The Black Death was one of the worst natural disasters in history. In 1347 an Italian merchant fleet docked at Messina in Sicily with sailors who appeared to be suffering from some strange disease. Terrified, the citizens of Messina drove the vessel back out to sea, but not before a number of the ships’ rats had scurried down the mooring ropes tied to the docks. These flea-ridden vermin were the real carriers of the disease.
Within weeks, people all over Sicily were dying. Three months later, the infection had spread to mainland Italy. And by the summer of 1350 most of Europe had been affected. The plague had come to the Continent, and by the end of the century over a third of the European population–an estimated 50 million people–would be dead.
The Black Death, as it came to be known, was an unpredictable killer. Some victims could go to bed in seemingly perfect health and be dead by morning. They were the lucky ones. Others suffered for up to a week, enduring the full range of symptoms before death: aches and chills, egg-sized swellings in the armpits and groin, hemorrhaging under the skin, and the collapse of the nervous system, which often caused bizarre, dance-like movements.
The toll was terrible. In the countryside so many peasants perished that the manorial system itself was threatened. But things were even worse in the cities, where overcrowded conditions and poor sanitation were ideal incubators for the disease. In some areas as many as 600 people died each day. Londoners buried corpses in mass graves six feet deep, six feet wide, and a 100 yards long. In Milan the living and the dead shared the same fate as all members of a victim’s household were walled up together to die.
Perhaps the worst natural disaster Europe has ever seen, the plague abated and recurred, seeming to run it’s dreadful course only to strike again. The Black Death of 1347 subsided in 1351, but another epidemic followed in 1361, another in 1369, and another every decade for the rest of the century. Its ultimate disappearance remains a mystery.
Medicine proved powerless to stop it. Academia was at a loss to explain it. Into this void flooded a host of wild theories. Some blamed the Jews for poisoning the water supply; others, the sinister conjunction of the planets Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars; still others, thought it came from corrupt vapors. Some even suggested that the plague was passed on through “lust with old women.” Most believed the Black Death was God’s vengeance on sinful men.
No matter the source, the sense of resignation was immense. Siena’s Agnolo di Tura wrote the words that sum it all up, “no one wept for any death, for all awaited death.”
