Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror; The Calamitous 14th Century

Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror; The Calamitous 14^th Century, Knopf, New York, 1978

His successors Benedict XII and Clement VI built in stages the great papal palace at Avignon on a rock overlooking the Rhone, a huge and inharmonious mass of roofs and towers without coherent design. Constructed in castle style around interior courts, with battlements and twelve-foot-thick walls for defense, it had odd pyramidal chimneys rising from the kitchens, banqueting halls and gardens, money chambers and offices, rose-windowed chapels, a steam room for the Pope heated by a boiler, and a gate opening on the public square where the faithful gathered to watch the Holy Father ride out on his white mule. (28)

Though himself something of a lapsed cleric, Petrarch shared the clerical habit of denouncing at double strength whatever was disapproved. Avignon became for him “the disgusting city,” though whether because of worldly corruption or the physical filth and smells of its narrow, overcrowded streets is uncertain. The town, crammed with merchants, artisans, ambassadors, adventurers, astrologers, thieves, prostitutes, and no less than 43 branches of Italian banking houses (in 1327), was not so well equipped as the papal palace for the disposal of sewage. The palace had a tower whose two lower stories contained exclusively latrines. Fitted with stone seats, these were emptied into a pit below ground level that was flushed by water from the kitchen drains and by an underground stream diverted for the purpose. In the town, however, the stench caused the ambassador from Aragon to swoon, and Petrarch to move out to nearby Vaucluse “to prolong my life.” (29)

Supposed to be commissioned by the Church, the pardoners would sell absolution for any sin from gluttony to homicide, cancel any vow of chastity or fasting, remit any penance for money, most of which they pocketed. (30)

Upon the approach of death, knights and noble ladies would have themselves clad in the Franciscan habit, believing that if they died and were buried in it, they could not go to hell. (31)

As an integral part of life, religion was both subjected to burlesque and unharmed by it. In the annual Feast of Fools at Christmastime, every right and article of the Church no matter how sacred was celebrated in mockery. A dominus festi, or lord of the revels, was elected from the inferior clergy—the cures, subdeacons, vicars and choir clerks, mostly ill-educated, ill-paid, and ill-disciplined—whose day was to turn everything topsy-turvy. They installed their lord as Pope or Bishop or Abbot of Fools in a ceremony of head-shaving accompanied by bawdy talk and lewd acts; dressed him in vestments turned inside-out; played dice on the altar and ate black puddings and sausages while mass was celebrated in nonsensical gibberish; swung censers made of old shoes emitting “skinking smoke”; officiated in the various offices of the priest wearing beast masks and dressed as women or minstrels; sang obscene songs in the choir; howled and hooted and jangled bells while the “Pope” recited a doggerel benediction. (32)

No one doubted in the Middle Ages that the vast majority would be eternally damned. Salvandorum paucitas, damnandorum multitudo (Few saved, many damned) was the stern principle maintained from Augustine to Aquinas. Noah and his family were taken to indicate the proportion of the saved, usually estimated at one in a thousand or even one in ten thousand. (34)

Even in bedrooms married couples often slept in company with their servants and children. Except for hermits and recluses, privacy was unknown. (39)

In October 1347, two months after the fall of Calais, Genoese trading ships put into the harbor of Messina in Sicily with dead and dying men at the oars. The ships had come from the Black Sea port of Caffa (now Fedosiya) in the Crimea, where the Genoese maintained a trading post. The diseased sailrs showed strange black swellings about the size of an egg or an apple in the armpits and groin. The swellings oozed blood and pus and were followed by spreading boils and black blotches on the skin from internal bleeding. The sick suffered severe pain and died quickly within five days of the first symptoms. As the disease spread, other symptoms of continuous fever and spitting of blood appeared instead of the swellings or buboes. These victims couched and sweated heavily and died even more quickly, within three days or less, sometimes in 24 hours. In both types everything that issued from the body—breath, sweat, blood from the buboes and lungs, bloody urine, and blood-blackened excrement—smelled foul. … The disease was the bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that infected the bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding, and was spread by contact; and a second, more virulent pneumonic type that infected lungs and was spread by respiratory infection. The presence of both at once cause the high mortality and speed of contagion. (92)

In a given area the plague accomplished its kill within four to six months and then faded, except in the larger cities, where, rooting into the close-quartered population, it abated during the winter, only to reappear in spring and rage for another six months. (93)

Although the mortality rate was erratic, ranging from one fifth in some places to nine tenths or almost total elimination in others, the overall estimate of modern demographers has settled—for the area extending from India to Iceland—around the same figure expressed in Froissart’s casual words: “a third of the world died.” His estimate, the common one at the time, was not an inspired guess but a borrowing of St. John’s figure for mortality from plague in Revelation, the favorite guide to human affairs in the Middle Ages. (94)

When the last survivors, too few to carry on, moved away, a deserted village sank back into the wilderness and disappeared form the map altogether, leaving only a grass-covered ghostly outline to show where mortals once lived. (95)

Petrarch’s brother Gherardo, member of a Carthusian monastery, buried the prior and 34 fellow monks one by one, sometimes three a day, until he was left alone with his dog and fled to look for a place that would take him in. (95)

The largest cities of Europe, with populations of about 100,000, were Paris and Florence, Venice and Genoa. At the next level, with more than 50,000, were Ghent and Bruges in Flanders, Milan, Bologna, Rome, Naples, and Palermo, and Cologne. London hovered below 50,000, the only city in England except York with more than 10,000. (96)

There were many to echo his account of inhumanity and few to balance it, for the plague was not the kind of calamity that inspired mutual help. Its loathsomeness and dealiness did not herd people together in mutual distress, but only prompted their desire to escape each other. “Magistrates and notaries refused to come and make the wills of the dying,” reported a Franciscan friar of Piazza in Siciliy; what was worse, “even the priests did not come to hear their confessions.” (98)

Exaggeration and literary pessimism were common in the 14^th century, but the Pope’s physician, Guy de Chauliac, was a sober, careful observer who reported the same phenomenon: “A father did not visit his son, nor the son his father. Charity was dead.” / Yet not entirely. In Paris, according to the chronicler Jean de Venette, the nuns of the Hotel Dieu or municipal hospital, “having no fear of death, tended to the sick with all sweetness and humility.” New nuns repeatedly took the places of those who died, until the majority “many times renewewed by death now rest in peace with Christ as we may piously believe.” (97)

Filled with the sound of mourning, the city 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. The silencing of funeral bells and of criers’ announcements of deaths was ordained by most cities. Siena imposed a fine on the wearing of mourning clothes by all except widows. (98)

Survivors in growing helplessness fell into apathy, leaving ripe wheat uncut and livestock untended. Oxen and asses, sheep and goats, pigs and chickens ran wild and they too, according to local reports, succumbed to the pest. … In the Austrian Alps wolves came down to prey upon sheep and then, “as if alarmed by some invisible warning, turned and fled back into the wilderness.” In remote Dalmatia bolder wolves descended upon a plague-stricken city and attacked human survivors. (98)

In Florence Giovanni Villani, the great historian of his time, died at 68 in the midst of an unfinished sentence, “…e dure questo pistolenza fino a…” (in the midst of this pestilence there came to an end…) … William of Ockham and the English mystic Richard Rolle of Hampole both disappear from mention after 1349. (99)

What precipitated the turn of the bacillus from innocuous to virulent form is unknown, but the  occurrence is now believed to have taken place not in China but somewhere in central Asia and to have spread along the caravan routes. (101)

Doctors struggling with the evidence could not break away from the terms of astrology, to which they believed all human physiology was subject. Medicine was the one aspect of medieval life, perhaps because of its links with the Arabs, not shaped by Christian doctrine. Clerics detested astrology, but could not dislodge its influence. Guy de Chauliac, physician to three popes in succession, practiced in obedience to the zodiac. (102)

To the people at large there could be but one explanation—the wrath of God. Planets might satisfy the learned doctors, but God was closer to the average man. (103)

Efforts to cope with the epidemic availed little, either in treatment or prevention. Helpless to alleviate the plague, the doctors’ primary effort was to keep it at bay, chiefly by burning aromatic substances to purify the air. The leader of Christendom, Pope Clement VI, was preserved in health by this method, though for an unrecognized reason: Clement’s doctor, Guy de Chauliac, ordered two huge fires should burn in the papal apartments are required the Pope to sit between them in the heat of the Avignon summer. This drastic treatment worked, doubtless because it discouraged the attention of fleas and also because de Chauliac required the Pope to remain isolated in his chambers. Their lovely murals of gardens, hunting, and other secular joys, painted at Clement’s command, perhaps gave him some refreshment. (105)

In their purple or red gowns and furred hoods, doctors were persons of important status. Allowed extra luxury by sumptuary laws, they wore belts of silver thread, embroidered gloves, and, according to Petrarch’s annoyed report, presumptuously donned golden spurs when they rode to their visits attended by a servant. Their wives were permitted greater expenditure on clothes than other women, perhaps in re cognition of the large fees doctors could command. (106)

They maintained a place in society because as moneylenders they performed a role essential to the king’s continuous need of money. Excluded by the guilds from crafts or trades, they had been pushed into petty commerce and moneylending although theoretically barred from dealing with Christians. Theory, however, bends to convenience, and the Jews provided Christians with a way around their self-imposed ban on using money to make money. / Since they were damned anyway, they were permitted to lend at interest rates of 20 percent and more, of which the royal treasury took the major share. The increment to the crown was in fact a form of indirect taxation; as its instruments, the Jews absorbed an added measure of popular hate. They lived entirely depended upon the king’s protection, subject to confiscations and expultions of the hazards of royal favor. Nobles and prelates followed the royal example, entrusting money to the Jews for lending and taking most of the profits, while deflecting popular resentment upon the agent. (110-111)