When a third of the world died During the catastrophic Black Plague, how did Christians respond?
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death (c. 1562 )—Museo del Prado / Wikimedia
Mark Galli In October 1347, when a Genoese trading ship fresh from Crimea docked at a harbor in Sicily, dead and dying men lay at the oars. The sailors had black swellings the size of eggs in their armpits and groins, oozing blood and pus, and spreading boils and black blotches on the skin. They endured severe pain and died within five days of their first symptoms. A variant soon appeared with continuous fever and spitting of blood. Its victims coughed, sweated heavily, and died in three days or less—sometimes in 24 hours. Some went to bed well and died before morning; some doctors caught the illness at a patient’s bedside and died before the patient. wreaking havoc Borne by ships traveling the coasts and rivers, by early 1348, the bubonic plague had penetrated Italy, North Africa, and France, and crossed the English Channel. At the same time, it moved across the Alps into Switzerland and reached eastward to Hungary. In any given area, the plague wreaked havoc for four to six months and then faded—except in larger cities, where
apocalypse now Bruegel’s 16th-c. painting The Triumph of Death includes bubonic plague among its killers.
it slowed in winter only to reappear in spring to rage for another six months. In 1349 it hit Paris again and began spreading through England, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, and Iceland, sometimes in chilling fashion. Off the coast of Norway, a ship drifted aimlessly, finally grounding itself in Bergen. On board people discovered a load of wool and a dead crew. By mid-1350 the plague had passed through most of Europe. The mortality rate ranged from 20 percent in some places to 90 percent in others. Overall the estimate of one medieval observer matches that of modern demographers: “A third of the world died.” In the beginning awed witnesses tended to exaggerate their reports. In Avignon chroniclers put the death toll between 62,000 and 120,000, although the city’s population was probably less than 50,000. But it did devastate cities, and grand projects came to a standstill: in Siena, as the Black Death took more than half
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