Conditions in Europe had been extremely prosperous in the twelfth and thirteenth century because it was a period where there was no infectious disease and the environment was good. It was a period in which the climate of Europe had warmed up one or two degrees. The summers were longer and the harvests were very good. There was no famine. This was an example of the Malthusian cycle. After 1300 there was about forty years of environmental change in which you had a deterioration of the weather. The weather got cooler. Most historians believe that this was due to an explosion of volcanoes in Indonesia in 1315. These massive clouds moved over Europe, blocked out the sun and resulted in two years of crop failure, predictably resulting in famine. 1317 was the year of famine in Europe and the deterioration of the food supply. This, of course, did not affect the aristocracy or most of the gentry. But it affected the peasants.
The Plague began in Italy in the late months of 1346. Cantor thinks it is likely the Plague came from Africa up the Nile and into the Eastern Mediterranean. There was a brutal Plague in the later months of 1346 in the cities of Northern Italy, like Florence and Genoa. This was the Bubonic Plague. According to Cantor, there were two great pandemics going on in England in 1347. His theory is only about 80% of Plague cases were bubonic, and 20% of Plague victims in England actually died of anthrax. The first four or five days of Bubonic Plague and anthrax symptoms are very similar and medieval medicine was not complex enough to distinguish between the two infectious diseases. Doctors in the Middle Ages still followed the teaching of Galen, a physician in ancient Greece who believed that disease came when the four “humors” of the body (blood, yellow bile, black bile, mucus) were not in sync.
When Venice got the Plague, it was seen as punishment for Venetian living. Medieval people did not have a concept of infectious diseases being spread by microbes. People in the Middle Ages didn’t have microscope, which didn’t come along until after 1500. Their other problem was that the church was opposed to dissection of the body. However, people in the Middle Ages did begin to think of how to create antidotes. Their first response was that of faith healing. Faith healing was the major remedy of the Middle Ages, so with the coming of the Black Death, you had religious processions, full churches, special prayers, and bishops carrying the reliquaries of saints through the streets. However, so many people died that they began to have some doubts about how helpful this was. Some large cities in Europe experimented with quarantine. Large tapestries were hung over the windows to block infected air from entering the home, and people rarely took baths for fear that the pestilence would seep into the body through their pores.
Another explanation for the Black Death that was very popular in France was astrological. They took astrology very seriously in the Fourteenth Century. The King of France even assigned a commission of professors at the University of Paris, which was the leading university in Europe, to discover the cause of the of the Black Death which ravaged Northern France. The designated committee returned six months later and informed the king it was because of bad astrological signs.
It did occur to people that flight into under-populated areas might be helpful. The royal family in England, by 1347, was hiding out at their furthest castles in Scotland and Wales where the population was very thin. Predictably, the level of mortality was noticeably lower in sparsely populated areas. One of the demographic movements was of Jews from Western Europe to Eastern Europe which were lesser populated. It was noticed by Christians in Northern Spain and in Germany that the frequency of the Black Death in the Jewish communities seemed to be lower. And that was probably because Jews had better public health, and the rabbis were very informative as to how people ought to take care of themselves. The Jews were less affected by the Plague,, and as a result of this, rumors spread that they were causing the Black Death by poisoning wells.
The Black Death reached England in the early months of 1347 through the Port of Bristol. The merchants had just opened direct sea communication by shipping directly from Genoa to England. It is likely that these ships transported the black rats and the fleas on their backs. The fleas are the carrier of the Bubonic Plague. If the black rat dies, the fleas will seek to migrate to the closest body, which was likely a human being.
Anthrax was spread throughout England by population, urban density, meat eating habits, and cow feces lying everywhere. The English were voracious meat eaters; even monks consumed two pounds of red meat per day. Cantor believes the humans contacted anthrax by eating tainted beef. Many cows became sick when they were fed dead flesh (cows are vegetarians), and there was no cattle inoculation in the Middle Ages.
Norman Cantor’s book caused me to consider the likelihood of a fatal pandemic overtaking the American population. Infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, which had been assumed eradicated, have started coming back in more extreme strains. There is a new strain of tuberculosis that is much more resistant to antibiotics and more of a danger to humans. We do have a terrible problem with HIV which is devastating sub-Saharan Africa. In Africa, you lack the infrastructure, only 15 percent of the people are literate and the costs of the medicine are excessive. The medical profession is not trained to deal with massive outbreaks. The HIV situation in Africa is somewhat comparable to the situation medieval physicians encountered in the fourteenth century with the Plague. Something interesting that has recently been discovered is that people whose ancestors survived the Black Death may have full immunity to the HIV virus. Although HIV has not attained the epic proportions of the Black Death, the mortality rate is rising exponentially. HIV (or any infectious disease we are not equipped to treat) could become the equivalent of a modern day Black Plague.
Present-day medicine in America is much more adequate than that of third world countries or medieval European countries. Science in the fourteenth century was not complex enough to allow physicians to diagnose and treat most diseases. Doctors certainly had no inkling that there may have been two pandemics going around in England. At the time in which the Black Plague struck, people were generally clueless about how the disease spread- all they knew was that serfs and princesses alike were dying. The most common medieval theory for the onset of the Plague was that God was displeased with the sinful actions of his people. The concept of contacting anthrax from a cow, or Bubonic Plague from a rat (flea) was simply unheard of in the Middle Ages. In his book, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World it Made, Norman Cantor stresses the fact that although the Black Death devastated the infrastructure of medieval society, the positive aspects were undeniable. As a result of this catastrophe, people in the fourteenth century began to dedicate more effort into understanding the arts of science and medicine. If the Black Death had never occurred, we might never have discovered what we know now about science.