Map 15.

1 The Course of the Black Death in Fourteenth-Century Europe Note the routes that the bubonic plague
took across Europe. How do you account for the fact that several regions were spared the “dreadful death”?

THE BLACK DEATH

In 1291 Genoese sailors had opened the Straits of Gibraltar to Italian shipping by defeating the
Moroccans. Then, shortly after 1300, important advances
were made in the design of Italian merchant ships. A square rig was added to the main mast, and
ships began to carry three masts instead of just one. Additional sails better utilized wind power to
propel the ship. The improved design permitted year-round shipping for the first time, and Venetian
and Genoese merchant ships could sail the dangerous Atlantic coast even in the winter months.
With ships continually at sea, the rats that bore the disease spread rap
idly beyond the Mediterranean to Atlantic and North Sea ports.
Around 1331 the bubonic plague broke out in
China. In the course of the next fifteen years, merchants, traders, and soldiers carried the disease
across the Asian caravan routes until in 1346 it reached the Crimea in southern Russia. From there
the plague had easy access to the Mediterranean lands and western Europe.
In October 1347, Genoese ships brought the plague to Messina, from which it spread throughout
Sicily. Venice and Genoa were hit in January 1348, and from the port of Pisa the disease spread
south to Rome and east to Florence and all Tuscany. By late spring, southern Germany was
attacked. Frightened French authorities chased a galley bearing the disease from the port of
Marseilles, but not before plague had infected the city, from which it spread to Languedoc and
Spain. In June 1348, two ships entered the Bristol Channel and introduced it into England. All
Europe felt the scourge of this horrible disease (Map 15.1).

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PATHOLOGY

Modem understanding of the bubonic plague rests on the research of two bacteriologists, one
French and one Japanese, who in 1894 independently identified the bacillus that causes the plague,
Pasteurella pestis (so labeled after the French scientist's teacher, Louis Pasteur). The bacillus liked
to live in the bloodstream of an animal or, ideally, in the stomach of a flea. The flea in turn resided
in the hair of a rodent, sometimes a squirrel but preferably the hardy, nimble, and vagabond black
rat. Why the host black rat moved so much, scientists still do not know, but it often traveled by
ship. There the black rat could feast for months on a cargo of grain or live snugly among bales of
cloth. Fleas bearing the bacillus also had no trouble nesting in saddlebags. I Comfortable, well fed,
and often having greatly multiplied, the black rats ended their ocean voyage and descended on the
great cities of Europe.
Although by the fourteenth century urban authorities from London to Paris to Rome had begun to
try to achieve a primitive level of sanitation, urban conditions remained ideal for the spread of
disease. Narrow streets filled with mud, refuse, and human excrement were as much cesspools as
thoroughfares. Dead animals and sore-covered beggars greeted the traveler. Houses whose upper
stories projected over the lower ones eliminated light and air. And extreme overcrowding was
commonplace. When all members of an aristocratic family lived and slept in one room, it should
not be surprising that six or eight persons in a middle-class or poor household slept in one bed—if
they had one. Closeness, after all, provided warmth. Houses were beginning to be constructed of
brick, but many remained of wood, clay, and mud. A determined rat had little trouble entering such
a house.
Standards of personal hygiene remained frightfully low. Since water was considered dangerous,
partly for good reasons, people rarely bathed. Skin infections, consequently, were common. Lack of
personal cleanliness, combined with any number of temporary ailments such as diarrhea and the
common cold, naturally weakened the body's resistance to serious disease. Fleas and body lice were
universal afflictions: everyone from peasants to archbishops had them. One more bite did not cause
much alarm. But if that nibble came from a bacillus-bearing flea, an entire household or area was
doomed.
The symptoms of the bubonic plague started with a growth the size of a nut or an apple in the
armpit, in the groin, or on the neck. This was the boil, or buba, that gave the disease its name and
caused agonizing pain. If the buba was lanced and the pus thoroughly drained, the victim had a
chance of recovery. The secondary stage was the appearance of black spots or blotches caused by
bleeding under the skin. (This syndrome did not give the disease its common name; contemporaries
did not call the plague the "Black Death." Sometime in the fifteenth century, the Latin phrase atra
mors, meaning "dreadful death," was translated "black death," and the phrase stuck.) Finally the
victim began to cough violently and spit blood. This stage, indicating the presence of thousands of
bacilli in the bloodstream, signaled the end, and death followed in two or three days. Rather than
evoking compassion for the victim, a French scientist has written, everything about the bubonic
plague provoked horror and disgust: "All the matter which exuded from their bodies let off an
unbearable stench; sweat, excrement, spittle, breath, so fetid as to be overpowering; urine turbid,
thick, black or red."
Medieval people had no rational explanation for the disease nor any effective medical treatment
for it. Fourteenth-century medical literature indicates that physicians could sometimes ease the
pain, but they had no cure. Most people—lay, scholarly, and medical—believed that the Black
Death was caused by some "vicious property in the air" that carried the disease from place to place.
When ignorance was joined to fear and ancient bigotry, savage cruelty sometimes resulted. Many
people believed that the Jews had poisoned the wells of Christian communities and thereby infected
the drinking water. This charge led to the murder of thousands of Jews across Europe. According to
one chronicler, 16,000 were killed at the imperial city of Strasbourg alone in 1349. Though 16,000
is probably a typically medieval numerical exaggeration, the horror of the massacre is not lessened.
The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), describing the course of the disease in

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Florence in the preface to his book of tales, The Decameron, pinpointed the cause of the spread:

Moreover, the virulence of the pest was the greater by reason that intercourse was apt to convey
itfrom the sick to the whole, just as fire devours things dry or greasy when they are brought close to
it. Nay, the evil went yet further, for not merely by speech or association with the sick was the
malady communicated to the healthy with consequent peril of common death, but any that touched
the clothes of the sick or aught else that had been touched or used by them, seemed thereby to
contract the disease.

The highly infectious nature of the plague, especially in areas of high population density, was
recognized by a few sophisticated Arabs. When the disease struck the town of Sale in Morocco, Ibu
Abu Madyan shut in his household with sufficient food and water and allowed no one to enter or
leave until the plague had passed. Madyan was entirely successful. The rat that carried the disease-
bearing flea avoided travel outside the cities. Thus the countryside was relatively safe. City
dwellers who could afford to move fled to the country districts.
The mortality rate cannot be specified, because population figures for the period before the arrival
of the plague do not exist for most countries and cities. The largest amount of material survives for
England, but it is difficult to use and, after enormous scholarly controversy, only educated guesses
can be made. Of a total population of perhaps 4.2 million, probably 1.4 million died of the Black
Death in its several visits.4 Densely populated Italian cities endured incredible losses. Florence lost
between half and two-thirds of its 1347 population of 85,000 when the plague visited in 1348. The
disease recurred intermittently in the 1360s and 1370s and reappeared many times down to 1700.
There have been twentieth-century outbreaks in such places as Hong Kong and Uganda.

SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES

Predictably, the poor died more rapidly than the rich, because the rich enjoyed better health to
begin with; but the powerful were not unaffected. In England, two archbishops of Canterbury fell
victim to the plague in 1349, King Edward III's daughter Joan died, and many leading members of
the London guilds followed her to the grave.

It is noteworthy that, in an age of mounting criticism of clerical wealth, the behavior of the clergy
during the plague was often exemplary. Priests, monks, and nuns cared for the sick and buried the
dead. In places like Venice, from where even physicians fled, priests remained to give what
ministrations they could. Consequently, their mortality rate was phenomenally high. The German
clergy, especially, suffered a severe decline in personnel in the years after 1350. With the ablest
killed off, the wealth of the German church fell into the hands of the incompetent and weak. The
situation was ripe for reform.
The plague accelerated the economic decline begun in the early part of the fourteenth century. In
many parts of Europe, there had not been enough work for people to do. The Black Death was a
grim remedy to this problem. Population decline, however, led to an increased demand for labor
and to considerable mobility among the peasant and working classes. Wages rose sharply. The
shortage of labor and steady requests for higher wages put landlords on the defensive. They
retaliated with such measures as the English Statute of Laborers (1351), which at tempted to freeze
salaries and wages at pre-1347 levels. The statute could not be enforced and therefore was largely
unsuccessful.
Even more frightening than the social effects were the psychological consequences. The
knowledge that the disease meant almost certain death provoked the most profound pessimism.
Imagine an entire society in the grip of the belief that it was at the mercy of a frightful affliction
about which nothing could be done, a disgusting disease from which family and friends would flee,
leaving one to die alone and in agony. It is not surprising that some sought release in orgies and
gross sensuality while others turned to the severest forms of asceticism and frenzied religious

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fervor. Some extremists joined groups of flagellants. who collectively whipped and scourged
themselves as penance for their and society's sins, in the belief that the Black Death was God's
punishment for humanity's wickedness.
The literature and art of the fourteenth century reveal a terribly morbid concern with death. One
highly popular artistic motif, the Dance of Death, depicted a dancing skeleton leading away a living
person. No wonder survivors experienced a sort of shell shock and a terrible crisis of faith. Lack of
confidence in the leaders of society, lack of hope for the future, defeatism, and malaise wreaked
enormous anguish and contributed to the decline of the Middle Ages. A long international war
added further misery to the frightful disasters of the plague.

From A History of World Societies (Chapter The Crisis of the Later Middle Ages) by J. P. McKay, B. D. Hill and J.
Buckler, second edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1988.