February 18, 2009 • 16 mins
When the Black Death swept across Europe, it killed an estimated 25 million people -- one third of Europe's total population. Tune in and learn more about the lasting effects of the Black Death in this HowStuffWorks podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Can't just gives in join my staff writer
Jake Graph either can't. Every now and then, just as
a treat for you really special listeners out there, we
(00:21):
like to discuss something really grizzly and maccab and in
the past it's spent towards your devices or or really
bloody wars. And today we have another trait for everyone,
the Black Death. It's true and I like this one
a lot better than the other very grizzly ones we've
talked about before. I don't know why, but it's it's
a really interesting topic to me. I guess it's just
(00:43):
that the shear, the sheer like effect of the Black
Death and how many people did kill because if you
look at the stats, like the one and most often
quoted is that you're lost a third of its population
in the Black Death and this was only in like
the short period that's referred to as a Black Death,
and the actual play actually you know, lived on after that.
So the Black Death we're talking thirty seven to thirteen
(01:04):
fifty one, and there are geneticists today who are studying
the effects of the Black the Black Death, and they
say that England's population especially one of the reasons there's
so little genetic diversity there is because of the Black Death,
and other parts of Europe were still trying to catch up,
and it took a long time to recover from the
effects of losing twenty five million people. That's, like you said,
(01:25):
a third of the population of Europe. We're talking about
all the way from the Mediterranean countries to the Scandinavian ones,
even to parts of Russia and even parts of Africa
where trade routes were established. That's right, and that leads
us to going back to the beginning of how the
Black Death began. And they believed today that it started
in Asia. The first case came from the Mongol territory,
(01:47):
and they can trace that the cases came up through
the trade route. So obviously people going back and forth,
we're carrying this disease and spreading it um and eventually
made its way to Europe. And it's pretty interesting story
the way it got there because there was this trading
post called Kafa and what is now Ukraine at least
where the Genoese were using it and they actually got
(02:08):
attacked by the Tartars. So when the Tars attacked, they
actually contracted the disease UM in the process because the
Genoese were were inflicted with it, and so the Tars
started dying. And at first the Genoese were like, yeah,
this is God, you know, saying, you know, we won
and we're on God's side. But then they started realizing
that that the disease was spreading towards them, and the
(02:30):
Tars actually launched. I love this. They had upholded. Um,
a rotting body was running from the plague into the
town of Genoees, so that it spread the disease towards
them and more. Yeah, and the Tarters thought that certainly
the malhuterous smell emanating from the rotting corpses would be
enough to drive them out. Well, for one, yeah, it did,
(02:54):
but for two also, it disseminated this awful, awful disease.
So the Genuee get back to Italy essentially, and we
can trace how the Black Death went on its major
trade routes around Europe. We know that um, some of
the the bigger paths were from Italy and then to
Austria and Germany and then from France to England and Ireland,
(03:16):
and then eventually by forty nine and fifty we see
that it reaches parts of Russia and then even parts
of Africa along these routes. So, Black Death, why is
it so bad? While we will tell you. Um, you
would get these purple splotches on your body, and they
referred to them as God's tokens, because once your body
became infected with these little purple splotches or black spots,
(03:38):
it was a sign from God that your time was
almost up. And if there were a blessing behind the
Black Death, it was that it killed quickly. It didn't
kill softly. It killed quickly, that's true, and people wouldn't
They would also get these tumors. They were basically the
size of eggs or or even apples next, yeah, they were.
Sometimes they were so big that your head would get
pushed to the side and you couldn't even cock it
(04:00):
upright again because it would just be completely turned over
from this giant, giant node of of pus and grossness.
And there were different variations on the Black Death. Some
people would get on like a bubonic form of the plague,
and they would be taken with trembling and chills and fever,
and then some who got the pneumonic form be coughing
up blood and your body would just be rotting from
(04:23):
the inside out until you would have really foul breath
and your body it would just just nastiness with seep
from your pores, and you just didn't want to be
around anybody at all. So you would see pestlen's houses
where people would go to die, or your neighbor's helps
would be covered with a black ex over the door
to show that there were people inside who'd been afflicted
with the black Death. Husbands would leave their wives, babies
would be abandoned. Sometimes entire villages would just be shut down.
(04:47):
That's right. And UM, this was partially a problem because
they didn't quite know how it was spread. And even
to this day it kind of eludes a lot of
historians and people studying this and how fast it did spread,
because it did spread so fast that it doesn't really
make sense. Um, because people didn't travel as much as
they do today. And Uh, anyway, to get back to
what caused it, people weren't sure. And UM, a lot
(05:09):
of people attributed it immediately to God's wrath, like God
wants to inflict this on us for something we did.
And one group that came out of this idea are
called the Flagelence. And this UH is a group of
people who at the time, I believe the plague was
certainly a consequence of their sins, and they would start
um basically inflicting UM suffering and and UH scourges on
(05:31):
themselves so that they could make up for their sins.
And this comes from the idea of redemptive suffering, which
you know still holds a place in Catholic teaching. But
the Flagelence took it way you know, they out to
left field. These Flagelens were seen as sort of way
too out there, and I believe the Vatican basically said, like,
you know, keep it down, and they eventually disappeared almost overnight.
(05:53):
But there are lots of other theories about what caused
it in the first place. UM. As far as Santita
sation goes, during the fourteenth century, well, there was none.
It was awful. People would throw their food scraps into
the street. There would be you know, excrement from animals
and from humans, and it was just everywhere. And we
know that um waste like that attracts vermin, and rats
(06:18):
were a really big carrier of fleas. So scientists today
have a theory about these these fleas and the rodents
that carried them, and the idea was that um a
flea would bite of rodent that had this bad bacteria
and it's blood, the bacterium that ultimately led to the
black death, and because it would infect the flee somehow
(06:40):
we get stuck in the four gut, which was the
the upper part of the flee stomach and essentially the
flee almost the way I think if it is like
the lap band system, if you guys have seen commercials
for that, you know how it cuts off part of
your stomach so you're not hungry, but had the opposite
effect that the top part would get full, but the
bottom part would still be wide open for more food.
So the flea would go searching for more food and
(07:02):
feast upon more and more rats, and it just could
never get enough. So eventually the rats are being infected
by these bad fleas with bad blood and they would
all die, and then the fleas needed more fodder. They
would start latching onto humans. And because that the rats
and the fleaves were said plentiful the Black Death could
spread up to two and a half miles that's four
kilometers for all of you out there per day, So
(07:25):
it was incredibly fast, incredibly swift, and you died really
fast from it too, that's right. And um, this theory
about the fleet to rat thing, it kind of might
explain why people blame Jews at the time, and there
were lots of there. There was a general feeling of
anti Semitism at the time, obviously, but people actually believe
that the Jews were intentionally tainting the water supply with
(07:49):
the plague. And um, this is of course not true,
but people believe it, and today people think and perhaps
what actually happened, supposedly Jews actually died and fewer numbers
in the Christians may not be true, but at least
it seemed that way at the time, and it makes
sense because the Jews and Christians had such desperate etiologies.
They typically didn't live together exactly. They were isolated. Yeah,
(08:09):
they were, and it kind of worked in the Jew's
favor at first, at least because they had their own quarantine.
That's right. And not only that, but there are theories
that the Jewish people had actually um more advanced ideas
of hygiene at the time, and so this helped them.
And also I remember hearing the theory when when I
was in school that Jews actually were more likely to
keep cats, and cats would scare away or kill the
(08:31):
rats that were likely to carry the fleas. Yeah, so
that was one theory. So anyway to get back to
any Semitism that was going on at the time, Uh,
Jews weren't immune. Obviously many died of the plague, but
many were blaming them. So they the Christians who did
blame them, uh, would go on these riots and they
would even take whole buildings full of Jewish people and
(08:53):
burn them to the ground, or they would take individual
Jews and burn them at the steak or they would
even put them like stuff them into wine caskets and
throw them into the river. And as if we're shadowing
the future, one of the countries that persecuted the Jews
the most was Germany actually, and we know that, uh,
most of the Jews who died during the period of
the Black Death, it wasn't due to contracting the disease,
(09:15):
but being put to death escapegoats for the plague. Now,
if you didn't buy into the idea of fleas and rodents,
as many people at the time didn't because mysticism and
uh superstition was much more advanced than medicine, they just
didn't have that kind of knowledge. Back during the Middle Ages,
there was another idea floating around, and this is sort of,
(09:35):
you know, sort of crazy, so you guys are gonna
have to bear with me. But the thought was that
on March Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars were all in aquarious.
Now I'm not really familiar with astrology, so I'm not
sure where this can know is, but apparently they were
all working together, they were all inline and conditions were
right before a big reaction to occur. And Jupiter is
known as a hot and wet planet and Mars is
(09:57):
known as a dry planet. So putter I was able
to absorb these evil vapors from the Earth, but Mars
sort of um uh re reassimilated them back down to
the Earth's atmosphere and specifically over Europe, I guess and
spreading what they called a death fog. And people had
a lot of different ideas about how to keep out
(10:19):
of the way of this death fog, one of which
was avoidance, which was pretty smart especially didn't have any
preventive medicine, but the others where you didn't eat meat,
you didn't eat figs, you didn't exercise, and you didn't
have sucks, all great ways to avoid the black death.
But also they also said you shouldn't bathe, which I
don't know if that helps. Such a good idea. And
they called this fog of death miasthma. I believe it
(10:41):
was pronounced um. According to a book by Joseph Patrick
byrne Uh. They believe that when you were infected with
a small amount of this miasma, the body could actually
combat it by moving it away to the heart and
and other organs that could get rid of or way
away from the heart, I should say two organs that
could get rid of it. So this ended up being
places where like the ears and the armpits and the liver,
(11:04):
and these were actually places where bubos would would show up,
these marks on your body. And so they believe these
these bubos were actually good um, and that when they
opened it actually lets out the bad um tainted whatever
it is, pus or whatever, and so you would recover
after that. But so there was this whole theory of
going around about my asthma, even even the Pope subscribed
(11:27):
to it. Um he didn't. He was actually an interesting
defender of the Jews at this time. He he loved
Jews for some reason, and he subscribed to the theory
of my asthma and not the idea that Jews poisoned
the wells. And so he would actually sit between things
of fire. And this was one thing that could actually
protect you from the my asthma was burning wood, Yeah, exactly,
aromatic woods, things like rose mary in time, and he
(11:49):
sort of herb that was very fragrant, and um name
was mentioned, this idea of letting out the bad stuff
from inside these big sores. And that's why there were
some very primitive attempts at Lansing then and blood letting,
very primitive. Like I said, medicine, but medicine nonetheless. And
that's something that's really interesting. Because after the Black Death
(12:11):
phased out, and it did, it eventually phased out and
ran its court. Uh, a lot of things happened. And
one of the biggest changes was an advancement in education
because people saw that before it was really inadequate. What
they had superstition was no way to treat a big
epidemic like this, they needed serious learning and serious medicines,
(12:31):
so was on increase in education. But there were also
big changes in the religious and economic sectors of society.
For one, Europe in the Middle Ages had been a
big sort of feudal system where you know, the service
work for the lords and they all shared this land
and they all lived in the country and everything was
you know, pretty happy, You're lucky for the most part,
but so many people had died that there were no
(12:52):
more people to really work the land, so the cost
of labor had skyrocketed. But there was enough food to
go around still and not enough people to eat it,
so the cost of food remain the same. So eventually
people started moving to where the city in the urban
areas really grew up in the feudal system sort of dissipated.
And what else was interesting about the religious sectors of
society was that if you were still a devout person
(13:15):
after you had seen this epidemic come in and wipe
out all of your family, then you worshiped in a
very small and private chapel. Because on the whole people
started engaging and all sorts of debauchery. They would wear,
you know, very elaborate clothes, they would eat very expensive foods,
they would party, they would drink because the predominant thought
was that God had turned his back on society and
(13:36):
and people couldn't trust him anymore, so why be devout?
That's right. So the Catholic Church a lot of lost
a lot of power in that way over over people's
personal lives. And um, even like you said, they like
they go on on these like debaucherous like parties and things.
It also sort of played into the idea of the
dons macabre, which was a dance with death kind of
(13:58):
and it was kind of a memento more sort of
line or that death is is around the corner. And
people say that the people at this time, when they're
at least immediately after the Black Death, were very preoccupied
with the idea, with the idea of death. And it's
very understandable. Um, when you think about it, you think
of so many people that you would know, so many
people in your family who have died at this time,
and you would obviously feel all the time like death
might be coming for you any moment. And so that
(14:19):
the Don's macab could be manifested in several different ways.
It was an art form, but underneath that broad umbrella
we had a visual arts, theater and music and different
ways to express the relationships between the living and the
dad and how the living could interact with the dad
and so um. Like you said, Candasa did run its course,
but it actually it's stuck around in certain places for
(14:40):
the next like a few hundred years. There was always
at least one town in Europe that was suffering from
it at one time for for this period. It phased
out a little bit after that, and then by the
eighteen hundreds the end actually came back in areas of
East Asia. And it was by this time that people
were studying it a little bit more closely and knowing
a little bit about how bacteria works, and they discovered um,
(15:01):
a particular by bacteria that they that they attributed to
it UM. And they tried and they felt that they
had finally figured out the key to what caused the
Black Death in the first place. But there's still a
lot of actually controversy to this day about what actually
calls it, because a lot of things just don't make
sense with the with what accounts were written in the
fourteenth century about the Black Death, right, reconciling people's accounts
(15:24):
of what they observed and their fellow man versus what
the science has discovered about the bacterium today. Right. And
it's also tough because the people back then, we can't
always trust exactly those accounts because they don't have the
same knowledge. They don't have the same terminology as we
do in describing medical conditions. So how much can we
trust their accounts? You don't know exactly, So that we're
working with what we have, and historians and geneticists and epidemiologists,
(15:49):
I think they're still researching it. There's still a lot
to find out and in nantrim. If you want to
know more about epidemics and contagious diseases and historical epidemics,
you can find out much more at how stuff works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what
(16:09):
you think, send an email to podcast at how stuff
works dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Can't just gives in join my staff writer
Jake Graph either can't. Every now and then, just as
a treat for you really special listeners out there, we
(00:21):
like to discuss something really grizzly and maccab and in
the past it's spent towards your devices or or really
bloody wars. And today we have another trait for everyone,
the Black Death. It's true and I like this one
a lot better than the other very grizzly ones we've
talked about before. I don't know why, but it's it's
a really interesting topic to me. I guess it's just
(00:43):
that the shear, the sheer like effect of the Black
Death and how many people did kill because if you
look at the stats, like the one and most often
quoted is that you're lost a third of its population
in the Black Death and this was only in like
the short period that's referred to as a Black Death,
and the actual play actually you know, lived on after that.
So the Black Death we're talking thirty seven to thirteen
(01:04):
fifty one, and there are geneticists today who are studying
the effects of the Black the Black Death, and they
say that England's population especially one of the reasons there's
so little genetic diversity there is because of the Black Death,
and other parts of Europe were still trying to catch up,
and it took a long time to recover from the
effects of losing twenty five million people. That's, like you said,
(01:25):
a third of the population of Europe. We're talking about
all the way from the Mediterranean countries to the Scandinavian ones,
even to parts of Russia and even parts of Africa
where trade routes were established. That's right, and that leads
us to going back to the beginning of how the
Black Death began. And they believed today that it started
in Asia. The first case came from the Mongol territory,
(01:47):
and they can trace that the cases came up through
the trade route. So obviously people going back and forth,
we're carrying this disease and spreading it um and eventually
made its way to Europe. And it's pretty interesting story
the way it got there because there was this trading
post called Kafa and what is now Ukraine at least
where the Genoese were using it and they actually got
(02:08):
attacked by the Tartars. So when the Tars attacked, they
actually contracted the disease UM in the process because the
Genoese were were inflicted with it, and so the Tars
started dying. And at first the Genoese were like, yeah,
this is God, you know, saying, you know, we won
and we're on God's side. But then they started realizing
that that the disease was spreading towards them, and the
(02:30):
Tars actually launched. I love this. They had upholded. Um,
a rotting body was running from the plague into the
town of Genoees, so that it spread the disease towards
them and more. Yeah, and the Tarters thought that certainly
the malhuterous smell emanating from the rotting corpses would be
enough to drive them out. Well, for one, yeah, it did,
(02:54):
but for two also, it disseminated this awful, awful disease.
So the Genuee get back to Italy essentially, and we
can trace how the Black Death went on its major
trade routes around Europe. We know that um, some of
the the bigger paths were from Italy and then to
Austria and Germany and then from France to England and Ireland,
(03:16):
and then eventually by forty nine and fifty we see
that it reaches parts of Russia and then even parts
of Africa along these routes. So, Black Death, why is
it so bad? While we will tell you. Um, you
would get these purple splotches on your body, and they
referred to them as God's tokens, because once your body
became infected with these little purple splotches or black spots,
(03:38):
it was a sign from God that your time was
almost up. And if there were a blessing behind the
Black Death, it was that it killed quickly. It didn't
kill softly. It killed quickly, that's true, and people wouldn't
They would also get these tumors. They were basically the
size of eggs or or even apples next, yeah, they were.
Sometimes they were so big that your head would get
pushed to the side and you couldn't even cock it
(04:00):
upright again because it would just be completely turned over
from this giant, giant node of of pus and grossness.
And there were different variations on the Black Death. Some
people would get on like a bubonic form of the plague,
and they would be taken with trembling and chills and fever,
and then some who got the pneumonic form be coughing
up blood and your body would just be rotting from
(04:23):
the inside out until you would have really foul breath
and your body it would just just nastiness with seep
from your pores, and you just didn't want to be
around anybody at all. So you would see pestlen's houses
where people would go to die, or your neighbor's helps
would be covered with a black ex over the door
to show that there were people inside who'd been afflicted
with the black Death. Husbands would leave their wives, babies
would be abandoned. Sometimes entire villages would just be shut down.
(04:47):
That's right. And UM, this was partially a problem because
they didn't quite know how it was spread. And even
to this day it kind of eludes a lot of
historians and people studying this and how fast it did spread,
because it did spread so fast that it doesn't really
make sense. Um, because people didn't travel as much as
they do today. And Uh, anyway, to get back to
what caused it, people weren't sure. And UM, a lot
(05:09):
of people attributed it immediately to God's wrath, like God
wants to inflict this on us for something we did.
And one group that came out of this idea are
called the Flagelence. And this UH is a group of
people who at the time, I believe the plague was
certainly a consequence of their sins, and they would start
um basically inflicting UM suffering and and UH scourges on
(05:31):
themselves so that they could make up for their sins.
And this comes from the idea of redemptive suffering, which
you know still holds a place in Catholic teaching. But
the Flagelence took it way you know, they out to
left field. These Flagelens were seen as sort of way
too out there, and I believe the Vatican basically said, like,
you know, keep it down, and they eventually disappeared almost overnight.
(05:53):
But there are lots of other theories about what caused
it in the first place. UM. As far as Santita
sation goes, during the fourteenth century, well, there was none.
It was awful. People would throw their food scraps into
the street. There would be you know, excrement from animals
and from humans, and it was just everywhere. And we
know that um waste like that attracts vermin, and rats
(06:18):
were a really big carrier of fleas. So scientists today
have a theory about these these fleas and the rodents
that carried them, and the idea was that um a
flea would bite of rodent that had this bad bacteria
and it's blood, the bacterium that ultimately led to the
black death, and because it would infect the flee somehow
(06:40):
we get stuck in the four gut, which was the
the upper part of the flee stomach and essentially the
flee almost the way I think if it is like
the lap band system, if you guys have seen commercials
for that, you know how it cuts off part of
your stomach so you're not hungry, but had the opposite
effect that the top part would get full, but the
bottom part would still be wide open for more food.
So the flea would go searching for more food and
(07:02):
feast upon more and more rats, and it just could
never get enough. So eventually the rats are being infected
by these bad fleas with bad blood and they would
all die, and then the fleas needed more fodder. They
would start latching onto humans. And because that the rats
and the fleaves were said plentiful the Black Death could
spread up to two and a half miles that's four
kilometers for all of you out there per day, So
(07:25):
it was incredibly fast, incredibly swift, and you died really
fast from it too, that's right. And um, this theory
about the fleet to rat thing, it kind of might
explain why people blame Jews at the time, and there
were lots of there. There was a general feeling of
anti Semitism at the time, obviously, but people actually believe
that the Jews were intentionally tainting the water supply with
(07:49):
the plague. And um, this is of course not true,
but people believe it, and today people think and perhaps
what actually happened, supposedly Jews actually died and fewer numbers
in the Christians may not be true, but at least
it seemed that way at the time, and it makes
sense because the Jews and Christians had such desperate etiologies.
They typically didn't live together exactly. They were isolated. Yeah,
(08:09):
they were, and it kind of worked in the Jew's
favor at first, at least because they had their own quarantine.
That's right. And not only that, but there are theories
that the Jewish people had actually um more advanced ideas
of hygiene at the time, and so this helped them.
And also I remember hearing the theory when when I
was in school that Jews actually were more likely to
keep cats, and cats would scare away or kill the
(08:31):
rats that were likely to carry the fleas. Yeah, so
that was one theory. So anyway to get back to
any Semitism that was going on at the time, Uh,
Jews weren't immune. Obviously many died of the plague, but
many were blaming them. So they the Christians who did
blame them, uh, would go on these riots and they
would even take whole buildings full of Jewish people and
(08:53):
burn them to the ground, or they would take individual
Jews and burn them at the steak or they would
even put them like stuff them into wine caskets and
throw them into the river. And as if we're shadowing
the future, one of the countries that persecuted the Jews
the most was Germany actually, and we know that, uh,
most of the Jews who died during the period of
the Black Death, it wasn't due to contracting the disease,
(09:15):
but being put to death escapegoats for the plague. Now,
if you didn't buy into the idea of fleas and rodents,
as many people at the time didn't because mysticism and
uh superstition was much more advanced than medicine, they just
didn't have that kind of knowledge. Back during the Middle Ages,
there was another idea floating around, and this is sort of,
(09:35):
you know, sort of crazy, so you guys are gonna
have to bear with me. But the thought was that
on March Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars were all in aquarious.
Now I'm not really familiar with astrology, so I'm not
sure where this can know is, but apparently they were
all working together, they were all inline and conditions were
right before a big reaction to occur. And Jupiter is
known as a hot and wet planet and Mars is
(09:57):
known as a dry planet. So putter I was able
to absorb these evil vapors from the Earth, but Mars
sort of um uh re reassimilated them back down to
the Earth's atmosphere and specifically over Europe, I guess and
spreading what they called a death fog. And people had
a lot of different ideas about how to keep out
(10:19):
of the way of this death fog, one of which
was avoidance, which was pretty smart especially didn't have any
preventive medicine, but the others where you didn't eat meat,
you didn't eat figs, you didn't exercise, and you didn't
have sucks, all great ways to avoid the black death.
But also they also said you shouldn't bathe, which I
don't know if that helps. Such a good idea. And
they called this fog of death miasthma. I believe it
(10:41):
was pronounced um. According to a book by Joseph Patrick
byrne Uh. They believe that when you were infected with
a small amount of this miasma, the body could actually
combat it by moving it away to the heart and
and other organs that could get rid of or way
away from the heart, I should say two organs that
could get rid of it. So this ended up being
places where like the ears and the armpits and the liver,
(11:04):
and these were actually places where bubos would would show up,
these marks on your body. And so they believe these
these bubos were actually good um, and that when they
opened it actually lets out the bad um tainted whatever
it is, pus or whatever, and so you would recover
after that. But so there was this whole theory of
going around about my asthma, even even the Pope subscribed
(11:27):
to it. Um he didn't. He was actually an interesting
defender of the Jews at this time. He he loved
Jews for some reason, and he subscribed to the theory
of my asthma and not the idea that Jews poisoned
the wells. And so he would actually sit between things
of fire. And this was one thing that could actually
protect you from the my asthma was burning wood, Yeah, exactly,
aromatic woods, things like rose mary in time, and he
(11:49):
sort of herb that was very fragrant, and um name
was mentioned, this idea of letting out the bad stuff
from inside these big sores. And that's why there were
some very primitive attempts at Lansing then and blood letting,
very primitive. Like I said, medicine, but medicine nonetheless. And
that's something that's really interesting. Because after the Black Death
(12:11):
phased out, and it did, it eventually phased out and
ran its court. Uh, a lot of things happened. And
one of the biggest changes was an advancement in education
because people saw that before it was really inadequate. What
they had superstition was no way to treat a big
epidemic like this, they needed serious learning and serious medicines,
(12:31):
so was on increase in education. But there were also
big changes in the religious and economic sectors of society.
For one, Europe in the Middle Ages had been a
big sort of feudal system where you know, the service
work for the lords and they all shared this land
and they all lived in the country and everything was
you know, pretty happy, You're lucky for the most part,
but so many people had died that there were no
(12:52):
more people to really work the land, so the cost
of labor had skyrocketed. But there was enough food to
go around still and not enough people to eat it,
so the cost of food remain the same. So eventually
people started moving to where the city in the urban
areas really grew up in the feudal system sort of dissipated.
And what else was interesting about the religious sectors of
society was that if you were still a devout person
(13:15):
after you had seen this epidemic come in and wipe
out all of your family, then you worshiped in a
very small and private chapel. Because on the whole people
started engaging and all sorts of debauchery. They would wear,
you know, very elaborate clothes, they would eat very expensive foods,
they would party, they would drink because the predominant thought
was that God had turned his back on society and
(13:36):
and people couldn't trust him anymore, so why be devout?
That's right. So the Catholic Church a lot of lost
a lot of power in that way over over people's
personal lives. And um, even like you said, they like
they go on on these like debaucherous like parties and things.
It also sort of played into the idea of the
dons macabre, which was a dance with death kind of
(13:58):
and it was kind of a memento more sort of
line or that death is is around the corner. And
people say that the people at this time, when they're
at least immediately after the Black Death, were very preoccupied
with the idea, with the idea of death. And it's
very understandable. Um, when you think about it, you think
of so many people that you would know, so many
people in your family who have died at this time,
and you would obviously feel all the time like death
might be coming for you any moment. And so that
(14:19):
the Don's macab could be manifested in several different ways.
It was an art form, but underneath that broad umbrella
we had a visual arts, theater and music and different
ways to express the relationships between the living and the
dad and how the living could interact with the dad
and so um. Like you said, Candasa did run its course,
but it actually it's stuck around in certain places for
(14:40):
the next like a few hundred years. There was always
at least one town in Europe that was suffering from
it at one time for for this period. It phased
out a little bit after that, and then by the
eighteen hundreds the end actually came back in areas of
East Asia. And it was by this time that people
were studying it a little bit more closely and knowing
a little bit about how bacteria works, and they discovered um,
(15:01):
a particular by bacteria that they that they attributed to
it UM. And they tried and they felt that they
had finally figured out the key to what caused the
Black Death in the first place. But there's still a
lot of actually controversy to this day about what actually
calls it, because a lot of things just don't make
sense with the with what accounts were written in the
fourteenth century about the Black Death, right, reconciling people's accounts
(15:24):
of what they observed and their fellow man versus what
the science has discovered about the bacterium today. Right. And
it's also tough because the people back then, we can't
always trust exactly those accounts because they don't have the
same knowledge. They don't have the same terminology as we
do in describing medical conditions. So how much can we
trust their accounts? You don't know exactly, So that we're
working with what we have, and historians and geneticists and epidemiologists,
(15:49):
I think they're still researching it. There's still a lot
to find out and in nantrim. If you want to
know more about epidemics and contagious diseases and historical epidemics,
you can find out much more at how stuff works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what
(16:09):
you think, send an email to podcast at how stuff
works dot com. M
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