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

by John Kelly

  baudea—a silk veil—but her dress, high-necked and loose fitting, is chaste by the standards of the day, which are quite daring. “Watching a woman undress,” complained one contemporary fashion critic, “is like watching a skinning.”

  The morning light suits Laura. The sun adds luster to the golden hair on her forehead and a tint of pink to her snowy complexion. Accompanying her this morning is her very proper-looking husband, chevalier Hugues de Sade. In a neat twist of history, M. de Sade is an ancestor of Petrarch’s most eminent eighteenth-century biographer, the Abbé J. F. X. de Sade, who, in turn, is an uncle of the diabolical marquis of the same name. The de Sades are a prominent Avignon family. Wealthy gentry, they own several spinning mills in the region. The Pont d’Avignon has borne the de Sade family coat of arms since 1177.

  No doubt, de Sade would be shocked to learn that a few hours earlier the most famous poet in Christendom had crossed the same bridge, fantasizing about his wife. But would the chevalier feel threatened? M. de Sade “cannot have taken [Petrarch] very seriously,” says Professor Bishop; otherwise he would never have tolerated the poet’s relationship with Laura. Besides, adds the professor, “de Sade knew very well the Provençal tradition of the infatuate poet suppliant. Whenever Petrarch went too far, he would lock up poor Laura, but otherwise, if the poet wanted to sigh at dawn beneath his wife’s window, there was no great harm done.”

  Linger longer on the bridge, and the visitor might encounter another friend of Petrarch’s, the musician Louis Heyligen. The glamorous Italians regard northerners as crude country bumpkins, but a decade in Avignon has given the Flemish-born Heyligen more than a little southern panache. Emerging from a crooked street in a vapor of cologne, Heyligen looks like an advertisement for Avignon’s most voguish tailors and barbers. His hair is cut fashionably short; his mustaches, which twirl upward like the toes of an elf’s shoe, are fashionably long; and his clothes are fashionably tight. This morning Heyligen has squeezed his upper body into a short, particolored, form-fitting jacket, and his buttocks, crotch, and legs into the male equivalent of the “windows of hell,” a pair of hose so tight they leave hardly anything to the imagination. Head thrown back, chin thrust forward, and shoulders squared, the former scholarship boy from rural Beerigen in Flanders glides across the Pont d’Avignon like the king of France himself. His is the walk of a man who has known success in life. And, indeed, in Avignon, a city full of brilliant musicians, Heyligen is regarded as the most brilliant.

  Heyligen, however, would be horrified to hear himself described as “creative.” Personal expressiveness and intuition had no place in medieval music, which was regarded as a branch of mathematics. Like every other aspect of the universe, music was thought to possess inherent structures. Musical structures were the fixed ratios between various notes and chords. The more accurately a musician could calculate the ratios with mathematical formulations, the more likely his music was to duplicate the “aural sound of God.”

  Currently Heyligen is employed by the erudite and handsome young Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, one of old Stefano’s sons and a patron of Petrarch. On Sunday mornings the musician can be found conducting the choir in the cardinal’s private chapel. Heyligen is probably coming from there now, going home to prepare next Sunday’s musical program.

  As Heyligen disappears behind a shuttling cart, the surgeon Guy de Chauliac lumbers into view. “Guigo,” as his friends call him, bears a passing resemblance to the French actor Gerard Depardieu (if contemporary portraits are to be believed). He is a big swarthy bear of man, with a very French kind of earthy masculinity. The surgeon looks as if he should have dirt under his fingernails, gold under his bed, and garlic on his breath. A casual observer would declare the surgeon a peasant, and the observer would be half right. Guigo is another bright scholarship boy. Born to a poor farming family in the Languedoc, he would still be pushing a plow but for a pair of “magic hands.” Legend has it that when he was a boy, Guigo’s skills at suturing wounds and setting bones earned him a reputation as a medical prodigy; he is said to have once saved the leg of a young noblewoman badly hurt in a fall.

  There may be some truth in the story. We know the surgeon’s education was paid for by a local baron; the subsidy may have been a gesture of gratitude for a life-saving act. From Bologna, where he studied anatomy and surgery, Guigo went to France to study and teach at the University of Paris, then south to Avignon to become personal physician to Benedict XII and John XXII, and now to Clement VI, who, true to his belief that his “predecessors did not know how to be popes,” employs a medical staff of eight physicians, four surgeons, and three barber surgeons. As chief papal physician, Guigo has the task of monitoring the papal bowels—stool along with urine analysis was a key diagnostic tool of medieval medicine. Guigo records the number of papal bowel movements made each day and examines the odor and form of each stool for signs of pollutants.

  Surgeon de Chauliac could also be thinking about almost anything on this lovely Sunday morning:

  Chirurgia magna, his masterwork, which will influence medical thinking for the next two hundred years; an irregular papal bowel movement; the pretty blond woman who passed by a moment ago. But what the surgeon could not be thinking about—what he could not even imagine on this fine spring day in 1345—is what Avignon will look like three years hence.

  No one could.

  Plague! The word conjured up . . . fantastic possibilities . . . Athens a charnel-house reeking to heaven and deserted even by the birds; Chinese towns cluttered with victims silent in their agony, the convicts at Marseille piling rotting corpses into pits; men and women copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; London’s ghoul haunted darkness. . . . A picture rose before him of the red glow of pyres mirrored on a wine dark slumberous sea, battling torches . . . thick, fetid smoke rising toward the watchful sky. Yes, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility.

  Unlike Dr. Rieux, the hero of

  The Plague, Albert Camus’s novel of modern pestilence, the people of Avignon knew nothing about the history of

  Y. pestis in 1347. But in the fading weeks of the year—as rumors floated up the Rhône from Marseille, Sicily, and Genoa about sulfurous rains and poisonous winds and great walls of fire, and about a contagion so supple it spread by glance—in some dark recess of the mind the Avignonnais, too, must have thought: “Yes, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility.”

  “From the outlying districts . . . a gentle breeze wafted a murmur of voices, of smells . . . a gay perfumed tide of freedom sounding on its way”: in the modern Oran of

  The Plague, the pestilence arrives gently, inconspicuously, like an odorless, tasteless poison. But the disease that Camus described was already old and enfeebled, drained of its most virulent poisons by centuries of battles in the streets of Sicily, the towns of China, and soot-stained cities of Renaissance Europe. The pathogen that struck Avignon in 1348 was still in the full vigor of youth.

  Emerging from the half light of a January dawn, the pestilence fell upon fleshy, wicked Avignon, killing relentlessly, unceasingly, with skills honed on the windswept plains of Mongolia, the shores of Lake Issyk Kul, the twisted olive groves of Cyprus, and the tormented roads between Messina and Catania.

  “They say that in the three months from 25 January to the present, 62,000 people have died . . . ,” musician Heyligen wrote to friends in Flanders on April 27. “Within the walls of the city [there are] more than 7,000 houses where no one lives because everyone in them has died, and in the suburbs one might imagine there is not one survivor.” In Avignon people fell in the streets, in churches, in homes, and in palaces; they fell from workbenches and under carts, and they fell in such astonishing numbers that throughout the cold wet winter and spring of 1348, the thud of the gravedigger’s shovel never ceased. The dying was so furious that the rustics who buried the dead—“half-naked men with no fine feeling,” Heyligen called them—could hardly keep up with the work. By March 14, eleven thousand people were already interred in
the new cemetery that Clement VI had bought the city, and, said Heyligen, this was “in addition to those buried in the churchyards of the Hopital de Saint-Antoine and the religious orders and in many other church yards.” When Avignon ran out of ground, Clement consecrated the Rhône; each morning that plague spring, hundreds of rotting corpses would flow down the stream like a mysterious new species of sea creature. Passing Aramon, Tarascon, and Arles, Avignon’s dead would flood out into the open Mediterranean, where, under the low gray light of a sea dawn, they would gather in communion with the dead of Pisa and Messina, Catania and Marseille, Cyprus and Damascus.

  Bonfires were set to ward off the pestilence and guards were posted to keep strangers out of the city. “If powders or unguents were found . . . the owners . . . were forced to swallow them,” wrote surgeon de Chauliac. However, little was done to protect the hastily buried dead from the twitching snouts of Avignon’s pigs. Each night, as the city slept a fretful pestilential sleep, the pigs would gather in the darkness and descend on the local graveyards, rooting through the loose, damp, corpse-laden ground until dawn; then, satiated, sleepy, and caked with cemetery mud, they would return home in the morning light.

  In local churches, preachers did what preachers do when confronted with inexplicable, senseless human tragedy. They told the faithful that the pestilence was a blessing from God, part of the “small still flame in the dark core of human suffering [which] reveals the will of God in action, unfailingly transforming evil into good.” But in the winter streets outside, another kind of transformation was taking place. As the plague wore on, along with the snorts of “the obscene pigs and the snarling dogs,” increasingly Avignon echoed with the shouts of pursued Jews, the crackle of streetcorner bonfires, and the harsh, hacking sound of hemmorhagic lungs. Residents were quick to recognize the uncontrollable cough of pneumonic plague, the violent, spasmodic tattoo that threw people against walls or doubled them over in the streets, left chins and shirtfronts stained with bloody mucus, and produced a rattling noise in the lungs that sounded like a heavy iron chain being dragged across cobblestone. In April, only a few months after

  Y. pestis arrived, Heyligen wrote, “It [has been] found that all those who died suddenly had infected lungs, and had been coughing up blood. And this form is the most dangerous . . . which is to say that it is the most contagious.”

  In Avignon, as elsewhere, the plague also illuminated the complexity of the human condition. There was the familiar story of abandonment, of people dying “without any mark of affection, piety or charity. . . . Priests do not hear confession . . . or administer sacraments. . . . Everyone who is still healthy looks only after himself,” complained Heyligen. There was also an alarming new series of attacks on the Jews. “Some wretched men . . . were accused of poisoning the wells,” the musician wrote to Flemish friends. “Many were burnt for this and are being burnt daily.” Avignon, however, was not bereft of heroism. The monks and brothers of La Pignotte, the municipal almshouse, displayed selfless devotion, feeding the hungry and tending the sick, swabbing oozing pustules, cauterizing painful buboes, bandaging cracked, gangrenous feet, washing bloodstained floors. But, alas, in a time of pestilence almost no good deed goes unpunished. The sick and dying who flocked to La Pignotte with contagious pneumonic plague made the almshouse a death trap. “Whereas at La Pignotte, they normally [go] through 64 measures of grain a day with one measure making 500 loaves of bread,” Heyligen noted, “now no more than one measure and sometimes only half is needed.”

  On May 19 Petrarch, who was in Parma, received a letter from Heyligen. After reading it, the poet made a notation on the flyleaf of his most beloved book, a copy of Virgil. “Laura,” he wrote, “illustrious for her virtues and long celebrated in my poems, first appeared to my eyes, in my early manhood, in the Church of St. Clare in Avignon, in the 1327th year of Our Lord, on the sixth of April, at the early morning service. And in the same city in the same month of April, on the same sixth day, at the same hour in 1348 her light was subtracted from the world. . . . That very chaste and loving body was laid to rest in the church of the Franciscan brothers on the very day of her death at evening. But her soul has, I am persuaded, returned to heaven whence it came. . . . I have decided to make this record in this place . . . which often falls under my eyes . . . that I may reflect that there can be no more pleasure for me in this life . . . now that the chief bond has been broken.”*

  The same day—May 19, 1348—Petrarch may have written these lines:

  She closed her eyes; and in the sweet slumber lying

  her spirit tiptoed from its lodging place.

  It’s folly to shrink in fear, if this is dying;

  for death looked lovely in her face.

  In the early stages of the pestilence, Avignon attempted every imaginable protective measure. People stopped eating fish, maintaining that they have been “infected by infected air,” and spices, “for fear they had been carried on Genoese galleys.” They tried making bonfires, and then they burned Jews—until Clement issued a bull denouncing the murders. Next, Avignon took to the streets in bloody, semihysterical candlelit marches. Some were “attended by 2,000 people from all the region . . . ,” says Heyligen, “men and women alike, many barefoot, others wearing hairshirts or smeared with ashes . . . [some] beat themselves with cruel whips until the blood ran.”

  After all alternatives had been exhausted, Avignon did what other pestilential towns did: it fell into the state of stuporous resignation Camus described in

  The Plague. “None of us was capable of exalted emotion [any longer] . . . ,” says the narrator of the novel. “People would say, ‘It’s high time it stopped.’ . . . But when making such remarks we felt none of the passionate yearning or fierce resentment of the early phase. . . . The furious revolt of the first few weeks had given way to a vast despondency. . . . The whole town looked like a railway waiting room.”

  In the midst of its suffering, Avignon did have one miraculous moment.

  On March 15, 1348, as dawn broke over the city, cooks from the papal palace; scribes from the Holy See; chamberlains from Cardinal Colonna’s palace; and stewards, clerics, and servants from everywhere jostled one another in Avignon’s crooked, malodorous little streets. Above the excited crowds, walls and windows were decorated with flowers and silk drapings, and on terraces above the walls stood the “most fair and noble ladies . . . dressed in those costly garments of ceremony which are passed from mother to daughter for many generations.”

  Around nine a.m. a chorus of silver trumpets sounded, and the wintry morning burst into glorious Technicolor. As a thousand excited spectators oohed and aahed, a parade of brilliantly dressed notables marched through the city. Leading the procession were the smiling bishop of Florence and the cap-waving chancellor of Provence. Behind them marched eighteen cardinals dressed in scarlet robes of the finest cloth, and behind the cardinals marched the most magical couple in Christendom and the reason the crowd got up early this morning. There was Luigi of Taratino, dressed in the latest Spanish fashion—short hair and tight jacket—and looking “as beautiful as the day,” and, walking a few paces ahead of him, twenty-three-year-old Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily, draped in a gold and crimson robe and bearing a scepter and orb. The queen’s lovely blond head was protected from the pale winter light by a brilliantly colored canopy held aloft by nobles of the highest rank. The crowd was rapturous. “Her figure,” says one admirer, was “. . . tall and nobly formed, her air composed and majestic, her carriage altogether royal, [and] her features of exquisite beauty.”

  Joanna’s fair skinned, blond beauty—a combination troubadours called “snow on ice”—was one of the great wonders of the medieval world. “Fair and goodly to look upon” is how Giovanni Boccaccio described the young queen. “Exquisite and enchanting,” declared Petrarch. “More angelic than human,” added the chevalier de Brantome. For the gallant young cavalier Galaezzo Gonzaga of Mantua, words alone failed to describe Joanna’s loveliness. After a
single dance with the Neapolitan queen, the cavalier fell to his knees and vowed to “go through the world until I have overcome in battle two knights whom I swear I will present to you in recompense.” Presently, two Burgundian knights arrived in Joanna’s court, accompanied by a note from ardent young cavalier Galezzo.*

  In character, the young queen was typically Neapolitan, which is to say that both her subjects—who believed Joanna to be kind and good-hearted—and her brother-in-law, King Louis of Hungary—who called Joanna that “great harlot that . . . ruleth over Naples”—had a point.

  The queen’s visit to pestilential Avignon was occasioned by her involvement in one of the most sensational celebrity murders of the Middle Ages. On a late summer evening three years earlier, Joanna’s husband—and Louis’s younger brother—eighteen-year-old Prince Andreas of Hungary, was found hanging from the balcony of a Neapolitan abbey. According to contemporary accounts, the young prince was still alive when a maid discovered him, but when she let out a scream a mysterious figure suddenly emerged from the darkness, grabbed the dangling prince by the ankles, and yanked down hard, breaking his neck and killing him.

  On hearing of the murder, Joanna was reportedly inconsolable. The next morning, whenever Andreas’s name was mentioned, she would sob, “My murdered man!” Declaring, “I have suffered such intense anguish at the murder of my husband . . . I well nigh died of the same wounds,” a few days later the queen offered a reward for any information pertaining to the crime. The Neapolitans were touched—the queen was so young and lovely and her grief so great. The Hungarians were suspicious—the circumstances surrounding Andreas’s death were unusual. There was first of all the fact that on the night of the murder, Andreas was summoned from the royal bedchambers by one of Joanna’s maids, a young woman named Mabrice di Pace. Mabrice knocked on the bedroom door late in the evening and told the prince an adviser wished to speak to him. There was the added circumstance that when Andreas left the bedroom, where Joanna was supposedly asleep, someone locked the door from the inside. And there was also the fact that one of the men who assaulted the prince in the darkened abbey hallway outside the royal bedchamber was Raimondo Cabani, husband of the queen’s childhood tutor. After wrestling Andreas to the ground, Cabani and two accomplices shoved a glove into the prince’s mouth, slipped a noose around his neck, then dragged him to a balcony and threw him over the rail.