Skull
Biblical reports indicate that, since antiquity, the Middle East already suffered from this deadly disease, whose name comes from the dark blisters that it causes to appear on the skin. The famous medieval outbreak of the Black Death would have started in China, in 1333, reaching Europe in 1347. Some historians believe that the disease – caused by the Yersinia pestis bacteria and transmitted by rat fleas – may have penetrated the European continent through a real germ warfare action. According to them, Turkish soldiers used catapults to throw infected corpses inside a Genoese trading post in Crimea (now part of Ukraine). Another version claims that the disease landed accidentally, with rats coming on ships from Turkey. The fact is that the disease soon spread from the ports of the Mediterranean Sea.
“By 1351, the plague had already swept across Europe and it is estimated that it killed, in just four years, about 25 million people – the equivalent of almost a third of the European population at the time”, says historian Vera Machline , from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP). She further states that successive waves of the Black Death continued to hit Europe from time to time until the 18th century. Even today, isolated cases of the plague occur in Northeast Brazil, and in regions of India and Africa. Combated, however, with antibiotics, it almost does not kill anymore.
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