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May 2, 2023 26 mins

The Black Death was a medical catastrophe, with the majority of deaths occurring in children under 16. It took 300 years for the population to recover.  But the plague also impacted social, economic, political, and religious aspects of life. Chris explains how the Black Death struck an already weakened society and the extreme measures some took to try to end it. 

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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Welcome.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
You're listening to half hour history Secrets of the Medieval World.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Well, we're finally here, folks.
It's the moment you've all been waiting for or dreading.
I don't know what you're into, but the plague is
finally here, and so is the Late Middle Ages. Now,

(00:53):
black Death didn't just hit once. It hit multiple times,
and the population didn't recover for centuries. It's a crazy story,
lots of fun. Here's Chris to tell you all about it.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Now. I want to start from the beginning by saying
the Black Death is more than a medical event. It's
impossible to say it's just a medical event because it's
a huge medical event. It's not the first plague in history.
We've had plagues in ancient Athens in the middle of
the four hundreds. There was a plague in Byzantium in
the five hundreds. But the Black Death becomes a model

(01:31):
for all of the plagues and all of the epidemics
in history. When aids first started, somebody use the expression
the Black Death about it hold totally different scale. But
the Black Death is more than a medical event because
the Black Death is an event that had profound social

(01:52):
economic implications. We've been talking about the Early Middle Ages,
little Bumpy Carolin Gene Renaissance in the middle of it,
behind Middle Ages, the flowering of knighthood and chivalry and
universities and guilds, and the Gothic landscape, and now the fall.
So the two hundred year period of what we call
the Late Middle Ages from about thirteen hundred to about

(02:15):
fifteen hundred has the Black Death right in the middle.
It's kind of like the nineteen thirties, the American and
worldwide Great Depression lasting two hundred years. So let's talk
about the Black Death not just as a medical event,
which we will, but also as a social event and
what the impact was on demographics. And to look at
the Black Death, we have to look at just before

(02:36):
it to see its impact. The population before the Black Death, well,
from one thousand to thirteen hundred, Western European population rises
two hundred and fifty percent. That's not a mistake. How
do we know that. We have baptismal records. That's how
we know that we have records of people who pay taxes,

(02:58):
we have a census. When the Norman invasion occurs in
ten sixty six, William, Duke of Normandy says, hey, hey,
what do I have now? And you get the Doomsday
Book from that, and it's account of all sorts of things.
So we really think we know pretty well from the
social and economic historians that the European population was doing
very nicely. Indeed, now I'm going to be using more

(03:20):
statistics that I normally do in these topics, and I
subscribe to what Mark Twain said about lies, that there
are three types of lies. There are lies, there are
damn lies, and then there are statistics. And you can
use statistics to prove anything. But nevertheless, I'm going to
foray out there England's population from one thousand to thirteen hundred,
from two to five million, France from six to fourteen million,

(03:45):
Germany and Italy combined from four to eleven million. And
here's an important point for the Black Death. Forty percent
of Europe's population are under the age of fifteen. It's
the exact opposite, by the way of the direction in
which we're going now, the direction that the world population
is going now is that it is a disproportionately aging

(04:07):
population in the twenty first century because we are living
longer and better and healthier. But in this period of time,
right before the Black Death, four out of ten people
alive in Europe are fifteen or younger, and they are
clusters of population's largely rural population, but we also had
big cities, remember that as well, and the Black Death's

(04:29):
going to hit both of those. What was the climate
like before, during, and after the Black Death. Well, one
of the reasons why you have this great rise in
population is that from one thousand to thirteen hundred the
climate was really good. Now, how do we know this
through a group of people known as the paleoclimatologists. These
are people who study tree rings. And you know that

(04:52):
if you cut a tree down, you can see how
old the tree is, and if you have a very
thin ring, that means that the growth period was poor.
A thick ring means that the growth period was good.
A thick ring means that the air was warm and
that there was plenty of moisture. And this was part
of that agricultural revolution and the agricultural expansion. Good harvest,

(05:15):
good harvest, good harvest from a subsistence to a surplus
economy that led from an agricultural revolution to a commercial revolution,
and the population begins to move into cities where they
are packed closer, where disease can move more quickly. But
then again, thanks to our paleoclimatology friends, from thirteen hundred

(05:37):
to fifteen hundred, the climate got colder and wetter. We
have accounts way up north in Scandinavia that the pack
ice was drifting up north and that restricted exploration and
trade up in Scandinavia and the British Isles between Britain
and Ireland all the way up to Iceland and Greenland.

(06:00):
At the same time, you had flooding in northern Europe,
so you have more water up north. It's colder, it's
going to be pack ice. But a little bit further
down now I'm in what we call the Low Countries
the Netherlands today, this particular area, the water is not freezing,
it's flooding. And so if it's flooding, that impedes the

(06:23):
textile trade. Because the textile trade gets impacted, the wool
cannot run back and forth as quickly, the finished products
can't go back as easily because this flooding has these
very difficult currents that are involved in it, and what
we would call factories, not quite factories, but places where
you store warehouses. These things get flooded. If wool gets wet,

(06:46):
forget it, it's absolutely useless. A little example is when
you think of England, you don't normally think of wine,
but England had from one thousand to thirteen hundred a
minor wine industry. The climate change is such that England
no longer had that anymore. So it wasn't a huge
part of the economy, but it was product that basically collapsed,

(07:07):
an economy that basically collapsed. And then again our sources
are very good on this. In thirteen thirteen, in thirteen seventeen,
and in thirteen twenty two, you had a series of
heavy rain alternating with drought. When you have heavy rain
alternating with drought, that's top soil gets washed away and

(07:27):
you have poor harvests. Poor harvests, lower nutrition, lower nutrition, famine.
Famine leads to hunger. Hunger leads to mortality going up.
Just think of yourself, if you haven't had enough food
to eat and water to drink, if you haven't had
your second cup of coffee in the morning, you get

(07:48):
a headache, you start to wear down, you start to
get tired, and when you get sick, you get sicker,
right because you feel like your immune system is depressed.
And that's what's happening on a massive scale. In fact,
that coldness proceeds to such extent that from fifteen hundred
to nineteen hundred, yes, nineteen hundred, there's a little mini

(08:10):
ice age. Mini it's not hugely different. You know, we
don't have mastodons walking around Chicago, but it's a little
bit colder, and a few degrees can make a big
difference at either end of your growing you're planting and
you're harvesting seasons, and that can be the difference literally
between life and death. So it's into this context of

(08:32):
a weekend population for several decades that the Black Death hits.
So the Black Death's impact is higher because people's immune
systems are depressed and they're not as physically strong. And
so yes, let's go the details. It spreads fast like wildfire.
From thirteen forty seven to thirteen fifty one starts out

(08:55):
in China. We have records out in China telling us
that this plague is moving from the Far East to
the Middle East, it hits Italy. Why does it hit
Italy Because Italy is trade with various areas, and these
fleas on rats are on ships, so it's going to
hit Italy first, and then it's going to move up
through continental Europe. You've all seen these maps of the

(09:16):
path of the Black Death month to month, week to week.
We can even track it. And the way that the
population dies is very interesting. You know this right that
a quarter to a third, so twenty five to thirty
five round numbers of the population dies. More men died

(09:38):
than women. Why we have no idea. Monks, nuns, and
friars die in hugely disproportionate numbers for two reasons. One
is monks and nuns we're living in closed communities. Now,
usually you would think, well, a closed community, a monastery, convent,

(09:59):
is going to protect you. Yeah, but stuff still has
to get back and forth. A sack of flower might
have fleas in it, and if the fleas come in
infect one person and then all bets are off and
it's going to rattle around that closed community rapidly, more
rapidly than an open community. Because the disease has nowhere

(10:19):
else to go. The same time, monks, nuns and friars
left the monasteries and convents and went to minister to
the dead, to the dying and the dead as well,
And so they picked up the disease that way and
honorable almost a martyr's death. Now do you remember when
I told you that forty percent of Europe's population is

(10:41):
under the age of fifteen, Well, now take that number
and think of this. Sixty to seventy percent of the
people who died, sixty to seventy percent of the people
who died in the Black Death were fifteen years old
and under. So the population can't recover if the people

(11:03):
who are going to make babies aren't there. So after
the Black Death you have an old and a young population,
and marriage and birth rates plummet. You have fewer young people,
so you have old women and younger men. They may
fall in love, and the younger men may be looking

(11:24):
for inheritances, but they can't have children if the women
are post menopausal, so the population cannot replicate itself. In fact,
it takes three hundred years for the population of Europe
to go back to its numbers before the Black Death

(11:46):
three hundred years, and it's primarily because forty percent of
the population was under the age of fifteen and sixty
to seventy percent of the people who died were fifteen
or younger. Now, we tend to think of the Black
Death as a one shot deal. It came, it left untrue.

(12:12):
The Black Death recurred every fifteen to twenty years for
about three cycles, and then it recurred every thirty five
to fifty years for about three cycles. What's happening. Look
at people getting older, people recovering, the population recovering a

(12:35):
little bit that they could have children, and there's an
immunity that's building up. That's why the spacing fifteen to
twenty years for a few cycles, thirty five to fifty
years for a few cycles. So you can see the
spacing out of the return of the disease because people
are getting stronger against it, but it kept coming back.

(12:56):
So can you imagine this thing which changed the way
everybody sees the world. It's a tornado. It's a hurricane
that comes and then it comes back again, and you
may experience it three times in your lifetime. It's not
a once in a lifetime event. And if you've gone
through it once and then it comes back again. It's
all the more frightening because the first time you don't

(13:17):
know what the heck is going on, but the second time, well,
you certainly do know what's going on, and it's scary.
In fact, some of you may have read Samuel Peep's
Journal of a Plague Year, where he talks about plague
in the city of London in the year sixteen sixty five,
the year before the Great Fire, which is also described

(13:40):
in his diary. That plague was the plague the Black
Death coming back about three hundred years later. And then
it's even in Marseille, the port of Marseille in France
in seventeen twenty. Now, what was the disease. Well, we've
been able to dig up bodies and we've been able

(14:01):
to look at not bone marrow, which isn't there anymore,
but the that's in teeth of plague victims, and using
kind of CSI kind of investigating, we can figure out
what types of strains of the plague. This where there
were three types of strains, and we also have this
from accounts of what happened to the bodies. There was

(14:21):
bubonic plague, which was not contagious. Everybody thought it was contagious.
It wasn't what's contagious as the flea jumping from your
body to mind. Sixty to eighty percent mortality. So if
you got the bubonic plague, chances were good that you
would not survive. And it took about five or six days,

(14:43):
so you had about a week to live. And it
was called the black death because the bubonic plague produced
these black or bloody swellings in your lymph nodes, and
that's why you have the description of these swellings in
your neck, under your arms, or in the groin area,

(15:03):
and that's the black death. It's communicated via fleas, as
I said, not person to person, and the flea would
suck the infected blood from rats, and the rats or
the fleas would bite humans and that's how that was spread.
And that was most of what this black death was.
There were two other strains of it, the pneumonic strain

(15:24):
of it, which was highly contagious person to person. Are
you ready for this? One hundred percent mortality two to
three days. And this was characterized not by the swelling
in the lymph node system, the neck, the groin, or
the armpit. But by the coughing up of blood. Well
that's how mneumonic plague was spread through this blood that

(15:50):
you would cough up. So if somebody is coughing in
a market, you know that's it. Somebody coughs on near
a bunch of produce, Well that person can't sell the
produce and that poor person basically dies in the street.
Another is called septocemic plague, which was insect born again
one mortality and this is just incredible. Six hours, six

(16:17):
hours to live. Wow, let's take a break.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
When we come back, we'll find out what astrologers, yes,
astrologers thought was cause of the plague.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
Now, remember I said that this is a medical event,
but not just a medical event. What was the social, economic,
religious impact of this event. Well, we have all sorts
of accounts that make us wonder what would I do
in that situation. One set of accounts damns the church

(17:03):
by saying, well, lots of priests did not give what
they used to call extreme unction, last anointing, last rites
because the priests were afraid of being contaminated themselves. And
that's a damnation of those priests, and maybe some did.
Yet we do have evidence that monks, nuns, and friars

(17:24):
died at a hugely not just disproportionate, but hugely disproportionate rate.
We have accounts that we have to allow God to
take care of the souls because so many die, they
can't have a proper burial, so they're just kind of
thrown into these mass graves. Lime is thrown on top
of them, and we just hope that the decomposition of

(17:49):
the bodies doesn't somehow reach us. We have accounts of
mothers and fathers abandoning their families. I don't know about that.
I don't know whether a mother or a father would
abandon a child. We do have stories of people abandoning
their elderly parents. That turns our stomach as well. It's

(18:12):
hard to separate fact here from apocrypha because when things
start going wrong, you know, the rumor mill starts churning.
We can all remember moments in our own lives where
we've turned on the radio and we've heard that strange phrase.
We have unconfirmed reports. That makes us wonder why those
unconfirmed reports are being reported. This is all you have

(18:34):
at that time, unconfirmed reports. Panic. So what does some
people do? Some people close up shop, and if the
disease doesn't get into your house, your monastery, your convent,
you're okay. But if it does, I mean it's an
all or nothing operation. Some people leave, they flee to
the countryside, and the people who flee to the countryside

(18:55):
tend to be people who have the money to have
a villa far from the city. In fact, Boccaccio's Decameron
is a collection of stories told while these rich people
wait the Black Death out. There are ten people. They
have ten days, so they're each going to tell one

(19:16):
story a day. And that's how you get the Decameron right,
ten stories a day, one hundred stories. It's a bunch
of rich people twiddling their thumbs in a rich villa
far from a city, hoping that the Black Death doesn't
make it in, doesn't infect their refuge, if you will.

(19:38):
So we have all sorts of accounts, of religious explanations,
explanations and reactions. Quite frankly, nobody knows what the heck
is going on, and people start to try to figure
it out. Well, that makes sense, right, so what do
they do? There were discussions about what was going on

(20:00):
in the East, So you have to remember that in Europe,
right in particularly universities settings, and among the merchants classes.
Because the merchants would have had contact with news from
abroad before anyone else because of their ships. They heard
about this plague, this disease going off in the far East,
and so what is going on on in the East

(20:23):
becomes part of the discussion. And so what do you do.
You go to the University of Paris. The University of
Paris is the Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Stanford
and University of Chicago and Sorbonne and Oxford and Cambridge
all wrapped up into one. This is where the heavy
hitters are. And they say to the people there, particularly

(20:46):
the medical faculty, what's going on. Now. These people go
to their astrological charts. Now we rehear that, and we go, whoa,
this is crazy. They're reading horoscopes. Astrology is really astrono
me in this age, and if you go all the
way back to Egypt and ancient Sumeria and Assyria, people
who are called astralla jerors are really astronomers. They're scientists.

(21:09):
They're not reading tarot cards. And they say, well, maybe
something went on in the Eastern sky. So they get
their charts out and they come up with this explanation
of bad air. That's the explanation. Does not strike us
as very scientific, but in their terms it made sense
thinking historically that in the east, remember the diseases coming

(21:33):
from the east, there was a war between the Sun
and the sea in the Indian Ocean. This is the
white paper or memorandum that was written by the University
of Paris medical faculty to publicize their findings that in
the east there had been a war between the Sun
and the sea in the Indian Ocean. And why do
they say this because they noted that on March twentieth,

(21:55):
thirteen forty five, there had been a conjunction of planets
within the constellation of Aquarius. What were the plantlanets Saturn, Jupiter,
and Mars. So this conjunction of planets Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars,
Saturn representing death, Jupiter representing air, and Mars representing pestilence.

(22:22):
And that this confluence produced, according to one explanation, hot
and dry air, according to another explanation, warm and humid air,
and that air mass moved from east to west along

(22:44):
trade routes, when what was really moving were fleas on
infected rats along trade routes. But their notion was that
the disease was somehow out there as opposed to on
the ground, and this was the bad air explanation. The
Italians started to quip about this, and the best advice

(23:09):
that I ever read as to how to avoid the plague,
the Italian said, take three pills Chito, longeay and tar
day Chiito, run away fast, laune ay, stay away, go far,
and tar day return after a long time. Run away fast,

(23:35):
go really really far, and don't come back for a
long long time. And in some ways that advice was
as good as any. The reaction went both ways. And
it's interesting because if you look at the plague that
hits Athens around four point thirty BCE, you have the

(23:55):
same reaction. You have people who become religious fanatics, who
become very austere, and then you have people who say, eat,
drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die rich
or poor, good or bad, old or young, pious or evil.

(24:16):
Everybody's dying, so why not have a good time. So
we have accounts of this tremendous licentiousness where people are
drinking and having sex in the streets and they're gonna
die anyway, So who really cares. Let's just gorge ourselves
with food and drink and sex. And then you also
have religious fanatics, the flagilante, the flagelets, who said, this

(24:41):
must be a plague sent on us by God because
of our sins, and so we must purge our bodies.
And particularly in Germany and Italy and France, they march
through the streets stripped down and they whip themselves with cords.
Sometimes the chords have a metal spikes or triangles on

(25:01):
the end of them, and they bleed themselves that if
they expunge their sins, God will allow the plague to end.
And then, of course the Jews get blamed for this.
We have programs against Jews, saying that Jews poisons the wells,
or somehow Jews burn something that infected the air. So

(25:22):
again the programs against Jews are byproducts of this religious
fanaticism as well. You can't say that the black death
isn't depressing, because that great flowering comes crashing down. The
Black Death, more than just being a medical event, is
a complete reorientation of medieval society.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
Thank you for tuning in to another episode of half
hour History, Secrets of the Medieval World. Mex is our
final episode. Are you upset? I am. It's the end
of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Age
of Exploration. Trust me, you don't want to miss it.

(26:05):
Our history Secrets of the Medieval World from One Day
University is a production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans.
If you're enjoying the show, leave a review in your
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Speaker 2 (26:32):
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