It is bacteria (Yersinia pestis) that have gone bad which lives on the stomachs of fleas that lived on rats. When the bacteria are in the right conditions, it can multiply and then the flea gets sick. When the flea gets sick, it injects the bacteria into the rat. From there the rat gets sick and then it spreads. The fleas jump from one rat to another and that’s how it spreads like a wildfire. One misconception about the Plague was, people thought the fleas that bit them got them sick, but it actually spread to people when the rats bit them. Once a person is infected they can spread it to other people around them. You wouldn’t actually catch the plague from a human unless you touch the open wound barehanded. If you wore gloves you were …show more content…
It was so overcrowded that feeding people became hard. In the years 1200’ s-1300 a large famine brought weakness to the large population of Europe. Then the Black Plague weakened the population by half. An example would be if one person with the Pneumatic plague would cough once in a market, and then 20 people would catch the plague and so on and so fourth.
The weather helped spread this disease as well. After many cold summers with rain, and then the dry summer came the perfect bad weather for the bacteria to form. After two summers the Black Plague died down. Sporadically the disease would pop back up but it did not spread through Europe like the previous attack. By the 1700’s Europe had just about regained their population before the Black Plague.
So the Black Plague had many affects upon Europe’s population. According to an article Depopulation, Rebellion and Social Progress, about one third of the population died, the farm space went unused, farm animals dying and the labor of Europe going down. The Plague made Europe weak and dead for two years. They starved because the Plague was destroying the farmlands and farm animals. The farms couldn’t sustain because the Plague was killing the laborers. The Plague also brought unwelcome hostility to people and caused