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

by John Kelly

  A burst of technological innovation added to agricultural productivity. Someone figured out that one easy (and cheap) way to get a horse to pull more was to redistribute weight away from its windpipe, so when it moved forward it wouldn’t choke. Thus was born the horse collar, which increased horsepower by a factor of four. Another simple innovation, the horseshoe, increased it even more, by improving the horse’s endurance. The new

  carruca plow, with its large, sharp rectangular blade, also represented an important improvement, particularly in northern Europe, where the soil was heavier and harder to turn. However, the true technological marvels of the age were the watermill and the windmill; for the first time in human history, a society had harnessed a natural source of power. “Behold,” wrote an admiring monk, in a soliloquy to his abbey’s watermill, “the river . . . throws itself first impetuously into the mill . . . to grind the wheat . . . separating the flour from the bran. [Then] . . . [it] fills the cauldron . . . to prepare drinks for the monks. . . . Yet, the river does not consider itself discharged. The fullers [wool workers] near the mill call [it] to them. . . . Merciful God! What consolations you grant to your poor servants.” Another important innovation was a new crop rotation system, which kept more of the land under cultivation during the year.

  As agricultural productivity improved, living standards rose, producing a baby boom of historic proportions. The demographic surge of the Central Middle Ages was as dramatic as the decline of five hundred years earlier. Between 1000 and 1250 the population doubled, tripled, and may even have quadrupled. Around 1300 Europe held at least seventy-five million—and some scholars think as many as a hundred million—people, up from twenty-six million during the Dark Ages.* In France the population jumped from five million to about sixteen to twenty-four million; in England, from a million and a half to five to six to seven million; in Germany, from three million to twelve million; and in Italy, from five million to ten million. In 1300 parts of Europe were more populous than they would be again until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Britain, for example, would not see six million people again until the American Revolution, and France would not reach seventeen million again until Napoleon’s time, while Tuscany would not have two million inhabitants again until 1850.

  As the population soared, urban life reawakened. Pre–Black Death Paris had about 210,000 residents; Bruges, site of the rapidly growing cloth industry, 50,000; London, 60,000 to l00,000; and Ghent, Liege, and Ypres, 40,000 each. In Florence, banker Giovanni Villani boasted that “five to six thousand babies are born in the city each year.” But Florence, with a population of 120,000, took a backseat to Milan, with its population of 180,000. Siena, Padua, Pisa, and Naples were the little brothers of the Italian peninsula, with populations of 30,000-plus, but even they would have been major cities in the year 1000.

  The medieval countryside also filled up. In Germany’s Moselle Valley, the 340 villages of the year 800 quadrupled to 1,380 villages by 1300. Many parts of rural France experienced equally spectacular growth; Beaumont-le-Roger county in Normandy would not have thirty thousand residents again until the twentieth century; and San Gimignano, in Tuscany, is still smaller than it was in 1300.

  In the village of Broughton in England, the population reached a medieval high of 292 souls around 1290.

  As the population went up, the forests came down. During the Great Clearances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Europeans burst out of the enormous woodlands that had held them prisoner since the Dark Ages and began to reassert human dominance over the environment. From Scotland to Poland, the great dark woods echoed with the song of human progress: sawing and banging, and the boom and thud and thump of falling timber. Swamps were drained, pastures cleared, fields laid out, crops planted, homes built, and villages erected. Sunlight fell on land that had not felt its warmth since before Justinian’s time. Under the press of an expanding population, the continent also thrust outward. In the south, land-hungry Christian kings and colonists—their hearts full of God and avarice—pushed the once invincible Muslims down the Spanish peninsula until, by 1212, only Grenada on the southern tip of Iberia failed to fly the flag of the “Reconquista.” In the East, German and Flemish colonists pushed across the Elbe to settle the still-dense forests of eastern Germany and Prussia; in the Danube Valley, streams of carts and horses were flowing into what would become Austria and Hungary.

  As the population grew, trade revived. In the year 1000 an Italian merchant had virtually no chance of doing business in England. By 1280 a trader—or a pathogen—could travel though a reinvigorated, reconnected Europe with relative ease. The Atlantic and Mediterranean regions were linked by a land route that wound through the meadows of the high Alpine passes and a sea route that looped around the Pillars of Hercules—Gibraltar—and ended in the busy port of London, where dinosaur-necked wooden cranes were used to unload arriving ships. There were also dozens of new regional trade networks: some originated in Flanders, home of a wealthy new bourgeoisie mad for jewels and spices; some in Germany, seat of the Hanseatic League, an association of Baltic merchants. Another important commercial network sprang up around Champagne, site of the Champagne (Trade) Fairs where, once a year, local servant girls, laundresses, and tradeswomen would become prostitutes-for-a-day to entertain merchants from as far away as Iceland, and where crafty Sienese and Florentine bankers offered loans with so many strings attached that a borrower could be excommunicated from the Church and face eternal damnation should he default.

  From the bustling ports of Venice and Genoa, another set of trade routes led southeastward across the Mediterranean to the great trading cities of the Middle East, where the air smelled of mango and palm and the call to prayers echoed through alabaster streets five times a day. In Alexandria (Egypt), in Aleppo (Syria), in Acre or Tyre (the Kingdom of Jerusalem), a shopper could buy sugar from Syria, wax from Morocco and Tunis, and camphor, alum, ivory tusks, muslin, ambergris, musk, carpets, and ebony from Quinlon, Baghdad, and Ceylon—but, alas, were he a Christian shopper, only at unconscionably high prices. In Alexandria, local tolls added 300 percent to the price of Indian goods, and that 300 percent was in addition to the enormous markup that the Arab middlemen took off the top.

  Early in the thirteenth century the Venetians, who described themselves as “rulers of half and a quarter of the Roman Empire,” devised an ingenious bit of mischief to circumvent the greedy Arabs and deal directly with the East. Venetian authorities offered a group of French Crusaders free passage to the Holy Land, then rerouted the Crusaders east to capture Constantinople. While the plan succeeded brilliantly—the Venetians even managed to steal four great gilded horses for St. Mark’s Cathedral—Constantinople, where the rival Genoese soon had a base, was still a long way from the timber, fur, and slaves of the Crimea and southern Russia, farther away from the great market towns of Central Asia like Samarkand and Merv, and light-years away from the emerald city of Hangchow.

  For the “two torches of Italy,” as Petrarch called Venice and Genoa, the Bosporus nights were full of frustration and longing—but relief was nigh.

  According to legend, on a cold morning in 1237, three anonymous riders emerged out of a lightly falling snow in front of Ryazan, a town near the eastern border of medieval Russia. The small party halted for a moment; then one rider broke free and dashed across the snowy ground toward Ryazan, shouting. Attracted by the noise, a crowd gathered at the town gate. “A witch,” said one townsman, pointing at the rider, who had turned out to be a woman of astonishing ugliness. “No,” said a second townsman, “a sorceress.” As the two argued, the rider continued to dash back and forth in front of Ryazan, shouting, “One-tenth of everything! Of horses, of men, of everything! One tenth!”

  In a second version of the Sorceress of Ryazan story, the female rider, apparently selected for her knowledge of the local dialect, demanded “one tenth of everything” from a group of Russian princes gathered in Ryazan. But in both versions, the end is the same. The Ta
rtar demand for tribute is spurned, the mysterious sorceress vanishes, and her visit is forgotten.

  Then, on a winter morning a few months later, a thunderous rumble awakens the town. Doors fly open, heads appear, half-dressed men rush into the street. Someone shouts; fingers point. To the east, a black band of horsemen is hurtling across the horizon toward Ryazan under a dawn sky. Hurriedly, children are slipped under floorboards or hidden under blankets and quilts; doors are bolted; swords unsheathed, prayers whispered. As the short-legged Mongol ponies clear the earthworks in front of Ryazan, the morning streets fill with slashing, cutting horsemen. People scream, body parts fly, pools of blood form in the fresh snow. Plumes of black smoke rise into a vermilion sky. All morning and into the early afternoon, under a dim winter sun, Ryazan is methodically, systematically exterminated. Children are killed along with parents, girls along with boys, old along with young, princes along with peasants. Later a Russian chronicler will write that the citizenry was slaughtered “without distinction to age or rank.”

  Ryazan was not the Mongols’ first appearance on the western steppe. Twenty years earlier, the Tartars had made another brief foray into medieval Russia, but that raid had been more in the nature of an evil rumor. Afterward the chronicler of Novgorod wrote, “For our sins, unknown tribes came among us. . . . God alone knows who they are or where they came from.” By contrast, Ryazan was part of a grand design of world conquest. Genghis Khan means “Emperor of Mankind,” and though the founder of the Mongol Empire was ten years dead when Ryazan fell, his universalist ambitions lived on in his sons and grandsons. After subduing most of northern China in the 1210s and Central Asia in the 1220s, the Mongol leadership held a

  kuriltai (grand assembly) in 1235, where it was decided to move against the West.

  Europe knew nothing about the

  kuriltai, but during the 1230s enough rumors had drifted westward across the steppe to create a profound sense of unease. There were stories of terrible massacres in Central Asia and, after Ryazan and other Russian towns fell, almost daily rumors of a Tartar invasion. In 1238 the fisheries of Yarmouth shut down because their German customers had become too frightened to travel. In the late 1230s the immediacy of the danger was underscored when one of Christendom’s most implacable foes, the “Old Man of the Mountain,” leader of the fanatical Muslim “Assassins of Iran,” reportedly sent an envoy to Europe to propose a joint alliance against the Tartars. Whether true or only a rumor, the story was as shocking to contemporaries as the Hitler-Stalin pact was in its time.

  On April 9, 1241, with a conquered Russia in ruins, the cream of European arms gathered on a Polish field to meet the Mongol onslaught. After the battle, the Tartars sent home nine sacks of ears. Two days later a large Hungarian army was crushed at Mohi; shortly thereafter, a small Tartar force appeared in the vicinity of Vienna. As eastern Europe filled with refugees, panic gripped western Europe. In Germany rumors that the Tartars were Gog and Magog, the two lost tribes of Israel, ignited pogroms against the Jews. In France a knight warned Louis IX that the Mongols would soon be on the Somme. In England the monk Matthew Paris predicted a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions. The Mongols, he said, are “monsters rather than men, . . . inhuman and beastly, thirsting for and drinking blood and devouring the flesh of dogs and men, and striking everyone with terror and incomparable horror.”

  In Rome the pope received a letter from Grand Khan Ogedi. It read: “You personally, as the head of all kings, you shall come, one and all, to pay homage to me and serve me. Then we shall take note of your submission. If . . . you do not accept God’s order, we shall know that you are our enemies.”

  However, Europe’s string of good fortune had not quite run its course. Just as the apocalypse seemed about to burst upon Christendom, dissension erupted in the Mongol royal family and offensive operations were halted in the West. This provided a breathing space for clerical visitors like William to improve relations between East and West. Thus, in the 1250s, when the Mongols next went on the offensive, it was not against Christendom, but against an older enemy. In the 1220s the Mongol hordes had crushed Islamic power in Central Asia; now they would crush it again, this time in the Muslim heartland, the Near East and Middle East.

  On hearing of Baghdad’s fall in 1259, a Christian chronicler exulted: “Now, after five hundred years, the measure of the city’s inequity [is] fulfilled and she [is] punished for all the blood she [has] shed.”

  A decade later, the Genoese were in Caffa and the Venetians in Tana at the mouth of the Don, and a few years after that young Marco Polo was crossing the Gobi Desert, observing the local wildlife. The ubiquitousness of one species in particular struck him. “There are great numbers of Pharaoh’s rats in burrows on [these] plains,” he noted.

  “Pharaoh’s rat” was a medieval term for the tarabagan.

  Chapter Three

  The Day Before the Day of the Dead

  HIDDEN IN A DEEP AND SECLUDED VALLEY, THE VILLAGE OF Broughton has two brooks, two streets, and not enough acreage to warrant the attention of the larger world. On most maps the village lies in the terra incognita of gray-green space between Huntingdon and Peterborough. Indeed, except for the local church spire, which rises above the valley wall like the hand of a drowning man, Broughton would be a rural Atlantis, secreted away on a few thousand acres of Oxford clay in the green and pleasant English countryside.

  Like many medieval villages, Broughton began life as a forest clearing. Three hundred years before villager John Gylbert was born, the tree line came right up to the front door, but by 1314—the year John turned nineteen—the enveloping forest had been cut down, replaced by neat checkerboard squares of gold and green farmland and pasture. Coming up the road from Huntingdon on a summer morning, Broughton would rise up before the medieval traveler like a thatched-roof island adrift on a sunlit sea of swaying oats and barley. In John’s time Broughton had some 268 residents, down slightly from its medieval high of 292, but not significantly down. The size of the local animal population is unrecorded, but cows, chickens, pigs, and horses, just beginning to replace oxen at the plow, were ubiquitous in Broughton. Animals roamed the village lanes and gardens like curious sightseers, peering into doors, sunning themselves in rosebeds, eyeing the old men in front of the alewife’s house. In the evening, while two-footed Broughton drank, cooked, argued, and made love in one room, four-footed Broughton slept, ate, and defecated in another room—or sometimes the same room.

  As far as medieval Broughton can be said to have left behind a collective biography of itself, it resides in the annual round of births, deaths, marriages, misdemeanors, bills of sale, and suits noted in the local court records. These show that while John Gylbert was growing up in the first decade of the fourteenth century, Broughton was anglicizing itself. In 1306 William Piscator became William Fisser or Fisher (the English equivalent of Piscator); a few years later Richard Bercarius became Richard Sheppared (the English equivalent of Bercarius), and Thomas Cocus, Thomas Coke. John was probably born Johannes, and his friend Robert Crane, Robertuses. Only the eponymously named John de Broughton resisted the anglicizing trend, perhaps because de Broughton, a humbly born man who had come up a bit in the world, could not resist that fancy-sounding French “de.”

  Local court records also show that Broughton, like many small villages, had its share of scandals. Between 1288 and 1299 John’s great-aunt Alota was arrested four times for brewing substandard ale. The records do not give a reason for the arrests, but it was not uncommon for an alewife to spike her product with hen excrement to hasten fermentation. Alota’s husband, Reginald, also makes an appearance in the court records; in 1291 Reginald was charged with committing adultery with “a woman from Walton.” As far as is known, Alota made no public comment about the case, but it is perhaps significant that after her next arrest, Alota appeared in court on the arm of another village man, John Clericus, who lived a few doors down from the Gylberts.

  John Gylbert’s name also appears in vil
lage court documents. In early February 1314 John was fined for drinking ale and playing alpenypricke—a kind of hurling game—with Robert Crane and Thomas Coke in a wood near Broughton when he should have been at Ramsey Abbey, working. Broughton was part of the abbey manor, which in the ethos of feudalism meant that its villagers owed the monks a portion of their labor.

  As an abbey villein, or serf, John was required to spend two days each week toiling in the monks’ demesne, or personal farmland. In return for his labor, on work days John would receive an

  alebedrep, a lunch served with ale, or, if the monks were in an ungenerous mood, an

  waterbedrep, a lunch served with water. But even the

  alebedrep, which came with thick slices of warm bread and the smiles of the servant girls, was meager compensation for the bite of the February wind on the abbey fields and the kick of a heavy iron plow against an aching shoulder. At harvest time, when John’s abbey obligations doubled, he would spend ten hours in the monks’ fields under a blazing August sun, walk back to Broughton in the gathering twilight, work into the night on the Gylberts’ farm, then fall asleep on a straw mat listening to the heavy breathing of the oxen in the next room.