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Before the disease even arrives, the climate has started to turn against humanity. A period historians call the Little Ice Age has begun to freeze crops in the fields. The famine is stalking the lands. People are hungry. Their immune systems are weakened, and they are crowded together in cities that have no sewers, no running water, and no understanding of hygiene. The world is a powder keg waiting for a spark. And that spark is coming, not in the form of an invading army of soldiers, but in something far smaller. It's coming in the belly of a flea, riding on the back of a rat, hiding in the cargo hold of a merchant ship. And. And when it arrives, it will not just kill. It will sweep the world clean. It will silence the markets. It will turn cathedrals into morgues. It will destroy the past and in doing so violently, give birth to the new future. This is not just a story about a disease. This is the Black Death. This is a story of the end of the world and what that rebirth actually looks like. So sit back, relax, relax, and welcome to History Camp. What's up, people? And welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagdon, and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week, we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from around the world through all history forever. Yes, that's what we do here in the tent. I try to figure out everything that's ever happened. And, oh, boy, there's all sorts of stuff going on. Every second, more history is getting made. So we got to catch up. All right. No time for dilly dallying. But before we jump in. I just want to say thank you so much for clicking on this episode. Every time you comment you like, you click, you engage with our content. You keep the lights on in the tent, and you keep the fire burning, and you keep on lacing. Christos. Pockets. Yeah. If you don't know Christos, he is the Greek freak. He is the magician on the ones and twos. He is the wonderful man that I call a friend, a brother, a father figure, and daddy. Christos, how are you doing? Great. Christos, we don't have time to be dilly dallying, like I said, all right? There's history happening every second. We got to jump in. We're talking about the Black Death. Do you know what that is? Yep. Don't make a racial joke, okay? Because I wasn't going to. You always do. And before we started recording, you were like, oh, Black Death. I know what that is. And I said, crisos. That is completely inappropriate. Good thing the cameras weren't rolling. Thank goodness. All right, let's just jump in. All right? I'm sure you've heard of the Black Death. I'm sure you're familiar with this infamous bubonic plague. But what. What was it really like? If you were living in a small village in London during, you know, the 14th century, what did it actually feel like to have this thing sweep through your town? Your whole village is gone in an instant. Everyone you've ever known, everyone that you ever met in your entire life, vanished. And there you are alone, sitting in a hut in a, you know, snowy winter wasteland that is medieval Europe. And you're looking around thinking, this is the end of the world. But before we get to the plague itself, we need to understand Europe and what it looked like in the decades leading up to the disease. Because the Black Death didn't strike a healthy population. It struck a population that was already deeply struggling. In 1315, the rains began, and they didn't stop, basically, for three consecutive years. From 1315 to 1317, Europe experienced one of the worst famines in recorded history. This is an event that they called the Great Famine. Not a very clever name, but it tells you everything that you need to know. I mean, the crops just rotted before they could ever be harvested. The ground just turned into just mud. Seed grain that basically would have been planted for the following year was just eaten out of desperation. I mean, people were just eating anything. Grass, bark. In some regions, people. People have suggested that it actually was even darker than that. Some allegations of cannibalism were Born out of absolute desperation. I mean, entire villages were starving to death. Parents were abandoning children that they could no longer feed. I mean, the death toll was so brutal, it reached into the millions. So by the time that the rains finally stopped, an entire generation had grown up basically malnourished. I mean, their bodies were stunted. They were generally shorter than average. Their immune systems were permanently compromised. They had survived the famine, sure, but they were not whole. And this is a really important point that I think a lot of people miss. When the plague arrived three decades later in the 1340s, it arrived to a population that was basically half dead. I mean, the famine had set the stage for an apocalypse. And the nightmare of the Black Death didn't actually begin in a European port. It began thousands of miles away in the wild open landscape where the Gobi Desert meets the Eurasian steppe, likely somewhere in modern day Kyrgyzstan or Mongolia. For centuries, a bacteria called Yersinia pestis had lived here in relative obscurity. It wasn't hunting humans. It was a disease of the wild, cycling harmlessly between fleas and then small rodents and back to fleas and then ground squirrels. And as long as humans stayed away from these remote regions, which they generally did, the bacteria was just contained. But humans didn't stay away. The world was changing, and one man was responsible for connecting these remote danger zones to the heart of civilization. And that's a man you've probably heard of before, a man named Genghis Khan, also known as Genghis Khan, depending on your translation. A century before the plague broke out, Genghis Khan and his successors had forged the largest contiguous land empire in human history. I mean, the Mongol Empire at its peak stretched from the Pacific Ocean on one side to Eastern Europe. And while the Mongols were ruthless conquerors, of course, they also brought something weirdly unexpected. Stability. Yeah. This is a time in history that's known as the Pax Mongolica, the Mongol era of peace. And for the first time, the Silk Road, the legendary network of trade routes connecting China to the Mediterranean, was actually safe. A merchant could theoretically travel from Beijing to the Black Sea without fear of bandits or, you know, getting attacked on the side of the road because they were protected by Mongol law. I mean, of course, the Mongolian empire wants to take a little tax of that trade, so they gotta keep it safe. So as a result, the superhighway of trade brought incredible wealth. I mean, you have caravans loaded with silk and spices and ceramics and, you know, gold, all going westward. But here's the thing. Trade routes historically don't just carry goods, they act as biological corridors. As merchants pushed deeper into the steppes, searching for new markets and shorter routes, they disturbed the natural habitat of these plague carrying rodents. These fleas jumped from wild marmots to the black rats that traveled with the caravans. And the rats lived in the grain supplies, in the cargo holds, in the very infrastructure that actually made this medieval trade possible. So the plague hitched a ride on the greatest trade network the world had ever seen. And it began moving westward, mile by mile, towards an unsuspecting and a very much unready European population. By the 1340s, the plague had traveled the length of the Silk Road and actually arrived at the doorstep of Europe. The location was Caffa, a major fortified city on the Crimean peninsula in the northern shores of the Black Sea. Caffa was a jewel of international trade operated by the Italian merchants from the city of Genoa. These Genoese traders were masters of the Mediterranean and Caffa was their vital link to the goods of the East. But. But Kaffa existed in Mongol territory, maintained only by the permission of the Golden Horde, the Mongol rulers in the region. And by the 1340s, tensions were running high. Now the spark that lit the fuse was a street fight in the nearby town of Tana. A brawl between Italian merchants and local Muslims escalated into a full blown riot. The Italians fled to the safety of Kafa's walls, but the Mongol army followed. Leading the Mongols was their khan, Johnny Beg, who saw this as an opportunity to basically drive the Italians out of Crimea once and for all. Johnny Beg laid siege to Caffa in 1345. His army surrounded the city, cutting off food and supplies. And the Genoese inside prepared for a long fight, trusting their thick walls to essentially keep them safe. But then something strange began happening in the Mongol camp. The soldiers were started to get sick, not from Genoese swords or arrows, but from this mysterious blistering sickness that killed. Within a few days, the plague had caught up with the Mongol army. Now panic spread through the ranks and Johnny Beg watched his forces just disintegrate. He knew he couldn't take the city with dying men. But according to the Italian notary, Gabriel Dimusas, who basically wrote about the these events, Johnny Beg devised a desperate plan, one that would go down in history as one of the earliest recorded acts of biological warfare. Now, this story has been contested and debated in history as to whether or not it actually happened, but the myth still persists. And basically it goes like this. He ordered his men to gather the corpses of the plague victims, bodies that were swollen and bloated and oozing and highly infectious. And he loaded them into trebuchets and catapults and then he launched them over. Over the walls of Caffa. Inside the city, the Genoese watched in horror as human bodies rained down from the sky and the corpses just exploded on impact, spraying blood and infectious fluid across the streets. I mean, the smell is just unbearable. The defenders tried to dump the bodies into the sea, but there were just too many coming in all at once. And here's an important caveat. Gabriel de Musas wasn't actually present at the siege of Caffa. His account, while famous, like we said, is secondhand. Some modern historians have questioned whether the catapulted corpses were truly the source of the outbreak in Kaffa, noting that the plague may have already been spreading through other means, possibly through infected grain shipments or, you know, the rats that had infested them. The truth is, we might never know exactly how the plague breached these walls. But what we do know is that the Genoese realized Caffa was doomed. They scrambled to their ships, desperate to escape this nightmare. They hoisted their sails and fled into the Black Sea, believing that they had left death behind them. But, oh, boy, they were wrong. They weren't escaping the plague. They were just bringing it with them. As the Genoese ships sailed towards Italy, the sailors had no idea what was happening inside their own bodies or the cargo holds beneath their feet. They didn't know really about germs. They believed that diseases were caused by miasma or malaria, also known as bad air, or by the wrath of God punishing a sinful humanity. They didn't have microscopes to actually see the real enemy, and it is this bacteria that I mentioned before, Yersinia pestis. This bacteria is just a masterpiece of evolutionary efficiency, designed to spread rapidly and ruthlessly, but it needs a vehicle to move, and that vehicle was a deadly partnership, that is the black rat and the flea. The black rat was everywhere in the medieval world. It lived in the rafters of houses, in the grain stores of ships, in the walls of pantries. I mean, it was just all over medieval Europe. Basically, any place that humans stored food, you're going to find a black rat. And clinging to the rat's fur was these fleas the actual delivery mechanism for the plague. And here's how it works. When a flea bites an infected rat, it sucks up the bacteria along with the blood inside the flea's guts. The bacteria multiplies frantically, forming this solid mass that eventually blocks the flea's throat completely. And now the flea is starting to starve, and no matter how much he bites, no blood can actually get through this blockage in its stomach. And driven mad by this hunger, the flea becomes desperate and aggressive, biting anything that it can find. Rats or dogs, cats, humans. But because its throat is blocked, it can't swallow. So instead, when it bites down, it vomits the bacteria filled blood back into the wound of its new host. I know that's pretty gross, but it's the reality of what was going on, and it's happening on such a small level. I mean, if these things were big, it'd be the most horrifying thing ever. But you just see a little flea and you're like, oh, this is fleas going crazy. So once the bacteria enters the bloodstream, the clock starts ticking. The immune system obviously tries to fight back, draining the infection to the nearest lymph node. But Yersinia pestis is too powerful. It colonizes the lymph nodes, causing them to swell into these massive, painful, purple black lumps called bubos, which is where we actually get the name bubonic plague. These swellings would appear anywhere a lymph node would be. I mean, your groin, your armpit, your neck, sometimes growing the size of, like, an apple. If the infection stayed confined to lymph nodes, you had a chance of survival, perhaps 40% without treatment. But the plague had other more terrifying forms. If the bacteria reached your lungs, it just became a pneumonic plague. This is essentially a death sentence. Victims would cough up this, like, bloody spit, phlegm stuff, spraying the bacteria directly into the air. Anyone who breathed that air would then get infected. This form is almost 100% fatal, and it killed really quickly, within 24 to 48 hours. And perhaps the most terrifying form is the septicemic plague. This happens when the bacteria multiply directly in the bloodstream, overwhelming the body entirely. It releases toxins that cause the skin to just turn black as the tissue is dying. And it killed so fast, sometimes in like 12 to 14 hours, that people would go to bed feeling completely healthy and just never wake up. Now, here's what makes the 14th century outbreak so scientifically significant. In recent years, researchers have extracted DNA from these mass graves, the plague pits, from London, Florence, and elsewhere, where bodies were stacked in the thousands. Using modern genetic sequencing, they've actually analyzed the ancient Yersinia pestis bacteria preserved in the teeth of the victims. And what they discovered is unbelievable. The 14th century strain is the direct ancestor of almost every plague strain circulating in the world today. Yeah, this wasn't just another outbreak. This was an evolutionary event. A single hyperverilant strain that emerged in the 1340s and fundamentally reshaped the genetic landscape of the disease forever. The Black Death wasn't just history's deadliest pandemic. It was the origin point for every plague epidemic that followed. So in October 1347, 12 Genoese galleys pulled up the harbor of Messina in Sicily. This was the moment that the Black Death officially set foot in Western Europe. When the Port Authority boarded the ship, they were greeted by literally just hell. Most of the sailors were already dead. The few who remained were just covered in these boils, oozing pus and blood. Coughing. The stench, I mean, forget it, was just overwhelming. During Lowe's Pro Savings Days Save more on what goes into the job. Add power to your lineup with a free Dewalt 20 volt max 5amp hour battery. When you buy a select Dewalt 20 volt max tool plus get up to 35% off. Select major appliances from Whirlpool, Maytag and more. Get the job done right. Keep more in your pocket. 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The rats carrying their cargo of infected fleas had already scurried down the mooring lines and into the city of Messina. The infection exploded. People began dying in their homes. Within a matter of days, panic gripped the island. The Messenians fell, fled their city running to the countryside. But they just carry the disease with them to neighboring villages. Everywhere they ran, the plague followed. I mean, the disease moved with such terrifying speed, advancing geographically about two miles every single Day, it was a wave of death that just couldn't be outrun. And by January 1348, the plague reached Venice. And Venice was the trading capital of the Mediterranean. A city built on water and money. And its constant flow of ships meant that constant exposure to whatever diseases those ships had was brought to the Venetians. But the Venetians were intelligent and they were organized. They quickly realized the ships were the source of the sickness. And they didn't understand the rats or the fleas or technically how germ theory was working to actually make them sick. But they knew that the ships were dangerous. So the city council took extraordinary measures. They declared that any ship arriving from an infected port had to anchor a at an isolated island in the lagoon and wait before anyone could disembark. Initially, the waiting period was like 30 days a Trentino. But here's a correction to a common misconception. Venice wasn't actually the first city to implement a quarantine. The distinction belongs to Ragusa, which is in the modern day city of Dubrovnik in Croatia, which established the first formal quarantine in 1377. Venice adopted and refined the practice, eventually extending the waiting period of 40 days, a quarantino, which is actually where we get the modern term quarantine. The 40 day period wasn't just arbitrary, it turned out to be remarkably effective. Modern estimates suggest the bubonic plague had roughly a 37 day period of infection to death. Meaning a 40 day quarantine would basically catch all the infected individuals before they could spread the disease. It was a brilliant scientific leap, one of the first public health measures ever in history, and it should have worked. But. But the quarantine missed one crucial the rats. While the humans stayed on the ships, the rats swam through the canals and climbed onto the damp foundations of the Venetian palaces. And Venice, the queen of the Adriatic, was brought to its knees. As 1348 progressed, the plague started to move inland, striking the great cultural centers of Italy. The city of Florence, famous for its art, its banking families and its intellectual life, became the epicenter of the horror. We actually have a vivid picture of what happened in Florence, thanks to the writer Giovanni Boccaccio. He survived the outbreak and wrote a collection of stories framed by a group of young nobles who basically fleed Florence to escape the plague. This is a book called the Decameron. But before the stories began, Boccaccio provided an introduction describing what he witnessed, basically a firsthand account of what he saw. And it remains one of the most chilling eyewitness accounts maybe in history. Boccaccio described a complete collapse of human decency. The fear was. Was so intense that all social bonds just disintegrated. He writes. Brother abandoned brother. And what is more, and nearly incredible, fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children as if they had not been theirs. I mean, it's heartbreaking. People died so fast that funerals were just impossible. The church bells, which traditionally would ring out for death at a normal funeral, just were silent because if they tried to keep up, they would just never stop ringing. Trenches were dug in the graveyards. Boccaccio actually described bodies being stacked in layers like merchandise in the hold of a ship, with only a thin layer of dirt separating each row. Florence just became a city of ghosts. I mean, the economy stopped. Law and order just vanished. Those who could flee did so, but those who couldn't just simply waited to die. And the plague marched north, crossing the Alps into France. It struck Marseille and then Lyon and then finally Paris. And in Paris, the crowded streets and open sewers created a perfect breeding ground for the rats. The King of France fled his own capital, but the doctor stayed. At least those that didn't just run in terror. But Europe was not the only victim. The Islamic world, often overlooked in Western accounts of the Black Death, suffered just as catastrophically. Cairo, at the time one of the largest and most magnificent cities in the entirety of the Mediterranean, was brought to its knees. The Mamluk Sultanate, which ruled Egypt and Syria, watched helplessly as the plague just tore through his territories. The famous traveler Ibn Battuta, who had journeyed across three continents, witnessed the horror firsthand in Damascus. His accounts were as haunting as Boccaccio's. Just markets falling completely silent, mosques just emptying out, entire neighborhoods just becoming ghost towns. The great centers of Islamic learning. Baghdad, Damascus, Alexandria, lost generations of scholars and scientists and artisans. The plague didn't just devastate Europe. It shattered the Islamic golden age, erasing centuries of accumulated knowledge. And, you know, I mean, you could just imagine generations of scientific intrigue in just a matter of months. I mean, it's unbelievable the scale of the amount of information that was lost. I mean, it's hard to really fathom. Imagine every person you've ever met, entire cities just vanished. Think about the amount of human capital. Obviously, the loss of human life is tragic, but just the things that they knew, the stories that they had, the books that they were going to write, just gone from the human record. So the English Channel had been a formidable barrier so far for this plague. I mean, there's roughly 20 miles of open water separating England from the rest of mainland Europe. But of course, it was only a matter of time for the black death. By the summer of 1348, a ship from Gascony in France docked at the port of Weymouth on the southern coast of England, and the plague had officially arrived. The disease spread rapidly through the English countryside, moving along the roads towards London, Bristol, and Norwich. Hey, we're going to take a break really quick because I need to talk to the fellas. All right? If you're a woman, you can skip forward. I don't really care. But, guys, I want to talk about one of the most probably demoralizing things that can ever happen to you. All right? 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Her advisors urged her to flee, but at that point, it was too late. Princess Joan contracted the disease and died in a foreign land, never actually reaching the altar. Now, when the news reached England, King Edward was devastated. He wrote a letter expressing his grief. This rare moment of vulnerability from a medieval king, and the death of the princess sent this shockwave through the kingdom. I mean, if the king himself, with all of his wealth and status and power, can't protect his own daughter, I mean, what hope do you have? What hope does the ordinary person living in England have? The death toll in England was beyond catastrophic. Modern estimates suggest that approximately 50% of the population died. Entire villages were just wiped out. Houses were just empty. They would eventually just rot and, you know, get reclaimed by the forest and the fields to the north. The Scots watched England suffering with kind of a morbid satisfaction. I mean, the two kingdoms were enemies. The Scots interpreted the plague as God giving some type of revenge on behalf of their people and punishing their neighbors. You know, they saw an opportunity. And in 1349, a Scottish army actually gathered in the forest of Selkirk, planning to invade northern England while it was weakened by disease. But it was a fatal hubris, a complete miscalculation. The soldiers were camping too close, together with poor sanitation, of course, and the plague crossed into their ranks. This revenging hand of God that the Scots believed was fortuitously on their side turned against them. The army was decimated before they could even attack, and the survivors fled back into Scotland, basically bringing the disease with them into the Highlands. The invasion didn't conquer England, but it did conquer Scotland for the plague. Imagine being a doctor in 1348. You've studied the ancient texts of Galen and Hippocrates. You understand the theory of the four humors, basically, that, you know, health depends on the balance of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile, blood. But you've learned basically nothing that could prepare you for what you're about to witness. Medieval medicine was completely Powerless against this new adversary, this new type of disease. I mean, doctors tried everything. They donned the now iconic plague mass that I'm sure you've seen pictures of this terrifying leather hood with this beak like protrusion filled with these aromatic herbs like camphor or dried flowers or spices. I mean, they basically believed that the herbs would actually filter out the bad air that was causing the diseases. The masks didn't work for that purpose, but the heavy leather clothing may have actually inadvertently protected some of the doctors from flea bites. So in a way, maybe it was helping. They tried lacing the buboes, basically like these giant kind of, like bulbous kind of pustules, and they tried to drain them, which they basically thought was a imbalance of the humors. They thought that this, you know, this fluid is basically a poison. They tried bloodletting, which, you know, as always, just weakened the patient who was already dying. They did a ton of bizarre remedies, drinking potions made from crushed emeralds, bathing in human urine, sitting between two enormous fires. But, of course, nothing worked. One doctor who actually stood out during this entire nightmare was a man named Guy de Chauliac, the personal physician to Pope Clement VI in Avignon, basically where the papacy was based at this time. The Pope during this era was actually based in France, not in Italy, at the Vatican outside Rome. So while all the other doctors were fleeing in terror, de Chauliac refused to leave his post. Then the inevitable happened. Guy de Chaliuk himself contracted the plague. He developed these, like, agonizing bulbous growths and this burning fever. And any. Any day now, he was going to die. But remarkably, he survived. He lanced his own boils, he treated himself, and he used his own suffering as a scientific experiment, basically documenting his own symptoms. He was the first medical expert to clearly distinguish between the two main types of plague, noting that the coughing sickness, pneumonic plague, was highly contagious and almost always fatal, while the boil sickness, bubonic plague, was not always a death sentence. His observation gave future generations the first scientific understanding of how the disease actually worked. His courage in the face of death was truly extraordinary. And of course, when doctors failed, the people turned to God. But, I mean, at this time, even the Pope was horrified. Pope Clement VI locked himself inside his palace at Avignon. His physicians, desperate to protect the leader of the Catholic Church, ordered two massive fires to be built in his chambers. The Pope sat between these two fires day and night, even in the heat of summer. I mean, it must have been so hot. But what's interesting is that this tactic kind of helped. The intense heat and the smoke likely repelled fleas and rats that would have carried the disease. And the Pope survived while thousands were dying just outside the walls. For the common people, there were no fires and no palaces and no hygiene or understanding of medicine. Instead, terror just drove them to madness. A movement called the flagellants rose across Europe. I mean, there were groups of men and women who just wandered from town to town, just publicly whipping themselves with leather cords tipped with these metal spikes. And they believed that by punishing their own flesh, they could maybe appease God's anger and stop this horrible plague. They were just a walking spectacle of blood and religious hysteria. But ironically, the flagellants actually spread the disease by traveling constantly between infected towns, beating themselves on their backs until they were bloody, carrying the plague with them everywhere they went, they just caused the plague to spread faster. Now, when people are terrified, when the world seems to be ending and no one can explain why, naturally people look for someone to blame. And in a tragic and horrifying turn, the people of Europe turned to a frequent enemy. They blamed the Jewish population. False rumors spread that Jews were poisoning the wells to kill Christians. Of course, this was not true. Jews were dying of the plague just like everyone else was dying. But the mob didn't care about evidence. Fear had just consumed reason. Horrific pogroms erupted across Europe. In Strasbourg, the entire Jewish community, approximately 2,000 people, were just rounded up and burned alive before the plague had even reached the city. In Basel, Jews were herded into wooden buildings and set on fire. In Mainz, the Jewish community, realizing what was about to happen, reportedly set fire to their own homes rather than be murdered and burned alive by the mob. Across Germany, France, Spain, hundreds of Jewish communities were just destroyed. Thousands were massacred. And to his credit, Pope Clem VI actually tried to stop it. He issued two papal bulls, official decrees from the Pope to declaring the Jews innocent and pointing out the obvious logic that the plague was killing everyone indiscriminately, Jews and Christians alike. How could the Jews be poisoning wells if they were also dying from the same diseases? But as always, the fear is stronger than the Pope's authority and the massacres continue. And a stain on humanity that revealed just how quickly civilizations can actually crack under this pressure. Though the plague was killing everyone, from Christians to Jews, from peasants to princes. I mean, the European world, the Muslim world. There was one unique distinction that historians have noted. His name was Alfonso, the 11th king of Castile. In Spain. In 1350, Alfonso was leading a military campaign against the Moorish stronghold of Gibraltar, part of this long Reconquista, as they call it, to reclaim this Iberian peninsula for Christian rule. His army had the fortress under siege, and victory was so close. But then the plague arrived at his camp. Alfonso's advisors just begged him to retreat. Get out of here, Alfonso. Save yourself. But he refused. He would not abandon the siege, he would not show weakness before his enemies. And on March 26, 1350, Alfonso XI died of the plague of the siege of Gibraltar at just 38 years old. His death shifted the balance of power in Spain and really proved that the disease could rewrite history as easily as it could just kill a peasant. No one was safe, no one was exempt, and the plague answered to no crown. The plague finally burned itself out around 1353, but it didn't disappear completely. This was just the first eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with Ebglis, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema after an initial four month or longer dosing phase. About 4 in 10 people taking MGLIS achieved itch relief in clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks, and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. MGLIS Lebricizumab LBKZ, a 250mg 2ml injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to Ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Ebglis before starting Ebglis. Tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about eglis and visit ebgliss.lilly.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979. So good, so good, so good. Spring styles are at Nordstrom Rack stores now and they're up to 60% off. 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They were tied to the land in this system called serfdom. And unfortunately for many of these working peasants, they had no rights, no leverage, no hope of improving their condition. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break real quick because I got to ask you a question. Are you the type of person that just wakes up in the morning and immediately, like, hits your vape or gets a coffee or throws in a pouch because you just want to feel anything at all? Like, you just throughout the day, you're like, okay, coffee pouch. Coffee pouch. Vape. Coffee pouch. I mean, to be honest with you, that was me. Like, I was just going from cold brew to pouch to cold brew to pouch all day, and my heart felt like it was going to explode. Like, I was just, like, felt strung out, like, all day, truly. I was, like, just kind of anxious and I didn't even know why. And I was trying to, like, eat clean. I was lifting weights. Meanwhile, I was also chemically nuking my nervous system. And that's why I started these ultra pouches. I'll be honest with you. I found these on my own. And then I reached out to the company. I was like, hey, I would love to work with you guys because I love what you guys do. Ultra is amazing because it's nicotine free and caffeine free, and it still gives you that focus and energy. It's really the best. Like, I'm like, okay, there's no nicotine or caffeine. I was like, well, what is it? Well, basically, they partnered with neuroscientists to put together a blend of, like, nootropics and adaptogens to actually help you focus and get energized and kind of, you know, help with that oral fixation. No, Diddy. Without, like, the Jittery crash. So it's got like, L theanine, infinity PX alpha, GPC, vitamins B6 and B12. And I'll be honest, they taste great, they make you feel great. And I don't know if it's just me or what, but, like, I truly feel like I'm more locked in when I'm taking them and there's no crash. And the craziest thing is that, you know, sometimes I'll still use nicotine. It just helps me cut back and I feel way better now. Caffeine and nicotine are going to wreck your resting heart rate. It's going to make you feel anxious if you're taking them all the time. And on top of that, it's going to destroy your sleep. So that was my biggest issues. I felt cracked out, I felt anxious, and I wasn't sleeping that good. But ever since I've been taking Ultra, I'm still getting that same little kick. I'm getting that thing to do throughout the day and I just feel better in general. Ultra is absolutely amazing. And if you're interested in checking them out, I have great news. You're gonna go to takeultra.com that's t-a k-e ultra.com, and you're gonna use the promo code camp, and you're gonna get 15% off when you use that code. That's takeultra.com and use a code camp for 15 off. And when you check out, they're gonna ask where you heard. Just please tell them that we sent you over at Camp Cagna. It really helps us out a lot. Thank you guys so much. Feel better, sleep better. Get less anxious, but stay locked in. Now let's get back to the show. After the plague, there was actually a desperate shortage of workers. Fields would just stand there unharvested because there was no one that was able to harvest them. Buildings stood unfinished because there were no more craftsmen. Lords and landowners were desperate. And for the first time, they had to compete for labor. And for the first time in history, they, the peasants actually had leverage. Workers demanded higher wages and they got them. They demanded better food, better housing, better treatment, and they got them. They refused to be tied to the land. I mean, if one lord wasn't paying fairly, they just went to the next town where someone else would. The rigid structure of feudalism which had held Europe in place for centuries, started to fade. I mean, the whole system just started to collapse. The Black Death did more to liberate the poor than many. Maybe any revolution that came before it. I mean, perhaps the most profound change was psychological. The plague didn't just kill people, it killed the medieval world. Europeans became obsessed with death in this way that they never had been before. This new artistic genre was actually emerging called the dans macabre, or the dance of death. There were paintings and woodcuts and murals showing these skeletons hand in hand with people from every walk of life. Kings and bishops and peasants, young women, old men, all of them being led inevitably to the grave. And the message was very clear that, hey, death is coming for you. It comes for everyone. And no amount of money or power or title, I don't care who you are, you're going to die. Churches were decorated with images of decomposing corpses. The phrase memento mori, remember, you will die. Remember, death became central to European culture. I mean, it appeared on jewelry and paintings, carved into architecture. And, I mean, this wasn't just some morbid fascination. It was a fundamental shift in how people actually saw themselves in the universe. The things they used to be so sure of in the medieval world, that God was merciful and just and protected the faithful and that the Church had all the answers, that the social order was ordained by God and that, you know, you have the divine royal upper class and then you have everyone else. All that was gone. It was shattered. Now a more questioning, darker culture was actually born out of this moment. A culture that needed evidence, A culture that challenged authority. A culture that would eventually give rise to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and ultimately the scientific revolution all came out of this one event. So the Black Death was a catastrophe of unimaginable scale. I mean, a cosmic tragedy that consumed somewhere between 75 and 200 million lives across Europe, Europe and Asia and North Africa. And at its peak, it killed half the population of just entire regions. It emptied cities. It silenced or stopped entire civilizations. I mean, ultimately, it hit the reset on what it means to be a citizen of Western civilization. The labor shortage forced people to innovate, to develop new technologies, farming methods that actually accomplished more with fewer hands. The failure of the Church to stop the plague really led people to start questioning religious authority and God for the first time. The failure of these ancient medical texts to do anything against the illness really led physicians for the first time to seek new answers based on observations, not just the writings of the Greeks. The cracks that the plague created in medieval society allowed a new light to come through. The questioning, the innovation, the restructuring of power and society, all of these planted seeds for the world that we live in now. Humanity came out of this nightmare. Different and scarred, but resilient. The old world was gone, but a new one, this modern world, the world that we're living in now, was just beginning to rise from the ashes. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an abridged history of the Black Death, AKA the bubonic plague. I mean, truly a fascinating thing. I mean like all of history, it's like, oh, the most evil, tragic thing, like, also has beauty in it. Like it creates a terrible condition, but also creates like, also so much good can come out of it. It's just from like a cosmic sense. It's so bizarre to like really consider. I mean, looking at the, the scale of the suffering and the death is like brutal. Like imagining one day you're just like in your town and the next day your whole town is just ravaged with disease. Everyone you know is dying. You can't even care for your own kids. You just abandon them. Like, it's like heartbreaking even think about. And it's all coming from these, you know, these rats. You don't even realize it's the rats. I mean I, this is probably apocryphal, but I've heard the story like they were trying to kill cats because I thought the cats were doing it. But it actually made the problem worse because cats were catching the rats, but now they're killing the cats. The rats are even more rampant. So the people are dying. You have these plague doctors walking around with these crazy looking masks. It's spreading everywhere. No matter where you go or who you talk to, whatever traveler you're talking to, they're like, yeah, dead bodies over here, dead bodies over here. And then of course there's scapegoating. They just blame the Jews once again, you know what I mean? Like, it's their fault. If there's an ethnic minority living in your country, they're going to get blamed when things get tough. That's just how it is. It's so shitty that humans do that, but they get blamed. And of course it's not them, but it's like just insane that this is like the, the nature of the world at that time. Also the zombie fleas apparently. Yeah. That these things have like this blockage in their throats that actually forces them to like bite and get hung and hungry and more savage. Like it's such an insane illness that hit a destitute population that was already emaciated. I mean, it's just crazy to think. And like the fact that this went on for a pretty long period of time and it literally Changed the psychology of what it means to be European. You know, like, it's like their whole perspective on life was, like, different. I mean, it's pretty crazy. Yeah. I mean, wild. I mean, what do you guys think? Is there anything that, that I missed? If you're a historian, if you've read a book on the Black Death or the bubonic plague, please let me know. I would love to. I would love to learn more. If there's anything that I overlooked or got wrong, please drop a comment. I read all of them. If you didn't know anything about this, if this is the first exposure you ever had to this topic, please let me know. What did you learn? Is there anything you found that was interesting or enlightening? I read all the comments. I'd love to know what you guys think. So please drop one below. But just be nice about it. I mean, please forgive me, for goodness sakes. Now, I have good news. If you like religious deep dives, well, we have this channel called Religion Camp. That's where we talk about everything that is going to happen. Basically, where do we go after we die? What does everyone on earth say about our relationship with the divine? That's Religion Camp. We also do Camp Gagnon. That's just deep dives on interesting stuff that I find. You know, things like that. And also we have the inner sanctum. We have the campfire, and that is the place where we all gather around. And that is our Patreon. That is patreon.com Camp Gagnon. And that's where you're going to get bonus episodes, live zoom calls with other campers and people like you, merch discounts, all sorts of cool stuff that we're going to be doing over there at camp. It's about the cost of, you know, a cup of coffee and you're going to get a month of content, ad free episodes, all that stuff. You can check that out. Patreon.com Camp Gagnon and if you just like History Deep Dives, great news. We do these episodes every single week here at History Camp. So thank you guys so much. God bless, and I will see you in the future to talk about the past. Monster Energy. Everybody knows White Monster Zero Ultra, that's the OG it kicked off this whole zero sugar energy drink thing. But Ultra is a whole lineup now. You've got Strawberry Dreams, Blue Hawaiian Sunrise, and Vice Guava. And they all bring the Monster Energy punch. So if you've been living in the white can branch out. 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