How Frightening Would it have been like to Live Through The Black Death?

I’m probably not the only person who finds the Black Death (or, as the Medieval People called it, the Great Mortality) fascinating. Don’t know what it says about me. Some people watch horror movies; I find documentaries on real pestilences that killed at least half the population of Europe more interesting. So perhaps it’s not a surprise that Plague occurs in both SAVE THE BEST FOR LAST and THE ELF AND THE OUTLAW. Although with the former book it doesn’t kill 50% of the population.

Unless you’re a super-precocious reader or read this many years from now, we all lived through COVID. Yeah, it was a terrible time—but compared to almost any wave of the Black Death or even the influenza outbreak that occurred between 1918 and 1919 (which was referred to as the Spanish flu at the time but really started in the United States¹), it was just a blip. Less than 1 out of every 1000 people in the world died from it². It was a frightening time; I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to watch half the people I know die from it.

Right after the pandemic, from what I heard, agents didn’t want to read plague/pandemic stories—too soon. But I’ve always been interested in it. Living through a pandemic made me even more interested in it. Because seeing how people before me went through some horrendous stuff and (well, half of them anyway) came out okay, or even better than they were before (the Black Death, while probably creating a whole heckuva lot of PTSD, ended up causing higher wages for many and at least in Western Europe, helped to end serfdom), gives me hope. And don’t we need a little hope in this world?

Fun fact: when Vlad the Impaler found someone with plague, he would bribe them to join the Ottoman army³. Easier than having to kill them with bullets! Or probably more likely, swords, because guns were pretty rare and not very good at the time. Although he lived about a century after the first and worst wave of the Black Death, I guess it was still around enough to become a problem.

1 – The Great Influenza by John M. Barry. Sorry I don’t have a page number for this but the last time I read this book was before I started taking notes on this sort of thing.

2 – Worldometers. As of April 13, 2024, 704,753,890 people had died of the virus, out of a world population of over 8 billion. Although I personally know someone who died of COVID that July, and there were certainly some cases that weren’t reported.

3 – Gone Medieval, episode 155, “Vlad the Impaler”. Matt Lewis with Gavin Baddeley, October 8, 2022, ~minute 34.