In Spain, Germany, England, Poland, and Russia the malady was as fatal as in Italy. At London they buried 100,000 persons in the cemeteries. It was the same in France. Avignon lost 150,000 citizens in seven months, among whom was the beautiful Laura de Noves, immortalized by Petrarch, who expired from the plague in 1348, aged forty-one years. At Marseilles 56,000 people died in one month; at Montpellier three quarters of the population, including all the physicians, went down in the epidemic. Narbonne had 30,000 deaths and Strasbourg 16,000 in the first year of the outbreak. Paris was not spared; the Chronique de Saint Denis informs us that “in the year of Grace 1348, commenced the aforesaid mortality in the Realms of France, the same lasting about a year and a half, increasing more and more until Paris lost each day 800 inhabitants; so that the number who died there amounted to more than 500,000 people, while in the town of Saint Denis the number reached 16,000.[13]
Among the victims were Jeanne de Bourgogne, wife of Philip VI.; Jeanne II., Queen of Navarre, grandchild of Philip the Beautiful. In Spain, died Alphonse XI. of Castille. “Happily,” says the Chronicle, “during the years following the plague the fecundity of women was prodigious—as though nature desired to repair the ravages wrought by death.” The symptoms and history of this plague have been described by several ocular witnesses, among others Guy de Chauliac, the celebrated surgeon and professor at Montpellier, who has left the following recital in quaint old French:
“The disease was such that one never before saw a like mortality. It appeared in Avignon in the year of our Saviour 1348, in the sixth year of the Pontificate of Clement VI., in whose service I entered, thanks to his Grace.
“Not to displease you, I shall briefly narrate for your edification the advent of the disease.
“It commenced—the aforesaid mortality—in January and lasted for the space of seven months.
“The disease was of two kinds. The first type lasted two months, with a continued fever and spitting of blood. This variety killed in three days, however.
“The second type of the disease, prevailing during the epidemic time, also had a continued fever, with apostumes and carbuncles at the external parts, principally on the axilla and in the groin; all such attacked usually died in five days.
“The malady was so contagious, especially that form in which blood-spitting was noticed, that one not only caught it from sojourning with the sick, but also, it sometimes seemed, from looking at the disease, so that men died without their servants and were buried without priests.
“The father visited not his son, nor the son his father. Charity was dead and hope disappeared.
“I call the epidemic great, inasmuch as it conquered all the earth.