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Rats in History: The Renaissance

© Karen Yang

The Renaissance may have been the beginning of man's enlightenment, but for rats it was the start of the Dark Ages. Ever since the Black Death ravaged human and animal populations from the mid-1300's on, rats have been regarded with horror as the cause of much of mankind's suffering, but they are not the guilty parties. For the plague bacteria, Yersinia pestis, to survive, it requires only one creature which transmits it from host to host -- the flea. The host can be a donkey, a sheep, a chicken, a cat, a human. It doesn't matter -- Yersinia's not fussy where it lives. Neither are fleas. When one host species dies, a meal can be attempted by feeding on another animal. Rats died of the Black Death right alongside people. Go ahead and blame Yersinia pestis or blame the fleas if you like, but the real culprit is us.

When humans upset the balance of nature, the natural world strikes back. We still suffer from epidemics of all kinds, and we are still looking for others to blame, but it's always us in the end. We live in crowded cities, and we encourage the growth of animal populations that are dependent on the extra food and waste we produce. But producing more waste than we or the earth or our dependant animals can handle is dangerous. We want to conquer and/or do business with the rest of the world. But traveling outside our native habitat puts us into contact with disease organisms that our bodies are unable to deal with and spreads them to our neighbors when we return. Our Renaissance lessons didn't last. We are still severely overcrowded, we are still busily traveling the world to conquer new markets, and we haven't learned very much at all from the rats, the fleas or Yersinia. Here are some pages with more perspectives on the Renaissance rat:

Discovery Online - Black Death

Take a virtual journey with black rats aboard ships from the Crimea to London and beyond. This is one classy plague site with Real Audio talking heads and cool rat graphics. This site makes the interesting speculation that it was this devastating disease that fueled the Renaissance:

After the plague, concern for the survival of learning drove the founding of new universities across Europe. Only five years after the Pestilence left its shores, England created three new colleges at Cambridge. It may not be too much of an overstatement to say that the Black Plague anticipated the onset of the Renaissance and the rise of humanism.

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