Pondering the Black Death

So, we all know the black death happened. The biggest plague to ever decimate society.

Or something like that.

No one really knows how many people died, which is a problem. Everyone who was around wrote WILD and exaggerated accounts of how many people they buried each day, and how many people died. They did this to make their town seem particularly bad off, and their survival so much important.

Not to mention we have NO idea how many people were actually alive in the 1300s. All we know is that the population had just breached an amount that could be supported by the amount of food produced. 

But the plague was not the only mass death of the 1300s, or at least not the first. The great famine of 1315 killed thousands and starved everyone else so that when the black death hit in 1347 they were so malnourished that they didn't have a good enough immune system to survive.

Which explains why so many people died in the first wave.

About every 5 years or so another wave of plague hit and more and more people died. There were also a series of crop failures and bad weather that were on a more local level that greatly affected populations, but by this time the population had normalized and there weren't too many people to feed in Europe.

The great famine began because in 1314, it never stopped raining, there was no summer, no time to plant crops, no land to plant crops as even mansions were recorded to be under water, and no time for crops to mature. And this was a HUGE problem, because over the last hundred years or so, the population increased so much that people started farming in areas they had never been able to farm before, or that simply were not smart to farm.

So when it rained and rained and rained, and there was a HORRIBLE harvest, many many people starved because there wasn't enough grain, and people who could hunt and hand animals were supplementing the grain shortage with more meat and veggies. Which meant less of those too. Overall there was a HUGE shortage in food. And LOTS of death.

One generation later, the kids are in their 30s, working hard in the fields. Lucky to be alive and have survived the famine, and WAHBAM. PLAGUE.

And not just one, but probably two different kinds of plague. Pneumatic that spread through the air, and Bubonic that spread through fleas and rats. What joy? So this explains why so many people in the prime of their lives who wouldn't normally be suitable to plague die.

Overall, the 1300s were not pleasant.