Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

The Black Death, or at least its effects, spread north. For many years the Danes and Norwegians had maintained small settlements for hunting and fishing in Greenland. Preoccupied by their troubles they now gave up the expeditions and abandoned to their fate any unfortunates who might still have been established there. ‘Towering icebergs formed at the same time on the coast of East Greenland,’ wrote Hecker in 1832, ‘in consequence of the general concussion of the earth’s organism; and no mortal, from that time forward, has ever seen that shore or its inhabitants.’ {210} 210 7 op. cit., p. 28.

Spain deserves rather less cursory treatment. No major study of the Black Death in the Iberian Peninsula has yet been written {211} 211 8 C. Verlinden’s monograph, ‘La Grande Peste de 1348 en Espagne’, in the Revue beige de Philologie et d’Histoire, XVII, 1938, p. 103, is the best general study yet published. but some valuable pioneer work has recently been undertaken, notably by Dr A. Lopez de Meneses, {212} 212 9 ‘Documentos acerca de la Peste Negra en los dominios de la Corona de Aragon’, op. cit., p.291 and ‘Una consecuencia de la Peste Negra en Cataluña: el pogrom de 1348’, op. cit., p. 92. and it is now possible to piece together a rough picture of what happened.

It must first be said that Spain, in the middle of the fourteenth century, was physically and psychologically quite as ill-equipped to face the plague as either France or Italy. Moorish Granada to the south was racked by dissension and depressed by the recent defeats it had suffered at the hands of King Alfonso XI of Castile. But Castile itself was little better. Alfonso, by his triumphal conquest of Algeciras, had the prestige of victory to bolster his position. The preparations which he was making for a siege of Gibraltar promised still greater glory. But the price which his country had paid was exhaustion and improverishment; high enough when one remembers the scars which it still bore as a memorial of the civil wars during the infancy of its King. Finally, in Aragon, Pedro IV was grappling with armed rebellion and victory was not won until 1348. Instability, insecurity, the constant dread of destruction in campaigns embarked on by irresponsible rulers bent upon little save their own personal glory and aggrandisement: these were the hall-marks of medieval Spain.

According to Pedro Carbonell, archivist of the Court of Aragon, the Black Death began in the city of Teruel and spread out from there through all Aragon, reaching Saragossa in September or October 1348. This seems most unlikely. Teruel is far from the sea and all the evidence suggests that Spain was first infected through its ports. The timing too is wrong since the first cases of the plague in Spain were recorded in April and May 1348, almost six months before it spread to Saragossa.

Carbonell must have known that the Black Death had much earlier reached his master’s possession of Majorca. In April 1348 Pedro IV instructed the Government of Majorca to take steps to prevent the further propagation of the disease. {213} 213 10 ‘Documentos acerca…’ op. cit., 20 April, 1348. This not very helpful instruction does not seem to have been observed with any success. One chronicler puts the death roll at fifteen thousand in a single month and other writers suggest that the total loss was at least twice that figure and up to eighty per cent of the total population. {214} 214 11 Philippe, Histoire de la Peste Noire, p. 54. On 3 May the Government of Majorca were complaining that the island was so weakened by disease that it could no longer protect itself against the attacks of pirates and the Bey of Tunis. They appealed for help from the mainland. Pedro IV agreed to send some galleys but, with the characteristic pawkiness of a central government, insisted that Majorca pay half the cost. By June 1349 the Governor of Majorca found himself in his turn instructed to send troops to defend the still worse depopulated Minorca against probable enemy attack.

The Mediterranean coast of Spain was quickly affected. Barcelona and Valencia were both struck by the plague in May 1348, and Almeria in June. Ibn Khātimah, the Arab physician, who was living in Almeria at the time, says that the first case arose in a house in the poor quarter of the town belonging to a family called Beni Danna. {215} 215 12 Sudhoff, Archiv, XIX, pp. 46–8. The plague took an unusually protracted course, lasting through the autumn and winter and still being active when Ibn Khātimah wrote his record in February, 1349. Even at its peak it was not killing more than seventy people a day in a population that must have been in the neighbourhood of twenty thousand.

The disease spread next through Arab Spain so that the armies confronting Alfonso XI were afflicted before their Christian enemies. It is said that the Arabs were deeply disturbed by this phenomenon and many of them seriously thought of adopting Christianity as a form of preventive medicine. Fortunately for their faith, however, the Black Death was soon raging quite as disastrously among the troops of Castile. ‘When they learned that the pestilence had now reached Christian men their good intentions died and they returned to their vomit.’ {216} 216 13 Walsingham, R. S., 28, I, p. 273; cf. Capgrave, R. S. 1, p. 213. (This may not relate to Spain in particular though it could as well apply there.) The Castilian army in front of Gibraltar survived inviolate through 1349; then, in March 1350, was suddenly attacked by the plague. The senior officers begged King Alfonso to leave his troops and seek safety in isolation but he refused to do so. He duly caught the disease and died on Good Friday, 26 March 1350. He was the only ruling monarch of Europe to perish during the Black Death.

But the royal house of Aragon did not escape unscathed. King Pedro lost his youngest daughter and his niece in May, and his wife in October. By the autumn order seemed to be breaking down in his dominions. Bands of armed brigands were straying over the countryside and an ordinance had to be published ordering severe punishment for any one found looting the houses of plague victims. Li Muisis records the experiences of a pilgrim to St James of Compostella who passed through Salvatierra on the way home. {217} 217 14 ‘Chronicon ma jus Aegidii Li Muisis’, De Smet, Vol. 11, p. 280. The town had suffered so grievously from the plague that not one citizen in ten remained alive (a characteristically woolly estimate which, inter alia , took no account of those people who had fled the town, to return when the plague was past). The pilgrim put up at an inn and ‘after taking supper with the host (who, with his two daughters and a single servant was the only survivor of his entire family and who had no sensation of being sick himself), paid for his night’s lodging in advance, as he meant to leave at dawn the next day, and went to bed.’ Next morning, when he got up, he found that, after all, he had to see the proprietor of the inn. After trying for some time to get an answer he eventually routed out an old woman sleeping in another part of the inn. It was then that he discovered that host, daughters and servant had all died during the night. ‘On hearing this,’ Li Muisis records, ‘the pilgrim made all haste to leave the place.’ In his account of the plague Ibn Khātimah referred to its intense infectiousness and to the coughing of blood by the victims; anecdotes of this kind confirm that the pulmonary and septicaemic variants of the Black Death must have been rife in Spain.

Until quite recently it was accepted tradition that the plague scarcely penetrated to Castile, Galicia and Portugal. This is clearly not true, though in general the Atlantic coast of Spain was less severely afflicted than the Mediterranean. The rich of Castile seem to have been peculiarly affected by the urge to give their lands and possessions to the Church in the hope that they might thereby earn themselves freedom from the plague or, at the worst, the guarantee of a comfortable niche in paradise. So far, indeed, did this process go that, when the panic abated, it was found that the economic structure of the country had been dislocated and an altogether undesirable amount of wealth accumulated in the hands of the Church. To redress the balance King Pedro I in 1351 ordered that, where the donors themselves or their heirs could be traced, then the Church must disgorge its gains.