by Carol H. Morgan

Created on: August 26, 2008   Last Updated: August 05, 2009

In 1347, right in the middle of one of the most disastrous centuries known to history, boys playing on a Genoan beach made a gruesome discovery. A trading vessel had missed the harbor and drifted ashore, containing dead and dying men. This ship and what it contained added to Northern Europe the worst chapter of a terrible story that had already been told repeatedly in Asia and the Near East. Years of pain, horror and death would befall the region as the Bubonic Plague spread like wildfire through its newest victim territory.

Along with its horrible symptoms, the plague the dying men would spread was to tear apart the infrastructure of the society that would experience them. The disease would ravage nearly half of Europe's population, stifle and overturn its economy, and undermine its faith-based social infrastructure. Medieval institutions that flourished before the plague would never recover. In fact, a wholly different society would emerge - one which we are all products of today. As destructive as the disease was, what it destroyed made way for what would come later. The impact it had on the acceleration of science, medicine, religious tradition and enlightenment thinking made possible the preparation for the growth of modernism that first took root in this very region and has since blossomed all over the entire globe.

CAUSES OF THE BLACK DEATH

While of course the direct cause of the black death (Bubonic plague) was the bacterium Yershina Pestis, initially spread through fleas, their bites, and the bites of infected rats. But that was only the direct and obvious cause. There were of course more subtle factors that created a population and environment that was ill prepared for an ecological disaster of these proportions.

The years right before the plague, the 1200's to the early 1300's (known as the "High Middle Ages,") had brought peace and prosperity, but the resulting population growth caused those economies and their host ecosystems to begin to strain. Tremendous growth, including the period that saw construction of great Cathedrals that are still standing in all their magnificence, had been enjoyed during this period, making it overdue for a recession. Cold weather and other economic factors made for few grain stores, water wells or other provisions for emergencies.

With shrinking affluence, violence and crime began to spread across the lands, particularly, in this period, highwaymen, mercenary soldiers, prostitution, the black arts and other

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