ShortHand: The Black Death

SPEAKER_1 (0:13)

Yes.

SPEAKER_2 (0:14)

Welcome to another Shorthand. It's going to be gross.

SPEAKER_1 (0:21)

Great.

SPEAKER_2 (0:23)

At the beginning of October, in the year of the incarnation of the Son of God, 1346, 12 Genoese galleys entered the harbor of Messina. In their bones, they bore so virulent a disease, that anyone who only spoke to them were seized by a mortal illness, and in no manner could evade death.

That's very good. Very good, isn't it? Those are not my words. They are the words of a man named Michael Platenius, a resident of Messina, in, as he said, 1346 Messina is a harbor city in Sicily, and Michael wrote this after he watched these ships come in, and the ensuing carnage that ravaged his city as a result. And then that carnage spread all through Europe and into Asia.

SPEAKER_1 (1:15)

When those 12 ships from the Black Sea docked in Messina, the town was met with a horrific sight. Most of the sailors on board were already dead and rotting, and those who were still alive were gravely ill, and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus.

I'm still on the Tudor side of TikTok, and I was watching one this morning about Henry VIII and how his ulcers could be smelled from 60 feet away. And there is documentation that his doctor at least once had to remove worms that were living in his legs. Oh my god. Yep.

SPEAKER_2 (1:52)

Good. Let's keep up the theme of this episode. But no, I know we just finished recording the Nosferatu shorthand that you will have already heard if you're being good and listening to all of them.

It kind of just feels like that, right? Death comes on a ship.

SPEAKER_1 (2:06)

Yes, it did.

The authorities ordered the fleet out of the harbour, but it was already too late. And over the next seven years, what that ship brought in, killed anywhere between 25 to 200 million people. In just seven years. Earning it the enduring name, the Black Death.

But where did it come from? What was it? How did it spread? And how did it leave a lasting impact on those who survived? This is the shorthand.

SPEAKER_2 (2:42)

The Black Death remains to this day, nearly 700 years later. The greatest ever demographic disaster ever to hit humanity. And just to be clear, I'm sure everybody knows this because they're very smart, but just to clarify, the Black Death is just the name of this particular plague outbreak. It's not the name of the disease itself. It's just the name of this era.

And it's important to know that because this wasn't the first plague of its kind, and it also wouldn't be the last.

In the sixth century, Byzantium was hit by the plague of Justinian. And in the mid-nineteenth century, so after the Black Death, China would suffer another outbreak. But neither of these pandemics came close to the Black Death of the Middle Ages.

SPEAKER_1 (3:30)

Firstly, let's talk about what the Black Death actually was. For a long, long time, nobody really knew. But after the pulp from the teeth of plague victims were dug up from a mass grave in Italy, we now know what the Black Death was caused by.

It was an infection of the bacterium Yersinia pestis.

SPEAKER_2 (3:54)

This bacteria is usually found in small mammals and their fleas. And the most common way the plague was spread is thought to have been through the bite of an infected flea. And these fleas lived on rats and other rodents, which liked to live around humans. They infected the rats. The plague killed the rats. And so the fleas would then go looking for alternative sources of food.

I read that once like a rat colony is infested with plagues, it will kill all of the rats in that colony within two weeks.

SPEAKER_1 (4:25)

Wow.

SPEAKER_2 (4:26)

But it doesn't kill the flea. This is the key thing. The flea is like a carrier. It's not affected by the plague. So I think obviously again, you guys are very smart, but a lot of people mistakenly think it's carried by the rats. But rats aren't typically running around biting people for it to spread this quickly. It's the fleas themselves.

But there are other ways in which people could catch the plague. It wasn't all through flea bites. It could also be spread through contact with contaminated fluids or tissue, and also by inhaling infectious droplets, both of which just made it easier for the disease to spread.

SPEAKER_1 (5:00)

The plague is thought to have originated in Asia over 2,000 years ago. Though recent research has indicated that the pathogen responsible for the black death may have existed in Europe as early as 3,000 BC.