Surviving the Black Death

Europeans in the fourteenth century were looking at the world in a new way, seeing

far-off places as desirable, worth finding out about, and maybe even worth acquiring.

Yet before Europeans really got out and started taking over that world, there had to be

enough personal wealth back home to make a decent-sized market for foreign

luxuries. Oddly, it took a horrible disease and death on a massive scale for that market

to find a foothold.

The Black Death (also called the Black Plague) was a devastating epidemic of bubonic

plague and its variants that probably started in the foothills of Asia’s Himalayan

Mountain range. But in the fourteenth century something happened to make disease

spread, and many have speculated that the culprit was the rise of trade. The disease

lived in fleas carried by rats, and where people go, especially people carrying food, so

go rats and their parasites.

When a rat died, the fleas jumped to another rat. When no other rat was handy, the

fleas tried less desirable hosts. When those hosts were human, the people got terribly

sick and most of them died quickly. The blackish bruises that appeared beneath their

skin were called buboes, which is where the name bubonic plague comes from. (Think

of that next time you hear a child call a bruise a “boo-boo.”) An even deadlier version

of the disease, pneumonic plague, spread through the air from person to person.Surviving the Black Death

Europeans in the fourteenth century were looking at the world in a new way, seeing

far-off places as desirable, worth finding out about, and maybe even worth acquiring.

Yet before Europeans really got out and started taking over that world, there had to be

enough personal wealth back home to make a decent-sized market for foreign

luxuries. Oddly, it took a horrible disease and death on a massive scale for that market

to find a foothold.

The Black Death (also called the Black Plague) was a devastating epidemic of bubonic

plague and its variants that probably started in the foothills of Asia’s Himalayan

Mountain range. But in the fourteenth century something happened to make disease

spread, and many have speculated that the culprit was the rise of trade. The disease

lived in fleas carried by rats, and where people go, especially people carrying food, so

go rats and their parasites.

When a rat died, the fleas jumped to another rat. When no other rat was handy, the

fleas tried less desirable hosts. When those hosts were human, the people got terribly

sick and most of them died quickly. The blackish bruises that appeared beneath their

skin were called buboes, which is where the name bubonic plague comes from. (Think

of that next time you hear a child call a bruise a “boo-boo.”) An even deadlier version

of the disease, pneumonic plague, spread through the air from person to person.

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