The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

by John Kelly

In the Islamic Middle East and North Africa, mortality rates also were in the one-third range. To the Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, it seemed “as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion.” In China the presence of chronic war makes it difficult to assess plague mortalities, but between 1200 and 1393 the population of the country fell 50 percent, from about 123 million to 65 million. Today a demographic disaster on the scale of the Black Death would claim 1.9 billion lives.

More recent research on the tarabagan also has relevance for the Black Death. The tarabagan is a member of the marmot family, and, according to the Russian scientists who have studied the animals, the strain of Y. pestis that circulates among marmots is the most virulent in the world. Besides extreme lethality, marmot plague, as the Russians call it, has another Black Death–like feature. It is the only form of the plague in rodents that is pneumotropic—that is, in tarabagan and other marmots, and only in them, plague has a tendency to spread to the lungs and become pneumonic. On the steppe, dead tarabagans are often found with a bloody froth around the nose and mouth—telltale signs of pneumonic infection.

In the Plague of Justinian, one also hears for the first time a sound that becomes overpowering during the medieval pestilence: the sound of human beings drowning in death. “At the outset of this great misfortune,” wrote a lawyer named Evagrius, “I lost many of my children, my wife and other relatives and numerous estate dwellers and servants. . . . As I write this in the 58th year of my life . . . I [have recently] lost another daughter and the son she has produced quite apart from other losses.”

The Plague of Justinian marked an important turning point in Europe’s relationship with infectious disease. The centuries preceding the First Pandemic were a period of chronic, devastating epidemics. In the second and third centuries, smallpox and measles outbreaks may have killed a quarter to a third of the population in parts of the Roman Empire. The centuries after Justinian were, if not disease-free, then close to it. During the early Middle Ages, all forms of infectious illness became uncommon and plague (as far as is known), nonexistent. For this disease-free interim, the collapse of civilization deserves some credit. A disease is more than just a pathogen plus a transportation system. To ignite an epidemic, a friendly environment is also necessary, and after Rome fell, the environment in Europe, particularly northwest Europe, became increasingly unfriendly to epidemic disease. In the early Middle Ages, the population plunged precipitously, shrinking the pool of potential host-victims. In the second and third centuries, Roman Europe had 50 to 70 million people; by 700, Europe had 25 to 26 million. The disappearance of urban life removed two other necessities: concentrations of people, and filthy, rodent-infested streets. At its height, the city of Rome had a population variously estimated at half a million to ten million; by 800, no city in Europe contained more than twenty thousand residents. “In the middle of the debris of great cities,” wrote one Dark Ages scribe,...

According to legend, on a cold morning in 1237, three anonymous riders emerged out of a lightly falling snow in front of Ryazan, a town near the eastern border of medieval Russia. The small party halted for a moment; then one rider broke free and dashed across the snowy ground toward Ryazan, shouting. Attracted by the noise, a crowd gathered at the town gate. “A witch,” said one townsman, pointing at the rider, who had turned out to be a woman of astonishing ugliness. “No,” said a second townsman, “a sorceress.” As the two argued, the rider continued to dash back and forth in front of Ryazan, shouting, “One-tenth of everything! Of horses, of men, of everything! One tenth!”

As eastern Europe filled with refugees, panic gripped western Europe. In Germany rumors that the Tartars were Gog and Magog, the two lost tribes of Israel, ignited pogroms against the Jews. In France a knight warned Louis IX that the Mongols would soon be on the Somme. In England the monk Matthew Paris predicted a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions. The Mongols, he said, are “monsters rather than men, . . . inhuman and beastly, thirsting for and drinking blood and devouring the flesh of dogs and men, and striking everyone with terror and incomparable horror.” In Rome the pope received a letter from Grand Khan Ogedi. It read: “You personally, as the head of all kings, you shall come, one and all, to pay homage to me and serve me. Then we shall take note of your submission. If . . . you do not accept God’s order, we shall know that you are our enemies.” However, Europe’s string of good fortune had not quite run its course. Just as the apocalypse seemed about to burst upon Christendom, dissension erupted in the Mongol royal family and offensive operations were halted in the West.

In Broughton, John’s future surrounded him like a death foretold. It was there in his father’s lame leg and in his uncle’s deformed back (spinal deformations, arthritis, and osteoarthritis were rife among the medieval peasantry), and it was there, too, in the worn faces of the village’s thirty-year-olds. John would work hard, die young—probably before forty—and, as sure as the sun rose into the cozy English sky above Broughton each morning, the day after his death an abbey official would be at the door to claim his best horse or cow from his widow as a heriot, or death tax.

Between 1250 and 1270 the long medieval boom sputtered to an end. One of the great ironies of the Black Death is that it occurred just as the medieval global economy, the vehicle of Y. pestis’s liberation, was nearing collapse. However, in Europe, it was the implosion of the vastly larger domestic economy, particularly the agricultural economy, that people felt most keenly. The implosion was continentwide, but in England, a nation of meticulous record keepers, it was documented with great diligence. Around 1300 the acreage under plow decreased, while the land still in use either declined in productivity or stagnated. After centuries of heady advancement, the medieval peasant’s mistakes had caught up with him. Some of the good land brought into service during the Great Clearances of the twelfth century had been overfarmed, and some of the more marginal land, which never should have been cleared in the first place, was giving out entirely.

The harvest of 1315 was the worst in living memory. The wheat and rye crops were stunted and waterlogged; some oat, barley, and spelt was redeemable, but not very much. The surviving corn was laden with moisture and unripened at the ears. In the lower Rhine “there began a dearness of wheat [and] from day to day prices rose.” The French chronicles also mention the “chierté” (dearness) of food prices “especiaument à Paris.” In Louvain the cost of wheat increased 320 percent in seven months; in England, wheat that sold for five shillings a quarter in 1313 was priced at forty shillings just two years later. Across the English countryside that autumn, the poor did their sums; a year’s worth of barley, the cheapest grain, cost a family sixty shillings, the average laborer’s annual wage was half that amount. The price of beans, oats, peas, malt, and salt rose comparably. Even when food was available, washed-out bridges and roads often prevented it from being transported. The early winter months of 1316 brought more suffering. As food grew costlier, people ate bird dung, family pets, mildewed wheat, corn, and finally, in desperation, they ate one another.

The Great Famine, the collective name for the crop failures, was a tremendous human tragedy. A half-million people died in England; perhaps 10 to 15 percent of urban Flanders and Germany perished; and a large but unknowable segment of rural Europe also succumbed.

From Caffa to Vietnam and Afghanistan, no human activity has been more closely associated with plague than war, and few centuries have been as violent as the fourteenth. In the decades before the plague, the Scots were killing the English; the English, the French; the French, the Flemings; and the Italians and the Spanish, each other. More to the point, in those savage decades, the nature of battle changed in fundamental ways. Armies grew larger, battles bloodier, civilians were attacked more frequently, and property was destroyed more routinely—and each change helped to make the medieval battlefield and the medieval soldier more efficient agents of disease.

The chevauchee, the second major military development of the fourteenth century, was created to resolve the great military dilemma of the age: how does an army break a siege? “A castle can hardly be taken within a year, and even if it does fall, it means more expenses for the king’s purse and for his subjects than the conquest is worth,” wrote Pierre Dubois, an influential fourteenth-century military thinker. Dubois’s solution to the siege problem, outlined in Doctrine of Successful Expeditions and Shortened Wars, was indirection. Attack civilians, Dubois argued, and your opponent will be forced to abandon his fortified position and come out and defend his people. Thus was born the chevauchee.

However, the Anglo-French Hundred Years’ War—the largest, bloodiest conflict of the Middle Ages—transformed the chevauchee into a common and devastating weapon.

The plague also left a lasting mark on Ioannes IV, the Byzantine emperor. “Upon arrival . . . [the empress] found [our] youngest . . . dead,” wrote Ioannes, in his only known statement about the death of his thirteen-year-old son, Andronikos. After the boy’s death the emperor lost his taste for the world. Abdicating the throne, Ioannes retired to the solitude of a monk’s cell, to pray and mourn and grieve for the remainder of his life.

There is also the violence of Sicilian history, a history so full of duplicity, subjugation, bloodshed, and despair that the sunny Mediterranean island has produced a society of black-hearted fatalists. In Sicily, says native novelist Leonardo Sciascia, “we ignore the future tense of verbs. We never say, ‘Tomorrow I will go to the country’; we say, ‘Dumani, vaju in compagna’—‘Tomorrow I am going to the country.’ How can you fail to be pessimistic in a country where the future tense of the verb does not exist?”

Through hunger and rain, flood and earthquakes, Italians persisted in killing one another. Genoa was at war with Venice, the papacy with the Holy Roman Emperor, the Hungarians with Naples, and in Rome the aristocratic Colonna family and the aristocratic Orsini family were slitting each others’ throats with the happy abandon of Mafia clans.

During the pestilence Genoa also received a brief visit from the most notorious woman in Christendom, the willful, beautiful Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily. Joanna, a combination of Scarlett O’Hara and Lizzie Borden, was in trouble again. On a September evening three years earlier, her husband, eighteen-year-old Andreas of Hungary, was discovered in the Neapolitan moonlight, dangling from a balcony with a noose around his neck. The queen and her lover, Luigi of Taratino, a man of such extraordinary physical beauty that a contemporary called him as “beautiful as the day,” were suspected of plotting the murder. The queen’s visit to pestilential Genoa was occasioned by her angry Hungarian in-laws, who had just invaded Italy in pursuit of her and Luigi and anyone who had helped them kill the eighteen-year-old Andreas. In March 1348, while notary de Bracelli was at his desk making out wills, and bodies piled up along Genoa’s “fine circuit of walls,” the lovely Joanna, in the breathless tradition of the romance novel heroine, was boarding a fast ship in Genoa harbor. Soon Christendom’s most beautiful couple would reunite in Avignon, where the Neapolitan queen would participate in a trial so notorious, for a while it upstaged even the plague.

However, by March 1348 the former Florentine wunderkind was an impoverished and disgraced old man—his fortune lost, his good name blackened beyond repair. Ten years earlier, at the age of sixty-two, Villani had endured the double humiliation of bankruptcy and debtors’ prison. After his release, the former banker returned to chronicling, a passion that survived all the storms and seasons of life, but postimprisonment Villani showed a new appetite for disastrous and apocalyptic events, as if drawn to situations that mirrored his own embittered old age. And during the 1340s, Florence was happy to provide him with many such episodes.

The modern idea of a personal death, of “my death,” is a product of the European Middle Ages. In Antiquity and the early medieval period “death, at least as described in epic and chronicle, was a public and heroic event,” says historian Caroline Walker Bynum. “But in the later Middle Ages death became increasingly personal. In painting and in story, [it] was seen as the moment at which the individual, alone before his personal past, took stock of the meaning of his life.”

Though he wrote several decades after the plague, Stefani employed a perhaps more resonant metaphor to convey the horror of pits. He says the dead were laid out, “layer upon layer just like one puts layers of cheese on lasagna.”

Microbiologist Robert Brubaker thinks that many of the differences between the two outbreaks dissolve if the vast differences between medieval and Victorian medicine are factored into the equation. Another possible explanation for the differences may lie in the unique impact of a disease like plague on a premodern society with no access to a relatively sophisticated colonial medical service.

Like Giovanni Villani, Agnolo di Tura was a town chronicler, but there the resemblance between the two men ends. The older Villani was a scion of a wealthy mercantile family: well educated, urbane, and, before his financial embarrassment, an important civic figure. Agnolo was an everyman, albeit an ambitious everyman. He seems to have begun life as a humble shoemaker.

In the medieval version of the “Take my wife” joke, the wife never tires of reminding her husband that her family is higher born than his. Some of this dynamic may have been at work in the di Tura marriage. During the 1330s and 1340s so many houses are listed under the name Agnolo di Tura, historians have speculated that Siena had several men of that name. But there may be another explanation. The residences all belonged to the same Agnolo di Tura, who kept moving his family into ever bigger houses in hopes that one day his higher-born wife would stop reminding him of how much she had sacrificed to marry a lowborn shoemaker.

One imagines that this was the day Agnolo added the concluding sentence to his chronicle for 1348: “And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands.”

Imagine Mussolini three times as handsome and four times as preposterous, and you have the drama’s hero, Cola di Rienzo, self-proclaimed tribune of Rome, fantasist extraordinaire, and local hero. For smashing the Mafia-style rule of Rome’s old noble families, the populus romanus were willing to forgive their handsome Cola almost anything, including the fantasy that he was the bastard son of a German emperor instead of the peasant son of a barkeep.

The second major character in the drama was Cola’s nemesis, eighty-year-old Stefano Colonna, Rome’s most powerful aristocrat and an authentic natural wonder. “Great God, what majesty is in this old man,” wrote a contemporary. “What a voice, what a brow and countenance, . . . what energy of mind and strength of body at such an age!” When Cola’s supporters killed Stefano’s son, grandson, and nephew, the old man refused to mourn, saying, “It is better to die than [to] live in servitude to a clown.”

The last major player in the drama was Francesco Petrarch, literary celebrity and early practitioner of radical chic. “I feel I have met a God, not a man,” Petrarch wrote, after encountering the handsome Cola, thereby proving that he was a better poet than a judge of character.

Life on the Roman street mirrored the city’s physical condition. The Hobbesian state of all against all, characteristic of medieval Italy generally, reached its apotheosis in the gangsterism of medieval Rome. The city’s ruling class—the great aristocratic families like the Colonna and the Orsini—engaged in a perpetual war against one another, and beneath the violence of the highborn there was the violence of the gutter: of robbers and muggers and streetcorner toughs. In 1309, when the papacy, the last bastion of municipal authority, fled to the safety of Avignon, civic order collapsed entirely.

“You say that I have invented . . . Laura to have something to talk about and to have everyone talking about me,” Petrarch wrote to a friend, who, like many others—in the poet’s own time and since—have thought Laura the artful fabrication of an artful fabricator. But the mystery woman in the poems was real enough. Her full name was Laura de Sade, she was related by marriage to the infamous eighteenth-century Marquis de Sade, and Petrarch loved her as deeply and truly as he claimed, though perhaps not as chastely. He had children with at least two other women.

An international celebrity as well as a poet, Petrarch dined with the aristocratic Colonna, walked the beaches of Naples with the beautiful Queen Joanna, attended audiences with Clement VI—if there had been a fourteenth-century People, the fish-eyed poet would have been on the cover under the headline, “The Fabulous Francesco!”

When a priest came to Stefano’s cell the next morning, the old man snarled and waved him away, saying he had no need to confess; Stefano Colonna would never die at the hands of a nothing like Cola di Rienzo. The remark proved prophetic. A few hours later, as bells tolled for the condemned men, the tribune lost his nerve. Executing the Colonna and Orsini prisoners, members of the most powerful aristocratic families in the city, might provoke the other nobles. A few minutes later, a chastened Cola stepped out onto a balcony and, reminding the crowd of the biblical adage “Forgive us our trespasses,” announced that he had decided to pardon the prisoners.

Surveying Philip’s France in the year 1314, the chronicler Jean Froissart described it as “gorged, contented and strong.” Foreigners might complain of “prating Frenchmen always sneering at nations other than their own,” but when left alone those foreigners would exclaim to one another, “Oh, to be God in France!” In the early fourteenth century, few would have challenged the assertion of Jean de Jardun that “the government of the earth rightfully belongs to the august and sovereign house of France.”

Almost everywhere, medieval culture was also by and large French culture. Medieval men and women wore French fashions, emulated French manners, imitated French chivalric traditions, mimicked French troubadours, read French sagas, and prayed in French-inspired Gothic cathedrals. Of another Gallic architectural wonder, the nation’s abbeys, the chronicler Joinville likened them to illuminations of a manuscript in azure and gold. Of the University of Paris, a young Irish scholar exclaimed, it is “the home and nurse of theological and philosophical science, mother of liberal arts, mistress of justice and the standard of the morals, the mirror and lamp of all theological virtues.”

The pogroms around Marseille not only pointed to this new form of plague-related anti-Semitism, they also heralded an important change in the nature of French anti-Semitism. Traditionally, Langue d’Oc—roughly, Mediterranean France—was the land of the troubadour; it was cosmopolitan, romantic, poetic, sensual, and tolerant. Jews had a long, mostly happy relationship with the south. Langue d’Oui—roughly, Atlantic France—was the land of the knight; it was ambitious, aggressive, resolute, and intolerant. The pogroms in the southern villages of La Baume, Apt, and Mezel were a signal that this historic division was coming to an end—that the north, which had long had political designs on the tolerant, more cosmopolitan south, was beginning to absorb the southern region culturally as well militarily.

“The simple fishermen of Galilee” are now “clad in purple and gold,” complained Petrarch.

John XXII, Clement V’s successor, was more frugal, but only because the spindly, pinch-faced John preferred counting his money to spending it. In an idle moment one scholar calculated that John’s personal fortune of twenty-five million florins weighed ninety-six tons.

As scholar Morris Bishop has noted, moving the enormous papal bureaucracy, the curia, to semirural Avignon was akin to moving the United Nations to a small New England town.

The morning light suits Laura. The sun adds luster to the golden hair on her forehead and a tint of pink to her snowy complexion. Accompanying her this morning is her very proper-looking husband, chevalier Hugues de Sade. In a neat twist of history, M. de Sade is an ancestor of Petrarch’s most eminent eighteenth-century biographer, the Abbé J. F. X. de Sade, who, in turn, is an uncle of the diabolical marquis of the same name. The de Sades are a prominent Avignon family. Wealthy gentry, they own several spinning mills in the region. The Pont d’Avignon has borne the de Sade family coat of arms since 1177.

But would the chevalier feel threatened? M. de Sade “cannot have taken [Petrarch] very seriously,” says Professor Bishop; otherwise he would never have tolerated the poet’s relationship with Laura. Besides, adds the professor, “de Sade knew very well the Provençal tradition of the infatuate poet suppliant. Whenever Petrarch went too far, he would lock up poor Laura, but otherwise, if the poet wanted to sigh at dawn beneath his wife’s window, there was no great harm done.”

Heyligen, however, would be horrified to hear himself described as “creative.” Personal expressiveness and intuition had no place in medieval music, which was regarded as a branch of mathematics. Like every other aspect of the universe, music was thought to possess inherent structures. Musical structures were the fixed ratios between various notes and chords. The more accurately a musician could calculate the ratios with mathematical formulations, the more likely his music was to duplicate the “aural sound of God.”

the surgeon Guy de Chauliac lumbers into view. “Guigo,” as his friends call him, bears a passing resemblance to the French actor Gerard Depardieu (if contemporary portraits are to be believed). He is a big swarthy bear of man, with a very French kind of earthy masculinity.

Joanna’s fair skinned, blond beauty—a combination troubadours called “snow on ice”—was one of the great wonders of the medieval world. “Fair and goodly to look upon” is how Giovanni Boccaccio described the young queen. “Exquisite and enchanting,” declared Petrarch. “More angelic than human,” added the chevalier de Brantome. For the gallant young cavalier Galaezzo Gonzaga of Mantua, words alone failed to describe Joanna’s loveliness. After a single dance with the Neapolitan queen, the cavalier fell to his knees and vowed to “go through the world until I have overcome in battle two knights whom I swear I will present to you in recompense.” Presently, two Burgundian knights arrived in Joanna’s court, accompanied by a note from ardent young cavalier Galezzo.* In character, the young queen was typically Neapolitan, which is to say that both her subjects—who believed Joanna to be kind and good-hearted—and her brother-in-law, King Louis of Hungary—who called Joanna that “great harlot that . . . ruleth over Naples”—had a point.

Boccaccio could not make up his mind. In the first of several thinly disguised accounts of the murder, he described a Joanna-like character as a “pregnant she-wolf.” But in a later version of the story, the author changed his mind and transformed the queen’s character into a beautiful maiden in distress.

It would be unfair to heap obloquy on Clement; if he can be accused of anything, it is the sin of being ordinary in an extraordinary time. The pope did what he thought he ought to do, and some of what he did was meritorious. He marched with the fearful and purchased cemeteries for the dead. It can even be argued that Clement was a bolder defender of the Jews than Pius XII, the pope who presided over the Church during World War II. However, in a situation that called for a leader with a Gandhi-like spiritual authority—someone who could both give comfort and inspire—Clement acted like a head of state. He was responsible but, in the end, unimaginative and self-preserving.

Corpulent and insecure, Philip was a man of profound contradictions. Though he fought like a lion at Crécy and planned a Viking funeral for himself—the royal heart was to be sent to a church in Bourgfontaine; the royal entrails to a monastic house in Paris so as to double the number of prayers offered up in repose of the royal soul—Philip fled Paris almost as soon as the pestilence arrived. Over the next year, one catches glimpses of him at Fontainebleau, at Melun, and at the casket of his plague-dead queen, the ill-tempered Jeanne of Burgundy, but Philip does not emerge into full public view again until the early 1350s, when he shocked Paris with a heinous betrayal. The high-minded moralist who hated to hear the Lord’s name taken in vain—in Philip’s France blasphemers had their upper lip cut off—stole his eldest son’s bride-to-be, the beautiful Blanche of Navarre, a few months before the couple were to be married.

The chronicler of Westminster saw an even more pernicious threat—medieval Spice Girls everywhere! Englishwomen, complained the chronicler, “dress in clothes that are so tight, . . . they [have to wear] a fox tail hanging down inside of their skirts to hide their arses.”

Edward II, the former sovereign, had been a puzzlement to his people. Kings were supposed to like wars, hunting, jousting, and women, but Edward’s tastes had run to theatricals, arts and crafts, minstrels—and men.

The only nice thing the author of The Reign of Edward II had to say about his subject was that Edward had been remarkably wealthy. He was also quite handsome, a trait he shared with his son and successor, but otherwise Edward III was everything his father was not: glamorous, romantic, politically deft—and bold.

Surprisingly for the city of Shakespeare and Dickens, London produced no great plague chroniclers on the order of Agnolo di Tura or Giovanni Boccaccio. But Thomas Vincent’s evocative description of London during a later outbreak of plague suggests what the city must have been like in the terrible winter and spring of 1349. “Now, there is a dismal solitude,” wrote Vincent. “Shops are shut . . . people rare, very few walk about . . . and there is a deep silence in almost every place. If any voice can be heard, it is the groans of the dying, and the funeral knell of them that are ready to be carried to their graves.”

Neither was the standing of the Church helped by a penchant for blaming the victim, a habit particularly pronouced among the English clergy. “Let us look at what is happening now,” declared the Bishop of Rochester. “We [English] are not stable in faith. We are not honorable in the eyes of the world—on the contrary, we are, of all men, the falsest and in consequence, not loved by God.” Henry Knighton could not have agreed more, though, in Friar Knighton’s view, it was tournament groupies that brought down God’s wrath against the English. The plague, he wrote, was a consequence of the bands of beautiful young women who corrupted public morals by attending tournaments in provocative dress. Admittedly, Knighton was a great crank—upon observing that the pestilence had killed 140 Franciscans in Marseille, he could not resist adding, “And a good job, too!”