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

by John Kelly

there arose the legend of Pest Jungfrau, a malignant plague goddess who emerged from the mouths of the dead in the form of a glowing jet of blue flame, and who had only to raise her hand to smite the living.

if ye keep not My Sunday, I will send upon you wild beasts such as have never been seen before, I will convert the light of the sun into darkness . . . and I will smother your souls in smoke.”

the Spartans, who whipped themselves everywhere, were enthusiastic self-floggers. But whereas the Spartans associated the practice with fertility, in the medieval world flagellation was designed to appease divine wrath.

New recruits also had to pledge to whip themselves three times daily for thirty-three days and eight hours, the length of time each Flagellant spent on pilgrimage.

since pilgrims were forbidden to bathe, shave, or change clothing, the Flagellant columns that tramped from town to town often became plague vectors.

As more conservative members of the movement died or were expelled, the Flagellants became increasingly younger, poorer, more criminal, ignorant, anticlerical, and anti-Semitic.

The magistrates of Erfurt closed the city to Flagellant bands, while Philip VI of France declared everything west of Troyes a Flagellant-free zone, and Manfred of Sicily threatened to kill any member of the movement who so much as set foot in his domain.

A year later, the Flagellants had “vanished as suddenly as they had come, like night phantoms or mocking ghosts.”

Islamic law held that since God alone decided who lived and died, in the case of plague, there was nothing to do but wait for Him to render a judgment.

the citizens of Almeria apparently felt there was nothing un-Islamic in giving God a little help. Active prophylactic measures kept the plague from breaking out of the city until autumn.

On March 26, 1350, a Good Friday, Alfonso became the only reigning European monarch to die of the pestilence.

septicemic

The account of Granada physician Ibn Khatimah suggests that pneumonic plague was also active in Spain. For the Muslim physician, the disease’s two outstanding characteristics were contagiousness and a bloody cough.

Except for the city of Coimbra, Portugal was lightly affected.

There are no reliable death figures available for Poland but, tellingly, as in England and France, wages in the country soared after the plague, due to a tremendous manpower shortage.

the southern Netherlands both lost large numbers of children during the Great Famine, and that may have left the two regions with fewer vulnerable adults when the plague struck—that is, adults with deficient immune systems due to early exposure to famine.

In the desolate north, the plague would have to become a feral scavenger surviving on the occasional farm family, the odd rustic knight and his dog, and the little fishing village

the Annual are describing is pneumonic plague secondary to bubonic plague—that is, cases of the disease where the plague bacilli metastasize from the lymph nodes to the lungs.

Italians, Englishmen, and Frenchmen who avoided windows with a southern exposure and inhaled fragrant scents, Y. pestis killed Swedes with and without shoes, on foodless Fridays and on gluttonous Saturdays.

Survivors drank intoxicatingly, fornicated wildly, spent lavishly, ate gluttonously, dressed extravagantly.

In Orvieto, where almost half the town lay buried in local plague pits, couples copulated on the freshly laid grass above the pits.

everywhere survivors luxuriated in the sudden abundance of a commodity that only a few months earlier had seemed so fragile, so perishable—time: wonderful, glorious, infinite time. Time for family, for work. Time to gaze into an evening sky. Time to eat and drink and make love.

Agnolo di Tura, who lived in Siena, where they were still counting the dead, offered a more succinct description of Europe’s post–Black Death mood. “No one could restrain himself from doing anything.”

Before the mortality was finally over, there would be tens of millions more dead to mourn, but by that time, Europe would be in the shadow of the Enlightenment, and the poet long dead.

Had it not occurred in the immediate shadow of the Black Death, today the second pestilence would be spoken of as an epic tragedy in its own right.

many contemporaries referred to the 1361 outbreak not as the pestis secunda but as the “Children’s Plague,” or “les mortalite des enfauntz.”

for the next several centuries, Europe would scarcely know a decade without plague somewhere on the continent.

Outbreaks became local in nature, while, on average, mortality rates shrank to 10 to 15 percent.

Instead of leaping from city to city, they crept from neighborhood to neighborhood.

However, since the human version of plague represented a biological dead end—it was so lethal, it risked obliterating its host population—Dr. Orent thinks that after the Black Death, Y. pestis returned to its roots as a rat disease,

the effects of chronic persistent plague were compounded by recurring waves of smallpox, influenza, dysentery, typhus, and perhaps anthrax.

Poor sanitation also produced a wave of waterborne enteric fevers, especially intestinal dysentery, or the “bloody flux,” and infantile diarrhea, which historian Robert Gottfried believes may have been an important contributor to the perhaps 50 percent infant mortality rate of the Middle Ages.

Complained Edward IV of England, after a campaign in France, “Many a man . . . fell to the lust of women and were burned by them, and their penises rotted away and fell off and they died.”

In the century between 1347 (when the plague first arrived in Sicily) and 1450, estimates of Europe’s population loss range from 30 to 40 percent to as high as 60 to 75 percent—a demographic collapse on the scale of the Dark Ages.

Despite the advantages of better diet and better housing, the English nobility fared little better. In 1400 the average English peer was living eight years less than his great-grandfather had in 1300.

One of the most eye-catching of the consequences was a severe decline in the continent’s physical infrastructure.

Another consequence of the chronic worker shortage was that the cost of labor—and the cost of everything labor made—increased dramatically.

The new losers, the landed gentry, began to see their wealth shredded by the scissors of low food prices and high labor costs;

In the second half of the fourteenth century, a man could simply up and leave a manor, secure in the knowledge that wherever he settled, someone would hire him; alternately, the peasant could use his new leverage to extract rent reductions or obtain relief from hated feudal obligations such as the heriot—or death tax—from a hard-pressed lord.

Women were also significant economic winners in the new social order. The labor shortage opened up traditionally well-paying male occupations

stevedore

However, as a group, the ruling classes were far more interested in stuffing the genie of social change back in the bottle than they were in renting out their property or finding ways around high wage costs.

Edward III froze wages at preplague levels; new laws also made it illegal to refuse employment or to break a labor contract.

In 1381 resentment at attempts to reinstate “the days of long ago” helped to ignite the Peasants’ Revolt.

Enter Johann Gutenberg, an ambitious young engraver from Mainz, Germany. In 1453, at the near-centenary of the mortality, Gutenberg introduced his printing press to the world.

One was a greater emphasis on practical, clinically oriented medicine, a change reflected in the growing influence of the surgeon and the declining influence of the university-trained physician, who knew a great deal about Aristotle but not much about hernias and hangnails.

One noteworthy post–Black Death innovation was the ward system: patients with specific maladies began to be housed together.

The plague also changed medieval higher education. Cambridge established four new colleges: Gonville Hall in 1348, Trinity Hall in 1350, Corpus Christi in 1352, and Clare Hall in 1362, while Oxford created two new schools, Canterbury and New College.

People began to long for a more intense, personal relationship with God. One expression of the new mood was what Professor Norman Cantor has called the “privatization of Christianity.”

Another expression of the “privatization” was the growing popularity of mysticism. In an age of “arbitrary, inexplicable tragedy,” many people sought to create their own private pipeline to God.