled, moved to
Poland & Lithuania

37. • Church lost prestige, spiritual authority, leadership
• Promised cures, treatment, and explanations
• No answers to the people
• Revolt against the church
• Severe shortage of clergy – functioned as nurses and
consequently died.
• The church targeted the Jews for persecution – had killed
Jesus and brought sin to the world

38. • Culture turned morbid
• Sense of death – impending &
inevitable
• Death is a game, like chess!
• Dance of death – death is random
• Everyone suffered
• Despair

39. • Danse Macabre = the dance
of death: skeletons mingling
with the living (here: Hans
Holbein the Younger)
• Shocking juxtapositions
• Written language almost lost
• Coffins had pictures of
corpses on the lid
• New creativity in motives

40. Ring a-round the rosy = rosary beads give you God’s help
Pocket full of posies = used to stop the odor of rotting
bodies through to cause the plague
Ashes, ashes! = the church burned the dead when burying
became too laborious
We all fall down! = dead
 Children suffered mentally and physically
 Children were not thought worth the trouble to raise!

41. • The bubonic Plague still exists
• Quite common among rodent
populations
• A cure is known today – but the
disease moves very quickly
• The Plague is still with us
Hythe Ossuary, remains of victims of
the Black Death

42. VIDEOS
• https://youtu.be/kScxc9DPrnY?t=45
• https://youtu.be/sFUQCWghjWc?t=2