When you sign up at curiosity stream dot com slash real life floor, you'll also get access to Nebula, the streaming video platform.

That real life floor is a part of pandemics, and diseases have been a constant companion of humanity for thousands of years, and although they happen relatively rarely, they can be tremendously destructive.

And they often change society in strange and unexpected ways.

And there is perhaps no disease that has changed the entire course of human history.

Mawr thin The original plague, the bubonic plague likely originating somewhere around the Tian Shan Mountains in Central Asia.

The bacterium, your city of testes that causes bubonic plague lied relatively dormant, with only occasional outbreaks for untold millennia.

Until something changed in the sixth century A.

D.

The Byzantine Empire was at its apex of power and influence.

She had just retaken the Italian peninsula and was close to reuniting the entire Roman Empire again when all of a sudden, at the worst possible time the bubonic plague appeared in Egypt.

It's not entirely clear how it got here from its origins in Central Asia, but the first global pandemic in human history was about to begin anyway.

The bubonic plague is spread by infected fleas that live on the backs of rats.

The rats stowaway on ships and live within close proximity to humans.

So when the ships carry the infected rats to new cities, the disease inevitably follows.

The rats eventually die, and the fleas that actually carry the disease search for new hosts and jump on humans.

When the flea bites, a human bacterium enters the body and rapidly spreads to the humans lymphatic system and multiplies.

The infected person may not show any symptoms for 1 to 7 days after getting bitten, but they'll eventually develop a fever, chills, vomiting and, eventually, the trademark appearance of smooth, painful booboos developing out of swelled up lymph glands around the groin, armpits and the neck game green of the victims fingers, toes, lips and nose will eventually develop, followed by extreme pain caused by the decomposition of living skin.

While the victim is still alive without proper medical treatment, the fatality rate is between 30% and now 90% of victims who become infected, and even with proper modern antibiotic care, the fatality rate still remains around 10% today.

Obviously, the people in sixth century Europe in the Middle East had no access to antibiotics, and they didn't even know that the rats and fleas were the cause of the pandemic.

So the bubonic plague exploded when ships carrying grain and infected rats left Egypt for Constantinople, the biggest city in the world at the time, the disease spread and would go on to wipe out 40% of the city's population, infecting even the emperor himself.

And as the epicenter of the Byzantine Empire, the plague spread out on ships leaving for ports across the Mediterranean and spread like wildfire.

25% of all the humans living in the eastern Mediterranean region died within just a few years, and tens of million's died across the Empire and Eurasia.

The millions of deaths caused economic mayhem across the empire who had just taken out massive loans to fight the wars of re conquest in Italy and the western Mediterranean.

With millions of less people to work on farms and pay their taxes, the empire could no longer afford to pay for future campaigns or even to garrison the new re conquests and therefore the empire entered into a long, long state of decline from which she would never recover.

The vast depopulation and economic mayhem left the Byzantine Empire crippled and over extended, which allowed the Lombard the opportunity to quickly and easily take over northern Italy while also providing a once in a lifetime opportunity for the Arabs and Islam to surge over the rest of the empire and take most of it over.

Just a couple generations later, the first global pandemic would ultimately cause the deaths of around 50 million people, or 13% of all the humans in the world alive at the time, and led to the final destruction once and for all of the Roman Empire, while making room for new empires and religions to rise up in the chaos.

The plague would finally quiet down again and remained relatively dormant after the mid eighth century, until several 100 years later, when it would explode onto the world scene once again with even mawr fury and death and it had ever done before.

In 13 47 the bubonic plague re emerged on the world scene in Crimea.

The Republic of Genoa in Italy had a trading outpost of the time in Crimea called Cafa, which was being besieged by the Mongols.

A few years previously, the plague had broken out in the Chinese province of who bay around Wuhan and had killed 80% of the province's population.

It was carried across the Silk Road in the Mongol army's supply and logistics lines before infecting the army that was besieging CAFA after suffering from the plague.

For a while, the Mongol army camped outside got the idea to begin catapulting their infected corpses over the city walls and an early attempted biological warfare.

The residents of CAFA began falling victim to the plague as well, and the genie's merchants decided to just call it quits and escaped on their ships back to Italy Unknowingly.

To them, however, they had brought the infected rats and fleas with them on their ships, which were the seeds that would so the worst pandemic ever in all of human history.

After the rats got off the ships in Sicily in Genoa, the plague exploded all across Italy and quickly spread along trade routes across the entire Mediterranean in Europe.

So between 13 47 and 13 51 the plague ravaged most of the European continent.

In just these five years, It's estimated that as much as 60% of the population of the European continent died.

But some areas were hit harder than others.

Mediterranean regions like Italy, France and Spain saw as much as 75% of their populations dying.

70% of England's population died out.

60% of Norway's in 20% of Germany's.

Paris and London both lost half of their populations, and Florence lost so many people that they didn't recover their population back until the 18 hundreds.

But other areas of Europe were almost never even touched by the plague.

Like Poland, most of Hungary and Belgium, it's unclear why exactly the plague varied so greatly an intensity across the continent.

But within just five years, six out of every 10 people living on the continent beforehand was dead.

The black death, as it became to be known, also heavily afflicted the Middle East, where approximately one out of every three people died in that same five year time frame as well.

It's believed that in just this five year length of time, the bubonic plague may have killed as many as 200 million people across Eurasia, which is absolutely staggering when you remember that the entire world population per prior to the pandemic was only 475 million people.

That means that it's possible that around 42% of the entire human population of the world died within just a few years from a single disease to put into perspective how absolutely earth shattering and cataclysmic it was for the time.

That would be exactly like if a disease wiped out three point 15 billion people today.

In just a few years, it would irrevocably changed the world forever, just like the black death did in the 14th century and like the first plague did in the sixth century.

In this case, the black death wiped out most of the people living in Europe, which caused the demand for common people as laborers to skyrocket.

The surviving peasants were in a much better position to demand higher wages and more freedom from the nobility, which the nobility had to accept his reality in order to keep society moving.

Wages for surviving common people went up, the price of land plummeted and peasants found new opportunities they never would have had beforehand.

The black death had begun the destruction of serfdom and feudalism as institutions in Europe and gave rise to the very beginnings of capitalism that would replace it.

It would take Europe an entire two centuries to recover back to the population that she had prior to the eruption of the plague.

And by that point in the 15 fifties, capitalism was well on its way to taking over the continent.

The bubonic plague would periodically flare back up in various places across Europe in the Middle East for centuries afterwards, most notably in London in 16 65 and Marseille in 17 20.

But none ever became a true pants endemic again until the final and the most recent third great plague pandemic of 18 55 in China.

This time around, the plague appeared in the Yunan province of China and quickly spread across the Qing Empire to the British outpost of Hong Kong, where it was transmitted aboard ships to the British colonies in India, where it wreaked immense havoc.

This third bubonic plague pandemic would go on to claim the lives of 12 million more people, mostly in India and China.

But it was relatively mild everywhere else in the world.

After the discovery of the bacterium that causes the disease and the realization that rats and fleas were the primary carriers in the late 19th century and especially after the discovery of antibiotics, the deadly grip that the plague had over the human species began to finally fade away.

But the bubonic plague does still exist today, between 2010 and 2015, there were still 3248 recorded cases of the plague across the world, and on average, nine people still managed to get infected by it per year.

In the United States, after thousands of years of chaos and earth shattering pandemics, though, humanity has finally learned how to properly fight back against the bubonic plague.

If you want to learn more about how diseases like this work on a biological level, or if you're curious for more information on the ongoing and evolving coronavirus pandemic curiosity Stream has multiple fascinating short documentaries like this one, this one or this one that will tell you about how the coronavirus began in Wuhan, how it spread to the rest of the world, and how scientists across the planet are racing to discover a vaccine.

There's plenty in each of them that will explain how the world got to this point in the coronavirus pandemic.

And these are just a few of the thousands of top quality nonfiction shows and documentaries that you can watch on curiosity stream.

Of course, the library that you get through a curiosity stream subscription is now much larger, thanks to their bundle deal with Nebula, the streaming video platform created by myself and loads of other educational creators.

We may nebula to be the home of our bigger and more ambitious projects, like my Car review show Grant Test Auto with J T.

From second thought, where we drive and tell you what we think about some pretty cool cars.

So to make sure you get to see that, along with all the other great original content being produced by creators like Wendover Productions or Riel Engineering, sign up for the Curiosity stream Nebula bundle deal at curiosity, stream dot com slash real life lower.

It's super simple.

Any subscription there comes with nebula included, and at only $20 for an entire year.