SOURCE5 The Black Death spread like a wave across Europe between 1348 and 1351.
Key
Extent of Black Death 1320 CE
Naples
1350 CE
City
1351 CE
Silk Road
1347 CE
Scandinavia
1352 CE
Muslim pilgrimage route
1348 CE
Other trade route
1349 CE
Moscow
Britain
2000
0
1000
London
EUROPE
kilometres
ATLANTIC
Venice
Caffa
ASIA
OCEAN
Genoa
ITALY
Naples
Constantinople
SPAIN
GREECE
Lisbon
Tabriz
Athens
Tunis
Xian
Tripoli
Baghdad
Marrakesh
Alexandria
Hubei
CHINA
Hangzhou
EGYPT
BURMA
Bagan
Arabian Peninsula
Mecca
PACIFIC
INDIA
ARABIAN
OCEAN
Timbuktu
AFRICA
SEA
Aden
INDIAN OCEAN
Source: Map drawn by Spatial Vision.
SkillBuilder discussion Using historical sources 1. According to the text, how did the rich and poor people in Scotland experience the plague differently? Support your answer with evidence from the extract at SOURCE 6. 2. The author describes how sons wouldn’t visit their dying parents. What does this tell us about how the plague affected family relationships? 3. In the extract, Fordun writes that this was the worst plague ‘from the beginning of the world even unto modern times’. What words and descriptions does he use to show how serious and unusual this disease was?
SOURCE6 Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish Nation — Pestilence among men
In the year 1350, there was, in the kingdom of Scotland, so great a pestilence and plague among men (which also prevailed for a great many years before and after, in divers parts of the world — nay, all over the whole earth), as, from the beginning of the world even unto modern times, had never been heard of by man, nor is found in books, for the enlightenment of those who come after. For, to such a pitch did that plague wreck its cruel spite, that nearly a third of mankind were thereby made to pay the debt of nature. Moreover, by God’s will, this evil led to a strange and unwonted kind of death, insomuch that the flesh of the sick was somehow puffed out and swollen, and they dragged out their earthly life for barely two days. Now this everywhere attacked especially the meaner sort and common people; — seldom the magnates. Men shrank from it so much that, through fear of contagion, sons, fleeing as from the face of leprosy or from an adder, durst not go and see their parents in the throes of death.
Did you know? Some historians believe that fleas carrying the Black Death came to Caffa on the skins of marmots. These small Central Asian mammals had no resistance to the disease, and large numbers became infected and died in the mid-1340s. Fur traders came across the dead animals, removed their hides (including the deadly fleas) and sent them along the Silk Road to cities such as Caffa.
96 Jacaranda Humanities Alive 8 Victorian Curriculum Third Edition
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