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

by John Kelly

“About what can you preach to the people?” he asked. “If on humility, you yourselves are the proudest of the world, arrogant and given to pomp. If on poverty, you are the most grasping and covetous, . . . if on chastity—but we will be silent on that.”

As William Langland observed in Piers Plowman, the only outstanding characteristic of the new clerical recruits seemed to be cupidity.

The safest conclusion one can make about the plague’s contribution is that, by promoting dissatisfaction with the Church, it created fertile ground for religious change.

There is a surer link between the recurrent plagues and epidemics of 1350 to 1450 and the death-obsessed culture of the late Middle Ages.

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Late medieval man not only expected to die, he expected to die hard and ugly.

Why then, miserable person, are you puffed up with pride? Dust you are, unto dust you return, rotten corpse, morsel and meal to worms.”

The trampling was supposed to effect a cure. However, since plague victims often had difficulty just standing unassisted, the story has the whiff of the apocryphal about it.

For all the terrible suffering the plague inflicted, it may have saved Europe from an indefinite future of subsistence existence.

The autumn morning that the Genoese plague fleet sailed into Messina harbor, a thick layer of congealed gel lay over an immobilized Europe.

After the plague, low-yielding farmland was used more productively as pasturage, and mills, once used largely to grind grain, were now put to a wider range of purposes, including fulling cloth and cutting wood.

“A more diversified economy, a more intensive use of capital, a more powerful technology and standard of living—these seem the salient characteristics of the late medieval economy,”

With that thought in mind, in the late 1990s a group of French paleomicrobiologists removed dental pulp from corpses buried in two plague pits in southern France and tested it. One pit dated from the Black Death, the other from a later recurrence of the plague.

the French investigators reported finding DNA from Y. pestis in both samples.

Moreover, marmot plague is the only form of rodent plague that is contagious; marmots spread the disease the way humans do, via a marmot version of the cough.

Thus, Dr. Orent thinks that P. irritans, the human flea, would have played an important role in the spread of a “humanized” plague.

However, in those localities, physicians cited two other measures with Black Death echoes as also important—adequate nutrition and decent nursing care.

when measures like stringent sanitation collapsed, as happened in Bombay during a disease outbreak in 1897, the plague of the Third Pandemic quickly began to behave like the plague of the Black Death.

French scholar Jean-Noël Biraben hypothesizes that the unusually cold weather of the fourteenth century may have been especially “pneumonic-friendly.” The problem with the Biraben theory is that, south of the Alps, the weather was still warm when the Black Death arrived.

However, about one thing we can be certain. Microbiologist Didier Raoult is right; the Black Death was an outbreak of plague.