Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

Of the plague at Avignon both lay and medical accounts survive. A full description is contained in a letter from an anonymous canon to his friends in Bruges. He remarks on the virulence of the contagion, and describes both pneumonic and bubonic types of the disease. He says that Clement VI ordered bodies to be examined after death, in the hope of discovering the origin of the disease. This fact should be noted by those who assert that the Church interpreted the De Sepulturis bull of Boniface VIII (a.d. 1300) as prohibiting the anatomy of human bodies. The autopsies disclosed no more than inflammation of the lungs in the pneumonic cases. Similar examinations, previously undertaken in Italy, had also yielded no better result. Clement also ordained expiatory processions and penitential litanies. Within the precincts of his palace, to which his medical attendant, Gui de Chauliac, confined him, he lent his own presence to the whole ceremonial that he prescribed. But he did not neglect to keep large fires alight in his apartments, as Pope Nicholas IV (a.d. 1288-92) had done at Rome in a previous visitation. Only those who have been at Avignon at midsummer can appreciate the price that Clement was ready to pay for immunity.

Clement’s physician, Gui de Chauliac, says that the plague began at Avignon in January, and lasted for seven months.[151] In his view the causes of the pandemic were twofold: universal, consisting in a conjunction of the planets: and special, dependent on the feeble constitution of the individual, whereby it came about that labouring men were chiefly attacked. But then as now the scared populace was proof against pontifical pronouncements from the Chair of Medicine. They saw in it the handiwork of Jews spreading poison throughout the world, so they put them to death. They saw in it malevolence of lepers, so they drove them out. They saw in it a plot of feudal overlords for their extinction, so they remained within their houses. And for completer security they set a guard around the towns and villages, who accosted each newcomer and compelled him to swallow any ointments or powders found upon him.

De Chauliac describes two prevalent types of the disease. The one type, the pneumonic, prevailed only for the first two months, and was characterized by spitting of blood, extreme infectiousness, and death in three days. The second type, the bubonic, prevailed throughout the five succeeding months, and was characterized by boils, by buboes chiefly in the armpits and groins, by slight infectiousness, and death in five days. The mortality extended to no less than three-fourths of the total population, so that to get rid of the bodies they were driven to throw them into the Rhone, after Clement had pronounced a blessing on its waters.

To Gui de Chauliac the best of all preservatives was flight, aided, or perhaps we should say embarrassed, by the free use of aloetic purgatives.

He did not fly himself, for he says, with the naïveté of a Pepys, ‘As for me, to avoid infamy, I did not dare absent myself, but still I was in continual fear.’ (Et moy pour euiter infamie, n’osay point m’absâter: mais auec continuelle peur me preseruay tant que ie peux, moyennant les susdicts remedes.) His hesitancy was to prove his undoing, for he was himself infected towards the end of the epidemic—but recovered after six weeks. Among other preservatives he reckons venesection, purification of the air by means of fires, comforting the heart with treacle and apples and things of savoury flavour, consoling the humours with Galen’s Armenian bole, and the prevention of putrefaction by the use of bitter things. Should the disease defy all these precautions, then he commends, as curative measures, bleedings and evacuations, with electuaries and cordial syrups. Buboes should be ripened with poultices of figs and boiled onions, pounded and mixed with leaven and butter: then they should be opened and treated like ulcers. Carbuncles are to be leeched, scarified, and cauterized—an improvement on the disastrous treatment meted out to Felix, bishop of Nantes, on a previous occasion.

Raymond Chalin de Vinario, another practitioner in Avignon during the plague, adds but little to what Gui de Chauliac has to say. He describes a solid cord, red or variously discoloured, which appeared in some cases on the body surface, with a carbuncle at one end and a pestilential tubercle at the other. This can hardly have been anything else than an acute lymphangitis.

It is clear from the descriptions of the various writers that a large proportion of the cases in this pandemic were of pneumonic type: hence its virulence and its infectiousness.

Amid all the panic of the Black Death, persecution of the Jews broke out with even greater ferocity than during the Crusades in the twelfth century. Some victim was needed to appease the maddened populace: so the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells, and even of infecting the air. Circumstantial accounts were circulated throughout Europe of secret operations directed from Toledo. The concoction of poisons from spiders, owls, and other supposed venomous animals was described, and its mode of distribution made known. So well did their accusers deceive themselves that in many places the springs and wells were sealed, so that no one might use them, and the inhabitants of many cities had to rely on rain and river water. If confirmation of poison were ever needed, the rack could be trusted to procure it: or, failing that, men could be found vile enough to deposit poison in places in which circumstances demanded its presence. Those who escaped the fury of the mob fell into the clutches of an inexorable justice. In the case of the Jews the suspicion of poisoning was prompted by the fact that at this time the practice of medicine, at any rate in southern Europe, was chiefly in the hands of Jewish physicians. Hideous massacres of Jews had taken place in southern France and Spain in the previous epidemics of a.d. 1320 and 1333, as we know from the writings of Rabbi Joshua.

The first outbreak of murderous ferocity seems to have occurred at Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva, in September and October, a.d. 1348. Here it was merely the culmination of an accusation of poisoning the wells so long previously as the epidemic of a.d. 1320. In face of the common danger, high and low bound themselves together by a solemn oath to extirpate the Jews by fire and the sword. Chillon summoned Bern, and Bern sent on the summons to Basle, Freyburg, and Strasbourg to join them in their righteous task. The record of confessions extracted from the Jews by the ordeal of torture within the Castle of Chillon has been rescued from oblivion by the vigilance of Hecker.[152] In Basle and Freyburg the Jews were seized, one and all, and without form of trial were burnt to death in a wooden building, specially constructed for the purpose, while at Strasbourg no less than two thousand Jews were immolated on a wooden scaffold, erected in their own burial-ground. Such as escaped were ruthlessly murdered in the streets, saving a few only to whom freedom was granted on submission to baptism. But for these the respite from renewed accusation and death was only temporary. Faithlessness to their own religion, or physical charms sufficient to assuage the blood-lust of their Christian persecutors, constituted the only acceptable claims to a passing mercy. Strasbourg betrayed the true ground of its hatred of the Jews in an order of its senate that all pledges and bonds should be returned to the debtors and the money divided among the working-people. Those who were unwilling to soil their hands with blood-money presented their share of the spoils to monasteries, at the prompting of their confessors. At Spires, Mayence, and Eslingen, voluntary immolation in their own houses alone saved the Jews from more inhuman tortures. Some were murdered in the open streets and their dead bodies thrown into the Rhine in empty casks, so that they might not infect the air. Now and again banishment was substituted for burning, only for the outcasts to perish at the hands of a savage and blood-thirsty countryfolk.

When the houses of the Jews were burnt a ban was set on entry into the ruins of their habitations: the site was accursed, as the site of Jericho of old. But the bricks of the destroyed dwellings and the tombstones of the victims were in due time rendered as an acceptable thank-offering to God in the repair of Christian churches. In Austria the same accusations were brought against the Jews as elsewhere, and numbers were burnt to death in Vienna and throughout the country. Where there were no Jews, as in Leipsic, Magdeburg, and other places, the grave-diggers were accused of propagating the plague for their own sordid ends.