The Bubonic Plague, or Black Death, had many negative as well as positive effects
on medieval Europe. While being one of the worst and deadliest diseases in the history of
the world, it indirectly helped Europe break grounds for some of the basic necessities for
The Black Death erupted in the Gobi Desert in the late 1320s, but one really
knows why. The plague bacillus was alive and active long before that; as Europe itself
had suffered an epidemic in the 6th century. But the disease had lain relatively dormant in
the succeeding centuries. It is believed that the climate of Earth began to cool in the 14th
century, and perhaps this so-called little Ice Age had something to do with it becoming
more active than normal (Knox 2). Whatever the reason, we know that the outbreak
began there and spread outward. While it did go west, it spread in every direction, and the
Asian nations suffered as cruelly as anywhere. In China, for example, the population
dropped from around 125 million to 90 million over the course of the 14 century. The
plague moved along the caravan routes toward the West. By 1345 it had made it's way to
the lower Volga River. By early 1347 it was in Constantinople. It hit Alexandria in the
autumn of that year, and by spring 1348, a thousand people a day were dying there. In
Cairo, Egypt, the count was seven times that. The disease traveled by ship as readily as by
land and it was no sooner in the eastern Mediterranean than it was in the western end as
well. Already in 1347, the plague had hit Sicily. By winter the plague had reached
mainland Italy. By January of 1348, the plague was in Marseilles, and it reached Paris in
the spring of 1348. By September of 1348 the Bubonic Plague had worked its way into
Bubonic plague was caused by the bacteria Yersinia Pestis. It is an organism most
usually carried by rodents. Fleas infest the rodents (rats, but other roden
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