Already read this one? Here’s part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.
Sometime around early spring, the thought occurred to you. Maybe it was just once, or maybe the notion clanged around your head for a while: this could be it.
The big one.
Of course in a sense it was. No pandemic of this scale has struck in a century. A year in, covid has probably killed millions; it’s sickened an order of magnitude more; it’s sunk entire sectors of economies local, national and global; it’s pried open political rifts we thought we—[scoff noise]—knew all about after 2016.
Still, this isn’t the big one. There may never be another one. (I’m knocking on wood, so don’t blame me for covid-22.)
The really big one hit the Old World in the 14th century.* And while I wouldn’t presume to speak for our forebears, I can practically hear them dismiss our present calamity in their pre-Great Vowel Shift lilt:
Oh, my sweet summer child …
We’ve all heard of the Black Death. But pandemic disease, a threat that just last year seemed to belong to a different time (with dinocidal asteroids, malevolent AIs and Russian nukes), isn’t so remote anymore. It’s worth taking a closer look at how society coped—or failed to—at another time when pestilence brought the world to its knees.
First, a note on sources. Sprinklings of Wikipedia aside, everything you’re about to read is drawn from Barbara Tuchman’s masterwork A Distant Mirror. I urge you to stop reading immediately, buy that book and everything else Tuchman ever wrote, and read them all.†
Back already? Rad.
The plague
The Black Death entered Europe via a trading ship that docked in Sicily in 1347.
It spread quickly, in two forms. The first, “bubonic” form spread via direct contact, leading to infection of the bloodstream, internal bleeding and the eponymous “buboes” (painful, bleeding, pustulent inflammations the size of an egg in the armpits and groin). The second, “pneumonic” form spread via the air, leading to infection of the lungs, sweating, fever and bloody coughing.
Both forms were caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which assaulted the Byzantine Empire in the 6th century, and may—recent evidence suggests—have affected Neolithic societies (though in a less virulent form that hadn’t yet learned to hijack fleas).
The pneumonic variety killed a bit more quickly on average—after around three days, compared to five for bubonic plague—but either could and did kill in a matter of hours.
The plague would assault a given area for up to six months, though it could lap over cities in gruesome waves for much longer. In Europe as a whole, the first outbreak lasted around three years. It would recur in miniature more or less once a generation for centuries.
Coronavirus has echoed certain horrors of the Black Death: in some places, during the worst moments of this pandemic, the apparatus for removing the dead has been overwhelmed, and bodies have lain unburied in the street. In the 1340s, the apparatus broke down completely, everywhere, all the time.
At a time when 100,000 people lived in Paris, records show 800 people would die in a single day. By the time the plague relented in 1349, half the city had succumbed. Florence may have lost 80 percent of its population. Nowhere was anyone able to cope with the volume of death: mass graves overflowed, coffins were impossible to obtain, bodies lay in the streets for days, dogs dragged corpses out of shallow graves.
Modern scholars believe something like a third of Europe died (though estimates range up to 60 percent). Contemporary scholars thought the same, though as Tuchman points out, the chronicler Jean Froissart probably didn’t write “a third of the world died” based on profane data.
God, after all, had promised to kill a third of humanity at the end of the world, and this was manifestly the end of the world.
And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.
— Rev. 9:15
Next time, The really big one (part 2): flagellants and pogromists—roving bands seek redemption, revenge and an end to the pestilence by shunning the Church, flogging themselves and killing their neighbors.
Notes
* There was an even really-er bigger one—a slew of them—that struck the New World following European contact. While these outbreaks were on a comparably apocalyptic scale to the Black Death (multiples-of-a-dozen percent of the population dying outright), the overall picture was even bleaker in the New World. The Black Death had its faults, but it didn’t include an invasion by complete aliens who brutally suppressed the whole cultural complex that—along with not-dying-of-inexplicable-plagues and not-being-murdered-by-men-on-giant-war-deer—kept society running. With any luck I’ll get around to writing a post on this even more horrific chapter in human history.
† Seriously, if modern English prose were a drinking game, it would take a combined team of Baldwin, Hemingway, Faulkner and 36 New Yorker staffers to even make Tuchman need to call an Uber.