Deep Dive Into Prior Pandemics: Part 3, the Black Plague in 1347-1351

 

How a Pandemic Caused Economic, Political, Social, and Religious Upheaval in France

The Black Death reached Italy's shores at the Messina port in October 1347.  

The Genoese ship had stopped previously in a port on the Black Sea.  They offloaded trade goods and a devastating infection.  

The diseased sailors showed strange black swellings about the size of an egg or an apple in the armpits and groin.  The swellings oozed blood and pus and were followed by spreading boils and black blotches on the skin from internal bleeding.  The sick suffered sever pain and died quickly within five days of the first symptoms. As the disease spread, other symptoms of continuous fever and spitting of blood appeared instead of the swellings or buboes.  These victims coughed ans sweated heavily and died even more quickly, within three days or less, sometimes in 24 hours.  In both types everything that issued from the body -- breath, sweat, blood from the buboes and lungs, bloody urine, and blood=blackened excrement -- smelled foul.  Depression and despair accompanied the physical symptoms, and before the end "death is seen seated on the face." 

Chapter 5 of Barbara W. Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (Random House 1978) opens with this grim description of a highly destructive time in European history.  The fall out from the plague lasted over 100 years in France, England, and Italy.  

The Contagion

Bubonic plague created the swellings. The pneumonic variety caused the respiratory distress.  With both present, the infection moved swiftly through the population with high rates of death.  People at the time had no knowledge of germ theory, the source of the contagion, or any way to treat it.  People could go to bed well and be dead before dawn. 

Some trace this outbreak to central Asia, then along the caravan routes to India and Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, Asia Minor, and then to Europe by 1346. 

In January 1348, the pathogen infected France through its Marseilles port. Travelling coasts and rivers aboard ships and boats, it quickly spread.  It reached Rome and Florence (with Florence losing 3/5 to 4/5 of its people) by May. It reached Bordeaux and Paris (with Paris reporting 800 deaths a day) during the summer.  By August, it reached southern England, Switzerland, and eastern Hungary.   It would rage during the summer and abate during the winter. By mid-1350, it was done with Europe, presumably killing anyone susceptible to it. 

The Death Toll

In some places it wiped out the entire population.  In other places, only one fifth of the population died.  Modern epidemiologists estimate that the pathogen killed 1/3 of the world's population or about 23 million people.  Fifty percent of the population of Paris perished.  No accurate records exist.  

When graveyards filled with the dead, officials created mass burial pits.  Some people flung bodies into adjacent rivers or abandoned them outside homes allowing them to putrefy.  Many reported that the "sick [died] too fast for the living to bury." Id. at 100. In Catholic France, people died without last rites and were buried without prayers. 

Villages, monasteries, and prisons, once emptied of inhabitants by the pathogen, "sank back into the wilderness and disappeared from the map altogether, leaving only a grass covered ghostly outline to show where mortals once had lived."  Id. at 101.  Young persons died at higher rates than the old. Women seemed more vulnerable than men, "perhaps because, being more homebound, they were more exposed to fleas." Even, livestock and pets caught the contagion and died.  Id. at 105-06. 

The Impact

It left behind an economy dependent on laborers (and consumers) who no longer existed. As a result,

• Businesses went bankrupt; 
• Crops failed or were never planted leading to food scarcity; 
• The area of cultivated land shrank; 
• Livestock roamed untended; 
• The prices of commodities increased; 
• Workers rebelled, seeking higher wages, as their bargaining leverage increased; 
• The moneyed classes extinguished these rebellions with punitive laws and violence; 
• A cathedral remained uncompleted as skilled masons disappeared; 
• The creation of art diminished as painters and authors died; 
• Sewage accumulated on city streets as the plague felled street cleaners; 
• Not enough priests remained to provide educational services; 
• Taxable assets diminished causing rulers to raise the rate of taxation, engendering great resentment; 
• Survivors claimed the assets of the perished; 
• Rogues married orphans to gain their property;  
• Manufactured goods became scarce and prices soared; 
• The Catholic Church emerged as richer, but more unpopular; and 
• Governmental officials perished leaving behind general chaos.

Fearful people did little to help each other, including priests, lawyers, and doctors. Parents and children deserted each other. Spouses died alone. Officials tried to counteract the fear by banning funeral bells, prohibiting criers' announcements of deaths, and imposing fines for wearing mourning clothes. 

The rich fled to places free of infection, but royals still succumbed.  The poor died at higher rates in the crowded, unsanitary slums.  

Signs of Ignorance

Without knowing the cause of the contagion, the sense of horror prevailed. No one suspected the bite of a small black rat or of the flea, perhaps because these pests were ubiquitous.  

A scientist some 500 years later would discover the pathogen, Pasturella pestis, a rod-shaped bacteria.  

Instead, people blamed poisoned air or "miasmas," tempests, sheets of fire, blasts of wind, earthquakes, mass fish die-offs, the triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius, Divine punishment, and demons.  Christians used the plague as an excuse to exterminate or expel Jewish people and confiscate their property based on allegations that they had poisoned well waters.

Doctors had few effective treatments. They included burning substances to purify the air, quarantine and social isolation, bland diets, bleeding, purging with laxatives or enemas, lancing or cauterization the the pus filled buboes, the application of hot plasters, avoidance of intense emotion, mild exercise, and the draining of any exterior site that created foul air.  Medicines included rare herbs, stag's horn, gold, saffron, or powdered pearls or emeralds.  People sprinkled their floors and their faces with vinegar and rosewater.

The Postscript

By 1350, as this outbreak of the plague drew to a close, people felt exhausted, apprehensive, and gloomy.  It generated self-doubt and perhaps self-disgust.  It marked the "start pf a pervasive presence of Death in art . . . ."  Id. at 132.

The sense of a "vanishing future created a kind of dementia of despair. . . . With so few hands remaining to restore the work of centuries, people felt . . . the world could never again regain its former prosperity."  Id. at 105.

As a result of wars, brigandage, and recurring outbreaks of the plague, the population continued to decline over the next 50 years.  Over the next six decades, the outbreaks of the plague would emerge six times for ten to fifteen years each.  Mortality among children increased in later phases of the pandemic. By the end of the century, the Black Death had reduced the population of Europe by 50 percent. 

The remaining chapters of Tuchman's book explore how this devastating disease created even more suffering as economic, political, social, and religious systems and institutions faced ongoing upheaval.

Take-Aways:

The suffering and superstition of people living in the 14th century stuck with me most.  The author juxtaposes this suffering with the extravagance, arrogance, and privilege of the ruling classes. They continued to seek power through territorial disputes, wars, murders, terrorism, Crusades, asset acquisitions, ruinous taxation, and the blessings of feckless kings and competing popes.  

The last half of the century saw the demise of chivalric behavior and conventions of war. It saw the seeds of the French Revolution, which would wait another 500 years. Tuchman suggests that the Black Death ushered in the modern man by creating a catastrophe that caused people to question any Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. People began to see the possibility of change in the fixed order of relationships that had prevailed until then. Id. at 131.

People will cling to religious explanations and rituals, while others will try to apply prevailing scientific and medical knowledge. 

Finally, human beings seem to have three responses to a pandemic.  First, some part of the population engages in behavior designed to prevent getting the disease.  A second group ignores the warnings and continues to engage in risky behaviors.  A third group seems to accept the inevitability of death and engages in profligate behavior.  They drink, debauch, and spend their assets.  

I found this information -- reinforced by my reading of books on other pandemics -- comforting.  The anti-maskers, declaring COVID-19 a "hoax," are just part of the spectrum of human responses to a biohazard like coronavirus.  I choose a safer response and expect to outlive the latest pandemic with my careful adoption of the precautions suggested by public health officials.  Unlike people living in the 14th century, we know the cause of the disease and scientists are working quickly to develop vaccines and treatments.   With our science-based knowledge, this pandemic will not likely kill 23 million people as did the Black Death, but many people will still suffer, and economic, political, social, and religious institutions will adapt and be forever changed. 

For Part 1 in the series, see here. That post lists the books I've read on pandemics.

For Part 2 of the series, see here.  In it, I discuss the smallpox epidemic in the US during the Revolutionary War. 

For my blog post about the Spanish flu pandemic, see here.