Black Death, outbreak of the Bubonic Plague swept through Europe and the Mediterranean area from 1347 to 1351. The Plague is a bacterial infection that can take on multiple forms. Victims that have the Bubonic Plague will often have the following symptoms, high fevers, and swelling underneath the armpits and in the groin area. If the disease is left untreated by modern antibiotics, usually 60 percent of the infected will die with in the first five days of being infected by the disease. The disease is carried by many different rodents, rats, marmots, and prairie dogs, it can be passed into the human population as easy as having a flea attach to a human host. It is unknown as to where the Black death originated, but medieval European writers believe that it originated in China. The theory states " infected rodents migrated from the Middle East into southern Russia, the region between the Black Sea and the Caspian seas.
The Black Death rapidly spread along the major Eur...
Swollen lymph nodes termed "buboes" caused by plag...
English: An illustration of an undertaker during t...The plague was the spread west along trade routes."ÃÂ There were epidemics among the Tartars in southern Russia in 1346. The Plague then passed through the Italian colonies in towns along the black sea. Merchants carried the disease from there to Alexandria in Egypt; then moving to Damascus and Libya in 1348 and upper Egypt in 1349. Venetian and Genoese sailors are know to have brought the plague to Europe.
Once the plague hit Europe it moved quickly along major trade routes. From Pisa, it traveled to Florence and then to Rome and Bologna. Moving from Venice to southern Germany and Austria, and from Genoa it went through the Tyrhennian Sea to Barcelona in Spain and Marseilles in France. The Black Death continued to move through towns in southern France, reaching Paris in 1348. Plague continued to move through England...