The Black Death: a global contagion

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Today we're launching the latest of our Sunday series and this time around we're going to be focusing on the Black Death. Emily Bureffit will be joined by Thomas Asbridge, author of the Black Death, a global history over the next three weeks, kicking off with today's first episode. The Black Death is remembered as one of the most devastating catastrophes in human history. A pandemic that swept across continents and killed millions. But where did this deadly disease come from? How did it travel so quickly through towns and countryside? And did people at the time understand just how transformative the terrifying illness that was unfolding around them would be? I'm Emily Bureffit and I'm joined by historian Thomas Asbridge. In this first episode we'll be tracing the origins and spread of the Black Death, exploring the moment it erupted onto the medieval stage. Now I wondered if we could start with a pretty notable example, a notable case, and that is the Siege at Caffer. So the year is 1347 and we have a band of Genoese merchants who find themselves on the brink of annihilation there, under siege in the port city of Caffer, on the Crimean Peninsula there are 1000 miles away from home, but for a moment there seems to be a sort of glimmer of hope for them. Their opponents are struck with this strange and merciless pestilence, but things are soon to take a turn for the worse for them. Could you tell us about this instance? Sure, so this is essentially the first time that we see what we now call the Black Death appearing in the written record. So the Siege of Caffer is in many ways the genesis moment for the history of this disease that's going to affect the whole of the medieval world. Exactly as you say, it's a Genoese outpost. We need to recognise that it's in many ways it's on the fringes of the European world, of the Western or Latin Christian world. It's a trading enclave and it's been put under siege by a massive Mongol force led by a Khan called Janubegg. And from the Genoese perspective, this is a pretty much a lost cause. Everyone expects them to fall. They're massively outnumbered. They make calls back to Europe, but no one's coming to help. But as you say, then a mysterious disease starts to hit the besiegers and they start dying in their droves in pretty gruesome forms. It would appear. And now perhaps the corner is going to be turned. Perhaps the Genoese are going to survive. But as it is, Janubegg makes a decision to launch a final assault, to use a final weapon to try to undermine the Genoese. And what he does is start to catapult the bodies of people who died from this disease into Kaffir itself. And we're then told that once these bodies enter the fortified site, the Genoese themselves start to suffer from this same disease. Some have strange swellings on their bodies, others start to spit up blood. And suddenly the death toll starts rising inside Kaffir. So the story goes, a single Genoese boat manages to make an escape. And these sailors bid farewell to Kaffir, I guess, thinking that they've made a clean getaway. But unfortunately, little do they know that they're actually carrying death in their midst. So this just gives us the sense immediately of the fear, the anticipation and also the devastation caused by the black death that we're going to be talking about in this particular series. Now I think we should start with the global nature of this. This particular example gives us a sense that this isn't just something that happens in Western Europe. This isn't just a European phenomenon. So we should spend some time getting to grips with the world we're going to be exploring. What would life have been like in the first half of the 14th century in places such as Kaffir? I think we need to face up to the fact that the medieval world is a difficult, challenging place to live in. But of all the centuries that you might choose, if we were going to be time travelers and I was going to give us a tip, we would not choose to go back to the 14th century. That would be a very bad decision. Even before the black death appears, it's first appearance is around 1347 in the written record as I said. It's going to then spend the next five or six years afflicting the medieval world. But even before that point, the middle ages in the 14th century is a period in which there's significant changes taking place that are affecting the quality of life. Perhaps the most important of these that's happening underneath the surface in many ways unseen by contemporaries is climate change. So contrary to what we are now experiencing, which appears to be man-made warming of the globe, this is a cooling of the globe, which we think is largely to do with fluctuations in solar activity, perhaps also exacerbated by a major volcanic eruption in the 13th century. But by the time we're into 1300 in the decades that follow, we're starting to see the start of what we now call the little ice age, or the LIA, and it leads to overall annually a change of around 0.4 to 0.8 degrees centigrade or cooling. It also leads to freak weather events. So it's not just about the cooling, it's also about very unusual levels of rain or drought, or the kind of events that we're unfortunately becoming more familiar with in our own world. And I guess when I was researching the black death, perhaps the thing that shocked me more than anything else was how destructive the little ice age was, how much the world changed through this climate change, even though it was only 0.4 to 0.8 of a degree centigrade. Even if all the black death hits, we're seeing that the medieval world is affected by periods of famine, other kinds of diseases that are appearing in part because of fluctuations in climate. There's also effects in terms of livestock, so there's in the early decades of the 14th century, there are major outbreaks, particularly in northern Europe, of cattle diseases that also lead to famine. So this is a period where the climate alterations are having an effect. It's also a period in which endemic warfare is starting to become more and more frequent where military conflict is accelerating in terms of its frequency and the profound effect it will have on society. So these are two elements in a triangle really that we might think of in relationship to the black death, climate change, warfare, and then the third point being the emergence of a pandemic disease, creating a pretty unpleasant reality. Not so high, we'd want to go back to them. Now, does this make the 14th century quite a vulnerable era? Does it soften the ground for the plague, essentially? That's a really good question. So one of the challenges we're trying to understand the black death is trying to appreciate why so many people died. Maybe later on we'll come on to try to estimate what the effect was in terms of mortality. And some historians and scientists have argued that the population was already affected by famine, weakened perhaps by micro-funguses growing in grain, all kinds of other factors that might have made the population particularly vulnerable, particularly prone to being affected and to being killed by this disease. I think that's possible. I don't think we have definitive evidence for that, particularly at a global level because we can argue that there's a failing harvest, let's say, in northern France, but we can also see the black death having a major effect in Egypt and the same climatic events or failing harvest are not occurring there. So it's not the only answer. Maybe it's part of the answer. Maybe could we zoom in on a few of these places that you've just mentioned to see what life was like on the onset of this plague? Sure. I think maybe we could pull out three of the most interesting cities as emblems of what's happening in the medieval world. So we might start in Florence. So in northern Italy, Italy is not a united country or nation at this point. It's a series really of what we might call city states. And Florence, in some ways, sometimes I like it almost to the New Yorker, the Manhattan of the medieval world in the 14th century. It's very much the banking and financial headquarters of the medieval world. Its currency, the gold flooring, is the equivalent of the US dollar today. It's the kind of the gold standard of trading currency. It's a very upwardly mobile, growing city. Its population is perhaps 90,000, perhaps at most 100,000. So it's not, of course, by modern standards, not vast, but by medieval standards, it's very substantial. And it has a view of itself as being at the center of the cultural and economic heart of medieval Europe. However, if we cross a little way over the Mediterranean, we actually come to a city that completely dwarfs Florence. Because Florence thinks of itself in these terms. But if you compare it to Cairo, which is the capital of one of the great medieval empires, the Mamluk Empire, we think its population is around 500,000, so half a million people dwarfing Florence. It sits within Egypt at the really the height of the power of the Mamluk Empire largely because it's on the Nile, or beside the Nile. And the Mamluks have built an empire that really gains much of its economic vibrancy from the fact that the Muslim world is able to develop technology that harnesses the annual Nile flood and uses that to create agrarian, well-farming wealth. that really outstrips anything else going on anywhere else in the medieval world. So Egypt and Cairo in particular have grown to a size that's really not parallel at this point anywhere else, certainly to the west in the medieval world. And maybe the last thread that we might pull on would be London. Because again, I guess we tend to think in, particularly in English terms, we like to think of the medieval England being a very prominent site. That's the history that we're most familiar with as a school children or students. But in many ways, England is really a backwater in political, certainly in economic terms, perhaps also in cultural terms at this stage. And London is at most its populations, perhaps around 60,000, perhaps a little bit higher. It's largely contained within the old circuit of Roman walls. And it's absolutely dwarfed by somewhere like Egypt. So there's an imbalance in power. And to some extent, the longer story of what's going to happen in the aftermath of the Black Death is when we look at it at a global scale, when we don't just think about it in European terms, is that it's going to bring down the Mamluk Empire. It's going to crush much of the Muslim world and it's going to allow cities like London actually to flourish. This is all hints for future episodes, indeed, for our listeners. Now, could you just tell us just how global was the Black Death? Well, I think we have to use the term in its medieval sense. So I'm thinking about it in terms of what's the known world in the 14th century. It's not global in terms of reaching what we now call the New World, the Americas. As far as we know, it's not reaching Australasia or the Americas in the medieval period at all. If we are putting a geographical span on it, we can take it as far west as Ireland. And certainly, we know that it's present in significant parts of Russia. It's certainly in North Africa and perhaps in sub-Saharan Africa. There's more recent research making a very strong case for the fact that there might be archaeological evidence for the fact that it went south of the Sahara. And to the far east, it's very contentious evidence about whether it's present in China. And if it is in China, how many people did it kill? I think it's very likely that it was there, but I don't think we can go far beyond that in terms of quantifying the degree of destruction that it brought. But certainly, it's present within Central Asia. I think one of the most fundamental things that I'd want to put across about the Black Death, again, from an educational perspective. So often I meet students or school children. We're brought up to think of it almost as a uniquely English thing. And even if we go beyond that, we might think, well, maybe it was in France, maybe it was in some other parts of Europe. But it's a much, much wider phenomenon. And it's ability to affect the medieval world is very crucially linked to that. So we're busting some myths here, and hopefully we'll bust them more as we go through. I've got to ask you. You mentioned earlier that this is something that spreads so rapidly. It's like wildfire, but you've also suggested that there may be some debate about why this is. Could you maybe talk about that debate if there is anything we know about it? So I think we have to answer that question in two different ways. So at a medical scientific level, there are answers that we might come to. Perhaps we can cover them in later episodes. What we think we now know about the transmission of this disease. But at a fundamental level, one thing that I don't think can be argued with is that the disease spreads along established trade and travel routes. When you start to look at the chronology of when you piece together where the disease is appearing, first off, it starts to appear in ports around the Mediterranean basin. And then it's clear that the disease somehow makes its way through the Straits of Gibraltar around the Atlantic seaboard of Iberia and then up through France, then to England. And once it gets a foothold in all of these ports and then along rivers, then it starts to move inland. And it almost always is following along established routes that connect the medieval world. In 14th century terms, in a globalised way. And I think one of the things that might surprise people is the degree to which trade is a very significant part of communication within the medieval world. And that even relatively small quantities of products can be sold and transported across large distances. And it's that process often involving seaboard or riverborne traffic that seems to have played a major role in the dissemination of the disease. And I suppose we could also say that this is maybe how the news spread there, I guess, as an uncertain. Yeah, we start, every now and again, we get glimpses. Obviously, much of what we know about the Black Death, though certainly not all, is based on accounts that people might have written at the time. Every now and again, they will report where they get their information from. They'll say that they spoke to a traveler or a pilgrim. Occasionally, there's a personal connection. There might be a relative that's come back has survived an initial outbreak. Come back to a city and said what they've not they've seen, but those are rare glimpses. So it's a question that I'd love to know the answer to exactly how news spread, but often we can't answer it. And in those accounts, do they give a sense of what the sentiment was at the time, whether there was that feeling of dread ahead of the plague arriving? I guess one of the things that I think has in the past often been missed about the Black Death is its capacity to inspire fear in the population. We tend to look at it as modern observers and try to decode everything we think we can now know about it. But from that perspective, it's very easy to forget how little people actually understood or knew in 1347, 1348 or the years that followed. So crucially, this isn't for them, it's an unknown disease. They don't know what it is. It seems to have a strange variety of symptoms. So some people argue, well, maybe it's not one disease, maybe it's multiple diseases. They don't know how to treat it effectively. And most importantly of all, they're not sure about how it's transmitted. One of the things that I think is most frightening to it when you try to imagine the atmosphere that must have been present in the 14th century is this sense that perhaps it's by speaking to someone that you might catch it. Somehow it's in the air, perhaps it's through touch. But there's also a school of thought that argues it's literally just through sight. So just looking someone in the eye could mean that you would catch this disease. And very quickly, one of the things we do know in terms of news is the idea that this is a lethal disease, that it can kill and it can kill thousands is spread very, very quickly. And that engenders this sense of fear and foreboding that often spreads even faster than disease itself. August is a tricky month for me. It's around the time where I start getting a little bit tired of my summer clothes and all I can do is look forward to the fall outfits that I'm going to be putting together when the air starts to crisp up a little bit. 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And it's not just a pair of quints also brings that same everyday elevation to everything they offer from hotel quality bedding and bath to kitchen staples and thoughtfully designed furniture. So upgrade your everyday. Download the quints app for app exclusive offers or go to quints.com/historyextra. Get free shipping on your order in 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's q-u-i-n-c-e.com/historyextra. Just how deadly was the blind death? So this is a pretty contentious question. And it's been much discussed over the last 150 years. But even within the last 50 years, there have been pretty wildly divergent estimates. If we just confine ourselves to what we might call chronicles and narratives, so accounts are written by people who are witnessing the event themselves. Now we get wildly divergent figures. Sometimes 30%, sometimes as high as 80% or 90%, and also estimates of numbers which are often suspiciously round figures and seem inflated figures. So you might get, there's a famous instance where a city in Normandy is supposed to have had 40,000 people die when we know it only had about 15,000 people in it. So it's clear that the chronicle is overblowing events. Luckily, for this period, we have a much richer base of source material. So we don't just have to rely on chronicles and narratives. We can use all kinds of other material, including wheels, parish registers of people who are dying, menorial court records, and letters, a whole array of material that gives us opportunities to start to try to guess at the number. I would argue that in the end, controversies of you, this might be. I don't think it's the right question to ask exactly how many people died. Because if we think about our experience of COVID, I would suggest that there is not a single person alive on the planet who can tell you exactly how many people died during the COVID pandemic globally. So the idea that we're going to be able to put a finite figure on events in the 14th century, I think is misguided. That said, I think it is important to try to get a sense of the scale because, as I said, historians have disputed it. Modern historians back in the early 70s, there was a British historian who argued perhaps it was as little as 5%, which makes it in the history of medieval Europe, it makes it more of a little speed bump rather than a major catastrophic event. I think the historiographical consensus, the general consensus against amongst scholars now, is that it's around 50% of the population in affected areas. And often that means that in that area, in the course of between six to 12 months, around half the population is dying. That's astonishing. How differently did the Black Death affect those of varying ranks in society? Yeah, it's a very good question. I think it is true to say that if you were very rich, if you remember of the noble class, or if you remember the royal family, in some areas at least, you had the resources to try and hide yourself away and endure the pandemic, the crisis as best you could. However, we do know that members of different royal families across the medieval world did die as a result of this pandemic. So famously, the king of Castile, Alfonso XI, or as he sometimes known, Alfonso the Avenger, he died in 1350 during the siege of Gibraltar. So he was a very ardent, competent against the enduring Muslim presence in Iberia, the king of Granada. He wanted to eradicate that. He wanted to snuff out their connection with North Africa by taking Gibraltar. And he was close to doing so. But then a lump appeared, a bugo appeared on his body. He started to show symptoms. He decided he wanted to stay at the front line. And he died. And it caused a terrible crisis within the royal family, a succession crisis. And he was subsequently succeeded by his son, Pedro, who bears the unfortunate Subrake Pedro the Cruel. So he was not exactly the nicest ruler of Castile for the decades to come. We could also look at the young English princess, Princess Joan. She was en route as it would happen to marry that same Pedro. In 1348, she set out from England. She got as far as Bordeaux, which was at this point still in English hands, but then got caught up in an outbreak of the Black Death in that port. And ultimately fell victim. We think on the 1st of June 1348, and we have a quite a moving letter from her father Edward III describing his emotions at losing this treasured child of his. So royal families were affected. But if I'm being really honest, one of the things that's for me most exciting about studying the Black Death and working on material from the 14th century and beyond, is that the increased survival of evidence means that you can start to look at not just the top 1% or the top 10%, you can look at all the structure of society. And there are a number of instances where we have very detailed documents that show us what's happening to people, even peasant farmers, and how they are being affected by the Black Death, how they're responding. Perhaps the most fascinating example comes from a small suffoc village called Walsh and the Willows. Only had about 1,500 people living in and around this community. Most of them were peasant farmers, most of them were indentured to one of the two lords who held manners in this region. But the way people managed their affairs in regions like this is that they would hold regular meetings, what we call "menorial courts." And you'd bring all kinds of business to these events. If you wanted to get married, you'd have to make an arrangement, you'd usually have to pay some money to the Lord to enable you to get married. If you wanted to complain about how much you were being charged, whether you wanted to demonstrate that you'd produce the crops you were supposed to, all of this would go down, would be recorded in a "menorial court" meeting and scrupulously written down on a role of parchment so that it could potentially be later consulted. Now, this is incredibly useful for us as historians, because at the time of the Black Death, all of the deaths of people who held acres of land and farmsteads in Walsh and the Willows were catalogued on these roles. Every single death is detailed and described at various meetings, and then we're told whether heirs came forward, wanted to inherit this land, when to make a claim to it. So it allows us to look at how many people are dying. Again, we have around a 45 to 55% of the population perishing during the outbreak, but also look at how communities try to reconfigure themselves in the aftermath. It's a story of horror, but it's also a story of rejuvenation, because we can see, for example, a family that I studied throughout the 14th century, the Denny family. One of their members, Nicholas Denny, lost his mother, lost his brother. His family had been in a pretty unpleasant, it would seem, dispute with another local family called the Francies. For decades, they seem to be quite imbited enemies, but in the aftermath of the Black Death, he actually marries a member of the Francies family, a woman called Agnes, and that union of their two families seems to have brought about a complete reproach more, and they were seem to work together for the decades to come. So there could be silver linings to the Black Death, even in communities that were ripped apart. Are there particular regions that really got hit hard? Again, I think that's a challenging question to answer specifically. I think one of the things that I've tried to explore is variations over space. So what's happening in lots of different areas to not try to say, okay, so this is what happens in medieval England, and therefore that's the model that we can use across the whole of the medieval world. I've also tried to look and compare what's happening in the Western Christian world and what's happening in the Muslim world, and there is a very significant difference in attitude towards this disease in the Muslim world that I think arguably meant that the Muslim world was more seriously affected, that mortality rates were higher. The difference is that in Islamic doctrine, plague is seen as a gift from God, an action from God, and for believers, for Muslims, it's argued, according to Islamic theology, that the disease is a guarantee of martyrdom. So it's a gift to believers. It's a punishment for unbelievers for non-Muslims, but that meant that crucially Muslims were not supposed to flee from sites affected by the Black death, and also that they were encouraged to believe that it was not contagious, that you didn't catch it directly from another person, that if you got it, it was the will of God. And this seems to have affected behavior within the Muslim world, and particularly where we can study it most specifically in the Mamluk Empire, in cities like Damascus, in Syria, or Cairo, in Egypt that we mentioned earlier on, I would argue that the death rate, the mortality rate may well have been somewhat, if not even significantly higher, because it affected social behavior, and meant that people were less likely to flee, less likely to isolate themselves. Yes, is that in opposition to other places in the world where that action, that attitude towards it, is vastly different? So very often in Western Europe, we do get a sense that people might attempt to flee from an affected site. Often we also hear that the disease just followed them, and they might well have died in spite of their attempt to escape. But perhaps, for me, the most important and revealing example of what's it like to live through this kind of experience comes from a letter written by a musician, court musician, and the papal court in Avignon, so now in southern France. The papacy had moved Avignon earlier in the 14th century, so this is where the papal court was present, and this individual was called Louis Sanctus. He was a close personal friend of a very, someone who's going to become a very, very famous writer and poet Petruch. Louis's particularly important to us because he writes a letter that is very specifically dated to the end of April 1348, and that matters because there's no hindsight involved in what he's writing. He's writing in the moment about what it's like to be in Avignon when the black death has hit about two months earlier, and to suddenly watch half of the population of the city die. So you get a really visceral sense of the horror of this moment, and also the unknown. He mentions at one point, I've been told that we're going to move out of the city. I don't know what's going to happen. He served a particular cardinal a man called Giovanni Colana. We know that he died a couple of months later, although Louis Sanctus survived, but you really get a sense in this letter of the unknown. And again, that's something I think it's so important to remember. They did not know how long this disease was going to last. They didn't know if this was the end of the world. With that in mind, did people at the time recognise this as something that was unprecedented? Or was it just perceived as another bad year of something? Again, I would argue that that has been and perhaps still is a controversial question among scholars. There are some who argue that it's only in the aftermath that people start to recognise the significance or are told this is an unprecedented event. And it is certainly true to say that death was much more familiar to people living in the 14th century than it is to us today. And that localised outbreaks of disease or famine relatively routinely might claim 10% of the population, 20% of the population. So this is not an absolutely foreign experience. But there's two things I would point out. One, we can see see from contemporary eyewitness accounts that they're aware of the wider nature of this. It's not just affecting their town or their city, that it's much broader, that it's affecting the whole of the medieval world very, very rapidly. And also, when we are able to glimpse sources that are written in the moment, so Louis Sanctus is letter, a range of other letters that appear, there's a letter written by a Greek Byzantine official in Constantinople called Demetrius Codornus. He writes a letter describing what happened in the great, what had been the great capital city of the Byzantine Empire, even already, it's a pretty, such a shadow of its former self, but he describes how the city is ripped apart by the disease. We get a sense from those kind of sources that they're aware that this is something different, that the scale of this, that the horror of this event is unprecedented, that it's taking the medieval world to a different place that's posing a different level of challenge. And we're going to be focusing on exactly that lived experience of the Black Death in our next episode. Thank you so much for your time today, Thomas. My pleasure. That was Dr. Thomas Asbridge, a historian of the Middle Ages, specialising in the study of the Crusades, knighthood and chivalry. He is also reader in medieval history at Queen Mary University of London, and the author of the new book The Black Death, a global history, published by Alan Lane. If you'd like to find out more about The Black Death and its surrounding context, or how humanity has dealt with disease through the centuries, I've put together some essential reading, listening and viewing from the history extra archive to help deepen your understanding. You can find a link to that in the description of this episode. [BLANK_AUDIO]