> These historians argue therefore that this helps explain the virulence of the Black Death. This outbreak was the most devastating natural disaster in European history, "ravaging Europe's population and causing economic, social, political, and cultural upheaval" (Duiker and Spielvogel 488). A chronicler of the time told how families were torn apart by death and abandonment. No one could be found to bury the dead, which only made the plague all the worse. The plague was seen as an evil force over which human beings had no control, and they were also horrified by its result--the breakdown of all normal human relations.
The Black Death was the first major epidemic disease to strike Europe since the seventh century, and this also made it all the more horrible to a people not accustomed to this sort of tragedy. Historians note that the absence of this sort of devastation was one of the explanations for the remarkable population growth of medieval Europe. the great plague originated in Central Asia, and it is believed that it was first spread by the Mongols as they expanded across Asia and also by ecological changes causing Central Asian rodents to move westward, taking the fleas and the disease with them. The symptoms of the bubonic plague then began to appear in Europe--high fever, aching joints, swelling of the lymph nodes, and dark blotches caused by bleeding beneath the skin. The bubonic form was actually the least toxic form of the plague, but it still killed 50 to 60 percent of its victims. Pneumonic plague was less frequent in occurrence than bubonic plague, which was fortunate because it is more virulent:
In pneumonic plague, the bacterial infection spread to the lungs, resulting in severe coughing, bloody sputum, and the relatively easy spread of the bacillus from human to human by coughing (Duiker and Spielvogel 488).
The plague arrived in europe in October of 1347 when Genoese merchants came from the Middle East ...