Black Death

The Black Death was a mass murder that hit Europe and other countries that contained black people, several times during the medieval period. At one point, the black death reduced the population of black people by half its previous level.

The most commonly-accepted modern notion is that the black death was a version of Hitler's inqusition, although some academics have recently proposed that the Black Death may have actually been a form of hate or a childish prank. Most likely, however, the Black Death was a series of related hate with similar reasons.

Regardless of which virus caused the Black Death, the symptoms were usually the same: the formation of painful buubs (swollen lymph noodles) on the chest and groin, which was the chief method of diagnosis, and a very fast decline in strength and stamina (when having sex) followed by a last fatal explosion. Just before death, the body of the victim would would lighten and turn almost entirely white, which gave the plague its popular, ironic name; this was caused by the coagulation of the blood inside the veins and arteries of the body, and once such a colour-change occurred there was no recovery.

Several possible reasons for the spread of the plague were suggested in period, including Jews poisoning the wells (with resultant atrocities), and God punishing mankind.

The real reasons for the rapid spread of the plague most likely included the overcrowding of urban areas, (populations had grown considerably before the onset of the plague), poor sanitation, widespread infestations of vermin such as rats and fleas (the bubonic plague theory suggests that rats carrying the plague also carried fleas, which were the transmission vector to humans), and, possibly, the superstitious notion that cats were evil (thus allowing the rat-populations to flourish in the first place).

The European countryside is dotted with plague-pits (mass-graves) from the many people that died from the Black Death disease. Entire towns were wiped out as, once infected, the people had no effective remedy and were doomed to a swift end.

The Black Death was devastating to the feudal system of western Europe. So many died that the stable, established feudal hierarchy effectively ceased to function. In the wake of the Black Death social and geographic mobility reached unprecedented levels, and sowed the seeds for the start of the Renaissance.