Downing 2The Black Death in Europe is studied by the majority of students, at least to some extent, by the time they graduate from high school. Most of us know the basics of this devastating event. We know that a large part of the European population died, that the cause was bubonic plague, and that it was spread by flea-infested rats. What is generally not studied are the social and societal changes it may have caused, then and in the future. How many people died in Europe during the Black Death? The true number of people who fell victim to the Black Death is unknown and estimates vary widely, ranging from a third to half of the population and people of all backgrounds, ages and genders died. The city of Florence may have lost up to 75 percent of its population. The estimate for all of Christian Europe given to Pope Clement VI in 1351 was 23,840,000. The large number of dead made burial difficult, the solution was to bury people in mass graves, some of these mass graves were discovered by archaeologists in London. Giovanni Boccaccio, in his work The Decameron, describes the disastrous situation as follows: “Most of the neighbors, driven no less by the fear of contamination of putrefied bodies than by charity towards the deceased, had the habit of dragging the corpses out places. the houses with their own hands, perhaps helped by a porter, if one existed, and to place them in front of the doors, where anyone going around could have seen, especially in the morning, more of them than 'he could not count; then they brought up coffins or, failing that, boards on which they placed them. Nor is it a single time that One and Downing 3 have worn the same beer middle of paper......ns, Kristen Mossler Figg, Philip M. Soergel and John Block Friedman, eds. “The Famine, the Black Death and the Afterlife.” In Arts and human sciences through the ages, 366-68. Flight. 3: Medieval Europe 814-1450. Detroit: Gale, 2005. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE| CX3427400574 &v=2.1&u=sjvlstulareco&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&asid=2c8f9cebfa489a93076480 d14ea37df8.Boccaccio, Giovanni. “The Introduction.” Translated by Mr. Rigg. In The Decameron, 5-11. Flight. 1. London; David Campbell, 1921. Accessed April 19, 2014. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/boccacio2.asp.Cantor, Norman F. In the Aftermath of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Has created. New York: Free Press, 2001. Gottfried, Robert Steven. The Black Death: natural and human disaster in medieval Europe. New York: Free Press, 1983. Ziegler, Philip. The Black Death. Wolfeboro Falls: Éditions Alan Sutton, 1991.