This intensified religiosity had long-range institutional impacts. Most immediately, the Black Death drove an intensification of Christian religious belief and practice, manifested in portents of the apocalypse, in extremist cults that challenged the authority of the clergy, and in Christian pogroms against Europe’s Jews. The Black Death pandemic was a profound rupture that reshaped the economy, society and culture in Europe. Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1562 painting "The Triumph of Death" depicts the turmoil Europe experienced as a result of the plague. In the late 1340s, news of the plague spread and people knew it was coming: plague pits recently discovered in London were dug before the arrival of the epidemic. Strikingly, if a mother survived the plague, her children tended to survive if she died, they died with her. But quickly-at least in Europe-the rich learned to barricade their households against its reach, and the poor suffered disproportionately. The bacillus was deadly and took both rich and poor, rural and urban: the daughter of King Edward III of England died of the plague in the summer of 1348. Within the last few decades, the genetic signature of the plague has been positively identified in burials across Europe. We know a lot about the impact of the Black Death from both the documentary record and from archaeological excavations.
The remains of Bubonic plague victims in Martigues, France. But, it is also becoming clear that small pools of plague had been established in Europe for centuries, apparently in wild rodent communities in the high passes of the Alps. This new explanation better explains the bacteria’s very rapid movement along trade routes throughout Eurasia and into sub-Saharan Africa.Īt the time, people thought that the plague came into Mediterranean ports by ship. However, evidence now suggests that it must have been transmitted first by direct human contact with rodents and then via human fleas and head lice. Traditionally, historians have argued that the transmission of the plague involved movement of plague-infected fleas from wild rodents to the household black rat.
When it was over, the European population was cut by a third to a half, and China and India suffered death on a similar scale. Hitting the Middle East and Europe between 13, the Black Death had aftershocks still felt into the early 1700s. It moved from Central Asia to China in the early 1200s and reached the Black Sea in the late 1340s. Spread of the plague in western Eurasia, 1346-1353Īt about the same time, it began to spread globally.
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