Pneumonic Plague Dbq

The 1300’s were a bad time for the citizens of the known world, which included Europe, most of Asia, and also parts of Africa. It was a time of horror, mainly because of the disease commonly known by many names, including, the Black Death, the bubonic plague, and pneumonic plague. This plague was the killer of over a third of the population of Europe, and was unstoppable in nature. It didn’t matter how you tried to safeguard yourself from it, it found you. In the face of such a seemingly guaranteed death, mankind stooped a very low existance, where most men only wanted what was best for themselves and didn’t care for anybody else, including family. Many thought that the plague was deserved, which included Petrarch, who wrote in his Letters …show more content…
As mentioned beforehand, instead of the dead being honored by his neighbors and carried by them, they would be carried by a group of men called sextons, who would charge a handsome fee to move the body; preying on the poor. According to Boccaccio, “they [the sextons] charged a fat fee.” (Boccaccio, doc 16, pg 78) In the same sense, Ahmad Ibn cAli Al-Maqrizi wrote about the black death in Egypt, particularly the funeral rites. He said “a reader took 10 dirhams… porters 6 dirhams when engaged, and another 6 at the grave… the gravedigger demanded 50 dirhams per grave.” (Al-Maqrizi doc 19 pg 85) People took advantage of each other for the basic rights that sound be given to everybody, which also kept the world cleaner and less infectious. Not only that, but the dead were not given any respect. Boccaccio claims “no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown toward dead goats.” (Boccaccio, doc 16, pg 79) Nowadays, that phrase probably would better compare the dead plague victims to a dead deer along the road. It is sad, but it is so common we as a society don’t even care anymore. Did society get so low then that they treated their own kind that