Black Death

[Annie Sargent]

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I’ve wanted to write something about the Black Death since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, but I refrained because it all felt a little bit raw. I hope it’s not too soon now that we might be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel? Because, as you will see, we have it really good by comparison.

The Black Death hit Asia and Europe in the second half of the 14th century. How did they face this terrible pandemic?

In the fall of 1347 France was at the start of another particularly cold winter. The weather started acting strange in 1310, serving up unusually cold temperatures, poor harvests, and the famines that always follow climate disruptions.  I can say without exaggeration that the average French person who lived in the 1300s spend most of their life hungry and cold.

To make things worse, typhus, typhoid fever and cholera were ever present in the middle age in France. All three are bacterial diseases that propagate due to crowding and poor sanitation. These were diseases that went around the population constantly. No big spikes, but their constant presence killed a lot of elderly people and lots and lots of children. Every woman alive in the 1300s lost at least a few of her children to one of these diseases, it was part of normal life. It bears saying again that during life in the 1300s, French people were constantly hungry, usually cold and that their soul was crushed by the loss of one child after another.

How were things on the political front? Not great.

This was the start of the 100 years war and the English were kicking our butts. To cite just one example, French soldiers suffered a major defeat in the battle of Crécy in 1346. Or you might remember the disastrous battle of Agincourt that I talked about in episode 89 of the podcast. In 1347, the English were led by King Edward III of England, who turned out to be a formidable opponent. He was also the father of Edward the Black Prince. You’ve heard of the Black Prince a lot if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while. He wasn’t a favorite in the southwest of France, that’s for sure!

As you can see, I don’t have a lot of good news to report about the early 1300s in France. And it was about to get worse, a lot worse.

It all started in September 1347. The Genoese had a small commercial settlement on the Black Sea and this is where they made commercial exchanges with the Mongols. At one point, the Mongols arrived on the Black Sea in great numbers, and they had a major dispute with the Italians. Since there were so many Mongols and so few Italians, the Mongols decided to lay siege to force the Italians to cave in.

But things didn’t turn out as you would have predicted. The Mongols started dying off one by one, falling to a mysterious disease. As was common during a siege, the Mongols started throwing the dead bodies of their comrades over the ramparts of the city. Crowd the enemy with dead bodies, why don’t you? Now the Italians were cut off from food, water, and dead Mongols were being thrown at them.

Eventually the Italians were freed from the siege because there weren’t enough Mongols left. With death all around, the Italians also decided to leave the commercial settlement on the Black Sea and head home to Italy.

Do you know how ships can go from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea? I didn’t and I had to look it up, so I’m going to tell you. Ships have to go through the Bosporus Strait (Istanbul is a major city on the Bosporus Strait), then on to the Sea of Marmara and Aegean Sea (where Izmir and Athens are). And from there you’re in the Mediterranean.

Some of those ships kept going south to Syria, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. Others went east to Sicily, up the Italian coast and to the French coast. Along the way the Italians started dropping like flies! But they kept going and spreading the Black Death to more cities.

Within a few months there were 500 dead per day in Aleppo, Bagdad and Jerusalem. So many people died that they couldn’t burry them all. Many were thrown into rivers or down wells and ravines. In Gaza, 22 000 died in one month. In some places they had so many dead that they made piles in the open air.

One particularly gruesome episode of this horrible story is that fishermen noticed a boat that was floating aimlessly on the Mediterranean Sea. They got on their rowboat to go check it out. What they found terrified them. The deck of the ship was full of dead bodies!

No-one in Europe had heard of this disease, but of course, I say wasn’t new at all. In Asia the plague was well-known because it had already killed 30 million people or ¼ of the population. Some places in Europe faired much worse. Messina and Syracuse lost 2/3 of their population. The city of Trapani in Italy was entirely wiped out.

This disease went by many names: Mortalega Grande (great mortality), Pestis Atrossissima (atrocious plague), Peste Epouvantable (insufferable plague), Mort dense (dense death), Mort Noire (Black Death), or La Mort (death).

In November 1347 one of the Genoan ship docked in Marseille. Ships were screened for disease and it shouldn’t have been allowed to get anywhere near land, but this ship was allowed to dock because the cargo belonged to one of the richest merchants in Marseille and he was prepared to pay lavish bribes.

Normally, when a ship was quarantined due to disease, the cargo was tossed into the sea. But this ship wasn’t quarantined. The precious cargo on board made its way into Marseille, introducing the Black Death to the city as surely as night follows day.

People started dying in droves within 2 weeks. Doctors were only able to attend to a few of those who suffer from this disease, and doctors were only for the rich back then. They didn’t understand what was happening. Parts of the skin turned grey, black abbesses erupted in the armpits or between the legs, high fevers and terrible pain. Clearly it led to death most of the time, but that was about all they knew. Historians now know that this disease spread at an average of 50 miles per day and this was without cars or airplanes!

When the plague reached Avignon (where the pope resided at the time), Marseille had already lost 1/3 of its population. Pope Clement VI was warned that a plague was developing in Italy. A lord in Milan told everyone to leave the city and take refuge in villages or in the forest. That was a good plan. But priests were forced to visit the sick to give them the last rites. Eternal salvation was serious business back then and some priests were killed for refusing to give last rites to folks who were dying of the plague.

French King Philippe VI consulted doctors, priests, theologians and fortune tellers. They all told him that this plague is a punishment from God, sent to punish Christians for their sins. Besides that they had no idea.

In Avignon, the Pope authorized priests to give the last rites to dying people assembled in a field. That was progress but it could be because there were so few priests left standing! He granted authority to lay men and women to give last rites when no priest could come. The Pope went as far as allowing a few  autopsies in hopes of finding out more about the plague.

The Pope’s doctor, Guy de Chauliac, ordered his patient to stay away from people. Good call doctor! But this was also revolutionary because everybody thought disease was in the air all around us, and that bad smells were to blame. Eventually the Pope decreed that healthy people needed to stay away from diseased people, but that decree didn’t spread near as fast as the Black Death.

By the middle of 1348 the Black Death had reduced the population of France to 1/3 of original. This is hard to fathom: 2/3 of people died within a year.  The population of France was reduced to what it had been centuries before under the Gauls.

What to do with the bodies? Burning the corpses would have been the best solution but this went against Catholic beliefs. People believed that cremation made the resurrection impossible so they thought it was best to pile up bodies and burry them hastily. Some survivors were too terrified to do more than toss the body of their deceased loved ones into the street.

By the end of 1348 doctors began to write about a new concept: contagion. They realized that what all the dead had in common was that they were in the presence of people who died of the Black Plague.

There weren’t a lot of doctors in the 1300s, but Kings, Bishops and Dukes had doctors, of course. They exchanged correspondence and tried to understand how this disease spread. In Venice they opened a hospital where those who had the plague went. Most of them didn’t make it out alive, but some of them did.

They didn’t see the link between the presence of rats and contagion yet. Much later doctors explained that it wasn’t the rats per se, but a tiny flea that bites both rats and humans. The ancient Greeks knew that when a disease spread it was vital to wall people in and that’s how they controlled their pandemics. But who wants to be walled in with people who are dropping like flies?

The Pope spent hours every day on his knees, alone, praying God for mercy on the people. All aspects of medicine were based on plants in the Middle Ages. As mentioned above, disease was thought to spread through bad smells, so people burned good smelling wood, adding a cabbage or some flowers here and there, just to try things. Historians have found any number of recipes against the plague. There developed a science of plants people should burn as incense and drink as potions. One practitioner might say to burn dry chamomile throughout the house. Another might say to mix quince and cabbage then burn them under the full moon. Or perhaps pull up your grape vines and burn them with chamomile leaves on top? How about sage, clovers and rosemary tea? Or perhaps black berries and sandalwood? How about mixing some goat excrements to it? They tried everything.

One thing everyone agreed upon was the need for a theriac. A theriac is a mix of plants and roots of every sort, concocted by someone who knew the business of creating good smells that were repulsive to the Black Death. Different medicine men and doctors made different theriacs, what mattered is that you were supposed to use them exactly according to the rules.

Doctors back then made masks that would allow them to stuff a theriac inside. You breathed through the theriac and you were safe from the bad smells. These masks were generally in the shape of the beak of a raven. The Commedia dell’arte and the character of the Medico della Peste made these masks famous and that’s the image I used for this episode.

And, of course, at a time when death was all around, there was a need for scapegoats. Things got particularly vicious in the east of France where they pointed to the Jews who they said had poisoned well water. They killed Jews by the hundreds and confiscated their belongings. Some places they locked Jews in their Synagogue and burned it. 900 Jews were killed in Strasbourg alone. It got so bad that even the Pope wrote two Papal bulls to tell Christians to stop killing Jews. He wrote them on July 4, 1348 and September 26, 1348. He said the Church had to protect Jews and immediately opened the city of Avignon to all Jews who might want to move there. Thousands of French Jews were killed in 1348, some of them after going through an official judicial proceeding for which we have records. It was all frightful.

In towns and villages that were decimated by the plague, groups of men walked the streets bare chested with whips. They were penitents who self-flagellated in public and hope that shedding their blood would appease God’s wrath and cleanse the air. These groups got big and travelled all over Italy, France and Germany. These men read letters to curious villagers where they said angels wanted them to know that Christ was saddened by sin and declared that all who traveled for 34 days and self-flagellated would receive mercy.

The Pope didn’t see anything wrong with it until he learned that these men confessed sins to one another, forgave each other their sins and performed an elaborate version of the last rites. They were creating a sort of fundamentalist lay priesthood that the Pope saw as a threat to his authority. For that, he threatened them of excommunication, which was possibly a fate worse than death in the eyes of Medieval people.

When the winter of 1348 came around, millions were dead but the plague abated for a time. Was it gone for gooe? No. It came back in 1360 and 1369 and 1375. Every time the Black Death came back, mentalities changed. Living through a plague changed people’s beliefs. It changed the relationships between people.

Some thought the world was coming to an end and they were sinners so they might as well do whatever brought them some immediate satisfaction. Faith had been at the center of everybody’s life, but faith had failed everyone. Men had to make their happiness in this lifetime and not simply pray for a better world. This shift in attitude brought about a complete change in mentality where men and women needed to find solutions for their own challenges instead of looking for God for answers.

There is no doubt that pandemics change people’s mindset. The latest pandemic we’ve suffered through thankfully didn’t have anywhere near the same impact as the Black Death. Did it change your outlook on life? It changed mine. Mostly it helped me see how lucky I am. Lucky to be alive in 2021 and not in 1348.

Thank you for your support of Join Us in France and do let me know how the pandemic changed your life on the Addicted to France forum. Merci, au revoir!

 

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