(Shown with Black Death the Giant Microbe and Yersinia Pestis, the Oriental Shorthair; yes, I am indeed that sick.)
I’ve had a fascination with the Black Death, aka Yersinia Pestis, ever since I took several summer courses at a local university as a child. The professor had two main classes; The Middle Ages, which covered everything from Ladyhawke to the Black Death, and Unsolved Mysteries, which covered everything from Jack the Ripper, to the Romanovs, to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. I suppose this says a lot about my childhood, but I digress.
John Kelly writes what I consider to be a very well-written and well-researched book on La Moria Grandissima, when the plague swept throughout Europe and Asia from 1347 to 1352 (not to be confused with Pestis Secunda/Les Mortalite des Enfaunta/”The Children’s Plague”-1361, which also came with smallpox aka “red plague”, Pestis Tertia-1369, 1360-1494 when Plague came on and off to the Netherlands, or The Great Plague of London-1665). This book covers how the Plague most likely started with the marmoset population of Mongolia, moved to Caffa and then swept out through Italy to France to England (detouring to Ireland and Scotland) to Spain to Germany to the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Bavaria, and finally ending 700 miles North of its starting point in Moscow.
“Not the end (of the plague) or even the beginning of the end but only the end of the beginning”- (altered quote of Churchill, that could be used for the plague once it hit Moscow)
Along the way, Kelly covers not only the massive death tolls (experts estimate that up to 60% of Europe died from either the Plague outright, or starvation when their caretakers died/no one would come to help them), but how the epidemic altered the fabric of European life. The plague brought about not only a weakening in the Church’s hold on people (many started believing if priests could not stop the plague, then did God really listen to them any more than average folk? Plus the Church’s habit of blaming the victim/the clothing styles of women didn’t help. Blaming women for everything; gee, I’m so glad that’s stopped), but actually improved peasants’ lives (especially women; Y.Pestis, total feminist), while worsening the landed gentries’, leading directly to the Peasants’ Revolt. The sad thing is that the plague actually in some ways improved life in Europe on the whole; fewer people fighting over the same amount of resources. It’s called the Malthusian theory, or “Gee, I guess Thanos had a point” if you’re into Marvel. He dives into the Flagellant movement that sprung up and swept Europe (skipping England though; the English were not amused), complete with their own hymn:
Come here for penance good and well,
Thus we escape from burning hell
Lucifer’s a wicked wight
His prey he sets with pitch alight
The Flagellants would have a trial penitence of 33 1/3 days, during which they claimed they supped with Christ and conversed with Mary. Their movement started with the “Heavenly Letter”, a 13th century manuscript that an angel allegedly dropped a revised copy of in 1343, in which God threatened death unto anyone who did not follow him; in the revised edition, this was apparently stopped due to intercession by the Holy Mother. So that’s a whole thing right there.
(For Pop Culture examples of flagellation and this time period, I would recommend Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal)
He also covers the execution of the Knights Templar in France with the blessing of Pope Clement VI, mostly due to the French King, Philip the Fair, and the Pope wanting a crack at the riches the Knights had amassed. Clement also presided over (and acquitted) the murder trial of Queen Joanna of Naples & Sicily, the 23 year old accused of stringing up her 28 year old husband with assistance from her lover. Priorities, people, priorities. Which is why it’s no surprise that Post-Plague Europe brought about privatisation of the Church, but also a disillusionment that brought about change such as the Lollards.
The book is a who’s who of famous people and books; Petrarch, Chaucer, Daniel DeFoe, the de Sades (of Marquis fame; they are actually related to Petrarch’s muse “Laura”), John Endicott (who left England from Weymouth to become one of the Founding Fathers of New England, and the longest-serving governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony), Camus’s The Plague, and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. Weymouth is also famous for the fact that it is most likely where the Plague hit England.
Each chapter covers a different country, in the order that Black Death hit them, except for the two chapters dedicated to the Flagellants and the Anti-Semitic Pogroms that sprung up through Europe, respectively. So you get a very decent dive into how it spread, how people handled it country to country, and what the individual death tolls were.
What I also found interesting was the claim that in comparison in scale, the death toll from the Plague was equal to the death tolls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki post-bombings. Or the fact that in the Victorian Era, Y. Pestis swept through India, but due to medical advancements, the death toll was not as high. Nor was it as high in Vietnam, when the plague hit during the Vietnam War. I had to laugh at the opinion that Augustine of Hippo was an earlier Winston Churchill; a great orator with an extremely overbearing mother. Or that The Lost Generation of the Great War, Kelly holds, is the closest in temperament to the survivors of the Black Death; the superficial yet frenzied gaiety, the proneness to debauchery, gluttony, and wild waves of extravagance.
Daily in cities throughout Europe, the quiet would be broken by the calls to bring out the corpses for transport to the plague pits on carts. In most places, people were either interred higgledy-piggledy, or had only a scant measure of dirt separating them. In England however, the dead were frequently placed in caskets and/or shrouds, and were usually separated by age and gender; in the 1980’s an excavation of one plague pit found the children’s bodies grouped together; though all the corpses were placed heads to the West, feet to the East.
I will ding him for two things: One, that the only sources of information about what actually happened are contemporary reports (true), but not to believe the numbers in them as they are vastly inaccurate (which is it?). Two, that the Children’s Crusade came about purely because the children got the brilliant idea all on their own that swords wouldn’t win the Holy Land, children’s good pure hearts would, packed up their kits, and marched off to Constantinople. Really? I mean, really?
I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in European History, or just wants to wallow in an Epidemic of massive proportions that isn’t Covid-19.
Bonus Fact:
Marchione di Coppo Stefani had what has to be one of the sickest, yet greatest descriptions of plague pits I have ever read: “(the dead) are layer upon layer just like one puts layers of cheese in lasagna.”
(“The Dance of Death” a popular post-Plague motif)
The life we lead is a sleep; whatever we do, dreams. Only death breaks the sleep and wakes us. I wish I could have woken before this.- Petrarch