[0:09]Listen, everybody, and I will set tears pouring from your eyes. No one will rest. Poisoned arrows will strike everyone. Fevers will throw down the proud and incurable disease will strike like lightning. For three horrifying years between 1348 and 1350, the Black Death pushed medieval man to the brink of an apocalypse. The living expected only death. Everywhere, graveyards were choked with corpses. The scale of death persuaded those who lived, weeping and lamenting through the bitter events, that the last judgment had come. It was a world without hope, seemingly abandoned by God.
[1:11]From Italy to Ireland, Europe lost nearly half its population. 20 million died. In the crisis, every part of medieval society was strained to breaking point. Medicine failed the sick. Violent and macabre religious cults appeared. Immorality collapsed as men turned on each other in brutal acts of cruelty. No one knew who or what would follow. The Antichrist? The end of the world? But some survived to chronicle the despair. Writers, doctors, lawyers, priests. Unique eyewitnesses from death's frontline. And their extraordinary words offer us intimate, shocking and surprising windows on the worst catastrophe in the whole history of Europe.
[2:15]For despite the trauma, the continent was not plunged into a new dark age. The gradual reawakening of Europe was in fact, seated in the horror and tragedy of the Black Death.
[2:49]In the mid 14th century, Europe was not the dark continent so often lampooned by history. It was well populated, sophisticated, mobile, and devout. People are moving, there are traders, there are merchants, there are pilgrims, there are soldiers, there are bureaucrats, there are people on every imaginable kind of business on the road, moving about this society.
[3:18]Nowhere was richer or busier with trade and commerce than the ports and cities of Northern Italy.
[3:28]Florence, with a population of over 100,000, was said to resemble a ripe pomegranate, a dense anthill of human contact. Merchants and peasants, rich and poor, business and pleasure. The population was tremendous, and the cities were big, crowded, but they were also very wealthy places to live, and so attracting lots of people.
[4:02]Into this medieval melting pot, in the autumn of 1347, stole a horrifying and mysterious disease. It was born by sailors returning from the Black Sea in the East, the pestilence already in their blood and on their breath.
[4:21]At first, the citizens had no idea of the scale of the horror that would hit them.
[4:28]The disease that later became known as the Black Death would threaten every part of medieval life, society, religion, feudalism, family. In the town of Piacenza, a lawyer, Gabriele de Muses, recorded the arrival of the disease.
[4:49]I have been urged to write what happened here. Every city, every settlement, every place was poisoned by the contagious pestilence. When one person had contracted the illness, he poisoned his whole family, and those preparing to bury the dead were seized by death in the same way. Thus, death entered through the windows, and as cities and towns were devastated, the survivors mourned their dead kin. Italy was the frontline of a bewildering epidemic. No one was prepared for the speed and horror of the disease. People became sick with a flu-like fever, and began vomiting. In their necks, armpits and groin, pus-filled swellings or buboes appeared. And on the skin, internal hemorrhaging produced purple and black blotches. Death followed within a week, from a pneumonia-like flooding of the lungs. In a matter of two, three months, 20% of your population is just a pile of corpses. So, being stunned, I think, is probably the most obvious reaction they must have had, as well as being petrified. And having no sense of what to do to make it stop. Though there were no known cures, many doctors tried their best. Gentile Da Foligno was among them, chief physician at the University of Perugia. He began to realize just how unstoppable the disease was. This pestilence, as the peasants call it, or epidemic, or whatever else you wish to call it, is more awful than anything I've ever seen before. No disease of comparative malignancy has ever been witnessed.
[6:54]Nevertheless, terrified wealthy citizens grasped at any hope, seeking to buy their way to medical salvation. The immediate and particular cause is a certain poisonous material, which is generated from the heart and the lungs. My job as physician is not to worry about the heavens, but to concentrate on the symptoms of the sick, and to do what I can for them. Gentile advised people to eat lettuce, and to alternate their sleep on the left and right side so as to keep the heat of the liver steady. Lying on one's back can be disastrous.
[7:35]Astonishingly, to those with advanced symptoms, he applied a paste of gum resin, the roots of white lilies, and dried human excrement. It was a form of using the human body to help itself. Blood, or excrement, or other waste products, which, if, for instance, they were treated by distillation or something like that, might yield some magic, in inverted commas, remedy that might be effective.
[8:10]But such treatments were rooted in the medieval past, and without exception, they failed.
[8:19]Just as the physician, Gentile Da Foligno, failed on the 18th of June, 1348, the pestilence added his name to the roll call of death.
[8:33]As people realized the disease could not be cured, they were left with only their faith and God and the efforts of the church. When one person lay sick in a house, no one would come near. Even dear friends would hide themselves away, weeping. The physician would not visit. The priest, panic-stricken, administered the sacraments with fear and trembling. No one knew what to do.
[9:05]Religion was no shield against the disease. The clergymen who braved the dying to administer their last rights, often fell victim themselves.
[9:18]In Piacenza, the Black Death ripped through the religious orders, more than 60 priests died. Fear was compounded by ignorance. Some believed the disease was transmitted by sight, others that merely thinking about it would bring death.
[9:39]Italian society faced real jeopardy. The crisis was captured by the pen of Giovanni Boccaccio. This Florentine writer now stepped forward as the Black Death's most lucid and startling witness. Such terror was struck into the hearts of men and women by this calamity, and that brother abandoned brother, and the uncle, his nephew, and the sister, her brother, and very often, the wife, her husband. But what was even worse, and quite incredible, was that fathers and mothers refused to see and attend their sick children, as if they had not been theirs.
[10:20]Bewildered and terrified, with neither defense nor understanding, families and friends shunned each other. Almost all adopted the same cruel policy, which was to avoid entirely the sick and everything belonging to them. By so doing, each thought he would secure his own safety. People in 1348 really thought the Apocalypse was nigh. Disaster was upon them, and there seemed to be nothing you could do about it. There'd been nothing like this before on this scale, and how to react, how to behave, they just didn't know. As the bonds of society fractured, the rhythms of medieval life began to unravel. Harvests went ungathered. Livestock untended. In the city of Siena, civil courts were closed and building work on the cathedral halted. Work never resumed, and the great nave remains unfinished today.
[11:27]As local leaders died, city life stopped. The scale of the disaster was becoming clear. In addition to lots of people being ill and dying, you now had nothing working properly. The bodies weren't being removed. Sanitation, to the extent that it existed, completely collapsed. Food wasn't being made, bread wasn't being baked. So, you had in addition to disease, famine, and the general problems of keeping some sort of order. In this suffering and misery of our city, the authority of human and divine laws almost disappeared. For like other men, the ministers and the executives of the laws were all dead, or sick, or shut up with their families, so that no duties were carried out. Every man was therefore able to do as he pleased.
[12:24]In a world seemingly abandoned by God, no one expected to live. Many behaved as if each day would be their last. Italian society was in moral meltdown.
[12:44]They thought the sure cure for the pestilence was to go about amusing themselves, satisfying every bestial appetite that they could. They spent day and night going from tavern to tavern, drinking immoderately. Or went freely into other people's houses doing as they pleased. This they were able to do because many had abandoned their homes, so that many houses became common property. And any stranger who went inside, made use of them as his own.
[13:14]Throughout the spring and summer of 1348, the toll of death went unabated. In Venice, some 90,000 died. In Florence, it was half the city's population.
[13:34]Such was the multitude of corpses brought to the churches every day and every hour, that there was not enough consecrated ground to give them burial. Where the cemeteries full, they were forced to dig huge trenches, where they buried the bodies by their thousands.
[14:12]As one chronicler of the time noted, more bodies were put on top of the corpses, with a little more dirt over those. Thus they put layer upon layer, just like one puts layers of cheese in a lasagna.
[14:30]In Milan, the fear of contagion fueled a brutal response. The city authorities ordered the houses of the sick to be locked and shuttered, leaving the victims inside to die. Everyone now believed that God was punishing the world.
[14:52]On the edge of the abyss, the rest of Europe braced itself, seeking answers. Could anything stop God's rage? But now, as the Black Death swept across Europe, the horror of the disease would be rivaled by the horror of man's own response.
[15:16]In six months, the Black Death had taken millions of lives and devastated Italy. Now, in the spring of 1348, it arrived in Southern France. It's clear that the disease followed the roots of trade across Western Europe, which had become by the 14th century, a pretty elaborate network, run largely by Italians. And ironically, of course, it was from Italy that they exported very successfully the disease to other parts of Europe. In the coming months, fear of the Black Death would strike at the heart of the church, provoking bizarre rituals of penance. But worse still, it would trigger ethnic hatred on a horrifying scale.
[16:08]The pestilence quickly spread inland to the papal seat of Avignon. It was here, rather than in Rome, that Pope Clement VI held court.
[16:21]Avignon was at this time, a city dripped feared on religious power, patronage, and diplomacy. It had, of course, at its heart the papal court, which was an enormous operation of some 6 or 700 people. But it was also, in effect, Europe's crossroads, a point where culture, politics, theology, art, science converged. The Pope was God's voice on earth. His court seethed with gossip and rumor. Surely religion would save them. In the court, musician and philosopher, Louis Heyligen, began a unique account of the arrival and impact of the disease. The entire province is infected by these calamities. Sea fish are now not generally eaten, men believing that they have been poisoned by the infected air. And it is thought that the whole coast, and all the neighboring countries, caught the infection from the stinking breath of wind which blew from the region contaminated by the pestilence. Day by day, more and more people die. Now, by God's will, it has reached us.
[17:40]Like many devout and educated men, Heyligen believed the pestilence was a miasmic wind blown across the continent by a furious deity. Moral decay, it was reasoned, had brought such divine retribution. Really big diseases are God's business.
[17:58]He punishes Egypt with plagues, he punishes the Israelites with plagues. And so, they will look for forms of pollution that aren't what we think of as pollution. Sinfulness, evil, moral pollution.
[18:16]It was surely a time to hold true to one's faith. The Pope declared that prayer, piety and religious processions were the route to salvation and survival. But they didn't work.
[18:32]So many were dying that the Pope ordered huge new graveyards to be consecrated to bury the piles of rotting corpses. He even consecrated the Rhone so that bodies could be dumped in the river.
[18:47]In Avignon, they buried 11,000 people in six weeks, and they lost 1/3 of the cardinals, and half the population. So clearly, Avignon, as the center or heart of Christianity, hadn't been spared. Was the Catholic Church failing the devout? Some clearly thought so.
[19:07]An extraordinary movement of lay extremists now appeared. They were known as the Flagellants, and they directly challenged the authority of the church.
[19:20]The church didn't like them at all, because it was a lay movement. It was very much do-it-yourself Catholicism, and the last thing it wanted, in the middle of a plague outbreak, was a large group of nuts marching from town to town. And they thought they were insane.
[21:23]Religion was something the church dispensed through the priesthood, through the sacraments. And so they considered them extremely dangerous as well. But the promise of the Flagellants proved empty and lethal. These bizarre marching mobs would simply have helped to spread the disease more quickly.
[28:50]In the three years of the Black Death, massacres of Jews took place in over 100 towns and cities in France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. Europe lay morally derailed.
[29:05]In the late spring of 1348, the Pope's musician, Louis Heyligen, penned a warning to colleagues in Northern France. I am writing to you, most dearly beloved, so that you should know in what perils we are now living.
