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HIST 1020 - 151

Sept 23, 2015

Impact of the Black Death in the Middle East

The Black Death was an epidemic caused by the outbreak of bubonic plague killing 1.5 million people in
Europe and Asia. Having no medical knowledge of the disease hitched up the deaths creating a shift as
the mass killer depopulated a quarter to a third of Europe. Needless to say this was one of the most
devastating pandemic to ever occur in human life. The impact of the Black Death, caused adverse
havoc to the Medieval times affecting virtually every aspect of life

1. Book
Cantor Norman F. In The Wake Of The Plague; The Black Death And The World It Made. Simon
& Schuster Paperbacks 2015.

The medical explanation of the Black Death from 1347 to 1350 is the focus of Norman Cantor's as he
explains how the epidemic was the greatest biomedical disaster in Europe and possibly the world and
was considered in a pundit as exterminating of humanity. About 25 mililion people succumbed to the
aghast outbreak that tortured its victims with raging fever, painful buboes and the extremely grotesque
sights of dead bodies all over.

Cantor's approach is to explore what happened to key individuals in a society overwhelmed by

biomedical devastation. More broadly, the author proposes to help present-day readers gain insight into
the complex relationship between humans and microbes throughout history, as well as examining the
problems this relationship continues to create today.

Cantor does not believe that it was just fleas from rats that spread the disease. He subscribes to theories
of specialists who think that there may have been an outbreak of anthrax or ingestion of stained meat
by the victims.

In the other chapters, the write dedicates his attention to the effects of the disaster on land rights and
assets ownership. He explains the labor shortage created by the deaths. This would result to the
survivors commanding more for their labor in such times that the plaque had paralyzed the
resourcefulness too.
Cantor’s writings however takes on another esoteric angle with some quite interesting findings. . There
are chapters that depict the disaster as a Jewish conspiracy leading to deaths of how the cosmic dust
consummated man. The timeline of his quirky writings are not linear either.

2. Periodical

Bridbury, A. R. “ The Black Death” The economical history review, vol. 26, no.4, I, 1 Jan. 1973, pp. 577-
592. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2593699? Refreqid=search-gateway;
88816a27114476233d6c2ale542e29if.

This journal article explored how people believed that the Black Death was a kind of divine punishment–
retribution for sins against God such as greed, blasphemy, heresy, fornication and worldliness. By this
logic, the only way to overcome the plague was to win God’s forgiveness. Some people believed that the
way to do this was to purge their communities of heretics and other troublemakers–so, for example,
many thousands of Jews were massacred in 1348 and 1349.

Some people coped with the terror and uncertainty of the Black Death epidemic by lashing out at their
neighbors; others coped by turning inward and fretting about the condition of their own souls. Some
upper-class men joined processions of flagellants that traveled from town to town and engaged in public
displays of penance and punishment: They would beat themselves and one another with heavy leather
straps studded with sharp pieces of metal while the townspeople looked on. For 33 1/2 days, the
flagellants repeated this ritual three times a day. Then they would move on to the next town and begin
the process over again. Though the flagellant movement did provide some comfort to people who felt
powerless in the face of inexplicable tragedy, it soon began to worry the Pope, whose authority the
flagellants had begun to usurp. In the face of this papal resistance, the movement disintegrated.

Others placed confidence in living in abstemiousness. They shut themselves in houses, where there
were no sick people, avoiding any excess, the talk about the disease, were eating and drinking only the
finest goods temperately and passing the time with music and prayers.

2. Website
History .com Staff “Black Death.” History.com, A&EN Television Networks 2010.
www.history.com/topics/black-death

This excerpt focuses on the labor shortage and how the society invented more ways with aim of labor
saving. The Black Death encouraged innovation of Labour-saving technologies, leading to higher
productivity. There was a shift from grain farming to animal husbandry. Grain farming was very labor-
intensive, but animal husbandry needed only a shepherd and a few dogs and pastureland.

Lords were forced to give better terms in tenure which resulted to much lower rents in Western Europe.
This led to a prevalent form of Tenure called the Copyhold which lords and peasants used to manage
their operations. They made a deal where the peasant used the land and the lord got a fixed annual
payment.

The laws on inheritance also changed withing this era. Earlier on the ancestral property was inherited by
the males only but the post plague saw the daughters too get a share of the family property.

In addition to Cantor’s view of the plaque as a Jewish conspiracy, there emerged new attitudes towards
the Jew community that led to persecution and seclusion from the rest. The conspiracy blamed Jews for
the Black Death and led, first, to the trial of a Jew named Agimet on October 30, 1348, at Chatel, near
Geneva.

Jews were taken as scapegoats, in part because better hygiene among Jewish communities and isolation
in the ghettos meant that Jews were less affected.[35][36] Accusations spread that Jews had caused the
disease by deliberately poisoning wells.[37][38] European mobs attacked Jewish settlements across
Europe; by 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed, and more than 350
separate massacres had occurred.

This was an early example, but sadly neither the first nor the last, of the social scapegoating that is one
of the most common, ugly, and unproductive features of epidemics in human society.
Work Cited

History .com Staff “Black Death.” History.com, A&EN Television Networks 2010.

www.history.com/topics/black-death

Bridbury, A. R. “ The Black Death” The economical history review, vol. 26, no.4, I, 1 Jan. 1973, pp. 577-
592. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2593699? Refreqid=search-gateway;
88816a27114476233d6c2ale542e29if

Cantor Norman F. In The Wake Of The Plague; The Black Death And The World It Made. Simon &
Schuster Paperbacks 2015.