Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

‘Where the fourteenth-century plague is said to differ from later experience is that in its quite slow extension across Europe it seemed to change as the season of the year changed from pneumonic to bubonic, and then from bubonic to pneumonic without discontinuity’ {43} 43 43 Greenwood, op. cit., p. 291. The medieval doctor can hardly be blamed for finding the process incomprehensible. But if he had understood it he would even then not have mastered the full story. For there would still have remained unexplained those cases, already mentioned, in which a man would die within a few hours or go to bed in the best of health and never wake in the morning.

There seems no doubt that a third element in the Black Death, septicaemic plague, was here at work. This, like bubonic plague, is insect borne. The distinction is that the brunt of the infection falls on the bloodstream which, within an hour or two, is swarming with plague bacilli. The victim is dead long before buboes have had time to form. It is in this form of plague that Pulex irritans , the man-borne flea, has a chance to operate. So rich in bacilli is the blood of a sick man that the flea can easily infect itself and carry on the disease to a new prey without the need of a rat to provide fresh sources of infection. Septicaemic plague must have been the rarest of the three interwoven diseases which composed the Black Death but it was certainly as lethal as its pneumonic cousin and it introduced yet another means by which the plague could settle itself in a new area and spread hungrily among the inhabitants.

IN a book of this scope it would be over-ambitious to attempt any serious analysis of the economic and social state of Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century. Something however must be said; for the circumstances of the continent and the physical and mental condition of its inhabitants are factors of the utmost importance when considering the impact of the Black Death. ‘The plague of the fourteenth century,’ wrote Michon, {44} 44 1. Documents inédits, op. cit., p. 21. ‘was no different to those which preceded or which followed it. It killed more people, not because of its nature, but because of the conditions of suffering and servitude in which it surprised its victims.’ No one who has studied the devastating blows which the Black Death struck against rich and poor, young and old, strong and weak, can accept that this was just another epidemic like any other. But Michon’s assertion is not, for this reason, to be dismissed as idle rhetoric.

During the eleventh, and even more the twelfth and first half of the thirteenth centuries Europe had enjoyed a period of massive and almost unbroken economic growth. Some historians have recently questioned whether, in England at least, the Golden Age of the ‘high’ Middle Ages was in fact so spectacularly prosperous as has been generally believed. {45} 45 2. See, in particular, A. R. Bridbury, Economic Growth, London 1962. Cf. E. Miller, ‘The English Economy in the 13th Century’, Post and Present, 1964, No. 28, p. 21. Of course, sectors of the economy can be identified which lagged behind the rest and certain areas fared less well than others. But on the whole what Professor Nabholz described as ‘the astonishing uniformity of medieval conditions throughout the whole region’ {46} 46 3. H. Nabholtz. Camb. Econ. Hist. Eur., Vol. 1, 1941, p. 493. ensured that the boom was general and that no part of Europe was left out altogether.

In the two centuries preceding the middle of the thirteenth century the face of Europe was changed, and changed vastly for the better. The Crusades siphoned off much of the belligerent tendencies of the inhabitants and the period was one of comparative calm. The peasantry throve in unaccustomed security or, at least, survived – unsurprisingly it was the landowners who reaped most of the economic benefit. Land in the valleys of the Rhine and the Moselle was worth seventeen times as much at the end of the thirteenth century as it had been at the start of the tenth, yet the old customary rents remained substantially unchanged. {47} 47 4. E. Power, Camb. Med. Hist., Vol. VII, 1932, p. 731. Colonization, that is to say the capture of virgin lands from hills, fens and forests, went on apace. By 1300, in Central and Western Europe, the amount of land under cultivation had reached a point not to be matched for another five hundred years.

The primary driving force behind the new colonization was, of course, the pressure of population on existing resources. By the middle of the thirteenth century Europe was becoming uncomfortably over-crowded. The density of population around Pistoia was thirty-eight per square kilometre – crowded by the standards of any rural area though by no means unusual in Medieval Tuscany. The province probably had a population of some 1.18 million, a total which was not to be reached again until well into the nineteenth century. The population had grown rapidly since the middle of the eleventh century; production of food had grown too but at nothing approaching the same rate. Nor did it seem that medieval techniques of agriculture were far enough advanced for the gap between demand and supply to do anything but widen. The Tuscan peasant, who had never lived far above the subsistence level, now found that he was near to falling below it.

Tuscany was in no way unique. In France ‘many districts supported as many, or very nearly as many, inhabitants as at the beginning of the twentieth century’. {48} 48 5. L. Genicot, Camb. Econ. Hist., Vol. I, 2nd Edition, 1966, pp. 668–9. In the region of Oisans, south-east of Grenoble, there were about 13,000 inhabitants in 1339; by 1911 the total had risen only to 13,805. Around Neufbourg in the Eure a population of some 3,000 in 1310 was 3,347 as late as 1954. Around Elloe in the Fenland, settlement was almost as dense in 1260 as in 1951. In certain areas, in particular Artois, Flanders, Champagne and parts of Western Germany, the surplus population sought a solution to its problems in a move towards industrialization. In the whole of Western Europe, villages grew into towns and cities with ten or twenty thousand inhabitants were no longer freakish rarities. {49} 49 6. M. Postan, Camb. Econ. Hist., Vol. II, 1952, p. 160. But the flow to the towns drew off only a small part of the rising population in the countryside.

So long as the growing population had unused land ready to hand which could easily be exploited to produce more food, then no unmanageable problems were posed. In certain areas – Basse-Provence, Catalonia, Sweden and Scotland – this was still the case until well on into the fourteenth century. {50} 50 7. L. Genicot, op. cit., p. 666. Europe, viewed as a whole, still had a fair amount of under-developed territory even as late as 1350. But in the great population centres, from which the peasantry could not or would not move, the end of the thirteenth century was a period of acute crisis. The forests that remained were jealously conserved, the mountains offered no hope to the would-be farmer. Productivity fell as erosion, lack of manure, failure to let fields lie fallow or to rotate crops on scientific principles, drained the goodness from the tired soil. The population soared, more and more mouths had to be filled, the gap between production and demand grew ever wider.

Taine’s aphorism about the Ancien Régime : ‘The people are like men walking through a pond with water up to their mouths; at the smallest depression of the ground or rise in the level of the water, they will lose their footing, sink and drown’ can be applied as well to the peasant of the later Middle Ages. And in Europe of the fourteenth century depressions of the ground seemed more the rule than the exception. The climate played a major part in the mischief seventy or eighty years before the Black Death. The intense cold led to a striking advance of the glaciers, polar as well as Alpine. High rainfall caused a rise in the level of the Caspian Sea. The cultivation of cereals in Iceland and of the vine in England was crippled and virtually extinguished; wheat growing areas were reduced in Denmark and the uplands of Provence. {51} 51 8. G. Utterström, ‘Climate Fluctuations and Population Problems in Early Modern History’, Scan. Econ. Hist Rev., III, 1955, pp. 3–47.