In October 1347 trading ships from Genoa entered the harbor of Messina in Sicily.
The oars are dead and dying men, they have come from a black seaport in the Crimea.
The Genoese have a trading post there. The ships tie up at the wharves. Those men who
can still walk go ashore; they take the disease with them and the disease reaches
Marseilles in November 1347. By January 1348 it has gone to North Africa through
Tunis, westward from Marseilles to Spain and genoa and Venice in march it goes
northward up the rhone river to Avignon between February and May it gets to
Narbonne, Montpellier, Carcassonne, Toulouse, Rome, and Florence. Between
June and August, it gets to Bordeaux, Lyon, and Paris. It gets to Seville in July it
spreads to burgundy and Normandy. Then goes into southern England it gets to
bristol in July it grows from Italy into Switzerland and into Hungary.
In 1349 it goes from Paris to Picardy, Flanders and the low countries it reaches
Vienna in march it gets to London in January and Durham in June it goes from
England to Scotland and Ireland and Norway from there it goes to Sweden, Denmark,
Prussia, Iceland, and Greenland and then to northern Russia. It attacked Russia again
in 1351. Once the black death gets to a place it kills people for about six months and
then fades away, but in big cities, it dies down in winter and then comes back in spring
for six months it has gone from most of Europe by the middle of 1350. Plague comes
back many times over the next 350 although it is never as fierce again it is not until the
early 18th century that it seems to have gone for good but of course it hasn’t really.
To start with the black death had no name people called it the “Pestilence” or the
“great mortality” it has three forms-
In the mid-14-century a deadly bacterium spread across Europe, killing entire populations. During this devastating pandemic, the communities appointed so-called plague doctors, whose mission was to tend to the victims and diagnose their fate. To avoid spreading the disease they were quarantined for 40 days after seeing patients before they were let out to operate.
How they tried to cure it
They had tried to cure it by rubbing onions, chopping herbs, or cut up a snake and rub it
on the boils. pigeon and rubbing it on the infected body. They would also drink vinegar, eating crushed
minerals, arsenic, mercury, or ten years old treacle. They would sit close to a fire or in a sewer to drive
out the fever or fumigating their house.
(most common type) Large lymph nodes or buboes
(black swellings about the size of an egg or an apple) erupt in the armpits and groin
oozing blood and pus. Boils cover the body and black blotches appear on the skin from
all the internal bleeding. There is a sudden fever, restlessness, confusion, and severe
pain. Death within five days
The infection spreads to the lungs causing pneumonia. Coughing expels millions of
contagious bacteria, sharp chest pain, contentious fever, heavy sweating, spitting out
blood, death within three days, or less.
Infection in the bloodstream, least common form of the disease. Most fatal,
sudden severe illness, chills, fever, headache, nausea, vomiting, delirium,
no time for other symptoms to develop, death within a few hours, or two days.
