Black Death

Black Death

In the early 1330s, in China, there was a deadly outbreak of the bubonic plague called, Black Death, hitting millions of people. It transferred from the fleas off of rodents to people. As soon as someone was infected, it infected others very quickly. Due to the fact that China was the busiest trading nation, the disease spread quickly to the rest of Asia. In late 1347, the plague reached Alexandria, Egypt; much of the crew had died of the plague on the journey back docking at the Black Sea. In a matter of days, the plague spread to bordering countries and cities ("The Black Death"). In 1348, when Black Death first reached the banks of Lake Issyk-Kul, there was a rampage of death across the Middle East (Cassel). The pandemic played itself out over the course of three years somewhere between 25 to 50 percent of Asian and African population had fallen to the pandemic (Boccaccio). By 1950, it had spread through the entire Middle East.

The bubonic death plague came off the fleas from the rats and spread from rat to rat. Due to the fact that there was a very substantial amount of rats onboard the ships leaving China, fleas followed everywhere they went so it was only a matter of time before their disease spread to people. The plague came in three very different forms. The bubonic variant, which was the most common, came from the swelling that appeared on the victim's neck, armpits, or groin. The sizes of the tumors could differ from an egg to an apple; the life expectancy was merely a week. The second, pneumonic plague, attacked the respiratory system and spread merely by breathing the exhaled air of a person already infected. It was much more severe than the bubonic; life expectancy was one or two days (Boccaccio). The last, most rare and dangerous, septicaemic plague was characterized by the deep, purple discolorations of the skin and extremely high fevers; it always killed a hundred percent of its victims ("History of Black Death"). In China, the early plague in Hubei province alone caused an extreme loss of life with five million deaths. The Chinese empire alone may have contributed to a total death toll as high as 25 million people. By the middle of the fourteenth century the Asian and African population dropped from 125 million to 90 million (Cambridge). As far as India was concerned, it was rumored to having been completely depopulated due to this pandemic (Tuchman).

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