Dauphin: The crown prince in prerevolutionary France.
Flagellants: Religious enthusiasts of the Middle Ages who beat themselves with lashes as a way of doing penance.
Joust: Personal combat, particularly on horseback and involving a lance.
Mercenary: A professional soldier who will fight for anyone who pays him.
Nationalism: A sense of loyalty and devotion to one's nation.
Perspective: An artistic technique of representing faraway objects so that they appear smaller than objects close by.
Pogrom: An organized massacre of unarmed people, in particular groups of Jews.
Tournament: A contest in which knights fought, usually with blunted lances, for a prize or a favor given by a lady.
Five and forty-five percent of the European population.
Of trade that had followed the Crusades aided its spread, as Italian merchants unknowingly brought the disease home in their ships. The first outbreak in Western Europe occurred in October 1347, in the city of Messina at the northeastern corner of Sicily. From there it was an easy jump to the Italian mainland, and by the following April all of Italy was infected. Meanwhile, it had reached Paris in January 1348, and within a year, 800 people a day were dying in that city alone. Quickly it penetrated the entire European continent and beyond, from Palestine to Greenland.
The only merciful thing about the Black Death was its quickness. Victims typically died within four days—a hundred hours of agony. If they caught a strain of bubonic (byoo-BAHN-ik) plague, their lymph glands swelled; or if it was pneumonic (nyoo-MAHN-ik) plague, the lungs succumbed first. Either way, as the end approached, the victim turned purplish-black from respiratory failure; hence the name. The ironic thing was that the force at the center of all this devastation was too small to see with the naked eye: a bacteria that lived on fleas, who in turn fed on rats.
The people of the time had no idea of this scientific explanation for the Plague and instead looked for spiritual causes and cures. Some believed that the world was coming to an end, and some joined sects such as the flagellants (FLAJ-uh-luntz), religious enthusiasts who wandered the countryside, beating themselves with whips as a way of doing penance.
The flagellants were closely tied with a rising anti-Semitic trend. Searching for someone to blame, Europeans found a convenient scapegoat in the Jews, who they claimed had started the Plague by poisoning the wells of Europe. This absurd explanation provided justification for many a pogrom (poh-GRAHM), or organized massacre.
World History
