Black Death : storm before the calm.

Okay, I was looking for a catchy headline. The bubonic plague in this case is the storm; the calm would be the Renaissance coming up a hundred-ish years later. It wasn’t exactly calm.

The idea is that something unfathomably tragic occurred, followed shortly thereafter (in the larger scope of history) by something magnificent.

It’s almost like the Middle Ages needed one last shot of awful to stick on humanity before plunging back into the light again. So what what was the Black Death?

The Black Death, also known as the bubonic plague, was an infection carried around by (black) rats and fleas. No Florence Nightingales or Edward Jenners around to nudge civilization in the right directions of hand washing and disease transmission protocols.

Anyway, it swept across Europe. And Asia. And North Africa. Nobody could stop it. Millions dead.

By “millions,” I mean “tens of millions.”
By “tens of millions,” I mean “hundreds of millions.”

According to Wikipedia, somewhere between 75-200 million people died from it. Some estimates have it killing fifty percent of Europe’s population.

Starvation, disease, famine, and the cultural destruction that comes from the collapse of lives and civilization on that scale. Devastation. It took a couple hundred years for Europe’s population to return to what it was.

Why and how did it go away?
Don’t know exactly. The prevailing theory is through the use of quarantines, which helped to prevent its spread by keeping people in their homes and out only when necessary.

One of the most horrific tragedies ever. And the worst pandemic in human history.

We hope.

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