At the best of times, the average person in the 1300s would not have been particularly well nourished. If you add a famine on top of some harsh winters and stick some deadly bacterium among them, you’re asking for big trouble. And that’s what they got.
The Black Death was actually known at the time under different monikers, it was called the Great Pestilence, Great Plague and the Great Mortality. All of which fit the bill nicely.
Where did it come from? It seems it probably originated from China, either on rats or marmots, or both. The silk road which connected Europe to the Far East was probably the culprit. Either marauding Mongolian armies or traders carried the bacterium with them on their travels.
The bug that did all this damage was a snidey little microbe called Yersinia pestis (pictured below) and can cause three types of plague: pneumonic, septicemic and bubonic. All three types seem to have existed at one point or another during the Black Death adventure and none of which are very pleasant.
He looks so harmless doesn’t he? But him and his kind have killed more people in one fell swoop than pretty much any of his other microbial cousins.
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