Mind Map: Bubonic Plague

Where and who it affected

How and When

The Black Death was thought to have started in China or Central Asia, at the time people traded across the Silk Road so that meant this pandemic was able to travel through different towns and infect many people. The disease was thought to have been spread by rats that held the Oriental rat flea. Once the fees had bitten you it injected you with the disease. The infested rats lived among the carriages that traveled along many different roads. The Black Plague started in 1347 and ended 1350.

The Bubonic Plague

The pandemic was very brutal and was quickly spread across towns and affected 1.5 million people out of an estimated total of 4 million people between 1348 and 1350. In towns and cities people lived very close together and they knew nothing about contagious diseases. Also the disposal of bodies was very crude and helped to spread the disease still further as those who handled the dead bodies did not protect themselves in any way.

The filth that littered streets gave rats the perfect environment to breed and increase their number. It is commonly thought that it was the rats that caused the disease. This is not true – the fleas did this. However, it was the rats that enabled the disease to spread very quickly and the filth in the streets of our towns and cities did not help to stop the spread of the disease.

People didn't know this at the time and belived it was cats and dogs that were spreading the disease so they started to kill them too.

Lack of medical knowledge meant that people tried anything to help them escape the disease. One of the more extreme was the flagellants. These people wanted to show their love of God by whipping themselves, hoping that God would forgive them their sins and that they would be spared the Black Death.

What happened after

Religion: How did it impact on how people reacted?

The Black Death had a profound impact on art and literature throughout the generation that experienced it. Many of the most useful manifestations of the Black Death in literature, to historians, comes from the accounts of its chroniclers. Some of these chroniclers were famous writers, philosophers and rulers such as Boccaccio and Petrarch. This helped lead onto the renaissance.

What impact did the Bubonic Plague have on Europe?

Religion had a major impact on the ways the people reacted to the disease. Before the Black Death, many medieval authorities had discouraged herbal and medicinal treatments, thinking it was witchcraft instead of faith in God, and priests might urge their sick patients to pray for healing or to visit the shrines of saints. In the case of the plague, the demonstrable ineffectiveness of this medical regimen in the long run caused ritual pilgrimage and ceremonial veneration of the saints to diminish in prestige. Others despaired, and wrote that God did not exist, or that He had died, or He was asleep, or He had given up on humanity. Europe did not regain a sense of optimism and hope.

Where and who it affected

How did it end?

The practice of proper hygiene played a likely role in the end of the Black Death. Before the pandemic struck, personal hygiene was lacking in vitality. It was common to consume contaminated water, people did not wash regularly, and the dead were buried in mass graves.

During the years of the Black Death, however, people began to practice better personal hygiene. More people washed, and though bacteria had yet to be discovered, this cleanliness removed the microorganisms. People began to boil drinking water. As the bodies piled up it became more efficient to burn them, again inadvertently preventing the further spread of disease.

Clean air was also another factor to the end of the pandemic. Over time, the plague became pneumonic, or airborne, passing from person to person without flea hosts. Many people sought environments in which the air quality was uncontaminated by disease. One way of inhaling pure air was to sit between two burning fires. As the bacteria were destroyed in extreme heat, this may have provided some protection.

The Bubonic Plague didn't just affect the victims. People at the time blamed the Jewish for this pandemic and they were killed.

As the plague swept across Europe in the mid-14th century, more than half the population were affected. It didn't matter what social rank you were or your age or gender; you were living in constant fear of getting the pandemic and dying horribly. There was better hygiene among Jewish communities at the time; and isolation in the ghettos meant in some places that Jews were less affected. Accusations were then spread that Jews had caused the disease by deliberately poisoning wells. The first killings related to the plague took place in April 1348 in France, where a Jewish community was sacked, and forty Jews were murdered in their homes.

By Sophia Mavridis