What happens when millions of people disappear within a few years? The Black Death devastated communities, strained food supplies and changed the lives of the people who survived.
Follow the plague from Central Asia to Mediterranean ports and across Europe, then step inside the towns left trying to care for the sick, bury the dead and keep everyday life running. This animated history explores the disease, its enormous human cost and the conflicts that followed.
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CHAPTERS
00:00 The empty street
00:33 A deadly arrival in 1347
01:05 The tiny passenger
01:37 Central Asia and the journey west
02:14 The spread across Europe
02:46 What getting sick meant
03:19 Trying to explain the invisible
03:51 Florence overwhelmed
04:26 How many people died?
05:00 Beyond Europe
05:34 Keeping the food coming
06:08 The survivors become valuable
06:43 Power pushes back
07:16 Fear and persecution
07:52 Plague returns and isolation begins
08:29 Living with the losses
SELECTED SOURCES
Ancient DNA and the Black Death’s Central Asian origins:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04800-3
Regional variation in European mortality:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01652-4
The University of Cambridge’s After the Plague project:
https://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/recently-completed-projects/after-plague
Plague biology and treatment — World Health Organization:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/plague
Boccaccio’s account of Florence:
https://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/Decameron/texts/DecShowText.php?lang=eng&myID=d01intro
Plague, labor and economic change in the Middle East:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/plagues-wages-and-economic-change-in-the-islamic-middle-east-7001500/3A99790607F69D1D7802907D21455A54
The history of isolation at Ragusa:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20500006/
#BlackDeath #History #AnimatedExplainer
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