The Black Death, the pandemic of bubonic plague that hit Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, is like a disaster movie: a menace stalks the land; cries go up in the streets; millions of people die, not including you and me. Therefore, like disaster movies, the Black Death is very popular. Its bibliography is long. A new title has now been added to the list, “The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time” (HarperCollins; $25.95), by the science writer John Kelly.
The Black Death seems to have originated in Asia, probably on or near the Central Asian steppe, home to large rodent populations carrying the plague bacillus. In the early decades of the fourteenth century, Asia reportedly suffered a series of ecological upheavals—storms, floods, earthquakes—and these disturbances may have forced the rodents out of their holes and into contact with human beings. In any case, a mysterious illness swept through Asia in those years, and eventually it reached Crimea. On the eastern coast of Crimea, there was a city, Caffa (today, Feodosiya), that was an important trading hub, with a large community of Genoese merchants dispatching silks, sturgeon, timber, fur, and slaves from east to west. In the early thirteen-forties, Caffa was attacked by Mongols, and the conflict dragged on until, in 1347, it took an unexpected turn: the Mongol soldiers started sickening and dying. Their general, Khan Janibeg, ordered his men’s corpses to be flung over the walls of Caffa, in the hope that they would infect the city. The plan apparently worked. The people of Caffa began to fall ill, at which point a number of the Genoese decided, “Let’s get out of here,” and ran for their ships. Belowdecks, Kelly writes darkly, “hundreds of plague-bearing rats were scratching themselves and sniffing at the cool sea air.”
In those days, it was the practice of trading vessels to stick close to the coast, and to dock every three or four days. The ships from Caffa most likely did so, thereby delivering bubonic plague to port after port along the Black Sea. From those places, it seems, the plague swung inward, by land, and outward, as other ships set off. Soon, to the west, Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania were stricken; to the south, Egypt and the Levant. In October of 1347, twelve ships, whether from Caffa or (probably) elsewhere, arrived in the Sicilian port of Messina. Shortly afterward, many people in the city came down with fevers and began to spit blood. The Messinese expelled the ships. Other port cities, once they got the news, turned back arriving vessels; the townspeople shot flaming arrows at them. But the boats found harbors eventually. The Black Death had entered Europe.
It now moved through Italy, France, and Spain. By 1348, it had jumped to England. Also in that year, it crossed the Alps, and began its sweep through Germany, Austria, and Hungary. (In some places, it moved as fast as two and a half miles a day.) By 1349, it had reached Scandinavia. From there, one front hit the ice walls of Greenland and came to a stop. Another circled back to Russia, north of Caffa. “Having closed the noose,” Kelly writes, “the hangman rested.” In four years, the plague had killed at least a third of the population of Europe: twenty-five million people. In the words of the medievalist Norman Cantor, “Nothing like this has happened before or since in the recorded history of mankind.” Measured against Europe’s population today, the Black Death took the equivalent of almost two billion lives.
The source of bubonic plague is the bacillus Yersinia pestis, named for a French bacteriologist, Alexandre Yersin, who identified it during a later outbreak, in China and India, in the eighteen-nineties. Y. pestis’s primary carrier is the flea Xenopsylla cheopis, one of whose common habitats, in turn, is the fur on the back of Rattus rattus, the black rat, an animal common to the Central Asian steppe. The black rat was not new to Europe in the fourteenth century—it seems to have arrived there, via trade, before the birth of Christ—nor was X. cheopis the only “plague vector.” The bacillus, specialists now think, probably jumped to Pulex irritans, the flea that makes its home on human flesh. Medieval people, who regarded bathing as dangerous to their health, were typically covered with P. irritans.
According to modern accounts (medieval reports sometimes say otherwise), bubonic plague has a course of three stages. First, the person shows flulike symptoms, including a high fever. In the second stage comes the symptom for which the disease is named: buboes, or dark, suppurating lumps (in fact, swollen lymph nodes), usually in the area of the neck, armpits, or groin. In the third stage, the organs fail. Untreated by appropriate antibiotics, which were not introduced until the nineteen-forties, bubonic plague kills three out of five of its victims within two weeks. If the disease goes straight to the lungs—a variation known as pneumonic plague—the course is shorter and nastier.
Ironically, the plague is associated with prosperity. As long as a region remains undeveloped, with low populations, small towns, heavy forests, and little trade, its local rats will remain in their holes and die quietly of the plague without passing it to human beings. During the Dark Ages, Europe was poor and quiet in that way, and, to our knowledge, the plague was nonexistent. But, around the end of the first millennium, Europe, as part of a normal climatic cycle, began to warm up. Across the continent, the temperature increased by an average of more than one degree Celsius. This change, known as the Little Optimum, plumped up harvests and hence the population. Between 1000 and 1250, the number of Europeans more than doubled, and they set about creating what we now call the high Middle Ages. Cities bloomed; universities were founded; Gothic cathedrals rose; vernacular literatures took root; trade exploded. Meanwhile, peace reigned. For most of the thirteenth century, there were no major wars in Europe.
Then this golden age ended. The plague is related not just to prosperity but to prosperity followed by hardship, and in the early fourteenth century the hardship came. The Little Optimum reversed. In 1315 and 1316, the sun barely showed its face. And now everything that the Europeans had built up in the preceding centuries turned against them. Their expanded population began starving. (People ate cats and dogs; according to some reports, they ate one another.) Their far-flung trade brought them more rats. Their fine cities ran with filth, on which the rodents battened. Those individuals who didn’t die of hunger had a good chance of dying in war, which erupted up and down the continent in the fourteenth century. By the thirteen-forties, the Europeans were weakened and discouraged, and at that moment the Black Death descended on them.
From city to city, the stories are much the same. The cart would come along the street in the morning, with the driver yelling, “Bring down your dead!” Very soon, the cemeteries were filled, and new ground had to be consecrated: “plague pits,” where the corpses were laid on top of one another, often in stacks of five—“like lasagne,” as one Italian scholar put it. In Avignon, when there was no land left for burial purposes, the Pope consecrated the Rhône, and the dead were pitched into the river. Family morals suffered. In the words of Boccaccio’s “Decameron,” which opens in Florence during the Black Death, “Brother abandoned brother. . . . Fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children.” Universities shut down; shops closed; mills stopped turning. In the countryside, farmhouse doors banged in the wind. At first, priests rushed to and fro, hearing last confessions. But the priests, too, began dying—possibly at a higher than average rate, because of their frequent exposure to the sick—and so, in certain dioceses, laypeople were given the authority to administer the last rites. In 1349, an Irish monk, describing these matters, wrote that he was leaving his record “in case anyone should still be alive in the future.” It seemed like the end of the world.
There was no effective treatment for the disease. Medieval medicine was basically a mixture of the ancient “four humors” theory and the astrological formulations of the Arabic physicians of the end of the first millennium. According to the Arab treatises, certain planetary alignments could foster illness by creating miasmas, or clouds of noxious air. In the judgment of many of the fourteenth century’s best minds, that was the cause of the Black Death. Some cities took public-health measures—mainly, quarantines. People were advised to avoid pore-opening activities (bathing, exercise, sex), so as to prevent the miasma from penetrating their skin.
The historian Richard J. Evans has written that in a pandemic people generally do two things: flee to supposedly uninfected areas, above all the countryside, and blame the contagion on strangers or on unpopular minority groups. Many Europeans did leave their cities. As for scapegoating, the primary object was the Jews. The pogroms seem to have begun in southern France in 1348 and then swept north. A turning point came in the fall of that year, in the Swiss town of Chillon, when a Jewish surgeon named Balavigny stated, under torture, that the Jews were causing the pestilence, by poisoning wells. (Indeed, Balavigny took his inquisitors to a well he had supposedly infected, and even showed them a rag in which, he said, he had carried the potion.) From this confession and others, a detailed conspiracy theory grew. The well poisonings were part of an international plot; its mastermind was a Spanish rabbi named Jacob; its goal was domination of the world by Jews. By late 1348, Jews were being slaughtered wholesale, particularly in Switzerland and the Rhineland. In Strasbourg, according to one chronicler, “They were led to their own cemetery into a house prepared for their burning and on the way they were stripped almost naked by the crowd which ripped off their clothes and found much money that had been concealed.” Some Jews killed themselves and their children before the mob could get them. Kelly supports the theory, common to many explanations of anti-Semitism, that the basis was not just paranoid but economic. Many Jews were moneylenders; many Christians owed them money. The pogroms cancelled the debts.
As this summary suggests, Kelly’s book contains a lot of interesting information. From the look of his notes, he got most of it from other modern histories of the Black Death, but there’s nothing wrong with retelling. There is, however, something wrong with Kelly’s narrative plan, which, in much of the book, is to go region by region, city by city. For some municipalities, there is little information; for others, the facts are the same as elsewhere. So Kelly is forced to pad. Sometimes he fictionalizes. In the case of Siena, for example, his primary source is what appears to be a short, tight-lipped journal by one Agnolo di Tura. Kelly doesn’t know Agnolo’s profession, but he knows his wife’s name, Nicoluccia, and his mother’s name, Donna Geppo. He also knows that Agnolo had five children, and for Kelly that’s information enough:
The door flies open to the di Tura family’s life—to the Christmas visits of Donna Geppo’s, the Sunday outings at the Campo, the evening walks through the little squares that blink out from Siena’s converging streets like an eye to a keyhole: the five di Tura boys running across the square, scattering a flock of birds into a vermilion-colored sky, an out-of-breath Agnolo chasing after them, and Nicoluccia shouting for everyone to stop, especially Agnolo, who is too grasso to run.
As for what happened to these fat, happy Italians when the plague hit town, need I say?
Elsewhere, instead of making up stories, Kelly will bring in any juicy anecdote he can scrape up from the years surrounding the plague. The history of Cola di Rienzo, the buffoonish demagogue who took over Rome briefly in 1347; the celebrity trial of Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily, a blond bombshell who was tried in Avignon in 1348 on the charge that she had had her husband murdered—we get pages and pages on both of them, and find out what everyone wore. Much of this has little or nothing to do with the plague. Never mind. Kelly is trying to give us a good time. His prose follows the same imperative. A continent-wide epidemic that killed twenty-five million people, not without first covering them in suppurating lumps: this, you might think, is a subject that requires no linguistic magnification. Kelly doesn’t agree. The plague strides, it dances, it howls, it bites. Twice in three pages, it slithers. At one point, it launches “an all-points attack.”
The writing, once you get used to it, can be a pleasant sort of pig wallow. But anyone buying this book should also pick up Norman Cantor’s 2001 “In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made” (Perennial; $13.95). Cantor, who died last fall, was a longtime professor at New York University, and probably the most widely read medievalist of the late twentieth century. His 1963 book “The Civilization of the Middle Ages” (revised in 1994) is the standard history of the period. By the time he wrote “In the Wake of the Plague,” he had retired, and if I am not mistaken he was weary of scholarship, of footnotes, of anything he didn’t want to do, which, in “The Wake,” included giving a comprehensive description of the Black Death. Instead, he just wanted to talk. He’s a very engaging talker, and he, too, tells us about the scandals and the clothes. But, as the title of his book announces, what he mostly wants to talk about is the consequences of the plague—the large changes it wrought in politics, in economics, in intellectual and religious life—and he makes these as interesting as the scandals.
What happens, Cantor asks, when one-third of the people in your world suddenly drop dead? A labor shortage, for one thing. The peasants of post-plague Europe found themselves in a good bargaining position, and they drove up wages. British landowners turned to Parliament, Parliament imposed controls, and this eventually set off the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Cantor’s description of the end of the revolt is a nice example of his terse and ironic style. A mob had assembled outside the Tower of London: “The young King Richard II came riding out to meet the peasants. He assured them that he loved them and if they would go home their demands would be met and justice fulfilled. . . . The peasants dispersed and the power of the government, using the instrument of class-biased common law, came down on them hard.” Most of their leaders were hanged. The momentum couldn’t be stopped, however. Many laborers won better pay, and were able to buy up land. The middle class, rising before, rose faster.
Weirdly, Cantor’s most enthralling chapter has to do with property law. The fortunes of fourteenth-century middle-class families depended entirely on whom their children married, what further children (preferably sons) those children bore, and who inherited what. Every gentry estate was an intricate construction of property calculations—on which, as Cantor puts it, the Black Death “fell like a tornado.” Many families were left with no male head other than a teen-ager, or a child. Outside the doors, the peasants were demanding more money. Inside the doors, quite possibly, were grandfather’s widow and father’s widow, each with a “dower,” or legal arrangement granting her, until her death, one-third of the estate’s income—an income now halved, or worse. Such situations gave rise to bitter family fights and hence to an explosion of litigation, during which much of our current property law was hammered out. (“A barrister of 1350 deep frozen and thawed out today,” Cantor writes, “would need only a six-month refresher course at a first-rate American law school to practice property or real estate law.”) In the course of their quarrels, the gentry and the nobility put aside old codes of civility, and that development, together with certain very striking national events—notably the ouster and probable murder of Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke, at the end of the century—created what Cantor calls a “new dark age of bad behavior.” The modern conviction “that unrestrained greed is good” was born. The new property legislation controlled it but also fostered it, by encouraging people to do whatever the law would let them get away with.
Cantor’s masterpiece of nuance is his discussion of the Jews. Kelly’s chapter on the pogroms is a scream in the night; Cantor’s is a complicated drama. Cantor tells us about the potentates—Pope Clement VI; Queen Joanna of Naples, she of the murder trial—who shielded the Jews. (Kelly does, too, but more briefly.) He describes the lesser folk—the mayors, the magistrates—who held back the mobs. In Cologne, the town councilmen forbade the persecutions even after a Jew was brought to them, in chains, and told them he had poisoned wells. But then the archbishop of Cologne, who had helped to keep the mobs out of the city, died, and the balance tipped.
Cantor has his doubts about the cancellation-of-debts theory. He says that people indebted to Jewish lenders were not necessarily eager to get rid of them. Where else were they going to borrow money? Furthermore, Jewish lenders could be heavily taxed, “in return for protection.” So it was not just out of humanitarianism but also for practical reasons that many people in positions of power held out. But then they got worn down, or were removed from office. Or they found themselves in a financial crunch, and the property of dead Jews was worth more to them than the loan services of live Jews. It is a human story.
Throughout the book, actually, Cantor is at his best when writing about human psychology, especially as its medieval contours differed from ours. Here he is on the nobility:
They were tactile, existential personages, not reflecting on long-range or even tomorrow’s significations. They were born to immeasurable wealth and great station; they behaved accordingly, in that way no different psychologically from the peasants who numbly pushed plows and existed on porridge. You played the hand you were dealt, the life to which Christ had called you, and then it was over, frequently in childhood or adolescence, almost never after the age of fifty.
This fatalism, which should make their extermination less poignant, only makes it more so.
The weakest part of Cantor’s book is his roundup, at the end, of the various theories of the Black Death that have accumulated over the years. Cantor was a famously argumentative man, and at times it seems as though his main criterion in judging a theory were its popularity. If it’s unpopular, he likes it. In 1979, the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle and the mathematician Chandra Wickramasinghe published a book arguing that the organic matter from which the Black Death (and human life) developed came from outer space, via comets—a proposal that Cantor says was ignored by most historians. He thinks it makes some sense, and he points out that in the nineteen-eighties the Nobel laureate Francis Crick made a related argument. Cantor also looks kindly on the idea, advanced in 1984 by the zoologist Graham Twigg, that the cause of the Black Death was not the rat-disease bubonic plague, imported from Asia, but the cattle-disease anthrax, contracted from Europe’s own herds. Most experts reject Twigg’s argument. Cantor accepts it, halfway. He believes that the Black Death involved both bubonic plague and anthrax, simultaneously.
Better regarded theories get a shorter hearing. Cantor has little faith in the famous notion, put forth by Millard Meiss in 1951, that the plague caused the painters of the late fourteenth century to abandon the new naturalism of Giotto and to retreat into the more abstract style that preceded it. Cantor is also not fond of the theory of his great predecessor Johan Huizinga that the Black Death fostered a new morbidity in late-medieval painting. (He suggests that the Europeans became death-minded before the plague, during the famine and other troubles that preceded it.) Finally, there is the idea, advanced in the mid-eighties by the historian David Herlihy, that the Black Death, by clearing away the old and making way for the new, ushered in the Renaissance. Kelly endorses this wholeheartedly. After the pestilence, he says, “Human ingenuity flowered. . . . Europe emerged cleansed and renewed—like the sun after rain.” Cantor ponders Herlihy’s theory but concludes that, even if the pestilence had some tangential effect, this “scarcely diminishes what we know to have been the main driving forces in Italian Renaissance culture—a very rich and politically powerful high bourgeoisie trying to establish its own identity . . . by recalling and identifying with the frame of mind, taste, and behavioral patterns of the ruling class of ancient Rome.”
As Cantor points out, the plague is not extinct. Just last month, there was an outbreak of pneumonic plague in a diamond mine in northern Congo. A hundred and fourteen people were infected; almost half of them died. Even in the United States, there are about a dozen cases of bubonic plague per year, usually as a result of contact with rodents, just as in the fourteenth century. (In 1995, a woman in California came down with the plague after she ran over a squirrel with her power mower.) The plague is not our only worry, however. Throughout the last two decades, there have been articles in the press on the growing threat of worldwide epidemics, whether from bioterrorism or just from globalization and immigration. Both Kelly and Cantor share that anxiety—their books may have been born of it—and each, in his own way, makes the prospect seem more grim. ♦