Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 457: The Black Death Part II - Passport to Hell

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

On part two, we explore the ways in which war, superstition, and fear gripped Europe as the plague robbed the continent of human life. Then, we travel north through Italy to get a closer look at the disease as it moved like a piranha, spilling blood in the gutters of Messina, Florence, Venice, and beyond. What does God's divine retribution look like? How far can rats jump? And what is the most elegant way to ditch your sickly family member? All answers will be revealed.Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

There's no place to escape to this is the last talk on the left That's when the cannibalism started Snood life Feeling snood life, dude Are you referencing the game people played eight years ago snood no man snood's a hat You're too good to take a bath when you want to make your whole fucking body a condominium for fleas Because I ate a bunch of edibles last night here in Denver, and I got real into medieval flute music Oh my god

I spent all day today at the hotel. We're at which is essentially the blobby's essentially port authority I spent all day writing the script and listening to fucking me evil Where the hell did you guys hear all this flute music Bro Henry actually sent me a link and I know you were high because you sent me a link of medieval flute music with this tagline I love this album It was well curated it's music from 1300s that allow it was I think it said the tapestries of Edward the second I believe oh, it was honestly very emotional and it sets the tone for how that what was in the background of

People screaming and dying streets of medieval Italy, which is people going Cryptic and horrifying that the music seems kind of happy. Oh, yeah, very John. Wow. All right. Let's get into it We are on to the black death part two now most people in medieval Europe believe that the black death was some sort of Divine retribution from God because in their eyes God was wiping the earth clean of sinners Just as he done with the flood of Noah or the biblical plagues of yore, but he didn't finish the job. Oh My don't remind him Really considering everything that happened before the black death that made the plague that much deadlier You really can't blame the people of Europe for thinking that the universe was

Righteously angry with each and every one of them We talked about this last episode and we've said and we're just gonna come up time and time again That this was the worst century to be alive. Yeah, and we're really gonna nail down why yeah, it wasn't the flute music was it? Absolutely not man. Hashtag snood life is real No, the black plague was not the only reason why life was awful though You could be excused for thinking so we're gonna go into all the reasons why the black plague was merely the cherry on top Oh of this century of human misery. All right crappy Sunday Yeah, see as we said at the end of the last episode medieval Europe had just seen an

Unprecedented period of growth near the end of the first millennium in this period of growth had lasted midway through the 13th century producing both bountiful Harvests and relative Technological marvels that it enabled the European population to triple But it really was technology that just allowed them to work harder and longer. Mm-hmm. And this nice Smarter not harder. Ah sorta Yeah, it sounds like they were working hard I walked through on YouTube I did a couple of searches for like medieval life reenactments, and it's still fucking sucked even when it was nice

Yeah, you understand some of their pain because you had to sit there in YouTube That's not easy to do the walkin handcraft each letter by finger on the keyboard That's not easy. Give yourself a little bit of credit Honestly, I did watch an hour-long special on how to make a castle by hand and they did it voluntarily in 2018 And it fucking sucks. I don't know why anybody would do this. It's hard. You're gonna make your own cement I'm not doing all that but this the little optimum. Yeah, what it was called It only lasted for like two and a half years when things were nice the little optimum That is so sad. Technically. It's the name of a hipster restaurant here in Denver. Yeah, but it is a it

It was just this little patch of time where everyone's like there for a second They're like maybe things are gonna be all right Maybe maybe maybe this time a is gonna stick and dad's not gonna continue drinking Oh, but two and a half years later after his dad dies. Oh, if he didn't get back to that bottle But unfortunately the population boom that came from the little optimum was unsustainable The land was becoming overworked much like it had during America's dustball disaster of the 1930s Where the land was given no time to rest and therefore turned to mnemonic dust Jesus fucking Christ the gerbils still is all gerbils

Are you still blaming the gerbils for this mnemonic dust the comparison? John Kelly made with medieval Europe was that their food population balance was akin to a man standing up to his neck in water The man may or may not drown But even the slightest rise in the next tide would result in his death and for the people of medieval Europe the rising tide Was the little ice age now the little ice age again. It's not a prequel to a Pixar movie When things got real cold and it didn't stop raining for about three years five years try 550 Years I think that's gonna be at least a medium size. It's an appetizer of an ice age

lasting from the year 100 until about 1850 the little ice age was another climactic shift that resulted in earlier longer and colder weather For centuries to come and the already exhausted European land failed to produce even enough food for pre little Optimum population levels and you know for a fact there was one of those guys like our good friend Adam warts who grew up in Wisconsin Who wears flip-flops in the winter? Oh, you know for a fact there's one good I Sometimes we're an extra snoot Honestly, it's kind of like a hip thing for me

It's a layered look and honestly in my fleas honestly really also really enjoy it because it gives them extra protection from the sun It's a special kind of cockiness those that can handle the cold. I don't like those The 1315 rye crop failed and the 1316 crop was even worse yielding 85% less than an already bad year as a result People all over Europe began to starve to death and died in such great numbers that cottages rivers and fields were filled With the bodies of the dead Now the writer of the Time Travelers Guide to medieval England claims that people stopped short of cannibalism But John Kelly, what does that mean they just sniffed the body

Do half you're eating with your eyes, so just take a look at that corpse there Almost feel it on your tongue But John Kelly author of The Great Mortality Maintains that there is no doubt that parents killed children and children killed parents Just to stay alive a little longer if for no other reason than to remove a mouth to feed I don't want to be blue, but you're gonna want to go with baby meat Baby meat apparently what we learned from old-timey cannibals from the from the French or from the 1800s Baby meat is the consistency of fish that it's flaky and it's very very soft and it melts in the mouth

So it's honestly not good for eating, but this is important now as a parent How did you have an answer for that? I did As a parent right now, I want you to line up your kids During this episode. I want you to line them up And I want you to hear that section and I want you to point at them and you all decide as children Who's gonna go to save the parents because it's important for the kids to know the parents have to continue to make more kids Yeah, I mean they're the children of the next generation So the parents could also die at that point because they already did what they have to do much like a small bug

You just procreate and die. I guess so maybe the kids should be alive Yeah, I guess so but kids are a lot weaker than adults and therefore cannot defend themselves against our attacks Yeah, they're gonna die anyway, okay Yeah, and that was just in the countryside in cities like Antwerp stevedores were charged with walking the streets with their infamous cries of Bring out your dad. Yeah Yeah, which actually started with the Great Famine and continued into the Black Death cool It was a meme just like bring out your dad actually it is the definition of a meme Wow But the Great Famine which happened first was just so wet

Yeah, I think that was a thing that really struck me is that I just didn't understand how wet yeah everything was and how just Rain can kill everyone. I didn't know that yeah Torrential rain for poor in some countries for six months straight And it was also so cold that the sea would freeze like rivers would freeze like it was no fishing Yeah, no no fishing it was insane how deep the ice on like the Thames would get no eels no eels no eels even They would die from starvation and just from rain They would just get flooded out of their own homes and then just be Ushered into the next town nude wet and screaming true. Well, I I just went camping and I was very similar

True true question though drought or torrential downpour isn't rain naturally just gonna be better though Don't you still want rain more than like no rain at all for 500 years? I mean, yeah, you would want rain more because you still have something to drink But it's still gonna ruin the crops either way apparently it rained so heavy. They said it looked like the Wheat and everything had been pressed down with an iron geez On air first Germany so many people died in the Great Famine that corpses were tossed into ditches in front of the town hall And in Louvain, France Collection carts carried bodies to the cemetery outside town two if not three times a day

In some cities in England living women and children were deemed expendable and were forced outside of the city walls So the survival of the men was ensured. Yeah No, ma'am Yeah, those expelled were then forced to survive on grass weeds Acorns and even bark in extreme cases actually here in Denver if you go to a little optimum That is this tasting course that they do is just like that. It's grass all sorts of acorns. Nice That's good actually, but at the same time that the crops were failing That wasn't the only bad thing that was happening. Mm-hmm the animals started dying as well from a disease called

Rinder pest. This is great. I'm I'm horror show Billy Mays and there's more Yeah, Rinder pest is also known as the cattle plague this came first Yeah, and this the animal very loudly shits itself to death Mm-hmm all while their noses mouths and eyes produce a constant stream of discharge Yeah, they said they would be kept awake at night for months listening to their cows Uh grunt and scream because the what Rinder pest also does is give the animal this constant sensation of needing to shit And not being able to shit. Oh, so they would just be kept up all night by a fucking pig going Trying to shit and we'll name that pig Zabraski

Thankfully the Rinder pest was finally eradicated in 2001 what got her another another check mark for a human guy Geez Additionally, there was so little food that people took more chances on sustenance that may or may not have already spoiled That meant that more people were eating moldy wheat and rye and moldy cereal grains sometimes bring on an hallucinogenic condition called Ergotism this is all straight from the movie the witch. Yeah. Yeah, see when grains get moldy They produce a fungus called ergot and a derivative of ergot is

LSD In fact, some people believe that the Salem witch trials were simply a result of a whole population Tripping balls on ergot all at once fueled by a belief that the devil was a very real presence in their lives Imagine you're that one person you're that one girl in Salem was just like I'm actually gluten-free and then everyone with LSD eyes It just starts chasing you down. Oh my god This was a you normally also with ergotism you get really sick. Yeah, and tripple So I don't know if it was just ergot that did it. I think it was a the constant classic hatred of Cool groovy people. Yeah, also, that's a great name for a kid ergot

Ergot he'll move right off them hands Well similarly the people of medieval Europe believed the same thing about the devil but at a much more intense level They saw the devil as a being without limits and since belief in superstition sorcery in the supernatural was so strong Medieval folk believed that anything could happen at any time Honestly the medieval times it is a fun time. I do I don't want to go there I would love to see it like if I was in some sort of time traveling orb I would like to like walk through and be able to see all of this shit. Oh, yeah, because it is killer like this idea of like people What part of it? It's all the talking goats people tripping balls all the time. It is the

It's really like tripping. They're being drugged by God. They're like like they don't know they're tripping. No, no nightmare Yeah, I Guess so but then you can so readily believe in magic because everything kind of has that tint to it But you don't know that you're actually very sick Yeah I'll add that belief to widespread ergot poisoning which by the way causes the arms and legs to blacken decay and actually fall off And you've got a population primed to believe that famines and the upcoming plagues were God's divine judgment Have you ever done a bunch of drugs when you're really sick?

No I think I've actually cured a cold with some mushrooms always I always believed you could party yourself healthy Yeah, but there is times when I remember like especially in college like having like a horrible chest cold No, yeah, but I still would do it where it's like you take like some kind of cold medication and you take hallucinogens on top of the Cold medication you're all sick and weird and feverish and gross, but you're still at the bar You're like drunk and you're on mushrooms. Yeah, it's like that Well, it's nice that you found something that if you ever do meet Lil Wayne you can bond over that Oh, I'll high-five him. Yeah, absolutely. I would love to meet him

But even if a person didn't die in the throes of a horrific trip death by starvation was no picnic either By the time a starving soul met their end their skin was brittle and brown and both their facial and Pubic hair began to grow abundantly just before their death This happened to me because I'm so hungry all the time why would the pubic hair grow? You know what? I actually forgot to look up what cuz I wrote that and I was like I gotta look up the Y on that one Yeah, and then I forgot to look up the Y. You know what? Let's just let it be the audience you let us know why the pubic hair grew you take this research on yourself

Maybe your body shrinks and then their hers get longer as a result like when they say with your Your fingernails like grow after death, but it's just your skin receding. That's great Marcus You did mention one optimal word picnic Mm-hmm. They should have had more picnics Did anyone suggest a Saturday picnic during this time a picnic is only a picnic when it's optional They all lived outside because they had shanty huts. So we mostly um, yeah, they were constantly in a word picnicking Yeah, and also, I mean if you were picnicking you reading grass you reading acorns And if you tried killing a deer in the king's forest that all that shit from Robin Hood that was real like you would kill you

You'd be executed for killing a deer in the king's forest. That's where my last name comes from That's what my people are the parks is the origin of the name parks is that my ancestors were park rangers That we would be the people you killed the people who were hungry. That's right. Well, they had to die They had to die Now from what we can surmise we think the great famine killed about half a million people in England and about 10% of all Germans Although we have absolutely no way of knowing how many people died in rural Europe But even though those numbers are low compared to what was seen during the black death It was actually the great famine that enabled the mortality numbers for the black death to be so high at least in part

See when it comes to malnutrition a famine of just three years has long-term effects on the future Immune system of children who were born into the famine and the people who were adults when the black death hit were children Dearing the great famine man. They had to go through all of that shit It's kind of very similar how we had to go through Alf just remember the big bang theory Yeah, I remember that yeah I remember one time I I got a teenage mutant ninja turtle toy and it had broken in the package Just like the plague will return that it came art and what a what a pain in the ass that was you might as well been dying tripping balls in a field nude covered in mud and my surfer Raphael yeah, the arm broke on in there

What a fucking dick in the ass by God. I'm pretty upset about it still However, the great famine also got the ball rolling on the big societal changes that came about after the black death See before the great famine most people in rural England at least didn't have surnames Last names were reserved for the wealthy in political classes because peasants didn't have a reason to move beyond their little slice of land Or their village and just so long as there weren't an abundance of guys named Ralph in your area There was no need for separate designations. You're just Ralph. Then you'd be dumb Ralph Oh my goodness, but after the great famine and especially after the black plague peasants began to move from town to town for work because there were so few people left and

People therefore began taking surnames based on their hometown like say now you're Ralph Kent because you're Ralph from Kent And once you had too many Ralph's and Kent surnames became professions. Oh, man. I love fat Superman Ralph Kent He's great. He works for the National Enquirer He could fly three feet above the ground and he went just slower than a slow bullet I can jump half as big as the normal man Wow Ralph Kent Now the little ice age and the great famine certainly did their jobs in weakening Europe's population for the upcoming plague But the last piece of the puzzle that enabled the plague to run rampant was one simple yet widespread problem

Filth See when the great famine hit the already Overcrowded cities were swarmed with refugees from the countryside and those peasants brought what animals were left after the Rinder pest epidemic filling the city with more garbage more shit and more rats All of their villages literally got rained out So after years and years and years of rain and destroyed all of like the village like kind of the worker class like people that would go and kind of Live on their own and whatever the freelance were or would like the outer edges of whatever fiefdom They were a part of and so they would be

Fucked right everything that they ever had was destroyed and so they'd all just roll into whatever cities they were But as they would come in they would just leave their actual lumps of shit and dead animals as they went Into the cities and then they're like okay here to be fed Ready to get some food from all the y'all and they're like well We only had so much for like for us You know I mean because we kind of been in here in the city scenario And you you seem to have left a lump of shit over here And that was the beginning of old country buffet where they realized treat them like cattle. They're hog people

By 1330 the cities were drowning in garbage and human waste and the problem was so great that in one recorded instance One man actually murdered another man over something as trivial as littering as the story goes a London merchant confronted an eel peddler who had tossed some eel skins into the lane outside of the merchant shop the merchant Demanded the eel peddler pick up the skins and when the peddler refused the merchant who had reached the end of his rope done Stabbed the peddler to death. You don't fuck with the conservationists This is the future the liberals want This is what they want. Well, this is just don't throw your shit in front of my store. I'm not fucking I'm tired. I've got I have to already deal with a river of shit and a river of blood that is constantly flowing past my store

Oh, you fucking throw fucking throwing eels out there. I'm blighted about having a shop. I got the rest of the eels all day That's my job. How much I'm wriggling to be able to bite Neither of them were happy to be fair, but you know that one guy was just like Pamela. I can't fucking one more person One more eel skin and then it just happened at the perfect time. Mm-hmm. You know, hey, it could happen to any of us But even outside of the tossed eel skins cities were covered in outdoor slaughterhouses and backed up gutters of shit And when those were combined with all the garbage that these people produced you had the perfect breeding ground for hundreds of thousands If not millions of rats, so we are going back to rats here We're out of gerbils right of hamsters. Well gerbils and I mean they are obviously not exonerated in any way shape

Then you're not exonerated the rats are a part of this a whole scenario If I were gonna put them all like what's they give them villain names because you got the gerbils on one side They think they're super fucking cute and they can hide behind their long tails mean all the rats are the obvious culprit They're the ones because they can jump real high and they love human shit Yeah, they do the gerbils are like poison ivy and the rats are the Joker. Okay. Whoo. I love poison ivy and the Joker sexy Now really why do you think gerbils are sexy? Oh, they're sexier than rats I would totally say rats are sexier than gerbils. There was okay. First of all, we're gonna put it in the record I'd go for a woman

Or a very feminine man gerbils are definitely a sexier rodent than a rat. Huh? Yeah, absolutely rat You get more of your dick in it You're too small like you would just sniff around your balls It's so hard to like you'd have to cut it open and kind of wrap it around your dick like it's a hot dog But guys, you know what? We're CEOs. Let's table it. We'll circle back. We'll circle back Yeah, really black rats are Extraordinary creatures from an objective point of view perhaps the most efficient pests in history Just two black rats breeding continuously for three years in optimal conditions are able to produce

329 million offspring But you know for a fact these retro like this is fucking awesome Fucking fuck party man. Oh man. They're the Irish of the road Dude even today London is home to 20 million rats You know New York City we get a bad fucking rat for having rats We have a lot of rats London has ten times more rats than we do. Yeah, we only have two million rats That's it. Yeah. Oh, I had a rat in my apartment one time that they are They don't die. They do not die. You know who I blame who dick Van Dyke

Oh, you've been blaming dick Van Dyke for a month and a half. I don't know what he did to you He's got skeleton mouth. You're just upset that he's living his best life in an older age with a beautiful woman No, I love that about him. Okay, but it's his he's like a dancing skeleton. He scares 98 He's kind of he's kind of crickety and he really honestly his face creeps me out Well, it'll happen all of us. Hopefully. Yeah, hopefully Well furthermore a black rat can jump three feet from a standing position He's leaped three feet I get if a rat was sitting here right now where I am been of that rat could leap and start eating your face

You know, you know here You've never seen a rat bounce off a woman on the subway train like when you were like waiting for one in New York I remember seeing a rat jump bounce off her tits And then like look on her face because it's just like a oh Because it happens so quickly and you didn't know that your tits could be a bounce board for something other than a very small man Absolutely, I saw a rat a massive must it looked like 10 pound rat it went through a hole the size of a quarter Yeah, they are endlessly powerful. They can fit through a Opening a quarter of an inch. They can squeeze down. They can also fall 50 feet without hurting themselves

Why were they made? To test us. Yeah. Yeah, and since they can fit into any opening That's a quarter of an inch wide that meant that they could cram themselves into any structure and medieval The shanty walls of the medieval world were made of a loose plaster like so they were kind of made Shiddily, it was very similar to plaster in Paris. Yeah. Yeah, they were just Fill right through that. Yeah, a lot of structures. They had to replace every 30 years or so Except if it wasn't a castle or something like eventually they got better at it But back then yeah about every 30 years a house would just fucking collapse. All right

Furthermore rats also thrive on dead animals and there was no shortage of death in medieval cities even before the plague dog catchers were more dog killers and they left copious amounts of stray corpses to rot on the street and Feed the rats. That's the problem. Why didn't anybody pick up after themselves at all? There was no culture for it. Okay, and besides the rivers of blood that came from butcher shops along with the piles of discarded heart slivers and intestines Surgeon barbers would pour the blood they'd let from their patients veins out into the gutters Which was the perfect sup for a rat the street rat bloody Mary ran with blood She's like actual not just animal blood, but human blood. Mm-hmm now concerning barber surgeons

I was actually quite interested to discover where the name barber surgeon comes from. Yeah, see they were indeed barbers But in medieval Europe regular folk were a little nervous about a stranger holding a razor to their neck Okay, but the thing was is that barbers figured they were leaving a lot of money on the table since they had all these fucking knives lying around So barbers became barber surgeons Expanding to bloodletting Amputations wound cauterizing tooth removal and boil lancing pretty much anything having to do with knives and flesh So you go in you get your tooth removed probably lose a pinkier too, and then at the end you're like and I'll have some corned beef Seriously, really is one stop shop. Yeah, and yeah, you can't all these knives sitting around

Yeah, a barber you can get a crop top I would assume they also butchers a meat for you. Oh the butchers in the barber surgeons Those are well there's a do they do butchers flesh and knives. I mean human flesh and knives Okay, butchers are a whole different game in the barber surgeons you get your teeth removed You move a couple of toes, and then you get a nice cut. Yeah, okay Yeah, but you could still get to probably get a sandwich there if it's a good barber surgeon Yeah, but the funny thing was that like butchers and barber surgeons were on the same level They were considered craftsmen, you know there was no for if I don't have the I am the thing that you are crafting

Well, that's the idea. They got a practice on somebody and oh, I bet your organs are easy to find You would have had experience with that. Oh, what do you talk about when you cut your finger off and you had that person? Oh, yeah, I did an experimental surgery Oh, I went to an urgent care and they would said is it cool if we have one of our residents like do this when I cut the Timmy thumb off and then the guy was like he's like just hold steady and he Cauterized my wounds and I screamed I've never had that sound come out on me before and then when he left the doctor came in and Looked at my thumb and was like he didn't have to cauterize that Probably could have stopped him from doing that but I didn't want to be like no damn it

But speaking of the slashing of flesh the final and deadliest spreader of the plague once it arrived in Europe was war Yes, specifically the way that war began to change in the 14th century See by the time the black death struck in the 1340s The Scots were killing the English the English were killing the French the French were killing the Fleming's and the Italians in Spanish We're killing themselves all on huge battlefields throughout the European countryside. They fought for a hundred years They also were the one of this new honestly, what did they fight over? Was it land? They had land ideologies like thrones, okay? Yeah, it was all of that because it was all the papacy Rome like it was like cities would get mad at each other

And then they just start fucking wars with each other Because the French was they were not one country yet France was not one country was a bunch of like landholders and little small dignitaries and then there was like Italy the same thing So they'd all enter fight. They also were they came up with the incredible military idea of called chevrochet which um was kill and pillage and rape and burn all the people because what they figured out a way to Weaken the countries what you do is what I do in Civ you got a pillage everybody It's just like everybody yeah, but it made for a holy unpleasant experience in the middle of your show

But she sounds so nice and it doesn't like what does it mean? You're like that's why the French the language of love the meaning is all death and murder Well, I mean really that of course it weakened the countryside, but when they did the the chevrochet Chevrochet The main purpose of that was to break sieges Because the king or whoever ruled the land would close themselves up in their castle and it would take like a year to break a siege It's hard once you get behind them walls Mm-hmm

And so what the opposing armies would do is they would just murder all of the villagers murder all the people all around everywhere So the king would be forced to leave his castle and come get you people. Yeah, and then he would be killed Well, you would the idea is you try to make the king come out to come get you And then when you go you go run out of the woods and the king's out there But a lot of times like the king would be trained to fight sometimes the king's a 14 year old exactly or just a rickety old Incest baby. Yeah. Oh, yeah many times an incest baby Yeah, well, this wasn't quite to the times of incest yet really the incest came like later on We didn't get really really bad. Don't discount nude life from having some brothers and sisters do a little licking

Oh, because I'm pretty certain there was some brother and sister licking a lick going on throughout the 1300s I'm sure there was but with the chevalier What that did is deep these were mini massacres all around the countryside and those produced more and more bodies And these essentially gave rats and the armies that they followed it gave the rats tiny little feeding stations suburbs Yeah, the rats had a whole thing. Yeah, they get their libo or their re-raw whatever they have like here in Denver Yeah, and that produced more rats and more fleas spreading the plague now concerning these larger armies Commanders discovered that while cavalry was a formidable force on the battlefield Mounted soldiers could be taken down if you just

Overwhelmed them with peasants armed with pikes and boats Yeah, dude because the horses get spooked and all of a sudden you stab a horse in fucking balls and drops the night off The top of it and you get it underneath and stab them stab them stab them stab you just like flood the area with dudes Yeah, yeah, there is some alternate universe where the there's like rat casts rat podcast They cover the same topics and they're just like the good old days. We're covering the black death Oh, this was a good time to be a rat. Yeah, this is the rat heyday right here Yeah, like how we talk about like the great Roman Empire. Yeah, that's how the rats talk about about the black play Abs they were kings

Well, infantry was also cheaper than cavalry because five or six bowmen or pikemen would cost about the same as one Cavalrymen and they were also very expendable because they were all peasants. How much did you say I was going for? Oh one shilling, huh? Is that a lot or oh, it's purposely very little. It's very little Yeah, how old are you I don't care The front he's an older one put him towards the front so that'll be where I'm say Why lie As a result armies became much larger again producing more garbage more bodies and more rats once the battles were over and done with Additionally while the bodies bred rats wore bred sickness because the insane stress of being a medieval

Infantryman weakened his immune system and the constant march and battle cycle produced filthy men Which attracted more plague carrying rat fleas? If one bar of Irish spring one bar of Irish spring could have just saved all of it could have in many ways It could have but then also the event soap are just jumping in the river, but they had that was that's what they considered to be gay When medieval people did take baths or when they did clean themselves up most of the time It was like jumping in the river that wasn't too bad It was just taking baths that was the bad thing because people who worked in shit like that were like worked in latrines They they did clean the shit off of them daily

Oh, they were also jumping into a river where the shit had been flowing into all They would go they had coarse salt soap that used to scour their skin that they would only use to wash Essentially their clothes and they also be actively used lie Quite a bit so they do could get washed but a lot of times There's a sort of burning your skin you just get burnt Yeah, but as far as where and how the plague entered Europe the main entry point was Sicily Specifically the port city of Messina this was where the ship or ships that it escaped both the golden horde and the plague at Kafa had arrived. Do you remember reading that letter?

Did you read the letter about how the head of the of the mongolian armies like sent that letter to the Pope saying? It's time for you to surrender now like as they were about to this whole thing as they were pressing forward like through Kafa and all this kind of Shit the mongolians very well could have taken over half of Europe if it wasn't for the plague Yeah, the plague and what and the side effects of the plague made them turn back and actually Concentrate more warfare in the China region of their empire But they were common for Rome and for France and they sent this letter essentially being like we're ready for your surrender at any point Now we're gonna come get you and it was only the plague that kept all of Europe from being a part of the mongolian Tell me the Catholics benefited or by a bunch of starvation death. It's weird, right?

Isn't that weird now the lucky jeans theory that we talked of last episode is only one of the possibilities of how the plague made Such a long journey without killing everyone on board these ships from Kafa to Sicily Equally likely is that the plague spread simply because of how sea travel was done in those days See back then most sailors found the act of traveling out of the site of land to be Psychologically disturbing which meant that most ships sailed along the coast where land could easily be seen I'd love that honestly. I'm very afraid of the ocean Well, that was the whole thing with Christopher Columbus. Everyone knew that the world was round It was just sailing out of the site of land just wasn't done. It was an insane thing to do

I get it. It sounds scary also when you said lucky jeans I did think of the sisterhood of the traveling pants, but then I didn't realize you're talking about genetics Took me a second, but I got it Well consequently since land could be seen port cities could also be seen and these ships carrying plague infected crews Likely stopped at ports every few days to trade and refresh supplies Amazingly though these ships also picked up more men in every port city to replace the ones who had died Probably recruited by the few crewmen who had the lucky jeans that enabled them to escape sickness and death Polish people And we're gonna get to that later in this series

We don't know if they were Polish Henry's is very proud that the Polish skirted the play We did not get the plague. We're immune to AIDS. Just let everybody know that at first I thought but I first saw the sentence that Polish people are immune to AIDS I thought it was just they didn't like to get help for people. They didn't like to reach out, right? I think it was just no one had sex with them But it seems to me like, you know the video game five nights at Freddy's how it begins where it's like what happened to The last guy who worked I just feel like if I'm going on a boat and they're like you're gonna fill in for stew It's like what happened to stew exactly like you'll find out

But honestly I think aren't sailors who were not expendable, but there were it is a transitory life. Yeah Now the plague hit Messina fast and hard after the plague ships docked and within weeks If not days the city was split into the sick and the well And this is the point when the black plague starts to ravage Europe for the next four years Sicily itself is the such a microcosm of how The plague rips up an island because it just it as soon as the the green light hit for the plague people would like obviously they were incredibly overwhelmed by it, but at the same time they They reacted in a very self-serving manner as well

Well in Messina crazed dogs ran wild in the streets Roads were filled with refugees fleeing the sickness and spreading it even further and the woods around the city were filled with The corpses of people who had wandered off to die alone because this is a new Sickness no one knew what the fuck was happening or where anyone was gonna end up even next week much less next month Well because at its best the plague kills you in six days at its worst the plague kills you 48 hours if not less than three days. I'm actually gonna flip those two though because I you know me I'm gonna get it done with please but the thing with six days of this But the people who died in six days had an extra three days to travel

Yeah, so all they are running scared from everything that's happening literally watching people clap screaming in the streets Like you're watching death happen live in front of you So you're running as far as you can meanwhile just spreading more and more plague as you go Yeah, the fear of the plague was so great But legends sprung up immediately one fryer wrote that a black dog with a sword in its paw Rushed into a church and smashed all the sacred objects while another fryer claimed that a statue of the Virgin Mary Was prevented from entering the city when the earth gaped open before its path You know what if I was there I'd be like somebody fucked the Virgin Mary statue didn't you I want to see every one of your dicks

And I'm looking for so I'm looking for dust looking for dust. Did you fuck the Virgin Mary statue? According to one account the plague wiped out entire networks of people within hours It was said that a man waiting to make his will died along with the notary The priest who heard the confession and the people that were there to witness the will and all of them were buried the next day All fucking dead. I also the one story that I liked that I came up. It's very brief You really enjoyed this story. I love the story um, but the it's it's a brief story in the great mortality But I was looking at there is some seeds of this but about their Duke Regent Duke Giovanni of Sicily who abandoned his job Right, so when the plague hit Sicily, he was like fuck this

I'm out save a number one and he just jumped in the woods And so he would go into you read under the woods and he became like a woods person where he and he's like the fancy man of Sicily, and he's out there with his all of his fineries getting covered in dirt and leaves and sticks and shit and Popping up every once while being splayed on run on back And he said that he became sort of like a cryptid of the Sicilian forest where he would run You know like basically they would see it's like I think that's our fucking president over there He's like oh no, is it out of me? Yeah I am a

But he died in the plague. He did die. Okay. Yeah, he deserved it I'm sure some of them did deserve a first most of them of course did not oh, yeah Now eventually people began to realize that the plague was coming into Messina through the ships So any ship showing signs of infection was turned away All this did though was take the plague to different cities who had not yet experienced the plague hell yeah We'd spread it even wider Sicily, however simply saw the plague as an act of God and until the plague burned itself out in the fall of 1348 chaos rained for an entire year You've been celebrating a lot of the horrible components of this

It's estimated that a third of the population of Sicily died and the entire island was littered with dead bodies found everywhere from the desolate volcanic interior to the green valleys near the coastal plains and Sicily's beaches from Sicily the plague spread into Italy who was going through yet Another famine caused by torrential rains that had flooded the country for six months at the same time major earthquakes rock Rome, Venice, Pisa, Bologna, Naples, and Padua and in Cyprus poisonous gases erupted from the ground when the earth cracked open. This is why they thought that this shit came directly from God I think it may have now the more than I hear about it. I think God may have been really pissed off There's some research going into the fact that they think that the earthquakes and the cracks that it would cause would release

Plague bacteria from the inner earth that literally the earth itself was attacking us with plague Oh, wow Finally war between cities in Italy had enveloped the country producing even more misery and death Now when the plague entered the city of Venice the city reacted reasonably in some ways and terribly cruel and others The plague arrived in January of 1348 and by March a ruling body decreed that all ships entering Venice would be Bordered and searched in any vessel that harbored corpses or Refugees that might have come into contact with the plague were set ablaze killing everyone on board. Everybody's got to go That's such a nice solution. You came up with also. I want to know

I don't know if the audience heard that but while he was recounting this horrible detail Kissles stomach rumbled like a cartoon bear hungry for honey Well, it's a it's a boat barbecue On the reasonable side Venice shut down all drinking houses and ends dead bodies were pulled from buildings and disposed of Convoys carried away the poor who had died in the streets and the dead were all buried five feet deep after receiving a Final prayer from a priest ending the Venetian tradition of burying the deceased in front of one's own house Hmm. Once the city began dying in impossible numbers though Venetians gave clemency to most prisoners and emptied the cells of debt exiles

Who could return to the dying city if they could manage to pay off one fifth of their debt So not only do you get to pay your bill, but you also get to die of the plague. This is so nice I'm also just as you mentioned before we all of the same the human brain hasn't changed whatsoever You know the human man loves taxes, don't they? They don't care they don't care they're they're saying they're doing this We're releasing the prisoners because of kind of reminds me of Michael Cohen when he got released to release at least people for COVID It's like we'll release ya, but you still owe me that money Yeah, we will get that money as soon as possible or you're dead

Let me feel your fucking pocket their taxes are going for so many great Gulches full of shit and how everything is like nine shambles one stoplight would have made me happy It was a stop sign. It was to pay for some very rich young man's Purple dye in his clothes because purple dye was incredibly expensive. Mm-hmm. I had the wealthy in this time period What did I get just wait? Okay by the summer of 1348 a year and a half after the plague arrived 600 people were dying in Venice per day and the city ordered a stop to the mass exodus of the population Lest Venice become a ghost town as a result 60% of Venice about 72 Thousand people died in the black death

Following Venice the plague entered a new phase when it entered central Italy through the port of Pisa There the plague worked so fast that a galley crew visiting a fish market merely spoke to a fish munker And the fish munker soon fell ill and died I was opposed to die in a war That's where opera came from isn't that something and then he probably had a couple of fish that you could steal after he died From Pisa the plague moved to Pistola Where it was decreed that bodies couldn't be removed from their place of death Until they were enclosed in a wooden box with a lid that had been nailed shut and that box was then buried in a grave

dug two and a half arm lengths deep Pistoia also decreed that people could not accompany a corpse further than the door of the church at a funeral and Bells to accompany mourning were forbidden so as to not trouble or frighten the sick which makes sense Because if they did ring the bells for every funeral the bells would never stop non-stop Yeah, but these rules only apply to the lowlier folk of Pisoia Because the families of knights judges doctors of physics or doctors of law They were allowed to mourn in any way they pleased. I mean, yeah, they have the diamond package the diamond package of life Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it seems as if these measures did do something to prevent the spread of the plague

Because while places like Venice lost 60% of its population Pistoia only lost a third. Hey. Yeah, look at that. Yeah Well, it's just random shit-ass fucking luck Yeah, they just a roll of the dice where some places where everybody died did some people only some places only some of the people died Isn't that great? You just see the politicians spinning it right now. Just like only one-third. We don't like them anyway Yeah, cuz you know while that did work in Pistoia in some cities Nothing they did had any effect on the plague in any way whatsoever And no Italian city saw more horrors from the black death than Florence see by the time the plague reached Florence

They'd already survived an epidemic of another kind in 1340 probably measles or smallpox and that was in addition to a war with Pisa in 1341 and civil strife by the time the plague arrived in one incident the city's chief of police and his son were Publicly executed and dismembered and once the police chief and his son were dead the crowd cut them into tiny little bits Beasted upon raw flesh then and there And that is where I don't even know if I want to say it but the kids like you eat like pigs Sometimes people refer to police officers Yeah, I like that a little bit those two little little chunks. Yeah, it makes me think of Costco

Everyone's complaining like oh, they say they want to defund the police. It's like back in the day So things still aren't that bad Florence was then hit by the same famine that had hit the rest of Italy and they had no money to import more grain Because King Edward the third in England had borrowed over a million Florence to fund the hundred years war with France and King Edward Had defaulted on his loan This is also the middle of the hundred years war Well, it's also the beginning of the hundred years war the hundred years war had started like about five or six years early Hundred years were actually lasted for a hundred and sixteen years

And it was actually it was three different phases and there was like usually kind of a pause of about ten fifteen years between phases But this is like right now so imagine like that in the hundred years war was the bloodiest conflict in medieval history And that was also going on during the black plague. Okay, so it's like hockey you have two intermissions By records when the plague hit Florence it quickly killed eight to ten thousand children 30,000 wool workers 600 notaries and lawyers and 60 physicians and surgeons well apparently Florence part of the reason why I got hit so hard is that it's main I believe important export is wool. Yeah, and the one thing that rats like is a warm little bed Because they used to go into all the wool needs sleeping in milk. Okay, which kill everybody next week

They would just come out of the wool mean like You got it. Yeah, and the wool is then full of fleas which then jumped to the wool workers Which then jumped to everybody else, right? Yeah, I mean and really like the reason why things were so bad and some player worse than some players And not as bad another it really was like these little things Yeah, you know that's why this story this whole subject matter. It's so fascinating Yeah, that's because it really is these little human factors that really shows and I don't know. I'm you know, we're obviously I'm I'm at my wispy hairline deep into this and it's really nice to see all of these little societal

Things similarities and then obviously yeah, I mean technology. There's a lot of differences. Yeah, but there are a lot of human similarities as well Oh, very much. So we'll get to the insane human similarities here in a bit a tragically one of the scribes who documented the plague in Florence so Well was himself stricken down and the last thing he wrote in his plague journal was and the plague lasted until Dot dot dot just before he died of the plague himself. I don't want to have a plague journal Do we need hamburger Diarrhea I can do sit down. We talk about our favorite hamburgers or favorite milkshakes You wouldn't believe it avocado on a hamburger. I thought it was out there until I had it in here It's great and my hamburger lasted until dot dot dot seven minutes ago

Another writer a poet named Giovanni Boccaccio Wrote that he witnessed the rags of a popper who died from the plague being thrown in the street Which attracted the attention of two street pigs Yeah, you know tough them street pigs are the actual pigs you ever met the east side porkers When you're a pig you're a pig all the way from your first turnip head to your last dying day Every city had street pigs Street pigs I love it like Orson's brother from Garfield and friends. Yeah, we're mean

Street pigs yeah, man the pigs then did what pigs do and they snuffled around the rats. They are cute Even when they're being horrible. Yeah. Yeah, and they rip the rags apart to extract the nutrients that were on the rags Which is probably plague puss and blood But yeah, cuz that's how you get beat into the east side porkers. You need a bunch of plague A short time later Boccaccio wrote the pigs began to ride the round as if they'd been poisoned and both dropped dead to the ground Suicide. Oh Boccaccio wrote further that the plague went far beyond the citizens of Florence Simply avoiding one another the fear of the plague was so great that brothers abandoned brothers

uncles their nephews sisters their brothers and wives their husbands as we've we'll see because these next two episodes were Kind of going country by country to see they're the people's reactions to the plague in Italy The fear response seems to be the biggest response where people just freaked out and Bugged like as soon as they saw that their family was dying of the plague people just said peace and just went north sure In some cases the fear was so overwhelming that quote fathers and mothers Refused to nurse and assist their own children as though they did not belong to them And of course when death and chaos reigns bad men came to take advantage as they always do

Mm-hmm in Florence the most hated people in town were the grave diggers You'll see which were called the bit genie in the Italian tongue. Oh, actually, I'm gonna give America I'm gonna give an English the win on that one. Yeah, right digger is so much cooler than a We calm grave diggers that when we act as if that's just what they do and they dig graves This really is like if they all got together and decide to make a fucking gang Well the Puccini adopted the motto those who live in fear die And they descended upon the city like vultures demanding huge fees for body disposal while drinking winching and

Corousing as the city died around them you use the word winching and Corousing in a way that kind of makes it sound fun But they weren't they were actually very dangerous They were that's what the whole thing is that they would just be like, you know, we don't obviously we could let these bodies I'll stay around here, but wouldn't it just be a shame something happened your fucking family This is the beginning of the sanitation union the most powerful union in every local government Yeah, eventually the people of Florence had to fear that gangs of drunken shovel wielding grave diggers Would burst into their homes demanding ransom lest the Puccini

Murder them and pass their body off as just another plague victims It's look like it's a time to make a summer work We got to make the bodies ourselves. There's so many bodies. You can have You want a fresh one? It's a nice. It's like oh and you'll get that nice a caprese You get the nice little you get the one fresh Motser a yeah, did Italians eat like Italian food then like as we see it today I'm sure they had a nice Mutsudel. They did a food history pot. Yeah, I don't know if they had Baba ghouls They might have I wonder when it all started

Yeah, well as far as where the Puccini were taking all these bodies most dead Florentines ended up piled in the plague pits with thousands of other victims and Interestingly these plague pits actually resulted in a change in the way Europeans perceived death suddenly death was a very personal thing an almost casual event endured in loneliness and Anonymity that had all the gravitas of a sick animal dropping dead in the streets get it I'm with that. Oh Snude life where he's before one could be comforted by the thought of ceremony upon death and the possibility of resurrection come judgment day

The plague pits destroyed all notions of a romantic death You might as well be a fucking dog and that only further increased the collective sense of Existential dread because think about this you believe that God is doing this to you for your sense Mm-hmm, so at some point while you did believe that God was gonna be the one that saved you God was gonna be the one that you would give you the final absolution all of your sins It's like oh God's doing this to us. We're alive. Yeah, you're gonna do when we die. What do we do? Like they know daddy no mo. Yeah, hey Becky What if I just a dude with like a travel passport to hell let's check out hell for a second

It's hot springs, but there is a couple of springs anything about fire little barbecue schmores It's gotta be it's more of a char Maybe we should think about Satan well God's going back on his promises, you know like the resurrection ain't happening anymore Thank God cuz that's called a zombie apocalypse Man, no those plague corpses came back and then just been like I hope you taped my shows As far as how the black death affected the way people in Florence lived their lives people reacted in one of four ways and this shows you how humans are still the Fucking same today as they were back then the first was complete isolation in which citizens would lock themselves away in a comfortable home to live a

Life of sobriety and reduced risk these people had the highest survival rate and most of the time They were also the richest people because they had a place to go they could do that You know they could buy a whole shitload of cheese and meats and salted meats and just like okay I'm gonna stay in here for a year. All right. Oh hashtag suffering. We're gonna be here We're gonna just move a bit of a staycation Videos though were they all saying imagine we could all relate to them Well others believe that the only way to ward off the plague was to live life to the fullest Giving in to every single craving or whim all while shrugging off the black death as the world's cruelest joke

Those people had the highest mortality rate But you'd go to because they try to close all the brothels right, but you know what even I gave up strip clubs during COVID So that actually so now I say no, that's not right I just think of the place you went to a Nashville where as all the girls were massed up, but just the Pussy's room I guess I guess it doesn't sneak up in there or sneak out Well unless you go to Kwee first That little fart of death Sorry, go on in the brothels you'd go to

You'd also be amongst these at the time sex workers that were also a third of them dying of the plague as they were servicing everybody So you go down to these like little spots where there would be people openly bleeding and like having the the boobos and But they're still sucking your dick and everybody's drinking and shit just smoking opium just trying to be like Fucking go to find me where I fall down Most however took the more moderate third path they didn't isolate themselves completely nor did they carouse openly But they instead carried flowers or fragrant herbs when they ventured outside Which is supposed to ward off the plague. I actually know I think I'm part three. Yeah Well, this is the technically this is the very stringent maskers group. Yeah

Yeah, and also the the flowers covered the stench of the dead in the dying. You're gonna want those Yeah, I actually you know what I did my little life hack for my mask to stave off my horrible breath Little chocolate bar in there. Sometimes you could literally like you get you choose some nice food beforehand that you get the food smells or gum Mm-hmm, cuz it's like men fall mask. Yeah, you really figured it all out for me It's the nicotine lozenges. They've been my constant companion for the last year and a half I love them a spearmint smell follows me throughout my day. I didn't smell my breath at all But there was also the fourth group the people who simply Abandoned the cities for their homes in the country. Of course, that was also the people who could afford to do so

So one in four are your wealthy class the two in the middle are just like trying to survive this the best they can Yes, city goers normal city goers But it's like, you know, and then the other group was the ones just wealthy enough to abandon everybody But then they brought the plague with them wherever they went. Yeah, right, okay And speaking of abandonment if someone decided to leave the city while others in their family were sick Family members suffering from the plague would often be left behind to die in the cruel list of ways I wouldn't want it any less I don't know about that to avoid what we might call an uncomfortable conversation

Instead of like ghosting somebody like they think that this was easier to do because it's literally ghosting someone Yeah, you left them to die. Yeah, yeah, we'll become a ghost indeed Yeah, well relatives would leave sweet meats water or wine next to the bed of the afflicted Yes And they would tell them hey, I'm gonna leave this here so you don't have to wake me up tonight Like I'm gonna get a good night's sleep. I don't want you to wake me up It's just you just take care of yourself for a little bit Okay, you for days wait a second. Why do you have so many bags?

Why do you have all of your luggage and family? I'm just gonna mark it later. You brought all of your pictures of your loved ones See, there is empty shadows on the walls because I saw this guy at the market yesterday I was telling him how cute my family wasn't I wanted to show him Then once the victim was passed out the relative would just sneak away and never return When the victim awoke to find themselves alone, they figured out what happened. They'd crawl to the window and just scream for help But since no one could risk the infection the victims were just left to die by Themselves in a pool of their own blood and vomit. Why don't they just do like uber eats?

I don't know the gig economy really could have saved them here Yeah, totally by the end of it Florence had lost half their population 50,000 people and in the interim city officials had taken advantage of the chaos by stealing half a Million gold Florence from the inheritance and estates of the dead scum bags Well, sometimes they also just got it right because if everybody in the family died and then those who were supposed to inherit it We're die. Yeah, you basically have all of these holdings that they would just sort of like I guess these are ours now And that was they'd high-fived themselves and all of a sudden they all got super rich It's like it's weird because again

It's very similar to the fact that you know how much money did Jeff Bezos make last year versus everybody else be Economically devastated because now he can go to the Mars Yeah, and I'm calling it the Mars from honesty It's the breakaway civilization that we've been talking about for years and we are going to see them do it Well, this was the beginning of trickle-up economics, which is really the world that we live in trickle-downs alive Yeah, the only thing that trickles down is plague puss. Oh, that's good. I always say is the cost Trickles down is the cost. I was gonna say the rivers of shit. Yeah, that's all Okay

Now what's interesting about this particular strain of Yersinia Pestis is that in every single way the second plague pandemic was Far deadlier than the third plague pandemic that came centuries later for starters The black death traveled Insanely fast especially when compared to the third plague pandemic which occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries when travel was Exponentially faster see during the third plague pandemic the plague traveled eight miles a year in India and 20 miles a year in South Africa by contrast the black death of the second pandemic Traveled 50 miles between Pisa and Florence in just two months and by the time it reached Paris and France It was traveling two miles a day

Damn as per John Kelly's description the black death moved like a piranha spreading so quickly that some medieval doctors Speculated that the disease was spread by nothing more than a passing glance. Oh, yeah, man Side eye inside. I did it and while Yersinia Pestis now kills people up to six days after the first symptom show the black death of the 1900s sometimes killed people within three days of exposure sometimes faster With symptoms far worse than what we see with the modern plague back then it was gangrene uncontrollable vomiting and a bloody infectious cough in addition to everything else and those were the good old days Yeah, do you think it also had something to do with the famine and how everybody had been weakened and what they now know

Which we've been saying for years, which is a really funny We got vindicated that the the statement what doesn't kill you makes you stronger actually shows for the immune system That is not true. No, not true. Not true There are many factors that we're about to go into but furthermore while the death tolls during the black death was high as 60% in the population in some cities the third plague pandemic never claimed more than 3% of any of the populations that struck You know, it's the struggle of being an immigrant's child. What's that? It's the kind of lofty things that the child the third pandemic held up to because like, you know, the second wave I don't know what the second wave plague was just being like, you know, we killed 60% in our day

We have 60% of people mean while the third plague pandemic is like, you know playing video games on the couch till they're 29 Sure. Well, it's World War two the greatest generation that spawned the boomers. Yeah Yeah Now as far as why the second plague was so much worse than the third It doesn't just come down to the fact that medicine was so much better in the Victorian age than it was in medieval times Because it can't be that much better. It was still better I mean that they still weren't fucking it doing surgeries based on the position of the stars by the Victorian ages You know, there was one doctor who's just like, I'm just gonna try coming on it

I'm pretty certain I had a dentist in Los Angeles that used astrology to talk about my mouth. Oh, that's great That's what I want to hear. It's a new moon. Do I have a cavity or not? Remember the black death was a bacteria not a virus and as opposed to viral infections that leave behind a core of immune survivors, your synopsis does not produce any Immunity in its victims you get it once you can get it again That meant that the plague introduced a second mortality Because even the people who didn't catch the deadlier plague strains still died because the people who would have cared for them We're already dead or if they didn't want a risk getting it again

They find themselves in a conundrum really absolutely and because the people who got it the worst were the helpers Yeah, people that would help you they got it the worst and they died and there were certain monasteries at the time because while Largely and this is true the church abandoned its people quite a bit, but there were certain sex and like I want to say the Dominicans and the people underneath the Francis of Assisi They were the ones that would go out these these monks They would show up and basically take care of you while you died and then they themselves died and the problem that the reason Why they didn't last very long all of those orders because they all died

Yeah, right entire entire monasteries would be just wiped out But they were trying to do something good they were trying and I do wonder at 7 p.m If people clang pots and pans around for them just so they could feel that so hear the sound of working in the kitchen Well furthermore the streets were dirtier and even more rat infested because the street sweepers were all dead and the Malnourished became even more so because the farmers who would have grown the food and the Cevadors who would have brought it to the city were also dead. Okay. I was gonna guess that yep But perhaps the simplest explanation of why the second plague pandemic was so much deadlier than the third Was because while there were different strains going around the main strain was probably a particularly

virulent strain of the marmot plague and don't worry Marmot plague we talk about the de bargain marmot that we all know that last week The de bargain marmot? Yeah. They were around man and these these fucking marmots them their gerbils the hamsters each one of these fucking little They're a little beady eyes, and we're supposed to feed them nuts all day. No when they're stealing our pizza Russian scientists who have studied the marmot plague in contrast to the rat or gerbil plagues Say that the marmot plague is more virulent because the toboggan marmot has lived with the plague for a longer period of time You can't mess with the toboggan marmot. They will never die No, and don't worry the a various governments around the world have been trying to figure out how to

Properly weaponize the plague for a very long time and one of those I remember this one statement from there was a major general Nikolai Urkoff who was the during the fucking This is like the 70s in the USSR where he basically said he would shout to his staff I only want one strain of our plague weapon the marmot plague My god Weaponize the toboggan marmot much like the penguin did to penguins and Batman to Batman returns I believe that would be really fun because then you are gonna die But you can also be like hi marmot fucking put them in little wigs

Yeah, I'll tell dresses and you send them at our soldiers and when they're a horniness of business of war They start having sex with these marmots They bite off of our soldiers penis and then what they do is decrease the breeding amongst our strongest Yeah toboggan marmots running around with a bunch of dicks in their mouths and it's a long road to walk. Yep I got there though you did it you did it But since the marmot lived with the plague longer the marmot evolved to resistance the plague in turn Evolved to become more virulent so it could kill the marmot this whole thing is about marmots again It's another one of these little rats

And by the time the marmot plague jumped to humans It had become the deadliest plague strain ever encountered by man before or since And so when the plague hit Sienna and the Tuscany region of Italy in 1348 Bodies were stacked in plague pits and a thin layer of dirt was thrown on top More bodies were stacked on top of that with another layer of dirt and so on and so forth like so much lasagna By the way, it's a comparison made by the Italians at the time and not a cheap shot made by me against the Italians They call the lasagna style pit plagues. Oh, that's I'm so I'm so happy they did that I want to see the plague themed diners driving

The guy Fieri would do about this like this idea of just been like I put this on a flip flop So that does answer your question they did have lasagna back then great because they did compare it Okay, the problem with the lasagna method is that the top layer of dirt was still a thin layer of dirt, right? Like like a good lasagna. Yeah, but too heavy on top Yeah So wild dogs dragged the bodies out of the ground and littered the city of Sienna with the limbs of plague victims Ripped off their dead bodies by animals who also carried the plague. Oh, that's just Borgie. He wants to play catch Just throw the leg there

Borgie come back boy Concerning mortality Sienna was by far at the hardest hit in all of Italy 60% of the population including 52,000 in the city and 28,000 in the countryside died of the black death But estimates at the time put the mortality rate as high as 84% oh my god But once the black death burned its way through Italy it moved on to France Which is where we'll pick back up next week for the black death part three. Yeah Oh my goodness next week. We're gonna see some naughty popes very naughty popes very sexy fun popes

Okay, we're going to see a little bit more of the even more modern Sort of view of the plague how they will experience a plague. We're going to France then we're going to England People guess what also got all fucked up. Yeah travel around the world and I got the black death Um, and then also next week. We'll talk about more of the social repercussions of the plague. We'll talk a little bit about the anti-Semitism They came about and what we were looking for like because everyone was looking for who did this stuff go? Yeah, absolutely Yeah, and also some of them were looking to wipe out their loans, but we'll get into that next week We will get into that next week. Thank you all so much for listening. I hope you're doing well out there We're super excited. We're in Denver right now. Yeah, and we will be well by the time this is out

We will have already performed at Red Rock. So I just want to congratulate us for the standing ovation We got in the middle of the show with a great joke. You told I heard mr. Bigg is coming Oh, we're getting a we'll be having a record deal at this point live via satellite feed I think so So honestly, we want to thank everyone who did come up to our show at Red Rocks And yeah, we're super excited to be in beautiful Denver The meet and greet for Whedon is none of the end of June. It is at the end of July The same date July 24th

Fantastic. We don't know what those hours are, but we were gonna let you know really soon That is three days after I will officially be 40 years old So please treat me with the respect of a fucking elderly adult We got that shit I'm turning thing any other announcements. We're ready to go. We don't know when to believe next week We'll be releasing our list of touring dates. Yeah, I'm really excited for for 2021 and 2022 you can't wait to get back out there and see y'all and yeah Just keep on supporting all the shows here on the last podcast network

We appreciate you for being with us and we'll just yeah, I think that's about it Yeah, the full Beastie Boy series on no docs in space is available now And we have already even that won't come out for another couple of months. We have begun work on season two sweet. All right, everyone hail yourselves Hail Satan hell game Magusta Lations help me. Oh man. I'm fucking I'm sick. You're gonna take care of me brothers Yeah, dude, I'm actually just gonna leave you with this salami and this wine and then you go to bed Yeah, I should I are actually just gonna be right next door and okay, but wait a second This show is made possible by listeners like you thanks to our ad sponsors

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