Even in the ancient world, not many diseases caused the same panic and destruction as the bubonic plague. This terrible bacterial infection was usually spread by rats and other rodents. But when it entered the human body, it quickly spread throughout the body and was often fatal. Death could occur in a matter of days. Let's take a look at six of the most notorious outbreaks of the disease.
Plague of Justinian
Justinian the First is often called the most powerful Byzantine emperor, but his reign coincided with one of the first well-documented outbreaks of the plague. The pandemic is believed to have originated in Africa and then spread to Europe through infected rats on merchant ships. The plague reached the Byzantine capital of Constantinople in 541 AD and very soon claimed 10,000 lives a day. This led to the fact that unburied bodies were piled inside buildings and even under the open sky.
According to the accounts of the ancient historian Procopius, the victims displayed many of the classic symptoms of bubonic plague, including a sudden rise in temperature and swollen lymph nodes. Justinian also fell ill, but he was able to recover, which cannot be said about a third of the inhabitants of Constantinople, who were not so lucky. Even after the plague subsided in Byzantium, it continued to appear in Europe, Africa and Asia for several more years, causing massive famine and devastation. It is believed that at least 25 million people have died, but the actual number could be much higher.
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Black Death
In 1347, the disease again invaded Europe from the East, most likely together with Italian sailors who were returning home from the Crimea. As a result, the Black Death tore apart the entire continent for half a decade. The populations of entire cities were destroyed, and people spent most of their time trying to bury all the dead in mass graves. Medieval doctors tried to fight the disease with bloodletting and other crude methods, but most people were convinced that this was God's punishment for their sins. Some Christians even blamed the Jews for everything and started mass pogroms. The Black Death died down in the West around 1353, but not before it took with it 50 million people - more than half of Europe's population. While the pandemic has wreaked havoc across the continent, some historians believethat the labor shortage it caused was a boon to the lower working classes.
Italian plague 1629-1631
Even after the Black Death retreated, the bubonic plague continued to re-raise its ugly head in Europe from time to time for several centuries. One of the most devastating outbreaks began in 1629, when troops from the Thirty Years' War brought infection to the Italian city of Mantua. Over the next two years, the plague spread through the countryside, but also affected major cities such as Verona, Milan, Venice and Florence. In Milan and Venice, city officials quarantined patients and completely burned their clothes and belongings to prevent the spread of the disease.
The Venetians even drove some of the plague victims to the islands of the neighboring lagoon. These brutal measures may have helped contain the disease, but until then 280,000 people had died, including more than half of Verona's inhabitants. The Republic of Venice has lost a third of its population - 140 thousand people. Some scholars argue that the outbreak has undermined the city-state's strength, leading to a decline in its position as a major player on the global stage.
Great Plague in London
Plague besieged London several times during the 16th and 17th centuries, but the most famous incident occurred in 1665-1666. It first appeared in the London suburb of St. Giles, and then spread to the dirty quarters of the capital. The peak occurred in September 1665, when 8,000 people died every week. Wealthy residents, including King Charles II, fled to the villages, and the main victims of the plague were the poor. As the disease spread, the London authorities tried to keep the infected in their homes, which were marked with a red cross. Before the outbreak subsided in 1666, an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 people died. Later that year, London faced another tragedy when the Great Fire destroyed much of the city center.
Marseilles plague
The last major outbreak of plague in medieval Europe began in 1720 in the French port city of Marseille. The disease arrived on a merchant ship that picked up infected passengers on a trip to the Middle East. The ship was under quarantine, but its owner, who also happened to be Marseille's deputy mayor, convinced officials to allow him to unload the goods. The rats that lived in it soon spread throughout the city, which caused an epidemic. People died in thousands, and the piles of bodies on the street were so large that the authorities forced the prisoners to get rid of them. In neighboring Provence, a plague wall was even built to contain the infection, but it spread to the south of France. The disease finally disappeared in 1722, but by that time about 100 thousand people had died.
Third pandemic
The first two pandemics are considered to be the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death. The most recent, the so-called Third Pandemic, broke out in 1855 in the Chinese province of Yunnan. Over the next several decades, the disease spread across the globe, and by the early 20th century, infected rats on ships spread it across all six continents. Globally, the outbreak killed 15 million people before being eradicated in 1950. Most of the casualties were in China and India, but there were also scattered cases from South Africa to America. Despite heavy losses, the Third Pandemic led to several breakthroughs in doctors' understanding of the disease. In 1894, a doctor from Hong Kong, Alexander Ersin, determined which bacilli are the cause of the disease. Several years later, another doctor finally confirmed that rat-borne flea biteswere the main reason for the spread of infection among people.
Anna Pismenna