Welcome back to the series of lectures on
western civilization.
I want to talk about the Bubonic plague, or
the Black Death, for a few minutes.
We’ve talked about the Mongols and how the
Mongols had sort of unified Eurasia in the
13th-14th centuries, and allowing for safe
passage for travel, allowing for extensive
trade between Europe and Asia.
They inadvertently did something else, and
that was to carry the bacteria, the Bubonic
plague bacteria, which exists in fleas, and
these fleas catch a ride with the Mongols,
who are of course, nomadic, and they travel,
the fleas travel across Eurasia with the Mongols,
and this results in one of the greatest demographic
disasters in history.
I’ve seen different arguments about the
demographic loss here – a quarter of the
population; a third of the population.
I heard one historian say it approached half
the population of Eurasia.
So I guess that historical debate is still
going on.
Nevertheless, it’s obviously a disaster
of great proportions.
So I guess the context for this would be the
Mongols, this is an inadvertent part of the
Mongol Empire, and Mongol expansion across
Eurasia.
And the greatest significance, I suppose,
of the Black Death – there are a few – the
mass death of millions of people is obviously
significant in and of itself.
The loss of Latin speakers, I’ve heard some
historians say that the loss of Latin speakers,
due to the Black Death, opened the door to
the vernacular languages, which will become
increasingly powerful, and of course, think
about how we organize nation states, by language.
So we’re going to have the demise of Latin
and the rise of the vernacular languages – French;
and German; and Italian; and English; and
so on and so forth.
I’ve heard another historian say that the
Black Death, one significance of it, is that
it weakened the church, weakened the church
because the priests would sometimes refuse
to come to the house of the dying to give
the last rites.
This sacrament, of course, is very important
and if the priest is afraid to come to our
house to deliver the last rites, then perhaps
his faith is no better than ours.
So this makes people skeptical about the church.
I want to read a quote here for you.
This is from 1348, this is from a village
– Sienna – in Italy, quote – And in
many places in Sienna, great pits were dug
and piled deep with a multitude of the dead,
and they died by the hundred both day and
night, and all were thrown into those ditches,
and covered with earth, and as soon as those
ditches were filled, more had to be dug.
I buried my five children with my own hands,
and there were those who were so sparsely
covered with earth, that the dogs drug them
forth and devoured the bodies in the streets
of the city.
There was no one to weep for the dead, for
we all awaited death, and so many died we
believed it was the end of the world.
It’s a very interesting quote.
It gives you a glimpse into a world that’s
almost unimaginable now.
I want to talk about the social consequences
of this type of mass death occurring.
Just imagine your own life, in your own community,
your colleagues, and friends, and family.
If a quarter to a third of those people you
know and associate with, are dead in ten days
to two weeks, this is going to cause great
psychological trauma to societies all across
Eurasia.
And again, I want to emphasize that this catastrophe
extends from China to Europe.
I’m going to focus here on Europe, in particular,
because this is a course on Western Civilization.
You can Google the Black Death or the Bubonic
plague, and you can see the symptoms.
The buboes are tumor¬-like protuberances
in your armpits or your neck, behind your
knees, your groin.
These turn purple and black, and then burst.
Symptoms include coughing up of blood, fever,
and generally you die within a week of the
onset of symptoms.
So this is a very, very bad way to go because
the people around you are fearful of being
near you because of the stench that your body
emits, and people believe that it’s the
stench of the dying that causes them to get
sick.
So people are going to avoid you once they
notice you have symptoms.
So let’s talk about some of the social consequences,
the psychological trauma of the Black Death.
First, I mentioned priests don’t want to
come to your house to deliver the sacrament
of the last rites.
This weakens people’s faith in the church,
and their faith in the priests themselves.
Doctors don’t want to come to your house
either.
Of course, there’s nothing the doctor can
do.
Medieval medicine sort of begins and ends
with leeches, and medieval medicine is nothing
to write home about – I can assure you.
We may talk about the contents of medieval
pharmacies later.
Nevertheless, people’s faith in doctors
and in the church is diminished.
There’s no infrastructure to take care of
mass death.
There are no funeral homes.
There’s no running water.
There’s obviously no electricity.
There are no, there’s no sewers.
There’s no way to handle this type of catastrophe,
so bodies are left lying in the streets.
You’ve got pigs and dogs eating corpses
in the streets.
Houses are abandoned because of a dying or
dead person in the house, someone dying of
the plague, the stench is there, and people
want to get away from it.
So this is very difficult to imagine just
how profound an impact this will have on the
average person’s life.
Dead bodies are thrown into bodies of water
– creeks and rivers.
You can imagine what this does to the people
downstream if they use the water.
The plague does not bring people together
to console one another.
The plague drives people apart.
Again, it’s the fear of the stench that
makes people run away.
In fact, you may get a chance to read a classic.
It’s by Boccaccio; it’s called The Decameron,
meaning the one hundred.
A group of people flee Florence during the
plague.
They gather in the woods there, and they tell
stories around a campfire to amuse themselves
as they await death.
On top of everything else, we have famine
during the plague, and this is because the
agricultural workers had fled or have died.
So for those who have not been impacted by
the plague, they may face starvation, and
I know this is hard to believe.
Here in our society, you can’t throw a rock
without hitting a restaurant, but in Medieval
Europe, there are no restaurants.
If the harvest doesn’t come in successfully,
you starve to death.
So the plague makes matters worse in that
way.
And then the last thing I’m going to say
here about social consequences is that there
is a breakdown in law and order.
It’s not just that the local sheriff is
dead, but there’s a sense that we’re all
going to be dead in two weeks anyway, so let’s
live it up, let’s do what we want.
Things, which otherwise, we would be restrained
from doing through religious faith or through
law or convention and tradition, now it’s
like, who cares we’re all going to be dead
anyway, so let’s do as we please.
I want to talk for a minute about remedies
for the plague.
Again, there’s a belief that it’s the
stench of the rotting bodies that’s causing
us to get sick, so we need to get away from
those bodies, or burn those bodies, or dispose
of them.
There are other causes, or beliefs in other
causes, and one of the obvious is God.
God has destroyed the world once, is He angry
with us for our sin, and is He destroying
the world again?
So remedies – The flagellants – and we’ll
print this word, so you can see it, the spelling
– it’s from the French verb, flagel, to
whip.
Flagellants will gather themselves in a parade,
strip their clothing, and put crowns of thorns
around their head, carry crucifixes, burning
incense, and they will parade themselves,
march from village to village, whipping themselves,
or whipping the person in front of them while
the person behind you whips you on the back.
This is an attempt at public penance.
This is a demonstration to God – Look, we
know we’re sinners; we’re punishing ourselves
for our sin.
You don’t need to punish us further by inflicting
the plague upon us.
I can recommend one of the classic films,
Ingmar Bergman’s, The Seventh Seal; there’s
a scene there that beautifully depicts the
flagellants, if you get a chance to see it.
But this public penance is a proposed remedy,
an appeal to God.
Other remedies – Flight, that’s the simplest
one.
We just mentioned Boccaccio’s Decameron,
where the characters flee Florence to get
away from the city and from the stench of
the dying bodies.
There’s a group of remedies that go under
the title of aromatics, and you can Google
this yourself.
You can Google the plague, and aromatics,
and you’ll see pictures of people walking
around with masks and the masks will have
a large beak perhaps, and the beak will be
stuffed with rose petals or rosemary and thyme
and parsley, and things that smell nice, aromatics.
The idea here is that if it’s the stench
of the plague that’s making us sick, then
perhaps we can fight off that stench with
something that smells good.
We can mask the stench of the dying bodies
with potpourri.
You see this with other variations on this
theme, with incense, to mask the smell of
the plague.
In the pope’s chambers in the Vatican, they
kept fires going, and the smoke was believed
to mask the stench of dying bodies.
Now aromatics is tricky because if you believe
it, then you can take it to its logical conclusion,
if we can fight off the stench of the dying
bodies with potpourri, can’t we also fight
off the stench of dying bodies with something
that smells worse?
So we have reports of people dipping their
clothing into latrines, and then wearing the
clothing.
The idea here is that the stench on us is
so great that it will combat the stench of
the dying bodies.
People bathe in their urine; we have reports
of this.
So these are extreme measures to take, but
if you believe it is the stench that’s causing
the mass death, then it does make some sense.
These remedies, of course, are all futile.
Today the plague is easily contained and combatted
with modern medicine.
But, of course, we didn’t have modern medicine
in the 15th century, in the 14th century.
Now, a couple of words about public and private
hygiene – since we’re talking about all
this nasty stuff – The average European
peasant lived in a thatched hut that had no
foundation, so easy access to snakes and varmints
and rats and roaches and what have you, and
of course, a thatched hut with a spark will
go up in flames.
People’s diet was very monotonous, very
little meat.
People did not drink water, for the most part;
they drank alcoholic beverages – beer; ales;
wine.
They wore the same suit of clothing most of
the time.
It’s not unusual for entire families to
sleep in the same bed.
It’s not unusual to bring livestock into
our hut, as sort of a portable heater, and
as a flea catcher.
Again, we don’t have any notion it’s the
fleas that’s causing the problem, yet a
flea is annoying whether he has the plague
bacteria in his belly or not.
So this is a society without basic infrastructure,
without running water, without sewers and
sidewalks, without the capacity to deal with
a catastrophe of this size.
I want to reiterate a couple of those significances
because we’ll talk about them again – The
diminishment of Latin speakers; the rise of
vernacular speakers.
The early blow against the church creating
skepticism in the minds of some about the
church, and in that regard, I want to say
that many of these people in their skepticism
believe that the church has lost its way.
The phrase, Imitatio Christi, from the Latin
to imitate Christ, the original mission of
the church to be Christ-like, that the church
has lost its way, and we’ll see this again
when we talk about the Protestant Reformation
in the early 16th century.
So I’m going to end there, and we’ll pick
up with the Reformation later.
Thank you very much.
