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

by John Kelly

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, population expanded faster than resources, and as sure as night follows day, in the fourteenth century the continent paid for its heedless growth

the baby boom and economic boom both ended around the same time—somewhere between 1250 and 1270.

indicating that the balance between resources and people had become very tight,

Drowning may not be inevitable, but the man’s position is so fraught, even a very slight rise in the next tide could kill him.

1250 the resurgent Allalin glacier began to reclaim the farmers’ traditional pasturelands.

By 1314 a string of poor and mediocre harvests had sent food prices skyrocketing.

“There was such an inundation of waters, it seemed as though it was the Flood,” wrote the chronicler of Salzburg.

Everywhere, ceilings and floors leaked, fires refused to light, bread molded, children shivered, and adults prayed.

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.

indecorous,

Many historians think the accounts of cannibalism are overblown, but no one doubts that human flesh was eaten.

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.

Circa 1200, the medieval city was drowning in filth, and in the postboom decades, the situation may have worsened as thousands of dispossessed peasants flooded into urban Europe,

No premodern city was clean, but the great urban centers of Antiquity employed a number of ingenious sanitation techniques.

medieval London seems to have been engaged in a low-level civil war over sanitation.

With this danger in mind, St. Benedict declared, “To those who are well, and especially to the young, bathing shall seldom be permitted.”

For one thing, the largely peasant infantry was far less apt to observe the rules of chivalry, particularly in combat with enemy nobles.

Even more heartfelt is the account of English terrorism by the French King Jean II.

Russian combat casualties in the conflict were quite low—under 3 percent—but the Soviet army suffered horrendous rates of illness, especially infectious illness.

75 to 76 percent of the entire Soviet army in the country—had to be hospitalized for disease.

According to the report, one important factor was military hygiene. The average Russian soldier changed his underwear once every three months,

There are the secrets of its mysterious ancestor, the Tethys Sea, which, before the birth of Eurasia, flowed across the face of the world into a great eastern ocean.

“Speak, Genoa. What have you done?” a contemporary demanded on behalf of the plague dead.

In England the summer of 1347 had some of the sepia-toned glamour of the summer of 1914.

the most beautiful woman in Europe and Christendom’s reigning Bad Girl—Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily—was facing accusations of murder.

“Men inhumanely shun each other’s company [for fear of contagion]. Fathers do not dare to bury their own sons; sons do not perform . . . last duties to their fathers.”

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.

In the summer of 1347, the world divided at the Dardanelles. Immediately to the west lay the green sunlit hills of Europe, still untouched by plague; to the east, the pestilential plains of Asia Minor.

One strain of the disease swung northward

a second strain darted southward across the Mediterranean toward Egypt and the Levant;

while a third strain doubled back eastward, striking Cyprus ...

Then the angry sea threw up a tidal wave so enormous, it seemed to scrape the sun as it rushed toward the island.

this fertile and blooming island was converted into a vast desert,” wrote a German historian.

slaughtered by men who would be dead of the pestilence within a week.

There is the violence of the island’s sky, which is too blue; of its sun, which is too bright; of its people, who are too passionate; and of its wind, the piercing summer sirocco,

Hot wind

How can you fail to be pessimistic in a country where the future tense of the verb does not exist?”

“carrying such a disease in their bodies that if anyone so much as spoke with one of them he was infected . . . and could not avoid death.”

plague that begins in the lymph system (producing the bubo), but metastasizes to the lungs (producing the bloody cough).

more credible scenario is that the fleet that brought the disease to Messina originated in a port closer to Italy.

Open sea sailing was still very dangerous in the Middle Ages, so mariners rarely sailed anywhere in a straight line.

That autumn many in Messina died, not only absent the consolation of a parent or a child, but without a priest to hear confession or a notary to make out a will.

“Cats and . . . livestock followed their master to death,” says Friar Michele.

Untouched until the summer of 1348, the English had nearly a year to collect intelligence and steady themselves.

“a man, wanting to make his will, died along with the notary, the priest who heard his confession, and the people summoned to witness his will, and they were all buried together on the following day.”

supercilious,

Now, to appease God and his conscience, not only did he let the refugees talk him into lending them St. Agatha’s relics, he promised to carry the relics to Messina himself.

it would get the next best thing: holy water into which the relics had been dipped—Patriarch Ortho would sprinkle the water over the infected city himself.

disquisition

The Genoese expelled from Messina behaved in character. Scattering “hither and thither,” they began to infect other ports,