SYSK Selects: How the Black Death Worked

I'm Josh Clark with me as always as Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes this stuff you should know the podcast, the audio podcast nothing more? Got it? Not a lot less then? Uh, comparably sized podcasts. No, No, this is chock full of good stuff. This one's gonna be a man do you think so? Oh? Yeah, I liked it. You like this one? Yeah? I like some of the historical stuff we did. Man, I love it, you know, as a history major at one point, love

of history, Yeah, Chuck. Yes, So we're talking about the Black Death, Yeah right, not Black Sabbath like death. Well, I'm gonna need some more time, okay, so we'll wait, hold on, all right, I'm back, Okay, Yes, Okay, you understand now what we're talking about, great chuck um. I was researching this to find out like, okay, what's newsy about the Black Death? Like, how am I going to find an intro? I actually found one, really, Yeah, it's

it's from two thousand six February two thousand and six. Sorry, but there was a study that came out of you tricked university. Have you ever heard of the Little Ice Age? Uh No, there was a period in um world history, global history. I think it may have been kind of localized to Europe. So let's say European history in about the fifteen hundreds where there was this in explicable period of cold. Interesting, right, it's called the Little Ice Age,

harmful cold. It got cold, like our our conception of like why you know, Vikings wear pelts and everything, they're always walking around it's very cold, not just because they live in Scandinavia, but because it was cold. Then okay, so this Little Ice Age, like I said, inexplicable. No one had any idea why it happened. And these you trecked researchers got that got ahold of some tree sample, some leaf samples from eras before the Little Ice age

and after, and they started counting stomas. These are the pores on the leaves. The more stonage you have, the more carbon dioxide there is in the air. Leaves developed these stomas, they can absorb more c O two, right, so if so facto, the more stonage you have, the more c O two in the atmosphere. And what they found by counting these stone Alma's was that there was a lot of c O two prior to the thirteen forties in Europe. That means that there's not that much

c O two. You know that there was a lot of c O two in the air in the atmosphere. One reason there's a lot of c O two is because there's not a lot of trees to soak that c O two up. One reason there's not a lot of trees is because humans are cutting down the trees to farm land, right or just stay warm. There's there's fewer trees deforestation brought on by human activity. Okay, So what they find then is that after fifty roughly, there's suddenly fewer stomas, which means that there's less c O

two in there, which means that there's more trees. Do you know, eitherre are more trees, do you. I have a pretty good guess it's because in between that time, the thirteen forties and the thirteen fifties, the Black Death happened and so many people die that it had a measurable effect on the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of not that many trees, and then suddenly lots of trees because there was no one to tend this farmland

in the interesting you know what else. This was a tidbit from the end, but we might as well say it here. They think that there is a lack of genetic diversity in the UK today because of the Black Death. They were much more genetically diverse than the eleventh century. It represented what's called the population Bottlenecke. Million people died, about a third of the population of Europe, which is mind boggling. Yeah, it is all right, let's do it. Well.

I was reading this one his story in his name is Skip Knox, and I don't know where he is now. But when he wrote that it was at the university, you know, Boise State, and he said, um abroncos he goes it's uh, it's worth saying this has never happened before or since death was an event like this where within about to three years million people died. That's never happened before. I mean, no war can account for that. Yeah,

no other pandemic. Yeah, it's this. This was it. This was as bad as it gets, and it was bad so big that it was bad. And it was bad not just because of the ultimate devastation, but it was bad because of how gnarly the Black Death is. Yeah, why don't you wanted to talk about some symptoms? All right? If you had the Black Death, this is what you had to look forward to. First of all, you had no idea what was happening to you. Neither did your doctor,

neither did your local cardinal or bishop. And you know, they didn't know a lot back then, but they had their like cock eye theories. At least they didn't even have cock eye theories on this. They had a cock eyed theory that everybody went along with. They developed something. But initially they're like, I don't know what this is. But you have these big tumor lumps, you got them on your body, you got black spots. Well to tell them about the tumors somewhere small, but they could get

pretty big. Yeah, some as big as an apple, And they said in the article here that if you had one on your neck, it could permanently, like cut your head to one side, permanently, meaning like the five days you had left. I know, I hope it's okay to laugh a little bit this now. And you surely know. Um, you had pus using out of sores, open sores. You had a nasty smell because you were rotting from the inside out. Your breath was awful, it was gruesome, purple splotches.

God's tokens, right, Yeah, they call them God's tokens, because once you got these, that means God's going to take you off the earth pretty soon. That's God's token. Fevers that could fry your brain, send you into delirium, vomiting, coughing up blood, blood, and puss using. I've already said it's worth twice. So, um, those are some of the symptoms. And once you start having the simp ums, you are pretty much done for within a matter of days. Right.

And so in our modern day it takes a little while to bury somebody, even with this machinery that we used to to dig modern graves. Um. But back then it took even longer to dig a grave to hold the service to bury somebody. And when people die within days and suddenly there was like a third of the population dying off. There was no time to bury anybody, no space even there's literally stacking up dogs eating corpses. It saysn't here children hungry babies beside their dead mothers. Yeah,

Molly edmans. Really when I wrote this, man, um, Yes, but that's the truth. I mean, that was crazy. That was the raw truth. That was an ugly, ugly, ugly scene. And of course anyone who see Monty Python knows that there are people who operated carts that banged on land pots. Since I bring out your dead, why s k, Well, we'll get into the flinging. Of course is too well, let's get into the flinging, because that's kind of how it started. Um. And first I want to point out

the Black Death, you know, gripped Europe. It did not only impact Europe. It's so funny, it's so eurocentric the way we approached the Black Death. It started in the Gobi Desert sometime in the late thirteen twenties in China. China lost thirty five million people in the fourteenth century from the Black Death. No one ever mentioned. They always hear about the Europe the Black Death in Europe, so it was localized, and it was actually in in Asia and Central Asia um for a decade or two um.

But they blame it pretty squarely on the Genoese for bringing it to Europe, right, yes, how did the Genoese get it? Well? In thirty seven in Kafa, which is modern day Ukraine, it was a Genoese trading post. They were attacked by the Tartar army. Uh, Tartars start to die off by the plague, and the Genoese are like, sweet, God is punishing our enemies and they're dying, Let's have

a big party and celebrate. And then the Tartars are like, well, we're gonna start flinging our dead corpses over the wall at you because the smell is so awful. You will die from the smell. There. It was a stupid idea, but stupid idea but at work because they actually what they were doing. What they were doing was germ warfare, very early germ warfare. Right. They had it wrong though they thought it was a smell. Actually it was this pestilence.

And so the Genoese, you know, said oh, we need to get rid of these nasty bodies, but it was too late. They were infected. By that point. The Genoese fled to Sicily and then from there it took two pass one. Uh where was the first one? The well? The first one went up through um Austria and Germany, and then the second path went through um Italy to France to the UK. Yes, at a speed which doesn't sound fast, but it really is. If you're talking about black death, about two and a half miles a day.

And not only is it fast, like even by today's standards, this is before This is when people were riding horses and carts and the two real it's lightning fastest toll. It trained fast for that time. Yeah, yeah, Why is it called the black death? Actually? Do you know this? I do, so there's a there's a mistranslation. At some point, well back in the day, people called that the big death or the great mortality, the big death, that's bad.

That's what they called it as it as it was happening, right and then um later on it came to be known as the um ultra morse, which is Latin for terrible death or black death. At some point in time, somebody decided that they liked the Black Death better. Uh. In sometime in the eighteenth century when they were using it to differentiate the um plague of London in sixteen sixty five, but they mistranslated. It wasn't originally called the Black Death or the um Terrible Death. It was called

the Big Death. And then it just kind of went from there all right. Well, at the time, King Philip the sixth of France turned it over to the Paris College of Physicians, who were they were like the Mayo Clinic of the time, and they said, here, we need to figure out what this is. What is it? Smartest doctors in the world, and they says, we know, we figured it out. It's all here on the report. This

is uh. This happened when Saturn and Jupiter and Mars lined up in Aquarius, and Jupiter's roll wet and hot and it soaked up the evil vapors from the earth and Mars is dry, so it exploded those purse and now it is a fog of death. And they very smugly pinpointed the time that it happened, one pm on March and they just shook their heads like but they

did say it was a fog of death. My guess is that it was probably pretty foggy for some reason, some weather system happened, or they were onto something like it was being transmitted through the air somehow, which you know, they might have been actually onto something there with an airborne pathogen possibly, but instead they went with the fog of death from the planet's aligning. And another term for a fog of death is a miasthma. It's a corrupted

bit of air. And this is what Europe went with, right, Yeah, like, okay, well, these are the smartest guys as far as medicine goes. They have the longest crow'sbeak masks of anybody, um, and we're gonna go with this fog of death thing, So how do we combat it? And what they figured out was, well, since you're breathing this fall, you gotta keep the fog at bay, and one good way to do that is

to fight fog with fire smoke. So there were fires everywhere. Yeah, they were recommended to burn um aromatic woods, so people would and people even carry this stuff around rosemary, amber and musk. The Pope even stood between two fires when he addressed people. Yeah, they kept him burning on street corners. Um. And then there were the fact that it was coming from the south and it was a fog of death. They started putting glass in their southern windows so that

the southern wing couldn't penetrate it. See that kind of smart there it is. They weren't all hokey. Now, some that seemed kind of smart. What didn't seem very smart was don't bathe don't have physical intimacy, although it's a good way to spread disease, so maybe they're onto something there. Um, don't sleep during the daytime. They had nothing to do with spreading it. They're like, just don't be lazy, avoid

sad thoughts about disease. It's something to that if you believe in the mind, uh, if you believe in positive psychology exactly. So some of the little hokey there was a little substance to a bit of it. Um. I have a little cocktail tidbit for you, though, so awesome. I don't know. The word quarantine actually comes from the

Black Death in Venice, Italy. They were pretty smart and they said, you know what, we should start isolating some of these ships of people that are coming in, not let them come on land until we know that no one on board is is sick. So let's do this for like thirty days. And then they went, now that's not long enough. It's just do it for forty days. Forty days or quawan quaranti giane quarantine. That's where the word came from. Well it's not as much of a

stretch of somebody besides, Chuck is pronouncing it. But yes, that is where quarantine. You look at it, it looks like the word quarantine. Yeah, so that's pretty smart too. There are some smart people. Still, six of the population of this died within I think eighteen months. Yeah, so the quarantine, while practical and useful, you know, didn't protect everybody. Yeah, and you know, we don't know what the doctors were doing that much because all we have here is just

recorded documents of what was going on. Well there there there wasn't even documentation. It was popular writers, church writers. It wasn't like science journals. I mean, not a lot of people knew how to read and write during this time. And the ones who did normally were affiliated with the church, so they would have had a very religious view of what was going on. Right, Um, they're probably blood letting there. Yeah, the like the physicians that were working the crow's mass

guys um were uh blood letting. They were um opening up these bu bos, which is it's almost like a textual representation of a pussy boo. They would open these and drain them because that made sense to get rid of whatever is in there, I guess, very small. Yeah, Um, we still do that today, Poppins. It's yeah every Tuesday. Uh. Religion comes into play pretty heavily there because a lot of people said, you know, let's let's turn to God and pray for help. Well, a lot of people thought

that this was punishment from God. Oh yeah, the flagellents, so only he could do anything about it or she depending in New York and um, so yes, the flagellents, chuck take it with the fligillents of Germany. Yeah, the brotherhood of the flood Flagellents had our vigilance. Flagelence had already been around, not flagilens though, no very big difference. Uh, they're already around. But they rose up, like you said, in Germany in the in the mid thirteen forties, and

they thought it was punishment from God. And they thought, you know what, we're gonna do something about it. So you've heard of self flagellation, that's where it comes from. They would walk barefoot across Europe whipping themselves with their little whatever cat of nine tails. Uh scourges, scourges like what have you that had like sharp kind of barbed and uh. It didn't work though, and a lot of people turned against God because of that. They also killed

a lot of Jews. The flagellents did a flagelence. Yeah, they killed Jews. They would kill clergy that opposed them, except for the Pope. And the Pope was like, you're officially denounced, and I think thirteen forty nine and that was it for the flagelence, although they popped up again in later um plugues and pestilences, but they stopped for

the black death like immediately when they denounced them. Well, they killed Jews because there was a pretty bad rumor going around that the Jews had, uh, we're poisoning the water supply. And because at the time Christians and Jews lived separately, largely, a lot of Jewish Jewish communities were effectively quarantined so they didn't get hit as hard. So all of a sudden, Jews are I don't know prosperings the right word, but they're not dying like the Christians are.

So so the Christians started burns. He started burning them alive. Apparently in Strasbourg, the Germany was more Jews died in Germany than anywhere else. Um at the hands of Christians who were upset about the plague um and in Strasburg in uh, let's see um, I think thirty eight on one day, two d Jews were burned alive at the stake,

just that one city, on that one day. And apparently entire communities used to be walled up and set on fire with everybody, or Jews would convert to Christianity on the spot, or they would set their own houses on fire, which is kind of sensible, like, oh, look, my house is already on fire. Better, I should probably take off, keep on walking, see you guys later. Well, a lot of Jews fled to the countryside, didn't they too, because they were able to Yeah, good for them, is what

I said. Well, I don't think it was just Jews. I think anybody who had the means of going to the countryside, which is crazy because I mean, like going to the countryside means like stepping out your back to where I thought in like the fourteenth century. Yeah, but apparently there were still the wealthy went out to the country once in a while and they would Yeah that's why SKO. So it was needless to say it was a really rough few years for europe um and by

thirteen fifty two it was largely gone. Yeah, it just took off. But what I mean there was It's not like all right, black desk on, everything's cool now. They were like huge, huge effects. Apparently the um self flagellation worked, right, Yeah, sure that's what it was. Well, yeah, you have to imagine if a third right, so that means that between you, me and Jerry, one of us dies, but it clearly

be me. It's not necessarily true. I'd set myself on fire. Um, okay, so then two of us would have died, right, Um, I mean a third a third of of this this population within like seriously, like two years, is just gone. People are um being eaten by dogs or corpses are being eaten by dogs in the streets. Families are just completely abandoning one another once they get sick. The whole um social psyche, the collective psyche of Europe just kind

of crumble a little bit. It took a pretty big ding, and one of the places it took that ding was in religion. A lot of heretical society sprung up because it was like, either this was your work, God, or you didn't do anything to help us, so we're not coming to church anymore. Well yeah, Instead of being like really thankful that they survived, people uh partied like it was nineteen nine, basically big time crazy parties. Yeah, a lot of debauchery, lots of debauchery. Um uh. There was

an economic impact to a huge one. Well yeah, if half your sorry, if a third of the workforce is gone, you've got no one working, So labor is gonna skyrocket. The price of labor is the price of labor is cost of goods food, you know, the little silver lining. Their food was in supply because there weren't as many people to eat it, exactly. Sadly. The other cool thing though, is it's potentially we saw the birth of modern science

and medicine because of the Black Death. Because the leaders we're like, you know, this whole planet's aligning thing was pretty stupid now that we look back at it, so why don't we found some schools and do some real research based on physical science and give that a whirl. And then it started it it worked, which is some kind of ironic as well, because is the population was so decimated that it even after they had this idea, they had to wait a little while to reopen schools

because they couldn't staff them. Oh yeah, um. And also, Chuck, there were there was an almost complete loss of any illusions about death and whether or not it's coming for you. Um. There's a whole allegory and art that um that sprang up at the time called Dance macab which was the dance of Death, which is basically like you know, showing living people and skeletons, you know, working side by side

or um, hanging out or partying together or whatever. And the point of that is that you know, death can come at any time and it's coming for everybody. So art and poetry and things like that just took a real downer turn there for a while because that was clearly what everyone was thinking about at the time. That's right, Chuck, Uh what caused it? See, this is where I get a little, um a little confused, because there's conflicting information even to this day. Well, it's um one of the

things where we thought we figured it out. But uh, modern techniques and modern investigation have kind of led us to think, as you like that, I have have led us to think that maybe that first idea hasn't wasn't right. Yeah, the first idea came out of the third pandemic, which was in eight in Hong Kong and India. Right um. And two bacteriologists, Alexander Yerson and uh Shibasaburo Kitasato, thanks um.

They worked independently and isolated the cause of that third pandemic, and it is what we know today as bubonic plague. It's a bacterium called your Cina pestis um, named after Alexander Jerson, right um, and it lives in the four gut of fleas, rodent fleas that feast on rats. Yeah, this was interesting, I thought, because the fleat bites the regular fleet um bites rat and drinks blood. And it's like,

oh man, that was fantastic. Uh. If you're infected with the your sena, you're sending a pestis in your flee You bite the rodent and you eat the blood. But it gets stuck in your foregut, and so you never feel that quench of that tasty, tasty blood in your

stomach if your flee. So you keep biting more and more rodents and infecting more and more rodes because you're, like we talked about with the fleas, regurgitating it back onto rodents, and all of a sudden you're killing all these rodents and then when there are no more rodents

and the fleas will go to people. And so they thought that's how it was spread, which makes sense because it's not like um conditions were really sanitary in the Middle Ages, or there were plenty of before the Middle Ages, um the fourteenth century, right, yeah, um, yeah, there were plenty of rats, plenty of fleas um. The problem is that there's a lot of discrepancy is between bubonic plague

or your sena, your Cinea pestis and whatever. The Black Death was right, so you've got like a big discrepancies. You've got um bubos right with both, but bubo is under the bubonic plague. Um tend to spring up around the growing area only, and descriptions of bubos with the Black Death where that they were all over the place, all over your body. Um bubos or bubonic plague doesn't cause um purple splotches. It doesn't cause delirium, doesn't. Yeah, or the vomiting um, blood and and pus and all

that stuff. There's a lot of stuff that was documented widely by different sources during the Black Death that doesn't

have anything in common with bubonic plague. Well, the big one to me was the fact that bubonic plague, even if you don't treat it as mortality rate of about and from the sounds of the Black Death, it was you know, near a hundred taken down entire villages, right, So they did figure out that the third pandemic in eight was caused by your cine a pestus bubonic plague, but they erroneously possibly attributed it to the Black Death.

But for about a hundred years, that was the premise that everyone went on was bubonic plague was the Black Death until Night four and some researchers who have been dubbed um plague deniers, Yeah, I have started to come up with competing theories and there's there's some interesting ones. Yes. Sociologists Susan Scott and biologist Christopher Duncan I think that

it is a hemorrhagic fever like ebola. Makes sense, sure, some say anthrax or maybe some just disease that is not around, some extinct disease right, like it went extinct somehow after after the Black Death. The thing though, is this d n A study in the nineteen nineties they dug up some corpses from mat s graves in France tested the teeth because I guess dental pulps about the only thing you can test at that point, and they did find that the y pestis in the samples, so

they said, oh, yeah, so it was a plague. But then they apparently looked at other bodies from other grave sites and that it wasn't conclusive, so they didn't find it at all. So what does that mean? I don't know. What do you think? Um? Well, Skip Knox, that historian I referred to earlier, his um his theory is that it was bubonic plague working in concert with the mnemonic plague,

so it was respiratory which is um bubo pneumonic. Yeah, which basically his ideas that there are two plagues working at once, or that's the theory he subscribed to, which I don't know, it's it seems likelier to me that there's probably some bacterium that's either extinct or worse than that dormant. Right, right, let's hope it's extinct. Dormants the word I want to be hearing right now. Oh, and there's one other thing that was a problem with the fleas.

There were two other problems that we didn't mention. One was that there should have been a die off of rats, because remember they jumped from rats to humans when there's no more rats and there's no documented die off of rats in Europe before the plague ever. Um. And then secondly, um, what was the same winter should kill fleas, that's right, Chuck, but it didn't. Well are they does kill fleas, but it didn't have any effect on the spread of the

Black Death. Yeah. Well. The other problem though, is it's like we said, it's all stuff that's written down, so it's not like, you know, you said the bubos are near the growing area. But at the time, you know, with the sensationalism of of the day, people they could have been writing, you know, sores all over their body, and you know, they could have exaggerated some of the symptoms because of fear. Uh. Yeah, I just don't know

how much I trust the records of hundreds in Europe well. Plus, Also, there was no standardized medical jargon either for them to use. You know that's true too, so or that that they could use that we would understand. Yeah, so we're cobbling together what we think they meant, what this one person meant, but they think the numbers of deaths are pretty accurately. Yeah,

this is pretty crazy. One third. Oh, and we're talking about how it's so eurocentric in Cairo, seven thousand deaths a day at its peak, the bubonic plaque for black death sorry the black death. Wow. Yeah, let's say for black death. If you want to see some pretty cool pictures um and read more about it, I strongly recommend this one. Type in black death in the search bar at how stuff Works dot com. And it's time now for a listener mail. Josh. I'm gonna call this our

second to mafia mail. Sometimes we get so much mail from one topic that we feel like we should read more than one email on the topic, especially when accompanied by physical threats. That's right. So this is from Kate the Canuck Stewart. That's what she calls herself, which I thought it's kind of funny. Hi, Josh and Chuck and Jerry. I'm a huge fan of the podcast, but I've never written in before because I never had much to say besides oh my gosh, I love you guys. It's a

great reason right in by the way. Um. However, after listening to the Mafia cast, I just had to write you an email to have some info for my family's past. My grandmother on my mother's side, it's a second cousin to the infamous Lucky Luciano. Most of the men and her family were made and although she was largely kept out of the loop when it came to the wheelings and underdealings of her family, like Diane Keaton and the Godfather, Uh, there is one event that really brought home the kinds

of things her brother and cousins were up to. When my mom was only a baby, my grandfather ran out on my grandma. When my great uncle heard about this, he and his cousins asked my grandma if she wanted them to take care of him for her. She really didn't know what that meant, but responded, maybe even jokingly, well don't kill him or anything. The next day, she got a phone call that her husband had been admitted

to a hospital, badly beaten, with both of his legs broken. Clearly, it wasn't prudent to mess around with members of my family. There are other rumors swirling around about different ventures that my great uncle and cousins were involved in, but they were notoriously tight lipped about everything. As far as I know, no one in my family is a part of the mob anymore, and no one has the broken legs. No one has broken the legs of any of my ex boyfriends. But I wouldn't date you just to be on the

safe site. Huh. That is Kate the Canuck Um. Thanks a lot, Kate appreciate that, and all you Canucks listening out there, thank you very much. If you want to get in touch with Chuck or me Um, you can get in touch with us via Twitter, that's right at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook, dot com, slash so have you you Know? Send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always, go check out our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know

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