The Black Death

Maria Rodriguez
November 12,2010
History 101

The Black Death. By Philip Ziegler. (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009. Print.)
“This book contains virtually no original research. It is an attempt to synthesize in a single readable but reasonably comprehensive volume the records of the contemporary chroniclers and the work of later historians, each treating some tiny aspect of this enormous subject.”
Philip Ziegler, Preface.
      A series of natural disasters in the Orient during the middle ages brought one of the most devastating periods of death and destruction in European history. Without a doubt the Black Death was one of the major scourges of the fourteenth century.   Covering such a broad event in history may seem somewhat pretentious, but Ziegler does a great job synthesizing this subject in three parts: How and when it spread, the mortality and its consequences.

    In the first chapters Ziegler takes the reader to the origins of the plague and tries to create an outline of its progress across Europe, making emphasis on England. Rumors reached European seaports around the year 1346 coming from the East, from the depopulated India, but they never thought the disease could reach them. But it did, in the year 1347 a merchant ship coming from Asia carried the plague to Europe. This happened at the center of the overseas trade, Genoa. Since this moment it spread rapidly throughout the West. By the year 1348 the Black Death had taken the heart of Europe. Since this moment Ziegler finds appropriate to explain to the reader the nature of the disease, if it was something entirely new and how it traveled from one place to another. Based on the bacillus Pasteurella Pestis, he argues that the original form of the Black Death was a Bubonic plague, a disease transmitted by animals. It started in the stomach of a flea and it moved across Europe carried by the black rats. In the course of the propagation, the plague had pneumonic and septicemic...