What was the bubonic plague and why was it devastating for Europe?

Answer 1

It used to be thought that the Black Death originated in China, but new research shows that it began in the spring of 1346 in the steppe regions.
The disease is transmitted from animals to humans.
Plague infects wild rodents, especially rats, and is transmitted animal to animal and occasionally to humans by flea bites. As infected rats die, their body temperature drops, and hungry fleas jump to nearby sources of warmth and liquid blood.
Septicemic plague has a 40% mortality rate in treated and 100% in untreated cases. Pneumonic plague has 100% mortality rate if not treated within 24 hours of infection. The lymph nodes are mostly affected. They become the size of Oranges, become filled with blood and become black. Hence the name the Black Death.
At this time people were weakened by war and harvest failures. Germs, the fleas which carried them, and the rats which carried the fleas, flourished in the dirty towns. Busy trade routes carried the plague from one place to another.
Medieval doctors did not have a clue what caused it, but guessed it was the result of: the movements of the planets, a punishment from God, bad smells and corrupt air or enemies who had poisoned the wells.
Estimates differ, but most historians believe that the Black Death killed half the population.
In some places, like the village of West Thickley in County Durham, it killed everybody.

Economic effect: there was a great shortage of workers, and when Parliament passed laws to stop wages rising, poor people became very angry – some historians think this helped to cause the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.
The data is sufficiently widespread and numerous to make it likely that the Black Death swept away around 60 per cent of Europe’s population. It is generally assumed that the size of Europe’s population at the time was around 80 million. This means that that around 50 million people died in the Black Death. This is a truly mind-boggling statistic. It overshadows the horrors of the Second World War, and is twice the number murdered by Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union.
So many died, there was none left to bury them and the bodies lay and rotted in the streets. It took 400 years for the population numbers to recover.

Answer 2

There was a negative affect because so many people died and there wasn't many people who survived