The Black Death
As the Italian writer Boccaccio said the victims, "ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise." That was a very realistic description of a plague that ran rampant throughout the world in the early 1300's. The Black Death, or The Bubonic Plague, killed everyone in its path. Throughout this paper I will discuss how the plague came into Europe, what the plague is, the different forms of the plague, and finally what the plague did to the economy and how it changed the World. The Bubonic Plague erupted in the Gobi Desert in the 1320's.Then by transport of ships it got into Italy and began to spread quickly. The plague moved from city to city by trade routes toward the West. It hit by 1347 and then by 1348 it was everywhere, this year was the worst (The Black). The Bubonic plague is the medical term. It is a bacillus most usually carried by rodents. Fleas infest the animal and then move freely over to a human host. The flea then regurtates the blood from the rat into the human (The Black). Then the rat dies, the human dies, and the flea goes on to live a long happy life. Some symptoms include high fevers and aching limbs. Most characteristic is the swelling of the lymph nodes. The swelling i
Cities were hit hard by the plague. Most business stopped and they went into a type of depression. Creditors could not collect for their debtors died and their families. Then the creditors died and there was no one to collect. Construction and farming stopped. Since there was a labor shortage towns were offering high wages yet people still were in debt. Since there was an oversupply of goods, since everyone was dead, prices plummeted. Whole families died and left no heirs, just empty houses. Cantor, Norman. "In the Wake of the Plague." The Free Press. New York, New York, 2001. When you look at the art work and read the poems and stories all you see and hear is death. Paintings were of what people saw. Dead bodies with death, represented by skeletons, coming to get them. They showed the burning and the despair of that time. Stories were about the same. One of the most famous storytellers that lived through this time and wrote about it was Boccaccio. He wrote the Decameron which was a typical response to the epidemic (Herlihy 93). "The Black Death." 5 Nov, 2001. http://www.byu.edu/ipt/projects/middleages/LifeTimes/Plague.html The church had a hard time keeping any of the clergy. They too were dying off. Some people thought this to be an act of God. They felt they a
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Approximate Word count = 880
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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