The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe Ever

In this essay, we will be talking about the Black Death, a disease that has completely changed Europe and its history in the Middle Age. There are going to be covered many aspects like the symptoms of the disease, the effects on the population and society, the reaction of the people and how they found their way out of it, its strong relation to religious topics, its effects on the art after it and also the ethnical problems caused to a certain group of people.

It is going to include points of view from different people of the Middle Age (mostly enlightened personalities but also peasants and their families or the higher classes ) that witnessed this natural disaster and suffered its consequences themselves, thus leading to a better understanding of the magnitude and brutality of this catastrophe. Also, we will be talking about it from a more actual point of view and comparing it to nowadays and how it has affected the European population. We are going to focus on the mains areas that suffered from it and include punctual data to help understand everything finally leading to a conclusion on this topic.

Europe was a prosperous continent in the fourteenth century despite its reputation. The business was in continuous growth especially in Italy with trade and export/import of products from around the world. This country can be considered as the border of the limit between the disease and its most uncontrolled extreme. One of the first places where the disease spread was in Florence. It was one of the busiest cities, full of population with many rich areas that made it an appropriate place for the disease to spread. In the summer of 1348, Venice decreased its population by around 90 thousand people and the population of the cities of Florence died. In Siena the situation was worse since nobody respected their duties; this led to the total revolt of society joined by the famine. There, the bodies were placed on top of each other and their remains are still there today in the wells. The victims were buried in the roof of the crypts of the Churches, since when they felt that death was near they would meet all possible dead nearby to die there, with the rage of God. In Milan, they made an even more ruthless decision, lock the sick in their own homes and let them die.

Therefore, Italian society fell due to the high mortality rate, lack of standing, corruption in morals, the failure of medicine, the lack of power caused by the death of the local leader and the lack of relationship between citizens caused by fear of being contagious.

When the epidemy arrived in France, the most infected city was Avignon, one of the capitals of the Christianism. The Pope thought that continuing with the religious rites was the solution to fight the disease and anger of God, but no one of those remedies cured the people affected. With all of this, the Pope trust in a famous doctor, Gui de Chuilac, that contracted the Black Death but tried to save himself. When he passed it through, he began to investigate the bodies. That is when he discovered the most damaged part were the lungs: the epidemy spread by the air. When he concluded the investigation, he transmitted to the Pope and started to purify the air, with fruit flavors and fire (the Pope also had two chimneys in both sides of his throne). However, the Christians started to become furious and impatient, so they manifested against the Church. But that was not a solution. They helped the Black Death move more quickly: while doctors and religious said they needed to get away from their friends and family, the Protestants made enormous amounts of people, so instead of getting a solution, they spread the infection further.

The Black Death was a disease considered for the medieval society like a divine punishment because the behavior of the people was terrible for the eyes of God. In the year 1348, in spring, the disease arrived in the south of France, and, the most affected city was Avignon with a lot of infections and deaths. This situation made that the Church and the Pope started to take measures to try please God and, with it, take away the disease. This measures started so soft, with processions and prayers but, as time passes and the situation was worse than before, there were a lot of groups met like “Flagelants”, these groups were a cleavage who started to take their measures with some bizarre rituals which consisted of processions with whips where the people who procession were hit with whips as a penance to ask for forgiveness. These groups were not accepted by the church but as the situation kept getting worse, the people started to set aside the processions made for the pope and started to form part of the “flagelants” as the last choice to save herself and her family.

After a while and considering that everything was worse, Christian society thought that the guilty were the Jews and the Carcassonne because of their polytheistic beliefs for what they decided to expel them from Avignon. They decided that God’s rage could be produced by the Jewish belief and were later accused of poisoning the waters and convicted to be burnt. They were forced to make false declarations making themselves guilty; this was the perfect excuse for Christians to get rid of payments they had to make to Jewish landowners. This even happened before the arrival of the disease in many towns.

Then it arrived in England in the summer of 1348 again by the sea in Bristol, Southampton, and Plymouth. Peasants had a hard time and barely survived before the Black Death mainly because of the landowners and living conditions, they could only rely on the worked lands. Lords were left without helpers and so the lands were waiting for new owners. Peasants took advantage of this to ask for bigger wages in exchange for their services: Denny’s family was one of the affected by this.

To conclude, we need to note that Europe could fight this terrible disease that was haunting everywhere. No one could know if a new symptom would suddenly appear, so this epidemy though irrational, was the fear of most of the population, without caring the social class. During the three centuries that the Black Death were hunting the lifes of the peasant, religious and nobles, writers like Bocaccio and a considerable number of artists represented the disasters that were caused by this threat (in paintings, the epidemy was characterized like a skeleton dancing around the people, in style of a joke. But Europe could survive, without really knowing how this horrible success, that, nowadays, any doctor or specialist can not identify exactly what kind of sickness was the Black Death.