by John Kelly
There is some evidence that the hyperlethal septicemic form of plague was active in Spain. There are several descriptions of what sound like the symptoms of the disease, and a number of Spanish plague stories revolve around almost instant death, which is a characteristic of septicemic plague. One such tale can be found in the chronicle of the old Abbot Gilles li Muisis.
The story concerns a French cleric who visited pestilential Spain on a pilgrimage. One evening he stopped at a little country inn, where he supped with the widowed innkeeper and his two daughters, then booked a room for the night. Awakening the next morning, the Frenchman found the inn empty. Puzzled, he called out to the innkeeper. Failing to get a reply, he tried first one and then the other of his daughters. Again, no answer. Finally, the Frenchman called for the family servant. Silence for a fourth time. Now, deeply perplexed, he began to search the inn.
Encountering another guest, the Frenchman asked after the innkeeper, his family, and the servant. All dead, sir, replied the other guest. The four were taken with the plague during the night and died almost immediately.
The account of Granada physician Ibn Khatimah suggests that pneumonic plague was also active in Spain. For the Muslim physician, the disease’s two outstanding characteristics were contagiousness and a bloody cough.
The Atlantic coast of Portugal marked the westernmost boundary of the plague’s advance, and by the time the disease arrived on the sandy beaches of the region, it was running out of steam. Except for the city of Coimbra, Portugal was lightly affected.
Three other areas of Europe are also supposed to have largely escaped the ravages of the Black Death: Poland, the Kingdom of Bohemia (roughly speaking, modern-day Czech Republic), and an odd-man-out region composed of Flanders and the southern Netherlands. However, new research suggests that, like the perfect guest,
Y. pestis considered no place in Europe too small or unimportant to visit.
Poland, like Germany, was squeezed by an octopus-type envelopment. In the July 1349, the first wave of plague entered the country near one of history’s favorite playgrounds, the Polish city of Danzig, where World War II (and later the Solidarity Movement) began. In a series of follow-up assaults, the Black Death took the country from the south via a disease prong advancing northward through Hungary from the Venetian-dominated Balkan coast, and from the east via a thrust out of Russia. Then, in 1351, just as the survivors were telling one another the worst was over,
Y. pestis sent a fourth plague prong across the River Oder from Frankfurt to conduct a mopping-up operation. There are no reliable death figures available for Poland but, tellingly, as in England and France, wages in the country soared after the plague, due to a tremendous manpower shortage.
Bohemia’s supposed immunity also has come under question recently. The kingdom was long assumed to have been spared the worst ravages of the Black Death because of its remoteness from the trade routes that carried the plague through the European heartland, but that view has been challenged of late. According to Professor Benedictow, in the decades before the Black Death, Bohemia, with its lucrative mining industry; gleaming capital, Prague, and energetic population of a million and a half, was one of the most prosperous and bustling regions of Europe, exporting tin and silver and importing salt (for the preservation of meat) and iron (for making farm implements).
As with Poland, no reliable mortality figures are available for the region. But as proof that the Black Death ravaged the kingdom, which was infected sometime in 1349 or 1350, Professor Benedictow points to a story in the
Chronicle of Prague. It concerns the visit a group of Bohemian students studying in Bologna made to the kingdom in the waning days of the plague. According to the account, the “students . . . saw that in most cities and castles . . . few remained alive, and in some all were dead. In many houses also those who had escaped with their lives were so weakened by sickness that one could not give the other a draught of water, nor help him in any way and so passed the time in great affliction and distress. . . . In many places, too, the air was more infected and more deadly than poisoned food, from the corruption of the corpses, since there was no one left to bury them.”
Recently, there has also been a critical challenge to the third “spared” region, the southern part of the Netherlands and Flanders, but here the revisionists have had less success. A wealth of local data indicates that compared to their neighbors, the two areas experienced relatively low mortality rates. Even Professor Benedictow, a profound skeptic on the subject of spared regions, concedes that “the Netherlands did not suffer such great losses in the Black Death as Italy or England.”
There may be an explanation for this “miracle.” Flanders, which had a relatively low Black Death mortality of 15 to 25 percent, and the southern Netherlands both lost large numbers of children during the Great Famine, and that may have left the two regions with fewer vulnerable adults when the plague struck—that is, adults with deficient immune systems due to early exposure to famine.
However, as a general proposition, it is fair to say that almost no area of Europe entirely escaped the Black Death. In addition to blanketing the continent from east to west, by 1350, the plague would also cover it from north to south.
Chapter Twelve
“Only the End of the Beginning”
IN MAY 1349, AS WILL-MAKING REACHED A PEAK IN PESTILENTIAL London, and the Jews of Strassburg sat shivah for the dead, out on the windswept latitudes of the “German Ocean” a frothy spring sea was carrying the plague northward toward Scandinavia, where it would complete its circumnavigation of Europe with a final thrust through Norway and Sweden before vanishing back into the Russian wilderness. Legend has it that Norway was infected by an English merchantman, which left London sometime in late April and was next seen a month later beached on a spit of land near Bergen with all hands dead. But Oslo, Norway’s other major city, may have been infected first. And while an English merchantman did carry the plague to Bergen, the crew was still alive when the ship sailed into port, though they did not have much longer to live. According to the Lawman’s Annual, a medieval Scandinavian chronicle, “At that time a ship left England with many people aboard. It put into the bay of Bergen and a little was unloaded. Then all the people on the ship died. As soon as goods from the ship were brought into the town, the townsmen began to die. Thereafter, the pestilence swept all over Norway.”
Scandinavia posed formidable challenges for
Y. pestis. Thinly populated, in the Middle Ages the region was the back of the beyond; it had little to offer in the way of crowded streets or dense cities. In the desolate north, the plague would have to become a feral scavenger surviving on the occasional farm family, the odd rustic knight and his dog, and the little fishing village perched above a fjord. Even more formidable than the thin population was the hostile climate. In Scandinavia summers are a blink of the eye and winters eternal and bitter. Accordingly, historians have long assumed that pneumonic plague predominated in the region. And, indeed, several medieval Nordic sources describe what sounds like pneumonic plague; says the
Lawman’s Annual, “People did not live more than a day or two with sharp pangs of pain. After that they began to vomit blood.” However, Professor Benedictow thinks that the seasonality of outbreaks, the pattern of dissemination, and degree of lethality all point to bubonic plague as the dominant form of the disease in Scandinavia. He argues that what sources like the
Annual are describing is pneumonic plague
secondary to bubonic plague—that is, cases of the disease where the plague bacilli metastasize from the lymph nodes to the lungs.
The answer to the Scandinavian conundrum may lie in the Russian theory of marmot plague, with its tropism for the lungs. In this regard, it is worth comparing two recent outbreaks of
Y. pestis. In 1991, when plague broke out near marmot foci in China, almost half the victims went on to develop pneumonic plague. By contrast, in Vietnam, where the rat predominates, the wartime epidemic
of the 1960s was almost exclusively bubonic—a case rate of 98 percent.
Whether pneumonic or bubonic, the pestilence spread across Scandinavia with its customary ferocity. A few months after James de Grundwell, sole survivor of the plague’s visit to Ivychurch priory in England, was elevated to the position of head abbot, his Norwegian counterpart, a priest who was the sole surviving cleric in the diocese of Drontheim, was elevated to the position of archbishop. After taking a monstrous toll in Bergen, the plague all but obliterated the remote mountain village of Tusededal. Months after the pestilence burned itself out, a rescue party reaching the village found only one survivor, a little girl who had been made so wild by her solitary existence, the rescuers named her Rype—wild bird.
From Norway, the plague thrust eastward across the interior of Scandinavia to Sweden, where, in 1350, the blustery King Magnus II issued a thunderous, albeit tardy, warning. “God,” declared Magnus, “for the sins of men, has struck the world with this great punishment of sudden death. By it, most of the people in the land to the west of our country [i.e., Norway] are dead. [The plague] is now . . . approaching our Kingdom of Sweden.” To repel the threat and to appease a wrathful God, Magnus ordered foodless Fridays (except for bread and water) and shoeless Sundays (Swedes were ordered to walk to church barefoot). But just as it killed Italians, Englishmen, and Frenchmen who avoided windows with a southern exposure and inhaled fragrant scents,
Y. pestis killed Swedes with and without shoes, on foodless Fridays and on gluttonous Saturdays. Among the dead were the king’s two brothers, Knut and Hacon.
In its travels across Eurasia, the pestilence had encountered every manner of ecological phenomenon. It had seen mountains collapse into lakes (China), plumes of volcanic ash swallow the noon sun (Italy and China), torrential floods gulp up villages (China, France, Germany), swarms of locusts three German miles long (Poland and China), tidal waves as high as a cathedral spire (Cyprus), and skies that poured rain for six months (England). But approaching the coast of Greenland,
Y. pestis encountered a new natural wonder. Rising out of the frigid, white-capped sea, it gazed up at monstrous cliffs of silvery ice shimmering in the brilliant, bitter sunlight of a new Little Ice Age.
From Scandinavia, one prong of the plague crossed the Baltic and reentered Russia. Striking Novgorod,
Y. pestis traveled south, clinging to the trade routes like a blind man feeling his way along a narrow corridor, until, at last, the golden onion-shaped domes of Moscow rose above the Russian plain. As the crow flies, the Russian capital, which was devastated by a terrible epidemic in 1352, lies only about seven hundred miles to the north of Caffa, where
Y. pestis had set sail for Sicily several years earlier. Having closed the noose, the hangman rested.
On a glorious morning, Christendom awoke to find the plague gone. Life and joy, denied for so long, demanded their due. Survivors drank intoxicatingly, fornicated wildly, spent lavishly, ate gluttonously, dressed extravagantly. In England craftsmen took to wearing silk cloth and belts with silver buckles, and ignored a royal ordinance forbidding the lower orders from eating meat and fish at more than one meal a day. In Orvieto, where almost half the town lay buried in local plague pits, couples copulated on the freshly laid grass above the pits. In France “men became more miserly and grasping.” And everywhere survivors luxuriated in the sudden abundance of a commodity that only a few months earlier had seemed so fragile, so perishable—time: wonderful, glorious, infinite time. Time for family, for work. Time to gaze into an evening sky. Time to eat and drink and make love. “There are three things a man may say properly belong to him,” declares a character in a work by the Florentine humanist Leon Battista Alberti. When a companion asks what they are, Alberti’s character replies: a man’s fortune, his body—“and a very precious thing, indeed.”
“Incredible, what is it?” asks the companion.
“Time, my dear Lionardo,” Alberti’s character replies.
The burst of postplague debauchery disappointed, though did not surprise, moralists like Matteo Villani, the dour brother of the plague-dead Giovanni. It was further proof—as if Matteo would ever need further proof—of the innate wickedness of man. “It was thought,” he wrote after the pestilence, “that people whom God by his grace in life had preserved . . . would become better, humble, virtuous and catholic, avoiding inequities and sins and overflowing with love and charity for one another. But . . . the opposite happened. Men . . . gave themselves over to the most disordered and sordid behavior. . . . As they wallowed in idleness, their dissolution led them into the sin of gluttony, into banquets, taverns, delicate foods and gambling. They rushed headlong into lust.” Agnolo di Tura, who lived in Siena, where they were still counting the dead, offered a more succinct description of Europe’s post–Black Death mood. “No one could restrain himself from doing anything.”
The hysterical gaiety was the very thin veneer of a profound and abiding grief and sense of dislocation. In 1349, as the plague lifted from Italy, a mournful Petrarch wrote to his friend Louis Heyligen: “The life we lead is a sleep; whatever we do, dreams. Only death breaks the sleep and wakes us. I wish I could have woken before this.”
Petrarch would get his wish. Before the mortality was finally over, there would be tens of millions more dead to mourn, but by that time, Europe would be in the shadow of the Enlightenment, and the poet long dead.
The plague of Moscow in 1352 was, to borrow a phrase from Churchill, not “the end [of the plague] or even the beginning of the end but only the end of the beginning.”
One can scarcely imagine with what heavy heart an English chronicler wrote the following words: “In 1361, a grave pestilence* and mortality of men began throughout the whole world.” Barely eleven summers passed between the Black Death and the
pestis secunda, as the second outbreak of plague was called. The new epidemic, which began in 1361, marked the beginning of a long wave of plague death that would roll on through more than three centuries. Had it not occurred in the immediate shadow of the Black Death, today the second pestilence would be spoken of as an epic tragedy in its own right. In rural Normandy 20 percent of the population died; in Florence, already shrunken to a remnant by the Black Death, the mortality also reached 20 percent. In England, losses among the landed gentry almost matched those of 1348–49, roughly 25 percent plus. However, to contemporaries, it was less the scope of the
pestis secunda than its victims that left the greatest impression.
To the people who lived through it, the
pestis secunda seemed to strike down the young in disproportionate numbers. Indeed, many contemporaries referred to the 1361 outbreak not as the
pestis secunda but as the “Children’s Plague,” or “les mortalite des enfauntz.” Surgeon Guy de Chauliac, who was still practicing medicine in 1361 and had one of the keenest clinical eyes of the Middle Ages, says that “a multitude of boys and few women were attacked.” Modern scientific opinion holds that no population group has a special vulnerability to plague. But, like the tarabagan born in a surge year, the children born after the Black Death may not have had an opportunity to acquire the temporary immunity that comes to survivors after exposure to
Y. pestis.
The
pestis secunda was followed by the
pestis tertia of 1369. Thereafter, for the next several centuries, Europe would scarcely know a decade without plague somewhere on the continent. In the Netherlands alone, there were epidemics in 1360–62, 1362–64, 1368–69, 1371–72, 1382–84, 1409, 1420–21, 1438–39, 1450–54, 1456–59, 1466–72, 1481–82, 1487–90 and 1492–94.
However, the Renaissance plague, as the post–Black Death wave of pestilence is sometimes called, differed from its predecessor in several crucial respects. Although there were occasional catastrophic exceptions, like the Great Plague of London in 1665, over the centuries
Y. pestis steadily abated in ferocity. Outbreaks became local in nature, while, on average
, mortality rates shrank to 10 to 15 percent. The pestilences of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also were different in other respects. If pneumonic symptoms like blood spitting persisted, no one wrote or talked about them anymore; the later plagues appear to have been largely bubonic in character, and, as in the Third Pandemic, seasonal in nature; they struck in summer rather than all year round and moved at a slow Third Pandemic pace. Instead of leaping from city to city, they crept from neighborhood to neighborhood. Contagion remained a prominent feature, but instead of flying randomly from person to person, in its later iterations, the plague struck specific clusters of people—say, householders living in a particular alley or lane, or members of a family who slept in the same bed or wore the same clothes.
Anthropologist Wendy Orent has an interesting theory about the reasons for the change. Dr. Orent shares the Russian view that plague strains become species-specific over time; that is, the lethality, rate of dissemination, and other characteristics of a particular strain of plague are shaped by its interaction with a particular host species—hence, marmot plague is different in certain respects from rat plague, because