Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

But the gloss of normality was quickly cracked. The remnants of the oligarchy had not been the only group to profit financially from the epidemic. A class of new rich arose and wished to play the part in the city’s government to which they felt the length of their purse entitled them. But their pretensions met with a chilly response. No concessions were made to meet them and harsh sumptuary laws were passed to curb the ambitions of those who affected the trappings of higher station than their birth and education justified. Meanwhile the poor, among whom the disease had raged the worst, often found that they had lost even the little which they had once possessed. The gap which divided them from their luckier neighbours grew ever wider.

By the time of the Black Death the Government of Nine had ruled Siena without serious challenge for some seventy years. A few years later it seemed successfully to have weathered the storm and to have launched Siena on another era of stable prosperity. Yet in 1354 it fell. It can be argued that this was not a direct consequence of the plague but, equally, it is certain that the Black Death, in Dr Bowsky’s phrase, ‘was instrumental in creating demographic, social and economic conditions that greatly increased opposition to the ruling oligarchy’. {100} 100 32 W. Bowsky, Speculum, Vol. XXXIX, op. cit., p. 34. Without some such prior conditioning it is hard to see how the necessary force and will to overthrow the oligarchy could have sprung into life. It is not desirable, at this point in the narrative, to give much attention to the long term effects of the Black Death on the society which it had devastated. But it is important to bear in mind the lesson of Siena: that a patient has not necessarily recovered because his more obvious wounds are healed.

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} 101 33 Matteo Villani, Cronica, Florence, 1846, Book 1, pp. 67–8. 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} 102 34 S. M. Gromberger, ‘St Bridget of Sweden’, American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. XLII, 1917, p. 97. 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} 103 35 D. Herlihy, ‘Population, Plague and Social Change in Rural Pistoia’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd Ser., Vol. XVIII, No. 1, 1965, p. 225. 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} 104 36 A. Doren, op. cit., p. 579. 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.

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} 105 1 De Smet, Vol. II, Breve Chronicon, p. 15. 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.

France was certainly one of the most populous and should also have been the most prosperous country of Europe. Professor Lot has put its population in 1328 – the population, that is to say, of the France of its present frontiers, including part of Flanders, Burgundy, Brittany and Guienne – at between twenty-three and twenty-four million. {106} 106 2 M. E. Lot, ‘L’état des paroisses et des feux de 1328’, Bibliothèque de L’École. de Chartes, Tome XC, 1929. Professor Renouard estimates the total twenty years later at somewhere near twenty million. {107} 107 3 Y. Renouard, Population, Tome III, 1948. The density of population in the countryside was more or less what it is today: {108} 108 4 J. R. Strayer, ‘Economic Conditions in the Country of Beaumont-le-Roger’, Speculum, XXVI, 1951, p. 282. a burden which the land was hard put to it to support since production per acre was barely a third of the present figure. On the whole the latest studies tend to indicate a total population somewhat lower {109} 109 5 For the best resumé of the debate see E. Carpentier and J. Glénisson, ‘La Démographie françhise en XTV e Siècle’, Annales E.S.C., Tome XVII, 1962, No. 1, p. 109. than earlier estimates but no one would deny that the rural population was dense by medieval standards, comparable with that of Tuscany, and that the pressure of population on resources was fast becoming intolerable.