The Black Death: A Timeline of the Gruesome Pandemic - 05.29.2020

Timeline:

• 1346 - The strain of Y.pestis emerges in Magnolia. 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.
• May 1347 - 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.
• October 1347 - 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.
• November 1347 - The plague arrives in France, brought by another of the Caffa ships docking in Marseille. It spreads quickly through the country.
• January 1348 - A different plague strain enters Europe through Genoa, brought by another Caffan ship that docks there.
• April 1348 - The plague awakes an anti-Semitic rage around Europe, causing repeated massacres of Jewish communities, with the first one taking place in Provence, where 40 Jews were murdered.
• June 1348 - plague enters England, as it spread through the town people that lived there began to flee to other islands to avoid the sickness. 
• Summer, 1348 - A group of religious zealots known as the Flagellants first begin to appear in Germany. These groups of anywhere from 50 to 500 hooded and half-naked men march
• October 1348 - Following the infection and death of King Edward III’s daughter Princess Joan, the plague reaches London. As the devastation grows, Londoners flee to the countryside to find food.
• February 1349 - One of the worst massacres of Jews during the Black Death takes place on Valentine’s Day in Strasbourg, with 2,000 Jewish people burned alive. In the spring, 3,000 Jews defend themselves in Mainz against Christians but are overcome and slaughtered.
• April 1349 - The plague hits Wales, brought by people fleeing from Southern England, and eventually kills100,000 people there.
• July 1349 - An English ship brings the Black Death to Norway when it runs aground in Bergen. The ship’s crew is dead by the end of the week and the pestilence travels to Denmark and Sweden, where the king believes fasting on a Friday and foregoing shoes on Sunday will please God and end the plague.
• March 1350 - Scotland, having so far avoided the plague, hopes to take advantage of English weakness by amassing an army and planning an invasion. While waiting on the border to begin the attack, troops became infected, with 5,000 dying
• 1351 - The plague’s spread significantly begins to peter out, possibly thanks to quarantine efforts, after causing the deaths of anywhere between 25 to 50 million people, and leading to the massacres of 210 Jewish communities.
• 1353 - With the Black Death considered safely behind them, the people of Europe face a changing society. The combination of the massive death rate and the number of survivors fleeing their homes sends entrenched social and economic systems spiraling.

Video Response Question: 

 Describe how the plague got to and spread throughout Europe.

     Originally the plague was is a Christian town on the east coast of the Black Sea. There was a large conflict between the Mongols and the people that were in the early Christian town. When the Mongols decided to siege the town they realized that the bodies that they had killed were infected with a very dangerous plague. As a result of their discovery they thought it would be a good idea to catapult the bodies into the town of their enemies. This then lead to the spread of the plague in the enemy city. When the city began to be overloaded with the dead bodies they loaded them into ships and sailed off to the island of Sicily. When the ships reached the port the plague had spread to the dead bodies and to the rats and small rodents on the ships. 

     When the ships had reached the ports the people knew that there was going to be a huge impact on the entire country. Due to there not being any medical way to treat or go about the plague, the disease began to spread faster and faster. Another thing that had an impact on the rapid spread was infected people running from the plague. The more infected people that moved to other countries made the country develop a higher and higher chance of the country receiving the plague.