Siena is an example of a city which, superficially, recovered quickly from the Black Death but, in reality, suffered economic and political dislocation so profound that things were never to be the same again. An intensive campaign to attract immigrants by tax concessions and other devices filled many of the gaps left by the plague. The exceptionally high death rate among clergy was to some extent overcome by throwing open to laymen posts usually reserved for monks or priests. Many estates, left without heirs, were taken over by the City Council. By 1353, a balanced budget had almost been achieved. What was left of the old oligarchy gained enormously through inheritances from their dead relations and the accumulation of power in fewer hands. It seemed that the status quo ante had been restored, indeed that the old order was even more firmly established than before the plague.
But the gloss of normality was quickly cracked. The remnants of the oligarchy had not been the only group to profit financially from the epidemic. A class of new rich arose and wished to play the part in the city’s government to which they felt the length of their purse entitled them. But their pretensions met with a chilly response. No concessions were made to meet them and harsh sumptuary laws were passed to curb the ambitions of those who affected the trappings of higher station than their birth and education justified. Meanwhile the poor, among whom the disease had raged the worst, often found that they had lost even the little which they had once possessed. The gap which divided them from their luckier neighbours grew ever wider.
By the time of the Black Death the Government of Nine had ruled Siena without serious challenge for some seventy years. A few years later it seemed successfully to have weathered the storm and to have launched Siena on another era of stable prosperity. Yet in 1354 it fell. It can be argued that this was not a direct consequence of the plague but, equally, it is certain that the Black Death, in Dr Bowsky’s phrase, ‘was instrumental in creating demographic, social and economic conditions that greatly increased opposition to the ruling oligarchy’.{100} Without some such prior conditioning it is hard to see how the necessary force and will to overthrow the oligarchy could have sprung into life. It is not desirable, at this point in the narrative, to give much attention to the long term effects of the Black Death on the society which it had devastated. But it is important to bear in mind the lesson of Siena: that a patient has not necessarily recovered because his more obvious wounds are healed.
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By the winter of 1348, about a year after its first appearance in Sicily, the Black Death in Italy was past the worst. There were to be minor outbreaks in the next year or two and it was to be much longer before the man in the street felt himself entirely safe; he barely did so, in fact, before the next epidemic was upon him in the early 1360s. But the period of acute crisis was over. Pope Clement VI threatened to revive the danger when he yielded to pressure from many countries and proclaimed 1350 a Holy Year. The first Jubilee had been held in 1300 and it had not been intended to hold another until a century later but, in the circumstances, the Pope agreed to advance the date and to grant special indulgences to all who made the journey to Rome. To fill the roads of Europe with wandering pilgrims and concentrate them in the heart of one of the areas worst struck by plague could well have been the surest means of renewing the full force of the epidemic. Matteo Villani, one of the sounder of the chroniclers when it came to statistics, wrote that around Easter, though the pilgrims were too numerous to count, there must have been more than a million visitors to Rome.{101} The figure must be by far too large but the influx of pilgrims from all over Europe was certainly immense.
St Bridget of Sweden was among the visitors, arriving early in 1349 when the Black Death was still a lively menace. She had clear views about the proper method of tackling the epidemic: ‘abolish earthly vanity in the shape of extravagant clothes, give free alms to the needy and order all parish priests to celebrate Mass once a month in honour of the Holy Trinity.’{102} These rather humdrum measures do not appear greatly to have impressed the Romans but she still scored a considerable personal success. One male Orsini, it is recorded, had caught the plague and was despaired of by the doctors. ‘If only the Lady Bridget were here!’ sighed his mother. ‘Her touch would cure my son.’ At that moment in walked the saint. She prayed by the invalid’s bedside, laid her hand on his forehead and left him, a few hours later, fully restored to health.
St Bridget’s attentions were not much needed. In spite of the Pope’s ill-judged decision, Holy Year brought little in the way of fresh outbreaks. But the damage was already bad enough. Italy had been depopulated. But when one tries to describe this dramatic concept in slightly more mathematical terms, the difficulties begin. On the basis of our present knowledge it is quite impossible to put forward even the most approximate figure and state with authority that such a proportion of Italy’s peoples must have died. Even in England, with its wealth of ecclesiastical and civil records and its army of diligent scholars, only a more-or-less informed guess is feasible. A fortiori in Italy, where many regions have been the subject of little or no research if indeed the materials for such research exists, an overall estimate has little value. Sometimes it is possible to fix a movement of population over a longer period. It is, for instance, reasonably well established that the population around Pistoia in 1404 was only some 30 per cent of what it had been in 1244.{103} But the data does not exist which would enable one to pinpoint the proportion of this decline to be attributed to the year 1348.
But the fact that any estimate for the whole of Italy must be highly speculative does not preclude a guess. Doren, in his Economic History,{104} has estimated that between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of town dwellers died and that, in the countryside, the proportion must have been much lower. Figures like these cover a multitude of qualifications. In Tuscany, for example, where the plague was exceptionally severe, more peasants died than in certain cities which escaped lightly, such as Milan or Parma. For some areas, where no statistics whatsoever can be garnered, the only remedy is to apply the proportion established for roughly similar parts of the country and hope for the best. A shot in the dark, or at least the twilight, however tentative, is still better than nothing. If one assumes that a third or slightly more of Italy’s total population perished, it is unlikely that one would be very badly wrong and certain that nobody could prove one so.
4. FRANCE: THE STATE OF MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE
THE Black Death seems to have arrived in France only a month or two after its first outbreak on the mainland of Italy; according to an anonymous Flemish cleric in one of those same ill-fated galleys which had been expelled from Italy towards the end of January 1348.{105} The galley called first at Marseilles, from where it was chased, rapidly but still not rapidly enough, by the horrified authorities. Thence it continued its destructive course, spreading the plague to Spain and leaving a trail of infection along the coast of Languedoc.
France was certainly one of the most populous and should also have been the most prosperous country of Europe. Professor Lot has put its population in 1328 – the population, that is to say, of the France of its present frontiers, including part of Flanders, Burgundy, Brittany and Guienne – at between twenty-three and twenty-four million.{106} Professor Renouard estimates the total twenty years later at somewhere near twenty million.{107} The density of population in the countryside was more or less what it is today:{108} a burden which the land was hard put to it to support since production per acre was barely a third of the present figure. On the whole the latest studies tend to indicate a total population somewhat lower{109} than earlier estimates but no one would deny that the rural population was dense by medieval standards, comparable with that of Tuscany, and that the pressure of population on resources was fast becoming intolerable.
Left to itself the French countryside was probably more capable of supporting such a crowd than any other region in Europe. But where Italy had to endure its Guelphs and Ghibellines, France had the English. King Edward III had no intention of
leaving France to itself or, to look at the matter in a more chauvinistic light, was justifiably outraged by French interference with his Duchy of Guienne and their support for David Bruce in Scotland. John of Bridlington, indeed, ascribed the plague in France mainly to the contumacious policy of its king.{110} He pointed out that the French had been guilty of avarice, luxury, envy, gluttony, anger, sloth and conspicuous lack of devotion to the saints but that the chief crime which had called down divine vengeance was undoubtedly the failure of Philip VI to allow Edward III free and peaceful enjoyment of his inheritance. He did not go on to explain the curious circumstance that God had subsequently extended the scope of his wrath to embrace the virtuous and ill-used English.
Whether or not the policy of Philip VI provoked the plague, it certainly led to the Hundred Years War between France and England; in the long run to the detriment of both countries, in the short with disastrous consequences for his own. From 1337, when Philip VI announced that the English throne had forfeited Guienne and Edward III retorted by claiming the throne of France, the French peasant, in great areas of his country, no longer knew the meaning of the word security. A brief truce after the naval battle of Sluys quickly ended in renewed warfare. In 1346 Edward III landed in Normandy with some 15,000 men. On 25 August he won a crushing victory at Crécy. The subsequent siege of Calais lasted a year. Military casualties in the campaign, by modern standards or when viewed against the size of the French population, were insignificant but the damage to civilian morale and to the agricultural richness of the country was immeasurable. To the luckless villagers, whose few possessions had alternately been looted by French or English soldiery, the apparition of the plague seemed merely the culminating phase in a process designed by God to end in their total destruction.
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Within a month, wrote one authority, fifty-six thousand people in Marseilles met their end.{111} The figure seems improbably high but, as in many sea-ports where bubonic and pulmonary plague raged side by side, mortality was greater than in the inland regions. From the Mediterranean the epidemic advanced along two main lines. To the west it quickly reached Montpellier and Narbonne. It afflicted Carcassonne between February and May; moved on to Toulouse and Montauban and finally reached Bordeaux in August. To the north, Avignon was attacked in March, April and May; Lyons in the early summer, Paris in June and Burgundy in July and August. Flanders was exempt until 1349.
In Perpignan the plague took much the same course as in Avignon though, as was usually the case, it passed more quickly in the smaller city. The disruption of everyday commercial life is shown strikingly by statistics of loans made by the Jews of Perpignan to their Christian co-citizens. In January 1348 there were sixteen such loans, in February, twenty-five, March, thirty-two, eight in the first eleven days of April, three in the rest of the month and then no more till 12 August. Of 125 scribes and legists known to have been active shortly before the Black Death only forty-five appear to have survived – even with a reduction for natural mortality a death rate of between fifty and sixty per cent seems likely. Physicians fared even worse – only one out of eight surviving – while sixteen out of eighteen barbers and surgeons perished or, at least,{112} disappeared.
‘Laura,’ wrote Petrarch in his manuscript of Virgil,
illustrious by her virtues and long celebrated in my songs, first greeted my eyes in the days of my youth, the 6th of April, 1327, at Avignon; and, in the same city, at the same hour of the same 6th of April, but in the year 1348, withdrew from life, whilst I was at Verona, unconscious of my loss…
Her chaste and lovely body was interred on the evening of the same day in the Church of the Minorites: her soul, as I believe, returned to heaven whence it came.
To write these lines in bitter memory of this event and in the place where they will most often meet my eyes has in it something of a cruel sweetness, but I forget that nothing more ought in this life to please me, which, by the grace of God, need not be difficult to one who thinks strenuously and manfully of the idle cares, the empty hopes and the unexpected end of the years that are gone…{113}
Avignon in 1348 had been for nearly half a century the seat of the Popes. As such it had swollen from an always considerable town to one of the great cities of Europe. Its role as papal capital ensured that it would be one of the most visited centres of Christendom; an easy prey for a plague that thrived on every kind of social intercourse. An unnamed canon writing to a friend in Bruges spoke of half the population of Avignon being dead, seven thousand houses shut up and deserted, eleven thousand corpses buried in six weeks in a single graveyard, sixty-two thousand victims in the first three months of the epidemic.{114} Another record put the total of the dead at more than a hundred and twenty thousand{115} while the German historian, Sticker, on still less certain authority, even ventured as far as a hundred and fifty thousand.{116} It is, at least, not hard to believe that half the population died though one of the few verified facts might be taken as indicating a lower figure. The Rolls of the Apostolic Chamber show that only ninety-four out of four hundred and fifty, or 21 per cent, of the members of the Papal Curia died during the Black Death.{117} But this is not much of a pointer to the overall death rate. Nobody would have expected the well-fed and well-housed senior staff of the papal establishment to perish at the rate of their fellow mortals.
On the whole the churchmen of Avignon seem to have behaved creditably during the plague; churchmen in the widest sense that is, from papal councillor to penniless and itinerant monk. ‘Of the Carmelite friars at Avignon,’ wrote Knighton uncharitably,{118} ‘sixty-six died before the citizens knew the cause of the calamity; they thought that these friars had killed each other. Of the English Austin Friars at Avignon not one remained, nor did men care.’ Knighton had all the contempt of a Canon Regular for these turbulent and often embarrassing colleagues. ‘At Marseilles, of one hundred and fifty Franciscans, not one survived to tell the tale; and a good job too!’ was another of his still harsher comments. Yet in fact there is no reason to doubt that the mendicant orders behaved at Avignon with as much courage and devotion as they did elsewhere and that their reputation rose accordingly.{119}
Pope Clement VI himself played a slightly less forthright part. There is no doubt that he was preoccupied by the horrors of the plague and genuinely disturbed and distressed for his people. Though by no means celebrated as an ascetic he was good-hearted and honourable, anxious to do what was best for his flock. He did all he could to ease the path of the afflicted by relaxing the formalities needed to obtain absolution and ordered ‘devout processions, singing the Litanies, to be made on certain days each week’. Unfortunately such processions tended to get out of hand; at some, two thousand people attended, ‘amongst them, many of both sexes were barefooted, some were in sack cloth, some covered with ashes, wailing as they walked, tearing their hair, and lashing themselves with scourges even to the point where blood was drawn’{120} At first the Pope made a habit of being present at these processions, at any rate when they were within the precincts of his palace, but excesses of this kind revolted his urbane and sophisticated mind. He also realized that large concourses, attended by the devout from all over the region, were a sure means of spreading the plague still further, as well as providing a breeding ground for every kind of hysterical mob outburst. The processions were abruptly ended and the Pope from then onwards sought to discourage any kind of public demonstration.
Not unreasonably, Pope Clement VI calculated that nothing would be gained by his death and that, indeed, it was his duty to his people to cherish them as long as possible. He therefore made it his business to stay alive. On the advice of the papal physician, Gui de Chauliac, he retreated to his chamber, saw nobody, and spent all day and night sheltering between two enormous fires. For a time he took refuge in his castle on the Rhône near Valence but by the autumn he was again at his post in Avignon. It does not seem that the Black Death died out in the papal capital much before the end of 1348.
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‘Fish, even sea fish, are commonly not eaten’ the horrified clerics of Bruges heard from their compatriots at Avignon, ‘as people say that they have been infected by the bad air. Moreover, people do not eat, nor even touch spices, which have not been kept a year, since they fear that they may have lately arrived in the aforesaid ships. And, indeed, it has many times been observed that those who have eaten these new spices and even some kinds of sea fish have suddenly been taken ill.’
As the Black Death moved across Europe it was inevitable that a host of theories would be generated on the best methods of avoiding, preventing and curing the disease. The growing threat to France induced King Philip VI to appeal to the Medical Faculty at Paris to prepare a considered report on the subject. Their response{121} provided the most prestigious, though neither the best informed nor the most intelligent, of the many studies of the Black Death in action. The plague literature as a whole, drawn from some half-dozen countries, was voluminous, repetitious and of little value to the unfortunate victims of the epidemic. Before considering it, however, it is worth taking a quick look at the growth of medical knowledge before and during the Middle Ages so that the disadvantages and limitations under which the medieval physician laboured can be better understood.
The Black Death Page 7