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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.
When you have the Black Death, it
means your disease is an infectious fever caused by the bacillus
Yersinia pestis, which originated with rodents and
hopped on to humans
by the bite of infected fleas.
The History of the
Black Death
For Europe, the entire nightmare started in 1347 when a Kipchak army
besieged a Genoese trading post in the Crimea. Some knuckle-heads
had the brilliant idea of 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.
More History
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