“How Earthquakes and Weather Contributed to the Black Death - The Great Courses Daily News” plus 2 more

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• How Earthquakes and Weather Contributed to the Black Death - The Great Courses Daily News
• How the Black Death Made Life Better | Center for the Humanities - Washington University in St. Louis Newsroom
• World's Oldest Plague Bacteria Found In 5,000-Year-Old Hunter Gatherer - IFLScience

How Earthquakes and Weather Contributed to the Black Death - The Great Courses Daily News Posted: 06 Jun 2021 12:00 AM PDT By Dorsey Armstrong, Ph.D., Purdue University In the Middle Ages, according to the medical faculty at the University of Paris, what contributed to the Black Death was that the air everyone breathe became infected by noxious vapors and spread about through gusts of wind. They suggested poisonous air from places like swamps, lakes, and unburied or unburned corpses probably contributed to the epidemic. According to the medical faculty at the University of Paris, the poisonous air from swamps had some link to the Black Death. (Image: Abbie Warnock-Matthews/Shutterstock) Corpses Didn't Just Smell Any medieval person who had had any experience with warfare or surviving a siege of a city knew that having corpses lying around was not conducive to the continued health of the population.  This is why there were so many mass graves during the plague—it might have been easier to simply leave the dead where they fell, or inside their homes, but enough civic leaders recognized the threat to sanitation if this were permitted to happen.  Most people who had been to war knew that besides the smell, it was highly likely that people in close proximity of corpses would become sick. (Image: Baloncici/Shutterstock) Those people who were willing to take on the job of transporting and burying corpses were able to command very high wages during the plague years. While most medieval people believed that they were affected by astrology, some scholars of the day completely discounted these planetary conjunctions and eclipse explanations. Plague from Under the Earth Although the Paris medical faculty did believe the plague had to do with astronomy, in addition to the planetary issue, they added: Another possible cause of corruption, which needs to be borne in mind, is the escape of the rottenness trapped in the center of the Earth as a result of earthquakes—something which has indeed recently occurred. Some scholars felt quite strongly that this was the whole answer right there. In a chronicle from Germany, one scribe makes the argument that astrological conjunctions happen all the time, and there's not usually a plague occurring in the aftermath. But what's less common are earthquakes, and the scribe finds this the most plausible explanation, on the following grounds: When air that is full of vapors and earthy fumes is enclosed and shut up for a long time in the prison of the Earth, it becomes so corrupted that it constitutes a potent poison to men. This is especially marked in caverns or deep inside the Earth as is often seen in the case of wells that have been unused for a long time. For when such wells are opened in order to be cleaned out it often happens that the first man to enter is suffocated, and sometimes in turn those who follow him. This is a transcript from the video series The Black Death: The World's Most Devastating Plague. Watch it now, on Wondrium. Earthquakes Might Have Contributed to the Black Death The anonymous chronicler notes that "it is a matter of scientific fact" that earthquakes are caused when noxious fumes build up inside the Earth and finally burst out, and that there was an earthquake in Germany on St. Paul's day in 1347, and after this, numerous people began to die from exposure to these vapors and fumes, which were then spread by storms, wind, and lightning.  Also, this cause makes more sense because the planets should affect everyone on Earth the same, but from his own experience, the poor were being struck down much more quickly and in greater numbers than the rich. He has an answer for this, however.  The chronicler argues that this is because the higher classes consume rich food and drink, which makes them hot, and "what is inside them leaves no room for such fumes and blocks their entry". Still, even they won't be able to avoid it forever, he concedes. Learn more about literary responses to the Black Death. Strange Weather Transported Miasma So, while many medieval experts disagreed on the source, they did agree on the fact that there was some sort of bad air that served as the means by which the infection was transmitted, and they even came up with a name for it, which we still use today—miasma. Making the outbreak and the spread of miasma that much worse, according to almost every expert, was the fact that for the last few years, the weather across Europe had been really unpredictable.  The Paris medical faculty affirmed that last winter was not as cold as it should have been, with a great deal of rain; the spring windy and latterly wet. Summer was late, not as hot as it should have been, and extremely wet—the weather was very changeable from day to day and hour to hour. Autumn, too, was very rainy and misty. Learn more about the economics of the Black Death. The Non-Scientific Explanation The winters leading up to the plague outbreak were unusually warm, so the infection season was extended. (Image: Kotenko Oleksandr/Shutterstock) When there are a series of earthquakes followed by pestilential disease, it's pretty hard for the medieval mind not to see a connection. But it's interesting to note the way in which the scientific explanations—planets, earthquakes, eclipses, weather—are able to stand right alongside a belief that the Black Death was also a punishment from God.  The weather also probably played a role in that the winters leading up to the plague outbreak were unusually warm, as the Paris medical faculty observed. The black rat flea usually goes into hibernation in the winter, but if the weather was unseasonably warm, some of the fleas might not have hibernated, which means that what might be called the infection season was extended. And, of course, the idea that infected air from unburied corpses might be a contributing factor is absolutely correct. Common Questions about How Earthquakes and Weather Contributed to the Black Death Q: How did scholars in the Middle Ages view the relationship between earthquakes and the Black Death? They believed that noxious fumes were trapped beneath the Earth, which eventually got released, leading to earthquakes. These fumes were then spread by storms, wind, and lightning, contributing to the Black Death. Q: What is miasma? Many medieval experts agreed on the fact that there was some sort of bad air that served as the means by which the infection was transmitted. They called this miasma. Q: What effect did bad weather have on the Black Death? Because of the strange weather before the plague arrived, people thought this contributed to the Black Death, but it was not in the way they quite thought. Some unusually warm winters might have meant that some of the black rat fleas, which usually go into hibernation in the winter, had not hibernated, extending the infection season. Keep Reading The Transmission of Plague: Identification of the Cause The Impact of Plague: The Plague of Justinian and the Black Death Medieval History, Heroes, and Legends

How the Black Death Made Life Better | Center for the Humanities - Washington University in St. Louis Newsroom Posted: 17 Jun 2021 10:00 PM PDT "[The] mortality destroyed more than a third of the men, women, and children … such a shortage of workers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent unless for triple wages. … As a result, churchmen, knights and other worthies have been forced to thresh their corn, plough the land and perform every other unskilled task if they are to make their own bread." — Account of the Black Death in the cathedral priory chronicle at Rochester (written no later than 1350) In its entry on the Black Death, the 1347–50 outbreak of bubonic plague that killed at least a third of Europe's population, this chronicle from the English city of Rochester includes among its harrowing details a seemingly trivial lament: Aristocrats and high clergymen not only had to pay triple wages to those toiling in their fields, but, even worse, they themselves had to perform manual labor. Curiously, the documentary record, which provides ample evidence that workers did demand and receive higher wages (on which more below), contains in contrast scant evidence that "worthies" ever dirtied their hands with fieldwork. Even if (or especially as) phantasms, however, these sickle-wielding lords reveal the importance of imagined possibilities in shaping pandemic responses. The eminent refused to take on menial roles, not because they could not perform these "unskilled" tasks, but because to do so would be unworthy of their social rank, and it was unthinkable to abandon that social and labor hierarchy. Farm work was peasant work, whether performed by serfs bound to a particular manor, tenant farmers or wage laborers hired by the year or the season. But the staggering mortality of the Black Death reduced this previously sufficient peasant population sharply enough to create a severe labor shortage. What happened next has been the subject of an enormous amount of scholarship, particularly in the case of England, where the large extant body of sources such as chronicles, legislation, court cases and manorial account books provides rich material for studying the social and economic changes in the wake of the Black Death. Scholars disagree about how and how much things changed, but they share a tendency to describe these changes in oddly passive terms: wages rose, inequality decreased, feudalism ended. Yet there was a great deal of deliberate (in)action behind these developments. Rather than supply some of the needed labor themselves, landowners turned to solutions that might produce the kind of world they were capable of imagining. In England they created first the Ordinance (1349) and then the Statute (1351) of Labourers, which froze wages at pre-plague levels, compelled workers not otherwise engaged in fixed, long-term employment into year-long contracts with the first employer who demanded it, and established penalties to ensure compliance. As Jane Whittle has noted, in putting their efforts behind the control of waged labor rather than the retrenchment of (already declining) serfdom, rural landowners sought a "thinkable" resolution to this impasse: They would use the existing market for labor, but control the terms of exchange. Many peasants, however, refused to play their assigned role of deferential wage earner. Court records from 1352, for example, show that "Edward le Taillour of Wootton, employee of the prior and convent of Bradenstoke … left his employment before the feast of St Nicholas [6 December] without permission or reasonable cause, contrary to statute," and that John Death of Wroughton demanded an "excess" of six shillings eightpence for reaping John Lovel's corn. Recalcitrant laborers remained a problem in 1374, when "John Fisshere, William Theker, William Furnes, John Dyker, Gilbert Chyld, Alan Tasker, Stephen Lang, John Hardlad, Cecilia Ka, Joan daughter of Henry Couper, Matillis de Ely, Alice wife of Simon Souter, all of Bardney, labourers, refused to work [for the Abbot of Bardney at the stipulated wages], and on the same day they left the town to get higher wages elsewhere, in contempt of the king and contrary to statute." With many state governments reducing unemployment benefits to push workers to fill open jobs, the aim, like England after the Black Death, is to reinstate and reinforce previous social and labor hierarchies, regardless of whose work has actually been "essential" over the past 16 months.  These records attest to some individuals' appreciation of the increased value of their labor in the new marketplace created by mass death. The number and geographical range of these individual acts of defiance, moreover, suggest a vibrant, if unrecorded, current of  communal discussions, rumors and calculations that supported such individual agency. In the face of official intransigence, workers pushed for higher wages and greater mobility, which they received because "churchmen, knights, and other worthies" were willing to make these concessions, rather than have to work the fields and herd the sheep themselves. As a result, wages rose, inequality lessened … and the social and labor hierarchies remained the same. Thankfully, the current COVID-19 pandemic is vastly less lethal than the mid 14th-century bubonic plague, and we can hope that people around the world do not experience the loss of human life on the same scale. What the Black Death does share with our present moment is the issue of labor and the limits drawn by the negative space of the unthinkable. The people who prospered under the pre-pandemic system are now deciding what "back to normal" looks like and how we get there. With many state governments reducing unemployment benefits to push workers to fill open jobs, the aim, like England after the Black Death, is to reinstate and reinforce previous social and labor hierarchies, regardless of whose work has actually been "essential" over the past 16 months. Workers in specific circumstances and with individual or collective determination might negotiate better labor conditions or higher wages, but these concessions' permanance remains in the hands of employers who saw no reason to implement them prior to the pandemic. As historians Ada Palmer and Eleanor Janega have argued, whatever gains peasants and artisans obtained in the decades after the Black Death did not survive the following centuries. Elites successfully reclaimed a greater share of wealth and income, hierarchies ossified, and laborers' power diminished. Simply stating that English society was changed by the Black Death not only discounts the people who did the changing, but also ignores the insufficiencies of the changes they produced. The Rochester chronicler raised the specter of knights and churchmen toiling in the fields to evoke the unthinkable scale of the disaster, and then refused to contemplate this radically different social order any further. We are not the Rochester chronicler. How can we think the unthinkable — about safety and health, racial justice, gender roles, immigration status, access to childcare, and the dignity, autonomy and worth of labor — for our own post-pandemic future? All quoted material from Rosemary Horrox, ed., The Black Death (Manchester University Press, 1994). Headline image: Medieval illustration of men harvesting wheat with reaping-hooks, on a calendar page for August, circa 1310. Queen Mary's Psalter (Ms. Royal 2. B. VII), fol. 78v, The British Library.

World's Oldest Plague Bacteria Found In 5,000-Year-Old Hunter Gatherer - IFLScience Posted: 28 Jun 2021 04:01 PM PDT The oldest known strain of Yersinia pestis — the notorious bacteria behind the plague that caused the Black Death — has been discovered in the remains of a hunter-gatherer who died over 5,000-years-ago.  This new discovery, reported in the journal Cell Reports this week, pushes back the earliest discovery of Y. pestis by well over 1,000 years and suggests the bacteria strain was likely part of a lineage that emerged about 7,000 years ago, over 2,000 years earlier than other studies have previously found.  "What's most astonishing is that we can push back the appearance of Y. pestis 2,000 years farther than previously published studies suggested," Ben Krause-Kyora, senior study author and head of the aDNA Laboratory at the University of Kiel in Germany, said in a statement. "It seems that we are really close to the origin of the bacteria."  Evidence of the bacteria was discovered in the skeletal remains of a male in his 20s or 30s, dubbed "RV 2039," who was buried over 5,000 years ago in a region known as Riņņukalns in present-day Latvia. The bones of this man were first discovered in the late 19th century alongside another skeleton. No one knows where the remains went for over a century until 2011 when they reappeared as part of German anthropologist Rudolph Virchow's collection. This rediscovery prompted researchers to return to the site, where they uncovered two more burials. The skull of "RV 2039."  Image credit: Dominik Göldner, BGAEU, Berlin In the new research, a team of European scientists led by Kiel University in Germany studied samples from the teeth and bone of all four hunter-gatherers to sequence their genomes, as well as test them for an array of bacterial and viral pathogens. Much to their surprise, they found evidence of Y. pestis in RV 2039. Sequencing of the bacteria revealed its backstory and hints it was part of a lineage that emerged about 7,000 years ago, just a few hundred years after Y. pestis split from its predecessor, Yersinia pseudotuberculosis.  It's unclear how the disease affected the victim, but it's apparent he had a high bacterial load in his bloodstream at the time of death, suggesting he died from the infection. Importantly, it appears that his ancient strain was less contagious and not as deadly as the medieval descendent that infamously wiped out hundreds of millions of people in Eurasia and North Africa in the 14th century. Genetic analysis of the bacteria shows it was yet to evolve a gene that allows flea-based transmission, a key factor that later helped the disease to spread like wildfire in the medieval period. As such, it appears this man was the sole victim of the disease after being bitten by an infected rodent. This likely caused a slow and ultimately deadly infection that was not transmitted to anyone else.  The discovery of the 5,000-year-old Y. pestis is set to rewrite the history of this notorious disease. Historians have assumed that plague and many other infamous infectious diseases first evolved in humans when the first ancient cities started to pop up around the Black Sea. With a densely packed population and increasing reliance on domesticated animal agriculture, urban centers would have provided the ideal melting pot for zoonotic diseases to jump from animals to humans. However, contrary to this idea, the new evidence comes from a hunter-gatherer who likely lived in a sparse population at a time when agriculture was only just starting to settle in Central Europe. Given that early strains of Y. pestis appear to be significantly less transmissible and deadly than the later medieval strains, it could also dispel the idea that the plague brought significant population declines to Western Europe at the end of the Neolithic Age.  "Isolated cases of transmission from animals to people could explain the different social environments where these ancient diseased humans are discovered. We see it in societies that are herders in the steppe, hunter-gatherers who are fishing, and in farmer communities – totally different social settings but always spontaneous occurrence of Y. pestis cases," explained Krause-Kyora.  This Week in IFLScience Receive our biggest science stories to your inbox weekly!

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