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

by John Kelly

  Y. pestis has had a different history with the two species. Dr. Orent hypothesizes that sometime in the 1320s and 1330s, after marmot plague jumped into humans,

  Y. pestis reinvented itself as a human ailment. “The Black Death became, in a limited, short-term sense, a human disease,” she says, “much of it spread lung to lung . . . [although] perhaps sometimes rats and fleas passed on the disease as well.”

  However, since the human version of plague represented a biological dead end—it was so lethal, it risked obliterating its host population—Dr. Orent thinks that after the Black Death,

  Y. pestis returned to its roots as a rat disease, and as it did many of the plague symptoms that have puzzled historians and scientists for centuries—such as the malodorous smell of plague victims, gangrenous inflammation of the throat and lungs, and the vomiting and spitting of blood—disappeared with it. “There is no doubt that [the rat and flea] played the principal role in converting the plague into a constant, if somewhat less virulent menace, over the next several centuries,” says Dr. Orent. The nature of Europe’s rodent population offers some support for her thesis. Europe does not have the right kind of wild rodent population to support permanent plague foci;

  Y. pestis requires the warmth and humidity of a burrow to survive; and European rodents do not dig the kind of burrows that the pathogen needs to sustain itself. In the post–Black Death era, the burden of sustaining the chain of infection fell to the black rat and its cousin, the Norwegian rat, neither of which is ideally suited to provide plague foci. Indeed, the truly catastrophic outbreaks of Renaissance plague, like the epidemic that struck Marseille in 1720, may not have been the work of European rodents, but rather have come from a form of plague transported to Europe from the eastern Mediterranean or the Middle East.

  In the words of

  Piers Plowman, one of the most famous English literary works of the Late Middle Ages, the century after the Black Death was a time of

  feveres and fluxes

  Coughs and caricles, crampes and toothaches

  . . . Byles and bocches and brennyng agues

  . . . pokes and pestilences

  However, the long stream of illness that afflicted post–Black Death Europe was not just

  Y. pestis’s doing. All across the continent, the effects of chronic persistent plague were compounded by recurring waves of smallpox, influenza, dysentery, typhus, and perhaps anthrax. Sometimes several diseases would strike at once. In England, France, and Italy, for example, the

  pestis secunda was accompanied by a major outbreak of smallpox. Sometimes an illness would appear alone. In the 1440s, a major wave of smallpox—or red plague, as the disease was then called, swept through northern France, claiming even more lives than had a recent outbreak of bubonic plague. Two decades later a smallpox epidemic killed 20 percent of an English town. Influenza, another late medieval killer, produced large mortalities. In 1426–27 a major flu epidemic swept through France, the Low Countries, Spain, and eastern England, where it may have killed as much as 7 percent of the population. Another major disease of the era, the sweating sickness—or the Picardy sweat—appeared six times between 1485 and 1551, mostly in the region around the English Channel; often by the time the “sweat” had burned itself out, 10 percent of the population was dead. Poor sanitation also produced a wave of waterborne enteric fevers, especially intestinal dysentery, or the “bloody flux,” and infantile diarrhea, which historian Robert Gottfried believes may have been an important contributor to the perhaps 50 percent infant mortality rate of the Middle Ages. In 1473 East Anglia, already ravaged by plague and influenza, lost 15 to 20 percent of its adult population to dysentery.

  The fifteenth century also saw the emergence of “modern diseases” such as typhus, which originated in India, and syphilis, whose origins remain a source of debate. Gonorrhea, or the “French pox,” long the classic venereal disease, continued to debilitate armies and upset kings. Complained Edward IV of England, after a campaign in France, “Many a man . . . fell to the lust of women and were burned by them, and their penises rotted away and fell off and they died.”

  In the century between 1347 (when the plague first arrived in Sicily) and 1450, estimates of Europe’s population loss range from 30 to 40 percent to as high as 60 to 75 percent—a demographic collapse on the scale of the Dark Ages. Florence shrank by two-thirds—from 120,000 in 1330 to 37,000—and England by perhaps as much. Eastern Normandy may have suffered even more grievously; between the last quarter of the thirteenth century and the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the region’s population shrank by 70 to 80 percent.*

  As often happens after a major demographic catastrophe, immediately after the Black Death the birth rate surged. Like many of his contemporaries, the French monk Jean de Venette was astonished at the number of pregnant women on the streets. “Everywhere,” he says, “women conceived more readily than usual. None proved barren; on the contrary, there were pregnant women wherever you looked. Several gave birth to twins, and some to living triplets.”† Indeed, historian John Hatcher argues that, had the post–Black Death demographic recovery proceeded unimpeded, by the 1380s Europe would have replaced its twenty-five million to thirty million plague dead.

  The reasons for the collapse of the demographic recovery are complex. The most obvious is the torrent of disease; indeed, there was so much infectious illness in the century after the Black Death, the period is sometimes called the “Golden Age of Bacteria.” However, illness in and of itself was not the only demographic depressant. A second may have been the way the various diseases interacted with one another and, even more importantly, the way they interacted with the recurring cycles of pestilence. Professor Ann Carmichael thinks one reason the influenza and smallpox outbreaks claimed so many lives is that the ill, especially the very old and young, were deprived of basic life-saving measures, like the delivery of food and normal sanitary care because the plague had killed their caregivers.

  A “birth dearth” may also have contributed to the demographic decline. In the century after the Black Death, reproductive patterns seemed to have changed; women began to marry younger, and, paradoxically, females who marry before twenty tend to be less fertile over a lifetime than women who marry later. The recurring waves of disease also helped to shrink the pool of potential parents.

  As the population declined, the character of medieval society began to change. For one thing, an early death became a near certainty. “To the best of our knowledge,” says historian David Herlihy, “in the good years of the thirteenth century, life expectancies were 35 to 40. The ferocious epidemics of the late fourteenth century cut that figure to below 20.” As the population began to stabilize again around the year 1400, Professor Herlihy thinks, people may have begun living to thirty or so. However, since high medieval infant and childhood mortality rates had a distorting effect, real-world life expectancies were not quite as dismal as Professor Herlihy’s numbers make them sound. Around 1370 or 1380, a healthy twelve-year-old peasant boy in Essex, England, still had an additional forty-two years of life left. In other words, the boy could expect to live to fifty-four. But, thanks to the recurring waves of illness, by the early fifteenth century, that figure had fallen to fifty-one, and by the middle of the century, to forty-eight. In less than a hundred years, the boy had lost about 14 percent of his life span. Despite the advantages of better diet and better housing, the English nobility fared little better. In 1400 the average English peer was living eight years less than his great-grandfather had in 1300.

  Post–Black Death society was also an old society. One of the paradoxical artifacts of negative demographic growth is that as population shrinks, median age increases. This is happening in modern Europe today. According to

  The Economist magazine, if current demographic trends hold—that is, if the European birth rate remains at or just below replacement rates for the dead—by the year 2050 the median age on the continent will be an astonishing fifty-two. Figures f
or the late Middle Ages paint a similar picture. In 1427 Florence had the same percentage of sixty-somethings as a modern low-birth-rate Western nation— 15 percent. Even more suggestive are figures from the convent of Longchamp, near Paris. In 1325 the percentage of nuns at the convent who were sixty or older was already high—24 percent. By 1402, after a half century of epidemic disease, the figure had risen to 33 percent. Even more telling, in the almost eighty years between 1325 and 1402, the percentage of nuns at Longchamp between twenty and sixty—that is, the percentage in the most productive, vital years of life—declined from almost 50 percent to 33 percent.

  The consequences of the Black Death cannot be properly understood unless set against this backdrop of severe, chronic population decline and lack of a vigorous young workforce. One of the most eye-catching of the consequences was a severe decline in the continent’s physical infrastructure. Circa 1400, Europe was beginning to resemble medieval Rome: there were hulking pockets of survivors surrounded by untended fields, unmended fences, unrepaired bridges, abandoned farms, overgrown orchards, half-empty villages, and crumbling buildings, and hovering over everything was the oppressive sound of silence. Indeed, the continent’s physical deterioration became so pronounced, it entered the cultural vocabulary of the post–Black Death era. One of the everyday sentences fifteenth-century English schoolboys were required to translate into Latin was: “[T]he roof of an old house had almost fallen on me yesterday.”

  Another consequence of the chronic worker shortage was that the cost of labor—and the cost of everything labor made—increased dramatically. Matteo Villani, who was a snob as well as a moralist, complained that “serving girls . . . want at least 12 florins per year and the more arrogant among them 18 or 24 florins, and . . . minor artisans working with their hands want three times . . . the usual pay, and laborers on the land all want oxen and . . . seed, and want to work the best lands and abandon all others.” A thousand miles to the north, the cackling English monk Henry Knighton snorted that “all essentials were so expensive that something which had previously cost one quid, was now worth four quid or five quid.” Across the channel in France, prices were so high, Guillaume de Machaut wrote a poem about inflation.

  For many have certainly

  Heard it commonly said

  How in one thousand three hundred and forty nine

  Out of one hundred there remained but nine.

  Thus, it happened that for the lack of people

  Many a splendid farm was left untilled,

  No one plowed the fields

  Bound the cereals and took in the grapes,

  Some gave triple salary

  But not for one denier was twenty [enough]

  Since so many were dead . . .

  Around 1375, food prices began to stabilize again and then to fall, as the demand for foodstuffs declined along with the population. This produced another sentence for fifteenth-century English schoolboys to translate into Latin: “No man now alive . . . can remember that ever he saw wheat or peas or corn or any other foodstuff . . . cheaper than we see now.” However, the price of nearly everything except food either continued to rise or else stabilized at a high level—and this brought about a change in the European social structure so unprecedented, an amazed chronicler described it “as an inversion of the natural order.”

  In the fifty years after the Black Death, the medieval world’s traditional economic winners and losers exchanged places. The new losers, the landed gentry, began to see their wealth shredded by the scissors of low food prices and high labor costs; the new winners, the people at the bottom, saw their one marketable asset—labor—increase dramatically in value, and with it their standard of living rise. Here is Matteo Villani looking down his nose again: “The common people, by reason of the abundance and superfluity that they found, would no longer work at their accustomed trades; they wanted the dearest and most delicate foods . . . while children and common women clad themselves in all the fair and costly garments of the illustrious who had died.” Down the road in Siena, Agnolo di Tura, newly remarried and prospering, was also complaining about the greed of the lower orders. Declared the former shoemaker, “the workers of the land and the orchards, because of their great extortions and salaries, totally destroyed the farms of the citizens of Siena.”

  Peasants were often the biggest winners among the poor. Serfdom, in decline before the mortality, now began to disappear entirely. In the second half of the fourteenth century, a man could simply up and leave a manor, secure in the knowledge that wherever he settled, someone would hire him; alternately, the peasant could use his new leverage to extract rent reductions or obtain relief from hated feudal obligations such as the heriot—or death tax—from a hard-pressed lord. And since there was now a great deal of excess farmland available, the peasant could often pick and choose his land. In the half century after the Black Death, crop yields rose, not because agriculture improved but because now only the best land was being farmed. One measure of the new peasant prosperity was a change in inheritance patterns. Before the Black Death, peasant holdings were so small, there was not enough land for anyone but the eldest son. By 1450 peasants were often prosperous enough to leave a parcel of land to all their children—including, increasingly, their daughters.

  The labor shortage even benefited the itinerant laborers who moved from manor to manor, picking up whatever work was available. Then as now, a migrant worker’s salary and working conditions put him at the bottom of the economic ladder. But by the summer of 1374 a migrant worker named Richard Tailor sensed that a new day was dawning for men like him. Thus, on July 3, when his employer, William Lene, offered what Tailor felt was an inadequate wage for plowman’s work, Tailor in effect told Lene: “Take this job and shove it.” Walking out at the start of harvest season, Tailor made more in the next two months, August and September 1374, than the annual wage Lene had offered him—fifteen shillings versus a mere thirteen shillings, four quid.

  Women were also significant economic winners in the new social order. The labor shortage opened up traditionally well-paying male occupations like metalwork and stevedoring, though the women who worked in these occupations were not paid as much as their male counterparts, and the work itself could be dangerous. In 1389, on a road near Oxford, a stevedore named Joan Edwaker was killed when her wagon tumbled over and she was crushed to death. A more typical path to empowerment was professional advancement in a traditional female field. Women cloth workers, for example, often rose from the ranks of low-paying wool combers to higher-paying weavers. By 1450 brewing—a female-dominated profession to begin with—had become virtually

  all female. Additionally, many widows took over family shops or businesses—and, not uncommonly, ran them better than their dead husbands.

  Y. pestis turns out to have been something of a feminist.

  The poet who wrote

  The world is changed and overthrown

  That is well-nigh upside down

  Compared with days of long ago.

  ably articulated the feelings of the economic losers in the post–Black Death era, the landed magnates. Caught between falling land prices—a by-product of falling food prices—and rising labor costs, a great many lords simply abandoned the land. Renting out their estates, they lived off the proceeds. Magnates more committed to the land attempted to make a go of it by switching to less labor-intensive forms of farming. Abandoning grain, they concentrated on sheep and cattle. However, as a group, the ruling classes were far more interested in stuffing the genie of social change back in the bottle than they were in renting out their property or finding ways around high wage costs. After the mortality, “the ruling groups temporarily closed ranks and used the power of the state to defend the interests of the rich in the most blatant manner,” says historian Christopher Dyer.

  In 1349 and again in 1351, Edward III froze wages at preplague levels; new laws also made it illegal to refuse employment or to break a labor contract. In 1363 a new set of sumptuary
laws banned the silk, silver buckles, and fur-lined coats the peasants had grown so fond of—as well as any other item of clothing that smacked of putting on airs or getting above oneself. To sop up some of the lower orders’ excess income, in the late 1370s the poll tax was extended to previously exempt groups like unskilled laborers and servants. In 1381 resentment at attempts to reinstate “the days of long ago” helped to ignite the Peasants’ Revolt.

  Conflicts between the landed magnates and the newly empowered peasantry and laboring class also led to unrest and rebellion on the continent. In France, there were insurrections in 1358, 1381, and 1382, and in Ghent, in 1379.

  Agriculture was not the only industry to be burdened by chronic labor shortages. In 1450 industrial Europe was producing fewer goods than it had in 1300. Particularly hard hit was the principal industry of the Middle Ages, the Flemish-dominated cloth industry, which was built around the production of cheap cloth for a mass market. Post–Black Death, there were often not enough consumers to provide a mass market. In addition, tastes changed. As people grew more prosperous, demand for plain, drab Flemish cloth declined in favor of fancier, more vivid, and sophisticated clothing.

  Depopulation also had an important effect on technological innovation. The sharp decline in the workforce was an impetus for the development of labor-saving devices in many fields, including book production. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the demand for books increased steadily, propelled by a growing class of merchants, university-trained professionals, and craftsmen. But making a book in the Middle Ages was a very labor-intensive project; it required several copyists, each of whom would write out a section of the book, called a quire. In the preplague era of low wages, this method could still produce an affordable product, but not in the high-wage postplague era. Enter Johann Gutenberg, an ambitious young engraver from Mainz, Germany. In 1453, at the near-centenary of the mortality, Gutenberg introduced his printing press to the world. Chronic manpower shortages also fostered innovation in mining—new water pumps allowed fewer miners to dig deeper mines—and in the fishing industry, where new methods of salting and storing fish allowed the shrunken fishing fleets of the post–Black Death era to remain at sea longer. In the shipbuilding industry, craftsmen found ways to increase the size of vessels while reducing the size of crews. Labor shortages and high wages also helped to spur changes in the nature of warfare. As the salaries of soldiers increased, war became more expensive. This spurred the development of firearms. Weapons like the musket and cannon meant that the new high-wage soldier would provide more bang for the military buck.