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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Search for By Design on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. It is the mid-1300s. For weeks now, the people in your town have just been disappearing. One day, it's a fever. The next, they're writhing in pain, their bodies covered in these huge, swollen lumps. Carts roll through the streets, stacked with the dead. The smell, it hits you before you can even see them.
And all you can think is, how is this happening?
And am I next? The Black Death, and that will eventually kill 25% of the world's population. That's an almost unthinkable number.
The Black Death, the plague, pestilence, whatever you call it, this was the worst health disaster the world had ever seen. But what and who caused it? Everybody blames rats. The rats did nothing wrong. Right? Not rats, not cats, not just the fact that the Middle Ages weren't great for hygiene, no.
Behind one of the most deadly chapters in human history is something far larger, more complex, and more lavish.
It's riches beyond our wildest imagination.
My name is Mark Finnell, and you are about to have the Black Death, completely myth-busted, an epic of war, of wealth, unintended consequences, and no one saw it coming.
What is it that people get wrong about medieval times? Because I feel like it gets a bad rap. It gets a really bad rap. It's one of the things that is most frustrating. People have this tendency to look at the medieval period as though it is intensely and uniquely stupid. As though it's just a group of people who are rolling around in mud being idiots.
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Chapter 2: What common myths about the Black Death are debunked?
Mm-hmm.
I think people forget, like, that's a millennia of history. Yeah, exactly. And it also means a lot of different things. I think one of the reasons why people don't have the opportunity to learn about it so these myths prevail is because it's intensely complicated.
Like, what is happening in 6th century Iberian Peninsula is very, very different to what is happening in 14th century, you know, what are the German lands, right? And that's very different to what is happening in Baghdad, which is very, very different to what is, you know, happening in China, right? You have all these kind of local cultures going on. So it's difficult to teach in school.
And there is one other thing that Eleanor loves calling out. It's this idea that the medieval world was just a bit brown and gray and dreary with mud everywhere. Because in reality, according to Eleanor, it was actually a period bursting with color.
Every single medieval building used to be like painted, painted, painted both inside and out. So you'd go in and it would be covered in murals. You know, it's got to be seven different colors. They've got flowers climbing up the walls. But plaster falls off of stone walls, right? So if you go into a castle or you go into a church now, you're just going to see the bare stone.
And that's because it hasn't been kept up. Within churches, you see the same thing because when Protestantism comes in, there's a backlash against decoration, so they stop doing it. And so if you go into a medieval building now, you're going to go into like a big cold stone hall.
It turns out that idea that medieval people were, as Helena puts it, rolling around in mud, it's a bit of a misconception.
A thing I have to bring up all the time is medieval people bathed, and I literally don't understand where this...
idea has come from it's like this modern thing we're like oh yeah medieval people didn't bathe and i'm like where are you getting this from um they absolutely did so medieval people they will um usually have if you're very very wealthy you have a bath room or like a bath house and like your servants will fill it full of hot water for you every day if you live in a city or a village there will be a public bath house where they keep that going and then you go in to that and and you like get clean a couple times a week and then in between you sort of shower
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Chapter 3: How did the interconnectedness of the medieval world contribute to the spread of the plague?
So, for example, there was a big outbreak of it that we call the Justinian Plague that happened in the 5th century, where bubonic plague comes up. We've tested the bones. That's definitely bubonic plague. But something happens with the Yersinia pestis bacteria where it mutates and becomes much, much, much more virulent and much more communicable.
It's the one germ that I know how to say, which is a bacteria called Yersinia pestis. And this is the version of the plague that you may have heard of. You and I probably know it and love it as the Black Death or the Plague.
The Black Death in the mid-1300s is the first full-blown plague, at least that we know of, to rip through populations at this scale. And you may have an image in your head from movies and novels or history class. To be absolutely honest with you, whatever you're imagining, the reality was probably worse.
The first thing that's going to happen to you when you get infected is you're going to come down with a fever. And that is the first way that you know things are happening. After that, things are going to continue to get worse. Now, you are going to develop what are called buboes. It is your lymph
nodes which are struggling to deal with the bacterial load will swell and harden so oftentimes you will see basically your lymph nodes especially in your armpits and groin sometimes also in your neck but usually armpits and groin just get up to a catastrophic size and and harden and suddenly you can see people's lymph nodes which is not no you shouldn't you shouldn't be able to see them
Yeah, ideally, no. And then also sometimes we hear from medieval people that it tends to get into the lungs a bit. So sometimes some people have tried to differentiate between what we will call the bubonic and the pneumonic plagues. So also whatever is happening within the lungs. But subsequent DNA testing has not really shown that to be true. It just seems that sometimes it can also attack you.
So if especially it gets into your lungs, we are seeing a typical mortality rate of most people dying within three days. And if you have the kind without the lung element, it's about five days to a week.
So I got infected on Monday. Then by the Wednesday, if it got into my lungs, I'm gone. You're gone. But I certainly didn't make it to Sunday. Okay.
That's right. We tend to see that mortality rates are higher in cities for obvious reasons, because, you know, diseases are communicable. So, for example, in Baghdad or Florence, we see a mortality rate of up to 60% of the population. And it's sort of like the countryside drags that back down.
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Chapter 4: What role did trade routes play in the transmission of the Black Death?
Black Death is our term, not theirs. They'll just say the plague, they'll say the pestilence. So we know the date that it's all in those graves, and it does seem that this is essentially the river through which Yersinia pestis then flows. And Kyrgyzstan, now people might say, Kyrgyzstan? Why Kyrgyzstan?
Yes, why Kyrgyzstan indeed? Well, to answer that, we need to get one thing straight about the medieval world. It was not just a bunch of sad, insular, muddy towns cut off from each other. People were moving, they were trading, they were talking. I think we tend to imagine it as a bunch of isolated hamlets. In reality, it was anything but.
The medieval world is incredibly interconnected and dependent on trade and movement of people. through the entire period. Even peasants, you know, they go to market. They move back and forth between towns. They go on pilgrimage.
So you would not think it was weird, for example, to see peasants who speak German showing up in what is now Spain at San Diego de Compostela, because that's one of the big pilgrimage routes. And, you know, if you're kings and queens, you're talking to the other kings and queens all the time. Everybody is moving back and forth.
Living in such an interconnected world meant that if I was in Constantinople, today's Istanbul, and I wanted pottery from China, I could get it. I would just have to travel a very long way along something you might know as the Silk Road, baby.
The Silk Road is probably the most important vector for trade the world has ever seen. Now, confusingly, it is not a road. I knew there'd be a twist. Yeah, we really messed it up. I'll tell you what, the labeling wasn't good. But it is a series of roads that connect China with the Middle East, like the Arabian Peninsula, places like that.
And indeed, also a series of shipping routes that especially go through what is now Malaysia and Indonesia, and even indeed all the way over to Kenya.
Fun fact, what we call the Silk Road, actually not a road. It was this massive network of routes. We're talking about like 6,500 kilometres. And it linked, well, pretty much linked the entire known world. You've got China, Korea, Japan in the east, down through Central Asia, into India, all the way across to Turkey and Italy in the west.
And along the way, there were these massive trading cities. So you're looking at Beijing, Baghdad, Damascus, Constantinople, all connected like a chain of commercial pit stops. The journey itself, though, yeah, not exactly easy. We're talking like the Gobi Desert, the mountains of Central Asia. It's very unforgiving terrain. And yet, despite that, stuff moved. A lot of stuff.
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Chapter 5: Where did the Black Death actually begin?
Ceramics, precious metals, tea, cotton. You have horses heading into China. You have gunpowder heading out, which of course completely changed warfare in Europe. And then, of course, it's not just things. Ideas moved. Religions moved. But of all of the things and all of the stuff, the most precious thing traded was silk.
Everybody wants silk. But spices also move back and forth really extensively. Pottery, everybody wants Chinese pottery, you know, so that moves back and forth very quickly. Out of Europe, oftentimes you have wool that is moving or silver. Furs, that is a big commodity that the Europeans are moving. So it is really the artery that connects Afro-Eurasia.
And Afro-Eurasia is kind of like the number one thing to think about, like in the medieval world, like Africans, Asians, Europeans, they are in constant connection and contact with each other throughout this period. They just haven't got to Australia and the Americas yet.
Don't worry. Give them time. But we made a big deal out of Kyrgyzstan earlier, and this is why. Because if you are traveling east to west or west to west along the Silk Road, at some point you will hit Kyrgyzstan.
You got to get through Kyrgyzstan if you are going to be going from China to Constantinople, which these people are.
Which means, along with the ceramics and the spices and the silks moving along the Silk Road, there will be something else traveling too. Something nobody is trading for, nobody's paying for, and most definitely nobody saw coming.
Germs, and in particular, the Black Death or the plague.
Yes, perhaps the most globally impactful commodity traded along the Silk Road was death. The black death, spreading into cities from Baghdad to Cairo and indeed all the way up into Europe.
Germs move as easily as money. So if you have trade routes where you are moving unfathomable riches, if you're moving nutmeg and pepper and silk, and pottery and furs and wonderful things like silver, you're also moving microbes and that means that you are essentially gambling whatever you trade.
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Chapter 6: What misconceptions exist about medieval hygiene and bathing practices?
We've got the plague and we've got the Silk Road. And I think if you ever think about them at all, you think about them as separate things. But actually, there is this deep and very tragic connection between the two that most people aren't aware of.
Oh yeah, and I mean, literally you cannot have one without the other. The Black Death simply would not have happened in the way that it did if the Silk Road wasn't going through there.
The plague spread along these trade routes, coursing through them like arteries in a body. But, and this is a personal request from Eleanor to you, contrary to popular opinion, Please stop blaming rats.
I feel very strongly about this because everybody blames rats. The rats did nothing wrong. So what happened was the Yersinia pestis germ lives in the digestive tracts of fleas.
And those fleas lived on marmots, which are a sort of large ground squirrel thing.
And marmots then come into contact with the animals that are in the caravans moving through the Silk Road and the fleas get off of the marmots and onto the varying animals, including humans.
But how much did the people of the Middle Ages actually understand what was happening? Because I think it's easy to assume that they just had no idea as all this chaos was unfolding around them. But there is a story that suggests that the people of the time knew a lot more about what was going on than perhaps we might give them credit for.
So there is a group of Mongol people that we call the Golden Horde.
The Golden Horde emerged in like the 1200s, initially led by the grandson of Genghis Khan.
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Chapter 7: How did the Golden Horde influence the spread of the plague?
There's this big myth that the church, capital T, capital C, thought that cats were demonic and made a pronouncement that everyone should kill their cats and so the cats couldn't keep the rat population down and that's why everyone got the Black Death, which is... You will not believe how prevalent this myth is. It's something that's said to me all the time on social media.
And I'm like, okay, so in the first place, no, none of that happened. We see no evidence, like in the record, you would see like a lot of cat bones around if everyone suddenly killed all their cats. You know, two, cats are seen as completely indispensable in the medieval world because you need to control vermin. That is absolutely true. Like monks own cats.
And then also, if that were true, well, what happened in Baghdad, where the church doesn't control everything, right? But people don't think the Black Death happened places other than Europe, so they just kind of conveniently forget about that. So there is this tendency to blame people, like the individuals who die at this incredible rate, in what is the worst pandemic the world has ever seen.
I think to make ourselves feel better, we want to say that this happened because they were stupid. It's a comforting story that we can tell ourselves. It's like, oh, well, they were just stupid and that's why they all died of this. And not that, well, sometimes germs are introduced and there isn't really anything that anyone can do about it and we can't respond quickly enough. That's scary.
So that's not the story we tell. We tell the story that, I don't know, medieval Europeans hate cats and we're all punished, which when you say it out loud, it's very funny when you think about it. But it's also one of these things that people really genuinely believe that to be true.
When you look back at a story like this where, in actual fact, something that popular culture tells us is a comprehensively European awful thing, but actually doesn't start there at all, originates in another part of the world and only gets there because of this incredible trade route, right? When you take a step back, what does it tell you about history? Like, what's the lesson it's telling you?
The thing that I think that people should take away from this is that the medieval world is incredibly interconnected and dependent on trade and movement of people through the entire period, right? Like that just is the fact of the matter. but that includes risks. Moving goods also means moving people, and particularly in the Middle Ages, it means moving people on animals, right?
You know, you're on horses, you're on camels, you're on things like this. And so that moves germs as well. And you simply have to accept that part of being in a community of people who are around other people is that you are going to get sick. The only way for someone to really completely avoid any germ at all, go ahead and live in the middle of the Gobi Desert. You'll be all right.
That'll be fine. But provided we are in contact with each other, these germs will spread. And so when we study the Black Death, you then need to choose. You need to choose. Are you going to go with the myth of the Middle Ages? where it is a time of unique stupidity, where Europe is completely cut off from the rest of the world?
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Chapter 8: Why is it incorrect to blame rats for the Black Death?
And you know, there's one answer that's correct there. I would say that. But so you can kind of keep your myths and your snobbery, right? And that's a comforting story, right? It's a comforting story. It could never happen to us. It will never happen here. But historically, it simply doesn't play out that way. But also, hopefully, I want it to interest people.
I want people to say, well, that's really, really incredible stuff. And, you know, come have a look at the Middle Ages. It's a thousand years of history with really interesting people doing incredibly interesting things. And, you know, the Black Death was my way in. It's a gateway drug. I'm telling you. 14th century, you learn the most about a group of people, I think, when things go wrong.
That's when you really see what makes a society tick. And so learning about the Black Death is just a great way to start learning how medieval people function, I think.
Dr. Eleanor Janager is a medieval historian. And if you enjoyed that, good news. Eleanor is part of the brand new season of Stuff the British Stole, premiering next week on ABC TV and iview. In one of the episodes streaming from next Tuesday, Eleanor has the very fun challenge of working out if the English flag actually isn't from England and was maybe stolen.
And the place that reckons it was stolen from them, we mentioned in this episode of No One Saw It Coming. Which of those cities could it be? Stream next Tuesday and you'll find out. No One Saw It Coming is produced by Zoe Ferguson and Rebecca Metcalf. Angie Grant is our legendary sound engineer. And you are our very best story engineers.
If you've got something you'd like us to look into, a bit of chapter of history, email us. NoOneSawItComing at abc.net.au. We have been coming to you from Gadigal Land in Sydney. Huge week next week. We'll have a brand new episode of No One Saw It Coming next. and the premiere of Season 3 of Stuff the British Stole on ABC TV. We'll see you then. on the ABC Listen app.
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