IX The Path of the Black Death 1

Group 3

The Path of the Black Death


· If the plague had just stayed in one city, the containment might have spared Europe. Unfortunately, the plague spread when people fled to other cities.

· It is believed the plague originated in Asia, and moved west with Mongol armies and traders.

· "According to a traditional story, the plague came to Europe from the town of Caffa, a Crimean port on the Black Sea where Italian merchants from Genoa maintained a thriving trade centre.

· The Crimea was inhabited by Tartars, a people of the steppe, a dry, treeless region of central Asia.

· When the plague struck the area in 1346, tens of thousands of Tartars died.

· Perhaps superstition caused the Muslim Tartars to blame their misfortune on the Christian Genoese. Or perhaps a Christian and Muslim had become involved in a street brawl in Caffa, and the Tartars wanted revenge.

· In any case, the Tartars sent an army to attack Caffa, where the Genoese had fortified themselves. As the Tartars laid siege to Caffa, plague struck their army and many died.

· The Tartars decided to share their suffering with the Genoese. They used huge catapults to lob the infected corpses of plague victims over the walls of Caffa.

· As the Tartars had intended, the rotting corpses littered the streets, and the plague quickly spread throughout the besieged city. The Genoese decided they must flee; they boarded their galleys and set sail for Italy, carrying rats, fleas, and the Black Death with them." (Corzine, 1997)

· The plague travelled on trade routes and caravans. Its path of death was generally from south to north and east to west passing through Italy, France, England, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Finland, and eventually reaching Greenland.

Efforts to Stop the Plague

· What were the efforts to stop the plague?

· Although the government had medical workers try to prevent the plague, the plague persisted.

· Most medical workers quit and journeyed away because they feared getting the plague themselves.

· "When the government acts to prevent or control a calamity, but the calamity persists, people turn to cures.

· Many believed that the disease was transmitted upon the air, probably because the smell from the dead and dying was so awful.

· So, the living turned to scents to ward off the deadly vapours. People burned all manner of incense: juniper, laurel, pine, beech, lemon leaves, rosemary, camphor and sulphur.

· Others had handkerchiefs dipped in aromatic oils, to cover their faces when going out.

· Another remedy was the cure of sound. Towns rang church bells to drive the plague away, for the ringing of town bells was done in crises of all kinds. Other towns fired cannons, which was new and made a comfortingly loud ding.

· There were no ends to talismans, charms, and spells that could be purchased from the local wise woman or apothecary.

· Many people knew of someone's friend or cousin who had drank elderberry every day, or who had worn a jade necklace, and who had survived the dreaded disease."

· There were methods that did work. "Cities were hardest hit and tried to take measures to control an epidemic no one understood.

· In Milan, to take one of the most successful examples, city officials immediately walled up houses found to have the plague, isolating the healthy in them along with the sick.

· Venice took sophisticated and stringent quarantine and health measures, including isolating all incoming ships on a separate island. But people died anyway, though fewer in Milan and Venice than in cities that took no such measures.

· Pope Clement VI, living at Avignon, sat between two large fires to breath pure air. The plague bacillus actually is destroyed by heat, so this was one of the few truly effective measures taken

Quotes:

· Boccaccio said that the victims "ate lunch with their friend and dinner with their ancestors in paradise."

· "Neither physicians nor medicines were effective. Whether because these illnesses were previously unknown or because physicians had not previously studied them, there seemed to be no cure.

· There was such a fear that no one seemed to know what to do. When it took hold in a house it often happened that no one remained who had not died.

· And it was not just that men and women died, but even animals died. Dogs, cats, chickens, oxen, donkeys sheep showed the same symptoms and died of the same disease.

· And almost none, or very few, who showed these symptoms, were cured.

· The symptoms were the following: a bubo in the groin, where the thigh meets the trunk; or a small swelling under the armpit; sudden fever; spitting blood and saliva (and no one who spit blood survived it).

· It was such a frightful thing that when it got into a house, as was said, no one remained.

· Frightened people abandoned the house and fled to another." -Marchione di Coppo Stefani

· "It struck me very deep this afternoon going with a hackney coach from my Lord Treasurer's down Holborne, the coachman I found to drive easily and easily, at last stood still, and came down hardly able to stand, and told me that he was suddenly stuck very sick, and almost blind, he could not see.

· So I 'light and went into another coach with a sad heart for the poor man and trouble for myself lest he should have been struck with the plague, being at the end of town that I took him up; But god have mercy upon us all!"-S. Pepys

· "Realizing what a deadly disaster had come to them the people quickly drove the Italians from their city.

· However, the disease remained, and soon death was every where. 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, and monasteries and convents were soon deserted, as they were stricken, too.

· Bodies were left in empty houses, and there was no one to give them a Christian burial."-Unknown

· "It was dark before I could get home, and so land at Churchyard stairs, where to my great trouble I met a dead corps of the plague in the narrow ally just bringing down a little pair of stairs."-S. Pepys

· "How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world?

· The condition of the people was pitiable to behold. They sickened by the thousands daily, and died unattended and without help.

· Many died in the open street, others dying in their houses, made it known by the stench of their rotting bodies.

· Consecrated churchyards did not suffice for the burial of the vast multitude of bodies, which were heaped by the hundreds in vast trenches, like goods in a ships hold and covered with a little earth." -Giovanni Boccaccio

·

"The Dance of Death"
by Hans Holbein the Younger

· Before the Black Death, music was happy and frequently heard.

· During the Black Death music was played very grimly or never played at all.

· The only exceptions were people who decided that since they were going to die anyway, they might as well spend the rest of their life in happiness.

· The sombre change in art and music demonstrated the grim reality of the world around them.