Famine
Around 1339 in northwestern Europe, the population was beginning to outgrow the food supply and a servere economic crisis began to take place. Since the winters were extremely cold and the summers dry, very low crops were harvested. Inflation was more apparent and famine broke out. The time period around 1339 to 1346 was known as the famine before the plague. These seven bad years of weather and famine lead to the greatest plague of all times. Spread of The Plague The Black Death arrived in Europe by sea in October 1347 when 12 Genoese trading ships docked at the Sicilian port of Messina after a long journey through the Black Sea. The people who gathered on the docks to greet the ship saw that most of the sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those who were still alive were gravely ill. The Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of “death ships” out of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the mysterious Black Death would kill more than 20 million people in Europe or about 1/3 of the continent's population. Devastation The Black Death was terrifyingly, indiscriminately contagious: “the mere touching of the clothes,” wrote Boccaccio, “appeared to itself to communicate the malady to the toucher.” The disease was also terrifyingly efficient--people who were perfectly healthy when they went to bed could be dead by morning. The Black Death killed more Europeans than any other endemic or war up to that time, greatly impacting the economy, social structure, culture and art, and medical advances. |