The Black Death

Hello everyone. This is Jermaine Fowler. Your host of The Humanity Archive podcast. And for those of you who don't know me, I'll give you a quick tip about myself. I am what you might call a logophile, simply meaning a lover of words. I mean, it's pretty deep. I used to read the dictionary as a kid for fun. So when I take a word like pandemic and break that into its roots, starting with pan, Greek for everyone. And then I take the second part of that word, demic stems again from Greek demos, meaning people.

So when I put those words together then that means all people. And when we normally refer to pandemics, what are we talking about? We're talking about disease. So this is a disease that affects all people. And if you say that a pandemic doesn't affect you, well, it's very close to home because even if it doesn't affect you, then you know somebody who it affects. And at the very least you know somebody who knows somebody that it affects. It's not that far removed from you. This is something that's going to be at your doorstep. And what is potentially terrifying about pandemics is not only do a lot of these diseases that we see throughout history affect the health and wellbeing of a person, a neighborhood, a community, a country, it also comprises the fabric of society, tears and tugs and pulls at it.

In today's story we're going to talk about one of the most devastating pandemics ever recorded in human history. It was called The Black Death otherwise known as the bubonic plague. Otherwise known as the pestilence that killed between 75 to 200 million people. Caused a religious, and social, and economic upheaval throughout Eurasia, ranging from Egypt all the way up to Italy and beyond, all the way over to China. That is our story today. I think you're going to want to stay tuned for this because it's quite fascinating.

On a cold night, the twilight of the moon illuminated a cobblestone street in Rome, Italy. The silhouette shadow of a slender man moves slowly across the clay wall. He stumbled and he swayed as if intoxicated, aimlessly approaching a small group of people warming up by a bonfire. At the sight of him they scattered away repulsed by his ghastly appearance. The crackling of the flames now paired with the harsh sounds of his hemorrhaging lungs. He coughed wildly, uncontrollably, and unpredictably.

Now it was clear. His staggering had nothing to do with the spirit of alcohol, it had everything to do with the spirit of death. The bubonic plague had set a fast ticking timer on his life. A violent cough shook him and he dropped to the ground, each exhalation expelling mucus, blood, and plague bacteria into the atmosphere. His painful last breath was also a death sentence for someone else. Bacteria droplets whip through the night air to be inhaled by another unsuspecting plague victim. The corrosive power of fear is like a slow-bubbling acid isn't it?

It's abrasive to the spirit. It's burning to the body and eroding away at the mind. And perhaps no time in history has terror held more sway over a humanity than in 1346. It is in this year that the black deaths' frigid hands gripped everyone in the known world. That story I just told you was a bit of narrative fiction of what it might have been like for somebody to be walking up the streets succumbing to this disease. And boy when it comes to diseases, if you could rank them from like 1 to 100, as far as the pain you would go through, the fear that it encapsulated the whole of society in and just the raw power of it all and the sheer ugliness of it all.

This yersinia pestis as The Black Death or The Plague, as actually scientifically known as, is probably one of the worst. Now we're going back to this year of 1346. If you lived in Europe, Asia or Northern Africa, you may have thought the world was coming to an apocalyptic end. Like it was that bad. And for you, it might have been the end, right? It was the end of the world for many, many, many, many people. Anthropologists and historians say that 100 million died. The estimates are all over the place for this thing. But some say, and these are reputable sources, saying that a hundred million died.

And even the most conservative estimates put it at 20 million in Europe alone. Now people were utterly unprepared for a disaster of this magnitude. It brought unprecedented levels of fear, unprecedented levels of despair. It utterly baffled the medical community of this time who still were on the verge of folk medicine and the medical university wasn't up and running yet like it is today. They weren't ready for this. They didn't know where it came from. Not only that but it caused enormous economic strain and ushered in an age of apathy. When I'm talking about apathy I'm talking about normal people just absentmindedly walking around a dead corpse headed to work.

This was like a norm because so many people were dying. And when you think about this it's so sad, but for the living to keep living, life must go on. When I was working on this show, I kind of wondered what is so fascinating about this massive death event in the first place? Why are people so morbidly interested in this? And then I reminded myself that people have been fascinated with death throughout history. I mean, right now at this present time, probably in the top 10 podcasts, you can go and see five serial killer and crime podcasts right now.

I don't talk about war all that much in my history but some of the most popular history and historical narratives that are told are wars and death and more death. Murders, celebrity deaths, violent games, all draws in like a moths to flames. And then if you want to go back further, you've got whole cultures that even worship death. Hades, the Devil or Anubis. Maybe it's our way of dealing with death and the unknown, right? Maybe it's a form of morbid escapism. Or what if people just get a real kick out of death and gore? I don't know but this Black Death story is highly searched, highly sought after, and highly interesting to a large amount of people.

So don't make me feel like I'm alone. Some of you out there are definitely interested in some of this stuff as well. And I ask what does that say about you? What does that say about me? What is it say about us? Well, back to The Black Death. Now let's think about the person in the middle ages. They didn't know that this disease was an infectious bacteria known as yersinia pestis. They were totally unaware that it was a rodent pathogen making its way to humans by way of blood sucking fleas. Antibiotics weren't anywhere in existence. They weren't even a thought yet and they had no form of resistance.

Since we can't provide the answers to those helpless souls, which are now so readily available to us, we again just have to say hindsight really is 20/20. Now we can say with a high degree of certainty that the plague started in Asia. Now it's uncertain if news of those plagues in China and Persia and India made it to the population of Europe. Some European travelers were certainly aware, but if they did get word to the European countries, you must assume that it was brushed off as a foreign problem, or maybe they would just help us to prepare. Either way, the bubonic plague was raging toward them like a violent hurricane on course to the mainland. And they didn't have any weather people to tell them about it.

We don't really see any writing showing that they knew that this was headed for them. And again, if they did know, they didn't really write about it to take it seriously. But once it got there, we have plenty of writings about what happened, the dynamics of it, like how it was affecting people, how many people were dying, just the whole breakdown of society. So the reason that we go to the European source is because they are the most numerous, they are the most direct. They are the ones that put that human side to the numbers and that human suffering to the numbers. When this thing hits Europe, modern Crimea is where we start. This was home to an Eastern outpost of mainland Italy. And from here, the Italian traders, they were these wonderful traders at the time.

They brought back silks and spices and other exotic goods traded from the Far East. Yet this time they were also carrying back something else. That's the thing about trade, right? Because when you trade, you could bring back all the best. All the best of another nation or the best of another country, all of the goods, all their specialties. Whether it be food or the things they wear or their culture. But if there's a disease, then you have a good chance of bringing that back too. And this is exactly what happened. The Italian traders brought back an unintended delivery, a special delivery and it was called The Plague and they brought this to Sicily.

An Italian notary by the name of Gabriele de' Mussi gives a startling account of the diseases' beginnings in Europe. And not really related, but no less interesting, history also gives the first known account of biological warfare. And this was carried out when the Mongols, they called them the Tatars attacked Caffa, a Genoese or Italian trading fortress in the Middle East. Now the Mongols, they started dying in these massive numbers that we know now is because of The Plague, they decided to abandon the military campaign. So this was when the Mongols, they were pushing and pushing. And a lot of historians now think that they almost could have made it and smashed through Europe, but they were turned back, not by some just raw, powerful military force of Europe or of the Genoese outpost, no.

If it weren't for The Plague, they probably would have smashed right through. However, they just started dying and they were like, okay, we're going to abandon this. Let's go ahead and go home. This is too much. We're dying of disease or whatever the case may be. We have got to get out of here, regroup, maybe come back later, but not before catapulting hundreds of Plague written human corpses into the fortress. Morbid I know, but this is really what happened. This is really the depths of human inhumanity like, if we got this, you're going to get it too. This is like one final act of spiteful cruelty. Now some of the Italians fled back to Sicily after this and they brought the bubonic plague with them.

And this is what Gabriele has to say about this. He says "an Eastern settlement under the rule of the Tartar called Tana, which lay to the north of Constantinople and was much frequented by Italian merchants was totally abandoned after an incident there which led to its being besieged and attacked by hordes of Tartar's, who gathered in a short space of time. The Christian merchants who had been driven out by force were so terrified by the power of the Tartar's that to save themselves and their belongings, they fled in an armed ship to Caffa, a settlement in the same part of the world which had been founded long ago by the Genoese.

Oh God! See how the heathen Tartar's race pouring together from all sides, suddenly invaded the city of Caffa and besieged to trap Christians there for almost three years. There, hemmed in by an immense army, they could hardly draw a breath. Although food could be shipped in, which offered them some hope, but behold, the whole army was affected by a disease which overran the Tartar's and killed thousands upon thousands every day. It was as though arrows were raining down from heaven striking across the Tartar's arrogance. All medical advice and attention was useless. The Tartar's died as soon as the signs of disease appeared on their bodies. Swellings in the armpit or groin caused by coagulating tumors, followed by a putrid fever.

The Tartar's, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster brought about by the disease and realizing that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege. But then ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city and hoped that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside. What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them. Although they dumped as many of the bodies as they could into the sea. And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply. And the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army.

Moreover, one infected man could carry the poison to others and infect people and places with the disease by look alone. No one knew or could discover a means of defense. Thus, almost everyone who had been in the East or in the regions to the South and North fell victim to sudden death after contracting this pestilential disease. As it struck by a lethal arrow, which raised a tumor on their bodies, the scale of the mortality and the form which it took persuaded those who lived weeping and lamenting through the bitter events of 1346 to 1348. The Chinese, Indians, Persians, Meads, Curds, Armenians, Sicilians, Georgians, Mesopotamians, Nubians, Ethiopians, Turks, Egyptians, Arabs, Sarcans, and Greeks.

For almost all the East had been affected that the last judgment had come. As it happened, among those who escaped from Caffa by boat, were a few sailors who had been infected with the poisonous disease. Some boats were bound for Genoa. Others went to Venice and others to other Christian areas. When the sailors reached these places and mixed with the people there, it was as if they had brought the evil spirits with them. Every city. Every settlement. Every place was poisoned by the contagious pestilence. And their inhabitants, both men and women, died suddenly. And when one person contracted the illness, he poisoned his whole family. Even as he fell and died those preparing to bury his body were seized by death the same way.

Thus death entered through the windows and the cities and towns were depopulated. Their inhabitants mourn their dead neighbors." I don't think the most profound Stephen King novel could portray the horrors of real life pestilence cost back in the 14th century. And this level of fear and death may be alien to those who've never lived through a great epidemic or through a war or a famine. And yet, if we look around, we can still see epidemic and war and famine. And now in my own lifetime, we could see a pandemic. So in this way, now we can connect the past to the present, right? We can see a little bit of what they were going through.

Kind of see how they dealt with such devastation and such death. You can walk in the shoes a little bit. Now the Black Death pandemic raises some morbidly curious questions, like what is death? So let's put death this way, just if we wanted to give it a one word summary. It is the irreversible cessation of organismic functioning. Like when our brain or our vital organs shut down. Or maybe we could take it a bit further. It is the irreversible cessation of the capacity for consciousness. Like when we stop thinking, or maybe when we stop becoming aware we die. And then it goes into the question: is there an afterlife?

Then there's the real effects of death on the living, especially during the plague. So there's all these philosophic ponderings that you could think about like when you think about what is death. And then you can get into the religious with that whole afterlife. Or maybe we come back or maybe there is a heaven or maybe there is nirvana or maybe we just poof into nothingness or maybe we just don't know. And it's okay that we don't know. Whatever your religious leaning, secular or non-secular, we've all pondered death. And we will probably continue to ponder death and what it means to die, until we die. And I do wonder how would you cope if one in four of your family and friends are getting sick and then dying within days?

Like this is unprecedented! I can't even wrap my mind around it! One in four. That means if you live with your brother, with your mother, and your father, one of them is going to die. No question. And then you go over to like your cousins and your aunt and uncle, and then you have two cousins. Well, one of them are going to die. So in the same week, maybe you lost your brother and maybe you lost your uncle and maybe lost your friend, or maybe your friend's sister, or maybe your friend's mother. Like this is the levels of death that we're talking about here. So what is the moral and emotional turmoil like when you have to choose, even if you have a choice.

You can either stay and care for your dying husband or wife or child, knowing you were almost certainly going to become ill yourself or just abandon them. Live for another day. Now we could say it's a very easy choice but you weren't there and you don't have to make that choice. So you don't know. And then there's even more, there's so many questions, right? How do rulers and leaders and officials pacify a rapidly dying population when you want to preside over that? Everybody says they want to be a leader, right? Like you want to be President of the United States? Or you wanna be a king? Or do you want to be a queen over that? I don't think I would. How do you convince them to keep on functioning, to keep on working, to keep on pushing on and to keep society going?

Now the 20th century philosopher Gabriel Marcel would say this was a grand battle of hope and despair. And that hope is what got them through. He says, "where despair denies that anything in reality is worthy of credit. Hope affirms that reality will ultimately prove worthy of an infinite credit. The complete engagement and disposal of myself." So there have always been those who in the face of catastrophe stood up and said life is still worth living. Imagine though if every single person in a catastrophe fell to despair. Imagine it's like a grand seesaw of humanity during this plague.

Then you have despair on one side and hope on the other side. Now that ebbs and flows. Sometimes it might be balanced but a lot of times during this plague, despair was on the uptick. Who would put out the fires if everyone gave into despair? Who would tend to the sick? Who would rebuild the houses? Who would protect the innocent? Only the hopeful? This probably would have been one of hope's biggest battles, right? Like no one in the world could have imagined this magnitude of social and economic and physical devastation of The Plague. One of the best sources we have on the Black Death is another contemporary by the name of Giovanni Boccaccio. Now I've filtered what seems like hundreds of Black Death first-hand accounts.

Boccaccio I chose because he presents The Plague in high definition. Like some of the other people are very systematic about how they write but he brings a lot of color and colorization to the history. Again some of the accounts are dry and they're court records and they just don't do justice to the devastation. Boccaccio gives the most compelling account and is an expert in poetry and prose. He inspired Shakespeare even. And you know, he's going to give you all of these little details that are going to make you feel like you were there. So his book that was entitled The Decameron is considered a literary classic for its depth of storytelling.

But the books' introduction is what's most important to us because it tells a vivid and real life account of The Black Death and he talks about its symptoms, its impact on society, and how people responded to it. So this is going to be the crux of the rest of what we're going to talk about here is Boccaccio's account. So take, for instance, what he says about the symptoms of The Black Death. He says "the symptoms were not the same as in the East where a gush of blood from the nose was the plain sign of inevitable death. On the contrary, its earliest symptom in men and women alike was the appearance of certain swellings in the groin or under the armpit.

Some of which were egg-shaped whilst others were roughly the size of a common apple. Sometimes the swelling's were large, sometimes not so large. And they were referred to by the populous as gavoccioli. From the two areas already mentioned, this deadly gavoccioli would begin to spread and within a short time it would appear random all over the body. Many people began to find dark blotches and bruises on their arms and thighs and other parts of the body. Against these maladies, it seemed that all of the advice of physicians and all the power of medicine were profitless and unavailing. Perhaps the nature of the illness was such that it allowed no remedy.

Or perhaps those people who are treating the illness, being ignorant of its causes, were not prescribing the appropriate cure. In all events, few of those who caught it ever recovered and most causes of death occurred within three days from the appearance of the symptoms. But what made this pestilence even more severe was that whenever those suffering from it mixed with the people who were still unaffected, it would rush upon these with the speed of a fire racing through dry or oily substances that happened to be placed within its reach. Nor was this the full extent of its evil. For not only did it infect healthy persons who conversed or had any dealings with the sick, making them ill or visiting an equally horrible death upon them.

But it also seemed to transfer the sickness to anyone touching the clothes or other objects which had been handled or used by its victims." How would you respond after realizing you have plague symptoms? Maybe at first you'd cope through denial, refusing to accept the cough or the fever. Maybe you try to play off that huge golf ball size swelling on your groin or on your armpit. It's just a bug bite. It's okay. It's nothing. But how long would it take for you to come to terms with your death?

How will we come to terms with it now? I'm going to die. And so are you. I'm reminded of a reading that I did on something called terror management theory, based on the work of a social psychologist named Ernest Becker, who did a great many fascinating studies on how we deal with death and the sheer terror of it all. And I was moved when he said, "man is literally split into two. He has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness and that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty. And yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever."

Heavy stuff. This existential crisis that we are going to die one day. Something we can deny all we want. In a culture that I live in we are kind of death denying. We act like we're going to live forever. And we have to deal with this sad and tragic reality sometimes though. This isn't one of my happier shows. If you were looking for something a little more upbeat, I suggest you go listen to a happy song or something else after you listen to this. I don't want to depress you or anything like that, but I just want to ask some real questions that we don't really ask that much. This is the discussion that needs to be had. Have it with me. Who else? Better to have this topical discussion about death.

What better time and what better event to look at when it was in such abundance? As I researched more into The Black Death I also began to wonder about the mass psychological shock of a pandemic like this. How does a raging disease affect the mindset of large groups of people? The collective human consciousness, if you want to call it that. Now I once saw a video where one man took off running and screaming past a group and then reactively the other people started running and screaming in the same direction. So with The Black Death if one person started acting out in despair or living like there was no tomorrow did others follow that lead? Boccaccio shows us that the disease triggered collective panic.

It triggered collective suspicion and it triggered collective anxiety. It fostered isolation and apathy and a meaningless view of life unparalleled in the history of such a deeply religious Europe. This disease instantly changed the national mood and altered the collective psychology. He says, "almost all without exception, they took a single and very inhuman precaution, namely to avoid a runaway from the sick and their belongings, by which all means, they all thought that their own health would be preserved. Some people were of the opinion that a sober and abstemious mode of living considerably reduced the risk of infection.

They therefore formed themselves into groups and lived in isolation from everyone else. Having withdrawn to comfortable abode where there were no sick people. They locked themselves in and settled down to a peaceable existence. Consuming modest quantities of delicate foods and precious wines, avoiding all excesses. They refrain from speaking to outsiders. Refuse to receive news of the dead or sick and entertain themselves with music and whatever other amusements they were able to devise. Others took the opposite view and maintained that an infallible way of warding off this appealing evil was to drink heavily, enjoy life to the full, go around singing and merrymaking, gratifying all of one's cravings whenever the opportunity offered.

And shrug off the whole thing as one enormous joke. Moreover, they practice what they preach to the best of their ability for they would visit one tavern after another. Drinking all day and night to immoderate excess. For people behaved as though their days were numbered and treated their belongings and their own persons with equal abandon. Hence, most houses have become common property and any passing stranger could make himself at home as naturally as though he were the rightful owner. But for all the riotous manner of living, these people always took good care to avoid any contact with the sick. There were many other people who steered a middle course, neither restricting their diet nor indulging and drinking and other forms of wantoness.

But simply doing no more than satisfy their appetite. Instead of incarcerating themselves, these people moved about freely. Holding in their hands a posy of flowers or fragrant herbs, which they applied at frequent intervals to their nostrils thinking it an excellent idea to fortify the brain with smells from the scent of the dead bodies and sickness and medicines that seem to fill and pollute the whole of that atmosphere. Some people pursuing what was possibly the safer alternative, callously maintained that there was no better remedy against the plague than to run away from it. Numbers of men and women abandoned their city, their homes, their relatives, their states, their belongings, and headed for the countryside."

Deep within human beings there seems to be a primitive emotion or a set of primitive emotions. Ones that most of us contain, control, and filter through a layer of rational thought or religious belief or moral belief or consciousness. But what happens when that morality switch is turned off. In a pandemic, the scale of The Black Plague, it appears more and more of these irrational fears and emotions come to the surface. The unthinkable becomes thinkable. The unspeakable becomes spoken. The un-doable becomes doable. In crisis this fear and irrationality consumes many of us. Frenzy and fear take shape.

Fear of separation and abandonment. Fear of being controlled by a plague out of control. Fear of an invasion by sickness of extinction and no longer being. The fear of shame and the loss of self-worth. All these fears are multiplied, magnified in times of crisis and pandemic and Boccaccio again relates this breakdown during The Black Death. He says, "in the face of so much affliction and misery, all respect for the laws of God and man had virtually broken down and been extinguished from our city. For like everyone else, those ministers and executioners of the laws who are not either dead or ill were left with so few subordinates that they were unable to discharge any of their duties.

Hence everyone was free to behave as he pleased. One citizen avoided another. Hardly any neighbor troubled about others. Relatives never or hardly ever visited each other. Moreover, such a terror was struck into the hearts of men and women by this calamity, that brother abandoned brother and the uncle his nephew and the sister, her brother, and very often the wife, her husband. What is even worse and nearly incredible was that fathers and mothers refuse to see and tend their children as if they had not been theirs. Thus a multitude of sick men and women were left without any care, except from the charity of friends. But these were few. Or greed of servants though not many of these could have been had even for high wages.

Moreover, most of them were coarse minded men and women who did little more than bring the sick what they asked for or watch over them when they were dying. And very often these servants lost their lives and their earnings. The Black Death caused an unimaginable death toll. How many pits and trenches must have been dug to cover these millions of bodies. Some of them have been recovered now, to the shock of archeologists. If the dead could cry out, what would they say?" And in this final quote that I'll share of Boccaccio he paints a detailed picture of what all that death was like. He says, "the plight of the lower and most of the middle classes was even more pitiful to behold.

Most of them remained in their houses either in poverty or in hopes of safety and fell sick by thousands. Since they received no care and attention, almost all of them die. Many ended their lives in the streets, both at night and during the day. And many others who died in their houses were only known to be dead because their neighbors smelled their decaying bodies. Dead bodies filled every corner. Most of them are treated in the same manner by the survivors who were more concerned to get rid of their rotting bodies then moved by charity toward the dead. There were no tears or candles or mourners to honor the dead. In fact, no more respect was awarded dead people than would nowadays be shown toward dead goats.

The scale of the calamity caused them to regard it with indifference. With the aid of porters, if they could get them, they carry the bodies out of their houses and lay them at the door where every morning quantities of dead might be seen. They then were laid on buyers or as they were often lacking on tables. Such was the multitude of corpses brought to the church every day in almost every hour that there was not enough consecrated ground to give them burial. So since the cemeteries were full they were forced to dig huge trenches where they buried the bodies by the hundreds." Here they stowed them away like bales and the hold of a ship and covered them with little earth until the whole trench was filled.

Many of us are preoccupied with defying, dodging, and denying death. Only when a loved one dies or faced with catastrophe is this superficial relationship with our mortality transforming, transformed into something substantial. An intimate closeness with the dying can rock our assumptions about one another and about life. And it tends to make people cling to some sort of immortality. Like the religions that promise an afterlife or having more children or acquiring wealth so that we can pass it down. This is all perceived as permanence. And I think this studying of The Black Death reminds us that society is fragile and that our time on earth is limited.

Although all societies and cultures deal with it differently, death is one thing all of humanity has in common. We're all going to die. And for all of this devastation, the Black Death shows us that through sustained collective and individual action, though, we can hope and we can cope and we can survive. We can maintain levels of social order and collective hope in the worst of times. In the face of our own individual deaths and the deaths of our families. In the face of impending ecological disaster, a nuclear disaster, a technological disaster or financial catastrophe or whatever we're facing, the human being is always going to struggle.

But in that struggle we can find hope that we can overcome that struggle. So this example of The Black Death provides hope that humanity can survive. We can also look back and mourn the collective losses of humanity and all those who died all across the world. Balance is the message of this. Hope and despair, always in the balance. Let's let hope win out, let us survive. Let us balance the despair. Mourn those we lost and continue to move forward. Thank you all for tuning in.

This is Jermaine Fowler with The Humanity Archive. If you want to see my sources for this work, you can head on over to the website www.thehumanityarchive.com and search The Black Death and you'll see the books that I read and some of the articles that I went to so that you can study this topic further. It's morbidly fascinating. Sometimes I have to dig into inhumanity in tragedy because this is all a part of our humanity. So even though some of the things that we talked about were quite disturbing in this show, I think it's necessary to show that other side, that shadow side, those dark events that we've experienced in human history, and that we're still going to continue to go through and that we go through today.

So if you will do me a great big favor, go ahead and hit the like button. Follow me on Instagram. Follow me on Facebook. Subscribe on iTunes. Leave a comment. That's very helpful to me in growing the show, continuing to build it, but I hope you share it, like it, and continue to come back. Next time we'll dive into another topic of human history. This is Jermaine Fowler with The Humanity Archive. I will see you next time.