BLACK DEATH
1347 - 1400

 

The Black Death is a form of the plague which, in the 14th century, caused the death of about one-third of Europe's population. In numbers that spells about 25 million people.

Encyclopaedia Britannica informs us that this disease is an "infectious fever caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis, a bacterium transmitted from rodents to humans by the bite of infected fleas."

The encyclopedia further comments that for Europe the hole nightmare started in 1347 when a Kipchak army besieged a Genoese trading post in the Crimea and some knuckle-heads started catapulting plague-infested corpses into the village.

And then there was the great plague of London. The year? 1665.

The British National Archives inform us that "in London alone it is estimated that 100,000 people died from the plague between spring 1665 and summer 1666. The disease also affected other parts of the country. Yorkshire, the Midlands, East Anglia, Kent and the North East all suffered many deaths."

"Today, we know that the plague was carried into England by fleas that lived on black rats. The rats crawled ashore from ships that had arrived in London from Europe and multiplied in the crowded city streets. When fleas bit people, they infected them with the plague."

" [...] The epidemic only died out in 1666 when the Great Fire of London killed large numbers of the black rats."

Today, we have worldwide and annually approx. 2,500 cases of the plague.