The Black Death

6 Pages 1477 Words

The Black Death was the most known incidence of the bubonic plague that killed at least 25 million people throughout Europe during the 14th century. The bubonic plague first appeared in Asia then moved at an alarmingly fast speed along the trade routes towards Europe carried by fleas that infested on rats (Hollister 1974). The disease was extremely swift where as explained by Boccaccio (1351) victims often “ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise”. The impact that the pestilence had on Europe was extreme and the psychological effects must never be underestimated. Immediate responses differ widely between people with some choosing to flee from their cities and family towards the countryside, others giving way to religious frenzy and debauchery, while some remained faithfully at their posts hoping for divine protection (Hollister 1974). No matter what people did nothing halted the disease and no one emerged from the ordeal unaffected.

Psychologically, the plague altered the way people of the 14th and 15th centuries viewed the world. Nobody wept for the dead, since each person was awaiting their own death, and so many died that everyone thought that the world was coming to an end. One of the firsts and most obvious consequences from the enormous amount of life lost was human behaviour and psychology (Holmes 1988). When the plague first attacked, the commonplaces of everyday life just stopped, peasants stopped ploughing, merchants closed their shops, and even churchmen stopped offering last rites (Gottfried 1983). Boccaccio’s ‘The Decameron’ not only details the horrid physical effects the plague had on people but also the social, the plague forced people to run from one another, “brother abandoned brother…wife abandoned husband, and even worse, almost unbelievable- fathers and mothers neglected to tend and care for their children, as if they were not their own”. This is supported by Di...