The Great Mortality

In his non-fiction book The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (2005), American historian John Kelly examines the Great Plague that swept through Europe and Asia during the fourteenth century, killing up to 200 million people, including about one-third of Europe's total population over the span of five years. Kelly argues that to this day, the plague remains "the greatest natural disaster in human history."

Kelly accepts the modern scientific consensus that the plague was the result of the Yersinia pestis bacterium, which is also believed to have caused an earlier plague in Constantinople during the sixth century. Its symptoms included flu-like symptoms combined with black, swollen skin boils on the armpits and genitals that ooze pus and blood. While bites from rats or fleas were the plague's primary infection vector, the disease could also be transmitted via pneumonic vectors through the air.

Following its earlier outbreak in the sixth century, Yersinia pestis reemerged in China in the 1330s, afflicting fleas that lived on black rats. The plague is believed to have accompanied Mongol armies hired to protect the Silk Road trading routes between China and the Middle East, before spreading throughout Europe via rats stowed away on ships traversing the Mediterranean Sea. By 1347, the disease had spread throughout Italy. Owing to the greater number of eyewitness accounts from which to source information, the majority of Kelly's narrative focuses on the plague's impact in Europe.



As the plague decimated Italy's cities and sent Pope Clement IV fleeing in terror, scientists and theologians alike were stumped by the Black Death. Although they were aware of the millions who had already died in Asia, many Europeans believed those deaths were the result of God's retribution against pagans and barbarians. As the disease ripped through Christendom and the European mainland, however, this belief could no longer be supported. Hoping to appease a God that had suddenly unleashed vengeance on His own believers, self-abusive flagellants traveled the countryside "bringing their passion play of blood, pain, and redemption to the multitudes." These passion plays tended to place the blame for the disease on European Jews who then fell victim to anti-Semitic pogroms that killed thousands. Eager to stamp out these violent pogroms, Pope Clement IV emphasized that Jews too were dying of the plague at alarming rates.

At the time, science was no better equipped than religion to explain the scourge of death. For example, scientists at the University of Paris believed that "a major conjunction of three planets in Aquarius" was to blame for the plague. A doctor wrote, "Instantaneous death occurs when the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy person standing near and looking at the sick." Their only avenues of treatment included barbaric and utterly useless practices such as bloodletting and boil lancing.

By the middle of 1348, the plague crossed the English Channel into Great Britain and on to London. A Welsh poet wrote of the coming calamity, "We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance." In his contemporary chronicle of English history, Geoffrey the Baker wrote of the plague, “At length, it came to Gloucester, yea even to Oxford and to London, and finally it spread over all England and so wasted the people that scarce the tenth person of any sort was left alive."



By the early 1350s, the disease had largely receded, but the world was forever changed. Kelly likens the attitude among European plague survivors to that of the Lost Generation of the 1920s after the immense death and destruction of World War I. He describes European and, in particular, English culture after the plague as one of "superficial yet fevered gaiety, the proneness to debauchery, the wild wave of extravagance, the gluttony." Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales perhaps best captured these attitudes, and indeed, the post-plague decades set the stage for a Renaissance of Western literature, Kelly argues.

Beyond its cultural impact, the plague also recast Europe's economic identity. Faced with a severe labor shortage, European industries were forced to find new ways of increasing productivity. In turn, peasants enjoyed higher wages and freedoms, no longer content to toil as feudal serfs beholden entirely to their masters in the English nobility. "For all the terrible suffering the plague inflicted, it may have saved Europe from an indefinite future of subsistence existence."

Publishers Weekly found The Great Mortality "an excellent overview, accessible and engrossing."