A list of thirty facts and quotes about the Black Death

UPDATE: The blog has now moved: https://commonreader.substack.com/

Most people thought the Black Death was the end of the world. According to one ranking system it was a bigger disaster than World War I. (It is worth remembering this was also the period of the Hundred Years War.) And yet, people still dispute what exactly the bacterium was that caused this outbreak. And we cannot ever know how many people it killed. I included two sources for the origin as that seems to be disputed too, although I cannot tell if the dispute is legitimate unless I spend more time on that question than I want to.

This is a list of things I wanted to know and was able to find out on Google Scholar, noting I have no access to anything gated. One or two links are journalism articles. It is therefore a skimming stone rather than a plumb line. The post is designed to give you a broad sense of the range and types of changes and effects the Black Death had on society. Some of it is remarkably apposite today. The article by Ole J. Benedictow (resurfaced by the Browser this week) is an excellent, thorough introduction.

Where there is no link and the reference is ‘Tuchman’, the information is from A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman (US link), the marvellous book that got me started on this topic.

1. ‘It began to appear in China during the 1330s and reached the Crimea in 1346. From the Crimea, Pasteurella pestis and the plague took ship and travelled to Constantinople and Sicily in the year 1347, Egypt and Syria in 1348, and spread to the rest of Europe in the following years.’ Pamuk
2. ‘It used to be thought that the Black Death originated in China, but new research shows that it began in the spring of 1346 in the steppe region.’ Ole J. Benedictow
3. ‘Of particular importance was the sudden appearance of the plague over vast distances, due to its rapid transportation by ship. Ships travelled at an average speed of around 40km a day [which] meant that the Black Death easily moved 600km in a fortnight by ship… By land, the average spread was much slower: up to 2km per day along the busiest highways or roads.’Ole J. Benedictow
4. ‘It devastated the Western World from 1347 to 1351, killing 20-50% of Europe’s population.’ Robert Gottfried
5. ‘In crowded Avignon… a single graveyard received 11,000 corpses in a week.’ Tuchman
6. ‘The importance of the black rat (R. rattus) and its fleas in the transmission of plague in medieval European plague is disputed, because rats were absent in large areas of northern Europe during the second plague pandemic.’ Schmid et al
7. ‘To the chroniclers of Padua the plague was a devastation more final than Noah’s flood – when God had left some people alive…’ Rosemary Horrox
8. ‘As if the world were indeed in the grasp of the Evil One, its first appearance on the European mainland in January 1348 coincided with a fearsome earthquake that carved a path of wreckage from Naples up to Venice… the destruction went as far as Germany and Greece.’ Tuchman
9. ‘In England, in strange and almost sinister process, the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Stratford,  died in August 1348, his appointed successor died in May 1349, and the next appointee three months later, all three within a year.’ Tuchman
10. ‘Before 1348 the word contagium (contagion) was rarely used, especially outside the medical profession. When chroniclers and theologians used the term, it applied almost exclusively to heresy or revolt and not to disease. By contrast, after 1348 its usage became widespread and not only among doctors. Chroniclers and merchants in their diaries and letters used it to describe the spread and destruction wrought by disease and principally by plague.²⁵ By contagion, they clearly meant person-to-person transmission by breath, touch, or occasionally by sight, and, although the term was applied to other maladies, it was mainly reserved for describing plague, in order to distinguish it from other diseases.’ Cohn
11. ‘For some parts of Europe, agrarian population density did not recover until the early 19th century.’ Chalmers
12. ‘The passing bells rang all day and all night… Filled with the sound of mourning, the city [Tournai]  became oppressed by fear so that the authorities forbade the tolling of bells and the wearing of black and restricted funeral services to two mourners.’ Tuchman
13. ‘Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship.’ Agnolo the Fat
14. ‘Even in the 14th century the health authorities in northern Italy had established the importance of a 40 day quarantine period, which became the gold standard for continental Europe for the next 300 years. The 40 day quarantine was not adopted in England until the 16th century and even then it was changed to 30 days only to find that this was completely ineffective, whereupon this regulation was speedily rescinded.’ C J Duncan, S Scott
15. ‘These results suggest the Black Death did not kill indiscriminately, but it did discriminate less sharply than death normally does.’ DeWitte and Wood
16. ‘The Black Death caused urban real wages to rise by as much as 100 per cent in the decades after 1350 and they remained above their earlier levels until late in the sixteenth century not only in western Europe and the western half of the Mediterranean but also around the eastern Mediterranean. Even a cursory look at real wage series makes clear that modern economic growth and the Black Death are the two events that led to the most significant changes in wages and incomes during the last millennium.’ Pamuk
17. ‘Women were recruited into the [English] work-force, partly because they could be hired more cheaply, and partly because they were often the only available source of labour. In some years women could be found doing jobs, such as harrowing, that in the past had been confined primarily to men.’ Mavis E. Mate 
18. ‘Florence was reduced in population from 90,000 to 45,000, Sienna from 42,000 to 15,000.’ William L. Langer
19. ‘In Florence, Genoa, Venice, and most of northern Italy, expenditures on warfare increased exponentially after the Black Death to the fifteenth century, as shown by the soaring of state indebtedness. In Siena, these fiscal pressures led in 1355 to the toppling of the most durable political regime in the history of the Italian city-states—the Nove—which had ruled since 1287. Afterward, popular unrest, factional conflict, and a rapid succession of governments filled the city’s political chronicle. In one year alone, 1368, popular uprisings overthrew three regimes.’ Samuel Cohn
20. ‘The population of Egypt probably did not return to its pre-Black Death levels until the nineteenth century.’ Pamuk
21. ‘During the Black Death in 1348 there was evidence of a few people who were resistant to the disease. For example, a monk who was the sole survivor in a monastic community… By the 17th century, inspection of the burials registers of London suggests that the percentage of the resident population showing resistance had risen considerably.’ C J Duncan, S Scott
22. ‘[English] Litigation, hindered by successive recurrences of the plague, recovered to 1348 levels only by 1365, aided by the appearance of new methods of litigation… Economic historians have been unable to see any sort of economic crisis until the 1370s.’ Robert C. Palmer
23. ‘In the plague history of Norway from the Black Death 1348-49 to the last outbreaks in 1654, comprising over thirty waves of plague, there was never a winter epidemic of plague.’ Ole J. Benedictow
24. ‘The most monumental of medieval Jewish persecutions… were the burning of Jews between 1348 and 1351, when in anticipation of, or shortly after, outbreaks of plague Jews were accused of poisoning food, wells and streams, tortured into confessions, rounded up in city squares or their synagogues, and exterminated en masse.’ Samuel K. Cohn Jr
25. ‘A vital portion of the qualitative roots of Tudor governance… was the change in governmental approach and the great expansion of legal subject matter jurisdiction that began with the Black Death. After the Black Death the King’s government became responsible for running the whole society.’ Robert C. Palmer
26. ‘King Alfonso XI of Castile was the only reigning monarch killed by the pest.’ Tuchman
27. ‘By the mid-fifteenth century, rather than being targets, Jews participated alongside Christians in processions to forestall the plague.’ Samuel Cohn
28. ‘Real wages roughly doubled from the 1340s until the middle of the fifteenth century. In each country or region, real wages tended to reach their peak a little later than the low point in population.’ Pamuk
29. ‘Declining mortality trends in waves of late medieval plague allowed doctors to become convinced they had devised effective regimes of prevention and cure. Thus 14th- and 15th-century physicians became the first professionals to believe that they had surpassed the genius of ancient authorities such as Hippocrates.’ Cohn (review)
30. ‘People died without last rites and were buried without prayers… A Bishop in England gave permission for laymen to make confession to each other as was done by the Apostles… Clement VI found it necessary to grant remissions of sin to all who died of the the plague because so many were unattended by priests.’ Tuchman

I have left plenty out, like the fact that doctors died before their patients, or were thought to be avoiding them, or that priests were reluctant to do their parish duties. (Although Bishops had a much lower death rate than priests, in England.) Many government officials died in Europe. Lawlessness was rife. Philip VI had trouble collecting his taxes in the winter of 1347-48. Those are perhaps the more obvious or intuitive pieces of information. I have tried to keep this list focussed on things that are (to me at least) less easily discovered.