The Black Death (9 page)

T
HE
Black Death seems to have arrived in France only a month or two after its first outbreak on the mainland of Italy; according to an anonymous Flemish cleric in one of those same ill-fated galleys which had been expelled from Italy towards the end of January 1348.
1
The galley called first at Marseilles, from where it was chased, rapidly but still not rapidly enough, by the horrified authorities. Thence it continued its destructive course, spreading the plague to Spain and leaving a trail of infection along the coast of Languedoc.

France was certainly one of the most populous and should also have been the most prosperous country of Europe. Professor Lot has put its population in 1328 – the population, that is to say, of the France of its present frontiers, including part of Flanders, Burgundy, Brittany and Guienne – at between twenty-three and twenty-four million.
2
Professor Renouard estimates the total twenty years later at somewhere near twenty million.
3
The
density
of population in the countryside was more or less what it is today:
4
a burden which the land was hard put to it to support since production per acre was barely a third of the present figure. On the whole the latest studies tend to indicate a total
population
somewhat lower
5
than earlier estimates but no one would deny that the rural population was dense by medieval standards, comparable with that of Tuscany, and that the pressure of
population
on resources was fast becoming intolerable.

Left to itself the French countryside was probably more
capable
of supporting such a crowd than any other region in Europe. But where Italy had to endure its Guelphs and Ghibellines, France had the English. King Edward III had no intention of leaving France to itself or, to look at the matter in a more chauvinistic light, was justifiably outraged by French
interference
with his Duchy of Guienne and their support for David
Bruce in Scotland. John of Bridlington, indeed, ascribed the plague in France mainly to the contumacious policy of its king.
6
He pointed out that the French had been guilty of avarice, luxury, envy, gluttony, anger, sloth and conspicuous lack of devotion to the saints but that the chief crime which had called down divine vengeance was undoubtedly the failure of Philip VI to allow Edward III free and peaceful enjoyment of his
inheritance
. He did not go on to explain the curious circumstance that God had subsequently extended the scope of his wrath to
embrace
the virtuous and ill-used English.

Whether or not the policy of Philip VI provoked the plague, it certainly led to the Hundred Years War between France and England; in the long run to the detriment of both countries, in the short with disastrous consequences for his own. From 1337, when Philip VI announced that the English throne had forfeited Guienne and Edward III retorted by claiming the throne of France, the French peasant, in great areas of his country, no longer knew the meaning of the word security. A brief truce after the naval battle of Sluys quickly ended in renewed
warfare
. In 1346 Edward III landed in Normandy with some 15,000 men. On 25 August he won a crushing victory at Crécy. The subsequent siege of Calais lasted a year. Military casualties in the campaign, by modern standards or when viewed against the size of the French population, were insignificant but the damage to civilian morale and to the agricultural richness of the country was immeasurable. To the luckless villagers, whose few possessions had alternately been looted by French or English soldiery, the apparition of the plague seemed merely the
culminating
phase in a process designed by God to end in their total destruction.

*

Within a month, wrote one authority, fifty-six thousand people in Marseilles met their end.
7
The figure seems improbably high but, as in many sea-ports where bubonic and pulmonary plague raged side by side, mortality was greater than in the
inland
regions. From the Mediterranean the epidemic advanced along two main lines. To the west it quickly reached Montpellier and Narbonne. It afflicted Carcassonne between February and
May; moved on to Toulouse and Montauban and finally reached Bordeaux in August. To the north, Avignon was attacked in March, April and May; Lyons in the early summer, Paris in June and Burgundy in July and August. Flanders was exempt until 1349.

In Perpignan the plague took much the same course as in
Avignon
though, as was usually the case, it passed more quickly in the smaller city. The disruption of everyday commercial life is shown strikingly by statistics of loans made by the Jews of
Perpignan
to their Christian co-citizens. In January 1348 there were sixteen such loans, in February, twenty-five, March, thirty-two, eight in the first eleven days of April, three in the rest of the month and then no more till 12 August. Of 125 scribes and legists known to have been active shortly before the Black Death only forty-five appear to have survived – even with a reduction for natural mortality a death rate of between fifty and sixty per cent seems likely. Physicians fared even worse – only one out of eight surviving – while sixteen out of eighteen barbers and surgeons perished or, at least,
8
disappeared.

‘Laura,’ wrote Petrarch in his manuscript of Virgil,

Avignon in 1348 had been for nearly half a century the seat of the Popes. As such it had swollen from an always considerable town to one of the great cities of Europe, Its role as papal capital ensured that it would be one of the most visited centres of
Christendom
;
an easy prey for a plague that thrived on every kind of social intercourse. An unnamed canon writing to a friend in Bruges spoke of half the population of Avignon being dead, seven thousand houses shut up and deserted, eleven thousand corpses buried in six weeks in a single graveyard, sixty-two thousand victims in the first three months of the epidemic.
10
Another
record
put the total of the dead at more than a hundred and twenty thousand
11
while the German historian, Sticker, on still less
certain
authority, even ventured as far as a hundred and fifty
thousand
.
12
It is, at least, not hard to believe that half the population died though one of the few verified facts might be taken as
indicating
a lower figure. The Rolls of the Apostolic Chamber show that only ninety-four out of four hundred and fifty, or 21 per cent, of the members of the Papal Curia died during the Black Death.
13
But this is not much of a pointer to the overall death rate. Nobody would have expected the well-fed and well-housed senior staff of the papal establishment to perish at the rate of their fellow mortals.

On the whole the churchmen of Avignon seem to have behaved creditably during the plague; churchmen in the widest sense that is, from papal councillor to penniless and itinerant monk. ‘Of the Carmelite friars at Avignon,’ wrote Knighton uncharitably,
14
‘sixty-six died before the citizens knew the cause of the calamity; they thought that these friars had killed each other. Of the
English
Austin Friars at Avignon not one remained, nor did men care.’ Knighton had all the contempt of a Canon Regular for these turbulent and often embarrassing colleagues. ‘At Marseilles, of one hundred and fifty Franciscans, not one survived to tell the tale; and a good job too!’ was another of his still harsher
comments
. Yet in fact there is no reason to doubt that the mendicant orders behaved at Avignon with as much courage and devotion as they did elsewhere and that their reputation rose accordingly.
15

Pope Clement VI himself played a slightly less forthright part. There is no doubt that he was preoccupied by the horrors of the plague and genuinely disturbed and distressed for his people. Though by no means celebrated as an ascetic he was good-hearted and honourable, anxious to do what was best for his flock. He did all he could to ease the path of the afflicted by relaxing the
formalities needed to obtain absolution and ordered ‘devout
processions
, singing the Litanies, to be made on certain days each week’. Unfortunately such processions tended to get out of hand; at some, two thousand people attended, ‘amongst them, many of both sexes were barefooted, some were in sack cloth, some covered with ashes, wailing as they walked, tearing their hair, and lashing themselves with scourges even to the point where blood was drawn’
16
At first the Pope made a habit of being
present
at these processions, at any rate when they were within the precincts of his palace, but excesses of this kind revolted his urbane and sophisticated mind. He also realized that large
concourses
, attended by the devout from all over the region, were a sure means of spreading the plague still further, as well as
providing
a breeding ground for every kind of hysterical mob
outburst
. The processions were abruptly ended and the Pope from then onwards sought to discourage any kind of public
demonstration
.

Not unreasonably, Pope Clement VI calculated that nothing would be gained by his death and that, indeed, it was his duty to his people to cherish them as long as possible. He therefore made it his business to stay alive. On the advice of the papal physician, Gui de Chauliac, he retreated to his chamber, saw nobody, and spent all day and night sheltering between two enormous fires. For a time he took refuge in his castle on the Rhône near Valence but by the autumn he was again at his post in Avignon. It does not seem that the Black Death died out in the papal capital much before the end of 1348.

*

‘Fish, even sea fish, are commonly not eaten’ the horrified clerics of Bruges heard from their compatriots at Avignon, ‘as people say that they have been infected by the bad air.
Moreover
, people do not eat, nor even touch spices, which have not been kept a year, since they fear that they may have lately
arrived
in the aforesaid ships. And, indeed, it has many times been observed that those who have eaten these new spices and even some kinds of sea fish have suddenly been taken ill.’

As the Black Death moved across Europe it was inevitable that a host of theories would be generated on the best methods of
avoiding, preventing and curing the disease. The growing threat to France induced King Philip VI to appeal to the Medical Faculty at Paris to prepare a considered report on the subject. Their response
17
provided the most prestigious, though neither the best informed nor the most intelligent, of the many studies of the Black Death in action. The plague literature as a whole, drawn from some half-dozen countries, was voluminous,
repetitious
and of little value to the unfortunate victims of the
epidemic
. Before considering it, however, it is worth taking a quick look at the growth of medical knowledge before and during the Middle Ages so that the disadvantages and limitations under which the medieval physician laboured can be better understood.

Modern medical science, if a gross over-generalization may be forgiven, began with Hippocrates. It was he who first conceived ill health, not as a series of unrelated and essentially inexplicable catastrophes but as an orderly process calling on each occasion for examination of symptoms, diagnosis of malady and
prescription
of cure. For any study of the Black Death his importance is paramount since he was the first student of epidemiology and the first to distinguish between epidemic and endemic diseases. In his First and Third Books of Epidemics and the four volumes of notes compiled either by Hippocrates himself or by his son he set out to analyse the factors which led to a disease settling in any given area and becoming endemic. The next stage was to define and explain the causes, climatic, meteorological or latent within the body of man himself, which provoked a subsequent
epidemic
outburst. It was his particular concern to work out a relationhip between each type of epidemic and the different environmental conditions in which it flourished. This ‘
katastasis
’, as he called it, was, it seemed to him, best established on astronomical evidence – a red herring which Hippocrates
himself
might in time have transcended but which was to bedevil medical research for many centuries.

The main flaw in the monumental labour of Hippocrates was that he had insufficient data from which to draw valid
conclusions
. He deduced, for instance, that spells of warm, moist weather were, in themselves, conducive to ill health; a thesis reasonable enough where malarial regions were concerned but
irrelevant if not positively misleading when applied to England. His great achievement was to have provided a blue-print for
research
on which subsequent generations should have worked. The tragedy is that the vast compilation of case histories, on which a serious study of epidemiology could alone have been based, was not made by his successors. After the death of Hippocrates in 377
BC
, medical science slumbered for five hundred years; it awoke only to find itself rigidified by the misplaced formalizing genius of Galen of Pergamos.