The Black Death: lessons from this medieval pandemic
Most people don't think about death. This is reminded by death itself while playing chess on the beach in The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman's best-known film. The day always comes, his opponent points out, when being on the edge of life one has no choice than to confront the darkness.
Throughout history there have been few occasions more conducive to reflection on mortality itself than pandemics. Of these, the Black Death has been the most devastating. Even today it permeates the image of the dark ages that many have of the Middle Ages, which Petrarch already called saeculum obscurum before the plague, for other reasons.
This pestis, which exactly means epidemic in Latin, took at least a third of the European population with it, reaching its peak between 1348 and 1350.
Today we know the origin of the disease, discovered in 1894 by Alexandre Yersin and by Kitasato Shibasaburō: a bacillus called Yersinia pestis, natural in the rodents and transmitted to humans through the rat flea. We also know that this bacterium has been the cause of three major outbreaks: the Justinian plague in the 6th century, the aforementioned Black Death and the more recent so-called third pandemic, which killed millions of people in China and India in the second half of the 19th century. Let Boccaccio describe the illness:
"And it wasn't like in the Orient, where the sign of inevitable death was evident to anyone who got a nosebleed, but in the beginning there were males and females born similarly in the groins or under the armpits, certain swellings that some grew to the size of an apple and others to the size of an egg, and some more and some less, which were called ‘bubas’ by the people (...) immediately the quality of the said disease began to change into black or livid spots that appeared to many in the arms and thighs and in any part of the body, some big and rare and others small and abundant".
The Italian writer dedicated the first pages of The Decameron to recounting the plague that struck Florence in 1348 and unknowingly explained the three main types of plague: bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic, caused by the bite of the flea or by inhaling Flügge's droplets.
The text also gives us an idea of the eastern origin of the disease, which entered Europe via Italian merchant ships from the Crimea and Constantinople. Although the original outbreak is still debated today, we know that from 1347 onwards the epidemic spread unstoppably throughout the continent through commercial and travel networks, which were inevitable vectors at a time when people moved around much more than is usually thought. The Black Death will eventually become a recurring disease and will be associated with war and famine in what Jules Valdeon calls the trilogy of great catastrophes that make up the crisis of the 14th century.
The devastation suffered in this first wave of the mid-fourteenth century won't be easily forgotten, and although with time people will get used to living with the disease, sources reminding us of its uncomfortable presence will not cease to appear. For example, the Wanderings of the Cordovan knight Pedro Tafur, which tells us how difficult it was to reach Constantinople by the Black Sea in 1437 due to quarantines and blockades. We also have texts such as Georg von Nürnberg's dictionary, designed for Venetian students of what we would call today a business school, which provides the basic vocabulary to learn about the pestilence and the dangers of the road in 1424.
The immediate consequences of the pandemic won't just be health-related. The morbidity, strangely much higher in rural and less densely populated areas, will mean the depopulation of many rural centres, the loss of income for lords and landowners and skyrocketing commodity inflation, which will be combated by a rise in wages.
In many regions the economy will need a generation to recover and in many cases activity will change substantially. The change to teleworking in the days of the coronavirus had in this sense an equivalent in the expansion of livestock farming, for which not so much labour is needed and in which abandoned spaces are taken advantage of. In terms of its social impact, the epidemic eventually crystallised anti-Judaism in Europe.
It will do little good if the Jews fall ill in the same way or if Pope Clement VI condemns the violence against them. Between 1348 and 1351 many communities, accused of polluting the waters and wells, suffered persecution. In some cities, such as Mainz and Cologne, the Hebrew minority was almost completely eliminated. It seems relevant to recall these lessons from the past, at a time when the coronavirus awakens solidarity among neighbors, but sometimes also fear toward the others and racism.
Pedro Martínez García is a Professor of Medieval History at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. He doesn't receive a salary, nor does he do consulting work, nor does he own shares, nor does he receive funding from any company or organization that could benefit from this article, and he has stated that he has no relevant links beyond the academic position cited