Plague appears for the first time in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin in 541-542, at the time of the Merovingian kings and the emperor Justinian. Each year it takes its toll in the population, weakened by poverty and insecurity to own barbarous times. Then, from 767, the time of Charlemagne, the chronic lose track ... but it remains endemic in the East, India and China.
Bubonic plague (with the appearance of "buboes" or tumors in the groin) made his reappearance in 1320 in Mongolia. From there it spread around and reached the Black Sea frequented by Genoese. They will bring it up carelessly Marseille. In
landing at Marseilles on 1 November 1347, they will open the doors to the scourge of the West.
The epidemic is growing all the better and faster than the population is exhausted. After three centuries of population growth, Europe is full of men struggling to feed the soil. Food shortages, famine and "dearths" become more frequent and in addition to these food shortages the war between French and English.
Europeans believe at first that the miasma of the plague spread by air. Also they have nothing better to do, when the epidemic reaches a city, to flee it. The poet Boccaccio said that in the Decameron , his collection of stories written after Florence had been reached by the Great Plague of 1347. This leakage is the worst attitude that is because it has the effect of accelerating the spread of the epidemic.
The "Great Plague" or "Black Death" and will kill in a few months up to 40% of the population in some areas by replaying episodes here and there. In four years, 25 to 40 million Europeans will die. For thousands of villages are deserted. Wastelands, forests and wild animals regain the ground lost during the two previous centuries who saw the country grow and populate the high-speed ...
But by the next generation, life takes over. Farmers and laborers, taking advantage of the scarcity of labor, require employers to lords and the new freedoms and wage increases.
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