Black Death Part 2
This is Black Death Part Two.
If you haven't listened to Part
One, go back and do that first.
It lays the foundation for
everything we're about to cover,
and it'll make the chronology of
Part Two far easier to follow.
In Part One, we traced the origins
of the bubonic plague, its genesis in
the East, its long crawl to European
shores, and the grim mechanics of its
pathophysiology and transmission, how it
moved, how it infected, how it killed.
We set the stage for how this disease
would reshape European society forever.
In this episode, we'll follow the
plague's invasion of Europe in a
roughly chronological and geographical
progression, tracking it as it sprints
northward across the continent.
At times, I'll break from the pattern
to dig into issues that were universal
across Europe during this period.
This is one of the most disastrous
stretches in European history, saturated
with anecdotes, events, theories,
political intrigue, and personal tragedy.
Far too much to cover in
full in a single podcast.
So consider this a bird's
eye view of the epoch.
If you want to go deeper,
there are excellent books on
the subject waiting for you.
All right, let's get started.
plague first landed in Messina,
Sicily, before crossing to the
Italian mainland at multiple points.
Reggio Calabria at the very tip of the
Italian boot, and a string of ports along
both eastern and western coastlines.
When it arrived, Europe was a patchwork
of fractured kingdoms and city-states,
politically fragmented, yes, but stitched
together by an extensive web of land and
trade routes, rivers, and tributaries.
Merchants, pilgrims, and soldiers
moved constantly along these arteries.
Within a matter of years, the
plague had spread across the entire
continent, tearing through every
social class without discrimination.
The plague ships didn't stop at Messina.
They also made landfall at
Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, and from
there, the contagion fanned out.
By the spring of 1348, Tuscany was
arguably the hardest hit region in
all of Italy, and within Tuscany,
no city suffered or was documented
more thoroughly than Florence.
The great city was ravaged.
The Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio,
a native son and a contemporary witness
to the plague, captured it vividly in
his literary masterwork, The Decameron.
It's a work of fiction, but it channels
what Florentines actually lived through.
Boccaccio writes of the dead, not
just human dead, but animals too.
Dying of the pestilence before his
own eyes, he describes pigs in the
streets of Florence seizing up and
dropping dead suddenly from the disease.
It's not hyperbole, it's a
haunting image, and it's real.
Boccaccio also captures how
people responded to the horror.
Some fled, abandoning
everything they owned.
Others took a middle path, self-imposed
isolation, venturing out only
for food or absolute necessities.
And then there were the reckless,
those who threw caution to the
wind and drank, sang, and indulged.
Public liaisons in the streets,
appetites fed by any means necessary.
This was the eat, drink, and be
merry for tomorrow we die crowd.
These are generalizations, of course,
but these same divergent human
responses would echo across every
corner of Europe as the plague advanced.
Death became so pervasive that a new
professional class emerged in Florence,
The gravediggers.
And these were not solemn,
respectful undertakers.
Many were drawn from the lowest,
most desperate rungs of society.
Men with little to lose, suddenly
holding an almost obscene amount of
power over the sick and the dying.
They controlled who got
buried, when, and how.
And with that monopoly on
the dead came opportunity.
Dark, predatory opportunity.
They would extort grieving families for
the privilege of a burial, demanding
payment far beyond what was fair, knowing
full well the family had no alternative.
They robbed corpses outright,
stripping the dead of jewelry,
clothing, anything of value, sometimes
before the body had even gone cold.
Some forced their way into homes
uninvited, using the pretense
of collecting the dead to loot
whatever they could carry.
There are accounts of extorting
the living, threatening to
leave a corpse rotting in the
household, spreading disease and
stench unless they were paid off.
In a city already drowning in horror, a
kind of parasitic class unto themselves,
profiting grotesquely answerable to
almost no one, because who, in the middle
of a pandemic, was left to police them?
As we noted in Part 1, famine
had already crippled the European
population before the plague ever
arrived, and Italy had no reprieve.
Its kingdoms were locked in constant
warfare, Genoa against Venice, the
Pope against the Holy Roman Emperor,
mafia-style blood feuds tearing
through Rome's aristocratic families.
Italy, was uniquely vulnerable
. Historian Philip Ziegler summed up the
state of the Italian people bluntly.
They were physically unprepared
to withstand a sudden, severe
epidemic and primed for a kind
of passive surrender to disaster.
If any people in history had earned the
right to despair, he argued, it was the
Italian peasantry of the mid-14th century.
The plague pits multiplied
across Florence.
Chronicler Marchioni di Coppo
Stefani describes the scene
in grim, unforgettable terms.
Bodies stacked layer upon layer, just
like one puts layers of cheese on lasagna.
And Stefani records something darker
still, a stain on human compassion itself.
Friends and family would sit
with dying loved ones until the
sick finally drifted into sleep.
And then they would simply leave.
The victim would wake alone, pleading
into an empty house because, as
Stefani put it, no one wished to
enter a house where someone was sick.
Countless plague victims died
utterly alone in pools of their
own blood, vomit, and fluid, their
cries for help going unanswered.
Genoa, Florence's neighbor to
the northwest, is a strange case.
Its merchants were the very ones
who ferried Yersinia pestis into
Messina, and by extension into Europe.
And yet, ironically, no significant plague
chronicler emerged from the city itself.
What does survive is the record of
a brief visit from one of the most
infamous women in the Christian world,
Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily.
Beautiful, headstrong, and just three
years earlier accused of murdering her
own husband with the help of her lover.
Even in the shadow of a
civilization-altering pandemic,
it seemed the medieval world had
every bit the appetite for a true
crime scandal that we do today.
Venice was proud, some would say
downright narcissistic, even by the
standards of its Italian rivals.
Tucked at the head of the Adriatic
Sea, the plague likely reached its
canals not long after the first
infected ship limped into port.
But Venice, for a time, resisted
the worst of the devastation,
thanks to leadership that was
unusually proactive and organized.
The city instituted early primitive
public health measures, crude, ultimately
ineffective, but a striking departure from
the fatalism gripping the rest of Europe.
Their municipal response was,
in essence, a medieval lockdown.
Canals were sealed, private boats
were pulled from the water, only
authorized gondolas were permitted
to move, collecting the dead from
the houses lining the canals.
Suspect ships arriving from
other regions were quarantined
on isolated lagoon islands, kept
well away from the city proper.
This is where Venice would
eventually pioneer something
genuinely novel, the lazaretto.
Named for the island of Santa Maria
di Nazareth, where the first of
these institutions was established, a
lazaretto was a dedicated quarantine
station, an island built for isolating
the sick and the suspect away from
the beating heart of the city.
Ships arriving from plague-stricken ports
were held offshore at these islands, their
crews and cargo left to wait out a period
of isolation before anyone or anything was
permitted to set foot in Venice proper.
The sick were ferried there as
well, separated from the healthy,
left to recover or die largely
apart from the general population.
It was crude, it was often
brutal, overcrowded, poorly
supplied, more a holding pen than
a hospital in any modern sense.
But it represented something the rest
of Europe simply hadn't attempted,
a systematic state-run response to
contagion, rooted not in prayer or
humoral theory, but in the simple
observed logic that distance and
isolation slowed the disease's spread.
The lazaretto would go on to become a
model copied by port cities throughout
the Mediterranean in the decades and
centuries that followed, a strange,
grim gift from Venice's plague years
to the future of public health.
But there was no consistency to
any of it, no standard for how
long a quarantine should last.
Isolation periods stretched from a
few days to several weeks, shifting
with public pressure and the economic
anxieties of merchants and trade houses.
Venice's leaders had strategy.
What they didn't have, couldn't
have, was medical knowledge.
And so, despite it all, mortality still
reached an estimated 60% in some accounts.
Organized or not, it was
still the Middle Ages.
That medieval blindness to the true
nature of the disease is perfectly
illustrated by one of Italy's leading
physicians, Gentile da Fligno,
who could not meaningfully
explain the plague at all.
Earlier in his career, Gentile had studied
human gestation, puzzling over why it
was so much more variable in humans than
in animals like horses or elephants.
His conclusion, humans, he theorized,
simply became too excited during
sex, and this threw off the timing.
It's a small, almost absurd detail,
but it tells you everything about the
limits of medieval science when faced
with a plague no one could explain.
As Italy burned, Yersinia pestis made its
simultaneous entrance into France through
the port of Marseille, a medieval melting
pot and the traditional launching point
for the Crusaders bound for the Holy Land.
Marseille would be pummeled.
Its harbor pulled in trade goods from
across the Mediterranean, making it an
easy, inevitable target for the disease.
Marseille was, quite literally, a city
on a hill, for the upper class anyway.
Down at the bottom, in what was known
as the lower town, the streets ran
with mud, garbage, and human waste.
Fishmongers, merchants, craftsmen, and
prostitutes packed the cobblestones
and alloys of a city bursting
with life, and that vibrancy,
that density, became its doom.
Yersinia thrived exactly where cities like
Marseille thrived, crowded, dirty, alive.
But before we push north into the heart
of France, one thing deserves recognition.
The people of medieval Marseille
and their remarkable tolerance
toward their Jewish community.
At a time when anti-Semitism
was tightening its grip across
Europe, Marseille stood apart.
Its Jewish residents were
not just spared the wave of
pogroms sweeping the continent.
The city became a known refuge for
Jews fleeing persecution elsewhere.
Avignon was next on Yersinia's
French tour, about 65 miles north
of Marseille, and at the time the
newly relocated seat of the papacy,
exiled from Rome for many reasons to
include crime in the classical city.
Avignon was where the who's who of
the religious world lived, and the
clergy there had largely shed any
pretense of humility, embracing instead
the opulence of French nobility.
The chronicler Petrarch
put it with real bite.
The simple fishermen of Galilee, he wrote,
now dressed themselves in purple and gold.
Avignon was bludgeoned.
We're seeing a pattern now, aren't we?
Density, wealth, trade.
Every urban center becomes a tinderbox.
From midwinter through spring of
1348, over 60,000 citizens died.
Grave diggers worked without rest,
consecrated ground filled to capacity,
so that Pope Clement was forced to
consecrate the Rhone River itself.
The graveyards were so full.
Turning the waterway into a mass
grave, the dead drifted downstream,
settling and rotting wherever
the current chose to leave them.
The sheer logistics of disposing
so many bodies produced scenes
almost too grim to imagine.
At night, pigs would wander into
the city's graveyards and feed on
corpses left in shallow graves.
Those who could flee did, including
the Pope himself, Clement VI.
Avignon became a ghost town.
Clement's survival was, in hindsight,
a stroke of unintentional genius.
At his estate outside the city, he
cloistered himself in a chamber flanked
by two fires kept burning constantly.
He had no idea why it worked, but
the flames kept the flea-ridden rats
away, and it likely saved his life.
One man who stayed behind by choice was
Guy de Chauliac, the papal physician,
who remained in Avignon to treat the
sick, studying and documenting the
disease as it unfolded around him.
He would eventually contract the
plague himself, hovering near death
for weeks, and yet fate intervened.
He survived.
The University of Paris was, at the
time, the intellectual epicenter of
European academia, home to a robust
and celebrated medical faculty.
But that prestige offered little comfort
to Parisians in the summer of 1348.
Paris itself was hit hard.
Contemporary estimates suggest
the city may have lost tens
of thousands of its residents.
Some accounts claim as many as 800 dying
a day at the outbreak's peak, a staggering
toll for a medieval city of its size.
The Hôtel Dieu, Paris's great hospital
on the Ãle de la Cité, became overwhelmed
almost immediately with the sick
and dying packed several to a bed.
The dead often left alongside
the living simply because there
was nowhere else to put them.
Chroniclers describe cart after
cart rumbling through the streets,
hauling bodies to hastily dug mass
graves outside the city's walls.
For a city that saw itself as the shining
capital of Christian learning and culture,
the scenes playing out in its own streets
were a brutal, humbling contradiction.
Amid the chaos, one group stood
out for a very different reason.
The young novitiates, nuns, many
barely out of girlhood, who had taken
up service at the Hotel Dieu, who
nursed the dying with a steadiness
that bordered on the miraculous.
Day after day, they bathed and
fed and comforted the sick,
fully aware of the fate that
likely awaited them for doing so.
And many did not survive
the service they gave.
The chronicler, Jean de Venette, who
witnessed it firsthand, left behind
one of the most quietly devastating
tributes of the entire pandemic.
She states that the saintly sisters
of Hotel Dieu worked sweetly and
with great humility, setting aside
consideration of earthly dignity.
A great number were called to
a new life and now rest, it is
piously believed, with Christ.
Medieval medicine was obsessed with bodily
fluids, bleeding patients to rebalance
the humors or examining and even smelling
stool and urine in search of a diagnosis.
The reigning theory centered on the four
humors, blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and
black bile, and the belief that disease
sprang from an imbalance among them.
This humoral framework had
passed to Europe through Arab
scholars who had inherited it
from classical Greco-Roman texts.
The resulting medieval medical model
was known as New Galenism, named for the
Roman physician Galen, whose influence
had dominated medical thought since the
late second and early third centuries.
There's a bitter irony
buried in his legacy.
Galen himself reportedly fled
his own community when it was
struck by a plague-like illness.
New Galenism took Galen's original
ideas and expanded them through an Arab
medical lens, forming a set of guiding
principles for medieval practice.
Alongside the humors, physicians
stressed the miasma theory, the
idea that foul odors and corrupted
air shaped by wind, humidity, heat,
and cold could trigger disease.
Open pores and sweat, they believed,
invited that corrupted air in,
which is why some contemporaries
actually advised against bathing,
sex, and vigorous exercise.
Diet mattered too, at least in
theory, though by modern standards
the guidance is almost nonsensical.
Avoid certain fish and meats
based on digestibility.
Roast meat instead of boiling it.
Wine and cabbage, some claimed, could ward
off the pestilence, while the value of
fruits and vegetables was hotly disputed.
Remedies, potions, and poultices
multiplied by the dozen.
Every single one from every so-called
plague doctor proved useless.
Aspects of human behavior were
also implicated as contributors to
susceptibility to the plague: anxiety,
depression, gossip, and anger.
Gentile da Foligno notes that these
emotions overheated the members.
An Arab scholar, Ibn Khatima,
hypothesized that stupidity reduced
the risk of contracting the plague,
while being smart increased the risk.
Parisian scholars turned to the
stars, concluding that a particular
planetary alignment had triggered
a deadly corruption in the air.
And here's where one of
history's most enduring images
was born, the plague doctor.
The long-beaked mask, the
goggles, the heavy robes.
That iconic silhouette is more
associated historically with later
and smaller outbreaks of the plague
centuries afterward, but its roots trace
directly back to this great pestilence.
The impulse behind the costume was,
in its own way, remarkably practical.
Physicians had noticed, even without
understanding why, that covering
the body seemed to offer some
protection from repeated exposure.
So they covered everything,
eyes, nose, skin.
The beak itself was stuffed with fragrant
herbs meant to filter out the foul air
believed to be spreading the corruption
and, indirectly, to protect the humors.
These same doctors would
lance and drain buboes, rarely
changing a patient's outcome.
They dispensed their remedies to no avail.
And yet, it's fair to say the
plague doctor's strange, ominous
outfit may have offered some
genuine, if accidental, protection.
Woven through every theory, every remedy,
every desperate practice of this era was
one unshakable thread, divine judgment.
Christianity was inseparable from
the fabric of medieval European life.
The church's authority
was total, uncontested.
Prayer, mass, ritual, iconography,
these were tools society reached for
as the world seemed to end around them.
But the most extreme, the most visceral
form of appeasement to divine wrath
didn't come from the church at all.
It came from outside it.
The flagellants, bands of peasant men
marched through towns and villages across
the continent in public processions
of brutal collective penance, whipping
themselves bloody in the streets.
The church never sanctioned this.
It didn't need to.
The flagellants were a raw,
unfiltered expression of a
continent in absolute desperation.
People taking divine retribution
into their own hands, quite
literally, whip in hand.
In our next and final episode, we complete
Yersinia's tour of European devastation,
starting in northern France, crossing the
English Channel into Britain, and circling
back through Germany and central Europe.
We'll dive deep into the phenomenon
of the flagellants, confront the
brutal persecution of Europe's Jewish
communities, and finally step back with
a modern lens to assess how the Black
Death permanently reshaped Europe's
demographic and geopolitical landscape.
