The epidemics were not unknown in the Middle Age. However, the Black Death that attacked Europe from 1348 to 1350 was a pandemic destruction of the European population. One third of the residents of Europe died from the spread of the plague. Mice and fleas were accountable for the transmission of the disease that travelled with several ways from central Asia up to the harbours of Mediterranean and in the European hinterland.
The disease had two forms, the bubonic and the pulmonary, and as expected, it found the society unprepared. It was instantaneously transmitted, assisted by the bad conditions of hygiene, the lack of medical knowledge of the era, but also by the consequent superstitious prejudices. Delivered to bigotry, prejudices and spiritual mentalities, people hoped only to enjoy the Divine Providence. In majority, they believed that the epidemic was sent from God, that it was His punishment for the sinful life of mortals. Similar was the anticipation of the disease. Litanies, calls and prayers to the Divine Charm were the beginning. However, when Black Death spread, battalions of whips came out in the streets in order to help to the purgation of bodies and souls. The paranoid climate had been astonishingly represented in Bergman’s film “The Seventh Seal”. Another articulation of the insane atmosphere were the mass murders of the “sinners”, the ground, and the Jews, who were forced to escape to Lithuania and Poland. In the early 1348, Black Death had already been propagated from Italy to all central France, to southern England and then to the Netherlands.
The epidemic was transmitted in the commercial streets of silk and spices. From the East, via Baghdad, it crossed the Tiger and through Armenia it reached the commercial stations of the Italian cities at Crimea. Gabriel de Mousi, trader at Piacenza, writes that Muslim Tatars, offended by lethal disease, attacked in the Italian fortress in the city Kaffa, on the coast of Crimea in the Black Sea, considering them guilty for their disaster. Italian tradesmen were a small Christian minority, extremely disliked by the locals because of their activities and their money. The Tatars, diseased and half dead, put the catapults in front of the fortress’ walls and darted the corpses into the city. Italians, stricken by horror, took the corpses and threw them in the sea.
It is estimated roughly 20 to 25 million people were victims of the devastating pandemic. For the number of victims in Asia and Africa there are no sources. However, any figures reported, should not be considered as completely correct as, at that time, people being in horror and despair, were inflating the figures. For example, the historians of the era report that the number of victims in Avignon was 120,000, while the city at that period did not have more than 50,000 residents.
More than the figures, the devastating fury of plague is more intensely portrayed in individual chronicles: The historiographer of Sienna, Agnolo di Tura, in Northern Italy, complains that there was no one willing to bury the dead people. John Clyn, the last survivor, monk of an Irish monastery, wrote before he died that he hoped that even one more person would survive after him to continue his own chronicle. In Venice, from the 24 doctors, 20 died, in Hamburg, from the 21 municipal advisers, the 16 died. In London, after the death of the archbishop of Canterbury, his candidate successor also died. In France, more than one third of royal notaries succumbed in the plague, while in Avignon one third of cardinals found tragic death.
However, Black Death left certain regions of Europe almost intact from its devastating passage. Big regions of Belgium and Poland, but also Prague were not influenced at all, while entire regions were literally depopulated. While Milan was saved from the plague, in Florence four fifths of the population died. In Germany, although the repercussions of plague were considerably smaller compared to Italy and France, mass deaths in Bremen, Hamburg and Cologne occurred. Generally, the pandemic of plague involved as direct consequence the fact that it required a lot of centuries in order to bring the European population in the levels before the plague.
The epidemic attacked again in the next few years of the 14th century, with small breaks, thus absolutely reversing the demographic increase that had been shown in the middle of 13th century. The pandemic was probably caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which lives in the populations of Central Asia. The most popular theory is that it emanated from the steppes of Mongolia or from Northern India. Probably, it was transported by the Mongolian armies and the tradesmen, who followed the Silk Road.
