The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

by Kelly, John

• ISBN13: 9780060006921
• ISBN10: 0060006927
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-01-12
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

In October 1347, at about the start of the month, twelve Genoese galleys put in to the port of Messina [Italy]. So begins, in almost fairy-tale fashion, a contemporary account of the worst natural disaster in European history -- what we call the Black Death, and what the generation who lived through it called la moria grandissima: "the great mortality." The medieval plague, however, was more than just a European catastrophe. From the bustling ports along the China Sea to the fishing villages of coastal Greenland, almost no area of Eurasia escaped the wrath of the medieval pestilence. And along with people died dogs, cats, chickens, sheep, cattle, and camels. For a brief moment in the middle of the fourteenth century, the words of Genesis 7:21 seemed about to be realized: "All flesh died that moved upon the earth." The Great Mortality is John Kelly's compelling narrative account of the medieval plague, from its beginnings on the desolate, windswept steppes of Central Asia to its journey through the teeming cities of Europe. "This is the end of the world," wrote a bootblack of the pestilence's arrival in his native Siena. The Great Mortality paints a vivid picture of what the end of the world looked like, circa 1348 and 1349: bodies packed like "lasagna" in municipal plague pits, collection carts winding through the streets early in the morning to pick up the dead, desperate crowds crouched over municipal latrines inhaling noxious fumes in hopes of inoculating themselves against the plague, children abandoning infected parents -- and parents, infected children. The Great Mortality also looks at new theories about the cause of the plague and takes into account why some scientists and historians believe that the Black Death was an outbreak not of bubonic plague, but of another infectious illness -- perhaps anthrax or a disease like Ebola. Interweaving a modern scientific methodical analysis with an evocative portrait of medieval medicine, superstition, and bigotry, The Great Mortality achieves an air of immediacy, authenticity, and intimacy never before seen in literature on the plague. Drawing on the latest research, it unwraps the mystery that shrouds the disease and offers a new and fascinating look into the complex forces that went into the making of the Black Death.

Author Biography

John Kelly, who holds a graduate degree in European history, is the author and coauthor of ten books on science, medicine, and human behavior, including Three on the Edge, which Publishers Weekly called the work of "an expert storyteller." He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction	xi
Oimmeddam	1	(28)
``They Are Monsters, Not Men''	29	(24)
The Day Before the Day of the Dead	53	(26)
Sicilian Autumn	79	(22)
Villani's Last Sentence	101	(26)
The Curse of the Grand Master	127	(36)
The New Galenism	163	(20)
``Days of Death Without Sorrow''	183	(26)
Heads to the West, Feet to the East	209	(22)
God's First Love	231	(28)
``O Ye of Little Faith''	259	(14)
``Only the End of the Beginning''	273	(22)
Afterword The Plague Deniers	295	(10)
Notes	305	(36)
Acknowledgments	341	(2)
Index	343

Excerpts

The Great Mortality
An Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Time

Chapter One

Oimmeddam

Feodosiya sits on the eastern coast of the crimea, a rectangularspit of land where the Eurasian steppe stops to dip itstoe into the Black Sea. Today the city is a rusty wasteland ofpost-Soviet decay. But in the Middle Ages, when Feodosiya wascalled Caffa and a Genoese proconsul sat in a white palace abovethe harbor, the city was one of the fastest-growing ports in themedieval world. In 1266, when the Genoese first arrived insouthern Russia, Caffa was a primitive fishing village tuckedaway far from the eyes of God and man on the dark side of the Crimea -- a collection of windswept lean-tos set between an emptysea and a ring of low-rising hills. Eighty years later, seventy thousandto eighty thousand people coursed through Caffa's narrow streets,and a dozen different tongues echoed through its noisy markets.Thrusting church spires and towers crowded the busy skyline, whileacross the bustling town docks flowed Merdacaxi silks from CentralAsia, sturgeon from the Don, slaves from the Ukraine, and timberand furs from the great Russian forests to the north. Surveying Caffain 1340, a Muslim visitor declared it a handsome town of "beautifulmarkets with a worthy port in which I saw two hundred ships bigand small."

It would be an exaggeration to say that the Genoese willed Caffainto existence, but not a large exaggeration. No city-state bestrode theage of city-states with a more operatic sense of destiny -- none possesseda more fervent desire to cut a bella figura in the world -- thanGenoa. The city's galleys could be found in every port from London tothe Black Sea, its merchants in every trading center from Aleppo(Syria) to Peking. The invincible courage and extraordinary seamanshipof the Genoese mariner was legendary. Long before ChristopherColumbus, there were the Vivaldi brothers, Ugolino and Vadino, whofell off the face of the earth laughing at death as they searched for a searoute to India. Venice, Genoa's great rival, might carp that she was "acity of sea without fish, ... men without faith, and women withoutshame," but Genoese grandeur was impervious to such insults. InCaffa, Genoa built a monument to itself. The port's sunlit piazzas andfine stone houses, the lovely women who walked along its quays withthe brocades of Persia on their backs and the perfumes of Arabia gracingtheir skin, were monuments to Genoese wealth, virtue, piety, andimperial glory.

As an Italian poet of the time noted,
And so many are the Genoese
And so spread ... throughout the world
That wherever one goes and stays
He makes another Genoa there.

Caffa's meteoric rise to international prominence also owed somethingto geography and economics. Between 1250 and 1350 the medievalworld experienced an early burst of globalization, and Caffa,located at the southeastern edge of European Russia, was perfectlysituated to exploit the new global economy. To the north, through abelt of dense forest, lay the most magnificent land route in the medievalworld, the Eurasian steppe, a great green ribbon of rollingprairie, swaying high grass, and big sky that could deliver a travelerfrom the Crimea to China in eight to twelve months. To the west laythe teeming port of Constantinople, wealthiest city in Christendom,and beyond Constantinople, the slave markets of the Levant, wherebig-boned, blond Ukrainians fetched a handsome price at auction.Farther west lay Europe, where the tangy spices of Ceylon and Javaand the sparkling diamonds of Golconda were in great demand. Andbetween these great poles of the medieval world lay Caffa, with its"worthy port" and phalanx of mighty Russian rivers: the Volga andDon immediately to the east, the Dnieper to the west. In the firsteight decades of Genoese rule the former fishing village doubled,tripled, and quadrupled in size. Then the population quadrupled asecond, third, and fourth time; new neighborhoods and churchessprang up; six thousand new houses rose inside the city, and then anadditional eleven thousand in the muddy flats beyond the town walls.Every year more ships arrived, and more fish and slaves and timberflowed across Caffa's wharves. On a fine spring evening in 1340, onecan imagine the Genoese proconsul standing on his balcony, surveyingthe tall-masted ships bobbing on a twilight tide in the harbor, andthinking that Caffa would go on growing forever, that nothing wouldever change, except that the city would grow ever bigger and wealthier.That dream, of course, was as fantastic a fairy tale in the fourteenthcentury as it is today. Explosive growth -- and human hubris -- alwayscome with a price.

Before the arrival of the Genoese, Caffa's vulnerability to ecologicaldisaster extended no farther than the few thousand meters of the BlackSea its fishermen fished and the half moon of sullen, windswept hills behind the city. By 1340 trade routes linked the port to places half aworld away -- places even the Genoese knew little about -- and in someof the places strange and terrible things were happening. In the 1330sthere were reports of tremendous environmental upheaval in China.Canton and Houkouang were said to have been lashed by cycles of torrentialrain and parching drought, and in Honan mile-long swarms oflocusts were reported to have blacked out the sun. Legend also has itthat in this period, the earth under China gave way and whole villagesdisappeared into fissures and cracks in the ground. An earthquake is reportedto have swallowed part of a city, Kingsai, then a mountain, Tsincheou,and in the mountains of Ki-ming-chan, to have torn open a holelarge enough to create a new "lake a hundred leagues long." In Tche, itwas said that 5 million people were killed in the upheavals. On the coastof the South China Sea, the ominous rumble of "subterranean thunder"was heard ...

The Great Mortality
An Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Time. Copyright © by John Kelly. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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