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Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Today we're launching the latest of our Sunday series and this time around we're going to be focusing on the Black Death. Emily Brevitt will be joined by Thomas Asbridge, author of the Black Death, A Global History over the next three weeks. Kicking off with today's first episode.
- [02:44]
Emily Brevitt
The Black Death is remembered as one of the most devastating catastrophes in human history. A pandemic that swept across continents and killed millions. But where did this deadly disease come from? How did it travel so quickly through towns and countryside? And did people at the time understand just how transformative the terrifying illness that was unfolding around them would be? I'm Emily Brifitts and I'm joined by historian Thomas Asbridge. In this first episode, we'll be tracing the origins and spread of the Black Death, exploring the moment it erupted onto the medieval stage. Now, I wondered if we could start with a pretty notable example, a notable case, and that is the siege at Caffa. So the year is 1347, and we have a band of Genoese merchants who find themselves on the brink of annihilation. They're under siege in the port city of Caffa on the Crimean Peninsula. They're a thousand miles away from home, but for a moment, there seems to be a sort of glimmer of hope for them. Their opponents are struck with this strange and merciless pestilence. But things are soon to take a turn for the worse for them. Could you tell us about this instance?
- [04:05]
Thomas Asbridge
Sure. So this is essentially the first time that we see what we now call the Black Death appearing in the written record. So the siege of Khafar is in many ways the genesis moment for the history of this disease that's going to affect the whole of the medieval world. Exactly as you say. It's a Genoese outpost. We need to recognize that it's. In many ways, it's on the fringes of the European world, of the Western or Latin Christian world. It's a trading enclave and it's been put under siege by a massive Mongol force led by Khan called Janebeg. And from the Genoese perspective, this is pretty much a lost cause. Everyone expects them to fall. They're massively outnumbered. They make calls back to Europe, but no one's coming to help. But, as you say, then a mysterious disease starts to hit the besiegers and they start dying in their droves in pretty gruesome forms, it would appear. And now perhaps the corner's going to be turned. Perhaps the Genoese are going to survive. But as it is, Jane Beg makes a decision to launch a final assault, to use a final weapon to try to undermine the Genoese. And what he does is start to catapult the bodies of people who've died from this disease into Kaphar itself. And we're then told that once these bodies enter the fortified site, the Genoese themselves start to suffer from this same disease. Some have strange swellings on their bodies, others start to spit up blood. And suddenly the death toll starts rising inside Kaffa. So the story goes, a single Genoese boat manages to make an escape and these sailors bid farewell to Khafar, I guess thinking that they've made a clean getaway. But unfortunately, little do they know that they're actually carrying death in their midst.
- [05:58]
Emily Brevitt
So this just gives us a sense immediately of the fear, the anticipation, and also the devastation caused by the Black Death that going to be talking about in this particular series. Now. I think we should start with the global nature of this. This particular example gives us a sense that this isn't just something that happens in Western Europe, this isn't just a European phenomenon. So we should spend some time getting to grips with the world we're going to be exploring. What would life have been like in the first half of the 14th century in places such as Caffa?
- [06:32]
Thomas Asbridge
I think we need to face up to the fact that the medieval world is a difficult, challenging place to live in. But of all the centuries that you might choose, if I was, you know, if we were going to be time travelers and I was gonna give us a tip, we would not choose to go back to the 14th century. That would be a very bad decision. Even before the Black Death appears. So its first appearance is around 13:47 in the written record. As I said, it's going to then spend the next five or six years afflicting the medieval world. But even before that point, the Middle ages in the 14th century is a period in which there's significant changes taking place that are affecting the quality of life. Perhaps the most important of these that's happening underneath the surface, in many ways unseen by contemporaries, is climate change. So contrary to what we are now experiencing, which appears to be man made warming of the globe, this is a cooling of the globe, which we think is largely to do with fluctuations in solar activity, perhaps also in exacerbated by a major volcanic eruption in the 13th century. But by the time we're into 1300 and the decades that follow, we're starting to see the start of what we now call the Little Ice Age or the Lia. And it leads to overall, annually a change of around 0.4 to 0.8 degrees centigrade, a cooling. It also leads to freak weather events. So it's not just about the cooling, it's also about very unusual Levels of rain or drought or, you know, the kind of events that we're unfortunately becoming more familiar with in our own world. And I guess when I was researching the Black Death, perhaps the thing that shocked me more than anything else was how destructive the Little Ice Age was, how much the world changed through this climate change, even though it was only 0.4 to 0.8 of a degree centigrade. Even before the Black Death hits, we're seeing that the medieval world is affected by periods of famine, other kinds of diseases that are appearing in part because of fluctuations in climate. There's also effects in terms of livestock. So there's. In the early decades of the 14th century, there are major outbreaks, particularly in northern Europe, of cattle diseases that also lead to famine. So this is a period where the climate alterations are having an effect. It's also a period in which endemic warfare is starting to become more and more frequent, where military conflict is accelerating in terms of its frequency and the profound effect it will have on society. So these are two elements in a triangle, really, that we might think of in relationship to the Black Death. Climate change, warfare, and then the third point being the emergence of a pandemic disease, creating a pretty unpleasant reality.
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Emily Brevitt
Not somewhere we'd want to go back to then, no. Now, does this make the 14th century quite a vulnerable era? Does it soften the ground for the plague? Essentially?
- [09:27]
Thomas Asbridge
That's a really good question. So one of the challenges with trying to understand the Black Death is trying to appreciate why so many people died. Maybe later on we'll come on to try to estimate what the effect was in terms of mortality. And some historians and scientists have argued that the population was already affected by famine, weakened, perhaps by micro funguses growing in grain, all kinds of other factors that might have made the population particularly vulnerable, particularly prone to being infected and to being killed by this disease. I think that's possible. I don't think we have definitive evidence for that, particularly at a global level, because we can argue that there's a failing harvest, let's say, in northern France, but we can also see the Black Death having a major effect in Egypt, and the same climactic events or failing harvests are not occurring there. So it's not the only answer. Maybe it's part of the answer.
- [10:20]
Emily Brevitt
Maybe. Could we zoom in on a few of these places that you've just mentioned to see what life was like on the onset of this plague?
- [10:27]
Thomas Asbridge
Sure. I think maybe we could pull out three of the most interesting cities as emblems of what's happening. In the medieval world. So we might start in Florence. So in northern Italy. Italy is not a united country or nation at this point. It's a series, really, of what we might call city states and Florence. Florence, in some ways, sometimes I liken it almost to the New Yorker, the Manhattan of the medieval world in the 14th century. It's very much the banking and financial headquarters of the medieval world. Its currency, the gold florin, is the equivalent of the US dollar today. It's the kind of the gold standard of trading currency. It's a very upwardly mobile, growing city. Its population is perhaps 90,000, perhaps at most 100,000. So it's not, of course, by modern standards, not vast. But by medieval standards, it's very substantial, and it has a view of itself as being at the center of the cultural and economic heart of medieval Europe. However, if we cross a little way over the Mediterranean, we actually come to a city that completely dwarfs Florence, because Florence thinks of itself in these terms. But if you compare it to Cairo, which is the capital of one of the great medieval empires, the Mamluk Empire, we think its population is around 500,000. So half a million people dwarfing Florence. It sits within Egypt at really the height of the power of the Mameluke Empire, largely because it's on the Nile or beside the Nile. And the Mamelukes have built an empire that really gains much of its economic vibrancy from the fact that the Muslim world is able to develop technology that harnesses the annual Nile flood and uses that to create agrarian wealth, farming wealth that really outstrips anything else going on anywhere else in the medieval world. So Egypt and Cairo in particular, have grown to a size that's really not paralleled at this point anywhere else, certainly to the west in the medieval world. And maybe the last thread that we might pull on would be London, because, again, I guess we tend to think in particularly in English terms. We like to think of medieval England being a very prominent site. That's the history that we're most familiar with as school children or students. But in many ways, England is really a backwater in political, certainly in economic terms, perhaps also in cultural terms at this stage. And London is at most, its population is perhaps around 60,000, perhaps a little bit higher. It's largely contained within the old circuit of Roman walls, and it's absolutely dwarfed by somewhere like Egypt. So there's an imbalance in power. And to some extent, the longer story of what's going to happen in the aftermath of the Black Death is when we look at it at a global scale, when we don't just think about it in European terms, is that it's going to bring down the Mamluk Empire, it's going to crush much of the Muslim world, and it's going to allow cities like London actually to flourish.
- [13:35]
Emily Brevitt
This is all hints for future episodes.
- [13:38]
Thomas Asbridge
Indeed.
- [13:38]
Emily Brevitt
For our listeners. Indeed. Now, could you just tell us just how global was the Black Death?
- [13:44]
Thomas Asbridge
Well, I think we have to use the term in its medieval sense. So I'm thinking about it in terms of what's the known world in the 14th century. It's not global in terms of reaching what we now call the New World, the Americas. As far as we know, it's not reaching Australasia or the Americas in the medieval period at all. If we are putting a geographical span on it, we can take it as far west as Ireland, and certainly we know that it's present in significant parts of Russia. It's certainly in North Africa and perhaps in sub Saharan Africa. There's more recent research making a very strong case for the fact that there might be archaeological evidence for the fact that it went south of the. The Sahara and to the Far East. It's very contentious evidence about whether its presence in China and if it is in China, how many people did it kill? I think it's very likely that it was there, but I don't think we can go far beyond that in terms of quantifying the degree of destruction that it brought. But certainly it's present within Central Asia. I think one of the most fundamental things that I'd wanna put across about the Black Death, again, from an educational perspective. So often I meet students or, or schoolchildren. We're brought up to think of it almost as a uniquely English thing. And even if we go beyond that, we might think, well, maybe it was in France, maybe it was in some other parts of Europe, but it's a much, much wider phenomenon and that its ability to affect the medieval world is very crucially linked to that.
- [15:13]
Emily Brevitt
So we're busting some myths here and hopefully we'll bust some more as we go through. I've got to ask you, you mentioned earlier that this is something that spreads so rapidly, it's like wildfire. But you've also suggested that there may be some debate about why this is. Could you maybe talk about that debate if there is anything we know about it?
- [15:30]
Thomas Asbridge
So I think we have to answer that question in two different ways. So at a medical, scientific level, there are answers that we might come to. Perhaps we can cover them in later episodes. What we think we now know about the transmission of this disease. But at a fundamental level, one thing that I don't think can be argued with is that the disease spreads along established trade and travel routes. When you start to look at the chronology of when you piece together where the disease is appearing, first off, it starts to appear in ports around the Mediterranean basin. And then it's clear that the disease somehow makes its way through the Straits of Gibraltar, around the Atlantic seaboard of Iberia, and then up through France, then to England. And once it gets a foothold in all of these ports and then along rivers, then it starts to move inland, and it almost always is following along established routes that connect the medieval world in 14th century Terms in a globalized way. And I think one of the things that might surprise people is the degree to which trade is a very significant part of communication within the medieval world, and that even relatively small quantities of products can be sold and transported across large distances. And it's that process, often involving seaborne or riverborne traffic, that seems to have played a major role in the dissemination of the disease.
- [16:54]
Emily Brevitt
And I suppose we could also say that this is maybe how the news spread, Though I guess that's an uncertain.
- [17:00]
Thomas Asbridge
Yeah, we start every now and again, we get glimpses. Obviously, much of what we know about the Black Death, though certainly not all, is based on accounts that people might have written at the time. Every now and again, they will report where they get their information from. They'll say that they spoke to a traveler or a pilgrimage. Occasionally there's a personal connection. It might be a relative that's come back, has survived an initial outbreak, come back to a city and said what they've seen. But those are rare glimpses. So it's a question that I'd love to know the answer to exactly how news spread, but often we can't answer it.
- [17:34]
Emily Brevitt
And in those accounts, do they give a sense of what the sentiment was at the time, Whether there was that feeling of dread ahead of the plague arriving?
- [17:42]
Thomas Asbridge
I guess one of the things that I think has in the past often been missed about the Black Death is its capacity to inspire fear in the population. We tend to look at it as modern observers and try to decode everything we think we can now know about it. But from that perspective, it's very easy to forget how little people actually understood or knew in 1347, 1348, or the years that followed. So, crucially, this isn't for them, it's an unknown disease. They don't know what it is. It seems to have a strange variety of symptoms. So some people argue, well, maybe it's not one disease, maybe it's multiple diseases. They don't know how to treat it effectively and most importantly of all, they're not sure about how it's transmitted. One of the things that I think is most frightening when you try to imagine the atmosphere that must have been present in the 14th century is this sense that perhaps it's by speaking to someone that you might catch it somehow. It's in the air, perhaps it's through touch. But there's also a school of thought that argues it's literally just through sight. So just looking someone in the eye could mean that you would catch this disease and very quickly. One of the things we do know in terms of news is the idea that this is a lethal disease, that it can kill and it can kill thousands, is spread very, very quickly and that engenders this sense of fear and foreboding that often spreads even faster than disease itself.
- [19:16]
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- [21:42]
Emily Brevitt
just how deadly was the Blank death?
- [21:45]
Thomas Asbridge
So this is a pretty contentious question, and it's been much discussed over well over the last 150 years. But even within the last 50 years there have been pretty wildly divergent estimates. If we just confine ourselves to what we might call chronicles and narratives, so accounts written by people who were witnessing the event themselves, then we get wildly divergent figures, sometimes 30%, sometimes as high as 80 or 90%, and also estimates of numbers which are often suspiciously round figures and seem inflated figures. So you might get there's a famous instance where a city in Normandy is supposed to have had 40,000 people die, when we know it only had about 15,000 people in it. So it's clear that the chronicler is overblowing events. Luckily for this period we have a much richer base of source material, so we don't just have to rely on chronicles and narratives. We can use all kinds of other material, including wills, parish registers of people who are dying, manorial court records and letters. A whole array of material that gives us opportunities to start to try to guess at the number. I would argue that in the end, controversial view this might be. I don't think it's the right question to ask exactly how many people died, because if we think about our experience of COVID I would suggest that there is not a single person alive on the planet who can tell you exactly how many people died during the COVID pandemic globally. So the idea that we're going to be able to put a finite figure on events in the 14th century I think is misguided. That said, I think it is important to try to get a sense of the scale because as I said, historians have disputed it. Modern historians. Back in the early 70s there was a British historian who argued perhaps it was as little as 5%, which makes it. In the history of medieval Europe, it makes it more of a little speed bump rather than a major catastrophic event. I think the historiographical consensus, the general consensus among scholars now, is that it's around 50% of the population in affected areas. And often that means that in that area, in the course of between six to 12 months, around half the population is dying.
- [23:57]
Emily Brevitt
That's astonishing. How differently did the Black Death affect those of varying ranks in society?
- [24:05]
Thomas Asbridge
Yeah, it's a very good question. I think it is true to say that if you were very rich, if you're a member of the noble class, or if you're a member of the royal family, in some areas, at least you had the resources to try and hide yourself away and endure the pandemic, the crisis, as best you could. However, we do know that members of different royal families across the medieval world did die as a result of this pandemic. So famously, the king of Castile, Alfonso xi, or as he's sometimes known, Alfonso the Avenger, he died in 1350 during the siege of Gibraltar. So he was a very ardent combatant against the enduring Muslim presence in Iberia, the Kingdom of Granada. He wanted to eradicate that. He wanted to snuff out their connection with North Africa by taking Gibraltar. And he was close to doing so. But then a lump appeared, a bubo appeared on his body. He started to show symptoms. He decided he wanted to stay at the front line and he died. And it caused a terrible crisis within the royal family, a succession crisis. And he was subsequently succeeded by his son Pedro, who bears the unfortunate sobriquet, Pedro the Cruel. So he was not exactly the nicest ruler of Castile for the decades to come. We could also look at the young English princess, Princess Joan. She was en route, as it would happen, to marry that Same Pedro in 1348. She set out from England. She got as far as Bordeaux, which was at this point still in English hands, but then got caught up in an outbreak of the Black Death in that port and ultimately fell victim, we think, on the 1st of June, 1348. And we have quite a moving letter from her father, Edward iii, describing his emotions at losing this treasured child of his. So royal families were affected. But if I'm being really honest, one of the things that's, for me, most exciting about studying the Black Death and working on material from the 14th century and beyond is that the increased survival of evidence means that you can start to look at not just the top 1% or the top 10%. You can look at all the strata of society, and there are a number of instances where we have very detailed documents that show us what's happening to people, even peasant farmers, and how they are being affected by the Black Death, how they're responding. Perhaps the most fascinating example comes from a small Suffolk village called Walsham. The Willows only had about 1,500 people living in and around this community. Most of them were peasant farmers. Most of them were indentured to one of the two lords who held manors in this region. But the way people managed their affairs in regions like this is that they would hold regular meetings, what we call manorial courts, and you'd bring all kinds of business to these events. If you wanted to get married, you'd have to make an arrangement. You'd usually have to pay some money to the law to enable you to get married. If you wanted to complain about how much you were being charged, or if you wanted to demonstrate that you'd produce the crops you were supposed to, all of this would go down, would be recorded in a manorial court meeting and scrupulously written down on a roll of parchment so that it could potentially be later consulted. Now, this is incredibly useful for us as historians, because at the time of the Black Death, all of the deaths of people who held land, who held acres of land and farmsteads in Walsh and Le Willows were cataloged on these rolls. Every single death is detailed and described at various meetings and. And then we're told whether heirs came forward, wanted to inherit this landwent and make a claim to it. So it allows us to look at how many people are dying. And again, we have around a 45 to 55% of the population perishing during the outbreak. But also look at how communities try to reconfigure themselves in the aftermath. It's a story of horror, but it's also a story of rejuvenation, because we can see, for example, a family that I studied throughout the 14th century, the Denny family. One of their members, Nicholas Denny, lost his mother, lost his brother, but his family had been in a pretty unpleasant, it would seem, dispute with another local family called the Fraunces. For decades, they seemed to be quite embittered enemies. But in the aftermath of the Black Death, he actually marries a member of the Fraunces family, a woman called Agnes. And that union of their two families seems to have brought about a complete rapprochement. And they seem to work together for the decades to come. So there could be silver linings. To the Black Death. Even in communities that were ripped apart,
- [28:46]
Emily Brevitt
are there particular regions that really got hit hard?
- [28:50]
Thomas Asbridge
Again, I think that's a challenging question to answer. Specifically, I think one of the things that I've tried to explore is variations over space. So what's happening in lots of different areas to not try to say, okay, so this is what happens in medieval England, and therefore that's the model that we can use across the whole of the medieval world. I've also tried to look and compare what's happening in the Western Christian world and what's happening in the Muslim world. And there is a very significant difference in attitude towards this disease in the Muslim world that I think arguably meant that the Muslim world was more seriously affected, that mortality rates were higher. The difference is that in Islamic doctrine, plague is seen as a gift from God, an action from God, and for believers, for Muslims, it's argued, according to Islamic theology, that the disease is a guarantee of martyrdom. So it's a gift to believers. It's a punishment for unbelievers for non Muslims. But that meant that crucially, Muslims were not supposed to flee from sites affected by the Black Death. And also that they were encouraged to believe that it was not contagious, that you didn't catch it directly from another person, that if you got it, it was the will of God. And this seems to have affected behavior within the Muslim world and particularly where we can study it, most specifically in the Mamluk Empire, in cities like Damascus in Syria or Cairo in Egypt that we mentioned earlier on, I would argue that the death rate, the mortality rate, may well have been somewhat, if not even significantly higher because it affected social behavior and meant that people were less likely to flee, less likely to isolate themselves, I guess.
- [30:35]
Emily Brevitt
Is that in opposition to other places in the world where that action, that attitude towards it, was vastly different.
- [30:42]
Thomas Asbridge
So very often in Western Europe, we do get a sense that people might attempt to flee from an affected site. Often we also hear that the disease just followed them and they might well have died in spite of their attempt to escape. But perhaps for me, the most important and revealing example of what's it like to live through this kind of experience comes from a letter written by a musician, a court musician in the papal court in Avignon. So now in southern France, the papacy had moved to Avignon earlier in the 14th century. So this is where the papal court was present. And this individual was called Louis Sanctus. He was a close personal friend of a very. Someone who's going to become a very, very Famous writer and poet Petrarch. Louis is particularly important to us because he writes a letter that is very specifically dated to the end of April 1348. And that matters because there's no hindsight involved in what he's writing. He's writing in the moment about what it's like to be in Avignon when the Black Death has hit about two months earlier, and to suddenly watch half of the population of the city die. So you get a really visceral sense of the horror of this moment and also the unknown he mentions. At one point, I'd been told that we're going to move out of the city. I don't know what's going to happen. He served a particular cardinal, a man called Giovanni Colana. We know that he died a couple of months later, although Louis Sanctus survived. But you really get a sense in this letter of the unknown. And again, that's something I think it's so important to remember. They did not know how long this disease was going to last. They didn't know if this was the end of the world.
- [32:25]
Emily Brevitt
With that in mind, did people at the time recognise this as something that was unprecedented, or was it just perceived as another bad year of something?
- [32:36]
Thomas Asbridge
Again, I would argue that has been, and perhaps still is, a controversial question amongst scholars. There are some who argue that it's only in the aftermath that people start to recognize the significance or are told this is an unprecedented event. And it is certainly true to say that death was much more familiar to people living in the 14th century than it is to us today, and that localized outbreaks of disease or famine relatively routinely might claim 10% of the population, 20% of the population. So this is not an absolutely foreign experience. But there's two things I would point out. One, we can see from contemporary eyewitness accounts that they're aware of the wider nature of this, that it's not just affecting their town or their city, that it's much broader, that it's affecting the whole of the medieval world very, very rapidly. And also when we are able to glimpse sources that are written in the moment. So Louis Sanctus letter, a range of other letters that appear. There's a letter written by a Greek Byzantine official in Constantinople called Demetrios Cadones. He writes a letter describing what happened in the great. What had been the great capital city of the Byzantine Empire. Even already, it's a pretty much a shadow of its former self. But he describes how the city is ripped apart by the disease. We get a sense from those kind of sources that they're aware that this is something different, that the scale of this, the horror of this event is unprecedented, that it's taking the medieval world to a different place, that it's posing a different level of challenge.
- [34:14]
Emily Brevitt
And we're going to be focusing on exactly that lived experience of the Black Death in our next episode. Thank you ever so much for your time today, Thomas.
- [34:22]
Thomas Asbridge
My pleasure.
- [34:24]
Emily Brevitt
That was Dr. Thomas Asbridge, a historian of the Middle Ages, specialising in the study of the Crusades, knighthood and chivalry. He is also reader in Medieval history at Queen Mary University of London and the author of the new book, the Black Death A Global History, published by Alan Lane. If you'd like to find out more about the Black Death and its surrounding context, or how humanity has dealt with disease through the centuries, I've put together some essential reading, listening and viewing from the History Extra Archive to help deepen your understanding. You can find a link to that in the description of this episode.