The Black Death

by Read Listen Learn

In October 1347, a few merchant ships from the Far East arrived in the port of Messina on the island of Sicily, in the Mediterranean Sea just south of Italy. Four years later, up to 30 million people in Europe had died or about a tenth of the population of the entire world, a figure which would rise to 100 or even, some say, 200 million throughout the Middle Ages.

The cause was an epidemic of plague, which came to be known as ‘the Black Death’. It completely baffled doctors and scientists who had never seen anything like it before and could offer no explanation of its cause, let alone offer hope for recovery to the infected or useful advice on prevention to those who were still untouched by it. Boccaccio, a writer who lived in Italy from 1313 to 1375, based his most famous work, ‘The Decameron’ around the disease. He had this comment to make:

“In those years, a dead man was no more important than a dead goat.”

Mortality rates varied from one country to the next, but reached their highest points in Italy and Spain, where as many as eighty per cent of the people died, while in England and Germany there were still as many dead as one in five of the population, more in cities where people lived close together. The plague spread first by sea and travelled along coastal areas, as ships came and went, but soon made its way inland by road and river until no part of Europe or the Middle East was untouched. Geoffrey the Baker wrote this in his ‘Chronican Angliae’ about the arrival of the disease in England:

“The seventh year after it began, it came to England and first began in the towns and ports on the sea coasts, ... where ... it made the country quite empty of inhabitants so that there were almost none left alive. “... At length it came ... even to Oxford and to London and finally it spread over all England and so wasted the people that scarcely every tenth person of any sort was left alive.”

The symptoms of the plague were terrible. First, the limbs began to ache. Then, sufferers showed a rash on their skin, often on their faces, around the necks, under their arms and at the tops of their legs. These tiny spots sometimes developed into swellings the size of eggs or even apples and were extremely painful. Patients had dreadful headaches; they sneezed, coughed and vomited. Within a couple of days, most were dead. The only hope of recovery was if the swellings broke open and the liquid in them was washed away. But this almost never happened in the first few years.

People died in their homes and were only discovered when the stench of their rotting corpses reached their neighbours’ homes. There were dead bodies everywhere in city streets and on roads leading to the countryside, where people hoped to escape the disease but often became ill before they had gone far. Great holes were dug everywhere and the dead thrown in together and hastily covered with earth, as the graveyards quickly filled and other sites had to be found for much-loved children and respected civic leaders.

The plague did not respect the wealth of the nobility, the scientific knowledge of doctors or the belief of priests. Young and old, from city or countryside, rich and poor all died in startling numbers and with terrifying speed. An Italian man from the town of Siena, Agnolo di Tura, wrote this in his diary in 1350:

“They died by the hundreds, both day and night, and all were thrown in ... ditches and covered with earth. And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug. And I, Agnolo di Tura ... buried my five children with my own hands ... And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.”

People did not trust their doctors who, in the early months of the plague, admitted they were as confused as everyone else about the disease. Plague doctors were, anyway, second-rate (if they had any medical training at all) and could not usually earn a living. They cut their patients so that they lost blood in the hope that this would reduce their fevers. They also put frogs on the patients’ swellings.

Obviously, very few people wanted to be plague doctors, despite the high pay, as the life expectancy was very short (although Nostradamus did the job and survived). Instead, people who could not rely on the medical profession bought pamphlets which pretended to understand treatment for the sick and advised the healthy how to prevent infection. These gained such popularity that they became the first example of popular literature, read by anyone who was literate.

If people had no faith in medicine, some turned to religion with new enthusiasm, seeing the disease as a punishment for their own sins or those of the entire community or even humankind. They joined groups walking the streets and beating themselves with sticks and whips until their backs were a mess of blood, in an attempt to get forgiveness for their sins and avoid the fate that had already overtaken so many members of their families, their neighbours and friends. At the height of the crisis, there were as many as eighty thousand people taking part in these desperate attempts to escape the disease.

Others gave vast sums of money for the building of colleges and other institutions so that they should not be forgotten after their deaths, but also because they had nobody left to leave their money to. In this way, for instance, more than one university college at Oxford and Cambridge was built.

Where people could not afford to build a lasting memorial for themselves, they grouped together to pay, so that for the first time in history, public buildings were not only the responsibility of the King and nobles.

Of course, these monuments were not only built so that the living would remember the people who had built them, but often their loved ones taken from them so suddenly and painfully by the disease, and thrown into mass graves without the comfort of religion to ease their passing. A public building was, perhaps, a way to show the dead they were remembered and missed.

Still others began to ignore the law and social rules. Theft increased dramatically, as people were no longer so worried about getting caught and punished. Of course, this was partly because the authorities had more important matters that were taking up their time, like burying the dead, and so did not give priority to preventing crime. However, there was also a feeling among some people that every moment of happiness had to be enjoyed because it might be the last. This meant that there were public displays of affection in the streets, not just kisses stolen, but groups of people having sex as others walked by on their way to work or the shops.

Finally, there were, as ever, those who could only make sense of the black terror of these days by blaming and killing others. One of the first groups of victims was those already suffering from some sickness that affected the skin. The rich often accused the poor, complaining that their laziness, their lack of cleanliness or their immoral ways of living had, in one way or another, caused the disaster.

The Jews were thought to have poisoned the rivers of Europe and were accused of causing the epidemic. Many, many were murdered even though the Pope pointed out that the plague was killing many in England too, where there were no Jews, and that it made no sense for the Jews to poison the water that they had to drink themselves.

Of course, none of this changed the progress of the disease. It continued for four years and destroyed whole communities. The Church was especially affected, as priests had tried to offer comfort to the dying and to the families they left behind them and so were more readily infected.

There were food shortages as there were not enough farm workers to plant crops or look after animals. Prices for basic supplies and wages paid to workers rocketed and more rabbits and fish were eaten throughout Europe as they could be more easily caught and cooked.

The plague was not bad news for everyone though. Some farmers became wealthy when they bought land for almost nothing all over Europe or simply occupied their neighbours’ fields as there was no-one left to care for them.

The first epidemic of the plague ended in 1351, but that was not the last of it. In different parts of Europe, it returned for shorter or longer periods until the end of the eighteenth century. The victims changed though. By the fourth outbreak of the disease as the fourteenth century came to an end, nine out of ten of the dead were children. Adults had begun to become immune.

In 1350, anyone catching the disease was dead within a week, most in a couple of days. As new outbreaks occurred, fewer were infected and more sufferers recovered. Doctors started to have more confidence in themselves and believed their treatments effective.

Yet, it was not until the twentieth century that the causes of plague and the way it was transmitted were understood. Medieval scientists and doctors believed it was carried in the air or was caused by unusual astronomical events. In fact, the plague came from rats. They were bitten by fleas that then became infected. As the fleas became ill in their turn, they could not feed from the blood and so bit more and more animals and people, each time passing some of the bacteria from the rats’ into their new victims’ blood streams. In this way, people became ill.

Although the plague is often seen as a medieval disease, there was an outbreak as recently as 1994 in Gujarat in western India, in which 52 people died. It is also worth pointing out that the first case of plague which cannot be treated by antibiotics has been identified in Madagascar.