What can I say? How to get started? What to contact? The wrath of God and great trouble do not come without harbingers. It was unusually cold, and the weather seemed to be in a fever: the cold winter was replaced by torrential downpours, followed immediately by drought and crop failure. Mother Nature didn’t even think about having mercy. Trade routes only partially filled the hole in our treasury: pellagra, smallpox, leprosy – even the strongest kingdoms could not resist the armies of miasma, coming one after another. Particularly famous for their hospitable ports, like our Marseille. 7 years ago, Edward III attacked Picardy, and a war with damned England began. We strengthened the already crowded cities with thick walls, and who would have known then that they would become our crypt. The order of the day was to throw trash out of the window, warning passers-by: "Beware!». Rumbling, it fell onto the small streets, blocking them: until the lord intervened, no one thought of removing it. Slops, human waste and blood from slaughterhouses flowed down ditches into the Seine, from which water was taken. The hanged men continued to frighten passersby with their appearance, even when their souls left them – according to the mayor’s idea, it was precisely this example that was supposed to deter crime. Then the rats came. Black as the bottom of a well, alone, in groups, and finally in flocks, they became bold enough to live comfortably with the poorest Parisians, and the fleas found new owners. In June 1348, the Lord sent us a sign: a bright star lit up in the sky. The Parisian nobility began to leave the city, and the church was fenced off from the believers with heavy gates. Our king, Philip VI, has left; and his wife, Jeanne of Burgundy, opposed and remained with her subjects. The pestilence has begun. First peasants and poor people, then traders and students. The University of Paris was deserted overnight, the city bishop Fulk de Canac and the Dauphine Bonne of Luxembourg died. Desolation came to the cities.
The Church, instead of extending a helping hand to God’s children, began to condemn us for sinfulness and “plague poisoning,” while itself feverishly seeking salvation. Not only human behavior, but according to the church, even fashion angered God. The Holy Fathers tirelessly repeated the prophecies of Christ and the apostles, the revelation of John the Theologian (6:1-8), unconditionally placing the plague among the horsemen of the Apocalypse. But the mediators of the sinful earth and pure heavens did not know how to overcome the attack. Nobody knew for sure. In fear of the Almighty, for only he "can ward off plague miasma", people filled the churches, went to prayer services and religious processions, and venerated Saint Roch (protector against the plague). And how much money came into the church treasury from parishioners and those seeking refuge in monasteries?. Believers voluntarily went broke on alms! But over time, even the servants of the Almighty began to value worldly life. Called to help the sick and needy, the church avoided them: confessions were no longer accepted, services were held behind closed doors.
Nicolas Bataille – Le IV-e cavalier de l’Apocalypse, La mort (la II-e pièce de la Tenture de l’Apocalypse d’Angers, 1373-1377 et 1382)
It was then that the laity thought that the wrath of God could be caused by the sins of his earthly governors. The churches began to remember the main, ordinary and serious sins: sodomy, adultery, fornication, wickedness, gluttony. The ministers did not answer our questions, God turned deaf to our prayers. People doubted their authority and began to seek solace in their own beliefs: flagellants and “dressed in white” appeared. Seeing the inaction of the church, they rejected its mediation in communication with God, considering themselves entitled to preach and confess. The first ascetically whipped themselves with spiked whips, tearing out the flesh until streams of blood ran down their ankles, and merged in a song of pain with the crucified Christ. The second fasted, repented and organized processions for mercy. I had a chance to see them once: a crowd of people in white robes with candles and crucifixes sang and walked behind a woman with 2 children. The Church responded not to such heresy with the Inquisition.
Beautiful Book of Hours of the Duke of Berry – Procession of Flagellants (~ 1409).)
Hartmann Schedel – Flagellants https://quality-bingo-casino.uk (Nuremberg chronicle, 1493)
"Dressed in White". Les penitents blancs et bleus du roy Henri III-e (Paris, 1583-1589)
Other people, whose minds were darkened by the illness around them, simply went crazy: they suddenly rushed to dance until they were completely exhausted, infecting others with their elaborate dance. Disappointed in the inaction of the church and the powerlessness of medicine, the inhabitants of the once prosperous kingdom descended to pagan roots and superstitions, looking for salvation in everything. They burned, drowned and walled up plague effigies. She was represented either as a whitish maiden with a red scarf, or as a blind old woman, or as a black horseman or a giant. They made amulets and amulets with mercury or arsenic. Naively believing that it was possible to recover only by infecting another, the sick crowded among the crowd and exhaled as much as possible. Even the clergy were so afraid of death that they adopted these popular beliefs. In the south, in Montpellier, they lit a candle in the altar, with a wick as long as the wall of the city fortress.
Hartmann Schedel & Michael Wolgemut — Dance of death (Nuremberg chronicle, 1493)
There was nothing more dangerous than the plague than the stricken mind of desperate people, the speculations and prejudices that grew like buboes on it. Soon the people stopped believing in the disaster sent by God, and declared it to be their own kind. Plague poison, be it powder or ointment (regardless of its composition), began to be seen in every wicked person, leper, outcast, foreigner, infidel, or simply “black sheep” – now the people decided their fate. In my memory, not a single poisoner was caught at the scene of the crime, but was indiscriminately accused, tortured to extract a confession, and sent to the stake. But to support their speculations, the common people relied on religion (Moses, who scattered the ashes over Egypt), and the nobility relied on history (the first known plague invasion under Justinian I (541-750).)). The authorities picked up the mood and, out of fear of infection, ordered the demolition of leper colonies: the terrible acts of Philip the Fair were repeated, and pogroms swept across our land from Picardy to Flanders and Poitou. The guests faced a quick trial with only one decision, confiscation of property and a bonfire. The infirmaries, where anyone with (in)obvious signs of illness was forcibly dragged, according to the caretakers, were worse than pigsties and stables – such a terrible condition that some people killed themselves just to avoid ending up there. Whether you are dead or fighting for life, they will dump you in a plague pit, bury you or burn you without looking. Others violated the commandments even more horribly, taking the lives of loved ones: in order to hide from general exile to the infirmary and preserve an ancient house, my neighbors in the yard just now killed and buried their youngest child, branded with the plague. But sometimes this did not help: even the wealthy were taken away to settle in their empty houses. The Jews were considered enemies of Jesus and, like sheaves of hay, were burned in pits. Neither Pope Clement VI (who forbade the killing of Jews without trial) nor the lords (who moved away instead of providing assistance) were an authority for the enraged townspeople and artisans.
Pierart dou Tielt & Gilles li Muisit – Burning of Jews during the Black Death epidemic (Fragment of "IV treatise" Gilles li Muisit. Tournai, Royal Library of Belgium, 1349.)
Looking at the suffering of the hopelessly ill, you can’t help but think that it would be better if they died a natural death. Or at least from their own kind. No one could say exactly how people became infected, and how to fight the disastrous campaign of the IV Horseman. Until a week after the miasma hit, a person could lead a normal life – the plague gained strength for attack, inflating the first bubo near the heart. When it burst and blackened the blood, the pestilence unconditionally, instantly came into its own: the patient was seized by a migraine, he felt feverish, his face turned red. Sometimes I was ready to believe in the diabolical nature of the plague. The sufferer’s eyes and intermittent breathing resembled an angry bull; the poor fellow was either feverishly hysterical and delirious, or huddled in horror in a corner and was silent for hours, spitting up blood. But the most infernal thing was the blackness spreading across the once pink body: the eyelids, tongue, knots on the neck, armpits and groin increased to the size of a plum and took on the color of the night. A stench emanated from the patient, incomparable to anything, even to the stench of a corpse. Finally, after 3-5 days of continuous suffering, life left the body. In our city, Death was indifferent to rich and poor, old and young, men and women. She mowed down everyone indiscriminately, giving a little more time to the most tenacious. And could the prolongation of their torment be called a reprieve??
Along with the guesses of theologians about God’s punishment for sins, and the people about poisoning, those close to the “science of sin” (earthly) saw the root cause in another. Some doctors developed Hippocrates’ ideas about miasmas – chthonic and fetid poisonous fumes. Usually they rose above swamps, cemeteries and human waste, but now also from corpse and plague pits, carried by the wind. Miasma appeared either in the earth itself, or from the tides of Saturn – there was no end to the debate about this. Others came up with the doctrine of contagion, suggesting that healthy people become infected with “seeds of disease” from sick people, so the latter had to be kept until the first manifestations – in a 40-day quarantine, and then in closed hospitals. But this idea was too new, and they preferred to fight the plague with proven, partly radical, means. Everyone who wanted to escape from the plague miasma was asked to: run to the leeward side and hide for a long time away from their sources; purify the air with fires, ringing bells, cannon shots, incense, milk, spiders and the breath of horses; kill the plague smell with pleasant aromas (laurel, rose, rosemary) or the smell of goats; eat broths; don’t sleep after dawn.
Medicine, due to its low status, turned out to be completely unprepared to give its mistress, death, any serious rebuff. The rector of our University of Paris, echoing the church, insisted that healing is a secondary matter, because it is much more important to save the soul, not the body. The graduates did not have the proper knowledge and experience: instead of surgery, they were taught the basics of theology, anatomy was prohibited. Only after much wrangling did Pope Clement VI allow my fellow countryman at alma mater, the outstanding surgeon Guy de Chauliac, to open up people who died from the plague for study. One day, a doctor I knew indignantly showed me an anonymous manual, written, apparently, not without the participation of the church: upon entering the house of a sick person, the first thing the doctor had to do was inquire about his communion. “How many more people will die before they reach God??», – asked the doctor. It was stupid to look for an answer. The successes of doctors were also directly prescribed by God’s will, but failures were prescribed by God himself: if the patient was occasionally cured, “it was destined to be so”, otherwise the doctor himself was to blame. It is not surprising that with such illiteracy they were afraid to enter the sick and often ran away, not wanting to share their fate. But even this cowardice, ironically, did not save them from infection.
The “Art of Healing” had nothing to oppose the rushing IV horseman, she fell to her knees before this humiliating disease. As a result, all that the doctors, who were not afraid to do their duty, did was only briefly delay death. Along with barbers, they bled “bad” blood; on the advice of Chauliac, they cut out and cauterized buboes. Those who considered the plague a poison treated the patient with theriac with only one known composition. Alchemists recommended applying precious stones to the nodes on the body, which was first tried by the fading nobility. Those who were looking for a cure “sympathy of the body with healing objects”, pulled out harmful juices with a magnet. The day before yesterday, the wife of the fair owner, who lived across the house from me, called a doctor to see her ill husband. As soon as he became a bachelor of medicine at the city university, he went to gain experience in other countries and returned to his native France, determined to stop the disease at least in his city. I heard from the doctor about “powerful and hitherto unheard of” remedy – placing frogs on buboes. He did not name the author of such an intriguing idea, but explained the healing effect "balance of vital juices". Lords and mayors, following the example of Clement VI, hired docteurs à bec (beaked doctors) for the residents, obliging to remain in the city while the pestilence raged and treat all those affected. Such risky but generously paid work was often taken on by yesterday’s students, determined to eradicate the problem. They put a mask on their face with red glasses for the eyes and a long beak, at the end of which they put spicy herbs to suppress the plague miasma; and on the body – a shirt, trousers, boots and gloves made of thick wax. Knocking on houses with their canes, from afar such doctors (especially in the late evenings) were at first often mistaken for Death coming for the next victim.
Bartholomew of England – Autopsy of a corpse (fragment of the treatise/encyclopedia “On the properties of things”, ~ 1240 g.)