As well as bleeding, it was useful to open and cauterize the plague boils or buboes. Various curious substances were applied to the boils to draw off the poison. Gentile used a plaster made from gum resin, the roots of white lilies and dried human excrement, while Master Albert was in favour of an old cock cut through the back. Ibn Khātimah believed that an operation on the bubo was possible between the fourth and seventh day of the disease when the poison was flowing from the heart to the boils. But even a slight mistake in timing could lead to the escape of the vital principle from the heart and the immediate death of the patient.
Various soothing potions were prescribed, in particular a blend of apple-syrup, lemon, rose-water and peppermint. This must at least have been pleasant to drink. Even this consolation was removed when powdered minerals were added to the mixture. There was some belief in the virtues of emeralds and pearls and the medicinal qualities of gold were taken for granted by most authorities. Take one ounce of best gold – was Gentile’s recipe – add eleven ounces of quicksilver, dissolve by slow heat, let the quicksilver escape, add forty-seven ounces of water of borage, keep airtight for three days over a fire and drink until cure or, more probably, death supervened. At least the high price of gold ensured that not many invalids could afford to be poisoned by such medicines.
Just how little the doctors learned from the Black Death is shown by the Tractate of John of Burgundy or John à la Barbe, published in 1365.{138} It is true that the author had gained much of his experience and no doubt devised his treatments in 1348 and 1349 but he had lived through a second great epidemic in 1361 and, at the time he wrote, was distilling what should have been a lifetime’s learning. The same sterile analysis of causes appeared, the same catalogue of futile preventive methods and still more futile cures. Given the state of medical learning no great leap forward was possible but if Hippocrates had been alive he would at least have discarded a lot of dead wood of proven uselessness and made some sensible and valuable deductions about the conditions in which the epidemic seemed to thrive and the best means of removing them. Of this there was nothing; only the regurgitation of long discredited dogmas and, from time to time, the addition of some new mineral or vegetable gimmick to give the technique of the writer a flavour of modernity.
I pray to God, so save thy gentil cors
And eek thyne urynals and thy jurdones,
Thyn ypocras and eek thy galiones.
And every boyste ful of thy letuarie.[2]
Fourteenth-century men seem to have regarded their doctor in rather the same way as twentieth-century men are apt to regard their priest, with tolerance for someone who was doing his best and the respect due to a man of learning but also with a nagging and uncomfortable conviction that he was largely irrelevant to the real and urgent problems of their lives. They were, of course, ready to believe almost anything which was told them with authority but their faith had been undermined by the patent lack of confidence on the part of the doctors themselves. Sometimes, under intolerable stress, scepticism would give way to something more primitive and violent, tolerance would crack and the doctor find himself execrated as the architect of the disease which he had proved so signally ill-qualified to check. But such moments of revulsion were rare and in general the doctor preserved a privileged position. Chaucer’s mockery and the occasional abuse of an aggrieved patient was the worst that he had to bear.
* * *
However little use the doctors may have been, the average Parisian at least had the comfort of knowing that he was far better provided with medical attention than his contemporaries. There were more doctors, predominantly Jewish, in Paris than in any other city of Europe and all surgeons had passed an examination and had been licensed by a panel of master surgeons trained at the Châtelet.{139} The fashionable course for study was based on the works of the Arab surgeon Razi and an ointment called ‘Blanc de Razès’ was on sale at apothecaries as a cure recommended for virtually any ailment. But no amount of ointments nor the wisdom of the august Faculty of Medicine itself could do much to help the Parisian when the Black Death broke about him.
It seems that the first authenticated cases of plague in the capital were noted in May or June 1348, though the full force of the epidemic was not felt until several months later. It did not die out until the winter of 1349. The chronicler of St Denis put the death roll at about fifty thousand,{140} a surprisingly conservative estimate for a city that may well have had more than two hundred thousand inhabitants.{141} Certainly there is no reason to think the figure exaggerated. An analysis based on church warden accounts for the parish of St Germain l’Auxerrois showed that seventy-eight legacies were bequeathed to the church between Easter 1340 and 11 June 1348.{142} In the next nine months the number rose to four hundred and nineteen – a rate forty times as high. ‘It seems,’ commented Mollat, ‘that the plague sent men to their lawyers as fast as to their confessors.’ On this, admittedly somewhat slender basis, he calculated that the plague was at its worst almost at the end, in September and October 1349, and that it ran an unusually protracted course. The Bishop, Foulque de Chanac, died in July 1349; the Duchess of Normandy, Bonne de Luxembourg, in October and her mother-in-law, Jeanne de Bourgogne, when the danger must have seemed almost over, on 12 December.
‘There was,’ wrote the best-known chronicler of the Black Death in Paris, ‘so great a mortality among people of both sexes, of the young rather than of the old, that it was hardly possible to bury them.’{143} This is not the only reference to the plague striking the young rather than the old, the strong before the weak. Statistically, as will be seen more clearly in the case of England,{144} there seems no reason to credit such a theory. The position is, of course, complicated by the tendency of the old to die from other causes without a major epidemic to speed them on their way, but, even after allowing for this, the young and fit, as was to be expected, proved the more likely to resist the disease. The death of a strong young man is naturally more shocking and more likely to be remembered: to this, perhaps, is due the conviction on the part of certain chroniclers that his chances of death were unfairly high.
‘In the Hôtel-Dieu at Paris,’ continued the chronicler, ‘so great was the mortality that for a long time more than five hundred corpses were carted daily to the churchyard of St Innocent to be buried.’ Cardinal Gasquet has suggested that this is a misprint for fifty.{145} Certainly the latter figure is probably nearer reality but there seems little reason to doubt that William of Nangis would have preferred the larger, more imposing total. ‘And those holy sisters,’ he continued, ‘having no fear of death, tended the sick with all sweetness and humility, putting all honour [sic ?fear] behind their back. The greater number of these sisters, many times renewed by death, now rest in peace with Christ, as we must piously believe.’ Such examples of self-abnegation were rare enough to deserve special mention; for the most part, in Paris as in every other city, the rule of the day was sauve-qui-peut. Charity, if it was to be found at all, began at home and ended there. Even the priests ‘retired through fear’, leaving the sick to shrive themselves or, if they were lucky, to gain the attention of a mendicant friar.
When the pastors set such an example it was hardly surprising that their flocks should follow suit. In the benighted city, where it seemed death to wander abroad, only those servants of death, the grave-diggers, felt themselves free to travel where they would. The rich and privileged fled, the poor remained to drown their fear in looted liquor and die in their hovels. Under the surface scum of terror and disorder ordinary decent men continued to behave in an ordinary, decent way; the life of the city fitfully continued. But to the casual visitor it must have seemed that society had disintegrated, that the plague must rage until there was not a home inviolated, not a Parisian alive. If it was not to be the end of the world, it seemed at least the end of the established order.
* * *
From Paris the plague moved northwards to the coast, which it reached in or a little before August 1348. In t
his area, exceptionally, the winter checked the violence of the epidemic but with the spring it returned, evidently in its more virulent pulmonary form. The King had fled from Paris to Normandy but the plague was quick to follow him. At Rouen, where an over-excited contemporary calculated the dead at a hundred thousand, the Duke of Normandy donated land for a new graveyard. At Bayeux the Bishop and many canons died. At La Graverie, about four miles from Vire, ‘the bodies of the dead decayed in putrefaction on the pallets where they had breathed their last.’ A black flag flew above the church as it did in all the worst affected villages of Normandy.{146}
La Léverie was a village within the parish of La Graverie. The lady of the manor died and her relatives wished to bury her in the churchyard. But no priest of La Graverie remained alive to conduct the service and there was no sign of a new incumbent being appointed. The relatives appealed to the priest of neighbouring Coulonces who was happy to bury the deceased but drew the line at visiting La Graverie, because of the danger of infection, and was equally reluctant to accept the corpse in Coulonces for fear of contaminating his so far inviolate village. So this lady was buried in the park of her own manor and the grateful relatives arranged the transfer of La Léverie from the parish of La Graverie to the parish of Coulonces.
St Marie Laumont in the same area lost four hundred people, or over half the population. The epidemic there raged for three months and had ended by September 1348. Amiens, it seems, must have suffered a second attack or perhaps, as occasionally happened in the larger cities, wasted away gradually over a year or more rather than succumbed to a brief but shattering epidemic. As late as June 1349 the King authorized the Mayor to open a new cemetery on the grounds that: ‘The mortality… is so marvellously great that people are dying there suddenly, as quickly as between one evening and the following morning and often quicker than that.’{147} Meanwhile the Black Death seeped across every corner of France. Bordeaux it had reached in August 1348 and there caught and killed Princess Joan, daughter of King Edward III of England, on her way to marry the son of the King of Castile. The news of her death reached England at much the same time as the plague itself.
To the North East the Black Death moved slowly on towards Flanders and the Low Countries. ‘It is almost impossible,’ wrote Gilles Li Muisis{148} ‘to credit the mortality throughout the whole country. Travellers, merchants, pilgrims and others who have passed through it declare that they have found cattle wandering without herdsmen in the fields, towns and waste-lands; that they have seen barns and wine-cellars standing wide open, houses empty and few people to be found anywhere…. And in many different areas, both lands and fields are lying uncultivated.’
Professor Renouard says that, though mortality in the French towns was terrifyingly high, the country escaped comparatively lightly.{149} In many areas this was certainly true but, though Li Muisis’s account may well have been embellished in the interests of the picturesque, there are too many descriptions like it to accept Renouard’s statement as invariably valid. At Givry, a large Burgundian village near Chalon-sur-Saône of between twelve and fifteen hundred inhabitants, the average death rate in the years before the plague was thirty each year. Between 5 August and 19 November 1348 six hundred and fifteen people died. In Saint-Pierre-du-Soucy, a rural parish in Savoy, the number of households dwindled from one hundred and eight in 1347 to sixty-eight at the end of 1348 and fifty-five in 1349. In the seven neighbouring parishes, all farming communities with small and scattered populations, the number of households fell from three hundred and three to one hundred and forty-two.{150} In areas such as these, at least, something close to half the population must have perished.
In the summer of 1349, the Black Death reached Li Muisis’s own city of Tournai. The Bishop, John de Pratis, was one of the first to die; then came a lull during which the citizens told themselves that they had been let off lightly. But by August the plague was raging with renewed strength:
Every day the bodies of the dead were borne to the churches, now five, now ten, now fifteen, and in the parish of St Brice sometimes twenty or thirty. In all parish churches the curates, parish clerks and sextons, to get their fees, rang morning, evening and night the passing bells, and by this the whole population of the city, men and women alike, began to be filled with fear.
The Town Council acted firmly to restore public confidence and check the collapse in moral standards which was likely, they feared, to bring down upon the city a still more ferocious measure of divine vengeance. Men and women who, although not married, were living together as man and wife were ordered either to marry at once or to break off their relationship. Swearing, playing dice and working on the Sabbath were prohibited. No bells were to be rung at funerals, no mourning worn and there were to be no gatherings in the houses of the dead. New graveyards were opened outside the city walls and all the dead, irrespective of their standing in the city or the grandeur of their family vaults, were in future to be buried there.
The measures seem to have been successful; if not in checking the Black Death then at least in raising the moral tone of the community. Li Muisis reported that the number of people living in sin dwindled rapidly, swearing and work on the Sabbath almost ended, the dice manufacturers became so discouraged with their sales-figures that they turned their products into ‘round objects on which people told their Pater Nosters.’ But gratifying though this must have been, the death roll was still terrifyingly high. ‘It was strange,’ said the chronicler, that ‘the mortality was especially great among the rich and powerful.’ Strange indeed, especially since he went on to comment: ‘Deaths were more numerous about the market places and in poor, narrow streets than in broader and more spacious areas.’ There seems no reason to doubt that in Tournai, as in every other city, the rich man who remained prudently secluded had a better chance of survival than the poor man who, like it or not, was forced to live cheek-by-jowl with his neighbours. But his chance was not necessarily a high one: ‘…no one was secure, whether rich, in moderate circumstances or poor, but everyone from day to day waited on the will of the Lord.’
* * *
The Middle Ages were described by Koyré, the great historian of science, as the period of à peu près. Everything is seen through a glass darkly; though here and there it may be possible to identify detail with fair certainty, for the most part a bold, impressionistic picture is the best that can be hoped for. No more in France than in Italy can it be said what proportion of the population died. Gui de Chauliac spoke of three quarters, other chroniclers of half; Professor Renouard, who has studied the subject as closely as anyone, can do no better than estimate that the death rate varied from an eighth to two-thirds according to the area.
But even if such details were known to us we would still be very far from understanding what the Black Death meant to medieval man. Some hazy outline of the reactions of the French emerges from the records of the chroniclers. Men seem to have taken refuge in frenetic gaiety. It was not only in Tournai that dice and lechery were the order of the day. ‘It is a curious fact,’ observed Papon,{151} ‘that neither the flail of war nor of plague can reform our nation. Dances, festivals, games and tournaments continued perpetually; the French danced, one might say, on the graves of their kinsmen….’ The standards of society were relaxed; debauchery was common; thrift and continence forgotten; the sacred rules of property ignored; the ties of family and friendship denied; let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.
It is dangerously easy to allow the prejudiced records of a handful of priestly and conservative chroniclers to delude one into a vision of Europe studded with Sodoms and Gomorrahs and echoing from end to end with the rattle of dice and the laughter of tipsy courtesans. But it would be hardly less foolish to let one’s rejection of such fantasies blind one to the very real degeneracy of life during the plague. The great nobles and churchmen, the richest merchants, withdrew from the city; those who were left drank, fornicated or skulked in cellars according to their inclinations. To none
of them could it have seemed likely that his life would drag on for more than a few painful weeks. With no future to await and the threat of annihilation hanging over all he cared for, how could medieval man be expected to behave with responsibility? Honesty, decency and sobriety were by no means dead but they must, at times, have been uncommonly hard to find. In Paris at least there had been something not far removed from a complete collapse of public and private morality. This was not the least of the penalties which the Black Death exacted from its victims.
5. GERMANY: THE FLAGELLANTS AND THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS
BY 1350, the plague in France had ended or, at least, so far abated as to make possible the holding of a Council in Paris to tighten up some of the laws against heresy. But in the meantime it had moved eastwards into Germany. Central Europe was thus attacked on two sides or if, as seems probable, the Black Death also advanced by land through the Balkans, on three sides more or less simultaneously. By June 1348, it had already breached the Tyrolese Alps and was at work in Bavaria, by the end of the year it had crept up the Moselle valley and was eating into North Germany.{152}
In Styria, which it reached in November 1348, it seems to have been especially ferocious. According to the Neuburg Chronicle{153} even the wild animals were appalled at its depredations. ‘Men and women, driven to despair, wandered around as if mad… cattle were left to stray unattended in the fields for no one had any inclination to concern themselves about the future. The wolves, which came down from the mountains to attack the sheep, acted in a way which had never been heard of before. As if alarmed by some invisible warning they turned and fled back into the wilderness.’ In Frankfurt-am-Main, where Günther Von Schwarzburg died in the summer of 1349, two thousand people perished in seventy-two days.{154} In December 1349 the first case was recorded in Cologne. Six thousand died in Mainz, eleven thousand in Munster, twelve thousand in Erfurt.{155} Nearly seven thousand died in Bremen in four parishes alone.
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