Facts about Black Death

The Black Death hit the culture of towns and cities disproportionately hard, although rural areas (where 90 percent of the population lived) were also significantly affected.

The famine was self-perpetuating, impacting life in places like Flanders and Burgundy as much as the Black Death was later to impact all of Europe.

Liquor (distilled alcohol), originally made by alchemists, was commonly applied as a remedy for the Black Death, and, as a result, the consumption of liquor in Europe rose dramatically after the plague.

The specter of the Black Death dominated art and literature throughout the generation that experienced it.

The pneumonic plague was the second most commonly seen form during the Black Death, with a mortality rate of 90 to 95 percent.

In 2006 a scientific study by Dr. Thomas van Hoof (Utrecht University) suggests the Black Death contributed to the Little Ice Age.

Their research and findings are thoroughly documented in Return of the Black Death: The World's Greatest Serial Killer.

Economic historians such as Fernand Braudel have concluded that the Black Death exacerbated a recession in the European economy that had been under way since the beginning of the century.

The initial fourteenth century European event was called the "Great Mortality" by contemporary writers and, with later outbreaks, became known as the "Black Death."

The Black Death led to cynicism toward religious officials who could not keep their promises of curing plague victims and banishing the disease.

A theory put forth by Stephen O'Brien says the Black Death is likely responsible, through natural selection, for the high frequency of the CCR5-D32 genetic defect in people of European descent.

More recently the researchers have published computer modeling (Journal of Medical Genetics, March 2005) demonstrating how the Black Death has made around 10 percent of Europeans resistant to HIV.

Recent scientific and historical investigations have led some researchers to doubt the long-held belief that the Black Death was an epidemic of bubonic plague.

The protagonist, a historian, is sent to the wrong year, arriving in England just as the Black Death is starting.

Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Masque of the Red Death (1842) is set in an unnamed country during a fictional plague that bears strong resemblance to the Black Death.

An important legacy of the Black Death was to cause the eastward movement of what was left of north European Jewry to Poland and Russia, where it remained until the twentieth century.

Still, the majority of historians support the theory that the bubonic plague caused the black death, so counterarguments have been developed.

Including Middle Eastern lands, India, and China the Black Death killed at least 75 million people.

The Black Death has been used as a subject or as a setting in modern literature and media.

A knight returns from the Crusades and finds that his home country is ravaged by the Black Death.

Liquor (distilled alcohol), originally made by alchemists, was commonly applied as a remedy for the Black Death, and, as a result, the consumption of liquor in Europe rose dramatically after the plague.

The Black Death, also known as the Black Plague, was a devastating pandemic that first struck Europe in the mid-late-fourteenth century (1347–1351), killing between one-third and two-thirds of Europe's population.

The Black Death hit the monasteries very hard because of their close quarters and their kindness in helping the sick, so that there was a severe shortage of clergy after the epidemic cycle.

A cause and effect relationship between the Renaissance and the Black Death has been suggested.

In 2001, epidemiologists Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan from Liverpool University proposed the theory that the Black Death might have been caused by an Ebola-like virus, not a bacterium.