Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  For the infected, bad breath was the first, sickening sign; they would initially feel lightheaded and nauseous, then the vomiting would start, followed by pain in the groin and the appearance of the bubos, a lump the size of an apple, either on the neck, groin or armpit—gavocciolo, the Italians called them. By this stage the victim would be vomiting blood and a priest called to give the Last Rites. These terrifying lumps came to haunt the European imagination, made all the more disturbing by the strange deformities sufferers displayed; a limp for those who had the gavocciolo on the thigh, or a head stuck at an angle caused by a lump on the neck. The smell of disease in cities became overpowering.

  Soon there was a feeling of the end times coming, the death of all mankind approaching; people in Messina witnessed a terrifying spectacle when the faithful gathered in church saw a black dog with a drawn sword in its paws, “gnashing his teeth and rushing upon them and breaking all the silver vessels and lamps and candlesticks on the altars and casting them hither and thither.”4 (Of course it’s possible the dog had rabies, another widespread affliction.) Another story told of how a statue of the Blessed Virgin came alive on the way to Messina and refused to enter the city.

  People across Italy perished in droves. One day “a man, wanting to make his will, died along with the notary, the priest who heard his confession, and the people summoned to witness his will, and they were all buried together on the following day.”5 In Venice, one dreadful day, a ship from the Black Sea arrived and moored close to the poet Petrarch’s house in the Basin of St Mark. Soon, bodies were being shipped off on special boats, many on board still breathing, some dying of suffocation, and most of the oarsman catching the disease too.

  During this summer of 1348, the boats, drapped in black to cover the corpses, went through the canals, with the cry “Dead bodies! Dead bodies!” ringing out every day. Ships thought to be infected were burned. Human interaction shrunk as taverns were closed, and the sale of wine was prohibited. The Venetian custom of poor families leaving the recently deceased outside the family home to get donations was banned.

  As the disease spread across Italy, cities tried to prevent their neighbors from approaching, but it seemed impossible to stop. Orvieto’s Council of Seven simply decided to ignore the coming plague in case it scared people; six of them died of the disease. In Pistoia in Tuscany “hardly a person was left alive,” and some fifty years later the city’s population was still less than a third of pre-plague levels. There will little the authorities could do to stop it, so in Ragusa the government ordered everyone to make a will.

  In some cases, the disease led to a breakdown of social norms. In Venice criminals roamed the street because their jailors were all dead. In Florence survivors were terrorized by the becchini, gangs whose motto was “Those who live in fear die” and who drank and whored and robbed, threatening people with violence or rape unless they gave up their property. Others behaved like saints, the Florentine dead being gathered up by the Compagnia della Misericordia, a confraternity who wore red robes and hoods masking their face.

  France was infected most likely via the southern port of Marseilles, and soon Avignon, the home of the pope, fell under the shadow of the plague. Every night cemeteries in the city were attacked by hungry pigs, the animals gathering in the dark and heading for that day’s new batch of fresh bodies, their noses stuck into the newly-dug soil searching for fresh human meat. So many were dying that there weren’t enough priests to give the Last Rites and so the pope consecrated the entire river Rhone; each morning corpses would pass by the town and its famous bridge, on their way to the Mediterranean. The disease soon raged in Paris where an estimated fifty thousand died before the plague had burned itself out; the living were thrown in with the dead, and the piles of corpses were seen to squirm.

  Most likely the plague first arrived in Britain via Calais, now infested with sickness after an eleven-month siege by the English. In Bristol, “the plague raged to such a degree that the living were scarcely able to bury the dead . . . At this period the grass grew several inches high in High Street and Broad Street.”6 A writer in nearby Gloucester lamented: “Miserable, wild, distracted. The dregs of the people alone survive.”7 Oxford lost three mayors to the illness, and three Archbishops of Canterbury died in quick succession.

  When someone fell sick, they went to a priest, and so naturally clerical casualty rates were high and religious institutions suffered especially shocking rates of death, some abbeys losing all their members. Some people behaved heroically and humanely during this disaster, but many fled and failed to look after dying relatives, something chroniclers lamented, although it is quite understandable.

  There were grim, upsetting stories from the time. In Durham “a mad lonely peasant . . . in the years after the plague, wandered the villages and lanes of the region, calling out for his plague-dead wife and children. The man is said to have greatly upset the populace.” Across the country there were mass graves in villages into which people would cart their loved ones, coughing to death themselves as they did so, knowing they’d be joining them soon enough. The black flag was flown from the church steeples of infected villages, as a warning.

  At one point two hundred a day were dying of plague in London, which in 1348 was described as a “Nomanneslond,” and a large field to the west was set aside as a mass burial site. Several hundred English villages were deserted altogether, although many were finished off by subsequent migration as desperate workers left for opportunities elsewhere.

  Some people took decisive measures. A manorial aristocrat in Leicestershire burned and razed the village of Noseley when plague appeared; his descendents still live at Noseley Hall, so clearly it worked out for them. The city of Milan had a far smaller death toll than its neighbors after introducing the most stringent rules, so that when someone in a house became infected all the inhabitants were simply boarded up and left to starve. In a later outbreak the city of Dubrovnik, which lies on the Adriatic opposite Italy, insisted that all ships stay anchored for forty days, quaranta, so inventing the idea of quarantine.

  Medical experts were baffled by the causes, and to make matters worse, and more confusing, there were two primary types of plague—bubonic and pneumonic—the first carried by fleas and the second by humans. There was also a third, less common form, septicaemic, that occurred when the blood was infected. The one thing all three had in common was that they caused an agonizing and horrific death, although the septicaemic variety had a fatality rate close to 100 percent. Plague can kill very quickly, with average survival time from first symptom to death being less than fifteen hours in some later outbreaks.8

  It did not really occur to anyone that rats were responsible, as in the words of historian Philip Ziegler: “Dead rats no doubt littered the streets and houses but this would hardly have seemed worthy of attention at a time when dead human beings were so much more conspicuous.”9 And yet this is still a source of confusion because some historians argue that a plague would have been preceded by numbers of dead rats so large even fourteenth century people would have found it worth noting. In fact, medical experts and historians today aren’t entirely sure that the Black Death was y pestis, and a 2018 paper suggested that rats were not the culprits.10

  Without any understanding of its causes, many people blamed the plague on conspiracies by lepers or Jews or Muslims, or a combination of two or all of these groups. Rumors of enemies poisoning wells was as old as the plague of Athens, when Spartans were blamed for a disease no humans could possibly control, but in the fourteenth century there grew a belief that lepers, Jews, and the Muslim ruler of Granada were part of a cabal. Massacres started in Narbonne and Carcassonne where Jews were thrown in bonfires, and soon pogroms spread across France and Germany. In 1348, Pope Clement issued a Bull, or decree, “prohibiting the killing, looting, or forcible conversion of Jews without trial” but it made little impact.

  As with times of warfare, people lived more for the day, were less fussy about marriag
e, and settled down to have children quicker. Jean de Venette, a French monk, observed that “Everywhere women conceived more readily than usual. None proved barren; on the contrary, there were pregnant women wherever you looked.”11 Crime also went up as people acted on impulse, and the exodus of aristocrats from plague-ridden cities increased disorder. But life went on, grim though it was.

  The modern consensus is that it killed between one-third and half of Europe, although small pockets in Bohemia, Poland, and to a lesser extent Flanders had relatively low fatality rates, while some regions suffered especially heavy losses; eastern Normandy saw a decline in population of between 70-80 percent from 1300 to 1400. Florence fell from 120,000 in 1330 to 37,000 after the outbreak, while most likely two-thirds of Venice was wiped out,12 and fifty noble families erased forever. For centuries fishermen around the city stepped ashore on deserted islands made of the whitening bones of plague victims. Italy is supposed to have suffered the worst rates, with up to 60 percent dead on the peninsula, but across the continents of Asia and Europe the streets and fields were silent. For many, though, it felt like the end of the world was upon them.13

  Plague was just one of many afflictions at the time. Smallpox, which killed uncontrollably until the discovery of vaccines in the eighteenth century, was also known as red plague; its 1440s epidemic killed more lives than a recent bubonic plague outbreak, and, in the 1460s, smallpox killed 20 percent of one English town in just twelve months. Then there was influenza, or the flu; the 1426-7 epidemic killed as much as seven percent of Europe’s population. Typhus also swept through Aragon after Spanish troops returned from Cyprus where they had beaten the Moors. St Vitus Dance was another common problem, an autoimmune illness resulting from a virus, usually affecting children, and which caused involuntary spasmodic movements due to painful internal burning, resembling a sort of dance.

  Plague eventually died out in Europe, the Marseilles outbreak of 1722 being the last; most likely the pestilence-carrying black rat was driven out by its cousin the brown rat, although the replacement of wooden houses with brick also made life less hospitable for the animal.

  The tide turned against smallpox after Edward Jenner discovered a vaccine in the eighteenth century, having noticed that milkmaids infected with the related cowpox never suffered from the more serious illness (vaccine is from the Latin for cow). He tested his dangerous new treatment on the eight-year-old son of his gardener, but luckily for employer and employee he turned out to be right. Leprosy is now called Hansen’s disease after Dr. Gerhard Hansen who, in the nineteenth century, isolated the bacterium which caused the illness; ironically, he discovered, the disease was not caused by contagion but by a bacterium, and is not that infectious, after all.

  16

  “CATTLE DIE, KINDRED DIE, WE OURSELVES SHALL DIE.”

  War was an ironman’s proper trade. The Drowned God had made them to reave and rape, to carve out kingdoms and write their names in fire and blood and song.

  —THEON GREYJOY

  They came from the sea. Heathens! They plundered, and they murdered. Blood flew in the altar. Christians were trampled under foot like filth in the streets. Some of the brothers were carried off.”1 So wrote the Saxon chroniclers after the Lindsifarne monks were attacked by raiders from across the sea in 792.

  The Anglo-Saxons were part of the culture of the German Ocean, as the sea that separated them from the “Saxons overseas” was called (it was not known as the North Sea until the eighteenth century). The Romans reached its southern limit but faced a storm which, the poet Albinovanus Pedo believed, was the work of the gods calling them from the edge of the world. The twelfth century Arab geographer Al Idrisi called it “the sea of perpetual gloom,” where oceans clashed, resembling the abyss out of which the earth was created.

  Beyond that world the Saxons knew little, only of travelers’ tales at the court of the kings, of voyages by the fjords of Norway up to the Arctic Circle and its midnight sun; to the east there was the land of the mysterious Finns and their shamans, and beyond that the freezing, black world of “Great Sweden,” as Russia was called; and then south to the Queen of Cities, Constantinople, a gilded, exotic metropolis that filled the imagination. To those even aware of them, the Saxons were considered to live at the end of the world. From “the western shores, where the sun sets . . . We know of no land beyond their islands, but only water,” wrote a Muslim official in Syria, meeting some strangely dressed Anglo-Saxon pilgrims in 724. The exotic-looking Christians meant no harm and “they wish only to fulfil their religious law,” the local dignatory concluded, letting them pass.2

  Back in the sixth century, the Roman Jordanes had written about a frozen isle to the north of Germany called Scanza, surrounded by “many small islands” and “where wolves could pass when the sea was frozen. In winter the country was not only cruel to people but also to wild beasts. Due to the extreme cold there were no swarms of honey-making bees.”3 He described it as a “womb of nations,” and home to numerous hungry tribes fiercer even than the Germans to the south. Now two centuries later they were more ravenous still, and in their desperation, had developed ships and navigational techniques that allowed them to cross the bitterly-cold ocean to their west, where there existed an island rich with plunder. There they were called Denes or heathens; since the nineteenth century we have known them through the Icelandic sagas as “raiders,” or Vikings.

  Like the Iron Islands, Scandinavia has few natural resources other than thin soil and salt water, and this absence of plowable land helped to create a pirate culture that glorified in raiding. As Balon Greyjoy says: “We are iron-born, we are not subjects; we are not slaves, we do not plough in the fields or toil in the mine. We take what is ours.”

  From the ninth century local warlords began to centralize power in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and these bitter struggles left the losers with little choice but to take to their ships, along with supporters and other adventurers. As many as 200,000 left this frigid region during the early medieval period, raiding, trading, and establishing colonies from Canada to Constantinople.

  In Westeros, the Iron Born worship their own deity, the Drowned God, just as the Vikings were among the last people in Europe to accept Christianity. Like the Iron Islanders, with their rock wives and salt wives, they kept a second spouse, a handfast of lower status, often non-Scandinavian. And also like the Iron Born, the Vikings were slavers, and established Dublin as a trading port for that purpose, selling many unfortunates across the seas; such was the interdependency of the Eurasian continent during this period that the re-emergence of the Viking threat in the 860s had much to do with an African slave revolt in Baghdad in the preceding years that had led the Arab rulers to turn to Europeans instead.

  The Iron Born have “slim, beautifully designed warships in which they strike at will along the coastline,” while the Vikings had their longboats.4 The Iron Born despise trade and agriculture, the motto “we do not sow” showing that they considered raiding the only honorable activity. Such was their hostility to trading that Balon tears Theon’s neck-chain and shouts “that bauble around your neck, did you pay the iron-price for it, or the gold?”5 In this they were somewhat different from Vikings, who were happy to become farmers or merchants when it was more profitable or expedient than raiding. Later Vikings would settle down to work as peaceful farmers except that they might still spend a few months of the year raiding, if it was profitable, such as Svein Asleifarson of Orkney with his “spring trip” and “fall trip.”

  The Norsemen first appeared in England in 787 near Portland in the Kingdom of Wessex, killing a local reeve on the shore. Six years later catastrophe arrived when “dire portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people”—immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons, were seen flying in the air. That year Danes attacked the monks at Lindisfarne in Northumbria, on the spit of land where St Aidan first knelt to pray when he founded his monastery in 635. To the Saxons the terrifying heath
ens were killers sent by God as punishment, hailing from the frozen north, the land of winter.

  The “nexus of ancient Scandinavian culture”6 was Uppsala, close to Stockholm, where in the dark forests the Norsemen first emerged. It was here, near the hillfort of Birka, that their god Odin dwelled, and hanged himself in order to gain the gift of prophecy, spending nine days suspended in the tree. To the south at Roskilde, slightly to the west of Copenhagen, the ancients lived by the banks of the now-dried up river Lejre. This may even be the Heorot of legend, the hall of King Hrothgar that appears in Beowulf. According to the tenth century chronicler Thietmar, here the ruler would maintain his power with sacrificial rites; every nine years nine cocks, nine dogs, nine horses, and nine men would be put to death. A German monk recalled similar scenes at Uppsala.

  While the Angles had gone through Christianization, with men now able to acquire status as priests or monks rather than fighters, their cousins across the cold sea had maintained a warrior culture in which a man’s status was heavily dependent on his ability to fight. Like the Iron Born, the Vikings also placed high value on virility, so a man without a functioning penis was no man at all. A warrior buried at Repton in Mercia who had been emasculated—a common atrocity after battle—had a boar’s tusk placed between his legs, most likely to ensure he was fully functional as a man in the afterlife.

  In their long ships, the Danish and Norwegian Vikings were experts at the rough open seas, and after a long absence they returned to England in the 830s. Then, in 865, a grand army led by the three sons of the mythical Ragnar Lothrbrok (“hairy trousers”) arrived on the country’s eastern shores. Ragnar, a Norsemen better known in the twenty-first century as the protagonist of the television show Vikings, may or may not have existed, but many of the stories attached to him are clearly untrue, unless he did actually die five times.