The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  The Great Mortality

  EDITORS ’ RECOMMENDATION , SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  “John Kelly’s Great Mortality is timely and welcome. . . . It conveys in excruciating but necessary detail a powerful sense of just how terribly Europe suffered.” —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

  “The images could have come from one of Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmarish paintings of hell: dusty roads with frightened refugees . . . dogs and rats running wild on deserted streets; fields littered with dead bodies. . . . John Kelly gives the reader a ferocious, pictorial account of the horrific ravages of [the] plague.” —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

  “There is a seething vitality here. . . . [The book] leaves an optimistic impression of the human race as a kind of hardy bacteria—at once tiny and fragile but also determined to thrive and very, very hard to erase.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Splendidly written.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “While Kelly combines distinguished scholarship in science, medicine, and European history, other capabilities earn Mortality a place in plague literature with seventeenth and eighteenth century eyewitness accounts, respectively, in Samuel Pepys’s diary and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Kelly meets the need for verisimilitude faced by all serious historians by confronting some of the world’s darkest days as if he were a forensic sleuth who must re-create the ambience of the victims’ world before tracking down their deaths.” —Houston Chronicle

  “A compellingly vivid account. Kelly’s prose moves with brushfire speed—often as exciting as a first-class TV drama-documentary.” —Guardian (London)

  “Kelly is a reliable guide, with a gift for providing racy and vivid background for those who know nothing of the Middle Ages.” —Independent on Sunday (London)

  “Kelly, the author of numerous nonfiction works . . . skillfully draws imaginative word pictures, for instance . . . Dorset is full of ‘brooding Heathcliff vistas.’ The selling of Papal indulgences turns the medieval church into a ‘spiritual Pez dispenser.’” —JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association

  “Kelly’s narrative offers us an intimate exploration of a world falling apart. It’s a world that, sadly, feels a lot like our own in its fears of an impending apocalypse from mysterious forces.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “John Kelly’s Great Mortality is one of those works that proves history can be a wonderful read and not merely a dry recounting of events and dates.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “The Great Mortality makes the pestilence personal, from the royals to the rowdies.” —Associated Press

  “The Great Mortality skillfully draws on eyewitness accounts to construct a journal of the plague years.” —New York Times Book Review

  “A fascinating account of the plague. A frightening reminder of what could happen today.” —Nelson DeMille, Birmingham News

  “The Black Death is history’s best-known pandemic, but until now its full history has not been written. In The Great Mortality, John Kelly gives a human face to the fourteenth-century disaster that claimed seventy-five million lives—a third of the world’s population.” —Oakland Tribune

  “A compelling and bone-chilling account.” —Tampa Tribune

  “Compelling. Explores both the human and scientific dimensions of the tragedy with skill and aplomb.” —Dallas Morning News

  “This sweeping, viscerally exciting book contributes to a literature of perpetual fascination.” —Booklist (starred review)

  “A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe . . . putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Accessible and engrossing.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A compelling and eminently readable portrait.” —Library Journal

  “The Great Mortality is a chilling account of a global siege: public pits, death carts, silent villages, and empty streets.” —Charleston Post and Courier

  “Written with a keen eye for the details of the past, it might also be a warning about our future.” —Jack Weatherford, DeWitt Wallace Professor of Anthropology at Macalester College and author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

  “Rich and evocative . . . written in the tradition of Barbara Tuchman.” —Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone

  The Great Mortality

  An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

  John Kelly

  Copyright

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers.

  P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

  THE GREAT MORTALITY. Copyright © 2005 by John Kelly. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2006.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  Kelly, John.

  The great mortality : an intimate history of the Black Death, the most devastating plague of all time / John Kelly—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-06-000692-7

  1. Black Death—History. I. Title.

  RC172.K445 2005

  614.5'732—dc22

  2004054213

  ISBN-10: 0-06-000693-5 (pbk.)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-06-000693-8 (pbk.)

  ePub Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780062243218

  06 07 08 09 10 ❖/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dedication

  FOR SUZANNE, JONATHAN, AND SOFIYA—

  TO A FUTURE WITHOUT PLAGUE

  Contents

  PRAISE FOR - The Great Mortality

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter One - Oimmeddam

  Chapter Two - “They Are Monsters, Not Men”

  Chapter Three - The Day Before the Day of the Dead

  Chapter Four - Sicilian Autumn

  Chapter Five - Villani’s Last Sentence

  Chapter Six - The Curse of the Grand Master

  Chapter Seven - The New Galenism

  Chapter Eight - “Days of Death Without Sorrow”

  Chapter Nine - Heads to the West, Feet to the East

  Chapter Ten - God’s First Love

  Chapter Eleven - “O Ye of Little Faith”

  Chapter Twelve - “Only the End of the Beginning”

  Afterword - The Plague Deniers

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. - Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Notes

  Credits

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  THIS BOOK BEGAN AS AN INQUIRY INTO THE FUTURE AND ENDED as an investigation of the past.

  Five years ago, when I first began thinking about writing a book on the plague, I had in min
d plague in the generic sense of a major outbreak of epidemic disease, and I was looking ahead to the twenty-first century, not backward toward the fourteenth. From an earlier book on experimental medicine, Three on the Edge: The Story of Ordinary Families in Search of a Medical Miracle, I had gotten a glimpse of the power of unfettered pandemic disease. One of the people I wrote about was an AIDS patient. During the two years I followed him in the early 1990s—a time when effective HIV treatments were rare—the man lost a former lover, three friends, and a colleague at work. A hallmark of pandemic disease is its ability to destroy worlds, not just individuals, but it was one thing to know that, quite another to witness it.

  In 1995, the year I finished the book, Jonathan Mann, a professor at the Harvard University School of Public Health, warned that AIDS was the beginning of a frightening new era. “The history of our time will be marked by recurrent eruptions of newly discovered diseases,” he predicted. Two years later, 1997, the New England Journal of Medicine issued a similar warning when a virulent new strain of bubonic plague was identified. “The finding of multi-drug-resistant [strain of plague] reinforces the concern . . . that the threat from emerging infectious diseases is not to be taken lightly,” declared the Journal. Scarcely twenty years after the eradication of smallpox in 1979, an accomplishment widely described in the media as humanity’s ultimate triumph over infectious disease, we seemed to be slipping back into the world of our ancestors, a world of sudden, swift, and uncontrollable outbreaks of epidemic illness. The book I was thinking about would explore the nature of this threat, and in particular the danger posed by newly emerging illnesses such as Ebola fever, Marburg disease, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, SARS, and avian flu.

  The book I ended up writing is quite different, though, indirectly, it rehearses many of the same themes. Its subject is an outbreak of a particular infectious disease in a particular time and place. Seven hundred years after the fact, what we call the Black Death—and what medieval Europeans called the Great Mortality, and medieval Muslims, the Year of Annihilation—remains the greatest natural disaster in human history.

  Apocalyptic in scale, the Black Death affected every part of Eurasia, from the bustling ports along the China Sea to the sleepy fishing villages of coastal Portugal, and it produced suffering and death on a scale that, even after two world wars and twenty-seven million AIDS deaths worldwide, remains astonishing. In Europe, where the most complete figures are available, in many places the plague claimed a third of the population; in others, half the population; and in a few regions, 60 percent. The affliction was not limited to humans. For a brief moment in the middle of the fourteenth century, the words of Genesis 7—“All flesh died that moved upon the earth”—seemed about to be realized. There are accounts of dogs, cats, birds, camels, even of lions being afflicted by the “boil,” the telltale bubo of bubonic plague. By the time the pestilence ended, vast stretches of the inhabited world had fallen silent, except for the sound of the wind rustling through empty, overgrown fields.

  What led me from the book I planned to the book I wrote was an encounter with the literature of the Black Death. Before plunging into a book about the future of epidemic disease, I wanted to acquaint myself with its past, and the medieval plague, as the most famous example of the phenomenon, seemed the appropriate place to start. Thus, in the autumn of 2000 I began shuttling between the main reading room of the New York Public Library and Butler Library at Columbia University. I read a number of excellent academic histories, but it was the original source material, the literature of the Great Mortality—the chronicles, letters, and reminiscences written by contemporaries—that turned my gaze from the future to the past. I had approached this material with some trepidation. If, as an English writer once observed, the past is a foreign country, no part of the past seems more foreign, more “otherly,” to a modern sensibility than the Middle Ages.

  My wariness proved unwarranted. Much has changed since the 1340s, the decade the Black Death arrived in Europe, but not human nature. The plague generation wrote about their experiences with a directness and urgency that, seven hundred years after the fact, retains the power to move, astonish, and haunt. After watching packs of wild dogs paw at the newly dug graves of the plague dead, a part-time tax collector in Siena wrote, “This is the end of the world.” His contemporaries provided vivid descriptions of what the end of the world looked like, circa 1348 and 1349. It was corpses packed like “lasagna” in municipal plague pits, collection carts winding through early-morning streets to pick up the previous day’s dead, husbands abandoning dying wives and parents abandoning dying children—for fear of contagion—and knots of people crouched over latrines and sewers inhaling the noxious fumes in hopes of inoculating themselves against the plague. It was dusty roads packed with panicked refugees, ghost ships crewed by corpses, and a feral child running wild in a deserted mountain village. For a moment in the middle of the fourteenth century, millions of people across Eurasia began to contemplate the end of civilization, and with it perhaps the end of the human race.

  The medieval plague was one of the seminal events of the past millennium. It cast a deep shadow across the centuries that followed, and it remains part of the collective memory of the West. In discussions of AIDS and other emerging infectious diseases, the Black Death is constantly evoked as a warning from the past, something humanity must avoid at all costs. Yet, as a historical event, the medieval plague remains little known. It originated in inner Asia, somewhere in the still-remote region between Mongolia and Kirgizia, and might well have remained there, had not the Mongols unified much of Eurasia in the thirteenth century, thereby facilitating the growth of three activities that continue to play an important role in the spread of infectious disease: trade, travel, and larger and more efficient communications. In the Mongols’ case, the improvement in communication was the Yam, the Tartar version of the pony express. From inner Asia, one prong of the plague swept eastward into China, another westward across the steppe into Russia. Sometime in the mid-1340s the western wing reached Italian trading outposts in Crimea; from there, fleeing sailors carried the disease to Europe and the Middle East.

  Despite the enormous size of Eurasia and the slowness of medieval travel—in 1345 it took eight to twelve months to travel from the Crimea to China overland—the plague spread to almost every corner of the continent within a matter of decades. It seems to have erupted in inner Asia sometime in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, and by the autumn of 1347 it was in Europe. In late September Sicily was infected by a fleet of Genoese galleys. One chronicler reported that the Genoese tumbled off the infected ships with “sickness clinging to their very bones.” From Sicily the pestilence moved swiftly northward to continental Europe. By March of 1348 much of central and northern Italy was or soon would be infected, including Genoa, Florence, and Venice, where gondolas slipped through wintery canals to collect the dead; by spring the plague was in Spain, southern France, and the Balkans, where one contemporary reports that packs of wolves came down from the hills to attack the living and feed on the dead. By summer the disease had reached northern France, England, and Ireland, where it took a great toll among the English in port towns like Dublin, but left the native Irish in the hills relatively unscathed. By the late autumn of 1348 the plague was in Austria and menacing Germany, and by 1349 and 1350 it had infected the regions along the European periphery: Scotland, Scandinavia, Poland, and Portugal. In a century when nothing moved faster than the fastest horse, the Black Death had circumnavigated Europe in a little less than four years.

  To many Europeans, the pestilence seemed to be the punishment of a wrathful Creator. In September 1349, as the disease raced toward an anxious London, the English king Edward III declared that “a just God now visits the sons of men and lashes the world.” To many others, the only credible explanation for death on so vast a scale was human malfeasance. Evildoers were using poisons to spread the plague, warned Alfonso of Cordova. To many of Alfonso’s contemporaries
, that could only mean one thing. The Great Mortality occasioned the most violent outburst of anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, a period already marked by violent anti-Semitic outbursts.

  Few events in history have evoked such extremes of human behavior as the medieval plague. There was the horrendous brutality of the Flagellants, who trampled the roads of Europe, flailing their half-naked bodies and murdering Jews, and the sweet selflessness of the sisters of Hôtel-Dieu, who sacrificed their own lives to care for the plague victims of Paris. There was the fearfulness of Pope Clement VI, who fled Avignon, seat of the medieval Church, a few months after the pestilence arrived, and the fearlessness of his chief physician, Gui de Chauliac, who stayed in the afflicted city until the bitter end, so as “to avoid infamy.” The Great Mortality produced many examples of great cunning and compassion, charity and greed, and, in a testimonial to the stubbornness—some would say the irredeemable wickedness— of human character, it also provided a backdrop for both the most notorious royal murder trial and greatest comic opera of the Middle Ages, the former featuring, as defendant, the beautiful Queen Joanna of Naples; the latter, the Roman tribune Cola di Rienzo, possibly the silliest man in Europe. Throughout the worst months of the plague, somewhere in Europe men were always waging war on one another.