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

by John Kelly

The report is right about human resiliency: even in the most extreme and horrific of circumstances, people carry on.

As a potential target, the order also had the additional advantage of being both loathed and feared. Part secret society—members were rumored to practice black magic—and part international bank, the Templars were viewed as a sinister organization peopled by powerful, shadowy figures. Every éminence grise in Christendom was thought to wear a Templar cross.

The fear of contagion makes the psychology of plague different from the psychology of war. In plague, fear acts as a solvent on human relationships; it makes everyone an enemy and everyone an isolate. In plague every man becomes an island—a small, haunted island of suspicion, fear, and despair.

Deaux compares the survivors to “soldiers . . . who have been in the line so long they no longer know or care if their side is winning or losing or even what the terms mean anymore. . . . [W]ar has become an endless course of terror and fatigue, mutated to a sort of boredom that destroys everything but the body’s motor functions.”

But later in the fall, when the pestilence came up the road from Bristol—tired, hungry, and eager to get out of the rain—the quarantine proved as useless as it had been in Catania a year earlier.

Personification of thse plague; as if it was a person seeking shelter from the rain

In the summer of 1349, it arrived in Poland, where King Casimir, influenced by his beautiful Jewish mistress, Esther, offered asylum to Jews fleeing persecution in Central Europe. The communities that the refugees established would last unbroken until the Second World War.

In a catastrophic tragedy, the barriers of time and culture fade, revealing the fundamental character of humanity.