The Black Death

When this history was published in 1969 I remarked in my preface that, though there might be controversy over some of its consequences, all at least would agree that the Black Death was of the greatest economic and social importance as well as hideously dramatic in its progression. I
therefore
found it surprising that, with the exception of Dr Coulton’s somewhat whimsical monograph of 1929, there had been no general study of the
subject
since Cardinal Gasquet wrote
The
Great
Pestilence
in 1893. In the meantime much new information had come to light and many of the dogmas accepted in the nineteenth century had been disproved or qualified.

I understood then, and perhaps see still more clearly now, the
considerations
which inhibited the academic historian from embarking on such a labour. Any general study must be either superficial or unwieldy: the first distasteful to the author, the second to the publisher and public. No one, too, can be expert in every aspect of this vast panorama and the spectacle of rival historians, each established in his fortress of specialized knowledge, waiting to destroy the unwary trespasser, is calculated to discourage even the most intrepid.

In Professor Elton’s kindly if contemptuous phrase, I was, and still am, an amateur and came to my task ‘in a happy spirit of untrained enterprise’. I had read massively but laid no claim to the title of medievalist. This, I hope, may excuse me for having rushed in where an angel or even a Professor of Medieval History would fear to tread. (To quote Professor Elton again – the angels may perhaps be forgiven if, rather than tread
themselves
in those treacherous paths, they prefer to bide their time and tread upon the fools instead.) This book contains virtually no original research. It is an attempt to synthesize in a single readable but reasonably
comprehensive
volume the records of the contemporary chroniclers and the works of later historians, in particular the great flood of Ph.D. theses and other specialist monographs, each treating some tiny aspect of this enormous subject.

There have been many more such studies since 1969. Colin Pratt, Professor of History at the University of Southampton and himself author of
King
Death,
a vivid portrait of the Black Death and its aftermath in late
mediaeval England, has kindly added an annexe summarizing these later contributions. I have made certain changes in my text to reflect the work of these recent researchers. On the whole, however, I feel that the thrust of my narrative is still valid and that its main conclusions are not in question. The most important change of emphasis has been away from the view widely held in the 1960s that the Black Death accelerated and modified
existing
social and economic trends rather than initiated new ones. Research generally tends to qualify or erode the certainties of earlier historians; it is noteworthy that, in the case of the Black Death, its effect is to express still more emphatically the dramatic results which this catastrophic plague had for the lives of those whom it afflicted.

I went on to suggest that if my book should chance to provoke some academic historian – no doubt incensed by its inadequacy – into engaging in a major work of scholarship, then it would have served a useful purpose. Unsurprisingly perhaps, no such historian has risen to this challenge. This book remains today, as it was in 1969, the only twentieth century study of the Black Death which aspires to cover every significant contribution made by students of the period and yet to provide a narrative that is accessible to the layman.

On the whole the professional medievalists treated my foray into their territory with generosity. Their tendency was to treat me not so much as a candidate for demolition as a useful tool with which to assault offending rivals. ‘Mr Ziegler describes himself as an amateur,’ ran one line of
argument
. ‘So indeed he is; but compared with Professor X of Y University he seems a real professional …’. Whether their charity would have endured if I had ventured for a second time into their field, I rather doubt. I did not put their forbearance to the test, but prudently retreated to the nineteenth and twentieth century where I feel rather more at home.

One feature of my book which came in for some criticism was the chapter in which I tried to recapture the impact of the plague in an imaginary medieval village. Such frivolity, it was suggested, was out of place in a book which had any pretensions to scholarship. Historical fiction was historical fiction and evermore would be so.

I remain impenitent. Provided an author explains what he is doing and makes no attempt to confuse fiction with fact, surmise with certainty, then I believe he has the right to use any device at his disposal if it will help to make his point more forcibly. In the case of the Black Death, I did not feel that it was possible fully to capture the consequences of the plague on a
small, credulous, rural society without inventing a village and examining it under the microscope of the imagination. Statistics and facts alone,
however
striking, could not convey the horror that afflicted Europe in the mid fourteenth century.

Although I dealt with the Black Death in England more thoroughly than elsewhere, I tried also to give some indication of its origins and to sketch in the outline of its progress across Europe. The result was untidy but to have confined myself to England or the British Isles would have been to sacrifice all perspective in favour of a neat but narrow pattern. To deal with the plague’s progress country by country is in a sense misleading – the Black Death knew no frontiers – but no other division would have made better sense and a seamless flow of narrative would have inconvenienced those who like to lay down a book at the end of a chapter and take it up again without having to remember how far they have got.

There were other problems of construction, too. It would in some ways have been more logical to treat in isolation such subjects as the persecution of the Jews or the state of medical knowledge. On reflection, however, I concluded that the book was little more lucid and considerably easier to read if such topics were dealt with as they seemed naturally to arise in the course of the narrative.

Considering the fearful march of AIDS, particularly in Africa, and the failure of medical science to find a quick solution, one inevitably wonders whether a second Black Death could one day ravage Europe. On the whole it seems unlikely; enough is now known about the workings of disease to ensure that, though doctors and scientists will not always be one step ahead, they will never lag fatally behind. It is more likely that humanity will find other ways to bring about its own destruction. But if another plague, inexplicable, uncheckable, were to sweep across the world, people would not react so very differently. There would be the same mixtures of cowardice and heroism, panic and resignation, selfishness and self-sacrifice. An immeasurable chasm stretches between the fourteenth century and today, but the more that one studies the medieval chronicles, the more convinced one is that human nature remains substantially the same.

Mr Richard Ollard, the late Mr Handasyde Buchanan and my brother, Mr Oliver Ziegler, read my manuscript with fortitude and made many suggestions of great value. Dr Keele of the Wellcome Institute of Medical History was kind enough to read and criticize those sections relating to the
nature and history of bubonic plague. Miss Barbara Dodwell, Reader in Medieval History at the University of Reading, corrected many of my blunders and pointed out a variety of ways by which the book might be improved. I have already paid tribute to the signal contribution of Professor Platt.

Any writer who has leant as I did on the work of other people must stagger under an almost intolerable burden of gratitude. I acknowledge with pleasure and admiration my debt to all those whose publications I have made use of in this book. Two names, above all, I would like to single out: Professor Hamilton Thompson, whose pioneer work in this field has exercised so great an influence on the labours of all subsequent historians, and Dr Elizabeth Carpentier, whose wit and scholarship illuminated the subject in later years.

Philip Ziegler

London, 1998

I
T
must have been at some time during 1346 that word first reached Europe of strange and tragic happenings far away in the East. Even in this age of easy travel and rapid spread of news, calamities in China tend to be accepted in the Occident with the polite but detached regret reserved for something infinitely
remote
. In the fourteenth century, Cathay was a never-never-land; unheard of except by the more sophisticated and, even to them, a place of mystery which only a few merchants had visited and about which little was known. No story, however horrific, would seem altogether implausible if it came from such a source; but equally no medieval savant or merchant would have conceived that what happened so far away could have any possible
relevance
to his own existence. The travellers’ tales were received with awed credulity but gave rise to no alarm.

Certainly things seemed to have gone badly wrong. An
imposing
series of disasters studded the history of the previous years.
1
In 1333 parching drought with consequential famine had
ravaged
the plains watered by the rivers Kiang and Hoai. Then had come floods in which four hundred thousand were said to have died, as a result of which, presumably, the mountain Tsincheou ‘fell in’, causing great chasms in the earth. In 1334 there was drought in Houkouang and Honan followed by swarms of
locusts
, famine and pestilence. An earthquake in the mountains of Ki-Ming-Chan formed a lake more than a hundred leagues in circumference. In Tche the dead were believed to number more than five million. Earthquakes and floods continued from 1337 to 1345; locusts had never been so destructive; there was ‘
subterraneous
thunder’ in Canton.

But these were mere curtain-raisers for the real calamity.
Several
contemporary accounts exist of the earliest days of the Black Death, so similar in detail as to suggest that they may well
have come from the same source. Almost the only man known to have been at or near the spot, Ibn-Bātuta, ‘The Traveller’ is
disappointingly
reticent.
2
An anonymous Flemish cleric, on the other hand, was fortunately unfettered by the restrictions
imposed
on those who have actually seen what they describe.
Basing
himself on a letter from a friend in the papal curia at Avignon he recounted how: ‘in the East, hard by Greater India, in a certain province, horrors and unheard of tempests
overwhelmed
the whole province for the space of three days. On the first day there was a rain of frogs, serpents, lizards, scorpions, and many venomous beasts of that sort. On the second, thunder was heard, and lightning and sheets of fire fell upon the earth, mingled with hail stones of marvellous size; which slew almost all, from the greatest even to the least. On the third day there fell fire from heaven and stinking smoke, which slew all that were left of men and beasts, and burned up all the cities and towns in those parts. By these tempests the whole province was
infected
; and it is conjectured that, through the foul blast of wind that came from the South, the whole seashore and surrounding lands were infected, and are waxing more and more poisonous from day to day …’
3

This concept of a corrupted atmosphere, visible in the form of mist or smoke, drifting across the world and overwhelming all whom it encountered, was one of the main assumptions on which the physicians of the Middle Ages based their efforts to check the plague. For one chronicler the substance of the cloud was more steam than smoke.
4
Its origin was to be found in a war which had taken place between the sea and the sun in the Indian Ocean. The waters of the ocean were drawn up as a vapour so corrupted by the multitude of dead and rotting fish that the sun was quite unable to consume it nor could it fall again as healthy rain. So it drifted away, an evil, noxious mist, contaminating all it touched. For the Chronicler of Este, however, this cloud of death owed nothing to the sea:

By the end of 1346, therefore, it was widely known, at least in the major European seaports, that a plague of unparalleled fury was raging in the East. Fearful rumours were heard of the
disease’s
progress: ‘India was depopulated, Tartary, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia were covered with dead bodies; the Kurds fled in vain to the mountains. In Caramania and Caesarea none were left alive …’
6
But still it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the plague might one day strike at Europe.

The most circumstantial account of how the disease made this fatal leap comes from Gabriel de Mussis. At one time, indeed, it was thought that the writer had himself visited Asia Minor and had been a passenger on the ship which carried the plague to Europe.
7
A subsequent editor, however, has reluctantly but
decisively
established that de Mussis, during the critical period, never stirred from his native town of Piacenza.
8

De Mussis stated that the plague settled in the Tartar lands of Asia Minor in 1346. According to Vernadsky it left eighty-five thousand dead in the Crimea alone.
9
Whether coincidentally or because they made the conventional medieval assumption that some human agency, preferably in the form of an already
unpopular
minority group, must be responsible for their sufferings, the Tartars decided to attack the Christian merchants in the vicinity. A street brawl, in which one of the locals was killed, seems to have provided the excuse for what was probably a
premeditated
campaign. The Tartars set on a Genoese trading station in the city of Tana and chased the merchants to their redoubt at Caffa, now Feodosia, a town on the Crimean coast which the Genoese had built and fortified as a base from which to trade with the Eastern hinterland. The Tartar army settled down
outside
the walls and prepared to bombard the city into
submission
.
10

Their plans were disastrously disturbed by the plague which was soon taking heavy toll of the besiegers. ‘Fatigued, stupefied and amazed’, they decided to call off the operation. First,
however
, they felt it was only fair that the Christians should be given a taste of the agony which the investing force had been suffering.
They used their giant catapults to lob over the walls the corpses of the victims in the hope that this would spread the disease within the city. As fast as the rotting bodies arrived in their midst the Genoese carried them through the town and dropped them in the sea. But few places are so vulnerable to disease as a besieged city and it was not long before the plague was as active within the city as without. Such inhabitants as did not rapidly succumb realized that, even if they survived the plague, they would be far too few to resist a fresh Tartar onslaught. They took to their galleys and fled from the Black Sea towards the Mediterranean. With them travelled the plague.

Though it is certain that this can not have been the only, and probable that it was not even the earliest route by which the plague arrived in Europe there is no reason to doubt that de Mussis’s story is true in essentials. One of the main trade routes by which the spices and silks from the East reached the European market was by way of Baghdad and thence along the Tigris and through Armenia to the entrepôt stations of the Italian
merchants
in the Crimea. Nothing is more likely than that the plague should travel with the great caravans and spread itself among the Tartars of the Crimea, the ‘hyperborean Scythians’ who, in the opinion of the Byzantine Emperor, John Cantacuzenos, were the first victims of the epidemic.
11

According to one chronicler: ‘This plague on these accursed galleys was a punishment from God, since these same galleys had helped the Turks and Saracens to take the city of Romanais which belonged to the Christians and broke down the walls and slew the Christians as though they were cattle or worse; and the Genoese wrought far more slaughter and cruelty on the
Christians
than even the Saracens had done.’ As with other instances of Divine retribution, the punishment seems to have been
strikingly
promiscuous. For even though it is not necessary to believe, with the Chronicler of Este, that these ill-fated galleys, with the crews dying at their oars, somehow contrived to spread the plague to ‘Constantinople, Messina, Sicily, Sardinia, Genoa, Marseilles and many other places,’ it is likely that infection was carried at least to Genoa, Venice and Messina by galleys from Eastern ports.
12

The inhabitants reacted violently when they realized the
cargo
that their visitors were bringing with them. They sought to drive the danger away and, in so doing, ensured that it spread more rapidly. ‘In January of the year 1348,’ wrote a Flemish chronicler,

But by the time that the Genoese authorities reacted, it was too late. The infection was ashore and nothing was to stop it. By the spring of 1348 the Black Death had taken a firm grasp in Sicily and on the mainland.

*

At this point, with the plague poised to strike into the heart of Europe, it seems appropriate to pause and consider what the epidemic really was and how far it was something entirely new. Today there is little mystery left about the origins and nature of the Black Death; a few points remain to be clarified but all the essential facts are known. But in the Middle Ages the plague was not only all-destroying, it was totally incomprehensible.
Medieval
man was equipped with no form of defence – social, medical or psychological – against a violent epidemic of this magnitude. His baffled and terrified helplessness in the face of disaster will be above all the theme of this book.

One of the minor mysteries which does still persist over the Black Death is the genesis of its name. The traditional belief is that it was so called because the putrefying flesh of the victims blackened in the final hours before death supervened. The trouble about this otherwise plausible theory is that no such
phenomenon
occurred. It is true that, in cases of septicaemic plague, small black or purple blotches formed on the bodies of the sick and this symptom must have made a vivid impression on
beholders
. But if the name of the epidemic had been derived
primarily from the appearance of its victims, one would have expected it to have been used at the time. Of this there is no evidence. Indeed, it seems that such a title was not generally heard until the eighteenth century, though similar expressions had often been applied to other epidemics in the past.
14
The first recorded use of the term for the epidemic of 1348 is in a
reference
to the
swarta
döden
in Sweden in 1555. About fifty years later it emerged in Denmark as the
sorte
død
.
15
Cardinal Gasquet believed that, in England at least, the name began to be used some time after 1665 to distinguish the fourteenth-century
epidemic
from the ‘Great Plague’ which ravaged Carolean London.
16

The fact that the title ‘Black Death’ was not used by
contemporaries
similarly makes it hard to credit those other
explanations
which attributed the name to a black comet seen before the arrival of the epidemic, to the number of people who were thrown into mourning as a result of the high mortality
17
or to the popular images of the plague as a man on a black horse or as a black giant striding across the countryside.
18

The most likely explanation seems to be that it originally stemmed from an over-literal translation into the Scandinavian or the English of the Latin
pestis
atra
or
atra
mors
. Even in the fourteenth century the word ‘atra’ could connote ‘dreadful’ or ‘terrible’ as well as ‘black’. But once the mistranslation had been established then all the other reasons for associating ‘Black’ with ‘Death’ must have contributed to give it general currency. In France it was once called the
morte
bleue
. The superior
dreadfulness
of the accepted phrase is obvious and today no other style would be acceptable.

Contemporary records are remarkably consistent in their
descriptions
of the physical appearance of the disease. The most commonly noted symptom is, of course, also the most dramatic; the buboes or boils, sometimes also described as knobs, kernels, biles, blaines, blisters, pimples or wheals which are the invariable concomitants of bubonic plague. Boccaccio’s description will do for all the rest: