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

by John Kelly

the twins had died the saddest of imaginable deaths. When one passed on, “the survivor held it in its arms for three days.” And given what happened in Hull, perhaps the twins’ deaths were a portent.

III was abnormally unforgiving about taxes—in one case, he sent seven tax collectors to a post, until finally he found one the plague couldn’t kill

18 May, Nicholas, brother of William 16 July, Robert, brother of William 5 August, Peter, father of William and Joan, sister of William 10 August, Joan, wife of William and Margaret, sister of William William himself survived the pestilence.

It is of a mad, lone peasant who, in the years after the plague, wandered the villages and lanes of the region, calling out for his plague-dead wife and children. The man is said to have greatly upset the populace.

The Scots, still laboring under the impression that the plague was an English phenomenon, were enjoying themselves immensely in the summer of 1349.

Woe is me of the shilling [bubo] in the arm pit; it is seething, terrible, where ever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried under the arms, a painful angry knob, a white lump

A seventeenth-century Irish historian, perhaps with the atrocities of the Cromwellians still fresh in mind, wrote that while the pestilence “made great havoc among the Englishmen . . . for those who were true Irish-men born and dwelling in hilly countries, it scarce just saluted them.”

The Anglo-Irish tendency to cluster in seacoast towns probably did make them more vulnerable.

The final sentence in the manuscript of John Clynn, the Irish monk who wrote “waiting among the dead for death to come,” was written by another monk. It reads: “And Here it seems the author died.”

and the conviction into an international Jewish conspiracy, complete with a mastermind, a sinister Spanish rabbi named Jacob; an army of secret agents; and a goal so evil, it filled every Christian heart with fear and trepidation. The Jews were contaminating the wells because they sought world domination.

peripatetic

effluvia

However, even men like Aaron and Elias lived the anxious, uncertain existence of outsiders.

Aaron’s death, the English Crown seized most of his fortune;

dyspeptic

Thrown out in 1306, the Jews were readmitted in 1315, expelled again in 1322, brought back again in 1359, and expelled again in 1394.

the only such ticket early Christianity issued to a dissident minority.

The women girded their loins with strength and slew their own sons and daughters and then themselves.

The pogroms in Mainz, Worms, and Trier were an early expression of a new, more militant Christianity.

Many aspects of modern anti-Semitism date from the period of the Civitas Dei.

For example, the menacing figure of the hook-nosed Jew, whom Chaucer described as “hateful to Christ and all his company,” first appears in twelfth-century paintings of the Crucifixion.

First in East Anglia, next in England, then throughout Christendom, stories circulated about the ritual murder of Christian children during Passover.

Supposedly, all Jews had suffered from hemorrhoids since they called out to Pilate, “His blood be upon us and our Children.” And according to Jewish sages, the only known relief for the condition was Christian blood.

bête noire

Rabbi Solomon was so aggrieved by the stance of the Mediterranean liberals that he turned to leaders of the Inquisition, the Church arm that enforced Christian orthodoxy, for assistance. Beyond this, the story grows murky.

However, the liberal was probably trying to discredit Rabbi Solomon. The rabbi may have had an “uncircumcised heart,” as one critic charged, but he was not stupid. There is no evidence that he handed over Maimonides’ works to a hostile Church body.

There are many such cases.”

The Jews are oppressed with the heaviest taxes, as if each day they had to buy anew the right to live . . . if they want to travel, they have to pay sums to gain . . . protection . . . [and they] cannot own fields or vineyards . . . So the only profession open to them is that of usury, which only increases the Christians’ hatred of them. —PETER ABELARD

Increasingly, international trade wore an Italian face, especially an avaricious Venetian and Genoese one, while at home commerce and finance became the province of Flemings, Florentines, Germans, and Lombards, whose reputation for unscrupulousness was legendary.

However, most of the men who became moneylenders did so out of the need to make a living.

Moneylending personalized anti-Semitism in a way Church doctrine never could;

Though many of the things said about moneylenders were clearly slanderous, loan collection is not an activity designed to bring out the best in any people. According to historian Norman Cohn, “Jewish moneylenders often reacted to insecurity and persecution by deploying a ruthlessness of their own.”

these alliances had a Faustian element. Frequently a ruler, loath to raise taxes, would use the local Jewish community to “sponge” the populace.

others were expressions of anger at a local bishop or prince who was too powerful to attack directly.

in both cases at first the accusations were directed not at the Jews, but at another fringe element in medieval society—lepers, criminals, and vagrants, even the English.

The exterminations were provoked by the discovery of a lepers’ plot to overthrow the French Crown. “You see how the healthy Christians despise us sick people,” a coup leader is alleged to have said when the plotters met secretly in Toulon to elect a new king of France and appoint a new set of barons and counts.

The Jews, who, despite their vulnerable economic position, still sat on a substantial amount of private capital, and the leper asylums, whose treasuries were flush with contributions and endowments, made lucrative targets.

For a period of four hours on the twenty-sixth, the afternoon sun appeared swollen and horribly engorged, as if bursting with blood; then, during the night, hideous black spots dimpled the moon, as if the craters on its acned face had turned inside out. Certain that the world was coming to end, the next morning the populace attacked the Jews.

Written in Hebrew and adorned with a gold seal weighing the equivalent of nineteen florins, the document was decorated with a carving of a Jew—though the figure could have been a Muslim—defecating into the face of the crucified Christ.

vicar said, beggars and vagrants and the “enemies of the Kingdom of France”—in other words, the English—were helping to spread the plague with secret potions.

the poisoners were described as men posing as pilgrims and friars, not beggars and vagrants.

Despite the allure of lepers, the charm of beggars, and the novelty of the English and the pilgrims, some tropism in the European soul always brought it back to the Jews.

Europe desperately needed a villain—someone it could snatch by the throat and throttle in retaliation for all its weeping mothers and dead children, for the squalid, rain-soaked plague pits and the tortured cities.

Even if the plague did come, with the Jews dead, at least debts to Jewish moneylenders would be canceled. Later, after the violence subsided, one chronicler would write that the “poison which killed the Jews was their wealth.”

his opponents could promise relief from Jewish debt and access to Jewish property.

I could believe that the end of the Hebrews had come if the time prophesied by Elias and Enoch were now complete, but since it is not complete, it is necessary that some be reserved.”

The pestilence seems to have penetrated Central Europe through the Venetian-dominated Balkans. In the Middle Ages, the Adriatic coast of Croatia

In a later outbreak of the plague, the city would gain fame as the creator of the quarantine.

the first breach of German territory occurred in the west.

indicate that the national mortality rate was on a par with Germany’s neighbors.