During the Black Death in Europe, people believed that carrying a ball of ambergris could help prevent them from getting the plague.

Plate armour became cheaper than mail by the 15th century as it required much less labour and labour had become much more expensive after the Black Death, though it did require larger furnaces to produce larger blooms.

Prior to the bubonic plague epidemic known as the Black Death, Mongol and Turkish armies were reported to have catapulted disease-laden corpses into besieged cities.

The weaponized threat comes mainly in the form of pneumonic plague ( infection by inhalation ) It was the disease that caused the Black Death in Medieval Europe.

Illustration of the Black Death from the Toggenburg Bible ( 1411 )

The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, peaking in Europe between 1348 and 1350.

Although there were several competing theories as to the etiology of the Black Death, recent analysis of DNA from victims in northern and southern Europe indicates that the pathogen responsible was the Yersinia pestis bacterium, which causes the Bubonic plague, although these were different, previously unknown ancestral variants of those identified in the 20th century.

The Black Death is thought to have started in China or central Asia, before spreading west.

Spreading throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, the Black Death is estimated to have killed 30 – 60 percent of Europe's population.

Inspired by the Black Death, The Dance of Death, an allegory on the universality of death, is a common painting motif in the late medieval period.

After 750, major epidemic diseases did not appear again in Europe until the Black Death of the 14th century.

The Black Death originated in or near China and spread by way of the Silk Road or by ship.

The 14th-century eruption of the Black Death had a drastic effect on Europe's population, irrevocably changing the social structure.

The work was translated into English the following year, and with the cholera epidemic happening at that time, " The Black Death in the 14th century " gained widespread attention and the terms Schwarzer Tod and Black Death became more widely used in the German-and English-speaking worlds, respectively.

Whether or not this hypothesis is accurate, it is clear that several existing conditions such as war, famine, and weather contributed to the severity of the Black Death.

In Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt ( 2002 ), Bayonne is the first city recolonized by the Muslims after the total depopulation of Europe by the Black Death.

Other names have been used to describe this disease, such as " The Black Plague " and " The Black Death "; the latter is now used primarily by scholars to describe the second, and most devastating, pandemic of the disease.

Unification or Death (), unofficially known as the Black Hand ( Црна рука, Crna ruka ), was a secret military society formed by members of the Serbian army in the Kingdom of Serbia, which was founded on 6 September 1901.

The Black Hand was formed when ten men met on 9 May 1911 to form Ujedinjenje ili Smrt ( Unification or Death ), better known as the Black Hand.

It was certain now that Jess was in the house, but also, presumably, was Stacey Black.

Potemkin's Army of Ekaterinoslav, totaling, it was claimed, 40,000 regular troops and 6,000 irregulars of the Cossack Corps, had invested Islam's principal stronghold on the north shore of the Black Sea, the fortress town of Oczakov, and was preparing to test the Turk by land and sea.

But it had, as was usual in southern cities of this sort, a Black Bottom, a low region near the river where the Negroes lived -- servants and laborers huddled together in a region with no sewage save the river, where streets and sidewalks were neglected and where there was much poverty and crime.

The rest of Black Bottom was a rabbit warren of homes in every condition of neglect, disrepair and careful upkeep.

Mr. Justice Black was one of the minority that rested on the Article 1, power.

This mountain was known as The Black Reef and it rose almost perpendicularly for about two hundred feet, honeycombed with caves, top covered with dense scrub and creepers and tall grass.

Hank was beginning to feel sharp concern for Mr. Black.

If Mrs. Black was who he thought she was, Mr. Black's Peerless selling days might well be over.

Next on his program was a call to the Jackson office of Peerless Business Machines to find out if Vincent Black was still with them -- or, more specifically, still with us.

Thirty years' experience let him know, even at this early stage, that Black was his man.

Johnston was assigned to posts in New York and Missouri and served in the Black Hawk War in 1832 as chief of staff to Bvt.

Van Vogt's first published SF story, " Black Destroyer " ( Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939 ), was inspired by Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin.

The score was written within a couple of weeks by Goodwin who was approached by George Pollock after Pollock had heard about him from Stanley Black.

Black sign language was born out of this isolation.

The Mariner's Cross is also referred to as St. Clement's Cross, in reference to the way this saint was martyred ( being tied to an anchor and thrown from a boat into the Black Sea in 102 ).

There are the Tubanti just south of the Chatti and at the other end of what was then the Black Forest, the Varisti, whose location is known.

Ptolemy's view of Germans in the region indicates that the tribal structure had lost its grip in the Black Forest region and was replaced by a canton structure.

Anacharsis (; ) was a Scythian philosopher who travelled from his homeland on the northern shores of the Black Sea to Athens in the early 6th century BC and made a great impression as a forthright, outspoken " barbarian ", apparently a forerunner of the Cynics, though none of his works have survived.

To Serenissimus such tribes as the Cossacks of the Don or those ex-bandits the Zaporogian Cossacks ( in whose islands along the lower Dnieper the Polish novelist Sienkiewicz would one day place With Fire And Sword ) were just elements for enforced resettlement in, say, Bessarabia, where, as `` the faithful of the Black Sea borders '', he could use their presence as bargaining points in the Czarina's territorial claims against Turkey.

To the east, the boundaries of the ocean proper are Europe ; the Strait of Gibraltar ( where it connects with the Mediterranean Sea – one of its marginal seas – and, in turn, the Black Sea, both of which also touch upon Asia ) and Africa.

Black sign language speakers prefer to use two hands opposed to one, for example: remember.

There have been settlements there since the medieval period, likely in the Grange Lane and Black Abbey area, and the King's Highway which passes above the town was at one time used by the kings and queens of England when they used the area for hunting when the Forest of Accrington was one of the four forests of the hundred of Blackburnshire.

Due to the rich mining history dating from medieval times ( the Black Forest was one of the most important mining regions of Europe circa 1100 ) there are many mines re-opened to the public.

The Black Sea is one of four seas named in English after common color terms — the others being the Red Sea, the White Sea and the Yellow Sea.

The Black Volta is one of the country's only two rivers which flow year-round, the other being the Komoé, which flows to the southwest.

John Caesar, nicknamed " Black Caesar ", was one of the first people of recent African descent to arrive in Australia.

Through its purported connections to the June 1914 assassination in Sarajevo of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, the Black Hand may have been one of the principal catalysts to the start of World War I, fueling the July Crisis of 1914 and giving Austria-Hungary a pretext to invade Serbia.

The Black and Tans () were one of two ad hoc paramilitary units employed by the Royal Irish Constabulary ( RIC ) as Temporary Constables from 1920 to 1921 to suppress revolution in Ireland, the other body being the Auxiliaries.

These uniforms differentiated them from the Army and the Regular RIC, and gave rise to the force's nickname: Christopher O ' Sullivan wrote in the Limerick Echo on 25 March 1920 that, meeting a group of recruits on a train at Limerick Junction, the attire of one reminded him of the Scarteen Hunt, whose " Black and Tans " nickname derived from the coloration of its Kerry Beagles.

Codebooks and codebook publishers proliferated, including one run as a front for the American Black Chamber run by Herbert Yardley between the First and Second World Wars.

Black is the color of mourning, and since Cretan families are notionally considered so extended as to include great-grandparents or second cousins ( although they may have little actual contact ) as well as all their respective in-laws, one is theoretically justified to be in continuous mourning for some relative or other, however distant.

Cover of Weird Tales ( May 1934 ) depicting Conan and Bêlit ( Fiction ) | Bêlit in Queen of the Black Coast, one of Robert E. Howard's original Conan stories.

Black and White # 1 ( 1959 ) is one of Alston's more " monumental " works.

Other names connected to the city include Max Born, physicist and Nobel laureate ; Charles Darwin, the biologist who discovered natural selection ; David Hume, a philosopher, economist and historian ; James Hutton, regarded as the " Father of Geology "; John Napier inventor of logarithms ; chemist and one of the founders of thermodynamics Joseph Black ; pioneering medical researchers Joseph Lister and James Young Simpson ; chemist and discoverer of the element nitrogen, Daniel Rutherford ; mathematician and developer of the Maclaurin series, Colin Maclaurin and Ian Wilmut, the geneticist involved in the cloning of Dolly the sheep just outside Edinburgh.

The New York Times also reported a series of jokes, including how in the coffee houses of Vienna, one could order a " Dollfuss " cup of coffee instead of a " Short Black " cup of coffee ( black being the color of the Christian Democratic political faction ).

At the age of 75, alone and in mental and physical despair, he completed the work as one of his 14 Black Paintings, all of which were executed in oil directly onto the plaster walls of his house.

The French sent one of their premier ships-of-the-line, the Charlemagne to the Black Sea as a show of force.

In the later Middle Ages, destructive Mongol invasions from the East, and the loss of population in the Black Death, greatly weakened the traditional centre of the Islamic world, stretching from Persia to Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire was able to conquer most Arabic-speaking areas, creating an Islamic world power again, although one that was unable to master the challenges of the Early Modern period.

The veterans at first wore a combination of black police uniforms and tan army uniforms ( because of shortages ), which, according to one etymology, inspired the nickname Black and Tans.

In later tradition the number of icons of Mary attributed to Luke would greatly multiply ; the Salus Populi Romani, the Theotokos of Vladimir, the Theotokos Iverskaya of Mount Athos, the Theotokos of Tikhvin, the Theotokos of Smolensk and the Black Madonna of Częstochowa are examples, and another is in the cathedral on St Thomas Mount, which is believed to be one of the seven painted by St. Luke the Evangelist and brought to India by St. Thomas.