The Great Mortality: an intimate history of the Black Death
John Kelly Fourth Estate, 364pp, £18.99
ISBN 0007150695
''Tot es mort, torz son mortz" - "Everything is dead, everyone is dead." So wrote a scribe in late 1348 in Millau, southern France, on a register containing the terms of a contract for work on the town walls. The Black Death was the deadliest epidemiological crisis in history. In Venice, at least three-quarters of the population died. Florence was so devastated that for a long time the disease was known as "the plague of Florence". The truncated transept of Siena's cathedral still stands as witness to the plague's abrupt intrusion into human plans, as do the many chronicles which end suddenly at this time, as their authors succumb to the miasma. John Clynn, a Franciscan friar at Kilkenny, Ireland, wrote a diary of the plague that was an-notated in another hand with the words, "Here, it seems, the author died." The Florentine chronic-ler Giovanni Villani wrote "and this pestilence lasted until -" but he died before he could fill in the blank. The present, as well as the future, seemed literally to be vanishing.
More than six centuries later, the Black Death still penetrates deeply into the European imagination. Every year, new academic studies and popular histories are published, adding to an already swollen bibliography, but rarely outclassing classics such as Philip Ziegler's The Black Death, first published in 1969. The other great classic is Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, written between 1349 and 1351. Boccaccio's clinical account of the plague was a pioneer contribution to descriptive medicine. He wrote:
Its earliest symptoms were the appearance of certain swellings in the groin or armpit, some of which were egg-shaped, while others were roughly the size of the common apple . . . these swellings would begin to
spread, and within a short time would appear at random all over the body. Later on, the symptoms of the disease changed and many people began to find dark blotches [hence "black" death] and bruises on their arms, thighs and other parts of the body.
A century later, Francois Villon captured the final moments of the disease in lines that portrayed death in all its horror:
Death makes him shudder and grow pale,
Makes his nose twist, his veins stretch,
His neck swell, his flesh soften,
His joints and tendons expand and strain.
Nothing in John Kelly's account comes close to the power of these words. His own writing is hyperbolic, fevered, blotchy with stylistic buboes ("the thin fabric of civilisation held - sometimes by the skin of its teeth"; "but by that time, Europe would be in the shadow of the Enlightenment") and energy-sapping cliches (the month of May is "merry", the English countryside is "green and pleasant", the sky and sun over Sicily are "violent"). Kelly also seems to be unaware that the expression "from whence" is an embarrassment of riches - or just an embarrassment.
But the real problem with this book is the author's insistence on anthropomorphising its protagonist, the rat-borne plague bacillus Yersinia pestis, or Y pestis. While its 14th-century victims may be pitied for believing that the pestilence was a manifestation of divine wrath, they were not so credulous as to believe, as Kelly appears to do, that the disease possessed the faculty of sight. Y pestis stops here and there to admire "views that resemble paintings", or to "gaze up at monstrous cliffs of silvery ice". Moreover, Y pestis is calculating, able to "marshal its forces" with "skills honed on the windswept plains of Mongolia"; pleasure-loving, "as if killing was the only happiness it knew"; as vain as an "old matinee idol"; and even vocal - at the Hampshire border, it can be heard "howling".
All this sits at odds with Kelly's synthesis of more judiciously expressed primary and secondary sources. From these, we learn of the continent-wide pogroms of Jews, who were scapegoated for the crisis. Accused of poisoning the water supply, they were rounded up in large numbers, locked into buildings, and incinerated. We learn of the measures taken to ward off infection: even the greatest physicians were able seriously to suggest sitting over the contents of one's privy and inhaling the odours. Paris was so full of excrement that, if logic had been at play in this matter, nobody would have been infected.
But public health, such as it did exist, was not entirely ineffectual. Boarding up the sick in their homes showed a basic understanding of the principle of containment, and the city statutes that introduced more stringent hygiene practices may have gone some way to reducing the impact of other diseases, if not Y pestis.
The plague took, but it also gave. As the supply of people dropped, the price of people rose: the economic consequences included an increased demand for labour, which caused wages and the average standard of living to rise, sometimes two- or threefold. As the ranks of the guildsmen, notaries and clerks who ran the machinery of commerce and government became depleted, laymen stepped forward to claim positions previously closed to them.
The Black Death deserves to be con-sidered as one of the most extraordinary and complex episodes in the history of early modern Europe. Unfortunately, this book is too slight a work, too sporadic in its insights, to add much to the story.
Frances Stonor Saunders's most recent book is Hawkwood: diabolical Englishman (Faber & Faber)
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
