It is possibly passed to humans by a tarabagan, a type of marmot. The deadliest outbreak is in the Mongol capital of Sarai, which the Mongols carry west to the Black Sea area. Mongol King Janiberg and his army are in the nearby city of Tana when a brawl erupts between Italian merchants and a group of Muslims.
Following the death of one of the Muslims, the Italians flee by sea to the Genoese outpost of Caffa and Janiberg follow on land. As the army catapults the infected bodies of their dead over city walls, the under-siege Genoese become infected also. Both sides in the siege are decimated and survivors in Caffa escape by sea, leaving behind streets covered with corpses being fed on by feral animals. One ship arrives in Constantinople, which, once infected, loses as much as 90 percent of its population.
Another Caffan ship docks in Sicily, the crew barely alive. Here the plague kills half the population and moves to Messina. Fleeing residents then spread it to mainland Italy, where one-third of the population is dead by the following summer. The plague arrives in France, brought by another of the Caffa ships docking in Marseille.
It spreads quickly through the country. A different plague strain enters Europe through Genoa, brought by another Caffan ship that docks there. The Genoans attack the ship and drive it away, but they are still infected. This was not due to any remedies used. Nor was it due to the fire of London that had destroyed many of the houses within the walls of the city and by the River Thames.
Many plague deaths had occurred in the poorest parishes outside the city walls. Some scientists suggest that the black rat had started to develop a greater resistance to the disease. If the rats did not die, their fleas would not need to find a human host and fewer people would be infected. Probably, people started to develop a stronger immunity to the disease. Also, in plague scares after , more effective quarantine methods were used for ships coming into the country. There was never an outbreak of plague in Britain on this scale again.
The lesson considers the measures taken by King Charles II in response to the plague and the reactions of some of the people to these restrictions, as well as providing contemporary comment on the situation. The questions encourage pupils to investigate the sources and make their own judgements on the evidence where possible.
Have a go at reading the original document first to spot familiar words, but all documents are transcribed and have simplified transcripts. Here are some suggestions for further activities:. And they tell me that in Westminster there is never a physician, and but one apothecary left, all being dead — but that there are great hopes of a great decrease this week. God send it. It might also encourage pupils to think about law and order in a wider historical context.
For example, after the experience of English Civil War, people were probably more accepting of authority. The plague did not only affect London. This tells the famous story of the village of Eyam in Derbyshire that deliberately isolated itself to stop the spread of the disease to nearby villages. A journal of the plague years. Key stage 1 An event beyond living memory that is significant nationally. Key stage 2 A programme of study concerning an aspect of social history from the Anglo-Saxons to the present.
The diversification of crops which became commoner during the eighteenth century helped to prevent famine in England, while disaster followed total reliance on the potato in Ireland as late as Increase in prosperity with the development of industries such as coal-mining and shipping in areas that were previously purely agricultural also helped to protect against death from starvation.
It is usually fairly easy to distinguish an increase in mortality from hunger from one due to disease, especially plague. Most obviously, contemporary accounts mention famine conditions and the resulting misery, while not recording a disease. Also, communities which were less vulnerable to epidemics could be affected by starvation; towns such as Carlisle were wracked by plague in , while the surrounding villages had too small a population to support an epidemic. Food shortage tended to hit wide areas regardless of population density, with winter the hungriest time, while summer was plague-time.
Again, starvation killed a different section of the population from plague children and the economically precarious, such as beggars and widows were particularly vulnerable when times were hard. Plague, on the other hand, was commonest in the crowded rat-infested hovels of the poor townspeople, had a distinctive clinical picture and on the whole caused the greatest mortality among young adults.
After the Black Death, the main plague epidemics occurred in , , and The first, in , probably caused the greatest proportional mortality of all the London outbreaks, accounting for one-quarter to one-third of the city's population: probably as many as 18, people died. By mid-August the death-rate was more than 1, per week and Queen Elizabeth, then aged thirty, left London for Windsor with all her court.
At Windsor she ordered a gallows to be erected, to execute anyone arriving there from London in case they brought the plague with them. Although the Queen had nearly died of smallpox the previous year, plague alone among diseases seems to have been the one that frightened her.
The rest of the country was infected then or in the following year, the fleas having hibernated through the comparatively mild winter. Stratford-upon-Avon suffered severely, losing nearly one-third of its population.
The disease mercifully missed John and Mary Shakespeare's new baby boy, christened William on April 26th, It was as a result of this epidemic that the English finally lost their French possession, Le Havre, which was being held as a hostage for Calais.
Plague broke out among the occupying garrison, so the town was surrendered in June, and Calais was lost for ever. The first hint of the epidemic came in September, when the Thames Fair was postponed, as was the later induction of the new Lord Mayor of London. Again London lost about 18, of its people, mainly in the rat-infested slums around the docks.
The winter of was a mild one, and the fleas only partially hibernated. The disease, which had smouldered through the winter, flared up again in the spring of and was only extinguished in the cold winter of Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour.
Brightness falls from the air, Queens have died young and fair. Dust hath closed Helen's eye, I am sick, I must die. Lord have mercy upon us. Nashe, then twenty-six, was one of the golden boys who adorned literary London in the late s and early s and included Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare among their number. Nashe did not in fact die in the epidemic, but at the age of thirty-four in ; the cause of his death does not seem to be recorded. Minor outbreaks of plague were re- corded in and in , but the epidemic of was again a disastrous one, especially for London.
All those who could afford to leave the capital did so, magistrates and doctors included. Desertion by the clergy, who felt an urgent need to visit their country parishes held in plurality with London livings was particularly resented. It is interesting to note that by the end of this epidemic, P. Sir John Coke records on October 18th, , that fewer than one in ten of those affected seemed to die of the disease, and that the plague seemed 'changed into an ague'. It raged through the summer and early autumn, started to decline in October and was finally killed by sharp frosts in November and December.
How great was it in fact? Again, it is difficult to know how many people died. The official Hills of Mortality, published weekly, were almost certainly unreliable as the strictness of the quarantine measures made it worthwhile to bribe the official searchers to certify death as being due to another disease. The official figure is 69, deaths, including those in the liberties and outparishes beyond the city walls.
Some people, however, put the mortality figure as high as , because of concealment. If the population of London beforehand was of the order of , people, then something like one in five, or 20 per cent of the inhabitants died. Though seventeenth-century documents and official records are comparatively plentiful, the truth about the epidemic is still surrounded by a great deal of myth.
Sensational writing started with Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year , which purports to be an eyewitness account. It has two failings as an historical document: first, Defoe was only four or five years old when the plague was abroad, and so he cannot be considered a reliable witness. Second, he did not write the journal until , when the memories of those who had endured it were clouded by the passage of fifty-five years. Samuel Pepys's Diary , written in plague-time for his own use, and neither to impress his readers nor to tell a good story, is a less suspect source.
Pepys, who lived from to , was educated at St. He fell out of favour when William III displaced his patron and he subsequently lived in retirement at Clapham until his death. His Diary starts on January 1st, , and finishes on May 31st, , when Pepys thought wrongly that his eyesight was failing. He wrote a complicated cipher shorthand with the racier bits in a strange personal blend of foreign languages, and it escaped decipherment until He was a tremendously vivid writer, and his diary gives an immediate insight into seventeenth-century life.
Pepys normally lived in Seething Lane, not far from the Tower of London, and his parish church was St. Olave's, Hart Street. He sent his wife to Woolwich during the worst of the plague, but went on with his own work at the Navy Office in Whitehall. Until August 28th, he lived at home and then spent a month at the height of the plague with his wife at Woolwich. The overall impression that one receives from Pepys is that though London was sick and sorry, it was certainly not buried under a pile of putrid corpses.
He first mentions the plague in April, and notes by the end of May that 'The quality are wont to leave town'. The King and court left, as did most of the doctors and clergy. By June 21st, Pepys remarked that the town has almost gone 'out of town'. Buboes in a victim of plague. It began in London in the poor, overcrowded parish of St. It started slowly at first but by May of , 43 had died. In June people died, in July people and at its peak in August, people died.
Incubation took a mere four to six days and when the plague appeared in a household, the house was sealed, thus condemning the whole family to death! Those people who could sent their families away from London during these months, but the poor had no recourse but to stay. In his diary, Samuel Pepys gives a vivid account of the empty streets in London, as all who could had left in an attempt to flee the pestilence.
It was believed that holding a posy of flowers to the nose kept away the plague and to this day judges are still given a nose-gay to carry on ceremonial occasions as a protection against the plague! A song about the plague is still sung by children. The plague spread to many parts of England. York was one city badly affected.
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