The Black Death of Europe’s Population

“Ring around the rosy, Pocket full of posies, Ashes, ashes! We all fall down!” This classic nursery rhyme refers to one of the worst plagues of all time in the Black Death.

Known for spreading quickly and killing incalculable numbers of people, plagues have had a prodigious impact on humans across the globe since the creation of man. Arguably one of the most devastating was in fact the Bubonic Plague, which is also known as the Black Death. It was an extremely contagious bacterial infection that wiped out nearly one-third of Europe’s population in the 14th century.

Due to the fact that the Europeans had no defense and no understanding of how the plague spread at the time, panic accompanied by illness and death ensued, thus devastating European Society.

Many conditions led to the havoc of European Society. One of which was the haste and validity at which the plague spread, in which physicians could not understand and in turn find a useful cure.

Document number two supports this by stating, “To cure these infirmities neither the advice of physicians nor the power of medicine appeared to have any value or profit; perhaps either the nature of the disease did not allow for any cure or the ignorance of the physicians . . . did not know how to cure it…” This shows that the physicians at the time could not find a cure due to how rapidly it spread. Document six builds on this and shows how harsh the plague was by displaying the attire which medieval physicians had to wear in order to protect themselves from it.

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The Bubonic plague’s haste and validity devastated European Society because of its seeming incurability and inevitability of infecting all of Europe.

As a result of the plague’s speed and violence, an innumerable number of people passed away. This is shown in the table of document 8, as Europe’s population dropped from 53.2 million to 37 million for a decline of 30 percent. This point is reemphasized in the table of document 9 as it displays a population decline of 23 million from the year 1345 to 1400. These two sources show a major population decline due to the previously stated haste and validity of the plague. But what really shows the extent of the casualties is when document four says, “The next morning, if there were many [bodies] in the trench, they covered them over with dirt. And then more bodies were put on top of them, with a little more dirt over those; they put a layer on the layer just like one puts layers of cheese in a lasagna.” The compilation of these points of evidence exemplifies the overall claim that the loss of millions upon millions of Europeans devastated European Society.

In addition to the physical effects of the Bubonic Plague, there was also an obvious sense of mental dejection that came along with it. Document 3 depicts this with a drawing of the Angel of Death holding a bow and arrow. The angel resembled the general miasma that seemed typical of the plague and the arrows represented the stereotypical image for plague since they seem to bypass some and strike other