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

by John Kelly

  Templar knight Gerard de Pasagio testified that after his arrest he was tortured by the “hanging of weights on his genitals and other members.” Other Templars were strapped to the rack, their ankles and wrists dislocated by a winching device that—slowly—pulled joints from sockets. Another popular torture was called

  strappado. The prisoner was pulled to the ceiling by a rope that suddenly went slack, his fall broken at the last moment by a violent jerk. Sometimes weights were attached to the testicles and feet to make the jerk more violent and painful. One Templar, Bernard de Vaho, had his feet smeared with fat and placed in an open flame. A few days later, when de Vaho tried to walk, “the bones in his feet dropped out.” Other popular tortures included yanking teeth and tearing out fingernails one by one.

  By early 1314 the Templars were in tatters. The order had been disbanded by papal bull, most of its treasury was in the hands of the French Crown, and its leadership either dead, in prison, or gone mad. All that remained was to end the affair on an appropriate note of dignity.

  But the only part of the finale that went according to schedule was the date, March 18, 1314. On learning that the grand master and his lieutenant, de Charney, had defied the Crown, Philip overrode the objections of Church officials who wished for a day to deliberate the men’s fate and ordered both “burned to death” immediately.

  Shouts of “heretic” and “blasphemer” greeted the condemned men as they arrived at the execution site, the desolate Ile des Javiaux in the Seine, late on the afternoon of the eighteenth. Someone in the mob picked up a stone and threw it. The raw river wind had put the crowd in an ugly mood, but there was also more than a hint of expectation in the air. People were hoping for a last great surprise from the grand master, something like the repudiation in front of Notre Dame that morning. And, according to legend, de Molay did not disappoint. As he disappeared into a plume of flame and smoke, the old man is supposed to have thrown back his head and called down a curse on the King of France and on all the king’s descendants unto the thirteenth generation.

  Stories about the grand master’s curse spread as far as Italy—Giovanni Villani mentions it in one his chronicles—but no one seems to have taken de Molay’s words very seriously. And, indeed, why should they have?

  Surveying Philip’s France in the year 1314, the chronicler Jean Froissart described it as “gorged, contented and strong.” Foreigners might complain of “prating Frenchmen always sneering at nations other than their own,” but when left alone those foreigners would exclaim to one another, “Oh, to be God in France!” In the early fourteenth century, few would have challenged the assertion of Jean de Jardun that “the government of the earth rightfully belongs to the august and sovereign house of France.”

  Stretching from Flanders and Picardy in the north to the Pyrenees in the south, Philip’s France was the largest state in Europe, with the largest population—variously estimated at between 16 million and 24 million. The country had the richest farmland, and its fief, Flanders, contributed the most important industry in medieval Europe: cloth making. Paris, the French capital, had grown into a bustling metropolis of 210,000* souls with a half dozen or more paved streets, including a cobblestoned marvel, the Grande Rue, the city’s main thoroughfare and the axis of Paris’s northward march from the Ile de la Cité and the Seine in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the military arena, France also stood supreme. No other monarchy in Europe could routinely field armies of 20,000 to 25,000.

  Almost everywhere, medieval culture was also by and large French culture. Medieval men and women wore French fashions, emulated French manners, imitated French chivalric traditions, mimicked French troubadours, read French sagas, and prayed in French-inspired Gothic cathedrals. Of another Gallic architectural wonder, the nation’s abbeys, the chronicler Joinville likened them to illuminations of a manuscript in azure and gold. Of the University of Paris, a young Irish scholar exclaimed, it is “the home and nurse of theological and philosophical science, mother of liberal arts, mistress of justice and the standard of the morals, the mirror and lamp of all theological virtues.”

  Against all of this, what was the grand master’s curse? Nothing.

  And yet . . .

  A month after de Molay’s execution, Pope Clement V, Philip’s reluctant ally in the Templars affair, died suddenly. Then, in November, the forty-six-year-old king was killed by a stroke. The following year, 1315, the Great Famine arrived.

  In 1316 Philip’s successor and oldest son, Louis X, died after a brief eighteen-month reign. A few years later, the Pastoureaux, a peasant rebel movement, swept through northern France, storming castles and abbeys, burning down town halls, ravaging farms, and killing Jewish moneylenders.

  And still worse was to come.

  In 1323 Philip’s second son and Louis’s successor, Philip V, died prematurely. A mysterious series of epidemics followed, then more famine and another royal mortality; in 1328 Charles IV, the last of Philip the Fair’s three sons, died; none of his heirs had survived to age thirty-five or ruled for more than six years. And since Charles left no male heir, the Capetian dynasty, rulers of France since 987, died with him. In the succession crisis that followed, Edward III of England, Philip the Fair’s grandson (through Edward’s mother), invaded France to lay title to the French throne, igniting the bloodiest conflict of the Middle Ages, the Hundred Years’ War.

  And still worse was yet to come for “the august and sovereign house of France.”

  Marseille, November 1347

  In Marseille, where a street fight could leave thirty dead and where even the clerical crime rate was a scandal, the plague arrived before the winter rains and may have killed half the population. Yet it failed to shake the city’s resolve or to destroy a centuries-long tradition of tolerance.

  Any history of fourteenth-century Marseille would have to include its energetic, sharp-elbowed population of 20,000 to 25,000, its reputation as a medieval Big Easy, and its commercial importance. Marseille was a principal entry point for goods coming from Spain and the Levant, and a principal disembarkation point for Crusaders. This latter role led to the city’s involvement in one of the most notorious incidents of the Middle Ages. In the early thirteenth century, thousands of members of the Children’s Crusade—youngsters who believed that pure prepubescent Christian hearts, not swords, held the key to liberating the Holy Land—descended on Marseille, seeking passage to the Levant. A number of local ships were booked, and the young Crusaders duly taken aboard, but, character being destiny in Marseille, en route to the East, the captains had a change of heart and instead sold the young Crusaders in the slave markets of the Muslim Levant.

  Any biography of medieval Marseille would also have to include the sloping hill the city sat on, and its odd three-tiered wedding-cake structure. At the top of the hill was the

  ville-episcopal—bishop’s town; beneath it, the administrative buildings of the

  ville de la prevote—provost’s town; and at the bottom of the hill, the

  ville-bas, or lower town. A rats’ maze of thoroughfares, the

  ville-bas was where medieval Marseille lived and worked and played. Inside the quarter’s shops, drapers, fishmongers, and box and barrel makers bent over workbenches, cutting, tearing, and banging, while outside on sinewy streets illuminated by a sliver of blue sky, money changers shouted out the latest exchange rates, drunken mariners ogled broad-hipped women in dresses cut so low the necklines were called “windows of hell,” and tanners poured vats of steaming hot chemicals into piles of mud and human waste. With ventilation limited to a breeze from the harbor, on most days the

  ville-bas had the pungent odor of a mermaid with loose bowels.

  In spring and summer, when the torrid Mediterranean heat settled over the city, making Marseille’s stone buildings sweat on the inside and hot to the touch on the outside, local magistrates, notaries, and lawyers would abandon the gloomy precincts of Hopital du St. Esprit, the center of the municipal legal syste
m, for the outdoor courts of the Place des Accoules. Passing through the plaza on a spring morning in 1338, a visitor could have heard a young woman named Guilelma de Crusols giving testimony in the case of Bonafos v. Gandulfa.

  At issue in the case was Madame Gandulfa’s wandering drainpipe. According to M. Bonafos, the madam had moved the pipe, which was supposed to be equidistant between their two homes, closer to his house, so waste would drain onto his property. Young Mlle. de Crusols, testifying on M. Bonafos’s behalf, told the court that she had tried to reason with the difficult Madame Gandulfa. “I went . . . and asked [her] why she had moved the drain. [But] all she would say is that if the drain was moved back to its original place she would move it again.” Mlle. de Crusols also told the court that during the conversation, Madame Gandulfa kept waving a piece of drainpipe back and forth in her hand.

  Ten years later, the Place des Accoules makes another brief appearance in Marseille’s history, although in a context that would have been incomprehensible in 1338. A reference to the square appears in an entry a notary named Jacme Aycart made in his casebook on April 30, 1348. The father of Silona and Augeyron Andree had just died of plague, and notary Aycart had been called to the Change, a new outdoor court near the harbor, to draw up a transfer of guardianship for the children. In a dotal act it was customary to record the location as well as the date. Accordingly, M. Aycart wrote down “the Change,” then, realizing that would sound odd since the outdoor court usually met on the Place des Accoules, Aycart added a clarifying note. He wrote that the court had changed venues

  “ob fecarem mortuorum terribilem de symmeterio ecclesie Beate Marie de Acuis”—“on account of the terrible stench of the dead from the cemetery of Notre Dame des Accoules” (next door to the Plaza).

  The plague came to medieval Marseille the way most things did—by sea. The infecting agent was apparently one of the pestilential galleys Genoa had expelled in late October 1347. Marseille’s last day of normalcy was November 1—All Saints’ Day, as it happens. Sometime during the day, the stray galley appeared outside the harbor like a shark fin circling in the water; the iron chain guarding the entrance was lowered, and the ship sailed past La Tourette, a fort manned by the Knights of St. John, and docked. The prompt action of the Genoese authorities suggests that many coastal towns in southern Europe were already on high alert for pestilential ships, but, strangely, the galley, already “driven from port to port,” aroused no suspicion in Marseille. Perhaps the previous expulsions had made the captain crafty. Aware that the physical condition of the crew would cause alarm, he may have waited for evening light or for a thick fog or heavy rain before making a run at the harbor. Whatever ploy he used, it worked; the arrival of the plague seems to have taken Marseille by surprise.

  “Men,” says a contemporary, “were infected without realizing it and died suddenly and the inhabitants thereupon drove the galley away.” But, as in Messina and in Genoa, all

  Y. pestis needed to establish itself was that narrow hour between not knowing and knowing. As the expelled galley vanished back into the Mediterranean, a silvery stream of disease was already slithering thorough the cavernous streets of the

  ville-bas, stopping here and there to admire the piles of waste and refuse in front of the four- and five-story buildings before heading north to La Juiverie, the Jewish quarter, and the Palais de Marseille, seat of government. Meanwhile, outside the harbor, the expelled ship joined two companions, and the three galleys faded into the autumn light somewhere “along the Spanish coast” heading toward the Gibraltar Gap. Of the little fleet, a contemporary wrote, “The infection that these galleys left behind their whole route . . . particularly in coastal cities . . . was so great that its duration and horror can scarcely be believed, let alone described.”*

  Marseille’s historic commercial ties to the Levant and to Asia Minor made it a natural target for any disease coming out of the East. In a.d. 543 the Plague of Justinian took a terrible toll on the city, and in 1720 Marseille would become one of the last cities in Europe to experience a major outbreak of pestilence. However, the 1347 outbreak was particularly severe. In April 1348 Louis Heyligen, the musician who lived in the papal city of Avignon to the north, wrote to friends in Flanders that “in Marseille . . . four of five people died.” The true figure was probably closer to one out of two, but that was enough for abbot Gilles li Muisis to describe the city’s suffering as “unbelievable.”†

  Another entry in M. Aycart’s casebook captures the casual pervasiveness of death in a city where half the population of twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand disappeared within a year. Dated April 10, 1348, the entry concerns the court appearance of a crafty old peasant named Jacme de Podio. Jacme was trying to get his hands on the dowry of his daughter-in-law Ugueta, a recent plague fatality. The purpose of the hearing was to establish the legitimacy of the old man’s claim. Normally, when a woman died intestate, as Jacme’s daughter-in-law had, her dowry automatically went to her daughter. But it was Jacme’s contention that his granddaughter was dead, too, and despite the cascade of death in the streets, he had managed to talk several of Ugueta’s neighbors into appearing in court to corroborate his claim. One told the magistrate that, yes, she had seen the girl on the streets a few times after her mother’s death; then she vanished, too.

  How do you know the girl is dead? the magistrate asked.

  The neighbor said that one day, by chance, she happened to see the girl’s corpse in one of the wagons that carry the dead to the cemetery of Notre Dame des Accoules. The next person in the line of inheritance was Jacme’s son, Peire, Ugueta’s husband. The magistrate asked about Peire’s fate. Dead, too, Jacme said. Again, the old man produced a neighbor to corroborate his claim. The neighbor said Peire died right after his wife and daughter, maybe two days later, the neighbor couldn’t be sure—so many people were dying these days, it was hard to keep track. A week after the hearing, M. Aycart made a final note about the case in his ledger: Old man Jacme was dead now, too.

  Venality like Jacme’s was not uncommon in Marseille. At a hearing after the plague ended, a young woman named Uga de Bessa gave testimony in the case of a man who had spent hours on the pestilential streets of the city, searching for a notary for his dying wife. At first the story sounded like an act of selfless spousal devotion: a caring husband risks death to give his dying wife the small final comfort of putting her affairs in order. But then the magistrate asked if the victim had indicated how she wished to dispose of her estate. Yes, replied Mme. de Bessa. Since no notary could be found, the dying woman had called several witnesses to her bedside and in their presence testified that “she was leaving a hundred florins to her husband Arnaut.”

  Yet this story, like so many other stories about the plague, has a twist ending.

  And where is Arnaut now? the magistrate asked.

  Dead, replied Mme. de Bessa. He died of the plague, too.

  If venality was common in Marseille, so was a kind of dogged, undemonstrative resolve. Though it was struck soon after Sicily, Marseille did not collapse into panic or social breakdown. No doubt, there were cases of desertion—parental, clerical, and civic—but not enough to find their way into local chronicles. There also do not seem to have been many instances of mass flight. City “residents accommodated the effects of the plague,” says historian Daniel Lord Smail, author of an illuminating study of Black Death Marseille. “Municipal institutions . . . did not fold up. . . . [People] stayed by their kinfolk, friends and neighbors.” Sometimes avarice can have a steadying effect. During March, the worst month of the pestilence, scheming old Jacme de Podio, his greed undimmed, was knocking on doors in his daughter-in-law’s neighborhood, looking for witnesses to testify in his court case. April, another terrible month, not only found the wealthy merchant Peire Austria still in Marseille, but he and two colleagues, Franses de Vitrola and Antoni Casse, were planning a new business venture. April was also the month that the solicitous husband, Arnaut, was searching the pestilen
tial streets for a notary to document his dying wife’s wish to leave him a hundred florins. People even continued to marry. In May Antoni Lort attended the wedding of his friend Pons Columbier.

  Sharp-elbowed Marseille was also not without its acts of human kindness. Taking pity on a client who had lost everything in the Black Death, Jewish moneylender Bondavin de Draguignan told the man that he could continue to work the garden he had offered in payment of his loan. The moneylender also told the man that when the debt was paid off, he could have his garden back.

  “If the plague had a profound impact on the residents of medieval Marseille, it was not a blow that led to despair,” says Professor Smail.

  * * *

  Marseille’s experience in the Black Death is also noteworthy in another respect.

  On Palm Sunday night, April 13, 1348, the Christian residents of Toulon, a quiet seaside village to the east of Marseille, attacked the local Jewish quarter. Doors were smashed, windows broken, furniture overturned; men, women, and children were hauled from beds and hurled into the nighttime streets to be jeered, taunted, kicked, and spat upon. Homes were torched, property looted, money stolen, forty Jews killed. Parents were cut down in front of sons and daughters, husbands in front of wives, brothers in front of sisters. The next morning, the bodies of dozens of dead Jews were hanging from poles in the town square.