The Black Death

Giovanni Boccaccio opens his Decameron with the plague at Florence. It had begun, he says, some years before in the East, and its effects showed in the city in the spring of 1348: swellings in the groin or the armpits, then dark spots, and death for almost all within three days. The authority of laws “human and divine” all but dissolved, because those who should have enforced them were dead or sick (Boccaccio, Decameron, Day 1, introduction). A few priests hurried the dead to the nearest church, and when the churchyards were full the bodies were laid in trenches by the hundred. It was believed, he writes, that more than a hundred thousand people died within the walls between March and July (Boccaccio, Decameron, Day 1, introduction (the burials and the number of the dead)).

A friar of Paris, whom his editor identifies as a Carmelite, writing of 1348 and 1349, says that in many towns timid priests withdrew and left the sacraments to bolder members of religious orders, and that the sisters of the Hôtel-Dieu nursed the sick without fear of death and died in great numbers. No one, he says, died without confession and the last sacrament, and Clement VI gave the dying in many cities absolution from guilt and penalty through their confessors (Jean de Venette, Chronicle, 1348 (Géraud, vol. 2, pp. 211–213)). The English chronicler Henry Knighton, a generation later, records the same grant, and adds that the bishop of Lincoln gave every priest power to hear confessions (Knighton, Chronicle vol. 2, p. 61).

The pope’s court was at Avignon. A Life of Clement, quoted by the seventeenth-century annalist Raynaldus, says that he appointed physicians to visit the poor there and bought a field to be consecrated as a burial ground (Raynaldus, Annales ecclesiastici, 1348, §32 (vol. 25, p. 454), quoting a Life of Clement VI). Knighton passes on figures that reached England: 1,312 dead at Avignon in a single day by a count made before the pope; seven friars left of 140 at Montpellier; not one of 150 Franciscans at Marseilles (Knighton, Chronicle vol. 2, pp. 58–59). In England, he writes, priests became so few that many churches had no services, and widowers crowded into holy orders, many of them barely able to read (Knighton, Chronicle vol. 2, p. 63).

The Paris friar reports that people blamed infected air and water, that the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells, and that in Germany and elsewhere many thousands of them were slaughtered and burned. He himself doubts that poison could have done so much (Jean de Venette, Chronicle, 1348 (Géraud, vol. 2, pp. 213–214)). On 4 July 1348 Clement forbade any Christian to force Jews to baptism, or to wound, kill or rob them without the judgment of the lord of the place (Clement VI, bull of 4 July 1348 (Raynaldus, 1348, §33)). On 26 September he wrote again. Christians, led astray by the devil, were blaming the plague on poisoning by the Jews and had killed some of them without regard for age or sex, though the Jews were ready to answer before a judge. He would have any who were guilty punished; but the charge was not credible, he said, because the plague struck Jews too, and peoples among whom no Jews lived. The annalist who prints the letter adds that bishops were to forbid such violence under pain of excommunication (Clement VI, bull of 26 September 1348 (Raynaldus, 1348, §33)).

The killing went on. At Strasbourg, says the city’s chronicler Jacob of Königshofen, the Jews were burned on a wooden platform in their cemetery on 14 February 1349, about two thousand of them. Those who accepted baptism were spared, the debts owed to them were cancelled, and their money, he remarks, was what killed them (Königshofen, Chronicle, on the plague and the burning of the Jews, 1349).

In 1349, the Paris friar continues, bands of men from Germany, Flanders, Hainaut and Lorraine went from town to town stripped to their breeches, scourging themselves with spiked whips until the blood ran (Jean de Venette, Chronicle, 1349 (Géraud, vol. 2, pp. 216–218)). On 20 October Clement ordered the bishops to suppress these “Flagellants”. They held the keys of the church cheap, he wrote, formed societies and wore a habit without leave, and many of them had shed the blood of Jews and of Christians. Penance done privately, without such societies, he did not forbid (Clement VI, Inter sollicitudines, Raynaldus, 1349, §§20–22).

When the plague had passed, the friar wrote, the world was not changed for the better: people were more grasping and quarrelsome than before, and few could be found to teach children their letters (Jean de Venette, Chronicle, 1348 (Géraud, vol. 2, pp. 215–216)).