Death "came out of The Region of Darkness," which could refer to Central Asia

                    The Black Death Bubonic Plague

                                          (PART 2)

THE REGION OF DARKNESS :

Death "came out of The Region of Darkness," which could refer to Central Asia – or a far darker and more distant land beyond this world. According to the Egyptian scholar Al-Mazriqi, Asia was depopulated all the way to the Korean Peninsula. His own country fared no better: Cairo, Africa's most populous city at the time, lost 52 percent of its population. In just two days, about 14,000 people died. The bodies were so many that religious officials, in a rare event, disregarded the compulsory prayers for the dead: there were simply too many. "The number who died daily in Damascus had been two thousand," Ibn Battuta, the great traveler, and writer of the 14th century wrote in his Travel memoir in 1345. 

"Civilization both in the East and in the West was visited by a terrible plague which decimated nations and caused populations to vanish," said Moroccan historian Khaldun of the apocalyptic wasteland. Cities and structures were demolished, highways and route markers were destroyed, towns and mansions were deserted, and dynasties and tribes weakened. 

STRUCTURES WERE DEMOLISHED :

Until recently, we (the descendants of the survivors) imagined that the spread had been stopped by the Sahara Desert, that the Black Death had spared Sub-Saharan Africa." The plague is never mentioned in written sources for that region, and the area lacks the most gruesome relic of the pandemic: the 'plague pits' or mass graves."Civilization both in the East and in the West was visited by a terrible plague which decimated nations and caused populations to vanish," said Moroccan historian Khaldun of the apocalyptic wasteland. Cities and structures were demolished, highways and route markers were destroyed, towns and mansions were deserted, and dynasties and tribes weakened. Due to fleas and rodents, the Yersinia thralls somehow traveled the forbidding expanse of sand and infected settlements on both continents' coastlines. In places like Akrokrowa, Ghana, and Ife, Nigeria, archaeologists have discovered evidence of societal breakdown and town abandonment. 

Other cities and communities in East Africa, from the Red Sea coast to Tanzania and even Madagascar, were abandoned in the mid-14th century. Geneticists were unable to obtain DNA from African victims during that time period, therefore proof is limited...Nonetheless, the trends of abrupt collapse and depopulation are alarming. The Black Death was clearly on a mission to conquer the entire world. Asia had plummeted. The Middle East and Africa were still being conquered. Europe was the next target. Yersinia Pestis outbreaks could have invaded Russian principalities very early in the battle for Asia. Yersinia Pestis prefers to infect rats and other rodents at first. Plague bacteria take ten to fourteen days to kill a rat colony infected with the disease. The fleas infesting these rats will fast for the next three days, waiting for new prey to walk close. This target could be another rat, but a hungry flea will attack a human without hesitation. When a human host is bitten by an infected flea, Yersinia Pestis enters his or her bloodstream. 

BUBONIC PLAGUE :

Swelling of a lymph node, most commonly in the groin, thigh, armpit, or neck, is one of the first signs of infection the lymph node will enlarge until it resembles a swollen, dark, and painful bubo. The bubonic plague is named after it. While the sickness is incubating, the infected person may feel fine for three days. Then the first symptoms arise, quickly becoming more severe: fever, headache, chills, and generalized weakness. It'll just take another three days after that. The infected individual will afterward die in more than 80% of cases. A rat colony is exterminated by Yersinia after 14 days. It will take another three days for infected fleas to infect the first human. The first human dies six days later the Black Death's speed and depravity, on the other hand, had a demonic quality about them. Plague bacteria became concentrated in the lungs in certain cases, causing pneumonia-like symptoms.

This was the pneumonic plague, which was even more dangerous than the bubonic plague. Pneumonic plague patients could die as soon as two hours after contracting the disease. Worse, because sufferers of pneumonic plague have severe, bloody coughing fits, they can readily infect healthy people. They can easily infect other people's airways with the droplets they release, restarting the contagion cycle. Surprisingly, the human-on-human transmission did not cause the great majority of Black Death victims. Infections were nearly all caused by flea bites from rats who had previously sucked blood. The parasites may strike right after consuming the blood of a rat, or they could travel unnoticed aboard another animal or human host. The Black Death had to rely significantly on rats for its invasion plans, which had an impact on both the invasion's geographic spread and timeframe. 

BLACK DEATH IN EUROPE :

Rats thrived on ships, particularly merchant ships, which could cruise 40 kilometers (25 miles) per day at the timeThis is why, unlike in Asia, the Black Death in Europe seemed to spread in leaps and bounds rather than in a linear fashion. Rat fleas are parasites that are most active during the warmer months, which explains why the mid-14th century's springs and summers were particularly deadly. 'Winter is coming,' must have seemed like a promise back then, for the illness lost most of its contagious power throughout the winter. Doctors at the time were powerless to combat the Black Death. 'Lancing,' or piercing, the buboes, which discharged a foul-smelling black liquid, was the most usual therapy. Leeching or bleeding the sick, or washing their bodies with vinegar, were some of the other procedures used. A far later book, Edward IV's Plague Medicines, published in 1480, mentions a regularly used medicine.

In 1344, the Golden Horde chose to lay siege to the Crimean peninsula's coastal city of Kaffa. Kaffa has been ruled by Genoa, one of the Four Italian Sea Republics, from the late 1200s. For three years, the Genoese held off the Mongols, but in 1347, troops from the Golden Horde came, bringing with them something unwelcome: the disease. The closing phases of the siege were described by an Italian lawyer, Gabriele De Mussis, as follows: "The entire army was infected by a plague that overran the Mongols and murdered thousands upon thousands every day."The Mongol leader ordered that bodies be loaded into catapults and hurled toward the city, in the hopes that the foul odor would kill everyone inside. "Catapulting your own dead warriors inside the city walls... that's a strategy that General Black Death would love. Despite this, the illness quickly spread within the municipal limits. The Genoese merchants then departed by ship, pushed out by the simultaneous menace of the Mongols and the epidemic. 

METASTATIC LEAPS :

The Black Death's war in Asia was fought on the ground, with caravans and quick Mongol cavalry. The invasion of Europe would be more of a maritime affair. One of the Genoese ships landed in the Sicilian port of Messina in October of 1347. The port officials could tell something was amiss because the majority of the crew had died, and the survivors spoke of a terrible disease that had devastated them. The survivors were not allowed to leave the ships, and they died all within a few days. "The sailors brought in their bones an illness so severe that whoever spoke a word to them was infected and could in no way rescue himself from death," according to a contemporary account. Then, on a thigh or an arm, a lentil-shaped pustule emerged. 

The infection spread throughout the body, resulting in intense bloody vomiting. It lasted three days and there was nothing that could be done to keep it from ending in death." As a result, anyone who spoke a word to the sick became infected. No one had considered the rats. They had hurried over the cables linking the ship to the piers, loyal to their dark Master. These tightrope walkers were Europe's executioners. The outbreak in Messina is widely regarded as the Black Death's first appearance in Europe. The Genoese sailors from Kaffa, on the other hand, stopped at several other ports before and after Messina, spreading the epidemic in so-called metastatic leaps.

In May 1347, the Black Death came to Constantinople after spreading along the Adriatic coast. In September, it arrived in Marseilles. Throughout the autumn, Genoese, or those infected by them, landed in all of the Mediterranean's major trading hubs: Dubrovnik, Venice, Pisa, Genoa, and Valencia. All of these ports served as the invasion force's bridgeheads before breaking through to the mainland. The Black Death infected more commerce ships, resulting in more metastatic jumps. Southern France, Northern Spain, and practically all of Italy were under the Conqueror's control by March 1348. Florence, a wealthy city-state, had been hit worse than other Italian cities. It is claimed that 70% of the population died in the first few months of the epidemic. The outbreak prompted Boccaccio to compose his major work, 'Decameron.' "It first betrayed itself by the formation of various tumors in the groin or armpits, some of which became as large as a normal apple, others as huge as an egg," he writes.

PLAGUE ARRIVED :

Many people died in the streets on a daily or nightly basis. Many others who died at home were barely noticed by their neighbors until the stink of their bodies spread the word."The Black Death moved northward after that. The swarms of Yersinia-infected rats marched inland from the French Mediterranean bridgeheads to reach the Atlantic ports. The plague arrived in England on a ship from Bordeaux, and the first town to be affected was Melcombe Regis, where the pandemic began just before June 24th. In August 1348, the city of London fell. 

The population was so low by January 1349, especially among priests, that the Bishop of Bath wrote to his diocese, "The plague... has left numerous parish churches... without parson or priest to care for their parishioners. By the end of 1349, the entire Kingdom had been poisoned. Norway was the first Scandinavian country to be invaded, located further north. In the autumn of 1348, Oslo was the first to fall. The outbreak in Oslo was thankfully brought to a halt by the arrival of cold weather, but it resurfaced in early spring. The Black Death's pincer maneuver into Norway was completed the following year with a second landing: the Ghost Ship at Bergen, the plague's own Naglfar, was a ship of wool merchants from the English port of King's Lynn. Taking Oslo was a brilliant strategic move by the Black Death. The Hanseatic fleet, a League of affluent and strong merchant towns ranging from the North Sea to the Baltic, used the city as a key commercial center. Needless to say, merchants sailing out of Oslo propagated an unknown cargo to new areas, and Denmark, Sweden, and Northern Germany quickly fell. The new front opened in the spring of 1350 and proceeded south, crushing the inhabitants with the same disease invasion that had arrived from Austria in Southern Germany. The Black Death plotted its next move now that it had swept throughout practically all of Europe. 

SICKNESS RESURFACED :

Invading Russia was one that would prove disastrous for many conquerors in the coming years. It had attempted to arrive from the east, but the caravans along the Silk Road had been blocked by the Golden Horde. Nobody could now stop the Nation's scourge. In the late fall of 1351, the plague struck the principality of Novgorod, but the outbreak was halted by the arrival of a cold. 

However, this was only a temporary respite: the sickness resurfaced in the spring of 1352, eventually reaching Moscow the following year. The Black Death crossed the border with the Golden Horde from the west, completing its epic journey. The pandemic died out the following year. The only countries that had escaped the Apocalypse were Iceland and Finland; the rest of Europe was on its knees. After the Finale The exact number of people who died is still being contested. The Black Death wiped out 20 to 30 percent of Europe's population, according to conservative estimates. 

According to recent assessments, the figure is closer to 60%. That's 50 million men, women, and children who died as a result of the bite of the tiniest and most insignificant parasite imaginable. Humanity just lacked the means to combat this unseen threat. Doctors were unable to find a treatment, and even prophylactic measures proved ineffective. Although germ theory was centuries distant, officials recognized that the sickness would spread if contaminated persons were close together. Quarantines were erected in a number of cities to prohibit travelers from entering their borders. Rats and fleas, on the other hand, could never be contained because they came in from everywhere undetected. So, what put a halt to the Black Death? It was the result of a combination of two factors. The first was the arrival of longer, colder winters, which eliminated plague-carrying fleas. 

Second, the disease was far too effective to be efficient in the first place. Rats and humans alike died too swiftly as a result of the pandemic. This kept them from spreading the bacterium to more and more hosts as they went further afield. Europe, which gradually recovered after 1353, was a changing continent. Surprisingly, some of the societal transformations were beneficial. Poorer people had access to better nutrition, better working conditions, and a higher life expectancy. This was a result of the reduced workforce: feudal lords were forced to raise their laborers' wages and come up with new techniques to boost the productivity of their estates. The epidemic influenced the expansion of culture and education as well. As travel to conventional university locations grew unsafe, new scholarship centers were established, allowing academia to expand and diversify.