Black Death Dbq Essay

The 14th century saw the emergence of an extremely contagious and deadly disease, bubonic plague, which was also known as the “Black Death”. This savage disease affected people from all classes of the society, regardless of their wealth, religion, gender or age (as seen in the Document 6). In that day and age, there was almost no one who didn’t lose a relative, a friend, or a loved one to the illness. During this dark age, people reacted to the disease with mass fear, endless grief, and quandary. Even though the death toll changed from one place to another, in places such as Cairo, the Black Death claimed the lives of more than twenty-four thousand people a day (Document 1). And the death of five children belonging to the same family (Document 5) was not something that was rarely seen. Never the humanity had seen such a rapidly murderous disease, and never the multitude of dead had been this high; which led to a widespread terror among people (Document 2).

In a chronicle written by Agnolo di Tura, who lost five of his children to the Plague, and had to bury them all with his own hands; it is written that the diseased died in hundreds, and as no graveyard was capable of holding that much cadavers, they were inhumanely thrown in great pits and covered with earth (Document 5). The disease also had some physiological effects that were never seen before. Accordingly, the patients are mentioned as “apparitions of supernatural beings in human guise of every description” in the History of the Wars of Procopius (Document