The claim which I choose is the Roman Catholic church. It made a statement that people have to suffer the plague since God punished their sins. I found that this claim is not really true for some reasons. First, when one person has disease, he or she will transmit their diseases to other people while they are traveling to many countries. In the past time, the health care is not developing and people are not educated well about the dangerous diseases. Therefore, the only thing that they believe is the superstition- God. Whenever somebody has diseases, they just think that they did something wrong , and that's why God punished them. They didn't take any medicine and suffer from that disease until they died. Second, the church said that plunder, looting, rape, and prostitution were the reasons for God need to punish people. It's not logical to state that these are causes leading to the diseases. As we know, the disease was caused when people transmit the bacteria or virus from one to one by many ways such as: eating, using the same personal, or dirty...There is no disease relating to the plunder, looting, rape, and prostitution.
There are some problems about this claim at that time. If Gods wanted to descend and punish somebody, he or she just suffered from it. It means that when they have disease, they just belive that God punish them. They cannot do anything to be better off instead of waiting until the death is coming. The church is not good at all, and it tried to guide innocent people just believe and follow all what they said.
Background Reading
In October 1347, Italian ships on the Black Sea en route to and from China dock in Messina, Sicily -- their crews are dead or dying. Whatever is killing them quickly spreads ashore. Within a month, it passes through Sicily and moves back out over water. By January 1348, it has penetrated France via Marseille and North Africa via Tunis, and by July 1348, it spreads through France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Eastern Hungary, and Southern England. This is all the more amazing given that at this time it took a person one to three months to travel from London to Rome. The plague died out in the winters and was resurrected in the springs. At the end of 1349, it had spread throughout the British Isles and Scandinavia and continued to move east.
The death toll was massive -- the "official" figure is one-third of Europe dead between 1348 and 1351, when it temporarily abated, but keep in mind that in some towns the death toll was 90 percent -- in others 10 percent. Further, the poor and anyone else living in close quarters (monks, for instance) died at a higher rate. Many monasteries were completely wiped out, but the death rates among the nobility and the nobility of the church were very low. Understandably, people wanted to know why this was happening to them. Here are the four prominent hypotheses of the day:
The claim of academics and physicians: The plague was the result of a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars on March 20, 1345.
The Roman Catholic Church's claim: God's wrath -- it was a punishment for the people's sins.
The claim of the mayors and town-controlling nobles: Poor sanitation. Dumping waste in the streets leads to sickness (a revolutionary claim at the time -- no one actually knew this to be true).
The claim of the masses (i.e., everyone else): The Jews are poisoning the wells.
Here is the "evidence" used by each group, respectively, to support its claim:
Medicine at the time was based on astrology and astronomy. Most physical sickness was attributed to poor alignment of the stars. The conjunction had happened, and it was a rare celestial event. Other events had been tied to celestial causes. Many were waiting to see what the triple conjunction would cause, and when the Black Plague occurred, they felt that they had found out.
The Church said, "Look around." Plunder, looting, rape, prostitution, war, and drinking were everywhere. God's wrath had shown itself in destructive ways before -- the people of Noah's time were hit with a flood, and the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.
The sanitation workers were among the first to die, and other diseases were suspected to be related to poor sanitation.
Christians tortured "confessions" out of Jews. The Jews were believed to be "jealous" of the Christians (because, it was thought, the Jews knew "in their hearts" that they were damned). The lepers had been blamed for poisoning the wells and causing the typhus outbreak in 1320 (after the Black Plague, it was believed that the Jews set them up to it).
Here are some problems people at the time saw with the evidence:
Nobody but the academics and physicians believed their explanation!
If God's wrath already has descended, there's no reason to change one's behavior. The attitude was roughly, "If we're already doomed, why alter our behavior?"
Later sanitation workers appeared to be immune (unknown to the people, they'd been exposed and had developed a resistance). If it really was poor sanitation, why weren't they still dying? In fact, this immunity among sanitation workers caused many people to think the sanitation workers had magical powers. People followed them on their street-cleaning routes, trying to absorb some of the immunity. Others, more desperate, actually applied waste to themselves, thinking that it would keep the disease away.
So many Jews died too (Why would any community poison itself?). The other problem is that the plague was present in areas where no Jews lived.
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Good post, but I don't believe that the claim is that disease was transferred from "plunder, looting, rape, and prostitution." I believe it was stating that God is punishing people because of all these actions by giving the disease to everyone.
ReplyDeleteIn “The dawn of the Dead”, a movie made at 2003, illustrated the same massage – God’s Wrath, he will kill all people even you haven’t done anything wrong. Just like in the Noah’s time, all people except Noah must die. Christians believe, I think, the “plunder, looting, rape, and prostitution” of course can be punished, but the moral folks can also die to carry out the sins for the others, like Jesus.
ReplyDeleteNgando, I don’t agree with your statement “The church is not good at all, and it tried to guide innocent people just believe and follow all what they said”. At that time there wasn’t any educational institute except the church, so people used to go there to become literate. The church gave the explanation to the people to become civilize in not only the religious ways but also the practically way. As a result, the church opinion was acceptable to all of the people. I think there was an inner problem of the mass dead. The background reading says that some towns the death was 90 percents which is definitely a very high rate. My question is what the root of the diseases was and why it didn’t attract to rest of the people? The church opinion is more acceptable to answer those questions because prostitution, war, drinking alcohol causes a lot of life killing discuses.
ReplyDeletei agree religion is always used to make believers out of everyone. The chruch use the plague to their own beneefits in order to become stonger.
ReplyDeleteYes good - actually it was up until the middle of the 19th century that people believed diseases might be caused by demonic possession or evil taint. Interestingly, if you research holistic or integrative medicine you will find commonalities with medieval beliefs about illness. Have a look at "cupping" for such an example!
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