The Black Death
Given the current fear over something like a bit of swine flu, I figured I'd dig up the worst natural disaster in written history. The title may be about what the disease was, but the debate is more than welcome to open up to its social/economic impacts, how many people it killed, where it was from, pretty much anything you're interested in.
So, I'll start it off by putting forward the suggestion that the disease was anything but bubonic plague (at least in any recognisable strain of its modern form). The disease spread far too quickly for bubonic plague (even in its primary pneumonic form) to have possibly been the cause. There is no strong evidence for the widespread existence of rats in the medieval countryside, whilst some countries such as Iceland were affected by the disease and yet it is well-documented they had no rats until later centuries.
In modern bubonic plague there is only usually one, or in a few rare cases two, buboes formed. However, the medieval chronicles are full of people being covered with black pustules, or documenting several buboes in various places of the body (including away from the lymphatic nodes). The medieval chroncilers are also insistent on the contagious nature of the disease, and yet modern commentators have often been astounded at how hard it is for bubonic plague to actually spread.
Moreover, chroniclers have suggested that the Black Death also killed animals - some by direct observation, and others by saying there was a simultaneous murrain - and yet bubonic plague does not affect animals except rodents. Lastly, modern bubonic plague is not nearly as lethal as the rates suggested by medieval physicians/chroniclers, who claim it was fatal in nearly all cases.
So - what was the disease? Bubonic plague? A form of bubonic plague that has since mutated into a much less virulent and deadly strain? The first recorded outbreak of anthrax? Or a disease from space that arrived in a comet strike?
