In just two years, 25 million people died of the plague.
In ten years, the plague had killed over 1/3 of Europe's population. Can you
imagine the fear people must have felt? People were sick everywhere. Whole
families were wiped out. Whole villages were wiped out.
At first, people locked their doors trying to protect
themselves. They carried flowers to ward off the smell of the dead and dying.
The skies were filled with ashes as people burned houses filled with the dead.
Villages filled with the dead were burned down, to contain and kill the
disease. Nothing worked.
Outbreaks of the disease seemed to come in cycles. Just
as people thought it was over, a new rash of illness would hit the towns, and
from the towns move to the villages.
People did not know that infected rats carried the
disease. They thought it was a punishment from God for being wicked. They
believed if you were bad, you would get the plague and die. The towns were hit
the hardest. There was no sanitation in the towns. People threw their garage
out on the street. To a rat, coming off a ship docked at port, the towns must
have seemed like heaven.
They did have doctors, and doctors were highly respected,
but medieval knowledge of health, hygiene, and medical practices was very
limited. Commoners and nobles took infrequent baths. The peasants slept and
worked in the same clothes for days and even weeks at a time without washing
themselves or their clothes. The nobles were not much better. Soap was made of
lye, which was very rough on the skin. There was no toothpaste or
toothbrushes. People used watered spices on their lips and teeth, but all that
did was briefly hide the smell of rotting teeth.
Peasants died young from malnutrition and the simplest of
diseases. Women died in childbirth from ignorance. People handled cattle and
then directly handled food. What's amazing really is that anybody lived. The
truth is, only the very strong survived. But the strong had no defense against
the Black Death. No one was safe. And millions of people died.
Outbreaks of the plague continued for two hundred years.
The cause of the plague was not discovered until the 20th century (1900's.)
Today, this disease is called the bubonic plague. We have a vaccine for the
plague should an outbreak ever happen again. We're lucky. The people in the
Middle Ages did not have vaccines to protect themselves from many diseases as
we do today.
