Bubonic plague history today

The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic that occurred in Europe from to It was the beginning of the second plague pandemic.

How did the plague impact europe?

The origin of the Black Death is disputed. From Crimea, it was most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats that travelled on Genoese ships, spreading through the Mediterranean Basin and reaching North Africa , West Asia , and the rest of Europe via Constantinople , Sicily , and the Italian Peninsula. European writers contemporary with the plague described the disease in Latin as pestis or pestilentia , 'pestilence'; epidemia , 'epidemic'; mortalitas , 'mortality'.

The pandemic plague was not referred to specifically as "black" in the time of occurrence in any European language, though the expression "black death" had occasionally been applied to fatal disease beforehand. The phrase 'black death' — describing Death as black — is very old. The historian Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet wrote about the Great Pestilence in [ 32 ] and suggested that it had been "some form of the ordinary Eastern or bubonic plague".

The symptoms of bubonic plague are first attested in a fragment of Rufus of Ephesus preserved by Oribasius ; these ancient medical authorities suggest bubonic plague had appeared in the Roman Empire before the reign of Trajan , six centuries before arriving at Pelusium in the reign of Justinian I. In , the Chinese physician Chao Yuanfang described a "malignant bubo" "coming in abruptly with high fever together with the appearance of a bundle of nodes beneath the tissue.

A report by the Medical Faculty of Paris stated that a conjunction of planets had caused "a great pestilence in the air" miasma theory. For non-believers, it was a punishment. Others adopted preventive measures and treatments for plague used by Europeans. These Muslim doctors also depended on the writings of the ancient Greeks.

Due to climate change in Asia , rodents began to flee the dried-out grasslands to more populated areas, spreading the disease. The bubonic plague mechanism was also dependent on two populations of rodents: one resistant to the disease, which act as hosts , keeping the disease endemic , and a second that lacks resistance.