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I say, then, that the years
of the fruitful Incarnation of the Son of God had attained
to the number of one thousand three hundred and forty-eight,
when into the notable city of Florence, fair over every
other of Italy, there came to death-dealing pestilence,
which, through the operation of the heavenly bodies or of
our own iniquitous doings, being sent down upon mankind for
our correction by the just wrath of God, had some years
before appeared in the parts of the East and after having
bereft these latter of an innumerable number of inhabitants,
extending without cease from one place to another, had now
unhappily spread towards the West.
---Giovanni Boccaccio,
Decameron
Imagine, that a mere five
days after having read this that all of your best friends
have succumbed to an illness which cannot be explained.
Imagine also, that all the residents who live on your street
have died under similar circumstances in the same amount of
time. If you can conceive of such a dreaded act occurring
within your experience than you may have some glimpse into
the mindset of the mid-14th century European who was
unfortunate enough to have experienced the BLACK DEATH.
In October 1347, twelve
Genoese trading ships put into the harbor at Messina in
Sicily. The ships had come from the Black Sea where the
Genoese had several important trading posts. The ships
contained rather strange cargo: dead or dying sailors showed
strange black swellings about the size of an egg located in
their groins and armpits. These swellings oozed blood and
pus. Those who suffered did so with extreme pain and were
usually dead within a few days. The victims coughed and
sweat heavily. Everything that issued from their body --
sweat, blood, breath, urine, and excrement -- smelled foul.
The disease was bubonic
plague and it came in two forms. In cases of infection of
the blood stream, boils and internal bleeding were the
result. In this guise the plague spread by physical contact.
In the pneumonic phase, the plague was spread by respiration
(coughing, sneezing, breathing). The plague was deadly -- a
person could go to sleep at night feeling fine and be dead
by morning. In other instances, a doctor could catch the
illness from one of his patients and die before the patient.
The Italian poet, GIOVANNI
BOCCACCIO (1313-1375) has left us a chilling account of the
plague as it struck Florence in 1348. His Decameron
relates the story of seven ladies and three gentlemen who
leave the city for their country villa for a period of ten
days. They each take turns telling stories, one hundred in
all, in the garden. Many of these are licentious while
others are full of pathos and a poetical fancy. The backdrop
of the first story is the plague and it is here Boccaccio
relates that:
in men and women alike
there appeared, at the beginning of the malady, certain
swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits, whereof
some waxed 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.
Rumors of a plague
supposedly arising in China and spreading through India,
Persia, Syria and Egypt had reached Europe in 1346. But no
one paid any attention. Of course, there have been plagues
throughout European history. Homer relates one such plague
in the Iliad. Athens was struck in the 5th century,
Arabia in the sixth and seventh centuries, and more
recently, a plague in India raged from 1892 to 1910.
By January 1348, the plague
had penetrated France by way of Marseilles and North Africa
by way of Tunis. Both Marseilles and Tunis are port towns.
The plague then spread west to Spain and and North to
central France by March. By May, the plague entered Rome and
Florence. In June, the plague had moved to Paris, Bordeaux,
Lyon and London. Switzerland and Hungary fell victim in
July. JEAN DE VENETTE, a French friar, has left us a
chronicle about the progress of the plague as it moved
through Europe.
In any given period, the
plague accomplished its work in three to six months and then
faded from view. The plague came and went like a tornado --
its appearance and movement was totally unpredictable. In
northern cities, the plague lay dormant in winter and then
reappeared the following spring. In 1349, the plague
reappeared at Paris and eventually spread to Holland,
Scotland and Ireland. In Norway, a ghost shipped drifted
offshore for months before it ran aground with its cargo of
death. By the end of 1349, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Iceland
and Greenland felt the full effects of the plague. The
plague left nearly as quickly as it had appeared. By
mid-1350, the plague had completed its deed across the
continent of Europe.
In enclosed places like
monasteries, nunneries and prisons, the infection of one
person usually meant the infection of all. Of one hundred
and forty Dominican friars at Montpellier, only one man
survived. Watching family and friends suffer and succumb to
violent deaths, men could not help but wonder whether this
pestilence had been sent to exterminate all sinners. After
all, hadn't this happened once before?
By the middle of the 14th
century, the largest cities of Europe were Paris, Florence,
Venice, and Genoa. These were cities with populations in
excess of 100,000 people. London, Ghent, Milan, Bologna,
Rome, Naples, and Cologne all had around 50,000 people.
Smaller cities such as Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseilles,
Barcelona, Seville, and Toledo contain 20 to 50,000 souls.
The plague raged through all these cities killing anywhere
between thirty and sixty percent. To make matters worse, in
January 1348 -- remember, this is the month the plague first
appeared on the continent -- a serious earthquake hit an
area between Naples and Venice. Houses and churches
collapsed, villages were destroyed, and foul odors emanated
from the earth.
The death rate from the
plague was erratic and ranged from twenty percent to one
hundred percent. For the area extending from India to
Iceland, it can be assumed that between thirty and
thirty-five percent of Europe's population disappeared in
the three years between 1347 and 1350. This meant about 20
million deaths out of an estimated population of 70 million
(see MAP).
Rich or poor, young or old,
fit or ill, man or woman -- the plague made no distinction
when it came to choosing its victims. The plague, like a
tornado, will strike when and where it wants. For every case
in which a healthy child was the only survivor of a family
of twelve there are other cases in which the family elder
was the only survivor. The plague could take out an entire
side of one street or the entire street or just one house on
the street. It oftentimes happened that a victim would catch
the plague but recover. On the other hand, most people who
caught the plague were dead within a few days. "To the cure
of these maladies," wrote Boccaccio:
neither counsel of
physician nor virtue of any medicine appeared to avail or
profit aught. . . . Not only did few recover thereof, but
well-nigh all died within the third day from the appearance
of the aforesaid signs, this one sooner and that one later,
and for the most part, without fever or other complication.
. . . The mischief was even greater; for not only did
converse and consortion with the sick give to the sound
infection or cause of common death, but the mere touching of
the clothes . . . appeared of itself to communicate the
malady to the toucher.
Of this my own eyes had one
day, among others, experienced in this way; to wit, that the
rags of a poor man who had died of the plague, being cast
out into the public way, two hogs came upon them and having
first, after their wont, rooted among them with their
snouts, took them in their mouths and tossed them about
their jaws; then, in a little while, after turning round and
round, they both, as if they had taken poison, fell down
dead upon the rags with which they had in an ill hour
intermeddled.
Trying to determine the
number of people who died with any accuracy is difficult
given the status of record-keeping at the time. However,
historians do have some records at their disposal which shed
some light on the numbers of people who met this awful fate.
In Avignon, 400 people died daily over a period of three
months (36,000 out of a population of 50,000). A single
graveyard received more than 11,000 corpses in six weeks. In
a three month period in 1349, 800 people died daily in
Paris, 500 daily in Pisa, and 600 daily in Vienna. In
Frankfurt 2,000 people died over a period of ten weeks in
1349 and in that same period 12,000 lost their lives in
Erfurt. Marchione di Coppo Stefani, who wrote his
Florentine Chronicle in the late 1370s, related that:
Now it was ordered by the
bishop and the Lords [of the city government] that they
should formally inquire as to how many died in Florence.
When it was seen at the beginning of October that no more
persons were dying of the pestilence, they found that among
males, females, children and adults, 96,000 died between
March and October
[1348].
Amid the accumulating death
and fear of contagion, people died without being
administered the last rites, in other words, they were
buried without prayer. Such an act terrified other victims
since there seemed to be nothing worse in the Age of Faith
than to be buried improperly.
How did men and women react
to the plague? What was their response? You would expect
those who remained to join together for mutual support. What
happened was the exact opposite. The plague forced people to
run from one another. Lawyers refused to witness wills,
doctors refused to help the sick, priests did not hear
confessions, parents deserted children, and husbands
deserted their wives. In the words of the Pope's physician,
"charity was dead." Boccaccio tells us that "various fears
and notions were begotten in those who remained alive . . .
namely, to shun and flee from the sick and all that
pertained to them, and thus doing, each thought to secure
immunity for himself."
In some villages it was
reported that several villagers danced to drums and
trumpets. They believed that after seeing their family,
friends, neighbors and perhaps their priest die each day
that in order to remain immune, they must enjoy themselves.
"They lived remotely from every other," recorded Boccaccio,
taking refuge and shutting
themselves up in those houses where none were sick and where
living was best; and there, partaking very temperately of
the most delicate viands and the finest wines and eschewing
all incontinence, they abode with music and other such
diversions as they might have, never allowing themselves to
speak with any, nor choosing to hear any news from without
of death or the sick.
Flight from infected areas
was the most basic response, especially among those who
could afford to flee. The idea was simple enough -- remove
yourself from those areas which were affected. This usually
meant fleeing from the city to the countryside, as did the
wealthy storytellers in Boccaccio's Decameron. But
things could be just as bad in the countryside. Peasants
fell dead in their homes, on the roads and in the fields.
Wheat was left unharvested, and oxen, sheep, cows, goats,
pigs and chickens ran wild, and according to most
contemporary accounts, they too fell victim to the plague.
English sheep -- the primary provider of wool to Europe --
died in great numbers. One report specified that five
thousand lay dead in one field. All this led to a sense of a
vanishing future and created what historians have referred
to as a "dementia of despair." One German observer wrote
that "men and women wandered around as if mad and let their
cattle stray because no one had any inclination to concern
themselves about the future."
General ignorance about the
causes of the plague did nothing to dispel fear and terror.
The carriers of the plague -- rats and fleas -- were not
suspected for one very simple reason: rats and fleas were
common and familiar to the 14th century. Fleas are not
mentioned in the records of the plague and rats only
incidentally. The actual plague bacillus, Yersina pestis,
was not discovered until the middle of the 19th century, 500
years too late! Living in the stomach of the flea or in the
bloodstream of the rat, the bacillus was transferred to
humans by the bite of either the flea or the rat. The
plague's usual form of transportation was the rattus
rattus, the small medieval black rat that was a
constant companion of sailor's on board sailing vessels. The
death of the rat caused the relocation of the flea, and if
its next host just happened to be a human, then contagion
was the result.
Medieval men and women were
quite resourceful, however, in determining the cause of the
plague. The earthquake of 1348 was blamed for corrupting the
air with foul odors, thus precipitating the plague. The
alignment of the planets was specified as yet another cause:
Saturn, Jupiter and Mars aligned in the 40th degree of
Aquarius on March 20, 1345.
For almost everyone, the
plague signified the wrath of God. A plague so sweeping and
unforgiving could only be the work of some species of Divine
punishment upon mankind for its sins. Popes led processions
lasting three days and which were attended by two thousand
followers, according to some accounts. The people prayed,
wept, gnashed their teeth, pulled their hair, imploring the
mercy of the Virgin Mary. The majority of people were
convinced that the plague was certainly the work of God. And
in September 1348, the Pope agreed. In a papal edict he
specifically referred to "this pestilence with which God is
affecting the Christian people."
The widespread acceptance
of this view created an enormous sense of collective guilt.
If the plague had descended upon mankind as a form of divine
punishment, then the sins which created it must have been
terrible: greed, usury, worldliness, adultery, blasphemy,
falsehood, heresy, luxury, irreligion, fornication, sloth
and laziness. Beneath all of this was the matrix of
Christianity itself -- nothing escaped the psychological and
social control of the Church. Even the boiling of an egg was
timed according to the time it took to say a prayer.
Efforts to cope with the
plague were fruitless. Both the treatment and prevention
offered little in the way of immunity, cure or hope. The
physician's primary effort was to burn aromatic herbs and
purify the air. Their role was to relieve the patient since
each victim's fate was in the hands of God alone. Victims of
the plague were treated by blood-letting, purging with
laxatives and the lancing of the plague-boils. Victims were
washed in vinegar or rose water, given bland diets and told
to avoid excitement. Regardless, if a patient suddenly
recovered, his recovery owed less to the care of the
physician that it did to luck.
People looked for answers.
They needed answers to questions: where did the plague come
from? why is it here? why am I alive? A scapegoat was needed
since anger and frustration had to be focused. And Europe
was full of scapegoats. On charges that they had poisoned
the water with the "intent to kill and destroy all of
Christendom," the extermination of European Jews began in
the spring of 1348. Jews from Narbonne and Carcassone in
France, were dragged from their homes and thrown into
bonfires. It was commonly accepted that the plague was God's
punishment. But anger could not be directed toward God. The
Jew, as the eternal stranger in Christian Europe, was the
most obvious target. He was the outsider who willingly
separated himself from the Christian world.
During the epidemic of
1320-1321, hundreds of lepers died and it was believed that
the Jews had caused the deaths of these unfortunate souls.
When the plague came twenty-five years later, the Jews were
once again the target of blame. Why did this occur?
According to the Church, the Jews had rejected Jesus as
their savior -- they refused to accept the Gospel in place
of Mosaic law. In the early 4th century, the Church denied
Jews their civil rights. But the Jews maintained a role in
medieval society as moneylenders. They were excluded from
all crafts and trades. There was also the belief that Jews
often performed the ritual murder of Christians, in order to
re-enact the Crucifixion.
Throughout the 13th and
14th centuries the Church issued laws that isolated the
European Jew. Jews could not own Christian servants, could
not intermarry and could not build new synagogues. They
were, furthermore, barred from weaving, mining,
metalworking, shoemaking, baking, milling and carpentry. At
the 4th Lateran Council of 1215, Pope Innocent III forced
the Jews to wear a yellow badge in the shape of a coin. By
the following century, other outcasts such as Muslims and
prostitutes were also forced to wear a similar badge. The
Inquisition stepped in and in Savoy in September 1348, the
first trial was held against the Jews. Their property was
confiscated while they remained in jail. Confessions were
obtained by torture and eleven Jews were burned at the
stake. At Basle in Switzerland (January 9, 1349), several
hundred Jews were burned alive in a house specially
constructed for this purpose. A decree was passed that
ordered that no Jew could settle in Basle for two hundred
years. In February 1349, the Jews of Strasburg, numbering
two thousand, were taken to the burial ground and burned at
the stake en masse. And, in early 1349, at Mainz in Germany,
Jews took the initiative and killed two hundred Christians.
The Christian revenge was horrible -- 12,000 Jews were
slaughtered.
When the Black Death
subsided in 1351, so too did the persecution of the European
Jew. But for a year or two following the appearance of the
plague, the massacre of Jews was exceptional in its extent
and ferocity. Coupled with the plague, the persecution of
the Jews nearly wiped out entire communities. In all, sixty
large and 150 smaller Jewish communities were exterminated.
Between 1347 and 1351, there were recorded more than 350
massacres which ultimately led to permanent shifts of the
Jewish population into Poland and Lithuania. It is a curious
comment on human nature that European men and women, already
overwhelmed by one of the greatest natural calamities,
should seek to rectify the situation with their own
atrocities.
One of the more interesting
and bizarre episodes of the Black Death was the FLAGELLANT
MOVEMENT. In 1348, processions of men, initially
well-organized, walked two by two, chanting their Pater
Nosters and Ave Marias, passed through
Austria, Hungary, Germany, Bohemia, the Low Countries and
Picardy, summoning the townspeople to the marketplace. At
the head of the procession was the Master and his two
lieutenants who carried banners of purple velvet and cloth
of gold. The marchers were silent, their heads and faces
hidden, and their eyes were fixed on the ground before them.
Word would travel ahead and the news of the procession
usually brought out all the townspeople. The church bells
would ring and announce their arrival.
The marchers, once they had
arrived, would strip to the waist and form a large circle.
The flagellants marched around the perimeter of the circle
and at the order of the Master, would throw themselves to
the ground. The Master walked among them, beating those who
had committed crimes or who had violated the discipline of
the Brotherhood. Following this ceremony, the collective
flagellation took place. Each brother carried a heavy
leather thong, tipped with metal studs. With this they began
to beat themselves and others. Three Brethren acted as
cheerleaders while the Master prayed for God's mercy on all
sinners. During the ceremony, each Brother tried to outdo
the next in suffering. Meanwhile, the townspeople looked on
in amazement -- most quaked, sobbed and groaned in sympathy.
The public ceremony was repeated twice a day and once at
night for a period of thirty-three and a half days!
The Flagellant Movement was
well-regulated and sternly disciplined. New entrants (mostly
laymen and unbeneficed clergy) had to make as confession of
all sins since the age of seven and then flagellate
themselves for thirty-three and a half days. Each member
also vowed never to bathe, shave, sleep in a bed, change
their clothing or converse in any way with members of the
opposite sex. If that wasn't enough, they also had to pay a
small fee! The payment of a fee tells us that membership in
the Brethren was not for everyone. Excluded were those
people who could not afford to pay a fee, therefore, the
Brethren was clearly an exclusive organization and
membership to the poor was out of the question.
The public usually welcomed
the procession of flagellants into their villages and towns
since it served as a major event in the otherwise drab life
of the peasant. But the flagellants also served as an
occasion for celebration. Those who attended the processions
could work off surplus emotion in a collective fashion.
Although we may tend to laugh at the flagellants and read
them off as lunatics, they did help medieval men and women
cope with the ravages of the plague. After all, taking part
in a procession served as an inexpensive insurance policy
that God would forgive them. "Before the arrival of the
Death," writes historian Malcolm Lambert, "flagellation was
one of the few outlets open to a fear-ridden population;
after it had arrived, the worst could be seen, and there
were practical tasks, such as burying the dead, available to
dampen emotions." (Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements
from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 1992,
p.221.)
By 1349, the flagellant
movement came into conflict with the Church at Rome. This
clash was perhaps inevitable. After all, the Masters were
claiming that they could purge sinners of their sins,
something the Church claimed it could do alone. The German
flagellants began to attack the hierarchy of the Church in
direct fashion. In mid-1349, Pope Clement VI issued a papal
bull denouncing the flagellants as a heretical movement.
The flagellants had formed unauthorized associations,
adopted their own uniforms, and had written their own church
statutes. Numerous princes in France and in Germany began to
prohibit the entrance of the Brotherhood into their
provinces. Masters were burned alive and the flagellants
were denounced by the clergy. By 1350, the flagellant
movement vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared.
It is easy to make fun of
the flagellants as misguided fanatics but in general they
did accomplish something. In the towns they visited they
brought spiritual regeneration for people who needed it.
Suffering the anguish of losing your family and friends in
rapid succession, medieval men and women needed some sort of
mechanism to purge themselves of both guilt and anger, and
the flagellants provided one such path. Adulterers confessed
their sins and thieves returned stolen goods. The
flagellants also provided a kind of diversion for the public
and held out the promise that their pain might bring an end
to the greater suffering of the living victims of the
plague. "We all recognize the late Middle Ages as a period
of popular religious excitement or overexcitement, of
pilgrimages and penitential processions, of mass preaching,
of veneration or relics and adoration of saints, lay piety
and popular mysticism," wrote William Langer in 1958.
"It was apparently also a period of unusual immorality
and shockingly loose living," he continued,
which we must take as the
continuation of the "devil-may-care" attitude of one part of
the population. This the psychologists explain as the
repression of unbearable feelings by accentuating the value
of a diametrically opposed set of feelings and then behaving
as though the latter were the real feelings. But the most
striking feature of the age was an exceptionally strong
sense of guilt and a truly dreadful fear of retribution,
seeking expression in a passionate longing for effective
intercession and in a craving for direct, personal
experience of the Deity, as well as in a corresponding
dissatisfaction with the Church and with the mechanization
of the means of salvation as reflected, for example, in the
traffic of indulgences.
These attitudes, along with
the great interest in astrology, the increased resort to
magic, and the startling spread of witchcraft and Satanism
in the fifteenth century were, according to the precepts of
modern psychology, normal reactions to the sufferings to
which mankind in that period was subjected. |
