Posted on 06/07/2026 8:47:14 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Black Death: A Global History. By Thomas Asbridge. Random House; 544 pages; $38. Allen Lane; 560 pages
The disease seems to have emerged in Asia. It soon reached Europe, ravaging Italy first. It killed millions, often quickly. Many people perished at home, or died within a few hours or days of receiving medical treatment. So large was the death toll and so great was the danger of contagion that funerary customs were disrupted. People fled cities. All this was true of covid-19. It was also true of the Black Death.
As Thomas Asbridge describes in detail, the medieval plague was much deadlier. Many towns and cities lost almost half their inhabitants in the first wave of the disease, in the mid-14th century; subsequent waves were smaller but nonetheless terrifying. In Damascus a poet observed that “The plague sat like a king on a throne.” One English village was hit so hard that it did not recover its pre-plague population until the 19th century.
Although medieval people were used to sudden death, the plague devastated them. “I am overwhelmed, I can’t go on,” wrote Gabriele de’ Mussis, an Italian chronicler who lived through the first wave. A Byzantine woman, seeming only half alive herself, stared at her sisters’ graves and wept. The Black Death spurred pogroms, as Christians claimed that Jews were spreading disease by poisoning the water supply (during the attacks they made sure to destroy records of debts they owed).
But the disease also changed society and art, frequently for the better. The most enjoyable sections of “The Black Death” describe how some people did well out of the pandemic. In Cairo, gravediggers raised their fees. There was a boom in religious art in Italy, because so many plague victims left money for paintings in their wills. Venetian citizenship became easier to obtain. In 1349, as the plague carried away English clergymen, a bishop advised that the dying could make their final confession to a layperson—“even to a woman”.
A pestilence that was assumed to have been sent by God disrupted and intensified religious life. Russians built timber churches in a single day to show their piety. A new group, the flagellants, publicly lashed their bodies with whips. Perhaps the pandemic encouraged anti-clericalism and even prepared the ground for Martin Luther, Mr Asbridge suggests. He does not push that point too far, which seems wise, given the 170-year gap between the outbreak of plague and the 95 theses.
“The Black Death” draws on a wide range of sources, from administrative records to wills and diaries. It contains many portraits of people who lived through the plague. Several of these portraits could be shorter—indeed, the book could be shorter, as it occasionally goes into numbing detail—but some are wonderful. Best of all is the description of Alexandre Yersin, a headstrong scientist who rushed to Hong Kong during a plague outbreak in 1894. He was the first to identify the bacterium, which is named after him: Yersinia pestis.
The book makes two big claims, and amply proves both of them. Mr Asbridge, a historian of the Crusades, shows that the plague affected the Islamic world at least as profoundly as Christian Europe. Cairo may have suffered more than any other city. Some Islamic scholars reiterated the orthodox view that the disease was not contagious and that people must not on any account flee infected places. Many Muslims seem to have ignored them. The Ottomans were especially pragmatic, which may help to explain how they increased their power and influence in the region.
Mr Asbridge’s second claim is subtler. Although medieval and early modern people harboured theories about the plague that strike modern readers as ignorant, they tried their best, he argues. The authorities made broadly sensible decisions. Physicians risked and often lost their lives treating plague victims. That their treatments were rarely effective does not diminish their bravery (and one expensive Italian remedy, theriac, helpfully contained opium). In London plague victims were buried in mass graves, but neatly, with their feet pointing east.
People dealt bravely with covid-19, too. Yet the authorities made decisions, especially about restricting personal freedoms, that now strike many as appalling. The vaccines that have saved many lives and have allowed normal life to resume have given rise to conspiracy theories. Dealing with a germ that is far less lethal than Y. pestis has been hard and contentious. Modern people should think before they use the word “medieval” as an insult. ■
Some did. Many dealt with it like absolute cowards.
From the article: Yet the authorities made decisions, especially about restricting personal freedoms, that now strike many as appalling.
More propaganda from The Economist. This is NOT a hindsight issue. People called it out at the time that the Pfascists showed their true colors.
From the article: The vaccines that have saved many lives and have allowed normal life to resume have given rise to conspiracy theories.
They were not vaccines, regardless of what the CDC and their Pfascist cohorts changed their definition to. There is ZERO proof that they worked. In fact, O M M O I R C O R N O I N C proved that it didn't work at all.
And they didn't "allow normal life to resume". Normal life NEVER stopped in locations that didn't lock down for the Scamdemic. As for "conspiracy theories", that CIA term was debunked when all the "conspiracy theories" related to the Scamdemic were shown to be true.
These propagandists at The Economist should be facing trial at Nuremberg II.
Next, many of the conspiracy theories about COVID have become conspiracy theorems having been proven with Euclidean rigor. I caught COVID twice after getting the first two rounds of the vaccine. Was the vax a complete waste of time or was it a great cure which cut down a deadly disease into a couple days of minor fever and dry coughing? I don't know, but with the way Pfizer and Moderna bury their results and the government not tracking side effects and deaths from the vaccine, I lean towards the conspiracy theorem side.
Complete idiciocy to compare Black Death with covid-19. Absolute silliness to act as if they were comparable.
Nipsey Russell: “Oh, now you gonna blame this on us, too?”
In some areas of Germany, hundreds of small towns were completely wiped out with 90% fatality rates, and those provinces did not regain their population levels until 400 years later.
To compare that to the effects of Covid-19 is a monstrous deception.
“All this was true of covid-19. It was also true of the Black Death.”
IOW, the book is BS.
You said everything I would have said. Good job!
And I’ll add that the death rate from The China Virus (I refuse to call it the politically correct “COVID” which was created to let China off the hook) was minuscule compared to Bubonic Plague.
Today it's anti-Christians who are the antisemites.
We can thank Western Civilization for eliminating the covid pandemic as quickly and efficiently as it did. Those who disparage it are short-sighted at best.
Had Western Civilization been as advanced in the 14th century as it is today, the Black Death would have taken a far smaller toll.
Western Civilization is one of God's greatest gifts to the world. Anyone with a functioning brain will nourish, protect, encourage, and advance it.
And the Jews were blamed. Why? Because they were isolated by the government to villages away from the cities. They seldom if ever got the plague and therefor were suspected of fostering it.
It came from Chi-na
Covid almost exclusively killed older people. Herd immunity came quickly. Covid was more of a social phenomena. Most people were vaccinated but we kept the restrictions as if the politicians didn’t believe the vaccine were working. They went after the non-vaccinated as if they were a threat but the vaxxed could spread Covid just as easily.
Now long-blamed “only” on the flea-transmitted plague, transmitted by rats investing Europe, the Black Death had two killers. One killed more slowly, one very rapidly in only hours. Just like the Spanish Flu 100 years ago. . Spread by person-person exactly like the 1919-1920 Spanish Flu worldwide, in 1919 by each ship and plane. In 1600, at the speed of ships and walking.
Covid was (is) a media-spread hype intended to destroy Western economies in 2020. Originally bred through China from US CDC-NIH original research, but probably released accidently.
Now long-blamed “only” on the flea-transmitted plague, transmitted by rats investing Europe, the Black Death had two killers. One killed more slowly, one very rapidly in only hours. Just like the Spanish Flu 100 years ago. . Spread by person-person exactly like the 1919-1920 Spanish Flu worldwide, in 1919 by each ship and plane. In 1600, at the speed of ships and walking.
Covid was (is) a media-spread hype intended to destroy Western economies in 2020. Originally bred through China from US CDC-NIH original research, but probably released accidently.
Now long-blamed “only” on the flea-transmitted plague, transmitted by rats investing Europe, the Black Death had two killers. One killed more slowly, one very rapidly in only hours. Just like the Spanish Flu 100 years ago. . Spread by person-person exactly like the 1919-1920 Spanish Flu worldwide, in 1919 by each ship and plane. In 1600, at the speed of ships and walking.
Covid was (is) a media-spread hype intended to destroy Western economies in 2020. Originally bred through China from US CDC-NIH original research, but probably released accidently.
People complain about Covid, but never tout its benefits. For instance it inoculated people from the flu, as almost nobody died of the latter that year miraculously.
T.B. Yoits wrote: “They were not vaccines, regardless of what the CDC and their Pfascist cohorts changed their definition to. There is ZERO proof that they worked.”
Paraphrasing R. Reagan: ‘The trouble with anti-vaxxers is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
The millions of lives saved by the vaccines is proof they worked. The fact that the effectiveness of the vaccines faded as the virus mutated isn’t proof that the vaccines were not effective or that they were not vaccines.
T.B. Yoits wrote: “They were not vaccines, regardless of what the CDC and their Pfascist cohorts changed their definition to. There is ZERO proof that they worked.”
Paraphrasing R. Reagan: ‘The trouble with anti-vaxxers is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
The millions of lives saved by the vaccines is proof they worked. The fact that the effectiveness of the vaccines faded as the virus mutated isn’t proof that the vaccines were not effective or that they were not vaccines.
Looks like the slow processing is causing some multiple posts.
The plague of Justinian or Justinianic plague (AD 541–549) was an epidemic of plague that afflicted the entire Mediterranean Basin, Europe, and the Near East, especially the Sasanian Empire and the Byzantine Empire.[1][2][3] The plague is named for the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565) who, according to his court historian Procopius, contracted the disease and recovered in 542, at the height of the epidemic which killed about a fifth of the population in the imperial capital Constantinople.[1][2] The contagion arrived in Roman Egypt in 541, spread around the Mediterranean Sea until 544, and persisted in Northern Europe and the Arabian Peninsula until 549. By 543, the plague had spread to every corner of Justinian's empire.[4][1]
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