Blog Post

NOT EVERY PANDEMICS IS THE BLACK DEATH

Interesting times, no? We live in interesting times. Oh ho ho the times they are interesting. By that, of course, I mean that I am very bored, but at the same time so anxious I am giving myself headaches. Pandemics are not fun! Staying in your house is not fun! Worrying that people are going to die is not fun! Watching governments debate whether rich people’s wealth is more important than people dying is not fun!

This is not as bad as living through the Black Death, or the plague generally.

And … you know that. You fundamentally understand that this is true. But it is also true that it is coming up over and over again right now as we all struggle to connect to something historical in the midst of a difficult time.

Now some of you may be wondering why I have deliniated between the Black Death and the plague up there. Well, that’s because the Black Death was an outbreak of bubonic plague, but not all bubonic plagues are the Black Death.  (All squares are rectangles, not all rectangles are squares, etc etc etc.)

K, so TF does that mean? Wellllllll the Black Death was, of course, an outbreak of the bubonic plague, otherwise known as Yersinia pestis. The thing about the bubonic plague is that it is a real one and it has been around the joint for a long damn time. The first European incursion of Yersinia pestis can be linked, for example to the early medieval period, when historians refer to it as the Justinian Plague. This little episode lasted from 541-542 and it was primarily felt in the Eastern Roman Empire (AKA Byzantium for the anachronistic crowd), especially in the capital Constantinople. It also killed a lot of people over in the Sassanian Empire, which we now know as Iran. When all was said and done after several recurrences, some historians have estimated that the Justinian plague killed about 25 – 100 million people, or about half the population of Europe. We are currently reassessing this as some historians have pointed out that these estimated may be based on traumatised people being extra, given that we don’t have the physical evidence to back it up. Either way, it was some real shit. It was not, however the Black Death.

Similarly, the piece of plague memorabilia that likely springs to mind when you think “plague”, aka plague doctor masks, are also not about the Black Death. Instead, they are linked to an outbreak of Yersinia pestis from the seventeenth century. Which means – and I cannot stress this enough – THEY ARE EARLY MODERN, AND NOT MEDIEVAL.