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

by John Kelly

  The Great Mortality. Several months earlier, Romy Hochman, an eighteen-year-old cancer patient who had played a major role in my previous book on experimental medicine,

  Three on the Edge, had died. Now here I was on a perfect late-summer day surrounded by students Romy’s age, about to enter the realm of death again. Except this time—I thought, walking up the library steps under a lovely September sky—I would be dealing with not death in the singular, but death in the millions: everywhere and at all times; death piling up at the front door, coming through the roof and windows and across the fields. I wasn’t sure I had much stomach left for that.

  My feelings that morning were further complicated by a strain of ambivalence regarding the period I was about to study. I had taken several courses on the Middle Ages in graduate school and had emerged from those classes feeling no particular affinity for the era. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had seemed distant and unresonant to me, and medieval people—with their God-haunted mentality and their almost animal-like docility—seemed a species of alien being. Such “otherness” might be fine for a historian accustomed to moving across the centuries, but I was a writer of science and medicine who was drawn to the Black Death for a very modern reason. In an age of the avian flu, Ebola, and AIDS, I wanted to take an anticipatory glance backward at the greatest pandemic in human history.

  This complex of feelings made the first few months of research difficult. If death in the singular is vivid and heartbreaking, then death en mass, I quickly discovered, is numbing and depressing. At first I also found it difficult to relate to the medieval mentality. It seemed claustrophobic, static, hierarchical, and full of either/ors. For medieval man and woman, there was good or bad, God or the Devil, Heaven or Hell, eternal salvation or eternal

  damnation, and almost nothing in between except purgatory, where the sinful could expect to spend a few thousand years hanging by their tongues from trees of fire. Coming from a culture where the concept of human progress was part of the fabric of life, it was also strange to enter a world where that concept did not exist—at least, not progress as we understand the term today. For medieval people, ancient Rome represented the pinnacle of human achievement. Thus, to the extent that medieval man and woman had a notion of progress, it involved recapitulating the past, not capturing the future.

  However, as the months passed, a subtle alteration in my perspective occurred. The first time I noticed the change was the morning I opened a new collection of source material from the University of Manchester. By chance, my eye happened to fall upon a fragment of chronicle dated November 1347. Previously, looking at a nearly seven-hundred-year-old date had made me feel like an astronomer viewing a distant planet in a far-away galaxy. On this particular morning, I still felt like an astronomer, but now, suddenly, the planet seemed close enough to belong to my own galaxy. This process of telescoping continued until, by the time I was midway through

  The Great Mortality, I was beginning to confuse past with present. One day when my wife and I were discussing a European trip we had taken, I said, “Yes, that was in 1380 wasn’t it?” I meant to say “1980.”

  No doubt, simple acculturation played a role in my mistake. Any historical period will come to life if you spend enough time thinking and writing about it—and I spent nearly five years researching and writing

  The Great Mortality. But even more than acculturation, I think what ultimately made me feel at home in the Middle Ages was the people I met there. A lot has changed since 1347, but not human nature. The fourteenth century had as gaudy a collection of schemers and dreamers, fools and knaves, heroes and villains as the twenty-first.

  One of my favorite schemers was a tough, larcenous old Marseille peasant named Jacme de Podio. Jacme lost a son, granddaughter, and daughter-in-law to the plague in January and February of 1348, but as March dawned in Marseille, Jacme was consumed not with grief, but with greed. As his daughter-in-law’s sole surviving heir, the old man was determined to get his hands on her estate, but to do that he had to overcome a large hurdle. The court would not release the estate until it received evidence that

  the daughter-in-law and her two

  immediate heirs—Jacme’s son and granddaughter—were dead. So in March of 1348, the worst month of the plague in Marseille, the old man spent weeks walking the streets of his deceased son and daughter-in-law’s neighborhood looking for witnesses who would testify to their deaths. And such was Jacme’s persistence that he managed to find two.

  Another schemer who left a deep impression on me was Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily. One of the most glamorous women of the Middle Ages, the beautiful young Joanna could have given old Jacme a lesson or two in duplicity. One night, a few years before the Black Death struck Europe, Joanna’s husband, Prince Andreas of Hungary, was found dangling from a hangman’s rope in the Neapolitan moonlight. Thereafter, Joanna had a series of adventures that would seem improbable for the heroine of a Harlequin Romance. These included the invasion of her domains by angry Hungarian in-laws who believed Joanna was complicit in Andreas’s death; a midnight escape to Provence, where the young queen reunited with her lover, the glamorous and handsome Luigi of Taratino; and then, in the midst of the plague, Joanna’s trial for murder, an event which featured a mix of sex and celebrity every bit as heady as the O. J. Simpson trial and ended in what some would call an equally improbable verdict—innocent.

  However, it was an Everyman from Siena named Agnolo di Tura who made me feel most at home in the Middle Ages. A devout family man who worked two and three jobs to support his wife and five children, Agnolo felt like someone who could have come from my old neighborhood in Boston. I particularly liked the pride Agnolo took in his enormous bulk—he often signed his correspondence “Agnolo di Tura del Grasso” (Agnolo the Fat). I also admired his drive. In a society where class and gender pigeonholed people from the moment of birth, Agnolo was that exceptional thing—a striver, and as far as can be determined, a successful striver. In the years before the Black Death, Agnolo, who seems to have been born into the medieval equivalent of a working- or lower-middle-class family, managed to achieve a middle-, and, perhaps even an upper-middle-class life.

  What I most admired about Agnolo, however, was his Everyman’s eloquence. When the Black Death destroyed everything he cared about, this plainspokenness would make Agnolo the author of what, in my opinion, is the single most haunting sentence in all the literature of the Black Death: “And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands.”

  All the way to the end of the book, writing about mass death continued to depress me, but as I followed the plague across Europe, I found myself deriving solace from humanity’s seemingly inexhaustible capacity for resilience. The Black Death caused death and destruction on an unimaginable scale, yet nowhere did it succeed in shattering the fabric of civilization. There were, it is true, countless instances of plague-driven panic and abandonment, of cowardice and greed, but in every afflicted town and village a cadre of men and women always stepped forward to begin the necessary business of recovery: to bury the dead, to nurture the sick, and—equally critical at a time when half the population of a city or region could vanish in a matter of months—to insure a reasonably orderly transfer of property from the dead to the living.

  If the Black Death was a great disaster for humanity, it was a great triumph for the human spirit.

  Read on

  Strange Parallels The Black Death—the Indian Ocean Tsunami

  History, we are told, does not repeat itself, but watching the news reports from South Asia over the holidays of December 2004, I was struck by the many parallels between the tsunami which ravaged the region the day after Christmas and the Black Death. Both disasters arrived on a morning tide, struck without warning under a lovely tropical sky, and lead to grand improvisations of rescue, mourning, and reckoning that tested human character and civil polity. Both catastrophes also produced mortality rates far in excess of a
nything contemporaries had experienced, indeed, had dreamed possible.

  However, in modern South Asia as in medieval Europe, wealth and privilege played a role in deciding who lived and who died. In both Phuket, Thailand, and Ahangama, Sri Lanka, affluent Western tourists received immediate care in clean, well-equipped medical facilities while tens of thousands of peasants were left untended for days in open-air relief stations where the smell of putrefying flesh made the air unbreathable and a burning tropical sun made cooking utensils and surgical

  instruments hot to the touch. Though even great wealth could not buy a medieval European competent medical care, it did provide them with something as valuable—the option of flight to a plague-free refuge. “Dear ladies,” says Pampinea, one of the young aristocrats in the

  Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s fable of Black Death Florence, “Here we linger for no purpose [other] than to count the number of corpses. If this be so and we plainly perceive that it is [why don’t we instead] go and stay together in one of our various country estates.” Still, in itself, even privilege was no guarantee of survival in either disaster. The jet-skiing grandson of Thailand’s King Bhumibol was engulfed by one of the killer waves that came ashore at Phuket; the beautiful teenage daughter of England’s King Edward III was felled by the Black Death en route to Spain for her wedding. “No fellow human being could be surprised if we were inwardly desolated by the sting of grief,” wrote a mournful Edward, “for we are human, too.”

  Echoes of the tsunami’s instant ravagement—the survivors’ tales of turning and suddenly finding a child, a spouse, a parent swallowed by a turbulent, debris-filled sea—can also be heard in the literature of the Black Death, most notably in a letter by the poet Petrarch. “Where are our dear friends now?” he wrote to a friend toward the end of the Black Death. “What lightning bolt devoured them? . . . What earthquake toppled them? What tempest drowned them? . . . There was a crowd of us; now we are almost alone.”

  Another link between the two tragedies is higher female mortality rates. And in both cases, they seemed to have been higher for the same reason—women were more likely to be at home when disaster struck. In Black Death Europe, a woman’s housebound existence increased her exposure to plague-bearing rodent fleas; in contemporary coastal South Asia, it meant being near the sea when the tsunami struck rather than in inland hills where the men went to tend their farms.

  Though science has long known what causes tsunamis—undersea earthquakes—modern South Asians were as quick as medieval Europeans to interpret the disaster that struck them as a sign of divine displeasure with a wicked humanity. A notable medieval proponent of the “wicked humanity” school was the English monk Henry Knighton, who was sure that God had killed a third or more of Europe because many of England’s well-born young women had become tournament groupies. “Whenever and wherever tournaments were held,” Knighton wrote a few decades after the Black Death, “a troupe of ladies would turn up . . . mounted on charges,

  [wearing] thick belts studded with gold and silver slung across their hips . . . deaf to the demands of modesty.” Knighton’s modern counterpart was the imam of tsunami-devastated Meulaboh, Indonesia, who interpreted the disaster as God’s punishment on townsfolk. “Some Muslim people,” he declared, “celebrated Christmas, they drank alcohol, and they danced on the seashore in violation of the Muslim way. This was a big mistake.”

  Both catastrophes also left behind images “that haunt the soul forever / Poisoning life till life is done” (“The Black Death of Bergen,” by Lord Dufferin). After a tour of mass graves at Meulaboh, a

  Washington Post reporter wrote, “Even by the standards of carnage inflicted elsewhere by the catastrophe, what happened here will evoke horror and amazement for generations to come.” A Black Death chronicler named Marchione di Coppo Stefani left a similarly memorable account of his encounter with mass death. Describing how people were buried in Florence’s municipal plague pits, Stefani wrote, the dead are laid out “layer upon layer just like one puts layers of cheese on lasagna.” Accounts of animals feasting on human remains on Indonesian beaches and bodies decaying under an intense Thai sun also could have been plucked whole from almost any page of the Black Death literature. Still, both then and now there was a touchingly stubborn insistence on decent burial: the patient, hopeful teams of DNA decoders in Phuket harken back to medieval London’s mandate that the plague dead be sorted by age and gender and buried in neat rows, with heads to the west and feet to the east.

  Finally, both tragedies featured luminous moments of selflessness and heroism. The aftermath of the tsunami disaster saw a mother and her son, Julie and Casey Sobolewski of California, rescue survivors in dramatic fashion. Sailing off the Thai coast, the Sobolewskis pulled aboard survivors trapped in the undertow; Casey, moreover, jumped into his lifeboat to rescue floundering children. Another hero, Dr. Ruvan Samarasinghe of Sri Lanka, steadfastly finished a Cesarean delivery while waves crashed against the hospital walls; after the procedure, he led the mother and her newborn to safety. These are modern counterparts of Antonio de Benito, Giudotto de Bracelli, and Domenico Tarrighi, three Genoese notaries who unwaveringly made out wills and legal documents rather than abandon their crucial task. Equally gallant was a woman named Simonia who, ignoring danger to herself, nursed her friend Aminigina through the final days of a bitter plague death, changing her

  soiled nightshirts, wiping her mouth, and holding her hand when she cried.

  In a catastrophic tragedy, the barriers of time and culture fade, revealing the fundamental character of humanity.

  Notes

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.

  Chapter One: Oimmeddam

  2 a handsome town of “beautiful markets”: Ibn Battuta in W. Heyd, Histoire du commerce du Levant au moyen age, vol. 2 (Leipzig: O. Harrassowitz, 1936), pp. 172–74.

  2 Vivaldi brothers: J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 238.

  2 “a city of sea without fish”: Eileen Power, Medieval People (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 42.

  2 “And so many are the Genoese”: Steven A. Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958–1528 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 166.

  3 travel from the Crimea to China: Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, p. 100.

  3 Description of Caffa: Heyd, Histoire du commerce du Levant, pp. 170–74. See also: G. Balbi and S. Raiteri, Notai genovesi in Oltremare Atti rogati a Caffa e a Licostomo (Genoa: 1973), sec. 14; R. S. Lopez, Storie delle Colonie Genovese nel Mediterraneo (Bologna: 1930).

  4 tremendous environmental upheaval: J. F. C. Hecker, The Epidemics of the Middle Ages, trans. B. G. Babington (London: Trübner, 1859), pp. 12–15.

  4 Mandate of Heaven: Sir Henry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols, from the 9th to the 19th Century, vol. 2 (London: 1888), p. 87.

  4 “in the Orient”: Gabriele de’ Mussis, quoted in Stephen D’Irsay, “Defense Reactions During the Black Death,” Annals of Medical History 9 (1927), p. 169.

  4 “Hard by greater India”: Louis Heyligen, “Breve Chronicon Cleric Anonymi,” excerpted in The Black Death: Manchester Medieval Sources, trans. and ed. by Rosemary Horrox (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 41–42.

  5 Dorias of Genoa: Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, p. 102.

  5 “eaters of sweet greasy food”: René Grousset, Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970), p. 249.

  5 “The road you take”: Francesco Balducci di Pegolotti, in R. S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World: Illustrative Documents Translated with Introductions and Notes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), pp. 355–58.

  5 An ultimatum was sent: A. A. Vasiliev, The Goths in the Crimea (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academ
y of America, 1936), p. 48.

  6 “Oh God”: Gabriele de’ Mussis, “Historia de Morbo,” in Horrox, The Black Death, p. 17.

  6 “In 1346”: Ibid., p. 16.

  6 “terrible events”: Heyligen, “Breve Chronicon Cleric Anonymi,” in Horrox, The Black Death, p. 42.

  6 pestilence raged in the East: Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 40.

  6 Jijaghatu Toq-Temur and his sons: Ibid., p. 41.

  6 Hopei province: William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor Books, 1976), p. 173.

  7 “a six month ride”: Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East, p. 41.

  7 Lake Issyk Kul: Jean-Noël Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, vol. 1 (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1975), pp. 49–55.

  7 “In the year”: J. Stewart, Nestorian Missionary Enterprise: The Story of a Church on Fire (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928), p. 198.

  8 after Issyk Kul: Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: Free Press, 1983), p. 36.

  8 Russian Chronicle: Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2004), p. 50.

  8 “Stunned and stupefied”: de’ Mussis, “Historia de Morbo,” in Horrox, The Black Death, p. 17.