11 The Black Death

In the middle of the 14th century, Europe was visited by a calamity the like of which it had never previously known, with a rate of mortality unsurpassed even by the two world wars of the last century. It is estimated that across the entire continent, around one-third of the population died within the space of three years.

The cause was a plague pandemic—known at the time as the Great Pestilence and subsequently as the Black Death. More than one contemporary chronicler noted that “the living did not suffice to bury the dead.”

The consequences of the Black Death extended beyond the devastatingly high mortality. It was a grievous blow to the collective psyche of medieval Europe. Gone were the certainties and optimism of the High Middle Ages. It seemed that God was delivering an awful chastisement to his people, not seen since the times of the Old Testament. There was surely something rotten in the heart of humanity to warrant such devastation, and something particularly rotten in God’s church, which could do nothing to stem the deadly tide of the disease. To many people, it seemed that the Last Days had come, that time of tribulation for humanity that was to precede the second coming of Christ.

The nature of the beast In the Middle Ages, people had no idea as to what caused disease, and thus found themselves helpless to prevent its spread or to effect a cure. It was not until the end of the 19th century that scientists identified the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, that causes plague, and realized that it was transmitted by the bites of fleas carried by black rats.

The commonest form of the disease suffered during the Black Death was probably bubonic plague—so called after the hard black buboes, the size of an egg or even an apple, that appeared in the groin and armpits. Those infected became fevered and delirious, suffered violent chest pains, and vomited blood. Few lived for more than three or four days, and many died in a matter of hours. In winter, the pneumonic strain of the disease, spread by coughing, was more common, while a third strain, septicaemic plague, infected the blood and killed its victims before any symptoms appeared. Some scientists today believe the pandemic may in fact have been viral in origin.

“Many died daily or nightly in the public streets …; the whole place was a sepulchre.”

Giovanni Boccaccio, in The Decameron, 1350–3, describes the plague in Florence

Out of Asia The Black Death probably originated in the steppes of central Asia, and spread via the trade routes to Europe. In one account, the Tartars besieging the Black Sea port of Kaffa (modern Theodosia) in the Crimea in 1346 were forced to abandon operations because of the disease, but before they left they catapulted the corpses of those who had died over the walls in the hope of infecting the inhabitants. The following year Genoese traders—or the rats aboard their ships—carried the disease from Kaffa to Messina in Sicily, and in 1348 it swept right across the Mediterranean lands and reached England.

By 1349–50 the plague had devastated France, all of Britain, Scandinavia, Germany and central Europe. “It passed most rapidly from place to place,” recorded the English chronicler Robert of Avesbury, “swiftly killing ere midday many who in the morning had been well … On the same day twenty, forty, sixty and very often more corpses were committed to the same grave.” In the English port of Bristol, the grass grew long in the silent streets. In some places, the mortality reached as high as 60 percent, and across Europe, at the lowest estimate, some 25 million people perished.

Fear and loathing

In the face of the almost unimaginable horror of the Black Death, people resorted to all sorts of desperate remedies. The disease was most commonly attributed to bad air, so doors and windows were kept shut, aromatic substances burned, and those who ventured out carried sponges soaked in vinegar. Some blamed the water supply, which, they said, must have been polluted with spiders, frogs and lizards—embodiments of earth, dirt and the Devil—or even with the flesh of the basilisk, a mythical serpent who could kill a man with a single glance. Scapegoats were sought everywhere—the lepers, the rich, the poor, the clergy and, most popularly, the Jews, who were subjected to widespread pogroms.

The avoidance of unclean living and the purgation of hidden sin became something of an obsession, and mass outbreaks of self-flagellation swept across Germany, the Low Countries and France. The flagellants, who spurned the company of women, adopted such names as the Cross-bearers, the Flagellant Brethren and the Brethren of the Cross, and in their ritualized and bloody sessions they sought to purge not only their own sins, but to take on the sins of the world and so avert the plague and the complete annihilation of humankind. The flagellants thus attracted great popular approbation, and at first they were tolerated and even encouraged by the ecclesiastical and secular authorities. However, once the flagellants appeared to threaten the established order, they were roundly condemned, and in October 1349 Pope Clement VI issued a Bull for their suppression.

The challenge to the old order Humanity had fallen out of God’s favor, and across Europe a new mood of pessimism prevailed. The literature and art of the period are filled with images of death and damnation—visions of Hell and the Devil, the Dance of Death, the Grim Reaper, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The realization of the deadly consequences of sin led to a growth in piety, and with it criticisms of the laxity and worldliness of the clergy. Various protest movements emerged, such as the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Bohemia, and their rejection of papal authority foreshadowed the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.

“And no bells tolled and nobody wept no matter what his loss because almost everyone expected death … and people said and believed, ‘This is the end of the world.’”

Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, a tax collector in Siena, in 1348. He had buried his five children with his own hands

It was not just the established authority of the church that was challenged. Once the pestilence passed, those agricultural workers who survived found their services much sought after, leading to demands for better pay. Such demands were resisted by the landowning classes; in England, for example, the Statute of Labourers of 1351 attempted to freeze wages at pre-plague levels. The resulting discontent among both peasants and townspeople, exacerbated by heavy taxes, led to popular rebellions—the Jacquerie of 1358 in France, for example, and the Peasants’ Revolt in England in 1381. There was also unrest in the cities of Flanders and Italy. Although such rebellions were suppressed, by the end of the century the shortage of labor had led to the abandonment of serfdom in many parts of Europe, and real wages for the mass of the population had risen to hitherto unknown levels. For many, the Black Death ushered in a golden age of relative plenty.

the condensed idea

The plague pandemic brought about a new questioning of authority