The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  Even more dangerous than the vitamin-deficiency disorders like scurvy and pellagra, or poisoning from badly prepared or toxic foods, was infectious disease. Malnutrition reduces the body’s resistance to infection by impairing the immune response; white blood cells, for example, are less able to surround and destroy invading pathogens. Famine victims died in the tens of thousands from opportunistic diseases, after their immune systems had been weakened to the point that a simple rhinovirus—the common cold—can become a killer.

  But the relationship between infectious disease and malnutrition is complicated, and two-way. Infections shrink the appetite, and—when the gastrointestinal tract is targeted—reduce the metabolism of nutrients, at the precise moment when more nutrients are needed to fight the infection. But while all infections affect nutrition, not all infections are affected by malnutrition (or, for that matter, good nutrition). A number of studies of modern famines have demonstrated that malnutrition has a progressive increase on the likelihood of infection. However, it’s just as common for malnutrition to actually inhibit the growth of pathogens, by denying them vital compounds. Many microorganisms that cause disease, for example, need iron to survive, and scavenge it from their host’s blood and bone marrow. When iron is in short dietary supply—as, for example, during a famine—the body protects itself by storing it in places like the liver in order to keep it away from a pathogen.

  As a result, not all infectious diseases are more easily spread, or made more virulent, by malnutrition. The ones that tend to see big spikes during famines include measles, tuberculosis, amoebic and bacterial dysentery, most intestinal parasites, cholera, and herpes. Others, more moderately promoted by nutritional deficiencies, include staph infections, influenza, syphilis, typhus, and diphtheria.

  However, the world’s most historically dangerous infectious diseases—smallpox, malaria, typhoid fever, bubonic plague, yellow fever, and poliomyelitis—are virtually independent of nutrition. Europe’s best-fed populations during the Great Famine, monks in rich monasteries, died like flies during the Black Death thirty years later.

  This particular fact is why modern increases in lifespan, and decreases in mortality at any given age, aren’t mostly a function of improved nutrition. During the fourteenth century—during any century up to the present—the better you ate, the better you lived. Better, but not longer. The British peerage died at roughly the same ages as the British peasantry until the end of the eighteenth century, and neither was likely at birth to live much longer than twenty-five years in the fourteenth century, or even thirty-eight years in the eighteenth.

  Nonetheless, not all the excess mortality of the Great Famine was a result of deficiency, toxins, or disease. Hundreds of thousands of people, from Ireland to Poland, simply starved to death.

  It wasn’t fast, to be sure. A typical adult stores up to one hundred thousand calories in fat reserves, and the body can live off nothing else for weeks or months. Even after consuming its stored glycogen, the body is remarkably adaptive; humans can use acetone, acetoacetic acid, and beta-hydroxybutyric acid—collectively known as “ketone bodies”—to run cognitive functions and some muscular functions for weeks in the absence of food, or even fat. Only then does it literally start consuming bone and skeletal muscle—the formal term is catabolysis. After a few days of this, autophagy is the result: cells cannibalize themselves. The structure of the diaphragm collapses, and lung function drops by up to 80 percent. Perversely enough, after weeks of agonizing digestive cramps and excruciating muscle atrophy from little or no food, a few minutes without oxygen supplies a relatively painless end.

  The Great Famine brought starvation everywhere from the Atlantic seawall to the Urals, but nowhere suffered more than Flanders. As with Scotland, the famine was not an anomalous disaster in an otherwise happy era; the third horseman was preceded—and followed—by the second: war.

  The rebellious province had been more or less at peace with France for over a decade in the spring of 1315. In 1305, Philip IV of France and Count Guy of Flanders had signed a peace treaty ending the war best remembered for the Battle of the Golden Spurs at Courtrai. After Guy’s death later that year, his son Robert took the county, and spent the next nine years ignoring the treaty’s terms.

  Fed up, Louis X, who had been crowned upon the death of his father in November 1314, decided to invade the Flemish homeland, in partnership with Count William of Hainaut, Holland, and Zeeland (and Louis’s nephew-in-law). In the narrow geographic confines of the Low Countries, William was the perfect ally: located northeast of Flanders, Zeeland would cut the Flemish off from the North Sea and be the anvil against which the French hammer would smash Flanders into submission. On September 6, 1315, William and Louis invaded, sailing up the Scheldt past Antwerp, and made it as far as Courtrai.

  Louis should have found the location an ominous place to give battle, given its historical associations. But he never got the chance. The rains of 1315, which hadn’t stopped for more than a day at a time since May, completely stopped the progress of the combined Franco-Dutch army. Horses drowned every day. Provisions rotted. In less than a week, Louis’s plans for solving the Flemish problem had sunk under the mud, and, on September 13, he began his withdrawal toward Tournai.

  The Flemings were as cheered as they had been at Courtrai twelve years before. It was the only bright spot in what were, perhaps, their worst two years of the millennium. Within weeks of the French retreat, in Flanders “there began a dearness of wheat . . . from day to day the price increased.” At Antwerp, the price for a modius of wheat (about two gallons) was £5 on November 1, 1315. By November 30, it was £7; by December 24, £10. By April 1316, it had increased to £12, and by June 24, £16—an increase of more than 300 percent in five months.

  By 1316, a contemporary chronicler wrote, “people in many places began to eat less than sufficient bread, because they had no more.” Jan van Boendale, a Brabant writer and chief clerk of Antwerp, wrote, “The cries that were heard from the poor would move a stone, as they lay in the streets with woe and great complaint, swollen with hunger.” In the words of Gilles li Muisis, abbot of St. Martin’s of Tournai, in 1316, men and women from every stratum of society “perished daily in such great numbers that the air was fetid with the stench.” The abbot further noted that “so many poor beggars were dying in the street, on dung-heaps” that the city was compelled to hire a force of laborers to dispose of the corpses in the surrounding countryside.

  Burials, traditionally and literally the last stage of European class distinction, became exceedingly democratic, given the need for common burial of everyone. In Louvain, hospital wagons carrying half a dozen corpses each made three round-trips daily to a new cemetery opened outside the city’s limits. In Brussels, two new cemeteries were created during the first years of the famine. The mortality among Flemish ecclesiastics was especially brutal, though possibly it appears so only because the Monasticon Belge were so diligent about keeping records. Literally dozens of heads of monastic houses perished in 1315–1316, decimating the leadership of the Cistercians and Benedictines. Only the Black Death itself would kill more abbots and friars, and not by much.

  Flanders—northern Europe’s richest region—suffered a 10 percent population drop in 1316 alone. The burghers of the city of Ypres recorded the weekly death count from the famine—specifically, the number of corpses buried at town expense—between May 1 and November 1, 1316. In the week beginning May 8, 54 people were buried. By May 21, the number was 173. During the week of August 7, it was 191, before declining in October back to a few dozen. The thirty-week total was nearly 3,000, in a town with about 25,000 inhabitants. Bruges lost at least 5 percent of its own inhabitants—I say “at least” because it recorded only those “collected” not “buried.” In Tournai, the death rate increased nearly fourfold over a “normal” year, losing one adult out of every ten.

  Not that France was all that much better off, particularly in
the northern provinces of Normandy and Brittany. But because France was, in European terms, the nation furthest along the path toward modern statehood, it could take remedial action more decisively, and more effectively, than the more feudally backward nations to the east. One of the most cherished of lordly privileges, the right to create protected areas for hunting, put them in direct conflict with France’s rural peasantry, whose distaste for hunting preserves was partly economic—lord’s land was, obviously, unavailable for either pasture or farmland—and partly a strong emotional regard for what they saw as their traditional rights: the even longer-standing common rights to common land. This conflict was endemic throughout Europe, but only in France was the king strong enough, once the famine made the issue urgent, to solve it by requiring that the nation’s lords receive a royal authorization in order to create a “parc à gibier,” or “game park.”

  Regarding the basics—grain and, to a lesser degree, salt—the Crown was even more active. By the summer of 1315, King Louis had authorized the importation of grain from Gascony and distribution to the northern provinces (and, in September, the king publicly scolded merchants for their “avaricious cupidity” in his published Ordonnances). The Crown, able to read the political winds, scapegoated the merchant class without mercy. Despite acknowledging that the rising price for salt was determined by the rainy weather, he ordered his officers to find supposed hoards of salt and to prosecute the hoarders in question by confiscating all their goods and inflicting pretty much any punishment they wanted.

  By the time Louis was succeeded by his brother, Charles V (technically, he was succeeded by his son, John . . . for five days), the French ruler was unquestionably the most powerful in Europe. He was able to settle the long-standing feud with Flanders and rule a country that was, for reasons of geography, still able to produce sufficient quantities of food to feed her eighteen million people, since the change in the North Atlantic Oscillation that dropped hundreds of days of rain on northern France, Flanders, and Germany in 1315 left the farms of southern France largely untouched.

  And his sister was the queen of England. Which would have its consequences, as long-lasting in their way as the famine itself.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “She-Wolf of France”

  1313–1320

  The twelve-year-old who had celebrated the nuptial mass in Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1308 had been a girl; a royal princess, to be sure, but still a girl. Five years as queen of England transformed Isabella. She improved her position with her husband after the murder of the despised Piers Gaveston, and did so without alienating any of the opposing sides in the Gaveston affair: the king, his earls, and even her father, the king of France, who had let it be known that he would support Gaveston’s enemies, even to the point of offering £40,000 to the earls trying to depose Gaveston. The young queen survived two failed expeditions to Scotland, not to mention near capture by Robert Bruce, and had even fulfilled her most important royal duty: giving birth to the future King Edward III in November 1312.

  Yet she was still seen by her subjects as a luxury-loving spendthrift—and not unfairly. Even by the standards of medieval queens, few of whom could be called frugal, Isabella was remarkable. In addition to the royal wardrobe keeper, John Faleise, and the five dozen seamstresses required to drape the royal frame in the latest fashions, her household counted 180 servants, 70 of whom were of the “upper rank,” including a physician, two apothecaries, three cooks, a chaplain, a steward, a comptroller, a cofferer, and an almoner, whose only job was to dispense alms on feast days and holy days, using “the Queen’s great silver alms dish.”* Reporting to them were lower servants such as butlers, pantlers, a “clerke of spicerie,” a saucerer, ushers, marshals, chandlers, watchmen, eight knights, twenty-eight squires, bailiffs, castellans, a variety of senior and junior clerks, ladies-in-waiting, and a fool called Michael. To manage the household stable’s dozens of horses (plus eight greyhounds, and half a dozen falcons and hawks) required six carters, thirty-nine grooms, twenty-five palfreymen, and assorted (and uncounted) pages.

  Such an extensive domestic staff made it easy for her enemies—and, as it happens, some of her modern biographers—to paint her as a profligate, even to the point of spreading gossip that Isabella’s October 1311 pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury was so lavish that it cost the treasury £140,000. The scandalmongers missed the far more important and valuable asset that the queen had become. On May 23, 1313, Edward and Isabella sailed for France, landing first in Gascony, and then traveling north to Paris. There Isabella was now old enough to be included, for the first time, in the negotiations between her father’s and her husband’s royal houses, and all three—Philip, Edward, and Isabella—formally accepted the cross of a crusader from Cardinal Nicholas, the papal legate, which technically obliged all three to enlist directly in the pan-European campaign to liberate the Holy Land.

  In one of the more curious episodes in medieval European history, the bishop of Rome for whom Cardinal Nicholas was a representative wasn’t, at the moment, actually residing in Rome. In 1305, after a decade of vicious fighting between Philip IV and Pope Boniface IX and his successors, a Frenchman, Raymond Bertrand le Got, had been elevated to the papacy as Clement V.* The new pope was, by design, far more pliant than his predecessors, especially where the French Crown was concerned, and in 1309, he decamped, along with the entire papal court, to the Comtat Venaissin, in Avignon, beginning seven decades of ruling the entire apparatus of western Christianity from southern France.

  The Avignon papacy was mostly a contingent historical event, the consequence of particular circumstances and decisions. It would be a mistake to see it as another piece of historical flotsam, floating on the same centuries-long wave that brought the Vikings to Europe and North America, turned Europe’s forests into farms and meadows, and trebled the continent’s population: the Medieval Warm Period. It would likewise be a mistake to see it as free from the effects of that wave. The medieval papacy had become the most powerful “state” in Christendom (its preferred name for Europe, for obvious reasons) on the back of the same feudal system that had emerged to manage and defend the millions of acres of newly arable land needed to feed a larger and larger population. But the medieval Church had an unfair advantage in a feudal system, since ecclesiastical vassals, unlike secular ones, were effectively immortal, with their lands, in particular, held by the “dead hand” of mortmain. Abbots died, just like any lord, but the abbey remained a fief, ultimately owing homage not just to a king but to the bishop of Rome. As much as anything else, the drive for secular sovereignty in any given country was a drive to oppose the Church on a more equal footing. It is no coincidence that the European nations that were slowest to become modern states were those where the papacy had the greatest ability to undermine secular rulers: in Italy by geography—the so-called papal states cut the peninsula in half—and in Germany by control over the title of Holy Roman Emperor.* And it is even less coincidental that the first modern European nations were those least dominated by the popes: England and France.

  The Avignon papacy—subordinate to the French king, but wealthier than ever, from increased tithes and taxes, aggressive requests for “donations” from those seeking Church offices, and the highly profitable business of selling indulgences, or absolution from sin—was only five years old when Isabella returned to France in February 1314, ostensibly to make pilgrimage to Boulogne and Chartres, really on behalf of her husband. She arrived almost to the day that the most notorious victim of both the first Avignon pope and the king of France was being burned at the stake.

  Jacques de Molay, the twenty-third and last Grand Master of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, better remembered as the Knights Templar, had been a member of the order for at least thirty years when he ascended to its highest position. It wasn’t the best of times for the Templars, the first of the dozen or so Catholic military societies—others includ
ed the Knights Hospitaller, the Knights of Calatrava, and the Teutonic Knights—organized to defend the Church against its enemies, from Iberia to the Baltic, and especially on Crusade in the Levant.

  The First Crusade had been called in 1095 by Pope Urban II with two explicit objectives: first, to liberate the Holy Land from the Islamic armies that had conquered it four centuries before; and second, to unite Christendom. On both fronts, initial success was followed by long-term failure. Not only had the crusading armies lost the short-lived Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Templars, like other knightly orders charged with expelling Islamic influence from the Holy Land generally, and Jerusalem especially, had been expelled themselves, and ruled only parts of the island of Cyprus. And though the Crusades, by reestablishing trade in commodities and ideas with the east, had done nearly as much as the Medieval Warm Period to revive the growth of Europe’s population and economy, the result wasn’t a united continent but the opposite: the emergence of nation-states like France and England.

  Thus, by the time de Molay became its Grand Master, a supranational organization like the Templars wasn’t exactly sailing with the winds of history at its back. Even worse, the Templars weren’t simply an affront to a secular king like Philip IV, they were also one of his largest creditors, with the Temple in Paris acting as the royal treasury as far back as the reign of Philip Augustus. The combination would prove deadly. In 1307, de Molay was summoned to the papal offices to discuss merging the Templars with other military orders like the Knights Hospitaller in preparation for a new crusade to liberate Jerusalem. He found himself the subject of an investigation into charges that his order had broken the canon law of the Church, including engaging in idolatry and fornication, and in violating the sacraments. The original five charges eventually grew to nearly a hundred, including bestiality, denial of sacraments, selling souls to the devil (whom the Templars were accused of worshipping in multiple forms: sometimes as a head with three faces, sometimes as a giant cat), sodomy, corruption, intercourse with succubi, and witchcraft. The expansion of the indictment was the work of Philip, who could not avoid seeing a successful prosecution of the Templars as an opportunity to clear his debts. On October 13, 1307, he ordered the arrest of all Templars in France, and the confiscation of all their possessions. Pope Clement obediently followed suit, ordering the same for every Templar in Christendom.