by John Kelly
* Unlike Gui de Chauliac, Galen, who in addition to being a medical theorist and sports doctor (he treated gladiators) was a Roman celebrity physician, showed no interest in acquiring a firsthand knowledge of the plague. When the Plague of Antonine struck Rome, he fled.
* The king was half right: the English won at Crécy, one of the most important early battles of the Hundred Years’ War, but Paris was not besieged.
* Estimates of English plague mortality vary. In A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 8), J. F. D. Shrewsbury, an English bacteriologist, came up with the highly improbable figure of 5 percent. The consensus figure, as expressed by John Hatcher in Plague, Population and the English Economy, 1348–1530 (London: Macmillan, 1977, p. 25), is between 30 and 45 percent. But medievalist Christopher Dyer thinks the contemporary evidence supports a mortality rate of close to 50 percent. Dyer has it about right.
* There are also conflicting reports about the day of the plague’s arrival. Among the dates cited in the chronicles are June 23, June 24, July 7, August 1, and August 15.
* One contemporary source says the ship that infected Melcombe came from Gascony, but, given the low volume of trade between the two regions, the allegation seems unlikely.
* The season, summer, and the two- to three-month interval between the arrival of Y. pestis in July and the first reports of fatalities in October suggests that the plague arrived in England in a bubonic form—“suggests,” because the interval could have been caused by a delay in recording deaths.
* This is a point of controversy. Evidence from the Third Pandemic suggests that stone houses can be penetrated by rats. But even if such homes are permeable, they were less permeable than wattle-and-daub peasant huts.
* “A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children and would not be comforted because they are not.”
* Besides overly vivid imaginations, one other reason medieval statisticians were so inaccurate is that calculations were often done with Roman numerals. Try multiplying CCXLIV by MCIX, and you get the idea. Only after Arabic numerals gained favor did it become possible to add, subtract, divide, and multiply with ease and precision. (George Gordon Coulton, The Black Death [London, 1929], p. 29.)
* By the time of the mortality, the water mill was beginning to do much of the fuller’s work.
* Like most statistics on the Middle Ages, this one comes in several variations. While a million and a half Jews is the consensus figure, estimates of the medieval Jewish population range as low as four hundred thousand (by the Italian scholar Anna Foa) and as high as two and a half million (by the historian Norman Cantor). (Anna Foa, The Jews of Europe After the Black Death, trans. Andrea Grover [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992], p. 87; Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made [New York: Free Press, 2001], p. 150.)
* Augustine imagined that, seeing the prophecies of the Old Testament fulfilled, at End of Days, the Jews would embrace Jesus on their own.
* It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that a favorite motif of Nazi propaganda art was Hitler dressed in gleaming Crusader armor.
* Jews, however, were not the only people to be singled out by a special dress code. Lepers and several other groups also were required to wear distinctive garments.
* In medieval Spain, Christian-Jewish disputations also covered nonreligious subjects. Topics included such questions as: “Why did Christians tend to be fair-skinned and good-looking while Jews tended to be black and ugly?” The Jewish answer to the paradox had two parts. One, Christian women had sex during menstruation, and hence were more prone to pass on a redness of blood to their offspring and, two, Gentiles often “had sex surrounded by beautiful paintings and [thus tended to] give birth to their likeness.” (Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews [New York: Harper & Row, 1987] p. 218.)
* There is some question about how common moneylending was among medieval Jews. But Rabbi Joseph Colon, who lived a century after the plague, says the Jews of Italy and France scarcely knew another profession.
* Toulon was in Provence, and Provence was unaffected by the 1322 exile order, since the region lay outside the direct control of the French Crown. Its ruler was Queen Joanna, a beacon of tolerance. After the pogroms in April and May of 1348, Joanna reduced taxes on the Jews.
* The original Heavenly Letter was discovered in the thirteenth century. In 1343 an angel left a revised, updated version of the letter at the same Jerusalem church where the original was found.
* Significantly, John of Reading says the reappearance of the plague in England in the spring of 1361 was accompanied by ecological upheaval. According to John, there was “a damaging drought . . . and because of the lack of rain there was a great shortage of food and hay.” The shortages must have driven infected rodents into homes and barns in search of food. (John of Reading, excerpted in The Black Death, Manchester Medieval Sources, trans. and ed. by Rosemary Horrox [Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1994], p. 87.)
* It is worth noting that in roughly the same period, 1200 to 1400, the population of China fell by half, from approximately 120 million to 60 million.
† De Venette says another oddity of the baby boom is that “when the children born after the plague began cutting their teeth, they commonly turned out to have only 20 or 22 [teeth], instead of the 32 usual before the plague.”
