By: Miguel Vallejo Duque (8°A)
Virus. Pandemic. Those are words you have heard a lot in the last couple of months. You’re probably sick of hearing them, and you’re also tired of staying locked up in the safety of your home and want to go out and see your friends. We’re all in the same situation, and we’re right there with you. But, if you think about it, staying at home isn’t the only lifestyle adopted by humans during times of disease. This is the system we have accepted during this virus, but how did people go about with their lives during other pandemics? How did people live during the most infamous health crisis in history, the Black Plague? Let’s go back to 14th century Europe and find out.
First, let me set the stage. Ships and merchants came from Asia, and with them came some rats. These rats were infested with fleas, and these fleas carried a disease. The rats got out of the ships, taking the fleas with them. The fleas jumped out of the rats and made themselves at home in the arms of humans. They bit the humans, and then all hell broke out. These fleas carried two extremely contagious and lethal diseases: the bubonic plague, which caused buboes to sprout in the skin of the infected, and the pneumonic plague, which was a lung disease. Both illnesses caused a fever and killed their hosts in around two days. The diseases spread like wildfire across all Western Europe and started an era of terror for humanity.
Imagine that everyone is perfectly fine in your small village, except for that one guy that got sick recently. Suddenly, two more guys are sick, then three, then fifteen and so on. Everyone is getting sick, and worst of all, everyone who’s ill dies in a very short time. You receive news from the neighboring village that the same thing is happening to them. Just like that, life as you know it has taken a turn for the worst, and it won’t get any better from there.
So, how did people live their lives while everyone died around them? Well, it was different for everyone. Some people boarded up their windows and stayed inside. Others went outside and got a new job. But why would someone go get a job while people dropped dead beside them? Well, the nobles needed someone to clean up the bodies and bury them. The nobles could do it themselves, but they wouldn’t get their hands dirty with those filthy corpses. Instead, they offered to pay the commoners some money if they took the bodies, dug huge mass graves for all of them, and buried them. Why would the commoners want some money when the economy had been thrown out of the window? I don’t know. What I do know is that this made even more people get infected, further increasing the plague’s kill count.
Ok, we now know what the commoners did. But what about the rest of the people? Even though the commoners were most of the population, there were still nobles, priests and doctors. Well, what many people were doing was buying flowers. Why flowers? Because it was a common belief that you got ill because of the putrid smell of the disease (this is, of course, wrong, no disease is contracted through scents). If you got flowers and carried them around, you smelled the flowers and not the disease, therefore you wouldn’t get sick! But carrying flowers around was annoying, especially for doctors who had to go around checking people up to see if they were ill. This is why plague doctors wore a cool bird mask. They stored flowers and spices in the beak and then put on the masks. This way, they could use their hands to examine a patient while still smelling flowers. Ok, you’ve bought your flowers. Now what do you do? One of three things. If you care about the state of the world and want this mess to be over, you go to church. It was widely accepted that the plague was divine punishment to cleanse the sins of humanity. Because of this, people went to temples in order to ask God for forgiveness. But maybe you want to get to the bottom of this. If so, you better find someone to blame. Those who looked upon the matter found someone. Who was this someone? The Jews. Why the Jews? No reason at all. People just felt that they had something to do with the plague. Apparently, this was enough proof for the authorities, because Jews were persecuted and killed. But what if you’re a noble and just want to have some fun? Some nobles thought exactly that. Even though everything was breaking down around them, they simply started partying. They thought that, since they didn’t have much time left, they’d enjoy it as much as they could. These parties they held were… wild. Everyone got drunk and… well, they were really wild.
Now you know how people lived during the Black Plague. Maybe now you think social distancing isn’t so bad. Or maybe not. But now you know that life in 14th century Europe was certainly a mess, and that we’re much better at dealing with pandemics nowadays.
Fuentes:
My World History, Pearson School (p. 696-699)
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