The Black Death

By the winter of 1348, about a year after its first appearance in Sicily, the Black Death in Italy was past the worst. There were to be minor outbreaks in the next year or two and it was to be much longer before the man in the street felt himself entirely safe; he barely did so, in fact, before the next epidemic was upon him in the early 1360s. But the period of acute crisis was over. Pope Clement VI threatened to revive the danger when he yielded to pressure from many countries and proclaimed 1350 a Holy Year. The first Jubilee had been held in 1300 and it had not been intended to hold another until a century later but, in the circumstances, the Pope agreed to advance the date and to grant special indulgences to all who made the journey to Rome. To fill the roads of Europe with wandering pilgrims and concentrate them in the heart of one of the areas worst struck by plague could well have been the surest means of renewing the full force of the epidemic. Matteo Villani, one of the sounder of the chroniclers when it came to statistics, wrote that around Easter, though the pilgrims were too numerous to count, there must have been more than a million visitors to Rome.^{101} The figure must be by far too large but the influx of pilgrims from all over Europe was certainly immense.

St Bridget of Sweden was among the visitors, arriving early in 1349 when the Black Death was still a lively menace. She had clear views about the proper method of tackling the epidemic: ‘abolish earthly vanity in the shape of extravagant clothes, give free alms to the needy and order all parish priests to celebrate Mass once a month in honour of the Holy Trinity.’^{102} These rather humdrum measures do not appear greatly to have impressed the Romans but she still scored a considerable personal success. One male Orsini, it is recorded, had caught the plague and was despaired of by the doctors. ‘If only the Lady Bridget were here!’ sighed his mother. ‘Her touch would cure my son.’ At that moment in walked the saint. She prayed by the invalid’s bedside, laid her hand on his forehead and left him, a few hours later, fully restored to health.

St Bridget’s attentions were not much needed. In spite of the Pope’s ill-judged decision, Holy Year brought little in the way of fresh outbreaks. But the damage was already bad enough. Italy had been depopulated. But when one tries to describe this dramatic concept in slightly more mathematical terms, the difficulties begin. On the basis of our present knowledge it is quite impossible to put forward even the most approximate figure and state with authority that such a proportion of Italy’s peoples must have died. Even in England, with its wealth of ecclesiastical and civil records and its army of diligent scholars, only a more-or-less informed guess is feasible. A fortiori in Italy, where many regions have been the subject of little or no research if indeed the materials for such research exists, an overall estimate has little value. Sometimes it is possible to fix a movement of population over a longer period. It is, for instance, reasonably well established that the population around Pistoia in 1404 was only some 30 per cent of what it had been in 1244.^{103} But the data does not exist which would enable one to pinpoint the proportion of this decline to be attributed to the year 1348.

But the fact that any estimate for the whole of Italy must be highly speculative does not preclude a guess. Doren, in his Economic History,^{104} has estimated that between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of town dwellers died and that, in the countryside, the proportion must have been much lower. Figures like these cover a multitude of qualifications. In Tuscany, for example, where the plague was exceptionally severe, more peasants died than in certain cities which escaped lightly, such as Milan or Parma. For some areas, where no statistics whatsoever can be garnered, the only remedy is to apply the proportion established for roughly similar parts of the country and hope for the best. A shot in the dark, or at least the twilight, however tentative, is still better than nothing. If one assumes that a third or slightly more of Italy’s total population perished, it is unlikely that one would be very badly wrong and certain that nobody could prove one so.

4. FRANCE: THE STATE OF MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE

THE Black Death seems to have arrived in France only a month or two after its first outbreak on the mainland of Italy; according to an anonymous Flemish cleric in one of those same ill-fated galleys which had been expelled from Italy towards the end of January 1348.^{105} The galley called first at Marseilles, from where it was chased, rapidly but still not rapidly enough, by the horrified authorities. Thence it continued its destructive course, spreading the plague to Spain and leaving a trail of infection along the coast of Languedoc.