.
~-,-l
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
778
harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human bat-
tle before my door.
Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated
5
and the date of them recorded , thoogh they say that Huber is the only mod-
ern author who appears to have witnessed them. "Aeneas Sylvius," say they,
"after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obsti-
nacy by a great and small species on th e trunk of a pear tree," adds that " 'this
action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of
Nicholas Pistorie nsis , an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the
battle with the greatest fidelity.' A similar engagement between great a nd small
ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus , in which the small ones, being victorious,
are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their
giant enemies a prey to the birds . This event happene d previous to the ex']Jul-
sion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden." The battle which I
witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of
6
Webster's Fugitive-Slave Bill.
5. Kirby and Spence were nineteenth-ce ntury American entomologists; Fran<;ois Huber
( J 750-l 83 J) was a great Swiss entomologist.
6. Passed in 185 J.
QUESTIONS
I. Thoreau uses the Latin word bellum to describe the battle of the ants and follows it
with a reference to the Myrmidons, the sold iers of Achilles in Homer's lliild. Locale ad-
ditional examples oF this kind of allusion. How does it work? Why does Thoreau com-
pare the ants to Greek soldiers?
2. Ordinarily we speak of accounts of natural events as ''natural history" and accounts
of human events as "his tory." How does Thoreau, in this selection, blur the distinction?
To what effect?
3. Look up a description of the behavio r of ants in a book by one of the entomologists
Thoreau refers to or in another scientific text. Compa re the scientist's style with
Thoreau's. Take another event in nature and describe it twice, once in scientific and
once in allusive language. Or write an essay in which you describe and analyze the dif-
ferences between the scienti st's style and Thoreau's.
BARBARA TucHMAN "This Is the End of the World":
The Blach. Death
N OCTOBER 1347, two months after the fall of
I
Calais, 1 Genoese trading ships put into the harbor
of Messina in Sicily with dead and dying me n at the
oars. The ships had come from the Black Sea port of
Caffa (now Feodosiya) in the Crimea, w here the
Genoese maintained a trading post. The diseased
sailors showed strange black swellings about the size of an egg or an apple in
the armpits and groin. The swellings oozed blood and pus and were followed
by spreading boils and black blotches on the skin from internal bleeding. The
sick suffered severe pain and died quickly within five days of th e first symp-
toms . As the disease spread, other symptoms of continuous fever and spitting
of blood appeared instead of the swellings or buboes. These victims coughed
and sweated heavily and died even more quickly, within three days or Jess,
sometimes in 24 hours. In both types everything that issued from the body-
breath, sweat, blood from the buboes and lungs, bloody urin e, and blood-
blackened excrement-smelled foul. Depression and despair accompan ied the
physical symptoms, and before the end "death is seen seated on the face."
The disease was bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that infected the
bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding, and was spread by con-
tact; and a second, more virulent pneumonic type that infected the lungs and
was spread by respiratory infection. The presence of both at once caused the
high mortality and speed of contagion. So lethal was the disease that cases
were known of persons going to bed well and dying befo re they woke, of doc-
tors catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient. So rapidly
did it spread from one to another that to a French physician, Simon de
Covino, it seemed as if one sick person "could infect the whole world. " The
malignity of th e pestilence appeared more terrible because its victims knew no
prevention and no remedy.
The physical suffering of the disease and its aspect of evil mystery were
expressed in a strange Welsh lament which saw "death coming into our midst
like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which
has no mercy for fair countenance. Woe is me of the s hilling in the armpit! It
is seething, terrible ... a head that gives pain an d causes a loud cry ... a
painful angry knob ... Great is its seething like a burning cinder ... a griev-
ous thing of ashy color." Its eruption is ugly like the "seeds of black peas, bro-
ken fragments of brittle sea-coal . . the early ornaments of black death,
From A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century ( I 978 ). iu which 'fliCinun"
presents a vivid picture of life in Htedieval France and draws porallels betweeu the dis(/s/ers
of that tim.e and those in our own.
I. After a year-long siege, the French citizens of Calais surr.cndercd to Echvard Ill , king
of England and self-declared king of France.
779
 BARBARA TucHMAN
780
The Triumph of Death. A detail from a fresco by Francesco Traini in the Cam-
posanto, Pisa, c. 1350.
cinders of the peelings of the cockle weed, a mixed multitude, a black plague
like halfpence , like berries .... "
Rumors of a terrible plague supposedly arising in China and spreading
through Tartary (Central Asia) to India and Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt,
a nd all of Asia Minor h ad reached Europe in 1346. They told of a death toll so
devastating that all of India was said to be depopulated, whole territories cov-
ered by dead bodies, other areas with no one left alive. As added up by Pope
Clement VI at Avignon, the total of reported dead reach ed 23,840,000. In the
absence of a concept of contagion, no serious alarm was felt in Europe until
th e trading ships brought their black burden of pestilence into Messina while
other infected ships from the Levant carried it to Genoa and Venice.
By January 1348 it penetrated France via Marseille, and North Africa via
Tunis. Shipborne along coasts and navigable rivers, it spread westward from
Marseille through the ports of Languedoc to Spain and northwa rd up the
Rhone to Avignon , where it arrived in March. It reached Narbonne, Montpel-
lier, Carcassonne, and Toulouse between February and May, and at the same
time in Italy spread to Rome and Florence and their hinterlands . Between
June and August it reached Bordeaux, Lyon, and Paris, spread to Burgundy
and Normandy, and crossed the Channel from Normandy into southern En-
gland. From Italy during the same summer it crossed the Alps into Switzerland
and reached eastward to Hungary.
In a given area the plague accomplished its kill within four to six months
and then fad ed, except in th e larger cities, where , rooting into the close-
"T1-1rs Is TilE END oF THE WoRLD": THE BLACK DEATH 781
Burial of the plague victim. From Annales cle Gales li Muisis.
quartered population, it abated during the winter, only to reappea r in spring
and rage for another six months.
In 1349 it res umed in Paris, sp read to Picardy, Flanders, and th e Low
Countries, and from England to Scotland and Ireland as well as to Norway,
where a ghost ship wi th a cargo of woo l and a dead crew drifted offshore until
it ran agro und near Bergen. From th ere the plague passed into Sweden, Den-
mark, Prussia, Icelan d, and as far as Greenland. Leaving a stra nge pocket of
immunity in Bohemia, and Russi a unattacked until 135 1, it had p assed from
most of E urope by mid-1350 . Although the mortality rate was erratic, ranging
from one fifth in some places to nine tenths or almost total elimination in oth-
ers, the overall estimate of modern demographers has se ttled-for the area ex-
tending from Indi a to Iceland-around the same frgure expressed in Froiss art's
casual words: "a third of the world died." Hi s esti mate , the common one at th e
time, was not an inspired guess but a borrowing of St. John's figure for mortal-
ity from plague in Revelation , the favorite guide to human a ffairs of th e Mid-
dl e Ages.
A third of Europe wou ld have meant about 20 million deaths. No one
knows in truth how many died. Contemporary reports were a n awed impres-
sion, not an accurate count. In crowded Avigno n, it was said, 400 died daily;
7,000 houses emptied by death were shut up; a single graveyard received
11,000 corpses in six weeks; half the c ity's inhabitants reportedly died, includ-
ing 9 cardin als or one third of the tota l, and 70 lesser prelates. Watching th e
endlessly passing death carts, chroniclers let normal exagge ration take wings
and put th e Avignon dea th toll at 62,000 and eve n at 120,000, al though the
city's total population was proba bly less than 50,000.
Wh en graveyards filled up , bodies at Avignon were thrown into the Rhone
until mass burial pits were dug for dumping the corpses. In London in such
 8ARBAHi\ TUC\I i\ IA N
782
pits corpses piled up in layers un ti l t hey overflowed. Eve rywhere reports speak
of th e sick dying too fast for the li ving to bury. Corpses were dragged out of
homes a nd left in front of doorways. Morn ing li ght revea led new p il es of bod-
ies. In Florence the dead were gathered up by th e Co mpagnia de lla Misericor-
dia-founded in 1244 to ca re for the sick-whose members wore red robes
a nd hoods masking the face excep t for the eyes. When their efforts fai led , the
dead lay putrid in th e streets for clays at a tim e. When no coffins were to be
had, the bodi es were la id on boards, two or three at once, to be carried to
graveyards o r common pits. Fam ili es cl umped the ir own relatives into the pits,
or buried them so hastily and thinly "that dogs dragged them forth an d de-
vo ured their bodies."
10 Amid accumu la tin g death a nd fear o f contagion, people died without last
rites a nd we re buried without prayers, a prospect that terrified the last hours
of th e stricke n. A bishop in Englan d gave permission to laymen to make con -
fe ssion to eac h ot her as was don e by the Apostles, "or if no man is pt·esent
then even to a woma n ," a nd if no priest co uld be found to administer ext reme
unction, "then fa ith must s urfl ce." C lement VI found it necessary to grant re-
missions o f sin to a ll who di e d of the plague because so many were un attended
by priests. "And no bells toll ed," wrote a chronicl e r of Siena , "a nd nobody
wep t no matter what hi s loss because almost everyone expected death .. . . And
people sai d a nd beli eved , 'Thi s is th e end of th e wor ld .'"
In Paris, where the plague lasted throu gh 1349 , the reported deat h rate
was 800 a day, in Pisa 500 , in Vienna 500 to 600. Th e total dead in Pa ri s num-
bered 50,000 or ha lf the popul atio n. Florence, weakened by the fami ne of
I 34 7, lost three to four fifth s of its c itize ns, Venice two thi rd s, Hamburg an d
Bremen, though smaller in size, abo ut th e same proportion. Cities, as centers
of transportation, were more like ly to be affected than villages, a lth ough once
a vi llage was infected, its deat h rate was equa lly high. At Givry, a prosperous
vill age in Burgundy of I ,2 00 to I ,500 peopl e, th e pa rish register records
6 15 deaths in the space of fourtee n weeks, compared to an ave rage of thirty
deaths a year in the previous decade . In three vill ages of Camb ridgeshire,
manorial reco rd s sho w a dea th rate of 47 percent, 57 percent, and in one case
70 percent. When th e las t survivo rs, too few to carry on, moved away, a de-
serted village sa nk back into the wi lderness a nd disappeared from the map al-
toge th e r, leaving on ly a grass-covered ghostly outlin e to s how where mortals
once had li ved.
In e nclosed pl aces such as monasteries and p riso ns , the infection of one
perso n usually meant that of a ll , as ha ppened in the Franciscan convents of
Carcasso nn e a nd Marseille , where every inmate wit hout exception died. Of
th e 140 Dominic a ns at Montpellie r only seven survived. Petrarch 's 2 bro ther
G hera rclo , member of a Ca rthu sian monaste ry, buried the prior an d 34 fellow
monks one by one, sometim es t hree a clay, until he was left a lon e with hi s dog
a nd fled to look for a place that wo uld take him in. Watc hin g every com rade
2. Fra ncesco Petrarch (1304- 1374 ), ltulia n wTiter whose son nets to "my lady Laura"
inAucnced a traditio n of Europea n love poetry for centuries.
''T Hi S Is TilE ENo OF Til E VVonLo'': TilE ilLIICK DEIITII
783
die, men in s uch places co uld not but wonder wheth er the stra nge peril th a t
filled the air had not been sent to exterm in ate the human race. I n Kilkenn y,
Ireland , Brother John C lyn of the Friars i\ linor, another monk left alone
amon g dead men , kept a record of what had happened lest "things which
should be .remembered perish with time and vanis h from the memory of those
who come after us ." Sensing "the whol e world, as it we re, placed withi n the
grasp of th e Evi l One," and wa itin g for death to vis it him too, he wrote, "I
leave parchment to continue th is work, if perchance any man survive and any
of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and ca rry on the work which I have
begun. " Brother J ohn , as noted by another hand , died of the pest ile nce, but he
foiled oblivion.
Th e largest ci ties of Europe, with populations oF about I 00,000, were
Paris and Florence, Ve ni ce and Genoa. At the next level, with more than
50,000, we re G h en t and Bruges in Flanders , Mi la n, Bologna, Rom e, Naples ,
and Palermo, a nd Cologne . London hovered below 50,000, the only c ity in
England excep t York wit h more than I 0,000. At th e leve l of 20,000 to 50,000
were Bordea ux, To ul ouse, Montpellier, Marseille, and Lyo n in France , Bm-ce-
lon a, Seville, and Toledo in Spa in , Siena, Pisa, and other seco ndary cities in
Italy, and the Hanseatic trading cities of the Empi re. Th e plague raged
through th e m all, killing anywhere from one third to two thirds oF their inhabi-
tants. Italy, with a total population of 10 to II million , probab ly suFfered the
heaviest toll. Followi n g the Florentine bankruptcies, the crop fa ilures a nd
workers' riots of 1346-4 7, the revolt of Cola eli Hi e nzi that p lun ged Rome into
anarchy, th e plague came as th e peak of successive ca lamities . As if the world
were indeed in the grasp of th e Evi l One, its first ap pearance on the Europea n
mainland in Jan ua ry 1348 coincided with a fearsome eart hqu ake th at ca rved a
path of wrec kage from Naples up to Venice. Houses co llap sed, c h urch towers
toppled , vi ll ages were crus hed, a nd the destruct ion reached as far as Germany
and Greece. Emotional response, du lled by horrors, und erwent a kind of atro-
phy epitom ized by the chron icler who wrote, "And in these days was burying
without sorrowe a nd weddin g withou t friendsc hipp e. "
In Siena, where more than half t he inh ab itants died of th e pl ague, wo rk
was abandon ed on the great cathed ra l, planned to be th e largest in the world ,
and n ever resumed, owing to loss of workers and master masons and ''the
melancholy an d grief " of the survivo rs. The cathedra l's truncate d transept sti ll
sta nds in permanent witn ess to the sweep of cl eat h's scythe. Agnolo di Tura, a
chronicl er of Siena, recorded th e fear of contag ion tha t Froze eve ry other in-
stin ct. "Fath er abandoned c hild, wife husba nd , one brother anot he r, " he
wrote, Hfor thi s p lague seemed to strike through th e breath and sight. And so
they died. And no one cou ld be found to bury the dead for money or friend-
ship .... And ! , Agnolo eli Tura, ca lled the Fat, buried my five children with my
own hand s, and so did many othe rs likewise. "
There were ma ny to echo his account of inhum a nity and few to ba lanc e 15
it, for the p lague was not the kind of calamity that inspired mutual he lp. Its
loat hsomeness and deadlines s did not herd peop le together in mutual distress,
but only prompted their desire to esca pe each o th er. "Magistrates and nota ries
 BARilAHA Tuc!J~IAN
784
refu sed to come a nd ma ke the wills of the dying," reported a Franciscan fr iar
of Piazza in Sicily; what was worse, "eve n t he pri ests did not co me to hear
their co nfession s." A clerk of the Archbishop of Canterbury re ported the same
of English priests who ''turned away from the care of their benef1 ces from fear
of dea th ." Cases of parents desertin g chi ldren and c hildre n th eir parents we re
reported across Europe from Scotland to Ru ss ia. The ca lam ity c hill ed the
hearts of me n , wrote Boccacc io 3 in his famous accou nt of th e plague in Flo-
re nc e that serves as introdu ction to the Decawwron. "One man shunn ed a n-
other . . . kin sfolk held aloof, broth e r was forsaken by brother, oftentimes
hu sband by wife; nay, what is more, and sca rcely to be beli eved, fathers and
moth ers were found to abandon their own children to their fate, unte nded,
unvisited as if th ey had bee n strangers." Exaggeration and lite rary pessimism
were co mmon in the 14th ce ntury, but the Pope's physician, Guy de Chau li ac,
was a sober, careful observer who repo rted th e sa me pheno menon : "A fat her
did not visit his so n, nor the son his father. Charity was dead."
Yet not e ntirely. In Paris, acc ording to the chronicler Jea n de Venette, the
nun s of the Hote l Die u or municipal hospital, "h avi ng no fear of death , tended
the sick with all sweetness and humility. " New nuns repeatedly too k the pl aces
of those who died, until the majority "many times renewed by death now rest
in peace with Christ as we may piou sly beli eve."
When th e plague e ntered northe rn France in July 1348, it se ttled f1rst in
Normandy and, checked by winter, gave Picardy a deceptive inte rim until the
next summ e r. Either in mourning or warning, black flags we re flown from
church towers of the worst-stricken villages of Normandy. "And in that tim e,"
wrote a monk of the abbey of Fourcarment , "th e mortality was so great among
the people of Normandy that those of Picardy mocked them ." The same un-
ne ighborly reaction was reported of the Scots, separa ted by a wi nter's immu-
nity from th e English. Deli ghted to hea r of the di sease that was scourgin g the
"so uthrons ," they gathered forces for a n invasion , "laughing at their e ne mi es."
Before they co uld move, the savage mortality fell upon them too, scattering
some in death a nd the res t in panic to spread the infec tion as they fled .
In Picardy in the summer of 1349 the pestilence pen etrated the castle
of Co uey to kill Enguerrand's 4 moth er, Catherine, and he r new husband.
Whether he r nin e-yea r-old so n escaped by chan ce or was perhaps livin g else-
where with one of his guardians is unrecorded. In nea rby Amiens, tannery
workers, responding quickly to losses in the labor force, co mbined to bargain
for higher wages. In another place vi ll agers were see n dancing to drum s and
trumpe ts , and on being asked the reaso n, answered that, seeing their neigh-
bors die day by day whi le th eir village remained immune, they believed they
could keep the plague from e ntering "by th e jollity th a t is in us. That is why we
3. Giova nni Boccaccio ( 13 13- 1375), Italian writer best known for hi s co llection of sto-
ries , Tiw Decamerott, in wh ic h seven yo ung ladies and three yo ung men f-l ee fro m Flo-
rence to escape the Black Death and tell stories to whil e away the time.
4. E nguerrand de C ouey, a French noble man, is the hi storical figure around whom
Tuchman constructs her acco unt o[ the fourteenth centu ry.
"TI-IIS Is THE ENo OF THE VVoRLo' ': THE BLACK DEATII
785
dance." Further north in Tournai o n the border of Fla nders, Gil les li Muisi s,
Abbot of St. Martin 's, kep t one of the ep idemic's most vivid acco unts . The
passing bell s rang all day and all night, he recorded, because sex ton s were anx-
ious to obtain the ir fees while they could. Filled with th e so und of mourning,
the city became oppressed by fea r, so th a t the authorities forb ade the tolling of
bells a nd the weari ng of black and res tricted funeral services to two mourners.
Th e silencing of funeral bells a nd of crie rs' announcements of deaths was
ordained by most citi es . Siena imposed a fine on the wearing of mourning
clothes by all except widows.
Flight was the c hief recourse of those who could affo rd it or arra nge it.
The ri ch fled to the ir country places like Boccaccio's yo ung patri cians of Flo-
rence , who se ttled in a pastoral palace "removed on every side from th e roads"
with "wells of cool water and va ults of rare wines." The urban poor died in
their burrows, "a nd on ly th e stench of their bodies informed neighbors of th eir
death ." That the poor were more heavily affl icted than the rich was clearly re -
marked a t th e time, in the north as in th e so uth. A Scottish chronicler, John of
Fordun , stated flatly that the pes t "attacked especia lly the mea ner sort and
common people-seldo m the magnates. " Simon de Covi no of Montpelli er
made the same observation. He ascribed it to the misery and want an d ha rd
lives that made the poor more susceptible, which was half the truth. Close
contact a nd lack of sanitation was the unrecognized other half. It was noticed
too tha t the young died in grea ter proportion than th e old; Simon de Covino
compared the disappearance of youth to the wit hering of flowers in the field s.
In th e countryside peasants dropped dea d on the roads, in th e fields, in 20
their houses. Survivors in growing help lessness fell into apa thy, leaving ripe
wheat uncut and lives tock untended . Oxen and asses, sheep and goats, pigs
and chickens ran wi ld a nd th ey too, according to local reports , succumb ed to
the pes t. English sheep, beare rs of the precious wool, di ed throughout the
country. The chronicler H enry Knighton, ca non of Leices ter Abbey, reported
5,000 dead in one field alone , "their bodies so corrupted by th e plague th at
neither beas t nor bird wo uld touch them," and spreading a n appalling ste nch .
In the Austrian Alps wolves came do wn to prey upon sheep and then, "as if
alarmed by some invisible warning, turned a nd fled bac k into th e wilderness."
In remote Dalmatia bolder wolves descended upon a plague-stricken city and
attacked human survivors. For wa nt of herdsme n, cattle strayed from place to
place and died in hedgerows and ditches. Dogs and cats fe ll like th e rest.
The dearth of la bor held a fearful prospect because the 14th century lived
close to th e annual ha rvest both for food and for next year's seed. "So few ser-
vants a nd laborers were left," wrote Knighton , "th a t no one knew where to
turn for help. " The se nse of a vani shing future created a kind of deme ntia of
despair. A Bavarian chronicler of Neuberg on the Danube recorded that "M e n
and women . .. wandered around as if mad " and let their ca ttl e stray ''beca use
no one had any inclination to concern th emse lves abo ut the future." Fields
went unc ultiva ted , spring seed unsown. Second growth with nature's awfu l e n-
ergy crept back over cleared land , dikes crumb led, salt water reinvaded a nd
soured the lowlands. With so few hands remaining to restore the work of cen-
 BARBARA TucH~IAN
786
turies, people felt, in Walsingham's words, that ''th e world could never again
regain its former prosperity."
Though the death rate was higher among the anonymous poor, th e known
and the great di ed too. King Alfonso XI of Castile was the only reigning
monarch killed by the pest, but his neighbor King Pedro of Aragon lost his
wife, Queen Leonora, his daughter Marie, and a niece in the space of six
months. John Cantacuzene, Emperor of Byzantium, lost his son. In France the
lame Queen Jeanne and her daughter-in-law Bonne de Luxemburg, wife of the
Dauphin, both died in 1349 in the same phase th at took the life of Enguer-
rand's mother. Jea nne , Queen of Navarre, daughte r of Louis X, was another
victim. Edward III's second daughter, Joanna , who was on her way to marry
Pedro, the heir of Castile, died in Bordeaux. Women appear to have been more
vulnerable than men, perhaps because, being more housebound , they were
more exposed to Aeas. Boccaccio's mistress Fiammetta, i llegitimate daughter
of the King oF Naples, died, as did Laura, the beloved-whether real or fic-
tional--of Petrarc h. Reaching out to us in the future, Petrarch cried, ''Oh
happy posterity who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon
our testimony as a fable."
In Florence Giovanni Vil lani, the great historian of his time, di ed a t 68 in
the midst of an unfin ished sentence: "... e dure questa pistolenzafi.no a . . . (in
the midst of this pestilence there came to an end . . . )." Siena's master
painters, the broth e rs Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti , whose names never ap-
pear after 1348 , presumably perished in the plagu e, as did Andrea Pisano, ar-
chitect and sculptor of Florence. William of Ockham and the English mys tic
Richard Rolle of Hampole both disappear from mention after 1349 . Francisco
Datini, mercha n t of Prato, lost both his parents and two siblings. Curious
sweeps of mortality aHlicted certain bodies of merchants in London. All eight
wardens of the Company of Cutters, all six wardens of the Hatters , and four
wardens of the Goldsmiths died befo re Ju ly 1350. Sir John Pulteney, master
draper and four t imes Mayor of London, was a victim, likewise Sir John Mont-
gomery, Governor of Calais.
Among the c lergy and doctors t he mortality was naturally high because of
the nature of th e ir professions. Out of 24 physicians in Venice, 20 were said to
have lost their lives in the plague, although, according to another account,
some were believe d to have Red or to have shut themse lves up in their houses.
At Montpellier, site of the leading medieval m edica l school, the physician Si-
mon de Covino reported that , despite the great number of doctors , "hardly one
of t hem escaped." ln Avignon, Guy de Chauliac confessed that he performed
his medical visits on ly because he dared not stay away for fear of infamy, but
"I was in continual fear." He cla imed to have contracted the disease but
to have cured himse lf by his own treatment; if so, he was one of the few who
recovered.
C lerical mortality varied with rank. Although the one-third toll of cardi-
2o
nals reflects th e same proportion as the whole, this was probably due to their
concentration in Avignon. In England, in strange and almost sinister proces-
sion, the Archbishop oF Canterbury, John Stratford, died in August 1348, his
appoi nted successor died in May 1349, and the next appointee three months
" THIS Is TilE E ND oF TII E WoBLo": TH E 13L AC K DEATII 787
later, all three within a year. Despite such weird vagaries, prelates in general
managed to s ustain a highe r survival rate than the lesser clergy. Among bish-
ops the deaths have been estimated at about one in twenty. Th e loss of priests,
even if many avoided their fearful duty of attend ing the dying, was about the
same as among the popul ation as a whole .
Government officials, whose loss contributed to th e general chaos, found,
on the whole, no special shelter. In Siena four of th e nine members of the gov-
erning oligarchy died, in France one third of the royal notaries , in Bristol 15 out
of the 52 members of the Town Council or almost one third. Tax-collecting
obviously suffered, with the result that Philip VI was unable to co ll ect more
than a fraction of the subsidy granted him by the Estates in the winter of
1347-48.
Lawlessn ess and debauch ery accompa nied the plague as they had during
the great plagu e of Athens of 430 B.C . , when according to Thucydides, men
grew bold in the indulgence of pleasure: "For seeing how th e rich died in a
moment and those who had nothing immediately inherited their property, they
reflected that life a nd riches were a like tran sitory and they reso lved to enjoy
themselves w hil e they could." l-Iuman beh av ior is timeless. When St. John had
his vision of plague in Revelation, he knew from some experience or race
memory that those who survived "repented not of th e work of their hands ....
Neither rep e nted they of their murders, nor of their so rceries, nor of their for-
nication , nor of th eir thefts."
Ignorance of the cause augmented the sense of horror. Of the real carriers,
rats and Aeas, the 14th century had no suspicion, perhaps because they were
so fami liar. F leas, though a common househo ld nuisance, are not once men-
tioned in co ntemporary plague writings, and rats only incidentally, altho ugh
folklore commonly associated them with pestilence. The legend of the Pied
Piper arose from an outbreak of 1284. The actual plague bacillus, Pasturella
pestis, remained undiscovered for another 500 years. Living a lternate ly in the
stomach of the Rea and th e bloodstream of the rat who was the flea 's host , the
bacillus in its bubonic form was transferred to humans and animals by the bite
of either rat or Rea. It traveled by virtue of Rattus rattus, the small medieval
black rat that live d on ships, as we ll as by the heavier brown or sewer rat.
What precipitated the turn of the bacillus from innocuous to virul e nt form is
unknown, but th e occurrence is now believed to have taken place not in China
but somewhere in central Asia and to have spread a long the caravan routes.
Chinese origin was a mistaken notion of the 14th ce ntury based on real but
belated reports of huge death tolls in China l'rom drought, famine, and pesti-
lence which have since been traced to the 1330s, too soon to be responsible
for the plagu e th at appeared in India in 1346.
The phantom enemy had no name. Called the Black Death only in later
recurrences, it was known during the first epidem ic simply as the Pestilence or
Great Mortality. Reports from the East, swollen by fearful imaginin gs, told of
strange temp ests and "sheets of fire" mingled with huge hail stones that ''s lew
11
ahnost all," or a vast rain of flre" that burned up n1en, beasts, stones, trees ,
villages, and cities. In another version, "fo ul blasts ol' wind" from the f-Ires car-
 BAnB ,\ HA Tuctti\lt\N
788
ried the infection to Europe "and now as some suspec t it co met h round the
seacoast." Accura te observa tion in this case cou ld not make the mental jump
to ships and rats because no idea of an im al- or ins ec t-borne contagion exis ted.
The earthquake was blamed for releas ing sulfurous and foul fumes fro m
30
the earth 's interior, or as evid ence of a titanic struggle of planets a nd oceans
ca using waters to rise and vaporize until fish died in masses a nd co rrupted the
air. All these explanations had in common a factor of poisoned air, of miasmas
and thick, stinki ng mists traced to every kind of na tural or imagined age ncy
from stagnant la kes to malign conjunction of th e p la ne ts, from the hand of the
Evil One to the wrath of God. Medica l thinking, tra pped in th e theory of astra l
influences, stressed air as th e co mmuni cato r of dis ease, ignoring san itation or
visible carriers. The existence of two carriers confused the tra il , th e more so be-
cause the flea could live and travel independently of the rat for as long as a
month and, if infected by the pa rticul a rly virulent septicemic for m of the baci l-
lu s, cou ld infec t human s without reinfecting itself from the rat. The simulta-
neou s presence of the pn e umonic form of th e disease, which was indeed co m-
munica ted through the air, blurred the problem further.
T he myste ry of the co ntagi on was "the most terrible of all the te rrors," as
an anonymous Flemish cle ric in Avignon wrote to a corresponden t in Bruges.
Plagues had bee n known before, from th e plague of Athens (believed to have
been typhus) to the prolonged epid emic of the 6th ce ntu ry A.D., to the rec ur-
rence of sporad ic outbreaks in the 12th and 13th centuries, but they had left
no acc umula ted store of und ers tanding. That th e infection came from co ntac t
with the sick or with their houses, clothes, or corpses was quickly observed but
not comp rehended. Gentil e da Foligno, renowned physicia n of Peru gia and
doctor of medicine at th e universiti es of Bologna and Padua , came close to
respiratory infection when he surmised that poisonous material was "co mmu-
nicated by mea ns of a ir brea thed out a nd in." Having no id ea of microscopic
carriers, h e had to assum e that the air was corrupted by planetary influ ences.
Pla nets, however, could not expla in the ongoing co ntagion. The agonized
search for a n a nswer gave rise to such theories as tra nsference by sight. People
fell ill, wrote G uy de Chauliac, not on ly by remaining with th e sick but "even
by looking at them. " Three hundred years later Joshua Barn es, the l 7th ce n-
tury biographer of Edward Ill , could write that th e power of infection had en -
te red into beams of light and "darted dea th from the eyes."
Doctors struggling with the evide nce could not break away from th e terms
of astrology, to which th ey believed all human physiology was subj ect. Medicine
was the one aspect of medi eval life, perhaps beca use of its links with the Arabs,
not shaped by C hristian doctrin e. Cle rics de tested as trology, but co uld not dis-
lodge its influ e nce. Guy de Chauliac, physician to three popes in success ion,
practiced in obedience to th e zodiac. While hi s Cirurgia was the major tre<l tise
on surgery of its time, while he understood the usc of anesthes ia made from the
juice of opium, mandrake, or hemlock, he nevertheless prescribed bleed ing an d
purgatives by th e plane ts a nd divided c hronic from acute diseases on the basis
of one being under the rule of the sun a nd the other of the moon .
In October 1348 Philip VI asked the medi cal faculty ol' the Unive rsity of
"TH I S Is T HE ENu oF THE 'vVoHLD.' : THE BLACK DEATH
789
Paris for a report on the affliction that seemed to threaten human survival.
With careful thes is, a ntithesis, an d proofs, the doctors ascribed it to a t ripl e
conju nction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius sa id
to have occurred on March 20, 1345 . They ackn owledged, however, effects
"whose cause is hidde n from even the most highly trained intell ects." The ver-
dict of the mas ters of Paris became th e offic ial version. Borrowed, copied by
scribes, carried abroad, transla ted from Lati n into vario us vernaculars, it was
~vef)'\vh e re accepted, even by th e Arab physicians of Co rdova and Granada, as
the sc ie ntific if not the popular an swer. Because of th e terrib le interes t of the
subject, the translations of the plague tracts stimul ated use of na tional lan-
guages. In that one respect, life cam e from death.
To the people at large there could be but one explanation-the wra th of Cod.
Planets might satisfy the learned doctors, but God was closer to the average
man . A sco urge so sweepin g and unspa ring without any visibl e ca use could
only be seen as Divin e punishm ent upon mankind for its si ns. It mig ht even be
God's te rminal di sappointme nt in his crea ture. Matteo Villani compa red th e
plague to the Flood in ultim ate purpose a nd believed he was record in g "the ex-
termina tion of man kind. " Efforts to appease Divi ne wrath took many forms , as
whe n th e city of Rouen ordered that everythi ng that co uld anger God, such as
gambling, cursing, a nd drinking, must be stopped. More general were the pen-
itent process ion s a uthorized at first by th e Pope, so me las ting as long as three
days , some attended by as many as 2,000, which everywhere accompanied th e
plagu e a nd helped to spread it.
Barefoot in sac kcloth , sprinkled with ashes , weep ing, praying, tearing 35
their ha ir, carrying candles and relics, sometimes with ropes around their
necks or beating the mselves with whips, the penite nts wound through the
streets, imploring t he mercy of the Vi rgin a nd saints at their shri nes . In a vivid
illustra tion for th e Tri!s Riches 1-feures of the Due de Berry, th e Pope is shown
in a pe nitent proc ess ion a ttend ed by four cardinals in sca rlet from ha t to hem.
He raises both arms in supplication to the a ngel on top of th e Cas tel Sa nt'
Angelo, while white-robed priests bea rin g banners and relics in go ld e n cases
turn to look as one of their number, stricken by th e plague , falls to the ground,
his fac e co ntorted with anxiety. In the rear, a gray-clad monk falls bes ide an-
other victim already o n the ground as th e townspeople gaze in horror. (No mi-
nally the illustration represents a 6t h century plague in the time of Pope
Gregory the Great, but as medi eva l arti sts made no di stinction be tween past
and present, the scene is shown as the a rtist would have seen it in the 14th
century.) vVhe n it became evi de nt that th ese processions were so urces of in-
fection , Cle ment VI had to prohibit them.
In Messina, where the pl ague first appeared, the people begged th e Arch-
bishop of neighboring Catania to lend them the reli cs of St. Agatha. When th e
Catanians refused to let th e relics go, the Arc hbishop clipped them in holy wa-
ter and took the water himself to Messina, where he carried it in a process ion
11~th praye rs and litan ies through t he streets . The de mo nic, whi ch sha red the
medieval cosmos with God, appeared as "demo ns in the shape of dogs" to ter-
 13ARB t\HA TucH~t t\N "TiltS Is THE END OF TilE vVot<LD": TttE i:lLt\CK DEXt'tt 79t
79°

feet the next house. In Lithuania the Maiden was said to wave a red scarf
through the door or window to let in the pest. One brave man , according to
legend, deliberately waited a t his open window with drawn sword and, at the
fluttering of the scarf, chopped off the hand. He died of his deed, but his vil-
lage was spared and the scarf long preserved as a relic in the local church.
Beyond demons and superstition the final hand was God's . Th e Pope ac-
knowledged it in a Bull of September 1348, speaking of th e "pestilence with
which God is afflicting the Christian people." To the Emperor John Canta-
cuzene it was manifest that a malady of such horrors , stenches, and agonies,
and especially one bringing th e dismal despair that sett led upon its victims be-
fore they died, was not a plague "natural" to mankind but "a chastisement from
Heaven." To Piers Plowman' "these pestilences were for pure sin."
The general acceptance of this view created an e>•panded sense oF guilt, for
if the plague were punishment there had to be terrible sin to have occasioned
it. vVhat sin s were on the 14th century conscience? Primaril y greed, the sin of
avarice, fo llowed by usury, worldliness, adultery, blasphemy, fa lsehood, luxury,
irreligion. Giovanni Villani, attempting to account for the cascade of calamity
that h ad fallen upon Florence, concluded that it was retribution f'or the si ns of
avarice and usury that oppressed the poor. Pity and anger about the condition
a;~l;;;~,[;,;;;~ Jhtf.
of the poor, especially victimizatio n of the peasantry in war, was often expressed
btic!TIICf,lliGI nrl !ll UIOil l by writers of the time and was certainly on the conscience of the century. Be-
miimmnrt]llllllniCmmfn neath it a ll was the daily condition of medieval life, in wh ich hardl y an act or
masrqnmmG ml; ~mn ~ thought, sexual, mercantile, or military, did not contravene the dictates of the
nllllfJPIO moqnf ttltllll1ll
Church. Mere failure to fast or attend mass was sin. The result was an under-
fmtgumrnto.WliO nrm(!' ground lake of guilt in the soul that the plague now tapped.
numnafc.ms nobrs.l:ef That the mortality was accepted as God's punishment may exp la in in part .JO
the vacuum of comment that followed the Blnck Death. An investigator has
noticed that in the arch ives of Perigord references to the war arc innumerab le,
to the plague few. Froissart mentions the great death but once , Chaucer gives
it barely a glance. Divine anger so great that it contemplated the extermination
of man did not bear close exami nat ion .

5. The main character (and title) of a fourteenth-century poem by the English poet
William Langland (c. 1330-c. 1386).

Penitential procession led by the Pope durin g the plague (pictured in 14th
century Rome although it purports to illustrate the 6th century plague under
Gregory the Great). By Pol de Lim bourg for the Tl·es Riches Heures of the QUESTIONS
Due de Berry, c. 1410.
!. Why does Tuchman begin with the account oF the Cenoesc trading ships)

rify the peop le. "A black dog with a drawn sword in his paws appeared among
them, gnashing his teeth and ru sh ing upon them and breaking al l the silver
vessels and lamps and candlesticks on the a ltars and cast in g them hither and
thither. ... So the people of Messina , terrified by this prodigious vision, were
all strangely overcome by fear."
The apparent absence of eart hly cause gave th e plague a supernatural and
sinister quality. Scand in avians believed that a Pest Maiden emerged from the
mouth of the dead in the form of a blue flame and flew through the air to in·
2. What ways does Tuchman find to group related facts together-in other words. what
categories does she develop) Suggest other categories that Tuchm<ln might have used in
arranging her facts. What would she have gained or lost by using such catcgorics 0
3. Can you determine a basis for Tuchman's dec isi on sometimes to quote i.! source.
sometimes to recount it in her own wo rd s?
4. VVrite a brieF acco un t of a modern disaster, based on research from sever;.ll sources.