A Popular History of Unpopular Things
A podcast that makes history more fun and accessible - we love all things gory, gross, mysterious, and weird!
A Popular History of Unpopular Things
The Black Death
Join Kelli for her fiftieth episode where she explores her favorite topic - The Black Death!
It's an all-out disease fest, where she goes over the symptoms of plague, how it spread, who it impacted, what it was like for people living with it, and how it impacted the Medieval world.
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The Black Death
Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a mostly scripted podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird.
Before we begin, a quick reminder that you can support me and the show on Patreon, and you can also now watch episodes on YouTube! Check out the links in the description and I appreciate all the love and support :)
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Today is a very special day for me because this is the fiftieth episode of APHOUT! So to celebrate, I’m doing an episode on my favorite topic of all time - the Black Death. It’s been a long time coming :)
From roughly 1338 - 1353, the bubonic plague decimated populations in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Some areas were spared - like Poland and parts of today’s Germany - while others saw mortality rates as high as two-thirds. Overall, we historians estimate that ⅓ of the populations of Europe and Asia died as a result of the plague bacteria, yersinia pestis, which had massive political, cultural, and economic consequences.
So in today’s episode, I’m going to talk about all things Black Death - what is the plague, what are the symptoms, where did plague come from, where did they think plague came from, how did it spread, how did people try to prevent and/or cure it, how did people react to it, what did things look like during the plague years, how did it end, what are the short and long term consequences of plague, and has the bubonic plague ever come back in the same way it did during the canonical “black death” years?
That’s a lot of questions. There’s a lot to cover today, so let’s get started :)
Yersinia Pestis
So first, a bit of terminology. When we use the phrase “Black Death,” we’re really describing those particular years in the mid-14th century, when it spread from Asia to Europe. There have certainly been more outbreaks of plague in the years since, but we only refer to this one particular event as the Black Death.
Side note: they didn’t call it the Black Death back in the 1300s. The term Black Death was coined in the mid-18th century, that’s the 1700s. It was called a whole bunch of things in the 14th century, but one that stuck is Magna Mortalitas, or The Great Mortality. I’ve also heard the Great Pestilence or the Great Plague.
So the disease at the heart of the black death was bubonic plague, caused by a bacteria known as Yersinia pestis. It’s a cute, cylindrical-shaped little dude that is endemic to a handful of areas in the world, including Central Asia, which is where the strain of yersinia pestis that became the Black Death originated. But just know it’s also endemic to many other places, including in the Western part of the United States, and can be carried by cute little fuzzy baby animals like prairie dogs… so don’t cuddle wild animals. Or eat them raw.
Now when you come in contact with enough yersinia pestis bacteria, you contract the plague. It can happen in four main ways - you can be bitten by an infected flea that is carrying plague bacteria, you can get it from direct contact with infected tissues or pus from someone with plague, if it’s pneumonic plague then it can be spread through the air and you breathe it in, or in some cases it’s septicemic plague - you get it from contaminated blood.
Plague symptoms include a fever that can go up to 105, convulsions, vomiting, sweating… but you get those with a lot of bacterial infections. The characteristic symptom of a plague infection is painful swellings in the lymph nodes - particularly the ones in your neck, your armpits, and your groin. These purplish-black swellings, known as buboes, can grow to the size of an egg or even an apple. So take your hand, make a fist, and imagine a lump that big growing out of your neck or your groin, filled with bacterial pus. Ouch. And yes, the term “bubonic” in bubonic plague comes from the buboes, as those characteristic lumps that are a dead giveaway for plague.
Now as I’m sure I’ve gone over many times in previous disease episodes, since yersinia pestis is a bacteria, it can survive in the wild on its own. It’s a living organism. It doesn’t need a host to survive. But it certainly can and does live in host creatures, like the aforementioned prairie dogs, or marmots, or rats.
So how did it spread to Europe? Well, the real answer is trade. But there’s a lot more to the story. And to get the proper historical context, we need to talk about the Mongols.
Historical Context
Genghis Khan became the leader of the consolidated Mongol clans in 1206. Prior to this, the Mongols stayed in family or kinship groups, often warring with each other. But Genghis Khan, a visionary, saw a chance to unite his people under one banner and grow their empire.
Now you know me, I crave context. Why 1206? Why that period of time? Why not earlier, or later, right? Part of it was the man himself, but a big reason why is the Medieval Warming Period. Between the years 900 to 1300, global temperatures were on average higher than in the centuries before and after. In fact, after the Medieval Warming Period we actually get the Little Ice Age… but that’s an unnecessary tangent right now. Sorry. I’m showing restraint this time :)
The bigger point here is that during the Medieval Warming Period, as things were on average hotter, the pastoral nomadic Mongols had a hard time living their normal way of life - following their grazing animals and surviving on their milk, meat, and blood. As grasses died off with higher temperatures, so did their livestock. But you know who was having a great time, with lots of agriculture and rice and food? China. To the South.
Once Genghis Khan gained control of the Mongols, he turned his sights towards the Song [saang] Dynasty in China. And a long story short and simplified, because the Mongols aren’t the main point of today’s story, they ended up conquering a land mass of over 9 million square miles from China and Korea in the East to parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle East in the West. It was the largest contiguous land empire in history, and I can’t ever foresee anyone building a larger land empire. Put them in the Guinness Book of World Records. The Mongols win. Genghis Khan died before the Empire reached its height, but his sons and grandsons carried on and grew the Empire even more. I did an episode on a particularly brutal descendant of the Mongols and Turks - Timur-i Lang - so go check that episode out when you’re done here.
Now stay with me - I promise this is all relevant to plague in Europe.
When most people think of the Mongols, they think of destruction, death, war, horseback archers, the pillaging of cities, piling skulls into pyramids… all the brutal aspects of war. But in truth, pretty much every warring Medieval society or empire was brutal and bloodthirsty, Christian Europeans included. So I instead think of their greatest legacy, which is trade.
The Mongols, as nomadic peoples, relied on trade to survive. Without it, they wouldn’t have gotten the things they needed to continue their pastoral, nomadic lifestyle. So when they conquered a massive empire that encapsulated the entirety of the Silk Roads trading network, they did everything they could to ensure safe trade for merchants of all countries and religions. The famous one everyone thinks of is Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant who is sometimes credited with being the first European to travel throughout China… though there is a possibility that he never actually went to Asia, and borrowed stories from other merchants. But I’ll leave that for other historians to uncover.
The Mongols did a lot of things to ensure peace, and their relatively peaceful rule once the empire was established was known as the Pax Mongolica - Mongol Peace. They issued passports, called paizas [pay-zuhs], to ensure safe passage for merchants. Highwaymen, bandits, thieves - they would be killed if caught. And nobody wanted to face the wrath of the Mongols. There were rest stops, if you will, spaced throughout their empire on the Silk Roads, with fresh horses, food, water - you name it. Towns and cities that were already big trading centers before grew even larger and more important, like Isfahan in Iran, Baghdad, and Constantinople - which of course is today’s Istanbul.
My main point here is that the Mongols valued trade, so trade grew. With greater and greater frequency. More things were flowing back and forth, east to west, than ever before. This led to the spread of goods, ideas, religions, and people. But it also led to the spread of disease. Because the more you come in contact with people and things, the more you transfer germs. And this is how the plague spread from a small village in Central Asia along the Silk Roads to China in the East and Europe in the West.
The Spread of Plague
Traditionally, historians believed that the plague began somewhere in China, likely on the Mongolian-China border. The first known death from plague during the Black Death was in Issyk Kul, a lake in today's Kyrgyzstan on the Silk Roads trade network, and we assumed that it spread there from a pocket of endemic plague in China. But in 2022, genetic research identified that the strain of Yersinia pestis that became the Black Death originated here at Issyk Kul. Which is super fascinating because this research shed new light on the true origins of the Black Death. Science and history together are just awesome.
But how it spread is still the same.
Rodents can naturally carry plague. The historic rodent scapegoat was the black rat, which is known to carry rat fleas, which can spread plague. But it’s more likely that it was a marmot that was carrying plague bacteria. For those of you who have never seen a marmot before… a groundhog is a type of marmot. And I wanted to see how the internet defines a marmot, so I googled it, and google told me it is a “large ground squirrel” which is a hilarious description.
To keep it simple, marmots are plague hosts. Fleas are the vector - they bite the marmot and take in some of its plague-infested blood, then transfer that to humans. And then boom - plague bacteria from the marmot is transferred from their original host to their new host - you.
You can also get plague from eating raw marmot meat, so… don’t do that. There are other ways of getting plague from marmots and other infected rodents, but that’s not important. Just don’t approach wildlife and handle it, and you won’t get sick. Like, and this is a total tangent, armadillos can carry leprosy. So don’t go around handling armadillos, just in case.
Anyways.
Trade is alive and well in the Pax Mongolica times, and people and goods are moving back and forth, east and west, through trading towns like the settlement on Lake Issyk Kul. And this means that the fleas, infected with plague, are also moving around. And it wasn’t just restricted to land; rats, rodents, and their fleas also found their way aboard trading ships. In fact, the first instance of plague in Europe was at an Italian port, Messina.
There was a source that claimed that the Mongols intentionally flung plague bodies over the walls of Caffa, a port city on the Black Sea. It’s a cool source, actually, and I used to use it while teaching because it’s neat… but with the caveat that it is the only source of its kind, so it cannot be corroborated, and is likely not real. But here’s an excerpt from that source anyway, because the imagery is gross and I like it. It comes from a Genoese scholar named Gabriele de Mussis, who wrote, quote,
“…In 1346, in the countries of the East, countless numbers of Tartars and Saracens [that’s Mongols and Muslims] were struck down by a mysterious illness which brought sudden death. These countries, broad regions, far-spreading provinces, magnificent kingdoms, cities, towns and settlements, ground down by illness and devoured by dreadful death, were soon stripped of their inhabitants. The Christian merchants, who had been driven out by force, were so terrified of the power of the Tartars that, to save themselves and their belongings, they fled in an armed ship to Caffa.
Oh God! See how the heathen Tartar races, pouring together from all sides, suddenly infested the city of Caffa and besieged the trapped Christians there for almost three years. But behold, the whole army was affected by a disease which overran the Tartars and killed thousands upon thousands every day.
The dying Tartars… ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside. What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many of the bodies as they could in the sea. And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply… Moreover one infected man could carry the poison to others, and infect people and places with the disease by look alone.” End quote.
De’ Mussis goes on to suggest that the merchants, panicked and infected with plague, got on ships and fled to Italy, which is how it spread there. And while the plague did spread to Italy through a boat, there is no evidence to suggest the Mongols engaged in what is described as biological warfare at Caffa. In fact, though De’ Mussis seems to claim here that he was there at Caffa and saw this happen, it’s possible he was in Italy during the invasion. I’ve seen historians claim that this account is plausible and likely correct, and others saying it was exaggerated. So take the source with a grain of salt, because there isn’t much to corroborate it. But regardless… the imagery of plague-infested bodies flying over the walls and rotting within the city is pretty gross and therefore cool.
But regardless of the exact method by which merchants brought the plague to Europe, it arrived at Messina’s ports in Sicily, then spread north throughout Europe from there.
Here’s a fascinating source from Agnolo di Tura, from Siena, Italy, who witnessed the plague firsthand. Quote:
“The mortality began in Siena in May [1348]. It was a cruel and horrible thing; and I do not know where to begin to tell the cruelty and the pitiless ways… The victims died almost immediately. They would swell beneath their armpits and in their groins, and fall over dead while talking. Father abandoned child, wife [abandoned] husband, one brother [abandoned] another...And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without [last rites]. Nor did the death bell sound. And in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead.
And I, Agnolo di Tura… buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city.
There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed that it was the end of the world.” End quote.
I love that source. It’s a classic one.
Other similar sources, of which there are many, by the way, describe plague in the same ways - those characteristic buboes, the absolute chaos that ensued… but it’s also worth knowing that not everyone responded to the Black Death this way. For Christians, the plague was seen as a punishment from God - they must have been doing something wrong to receive his wrath in this way. And some acted accordingly; there were bands of Christians who were flagellants and would whip themselves in penance, hoping God would save them from the onslaught of plague. Other Christians went the opposite way, forsaking their religion because clearly their God had forsaken them. A source from 1350 by English chronicler William Dene notes that, quote,
“The people for the greater part became ever more depraved, more prone to every vice and more inclined than ever before to evil and wickedness, not thinking of death nor of the past plague nor of their own salvation… The labourers and skilled workmen were imbued with such a spirit of rebellion that neither king, law, nor justice would curb them.” End quote.
Muslims, on the other hand, generally believed and behaved the opposite of their Christian counterparts; one 1364 source from Muhammad al-Manbiji states, and a short quote here,
“Prayer for lifting the epidemic is abhorrent because plague is a blessing from God; at the least, a Muslim should devoutly accept the divine act.” End quote.
And instead of either blaming God or turning away from him, multiple sources suggest that Muslims instead increased their devotions and prayers. I just found that to be an interesting difference.
So as you probably gathered, most believed the plague to be either a gift or curse from God. Consider that this is not a world wholly based in science or germ theory. They would have no idea about germs, bacteria, any of those things. If you’ve listened to a bunch of my episodes, then you know that germ theory didn’t really come about until the mid-19th century, that’s the 1800s. So if that’s the case, then how did the Medieval world handle prevention and cures?
Preventing and/or Curing the Plague
For the remainder of this episode, I’m going to be focusing on the plague in Europe, because it’s what I’m more familiar with and what my studies are in.
Now my first question is this - how did the contemporary Medieval peasant or more broadly the town try to prevent the plague? Most believed it came from God, right? So apart from being more pious… what did they think would save them?
And what’s fascinating about this is what we learn about their beliefs in sanitation and health based on their actions.
Now one thing you might already know about this period of time, if you’ve been listening to my episodes, is the idea of miasma theory. The briefest of recaps for those of you who are new to the show - miasma theory is the idea that bad, stinky air, called miasma, causes disease. So some of their preventatives involved cleaning or purifying the air. Here are some examples of preventions and/or cures that align with the miasma theory:
Break up the air inside your home by ringing bells and releasing birds, then chasing them so they fly around the room
Do not bathe, for this opens the pores to the air (the thought being, of course, that miasma will get into your body through your big, open pores and you’ll get sick and die)
Burn aromatic wood in your home
Periodically, throw a powdered mixture of sulphur and arsenic on your fire. Which is exactly what you’d want to smell in your cramped, squalid little home - burning rotten eggs.
Pile sweet-smelling shrubs around the boundaries of cities.
And finally
Fill your house with pleasant-smelling flowers, sprinkled with vinegar and rose-water.
Ooookay. So you see what I mean - these are all rooted in the idea that miasma caused plague, and so therefore, make it so that you aren’t smelling the bad stuff. Or are breaking up the air so the miasma is dispersed. We see that in suggestions like breaking up the air inside your home, and having birds fly around to keep the air moving. Or having heavily scented things in your home, like burning wood or flowers. This perpetuates the idea that smelling good things keeps you healthy. And this wasn’t just limited to peasant homes - doctors at the time thought the same thing.
Enter - the plague doctor.
When most of us think of the plague doctor, we think of the long black trench coat and the creepy bird-like mask. It’s an image you see everywhere now. You can even get cute, squishy plague doctors. They've been turned into SCP monsters, their masks are popular carnival costumes, you see them in movies… it’s everywhere. The reason for this characteristic mask is to ward away miasma. The long, beak-like nose would be stuffed with flowers and herbs to keep the miasma away so the doctor could do his work.
However, the archetypal plague doctor wasn’t around during the Black Death. The earliest recorded use of a plague doctor using some kind of mask stuffed with flowers and herbs can be traced back to 1373, which is after the Black Death ended. And the typical imagery of the plague doctor we use actually comes from a 17th-century epidemic, that’s the 1600s. So, unfortunately, no creepy plague doctor masks during the Black Death.
However, what we can say about the maskless-plague doctors during the Black Death is that they equally didn’t understand the cause of the plague, and their ideas about the four humours and how the body worked actually made things worse. For more information about the four humours and that theory on medicine, check out some other episodes where I went into more detail about it - the London Cholera Epidemic, the Dancing Plague, Corpse Medicine, and the Victorian Houses of Death. I think I probably go into the most detail in the Corpse Medicine episode.
But anyway, here’s how the plague doctors treated their patients:
Purge the body with laxatives.
Draw off impure or excessive blood by bleeding.
Drink syrup of roses mixed with powdered coral, precious stones, and bones from the heart of a stag to strengthen the heart.
Put an old rooster cut through the back to flatten it, or a poultice of mustard and lily bulbs, right on the buboes.
Cover buboes with clay.
Sear buboes with a red-hot iron.
And my last one here
Cut open and drain buboes, treating them like ulcers.
And of course, none of these are going to work. We know that plague is a bacterial infection. So in the modern age, if your body can’t fight it off alone, you take antibiotics. But antibiotics aren’t anywhere close to being discovered yet, so based on the limited medical knowledge Medieval doctors had, these were their best remedies. Balancing the four humors.
But doing things like lancing and slicing open the buboes or branding your infected lymph node with a hot iron is only going to spread plague pus and bacteria everywhere. Or allow more bad bacteria to get into your body. And doctors were most likely just bringing plague bacteria from one patient to the next, anyway.
And let’s also add in the fact that Medieval homes and towns were… dirty. Sanitation was just not present. The streets were caked in filth, animal blood and guts and excrement, human blood and urine and excrement… just nasty, right? And super packed with people - the rise in trade meant more jobs, which meant more money, and when there is a stable economy, we often see populations rise. So there are tons of people crammed into tiny, dirty spaces… the perfect breeding ground for disease.
It’s also the perfect place for the rats and fleas that carry plague, allowing it to spread even faster. And then in some cases, it spread pneumatically - through the air - so it could be coughed up, others would respirate it, and they’d get plague that way. Pneumonic plague has a much higher mortality rate.
And, as we know, up to one-third of Europe’s population died. In some towns, like Siena, 60% or more of the population died from plague. And those figures are similar for the Middle East and Asia, anywhere the plague spread. I do need to mention, however, that it’s likely not all the deaths during the peak plague years were from plague. There are some that suggest either smallpox or anthrax killed some of the population, but because it was similar enough to plague and killed at the same time, it was just written down as a plague death in church records. This is more than likely. But still - there’s no denying plague had a massive impact on the population.
So with all of this death and destruction, fear and chaos, what did life look like during the plague years?
Life in the Plague Years
In addition to the religious confusion I mentioned before, life in the plague years was rough on the survivors. With an average of one-third of the population dead, social, political, and economic systems were crippled.
I’m not going to get deep into the medieval feudal system, but essentially, with so many peasants dying from the plague, there were few left to keep the farms running. There was a serious food shortage. And those left to do all the extra work insisted that they receive more pay for the work they were doing, which completely upended the entire premise of the feudal system.
One source that gives us some good information on this is the 1349 Ordinance of Laborers from England. In it, the King essentially puts laborers to work with wages to be paid in what they were at the pre-plague levels, to ensure that workers were getting paid properly for work, to encourage them to work, and to also punish those who refused to work despite being able to. As a historian, it tells us that there was clearly a labor issue if the King had to issue an ordinance. But this didn’t solve the problem; decades later, in 1381, there was a massive peasant revolt that helped speed up the end of the Medieval feudal system - all a long-term result of the Black Death on population levels, the economy, and society as a whole.
But one of the more distressing things that came from the Black Death is actually wrapped up in religion and what some Christians thought caused the plague… they blamed the Jews.
The best example we have of this is the Strasbourg Massacre, which took place on Valentine’s Day in 1349. Some couldn’t fathom the idea that their God would deliberately punish them with plague, so instead they looked to a scapegoat - someone must be poisoning the wells! And historically, Jewish populations in Europe have been blamed for things that went wrong or were unexplainable.
It certainly didn’t help that a man was tortured into confessing to poisoning the wells. Agimet of Geneva, on October 20th, 1348, confessed to putting poison in several places, including the Toulouse public fountain. A source detailing his confession tells us that, quote,
“Agimet the Jew, who lived at Geneva and was arrested at Châtel, was there put to the torture a little and then he was released from it. And after a long time, having been subjected again to torture a little, he confessed.” End quote.
It then details his confession. But… I mean… he was tortured into it. There’s no actual proof the wells were poisoned. This is just a case of people not knowing what’s going on, and casting the blame on scapegoats.
The end result is that about 2,000 Jews were gathered up in Strasbourg. About 1000 were spared because they got baptized and renounced their faith, but the other 1000 were burned to death. Their property and assets were taken and given to the non-Jewish people in town.
This happened in other towns too, but the incident at Strasbourg is pretty heavily documented, so it’s a good example to us of what was happening.
In fact, things were so bad that the Pope had to step in and make a statement. Pope Clement VI, on July 5, 1348, wrote that, quote,
“Since this pestilence is all but universal everywhere, and by a mysterious decree of God has afflicted, and continues to afflict, both Jews and many other nations throughout the diverse regions of the earth to whom a common existence with the Jews in unknown, [the charge] that Jews have provided the cause of this occasion for such a crime is without plausibility.” End quote.
In short, the plague is killing Jews just as much as it’s killing Christians, so it’s not plausible to say they are the cause.
Now curiously, there are some areas that were spared from plague. For example, when we look at a map of the spread of plague in Europe, starting in Italy and working its way north, there is a little circle around Poland and the eastern parts of today’s Germany. The plague didn’t get there. But it got to the other side and infected Russian cities, so what gives?
The most plausible explanation is the geography of the area. The Carpathian Mountains likely slowed down the movement of trade and infected people from entering the general area. The population was also much lower there than it was in the cramped towns of Western and Southern Europe, so there were fewer incidences of infected people rubbing up on each other and sharing germs. The parts of Poland that did contract the plague were not protected by mountains. So, as is usually the case, the physical geography here matters. It’s the same with the spread of plague from its origin at Issyk Kul - it went East and West, but not too far South. The Himalayas more or less prevented the plague (and also the Mongols) from invading India. In later epidemics, like the one in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in India, it was industrialization and steamships that brought plague to the subcontinent - not caravans of traders on the Silk Roads.
So I think it’s safe to say that the Black Death had a huge impact on Europe, both short-term and long-term. In the short term, it wiped out a good chunk of the population. In fact, England’s population only reached pre-plague levels again in the mid-1500s, around 200 years later. That’s wild! It took two centuries for the population to recover.
And as I went over earlier, this drop in population had huge ramifications for life in the traditional Medieval feudal system. Without peasants to support the knights, nobles, and clergy, there was no food. Without them, the whole system crumbled. The Black Death was a huge part of its decline towards the tail end of the Medieval period. That and trade in general, which offered more jobs and opportunities so people who couldn’t better themselves, because of a lack of social mobility, weren’t forced to just be peasants under a liege lord.
The years of plague’s greatest impact in Europe were between 1347-1351, though it continued to spread east into Russia until 1353. It eventually ended in part because it had already swept through most of the population, and those who contracted it and survived had a better shot at fighting off future infections. But also, quarantining helped. Those who weren’t infected would stay in their homes to wait it out. Those with money moved to less densely populated areas and lived in isolation until the plague swept through.
Time was also helpful - colder weather killed the fleas that served as the primary vector for plague bacteria.
But while the “Black Death” did eventually end in the mid-14th century, the plague bacteria of course survived - remember that it doesn’t need a host like a virus does to survive. And there have been several epidemics in the years since.
Other Instances of Plague
I would argue that there are three great plague pandemics in history. The first recorded plague pandemic was the plague of Justinian, which ravaged the Byzantine Empire centered around Constantinople in 541.
The Black Death is the second.
An honorable mention goes to the Great Plague of London, 1665-1666, which killed over 68,000 people in the span of a year, about one-fifth of the city’s population. It ended, in part, thanks to the Great Fire of London in 1666, which killed many of the rats, fleas, and filth spreading the plague. I’ll be covering that in the next episode! But since this was more or less confined to just London and its surrounding areas, it doesn’t count as a pandemic… I just wanted to mention it because it was a pretty big deal regardless.
The third great plague pandemic began in China in 1894, then spread to Hong Kong, then India, then everywhere else through the late 1800s, early 1900s. More than 12 million people died in India and China alone, and death tolls are estimated at 15 million worldwide. It doesn’t really compare to the Black Death’s estimated death toll, somewhere between 25 and 50 million, but considering how much better medical science was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, 15 million is still a huge figure.
For a number and size reference, the death toll for the COVID pandemic sits at just over 7 million.
Because of how much the world changed as a result of the Black Death - new sanitation measures like quarantining, the decline of the feudal system, and the impact on local economies - it remains one of those topics that people still love to learn about. And new discoveries are still being made, like the research that came out in 2022 with proof that the plague actually began at Issyk Kul! Which is incredibly exciting for historians like me who love this stuff.
And who knows what we’ll find out in the years to come. But studying disease history like this is a way of studying how our world has changed over time and how one little bacterium, like the cute little cylindrical Yersinia pestis, can completely change the world.
Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of the Black Death. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen!
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Go listen to Nedric, my editor and the genius behind my intro and outro song, Yello Kake. You can find his stuff wherever you get your music! There’s a link in the description to his website.
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