Age of Adversity

Vann White

Western Civ

Tuesday 7-930 D. Ricci

“Age of Adversity”

The age of adversity was called that for a reason. To begin there were serious effects on life, economy, politics, etc and caused great adversity to almost everyone from rich to poor. To start there was severe weather that impacted things like harvest and agriculture. The economy is effected by this because farmers, land owners, cattle owners, and so, loose money, product, and the economy goes down. It was considered the “ Little Ice Age” because most of the Northern Hemisphere in United States and Europe was freezing cold for a long time. With this harsh weather also came health and famine because of lack of food and other things. Most of the population of Europe had to migrate and were forced to be homeless. They didn’t have a choice, it was either stay in the freezing weather with no food, horrible shelter if so, or migrate and become homeless to survive. Imagine living in these harsh weathers of freezing cold temperatures with no sufficient housing, food, sick, and so on. The word adversity seems to mild, more like a cold hell.

Besides the weather, Europe was plagued with diseases a couple of times. The first was the Typhoid fever that started amongst animals like cattle. The disease could be spread by the animal into the human and then spread from human to human. There was a massive outbreak and there was little that could be done. Considering that it was freezing temperatures, little food, little shelter, and not to much medically that could be done the disease was hard to stop and treat. So with all that came another big hit called the Bubonic Plague (1348-1351) swept across Europe. Now there was two different types of the bubonic plague mumonic and bubonic. Mumomic was caught by humans, either from exposure such as coughing, or blood contact. Then there was the bubonic plague which was caught by a flee that would hop from a rat to human. It was believed that these rats had come on a ship and ported in Europe and before the Turks could stop the rats from coming aboard the shipped hit the docks and rats spread. From there on they made there way up through the middle of Europe and spread through out with nothing stopping them. This disease managed to take out 1/3 of the population of Europe. Since the population had risen in the past couple of years, the disease spread quickly throughout. There wasn’t much medically at the time that could be done. The most that could