Posted on 03/16/2020 5:20:22 PM PDT by Zhang Fei
The aftermath of the plague created a series of religious, social, and economic upheavals, which had profound effects on the course of European history. It took 150 years for Europe’s population to recover, and the effects of the plague irrevocably changed the social structure, resulting in widespread persecution of minorities such as Jews, foreigners, beggars, and lepers. The uncertainty of daily survival has been seen as creating a general mood of morbidity, influencing people to “live for the moment.”
Because 14th-century healers were at a loss to explain the cause of the plague, Europeans turned to astrological forces, earthquakes, and the poisoning of wells by Jews as possible reasons for the plague’s emergence. No one in the 14th century considered rat control a way to ward off the plague, and people began to believe only God’s anger could produce such horrific displays. Giovanni Boccaccio, an Italian writer and poet of the 14th century, questioned whether plague was sent by God for human’s correction, or if it came through the influence of the heavenly bodies. Christians accused Jews of poisoning public water supplies in an effort to ruin European civilization. The spreading of this rumor led to complete destruction of entire Jewish towns, but it was caused simply by suspicion on the part of the Christians, who noticed that the Jews had lost fewer lives in the Plague due to their hygienic practices. In February 1349, 2,000 Jews were murdered in Strasbourg. In August of the same year, the Jewish communities of Mainz and Cologne were exterminated.
There was a significant impact on religion, as many believed the plague was God’s punishment for sinful ways. Church lands and buildings were unaffected, but there were too few priests left to maintain the old schedule of services. Over half the parish priests,
(Excerpt) Read more at courses.lumenlearning.com ...
I am currently reading A Distant Mirror, and read Journal of the Plague Years a decade ago. They estimate the initial death toll from the 1347 plague arrival was about 1/3rd of Europe although there were cities, towns, and villages where it was 80 to 100%. By the 1360s about 60% had died, and at the end of the century Europe had only 1/2 the population it had at the beginning of the century.
See my Comment #4, and the second link about Puerto Rico which once had a thriving pharmaceuticals sector.
[Saw that Italy is not identifying the dead as Chinese to prevent prejudice. ]
If they’re obscuring it to deceive Italians into thinking that the vast majority of the victims are ethnic Chinese, thereby sparking sympathy instead of anger at that community, word of mouth alone should give the lie to that attempt at myth-making. Then there are the vastly expanded obituary sections in Italian language Italian newspapers:
“On Febrary 9th, obituaries occupied 1.5 pages.
“On March 13th, the paper printed 10 (!!) pages of obituaries.]
Each page had an average of 8 columns and 8 names per column. That’s 64 per page. 10 pages would be 640 names. Before the catastrophe, obituaries were 1-1/2 pages. That’s 96 names. So the increase in daily deaths comes to over 500, which is higher than the daily coronavirus death toll so far. These are obviously rough guesses, but they lead me to wonder whether there are coronavirus deaths that remain unrecorded as pathogen-related. At any rate, my guess is that based on the vast expansion in the obituaries section, the vast majority (perhaps 99%) of coronavirus deaths in Italy are ethnic Italian.
A footnote - not everyone has living relatives willing to pony up for an obituary. And of those who do pay up, presumably not everyone does so in that particular daily. So the obituary expansion in this particular Italian paper is probably not all-inclusive of the extraordinary death toll from this virus.
2nd footnote - if this bug is just the flu, the question is why the obituaries went from 1.5 pages to 10. We’d have to assume that survivors of the coronavirus dead are much more into paying for obituaries than the relatives of people who died from the flu.
Below is a link tracking the growth in deaths and confirmed cases by country 3/16. First there are a number of paragraphs explaining their methodology and explaining the difference between linear growth and exponential growth. There are links to some of the major information established health information sources. Lists of countries at the bottom include little charts which enable you to see how quickly deaths and confirmed cases are changing in each listed country. I was surprised at how many countries now have confirmed cases.
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
Regarding using obituaries in Italy to track nationality of the dead. I pointed out in another post that the cases in US Chinatown in NY were probably low because this long established Chinese community had family here, and many did not have to go home (China) to celebrate the holidays. If the Chinese workers in the Milan leather trades are new, then a lot of them would have gone to China for the holidays, and without family in Italy their obituaries would not have been submitted.
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