The More You Know... Facts, facts and more facts.....

Just watched a documentary on the Plague. Some interesting tidbits:

  • 20 million died (the 100K in the chart above is just London)
  • It started in China/India
  • Mongols/Muslims were laying seige to Cartha. The Mongol army carried the plague, and a huge number of their soldiers were killed by it, to the extent that they had to give up the seige. But before they left the field, they threw plague-ridden corpses into the city of Cartha. They flung hundreds of them into the city on catapults. It was one of the earliest forms of germ warfare. That's how it spread to Europe -- the bodies carried fleas, which jumped on rats, which then climbed aboard Carthan ships bound for Italy.
  • Death involved 3 to 5 days of extremely painful boils, fever, spitting up blood, then death
  • Europe was in bad shape even before the plague, having been swept by famines and droughts and all sorts of trouble [we really have no sense of how hard life was back then.]
  • The flagellant sect began during this period. These were the monks who inflicted punishment on themselves in order to appease God's wrath.
  • The episode weakened the public's faith in the Church's authority (which was pretty much unquestioned previously). Faith in God increased, but there was also increased skepticism of the established church and tradition. In some ways, the Plague set the stage for the Reformation, 150 years later.
  • It killed one-third of Europe's population.
  • "Ring around the Rosey," the old nursery rhyme, is a reference to the plague





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