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

by John Kelly

  No doubt, the principal insect vector in the Black Death was

  X. cheopis, the rat flea, but given the state of the medieval body, it is extremely likely that

  Pulex irritans, the human flea, also played an important role in the medieval plague.

  From Caffa to Vietnam and Afghanistan, no human activity has been more closely associated with plague than war, and few centuries have been as violent as the fourteenth. In the decades before the plague, the Scots were killing the English; the English, the French; the French, the Flemings; and the Italians and the Spanish, each other. More to the point, in those savage decades, the nature of battle changed in fundamental ways. Armies grew larger, battles bloodier, civilians were attacked more frequently, and property was destroyed more routinely—and each change helped to make the medieval battlefield and the medieval soldier more efficient agents of disease.

  Different historians date what is sometimes called the Military Revolution of the Later Middle Ages to different events, but as good a place to start as any is a meadow outside the Flemish village of Coutrai on a steamy July day in 1302. Arriving at the meadow that morning, a large French cavalry force on its way to Coutrai to relieve a group of besieged comrades (Flanders was a French domain in the fourteenth century) found the way blocked by several battalions of resolute Flemish bowmen and pikemen, dressed in wash-bowl helmets and fishnet armor.

  Shortly after noon the French commander, Robert of Artois, ordered an attack on the Flemings, and his cavalry—pennants flapping in the summer wind—began advancing across the meadow high grass with all the stately grandeur appropriate to warrior-knights of the “august and sovereign house of France.” After forging a small brook midway between the two camps, the French broke into a run. A moment later, an enormous

  thwang! sounded, and the cloudless July sky filled with a thousand steel-tipped Flemish arrows; a few seconds later, there was an even louder

  thud! as several hundred French war horses smashed into the Flemish line at twenty miles an hour. According to conventional medieval military theory, the impact of the charge should have knocked the Flemings to the ground like bowling pins, making them vulnerable to trampling by horse and impalement by rider, but at Coutrai the gods of war rescrambled the rules. Instead of plunging through the Flemish line, the French broke against it like a wave against a sea wall—and dissolved, Humpty Dumpty–style, into a jumble of falling horses and falling men.

  The discovery that infantry, well armed and resolute, could defeat cavalry, the queen of the battlefield—a discovery reaffirmed in several subsequent battles—revolutionized medieval military strategy, and like most revolutions, the infantry revolution produced several unanticipated consequences. First, medieval captains upgraded the role of infantry; then, discovering that foot soldiers were much cheaper to field—five or six bowmen and pikemen cost about the same as a single cavalry man—the captains expanded the size of the medieval army; and as armies grew much larger, battles grew much bigger and bloodier. This was partly a matter of numbers, but it also reflected the growing violence of warfare. For one thing, the largely peasant infantry was far less apt to observe the rules of chivalry, particularly in combat with enemy nobles. Since stress, including combat stress, weakens immune system function, arguably one consequence of bigger, more violent wars was a larger pool of disease-vulnerable people. Less arguably, larger armies produced larger concentrations of dirty men and debris, which attracted larger concentrations of rats and fleas.

  The

  chevauchee, the second major military development of the fourteenth century, was created to resolve the great military dilemma of the age: how does an army break a siege? “A castle can hardly be taken within a year, and even if it does fall, it means more expenses for the king’s purse and for his subjects than the conquest is worth,” wrote Pierre Dubois, an influential fourteenth-century military thinker. Dubois’s solution to the siege problem, outlined in

  Doctrine of Successful Expeditions and Shortened Wars, was indirection. Attack civilians, Dubois argued, and your opponent will be forced to abandon his fortified position and come out and defend his people. Thus was born the

  chevauchee. The idea of sending large raiding parties on search-and-destroy missions through the enemy countryside was not quite as new as Dubois pretended. The practice had been tried before, including by the Normans against the English in 1066. Civilians had also been targeted before. “If sometimes the humble and innocent suffer harm and lose their goods, it cannot be otherwise,” declared Honore Bouvet with a Gallic shrug.

  However, the Anglo-French Hundred Years’ War—the largest, bloodiest conflict of the Middle Ages—transformed the

  chevauchee into a common and devastating weapon. The war began in 1337, and in the decade before the plague arrived in 1347, the English, who became masters of the

  chevauchee, employed it with lethal effect against Dubois’s fellow countrymen. All through the 1340s, flying wedges of English horsemen crisscrossed the French countryside, torching farms and villages, raping and murdering civilians, and looting cattle. In a letter to a friend, the Italian poet Petrarch, a recent visitor to wartime France, expressed astonishment at the level of destruction. “Everywhere were dismal devastation, grief and desolation, everywhere wild and uncultivated fields, everywhere ruined and deserted homes. . . . [I]n short everywhere remained the sad vestiges of the Angli [the English].”

  Even more heartfelt is the account of English terrorism by the French King Jean II. “Many people [have been] slaughtered, churches pillaged, bodies destroyed and souls lost, maids and virgins deflowered, respectable wives and widows dishonored, towns, manors, and buildings burnt, . . . the Christian faith . . . chilled, and commerce . . . perished. . . . So many other evils and horrible deeds have followed these wars that they cannot be said, numbered or written.”

  While the present is, at best, an imperfect guide to the past, several studies on modern conflict provide some additional insight into how war may have made the medieval world more vulnerable to plague. The subject of the first report, a U.S. Army study, is the old Soviet army, which fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Russian combat casualties in the conflict were quite low—under 3 percent—but the Soviet army suffered horrendous rates of illness, especially infectious illness. Three out of four soldiers who fought in Afghanistan—75 to 76 percent of the entire Soviet army in the country—had to be hospitalized for disease. Some soldiers were stricken by bubonic plague, but malaria, cholera, diphtheria, infectious dysentery, amoebic dysentery, hepatitis, and typhus were, if anything, more common.

  What caused such a disastrous disease rate? The answer sheds some light on the unchanging nature of soldiering. According to the report, one important factor was military hygiene. The average Russian soldier changed his underwear once every three months, washed his uniform and blankets at about the same rate, drank untreated water, left his garbage unpicked up, defecated near his tent rather than at a field latrine, and, even when involved in kitchen work, only washed his hands after a bowel movement when an officer made him. Significantly, the report says that combat stress may also have played a role in the high disease rate. Stress, as noted earlier, impairs immune system function, lowering resistance to disease. This observation, of course, also applies to civilians menaced by marauding armies.

  A second report comes from Vietnam, where approximately twenty-five thousand people, most native Vietnamese, were struck by plague between l966 and l974. According to U.S. Army medical authorities, one important factor in the outbreak was the siegelike conditions in large parts of the country. Not atypical is the fire base a team of American doctors visited in the winter of 1967. Twenty-one people were suffering from plague at the base, and an inspection quickly revealed why. Vietcong mortar and artillery attacks had driven life underground. The soldiers—and, in many cases, their families—lived in dirt bunkers whose warm, moist environments perfectly mimicked the rodent burrow; personal hygiene was appalling. No on
e washed, the bathing facilities being above ground, and no one used the field latrines, for the same reason. The Genoese, who were besieged at Caffa, and the French, who were besieged at Calais on the eve of the Black Death, would have found the fetid Vietnamese bunkers, piled high with human waste, half-eaten rations, and bloodstained battle dressings, quite familiar. Working under appalling conditions, the army doctors managed to save seventeen plague victims, but in four cases the disease was too advanced even for treatment with modern antibiotics.

  The uprooting of populations—another feature of war that dates back to the

  chevauchee and beyond—was also of great assistance to

  Y. pestis in Vietnam. In 1969 more than six hundred people—the majority of them children—were stricken by plague in the village of Dong Ha. Again, U.S. Army doctors found rats and fleas everywhere, but this time the infestation was caused by a resource imbalance, not a siege. Little Dong Ha had suddenly become a receiving point for refugees fleeing south from the DMZ (demilitarized zone) and east from Khe Sanh, but the village lacked the sanitary resources to cope with a large influx of dirty people.

  Of course, it is impossible to say with any precision how, and to what degree, these three factors—war, famine, and inadequate sanitation—helped to pave the way for the Black Death, but what can be said with some certainty is that by the time

  Y. pestis left Caffa in late l346 or early 1347, Europe was already up to its chin in water and the tide was still rushing in.

  Chapter Four

  Sicilian Autumn

  Sicily, October 1347

  THE MEDITERRANEAN IS A SEA OF SECRETS. THERE ARE THE SECRETS of its submerged mountains, the lofty ranges that once linked Tunisia to Sicily and Spain to Morocco. There are the secrets of its mysterious ancestor, the Tethys Sea, which, before the birth of Eurasia, flowed across the face of the world into a great eastern ocean. And there are the secrets of the Mediterranean’s dead: the Vivaldi brothers, who vanished into the infinity of longitude and latitude, searching for a passage to the Indies. And the greatest secret of all: the fate of the pesilential Genoese, who fled Caffa with “sickness clinging to their very bones.”

  “Speak, Genoa. What have you done?” a contemporary demanded on behalf of the plague dead. But Genoa has kept her silence about the ships, and keeps it still. The Caffa plague fleet floats through the literature of the Black Death like a ghost shimmering on a night sea. One account speaks of “three galleys loaded with spices . . . storm driven from the east by the stinking breath of wind”; another of four Genoese ships returning from the Crimea “full of infected sailors”; a third of a Genoese fleet—variously numbered at two to twelve ships—sailing from Asia Minor to the Mediterranean, infecting everything in its wake, including the Black Sea port of Pera, Constantinople, Messina (Sicily), Genoa, and Marseille.

  In June, as the apocalypse gathered in the East, few in Europe were aware that something wicked was coming their way. In England the summer of 1347 had some of the sepia-toned glamour of the summer of 1914. Fresh from a glorious campaign season on the plains of northern France, the golden-haired Edward III was in London, enjoying the tournament season, while down the Thames at Westminster Palace, his daughter, Princess Joan, was spending the soft June evenings strolling the palace lawns serenaded by a Spanish minstrel, a gift from the dashing Prince Pedro of Castile. In Siena bootmaker and part-time real estate speculator Agnolo di Tura was at work on a history of the city, eyeing some properties on the Campo, the town square, and doting on his wife, Nicoluccia, and their five children. In Paris the cleric Jean Morellet was updating the building fund at his church, St. Germain l’Auxerrois. The fund received so few donations, Morellet had time for long morning walks along the unembanked Seine, where the river breezes kept the water mills in perpetual motion and the narrow rectangular houses along the bank stood up like “hairs on a multitude of heads.” In Thonon, a town on Lake Geneva, a barber surgeon named Balavigny could be found at the town gate most mornings that summer, gossiping with fellow members of the local Jewish community. In Naples, where the warm night air smelled of the “sweet, soft perfume of summer,” the most beautiful woman in Europe and Christendom’s reigning Bad Girl—Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily—was facing accusations of murder.

  In July, as the fields around Broughton filled with straw-hatted peasants, and the monks in Avignon glazed their windows to trap in the cool air, in Constantinople hopelessness and despair already reigned. Positioned just below the Black Sea and just above the Dardanelles, gateway to West, the Byzantine capital sat in the middle of a bull’s-eye. A Europe-bound ship leaving the Crimea could not reach home without passing the city. Thus, sometime in the spring or early summer of 1347, the plague-bearing Genoese arrived in the harbor, chanting the words of the black-hatted stranger in the American Indian myth: “I am death.”

  The Venetian scribe who estimated that 90 percent of Constantinople perished in the Black Death surely exaggerated, but no one who lived through the pestilential summer and fall of l347 in the Byzantine capital ever forgot the experience. “Every day we bring out our friends for burial. [And] every day the city becomes emptier and the number of graves increases,” wrote the court scholar Demetrios Kydones. As the mortality intensified, Kydones saw his fellow citizens become twisted by fear and selfishness. “Men inhumanely shun each other’s company [for fear of contagion]. Fathers do not dare to bury their own sons; sons do not perform . . . last duties to their fathers.”

  The plague also left a lasting mark on Ioannes IV, the Byzantine emperor. “Upon arrival . . . [the empress] found [our] youngest . . . dead,” wrote Ioannes, in his only known statement about the death of his thirteen-year-old son, Andronikos. After the boy’s death the emperor lost his taste for the world. Abdicating the throne, Ioannes retired to the solitude of a monk’s cell, to pray and mourn and grieve for the remainder of his life.

  From Constantinople,

  Y. pestis followed the trade routes southward into the Dardanelles, the thin vein of blue water that carries the Europe-bound traveler into the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean beyond. In the summer of 1347, the world divided at the Dardanelles. Immediately to the west lay the green sunlit hills of Europe, still untouched by plague; to the east, the pesilential plains of Asia Minor. Descending through the straits,

  Y. pestis stopped to pay its respects to Xerxes, the Persian king who built a bridge of boats to ferry his army across the waterway. Then, as the Aegean rushed into view, the plague bacillus cloned itself. One strain of the disease swung northward through Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania, in the general direction of Poland; a second strain darted southward across the Mediterranean toward Egypt and the Levant; while a third strain doubled back eastward, striking Cyprus late in the summer. As if trying to repel a malignant body, the island immediately rose up in violent rebellion. First the earth ripped open, and “a tremendous earthquake” uprooted trees, collapsed hills, leveled buildings, and killed thousands. Then the angry sea threw up a tidal wave so enormous, it seemed to scrape the sun as it rushed toward the island. Mothers snatched up their children, farmers ran from the fields; seagulls scattered into the sky, gawking and yakking in alarm; while fishermen, caught between the coast and the wave, whispered a quick last prayer as the luminous Mediterranean light disappeared behind a hard black wall of water. A moment later an enormous crash sent shock waves flying across the water for dozens of miles in every direction; then large parts of coastal Cyprus disappeared beneath a turbulent sea of white foam. “Ships were dashed to pieces on the rocks and . . . this fertile and blooming island was converted into a vast desert,” wrote a German historian. Next the air itself seemed to give out. A “pestiferous wind spread so poisonous an odor that many, being overpowered, . . . fell down suddenly and expired in dreadful agonies.”* As calamity followed calamity, alarmed Cypriots began to fear that their Arab slaves would rise up in revolt. Closing their hearts to pity, islanders reached for the sword. Day after day that bleak fall, hundr
eds of Muslim men, women, and children were herded into ruined olive groves littered with puddles and twisted, uprooted trees and slaughtered by men who would be dead of the pestilence within a week.

  The fourth strain of the plague swept westward across the Mediterranean until it found an island even more tragic and tortured than Cyprus.

  Sicily lies only a few miles off the coast of Europe, but it belongs to a different world—a more primitive, insular, and, above all, violent world. There is the violence of the island’s sky, which is too blue; of its sun, which is too bright; of its people, who are too passionate; and of its wind, the piercing summer sirocco, which blows northward across the Mediterranean from Tunisia and stings the eyes, burns the throat, and coats the lungs with sand. There is also the violence of Sicilian history, a history so full of duplicity, subjugation, bloodshed, and despair that the sunny Mediterranean island has produced a society of black-hearted fatalists. In Sicily, says native novelist Leonardo Sciascia, “we ignore the future tense of verbs. We never say, ‘Tomorrow I will go to the country’; we say,

  ‘Dumani, vaju in compagna’—‘Tomorrow I am going to the country.’ How can you fail to be pessimistic in a country where the future tense of the verb does not exist?”

  The most tragic moment in Sicily’s history begins almost like a child’s fairy tale. “In October 1347,* at about the beginning of the month, twelve Genoese galleys put into the port of Messina.” The author of these words, a Franciscan friar named Michele da Piazza, does not say from where the galleys originated—Caffa, another Black Sea port, Constantinople, Romania, or somewhere closer—but apparently nothing about the vessels seemed untoward or suspicious. As the ships docked, Messina went about its daily business, enjoying a final moment of normalcy before the world changed utterly. Fishermen unloaded their catch, old women gossiped from windows, children chased one another across long golden beaches, a soft autumn wind danced up the narrow streets of the town; then anchors dropped, gangplanks came down, and the Genoese crews rolled onto the docks, “carrying such a disease in their bodies that if anyone so much as spoke with one of them he was infected . . . and could not avoid death.”