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

by John Kelly

The medieval plague spread so quickly, several medieval medical authorities were convinced the disease was spread via glance.

Despite the findings about CCR5-D32, the best available current evidence is that Y. pestis does not produce permanent immunity in victims.

Thus, to survive in marmots, biologically speaking, Y. pestis has been forced to go nuclear by adopting a strategy of hypervirulence, which it has done by, for example, evolving a tropism for the lungs.

Feeling overshadowed by larger, wealthier Florence, little Siena spent the better part of the thirteenth century huffing and puffing to make itself look bigger than it was, usually with disastrous results.

Giovanni Villani, Agnolo di Tura was a town chronicler, but there the resemblance between the two men ends.

his habit of signing himself Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, or Agnolo the Fat, suggests that he liked to eat.

The plague produced one additional casualty. While the eternal ban on gambling was revoked within six months (Siena was broke again), seven hundred years on, the cathedral renovation awaits completion.

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.

Cola knighted his own son in the blood of another man, even the Roman crowds recoiled in horror.

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.”

sybarite

In 1309, when the papacy, the last bastion of municipal authority, fled to the safety of Avignon, civic order collapsed entirely.

Cola di Rienzo’s emergence as the self-appointed savior of a bleeding Rome owed something to civic patriotism, something to personal grievance

He also began telling people that he was the illegitimate son of the German emperor Henry II, who had seduced his barkeep mother on a visit to Rome.

To revive tourism in popeless, lawless Rome, municipal authorities wanted Clement to declare 1350 a Jubilee Year and offer a special indulgence—a forgiveness of sin—to pilgrims who visited the city.

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,

He had children with at least two other women.

Cola, who had been building a power base in Rome since his return from Avignon, launched a coup.

After a summer full of comic opera events, support for Cola began to evaporate.

As the guests prepared to leave, Cola ordered the arrest of seven leading nobles, including five members of the powerful Orsini family, and impudent old Stefano.

twenty-year-old Giovanni Colonna, old Stefano’s grandson, was cut to pieces by Cola’s cavalry. The morning after the assault, the tribune brought his son Lorenzo to the spot were Giovanni fell.

Unseated the previous December in a countercoup, he was living in disgraced exile with the Celestine monks in Abruzzi.

The king was infuriated, the Church embarrassed, the Parisian mob titillated.

if there was a Templar alive in France who had not been charged with having intercourse with demons; spitting on Christ’s image; urinating on the cross; administering the “kiss of shame” to the penis, buttocks, and the lips of the order’s prior; or engaging in other homosexual acts, it was because he was hiding in a haystack or under a bed.

The ambitious Philip was an architect of the modern nation-state; his great dream was to transform feudal France,

the order also had the additional advantage of being both loathed and feared.

éminence grise

The only thing the order lacked was culpability.

Templar knight Gerard de Pasagio testified that after his arrest he was tortured by the “hanging of weights on his genitals and other members.”

Another popular torture was called strappado. The prisoner was pulled to the ceiling by a rope that suddenly went slack, his fall broken at the last moment by a violent jerk.

One Templar, Bernard de Vaho, had his feet smeared with fat and placed in an open flame. A few days later, when de Vaho tried to walk, “the bones in his feet dropped out.”

ordered both “burned to death” immediately.

“prating

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.”

Philip’s France was the largest state in Europe, with the largest population—variously estimated at between 16 million and 24 million.

In the military arena, France also stood supreme.

medieval culture was also by and large French culture.

none of his heirs had survived to age thirty-five or ruled for more than six years.

the Capetian dynasty, rulers of France since 987, died with him.

Edward III of England, Philip the Fair’s grandson (through Edward’s mother), invaded France to lay title to the French throne, igniting the bloodiest conflict...

Marseille was a principal entry point for goods coming from Spain and the Levant, and a principal disembarkation point for Crusaders.

In the early thirteenth century, thousands of members of the Children’s Crusade—youngsters who believed that pure prepubescent Christian hearts, not swords, held the key to liberating the Holy Land—descended on Marseille, seeking passage to the Levant.

the captains had a change of heart and instead sold the young Crusaders in the slave markets of the Muslim Levant.

With ventilation limited to a breeze from the harbor, on most days the ville-bas had the pungent odor of a mermaid with loose bowels.

torrid

Whatever ploy he used, it worked; the arrival of the plague seems to have taken Marseille by surprise.

Marseille’s historic commercial ties to the Levant and to Asia Minor made it a natural target for any disease coming out of the East.

The true figure was probably closer to one out of two, but that was enough for abbot Gilles li Muisis to describe the city’s suffering as “unbelievable.

intestate,

week after the hearing, M. Aycart made a final note about the case in his ledger: Old man Jacme was dead now, too.