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

by John Kelly

Clement consecrated the Rhône; each morning that plague spring, hundreds of rotting corpses would flow down the stream like a mysterious new species of sea creature. Passing Aramon, Tarascon, and Arles, Avignon’s dead would flood out into the open Mediterranean, where, under the low gray light of a sea dawn, they would gather in communion with the dead of Pisa and Messina, Catania and Marseille, Cyprus and Damascus.

Avignon, however, was not bereft of heroism. The monks and brothers of La Pignotte, the municipal almshouse, displayed selfless devotion, feeding the hungry and tending the sick, swabbing oozing pustules, cauterizing painful buboes, bandaging cracked, gangrenous feet, washing bloodstained floors. But, alas, in a time of pestilence almost no good deed goes unpunished. The sick and dying who flocked to La Pignotte with contagious pneumonic plague made the almshouse a death trap. “Whereas at La Pignotte, they normally [go] through 64 measures of grain a day with one measure making 500 loaves of bread,” Heyligen noted, “now no more than one measure and sometimes only half is needed.”

walking a few paces ahead of him, twenty-three-year-old Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily, draped in a gold and crimson robe and bearing a scepter and orb. The queen’s lovely blond head was protected from the pale winter light by a brilliantly colored canopy held aloft by nobles of the highest rank. The crowd was rapturous. “Her figure,” says one admirer, was “. . . tall and nobly formed, her air composed and majestic, her carriage altogether royal, [and] her features of exquisite beauty.”

Imagine a shopping mall where everyone shouts, no one washes, front teeth are uncommon, and the shopping music is provided by the slaughterhouse up the road, and you have Cheapside, the busiest, bawdiest, loudest patch of humanity in medieval England. The

Norwich—the suffix “wic,” as in Norwich and Ipswich, is an ancient designation for trading place—