• ImWaitingForRetcons@lemm.ee
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    9 days ago

    And to be fair, Europe thrived a lot more after the plague, since massive labour shortages meant the value of labour shot up dramatically, improving the quality of life and culminating in the Renaissance.

      • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works
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        9 days ago

        Not having to worry about managing your surplus sons helped a whole lot. Sending them out to crusade against the heathens took a lot of coordination and energy. Plague reversed that problem real fast.

      • theUwUhugger@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        In the west! In the east? They switched to less laborious methods if need be, in fact laws were passed so that serf could no longer migrate away from their lords; making them the closest we have ever had to slavery with exception to the slaves we had

    • lepinkainen@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      IIRC the plague was also the thing that invented surnames.

      Before you were just John, but after you had to travel to other cities and there might already be a John so you became John Smith or John <nameofcity>

    • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Yersinia pestis actually kills fleas. It causes a blockage in their intestines, causing them to starve. That means they will sting a lot in a futile attempt to get sustenance, but all that happens is that they regurgitate YP into the victim. It’s a really neat mechanism but very unethical. I hope modern bioweapons labs have vegan alternatives.

  • BetaBlake@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    It wasn’t actually the rats that caused the plague, fleas and other people were the largest vectors not rats. rats are actually really similar to cats and spend a lot of time cleaning themselves

  • Darjuz@feddit.it
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    9 days ago

    It was not the rats who bringed the plague but the flea/parasite what the rats hosted.

  • Jerb322@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    The Misadventures of Flapjack has an episode where the kid has a rat that flings ticks at people that fuck with the kid. It uses it’s tail like a whip.They all instantly get the black plague. So fuckt up and funny.