BLACK DEATH (Lat. pestis, Testis bubo nice, pestis inguinalis, bubonic plague). One of the names given to an Oriental plague. An acute infectious disease caused by the presence of a specific microbe, and marked by suppuration and tumors, which in the Fourteenth Century deso lated the world. It took this name from the black spots which appeared in the skin, caused by subcutaneous hemorrhages. The symptoms were: swelling of glands and formation of bu boes; headache, vertigo with tottering gait, pains, deafness, convulsions, cough, and expec toration of bloody mucus in some eases, enlarge ment of liver and spleen. etc. On the first ap pearance of the plague in Europe. fever, the evacuation of blood, and affection of the lungs brought death before the other symptoms could he developed; afterwards boils and buboes char acterized its fatal course in Europe, as in the East. In almost all cases its victims perished in two or three days after being attacked. Rufus of Ephesus wrote of its appearance in Libya, Egypt, and Syria during the Third Century B.C. The plague which broke out in the reign of Justinian originated in Egypt about 542, and passed through Constantinople, Gaul, Spain, Marseilles, and thence over all Europe, lasting 50 years and resulting in enormous modality. The precise date of the appearance of the plague in China is unknown, hut from 1:333 till 1348 that great country suffered a terrible mortality from famines, floods, earthquakes which swallowed mountains, and swarms of innumer able locusts; and in the last few years of that period, from the plague. It appears that the pestilence had, in a milder form, appeared in Europe in 1342. The invasion of 1348 may be tracked from China in its advance by the various caravan routes toward the west. The northern coast of the Black Sea scut the plague by con tagion to Constantinople. By contagion it readi ed the seaports of Italy, and thence, as from so many foci of contagion, it soon established itself over Europe. Its advance may be traced through Germany and France to England, from which it was transmitted to Sweden. It was three years from its appearance at Constantinople before it crept, by a great circle, to the Russian ter ritories.
There are no proper materials for estimating the mortality which this plague produeed, for it occurred before the value of statistics was appreciated. But in China 13,000,000 are said to have died, and in the rest of the East nearly 24,000.000. Coming to Europe, the horror is increased by the greater exactness of the details. London alone lost over 100,000 souls; 15 Euro pean cities lost among them about 300,000; Ger many is calculated to have lost 1,244,000; Italy, one-half its population. On a moderate calcula tion, it may be assumed that in Europe 25. 000.000 human beings perished. Africa suf fered with the rest of the known world. All animal life was threatened. Rivers were conse crated to receive corpses, for which none dared to perform the rites of burial, and which in other places were cast in thousands into huge pits made for their reception. Death was on the sea, too, as well as on the land, and the imagination is quickened to the realization of the terrible mortality by accounts of ships with out crews—the crews dead and putrefying on the decks of the aimless hulks—drifting through the :Nlediterranean, the Black, and the North seas, and cursing with contagion the shores on which winds or the tide chanced to cast them.
:Many died of fear, which among the living dis solved the ties of kindred; mothers forsook their plague-stricken children; the worldly became quickened to a maddening sense of sin; the reli gious fixed their eyes more steadily on futurity; all rushed to sacrifice their means to the Church, while the ecclesiastics drew back from the gold showered over their walls, as heing tainted with death. In other cases people abandoned them
selves to crime and debauchery. Superstition finally banded multitudes together by common means to work out the common safety. In Hun gary,and afterwards in Germany, rose the brother hood of the Flagellants (q.v.), who undertook to expiate the sins of the people, and avert the pestilence by self-imposed sufferings. Originally of the lower classes, they gathered to their order, as it extended, crowds of the highest, both men and women, and marched from city to city, robed in sombre garments, with red crosses on the breast, back, and rap, and with their heads cov ered as far as the eyes; they went chanting in solemn processions with banners, with down turned faces, and bearing triple scourges with points of iron, with which, at stated times, they lacerated their bodies. They at last pervaded nearly all Europe; Germany, Dung:try, Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, and Flanders did them homage. The order was not suppressed till the Pope. at the instigation of several crowned heads, pro hibited throughout Christendom their pilgrim ages, on pain of excommunication. While the wanderings of the Flagellants threw society into confusion, and helped to spread the plague, the horrors of the time were further heightened by the fearful persecutions to which the .lews were subjected, from a popular belief that the pesti lence was owing to their poisoning the public wells. The people rose to exterminate the Ile I.rew race, of whom in Alainz alone 12,000 were cruelly murdered. They were killed by fire and by torture wherever they could be found, and to the terrors of the plague for them were added those of a populace everywhere infuriated against them. In seine places, the Jewish people im molated themselves in masses; in others. not a soul of them survived the assaults of their ene mies. No adequate notion can lie conveyed of these horrors. To aggravate the pestilence, the poison-panic made the people shut up their wells. With terror of poison and of plague in a state of society rude at the best, but now disorgan ized, what means were available to mitigate or prevent the sufferings of the people were rendered altogether nugatory. The enormous decrease in the population of Europe occasioned by the Black Death necessarily brought about great and last ing changes in social conditions. Perhaps on no class of society were the effects of the plague so marked as on the laboring population, among whom the rate of mortality had been especially great. immediately after the cessation of the pestilence, what would be called at present a very serious stringency in the labor market ensued. In England. where probably one-half of the pop ulation had been swept away (according to some chroniclers the survivors numbered only one tenth). the agricultural laborers handed together for the purpose of securing higher wages. This led to a struggle between the laborers and the landlords, which took the form of violence on one side, and on the other of legislation fixing the scale of wages and prohibiting the migration of laborers from place to place, culminating in the peasant revolt of 1381 (see TYLER, \VAT), and reuniting in the gradual abolition of villeinage and the reorganization of land-holding relations on the basis of rent, as between owner and ten ant. and wages. as between farmer and laborer.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. The following authors refer Bibliography. The following authors refer to or describe the Great Plague: Chaucer; Laugland: Boccaccio in the Decameron; Bub wer. in Rienzi (Boston, 1896) ; Hecker, Epidem ics of the Middle Ages (London, 1849) : Creigh ton. History of Epidemics in Britain (New York, 1892 ) ; Meeker. The Black Death (London, 1890) ; F. A. Gasquet, The Great Pestilence (London. 1894). See PLAGUE.