Finding Arguments

The Path of the Black Death The course of the 1347–1353 epidemic has been well authenticated, although its point of origin remains uncertain. Various areas in central or western Asia have been proposed, without any conclusive evidence. In any case, the dis-ease spread across the Asian steppes in the 1330s and was then carried by ship from the Crimea to Sicily in 1347. Alexandria and Constantinople also faced the disease that autumn, and before the year’s end plague had gained footholds in Italian ports (notably Pisa, Venice, and Genoa) as well as southern France (Marseilles) and the coast of Dalmatia. After the end of 1347, plague spread across Europe by both land and sea; thus it reached Florence (by land) and the Aragon coast (by sea) in early 1348, much of the rest of Italy by that spring, and southern France in the spring and summer. Northern Spain was also infected, in part from Bordeaux by way of the sea. By late in the summer of 1348, plague had come by sea to England’s south coast, Ireland’s east coast, and northern France, while it gradually spread overland from Italy into southern Germany in the same year. In the course of 1349, plague’s spread continued from the south and west into cen-tral Germany and the Danube valley; into northern England and the rest of Ireland; and by sea to western Scandinavia and some points on the Baltic coast. By 1350 Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, and northern Germany had plague; in 1351, eastern Baltic lands; and in 1352 and 1353 plague reached first western Russia and Ukraine, and then Muscovy. The epidemic had therefore completed a clock-wise circuit through Europe, from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, then from southern and western Europe into northern and eastern parts. The regions first affected (the Crimea) and last affected (Muscovy) were not that far apart....Europe before the Black Death This great epidemic made its way across a Europe whose social and eco-nomic stability, and the very health of its inhabitants, had been weakening in the earlier years of the fourteenth century. When we consider plague as an agent of social change, that weakness must be kept in mind. Not all the disasters of the fourteenth century can be ascribed to the epidemic, and the preplague condition of the society helps explain the epidemic’s course.

Europe’s population perhaps doubled between 1000 and 1300, driven in part by the agricultural technology discussed in Chapter Two. But by the end of that time, and perhaps even before 1300, the society’s ability to produce food may have reached an upper limit for the available technology. Growing cities, for example, had become increasingly dependent on food supplies imported from greater and greater distances; their vulnerability to famine increased accord-ingly, for too many fragile links existed in the medieval transportation chains that brought food to cities. New lands pressed into cultivation in the thirteenth century were often marginal ones, whose productivity— never good—could fall quickly. Soil erosion became more and more serious...The preplague world in Europe was one in which food was scarce and hence expensive, land was in short supply and hence also expensive, and labor, being plentiful, was cheap. But the evidence (from Pistoia, for example) suggests that the overpopulated world of 1300 was already losing people before the great epidemic, so that while the plague may have exaggerated changes, it did not initiate them.

1

Medieval Opinions

What did medieval people make of this epidemic? In their view, what caused it? For most of those who thought about that question, divine wrath pro-vided the most satisfactory general answer. Other causes were often cited, but for most writers such other reasons were “secondary,” explaining how plague came in a particular time or place. Only God’s wrath could explain such a com- prehensive disaster. Furthermore, God’s anger did not in this case fall on partic-ular sinners, as was the case with leprosy. The scale of the plague suggested rather that the whole civilization, or the whole human race, was being punished.The general social and economic hardships of the previous hundred years gave such arguments credence: man had sinned, the judgment of God was at hand. Millenarian expectations were close to the surface already; they had emerged in Italy around 1260, and the great epidemic would call them forth again.

Within the general framework of a heaven-sent scourge, medieval thinkers offered a number of more immediate causes, and on the basis of those causes proposed (or put into effect) some remedies. At the head of the list of such imme-diate causes was “bad air,” the official doctrine of the medical faculties of some universities, where it was integrated with Galenic theory. Hot, moist air, putri-fied (ultimately by God’s action, to be sure), entered the lungs and caused a blood disorder. Plague resulted. But if widespread agreement existed on the role of bad air, great disagreement ensued about the source of that air. Some found its origins in the heavens; thus the Sorbonne cited an unfortunate conjunction of the planets that engendered bad air. Eclipses, always regarded as grave astronomical events, were another possibility. Comets—sublunary phenomena in the dominant Ptolemaic astronomy— were likely disturbers of sublunary air. For some the moon influenced the stages of the plague, as it seemed to affect other periodic human physical events such as menstruation. Others maintained that “plutonic,” not astronomical, forces produced bad air: corruption poured from openings in the earth such as volcanoes. Sicily, with both Mount Etna and early cases of plague, was especially suspect. Or perhaps the bad air merely accompanied a variety of natural cataclysms; the Sorbonne instanced earth-quakes as “provoking an unaccountable abundance of frogs and reptiles.”10 Bad air as well as frogs might result from such disturbances.

But for many medieval people such causal explanations were too “natural”; they preferred to see supernatural beings: angels or demons, the small blue flame in the sky seen in Düsseldorf in 1348, the witchlike apparition called “la Mère Peste” or “l’Ulcéreuse.”11 With explanations such as these we enter a murky area between environmental and contagionist explanations of disease. Does God send the small blue flame to pass plague from one individual to another (contagion), or to infect the entire atmosphere (environmental)? When individuals (“l’Ulcéreuse”) were specified in the transmission process, contagion was close at hand, despite the universities and their bad air. Certainly European cities and people reacted almost instinctively as though they accepted contagion-ism. In 1347 Catanians attempted, without success, to keep those fleeing Messina out of Catania, and in 1348–1350 their efforts at quarantine were many times repeated all over Europe. In fact European thinking about the plague did not fall into clear categories of “contagionism” or “environmental cause.” Europeans accepted God’s power as the primary cause and saw that power working in many ways. Bedeviled by guilt, they saw humankind as a whole as provoking divine wrath; perhaps reacting in fear and denying their individual guilt, they blamed

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other individuals, either because those people had sinned or because they mali- ciously and deliberately spread disease. Lepers and Jews, both groups outside the framework of Christian society, were likely candidates for such accusations. So too were domestic animals.

Part of the pattern of causal explanation involved not just God’s mechanism (bad air, bad individuals, bad animals), but also the victim’s propensity for the disease. It was perhaps not satisfying enough to say simply that God was scourg- ing the human race; had some individuals made themselves susceptible by their actions or their temperaments? Galenic theory generally viewed plague as a blood disorder, and some physical types seemed prone to diseases related to that humor: fat, florid people, and the sensually hot-blooded, especially women. As in the case of leprosy, the fornicator was a likely victim, perhaps as a sinner who displeased God, perhaps as a fool who sapped his strength; for men espe- cially, sex was thought to weaken the constitution. Some thought revolved around questions of age, social class, or profession. The rich—especially the very rich and powerful—seemed less susceptible; physicians, surgeons, apothe- caries, and members of religious orders were thought vulnerable. Others believed in a “natural predisposition,” or a hereditary propensity for the disease, consistent with some Hippocratic traditions.

Out of these varying theories of cause—operating within the grand general cause of God’s wrath—came medieval responses and remedies. The scale of the disaster was quickly appreciated and gave rise to widespread panic and flight, the latter of course easier for the rich than for the poor. Omens were consulted. Belief in God’s anger led to numerous local attempts to propitiate the divine rage. Town after town held religious ceremonies and processions. Cities resolved to build new churches. Legislation attempted to enforce a purer morality on the populace, as in Siena where the city government outlawed gambling in an attempt to win divine favor, or in Tournai where swearing was forbidden and cohabiting couples were ordered to marry. In some dramatic cases groups of individuals took on themselves the sins of society and hoped by their suffering to assuage God’s anger. That response was most vivid in the processions of the Flagellants that moved through the towns of Germany and the Netherlands. The Flagellants were among the most striking manifestations of medieval millenarianism; they came to see themselves as armies of saints whose very blood had redemptive power, as they not only assumed the burden of humanity’s sins, but through their suffering (in their self-flagellation) assumed Jesus’ role as redeemer.

But the plague came anyway. Probably the gathering of city populations in processions and religious ceremonies offered more opportunities for contagion, as would the enthusiastic war bond rallies in the midst of the World War I influenza epidemic. Many responses were based on a more “natural” explanation of the disease’s cause. Many people believed in some type of contagion, regardless

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of official “bad air” environmentalist doctrine. Port cities refused to allow ships with plague victims to land. Pistoia imposed quarantines on the movement of people and goods. Bodies of the victims were shunned, thrown over town walls, hastily buried in mass graves while their clothes were burnt. Dogs and cats, pos- sible bearers of contagion, were massacred, allowing the rats more license. Belief in bad air led some to flee to the pure mountains; an extreme (and well-known) example of a search for good air was afforded by Pope Clement VI, who barri- caded himself, surrounded by fires, in his palace in Avignon. He survived. Measures of public health—quarantines, burning the clothes of the sick, dispos- ing of bodies outside town walls—might also be the outcome of a “bad air” theory, if clothes or bodies were thought to produce the corruption.

Immediate Effects The immediate effects of the plague on communities varied, although

mortality was high in most places affected by the disease. Studies of particular places in the midst of the epidemic leave different impressions. In some places the fabric of the social order seems to have been surprisingly resilient; after a few months’ interruption, city government resumed its functions, men of the profes- sions went about their business, and social order was consistently maintained. In other cases communities embarked on frenzied searches for scapegoats, and grave social revolution threatened. Almost all communities apparently ground to a halt for a few months. Thus Siena’s economic and political activity largely ceased in June, July, and August 1348: the woolen cloth industry stopped working, olive oil imports ceased, and the city’s courts recessed, while the government ordered religious processions and ended legalized gambling. Fields in the surrounding countryside were neglected, animals wandered uncared-for, and mills closed. From Perpignan in April, May, and June 1348 the only legal documents that survive are wills; other legal or political business apparently simply stopped.

Modern historical studies of Siena, Perpignan, Pistoia, and Orvieto all sug- gest that after a few months political and legal machinery once again functioned, and that at least in some cases city governments tried to assist their populations in coping with the disaster. In Perpignan the persistence of will-making even at the height of the epidemic was impressive; a will written by professionals, with witnesses, was a “fairly sophisticated document, representing a rather high level of social organization” that did not break down in panic.12 When the worst months passed, legal documents reappeared in full flower, and their character reveals a community rebuilding itself: there were again estate settlements, dis- putes among heirs, restorations of dowries, and apprenticeship contracts as new workers were recruited to fill gaps in trades. The finances of the city govern- ment of Siena recovered rapidly, as the governing council successfully raised taxes and imposed forced loans, all of which met the higher demands of the city’s

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mercenary army. Individuals who had fled the city began returning, and the city government attempted to assist the reconstruction of the rural hinterland of Siena: taxation of hard-hit villages was remitted and rent payments were canceled. A city government that could actually boast of a budget in balance, as Siena could do in 1353, was hardly a demoralized or disorganized community; a balanced government budget in Siena, according to William Bowsky, rarely happened even in prosperous times.13 The government of Orvieto was perhaps less effective than that of Siena, but there too the council resumed its regular meetings and appointed new city employees.14

Similarly mixed evidence comes from rural communities in England, where several locales have been studied. In some respects agricultural activity, like its urban counterpart, came to a near halt during the three or four months in which plague peaked. Many landholdings were vacated by either the death or the flight of the tenants; mills fell into disuse, buildings deteriorated, and livestock wandered unsupervised. Rural societies might depend heavily on the management skills of a bailiff or other agent; a very high turnover of management positions occurred in the manors of Cuxham, near Oxford, between 1349 and 1359.15 A cleric’s death might also unhinge a village, and many English studies document the high mor- tality of the clergy.16 Yet in Midlands manorial society, legal procedures and their routines were maintained (as they were in Perpignan), even though those proce- dures for a time concentrated almost wholly on the registration of deaths, con- veyances of vacant holdings, and wardships arising from the great epidemic.17

But while communities showed considerable resilience in the face of human calamity, social and political systems did suffer shocks that manifested them- selves in later years. Siena provides a good illustration. The epidemic apparently furthered a considerable social and economic upheaval there, involving newly emerging rich and newly created poor. The new rich showed their political power by ending monopolies enjoyed over tax-farming by a narrow circle of bankers. The city government, alarmed by the new rich and their ways, passed sumptuary legislation to limit their fancy-dress display. While new wealth vied with an estab- lished oligarchy, new citizens flocked into the city, encouraged by the govern- ment’s immigration policies. Political tensions between these groups intensified, and the existing government (the Council of the IX) was unable to defuse them. In 1355 a revolution overthrew the IX, thus ending seventy years of continuous oligarchic domination. In Bowsky’s view the great epidemic served not so much as the immediate disrupter of society as the catalyst that set in train or acceler- ated larger social and economic effects.

Long-Term Effects When we extend the question of effects over the balance of the four-

teenth century and into the fifteenth, more complications arise. How rapidly did

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the population of Europe recover its pre-1300 level? Did the depression in population have major effects on wages, prices, land tenures? Did productive processes or land uses change? Were authorities—ecclesiastical, political, intellectual—called into question? Clear answers to all those questions are diffi- cult, but the great epidemic certainly had some weight in all such issues.

First, the Black Death of 1347–1353 seriously reduced the population of Europe. Mortality may have ranged from 30 to 60 percent, in some places higher, in some places lower. But the plague’s impact on the European popula- tion did not end in 1353. Although controversy continues about just when the population began to grow again, much local evidence suggests that repeated vis- itations of plague in the years after 1353 contributed to holding populations down. The population of Cuxham in 1377 had reached only one-third of its 1348 level.18

Many writers, in fact, see no real recovery of growth in the European population until the end of the fifteenth century. For this remarkable period of declining or stagnant populations the plague bears at least some responsibility. Once plague established itself in the 1340s it remained an almost constant menace for over three hundred years, in what may be properly called a prolonged plague pan- demic. Jean-Noël Biraben has compiled tables which claim that plague was pres- ent somewhere in Europe every year between 1347 and 1670.19 The most serious and widespread episodes followed on the heels of the great Black Death; thus the epidemics of the early 1360s and middle 1370s, though overshadowed by the 1347–1353 catastrophe, rank as demographic disasters in their own right. Such massive after-shocks hampered the recovery of population levels late in the fourteenth century; and although the intervals between major plague waves seemed to have lengthened in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the disease could still be a powerful brake on growth in some localities.

The social and economic consequences of the great decline in population between the mid-fourteenth and the late fifteenth centuries have been much dis- cussed, and some points remain controversial. As we have seen, Europe in the early 1300s manifested many signs of a society with cheap labor and expensive land. To some extent the Black Death reversed that picture; Europe, now population-short, experienced rising labor costs and falling land costs. Especially in western Europe, the drastic depopulation forced landlords to lower rents, to replace fixed-term rents with share-cropping arrangements, to offer higher wages for agricultural labor, and to commute the traditional labor services demanded of peasants by lords. Considerable regional variation in such effects could be found; in some cases, for example, deaths among the tenantry enabled landlords to let out lands on new terms that freed them from long-term custom- ary arrangements favorable to a tenant family.20 But in many places in western Europe the lives of peasants improved as the obligations of manorialism fell away. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie’s classic study of the peasants of Languedoc

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shows them enjoying the results of abundant and cheap land and high wages in the second half of the fourteenth century and the fifteeenth century.21

For many European landowners the serious depopulation of 1347–1353 cre- ated problems: lower rent receipts, a shortage of tenants, perhaps higher wages to pay, perhaps lower prices for the produce of their lands as demand for those products fell. Landlords had several options. They could join employers every- where in attempts to hold wages down by statutes that could be enforced with state power, or to use other legislative or judicial means to control labor (such as restricting the laborers’ geographical mobility). Several European states adopted such measures in the years after 1348—for example, the English Statute of Labourers of 1349—and serious social and political grievances often resulted.

Another possibility for the landowner was greater efficiency. Labor apparently became more productive, if only because (in agriculture) it was possible to aban- don the cultivation of marginal lands and concentrate on richer soils. Still other landlords converted their fields from arable to pasture and thus reduced their labor costs. That point relates to a subtle but significant shift: that in the years after the great epidemic, what we may loosely call “luxury” products and crops prospered, at least in relation to more “staple” items.22 Several likely factors com- bined to cause this trend. Survivors of the Black Death possessed greater per capita wealth than they enjoyed before 1348, for such sources of wealth as land, tools, or plate did not vanish in the same proportion as the people who shared them. Survivors also perhaps enjoyed marginally higher incomes, if land costs fell while wages rose. With both greater wealth and greater income came mar- ginally higher disposable income, and items that had been unimaginable luxu- ries might become desirable possibilities.

Producers—large and small—might respond to this new situation. The demand for grain products fell with the fall in population; half the population will not eat twice the bread it had eaten even if the price falls in half (that is, the demand for such “necessities” as bread is relatively inelastic, or constant regard- less of price). The years after 1348 were therefore difficult for producers of grain, caught between higher labor costs and declining absolute demand for their prod- ucts. For some, the answer lay in the production of goods for which demand might be more elastic, goods that appealed to the new wealth and higher level of disposable income. And so in Spain and England the importance of pasture for wool increased. More land, proportionally, was also given over to crops from which drink could be made: barley for beer in England and Germany, grapes for wine in France, northern Italy, and southern Germany. More varied fruits and vegetables appeared, especially in France and Spain, while the demand grew for exotic substances such as sugar. Crops from which industrial materials came prospered: dyestuffs, flax and hemp, mulberry trees (for silkworms). Meanwhile, areas that had lived by the export of grain, such as Sicily and southern Italy,

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suffered hard times. Finally, the position of smallholding peasants in this changed market might be mixed; as subsistence farmers they benefited from lower land costs, but as producers for a market they might lose.

The Black Death and subsequent plague assaults may have eased the lives of surviving peasants in western Europe, making their land cheaper, increasing their wages, and decreasing the traditional labor services expected of them. But the general experience of the peasantry of eastern Europe should make us wary of the power of the plague as an overwhelming historical cause. At least in the- ory the same change in the positions of laborers and landlords occurred there, although it is possible that the plague’s incidence and hence mortality was lower in eastern Europe. Perhaps more eastern peasants survived, but that point remains speculative; certainly the position of the eastern landlords strengthened. They seized opportunities that made the east increasingly the supplier of large- scale agricultural products to the more developed western European economies. A different political milieu made it possible for landowners to tighten the bonds of serfdom on the large estates on which they pursued those profitable activities. Disease and its resulting depopulation is clearly not the single determinant of social, economic, and political change.

The industries of towns likewise found a different climate in the post-plague era. Without doubt the great epidemic caused tremendous short-run disruption, as the social mechanisms of markets, transportation, money institutions, and pro- duction collapsed in varying degree; a sudden dearth of artisans, or merchants, or seamen might each bring their trade to a standstill, with effects that rippled through an entire local economy. In the somewhat longer term, urban industries shared some—but not all—of the circumstances that affected the rural economy. A peasant in the countryside could benefit immediately from more or better land after 1348; an urban artisan did not have those advantages. Productivity of urban crafts may have declined per capita, at least temporarily, owing to the loss of hard- to-replace skills. But some evidence suggests that such a decline was very tempo- rary, and that both productivity and prices rose in the years after 1350. For that prosperity both demand for manufactured goods and greater efficiency of produc- tion may have been responsible. The same factors that promoted the sale of “luxury” agricultural products also applied to manufactures; with more disposable income, consumers demanded more clothing (or fancier clothing, involving silks and dyestuffs) and the products of skilled artisans. Not all manufacturers prof- ited; wool cloth made in Florence declined relative to the luxurious silk, and hard times for some artisans (also facing competition from wool producers elsewhere) resulted. Certainly contemporary observers noticed that conspicuous consump- tion was a common reaction among survivors of the Black Death.

In the century after the great epidemic, Europe embarked on one of its seminal periods of technological innovation. The sternpost rudder and the ship outfitted

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with both square-rigged and lateen sails expanded the possibilities of ocean nav- igation, and Europeans simultaneously adopted compasses from Asian civiliza- tions. By about 1450 the various technologies involved in printing by movable type had been brought together. In the 1400s the use of firearms made headway; what in the 1300s had been a battlefield curiosity became before the end of the 1400s a decisive weapon of war. These technological changes are dramatic and well known, but others of great importance also appeared in the late 1300s and the 1400s. Especially significant were the spinning wheel and the rapid spread of such instruments of power as water- and windmills (especially the latter) in industrial processes. In some manner we may see all of these technological changes as “labor saving,” whether printing presses that save the labor of copy- ists, mills that save the labor of fullers, or cannon that save the labor of battering- ram carriers. Is it too much to wonder whether the scarcity of labor in the century after 1350 encouraged such innovations?

Plague and the European Spirit The great epidemic had serious consequences for “authority” in several

respects. The landed class had dominated European social, economic, and politi- cal life for centuries. On balance in western Europe, the Black Death damaged its economic position, especially in respect to the peasantry which it had exploited for so long. Its power over the peasantry did not end in 1350, but in the later medieval centuries its authority did gradually weaken. Many factors con- tributed to that immense change in social relationships, including the changing power of towns and trading wealth, the growing authority of central political lead- ers such as kings, and the development of military technology that supplanted the armored horseman. Although it would be foolish to claim that the Black Death ended the power of the western European landed class, it would also be foolish to assert the epidemic’s irrelevance.

The institutional authority of the Church received several blows. To the extent that it depended on learned and administrative talents, it suffered. Such talents and learning could not be quickly replaced, and the death of a parish priest, for example, sometimes resulted in the rapid ordination of a replacement with little training or vocation. Such a circumstance might worsen an already bad situation if the deceased priest had shirked his pastoral duties while the plague raged. Many did (as many did not), and contemporaries held the secular clergy up to unfavorable comparison with the mendicants; some members of the clergy had abandoned their flocks, and others had enriched themselves in the crisis. And even if a clergyman remained devoted to his parish in its travail, his powerless- ness was manifest; the extent to which members of the clergy commanded respect because of their “superhuman” qualities was weakened by their inability to stem the disease, and by their own vulnerability to it.

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The epidemic touched off long-simmering resentments against the Church as well as against other symbols of authority. The direction taken by the Flagellant movement in Germany provides an illustration. Flagellant processions, especially in Germany, quickly passed out of clerical hands and control. The Flagellants were often highly organized groups, under the direction of a master—a layperson—who heard confessions and imposed penances, thus seemingly poaching on the preserves of the clergy. A millennium was thought to be at hand, in which Christ (perhaps accompanied by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, awakened from his mountain tomb) would come again, slay the priests who oppressed the people, and take from the rich to give to the poor. Flagellants saw themselves as armies of saints. In some horrific cases the coming of such an army ignited savage massacres of the Jews, the most obvious outsiders who might serve as scapegoats for the tragedy of the epidemic; thus the Jewish popu- lations of Frankfurt, Mainz, Cologne, and Brussels were put to the sword as a part of the mass hysteria. As Norman Cohn describes the episodes, their revolu- tionary potential was very real, not only against the authority of the Church but also against the wealthy and the entitled.23

These plague-inspired popular movements fed other, later fourteenth-century currents. For while the epidemic may have weakened the institutional authority of the Church, it did not diminish the piety of the population. Although “piety” is hard to measure (as is “authority”), the same civilization that denounced the laxity of the clergy left bequests to churches for prayers and buildings, went on pilgrim- ages, and manifested signs of intense personal piety that found an outlet in such movements of the laity as confraternities. By the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries such expressions of lay piety boiled over in what the Church judged to be heresy, as with the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Bohemia.

Did public morality decline during and after the epidemic? Some witnesses claimed that the horror of the plague loosened the bonds of behavior. Boccaccio reported: “Others . . . maintained that an infallible way of warding off this appalling evil was to drink heavily, enjoy life to the full, go round singing and merry-making, gratify all one’s cravings whenever the opportunity offered, and shrug the whole thing off as one enormous joke. Moreover, they practiced what they preached to the best of their ability.”24 But the same author also told of those who lived abstemiously in the hope of avoiding plague, and it is possible as well that the plague overstimulated moralists to find “sin” everywhere to explain the catastrophe. The drastic mortality laid the basis for conspicuous consumption by the survivors, nevertheless, and there were those who adopted a tonight-we-drink-for-tomorrow- we-die attitude. And as we have seen, in some cases the social fabric was badly torn by revolutionary movements and hysterical massacres of innocents.

As hard to measure as “piety,” “authority,” and “morality” is the notion of a civilization obsessed with death and its images. Johan Huizinga, in a famous book

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written in 1924, drew a memorable picture of a post-plague world of extreme con-trasts, of silences and noises, a highly strung civilization quick to violence and outward displays of emotion, one in which the smell of blood mixed with that of roses.25 Millard Meiss, who studied Florentine and Sienese art in the wake of the plague, showed that art grew more “religious” and “conservative,” perhaps from a general desire for intense personal religious expression in painting, but per-haps a reflection of the typical arriviste tastes of those enriched by the changed circumstances.26

Certainly much evidence says that Europeans reacted to the Black Death with mingled guilt and fear: convinced that their sins had brought on God’s wrath, fleeing in terror when and where they could, and savagely turning on scapegoats. To many Europeans the Apocalypse seemed at hand. Michael Dols’s study of the same epidemic’s effects on another civilization both offers interesting contrasts and reinforces the view of European guilt and fear.27 Dols found that Mamluk Egypt, where the mortality in 1348 rivaled that experienced in Europe, was generally free of most of the hysterical reactions found in Europe. According to Dols, differences in religious background and ideas account for the different reactions. A plague epidemic (part of the first great plague pandemic, mentioned in Chapter Two) had ravaged the Middle East in the earliest years of Islam, so that the faith’s original writings discuss the plague specifically and with (for Muslims) enormous authority.

Muslims regarded the plague as God’s gift, not his scourge—“a mercy and a martyrdom” for the faithful. Flight was therefore wrong, for it was flight from God and God’s will (although there was some theological disagreement about that point, Dols admits). Because plague came directly from God, Muslim thinkers more consistently held to a heaven-sent miasma as the immediate cause; doctrines of “bad air” did not slide into ideas of contagion, as they did in the Christian world. Hence Muslims did not turn on alien minorities who might be blamed for contagion. More generally, the Muslim tradition lacked the Christian emphasis on original sin, which lay behind both the guilt felt by Christians and the punishment which Christians believed that someone deserved. Mamluk Egypt, Dols argues, reacted with reverent resignation to the disaster of the Black Death.

But Dols’s contrasts may be too sharp. Did Westerners characteristically react with flight, guilt, and a search for scapegoats? Remember the speed with which communities rebounded from the social and economic blows of the epidemic; remember not just the wild Flagellant hysteria, but the legal routines of Perpignan, the effective governments of Siena and Cornwall, the rising prices and productivity of craftspeople, and the prosperity of surviving peasants.

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