by John Kelly
284 “For many have certainly”: Herlihy, Black Death and the Transformation of the West, p. 41.
284 “No man now alive”: Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages, p. 266.
285 winners and losers: Ibid., p. 278.
285 “The common people”: Matteo Villani, Chronica di Matteo Villani, book 1, ch. 4, p. 10.
285 “workers of the land”: Gottfried, The Black Death, p. 148.
285 often prosperous enough: Ibid., p. 140.
286 “Take this job and shove it”: Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages, p. 279.
286 Joan Edwaker: Ibid., p. 267.
286 “The world”: Ibid., p. 210.
287 “the ruling groups”: Ibid., p. 28.
287 there were insurrections: Ziegler, The Black Death, p. 275.
287 industrial Europe: Gottfried, The Black Death, p. 140.
287 technological innovation: Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, pp. 50–51; Gottfried, The Black Death, pp. 142–43.
288 innovations in the medical profession: Gottfried, The Black Death, pp. 117–223.
289 hospital also began to move: Ibid., p. 121.
289 birth of public health: Ibid., pp. 123–24.
289 theory of contagion: Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, p. 72.
289 medieval higher education: Ibid., p. 70.
290 “privatization of Christianity”: Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (New York: Free Press, 2001), p. 205.
290 “About what can you preach”: Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882–88), p. 290.
291 “Parsons and parish priests”: William Langland in Ziegler, The Black Death, p. 264.
291 Lollards: Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague, p. 207.
291 “no other epoch”: Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1999), p. 12.
292 tomb of Cardinal Jean de Lagrange: John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 230–31.
292 The Three Living and the Three Dead: Ibid., pp. 196–205.
293 Dance of Death: Ibid., pp. 205–15.
293 “A more diversified economy”: Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, pp. 50–51.
Afterword: The Plague Deniers
295 Plague Deniers: Cohn, Samuel K., The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (New York: Schocken, 1985); Susan Scott and Christopher J. Duncan, The Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historical Populations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
296 Anthrax: Twigg, The Black Death, p. 200.
296 Disease X: Cohn, The Black Death Transformed, p. 247.
296 hemorrhagic plague: Scott and Duncan, The Biology of Plagues, pp. 107–8, 385, 388.
297 Gasquet’s symptom list: Francis Aidan Gasquet, The Black Death of 1348 and 1349 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1908), pp. 8–9.
297 “Breath spread the infection”: da Piazza, “Bibliotheca Scriptorum,” in The Black Death: Manchester Medieval Sources, trans. and ed. by Rosemary Horrox (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 36.
297 “The disease is threefold”: Heyligen, “Breve Chronicon Clerici Anonymi,” in Horrox, The Black Death, pp. 42–43.
298 list of symptoms: Cohn, The Black Death Transformed, pp. 41–54; Scott and Duncan, The Biology of Plagues, pp. 107–9; Twigg, The Black Death, pp. 202–10.
298 describe the bubo differently: Cohn, The Black Death Transformed, pp. 64–65.
298 Rat die-offs: Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 27; Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (New York: Free Press, 2001), p. 172.
299 In Vietnam: Wendy Orent, Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 57.
299 during the Third Pandemic: Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 176.
299 immune to climatic effects: Scott and Duncan, The Biology of Plagues, p. 364.
300 finding DNA: Raoult et al., “Molecular Identification by Suicide ‘PCR’ of Yersinia pestis,” PNAS 97: 12800–12803.
300 marmot version of the cough: Orent, Plague, pp. 56–57.
301 the human flea: Ibid., p. 138.
301 evolutionary terms: Dr. Robert R. Brubaker, Professor of Microbiology at Michigan State University, personal communication.
301 “By the late nineteenth century”: Ibid.
301 “Indian Plague Commissioners”: Anne G. Carmichael, “Plagues and More Plagues,” Early Science and Medicine 8, no. 3 (2003): 7.
302 nutrition and decent nursing care: Ibid.
302 “fatigue, destitution”: Ibid.
303 human flea as a plague vector: Dr. Ken Gage, Chief Plague, U.S. Centers for Disease Control, personal communication.
303 south of the Alps: Cohn, The Black Death Transformed.
303 “There may have been”: Anne G. Carmichael, personal communication.
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* For centuries de’ Mussis was thought to have been an eyewitness to the events he describes. But in the nineteenth century a curious editor discovered that the notary was in Piacenza when Caffa was besieged. The source of de’ Mussis’s information is unclear, but his account is probably based on talks with merchants and/or mariners recently returned from the Crimea.
* Recently, Chwolson has been accused of misreading the inscriptions on the tombstones. Allegedly, he mistranslated “pestilence” as “plague.” If true, the accusation would not materially alter the case for or against the Black Death’s visit to Issyk Kul. In the Middle Ages, both plague, a biblical term used to describe an affliction associated with divine displeasure, and pestilence were applied to all kinds of epidemic disease. The appearance of either word on the Issyk Kul tombstones suggests but does not prove that the Black Death visited the lake region.
* Khan Janibeg does have one stout modern defender, Mark Wheelis, a professor of microbiology at the University of California. The professor notes that in a recent series of 284 plague cases, 20 percent of the infections came from direct contact—that is, the victim touched an object contaminated with the plague bacillus, Y. pestis. “Such transmissions,” he says, “would have been especially likely at Caffa, where cadavers would have been badly mangled by being hurled, and many of the defenders probably had cut or abraded hands from coping with the bombardment.” Professor Wheelis also thinks the rat scenar
io favored by many historians ignores a crucial feature of medieval siege warfare. To stay out of arrow and artillery range, besiegers often camped a kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) away from an enemy stronghold—normally beyond the range of the sedentary rat, who rarely ventures more than thirty or forty meters from its nest. (Mark Wheelis, “Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8, No. 9 [2002]: 971–75.)
* Estimates of the Black Death mortality rate fluctuate almost as often as the stock market. Recently, one historian argued that 60 percent of Europe perished in the Black Death. However, 33 percent is the most frequently cited and enduring figure. Interestingly, it is also not far from the estimate contemporaries arrived at. In the wake of the plague, a Church commission put the death toll at almost 24 million, remarkably close to a mortality of one-third in a Europe of 75 million. (William Naphy and Andrew Spicer, The Black Death: A History of Plagues [Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing, 2000], p. 34. See also Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death: The Complete History [Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2004], p. 383.)
* At the moment, plague seems to have the upper hand in the battle. Recent studies suggest that the disease has become so virulent in rodents, it may be disrupting the natural selection process in several species. (Dean E. Biggins and Michael Kosvol, “Influences of Introduced Plague on North American Mammals,” Journal of Mammalogy [November 2001]: 906–16.)
* During the Vietnam War, roughly twenty-five thousand cases of plague were reported; almost all the victims were Vietnamese. (Plague Manual: Epidemiology, Distribution, Surveillance and Control [Geneva: World Health Organization, 1999], pp. 23–24.)
* Recently, some scholars have challenged the Black Death connection, arguing that the poem originated in the early nineteenth century.
* An allele is one of at least two forms of how a particular gene might be expressed. For example, the gene for human eye color might be expressed in several forms: brown, blue, green, and so forth.
* Pegolotti’s credibility as a travel writer is not enhanced by the fact that he never got any farther east than the east side of his native Florence. His information was based on interviews with Italian merchant-travelers.
* France is a hotbed of P. irritans support. French scholars, including the leading modern historian of the plague, Jean-Noël Biraben, believe that British and American medievalists have seriously underestimated the role of the human flea as a plague vector.
* P. irritans and General Ishii may help provide an answer to one of the great mysteries of the Black Death: why do so few medieval sources mention rat die-offs? In modern outbreaks of plague, dead rats usually litter the streets a few weeks before Y. pestis jumps into humans. Many authors have tried to explain away the discrepancy by saying that dead rats were such a common sight on the medieval street that no one thought them worth writing about. But there may be another explanation: medieval man’s poor hygiene may have made P. irritans a significant vector in the Black Death.
* The Big Optimum lasted from the end of the Ice Age to roughly 1300 b.c. Perhaps significantly, this may also have been the period when Y. pestis evolved. (“Climatology,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph Strayer [New York: Charles Scribner, 1982], p. 456.)
* Says Dr. Phillip Stott, professor emeritus of bio-geography at the University of London, “What has been forgotten in all the discussion of global warming is a proper sense of history. . . . During the medieval warm period, the world was warmer than even today and history shows that it was a wonderful period of plenty for everyone.” (Phillip Stott, interview, Daily Telegraph, 4/6/2003.)
* Medieval demographic data are very rough approximations and should be read that way.
* The starting date of the Little Ice Age is a source of controversy. Most authorities date it from 1300, when the Alpine glaciers began to advance again, but some experts insist that the true Little Ice Age did not begin until the 1600s, when temperatures turned bitterly cold.
* Woefully inadequate sanitation made medieval urban Europe so disease-ridden, no city of any size could maintain its population without a constant influx of immigrants from the countryside.
* Michael Baillie, a professor in the school of Archealogy and Palaecology at Queens University, Belfast, hypothesizes that the miasma was caused by “outgassing,” a rare geological phenomenon in which gas deposits trapped underneath the ocean floor suddenly break free and escape into the atmosphere, corrupting the air. A recent example of the phenomenon may have occurred in 1986, when a poisonous cloud of hydrogen sulfide emerged from Lake Nyos in Cameroon and killed 1,700. Strikingly, survivors said the cloud smelled like “rotten eggs.” What released the trapped gas in the lakebed is unclear, but, in the case of Cyprus, the triggering event may have been the earthquake. (M.G.L. Baillie, “Putting Abrupt Environmental Change Back into Human History,” in Environment and Historical change, ed. Paul Slack [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], p. 68.)
* Friar Michele’s account illustrates why historians believe that contemporary descriptions of the Black Death have to be read with caution. Other evidence suggests that the Genoese arrived in Messina in late September, not October, and while their fleet may have contained twelve galleys, Friar Michele also may have selected the number because twelve had a special magical significance for medieval man. Another problem with contemporaneous plague chronicles is plagiarism. Frequently a chronicler would lift an expression, turn of phrase, and sometimes even an entire description whole from an ancient author, two favorite sources being Thucydides, who wrote a classic account of the fifth-century b.c. Plague of Athens and Tacitus, who wrote an equally famous description of the third-century a.d. Plague of Antoine in Rome. (Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death 1346–1353: The Complete Story [Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2004], p. 70.)
* It is possible that the pestilence slipped into another European port a few days or weeks earlier, but Messina and Sicily are where the plague enters the historical record in Europe.
* Rabies seems to have been widespread in medieval Sicily, so this story may have some basis in reality. (Philip Ziegler, The Black Death [New York: Harper and Row, 1969], p. 42.)
* Research on modern outbreaks of plague illustrates how the ecological unheaveals in Italy may have paved the way for Y. pestis. According to Dr. Kenneth Gage, chief of the Plague Division at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, an earthquake was the triggering event in a 1994 outbreak of plague in India. The quake destroyed rodent burrows in nearby plague foci, forcing the wild rodent community to relocate closer to areas of human habitation, where they exchanged fleas with R. rattus. In Africa, which has the highest incidence of plague in the modern world, a frequent triggering event in the disease are cycles of torrential rain and parching drought, says Dr. Gage. The rodent population increases in the rainy years when food is abundant; then, when drought strikes and food becomes scarce, the hungry rodents flee toward cities, towns, and villages in search of food.
* Several scholars have argued that Boccaccio was not in the city during the plague. While that seems unlikely, the author’s whereabouts remain a source of controversy.
* Estimates of medieval Paris’s population, like many medieval demographic estimates, range all over the lot. Some historians think the city may have had only a hundred thousand residents.
* Economic desperation probably kept the little fleet going. The collapse of the Crusades at the end of the thirteenth century and the weakening of the Mongol empire a few decades later produced a great maritime depression. In 1248 the casebook of a single Marseille notary contained more than a thousand commercial acts. In the ten years prior to 1348, all Marseille’s notaries combined recorded only 147 such acts. (Daniel Lord Smail, “Mapping Networks and Knowledge in Medieval Marseille, 1337–1342,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994], p. 22.)
† Contemporary accounts put the mortality in Marseille at 56,000, but since that is more than twice the city’s med
ieval population, the figure is meaningless. The estimate of something like a 50 percent mortality rate is based on the fact that the plague probably arrived in Marseille, as it did in Messina and Genoa, in—or about to burst into—its highly contagious and lethal pneumonic form.
* During a wave of epidemics in the 1320s, a variant of this rumor appeared. At that time it was lepers who were alleged to be poisoning the wells, but they were said to be in the pay of the Jews and their ally, the Muslim Caliph of Granada (see chapter 10). The association between well poisonings and the pestilence is ancient. During the Plague of Athens in the fifth century b.c., it was said that Athenians were dying because the Spartans were poisonings the wells. (Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century [New York: Ballantine Books, 1978], p. 109.)
* Petrarch probably invented the matching deaths for literary effect. Life is rarely so heat.
* The laws of chivalry dictated that when a knight defeated an opponent, the opponent became his property. Joanna gave her two “gifts” their freedom.
* Alas, Hungarians, like elephants, have long memories. On May 22, 1382, thirty-seven years after Andreas’s murder, agents of the Hungarian Crown slipped into the chapel where Joanna, then on her fourth husband, was kneeling in prayer and strangled her to death. As with all stories about the queen—who continued to seduce historians, biographers, novelists, and playwrights long after death—this one is clouded in ambiguity. Another account has Joanna being poisoned; a third, smothered by a pillow; a fourth, starving herself to death. (St. Clair Baddeley, Queen Joanna I, of Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem, Countess of Provence, Forcalquier and Piedmont: An Essay on Her Times [London: W. Heinemann, 1893], p. 295.)
