According to one chronicler: ‘This plague on these accursed galleys was a punishment from God, since these same galleys had helped the Turks and Saracens to take the city of Romanais which belonged to the Christians and broke down the walls and slew the Christians as though they were cattle or worse; and the Genoese wrought far more slaughter and cruelty on the Christians than even the Saracens had done.’ As with other instances of Divine retribution, the punishment seems to have been strikingly promiscuous. For even though it is not necessary to believe, with the Chronicler of Este, that these ill-fated galleys, with the crews dying at their oars, somehow contrived to spread the plague to ‘Constantinople, Messina, Sicily, Sardinia, Genoa, Marseilles and many other places,’ it is likely that infection was carried at least to Genoa, Venice and Messina by galleys from Eastern ports.{12}
The inhabitants reacted violently when they realized the cargo that their visitors were bringing with them. They sought to drive the danger away and, in so doing, ensured that it spread more rapidly. ‘In January of the year 1348,’ wrote a Flemish chronicler,
three galleys put in at Genoa, driven by a fierce wind from the East, horribly infected and laden with a variety of spices and other valuable goods. When the inhabitants of Genoa learnt this, and saw how suddenly and irremediably they infected other people, they were driven forth from that port by burning arrows and divers engines of war; for no man dared touch them; nor was any man able to trade with them, for if he did he would be sure to die forthwith. Thus, they were scattered from port to port…{13}
But by the time that the Genoese authorities reacted, it was too late. The infection was ashore and nothing was to stop it. By the spring of 1348 the Black Death had taken a firm grasp in Sicily and on the mainland.
At this point, with the plague poised to strike into the heart of Europe, it seems appropriate to pause and consider what the epidemic really was and how far it was something entirely new. Today there is little mystery left about the origins and nature of the Black Death; a few points remain to be clarified but all the essential facts are known. But in the Middle Ages the plague was not only all-destroying, it was totally incomprehensible. Medieval man was equipped with no form of defence – social, medical or psychological – against a violent epidemic of this magnitude. His baffled and terrified helplessness in the face of disaster will be above all the theme of this book.
One of the minor mysteries which does still persist over the Black Death is the genesis of its name. The traditional belief is that it was so called because the putrefying flesh of the victims blackened in the final hours before death supervened. The trouble about this otherwise plausible theory is that no such phenomenon occurred. It is true that, in cases of septicaemic plague, small black or purple blotches formed on the bodies of the sick and this symptom must have made a vivid impression on beholders. But if the name of the epidemic had been derived primarily from the appearance of its victims, one would have expected it to have been used at the time. Of this there is no evidence. Indeed, it seems that such a title was not generally heard until the eighteenth century, though similar expressions had often been applied to other epidemics in the past.{14} The first recorded use of the term for the epidemic of 1348 is in a reference to the swarta döden in Sweden in 1555. About fifty years later it emerged in Denmark as the sorte død.{15} Cardinal Gasquet believed that, in England at least, the name began to be used some time after 1665 to distinguish the fourteenth-century epidemic from the ‘Great Plague’ which ravaged Carolean London.{16}
The fact that the title ‘Black Death’ was not used by contemporaries similarly makes it hard to credit those other explanations which attributed the name to a black comet seen before the arrival of the epidemic, to the number of people who were thrown into mourning as a result of the high mortality{17} or to the popular images of the plague as a man on a black horse or as a black giant striding across the countryside.{18}
The most likely explanation seems to be that it originally stemmed from an over-literal translation into the Scandinavian or the English of the Latin pestis atra or atra mors. Even in the fourteenth century the word ‘atra’ could connote ‘dreadful’ or ‘terrible’ as well as ‘black’. But once the mistranslation had been established then all the other reasons for associating ‘Black’ with ‘Death’ must have contributed to give it general currency. In France it was once called the morte bleue. The superior dreadfulness of the accepted phrase is obvious and today no other style would be acceptable.
Contemporary records are remarkably consistent in their descriptions of the physical appearance of the disease. The most commonly noted symptom is, of course, also the most dramatic; the buboes or boils, sometimes also described as knobs, kernels, biles, blaines, blisters, pimples or wheals which are the invariable concomitants of bubonic plague. Boccaccio’s description will do for all the rest:
…in men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or the armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg, some more, some less, which the common folk called gavocciolo. From the two said parts of the body this deadly gavocciolo soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now minute and numerous. And as the gavocciolo had been and still was an infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they shewed themselves….{19}
Medically the only questionable detail in this account is the reference to the bubo as an ‘infallible token of approaching death’. Other contemporary records{20} as well as observation of subsequent epidemics show that it was by no means unheard of for the buboes to discharge and the patient recover. But certainly this happened in a very small minority of cases. To most of its victims the bubo meant inevitable death and it would not be surprising if Boccaccio had never heard of an instance to the contrary.
It was Gui de Chauliac, physician to the Papal Court at Avignon, who saw most clearly that these buboes were by no means an invariable symptom and that a distinct, still more violent variant of the plague existed.{21} ‘The mortality… lasted seven months,’ he wrote. ‘It was of two types. The first lasted two months, with continuous fever and spitting of blood, and from this one died in three days. The second lasted for the rest of the period, also with continuous fever but with apostumes and carbuncles on the external parts, principally on the armpits and groin. From this one died in five days.’