All Things Medieval

As the farming situation slowly stabilized in the next century, the plague kept returning to clear out surplus workers. Probably, in every year until the 1600s, someone in Europe had bubonic plague; regional outbreaks occurred without becoming continent-wide events. Other illnesses and weather-related famines took their toll as always.

If Europe had been over-populated for its level of development in 1300, it no longer was. Its level of development sped up after 1400, too. More iron production, more coal mining; more metals of other kinds, more wind and water powered mills; more specialized crafts, more machines to spin, weave and carve; more specialized land use, better crop hybrids. The continent did not again reach a point of feeling like it could not feed its people (barring weather-related famines) for many centuries.

Additionally, the continent’s population was now spilling into the New World. From 1500 to maybe 1950, there was always a sense of some frontier where restless surplus men could go if they weren’t fit for a ladder-climbing traditional rat-race work environment at home. The very existence of a frontier shaped Europe’s mentality, and subsequently, America’s and Australia’s.

People tended to have big families. I want to talk more about this in other ways in future essays, but for now, let’s just look at it economically. There was never a question of five sons growing up and finding no work. (Except for local, temporary downturns, which still happened.) They could go to sea, or emigrate, or head into the city to get job training. If parents could feed ten children, they could feel confident that all ten would find places in the economy.

When the economy is expanding but there are still serious mortality threats, people’s philosophical attitude to individual life is “it is precious.” Each person matters and can fill out the place the world has for him.

This idea became a bedrock notion of Western society. It shaped medicine, farming, education, social class change, and religion. I’ll pick up another thread of life after the Black Death next, but we’ll find that other topics, too, eventually connect to the same idea.

We know a great deal about the 14th century plague because paper had been invented and in many places, especially around the Mediterranean, was widely available. People wrote letters and copyists made textbooks, but there was so much paper that men began to keep diaries for their own use. From letters and diaries, and also from sermons that were written down, we know a lot about how culture began to change when the infection subsided.

When all the bodies were buried and grass grew over the graves, the memory of such a surfeit of death remained the controlling principle in people’s life decisions. There were three immediate effects.

The first year after the plague subsided, the birth rate was unusually high, even for the smaller number of surviving women. There are some signs that more twins than usual were born. I’m put in mind of The Shire after Galadriel’s dust has blown out over the lands, when hobbit children were born as twins and with especially curly hair. But there was no magic.

We don’t have proof that there were many twins, unless someone’s PhD research has turned it up by examining birth records. If there were more twins, the explanation may be in our unconscious animal natures. When mice, rats and rabbits are overcrowded, they stop having large litters and some females stop having babies entirely. The animals aren’t calculating survival numbers; their endocrine systems react to signals that we can’t quantify yet. What if something like that was happening? People, as smart as they are, still have animal natures and pick up chemical signals that we can’t yet identify. Maybe the severe loss of life signaled unconsciously for higher fertility.

The other changes were more conscious. Traumatized society turned to or away from religion in more dramatic ways than ever before. Until now, the basic idea had been that monasteries took care of holiness so that the average man could be no more than averagely righteous. This wasn’t good enough now. People began to ask questions about where the soul went after death. Many of the dead hadn’t been properly given last rites or burial prayers. This couldn’t mean they were all in hell, could it? People wanted to find their own holiness. We can find the earliest groping toward what became the Reformation here, as people wondered if it might not be better to read the Bible for themselves. In Italy, some people began to have small home Bible studies.

To the opposite pole, other people ditched religion entirely. It had failed them; its promises were void. What good did fast days and saints’ relics do during the plague? None at all. In fact, they believed that the irreligious sometimes survived better. Heavy drinking and eating may have “balanced the humors” of the body, even if prohibited by religion. Sexual mores followed quickly. The survivors wanted to make up for lost time, and as mentioned before, they may have been responding to hormone signals to replace population.

Writers noticed that young people were behaving shamelessly. Girls dressed with no modesty and stayed out till all hours with young men. They drank and sang, they paid no attention to their family’s reputation. They got married while pregnant (probably with twins).

Another factor here was that modesty no longer made sense. People had seen every body part exposed many times during the plague. What did it matter if cloth covered more or less of the body? Who hadn’t seen a dozen penises on sick people or corpses, and bared breasts in just about any circumstance at home or on the street? Who hadn’t seen legs and arms, once beautiful and sexy, then wasted and covered with flies? Art no longer beautified death; expensive stone effigies began to show gross corpses, not people in robes. Skeletons danced like drunken men across the landscape, urging everyone to eat drink and be merry, then die: ready or not!

Because the plague had such a low rate of recovery and high speed of infection, it disrupted towns and cites more than past epidemics. Cities varied in how well they coped.

Probably the best-organized city in Europe was Venice. Venice, born in swampy islands of the Adriatic Sea, could never count on an easy life. No food was grown there; all had to be shipped in. Stone buildings were impossible on the soft ground until thousands of long logs were pounded into the ocean bed to form an artificial platform. The harbor was artificial, too, built as a planned defensive and manufacturing hub. Venice had three sources of income, all of which required intense social cooperation and planning. They made salt in the marshes along the mainland and carried a lot of other cities’ goods in their ships. They learned the secrets of fine glass from Constantinople and set up a secretive factory on a nearby island, on Willy Wonka’s model: nobody came and nobody left, except for those permitted to ship the finished glass out and the supplies in. The ruler of Venice, the Doge, had more power than other rulers of his time, and he even employed a modern spy network to root out possible infiltrators or traitors.

All of this helped Venice when the plague struck. Their ferry and canal boat services suffered many staff losses, but boats never stopped picking up garbage and corpses. The ferries to the mainland, now often for burials, never failed. The city had learned rigid discipline in order to survive, and that discipline helped them survive again. The death rate from the plague itself was just as high as anywhere else, but there were fewer victims of abandonment and neglect.

Some other cities in Italy fell apart completely, and London and Paris faced the same problems. Italy, a direct heir of Roman legal traditions, used a lot of notaries to draft and certify contracts including wills. Italian notaries were called to death beds to take dictation, with witnesses nearby to put their seals to the document. But during the plague, by the next day, notaries would find that the witnesses had died and the executor was sick; the heirs died before there was time to write a new will, and then the notary died. It was extremely difficult to keep accurate records, and at the height of the plague, death records can’t be considered accurate. We can assume that Venetian notaries kept plugging away, but in other cities, things began to fall apart.

In Florence, as in London and Paris, city services stopped. Officials left their posts and fled into the countryside (this had been a custom in Roman times too). As mentioned before, families sometimes locked a sick person in with a pitcher of water, refusing to come near again or even leaving the house so as not to see the end. But these measures weren’t enough to save them; Bocaccio reported seeing a dead man’s blanket in the street, nosed at by two wandering pigs, and within eight hours, the pigs were both dead. People, too, died as they were fleeing, abandoning or neglecting their duties.

City systems broke down. Bodies went unburied. They piled up in the streets, where pigs and dogs could molest them (and then die). They piled up near cemeteries where the land had been filled as deep as they could dig. Priests and bishops were afraid to go out and consecrate new fields for burial, or they were dead too. Whole monasteries collapsed with few or no survivors. Entire schools died.

If these problems had been severe for only a few weeks, society would have recovered. But the peak of the plague lasted as long as six months and more. It seemed like the end of the world to the suffering. Some of them decided that morality was a waste of time, so they ate and drank anything they could find. Some of them broke into houses to raid the pantries and party in someone else’s kitchen. They looted the houses of the dead. They drank to excess, to see if that would balance the body’s humors and save lives. I’m pretty sure it didn’t. They, too, died.

The plague’s visitation in each place lasted for about a year; the first cities struck down were starting to see no new cases, a year later. But it took a full three years for the disease to work its way through all of Europe. Italy was in recovery before Germany began to suffer.

It’s significant that Germany was affected last, because people’s coping strategies changed as time went on, and their subcultural ways were already different. Before we discuss Germany’s hysterical response, we have to see what had come before.

The plague began in Sicily, Marseille and Genoa. We have very detailed records from Italy, France and England; we have fewer records from Spain and Germany. Here is a general plot of the infectious progress:

November, 1347: Constantinople, Messina, Marseille, Genoa
January, 1348: Avignon (France); Venice (Italian island); Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, across the sea from Venice)
March, 1348: Spain; Florence, Italy (disease moves inland)
June, 1348: Paris, France
August, 1348: Rome, Italy (more inland progression); coast of England
September, 1348: spreading in France and Spain
November, 1348: London, England

By this time, as the plague grew severe in London, Genoa and Marseille were seeing no new cases. Each month that the plague grew worse in the north, the Mediterranean’s health improved. But when the plague struck in the north, they didn’t yet know that it would only be a year to hold on; that’s hindsight at work. So by 1349, the northern Baltic regions, and inland on Europe’s rivers, were just beginning to catch the infection but had heard all about just how terrible it was. They were terrified.

April, 1349: Norway
June, 1349: Sweden; Bavaria and Vienna
August, 1349: Poland
January, 1350: Scotland, Ireland

1349 was the calamitous year for central Europe. The plague was still at peak in London and Paris, and now each German city was holding its breath awaiting its first case. This is the period when the Flagellants began to pilgrimage around Flanders and nearby, flogging themselves to bleeding and crying out for God’s mercy. Europe completely despaired. They were only starting to see that Italy was doing better, so the news didn’t cheer them at all.

The emotional trauma of a four year period of calamitous sickness, even if not every region was in the same straits at all times, changed Europe’s culture. By 1351, the worst was over. Some regions had been touched lightly, like the hills of Ireland, but most had lost between 30 and 60% of their population.

Frankly, they didn’t know what to do. First, they didn’t know that a historic plague was starting; it could have been a smaller epidemic of the sort that passed through every few years. So they began by not altering their routines and hoping for the best.

They did sick care for family members until many of them started panicking. Then they abandoned the sick, sometimes leaving them with a pitcher of water and promises, locking the door and not coming back until it was over. Survivors who wrote about the terrible time recalled instances of abandoned husbands, wives, and young children.

Nobody really thought about quarantining the sick, but a few healthy people tried their own quarantine. One family in Italy filled the house with supplies and then locked the doors and sealed the windows. They just didn’t come out for several months, and they survived. The rich fled into the country, assuming that the plague would not follow them there. They felt safer in the hills, where the air was cleaner and cooler. Of course, if this strategy worked, it was only because it acted as quarantine. The plague spread inland and wiped out country villages like anyone else.

The Pope stayed indoors next to a hot fire as the infection passed by in 1347 and 1348. It worked; the Pope survived. Maybe it was too hot for the fleas.

Natural selection pushed those with natural immunity into posts of public service, including grave digging. Communities could hardly keep up with the pace of grave digging, and at the peak of the infection they resorted to mass graves. Bodies were layered with sand between them, “like lasagna,” one Italian commented. Grave diggers didn’t seem to get sick, so with flawless post hoc reasoning, some people concluded that breathing the smell of the dead caused immunity. Parties of terrified citizens would go out to the burial grounds and deeply breathe the foul air of the stacked corpses.

By 1349, as the plague roared into Northern Europe, people tried public confession of sin. Flagellants vowed to go on pilgrimage (locally) for 40 days, walking in a group and lashing themselves with whips in each town center to show public sorrow for sin. They hoped that God’s punishment could be turned away.

The plague went into Muslim areas of Spain, and we have records that religious fatalism wasn’t very helpful. Doctors who tried too hard to save patients might be flogged for thwarting God’s will. So some people really did nothing when the plague arrived. They waited it out and cleaned up afterward. Christians believed it was meritorious to save the sick, perhaps modeling their efforts after their cult of the saints. They just didn’t know how. It would take several more visitations of the Bubonic Plague before anyone began to notice isolation and masks helped.

There’s no special reason why the plague that began in 1347 is called the Black Death. It wasn’t called so at the time; the nickname seems to have begun several centuries later, perhaps as a mistranslation. When survivors looked back on those dreadful three years, they called it the Great Mortality.

Like all plagues of the ancient world, the infection made several body systems break down at once. The most visible sign of the infection was the “bubo,” an egg-shaped swelling in the lymph nodes. We named it Bubonic Plague for these painful outbreaks. There were some survivors of the infection, including a few who lanced and drained their buboes. The buboes were ugly but not the most virulent part of the disease.

Bubonic Plague is famous for being spread by rat fleas; this is true, but it seems to have been more strictly true of later outbreaks, including one in the late 19th century when the bacterium was isolated and named Yersinia pestis. In later outbreaks, such as in India, people saw many dead rats. Dead rats are missing from medieval accounts, although other dead animals, such as pigs and cattle, are described. There may have been dead rats, but they were not dying in conspicuous enough numbers.

Yersinia pestis originated in the Central Asian marmot population: the woodchucks of the Silk Road. Global cooling may have flushed them out of northern plains, closer to the Silk Road, and greater merchant traffic meant that more unwary strangers were skinning and eating them—and picking up their fleas. But there’s no way to account for the way Y. pestis spread in Europe unless fleas on human hosts began to carry it. Not only did this zoonotic disease jump from marmots to humans, it moved from marmot/rat fleas to human fleas. It may also have gone airborne for a while. It appears to have mutated several times in the process.

The infection spread along the Silk Road in both directions; it devastated India and China, although Europe was not aware. It reached the Tatars as they laid siege to a Genoese colony on the Black Sea; as they grew desperate, the besiegers catapulted dead bodies over the city wall, spreading infection. Survivors ran to their remaining ships and put out to sea, hoping to escape to other Genoese colonies. But each time they tried to land, the harbor workers saw that they had plague and drove them off. Unfortunately, there was just enough contact each time that every Genoese colony took infection. By the time the remaining ships with the last dying people reached Marseille and Genoa, the infection had begun to take off in all of these port towns. Genoa heard of it in advance and drove off the ships with flaming arrows. The plague still spread (perhaps even from the messengers who brought warning).

Like a newspaper lit in several places, the Mediterranean coast spread the infection from town to village and from boat to boat. Within two months, most port towns had the plague.