Plague Times…

Just when mankind thinks it has beaten nature, a hand reaches out and pulls it back. The cracks in man’s armour become the gateway of invasion. This is what happened with the Black Death. 

The fourteenth century saw the first cases of the Black Death. In the spring of 1348, a virulent strain of the plague landed on the shores of Italy unleashing a march of death that was unrelenting and unprecedented. In three short years, the disease had laid 25-50% of Europeans in their graves. Like the horsemen of the apocalypse, this plague rode in three. The most commonly known of the variants was bubonic plague which caused buboes and swellings that gave the tell-tale blackness which was to give its name to man’s scourge. This was the result of rat infestations, particularly the Black Rat, Rattus Rattus, which had made their way from Asia stowed away in…