Long Term Cultural and Historical Impacts

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Welcome to Gone Medieval fromrom History Hit, a podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobbsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the Crusades We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. find out who we really were We've gone medieval Imagine the terror gripping your stomach the moment you feared The moment everyone has feared Let's come You've heard stories of the pestilence and how fast it spreads you'd hoped beyond all hope pass your community by Now You can look upon its vicious and fatal ravaging of the people you know. The inky black swellings bulge beneath clothes blood stained lips and linen shirts you pain etched on the faces of each body awaiting burial. and who will bury them touch someone taken by a disease so hungrily seeking its next home who would deny family and friends the final rights that will save their souls Can you balance this life with the next Fear seeks to strangle faith. which will prevail. What if your faith demanded that you stand still in harm's way inssisting this isn't a punishment from God, but a test of faith All you have now questions and no one has the answers Dcacio, living in Florence during the terror and immense losses of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, lamented How many valiant men How many fair ladies Breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night, supppped with their ancestors in the next world Black death is often viewed through a European lens as it travels west Today's guest is suggesting that a much broader view is required to understand what really happened across the medieval world. to measure the global impact and legacy of devastation that cared nothing for the borders people imagined around their kingdoms or their homes Death A Global History is the latest book by Thomas Asbridge, who's a reader in medieval history at Queen Mary's at the University of London It seeks to zoom out from regional reactions to consider a more global impact Welc to Mieal Thom,' great to be with us. Thanks for having me on. You're bringing with you the Black Death, which is probably never a good thing to bring with you to a party, is it? Yeah, I'm promising not to try to infect you down the lone talk about the Black Death as one of those really defining moments in all of history, you know not just medieval history And I think we're often guilty and I know I'm guilty of this of viewing it through a very euroc centric lens. So we're very concerned about the effect that it has on Europe and partarticularly as a British medievalist on England and Britain. Why are we so wrong, do you think, to confine its cause and its effects to just thinking about the impact on Europe Yeah, I think it's an excellent question. One I guess one of the most important things that I set out to try to do in the book was to expand the lens I met plenty of people who were surprised even that there was black death outside of England let alone Beyond Europe And I think that's no a surprise necessarily from Our educational system, that's the way we tend to teach the subject. That's the way people consume it But in real terms, it was a global phenomenon in medieval global terms. So it's not something that we can track or identify in what we now think of as the New worldorld, so the Americas or Australasia but across The rest of the known world really, it was a significant factor And I would argue that it is one of the defining features of our of humanity's history, it is an epocchal moment So in the book, I try to take as broad as possible a view as I can. And the fundamental reason for that is I don't think there's one experience of the bllack death What happened in England is not the same thing that happened in Egypt, for example All has happened in Central Asia And so if we really want to understand this pandemic and its significance and its impact upon the medieval world. And I think we have to look at it in this broadest way And as you try to expand that view, what kind of sources, what kind of voices are you able to draw upon to talk about experiences of the bllack death in different parts of the world Yeah, so in at one level, like many medievalists'm drawn to what we' think of generally as chronicles or narratives, so people who've written about their experiences or recorded history, either from the position of an eyeewitness or Cps some years or even decades later. And those are very important sources and they're the bread and butter of much of our understanding at least from a narrative sense of what's going on in the Middle Ages And the same is true for the Black Death If we didn't have those, then we would be be missing very significant parts of our current understanding The problem with chronicles and narratives is always there are things that they don't cover. They tend to be very localized in their interests and also they're often prone to significant exaggeration or at least rounding up. So medieval sources are notoriously poor when it comes to numbers. If you're talking about a battle, it's always five thousand or ten thousand or twenty thousand. And the same is true when it comes to mortality rates And one of the things that I think it's important to try to understand, though I don't fixate on this in the book. is to try to get a sense of how many people died, at least in a broad sense within the Black Death. And if we only had chronicles and narratives, very poorly served we'd be very inaccurate I suppose one of the issues you would have with dealing with just chronicles is also that they I find they tend to extrapolate what's happening on their doorstep across the world. So you would kind of get them believing that the Black Dath was the same everywhere as it is in their local town or village Yeah, absolutely. and o be honest, quite a lot of secondary historians writing in the last hundred years have also fallen into that trap. They'll look at one particular source, pererhaps the most frequently repeated it is not actually a chronicle. It's an introduction to a literary work. It's introduction to Bercaccio's to Cameron. He was a someone pretty certain was in Florence when the Black Death struck in thirteen forty eight and he went on to describe The horrors of the pandemic. in the introduction to this work But many historians have used that as their template. They'll quote a passage from it, and they'll say, Oh what a terrible disaster this was. and this is what it happened across the whole of Medieval Europe Whereas of course, really, he's only talking about Florence So we're very fortunate that we have pretty significant range of other sources to draw upon And I think one of the peculiarities for me coming to this subject area, the truth is I've spent most of my life living in either the eleventh or the twelfth century with a few of brief fors into the thirteenth So fourteenth century history for me is almost. equivalent of modernity. futuristic. It's futuristic. and it's One of the great pleasures of working on this project. been the extent of the surviving written sources alongside archeological material and scientific studies in the modern era. It's made it very, very rich in terms of its source space. And because we have Things like parish registers, Morial court records sururviving letters. and perhaps most importantly of all surviving caches of wills that people drew up at the time of the Black Death then we're able to go into much more precise detail in our estimates, both of how many people died, but for me, even more importantly what it was like to actually live and die through this process, what the human experience was It's interesting, I think people coming backwards from the sixteenth and seventeenth century would probably feel like there was Almost no source material to work with in the fourteenth century, but it's interesting that you coming forward from the eleventh and twelfth feel like you're tripping over evidence. That's a staggering difference For me as being someone who's worked in the earlyer middle agges particularly because so much of my earer work has of necessity had to focus on what we might now think of as either the top ten percent or even the top one percent. So on people who are of a royal background or of a noble background, people operating at the top echelons of society And one of the brilliant features of this project is being able to, yeah, you can look at Pinces and princesses and kings who were affected by this process you can also go all the way down through different strata of society, all the way down to peasant farmers And that for me was very refreshing because I wanted to tell as full a story as possible. And if we start at the the beginning of the Black Death. What do we know about where it begins and what causes it So there's two ways of answering that question, I guess. One is from the written records So we could start there But very excitingly, at least from my perspective, since twenty twenty two, we've been able to go beyond the written records because of archaeology and science According to the written Reords, the first appearance is at the siege of KafA. So KQafA is an outpost in Crimea, a Genouese trading outpost. It's very close to The frontier of a polity run by the Mongols called the Golden Horde And in around thirteen forty six, thirteen forty seven The Mongol Khan at the time called Janabbeg, decides to lay siege to KQafa and the siege is underway The Genoese within the fortress of Kafa are pretty beleaguered. They reach out for help from the West, even call for a An the crusade to be launched, but really no help is coming. So it looks pretty certain that they're going to fall. this outpost is going to collapse But then something unusual happens News starts to circulate that a disease is circulating and appearing in the Mongol forces and spreading like wildfire and people are starting to die. supposedly spitting up blood, others have strange swellings on their body. But the losses in Janibbeg's forces start to be pretty severe And I think at this stage, the Jenoese perhaps If they're learning of this this news, they're perhaps thinking, oh yeah, we're going to make it We're going to endure this siege But it so happens that Johnny Beg has gruesome ace up his sleeve, at least according to our sources in that he decides to not give up on the investment, but instead to start using stone throwing devices, treboets to start flinging bodies of people who've died from this mysterious disease into the fortress of Kafa. So basically Germ warfare Yeah, so it been it's been argued that this might be regarded as the first attempt at biological warfare. It's based really, our account is really based on the work of one particular writer. Gabriel de Musis. who's an Italian notary Per Chenza used to be thought that he was an eyewitness to these events. We now don't think that. so How much of this is an embroidered tail is more difficult to tell We certainly know that the KafA is a real outpost We certainly know that it was besieged and there's a very, very strong likelihood that the Black Death emerged from the Black Sea region from Crimea. So lots of things add up But exactly whether Janibbeg went to this extent of flinging bodies into the fortress at Kafar is less certain. Perhaps even more doubt needs to be raised about the coder to this story, which is that The disease then started to spread within the stronghold. but a single of Genoese sailors decided that they'd try to make good their escape And according to Gabel de Musis, this chronicler This one ship made it away from Kafa and he suggests, you know, they thought they'd made a clean getaway realizing that they were actually carrying the disease in their mids traditional tale of how the Black Death emerges is that there's this siege And from this inception point, then the disease starts first to spread through the Black Sea And then into the Mediterranean basin and from there beyond, it's spreading throughout the medieval world And I guess a critical element in this is understanding the extent to which at least in medieval terms, the world has now become somewhat globalized So there's a surprising degree of communication between these different parts of the world I was just thinking so even just from our written source there We're getting this idea there are Genoese Italian merchants up in the Crimea engaged in a conflict with Mongols from the eastern steppe So that gives us our first kind of alarm bell about just what an international situation we're in that helps us to to understand perhaps why the Black deeath is able to spread so far and so quickly. Yeah, I mean, essentially, what are the Genoese doing in Kafa? They're not just there to twiddle their thumbs. They're there because they're traders, they're merchants. They want to move commodities from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean and sell them as far afield as they possibly can. One of the key commodities that they're interested in is grain because just as it is today, Ukraine, that region is a major grain producing. area and cities like Genoa. and Florence and other Italian cities and many cities beyond aren't able to produce enough grain to feed themselves, feed the populace of their cities. So they're importing grain from far afield The other major commodity that they're selling tragically is human slaves So there's a major trade ins slaves coming from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. and many of those in particular are heading to the Mamluk emmpire, so to Egypt and the Nar East So frequent transportation of those commodities gives us a sign of how this disease is going to start to spread once it makes its outbreak in either the summer or autumn of thirteen forty sevenven And how has the science moved on our understanding of how and where the plague began. So we still think that the an outbreak is initially taking place in Kafa. but Because of new developments, we're now able to push the timeline a bit backwards. So the siege of Kafa and the events I just described, that's somewhere in the second half of thirteen forty seven as our best guess. But if we go back to thirteen thirty eight to nine, then we can actually go further east, we can go to Central Asia and what we now think of as Kyrgyzstan near a huge lake at the foot of the Chanhan mountains known as IsSIk cool And it just so happened that in the mid fourteenth century there was a community of Nistorian Christians living in this region Probably our best guess is that they were living within equivalent of a caravan calling site, a place where trade caravans would would stop would be provided for and then move on along what we broadly call one of the forms of the Silk Road We've known for a long time, we've known for more than a century that There was a significant outbreak of some mysterious disease in these communities because right at the end of the nineteenth century Archaeologs started uncovering the storyian An historian Christian cemeteries and gravestones that contained inscriptions And some of those were dated so we could date this outbreak, this sudden spurt of burials to thirteen and thirty eight to nine. And some of those inscriptions used a term mortner which roughly translates as plague. So for a long time, there's been this theory that this might be one of the origin points for the Black Death. But it was It was never any kind of precision to it But fantastically, in twenty twenty two, a brilliant article was published with many people involved in the research The critical element into this was that the remains they found when they and they uncovered that cemetery in the nineteenth century those remains were not discarded, they were packed away in a museum in St. Petersburg So they were able These modern researchers were able to go to those remains and test them in the way that we now can for evidence of what disease had caused these people to die or what disease was present within these remains. And they found the evidence of what we now think of as the causative agent. that led to the Black deeath, Yusinia Pestis And not only that, they were able to look at the genome of that form of yucinia pestis and show it's the same one that then went on to infect the rest of Europe So our earliest confirmed point at present s that are in around thirteen, thirty eight to nine, somewhere in Central Asia And our theory is that the disease then spreads along tribal routes to the Black Sea and then from there The story picks up in thirteen forty seven. And I mean, you point out in your book that it's kind of the first impact is focused on lots of coastal communities. They seem to be hit hardest and hit first, is that because This disease is now moving along fairly well established, well trodden trade networks that involve using ships to move stuff around. so when they port somewhere That's where they're going to land the disease Yeah, absolutely. And it's not just it's not just coastal ports. it's also cities and communities that are along rivers One of the slightly bizarre and unsettling things about studying the process by which the disease spreads You can tell when communities are successful. If they're thriving, active and commercially successful, communities they're the ones that are going to get the black there first and fast. because that's very clear when we look at the chronology, even in the British Isles, when it seems to arrive various coastal ports, including Bristol and it it's into places along the Seven River pretty quickly because those are well connected The same is true of Avignon, the River Rome it's in land, but because it's positioned along this major waterway, then it also gets the black death relatively quickly. Whereas when you have isolated communities it can take months for them to be affected.. So we've kind of got a situation where the the commercial connectedness of the medieval world that I think is the medieval world is much more connected than people usually allow And things like the Silk rooad and all of that flow of goods and the The mercantile success that's been going on has kind of created this network that allows the Black Death to thrive. Yes, absolutely And over the course then of kind of thirteen forty eight, it moves into cities. It begins to move inland. It manages to get away from the sea Do we get a sense of what kinds of cities, you know where in the world is hardest hit by the thirteen forty eight Black death I guess I'd make two points on that One is another common misconception about the Black Death that I wanted to try to exploe in the book is to show that it's not purely urban phenomenon So when we look at the records that give us insight to rural communities alongside major cities We actually see relatively similar mortality rates And our best guess as an overall average is I would suggest somewhere in the region of around fifty percent of the population in affected areas. And that holds true whether you were in a city like London or whether you were in a small village somewhere in Suffolk That's the sort of general realm of mortality rates That said, I do think there are differences in terms of Both the experience of the Black Death, its's destructive effects and also the mortality rate. And perhaps the the critical way of just describing that or defining that would be Let's say start with somewhere like London. So a guess about its population when the Black Death hits at the end of thirteen forty eight He' perhaps somewhere in the region of sixty to sixty five thousand And we think that somewhere around thirty to thirty three thousand people died in the next twelve months or so from the black death and from associated diseases with the with the pandemic because of just as we cannot now. tell precisely In any sense, how many people died from COVID? That's an incredibly difficult question to answer globally or even regionally. we can't also rule out the fact that Things like associated famine breakdown of food supply systems, things like that also led to increase in mortality rates during this disaster. But let's say we've got London losing around half of its population, and that puts it in a region of around thirty thousand If we were to move across the Mediterranean though, into the Muslim ruled world, into the Mamluk empire and look at their capital city, Cro, F of all, we need to recognize a huge difference in terms of scale So we're going from sixty thousand in London to around five hundred thousand as an estimated population in Cairo when the Black deeath hits and There's a particularly important difference in attitude towards plague in the Muslim world that I tri to explore within the book. at some length And that is that Tross the Christian Jewish and Muslim world, one thing is shared, and that is the notion that this disaster, this disease has been brought by God. And in the West in the Christian world It's very much seen as a punishment from God, a punishment for sin which is a pretty common phenomenon and a pretty common notion across many aspects of medieval history. But the differentiation in the Muslim world and in the Mamluk empire is that Islamic doctrine, Islamic Orthodoxy argues that yes the disease plague is is from God. It's ordained by God But actually For Muslims, it's not a punishment It's a full of martyrdom So to die from plague is actually a gift from God. It's a guaranteeing you a place in heaven. And in subsequent years, people were right about it equating it with Martyrdom in battle. It's the same equivalent Crucially Islamic doctrine also suggests that people are not supposed to flee from an outbreak of plague and that the disease is not contagious. You don't catch it from another person. If you get it, you're getting it because it's God's will and I argue in the book that this very likely had an impact both on social behavior but also upon mortality rates Even if we're only looking at fifty percent, then the scale in Cairo is pretty overwhelming. We're looking at perhaps at two hundred fifty thousand dead versus thirty thousand dead in London, which is obviously going to be much more difficult to cope with But I think death rates may well have been significantly higher than that both across Egypt Palestine in Syria across the Mamalleu Empire where we were able to trace them And thats that's one of the things I'm trying to get out in the book, that kind of regional difference Yeah, no, it's a really fascinating different interpretation of kind of why it's happening. Do we get a sense from the sources of People thought the disease was, you know beyond the spiritual causes that people could see, did they try to understand what was physically, medically going on, and were they trying to find ways to counter it? And did those vary around the world too So they certainly tried. One of the things that I attempt to do in the book And I won't really know whether it's worked or not until I start to get feedback from readers. which I'm very interested to hear is to try in the book to do something which other historians haven't attempted and that is to convey clearr a sense as I can of the experience of this disease almost all studies of the black death in historical works, start by telling you what the disease was and telling you how as far as we now understand it from a biological and epidemiological level, how it functioned What I'm trying to do in the early sections of the book, so the book is broken up into four parts. So the first two parts I'm not telling readers what the disease was. And there are a number of reasons why I adopt that position, but the most important of those is because medieval people didn't know what it was So this was an unknown disease Crucially, it was a disease that engendered enormous amounts of fear doubt ly around how it was transmitted So one of the most terrifying things we can imagine is not understanding how a disease might spread. I think that was something that we can all Perhaps Remember from the very early days of COVID and the kind of rumors that went aroundound, Could you catch CVID from literally just touching a surface or if something was delivered through your postbox, did you? Should you clean it immediately Well, if you take that and you take a disease actually that's not killing one percent of the population, but killing fifty percent of the population, and then you add in The idea, which is certainly circulating in some parts of medieval Europe propounded by specialists studying in Montpellier in southern France, the idea that the disease could be spread through sight alone. So literally all you have to do was look someone in the eye. and you could catch this fatal disease. That's that's all of that is ramping up the fear. The other thing that's causing doubt is that the disease seems to manifest in different ways. And we know from various accounts, not just narrative accounts, but also from letters and inscriptions Some people thought this was multiple diseases because it could appear Some people started very quickly. to just start spitting up blood and would die perhaps within twenty four hours. Others it was more protracted, they'd get a fever. They would develop swellings either in the groin under their arm or in the neck sububsequently they might start spitting up blood, but then They also might die, though more of those people would survive. That also caused confusion What are we actually dealing with? Are we dealing with a multiplicity of threats here And the final thing that I wanted that I tried to convey is they had no idea when this thing was going to stop So we know, we have the enormous benefit of hindsight to say, well here's the black Dath three thousand forty seven to fifty three We see an end to it for many of the people living through this And we can glean this in particular from looking at lter evidence. pretty pretty evident that they this was perhaps the end of the world and that they were probably going to die themselves So I try to convey all of that sense of being in the moment in the book. but to answer your other question, so were people trying to combat it? Absolutely So there's a range of broad range of evidence that we have showing particularly eith what we might think of now as theoretical physicians. So people working at universities in a region like France partarticularly there were authorities in the University of Paris who draw up The equivalent of what we might think of now as the World Health Organization's statement on what this disease is in thirteen forty eight on the instructions of the French King It's a pretty confused Text it's a very influential text, nonetheless But it's written by people almost none of whom had any practical experience of treating patients with the Back death. So that text doesn't really give us any insight into what practical measures were undertaken But if we look elsewhere One of the people I write about at some length in the book is and one of I think of the heroes of the time of the Black Death is an elderly Italian physician called Gentile Da Faligno. was working in particular in the Umbrian city of Perugia Certainly in his late sixties may have been as old as seventy And he was one of the frontline physicians treating people with a black death, but also taking time to write a number of treatis is on the disease, offering advice on how it should be treated. prettyt much everything he suggests is not really effective, unfortunately. The one thing that he was a particular proponent of was this almost a miracle cure of the Middle agges, it's called Therriac It's a trreacle like substance compound, which has many, many ingredients. certainly up to sixty and perhaps even more than that different ingredients put into it to supposedly give it this incredible ability to cure. Having looked at recipes of these, though, historians have shown clusively that pretty much the only thing was affected with to any degree was opium. So it contained opium and on those grounds, if you gave it to someone with plague then It might ease their breathing somewhat if they were struggling in that way. It would certainly help them with pain, but it wouldn't in any way enable them to cured or survivive the Black death to a greater extent So Gentile' one, who's in the front line. The other one I'd really want want to mention Another remarkable individual, but this person living under Muslim rule is a man called Ibn Katama who lived in the Southern Iberian cour of Al Maria in the last vestige of Muslim presence in Iberia, so in the Kingdom of Granada And I in Katomo wrote what I think is the most important text. from a medical perspective on the Black Death very, very carefully and in a very sophisticated level describing symptoms. He's someone who accurately describes three different manifestations of the disease And it's it's various symptoms He also attempts various forms of treatment including bloodleting and doesn't have a great deal of success in that regard But he's a key source for us in terms of showing that eople living in the fourteenth century were trying to grapple with this disease. As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Bwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history Kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to but twwix the sheets the history of sex scandal in society twice a week every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts, brought to you by the award winning network, History Hit So I guess even if they weren't clear what it was and the ways that they were trying to treat it and deal with it weren't successful those writers have left behind their process for you to look at. so you can see what they were trying to do, the ways that they were trying to work through this problem Yeah, and they were they were building on an excellent body of material. so much of medical knowledge and understanding was based on authority, not necessarily on observation as is the case for so much of intellectual activity in the Middle Ages One of the things I often talk to my students about is the idea that we're so imured to the concept of science, the idea of observation and an experiment that it seems like it's second nature to us Whereas in the middle Ages if you wanted to know why something happened Certainly in the tenth, eleventh, twelfth century and perhaps into parts of the thirteenth. For most people it wouldn't occur to you to think about looking at the world outside you. You'd go to a text to find the answer, whether that was a scriptural text, a patristic text or texts from the ancient world And that's still very much the case. with medieval medicine Very much of it is grounded in the idea of the four humors muchuch of it is grounded in text, either written in a Roman world or added to by major indndividuals like Evven Sinner in the Muslim world and then recirculating back into the West So that's the body of ideas and evidence and practice that they're basing their activity on. We do get a sense that there are some steps being taken forward. We know that somewhat surprisingly Pope in Avenue actually argued and ordered for autopsies to be carried out on some bodies of the dead and we know that from another writer in Southern Italy that he also carried out an autopsy and it's quite possible, if not probable that Gentilida Faligno did so as well So they're looking at victims, they're trying to understand how to cope with the disease but they're not really able to do much in terms of treatment. And we shouldn't really be that surprised by that because the honest truth is this disease it was and is pretty horrific. and we only came up with an efficacious treatment for in the nineteen fifties So this is not a simple matter to cope with this disease By the time that it begins to subside or at least the first wave of it begins to subside around thirteen fifty three How far and wide in the medieval world had the black Death? So we can trace it in the far west to Ireland We can see its progress across Scandinavia through into Russia has a major impact in Moscow where it kills the ruling prince of what will be one of the foundational blocks of what will become more understandable as Russia To the south, we can certainly see it through all across Europe. Mainland Europe and across the Mediterranean into the easastern Mediterranean and North Africa We're less able to properly chart its progress in most of Asia. and there's a big question mark over the degree to which it has an effect in China So there's very fragmentary evidence. and it's little studied and I'm not convinced that we're really going to get a a definitive answer I argue in the book that it's probable that it had an effect perhaps caused significant mortality in China, but we can't answer that. precisely, and the same is true for Sub Saharan Africa So here we have no textual evidence. We're working really only off archaeological excavations that have taken place in the last ten years. and they've shown the sudden disappearance or diminishment of certain communities in Sub Saharan Africa that seem today from the second half of the fourteenth century. And so it's been suggested, I think, quite reasonably that that might have a connection either to the Back death or as you describe it, the first wave or to subsequent wavays of this same disease. And do we get a sense of some kingdoms some realms being harder hit by the plague than others does pree existing kind of instability, political or social instability causeed the plague to be worse in some areas Yeah, I think the prime example of that is actually the kingdom of Aragon But I would so I would put a caveat into all of this There's a potential optical illusion place with a black dath because As is the case for all historians and particularly for medieval historians, we're at the mercy of our sources So we can only write about, we can only answer questions when we have some evidence to draw upon And the unfortunate fact is, in spite of what I said about there being a plethora of material for the fourteenth century, which there is, there are still big Blank on the map where we know very little, particularly parts of Eastern Europe But also parts of Iberia, parts of France, parts of England That leaves us with a question. So does that tell us that these are places that aren't affected by the Black Death at all Or actually does it tell us the opposite? Does this tell us that these are places where record keeping collapsed because this is an area that was The worst affected. We just don't know anything about it because nothing survives from it as a black hole So everything I say about the Kingdom of Aagon now is going to be under the banner of caution to say there could well have been much worse affected areas, but it just so happens we have range of material for the Kingdom of Aagon in Northeastern Iiberia, that shows us continontinuation, so survival of humanity and the extant regime U King Pedro IV but also pretty significant signs of administration governance creaking, if not collapsing in certain certain areas. And I think a lot of that is down to No just predations of the disease, but that the fact that it arrives just as Araagon is in the midst of a civil war. So rural authorityities diminished And we start to see much more significant evidence of lawlessness of particular areas falling into decline in terms of ability to seek intervention by rural authorities Perhaps one of the examples I give in the book is a community called Pradis in the mountains to the west of Barcelona. and we learn from Royal records in the thirteen fifties that basically this town has become a lawless No man's land where most people are trying to leave the town because They're being ye murder is rife, theft is rife And this has been the case not just for a year, not just for two years, but for the best part of five years So that gives a sense that Aagon has gone through pretty tumultuous experience of the Black death. and it's one of the reasons I argue was worst affected by the pandemic Are there equally places that seem to fare And is there an extent to which in danger of going back to being anngloc centric? We often think about medieval England as being a good example of a kingdom with powerful institutions of government that are less reliant on personality and that the machinery of government is capable of keeping working Do we see evidence of some places faring better perhaps because they have that structure? But I guess even in those situations, you're still losing an awful lot of people who know how to work those levers Yeah, I certainly think that England shows remarkable levels of continontuity resilience, endurance We can look at that at a more of a macro level and recognize, I think that a lot of this continuity is not down to ral direction. So Edward III largely takes If I was being polite, I would say takes a back seat. if I was being more direct, I would say he was a little bit neglectful and basically left to municipal authorities, local authorities and the local ciastical powers to navigate their way through this crisis. Pretty shockingly I mean, Edward III and his government. their big involvement in the Black Death seems to be the kind of ordinance of labouourrs and things like that to try and repress wage growth rather than actually tackling the problem of the Black deeath. Yeah, I was I have to be honest, I was a bit appalled by the language that Edward uses towards the end of the pandemic, at least in the south of England the issues communicate a letter that he once read by all churchmen. And it basically says to people How can you be so ungrateful as to not want to do your jobs and demand more pay appalling what you're doing. I'm disgusted and there's no No attempt to say to people, well done for making it through this utterly appalling disaster. I now want you to just do exactly what Id tell you. And He and most of his family have survived because they've basically fled hold themselves up And at the worst point of the disaster, certainly in London in April of thirteen forty nine Edward is busy setting up the order of the Garter So he is then holding Civalric pageants So I think there is a way of arguing that he's not focused as much as he might be on managing this pandemic But if we were to look at London, if we were to look at other communities We have very good records from what we call the hundredundred of Farnham, so the area around Farnham in Hampshire. We also have excellent records from a small village in Suffolk small community in Suffolk called Walsh on the Willows All of those show. Pre remarkable levels of continuity of administration as you describe Crucially, that does not mean that they're not suffering appalling levels of mortality. So Wilsham just as I mentioned before has a mortality rate of around fifty percent, or fifty percent of the population dying in this instance, probably in less than six months The same is true for the hundredundred of Farnhum but they're managing to find a way to continue onwards. experience of terrible levels of done. but also continuity is shared by a number of different localities across the medieval world The other one I would point to, which I was really struck by was the Republic of Venice So the Venetian authorities In comparison, something like Edward III's administration is much more attentive to taking action being very, very determined to mitigate the worst effects of the pandemic, though the city in the Republic are still very, very severely affected You can see from their surviving records that they really take this pandemic seriously, they go into action very quickly As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Bwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to but twwix the sheets the history of sex scandal in society twice a week every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts, brought to you by the award winning network, History Hit And alongside those kind of political and human effects of the Black Death Is it fair to see it? I mean, I guess the question is, if you see it as a visitation from God, a punishment from God canan either drive view away from the church and away from religion or it can cause you to double down on it. Do we get a sense of which direction people are going in? Yeah, we do very powerfully. And I have to be honest, I came to the project wondering Am I going to find evidence either in the Christian, Jewish or Muslim spheres of people turning away from their faiths from a modern perspective You'd think if you in your heart believe this is the work of God, you might for a second think, well, should I still be believing in this God? And you're in a situation as well, I guess where the church, sorry, the church and your religious leaders aren't able to solve this problem. You know, the church has told you if you live free from sin and you pray and you attend church all the time, everything will be fine This is something the church isn't finding it can can pray its way out of Yeah, so that's the difference, I think. What we see, particularly within the Latin or Catholic Christian world of the West is not a turning away from religion in essence in itself Qioning instead of the apparatus of the church of the apparatus of religion. And that certainly is present we start to see I think from the early part of the thirteen fifties onwards the germinating of questioning about the role of the church. which has, of course been present For decades and centuries we could trace significant questions about the performance of the church, certainly all the way back to the eleventh century if not beyond and the reform movement But what I argue in the book is this is this is a catalyst to Black Death a catalyst that accelerates that process, deepens that level of questioning. But interestingly, we don't see that same level of doubt and questioning within the Muslim world. And there's no similar phenomenon to the Reformation ultimately takes place in the Muslim world and certainly not in the Mammluk emmpire as a result of either the first wave of the Black Death or its subsequent outbreaks. And in many ways is because it doesn't have a central authority in the form of the Pope. It doesn't have that same singular level of attempted rule and direction. And And I think that's an interesting difference in the way in which these two worlds interact with a phenomenon of way. Do we see the Black Death driving antiemitism? Is that on the rise in the aftermath of it? Yeah, tragically, not even just in the aftermath. So one of the most disturbing elements of working on this project and thinking about the Black death is facing up to the fact Humanity has one of its darkest inclinations, I think. which is at times of crisis to look to blame, to persecute minorities. and that's very much the case in the course of the Black Death We see this very prominently in southern France in parts of Iberia and then into the Alps and into Germany and You might notice immediately, I'm not saying anything about France, I'm not saying anything about England and we might think, o, that means Those were nice tolerant areas. Of course that's not the case The only reason we're not seeing persecution of Jews in those two kingdoms is because they've already been expelled. either at the end of the thirteenth century or the start of the fourteh but from At veryer early stages of thirteen forty eight, already by Easter thirteen forty eight, we start to see attacks on Jews, the first one taking place in Toulon, the port near Marseille in southern what we now think of as southern France initially those don't seem to have necessarily a direct connection to the Black Death in terms of the Jewish population being blamed, they're more an outpouring of anger But over time very disturbingly and particularly initially in the alpine regions we start to see the theory propounded that the Jews are somehow responsible for the mass mortality that's taking place, that they're involved in what comes to be known as a poisoning conspiracy that they're supposedly collectively working to poison water sources and it's that poisoned water that then is causing thousandousands of people to die And tragically We go from what has already been horrific. So instances of mob violence. Wh for example, we can see in Barcelona and a nearby community known as Tataga, which are appalling But they're singular incidents of Mb activity. We move from that to what we then start to see in later thirteen forty eight into thirteen forty nine in Germany. a much more institutionalized desire to identify the Jews as being guilty and then to eradicate them. And this is absolutely not mob violence. This is much more calculated and in many ways more disturbing. And I guess this idea of punishing also reaches a pinnacle when people you get a group of people, the flages who are interested in punishing themselves who believe that they can kind of scourge themselves to rid themselves of sin Yes, this is another of the unusual but not unique manifestations of the Black death So this We talked about the fact that particularly in the West, people are seeing The Black Death is the work of God They're being told that this disease is raining down upon them because of A sin But they're also deciding, well, the church doesn't seem to have an answer to how to stop this. So popular religious movement emerges. It's not unique It's not. Absolutely groundbreaking. We've seen similar is types of movements appear back in the thirteenth century and we've seen many penitential movements have enormous ion and they bring in thousands of participants. previous decades and centuries, and I would include the Crusading movement. in that equation But in this instance We start to see probably emerging from the easastern parts of Germany and then spreading Westwards the idea that Participants should leave their homes As far as we know, they then would spend perhaps thirty three days or so on the road visiting different communities along the way in groups and that they would carry out penitential rituals. at their various stopping points and the penitential rituals would involve stripping themselves to the wasate and then using wh or multi thonged whips to flagellate themselves until blood was pouring from their bodies And through these elaborate rituals, the argument was that they were attempting to invite God to bring this disease to an end And these become remarkably popular. We see Hundreds of bands with thousands of participants roaming across the medieval world. carrying out this kind of ritualistic behavior And sadly, of course, just as we mentioned, the physicianans not being able to necessarily halt the disease in its tracks These rituals do nothing to stop the disease. and ultimately that's I think the most important reason why the Flagellent movement dies out Again, it offers answer that doesn't kind of come to fruition I wonder if we could just end by thinking about some of the the longer term impacts, we've seen that this is hellish for people to have lived through and that there are voices that tell us about what was happening during the disease, But in terms of the aftermath, I mean you cite the Black death as part of the cause of the downfall of the Mamluk Empire., do we see it having that kind of seismic political effect. I think we do, but I think there are two critical considerations that we need to bear in mind when we're trying to consider the longer term macro historical impacts The first and perhaps the most important thing I could say about the Black deeath in any one moment is to say it's not one and done. It is not a singular event. So I talked about its dates ross the medval world in this outbreak being thirteen forty seven to fifty three. it had been a singular outbreak in that period and it never reappeared. I still think it would have had a profound effect. you cannot take away fifty percent of the population in affected areas without changing the course of history Perhaps it would not have been as significant as it ultimately became, not least because Medieval communities showed themselves to be incredibly able, resilient in terms of recovering from that first outbreak But the tragic reality is that it wasn't singular By the time we get to thirteen sixty one to two, somewhere in the region of the early thirteen sixties, the disease reappears And in most places, it kills another twenty percent of the population And then it starts coming back every ten to fifteen years for centuries So in most parts of the known world We need to think of this as the age of plague in a period where the disease becomes a reality of life. So its ability to effect change is critically dependent on that reoccurrence And crucially when we're thinking about the Mamaluk Empire We also need to recognize that Be of the Islamic doctrinal notions that I mentioned earlier on, the rejection of contagion, the banning of flight, those stay in place through the rest of the fourteenth centy into the fifteenth And I think that's one of the significant reasons why the Mamlu Empire suffers so terribly during recurrent outbreaks in the fifteenth century The worst of which seems to have been fourteen twenty nine to thirty in Cairo, which becomes known as the Great Extinction, where another fifty percent of the population is killed That's one consideration. The fact that this becomes a cyclical fact of life The other though, I think is a bit more complicating because I wouldn't be a good historian if I didn't question the idea of a monoccaausal explanation for something And the reality is that Plague is not not operating on its own at a macro level. and perhaps even more importantly somethingomething else is going on in the background that probably played a significant role in the very first emergence of plague And that is naturally occurring climate change. since the mid to latter part of the thirteenth century, The medieval world has started to experience what we now call the Little Ice Age So a gradual Cooling of the world Probably caused by changes in solar activity, though perhaps also influenced by volcanic activity in the mid part of the thirteenth century over the course of Th to four centuries, this is going to lead to an average cooling of around zer point four to er point eight of a degreree centrigade It's also going to lead to a significant increase in the unpredictability of weather patterns and much more frequent occurrence of freakish weather events. which all of which I know sounds very familiar, just that we're going in the opposite direction in terms of eating. But that fact of climate change alongside plague and connected to that, what I call the sort of the third point of the triangle, an increasing pulse of military conflict, of military activity, warfare becoming increasingly endemic All three of those factors, I think, contribute to destabilizing the world. They lead to enormous change across the medieval Christian European world. Ultimately, I do think that they play a very significant factor a role in the ultimate collapse of the Mammok Empire in fifteen seventeen as well And so if we if we then view the plague as rather than a direct cause of anything, a catalyst that is playing into things, perhaps accelerating things. Can we consider it having an impact being an accelerant towards the Reformation. Does the disaffection with the church that results from the Back death move the Reformation closer? I do think it plays a role. I don't think we can draw a direct line between the Black Death and Luther's theses in the sixteenth century because I think that would be too reductionist to suggest you know, one without the other is impossible. In all likelihood, we're going to we would eventually have seen this move because of the doubts that have been raised around the church for centuries. I think this is perhaps the most important area where the Black Death is acting as a catalyst because I think it is causing partarticularly in the Christian world, a sense that death is more immediate as a threat. It's more the idea that mortality has always been present within the medieval world is something we need to accept. there. familiarity with the possibility of death and early death and sudden death in a different league from what we experience now in the twenty first century evenven in that context, the advent of the age of pllague, I think, makes mortality a more immediate presence. It makes a necessity really, within people's lives to be ready for the fact that another wave of play could reemerge. death could come knocking on your door very, very suddenly And I think this raises doubts makes them deeper. these doubts about the way in which the established church has been behaving, the ways in which The system of indulgences, function, the concept of how people might escape the trap of sin, all of these things become more immediate concerns So I think it accelerates that sense of questioning but it's part of a much, much more complex and detailed pattern of events that ultimately leads to what we see in the sixteenth century. Yeah. And can we consider it having a similar function or role in the Renaissance?, Do the desire to look in different places for answers Is that a driver towards the Renaissance? I think to some extent One of the things that I explore in the final chapter of the book, which I have to admit has a rather unchheery title of the culture of deeath But I want to encourage you if you are brave enough to read the book, please don't don't ignore the book. the chapter on the culture of death because I think to me, it's one of the most important explorations of how cultural activity and especially artistic and literary activity is affected by The advent of the Black Death and the age of plague. One of the strangest phenomenon, I think is that we see we do, of course see Germination of what we now think it was the Rnaaissance in the early stages of the fifteenth century and on through that period of years But we also see very direct engagement with the notion of death is what it represents and how humans should interact with it. So we see For example the development of what we now call the dance of Death or the dance of Macabre. described both in literary form but also in artistic form This often shows people engaged in a Almost a joyful dance, sometimes a fearful dance, but surrounded by skeletal figures usually.