ClassX Video Lessons Youtube Channel Biographics The Return of the Black Death: The Plague of Children
In the mid-14th century, a catastrophic plague swept across the East and West, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. This pandemic, known as the Black Death, decimated populations and brought empires to their knees. The Tunisian scholar Abu l-Rahman Ibn Khaldun captured the essence of this devastation in his writings from 1377, highlighting the profound impact on civilization.
The Black Death, which claimed the lives of a significant portion of the world’s population, likely originated in Central Asia or China in the early 1330s. It spread rapidly through Europe, the Mediterranean, and Africa, carried by merchants and Mongol cavalry along the Silk Road. By 1347, it had reached Southern Italy, and within a few years, it had ravaged most of Europe and Africa.
Modern science has identified the cause of the Black Death as the bacterium Yersinia pestis, responsible for both bubonic and pneumonic plague. This bacterium used fleas as vectors, which traveled on rats and other rodents. Once the animal hosts were infected and killed, the fleas would turn to humans, spreading the disease further.
While the initial outbreak of the Black Death is well-documented, less attention is given to its return a decade later. From 1360 to 1364, Europe and the Mediterranean faced a second wave known as the Plague of Children. This outbreak primarily affected young people and those who had been spared during the first pandemic.
The aftermath of the Black Death brought significant societal changes. With a drastically reduced population, labor became scarce, allowing peasants to negotiate better wages and conditions. Cities sought to attract new residents, while the Church gained wealth and power from inheriting lands left by deceased families.
The Black Death also altered the nature of warfare. With fewer men available for military service, feudal lords relied more on mercenaries. This shift, combined with unsanitary conditions, created a breeding ground for future epidemics. However, the 1350s saw a unique outbreak: a surge in marriages and birth rates as younger generations sought to rebuild society.
The second wave of the plague began in Bohemia and Poland, areas largely untouched by the first outbreak. By 1357, it had reached Prague, and by 1360, it had spread to Germany and France. The city of Avignon, home to the papacy, was particularly affected, with widespread paranoia and violence against Jewish communities, who were unjustly blamed for the disease.
Medical professionals of the time, like Dr. Guy de Chauliac, documented their experiences with the second plague. Despite their efforts, misconceptions about the disease’s causes persisted. Some believed it was spread by “venomous humors” or toxic vapors, leading to ineffective treatments and preventative measures.
In 1362 and 1363, the plague crossed the Alps into Italy, targeting cities like Milan, which had previously escaped the first wave. The disease spread slowly but relentlessly, leaving a trail of death and despair. Chronicles from Piacenza describe the symptoms and attempted cures, highlighting the limited medical knowledge of the time.
The second plague eventually reached Britain, where detailed records from the Diocese of Winchester provide insight into its impact. The disease disproportionately affected children and young men, leading to significant societal and demographic changes. Despite a lower overall death rate compared to the first outbreak, the second plague’s toll on morale and recovery was profound.
The Plague of Children serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerability of human societies to pandemics. While the Black Death and its aftermath reshaped the medieval world, they also offer valuable lessons for understanding and managing modern public health crises. The resilience and adaptability of societies in the face of such challenges continue to be relevant today.
Research another historical pandemic and prepare a presentation comparing its impact and societal changes to those of the Black Death. Focus on the origins, spread, and societal responses. Present your findings to the class, highlighting any similarities or differences in how societies adapted to these crises.
Engage in a role-playing debate where you assume the role of a medieval figure (e.g., a peasant, a noble, a merchant, or a clergy member) and discuss the societal changes post-Black Death. Debate the benefits and drawbacks of these changes from your character’s perspective.
Conduct a research project on Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the Black Death. Explore its biology, transmission methods, and modern scientific understanding. Present your findings in a report, discussing how this knowledge could help prevent future outbreaks.
Write a fictional diary entry from the perspective of a survivor of the Plague of Children. Describe daily life, societal changes, and personal reflections during this period. Share your entry with classmates to explore different viewpoints and experiences.
Analyze the medical observations and treatments documented during the Black Death and the Plague of Children. Compare these with modern medical practices and discuss the evolution of medical understanding. Prepare a short essay or presentation on your analysis.
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Towards the middle of the 14th century, a terrible plague struck the people of the East and the West. It cruelly mistreated nations, carrying away a significant part of that generation. It swept away and destroyed many achievements of civilization, shattering the forces of empires and weakening their power to the point of total destruction. It was as if nature had ordered the world to humble itself, and the world had obeyed.
These words were written in 1377 by Tunisian scholar and historian Abu l-Rahman Ibn Khaldun. He was discussing the single greatest catastrophe in the history of mankind up until that point: the Black Death, which reached North Africa and Europe in the 1340s. However, Ibn Khaldun was not referring exclusively to that pandemic. Modern accounts of the Black Death usually focus on the first wave but rarely cover its return to the shores of the old world. Just a decade after the initial outbreak, inhabitants of Europe and the Mediterranean basin would again suffer from a second sweep of the grim angel, known as the Plague of Children.
The Black Death is the name we give today to the pandemic that killed between one-third and two-thirds of the world’s population in the first half of the 14th century. The epidemic likely originated in Central Asia or China in the early 1330s and then spread to Europe, the Mediterranean, and Africa, carried by caravans of merchants along the Silk Road as well as Mongol cavalry. By September of 1347, the Black Death appeared in Southern Italy as an uninvited guest on merchant ships. From there, traveling mostly by sea, this mysterious disease conquered most of Europe and Africa, eventually subsiding in the early 1350s.
When I say “mysterious,” I mean from the point of view of witnesses of that time. Contemporary historians, archaeologists, and medical professionals have identified the most likely culprit: the Black Death was an extremely virulent and infectious pandemic of bubonic and pneumonic plague caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. The bacteria used fleas as vectors, which traveled on the fur of rats and other rodents. After infecting and killing their animal hosts, the fleas would attack humans.
If you want to know more about the Black Death, you can absolutely watch our biographic special from Halloween last year. Today, though, we’re going to focus on the period immediately after the pestilence of 1347, especially about the so-called second plague or second pestilence, or the Plague of Children. This was the second outbreak that ravaged Europe from 1360 to 1364.
In the early 1350s, the Black Death had finally given some respite to Europe. Most souls were swept away by the normal occurrences of the era: famine, endemic disease, and the Hundred Years’ War. The unseen angel of death had laid down its broom for the moment. But what type of society arose after the catastrophe? As I mentioned, as much as two-thirds of the population had died in an agony of fevers and swollen black buboes. This meant that fields and farms were empty. Some of the remaining survivors in the countryside abandoned their dwellings and moved to the cities, looking for a fresh start and to enjoy the benefits offered by city authorities seeking to replenish their numbers. Municipal leaders were keen to attract new residents.
Others decided to remain in the countryside. Labor was now scarce, and peasants and farm tenants could negotiate higher wages and lower rents. The demographics of landowners had also changed, with entire families wiped out and large plots of land left without anyone to inherit them, except for the Church, which used the aftermath of the Black Death to greatly increase its wealth and power.
Another consequence of the Black Death was a downshift in the nature of warfare. There were fewer men of fighting age, especially fewer peasants who could be levied to raise armies. So in the 1350s, feudal lords and monarchs had to rely more on companies of mercenaries—private armies that frequently shifted their theater of operations or simply switched sides. It can be argued that large numbers of traveling soldiers in unsanitary conditions may have been a recipe for a pestilence disaster, but in the first half of the 1350s, no new epidemics were recorded in Europe, except for one of an unconventional sort: an outbreak of marriages.
Take the French town of Jivari, 130 kilometers north of Lyon. Jivari was hit hardest by the Black Death in 1348. The town registers acknowledged zero marriages taking place that year, but in 1349, 42 lucky couples sealed their vows. A similar situation was described in Britain by historian J. Crussell, who argues that the Black Death in Britain killed only 20% of those aged between 10 to 35 but exacted a much higher toll amongst their parents. The younger generations, having now inherited and become financially independent, were all too eager to marry. A spike in marriages naturally led to an increase in birth rates. One could even say that humanity was bouncing back or that nature was trying to compensate for the tremendous losses that the human race had suffered.
I know that life in the late Middle Ages was no picnic, especially if you were French or English, slugging it out for decades on end. The aftermath of the Black Death, though, must have felt like a relief. After years of pain, finally, the giggles of children and nursery rhymes would fill the air. But alas, it wouldn’t last long. The Black Death of 1347 had largely spared the lands of Bohemia and Southern Poland. During its march of conquest in 1352, the plague reached the vast lands of Russia before apparently subsiding. In 1357, records showed that a second pestilence had reached Prague, ravaging the city over several outbreaks that lasted until 1360. In 1359, evidence shows that the plague crossed into modern-day Germany, with cases recorded in the city of Ulm in the region of Swabia. The contagion cut through Germany from east to west and crossed the Rhine into the Kingdom of France.
In 1360, the epidemic reached the fair city of Avignon in Southern France, which had served as the residence of the papacy since 1305. As you may imagine, such an important city was teeming with clergymen, bishops, aristocrats, and the best physicians that money could buy. One of them was Dr. Guy de Chauliac, who left a precious testimony of his experience with the second plague and the atmosphere of despair and paranoia that gripped his fellow citizens. He wrote that many were in doubt about the cause of this great mortality. In some places, they thought that the Jews had poisoned the world, and so they killed them. In others, they believed it was the poor and deformed, and they drove them out. In others still, they feared the nobles and were afraid to go abroad.
The lynching of Jewish communities was unfortunately a common byproduct of this pandemic, as well as the 1347 outbreak. Even the Pope had called for Christians not to slay their fellow Jewish citizens, but senseless death breeds panic, and panic breeds violence. Violent crowds need a scapegoat. Jewish communities were perceived to suffer fewer deaths than Christian ones, making it easy to blame them for the plague.
These acts of violence, when recorded, could be used by historians to trace the progress of the contagion. For example, French author Jean de Gennosaur was able to determine that the second plague had reached Poland in 1630 after finding Jewish eulogies commemorating the slaying of martyrs in Krakow. Gennosaur compared further Polish records with writings by de Chauliac and others, and they all highlighted the same conclusion: the second pestilence reaped victims across the societal spectrum, but it had a predilection for certain profiles of victims—young men over women and members of the upper classes over the lower classes. Most of all, there were child victims aged 13 or younger. These were the children who had been born after the Black Death had disappeared, who were now being struck down by this new plague.
What would it have been like to be a parent in those days? Consider this: you have survived the single deadliest event in the history of humanity. You have risen from despair and found the strength to start a new life and to create new life. Only a few years later, that same invisible monster, which has killed half of those you ever knew and loved, returns and kills the young person who has given new meaning to your existence.
One year after Dr. de Chauliac recorded his findings, the plague reached Paris in the summer of 1361. Chronicles confirmed that children died by the thousands. They also noted that the illness killed scores of young men in their late teens or early 20s but spared their young wives. They described how the streets of Paris, half-empty, were strewn with silent shadows gliding away with their eyes lowered to the ground—a city of widows clad in black.
You may have started to spot a pattern here: Bohemia, Poland, young men, children—areas and populations that had been spared the ordeal of the 1347 pandemic were now succumbing to the second plague. This trend was confirmed by the pattern of contagion in the Italian peninsula.
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In 1362 and 1363, the second pestilence crossed the Alps and made its return to Italy. Areas that had survived the first pestilence largely unscathed were now punished by the fury of the new contagion. In this case, the target was Milan. City authorities had successfully protected their population by enforcing a strict quarantine in 1348, but now they were taken by surprise. From Milan and Lombardy, the plague spread to the east in the Venetian region and then southwards, reaching Piacenza, some 70 miles southeast of Milan. Here, an unnamed chronicle left a vivid description of the outward signs of the second pestilence in some of the dying: coagulated blood in the buboes under the armpits or on the groin, pustules or abscesses forming around their heads, especially behind the ears, and others yet spitting putrid blood, which was a very bad sign. A burning fever suffocated all of them after two or three days of manifesting symptoms.
Our friend in Piacenza also explains how he may have survived. In patients who had developed buboes on the groin, if those tumors became softer and the fever diminished, if the bubo was covered in plaster of lard and then lanced with a hot iron and depleted of secretions, then the patient was healed. This description is just one of the many cures that circulated at the time. The most widely reprinted was a treatise written by the Bishop of Aarhus, a doctor of physique, who claimed to have studied medicine at Montpellier University, a renowned center of medieval medical studies. Fun fact: two centuries later, Montpellier would be the alma mater of another famous plague doctor and prophet, Michel de Nostredame, aka Nostradamus.
The Bishop believed that the disease was propagated by venomous humors that entered the victim’s airways. To prevent this from happening, he recommended holding a loaf of bread or a sponge soaked in vinegar next to one’s mouth. He taught to look out for signs of warning that may alert to the incoming pestilence: swarms of flies, shooting stars, comets, thunder and lightning coming from the south, and southern winds. The venomous humors or vapors could be generated by any factor that may corrupt the air: a dead carcass, still waters in a ditch, or even a privy (toilet). These vapors could poison either the air or the ground, causing infirmity in man.
The formidable physician explained why some people fall ill while others are immune. According to him, bodies that are more “hot disposed” will be an easy prey to contagion. By “hot disposed,” he meant people whose pores were more open than normal. This could happen if they had an angry temper, engaged in hard physical labor, bathed too often, or abused themselves with women. The Bishop addresses the question of person-to-person contagion. While a primary infection may be caused by humors, a diseased individual will develop boils and sores that release toxic vapors, infecting bystanders.
Now, we may have gotten the causes all wrong, but he nailed this next piece of advice: in pestilence time, nobody should stand in great press of people because some of them may be infected. Also, during the time of the pestilence, it is better to stay within the house, as it is not wholesome to go into the city or town to get rid of vapors. Infected individuals should change the chamber they sleep in and have their windows open to the north and east, but never to the south. And why not to the south? Because hot winds from the south will open your pores.
Of course, as an added precaution against contagion, households were encouraged to purify the air by spraying vinegar and rose water or by burning herbs such as bay tree, juniper, wormwood, and something called “this,” which I’ve never heard of. When it came to curing the infected, the Bishop’s advice was to bleed the patients until they fainted. For a little letting of blood, “move thine stereth venom.” Clearly, neither the learned advice from Aarhus nor from the writer in Piacenza could work for all of those affected. The plague took another leap in a south-easterly direction, reaching Bologna. Here, the contagion was stubborn and unforgiving. The first cases were recorded as early as January 1362, and the citizens of this fair city continued to die for the next 13 months.
While Bologna was systematically decimated, the speed of travel for the second Black Death seemed to have slowed down, but it was only a temporary respite. In 1363, death moved to Tuscany, then central Italy. By June, it had entered Naples, its gateway to the rest of Southern Italy. When death kicked open the door to Naples, it had completed its invasion of the major port cities of the Mediterranean basin. Traveling merchants and sailors were efficient vectors of the plague. Barcelona, Crete, and Damascus, among other port cities, had to endure the cruel cull. The generalized mortality appeared to subside in Italy only in mid-1364, although it continued to haunt the canals of Venice for much longer.
Italian chroniclers and historians have observed an interesting point about the timing aspect of the second plague: it killed about as quickly as the first one, after about five days from the appearance of the first signs. However, its geographic spread was much slower compared to the original Black Death, which had blazed through the peninsula from south to north in 10 months. The second one, instead, lingered on for almost three years, taking its time to lay ruin to depleted populations before marching on to another location. The slower spread may be explained by the more selective nature of the killer.
In 1361, most European chroniclers agree that children and young men were the favorite victims of this plague. Young men, especially, were more physically mobile. By killing them, the pathogens also reduced their own chances to travel. However, the slower spread did not prevent the Plague of Children from reaching all corners of the continent.
Our next destination will be Britain, where we’ll take a look at the detailed records left by the Bishops of Winchester. A medieval text, the Polychronicon, tells us how the second plague outbreak began in London during Easter of 1361. It then moved to invade the rest of Southern England. Like in France, Italy, or Poland, the pestilence laid waste among children, young men, and the wealthier rungs of society. Whereas nobles and clergymen had endured a mortality rate of 4.5% in 1348 and 13% in 1349, nearly 24% of the upper classes were killed by the foul buboes in 1361.
However, when it comes to the general death rate, all chroniclers and records agree that it was not as high as the one experienced during the Black Death. Approximately one quarter of the population died during the second plague, which is still a horrifying figure out of context but might be less than half the figure from only a decade earlier. However, the second plague’s impact on society was equally devastating, if not more so. The population had not fully recovered yet was subjected to a second cull. The demise of the more innocent victims had a profound effect on the morale of those who were left behind.
The waste laid by the second plague in Britain is generally well documented, but the records held in the Diocese of Winchester offer a particularly detailed picture. As we have learned from an excellent paper by John Mullen of Cardiff University, the Bishops of Winchester oversaw 60 manors spread over a large area, which included six counties. The records left behind by the diocese gave a detailed account of the demographics of the outbreak.
Plague – A contagious bacterial disease characterized by fever and delirium, often resulting in widespread mortality, such as the Black Death in the 14th century. – The plague significantly reduced the population of Europe during the Middle Ages, altering the course of history.
Children – Young human beings below the age of puberty, often considered in historical contexts for their roles in family and society. – In the Industrial Revolution, children were often employed in factories, which led to significant social reforms.
Society – A community of individuals living together and interacting within a shared environment, often analyzed in historical and sociological studies. – The Enlightenment period brought about significant changes in European society, emphasizing reason and individualism.
Warfare – The engagement in or the activities involved in war or conflict, often studied for its impact on civilizations and technological advancements. – The development of trench warfare during World War I marked a significant shift in military strategy and technology.
Population – The total number of people inhabiting a particular area or country, often analyzed in demographic studies. – The population of Europe experienced a dramatic increase during the 19th century due to industrialization and improved living conditions.
Europe – A continent that has been the site of significant historical events, cultural developments, and scientific advancements. – The Renaissance was a pivotal period in Europe, marking a renewed interest in art, science, and exploration.
Medicine – The science and practice of diagnosing, treating, and preventing disease, which has evolved significantly throughout history. – The discovery of penicillin in the 20th century revolutionized medicine and drastically reduced mortality rates from bacterial infections.
History – The study of past events, particularly in human affairs, often involving the analysis of causes and effects. – Understanding history is crucial for comprehending the social and political dynamics of the present.
Devastation – Severe and overwhelming destruction or damage, often used to describe the impact of wars or natural disasters. – The devastation caused by the atomic bombings in World War II led to a reevaluation of nuclear warfare’s ethical implications.
Bacteria – Microscopic single-celled organisms that can be beneficial or pathogenic, playing a significant role in ecosystems and human health. – The discovery of bacteria as a cause of disease was a major milestone in the field of microbiology.
