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The people of the Crimea were dying from a plague of unparalleled fury. Rumors spread to major European seaports: India was depopulated; dead bodies covered Mesopotamia, Syria and Armenia; in some areas along the Great Silk route no one was left alive. These reports, however, barely added a moment of reflection to the everyday activities of the Europeans. To the west, Asia was the land of pagans and infidels. Strange events happened in these exotic places and there was no reason to believe that a similar disaster would strike the West. Even though Genoese merchants had long ago established a trading settlement along the Black Sea, this plague was considered a foreign illness attacking foreign cities in a foreign land.
Origins
It was said that the cause of the Pestilence or The Great Mortality -- 14th-century names for the contagion -- was a particularly sinister alignment of the planets, or a foul wind created by recent earthquakes. Other theories existed. Looks, according to one medieval physician, could kill.
But the source of the pestilence was something much more common and much more insidious -- rats and fleas infected with plague.
For centuries the bacillus Yersinia pestis, the bacteria associated with plague, lived comfortably within the confines of the blood streams of the small medieval wild black rat and the stomachs of adult rat fleas, and for centuries human populations were left untouched. The habitats of wild rats and humans rarely crossed paths, and rat fleas seldom found the blood of humans an enjoyable meal. People were accidental victims when no other warm-blooded small mammal was available.
Uncertainty still exists as to why the disease spread with such virulence at this point in history, but severe ecological changes in Central Asia in the mid-14th century could have contributed. Medieval chroniclers write about famines, floods and earthquakes. Such disturbances may have driven infected rats scurrying into human settlements, allowing the disease to become endemic in the common urban or sewer rat. The plague exists even today and just as in the 14th century, the disease spreads primarily through the bite of a flea. Rats are merely the vehicle for transporting fleas from one area to another; rats, like humans, eventually contract the disease and die, forcing diseased fleas to seek another warm-blooded mammal to survive. In the 14th century, hidden among the silks and grains in the hull of a ship, hungry fleas waited for an unsuspecting seaman to unload the precious goods. To make room for their next bloody meal, fleas, engorged with Yersinia pestis, regurgitated the swarming bacillus within their stomachs into the bloodstreams of their victims.
Rats and fleas have been the barely noticed companions of sailors ever since the time humans erected sails on wooden boats. In the mid-14th century the plague was ready to be shipped to the world. The only question was "Where would it strike next?"
Medieval physicians and chroniclers observed with horrified accuracy a panoply of symptoms, not realizing that they were witnessing different forms of the same illness. The most common form, called bubonic, is characterized by the formation of egg-sized swellings at the site of an infected flea bite, usually located in the armpits, groin or neck. Acute agonizing pain accompanies these growths. Next, hemorrhaging under the skin occurs, causing purplish blotches that frequently encircle the waist. Victims of bubonic plague die within four to six days of contraction. A second form, pneumonic, occurs when the infection moves into the lungs, allowing the bacteria to be transmitted easily from person to person. A cough, a sneeze or the mere act of breathing sends death into the air. Symptoms include the vomiting of blood. In septicemia, the third type of plague, massive numbers of the bacilli enter the bloodstream. A victim's body virtually explodes with the disease. A rash appears within hours, and death occurs within a day, even before buboes have time to appear. Whatever form a victim contracted, everything about the plague was disgusting, so that the sick became objects of revulsion rather than of pity. All matter that exuded from their bodies let off an unbearable stench; sweat, excrement, spittle, and breath became so foul as to be overpowering; urine could be turbid, thick, black or red. All diseases have their own methods for creating misery, but this plague brought with it a unique ability to degrade, disgust and destroy its victims. Parents abandoned children, husbands left wives, and sick relatives were forgotten. The healthy wanted to laugh and enjoy life again before it was too late. Many escaped to the countryside, but the plague soon found them. In the meantime, they danced, ate, reveled and spent money. Promiscuity and drunkenness abounded. Giovanni Boccaccio, scholar and Italian poet, recorded in his famous book, The Decameron, the moral laxity that had become the norm. In his tale, seven women and three men run to the countryside and amuse themselves by telling earthy, profane, comic, and, in a time of the religious allegory, unabashedly secular stories. They were out to have fun before death caught up with them.
The world took on an eerie silence. Mourning bells no longer tolled as villages and towns discontinued the practice that had become too repetitious. Castles echoed with their stillness. Fields remained empty. Ghost ships off the coast could be seen floundering as the crews were all dead. Unfinished cathedrals dotted the countryside standing like headless skeletons -- morbid monuments to the masons and architects who lay dead in nearby trenches. Many cathedrals would not be finished for a hundred years or more as the stone cutters, artisans and laborers were all dead. A few survivors took to the roads in an attempt to flee the contagion, in the process spreading as well as contracting the disease. In their wanderings they witnessed a world that in a little more than three years had changed beyond recognition. In 1348 the Pestilence sailed up the Thames into the heart of London, killing 50 percent of the population.
Amid the yellow-green Irish hills, a monk sits at his desk, tonsured head bent closely over his work. He has just witnessed the last of his brothers die, and the chanting voices of the dead echo in his ears as he awaits his own excruciating death. Brother John Clynn is writing a letter to the future with little hope that anyone will remain to read his last work of recorded history. Like many of his contemporaries, this lone monk, surrounded by the Irish hills set against the backdrop of a setting sun, bel ieves the world has come to an end. Brother Clynn is right. The plague lasted from 1346 until 1350. In less than four years the disease carved a path of death through Asia, Italy, France, North Africa, Spain and Normandy, made its way over the Alps into Switzerland, and continued eastward into Hungary. After a bri ef respite, the plague resumed, crossing the channel into England, Scotland, and Ireland, and eventually made its way into the northern countries of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and even as far north as Greenland. In other words, the plague touched al most all of the known world. Although the death toll from region to region varied, modern demographers agree with the casual remarks of the medieval chronicler Froissart, who stated that "a third of the world died." Translated into a body count, about 20 million victims lay in hastily dug trenches. So much death could not help but tear apart economic and social structures. Lack of peasants and laborers sent wages soaring, and the value of land plummeted. For the first time in history the scales tipped against wealthy landlords as peasants and serfs gained more bargaining power. Without architects, masons and artisans, great cathedrals and castles remained unfinished for hundreds of years. Governments, lacking officials, floundered in their attempts to create order out of chaos.
The living lost all sense of morality and justice, and a new attitude toward the church emerged. Medieval people could find no Divine reason for the four-year nightmare, and dissatisfaction with the church gave impetus to reform movements that eventually broke apart the unity of the Catholic Church. Priests and elderly scholars, the holders of knowledge, died in unprecedented numbers. In England, from the days of the Norman Conquest, the keys of education had been locked away in the languages of Latin and French. Into the vacuum left by the dead clergy and teachers flowed new ideas, and the revolutionary use of the vernacular to communicate these ideas allowed the common person to become educated. After the plague, concern for the survival of learning dro ve the founding of new universities across Europe. Only five years after the Pestilence left its shores, England created three new colleges at Cambridge. It may not be too much of an overstatement to say that the Black Plague anticipated the onset of the Renaissance and the rise of humanism. Before the plague, death was seen as a kind caretaker for souls awaiting resurrection. In plague-stricken Europe, death became something much more sinister. Art and literature portrayed death as an inescapable monster.
One gift the Black Plague may have bequeathed to future generations is the ability to resist the immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS. The virus for AIDS and the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis attack the body in similar ways. Those who survived the Black Death may have carried a chance gene mutation, giving them immunity from the plague that would also provide protection against HIV. Those immune to the AIDS virus today may have received this mutation from the survivors of the Black Death.
For those living in the years directly after the plague, however, the nightmare was over, but getting on with the business of life in a new world remained painful and difficult. No longer were the mysteries of life easily explained, and the reality of death was all too plain. As one Black Death epitaph put it:
We are a spectacle to the world. Let the great and humble, by our example, see well to what state they shall be inexorably reduced, whatever their condition, age or sex. Why, then, miserable person, are you puffed with pride? Dust you are and unto dust you shall return, rotten corpse, morsel and mean for worms.
Brother Clynn left five clean pages for anyone who might survive the Pestilence to continue his work. At the end of his last paragraph, written in the copyist's hand, are the words "Here it seems the author died." Brother John Clynn had died of the plague.
