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Hello in October 1347 a

Genues trading ship arrived at the visit board of Messina in Sicily

Readying to dock it would have nosed in among many similar ships doing similar things

But this ship was special it carried the plague the black death

Caused unknown for about 600 years, but in the next four years it killed up to half of Europe's population

Its terrible progress was captured by the Florentine writers Giovanni Bocaccio who declared in those years a dead man

Was then of no more account than a dead goat

The black death not only massively reduced the population of Europe

It changes economics and rearranged its society

But did the disease also bring subtletransformations in its art its religion and its intellectual outlook with me to discuss the black death

Amir Rubin professor of medieval and early modern history at Queen Mary University of London Paul Minski professor of the history of medieval art

At the University of Cambridge and Samuel Kern professor of medieval history at the University of Glasgow

Amir Rubin can you talk us through the symptoms that people would have started to play to display in Messina? What happened to a plague victim?

Well, the plague victim would have been someone who was bitten or attacked by a flea

That is carrying within it the bacterium in its in the blood within its body and that blood would have been sucked out of an infected rat

So there's a chain there's an infected rat the flea feeds off the rat

The flea leaves the dying rat perhaps to seek another more warmer more attractive environment and that can be a human

It can be also another creature, but it can be a human and then when that flea

Attacks the body of the human it both removes blood out of the body of the human

But also it infuses into the body some of the

...