The beaked mask came a long time afterwards
The plague DOCTOR costume — waxed coat, beaked MASK stuffed with herbs, long stick for examining patients without touching them — belongs to the 1600s. It is usually credited to a French physician, Charles de Lorme, around 1619, which is roughly 270 years after the Black DEATH itself.
Nobody in 1348 wore one. The reasoning behind it was sound given the theory of the time: disease was thought to travel as bad air, so a nose full of dried flowers should filter it. The costume did offer some real protection, though not for the reason intended — a sealed coat and gloves keep FLEAS off the skin.
It killed something like half of Europe
Between 1347 and 1351 the PANDEMIC is estimated to have killed 30 to 60 per cent of the population of EUROPE — somewhere between 25 and 50 million people. Nothing else in recorded history comes close as a proportion. Some villages simply ceased to exist, and England has hundreds of deserted medieval VILLAGE sites, a number of them abandoned then and never reoccupied.
It moved along the TRADE routes, because that is where the traffic was. It reached Sicily by SHIP from the Black Sea in 1347, was in Marseille and Tunis within months, Paris and London by 1348, and Norway by 1349. Roughly a mile a day overland, and far faster by sea — the same network that made medieval Europe prosperous was what SPREAD it.
Quarantine is a Venetian invention and a number
Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, ordered arriving ships to wait thirty days offshore in 1377. Venice extended it to forty — quaranta giorni, which gives us the word QUARANTINE. It was a guess rather than a calculation, forty being a number with biblical weight, but it happened to be longer than the incubation period and it worked.
Other responses did not. Flagellant processions moved between towns, spreading infection efficiently. Jewish communities were blamed and massacred across the Rhineland — at Strasbourg in 1349 several hundred people were burned before the plague had even reached the city. A pope condemned the accusations and was largely ignored. The scapegoating is part of the history, not a footnote to it.
What it did to the survivors
Killing a third or more of the workforce made the labour of every SURVIVOR abruptly valuable. Wages rose sharply, and landowners responded with laws to force them back down — England's Statute of Labourers in 1351 fixed pay at pre-plague rates and made refusing work a crime. Attempts to enforce it fed directly into the Peasants' Revolt thirty years later.
Over the following century serfdom weakened across much of western Europe, rents fell and diets improved, because the balance had shifted and could not be legislated back. The rest of the grid holds the experience of it: the BUBOES that gave bubonic plague its name, the FEVER and SICKNESS, the BURIAL pits and the CART, the MONK whose monastery kept the record and often died with it, the RATS whose fleas carried the bacterium, the MEDIEVAL DISEASE nobody could explain.