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

by John Kelly

were all infected via the traditional Mediterranean trade routes, as was mainland Italy, which, in the autumn of 1347, may have been the most vulnerable region of Europe.

“In 1346 and 1347,” says a contemporary, “there was a severe shortage of basic foods . . . to the point where many people died of hunger and people ate grass and weeds as if they had been wheat.”

vintners

turbid.

in Rome the aristocratic Colonna family and the aristocratic Orsini family were slitting each others’ throats with the happy abandon of Mafia clans.

if ever there was a people with a right to despair of life, it was the Italian peasantry of the mid-fourteenth century.”

Genoa also bore the special burden of its hubris and ambition.

Almost alone among major Italian cities, she failed to produce a plague chronicler.

in a period of mass death, when enormous amounts of money and property were suddenly being orphaned, notaries, who made out wills and other legal documents, played an essential role in the maintenance of civic order.

“The Venetians are like pigs,” the cleric declared, “and truly they have a pig’s nature, for when a multitude of pigs . . . is hit or beaten, all draw close and run unto him who hits it.”

Unlike the fatalistic Sicilians, who accepted the pestilence as an act of God, the competent, vigorous Venetians displayed what psychologists call agency.

ruthless in its insistence on the maintenance of public order.

As a reward for being a citizen of a state that ruled “half and a quarter of the Roman Empire,” each cadaver got a grave dug exactly five feet deep, a last view of Venice, and a final prayer from a priest.

By summer, with black-draped mourners everywhere, public morale became a grave concern.

A historian of the city, Frederic C. Lane, thinks the plague killed about 60 percent of Venice, roughly 72,000 people, extraordinary enough.

the thin fabric of civilization held—sometimes by the skin of its teeth, but it held.

The incident in the fish market in Pisa marks a new stage in the spread of the Black Death.

Prostitutes and sodomites—medieval Florence had a reputation as a hotbed of sodomy—were expelled,

If Siena took any precautions to protect itself from the plague, they have been lost.

It almost seems as if the council had convinced itself that if the pestilence did not hear its name spoken in Orvieto, it would pass over the town as the Angel of Death passed over the children of Israel who marked their doors with lambs’ blood.

In his prime, Giovanni Villani had been a revered figure in Florence. A dazzling polymath, the young Villani had seemed capable of anything:

writing a multivolume history of Florence in the manner of Virgil and Cicero.

apotheosis

Even without the plague, the 1340s would have been a desperate decade for the city. In 1340 there was a terrible epidemic; in 1341, a war with Pisa; and in 1343, political upheaval and civil strife,

the financial catastrophe of 1346, when Edward III of England, who was using Florentine money to fight the Hundred Years’ War, defaulted on his loans to local banks to the tune of 1,365,000 florins—a sum the horrified Villani described as the “value of an entire kingdom.”

shortly after Christmas 1347 a mysterious “column of fire” appeared over Avignon.

when the summer came and the July sun baked a thousand tangerine rooftops, it killed with an even greater ferocity, as if killing was the only happiness it knew.

Seven hundred years later, Villani’s last sentence still awaits completion.

this scourge had implanted such a great terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandon brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases, wives deserted husbands.

succor

This explains why those women who recovered were possibly less chaste in the period that followed.” According

Boccaccio is referring here to the way the plague changed the grand opera that was the Florentine Way of Death.

bereavement was the signal for laughter, and witticism and general jollification—the art of which the women, having for the most part suppressed their feminine concerns for the salvations of the souls . . . , had learned to perfection.”

Boccaccio’s grave diggers are the sinister becchini, who circled Florence like vultures during the plague. Adopting the death’s-head motto, “Those who live in fear die,” these rough country men from the hills above the city earned an unsavory reputation

The greatest blow to the Florentine Way of Death, however, was not the becchini or the cynicism of the female mourners, but the plague pits.

“Nothing,” she writes, “was more senseless, uncommon and cruel [to Florentines] than to be buried . . . far from the family vault, one’s own church . . . from the texture of family life and neighborhood life

The plague pit was the antithesis of this idea; it made death anonymous, casual, animal-like, and left the individual unrecognizable “even for future resurrection.”

abstemious

“Others took the opposite view and maintained that an infallible way to ward off this appalling evil was to drink heavily, enjoy life to the full . . . gratifying all one’s cravings . . . and shrug the whole thing off as one enormous joke.”

A third group of citizens “steered a middle course . . . living with a degree of freedom sufficient to satisfy their appetites, and not as recluses.

“the most sound perhaps . . . affirmed that there was no medicine for the disease superior or equal in efficiency to flight; following which prescription, a multitude of men and women, negligent of all but themselves, deserted their city, their houses, their estates,

He says the dead were laid out, “layer upon layer just like one puts layers of cheese on lasagna.”

“When the sick person fell asleep [the relative] left and did not return.” Frequently these little dramas of abandonment and betrayal had an even darker second act.

the call would go unheeded, leaving the victim to die alone in the warm morning light in a pool of her own blood and vomit.

For many Florentines, one of the strangest aspects of the Black Death was the eerie stillness that fell over the streets and squares.

A pound of wax would have gone up more than a florin if there had not been a stop put [by the municipal government] to the vain ostentation that the Florentines always make over funerals.

The Black Death’s visit to Florence is unusually well documented. We know that the mortality claimed roughly fifty thousand lives, a death rate of 50 percent in a city of about a hundred thousand.

along with Boccaccio’s pigs, there are reports of dogs and cats and apparently even chickens being stricken by the gavoccioli, or plague boil.

What remains a source of contention, however, is why the plague was so severe in the city.

In early-twentieth-century India, Y. pestis traveled at an average of eight miles per year; in South Africa, a little faster: eight to twenty miles annually. By contrast, in Black Death Europe, Y. pestis covered the eighty-one kilometers between Pisa and Florence in two months