Plague
Plague
The plague—a highly contagious and often fatal disease—swept across Europe repeatedly throughout the Renaissance. It struck every region in Europe at least once in every generation, and there was no effective treatment or cure. The first and deadliest outbreak, the Black Death, struck between 1348 and 1350. The last large-scale epidemic of plague occurred at Marseilles, France, in 1720.
No war, disease, or famine has killed as large as percentage of the population as the Black Death. It wiped out between 30 and 50 percent of the population wherever it appeared and left some places almost uninhabited. The Italian poet Petrarch survived the Black Death and described its horrific effects: "When was anything similar either seen or heard? In what [history] did anyone ever read that dwellings were emptied, cities abandoned, countrysides filthy, fields laden with bodies, and a dreadful and vast solitude covered the earth?"
The Disease. The plague took two main forms, pneumonic and bubonic. Pneumonic plague, a severe and often fatal lung infection, caused its victims to spit up blood. The characteristic symptoms of bubonic plague were swellings in victims' groins or armpits. According to one witness, they could grow to be as large as an egg or an apple. This form of the disease took its name from buboes, the word Renaissance Europeans gave these lumps.
Modern medical researchers have identified the bubos as swollen lymph nodes and the plague as infection with the bacterium Yersina pestis. Normally the bacterium lives in rodents and their fleas. In humans, however, its effects are devastating. It can spread rapidly to people from rodents such as the common house rat.
People of the time might refer to any episode of widespread disease as a plague or pestilence. Bubonic plague was at the center of these waves of death, although other diseases may have been involved as well. Outbreaks usually occurred during warm summer months and struck suddenly. They affected both urban and rural people and raised the death rate to levels two to ten times normal.
Plague Prevention. Communities tried to organize measures to protect themselves in times of plague. Even during the Black Death, leaders in some cities tried to enforce laws about street cleaning and other forms of sanitation, thinking that filth somehow fueled the plague.
Between 1350 and 1500 Italian cities developed new public-health approaches to plague based on keeping healthy people apart from individuals or goods that might carry plague. Over the next 150 years the rest of Europe adopted these practices. One method was the quarantine—an attempt to prevent the spread of plague by banning trade or travel from areas where there had been an outbreak of the disease. To protect a port city, passengers on incoming vessels stayed under observation to see whether they developed plague. Although "quarantine" refers to a period of 40 days, the actual length of isolation varied. Another protective measure was the lazaretto, or plague hospital, sometimes called a pesthouse. It was a place set aside for individuals thought to have plague in order to isolate them from the healthy.
During the 1400s, local authorities began tracking outbreaks of plague. Their operations gave rise to permanent organizations. By the 1600s, monitoring plague had become a sensitive government activity. It required governments and merchants across regions to work closely together.
Effects of the Plague. The Black Death, and the lesser outbreaks of plague that followed it, had a long-lasting effect on Europe's population. For a century after the first outbreak, the population steadily declined in both rural and urban areas. Before 1348, for example, more than 100,000 people lived in the city of Florence. By 1430 plague had reduced the city's population to about 40,000. In the late 1400s the population of Europe began to rise gradually. However, the patterns of settlement and land use during this time differed from those before the Black Death. Europeans now preferred to live in cities, and most of the great urban areas of modern Europe emerged between 1500 and 1700. Even brutal outbreaks of plague during those years did not halt the growth of Europe's cities.
Most of the people who survived the Black Death and wrote about it were churchmen. They viewed the plague as a warning or a punishment from God for the sins of the world. Religious responses to the plague included appeals to saints and public processions of sorrowful sinners. After the Protestant Reformation*, Protestants abandoned these practices and turned to private prayer. However, all Christians continued to see sin as the primary cause of the plague.
The plague had strong effects on Renaissance medical beliefs. Medical scholars who wrote about plague during the Renaissance believed, according to traditional ideas, that the plague resulted from an imbalance in the body's natural order. As time went on, however, some Renaissance researchers reviewed ancient accounts of other plagues and began to consider how such diseases might come into existence or change over time. These discussions contributed to new ideas that challenged the traditional view of illness as an internal imbalance.
- * Protestant Reformation
religious movement that began in the 1500s as a protest against certain practices of the Roman Catholic Church and eventually led to the establishment of a variety of Protestant churches