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

by John Kelly

the early stages of the pestilence, Avignon attempted every imaginable protective measure.

Clement issued a bull denouncing the murders.

The furious revolt of the first few weeks had given way to a vast despondency. . . . The whole town looked like a railway waiting room.”

The Hungarians were also quick to point out that Joanna had good reason to desire Andreas dead.

When Joanna visited Genoa in March 1348, she was fleeing the armies of the avenging Louis, who had just celebrated his conquest of Naples by decapitating a cousin of Luigi’s on the balcony where Andreas was hanged.

The evidence against Joanna was incriminating in the extreme, and the Hungarians made the most of it.

The judges pronounced Joanna not only innocent but “above suspicion of guilt.” Embracing the exonerated queen, Clement declared her his “blameless and beloved daughter.

A few months later, it was announced that Clement had purchased Avignon from the queen, who, as countess of Provence, held title to the city.

Nonetheless, rumors persisted for years that no money ever changed hands in the sale.

Clement’s departure in May did not arouse much public comment. Almost anyone who could was fleeing the city, and the pope had done what he could for Avignon.

obloquy

Clement acted like a head of state. He was responsible but, in the end, unimaginative and self-preserving.

He noted that between winter and spring, the plague changed character in Avignon, altering from a pneumonic to a bubonic form.

It is only a conjecture, but perhaps the infamy the surgeon feared was the infamy of scientific conscience, of failing to stand in the whirlwind and try to understand and tame it with human reason.

theorist Herman Kahn describes a casualty rate of 50 percent in a nuclear exchange as unacceptably high. In little Avignon in the year of 1348, one out of every two people died.

prosperity and a growing population created a brisk demand for medical care.

astrology had made the technique obsolete. With a knowledge of the stars, declared William, you could tell what was in a patient’s urine without examining

The most pronounced was a typically medieval reverence for authority, especially ancient authority, over observable fact.

Courses in anatomy were offered in many medical schools, but since autopsies were frowned on by the Church, students had to learn about human anatomy by watching a pig being dissected.

Chaucer’s new medical professional also acquired another attribute of the modern physician, a license—obtained, as today, by examination.

licensure was as much about professional and economic hegemony—it would allow physicians to dominate the old-style healers, who still provided the bulk of medical care—as it was about public health.

volubility.

One of the most surreal images to emerge from the Black Death is of knots of people crouched at the edge of municipal latrines inhaling the noxious fumes.

At a time when six sous could buy a man a good horse, twenty-four sous was a significant sum.

Director Morellet’s figures, which represent a single stream of deaths in a single Paris parish, can’t be extrapolated to the entire city.

indigent

“more than 500 bodies a day were being taken in carts from the Hôtel-Dieu [on the Ile de la Cité]

novitiates

between June 1348 and December 1349, Paris seems to have lost the equivalent of a good-sized village almost every day,

According to Richard the Scot, 50,000 residents died during the plague.

as if he can no longer envision them as anything but a pile of corpses in one of the little death carts shuttling back and forth in the rain to the cemetery of Holy Innocents.

the monotony of death replaced the terror of death.

the family of a noblewoman was unable to find a priest to bury her because the local clergy were all dead and priests from other villages refused to visit one that was flying the black plague flag.

Edward’s tastes had run to theatricals, arts and crafts, minstrels—and men.

In a guarded reference to the old king’s homosexuality, a chronicler wrote that Edward loved the knight Piers Gaveston more than his wife, the beautiful French princess Isabella.

According to legend, Edward’s last moments on earth were spent with a hot plumber’s iron in his anus.

deprivations of the famine years. In 1348 demand for English wool was such that English sheep outnumbered English people—roughly eight million sheep versus six million humans.

Strengthening the it-can’t-happen-here mood was the fact that the plague was ravaging France, and the insular English considered the French strange even for foreigners;

your average Frenchman was effeminate, walked funny, and spent too much time fussing with his hair.

jetty,

burghers’

lugubrious

One hundred fifty years later there were still so many abandoned buildings in the town, Henry VIII took time out from his complicated romantic affairs to order their repair.

the plague was now spreading northward through the incessant rain on an inland route that would carry it through the deer-filled forests and sprawling sheep farms of upper Dorset and into the English midlands.

charnel house.

However, after a year of “death and death and death,” the townspeople apparently became upset at the sight of the pink, plump Ralph riding into town at the head of a rather large and resplendent entourage. After the bishop disappeared inside the local church, an angry mob gathered in a nearby square.

Mass animal die-offs were common in the mortality, but, judging from contemporary accounts, in England they achieved a special intensity.

The stone houses of the wealthy were less vulnerable to rat infestation,* and the aristocracy and the gentry tended to enjoy better health in general.

a golden-haired princess of England, Joan Plantagenet, youngest child of Edward III.

that the morning of her arrival the mayor, Raymond de Bisquale, was waiting on a quay to warn her and the rest of her wedding party about the presence of the plague.