by John Kelly
The Black Death had arrived in Europe.*
Almost immediately people began to fall ill, and they fell ill in ways no one in Messina had ever seen before. First, says Friar Michele, “a sort of boil . . . the size of a lentil, erupted on the thigh or arm, [then] the victims violently coughed up blood, and after three days [of] incessant vomiting . . . for which there was no remedy, they died . . . and with them died not only everyone who had talked to them, but also anyone who acquired, touched or laid hands on their belongings.”
Friar Michele seems to be describing pneumonic plague
secondary to bubonic plague—that is, plague that begins in the lymph system (producing the bubo), but metastasizes to the lungs (producing the bloody cough). Messina’s rapid infection suggests that if the disease was not pneumonic when it arrived, it rapidly became so—that is, at a certain point, the infection began to spread directly from person to person via airborne droplets.
More puzzling is how the Genoese, ravaged as they were, managed to get to Messina. Some of the crew members may have had a natural immunity to
Y. pestis, but even assuming that CCR5-∆32 does heighten resistance to the disease, far from settled scientific fact, could enough crew members have survived to get a fleet from the Crimea or Constantinople to Sicily, both several months’ sail away? Given how quickly plague kills, another, perhaps more credible scenario is that the fleet that brought the disease to Messina originated in a port closer to Italy.
Open sea sailing was still very dangerous in the Middle Ages, so mariners rarely sailed anywhere in a straight line. Even during extended trips, ships would inch along a coastline like rock climbers on a ledge, stopping every third or fourth day to trade and buy supplies. The practice, called
costeggiare, would have allowed
Y. pestis to proceed to Europe in a stepwise fashion, moving from port to port and fleet to fleet, allowing it to kill crews at will.
Messina quickly expelled the Genoese, but the plague had already entered the lifeblood of the city. As the mortality deepened, churches and shops fell silent, beaches emptied, fishing boats lay idle, streets became deserted. Soon Messina, like Constantinople, became two cities, the city of the infected—a municipality of pain and despair—and the city of the uninfected, where fear and hate ruled. “The disease bred such loathing,” says Friar Michele, “that if a son fell ill . . . his father flatly refused to stay with him.” That autumn many in Messina died, not only absent the consolation of a parent or a child, but without a priest to hear confession or a notary to make out a will. Only Messina’s animals maintained the old traditions of loyalty and faithfulness. “Cats and . . . livestock followed their master to death,” says Friar Michele.
Soon Messina began to empty out. Friar Michele speaks of crazed dogs running wild on deserted streets, of nighttime fires winking from crowded fields and vineyards around the city, of dusty, sun-drenched roads filled with sweaty, fearful refugees, of sick stragglers wandering off to nearby woods and huts to die. He also describes several incidents of what sound, to a modern sensibility, like magical realism but were probably episodes of panic-induced hysteria. In one, “a black dog with a naked sword in its paw” rushes into a church and smashes the silver vessels, lamps, and candlesticks on the altar.* In another, a statue of the Blessed Virgin comes alive en route to Messina and, horrified by the city’s sinfulness, refuses to enter. “The earth gaped wide,” says Friar Michele, “and the donkey upon which the statue of the Mother of God was being carried became as fixed and immovable as a rock.”
Not long ago a British historian boasted of English resoluteness in the face of the Black Death. “With his friends and relations dying in droves, . . . with every kind of human intercourse rendered perilous,” wrote the historian, “the medieval Englishman obstinately carried on in his wonted way.” The assessment is accurate, but English fortitude owes something to good fortune as well as good character. The plague did not suddenly drop from the sky on England one day. Untouched until the summer of 1348, the English had nearly a year to collect intelligence and steady themselves. Without pressing the analogy too far, cities like Messina and Constantinople were in the position of a Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Not only did the plague more or less strike out of the blue, it produced death on a scale no one had ever seen, no one had ever imagined possible—death not in the hundreds or thousands, but in the hundreds of thousands, and in the millions. Moreover, it was a death capable of obliterating whole networks of people in a matter of hours. One day, wrote a contemporary, “a man, wanting to make his will, died along with the notary, the priest who heard his confession, and the people summoned to witness his will, and they were all buried together on the following day.”
Faced with catastrophe on such an unprecedented scale, it is hardly surprising that so many in Sicily lost their heads.
The tale of the Black Death in Sicily is also a tale of two cities, Messina and its southern neighbor, Catania. Believing the Messinese to be vain and supercilious, the Catanians had long disliked their swaggering northern neighbors, and when the town became a collection point for refugees from the port, relations between the two cities soured further. “Don’t talk to me if you are from Messina,” wary townsfolk told the refugees. The Messinese, whose reputation for vanity was not entirely unjustified, did not enhance their standing by promptly asking to borrow Catania’s most precious relics, the bones of the blessed virgin St. Agatha. The Catanians were aghast. Even by the standards of Messinese cheek, this was outrageous. Who would protect Catania from the pestilence while St. Agatha was in the north helping the Messinese drive the plague from their native city? Even Friar Michele becomes a little unhinged when he describes the request. “What a stupid idea on the part of you Messinese. . . . Don’t you think if she [St. Agatha] wanted to make her home in Messina she would have said so?”
The crisis deepened when Catania’s patriarch, Gerard Ortho, experienced a fit of guilt. Under public pressure, the patriarch had agreed to ban Messinese refugees from the city. Now, to appease God and his conscience, not only did he let the refugees talk him into lending them St. Agatha’s relics, he promised to carry the relics to Messina himself. Again, Catania was aghast. The patriarch seemed to be imposing a form of unilateral spiritual disarmament on the city. An angry crowd quickly gathered and marched on the cathedral. On every other day, Catanians addressed their patriarch on bended knee and with bowed head, but not on this day, with the city under imminent threat from a horrible illness. On this day the marchers spoke truth to power. Confronting the patriarch inside the cathedral, they told him flatly, “They would rather see him dead before they let the relics go to Messina.” A man of some moral courage, Patriarch Ortho insisted on keeping his word to the Messinese. Finally a compromise was struck. Messina would not get St. Agatha’s relics, but it would get the next best thing: holy water into which the relics had been dipped—Patriarch Ortho would sprinkle the water over the infected city himself.
Like almost all stories about Sicily in the autumn of 1347, the tale of two cities ends badly. Despite the holy water, the plague continued to rage in Messina; despite St. Agatha’s relics, Catania was struck by the pestilence; and despite a close association with two most important symbols of Sicilian spirituality, Patriarch Ortho died a terrible plague death.
The story of Duke Giovanni, Sicily’s craven regent, also has an unhappy ending. As the plague spread across the island—while it produced grievous mortalities in Syracuse, in Trapani, in Sciacca, in Agrigento—the duke thought of no one and of nothing but himself. “He roamed here and there like a fugitive,” says Friar Michele, “now in the forest . . . of Catania, now at a tower called
lu blancu . . . now at the church of San Salvatore. . . .” In 1348, certain that the plague was abating, the duke emerged from hiding and settled “in a place called Sant’ Andrea.” Hearing of his reemergence shortly before leaving Sicily,
Y. pestis paid a call on the duke at his new home and killed him.
/> Near the end of his chronicle, Friar Michele throws up his hands in despair and declares, “What more is there to say?”
Very little—except that by the autumn of 1348, when the pestilence finally burned itself out, the dead had come to inhabit Sicily as insistently as the living. Human remains could be found everywhere on the island: on the desolate volcanic wastelands of the interior, in the soft green valleys near the coastal plains, and along the island’s golden beaches. A third of Sicily may have died in the plague; no one knows for sure.
Genoa, November-December 1347
In a disquisition on Genoese “character,” a local cleric likened his fellow citizens to “donkeys.” “The nature of a donkey is this,” he explained. “When many are together . . . and one is thrashed by a stick, all scatter, fleeing hither and thither.”
The Genoese expelled from Messina behaved in character. Scattering “hither and thither,” they began to infect other ports, but the expelled galleys were almost certainly not the only agents of plague in the Mediterranean in the desperate fall of 1347. From Caffa, the pestilence had spread around the Black Sea, then to Constantinople, Romania, and Greece, producing a panicked flight west. By November there must have been twenty or more plague ships off the southern coast of Europe, some sailing toward the western Mediterranean, others toward the Adriatic, each armed with the equivalent of a large thermonuclear device, and most, if not all, captained by men whose innate greed was greatly enhanced by the fact that they had a personal financial stake in the cargoes their ships were carrying. With holds full of dead and dying, many infected vessels continued to sail from port to port, selling their wares. One contemporary account speaks of three infected ships expelled from French and Italian ports “heading toward the Atlantic along the Spanish coast . . . to conclude their trade.” France, Spain, Egypt, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, and Tunis were all infected via the traditional Mediterranean trade routes, as was mainland Italy, which, in the autumn of 1347, may have been the most vulnerable region of Europe.
For years nothing had gone right on the Italian peninsula. Even the land and sky had seemed to fall into disorder. In 1345 the heavens burst open, and it rained torrentially for six months, flooding fields, washing out bridges, and producing famine on an epic scale. “In 1346 and 1347,” says a contemporary, “there was a severe shortage of basic foods . . . to the point where many people died of hunger and people ate grass and weeds as if they had been wheat.” In Florence the terrible plague spring of 1348 was preceded by the terrible famine spring of 1347. In April of that year much of Florence was surviving on a municipal bread ration. As if sensing the approaching horror, the Italian earth also began to tremble. Major earthquakes rocked Rome, Venice, Pisa, Bologna, Naples, Padua, and Venice,* perhaps releasing poisonous gas into the atmosphere as in Cyprus. In several places vintners complained that the air in their wine casks had grown turbid. Everywhere on the peninsula, there was also war and rumor of war.
Through hunger and rain, flood and earthquakes, Italians persisted in killing one another. Genoa was at war with Venice, the papacy with the Holy Roman Emperor, the Hungarians with Naples, and in Rome the aristocratic Colonna family and the aristocratic Orsini family were slitting each others’ throats with the happy abandon of Mafia clans.
“What was true of late medieval Europe as a whole was
a fortiori true of Italy,” says historian Philip Ziegler. “The people were physically in no state to resist a sudden and severe epidemic, and, psychologically, they were attuned to . . . a supine acceptance of disaster. . . . To speak of a collective death wish is to trespass into the world of metaphysics, but if ever there was a people with a right to despair of life, it was the Italian peasantry of the mid-fourteenth century.”
If Italy was the most vulnerable region of western Europe, the most vulnerable region of Italy may have been Genoa, a handsome city with a “fine circuit of walls, . . . beautiful palaces” set against a majestic mountain backdrop. In addition to sharing the afflictions of its neighbors, Genoa also bore the special burden of its hubris and ambition. Having become the center of an eastern trading empire, the city exerted an almost magnetic attraction on anything coming out of Asia, whether it be Sungware from China, spices from Ceylon, ebony from Burma, or death from the Mongolian Plateau.
Perhaps sensing the city’s vulnerability, the Genoese exercised great vigilance in the autumn of l347. Contemporary accounts say that Genoa was infected on December 31, 1347, but a reconstruction of the timeline that fall suggests that
Y. pestis made a first run at the city eight to ten weeks earlier. In this version of events, on a late October morning three or four galleys, probably members of the expelled Messina fleet, appear in Genoa harbor and are promptly driven away. As the fleet scatters “hither and thither” again, one stray vessel makes its way north along the French Mediterranean coast to Marseille, and infects the unsuspecting city; then upon being expelled for a third time (Messina and Genoa are one and two), the stray meets up with two companions and sails into history as part of the pestilential fleet last seen heading “toward the Atlantic along the Spanish coast.”
However, the prompt action by authorities in October only bought Genoa a little extra time. In late December a second infected fleet appeared in the winter sea off the city. It is unclear where the vessels, also Genoese in origin, came from—Messina, Constantinople, the Crimea, or somewhere else—but their visit appears to have been in the nature of a death ride. The crews were “horribly infected,” and may have wanted to gaze a final time upon their native city and its “fine circuit of walls” and “beautiful palaces.” Again the ships were driven away by “burning arrows and other engines of war,” but, in this instance, too slowly. During this second visit, which may be the December 31 episode described in the chronicles, the plague got into the city. Thereafter, Genoa falls silent. Almost alone among major Italian cities, she failed to produce a plague chronicler. The only record we have of the city’s experience in the winter and spring of 1348, the period of the Black Death, is a report of a famous visitor and a few accounts of individual acts of heroism and self-sacrifice.
One such act was performed by a woman named Simonia, who, in late February 1348, nursed her friend Aminigina through the final days of a bitter plague death. Ignoring the danger to herself, Simonia remained at Aminigina’s side, changing her soiled nightshirts, holding her hand when she cried, wiping the blood and spittle and vomit from her lips. On February 23, 1348, the dying Aminigina rewarded Simonia with a small monetary bequest. On that same day, in another part of Genoa, in an office above winter streets dancing with plague, a notary named Antonio de Benitio was making out wills. De Benitio and his colleagues, Guidotto de Bracelli and Domenico Tarrighi, both of whom also stayed in the city, are not obviously heroic figures in the mold of a Patriarch Ortho and Simonia. But in a period of mass death, when enormous amounts of money and property were suddenly being orphaned, notaries, who made out wills and other legal documents, played an essential role in the maintenance of civic order. Without notarial records, there could be no orderly transmission of societal resources from the dead to the living; and without such a transmission, chaos and disorder would result.
During the pestilence Genoa also received a brief visit from the most notorious woman in Christendom, the willful, beautiful Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily. Joanna, a combination of Scarlett O’Hara and Lizzie Borden, was in trouble again. On a September evening three years earlier, her husband, eighteen-year-old Andreas of Hungary, was discovered in the Neapolitan moonlight, dangling from a balcony with a noose around his neck. The queen and her lover, Luigi of Taratino, a man of such extraordinary physical beauty that a contemporary called him as “beautiful as the day,” were suspected of plotting the murder. The queen’s visit to pestilential Genoa was occasioned by her angry Hungarian in-laws, who had just invaded Italy in pursuit of her and Luigi and anyone who had helped them kill the eighteen-year-old Andreas. In March 1348, while notary de
Bracelli was at his desk making out wills, and bodies piled up along Genoa’s “fine circuit of walls,” the lovely Joanna, in the breathless tradition of the romance novel heroine, was boarding a fast ship in Genoa harbor. Soon Christendom’s most beautiful couple would reunite in Avignon, where the Neapolitan queen would participate in a trial so notorious, for a while it upstaged even the plague.
Little else is known about Black Death Genoa, though it is said that if you stand under the statue of Columbus in the harbor on a summer night, you can hear the plague dead speak—but, of course, the voices are just the moans and creaks of small pleasure craft pitching in the night wind. Along with a magnificent harbor, the winds were nature’s great gift to Genoa. They blow to the south and west—just the directions the medieval Genoese wanted to go—until the day they arrived at the place where the winds end and discovered what lay in wait.