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In 1346, the Crimean port of Caffa was besieged by steppe nomads from north of the Black Sea. The siege dragged on into 1347, when disease broke out among the attackers and they were forced to lift the siege; Italian merchants who had been among the besieged were now free to return home. On the ships with them were rats, on the rats were fleas, and in the rats and fleas were bacteria: Yersinia pestis.
Y. pestis (used to be called Pasteurella pestis, but that name has gone the way of the brontosaurus) normally lives in communities of burrowing rodents - rats, especially - carried from host to host by fleas. There are always plenty of rats in the tunnels, so the eventual death of individual rats doesn't affect the overall population of fleas and bacteria. But if something disrupts the normal cycle, if the bacteria spread to a rat population less tolerant, or too small to sustain it, then the rats start to die and the fleas move to other hosts (fleas can tell if their host is dying). Including humans, who are much less tolerant of the infection. Y. pestis infection in humans takes three forms. In the most common, the bacteria multiply and concentrate in the pericardial sac, spleen, liver, and (especially) the lymph nodes; the nodes swell painfully into hard, visible lumps. This is the most common form of the disease, called bubonic (from "bubo," the name for these swollen lumps), and without modern antibiotics is 60-70% fatal. The pneumonic form of the disease occurs when the bacteria infest the lungs, and is easily transmitted by coughing; the septicemic form infests the bloodstream, and is the rarest form; both of these forms are 100% fatal. In any form, onset is quick: the victim becomes ill 3-6 days after being infected, and death follows within days, sometimes hours. Now forget all that, because medieval Europeans knew nothing of bacteria, and rats and fleas were everywhere and unremarkable. All they knew were the gross symptoms: black swellings about the size of an egg in the armpits and groin (the swollen lymph glands), oozing blood and pus; fever, severe pain, and spitting up blood; and all bodily emissions stank. As you must have figured out by now, we're talking about plague, the Black Death - though it wasn't called that at the time, it was just called The Great Dying. The spread of the plague was astonishing. It first appeared in Messina (Sicily) in October 1347, and in Genoa and Venice very soon after; by the start of 1348 the pandemic had reached Marseilles and moved on into France, spreading up the Rhone to Avignon by March. In the spring it came to Rome, Florence, and all central Italy, and in France spread through Languedoc. By August it had struck Paris and moved on to Burgundy, Normandy, and southern England; from Italy it moved into Switzerland and Hungary; from southern France it moved into Spain. By the next summer (1349) it had spread through London and the Midlands in England; in Germany it had gotten most of the way down the Rhine, and down the Danube to Vienna. By the end of the year it covered most of Germany, and entered Denmark; in Britain, it had reached the Anglo-Scottish border. The Scots heard of the devastation in England, and spent the winter gleefully preparing an invasion; but the plague came to Scotland with the spring, and the army massed for invasion was destroyed. That same year, 1350, it penetrated Scandinavia and the Baltic, and by 1351 it reached Russia. The plague had burned through Europe in four years. (If you'd rather have a more visual story, there's a good-looking map here.) In any one area, most of the dying occurred within four to six months, then faded; the exception was in large cities, where it would abate during the winter and then reappear in spring. New outbreaks of the plague re-emerged every 10-15 years for the rest of the century, and less frequently for several centuries more (through the end of our period and beyond). Chroniclers at the time wrote that "a third of the world died" - the figure was taken from Scripture (specifically the Book of Revelations) not based on any real actuarial data, but it does approximately match modern historians' best reconstruction for Europe overall. In urban centers, especially in Italy, the proportion was probably closer to 2/3; in other localities, it varied from almost nothing to complete extermination. In Milan, the first three households in which the plague appeared were walled up with all persons - masters and servants, living and dead - and after that the disease never re-appeared. Some few pockets were left untouched, including Bohemia and Navarre. The impact on the fabric of society was devastating: husbands deserted wives at the first sign of illness (and vice versa), parents deserted children; the living could not keep up with burying the dead; much property was abandoned (but there wasn't as much looting as you might think, for fear of the disease.) People tried all sorts of bizarre remedies, including drinking medicines of powdered gold or emerald, or bathing in human urine; some retreated to isolated enclaves. Some people cast off all morality, choosing to go out in a blaze of debauchery. In an age where everything happened for a reason, the mysterious randomness of the plague led to some savagely irrational reactions. For those who believed it was the work of God, the plague was a punishment for human sins: processions of penitent flagellants marched from town to town, staging public whippings at every stop. These were condemned and eventually suppressed by church and state alike, as sources of dangerous anarchy. Those who believed it was the work of men fixed instantly on the "obvious" suspects: there was widespread persecution and massacre of Jews. Pope Clement tried to protect them, pointing out (correctly) that Jews were dying of the sickness just as Christians were, and that the plague struck places where no Jews were living; but outside his own dominions - Avignon and the Papal States - his decree was ignored. Longer-term effects of the plague were even more significant. For one thing, wealth became concentrated in fewer hands, as lands and estates from scattered branches of noble families were inherited by the few survivors. And it wasn't just the upper classes that got richer: with fewer laborers around, their value increased, and the lower classes got more pay and a little taste of their own worth. (The next half-century saw the revolt of the French Jacquerie, the Peasant's Revolt in England, and similar uprisings in other parts of Europe.) While the Church (like the aristocracy) got much richer, it also lost much of its authority as many came to question its power in a chaotic and uncaring world. Because of these effects - the concentration of unprecedented wealth, the increased value placed on secular humanity, and the weakening of faith - the Great Plague has been argued by some as a direct cause of the Renaissance. |
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In the Current Middle Ages I'm sure we've each thought Carolingia would be a better place if a third of the people in it just went away - as long as we got to pick that third. But try this experiment: take an old Liber, and cross out every third name. (Or if you're one of those who like to think of Carolingia as like an Italian city-state, cross out two names out of every three.) For extra impact, use a big thick black permanent marker. Now imagine life with a random third (or two thirds) of the barony suddenly eliminated. Don't just think of it as life in a smaller barony or a shire, feel it as a loss, and one that we can't make up with a few seasons' on-campus recruiting. How many of your best friends are gone? How many guilds, boroughs, households are left empty? And there's still all that work that has to get done, with fewer people to do it: events will not only be smaller, they will be much plainer. There are some activities that just can't happen at all without enough people: Shakespeare plays definitely, the Waytes or I Sebastiani possibly; the fencers are facing this situation currently [at the time of writing: Feb. 2000]. No, on further thought I guess I don't wish any of us would go away. |
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Further Reading A Distant Mirror: the calamitous 14th century, by Barbara W. Tuchman (1978), has a whole chapter on the plague. In fact, Tuchman began the book as a study of social effects of the plague, specifically; it just grew as she found out more about everything else that went on in that century. This is such an excellent book, I can't believe I haven't recommended it in an essay before now. William H. McNeill, in Plagues and Peoples (1976), goes into more detail on the ecological balance of disease parasites and human society over time, including the natural history of plague and the role of the Mongol Empire in its spread from China westward to Europe. McNeill develops an interesting - if cynical - model of government as "macro-parasitism," living off of humans en masse as micro-parasites (disease organisms) live off individuals. Connie Willis won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Doomsday Book (1992), and it's a powerful book. A time-traveller from the 21st century goes back to the 14th and witnesses a small English village attacked by the plague. The book is especially appropriate for us Creative Anachronists, because you have to care about and identify with the people to get the point of the book; if you read it as "hard" plot-driven sf you'll be disappointed, it will seem like she didn't make any difference at all. It's been observed that a lot of the fiction I recommend in these essays (including the above) are major downers. So let me make an emphatically upbeat recommendation now: Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. You ought to have read this already for the stories; this is your excuse to go back and re-read, paying more attention this time to the eyewitness account of the plague in Florence that forms the opening chapter. |
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| text copyright 2000 by Caleb Hanson (e-mail) |
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