THE BLACK DEATH
Even before the death ships pulled into port at Messina, many Europeans
had heard rumors about a Great Pestilence that was carving a deadly path
across the trade routes of the Near and Far East. (Early in the 1340s, the
disease had struck China, India, Persia, Syria and Egypt.) However, they
were scarcely equipped for the horrible reality of the Black Death. In men
and women alike, the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio wrote, at the
beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the
armpitswaxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an
egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils.
Blood and pus seeped out of these strange swellings, which were followed
by a host of other unpleasant symptomsfever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea,
terrible aches and painsand then, in short order, death. The Black Death
was terrifyingly, indiscriminately contagious: the mere touching of the
clothes, wrote Boccaccio, appeared to itself to communicate the malady to
the toucher. The disease was also terrifyingly efficient. People who were
perfectly healthy when they went to bed at night could be dead by morning.
Did You Know?
Many scholars think that the nursery rhyme
Ring around the Rosy was written about the
symptoms of the Black Death.
UNDERSTANDING THE BLACK DEATH
Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the
plague, is spread by a bacillus called Yersina pestis. (The French biologist
Alexandre Yersin discovered this germ at the end of the 19th century.) They
know that the bacillus travels from person to person pneumonically, or
through the air, as well as through the bite of infected fleas and rats. Both of
these pests could be found almost everywhere in medieval Europe, but they
were particularly at home aboard ships of all kindswhich is how the deadly
plague made its way through one European port city after another. Not long
after it struck Messina, the Black Death spread to the port of Marseilles in
France and the port of Tunis in North Africa. Then it reached Rome and
Florence, two cities at the center of an elaborate web of trade routes. By the
middle of 1348, the Black Death had struck Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon and
London.
Today, this grim sequence of events is terrifying but comprehensible. In the
middle of the 14th century, however, there seemed to be no rational
explanation for it. No one knew exactly how the Black Death was
transmitted from one patient to anotheraccording to one doctor, for
example, instantaneous death occurs when the aerial spirit escaping from
the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy person standing near and
looking at the sickand no one knew how to prevent or treat it. Physicians
relied on crude and unsophisticated techniques such as bloodletting and
boil-lancing (practices that were dangerous as well as unsanitary) and
superstitious practices such as burning aromatic herbs and bathing in
rosewater or vinegar.
Meanwhile, in a panic, healthy people did all they could to avoid the sick.
Doctors refused to see patients; priests refused to administer last rites.
Shopkeepers closed stores. Many people fled the cities for the countryside,
but even there they could not escape the disease: It affected cows, sheep,
goats, pigs and chickens as well as people. In fact, so many sheep died that
one of the consequences of the Black Death was a European wool
shortage. And many people, desperate to save themselves, even
abandoned their sick and dying loved ones. Thus doing, Boccaccio wrote,
each thought to secure immunity for himself.
GODS PUNISHMENT?
Because they did not understand the biology of the disease, many people
believed that the Black Death was a kind of divine punishmentretribution
for sins against God such as greed, blasphemy, heresy, fornication and
worldliness. By this logic, the only way to overcome the plague was to win
Gods forgiveness. Some people believed that the way to do this was to
purge their communities of heretics and other troublemakersso, for
example, many thousands of Jews were massacred in 1348 and 1349.
(Thousands more fled to the sparsely populated regions of Eastern Europe,
where they could be relatively safe from the rampaging mobs in the cities.)
Some people coped with the terror and uncertainty of the Black Death
epidemic by lashing out at their neighbors; others coped by turning inward
and fretting about the condition of their own souls. Some upper-class men
joined processions of flagellants that traveled from town to town and
engaged in public displays of penance and punishment: They would beat
themselves and one another with heavy leather straps studded with sharp
pieces of metal while the townspeople looked on. For 33 1/2 days, the
flagellants repeated this ritual three times a day. Then they would move on
to the next town and begin the process over again. Though the flagellant
movement did provide some comfort to people who felt powerless in the
face of inexplicable tragedy, it soon began to worry the Pope, whose
authority the flagellants had begun to usurp. In the face of this papal
resistance, the movement disintegrated.
The Black Death epidemic had run its course by the early 1350s, but the
plague reappeared every few generations for centuries. Modern sanitation
and public-health practices have greatly mitigated the impact of the disease
but have not eliminated it.
