The Problem of the Plague Trivia Quiz

Answer: serpents

Serpents, snakes, and dragons were closely associated with each other and with evil in the medieval mind; after all, it was a serpent who had tempted Eve in the garden. Although no one saw waterborne snakes in the 1348 epidemic, many believed that poisoned breath from snakes in the far East had spread through the air and caused the Plague.

Answer: poisoning wells

The accusation was laughable but the results were not. Thousands of Jews were burned by local governments, slaughtered by mobs, or exiled from the cities they had inhabited for generations. Pope Clement VI was able to protect the Jews living near him in Avignon, and some bishops also protected the Jews in their dioceses, but most clerics were perfectly content to take their confiscated property.

A few secular governments, such as the city council of Strasbourg, also attempted to protect the Jews in their jurisdictions; these governments were overthrown by angry mobs and replaced with more anti-Semitic ones.

It was the aftermath of the Black Death that led so many Jews to settle in Poland, where there was little anti-Semitism until the mid-1600s.

Answer: rats

Rats were everywhere in the Middle Ages, and frequently stowed away on board cargo ships. This would explain the plague's transmission to places like England and Iceland, across a barrier of water from the continent.

Answer: flung infected corpses over the walls

It is not known, however, whether bubonic plague can be caught from cadavers.

Answer: Genoa

Although the story has appealing parallels to legends like that of the Flying Dutchman, it is no longer considered particularly plausible. The chronicler Louis Sanctus of Beringen, however, recorded it as fact in April of 1348.

Answer: an astrological problem: Saturn in the house of Jupiter

Although all of these theories were advanced by scholars in 1348, the king's commission decided the answer was in the stars.

Answer: Pathogens arrive on earth in an 'organic rain' from passing comets

Their theory is seriously undermined by their argument that ALL diseases MUST have come from space (since no bacteria could have evolved on Earth, oh no) and by their fundamental misunderstanding of Darwin's theory of evolution. In epidemiology, vertical transmission refers to the transfer of diseases from mother to fetus.

Answer: Yersinia pestis

Called Y. pestis for short. E. coli is responsible for most modern food poisoning associated with beef, although humans could not survive without its presence in our guts.

Answer: anthrax

Anthrax, a cattle disease, would also have spread more quickly than a rat-borne disease.

Answer: bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic

Bubonic plague is distinguished by the aforementioned buboes and takes the longest to kill its victims. It is spread only by flea bites, as far as is known. Pneumonic plague affects the lungs, kills more quickly than bubonic plague, and is harder to diagnose; it can be spread through the air, much like tuberculosis. Septicemia, a disease of the blood, kills the fastest of all and is hardest to recognize; it is, however, much rarer than the other two.

It is commonly believed that most plague victims suffered from two or three of these varieties at once -- which would certainly explain how they died so quickly.