Three Books on the Black Death | The Heritage Portal

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My eye has been on the international corona virus news ever since the story of this mysterious, life-changing disease in wuhan, china first appeared in the news. everything seemed a bit far away in January. we were worried and curious, but it was not a personal threat: china seemed (mistakenly) very far away. I now remember our 2019 Christmas celebration as a time of innocence and carefree time. it was a time before christ, before covid 19. our biggest problem was a power outage on christmas day. 48 hours without power and I had to cook a turkey and cater for lunch. that moment and making a plan to host a Christmas brunch for 12 seems like a lifetime. as january and february and then the march rolled on the word corona and covid-19 got closer and closer and the march turned our lives upside down. instant news and social media brought the impending dangers closer and signaled a highly dangerous developing situation.

During the month of March, when the first case was detected in South Africa, I was suddenly addicted to disease statistics and the global trajectory of disease movement. it all became quite a bit more real and closer to home as by the time I woke up and thought maybe I should buy some toilet paper, some hand sanitizer and a mask these items were mostly gone from store shelves . panic buying took hold, along with a steady upward line on the case number charts. the mortality rate in italy became alarming and my italian friends drew me into their world. i once visited some of these places now on the map, like bergamo. a case of covid-19 appeared in south africa and then a few more. then when the news came that our national government had ordered us to shut down, stay home and accept a house siege, I decided that once again books are comfort and consolation.

You are reading: Books about the black death

my choice of reading for the past few weeks has been narrowed down to three books in my own library on the subject of the black plague, the mysterious high-mortality disease that reached sicily and crimea on the black sea in 1347 and made a it spread to other mediterranean port cities and from there spread across europe over the next two years, reaching scotland and ireland in 1349 and sweden and norway in 1350. although the disease spread at the pace of a horse or a man walking, maybe 21 miles in a day. In a matter of months, the populations of towns, cities, and villages in medieval Europe died in great numbers. statistics vary and it is difficult to guarantee the accuracy of mortality in the fourteenth century; different sources give figures of between 25% and 70% of the population of europe dying in a few years and it has been estimated that the world population fell from an estimated 475 million to 350-375 million during the second half of the fourteenth century . . Europe’s population took 200 years to recover. indeed, it was a terrifying and unprecedented moment in which all assumptions of a stable world were turned upside down. historians argue about the causes, wondering what other catastrophes preceded the pandemic we call the black death (although at the time it was called the great mortality). It was a turning point in Western civilization. Was this a zoomorphic disease (spread from animals to man and then from man to man)? I am aware that, as I sit down to write this article, the number of coronavirus cases has exceeded one million (April 3, 2020) with a death toll of more than 54,000; but 220,025 people worldwide have recovered. Turning back the pages of history some 670 years, I was wondering if there are any lessons or “takeaways” to be drawn from a distant story.

Many books and scholarly articles have been published on the Black Death. My reading narrowed down to John Kelly: The Great Mortality – An Intimate History of the Black Death (Fourth Estate, 2005); Robert S Gottfried: The Black Death – Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (Macmillan, 1983) and Philip Ziegler: The Black Death (first published 1969 and republished 1997 by the Folio Society).

all three books are worth reading and have become classics. I have little doubt that all three books will be republished to the edification of a new audience affected by the pandemic. our world has been turned upside down in a short month: air travel has caused the virus to pass very quickly from one country and continent to another. in our world it is not the passage of a man or a horse that carries a contagion for a day; in fact, you can reach any part of the world from any other within 24 hours. No country is not affected and even a small island like Mauritius has 169 cases (April 3, 2020). so today is a global crisis. The speed with which the corona virus has spread has also made the response rapid despite the fact that we do not have all the scientific knowledge or the antidotes to cure it, nor do we have a vaccine. air travel has come to an abrupt halt as the giant airbirds are marooned in waiting bays. From our world to the medieval world, what can historians share with us?

all three books focus on europe because that is where the ravages of the plague were most marked but also what happened was closely documented. In some ways, I feel like I’m mentally flagellating myself by reading such books in this time of trauma, but on the other hand, reading about how people have responded resonates with our current crisis. the reality is that we have no perspective or distance on what is currently happening. reading about the past at least gives a historical perspective. Of course, one could choose to write about other pandemics (such as the 1918-19 influenza pandemic that killed more people in the world than the victims of World War I), but going back 650 years in time one can reflect on how little and how much the world has changed.

The first significant point is that statistics and number counting are important, but statistics are not always reliable or tell personal history. the chroniclers of the time, people who write about their daily lives and the disaster experienced by their families and their communities, gave us an invaluable record of what really happened, what they tried to deal with the situation, how they understood the causes and how they survived or, more likely, they themselves became a body dumped in a village mass grave.

let me start with the oldest of the three books. In 1969 Philip Ziegler published her book, The Black Death. tells the story of the great plague that came from china and then spread across europe between 1348 and 1351. the plague was a pandemic believed to have been spread by rats and fleas that lived on rats. it was deadly to humans and wiped out between a third and a half of Europe’s population. ziegler begins with the point where news of the calamity that had befallen china first reached europe somewhere around 1346. news in those early days traveled slowly, but china or cathay then seemed remote and people he would simply have felt a “separate regret”. China was still a place of mystery. the stories of the travelers were listened to with wonder and amazement.

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The plague reached Europe along major trade routes that brought ships to anchor and access Europe’s markets for spices and silks via Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), Messina, Sicily, sardinia, genoa, venice and marseille. the rats came on the ships and the rats carried fleas and the fleas in turn carried the deadly bacillus. when they realized that the ships and their cargo were bringing diseases and deaths from afar, efforts were made to drive the ships away with fiery arrows, and thus these galleys were forced to seek other ports, carrying the epidemic to other places and, in fact, accelerating penetration. of the plague in Europe. it was unprecedented, unintelligible and mysterious. Attempts to quarantine people, ships, and towns were also adopted, but not always successfully. the word quarantine comes from Italian – a 40-day quarantine. Demographic historians have had to piece together the history of population loss, who died and why, and why population declines were more pronounced in some parts of Europe than others. how do we know how many people died before modern statistical and actuarial systems took over? remember that yours was a world without computers. Guthenberg’s printing press dates to 1450. Church records were written by hand. the municipal records of ownership and alienation of land give us clues as to what happened. News spreads by word of mouth and surprisingly fast, but not in the way that we are inundated by social media and television and world news channels.

ziegler’s book became a classic and was republished by the folio society in 1997. i was drawn to reread ziegler in the current crisis. it is a work of scholarship and erudition. It is not light reading, but the advantage of reading about the world in the fourteenth century is that there is a perspective from a distance of almost 700 years. I especially enjoyed the chapter where Ziegler recreates an imaginary English town, as he calls it the Blackwater Town (a medium-sized town of 30 families and a population of 150). he places his town between london and winchester. a close-knit people where status, hierarchy, and economic function were defined. ziegler brings to life who died and how the people in this town died and we share the pain and sadness. Another key point is that during those years of disaster, it was important that various forms of government, city-state, manor, or church administer the law and that the cycle of inheritance, land ownership, and a sequence of succession be maintained. the medieval world teetered on the brink, but did not descend into anarchy.

I began to think about how much and how little the world had changed. In the 1997 preface, Ziegler points out that humanity is unlikely to suffer the ravages of the landscape and countryside caused by the plague. His 1997 reflections were greatly influenced by the march of the AIDS pandemic and the frantic search in medical science for containment and cures for HIV-positive people. Ziegler did not see the return of a black death, and comments that we know there are antibiotics that will fight pneumonic and bubonic plague. but there are some wise thoughts in the context of events and the terrifying spread of covid-19 since late december. he comments: “but if another plague, unexplained, uncontrollable, were to sweep the world, people wouldn’t react so differently. there would be the same mixtures of cowardice and heroism, panic and resignation, selfishness and self-sacrifice. an immeasurable gulf stretches between the fourteenth century and the present, but the more one studies the medieval chronicles, the more one becomes convinced that human nature remains substantially the same.”

The Black Death by Robert Gottfried was published in 1983. My copy is a paper edition, which means that this book became a standard prescribed book for a medieval history course, and with good reason. Gottfried writes about the origins of the plague and its natural history, the European context. this reminds us that the nature of the world before the pandemic is part of one’s understanding: if the corona virus marks a radical change, we must relate it to questions of global warming and carbon footprint, for example. the middle chapters of this book deal with the actual progress of the plague: what happened, when, and where. a strength of this book is that it quotes extensively from contemporary sources. for example, he cites henry knighton, a canon of an abbey in the eastern midlands of england, who wrote, “then the terrible pestilence made its way along the coast by southampton and came to bristol, where it nearly perished. the entire force of the city, as it was surprised by sudden death; because few stayed in bed more than two or three days, or even half a day. then this cruel death spread everywhere, following the course of the sun.” the last three chapters of the book discuss the immediate and then the long-term consequences. The key questions here revolve around the progression to modern medicine and how this disaster transformed Europe in the long run. His argument is that from the mid-thirteenth century to the late fifteenth century, Europe, much of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia suffered the most serious environmental crisis in history up to that time. plague was only the most horrendous manifestation of this environmental crisis and man was helpless. in the long run the positives followed, although there were a series of plagues. there was a turning point in the late middle ages when man marked the transition from medieval to modern civilization. Gottfried concludes that the Black Death ranked as the largest biological environmental event in history. that’s a pretty broad statement and I think that while we now believe in the ability of medical science to adapt, respond and find solutions, can we be as sure as people of the 21st century that the future of humanity as a species is secure ?

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John Kelly’s Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, published in 2005, is the most recent of the three books. is a powerful and highly enjoyable narrative account of the Black Death. Kelly writes in a popular, journalistic style, which is quite reminiscent of the pace and style of Barbara Tuchman. history is too important to be left in the hands of professional historians who so often argue and debate but cannot write. Kelly writes well. he began his research from the perspective of a modern man interested in the future of the disease, as he too observed the ravages of the AIDS pandemic that caused the premature death of millions since the early 1980s over a period of 22 years . It was in the late 20th century that emerging diseases such as Ebola, Marburg Fever, Avian Flu, Sars, and HIV/AIDS sparked renewed interest in history, and for an author like Kelly to wonder whether to investigate the Black Death. and a fourteenth-century apocalypse could shed light on our modern understanding of and response to the terrors of new diseases. At the time of writing (2005), Kelly comments that there were 27 million deaths from AIDS worldwide and that antiretrovirals had not yet pushed that disease back to the contemporary position where people who know they are infected receive a regimen of antiretroviral medication (arvs) and living with state intervention providing managed care. Kelly’s goal is to relive the late medieval world and how people coped with the catastrophe. he has also been inspired by contemporary chronicles, in letters of reminiscences. he also looks at new theories about the nature of the plague—in his various guides—pneumonic, bubonic, and septicemic. His conclusion is that while history may never repeat itself, as Voltaire observed, “man always does.” in the face of a pandemic, modernity is fragile and, as we have seen, it takes the government between a few weeks and a month to move from commitments to human rights and the rights of the individual to the introduction of draconian norms, decrees and regulations and somewhat undemocratic. for the sake of “saving” humanity.

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Reading these three books gave me a better understanding of why there should be such high-profile, fearsome interventions to “flatten the curve.” collective governments and international organizations are not willing to allow deaths to be counted in the millions. modernity and the factors and forces that shaped economic development and civilization over the last seven centuries mean that the kind of death rates that occurred at the time of the black plague (millions dead) are considered too appalling to contemplate today . In medieval times, ecological and human disasters tested and exposed the weaknesses of many societies and it was because of the plague and its impact that new approaches and new directions were taken. could this not happen as a consequence of the biological crisis of our own time?

kathy munro is honorary associate professor in the school of architecture and planning at the university of the witwatersrand and president of the johannesburg heritage foundation. She enjoyed a long career as an academic and in management at the University of Ingenuity. she was trained as an economic historian. she is passionate about books and has built her own somewhat eclectic collection of books over 40 years. her interests span african, johannesburg history, history, art history, travel, business and banking histories. she researches and writes on historic architecture and heritage issues. she is a board member of the johannesburg heritage foundation and is a docent at the artful arts museum. she is currently working on a couple of projects for johannesburg architects and is researching south african architects, war cemeteries and memorials. kathy is a member of the library thing online book community and recommends this worldwide network and cataloging website as a haven for book lovers.

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