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

by John Kelly

  9 fabricated the catapults: Benedictow, p. 52.

  10 chronicler of Este: Quoted in Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 16.

  10 ancient Indian legend: David E. Stannard, “Disease, Human Migration and History” in The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 35.

  11 200 million people: Robert R. Brubaker, “The Genus Yersinia,” Current Topics in Microbiology 57 (1972): p. 111.

  11 Foster scale: Harold Foster, “Assessing the Magnitude of Disaster,” Professional Geographer 28 (1976): pp. 241–47.

  11 David Herbert Donald: David Herbert Donald, “The Ten Most Significant Events of the Second Millennium,” in The World Almanac and Book of Facts (Mahwah, NJ: Primedia, 1999), p. 35.

  11 Cold War—era study: Jack Hirshleifer, Disaster and Recovery: The Black Death in Western Europe, prepared for Technical Analysis Branch United States Atomic Energy Commission (Los Angeles: RAND Corporation, 1966), pp. 1–2.

  11 mortality figure is 33 percent: Ziegler, The Black Death, p. 230. See also: Maria Kelly, A History of the Black Death in Ireland (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2001), p. 41; “The Black Death in the Middle Ages,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. by Joseph R. Strayer (New York: Charles Scribner, 1982), p. 244; Horrox, The Black Death, p. 3; William Naphy and Andrew Spicer, The Black Death and History of Plagues, 1345–1730 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2000), pp. 34–35.

  12 “Where are our dear friends?”: Francesco Petrarch, “Letter from Parma,” in Horrox, The Black Death, pp. 248–49.

  12 In the Islamic Middle East: Gottfried, The Black Death, p. 35.

  12 “the voice of existence”: Ibn Khaldun, in Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East, p. 67.

  12 In China: McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, p. 174.

  12 disaster on the scale of the Black Death: Naphy and Spicer, The Black Death and History of Plagues, p. 35.

  13 environmental stress in the fourteenth century: M. G. L. Baillie, “Putting Abrupt Environmental Change Back into Human History,” in Environments and Historical Change, ed. Paul Slack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 52–72. See Also Bruce M.S. Campbell, “Britain 1300,” History Today, June 2000.

  13 relationship between plague and earthquakes: Personal communication, Dr. Ken Gage, chief of Plague Control Division, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

  13 “We marvel to see”: M. G. L. Baillie, “Marking in Marker Dates: Towards an Archeology with Historical Precision,” World Archeology 23, no. 2 (Oct. 1991): 23.

  13 environmental instability: Gottfried, The Black Death, p. 34.

  14 Seismic activity in the world’s oceans: Personal communication. M. G. L. Baillie, professor, School of Archaeology and Paleoecology, Queen’s University, Belfast.

  14 risk factors in plague: Robert Pollitzer, Plague (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1954); L. Fabian Hirst, The Conquest of Plague: A Study of the Evolution of Epidemiology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953); Wu Lien-Teh et al., Plague: A Manual for Medical and Public Health Workers (Shanghai: Weishengshu National Quarantine Service, Shanghai Station, 1936); Wu Lien-Teh, A Treatise of Pneumonic Plague (Geneva: 1926); Plague Research Commission, “On the Seasonal Prevalence of Plagues in India,” Journal of Hygiene 8 (1900): 266–301; Plague Research Commission, “Statistical Investigation of Plague in the Punjab, Third Report on Some Factors Which Influence the Prevalence of Plague,” Journal of Hygiene 11 (1911): 62–156.

  14 role of malnutrition: David Herlihy, in The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, ed. by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 34.

  16 “Malthusian deadlock”: Herlihy, in The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, p. 34.

  16 died of starvation: William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Fourteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 118, 147.

  16 medieval city a human cesspool: Jean-Pierre Leguay, La rue au Moyen age (Paris: Éditions Ouest-France, 1984).

  17 “I shall undress myself”: Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (London: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 308.

  17 “boiled over”: Terence McLaughlin, Coprophilia, Or a Peck of Dirt (London: Cassell, 1971), p. 19.

  17 the medieval countryside: Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353, pp. 33, 34.

  18 “Corrupted air”: “The Report of the Paris Medical Faculty, October 1348,” in Horrox, The Black Death, p. 158.

  18 Gentile da Foligno: “Tractatus de pestilenta,” in Archive für Geschichte der Medizin, ed. by Karl Sudhoff (Berlin: 1912), p. 84.

  18 “a troupe of ladies”: Henry Knighton, “Chronicon Henrici Knighton,” in Horrox, The Black Death, p. 130.

  19 grain or cloth shipments: Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1984), p. 21.

  19 in an infected flea: Robert R. Brubaker, “Yersinia Pestis,” in Molecular Medical Microbiology, ed. by M. Sussman (London: Academic Press, 2001), pp. 2033–2058.

  20 incubation period: Robert Perry and Jacqueline D. Fetherstone, “Yersinia Pestis—Etiologic Agent of Plague,” Clinical Microbiology Review 10, no. 1 (Jan. 1997): p. 58.

  20 God’s tokens: Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete Story, p. 26.

  21 Infrequency of plague symptoms: personal communication with Dr. Kenneth Gage, chief of the Plague Control Division, CDC.

  22 Difficulty in transmitting pneumonic plague: Benedictow, p. 28.

  22 Survival time in septicemic plague: Ibid., p. 26.

  23 term Black Death: Jon Arrizabalaga, “Facing the Black Death: Perceptions and Reactions of University Medical Practitioners,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. Luis Garcia-Ballester, Robert French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 242–243.

  23 the “Big Death”: Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London: Arnold, 2002), p. 104.

  23 recent research suggests: J. Clairborne Stephens et al., “Dating the Origin of the CCR5-∆32 AIDS-Resistance Allele by the Coalescence of Haplotypes,” American Journal of Human Genetics 62 (1998): 1507–15. See also: Cohn, The Black Death Transformed, p. 250.

  25 “Unusual conjuction”: “The Report of the Paris Medical Faculty, October 1348,” in Horrox, The Black Death, p. 158.

  25 “No fellow human being”: “Letter of Edward III to Alfonso, King of Castile,” in Horrox, The Black Death, p. 250.

  25 “black smoke”: W. Rees, “The Black Death in England and Wales,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine Vol. 16 (part 2 [1920]): 134.

  25 “waiting among the dead”: In Annalium Hibernae Chronicon, ed. by R. Butler (Dublin: Irish Archaeological Society, 1849), p. 37.

  26 “the sick hated”: Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, Cronica friorentino, ed. by Niccolo Rodolico, RIS, XXX/1 (Città di Castello: 1903).

  26 “end of the world”: Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, “Cronaca sense attribuita ad Agnolo di Tura del Grasso,” in Cronache senesi, ed. by A. Lisini and F. Iacometti, RIS, XV/6 (Bologna: 1931–37), p. 555.

  26 “each grave”: Ordinances of Pistoia 1348, quoted in Horrox, The Black Death, pp. 195–203.

  26 “turned and fled”: Neuburg Chronicle, in Ziegler, The Black Death, p. 84.

  27 “lashed themselves”: Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana 1272–1422, H.T. Riley (ed.), 2 vols, Rolls Series, 1863–64, Vol 1, p. 275.

  27 “no mortal”: Hecker, p. 13.

  Chapter Two: “They Are Monsters, Not Men”

  30 La Practica della Mercata: 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.

  30 travel time to Mongolia and China: J. R. S. Phillips, Th
e Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) p. 100.

  30 “They [are] like beasts”: René Grousset, Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970), p. 249.

  31 Description of Mongols: William of Rubruck, The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255, trans. by Peter Jackson (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990), pp. 89–90.

  31 “discovery of Asia”: René Grousset, Histoire de l’Asie (Paris: 1922), p. 130.

  31 Dog Men: Ibn Battuta, in Cathay and the Way Thither: Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China, trans. and ed. by Colonel Sir Henry Yule (London: Hakluyt Society, 1913–16), p. 94.

  31 Prester John: Robert Marshall, Storm from the East: From Genghis Khan to Khubilai Khan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 121.

  31 “delighted, yea”: J. Stewart, Nestorian Missionary Enterprise: The Story of a Church on Fire (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928), p. 7.

  32 “I myself am”: Eileen Power, “The Opening of the Land Routes to Cathay,” in Travel and Travellers of the Middle Ages, ed. by Arthur Percival Newton (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1926), p. 147.

  32 William’s discoveries: Rubruck, The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck, p. 50.

  32 defended the Western concept: Ibid., p. 229.

  32 second wave of European visitors: Power, “The Opening of the Land Routes to Cathay,” p. 128.

  32 Italian colonies: Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, pp. 104–5.

  33 “worth more”: Power, “The Opening of the Land Routes to Cathay,” p. 137.

  33 route led down: Ibid., pp. 140–41.

  33 Hangchow, Venice of the East: Stewart, Nestorian Missionary Enterprise, p. 193. See also: Power, “The Opening of the Land Routes to Cathay,” pp. 134–35.

  33 singing virgins: Howorth, History of the Mongols, p. 310.

  33 route across the northern steppe: Phillips, Medieval Expansion of Europe, p. 99, and Power, “The Opening of the Land Routes to Cathay,” p. 142. See also McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, p. 163.

  33 tarabagan colonies: Hirst, Conquest of Plague, p. 189.

  33 Memories of a Hunter in Siberia: A. K. Tasherkasoff, Memories of a Hunter in Siberia. Wu Lien-Teh et al., Plague: A Manual for Medical and Public Health Workers (Shanghai: Weishengshu National Quarantine Service, Shanghai Station, 1936), p. 198.

  34 “tarabagan gardens”: Ibid., p. 7.

  34 marmot plague: Wendy Orent, Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 56–60, 158.

  34 “I only want one strain”: Ibid., p. 58.

  34 seems to have originated: Wu Lien-Teh, “The Original Home of the Plague,” Japan Medical World 4, no. 1 (January 15, 1924): 7. See also: Orent, Plague, pp. 55–60.

  34 big bang: Dr. Robert R. Brubaker, Professor of Microbiology at Michigan State University, personal communication.

  34 Y. pestis is only: Mark Achtman et al., “Yersinia pestis: The Cause of the Plague Is a Recently Emerged Clone of Yersinia Pseudotuberculosis,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 46, no. 24 (November 23, 1999): 14043–48.

  35 Y. pestis has all the properties: Brubaker, “Yersinia Pestis,” pp. 2033–2058.

  35 lions: Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London: Arnold, 2002), p. 132.

  35 different flea species: Robert Perry and Jacqueline D. Fetherstone, “Yersinia Pestis—Etiologic Agent of Plagues,” Clinical Microbiology Review 10, no. 1 (Jan. 1997): p. 52.

  36 General Shiro Ishii: Thomas W. McGovern, M.D., and Arthur M. Friedlander, M.D., “Plague,” in Military Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare (Washington, DC: Office of the Surgeon General at TNN, 1997), pp. 483–85.

  36 “one of Ishii’s greatest achievements”: Ibid., p. 485.

  36 number of animals are also resistant: Perry and Fetherstone, “Yersinia Pestis,” p. 53.

  36 allele that protects: Cohn, The Black Death Transformed, p. 252.

  36 partial immunity: Perry and Fetherstone, “Yersinia Pestis,” p. 52.

  37 surge years: Hirst, The Conquest of Plague, p. 214.

  37 sun spot cycles: Ibid.

  38 local hunters: Ibid., p. 217.

  38 pneumonic plague broke out: Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1984), pp. 164–65.

  38 looking for new pastureland: Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: Free Press, 1983), p. 34.

  38 wind patterns: Ibid., p. 14.

  39 “Assuredly the far-flung”: McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, p. 175.

  39 water temperatures: Stewart, Nestorian Missionary Enterprise, p. 199.

  39 “We have found”: Ibid., p. 193.

  39 “This is the grave”: Ibid., pp. 212–13.

  42 “The Japanese . . . have”: Thomas Butler, Plague and Other Yersinia Infections (New York: Plenum Medical Book Co., 1983), p. 17.

  42 “The pulp of the buboes”: Ibid., p. 18.

  42 “disease of rats”: William Ernest Jennings, A Manual of Plague (London: Rebman, 1903), pp. 39–40.

  42 port of Pelusium: Jean-Noël Biraben and Jacques Le Goff, “The Plague in the Early Middle Ages,” in Biology of Man in History, ed. by Robert Foster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 58.

  42 trade route from Egypt: Ibid.

  42 tree ring dates: M. G. L. Baillie, “Putting Abrupt Environmental Change Back into Human History,” in Environments and Historical Change, ed. by Paul Slack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 55–56.

  43 “The streams are”: Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, trans. by Howard B. Clarke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974),p. 10.

  43 “History of Evagrius Scholastica Ecclesiastica,” trans. M. Whitley (Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 2000), pp. 229–33.

  43 name badges: P. Allen, “The ‘Justinianic’ Plague in Byzantion,” Revue Internationale des Études Byzantines 49 (1979):5–20.

  43 “In every field”: Ibid., p. 12.

  43 “soon no coffins”: Biraben and Le Goff, “The Plague in the Early Middle Ages,” p. 57.

  43 smallpox and measles outbreaks: McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, pp. 131–32.

  44 if not disease-free: Gottfried, The Black Death, p. 12.

  44 population plunged precipitously: “Demography,” in Joseph Strayer, ed., The Dictionary of the Middle Ages (New York: Scribner, 1982), p. 140.

  44 twenty thousand residents: David Herlihy, “Ecological Conditions and Demographic Changes,” in Western Europe in the Middle Ages (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p. 4.

  44 dense woodland: “Demography,” in The Dictionary of the Middle Ages, p. 140.

  44 Little Optimum: “Climatology,” Ibid., p. 456.

  45 European farms began to produce: Gottfried, The Black Death, p. 25.

  45 horse collar: Herlihy, “Ecological Conditions and Demographic Changes,” p. 18.

  45 carruca plow: Ibid., p. 17.

  45 “river throws itself”: David Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe After the Year 1000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 169.

  46 Population estimates: “Demography,” in The Dictionary of the Middle Ages, p. 141.

  46 urban life reawakened: “Demography,” Ibid., p. 141.

  46 medieval countryside: “Demography,” Ibid.

  47 village of Broughton: Edward Britton, The Community of the Vill: A Study in the History of the Family and Village Life in Fourteenth-Century England (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1977), p. 138.

  47 Europeans burst out of: “Demography,” in The Dictionary of the Middle Ages, p. 140.

  48 prostitutes-for-a-day: Joseph and Frances Gies, Life in a Medieval City (New Y
ork: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 86.

  48 local tolls: Power, “The Opening of the Land Routes to Cathay,” p. 137.

  48 “rulers of half”: Eileen Power, Medieval People (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 42.

  49 Sorceress of Ryazan: Marshall, Storm from the East, p. 97.

  49 “For our sins”: Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, p. 62.

  50 held a kuriltai: Marshall, Storm from the East, p. 88.

  50 fisheries of Yarmouth: Power, “The Opening of the Land Routes to Cathay,” p. 127.

  50 “Old Man of the Mountain”: Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, p. 63.

  50 “monsters rather than men”: Ibid.

  50 “You personally, as the head”: Ibid., p. 60.

  51 “great numbers of Pharaoh’s rats”: Marco Polo in Wu Lien-Teh, Plague: A Manual for Medical and Public Health Workers, p. 199.

  Chapter Three: The Day Before the Day of the Dead

  54 Broughton had some 268 residents: Edward Britton, The Community of the Vill: A Study in the History of the Family and Village Life in Fourteenth-Century England (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1977), p. 138.

  54 Broughton was anglicizing itself: Ibid., pp. 11–12.

  54 John’s great aunt Alota: Ibid., p. 29.

  55 John was fined for drinking: Ibid., pp. 42–43.

  55 receive an alebedrep: Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 58.

  55 spinal deformations: Brian M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 33.

  55 die young: David Herlihy, “The Generation in European History,” in The Social History of Italy and Western Europe, 700–1500, vol. 12 (London: Variorum Reprints, 1978), p. 351.

  55 heriot: Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound, p. 110.

  56 acreage under plow: Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 239.

  56 decline in productivity: Ibid.

  56 officials in west Derbyshire: Ibid., p. 236.

  56 rents in central London: Ibid., p. 243.

  57 “Many . . . went hungry”: David Herlihy, in The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, ed. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 38.