‘Laura,’ wrote Petrarch in his manuscript of Virgil,
illustrious by her virtues and long celebrated in my songs, first greeted my eyes in the days of my youth, the 6th of April, 1327, at Avignon; and, in the same city, at the same hour of the same 6th of April, but in the year 1348, withdrew from life, whilst I was at Verona, unconscious of my loss…
Her chaste and lovely body was interred on the evening of the same day in the Church of the Minorites: her soul, as I believe, returned to heaven whence it came.
To write these lines in bitter memory of this event and in the place where they will most often meet my eyes has in it something of a cruel sweetness, but I forget that nothing more ought in this life to please me, which, by the grace of God, need not be difficult to one who thinks strenuously and manfully of the idle cares, the empty hopes and the unexpected end of the years that are gone…{113}
Avignon in 1348 had been for nearly half a century the seat of the Popes. As such it had swollen from an always considerable town to one of the great cities of Europe. Its role as papal capital ensured that it would be one of the most visited centres of Christendom; an easy prey for a plague that thrived on every kind of social intercourse. An unnamed canon writing to a friend in Bruges spoke of half the population of Avignon being dead, seven thousand houses shut up and deserted, eleven thousand corpses buried in six weeks in a single graveyard, sixty-two thousand victims in the first three months of the epidemic.{114} Another record put the total of the dead at more than a hundred and twenty thousand{115} while the German historian, Sticker, on still less certain authority, even ventured as far as a hundred and fifty thousand.{116} It is, at least, not hard to believe that half the population died though one of the few verified facts might be taken as indicating a lower figure. The Rolls of the Apostolic Chamber show that only ninety-four out of four hundred and fifty, or 21 per cent, of the members of the Papal Curia died during the Black Death.{117} But this is not much of a pointer to the overall death rate. Nobody would have expected the well-fed and well-housed senior staff of the papal establishment to perish at the rate of their fellow mortals.
On the whole the churchmen of Avignon seem to have behaved creditably during the plague; churchmen in the widest sense that is, from papal councillor to penniless and itinerant monk. ‘Of the Carmelite friars at Avignon,’ wrote Knighton uncharitably,{118} ‘sixty-six died before the citizens knew the cause of the calamity; they thought that these friars had killed each other. Of the English Austin Friars at Avignon not one remained, nor did men care.’ Knighton had all the contempt of a Canon Regular for these turbulent and often embarrassing colleagues. ‘At Marseilles, of one hundred and fifty Franciscans, not one survived to tell the tale; and a good job too!’ was another of his still harsher comments. Yet in fact there is no reason to doubt that the mendicant orders behaved at Avignon with as much courage and devotion as they did elsewhere and that their reputation rose accordingly.{119}
Pope Clement VI himself played a slightly less forthright part. There is no doubt that he was preoccupied by the horrors of the plague and genuinely disturbed and distressed for his people. Though by no means celebrated as an ascetic he was good-hearted and honourable, anxious to do what was best for his flock. He did all he could to ease the path of the afflicted by relaxing the formalities needed to obtain absolution and ordered ‘devout processions, singing the Litanies, to be made on certain days each week’. Unfortunately such processions tended to get out of hand; at some, two thousand people attended, ‘amongst them, many of both sexes were barefooted, some were in sack cloth, some covered with ashes, wailing as they walked, tearing their hair, and lashing themselves with scourges even to the point where blood was drawn’{120} At first the Pope made a habit of being present at these processions, at any rate when they were within the precincts of his palace, but excesses of this kind revolted his urbane and sophisticated mind. He also realized that large concourses, attended by the devout from all over the region, were a sure means of spreading the plague still further, as well as providing a breeding ground for every kind of hysterical mob outburst. The processions were abruptly ended and the Pope from then onwards sought to discourage any kind of public demonstration.
Not unreasonably, Pope Clement VI calculated that nothing would be gained by his death and that, indeed, it was his duty to his people to cherish them as long as possible. He therefore made it his business to stay alive. On the advice of the papal physician, Gui de Chauliac, he retreated to his chamber, saw nobody, and spent all day and night sheltering between two enormous fires. For a time he took refuge in his castle on the Rhône near Valence but by the autumn he was again at his post in Avignon. It does not seem that the Black Death died out in the papal capital much before the end of 1348.
‘Fish, even sea fish, are commonly not eaten’ the horrified clerics of Bruges heard from their compatriots at Avignon, ‘as people say that they have been infected by the bad air. Moreover, people do not eat, nor even touch spices, which have not been kept a year, since they fear that they may have lately arrived in the aforesaid ships. And, indeed, it has many times been observed that those who have eaten these new spices and even some kinds of sea fish have suddenly been taken ill.’
As the Black Death moved across Europe it was inevitable that a host of theories would be generated on the best methods of avoiding, preventing and curing the disease. The growing threat to France induced King Philip VI to appeal to the Medical Faculty at Paris to prepare a considered report on the subject. Their response{121} provided the most prestigious, though neither the best informed nor the most intelligent, of the many studies of the Black Death in action. The plague literature as a whole, drawn from some half-dozen countries, was voluminous, repetitious and of little value to the unfortunate victims of the epidemic. Before considering it, however, it is worth taking a quick look at the growth of medical knowledge before and during the Middle Ages so that the disadvantages and limitations under which the medieval physician laboured can be better understood.
Modern medical science, if a gross over-generalization may be forgiven, began with Hippocrates. It was he who first conceived ill health, not as a series of unrelated and essentially inexplicable catastrophes but as an orderly process calling on each occasion for examination of symptoms, diagnosis of malady and prescription of cure. For any study of the Black Death his importance is paramount since he was the first student of epidemiology and the first to distinguish between epidemic and endemic diseases. In his First and Third Books of Epidemics and the four volumes of notes compiled either by Hippocrates himself or by his son he set out to analyse the factors which led to a disease settling in any given area and becoming endemic. The next stage was to define and explain the causes, climatic, meteorological or latent within the body of man himself, which provoked a subsequent epidemic outburst. It was his particular concern to work out a relationhip between each type of epidemic and the different environmental conditions in which it flourished. This ‘katastasis’, as he called it, was, it seemed to him, best established on astronomical evidence – a red herring which Hippocrates himself might in time have transcended but which was to bedevil medical research for many centuries.