Black death book pdf

When William, Duke of Normandy, killed King Harold and seized the throne of England, England's language, culture, politics and law were transformed.

Over the next four hundred years, under. Das unsichtbare Leben der Addie LaRue. Fischer Verlag. Addie LaRue ist die Frau, an die sich niemand erinnert. Die unbekannte Muse auf den Bildern Alter Meister. Population devastation of such a considerable level led to massive economic decline, an increase in criminal activity, and a general lack of consideration for the value of human life. Superstition reigned supreme and religious persecution claimed numerous lives along with the Black Death itself.

Contemporary accounts and reflections in art show the despair and horror felt by the people living through this pandemic. This book investigates the birth and dissemination of the Black Death across the known world, giving detail about the disease itself as well as the consequences of the pandemic on medieval society in general.

It seeks to illuminate the reader with enough information to be well-informed, and perhaps to catalyze investigation further into other corners of the sweeping effects of The Plague. The terrible thing about the Black Death is that no one at the time knew what it was. A current account describes it thus:. As the gavocciolo had been and still was an infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they showed themselves. The Black Death is a European term, used first in its Latin form atra mors by a French physician called Giles de Corbeil in the twelfth century, approximately one hundred years prior to the Black Death itself.

His assessment was that the plague was caused by an unfavorable conjunction of the heavenly bodies Jupiter and Saturn, a theory supported by many of his contemporaries. At the time, the word plague did not have the same connotation we give it today.

In fact, it had no real meaning, and it is largely because of the Black Death that we associate the horrors of pestilential death with the word today. Though a common term now, the Black Death as a reference to the plague of and its following waves was not used until at least one hundred years later, if not longer.

Most commonly known as the Plague of Justinian as the emperor himself contracted the disease but survived due to extensive treatment, the death toll in the first outbreak alone is thought to have reached upwards of 25 million people.

As with most other recorded plagues, it recurred every few years after the first devastating wave, and over the course of two hundred years of plague and subsequent recurrence up to 50 million people are thought to have perished. As related by the contemporary historian Procopius, the plague first surfaced in Constantinople in and spread via shipping routes throughout the Mediterranean, reaching Italy and Greece to the west and into Asia Minor to the east.

The second and largest outbreak was the medieval Black Death, the subject of this book. The Black Death was followed by the Second Pandemic which included all outbreaks of plague subsequent to the Black Death and prior to the great plague of nineteenth century India and China.

This is referred to as the Third Pandemic and claimed over 10 million lives. Historians and researchers postulate that the Black Death originated in Central Asia, specifically in Mongolia and western China. The rodents that carry the plague disease are indigenous to the central and western Asian areas of Kurdistan and Northern India. Graves found in Kyrgyzstan from make written mention of plague, and Chinese sources make mention of a large pestilential outbreak in or around Mongolia about a decade before the Black Death reached Europe.

Many researchers believe that this was the inception of the Black Death and perhaps one of the first outbreaks. Kyrgyzstan was located directly on the Silk Road, and from here the disease could easily have spread east to China or west to the Middle East and Europe. Mongol conquests had led to economic decline in China and northern India in the century before the outbreak of plague.

However, in the decades leading up to the pandemic, trade had begun to recover but unfortunately was curbed by a series of natural disasters such as the Little Ice Age, which began at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and epidemics that included but were not limited to plague.

The combination of these events led to famine and widespread population decline. It is possible that plagues of the severity of those causing the Black Death became a pandemic due to the weakened state of those that had originally suffered from it. Disease, likely including plague, killed upwards of a hypothesized 25 million Chinese and Central Asians in the first half of the fourteenth century. Theories of plague had reached the trading seaports in the west as early as , mentioning the extreme number of deaths and resultant depopulation in India, Tartary and the Middle East.

The disease spread as merchants and goods travelled from Asia west on the Silk Road, the famous trading route linking Europe, the Middle East, and ultimately the Far East.

It was also carried by Mongol raiders as they pushed west to gain control of more territory. There is one specific documented incident in which The Golden Horde, the medieval Mongol khanate under the leadership of Jani Beg, attacked the Crimean city of Kaffa first known as Theodosia and now known as Feodosia in whilst under the scourge of the plague. A port city at the mouth of the Silk Road, Kaffa had been held as a strategic trading post by the Genoese for centuries.

Surviving documentation describes the Mongol army catapulting the corpses of the deceased raiders over the city walls, a tactic presumably meant to infect the inhabitants of Kaffa but also likely a strategic move for the health of the remaining army. Effective disposal of dead bodies in the medieval world was crucial to maintain the health of survivors, as rotting corpses provided an ideal breeding ground for further disease and pestilential spread.

The inhabiting Genoese fled Kaffa and sailed in the direction of home, carrying with them the rats that were infected with the very disease they were running from. In October of , twelve Genoese ships that had fled Kaffa arrived in Sicily.

Current accounts describe the ships arriving with decks filled with dead bodies. Other ships fleeing Kaffa reached Genoa and Venice at the beginning of Port cities in Italy had begun to refuse entry into dock from any ship carrying presumably infected passengers, and thus the ships travelled north. Due to the lack of quick communication, a ship turned away by Italy was allowed to dock in Marseilles at the end of January , thus marking the commencement of the Black Death in France.

It spread north to Bergen and even reached Iceland. The Plague reached the northwestern part of Russia in Parts of Europe that had little trade with their neighbors were for once extremely lucky.

Fewer travelers meant less chance of contact with rodents that carried the disease. Areas in Poland, Belgium and the mountainous Basque region largely escaped the Black Death, as did many other isolated alpine locations throughout the Alps.

The Plague swept across the Middle East, equaling the devastation recorded in Europe. It reached Alexandria in Egypt at approximately the same time it reached Sicily in Alexandria had significant trading relations with Constantinople and other ports, potentially including Kaffa in the Crimea. From Alexandria, plague spread into Gaza and then north through large cities including Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, and even reaching Antioch in Asia Minor by It also seems to have spread south into Egypt, as the Black Death reached Yemen after its regent, King Mujahid, returned to the country after being imprisoned for a time in Cairo.

The holy city of Mecca played host to the disease starting in Mawsil modern-day Mosul , suffered acutely from the epidemic, and Baghdad was subjected to a second round of the disease from the west it had been hard hit when the disease first left the steppes of Central Asia on its way to the Crimea , causing further catastrophic population decline.

The Black Death, also known as The Plague, is generally thought to have been caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, named after Alexandre Yersin, the scientist and bacteriologist who discovered it in the nineteenth century. These bacteria are commonly present in fleas which are carried by rodents found primarily in the Orient. The flea that lives on central Asian rodents, called the Oriental Rat Flea, is the primary vector for the Y. Interestingly, the spread of Y.

One population must be resistant to the disease, therefore acting as the carrying hosts. The other population must not be resistant, in order to keep the bacteria alive.

Modern investigation of mass burial pits created during the Black Death indicate the possibility that there were actually two strains of Y. As described by Boccaccio in his medieval masterpiece The Decameron , the precursors to plague-induced death were horrible and grotesque.

Govocciolos were puss-filled tumors, also known as buboes , hence the term bubonic plague. Modern medicine has discovered that in many cases, if the pus from the tumors is able to be discharged, recovery is possible.

Following the appearance of buboes, many sufferers were subjected to acute fever and vomiting, often of blood. One of the most unsettling things about the disease was the swiftness with which it claimed its victims.

Most people died within two to seven days after becoming ill. Based on contemporary accounts of the Black Death and modern examination of mass Plague graves, most researchers agree that there are three types of plague, all of which were active and deadly during the Black Death. The first and perhaps most commonly known type of plague is bubonic plague , so named because of the distinctive buboes or gavocciolos that arose on suffers.

Buboes are swollen lymph nodes infected with the Y pestis bacteria. Bubonic plague is usually transmitted by fleas carrying the Y. Within a week of contraction, the victim begins to suffer flu-like symptoms, all of which are the same as are described in medieval accounts: extraordinarily high fever, vomiting, and headaches, as well as the possibility of the presence of pus-filled tumors.

Some antibiotics work, although vaccines have not proven to work effectively to prevent the disease. Bubonic plague still occurs with some frequency in parts of Africa. The second type is pneumonic plague, and as the name suggests this affects the respiratory system. Symptoms are coughing blood and high fever. At the end of the life of a person suffering from pneumonic plague, coughing will induce free-flowing blood expelled from the lungs. The third, least common, and arguably the deadliest type of plague is septicemic plague , which is an infection of the blood.

It is the rarest of all plagues because it requires actual infection to take place in the blood. In most cases, bubonic plague or pneumonic plague stays either in the lymph or respiratory systems respectively, but occasionally they do spread to the blood stream, and hence become septicemic plague. This causes disseminated intravascular coagulation, which causes clotting agents in the blood to activate unnecessarily.

This results in the formation of multiple small blood clots throughout the body, which ends up starving tissue within the body of oxygenated blood. The medical term for this is ischemic necrosis, which is essentially the death of tissue.

However, septicemic plague very rarely occurs in the total of all plague cases due to the difficulty of infecting the blood stream directly. Most historians and epidemiologists are in agreement that the plague theory is by far the most likely of all possible diseases behind the Black Death. However, there are certain unknowable facts and postulations that have drawn a few historians and scientists to examine the possibility of other options.

Firstly, there are absolutely no reliable statistics for the period in question. The range of possible deaths in the seven-year period known as the Black Death in Europe alone is anywhere between 75 — million casualties. That is an enormous difference. One argument is that it is unlikely that the rat population would even have been sufficient enough to cause mass casualties to the degree that the Black Death claimed.

Read Online Download. Dick by Philip K. Great book, The Black Death pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. Pan by Philip P. This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs.

Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of European history and culture between the 14th and 17th centuries.

Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www. A fascinating account of the phenomenon known as the Black Death, this volume offers a wealth of documentary material focused on the initial outbreak of the plague that ravaged the world in the 14th century. A comprehensive introduction that provides important background on the origins and spread of the plague is followed by nearly 50 documents organized into topical sections that focus on the origin and spread of the illness; the responses of medical practitioners; the societal and economic impact; religious responses; the flagellant movement and attacks on Jews provoked by the plague; and the artistic response.

Each chapter has an introduction that summarizes the issues explored in the documents; headnotes to the documents provide additional background material. The book contains documents from many countries - including Muslim and Byzantine sources - to give students a variety of perspectives on this devastating illness and its consequences. The volume also includes illustrations, a chronology of the Black Death, and questions to consider.

The worst pandemic in recorded history, it is estimated that the Black Death infected two in three Europeans, resulting in the deaths of around 25 million, or a third of the population of the continent.

Author Don Nardo explores the complex moral, economic, and scientific implications of the Black Death.