The Black Death and the

Transformation of the West

The Black Death
and the Transformation of the West

DAVID HERLIHY
Edited and with an Introduction by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
Copyright © 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Herlihy, David.
The black death and the transformation of the west / David Herlihy; edited and with an introduction by
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-07612-5 (cloth: alk. paper).
—ISBN 0-674-07613-3 (paper : alk. paper)
1. Black death—Europe. 2. Diseases and history.
3. Civilization, Medieval. 4. Renaissance—Europe.
I. Cohn, Samuel Kline. II. Title.
RC178.A1H47 1997
940.1'92—dc21 96-54637

Designed by Gwen Nefsky Frankfeldt

Contents

Introduction

1 Bubonic Plague: Historical Epidemiology and the Medical Problems

2 The New Economic and Demographic System
3 Modes of Thought and Feeling

Notes
Index
Introduction

David Herlihy crossed a chronologically critical divide after completing his

book on medieval Pisa1 and a series of essays on the agricultural history of
the early and central Middle Ages.2 In the early 1960s he embarked on an
investigation of the social and economic history of late medieval and
Renaissance Europe, taking the Black Death of 1348 and its aftermath as the
center of his analysis. This new focus characterized the bulk of his historical
forays for the rest of his life. No matter what the subject—the history of
popular piety, the networks of political elites, the family, women, or
technology—the Black Death of 1348 and its consequences were central to
his interpretative frameworks. Hence we were fortunate to find in Herlihy’s
stacks of research notes, computer files, and essays three unpublished lectures
delivered at the University of Maine in 1985. With characteristic lucidity and
boldness, these essays establish more clearly than anywhere else in his
writing Herlihy’s belief in the critical importance of the Black Death for the
development of Western Europe and the transition from medieval to modern
“systems” of behavior.
The three essays are not simply recapitulations of previously stated
positions or revisions of previous research. Instead, they show an engagement
with new sources for interpreting the Black Death and a marked change of
mind in Herlihy’s conceptualization of the plague and its effects on medieval
societies.3
The essays also, of course, follow the main lines of his thinking. Already
in his first work on late medieval and Renaissance Italy he characterized the
Black Death of 1348 as “the great watershed” in medieval demographic and
economic history.4 He had begun to chisel away at the Malthusian approach
then current in the historiography of the plague in France and England as it had
been set by the authoritative works of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and M. M.
Postan.5 Herlihy’s analysis of Pistoia replaced mortality with fertility as the
critical variable for understanding Europe’s failure to recover from the plague
for over a century after its outbreak: “The failure of the birth rate to respond
to the stimulus of deaths, more even than deaths themselves, seems the root
cause of the shocking population plunge of the fourteenth century.”6
Nonetheless, in sharp contrast to the three texts of 1985, Herlihy’s
diagnosis of the plague circa 1965 was still enmeshed in the broad Malthusian
framework set by historians of the early 1960s. In the early 1970s, moreover,
the importance of Malthusian cycles had become more pronounced in his
work. In a “spectral analysis” of burial and death records, Herlihy and his
statistician colleagues drew a symbiotic relationship between cycles of
fertility and mortality in which the peaks in mortality were driven by fertility:
The cycle of death rates, we propose, is closely related to, and in some sense may be
considered in delayed reciprocal movement with, the cycle of birth rates. The high mortalities of
a major plague stimulated the formation of a large age cohort, relative to the older population, in
the following years, and this cohort was also likely to prepare another plague outbreak some
forty or more years later, when it was most actively reproducing.7

True, Herlihy had eloquently demonstrated the shortcomings of a

Malthusian model that stressed only the “positive” checks without any
discussion of the “moral constraints,” which Malthus emphasized in
subsequent editions of An Essay on the Principles of Population.8 By such a
reckoning the plague should have struck much earlier—in Pistoia, even before
the recurrence of famines in the early fourteenth century and possibly as early
as the mid-thirteenth century. Moreover, a crude Malthusian model was
inadequate for explaining the delay of European populations to recover their
losses during the fifteenth century. Yet in Herlihy’s work on Pistoia it was the
social, political, and economic conditions—overpopulation, over-extended
planting of wheat, burdensome taxes in the countryside heaped on those least
able to pay, and poor living standards for the mass of the population—that
formed the crucible from which pestilence, even if delayed, would emerge by
the mid-fourteenth century to change the ecology of Europe.
 In both his article of 1965 and his book on Pistoia Herlihy concluded his
discussion of the plague by turning to the account of the contemporary
chronicler of Florence, Giovanni Villani, himself struck down by the
pestilence of 1348. In his last days Villani had asked whether the disasters of
his day should be attributed to factors beyond human responsibility—blind
chance or the forces set in motion by celestial conjunctions—or whether they
were to be interpreted as divine retribution for the present-day sins of the
Florentines—“avarice, greed and usurious oppression of the poor.”9 Like
Villani, Herlihy in the 1960s chose the second explanation, which he rendered
into modern terms as man-made social factors to explain the plague’s
devastation of Europe.10
By 1985 Herlihy had changed his mind. Had he chosen to return to
Villani’s interpretive dilemma, he would have picked the first of the
Florentine chronicler’s explanations. For Herlihy’s analysis, the plague now
had little if anything to do with social forces. He had moved away from his
modified Malthusian frame-work of the 1960s, in which his stress on the role
of class and exploitation of the countryside might even be seen as an unstated
Marxist perspective (though Herlihy would have denied this interpretation).
By the 1980s he no longer saw late medieval society headed inexorably
towards a Malthusian disaster; instead, he saw it locked in a “stalemate” or
“deadlock.” The plague was not historically necessary, and without it Europe
may have well persisted with remarkably stable institutions and systems of
behavior for millennia. By his later interpretation, the Black Death had
become an external factor independent of the social, political, or even the
demographic environment. Once it had struck, however, it set Europe on a
new path almost totally unrelated to its late medieval social past.11
Why had Herlihy changed his mind? Part of the explanation might be
traced to a conference of 1983, during which the Italian demographer
Massimo Livi-Bacci, among others, had argued vigorously against any causal
link between malnutrition and plague or, for that matter, between malnutrition
and many other epidemic diseases. Indeed, it would appear that malnutrition
often served as a prophylactic against disease.12 In addition, as Herlihy’s first
essay attests, he was swayed by Bruce Campbell’s study of the Norfolk
village of Coltishall, in which Campbell argued that even the famines of
1314–1317 did not alter the “demographic status quo,” that the plague “was
the result not of economic but of biological factors,” and that it was “an
exogamous variable.”13
But what was even more crucial to Herlihy’s change of mind in
interpreting the distant past was the emergence in our own times of the
pestilence we have called AIDS. Indeed, Herlihy opens these essays on the
Black Death by pointing to the cholera epidemic of the 1820s as the stimulus
for modern historiographical interest in the late medieval plagues. He further
claims that society’s preoccupation with our own current pestilence similarly
has stimulated a renewed interest in the Black Death.14
But the rapid dissemination of AIDS, unlike that of typhus,15 cholera,16 or
tuberculosis later in the nineteenth century,17 cannot be pinned on social
conditions that may have arisen from urbanization, industrialization, or
inequalities in class structure. The origins of AIDS, as with the plague of
1348, remain more mysterious. AIDS too appears to have arisen ex-nihilo and
—despite the propaganda of religious and homophobic commentators—looks
to us, as the plague of 1348 did to the people of medieval Europe, like an
inexplicable and horrific exogamous calamity.18
While the etiology and spread of syphilis in the sixteenth century would
certainly make a better historical parallel to the present AIDS epidemic than
does the Black Death,19 Herlihy draws parallels from the Black Death
experience of the later Middle Ages to our present-day predicament. These
parallels lie largely in the history of attitudes. Perhaps stemming from the utter
mystery of these two epidemics in contrast to syphilis in the sixteenth, cholera
in the nineteenth, and tuberculosis in the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries20—all highly contagious diseases—AIDS and the Black Death
heightened popular distrust of expert opinion, particularly of the medical
profession,21 and have led more forcefully to suspicions, fears, and hatreds of
the alien.22 In the fourteenth century the plague gave rise to the spread of anti-
Semitism—the rumor and persecution of Jews as poisoners of wells23; today
it has reinvigorated fears and hatred of homosexuals and the poor. These
suggestions surely invite some closer comparative studies of the outbreak of
new diseases through modern history, all of which to a greater or lesser extent
have sought out scapegoats for blame and had beginnings that were clouded in
mystery in both the medical and lay communities.24
Finally, the AIDS epidemic may well have inspired Herlihy’s skepticism
about the methods commonly used since the late nineteenth century of
analyzing the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century plagues. The rapid mutations of
viruses and the appearance of new ones without any known historical
precedents should cause us to be wary of any match between diseases of the
past and those that have been clinically described since the end of the
nineteenth century. While bacteriologists and zoologists have recently
questioned whether the bubonic plague was the only or even the principal
disease in 1348 and in subsequent strikes of high mortality during the later
Middle Ages,25 the attempt to match medieval plague descriptions with
modern diseases may be wrongheaded, even if the reports of medieval
chroniclers and physicians can be trusted and deciphered in clinical terms.
Modern medicine and the rapid dissemination of AIDS have taught the layman
that new diseases can emerge in history without precise precedents, and that,
perhaps as mysteriously as they appeared, they can vanish from the pool of
infectious diseases. Thus medieval chronicles and doctors may not have been
so blind or foolish in failing to discover the rat-flea nexus as twentieth-
century historians have often assumed. As Herlihy concludes from what
contemporary chroniclers, story-tellers, and doctors said, as well as from
what they did not report, this failure to notice the rat-flea relation of Yersinia
pestis may be justified by the simple fact that the connection did not exist.26

In these essays, as in Herlihy’s historical writing more generally, the reader

will find no trace of any lackluster recounting of the old historical debates.
Instead, the author engages afresh with new sources as he continues to depend
on the old ones in formulating new ideas. Like a finely tuned detective story,
the first chapter marshals evidence to claim that the Black Death of 1348 was
most likely not the bubonic plague assumed by historians since the late
nineteenth century.27 Instead, Herlihy takes seriously the thesis of the zoologist
Graham Twigg, largely ignored or dismissed as nonhistorical by the rest of
the historical profession, who has shown that the plagues in late medieval
Britain could not possibly have been either pneumonic or bubonic.28 While
not completely agreeing with Twigg’s solution—that the epidemic of 1348–49
was the spread of anthrax—Herlihy expands Twigg’s argument against the
bubonic plague in Great Britain to Europe more generally, emphasizing the
complete absence of any contemporary evidence of a preceding epizootic
among rodents.
 Ingeniously, Herlihy reaches for another source of evidence heretofore
untapped by the historians of epidemics—the acts and processes for
conferring sainthood, later collected in abbreviated form in the Acta
Sanctorum. From these, he discovers that the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-
century laity sought out new spiritual patrons for protection against the plague,
reaching back to obscure figures such as the thirteenth-century Rose of
Viterbo, about whom stories of miracle cures for the later pestilence were
invented. In these accounts, similar to the descriptions by the most
authoritative doctor of the period, Guy de Chauliac, Pope Clement VI’s
physician at Avignon, Herlihy finds that the buboes characteristic of (though
not unique to) the bubonic plague were not the thing commonly described as
“the sign” of plague; instead, these sources refer to lenticulae or freckles,
which were more common to a number of other diseases including anthrax.29
The subsequent two chapters turn to the consequences of the plague for
European civilization writ large: first, the demographic and economic
consequences; second, those for the history of cultural attitudes. Again,
Herlihy emphasizes that the decisive transition in the late fourteenth century
from medieval to modern “systems of behavior” was not inevitable but
depended directly on that most grand and horrific of external variables, the
Black Death of 1348 and subsequent strikes of the disease against European
populations through the early fifteenth century. From these, Herlihy creates
two models of change: one regards the economic “system,” the other, the
demographic. In the economic sphere, Herlihy sees in the Black Death the
mother of technological advance as societies strove to create labor-saving
devices in the wake of population depletion. In the demographic system, he
finds a shift in population control from “positive checks,” such as disease,
war, and famine, to a post-plague demography controlled principally by
“preventive checks,” that is, controls that stemmed from changes in
inheritance practices, ages at marriage, and even birth control. Taking the
place of strikes of high mortality, these “preventive” checks would come to
distinguish Britain by the seventeenth century,30 and perhaps also other areas
of Europe yet to be systematically studied through the early modern period.
The final chapter turns to culture. Eschewing the debates founded on such
classic works as Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages,31 Millard
Meiss’s Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death,32 Alberto
Tenenti’s Il senso della morte,33 and Philippe Ariès’s The Hour of Our
Death,34 Herlihy turns to a new type of evidence, the rise in the frequency of
Christian first names given to newborns, to propose an intriguing hypothesis:
the plague’s role in the spread of Christianity as a part of popular culture.
Moreover, he gives new clarity and force to older themes such as the role of
plague in the dissemination of vernacular cultures and the rise of proto-
nationalist urges; he does not simply enumerate these as effects of the plague
by virtue of coming afterwards.35

Herlihy’s novel and bold conceptualizations will inspire students and

professional historians alike to rethink the plague along his broad lines of
interpretation: to refine or perhaps even to refute altogether some of his
sweeping generalizations. In regard to the post-plague demographic system in
which families limited the number of offspring to achieve or maintain greater
prosperity, an additional idea is suggested by his argument: with the Black
Death and its tragic onslaught, which by many accounts struck down a
disproportionate number of the young, a new, more cherishing view of
children arose during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As with many
of the plague’s reactions, its long- and short-term consequences were often
mirror opposites of one another. In the face of the 1348 unprecedented
disaster, fathers and mothers may well have abandoned their children, as one
contemporary chronicler or story-teller after another reported and repeated.
“Oh father, why have you abandoned me? … Mother, where have you gone?”
were among the laments recorded by the 1348 chronicler from Piacenza,
Gabrielle de’ Mussis.36 Boccaccio ended his lament over relatives
abandoning one another by reporting that “what is hardly believable, fathers
and mothers [abandoned] their children as though they were not their own,
disgusted by seeing or assisting them.”37 Yet by the time of the later onslaughts
of pestilence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, familial sentiments had
radically shifted. Here, the complaints of the post-plague William Langland
might be compared with those of the pre-plague Sienese poet Cecco
Angiolieri. Disinherited from his worldly possessions because of the selfish
pietistic zeal of his parents, Cecco penned his famous ode of familial hatred:
If I were death I would go to my father;
If I were life I would flee from him;
And I would do the same for my mother.38
In contrast, a century later, Langland criticized parents of the merchant classes
for spoiling their children, and suggested that the plague and rampant mortality
may have been the cause of their parental overindulgence:
Don’t let wealth spoil them while they are young
Nor for fear of the pestilence indulge them beyond reason.39

Beyond these literary impressions, the historian might turn to a more

systematic source—last wills and testaments—which at least for central and
northern Italy included large swathes of rural and urban populations as early
as the last decades of the thirteenth century.40 In samples from Tuscany and
Umbria, testaments show a steady progression in the importance of children.
Men and women alike whittled down long lists of itemized gifts for numerous
pious as well as nonpious causes to concentrate their attention on their
surviving offspring as the universal heirs, spelling out with increasing detail
the terms of these final allocations. By the early sixteenth century, the bulk of
last wills and testaments in central and northern Italy came to focus on
surviving sons. In near-religious terms, the children (usually but not always
the sons) were seen as the conduits and repositories for the continuation and
preservation of familial blood lines, which came to mark a new sense of
earthly immortality.41
As well as provoking ideas in sympathy with Herlihy’s broad lines of
argument, these essays will no doubt invite modifications and objections. Did
the Black Death mark a fundamental change in medical theory, leading toward
a new theory of contagion? Was the Black Death the central turning point in
the history of technology in Western Europe? Did the Black Death and its
onslaught on European populations in fact spur new labor-saving technology?
In arguing that the plague set off a new wave of technological ingenuity that
would lead inexorably to the Industrial Revolution, Herlihy points to labor-
saving devices invented after the Black Death of 1348. One of the most
provocative of his examples is Johann Gutenberg’s printing press, invented in
1453. This, he suggests, came to replace the large teams of monastic copyists
who, because of their cloistered life, may have been cut down more severely
than the general population by the plague. But if the historian looks more
closely at the period of the diffusion of this new technology instead of its date
of invention, a different relationship between technology and population
emerges. Although the printing press had been invented during the trough of
European population in the mid-fifteenth century, the “takeoff” in the printing
industry as marked by surviving publications (incunabula) did not occur until
the 1470s—that is, when the population of Europe was no longer falling or
even stagnant but was once again surging forward (see figure below).
Moreover, the most important centers of printing—Venice, Rome, and the
southern German cities and principalities—were not places of lagging
population growth but instead were experiencing the fastest demographic
growth in all of Europe.42
Nor was the immediate post-plague period or even the fifteenth century
particularly noted for technological advances in other sectors. For wool and
silk manufacture, the major breakthroughs (before the Industrial Revolution)
came earlier, indeed during the period of surplus labor in the late thirteenth
and early fourteenth centuries.43 The same might be said of agriculture.44
While the agricultural depression of the fifteenth century may have led to
some labor-saving devices such as a light one-stilt plough, other agricultural
practices—the expansion of complex field systems, the extensive planting of
vetches, the Hainault scythe—had clearly antedated the plague, spreading
through large parts of Europe in the early fourteenth century.45 The diffusion of
other technological innovations such as windmills, which the Crusaders
brought to the West in the twelfth century, depended not on labor scarcity but
on the great expansion of wheat production spawned by European
demographic expansion of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.46 For
Norfolk, Bruce Campbell and Mark Overton have recently argued that before
the agricultural revolution of the mid-eighteenth century, “all the technological
innovations that brought it about can be found as far back as the thirteenth
century.” In their survey of six centuries of yield ratios, the Black Death and
its aftermath were absolutely of no consequence to broad changes in Norfolk
agriculture.47
 Known Incunabula Survivals, 1454–1500

Finally, despite the upsurge in warfare in France and Italy during the
second half of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the plague did not
mark widespread innovations in military technology. While the invention of
the canon and gunpowder came earlier, in the thirteenth century,48 the so-
called Military Revolution came later, in the sixteenth century, and at a time of
population increase and even overpopulation.49
Second, Herlihy’s provocative analysis of Christian names as marking the
spread of Christianity through the unlearned layers of Western society is also
questionable, as indeed he later realized in one of his last publications.50
While the absence of saints’ names such as Giovanni, Antonio, Niccolò, and
Francesco in the Libro di Montaperti (1260) is striking in comparison to their
later predominance in the Florentine monastic necrologies of the fifteenth
century and the Catasto of 1427, a closer look at the chronology of naming
practices does not show the Black Death of 1348 as the watershed. As
Charles Marie de la Roncière has shown, the change in the choice of names
came earlier, with the spread of mendicant preaching through the countryside
during the first half of the fourteenth century.51 Indeed, the Black Death of
1348, at least in the short run, had the very opposite effect. The rural
populations of the Florentine contado recoiled against the popular naming
practices of the past several generations; instead of increasing, mendicant
saints’ names such as Francesco declined during the second half of the
fourteenth century.52
Later, Herlihy even questioned whether the appearance of saints’ names
can be taken as evidence of Christianization, suggesting that they express
instead psychological needs for protectors in the face of adversity. What
exactly caused that adversity remains a mystery in Herlihy’s account, since the
change in naming practices came about fifty years before the advent of
plague.53 In his later essay, Herlihy stressed the reduction of the stock of
personal names over his earlier emphasis on the change to saints’ names.
That, again, was a change that preceded the Black Death and that was spurred
by a growth in both ecclesiastical and secular bureaucracies during the
thirteenth century.54
Herlihy’s sweeping analyses for Western Europe cry out for comparative
investigations. Were the social, political, and psychological consequences of
the Black Death as uniform throughout Western Europe as Herlihy’s essays
imply?55 And how do we account for the sharp differences between eastern
and western Europe in economic and social developments set off by the
plague56 or, even more profoundly, between the West and the Middle East,
where the plague was as virulent if not more so than in the West?57
In the Moslem areas of the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, the plague
appears to have set in motion a chain of reactions just opposite to that
described by Herlihy and others for the West. As against the rapid
dismemberment of regimes and scores of popular revolts in the West, Mamluk
political control was unshaken by the plague experience. Further, far more
than may have been the case in the West, commerce, industry, and agricultural
productivity declined rapidly in the East after the plague and failed to recover
during the fifteenth century. In the Moslem countries surveyed by Michael
Dols, the decline of rural population in no way aided “the long-term
improvement of agrarian technology or the re-allocation of resources” as,
some have argued, it did in Western Europe.58 Nor did the Black Death set off
bitter factional rivalries in the East between Moslem neighbors or foster
hatred of aliens and waves of anti-Semitic pogroms as it did in numerous
localities throughout Western Europe. How do we explain these differences?
Is it enough to point to the plague alone to understand these broad
developments and differences in politics, economy, technology, and mentality
between the East and the West?59
Finally, historians may draw different lessons from our contemporary
experience with the AIDS epidemic and the eruptions and rapid mutations of
new viruses at ever frightening rates from those evocatively proposed by
Herlihy. Indeed, in contrast to Campbell’s and Herlihy’s utter skepticism
about the relationship between societal conditions and the great mortalities set
in course in 1348, future historians might emphasize once again the
importance of the underlying social conditions. In parallel with Marc Bloch’s
interpretation of the plague as a “psychological fact” and the development of
late medieval trade as the necessary precondition for the plague’s
dissemination over Europe,60 they might draw on recent epidemiology and the
explanation of the diffusion of new viruses over the past decade as the result
of certain societal factors—rapid global migration and mass travel—that have
paved the way for the new “superhighways” of viral infections.61
No doubt the courageous interpretations and creative syntheses found in
these three essays will stimulate other questions and objections, and it is in
this that I see the principal merit of their posthumous publication. These
lectures show the breadth of Herlihy’s historical oeuvre, from broad sweeps
in reinterpreting Western Civilization to the creative use of quantitative
methods to ferret out new facts from previously untapped medieval sources.62
At the same time, these essays underscore what Anthony Molho has recently
claimed about David Herlihy and the direction of late medieval history:
The economic and social consequences of the ecological balance have been studied
systematically only in the past quarter century. However recent, these studies have themselves
transformed our vision of European society at the close of the Middle Ages. No scholar has
contributed more effectively to this view than David Herlihy.63
 ONE

Bubonic Plague: Historical

Epidemiology and the Medical
Problems

The Black Death of 1348 and 1349, and the recurrent epidemics of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were the most devastating natural disasters
ever to strike Europe.1 We cannot cite exact losses; there are no global
figures. The populations of some cities and villages, in areas as far removed
from each other as England and Italy, fell in the late decades of the fourteenth
century by 70 or 80 percent.2 The more we learn of the late medieval
collapse in human numbers, the more awesome it appears. Europe about
1420 could have counted barely more than a third of the people it contained
one hundred years before.
This was Europe’s greatest known ecological disaster, and also the last
of such magnitude it has had to endure. The epidemics of modern history
seem mild when compared with the fury of the Black Death. A principal
thesis here is that the two salient characteristics of the population collapse of
the late Middle Ages—Europe’s deepest and also its last—are not unrelated.
The devastating plagues elicited a social response that protected the
European community from comparable disasters until the present.
The great medieval epidemics have in recent years attracted considerable
attention from historians. There are several reasons for this. In part it reflects
the contemporary effort of historians to recapture more of the past than their
predecessors accomplished. Ultimately, they would like to reconstruct the
entire environment, the total life situation, that prevailed in past epochs. In
this quest for total history, they of course include the cultural climate—ideas,
ideologies, beliefs, myths and values—that circumscribed human life. But the
physical environment also demands consideration. How did human
communities interact with their natural surroundings? What were the
ecological systems of the past? Indisputably, microorganisms play a crucial
role in all systems of human ecology. Parasitic microbes also have a history,
dark to be sure, but intimately connected with that of their human hosts.
Then too, current interest in past plagues owes a good deal to present
concerns about public health. One hundred years ago, the great bacteriologist
Louis Pasteur declared: “It is now in the power of man to cause all parasitic
diseases to disappear from the world.”3 The science he helped found went on
to spectacular successes. But the victory has not proved total, and the
microbiotic legions have proved to be unexpectedly resilient. The disease
called AIDS, mysteriously appearing, was once mostly limited to certain
clearly delineated social groups; but it now seems poised to make forays into
the general population. Almost all current descriptions of AIDS, if they are
written with some historical awareness, carry allusions to earlier epidemics,
and to the king of them all, the Black Death. An AIDS researcher at New
York University was quoted as claiming that this new disease will “probably
prove to be the plague of the millennium.”4 Not long ago, the accounts of the
medieval epidemics, preserved in the great warehouse of history, were
regarded as irrelevant to modern life. AIDS has made them relevant again.
How do people behave, when their environment becomes life-threatening?
History here can serve; it remembers how societies coped in the past with
the threat of mors repentina, unexpected death.
The results of much recent research on the medieval epidemics and their
impact can be summarized. Some personal interpretations about what they
were and what they did can be offered. The plague itself cannot be directly
examined. Always it is filtered through the reports of witnesses, who might
have been unperceptive, uninformed, gullible, panicked, or eager to prove
that they had read earlier accounts of dramatic mortalities. For example,
medical writers of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages recognized only
one type of epidemic disease marked by only one kind of symptom,
inflammations, boils, or buboes in the area of the groin.5 The authority of the
ancients may have blinded later witnesses to other symptoms, indicating the
presence of other types of epidemic disease. Then too, the plagues touched
every aspect of social life, but in doing so they became intertwined with
every other social influence. From the matrix of forces shaping the late
medieval world, it is impossible to factor out those attributable to plague
alone. The significance of plague in medieval history can be easily
exaggerated. But more easily still, it can be, and usually has been, ignored. It
did not of itself redirect European history. But neither can the new directions
of European history be appreciated without recognition of its role.
What was the Black Death really?
The name, Black Death, was never used in the Middle Ages.6 Apparently
the first to coin the term were Danish and Swedish chroniclers of the
sixteenth century. “Black” here connoted not a symptom or a color but
“terrible,” “dreadful.” The name was slow to achieve currency in the other
north-European languages, German and English.
Then, in the early nineteenth century, much as today, a new disease
awakened interest in the old. Cholera invaded Europe and America; though
not extraordinarily contagious, it was ghastly in the sufferings it imposed. In
1832 a German physician named J. F. K. Hecker, directly motivated by the
menace of cholera,published an essay on the pestilence of 1348 and 1349.
Dr. Hecker expressly intended his essay for “medical doctors and educated
non-doctors.” The title he chose for his essay was Der schwarze Tod, the
Black Death.7 The essay won immediate attention, thanks largely to the panic
which cholera was everywhere inciting. It was quickly translated into
English in 1833, and was several times reprinted in the nineteenth century.8
Hecker’s large readership, especially among doctors, helped make “Black
Death” the standard term in English for the great pestilence of 1348. But he
may not have been the sole source of its diffusion. In 1823 the wife of an
Anglican minister, Elizabeth Cartwright Penrose, wrote a history of England,
ostensibly for the instruction of her own children.9 The work, which
purported to record conversations between a mother and her children about
English history, achieved the status of a school textbook and was many times
reprinted, both in England and America. She too uses the term Black Death to
describe the pestilence of 1349, but gives no source for her choice. At all
events, her textbook made the name familiar to the schooled population of
England and America, even as Dr. Hecker established its usage in savant
circles. However, the name has remained primarily a north-European
coinage; even today, for example, it is rarely encountered in Italian works,
and its occasional appearance primarily reflects Anglo-American influences.
The modern medical diagnosis of the disease is chiefly based on research
and clinical observations made at the turn of the last century. Most notably in
1894, in China, the plague emerged from the inland provinces of Hunan and
Canton, where it was endemic, to attack the port city of Hong Kong.
Classically a water-borne disease, it went on to menace port cities and their
hinterlands all over the world. A Swiss microbiologist named Alexandre
Yersin, who had trained at the Pasteur Institute at Paris, was then serving in
the French colonial service in Indo-China. He hurried to Hong Kong and set
up a laboratory there, in hopes of containing the disease before it struck
southeast Asia. In 1894 he isolated the bacillus and went on to develop a
serum for the treatment of plague.10 The disease is consequently called
pasteurella pestis, after the Pasteur Institute, or, more commonly today,
Yersinia pestis, after Alexandre Yersin.
The efforts to contain the disease at Hong Kong were not entirely
successful. In 1896 the plague, apparently brought from the Chinese port,
struck the city of Bombay and an adjoining district called the presidency.
From India and China we possess extensive clinical descriptions of the
character and course of the epidemic. Raging at Bombay until 1899, it
flickered sporadically in other ports—Oporto in Portugal, Glasgow in
Scotland, and Sidney in Australia. Even American ports, such as San
Francisco, passed uneasy moments. But except in India, it could not break
through the defenses which centuries of struggle had raised against it.
In current understanding, plague is primarily a disease of small
mammals.11 It survives indefinitely in populations of wild rodents—prairie
dogs, ground squirrels, marmots, and the like. These wild populations are its
natural reservoirs. But it can infect rodents, such as grey rats, that live in or
close to human habitations. Humans, on the other hand, are always its
secondary, almost accidental victims. Its principal vector, the rat flea, prefers
to avoid human beings. The flea will leave the infected rat only when the
rodent dies and grows cold, and will seek out a human host only when a live,
warm rat is not accessible.
Modern clinical observations of the disease identify three types of
plague, though not all are due to the same bacillus. These are bubonic,
septicemic, and pneumonic. The presence of bacilli, whether in glandular
inflammations called buboes, in the blood, or in the sputum, is the basis for
this differentiation. The most common of the three types is bubonic. To judge
from the Chinese and Indian data, bubonic plague accounts for three-quarters
and more of all cases.
Injected into its human host by the flea’s bite, the plague bacilli pass an
incubation period of from two to eight days. A soaring fever then ensues,
climbing as high as 105 degrees, and it is often accompanied by convulsions,
vomiting, giddiness, intolerance to light, and agonizing pain in the limbs. The
patient frequently appears dazed or stupefied. On the second or third day
after the inception of fever, swellings, about the size of an egg or small
apple, occur in the lymph glands closest to the location of the initial bite,
usually in the groin, but sometimes in the armpits or the neck. These are the
famous buboes, and much pain accompanies their formation. Left alone, they
will usually suppurate and burst. Petechiae, small crimson or livid spots,
appear on the patient’s skin in severe cases. If the patient does not succumb
to exhaustion, heart failure, or internal hemorrhage, convalescence begins
after eight to ten days.
The more lethal forms of plague, apparently always fatal, are the
septicemic and pneumonic. At the onset of septicemic plague the bacilli
invade the bloodstream in such massive numbers that the patient dies before
the buboes can form—typically within 24 to 36 hours. Pneumonic plague is,
as its name implies, a form of pneumonia triggered by the plague bacillus.
The patient breathes rapidly and must gasp for air, produces a watery and
profuse expectoration, and develops edema of the lungs. Alone among the
types of plague, pneumonic can pass directly from one human to another.
Drops of saliva carry the bacillus, and are spread about by coughing,
sneezing, or simple conversation.
How well do the etiology and epidemiology of modern plague fit what
we know about the medieval epidemics? In the now largely accepted
reconstruction, the original reservoir of the medieval disease was the
population of wild rodents, specifically marmots or a kind of large marmot
called tarbagan, that inhabited the arid plateau of central Asia, the area that
was the Soviet Republic of Turkestan. There the disease was, and is,
enzootic. But for centuries it left untouched the indigenous, nomadic
populations. Apparently rat fleas do not like the smell of horses, and the
nomads did not remain in close proximity to infected rodent populations.
Several events disturbed the ecological stability of the area in the early
fourteenth century. Western chroniclers speak of earthquakes and volcanic
eruptions in eastern lands, but their true effects are impossible to
determine.12 Social and political changes were probably more important, or
at least more visible. A great silk route connecting Europe with China ran
through the region, and traffic across it had grown intense by the early
fourteenth century. The commercial towns of Italy were eager to trade with
fabled Cathay. From the middle of the thirteenth century, Italians founded
colonies on the northern littoral of the Black Sea. From these stations
missionaries and merchants, Marco Polo among them, successfully traversed
the overland highway, all the way to China. To serve its flourishing
commerce, post stations were set up along its course. Towns grew there too,
bringing with them complex social and political organizations. The settled
inhabitants of towns were apparently more vulnerable to plague infection
than the wandering nomads.
Some years ago, a Soviet archeologist named Khvolson excavated a
cemetery of Nestorian Christians at a town called Issyk Kul, south of Lake
Balkhash. He noted heavy mortalities in 1338–39; three gravestones actually
identify plague as the cause of death. This seems to be the first appearance of
the epidemic that would devastate Europe.
In the early 1340s the plague, moving westward along the silk route,
penetrated the Mongol Khanate of the Golden Horde, with its capital at Sarai
on the lower Volga River. But it still was contained within the great Eurasian
landmass. To spread widely and quickly, and to take on the proportions of a
true pandemic, the plague must cross water. Contact with water ignites its
latent powers, like oil thrown upon fire.
It struck water at the Black Sea port of Kaffa, modern Theodosia, in the
Crimea. The Genoese had founded the colony about 1266. A khan of the
Golden Horde, named Yanibeg, besieged the town in 1343 and again in
1345–46. In a determined effort to take the town, he catapulted the bodies of
plague victims over its walls. The Genoese hurriedly dumped these
biological bombs into the sea. But the infection caught on.13 In entering
Kaffa, the disease broke onto the far-flung trading network of the Genoese.
The coastline of the entire Mediterranean Sea now lay open to attack.
The now rapid diffusion of the plague through Europe followed a
characteristic pattern. In a first phase, the plague leapt from infected port to
one still uncontaminated. It then fell quiescent for a while, usually during the
cold months of winter. Then, in a second phase, usually in the following
spring, it invaded the hinterland and simultaneously moved by sea to the next
accessible port. These again served as bases, for forays inland, and for
farther leaps by sea. The deadly cycle was renewed.
Thus, in 1347, plague leapt from Kaffa to Constantinople and then to
Cairo and Messina in Sicily. A Byzantine observer noted its pattern of
infesting first the ports, then the hinterland: “A plague attacked almost all the
sea coasts of the world and killed most of the people. For it swept not only
through Pontus, Thrace and Macedonia, but even Greece, Italy and all the
Islands, Egypt, Lybia, Judea and Syria.”14 From Messina, it was carried in
early 1348 to Pisa, Genoa, Venice, Marseilles, and Barcelona, paused, and
then moved like a well-drilled army forth from its maritime bases into the
hinterland. It struck Florence in April of 1348; Giovanni Boccaccio, in the
preface to the Decameron, has left a classical description of its devastation.
In the north of Europe, the plague reached Melcombe Regis, the present
Weymouth, in the shire of Dorset in southwest England, in June of 1348.
Apparently, it rode the merchant ships coming from the Gascon ports of
Bordeaux or Bayonne, then under English rule.15 Again it paused, smoldering
over the winter. But in 1349 it flared with power, raged through Britain as far
north as the Scottish highlands, and wrecked havoc on the eastern half of
Ireland. Bubonic plague is today regarded as a tropical disease, but it had no
difficulty crossing the waters of the North and Baltic seas, that is, the
northern Mediterranean. Movement from port to port, respite, then invasion
of the hinterland: the familiar pattern holds. Calais, Bergen, Cologne,
Copenhagen, Lübeck, and Novgorod in distant Russia now caught the
infection from incoming ships. And it advanced deep into the eastern part of
the Continent. In 1352 it struck Moscow; both the grand duke of Muscovy and
the patriarch of the Russian Church were counted among its victims. It swept
still farther south, apparently as far as Kiev. Launched at Kaffa in the Crimea,
and now attaining Kiev some 700 kilometers to the north, the plague almost
closed a deadly noose around Europe.
Was this Yersinia pestis, bubonic plague as it is known through recent
occurrences? Most historians think so. Many witnesses mention boils or
buboes found upon the bodies of its victims. For example, a Florentine
chronicler, Matteo Villani, gives the following description of the Black
Death:
It was a plague that touched people of every condition, age and sex. They began to spit blood
and then they died—some immediately, some in two or three days, and some in a longer time.
And it happened that whoever cared for the sick caught the disease from them or, infected by
the corrupt air, became rapidly ill and died in the same way. Most had swellings in the groin,
and many had them in the left and right armpits and in other places; one could almost always
find an unusual swelling somewhere on the victim’s body.16

As buboes are the classic symptom and even give their name to plague, this
now conventional diagnosis appears well founded.
But many puzzles remain. Perhaps the biggest puzzle touches on a
characteristic of bubonic epidemiology which the sources do not mention. To
my knowledge, not a single Western chronicler notes the occurrence of an
epizootic, the massive mortalities of rats, which ought to have preceded and
accompanied the human plague. Humans, in the classic bubonic
epidemiology, can contract the disease only from a dying rodent; unless the
rodents die, the human population remains untouched.17
Epizootics were very visible during the observed plagues of China and
of India. As one witness at Canton in 1894 reported, “the rats … would come
out of their holes in broad daylight even, and tumble about in a dazed
condition and die.”18 One Chinese official collected 22,000 dead rats—we
aren’t told why.19 Albert Camus, in La Peste, his fictional account of the
plague in a North African city, appropriately makes the observed sickness
and death of rats the first indication of the approaching human epidemic.20
But witnesses watching the disease in its repeated onslaughts over centuries
of European history miss this omen. Or did they miss it; did it in fact occur?
The problematic connection of epidemic to a preceding epizootic
highlights another puzzle: how could the disease have spread so quickly and
so powerfully, over land as well as water? Humans cannot infect other
humans,21 and the grey rat is allegedly a homebody that will not migrate
spontaneously. The mechanisms by which bubonic plague diffuses in a human
population are singularly cumbersome. Some historians avoid these
difficulties by attributing the high mortalities to the pneumonic form of the
disease, which could be carried and spread by humans.22 But this does not
remove all the difficulties. The great medieval epidemics usually show a
pronounced seasonal rhythm. Typically, they gathered strength as the weather
warmed, and reached maximum virulence in late summer or early autumn,
when temperatures were at their warmest. Cool weather in late autumn and
winter dissipated their power. This cycle does not suggest a form of
pneumonia. Pneumonic plague should have worsened in winter, when people
stayed indoors, huddled around the sources of heat and breathing the same
stale air.
Nor does a diagnosis of bubonic plague fit all the symptoms noted in the
contemporary accounts. Guy de Chauliac, a physician and surgeon serving
the papal court at Avignon, identifies two forms of the disease.23 The first
and more virulent of the two appeared early in 1348; it was marked by high
fever and coughing of blood. Death came very quickly—in three days—and it
was so contagious that the sick persons allegedly even passed on the
infection by their glances alone. No buboes formed, and the symptoms more
closely resemble those of galloping consumption than plague. The second
type appeared later in the year and did produce buboes, but was less deadly
and less contagious.24 Another physician at Avignon, Raymond Chalin de
Vinario (or Raymond Chalmel de Viviers who flourished between 1373 and
1388) mentions as symptomatic of the plague skin eruptions, pustulae or
pustules which appeared in the groin, legs, head, arms, or shoulders.25 They
were livid in color, and numerous enough to form a rash over large areas of
the body. The common people, he tells us, called this rash the “plague
girdle.”
In investigating the medical aspects of the plague, the great need is for
clear and precise descriptions of the disease and its symptoms. The Black
Death itself certainly inspired much closer inspection at the time of all the
sick and dying and great interest in the nature of their illnesses. At Florence,
for example, from at least 1377, the commune required that undertakers
report all burials, which were entered into registers called Libri dei morti,
“Books of the Dead.”26 From at least 1424, the Florentine undertakers were
also reporting the apparent cause of death. Unhappily, they did so only
occasionally, whenever plague was in the vicinity and an epidemic was
feared. To identify those who died of plague, the scribes entered the words
“di segno,” “with the sign,” in the margin alongside the burial entry, and for
good measure added a big “P” in front of the names. They do not, however,
state what they took to be the certain sign of death from plague.
 What was this sign? Another kind of record carries many exact
descriptions of medieval illnesses, but this has not, to my knowledge, been
used in the study of historic diseases. These are the acts or processes used to
judge candidates for sainthood.27 Since the early thirteenth century, the
papacy claimed the exclusive right to canonize saints. It created tribunals and
set up elaborate procedures to judge the holiness of each reputed servant of
God. An essential part of the process was proof that the candidate had
worked miracles, either before or after death. Most miracles involved cures.
Witnesses claiming that they had been healed or had seen a healing came
forward, and their depositions draw a striking picture of medieval morbidity.
Many such depositions are published, though usually only in part, in the great
collection of hagiographic texts known as the Acta Sanctorum.28
Some saints were specialists in curing plague. One of them was Rose of
Viterbo in Italy, who died about 1252. She lapsed into obscurity soon after
her death, and no contemporary recorded her life. But the devastating
epidemics inspired a frantic search for heavenly patrons. Rose was
rediscovered when the great epidemic struck Viterbo in 1450, and she
responded by effecting many cures. In gratitude for her help, the government
pressured the Pope to initiate canonization procedures, and many citizens
came forward to testify concerning recent cures.
Some depositions mention buboes. “In the year of the Lord 1448, in the
month of July, a certain Angelina, daughter of Tozio Lorenzetti, of Viterbo,
was gravely sick of pestilence, with two [buboes] in the groin and one in the
arm.”29 Others refer to the disease “which in the vulgar tongue is called
aguinaglia.”30 This old Italian word for the plague derives from the term for
groin. But many others mention fistulae, skin lesions of some sort found
typically on the shins.31 As the fistulae remained for years—one deposition
mentions eight—the illness may have been a form of tuberculosis rather than
plague.
Unlike the Florentine undertakers, the witnesses of Viterbo describe the
“sign” that infallibly identified death from plague. It was not the buboes.
“Thus all the signs that death was coming upon her were seen, especially
since throughout her whole body the signs which are vulgarly called
lenticulae appeared to such an extent that everyone despaired of her life.”32
Another deposition relates: “and already the signs of death had appeared
upon her, which are vulgarly called lenticulae.” We read further: “Peter
Dominus, when he was about six years old in 1450, was racked by an
intolerable fever, and the sign came upon him.”33 But his nurse and relatives
forced the sick boy to drink water that had washed Rose’s hands (her body
had been exhumed). “Without any delay the fever ceased together with the
sign.” The sign is not specified, but there is no mention of buboes.
The key word here, lenticulae, is the same as the vernacular Italian
word, lentiggini, “freckles.” The sense seems to be a rash or splotches
formed of pustules or boils. Another deposition refers to pestilentialis
punturae, “pestilential points.”34
The “sign,” in other words, which contemporaries took to be the surest
indication of death from plague, was not the bubo,35 but darkish points or
pustules which covered large areas of the body. Cases of true bubonic plague
sometimes produce petechiae, but the symptom does not seem universal or
even common, and could not be taken as the sure sign of plague infection.36
Can the epidemics of the Middle Ages then be medically identified? In a
book published in 1984, an epidemiologist named Graham Twigg tentatively
identified the medieval epidemics as anthrax.37 Anthrax can produce the
characteristic swellings which might be mistaken for buboes, and it can also
come in pulmonary or pneumonic form. But historically, it has certainly never
struck human populations in epidemic proportions.
We still have much to learn of the etiology and epidemiology of medieval
pestis. It is at least certain it comes in epidemic outbursts. It rages in warm
weather, and this suggests some association with contaminated food and
water. Its victims always develop a high fever and sometimes delirium.
Buboes frequently appear, but the most common sign of a plague mortality
are lenticulae,spots or pustules covering large areas of the body.
Unfortunately for certain identification, many fevers share these traits, but no
one of them, including bubonic plague, shows them all. A fulminant rash
appears in cases of typhoid and typhus fever, and both can sustain epidemics.
Other symptoms—the presence of skin lesions over long periods, the spitting
of blood, even inflammation of the lymph glands—suggest forms of
tuberculosis. Perhaps different diseases were responsible for the epidemics
of different years. Perhaps too they sometimes worked together
synergistically to produce the staggering mortalities. Finally, the plague
bacilli may have taken on variant forms, aping other diseases in the
pathology they produced. Microbiologists have identified at least two such
variants.38 One they call Yersinia pseudo-tuberculosis, because of the
similarity of its pathology to true tuberculosis. A second is Yersinia
enterocolita, which, like typhoid or typhus, is primarily seated in the lower
digestive track. But it remains hard to know whether these mutants existed in
the Middle Ages.
The question as to the true nature of the great medieval epidemics
remains open. But three conclusions seem justified. The present
understanding of the medical nature of the plague is inadequate. But we have
not exhausted the sources that record its symptoms, and here the depositions
taken in processes of canonization appear especially promising. And the
plague bacillus itself seems not to have been stable, and probably has not
even today exhausted its capacity to evolve into new forms. It is not at all
certain that the diseases we observe today are the same that troubled our
ancestors.

Why were the medieval populations so vulnerable to these killing diseases?

Many historians, dissatisfied with medical explanations, have looked to
social factors to explain the catastrophic losses. Two proposed explanations
have elicited much lively discussion. One is based on Malthusian principles,
the other on Marxist.
In 1798 the English clergyman Thomas Malthus published the first edition
of his influential Essay on the Principle of Population.39 In it he concluded
that human populations would tend to expand up to and beyond the limits of
their food supplies. When they passed those limits, a reckoning was
inevitable. The reckoning took the form of famines, epidemics, wars, and the
soaring mortality resulting from them. These “positive checks,” as he called
them, violently reduced the community’s numbers to a size that its resources
could support.
Several historians maintain that the great population debacle of the
fourteenth century was itself a classical Malthusian crisis, triggered by
excessive numbers of people. Among the most prominent advocates of such a
view have been the late M. M. Postan in England, and Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie in France.40 Their conclusion—that Europe was overpopulated on
the eve of the Black Death—rests on two types of evidence, direct and
indirect. The direct evidence is the sheer size that many European
communities had attained by ca. 1300. To cite only one out of many possible
examples, the Italian region of Tuscany at its medieval height, according to
the estimates of Enrico Fiumi, was inhabited by probably two million
people.41 It would not hold such numbers again until after 1850. With its
poorly productive economy and stagnant technology, how could medieval
Tuscany have supported so big a population? It could not support it, the
argument runs, and famines and wars, and the Black Death itself, were the
consequences.
The indirect evidence of overpopulation rests primarily on the history of
cereal prices and the occurrences of famine. Basic foodstuffs were costly in
the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. One price list from Norfolk,
from 1290 and 1348, shows there were nineteen years when wheat prices
were so high as to indicate dearth and hunger.42 In Languedoc between 1302
and 1348, the years of scarcity were twenty, nearly the same as the twenty-
seven years of adequate food supplies.43 More dramatic than price series in
measuring population pressures against the food supply were the
appearances of true famines. In northern Europe, a major famine, known
traditionally as the “great hunger,” persisted for three years, from 1314 to
1317. Famine struck also right before the Black Death, in 1346 and 1347, in
both north and south. A Florentine, Giovanni Morelli, attributes the high
mortality of the Black Death to famine the previous year. Not twenty out of
one hundred people, he reports, had bread. The rest lived on herbs and vile
plants; grazing like cattle, they filled the countryside. “Think,” he explains,
“how their bodies were affected.”44 In France, Simon de Couvin affirmed:
“The one who was poorly nourished by unsubstantial food fell victim to the
merest breath of the disease; the impoverished crowd of common folk died a
welcome death, since for them life was death.”45
Malthusian pressures against the food supply are very apparent in pre-
plague Europe, as a huge population struggled to live on scant resources. But
was there a Malthusian reckoning? There are grounds for disbelief. European
population movements in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries do not adhere
very closely to Malthusian predictions. It is not known when the medieval
population peaked; the documents are full of gaps, and regional variations
undoubtedly were considerable. It is, however, certain that European
population levels were already high, at least from the last decades of the
thirteenth century. Hence the Black Death did not strike against a population
recklessly adding to its size, but one that had been stable for fifty to a
hundred years before 1348. If the Black Death was a response to excessive
human numbers, it should have arrived several decades earlier. Moreover, if
Europe was overpopulated in 1348, was it still overpopulated later in the
century, when the number of people had fallen to half of what it had been?
And yet the population continued to fall. It did not stabilize until the opening
decades of the fifteenth century, and even then remained stagnant at very low
levels for another fifty years. Not until 1460 or 1470 does it again begin to
grow. These movements of deep decline, long stability, and slow recovery
are inexplicable, on the assumption that resources and their availability alone
dominate demographic cycles. A British historian, Bruce M. S. Campbell,
who studied the Black Death in an English village, Coltishall, concludes:
“The extraordinarily prolonged demographic recession which followed the
advent of plague at Coltishall, as elsewhere in the country, defies simple
Malthusian … logic.”46
The role of famines in affecting population movements is also
problematic. The many famines preceding the Black Death, even the “great
hunger” of 1314 to 1317, did not result in any appreciable reduction in
population levels. They pale besides plague as a waster of human numbers.
Even in modern European history, with the exception of the potato blight in
Ireland in 1847, famines seem never to have taken exceptional tolls, and
never to have reversed the dominant demographic trend.47 Nor do there seem
to be direct linkages between famine and plague, malnutrition and disease.
Under certain conditions, malnutrition can even work as a prophylactic
against infection. Bacteria need many of the same nutrients as their human
hosts. When those nutrients are lacking, the germs cannot multiply. It has even
been claimed, although not convincingly proved, that persons prone to
anemia—chiefly menstruating women and growing children—enjoyed a
certain immunity against plague.48 The bacilli found insufficient free iron in
the blood to support their own fast multiplication. Campbell is doubtless
correct in his further conclusion: “none [of the fourteenth-century plagues]
had anything whatever to do with prevailing economic conditions. Plague is
an exogenous variable and as such is neither easily nor happily
accommodated within an exclusively Malthusian or Marxist interpretation of
events.”49
There are also conceptual difficulties with the Malthusian argument.
When is a community overpopulated? Presumably, when it fails to maintain
some known standard of subsistence. But that is necessarily a relative, not an
absolute measure, which will vary from community to community and from
period to period. A count of the hearths of Tuscany at about 1300 makes the
region appear very crowded indeed to a modern observer. But what did this
mean in real terms? Many Tuscans went hungry, and many were undoubtedly
malnourished. But somehow people managed to survive. Until the arrival of
plague, the region held its numbers rather well.
Malthus, in sum, seems mistaken in his conclusion that populations grow
relentlessly,50 and that violent adjustments downward have to occur. The
medieval experience shows us not a Malthusian crisis but a stalemate, in the
sense that the community was maintaining at stable levels very large numbers
over a lengthy period. In Tuscany, under these crowded conditions, many
lived in misery, but somehow they coped. Malthusian deadlock, rather than
crisis, seems the more appropriate term to describe the demographic state of
Europe before the epidemics.
A final weakness of the Malthusian interpretation is its failure to
consider divisions within medieval society, especially between rich and
poor. Surely rich and poor were not subject to the dearth of resources in the
same way. Marxist critics in particular have dwelt upon this omission, even
as they propose their own explanation for the crisis of the closing Middle
Ages.
Marxism makes the balance of classes and the class struggle the chief
motor of historical change. Marxist historiography has been from its origins
antagonistic to Malthusianism in any form. Exploitation, not overcrowding,
explains human misery, and insurrection, not contraception, is the right
response. Among the chief architects and advocates of a Marxist
interpretation have been an American, Robert Brenner, and a Frenchman,
Guy Bois. In a article published in 1976 in the journal Past and Present, rich
in theory though not in data, Brenner launched a spirited criticism of the
Malthusian thesis.51 Basically he argued that the plague was common to all
Europe, but social and economic changes were very different from one
region to another. Malthus was not the master of the game; Marx was. Only
social structure can explain the regional evolutions. Plagues came and went,
but classes and their tensions remained. Late medieval society carried this
mark, not the sign of the plague, upon its body.
 Guy Bois, in a study of eastern Normandy in the late Middle Ages,
published in 1976 and now translated into English, has developed the most
elaborate Marxian model of social and political change across the late
Middle Ages.52 His data show the same shocking reduction in population
with which we are familiar. Between the early fourteenth and the early
fifteenth century, the population of eastern Normandy collapsed by 70 or 80
percent. Were plagues responsible? Bois thinks not. They occurred in the
middle of the fourteenth century, and the population was still declining
afterwards. They also occurred in the early sixteenth century, and the
population continued to grow. They did not, in other words, redirect the
dominant trends. The real driver in this demographic debacle was a crisis in
the social order, what Bois calls the crisis of feudalism.
To understand that crisis it is necessary first to appreciate the “feudal
mode of production,” its characteristics and its contradictions. The basic unit
of production in this feudal mode was the small peasant farm, worked with
an essentially stagnant technology. The only growth the system allowed was
extensive, that is, the expansion of the cultivated area and the multiplication
of farm units. But growth under the feudal mode was subject to the law of
diminishing returns. As cultivation extended onto poorer soils, so the returns
to the average family farm necessarily diminished. In eastern Normandy, the
lords monopolized political power and used it to extract rents from the
peasants. But the peasants still controlled actual production and the
distribution of the harvests. This was a fundamental flaw, or contradiction, in
Marxist terminology, in the system. As peasant income diminished, they paid
lower and lower rents; the support of their own families had first claim upon
them. Initially, the lords did not suffer from declining per-family rents. The
continuing expansion of the cultivated area and the multiplication of rent-
paying units at first compensated for the lower rents that each family
delivered.
But at a certain moment, which Bois dates to about 1315, the decline in
per-family rents overcame the increase coming from the larger number of
farms. From that moment on, the lords faced continuous shrinkage in the total
revenues they collected. Bois calls this a “crisis of feudal rent,” and claims it
engendered a crisis of feudalism itself.
The lords had to seek alternate sources of revenue. They took to robbery
and pillage—the direct expropriation of peasant wealth. They also hired
themselves out as mercenaries. And they pressured their overlords, notably
the king, to wage wars against their neighbors. In war they hoped to capture a
wealthy opponent, hold him for high ransom, and thus repair their fortunes.
In sum, the crisis of feudalism provoked the interminable wars of the late
Middle Ages, many of which were thinly disguised pillaging expeditions. But
the waging of wars required that the king enlarge his powers and his fiscal
resources. State taxes tended to replace feudal rents as the chief form of
peasant expropriation. Military bands ravaged the countryside, and tax
collectors took what the pillagers left behind. Little wonder, then, that the
population collapsed, but this was the effect and not the cause of the crisis in
feudalism.
Sensitive to class divisions, Bois’s model offers a complex, subtle, and
illuminating analysis of late medieval social trends in eastern Normandy. But
it does not seem to be as free of Malthusian influences as the author contends.
The balance between population and land determines per-farm productivity
and the level of rents. Pressures against the land—must we not call them
Malthusian?—lower farm productivity and directly engender the crisis in
feudal rent. That crisis might be considered a Malthusian reckoning in
another form. Bois even concedes that demographic movements seem to
follow “a law of their own,” and this seems tantamount to admitting that not
even Marxist analysis can control the total picture.
Then, too, the crisis of feudalism might well be regarded as an
appropriate model of social change in late medieval eastern Normandy. But
what about other regions in Europe, such as Tuscany, which possessed very
different economic and social systems? Tuscany, for example, included one
of Europe’s largest cities, Florence, which lived from international
commerce, banking, and manufacture. Even its agriculture was very different
from that found in Normandy. Did a crisis of feudalism occur there too? The
merchant elites of Italy did not respond to falling agrarian rents by resorting
to pillage and to mercenary service; they were in fact reluctant fighters.53
And yet the population movements in the two regions are very similar. What
did the Florentine metropolis and the Norman villages truly share, except the
experience of plague?
This then is how several historians have viewed the state of Europe
before the plague. To my mind, the best reading of the evidence is the
following. European population had grown to extraordinary levels during the
central Middle Ages, but the result was not a Malthusian reckoning or crisis,
but a deadlock. In spite of frequent famine and widespread hunger, the
community in ca. 1300 was successfully holding its numbers. It is likely that
this equilibrium could have been maintained for the indefinite future. It is
likely too that the Malthusian stalemate might have paralyzed social
movement and improvement. Then the plague struck. It appeared as an
exogenous intervention; it owed its power not to social factors but to its still
obscure nature. And it devastated Europe. But in spite of the havoc it
wrought, it did a service to the West. It broke the Malthusian deadlock that
medieval growth had created and which might have impeded further growth
in different forms. It guaranteed that in the generations after 1348 Europe
would not simply continue the pattern of society and culture of the thirteenth
century. It assured that the Middle Ages would be the middle, not the final,
phase in Western development.
 TWO

The New Economic and

Demographic System

Europe, before the Black Death assaulted it, was a very crowded continent.
But despite the pressure on the land, stability prevailed. For fifty, perhaps
one hundred years before 1348, the population had registered no significant
gains. Food costs were high and famines frequent, but they did not send the
population plummeting. The economy was saturated; nearly all available
resources were committed to the effort of producing the food, clothing, and
shelter needed to support the packed communities. Agriculture was
mobilized for the production of cereals, the basic foodstuff, and cultivation
had extended to the limits of the workable land. Undoubtedly, vast numbers
of Europeans lived in deep deprivation. But despite misery and hunger, the
pressure of human numbers went unrelieved. The civilization that this
economy supported, the civilization of the central Middle Ages, might have
maintained itself for the indefinite future. That did not happen; an exogenous
factor, the Black Death, broke the Malthusian deadlock. And in doing so it
gave to Europeans the chance to rebuild their society along much different
lines.
The salient effects of the Black Death on the economic and demographic
systems of medieval Europe can be described with some certainty: the
surviving evidence is reasonably abundant. Many contemporary witnesses
commented on human behavior at the workplace and marketplace in the wake
of epidemics. Even some quantitative data, chiefly price citations, have
survived. Several historians have used these materials, and they are in
considerable agreement as to the nature and direction of economic change in
the late Middle Ages. The demographic system operating in medieval Europe
is much harder to investigate. Records that could tell us how medieval
people married and reproduced are notoriously scarce and nearly always
subject to diverse interpretations. Nonetheless, I shall argue here that the
demographic system of the Middle Ages, which I envisage as formed of the
relationships among deaths, marriages, and births, all subject to the economic
performance, was also profoundly altered in this period of plague.
In considering the effect of the epidemics upon the economy, it is
necessary to distinguish short-term and long-term repercussions. The chief
short-term repercussion was shock. And shock in turn broke the continuities
of economic life and disrupted established routines of work and service. The
high mortalities left numerous posts in society unfilled and services
unperformed. According to Boccaccio, many concurred “that against plagues
no medicine was better than or even equal to simple flight.”1 The retreat of
the ten young Florentines to a country villa, portrayed in the Decameron, is a
fictional but still typical example of this popular response to epidemic. The
desertion of towns and cities, through death and flight, threatened
communities with chaos.
How, under such conditions, could an organized economy be maintained?
Many contemporaries affirm that it was not maintained, that workers either
died or fled their posts, or simply refused to perform, preferring to indulge
their appetites while they still had the chance. Peasants, according to
Boccaccio, “just like the townspeople became lax in their ways and
neglected their chores as if they expected death that very day.”2 A French
poet, 40Guillaume de Machaut, describes the breakdown of the rural
economy:
For many have certainly
Heard it commonly said
How in one thousand three hundred and forty nine
Out of one hundred there remained but nine.
Thus it happened that for lack of people
Many a splendid farm was left untilled,
No one plowed the fields
Bound the cereals and took in the grapes,
Some gave triple salary
But not for one denier was twenty [enough]
Since so many were dead …3
 He goes on to say that the animals roamed untended in the fields, as the
lords could hire no shepherds.
The epidemics also greatly enlarged the demand for certain types of
services. The records mention most often the need for gravediggers,
physicians, and priests.
Gravediggers gained a special prominence at a time when people died
each day by the hundreds. The task of burying the dead apparently gave
employment to marginal social groups, poor rustics, beggars, and the urban
jobless. Boccaccio implies that gravediggers who worked for pay were
unknown at Florence before the Black Death. He calls them “a species of
vulture born from the lowly.”4
Physicians too were in demand. Boccaccio again laments that “the
numbers [of physicians] had increased enormously because the ranks of the
qualified were invaded by people, both men and women, who had never
received any training in medicine.”5 His allusion to women carers of the sick
is especially noteworthy. Another profession whose numbers proved
inadequate for the services required was the clergy. Many priests had died,
and many fled the contagion. Who would administer the Church’s last rites to
the many who were dying? In January 1349, Ralph of Shrewsbury, the bishop
of Wells and Bath in England, gave these instructions to his flock:
The continuous pestilence of the present day, which is spreading far and wide, has left
many parish churches and other livings in our diocese without parson or priest to care for their
parishioners. Since no priests can be found who are willing, whether out of zeal and devotion
or in exchange for a stipend, to take on the pastoral care of these aforesaid places, to visit the
sick and administer to them the sacraments of the Church (perhaps for fear of infection and
contagion), we understand that many people are dying without the sacrament of Penance …
all men, in particular those who are now sick or should fall sick in the future, … if they are on
the point of death and cannot secure the services of a priest, then they should make confession
to each other, as is permitted in the teaching of the Apostles, whether to a layman or, if no man
is present, even to a woman.6

The Church was traditionally suspicious of laymen and, in particular, of

women assuming pastoral functions or administering the sacraments. In this
instance, as plague thinned the cadre of priests, the bishop of Wells and Bath
had no choice.
The legal systems of late medieval Europe also had to respond to the
extraordinary social situation created by an epidemic. Under conditions of
plague, certain “privileges,” as they were known in the legal language, went
into effect.7 Women, for example, could now serve as witnesses, and scribes
not formally admitted into the guild of notaries could draw up legal contracts.
Society needed certain services, and at these moments of crisis it had to
allow even the unlicensed or people believed to be incompetent to perform
them.
Over the long term, the relaxation of the pressure of human numbers
created serious problems for the economy. The chief problems were the
drastic decrease in the number of workers, and the abbreviated span of years
over which they remained productive. The plagues radically reduced the
average duration of life. To the best of our knowledge, life expectancies in
the good years of the thirteenth century were between 35 and 40 years.8 The
ferocious epidemics of the late fourteenth century cut that figure to below 20;
after 1400, as the population achieved a new equilibrium at very low levels,
it extended to about 30 years. These figures necessarily affected the balances
between young and old, and also between producers and dependents.
At Florence, a survey redacted in 1427 to 1430, called the Catasto, gives
the ages of a large population of some 260,000 persons, in both cities and
countryside.9 It thus allows us to see the demographic contours of a
community that had within the lifetime of some of its members endured
repeated epidemics, including the Black Death of 1348. The age pyramid of
the Tuscan population is very distorted. Old persons age 60 or above are
surprisingly numerous. They constitute nearly 15 percent of the community—
a proportion one would expect to find in a modern Western population with a
low birth rate. How did Tuscany accumulate such large numbers of the aged?
The answer seems to be that those in the last stages of life were in part
survivors of a time when the total community was much bigger than in 1427.
It also suggests that the plague preyed on the young rather than the mature. If a
person survived one major epidemic, the chances improved that he or she
would survive the next.
The number of children and youths up to age 19 was also very large,
forming about 44 percent of the population—again a figure surprising for its
size. So large a proportion of the young is normally found in a rapidly
growing community, but Tuscany in 1427 was still barely maintaining its
numbers. The adult and productive members of society, those between 20 and
59, were thus a minority of about 41 percent. Economists make use of a
figure called a dependency ratio, the number of dependents in the community,
the aged and the young, divided by the producers. In Tuscany in 1427, it was
1.44. Adults in their productive years thus bore a huge burden of dependents.
Moreover, the wealth and effort invested in the rearing of children remained
in significant measure wasted. Death ruthlessly thinned the ranks of the young
before they could repay to society the resources and energy devoted to them.
High mortalities also cut short the careers of craftsmen and other
professionals. Our best estimates are that the average duration of time spent
in a career fell from about 32 years in the late thirteenth century to 26 in the
last quarter of the fourteenth—a contraction of almost 20 percent.10 The
professions tried to compensate for reduced years of service by recruiting
more new members than they had in the past, but they had to fish in a
shrinking pool. Guild matriculation records tell us something of these
problems of replacement under conditions of high mortality. At Florence, the
matriculation lists of the guild of Por Santa Maria have survived seemingly
intact from the early thirteenth century. The guild included but was not
limited to silk merchants. The immediate response to epidemic was to
increase the number admitted, in an obvious effort to replace those who had
died.11 Thus sixteen neophytes were matriculated in 1346, and 18 in 1347.
The number jumped to 35 in the plague year of 1348, and reached 69 in 1349
and 67 in 1350, after which it slowly declined. The post-plague peaks of 69
and 67 represent the largest numbers admitted into the guild since 1328,
twenty years previously. Over a longer term, the circulation of masters into
and out of service greatly accelerated. In the 20 years immediately preceding
the Black Death, from 1328 to 1347, the guild matriculated 730 new
members. In the 20 following years, from 1348 to 1367, it brought in almost
as many, 672, although the population was down by about one-third. In the
early fifteenth century, from 1408 to 1427, it admitted 784, more than in the
pre-plague period, although the city’s population had fallen by two-thirds.
The most remarkable aspect of these and other matriculation lists we
could cite is their apparent stability, in spite of soaring mortalities. Society
tried to keep its occupational cadres constant in size, even though the total
community and the pool of possible members were shrinking. The policy
reflects in part social resistance to any disturbance or change, and in part too
the premature deaths of the older masters. But to enlist constant numbers out
of a shrinking pool, the guild had to spread its net broadly and bring in new
apprentices with no previous family connection with the trade. The
matriculation lists identify those among the neophytes whose father, uncle, or
other close relative had practiced the trade. In the 25 years from 1406 to
1430, when the urban population was largely stable, 487 out of 938, or better
than one out of two, claimed this association. In the 20 years after 1348,
when the population was falling, 222 out of 672 were close relatives of a
previous master, or one out of three. The depleted population forced the guild
to extend its outreach. Probably in all occupations, the immediate post-
plague period was an age of new men.
Short years of service before death intervened, rapid turnover in
members, wide recruitment of new persons, affected the quality of the
product or service the professions provided. The new masters of the art were
trained less rigorously, and would accumulate less experience, before
passing away. We take an example of what we mean from careers in religion,
the best illuminated of all medieval professions.
In the opening decade of the fifteenth century, a Dominican friar,
Giovanni di Carlo, from the convent of Santa Maria Novella in Florence,
lamented how the religious orders had fallen into decadence. The chief
reason he gives for their plight was the flooding of their ranks with young
men, without the piety or learning of their predecessors. “How painful it is
[he remarks] whenever men have been trained for many years and with great
effort, that they pass away in scarcely one hour. All that diligence, which men
previously applied in preparing and supporting outstanding careers, is
rendered vain and useless.”12 The deterioration of skilled traditions was
inevitable under conditions of high mortality—we shall see the pattern again
in medieval cultural life. Europe at the time of plague, then, was a society
reeling under repeated, powerful shocks; burdened with huge numbers of
dependents; struggling with difficulty to maintain its occupational cadres;
struggling also to uphold the quality of its skilled traditions.
But, over the long run, the breaking of the Malthusian deadlock conferred
advantages too. Above all it freed resources. The collapse of population
liberated land for uses other than the cultivation of grains. It could be turned
to pasturage or to forests. In the past mills and mill sites had served
predominantly for the grinding of grain. They now could be enlisted for other
uses: the fulling of cloth, the operation of bellows, the sawing of wood. Even
as the population shrank, the possibility of developing a more diversified
economy was enhanced.
Price movements provide our best evidence of the directions of long-
term economic trends in the late Middle Ages. The immediate effect of the
Black Death upon prices was to produce general inflation. The Florentine
Matteo Villani, writing in 1363, presents an apt analysis of price movements
since 1348:
It was thought that, given the lack of people, there ought to be a wealth of all the things
which the earth produces. On the contrary, through men’s ingratitude an unprecedented
scarcity affected everything, and this continued for a long time. In certain lands, as we shall
narrate, there were severe and unprecedented famines. And again, it was thought that there
ought to be wealth and abundance of clothing, and of all the other things that the human body
needs … but the opposite happened … Most things cost two times or more what they cost
before the epidemic. And labor, and the manufactures of every art and profession increased in
disorderly fashion to double the price …13

This general inflation persisted until the last decades of the fourteenth
century, and indicates that under the shock of plague production in town and
countryside had fallen even more rapidly than the population.
Of all commodity prices, the most important, indeed the usual reference
base for all others, was that of wheat. Wheat prices were everywhere high in
Europe before the Black Death, reflecting the huge numbers of consumers and
the intensive cultivation of grain, even on marginal soils. Wheat prices also
increased after the Black Death. In England, Normandy, the Ile-de-France,
Alsace, Flanders, and Spain, they remained high until about 1375.14 In
Tuscany the period of inflation persisted even longer, to about 1395.15
After 1375 or 1395, the price of wheat enters a phase of decline that
persists for a century. Commodity prices now differentiate in their
movements, and wheat prices form the lower blade of an opening scissors.
Other food grains remain relatively buoyant. The price of barley, for
example, stayed comparatively strong. This reflects its use in the brewing of
beer. Perhaps the melancholy induced by the massive mortalities whetted the
taste for beer, but it surely indicates an improving standard of living, and the
better and more balanced diet of the people. The price of animal products—
meat, sausage, cheese and the like—also remained relatively high.
Europeans, even as their numbers declined, were living better. Many
moralists complain of the extravagant tastes for food and attire which the
lower social orders now manifested. Matteo Villani remarks: “The common
people, by reason of the abundance and superfluity that they found, would no
longer work at their accustomed trades; they wanted the dearest and most
delicate foods … while children and common women clad themselves in all
the fair and costly garments of the illustrious who had died.”16 Conspicuous
consumption by the humble threatened to erase the visible marks of social
distinctions and to undermine the social order. The response of the alleged
prodigality in food and clothing was sumptuary laws, which governments
enacted all over Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They tried to
regulate fashions, such as the size of sleeves or the length of trains in
women’s dresses; meals, such as the food to be served at weddings; or
customs, such as the number of mourners who could attend a funeral. The
repetition of these laws suggests their futility. High wages to the poor and
improved living standards came to be irremediable facts of late medieval
economic and social life.
The price of wool moved erratically, but was strong enough to stimulate
a widespread conversion from plowland to meadow. Moreover, one or two
shepherds could guard hundreds of sheep, and this extensive use of the land
saved the costs of hiring expensive tillers. Manufactured products also held
their value better than wheat. But in the late Middle Ages, silk challenged
wool as the most active branch of the textile production, again indicating
smaller, but richer markets.
Besides commodity prices, the costs of the classical “factors of
production”—labor, land, and capital—also responded to the new
conditions. Of these production costs, the one most dramatically affected was
that of labor. The falling numbers of renters and workers increased the
strength of their negotiating position in bargaining with landlords and
entrepreneurs. Agricultural rents collapsed after the Black Death, and wages
in the towns soared, to two and even three times the levels they had held in
the crowded thirteenth century. In 1363, Matteo Villani acutely observed:
Serving girls and unskilled women with no experience in service and stable boys want at
least 12 florins per year, and the most arrogant among them 18 or 24 florins per year, and so
also nurses and minor artisans working with their hands want three times or nearly the usual
pay, and laborers on the land all want oxen and all seed, and want to work the best lands, and
to abandon all others.17
 Governments tried to cap the swell in wages and to shore up the
shrinking rents. They sought to hold prices and wages to previous levels and
insisted that workers accept any employment offered them. But they
succeeded only in sowing discontent and in provoking social uprisings in city
and countryside. The value of land diminished. We do not know a great deal
of the costs of capital. But references in chronicles such as Matteo Villani’s
to the accumulation of inheritances suggests that capital too became cheaper
in the contracting community.
The different movements of factor costs favored a policy of factor
substitution. In particular, cheap land and capital were widely substituted for
expensive labor. In effect, the conversion of land from wheat fields into
pasturage is an example of factor substitution, and many others could be
cited. In agriculture, the purchase of oxen to aid the peasant in plowing and to
increase his supply of fertilizer enabled him to work more productively.
According to Matteo Villani, Tuscan peasants would not accept a lease
unless the landlord provided oxen and seed—in other words, increased
capital. In the urban economy, the substitution of capital for labor meant the
purchase of better tools or machines—devices that enabled the artisan to
work more efficiently. Frequently too, the policy of factor substitution
involved technological innovation, the development of entirely new tools and
machines. High labor costs promised big rewards to the inventors of labor-
saving devices. Chiefly for this reason, the late Middle Ages were a period
of impressive technological achievement.
New methods of reproducing the written word offer a clear instance of
capital replacing labor by virtue of technology. The growth of universities in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the expanding numbers of literate
laymen generated a strong demand for books. Numerous scribes were
employed to copy manuscripts. At Paris, for example, in the thirteenth
century, manuscripts were divided into quires and given to separate scribes,
who assiduously reproduced them. The parts were then combined into the
finished book. As long as wages were low, this method of reproduction
based on intensive human labor was satisfactory enough.
But the late medieval population plunge raised labor costs, and also
raised the premium to be claimed by the one who could devise a cheaper
way of reproducing books. Johann Gutenberg’s invention of printing on the
basis of movable metal type in 1453 was only the culmination of many
experiments carried on across the previous century. His genius was in finding
a way to combine several technologies into the new art. His family had long
been associated with the mint of his native city of Mainz, and from this he
gained familiarity with presses. He also was an engraver, and he needed that
skill to cut the matrices for casting the type. He had to know metallurgy as
well, and he successfully combined lead, tin, and antimony into an alloy that
melted at low temperature, cast well, and remained strong in the press.
Finally, he and all the early printers were businessmen. Printing shops
required considerable capital to set up their presses and to market their
books. But they were able to multiply texts with unprecedented accuracy and
speed, and at greatly reduced costs. The advent of printing is thus a salient
example of the policy of factor substitution which was transforming the late
medieval economy.18
There are many other examples. There occurred a revolution in maritime
transport. Its thrust was to produce bigger ships with smaller crews, able to
remain long at sea and to sail directly from port to port. Here too, several
new technologies affecting both ship construction and the navigational arts
were combined to achieve this change. Capital was required as well, and
also new business institutions, such as maritime insurance, to encourage and
protect the big investments. Even firearms, another innovative technology of
the age, can be interpreted in these terms. Soldiers too were commanding
higher wages in depopulated Europe, and soldiers with firearms could fight
more effectively than those without.
A more diversified economy, a more intensive use of capital, a more
powerful technology, and a higher standard of living for the people—these
seem the salient characteristics of the late medieval economy, after it
recovered from the plague’s initial shock and learned to cope with the
problems raised by diminished numbers. Specific changes in technology are
of course primarily attributable to the inventive genius of individuals. But the
huge losses caused by plague and the high cost of labor were the challenge to
which these efforts responded. Plague, in sum, broke the Malthusian
deadlock of the thirteenth century, which threatened to hold Europe in its
traditional ways for the indefinite future. The Black Death devastated society,
but it did not cripple human resilience.
Another set of institutions and practices reformed in the wake of the
epidemics was the demographic system. To examine the changes in the
European demographic system across the late Middle Ages requires first that
we understand the principles that govern demographic systems of any sort.
People are born and people die, and these events affect the size of the
community. But the size of the community also affects these events, through a
kind of feedback mechanism, in the language of contemporary systems
analysis. Many observers in both the ancient world and the Middle Ages
recognized, for example, that the earth could not support infinite human
numbers; when overburdened, it periodically purged itself of excess, through
famines, wars, plagues, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.19
It remained, however, for Thomas Malthus to interpret the relation of
community size to vital events in terms of an overarching system.
Populations, he argued, inevitably grow faster than their supplies of food, the
former tending to increase geometrically, the latter only arithmetically.
Predictably, the population would at some point surpass the numbers that its
resources could adequately feed. It would then face a reckoning. The
reckoning took the form of famines, malnutrition, plagues, and wars, which
raised the death rate to a level higher than the birth rate, and thus cut down
the size of the community. Malthus called the mechanisms by which growth
was restrained and reversed “checks.” Those which operated directly on the
death rate he named “positive checks.” In the world he surveyed, China
seemed the land in which the demographic system was most clearly based on
the primacy of positive checks. The population repeatedly surged against
restraining walls, but death was guarding the ramparts.
Malthus also recognized another type of check that controlled human
numbers. These he called “preventive checks.”20 The cost of food, rising as
population increased, reduced real wages, as workers had to devote ever
greater shares of their disposable income to subsistence. But in some
cultures, declining real wages also inhibited marriages, as only those young
couples with the means of supporting a family could allow themselves to
marry and to set up a new household. In preventing or delaying marriages,
this sort of check lowered the birth rate as well. It thus was capable of
controlling growth and of keeping the population well within the size its
resources could comfortably support. The community need not test the ceiling
of subsistence.
Malthus had no way of measuring the true effectiveness of the preventive
checks in the Europe he knew as against the positive checks. But recent
historians have tried to do so. In particular, in their enterprising survey
published in 1981, The Population History of England, E. A. Wrigley and
Roger Schofield have attempted to estimate not only the total population of
England from the sixteenth century to 1871, but also to identify the
demographic system or systems which governed its size.21 They begin their
history only in 1541, from which time their principal records, parish
registers, survive. They conclude that already in the middle of the sixteenth
century preventive checks were more powerful than positive ones in
controlling English population. And its relative strength continued to increase
in the modern age.
Reliance on preventive rather than positive checks also conferred
substantial advantages upon England as presumably upon Europe in early
modern times. Controlled population growth meant that increments in output
were not immediately consumed in the support of a larger population. Early
modern England escaped the Malthusian trap, which kept many nations of the
earth on the margins of subsistence and in the grip of poverty. The surpluses
that the economy might generate were available for other uses, wise or
foolish. Surpluses, allowing for a high rate of reinvestment, were at all
events a precondition for eventual industrialization.
Even a superficial reading of modern European history lends these
conclusions a certain plausibility. Subsistence crises, famines, even
pandemics of the magnitude of the Black Death have not been major factors
in modern European history, with the possible exception of the potato blight
in Ireland in the 1840s. This suggests that the population contained relatively
few persons surviving on the margins of subsistence, who would be the
immediate and most likely victims of hunger and disease. Natural disasters of
this kind seem strangely tame in Europe in the modern centuries. But if
preventive checks were already the principal means of population control in
the sixteenth century, then the question at once arises: when, how, and why
did it first acquire this predominance?
It is certain that some forms of preventive checks functioned even in the
Middle Ages. The chief evidence for this comes from the consistent
association in medieval household surveys of wealth and household size. The
earliest large survey of a medieval community we possess is the polyptych of
the abbot Irminon, who presided over the monastery of St. Germain de Pres
near Paris in the early ninth century.22 The polyptych includes nearly 2,000
entries describing the monastery’s possessions in the neighborhood of Paris,
some 1,647 of which inventory dependent farms, specify their size, and take
note of the serfs and their families who worked and lived on the farms. There
are many difficulties with these data, and the survey does not support refined
analysis. But if we crudely compare the size of the plowlands, vineyards, and
meadows with the number of persons settled upon them, an unmistakable
association emerges.23 Those households with five or fewer units of land
show an average size of 3.9 persons; those with six to ten units, 5.43
members; those with 11 to 15, 7.04 members; those with 16 to 20, 8.83; and
those with more than 20, 10.07. The progression is clear: the more land, the
larger the household living from it.
This close association of extent of land with size of household, evident in
our earliest surveys, is very nearly a general rule of household organization
in the Middle Ages. It means that the possession of a big farm made possible
the support of a big family, but the converse also holds true: those with little
land could afford to maintain only small households.
There are many other indications that propertied Europeans in the Middle
Ages kept their size of households in balance with their resources. A crucial
institution in this regard was the dowry, the contribution that the bride or her
family made to the costs of setting up the new household, to what in the
Roman legal tradition was called “the burdens of matrimony.”24 In the early
Middle Ages the groom or his family had borne the chief burden of these
costs, but the flow of property at the making of a marriage changes direction
from the twelfth century. The bride’s contribution, the true dowry, now
predominates.25 But girls with few resources found it ever more difficult to
attract husbands, at least within the propertied classes. A young man too
could marry only when able to support a wife. Usually, this meant that he had
to wait until he had received the paternal inheritance or had achieved status
in a profession or career. Under such conditions, many men married late and
some would not marry at all.
Within the propertied classes—chiefly the nobility and the urban
patriciate—a linkage was forged between resources and nuptiality, resources
and reproduction. What we do not know is whether these restraints affected
the behavior of those who owned little or nothing. They are nearly invisible
in the sources; our surveys and collections of charters are concerned
overwhelmingly with property and the transactions affecting it. The
documents ignore the poor. But we do have hints that the poor were very
many. The Carolingian capitularies refer to a floating population of drifters
and beggars, the pauperes.26 In the early fourteenth century, the chronicler
Giovanni Villani tells of a Florentine who bequeathed in his will 6 denarii to
“all the poor of Florence, who went about begging.”27 To assure a fair
distribution, the executors of the will summoned the poor but locked them up
in the biggest parish churches, so that none would receive more than the 6
denarii. Still, the number of poor, both men and women, children and adults,
who accepted the donation was more than 17,000. This did not include “the
shamefaced poor and those in hospital and prisons and the religious
mendicants.” They were more than 4,000. Villani was himself astonished by
these figures, and thinks that many paupers from outside of Florence must
have slipped into the city. On the other hand, these were the ones who
supposedly lived by begging. How big would the figure have been, if the
needy who did not beg had been included?
Medieval observers shared the view that the poor were much more
susceptible than the rich to the ravages of famine and plague. At Florence,
Matteo Villani claims that the Black Death of 1348 wiped out the poor
completely—those who two decades before were more than 17,000. “And
the mendicant poor were almost all dead,” he states.28 “And there were not at
that time,” he elsewhere observes, any “needy poor.”29
The presumption that the poor were the chosen victims of hunger and
disease persists into early modern times. In the seventeenth century, a
Florentine doctor named Alessandro Righi compared the body physical with
the body social. The human body was composed of both noble and ignoble
parts. The noble parts were the heart, the brain, the liver, and the principal
organs. They had the power to expel poisonous substances to the periphery.
The ignoble parts, the glands and the skin, had no such powers and thus
became the receptacles of the poisons dispatched from the center. So it was
with the city. The nobles were the principal organs, and the poor the ignoble
skin and glands. “Nor can they,” writes the doctor, “transmit [the poison] to
others, and therefore it is necessary, that if anything evil is in the city, they
receive it and hold it as they are the glands of the city.”30
The demographic system prevailing in medieval society appears to have
been two-tiered. At the bottom of the social ladder, positive checks primarily
controlled the numbers of the impoverished. Above this social sector were
the middle classes and the wealthy, among whom preventive checks had
become the more effective means of regulating numbers. In the Catasto of the
city of Florence, dated 1427, wealth shows its characteristic correlation with
household size, but, significantly, its influence becomes evident only above a
threshold of approximately 400 florins in assessed household wealth.31
Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the households fell below the
threshold when wealth began to have a visible influence on household
organization and demographic behavior. The demographic system operating
in Florence in 1427 still looks to be two-tiered, but now most households
had passed under the control of preventive, not positive, checks.
The great population debacle of the late Middle Ages did not, in sum,
introduce an entirely new demographic system. But it did redistribute the
population between the two tiers of the traditional system. Depopulation
gave access to farms and remunerative jobs to a larger percentage of the
population. High wages and low rents also raised the standard of living for
substantial numbers. They became acquainted with a style of life that they or
their children would not want easily to abandon. For a significantly larger
part of society, the care of property and the defense of living standards were
tightly joined with decisions to marry and to reproduce. Presumably, these
are the origins of the demographic system which Wrigley and Schofield find
already functioning in sixteenth-century England. Out of the havoc of plague,
Europe adopted what can well be called the modern Western mode of
demographic behavior.
 THREE

Modes of Thought and Feeling

The impact of the Black Death on the social and cultural life of Europe was
similar to its effects upon the economy. Again we must distinguish between
what it wrought in the short run, and what in the long. Its chief short-run
effect was shock and social fissures, tears in the fabric of society which
undermined social discipline and cohesiveness. In the long run, it threatened
the quality and continuity of cultural traditions. High mortalities thinned the
ranks of the skilled, curtailed the duration of careers, and obstructed
recruitment. The result was deterioration, but the decline also stimulated
efforts at reform and renewal. In other words, decline was never so deep as
to stifle awareness of decline.
We look first at shock and social fissures. The plague caused divisions
between the healthy and the sick; between those in the cultural mainstream
and those at its margins, namely, strangers, travelers, beggars, lepers, and
Jews; and between the mass of society and its cultural leaders, its governors,
priests, and physicians. These fissures cut across society in complex and at
times pernicious ways, as we shall see.
The shock of plague disrupted the customary ways by which society
coped with the passing of its members. Over the centuries the medieval
Church had softened the sting of death through comforting rituals. Like last
rites in other cultures, their primary purpose was to help the dead achieve
eternal rest. But they also instructed the living that the separation was only
temporary: on the last day all would be resurrected and reunited. The body
too would rise again; even in death it remained a temple of the Holy Spirit
and had to be treated with honor. The rituals thus encouraged the living to
accept the loss of their loved ones, recruit others to continue the work of the
departed, mend the rift in the social fabric that death had caused, and return
now to their quotidian labors. Through these rites of passage, not only the
dead but the living too were introduced into a new phase of existence.
Rituals helped restore mental and social equilibria.
To perform the last rites, the priest came to the bedside of the dying
person. He heard a final confession of sins, gave communion, called
viaticum, “food for a journey,” and administered the sacrament of Extreme
Unction, the “last anointing.” These were largely private rituals. After death,
the corpse would be taken by public procession from home to the place of
burial. “Outside the house of the dead man,” Boccaccio reports, “his friends,
neighbors and many others would assemble. Then, according to the status of
the deceased, a priest would come with the funeral pomp of candles and
chants, while the dead man was borne on the shoulders of his peers to the
church chosen before death.” 1 The parish church tolled its bells, and
sometimes a crier went through the neighborhood to announce the passing. At
the church the corpse was blessed; a funeral mass might or might not then be
sung. The climax of these last rites was a service at the graveside, in which
the priest invoked further blessings upon the deceased. The body was then
consigned to holy ground, usually alongside relatives and friends, there in
familiar company to await the resurrection. Those in attendance then often
partook of a funeral meal—another communion, intended to achieve what the
word implies, a reintegration of the community, a healing of the wound that
death had inflicted upon it.
According to a recent study of wills from the region of Avignon in
southern France, funeral arrangements became ever more elaborate as the
fourteenth century progressed.2 The funerals, at least of the wealthy,
developed into veritable “theaters of death.” More and more of the people
who were making their wills expressed the desire to have a big cortege and
to be buried within the parish church itself and not in the outside cemetery—
close to the altar and its salvific relics. But even those without the means of
securing this privileged space could expect to rest in consecrated earth. They
could, that is, if plague permitted.
“As the ferocity of the plague increased,” Boccaccio again reports, “such
customs ceased either totally or in part, and new ones took their place.” It is
indeed remarkable how many contemporary observers mention the failure to
perform the accustomed rites; they dwell upon the hasty burials of the dead.3
We return to Boccaccio:
Now a general procedure was followed more out of fear of contagion than because of charity
toward the dead. Alone or with the help of whatever porters they could find, they dragged the
corpses from their houses and piled them in front so, particularly in the morning, anyone abroad
could see countless bodies. Biers were sent for and when they were lacking, ordinary planks
carried the bodies. More than one bier carried two or three together. This happened not just
once, but many biers could be counted which held in fact a wife and husband, two or three
brothers, or father and son. Countless times, it happened that two priests going forth with a
crowd to bury someone were joined by three or four biers carried behind by bearers, so that
while the priests thought they had one corpse to bury, they found themselves with six, eight or
even more. Nor were these dead honored with tears, candles or mourners. It had come to
such a pass that men who died were shown no more concern than dead goats today.4

Boccaccio quite rightly attributes this behavior to fear of infection. The

cadaver had to be removed as quickly as possible, to a distant burial, in a
common ditch, with many other victims. Frequently, lye was sprinkled about
the mass graves in order to kill the contagion. Multiple and anonymous
burials called into doubt all of the reassuring hope that each body was
destined for resurrection. The plague incited a new tension between the
living and the dead, even between the living and the sick. Like AIDS victims
today, the sick had become the enemy.
A witness at Avignon relates in 1348:
[Sick] relatives were cared for not otherwise than dogs. They threw them their food and
drink by the bed, and then they fled the household. Finally, when they died, strong rustics came
from the mountains of Provence, miserable and poor and foul-tempered, who are called
gavots. At least, in return for big pay, they carried the dead to burial. No relatives, no friends
showed concern for what might be happening. No priest came to hear the confession of the
dying, or to administer the sacraments to them. People cared only for their own health [and
that of their families]. It even happened that every day a dead rich man was carried to the
grave with only a little light and by ruffians—none else followed the corpse but these.5

It is of course not true that all families neglected their sick, treating them
as if they were not their own, in Boccaccio’s phrase. However, even those
who tried to nurse sick relatives faced traumatic choices. Boards of Health,
set up in the wake of epidemics, were given sweeping powers, which they
used to segregate the sick and the suspect from the healthy. By the fifteenth
century they characteristically removed those who were infected from their
homes and families and consigned them to special, isolated hospitals. Those
who entered these pesthouses rarely emerged, and after death would be
buried in mass graves, probably in unconsecrated ground, far from ancestors
and loved ones. Many families sought to conceal the sickness of a member
from the health authorities, although the punishments for so doing were
drastic. The administrative records of these Boards of Health include many
prosecutions of people who hid from the health authorities the sickness of a
household member, or tried to secure a church burial for one who had died of
the plague. For even if the family refused to regard a sick member as a
menace and an enemy, the Boards of Health had no such qualms.6 Even the
Church had to suspend its normal requirements for Christian burial in periods
of plague. Salus populi suprema lex.
The fear of the sick and dying easily expanded into a horror of death, into
the sense that life itself was a desperate battle against death’s dominion. In
the thirteenth century, Francis of Assisi had addressed death as a sister. In
plague-stricken Europe, death was no longer the kind caretaker of souls
awaiting the resurrection. Many historians have noted the changed image of
death in late medieval literature and art.7 It becomes a ravishing monster, the
master of a dance in which all must join. One of the great masterpieces of
macabre art is the tomb at Avignon of Cardinal La Grange, done shortly
before 1400.8 It shows the cardinal’s nearly naked and decomposing body.
The inscription reads:
We are a spectacle to the world. Let the great and humble, by our example, see well to
what state they shall be inexorably reduced, whatever their condition, age or sex. Why then,
miserable person, are you puffed with pride. Dust you are and unto dust you shall return, rotten
corpse, morsel and meal for worms.9

Death, as represented in this epitaph, vilified the body; it had become

untamed.10 Revulsion toward death and the dead seemed reflected in the
feasts and celebrations that often accompanied epidemics. Boccaccio
remarks that during the pestilence, jokes and merrymaking were common at
burials.11 Of course plague mortalities reminded survivors of their own
fragile grasp on life, and prompted some of them to spend their remaining
hours in revelry. The philosophy appears pedestrian: “eat, drink, and be
merry, for tomorrow we die.” But the orgies that many witnesses describe
seem also the celebration of a victory, however temporary, over death. Why
else should a favored site for such behavior be graveyards? At Avignon by
the late fourteenth century, the cemetery of Champfleur had become, at least
by repute, a place of debauchery. In 1394 a papal official threatened with
excommunication those who dared “to dance, fight, throw iron or wooden
bars, to play with wheels, to bowl, or play dice or other unseemly games or
commit other unseemly acts” over the graves of the dead.12 Prostitutes
solicited in cemeteries, and, by the testimony of contemporaries, fornicators
and adulterers trysted among the graves.
The second fissure induced by plague and panic divided those in the
cultural mainstream from those at its margins. Relations with strangers,
beggars, lepers, Jews, and others were always tense in medieval society, but
not usually violent. Jews, for example, the largest cultural minority, long
enjoyed the right, recognized by both Roman and canon law, to practice their
religion free of interference. But the plague also discredited the leaders of
society, its governors, priests, and intellectuals, and the laws and theories
supported by them. These elites were obviously failing in their prime social
function, the defense of the common welfare, in the name of which they
enjoyed their privileges.
Boccaccio points to this breakdown of the old leadership and its rules:
In this great affliction and misery of our city, the revered authority of both divine and
human laws was left to fall and decay by those who administered them. They too, just as other
men, were all either dead or sick or so destitute of their families, that they were unable to fulfill
any office. As a result, everyone could do just as he pleased.13

And Matteo Villani:

It was thought that the people, whom God by his grace had preserved in life, having seen
the extermination of their neighbors and of all the nations of the world … would become better,
humble, virtuous and catholic, avoiding iniquities and sins and overflowing with love and charity
for one another. But … the opposite happened. Men, finding themselves few and rich by
inheritances and successions of earthly things, forgetting the past as if it never was, gave
themselves to the most disordered and sordid behavior than ever before. As they wallowed in
idleness, their dissolution led them into the sin of gluttony, into banquets, taverns, delicate foods,
and gambling. They rushed headlong into lust…. And without any restraint almost all our city
took up this shameful style of life; the other cities and provinces of the world did the same or
worse.14

The terrible violence directed against Jews in 1348 and 1349 was itself
a product of these combined rips in the social fabric. Early in 1348, the
rumor arose that the Jews of northern Spain and southern France were
poisoning the Christian wells, and thus disseminating the plague. Few
recognized leaders of medieval society—no emperor, king, or Pope—gave
credence to this absurdity. The physician Guy de Chauliac, for example, first
mentions the rumor in 1348. The common people, he observed with evident
contempt, variously blamed beggars or Jews for the disease’s spread. In the
same year Pope Clement VI, then at Avignon, tried to discredit the charge in
a bull, calling the accusation “unthinkable.” After all, he argued, the plague
was raging in regions of the world where no Jews were present; and in
regions where they resided, they too were its victims. We do not know who
launched and sustained the libel; but they were believed, not physicians and
popes.
In September and October, at Chinon on Lake Geneva and at Chambery in
the French Alps, formal accusations were brought against Jews for having
poisoned the wells. The court officials extracted several confessions, and the
rumor spread to the east and north, outracing the spreading epidemic. It next
reached Strasbourg in Alsace, from whence it diffused throughout the
German lands and passed into Poland.
Riots occurred in Strasbourg, and a government that tried to protect the
local Jews was thrown out of office. In this instance too, fear of the plague
worked to discredit traditional leadership. With the connivance of the new
government, on February 14, 1349, more than 900 Jews, about half the
community, were burned on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery. Similar riots
and burnings followed in numerous German towns, in the early months of
1349. The fury abated after April, as the old elites with difficulty
reestablished order in the towns.
Eliciting the same kind of response in another quarter, the plague
undermined confidence in the Church’s spiritual leadership. Many
spontaneous religious movements arose in the aftermath or even in
anticipation of epidemics. Over some the Church was able to maintain an
uneasy control, but others mounted a direct challenge to its monopoly over
spiritual direction.
Epidemics and the fear of epidemics drove people out on the roads, for
which piety provided a ready justification. To go on pilgrimage offered an
escape from infected areas and allowed the voyager to visit holy places; the
practice benefited both body and soul. There is a paradox here. Plague
multiplied the number of people on the highways and byways, but also
provoked deep hostility against them, and against all strangers and
foreigners. They too, along with other marginal social groups, were under
suspicion: they too were at worst the malicious sowers of plague, or at best
its unsuspecting carriers. Their ranks, moreover, typically included beggars,
thieves, and prostitutes—undesirables who were likely to be the targets of
God’s wrath wherever they went. Their arrival menaced the community. In
periods of plague, towns typically closed their gates to travelers, especially
from infested regions, and tried to expel beggars, prostitutes, and other
undesirables from their midst.
The problem was aggravated by the very numbers that took to the roads
in fear of or in reaction to epidemic. Pope Clement VI, in the plague year of
1348, offered a plenary indulgence to all Christians who repented and
confessed their sins. In the same spirit, he declared 1350 to be a year of
jubilee, with plenary indulgences for all who visited Rome. Matteo Villani,
from his vantage point in Florence, was amazed at the numbers that
responded, not only from Italy but from the lands beyond the Alps. “The
multitude of Christians [he writes] that went to Rome was impossible to
count. By the estimate of those resident in the city, on Christmas day … and
in Lent up to Easter, the pilgrims to Rome were from one million to
1,200,000. And then from Ascension to Pentecost, more than 800,000. The
roads were filled day and night.”15 The heat and the demands for harvest
workers, he notes, reduced the numbers to 200,000 during the summer. But
never before, he believes, had so many gone on pilgrimage.
Chaucer, in the Canterbury Tales, thus portrays a typical medieval
practice which fear of illness often inspired. The poet himself mentions that
people go to Canterbury in gratitude for cures: “There to the holy sainted
martyr kneeling / That in their sickness sent them help and healing.”16 Help
and healing: these become the major social concerns in plague-stricken
Europe.
Among the most flamboyant of those who seemed to promise help were
the flagellants, pilgrims of a special kind. Processions of men through cities,
scourging themselves in expiation for their own sins and those of society,
were not unprecedented in the history of medieval piety. A similar
movement, called the “Great Alleluia,” had swept through the cities of Italy
in 1260. But the Black Death gave the practice unprecedented dimensions.
The flagellants claimed divine authorization for their mission, usually
delivered in the form of a letter dropped from heaven. Each band had a
leader, but whether any overarching organization joined them all is uncertain.
The bands marched from town to town, sleeping outdoors as part of their
penance. At the central squares, the leader preached repentance. The
marchers sang hymns and performed a kind of ritual dance. At its climax they
fell to earth and took positions that indicated the types of sins they had
committed—usury, perjury, adultery, murder. They then stripped to the waist
and whipped themselves with knotted cords. After this discipline, they
donned their clothes and marched on. It was all dramatic theater. But clearly
these men seemed to be supplanting the clergy in the role of intermediaries
between heaven and earth. This the Church could not allow. In 1348 Pope
Clement VI prohibited public flagellation, although the movement was far too
powerful and popular to be suppressed.
Flamboyant movements of penance also accompanied the later
epidemics. In 1399, for example, a story spread through Italy. In the
Dauphine province in southern France, the Virgin had appeared to a young
shepherd. Our Lady told the boy that her divine Son was exasperated by the
sins of mankind. He had already in his fury rained death on one-third the
human race; what now could dissuade him from its total destruction? Men
must do penance and reform. The warning evoked its only recorded response
in Italy, but there it was massive. In the summer and fall of 1399, bands of
penitents dressed in white marched from city to city singing hymns, doing
public penance, and urging peace and reconciliation among warring factions.
The great movement of the Bianchi or the Whites occurred a year in advance
of a major epidemic, that of 1400, possibly the worst recurrence since 1348.
The movement was not initiated by the Church, though the clergy gave it its
reluctant blessing. New leaders, unfortunately unknown to us, were guiding
and inspiring the faithful.
Is it possible to see here a parallel in the medieval reaction to plague and
contemporary fears about AIDS? Many persons today do not believe what
the experts relate about AIDS and its modes of transmission. They still want
infected children taken from schools, and contacts with the sick severely
limited. We seem to witness here too a crisis of confidence in expert opinion,
much like the one that occurred in the Middle Ages.
In the long term too, plagues undermined the stability of European
culture. Continuing high mortalities thinned the ranks of the skilled and the
learned and debased the quality of cultural expressions of every sort. Europe
faced the formidable task of maintaining and repairing its cultural heritage.
The crisis had a visible impact upon institutions of education, most
notably the universities. The universities trained the theologians, the lawyers,
and the academic doctors, the physicians. The plagues cut down the number
of students as much as they depleted all other social groups. The enrolled
students at Oxford declined in the late fourteenth century from a pre-plague
high of some 30,000 to 6,000. A contemporary, John Wyclif, later condemned
as a heretic, thought the losses were even greater; he set the numbers falling
from a fabulous 60,000 to fewer than 3,000. In all Europe, the number of
universities numbered about 30 before 1348; five of these were wiped out
completely.17
But the epoch of epidemics also witnessed a plethora of new foundations,
of both colleges and universities. There were several reasons for this
expansion of institutions amidst collapsing human numbers. The depletion of
the ranks of the clergy gave deep concern, and the universities were the ones
that supplied the leading clerics. Travel was, as we have mentioned,
regarded as dangerous, and a local university saved the students from the
risks of long journeys to distant schools. Finally, the many deaths produced a
great flood of pious bequests, and many of those benefited poor scholars,
future priests, and the institutions that trained them.
Thus Cambridge University acquired four new colleges, the foundations
of which can be associated with the Black Death. Gonville was established
between 1348 and 1351; Trinity Hall, in 1350; Corpus Christi, in 1352; and
Clare Hall, in 1362. Oxford acquired two new colleges: Canterbury, in 1362,
and New College, 1372. Even more dramatic was the proliferation of new
universities on the Continent. In 1348, Emperor Charles IV, expressing
concern for the decay of learning, granted a charter to the new University of
Prague, which still today bears his name. It attracted many Czech and
German students, who formerly had to travel to Bologna or Paris.
Universities were established at Vienna and Cracow in 1364; at Fünfkirchen
in Hungary in 1367; and at Heidelberg in 1385. In sum, all the universities
east of the Rhine and north of the Alps were founded after the onslaught of
epidemics. Most of the authorizing charters mention the shortage of priests
and the decay of learning as the reasons for their foundation.
 It is interesting to speculate on the cultural results of this proliferation of
universities. For one, it undercut the dominance of the older great centers,
notably Paris and Bologna. It is hard to evaluate the quality of learning in the
new schools, but they probably helped give late scholastic thought its
reputation for logic-chopping and futility. They also freed the curriculum of
the weight of traditional subjects. At the University of Florence, for example,
which was also founded in 1350 in the immediate wake of plague, rhetoric
and soon the study of Greek replaced logic at the core of the program in
liberal arts. The reform spread quickly to the other universities of Italy and
gave a major thrust to the revival of classical studies.
While it weakened the dominance of a few international centers, the
proliferation of universities gave the new foundations much more of a
national constituency than any school had shown before. This surely loosened
the international cohesion of medieval culture and prepared the way for the
theological schisms coming in, and even before, the Reformation. The plague
helped bring the age of cultural nationalism to Europe.
This trend toward national cultures is seen too in its effects upon the
forms of linguistic expression. The number of teachers who knew Latin
declined, and this made necessary the use of the vernacular tongues in
instruction, at least below the university level. But the bad quality of
university Latin provoked a movement too in the opposite direction, initially
in Italy: an effort to restore the language not to its medieval but to its
classical purity. The Renaissance of classical Latin thus was a counterpoise
to the simultaneous emphasis upon vernacular usage.
To evaluate the influence of plague on the bodies of medieval learning is
necessarily to indulge in speculation. But some comment can be offered.
Medicine is the domain of formal learning most deeply affected. The corps of
medical practitioners in medieval society had been deeply divided into four
groups: physicians, who held university degrees and knew medical theory but
played a limited role in the care of the sick; surgeons, who learned their
skills as apprentices and were the most important among those who cared for
the sick; barbers, competent to do minor surgery, blood-letting and the like;
and practitioners of folk medicine, a group in which women seemingly
predominated.
The universities taught the principles of Galenic medicine inherited from
the ancient world and received primarily through the mediation of the Arabs.
Disease was a disturbance in the balance of the four humors. Galenic
medicine had no clear theory of contagion.18 But observers of the Black
Death had no doubt of its contagious nature. Confidence diminished in the
assumption that the ancients had said it all. In 1377, the town of Ragusa
(present-day Dubrovnik) required that arriving ships, their crews,
passengers, and cargoes, be kept for a certain time in isolation, to make sure
that plague was not traveling with them. This was the origin of what came to
be known as the quarantine. The name is Venetian, but sooner or later all
Europe’s ports adopted similar measures. No one now was doubting that
plague was contagious.
Several results followed in the field of medical science. On a social
level, the challenge of plague broke down the division between theorizing
physicians and practicing surgeons, lent new prestige to the surgeons, and
gave new impetus to the direct study of the human body in sickness and in
health. Anatomical investigations, which had begun before the plague, were
now pursued with more urgency and with higher levels of support from
public authorities. And, as a more far-reaching consequence, the experience
of plague at least began the long, slow reevaluation of the Galenic system
leading to the formation of modern pathological theory. The first to advance
systematically the theory of contagion was Giovanni Fracastoro (1483–
1533), a physician who served as a public health official and who had
earlier written an elegant Latin poem about syphilis, giving that new disease
its classical-sounding name. The road to modern medicine had scarcely been
entered, but the first steps were taken.19
In philosophy, the major trend in late medieval schools was a critical
attack upon the great philosophical systems developed in the immediate pre-
plague period. Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274, can here serve as an
example. This great Dominican had argued that the universe possessed an
underlying order, and that the human intellect could achieve at least a partial
understanding of its structure. His late medieval critics, called
conventionally nominalists, claimed that he was wrong on both counts. The
human intellect had not the power to penetrate the metaphysical structures of
the universe. It could do no more than observe events as they flowed.
Moreover, the omnipotent power of God meant in the last analysis that there
could be no fixed natural order. God could change what He wanted, when He
wanted. The nominalists looked on a universe dominated by arbitrary
motions. Aquinas’s sublime sense of order was hard to reconcile with the
experience of plague—unpredictable in its appearances and course,
unknowable in its origins, yet destructive in its impact. The nominalist
argument was consonant with the disordered experiences of late medieval
life.
Finally, we consider how plague affected the religious sensibilities of the
Middle Ages, not on the level of formal theology but in the beliefs and
practices of the people. The entire issue —how Christian were the Middle
Ages?—has elicited much scholarly debate. The French historian Jean
Delumeau has been especially forceful in arguing that during the medieval
centuries only the clergy and a small lay elite practiced a recognizable
Christianity; the masses, especially in the countryside, remained ignorant of
the principal tenets of the Christian faith.20 They adhered to a kind of folk
paganism only superficially touched by Christian beliefs. Jacques Le Goff
advances a similar argument. “At about 1500,” he has written, “Christendom
was almost a missionary country.”21
It is, to be sure, not easy to evaluate the religious beliefs of the unlettered
masses. How can the historian know the prayers and pieties of people who
did not write and who were largely ignored by the book-producing elites?
One precious clue which we shall utilize here is naming conventions, what
names people gave to their children. The choice of names, presumably made
in freedom, is a cultural statement. In choosing a name, parents may evoke the
memory of an ancestor or of a renowned hero. They may express good
wishes for their offspring, as in the Italian “Dietiguardi,” “May God guard
you.” And they may also invoke for their child a spiritual patron, a saint, a
kind of celestial godparent who would look after their baby’s welfare. This
last choice interests us primarily. It speaks to the awareness that medieval
people had of the Christian cult of saints, and also to the importance they
attached to the appointment of a spiritual patron. And even the choice of a
spiritual patron tells us something of their concerns.
The cult of saints is of course very old, going back to the commemoration
of martyrs in the early Church. It is, however, also true that comparatively
few medieval people bore a saint’s name until quite late in the epoch—a fact
that lends support to the thesis that official Christianity was little practiced
by the masses. For example, the great ninth-century survey of the abbey of
St.-Germain de Près near Paris gives 6,046 male names and 4,036 female
names.22 Most of the persons named were legally “the men of St. Germain,”
but how many bore the name of the saint, once the bishop of Paris? Only ten
of the 6,000 men. Names with a Biblical or Christian association are very
rare. Iacobus, Jacques or James, appears only three times, and Iohannes or
John, 24. One of the most renowned saints of this place and period was
Martin of Tours, a former soldier and hermit. According to his famous
legend, he once divided his cloak with a beggar; that night, in his dream,
Christ appeared to thank him for it. The cloak was kept as the most precious
relic of the Frankish kings; our word, chapel, derives from it. How many men
of St. Germain bore the name Martin? Only 31. So it is also among the
women; only two carry the name of Geneviève, the saint who saved Paris
from the Huns. There are 19 Marys. Among both men and women, names
formed from Germanic roots and showing no religious associations hold an
overwhelming preponderance. Those with the initial element of “Erme,” as
in Ermenarius among the men and Ermengardis among the women, number
223 and 178 respectively for the two sexes. The peasants of St.-Germain
were not inclined to appoint celestial patrons for their children.
This was of course before the great efflorescence of medieval culture in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but even then medieval names show
comparatively little religious influence. We can illustrate naming conventions
in the thirteenth century, and subsequent changes in them, specifically for the
city of Florence. Florentine sources are exceptionally abundant, and the city
is attractive too by virtue of its cultural prominence.
In 1260, the commune of Florence summoned its male citizens to march
against Siena, and its officials recorded the names of those mustered into the
communal army. Their records have partially survived, and are gathered into
a collection named after the valley where the battle was fought, the Libro di
Montaperti. A Swedish scholar, Olof Brattö, studied these names, and I
follow his principal conclusions here.23 He counted up 6,207 persons,
bearing some 3,000 names. The stock of thirteenth-century Florentine names
was thus very big. Brattö initially selected for special attention 203 names
that appeared more than five times; they are shared by 80 percent of the
population. By my own calculations, if we rearrange the names by frequency
of appearance, then we must count as many as 73 most common names before
we can cover one-half the army. In other words, by 1260 Florentines made
use of a large variety of names. And the number of names with religious
associations is tiny—by Brattö’s count; 19.4 percent, about one in five. The
two largest categories of names are historical names, like Guido or
Aldobrando, with a long tradition at Florence, and augurative names, like
Bonaventure or Dietisavli. Nearly 60 percent of the army bear names out of
these two categories.
If we take a closer look at the twenty most common names at Florence in
1260, the first place, based on 163 appearances, is held by Iacopo.24 This is
a religious name, and its popularity may reflect the prestige of the church of
St. Iacopo di Compostella in Spain, which attracted many Tuscan pilgrims.
Third place also goes to a religious name, Giovanni, presumably recalling
Florence’s own patron saint. But only two others among the twenty have
religious associations—Filippo in thirteenth position and Bernardo in
fourteenth. The situation is closely analogous in the countryside.25 With
celestial patrons associated with only one out of five Florentine males, it
does not appear that the cult of saints had much appeal in the city or the
countryside even as late as 1260.
But a dramatic change occurred over the immediately following
generations, amounting to a veritable revolution in the choice of Florentine
names. To illustrate the shifting choices, we next look at the names of citizens
interred at the Dominican convent of Santa Maria Novella, as recorded in a
necrology kept by the friars. The males buried between 1290, the date of the
earliest entry, and 1350, number only 369, and the distribution is
concentrated in the later decades of this period. The women buried were
245. Those interred at Santa Maria Novella represent a richer tier of citizens
than the soldiers of 1260, but this affects only marginally the choice of
names.26
Men’s names are noticeably fewer and repetition of them greater. In
1260, as many as 73 names were needed to cover one-half the population.
Among the dead males at Santa Maria Novella, this number falls to 27.
Likewise, the most popular choices have changed. Of the twenty most
common names in 1260, only five are still found in that category in 1290-
1350. They are Giovanni, now holding first position; Iacopo, reduced to
third; Filippo, advancing from thirteenth to eighth; and Bernardo, falling from
fourteenth to nineteenth. Significantly, four of the five survivors are religious
names; only Neri in twelfth place is not. They are joined in the top twenty by
other religious names: Piero, who had not registered even five appearances
in 1260; Francesco, altogether missing from the earlier survey; Andrea,
which previously had been far back in the count, in sixty-eighth position.
Among the top twenty, names associated with a saint show an increase from
four in 1260 to 13 in the pre-plague generation.
Among the women’s names, the first position is shared by a religious
name, Giovanna, and by one that is not, Lapa, both with 15 appearances. Of
the top twenty feminine names, only five are religious. This suggests that the
Christianization of Florentine names proceeded more slowly for women than
for men, but the direction of evolution was the same.
If the cult of saints is any measure, religious awareness grew more
intensive within the Florentine population between the late thirteenth and the
middle fourteenth century. The chief disseminators of the new consciousness
were doubtlessly the mendicants, especially the Franciscan and Dominican
friars. They took as their chief mission the evangelization of the masses. Thus
Franciscan influence is unmistakable in the unprecedented popularity of the
name Francesco. Rarely encountered in the thirteenth century, it achieves
fourth place among the men buried at Santa Maria Novella, even though the
convent was Dominican. By the last half of the fifteenth century, it supplants
even Giovanni as the most popular Florentine name.27 Domenico gains too,
rising from twenty-second position to as high as tenth in the late fifteenth
century, but St. Dominic never equalled the appeal of the little poor man of
Assisi, at least within the city.
How did the experience of epidemic affect the choice of names? Quite
clearly, the increase in the stock of religious names, and perhaps also the
conversion of the Florentine population to intensified religious fervor, had
made substantial advances even before the plague appeared. But the Black
Death added momentum to the process and profoundly influenced the choice
of patrons.28
The 1427 Catasto provides the names of all the household heads in
Florence—8,372 males and 1,280 women. Now it is only fourteen names that
cover half the population, as opposed to 27 in the generation before the
plague. The substantial reduction in the stock of names necessarily led to the
greater use of family names, to identify individuals.
The names registered in the Catasto show several new choices which can
be reasonably attributed to the experience of plague. The most prominent is
Antonio, which gained second position after Giovanni in 1427. The name
does not appear among the soldiers of 1260, nor among the men buried at
Santa Maria Novella before 1350. Its popularity comes with the great
epidemics. In most instances it doubtlessly honors Anthony of Padua, one of
the followers of St. Francis, who acquired renown as a preacher and worker
of miracles. St. Bernardine of Siena, a contemporary of the Catasto, remarks
about him: “God gives to certain saints particular powers of patronage in
particular causes, as to St. Anthony of Padua, by whose patronage every day
graces and miracles are obtained.”29 Anthony was the special patron of those
struck by fever. The name Niccolò too, unknown among the soldiers of 1260
though already present among those interred at Santa Maria Novella,
achieves exceptional popularity in the late fourteenth century. It ranks seventh
among the Florentine household heads in 1427. It probably recalls the name
of another wonderworker, Nicholas of Tolentino, dead in 1320.
Another new name, ranking sixth in 1427, is Bartolomeo, which
supplants its hypocoristic Bartolo, a popular name before the plague. Why
Bartolomeo should replace Bartolo is not clear, but Bartolomeo is
recognizably the name of an apostle. According to his legend, Bartolomeo
was flayed and crucified. In the painting of the Last Judgment in the Sistine
Chapel, Michelangelo depicted him holding his own skin. As the sign of
plague was most manifest on the skin, he too might have some association
with the disease. As one who endured dreadful tortures, he knew what pain
was like and was a prominent member of the Christian community of
sufferers. This perhaps explains his popularity amid raging epidemics.
Still another name that comes to common use in the period of plague is
Lorenzo. Deacon of the Church of Rome, he also suffered a painful
martyrdom: he was roasted on a gridiron. Like Bartolomeo, he too
understood suffering, and would protect his followers from the pains he had
known.
Christopher is another new name, not used before the plague. Christopher
guarded against sudden death, and death that over took a person before he or
she could receive the sacrament of penance. Given the violence of plagues,
his special services were valued. The saint with particular association with
plague was Sebastian, a Roman soldier under Emperor Dicoletian who, for
reason of his faith, was shot through with arrows. The flying arrow was a
traditional symbol of the flight of infection, and the arrow wound resembled
plague boils. Like other suffering saints, Sebastian was qualified to ward off
the very ills that he had endured. At Florence, however, he is late in
appearing; not until after 1450 does his name, in the form of Bastiano,
become reasonably common.30 Two other saints with concern for the sick are
Cosmas and Damian, with the former much more popular at Florence than the
latter. They are the patrons of physicians. And Cosmas, in the form of
Cosimo, was the name of the member of the Medici house who, in 1434,
established the family’s hegemony over Florence.
The expanding and intensified search for spiritual patrons who knew
suffering and had the power to offer help to those stricken by it thus singled
out several ancient saints for special veneration. The quest also raised out of
obscurity more recent figures. One was Rose of Viterbo, who died about
1250, but acquired stature in her native city only with the plague of 1450.31
Her frequent intercession on behalf of those infected led the commune to
petition the Pope for her formal canonization. Another example comes from
Sicily: St. Rosalia, who died about 1160, lived as an anchoress in a grotto
near the city of Palermo. The true story of her life is even more obscure than
Rose’s own, and in her case it was a late plague, that of 1624, which won her
prominence at Palermo.32 At Florence, the plague of 1630 also rendered
popular the cult of a saint who died in 1553. This was Domenica da
Paradiso. These women saints, elevated by plague to the stature of major
intercessors, usually worked their miracles through some sort of physical
object—water, bread, or a garment—which was associated with their bodies
and was taken to the sick.33 Women nurses or relatives were often the ones
who recommended these procedures. The curative powers of women
working through women may reflect the role which they held in the practice
of folk medicine, with which these miraculous cures seem closely
associated.
But the chief of the plague saints was a man, though it is not sure whether
he really existed. This was St. Rock. He was supposedly born about 1295 at
Montpellier, where his father was ruler of the town. The infant bore a red
cross on his breast, and on Wednesdays and Fridays refused to nurse more
than once a day in honor of the Virgin. As a young man, he distributed his
wealth among the poor and embarked on a pilgrimage to Rome. The plague
was raging in many places on his journey, but he cured the buboes by his
touch. He contracted the plague himself at Piacenza and was expelled from
the town. He returned to Montpellier, where he was imprisoned as a spy; he
died there in 1327—well before the plague had actually entered Europe. He
seems to have gained his reputation as healer in 1414, when he was credited
with saving the Council of Constance from infection. Late in the century, a
Venetian humanist and governor of Brescia named Francesco Diedo wrote
down his legend. Iconographically, St. Rock is presented with his pilgrim
staff and purse, and often with a dog; he points to a plague boil on his inner
thigh.34
The frantic search for celestial protection affected other religious
practices. Princes and the wealthy amassed treasuries of relics, which they
hoped would guard their health. In their wills they called for Masses to be
sung for their souls in what seems preposterous numbers—sometimes in the
thousands, as if heaven could be forced open if enough Masses were piled up
at the gates. French scholar Jacques Chiffoleau calls this mania for numbers
“heavenly accounting.”35 He associates this quantitative bent with the
emergence of the calculating mind of the modern world. The argument is not
altogether convincing. But there is no doubt that fear of an untimely death
profoundly affected the practices and style of late medieval religious life.

Europe at about 1300 was a land caught in a Malthusian deadlock, in a

demographic and economic situation which paralyzed its capacity to improve
the ways it produced its goods. That system, marked by saturated use of
resources and stagnant outputs, might have persisted indefinitely. The plague
broke the deadlock, and allowed Europeans to rebuild their demographic and
economic systems in ways more admissive of further development.
Culturally, the plague thinned the cadres of the skilled and learned and
reduced their years of service; it weakened schools and universities; and it
compromised the quality of cultural traditions. But it also prepared the road
to renewal. Moreover, the fear of plague and of unforeseen death intensified
the religious consciousness of the population and disseminated it across
larger sectors of society. But it also favored the development of a kind of
medicinal, even magical religion, the chief feature of which was the cult of
protector and healer saints. To many, particularly among the educated, the
cult of saints, their relics and shrines, had seemed superstitious or idolatrous.
The saints were usurping the veneration due to God alone. The plague and
the style of piety it promoted set the stage for a protracted and divisive
debate over the nature of pure religion. The sounds of religious dispute echo
down the centuries of the late Middle Ages and the early modern epoch. And
the debate helped provoke eventual schism in the Christian community.
Europe proved to be a strong patient, and emerged from its long bout with
pestilence healthier, more energetic, and more creative than before.36 But its
civilization has not outlived all the sequelae of the great epidemics.
Notes

I have made only minor adjustments to the text of David Herlihy’s lectures. His notes, however,
were incomplete. In revising them, I have confined my commentary largely to my introduction.

Introduction
1. David Herlihy, Pisa in the Early Renaissance: A Study of Urban Growth (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1958).
2. These have been collected in Herlihy, The Social History of Italy and Western Europe, 700–
1200 (London: Variorum Reprints, 1978).
3. See Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia: The Social History of an Italian Town, 1200–
1430 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), esp., pp. 102–120; Herlihy, “A Spectral Analysis
of Deaths in Florence, 1275–1500,” written with the assistance of Perry Gluckman and Mary Pori,
both of whom were at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences of Stanford
University, where Herlihy was in residence during the academic year 1972–73. Herlihy and
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles: Une étude du catasto de 1427 (Paris:
Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques/Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1978),
p. 194, briefly summarize the results from this study. It is cited as “Typescript. Center for Advanced
Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1973.”
4. Herlihy, Pistoia, pp. 65–66.
5. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans de Languedoc, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale,
1966), and M. M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the
Medieval Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
6. Herlihy, Pistoia, p. 117.More recently, John Hatcher, in his Plague, Population and the English
Economy 1348–1530 (London: Macmillan, 1977), has argued against this interpretation,
emphasizing once again mortality as the key demographic variable for understanding the stagnation
 of Europe’s population through much of the fifteenth century. For a contrary view, see Larry Poos,
A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), pp. 121–129; and Jim Bolton, “ ‘The World Upside Down’: Plague as an Agent of
Economic and Social Change,” in The Black Death in England, ed. by Mark Ormrod and Phillip
Lindley (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1996), pp. 39–40.
7. “Spectral Analysis,” 17–18.
8. For this distinction, see Chapter 2 above and the excellent discussions of Pier Paolo Viazzo, Upland
Communities: Environment, Population and Social Structure in the Alps since the Sixteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 7, 42-46, 178–179.See also Herlihy
and Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs families, pp. 209–214.
9. Herlihy, Pistoia, p. 145; and “Population, Plague and Social Change,” p. 242.
10. Herlihy begins “Population, Plague and Social Change in Rural Pistoia” with criticisms of Enrico
Fiumi’s interpretation of the plague’s role in late medieval social and economic history: “His silence
implies that he holds the plagues, famines and accompanying demographic decline of the fourteenth
century to be fortuitous interventions, pure acts of God, to which no social or economic factor
substantially contributed” (p. 226).
11. Barbara F. Harvey, “Introduction: The ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century,” in Before the
Black Death: Studies in the ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century, ed. by Bruce M. S.
Campbell (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1991), pp. 1–24, has recently reached a
similar conclusion: “Left to its own devices, the early fourteenth-century economy would not have
proved capable of fundamental long-term changes, comparable to those which actually took place in
the very different circumstances created by the Black Death. ... it was in fact the advent of plague,
an exogenous factor, that transformed the economic life of Western Europe in the later Middle
Ages, and the changes which actually occurred after that event could not have been predicted in
the first half of the century.”
12. See the special number of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 14, 2 (1983): 199–534:
Hunger and History: The Impact of Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns
on Society; and in particular Massimo Livi-Bacci, “The Nutrition-Mortality Link in Past Times: A
Comment,” pp. 293–298; and his later book, Population and Nutrition: An Essay on European
Demographic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [Bologna: II Mulino, 1987]).
See also John Walter and Roger Schofield, “Famine, Disease and Crisis: Mortality in Early Modern
Society,” in Famine, Disease and Social Order in Early Modern Society, ed. by Walter and
Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1–73, esp. pp. 18–21.
13. Campbell, “Population Pressure, Inheritance, and the Land Market in a Fourteenth-Century Peasant
Community,” pp. 87–135, in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, ed. by Richard M. Smith (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), especially pp. 120,127.
14. According to a keyword search for “Black Death,” “pest,” “plague,” and “peste” in the British
Library catalogue, Herlihy’s claims for the late 1970s and early 1980s seem justified. After 1985 to
1995, however, the number of titles with these words has declined markedly. Nonetheless, since
Herlihy’s lectures of 1985 several important works have appeared, especially about German-
speaking and Nordic countries—areas that received scant attention in Herlihy’s essays. For a
review of that literature as of 1979, see Neithard Bulst, “Der Schwarze Tod: Demographische,
wirtschaftsund kulturgeschichtliche Aspekte der Pestkatastrophe von 1347–1352. Bilanz der
neueren Forschung,” Saeculum, 30 (1979): 45–67.
Among the recent books and articles that have appeared after Herlihy’s lectures, see Hatcher,
“England in the Aftermath of the Black Death,” Past & Present, 144 (1994): 3–35; Poos, A Rural
Society after the Black Death; Die Pest 1348 in Italien: Fünfzig zeitgenössische Quellen, ed.
by Klaus Bergdolt (Heidelberg: Manutius Verlag, 1989); William B. Ober, “The Plague at Granada,
 1348–49: Ibn al-Khatib and Ideas of Contagion,” in Bottoms up! A Pathologist’s Essays on
Medicine and the Humanities (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 288–
294; Manchester Medieval Source Series: The Black Death, trans, and ed. by Rosemary Horrox
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); La pesta nera: Dati di una realtà ed elementi
di una interpretazione. Atti del XXX Convegno storico internazionale, Todi, 10–13 ottobre 1993
(Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1994); Frantisek Graus, Pest, Geissler,
Judenmorde: Das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1987);
Karl Georg Zinn, Kanonen und Pest: über die Ursprünge der Neuzeit im 14. und 15.
Jahrhundert (Ophalen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989); Before the Black Death: Studies in the
‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century, ed. by Bruce Campbell (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1991); Heide Schmölzer, Die Pest in Wien (Vienna: Österreichischer
Bundesverlag, 1988); Oie Jorgen Benedictow, Plague in the Late Medieval Nordic Countries:
Epidemiological Studies (Oslo: Middelalderforlaget, 1992); Neithard Bulst, “Krankheit und
Gesellschaft in der Vormoderne: Das Beispiel der Pest,” in Maladies et société (Xlle-XVIIIe
siècles), ed. by Bulst and Robert Delort. Actes du colloque de Bielefeld, novembre 1986 (Paris:
Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1989), pp. 17–55; The Black Death in
England, ed. by Ormrod and Lindley.
15. See Ann Carmichael, “Infection, Hidden Hunger, and History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, 14, 2 (1983): 261.
16. See Anna Lucia Forti Messina, “L’Italia dell’Ottocento di fronte al colera,” in Storia d’Italia:
Annali 7: Malattia e medicina, ed. by Franco Della Peruta (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), pp. 427–494;
and Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 55–64.
17. Chiara Borro Saporiti, “L’endemia tubercolare nel secolo XIX: Ipotesi per ripensare un mito,” in
Della Peruta, Malattia e medicina, pp. 841–875; and Domenico Preti, “La lotta antitubercolare
nell’Italia fascista,” in ibid., pp. 953–1015; and Pierre Guillaume, Du désespoir au salut: Les
tuberculeux aux 19e et 20e siècles (Paris: Aubier, 1986), pp. 131–169.
18. Herlihy also drew parallels between the Black Death and the AIDS virus in “The Black Death:
Shock and Social Fissures,” The Maine Scholar, 5 (1992): 33–44.
19. See Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900
( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); John Henderson, “Epidemics in Renaissance
Florence: Medical Theory and Government Response,” in Maladies et société, pp. 165–188, esp.
p. 169; Jon Arrizabalaga, Roger French, and Henderson, eds., The Great Pox: The French
Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Roger French, “The
Arrival of the French Disease in Leipzig,” in Maladies et société, pp. 133–141; and Anna Foa,
“The New and the Old: The Spread of Syphilis (1494–1530),” in Sex and Gender in Historical
Perspective, ed. by Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press,
1990), pp. 26–45.
20. According to Messina, “L’Italia dell’Ottocento,” p. 431, cholera also struck the public imagination
because of its spontaneous appearance and mysterious character. But by the middle of the
nineteenth century doctors realized that its cause and cure depended on sanitary conditions and in
particular on clean water and the proper disposal of sewage; ibid., p. 436.
21. This is a hypothesis that must be tested with comparative analysis. Messina, “L’Italia
dell’Ottocento,” pp. 480–481, 489, reports the fears and reactions of the poor against the medical
profession and hospitals during the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century (“veleno! vogliono
farci morire, perché siamo troppo”). See also Paolo Sorcinelli, “Uomini ed epidemie nel primo
Ottocento: comportamenti, reazioni e paure nello Stato pontifìcio,” in Malattia e medicina, pp. 495–
537.But neither author concludes that the medical profession declined in respect during the century.
 Indeed, it was quite the opposite: the nineteenth century saw the rapid spread and legitimization of
the medical profession in Italy. According to Ada Lonni, “Medici, ciarlatani e magistrati nell’Italia
liberale,” in Malattia e medicina, pp. 799–840, a new trust in the ability of doctors to cure disease
spread through the Italian population at least in the major cities during the nineteenth century.
On the decline in the status of the medical profession after the Black Death of 1348 and public
distrust of it, see Katharine Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 34–42, 237–238. For a contemporary source that
links the Black Death with the decline in skills and prestige of the medical profession, the clergy,
and educators, see William Langland, Piers the Ploughman, transl. by J. F. Goodridge
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959). Historians have questioned these generalizations, however.
William J. Courtenay, “The Effect of the Black Death on English Higher Education,” Speculum, 55,
4 (1980): 696–714, argues that support and respect for education and educators increased in
England after the Black Death through the second half of the fourteenth century. William J. Dohar,
The Black Death and Pastoral Leadership: The Diocese of Hereford in the Fourteenth
Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), has emphasized the “heroic efforts
of John Trillek” (bishop of Hereford) to ensure that the diocese where Langland lived maintained
high levels of recruitment and upheld the standard of priestly qualifications in the post-plague period.
Similarly, Christopher Harper-Bill, “The English Church and English Religion after the Black
Death,” pp. 79–124, in The Black Death in England, has claimed: “What is most striking is the
consistently high standard of episcopal governance over almost two centuries from the Black Death
to the Reformation” (p. 105).
22. At least for Italy, the authors of Malattia e medicina do not report any correlations between the
outbreak of disease and the search for scapegoats or pogroms against Jews or aliens. Indeed,
according to Giorgio Gattai, the spread of syphilis in the nineteenth century promoted the “birth of
‘tolerance’.” (“La sifilide: Medici e poliziotti interno alla ‘Venere politica’,” pp. 739–798.) Following
the outbreak of cholera in Hamburg in 1892, right-wing politicians were unsuccessful in provoking
anti-Jewish violence. Instead, criticism led to social and governmental reform; see Richard J. Evans,
Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830–1910 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1987), pp. 387–401.
23. See most recently Graus, Pest, Geissler, Judenmorde. Plagues in early modern Italy led to the fear
and repression of the poor mixed with acts of charity; see Brain Pullan, “Plague and Perceptions of
the Poor in Early Modern Italy,” in Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of
Pestilence, ed. by Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
pp. 101–123. Anti-Semitic pogroms did not occur everywhere, however, as historians of Great
Britain and Italy are well aware. An atlas analyzing and comparing areas free from post-plague
pogroms with those stricken by them is much needed.
24. The essays in Ranger and Slack, eds., Epidemics and Ideas, provide a greater sense of the
commonalities in the psychological reactions to disease across history than does Herlihy; see in
particular Slack, “Introduction,” pp. 1–20, esp. pp. 3–5. On the beginnings of a comparative
approach to diseases in early modern Europe, see Bulst, “Krankheit und Gesellschaft in der
Vormoderne.” On Jews, Indians, the French, and lepers as “the Other” sought out for blame with
the spread of syphilis, see Foa, “The New and the Old.” But in the case of syphilis, Foa concludes
that “the idea of contagion, with its totally natural means of transmission, tended to eliminate an
essential aspect of blaming: the aura of mystery that always surrounded it” (p. 31). For American
hysteria following the outbreak of tuberculosis at the time of World War I and its consequences for
class and race hatred, see Katherine Ott, “The Intellectual Origins and Cultural Form of
Tuberculosis in the United States, 1870–1925,” Ph.D diss., Temple University (1990), pp. 278–285;
for France, Guillaume, Du désespoir au salut, pp. 81–105. For riots and popular violence in
 southern Italy after the outbreak of cholera, see Francesco Leoni, Il Colera nell’Italia
meridionale (1836–1837), 2nd ed. (Rome: Editrice Apes, 1990); and more generally on fear and
its reactions, Sorcinelli, Nuove epidemie, antiche paure: Uomini e colera nell’Ottocento (Milan:
Franco Angeli, 1986) esp. pp. 32–49; and Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, pp. 55–64. On typhus
and influenza as “new diseases,” see Carmichael, “Infection and Hidden Hunger,” pp. 258–261.
25. See J. F. D. Shrewsbury, A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970); Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal
(London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1984). Also see the work of the physician and
historian of medicine, Ann Carmichael, Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 18–26, who maintains that the plague was
accompanied by a variety of other contagious infections: smallpox, influenza, and typhus. On the
interaction of diseases in history, see her “Infection and Hidden Hunger.”
26. On the supposed ignorance of contemporary observers, see Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death:
Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (London: Hale, 1983; 2nd ed., 1986), p. 110:
“But it is surprising that virtually all of the medical observers failed to make the connection between
plague and the plethora of dead rodents that preceded an epidemic.”
27. See most recently the introduction to the collection of sources on the Black Death edited and
translated by Horrox, The Black Death, p. 5: “What such writers were describing were quite
clearly cases of bubonic and pneumonic plague.” Benedictow, Plague in the Late Medieval
Nordic Countries; The Pest Anatomized: Five Centuries of Plague in Western Europe: An
Exhibition at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (London: The Wellcome
Institute, 1985); Gottfried, The Black Death. Except for Gottfried’s discredited book (see Stuart
Jenks’s review, Journal of Economic History, 46 (1986): 815–823; Caroline Walker Bynum,
“Disease and Death in the Middle Ages,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 9 (1985): 97–102;
and John Norris’s review in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 58 (1984): 250–252),
historians have recently eliminated pneumonic plague as the source of the unusually swift contagion.
On pneumonic plague, see Shrewsbury, A History of Bubonic Plague; Twigg, The Black Death,
p. 163 and Benedictow, Plague, pp. 266–267.
28. I know of few historians other than David Herlihy who have supported the radical claims of Twigg,
The Black Death. On the basis of the complete absence of contemporary reports of dying rats or
other rodents accompanying the plague, average annual temperaturcs in Great Britain that would
not support a rat or flea population required for the mammoth mortalities scored by the plague, and
the rapidity of dissemination over long distances wholly incomparable with modern plague even
when assisted by steamships and railroads, Twigg argues tentatively for another disease candidate
—anthrax. This speculative conclusion put forward in his final chapter is less convincing than the
previous ten chapters, which forcefully refute the assumption that the 1348 plague and subsequent
waves of fourteenth-century pestilence were bubonic and pneumonic plagues. Reviewers raised the
objection that there are no known modern cases in which anthrax has taken on such epidemic
propositions. (In Twigg’s defense, no epidemics in modern records have reached the levels of the
Black Death’s mortality relative to population.) But had the plague been anthrax, why were the
cattle-grazing regions of Europe the least affected by the Black Death? See Léopold Genicot,
“Crisis: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times,” The Cambridge Economic History of Europe.
Vol. I: The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages (2nd ed.), ed. by M. M. Postan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 660–741.
The anthrax speculation is only a short coda to Twigg’s important book. Indeed, in a later article
which largely summarizes his book, “The Black Death in England: An Epidemiological Dilemma,” in
Maladies et société, pp. 75–98, Twigg does not even menuon anthrax. Instead, he argues: “The
logistics of the epidemic in England support the hypothesis of an air-borne organism of high
 infectivity and virulence, having a short incubation period and being spread by respiratory means”
(p. 98).
Despite Twigg’s array of overwhelming evidence that the plagues of the mid-fourteenth through
fifteenth centuries could not have been bubonic or pneumonic plague, historians in Britain have
largely ignored his book, while Americans have rejected its findings out of hand, without any
counterarguments. Further, recent works on the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century plagues continue
to maintain that the disease was bubonic but with no new evidence or rebuttal to Twigg’s argument.
See previous note.
29. Guy de Chauliac’s contemporary in Avignon, the physician Raymond Chalmel de Viviers, also
mentions the “bubo,” but it was only one of the 22 signs of pestilence listed in his De peste libri
tres, ed. by Robert Hoeniger in Der schwarze Tod in Deutschland (Berlin: Grosser, 1882), p. 171.
On Gentile da Folgino’s consilia on the plague and his analysis of “the signs,” see Jon Arrizabalaga,
“Facing the Black Death: Perceptions and Reactions of University Medical Practitioners,” in
Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. by L. García-Ballester, R. French, J.
Arrizabalaga, and A. Cunningham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 237–288.
30. E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: A
Reconstruction (London: Edward Arnold, 1981). As far as birth control goes, Wrigley has revised
his earlier claims based on Colyton. See his “Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England,”
Economic History Review, 19 (1966): 82–109, and “Marital Fertility in Seventeenth-Century
Colyton: A Note,” in ibid.: 429–436. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, in Les Toscans et leurs families,
pp. 439–446, continued to speculate that birth control was practiced by the Florentine population in
the fifteenth century. For a criticism of their argument see Rudolph Binion, “Fiction as Social
Fantasy: Europe’s Domestic Crisis of 1879–1914,” Journal of Social History, 27, 4 (1994): 697–
698.
31. Huizinga, Johan, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, transl. by Rodney Payton and Ulrich
Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996; Dutch orig.; Haarlem, 1919).
32. Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death: The Arts, Religion, and Society
in the Mid-Fourteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951).
33. Alberto Tenenti, Il senso della morte e l’amore della vita nel Rinascimento (Francia e Italia)
(Turin: Einaudi, 1957); see the review essay by Salvatore Camporeale, “Senso della morte e amore
della vita nel Rinascimento: Susone, Valla, Erasmo, e il ‘problema della salvezza,’ ” Memorie
Domenicane, n.s. 8–9 (1977–78): 439–450.
34. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (London: Allen Lane, 1981).
35. Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (London: Collins, 1969); and Gottfried, The Black Death.
36. Horrox, The Black Death, p. 22. For other examples, see documents pp. 30, 43, and 69; and Cohn,
Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
37. Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), vol. 4, p. 14.
38. Il Canzoniere, ed. by Sebastione Blancato (Milan, 1946), p. 129, Sonnet 99: “S’i’fossi.”
39. Horrox’s translation, The Black Death, p. 136; for a slightly different slant, see the Goodridge
translation, Langland, Piers the Ploughman, p. 62.
40. See Cohn, Cult of Remembrance.
41. See Cohn, Death and Property in Siena: Strategies for the Afterlife (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1988), and The Cult of Remembrance. Philippe Ariès, L’enfant et la vie
familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Plon, 1960), and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and
Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Wei-denfeld and Nicolson, 1977), have argued that
parents did not develop ties of affection with their children until the eighteenth century because
earlier high rates of infant and adolescent mortality had blunted these affections. These arguments
 have come under sharp attack; see for instance David Herlihy, “Medieval Children,” in Essays on
Medieval Civilization: The Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, ed. by Bede Karl Lackner
and Kenneth Roy Philip (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), pp. 109–141; Simon Schama,
The Embarrassment of Riches (New York: Knopf, 1986); Richard Trexler, Public Life in
Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980). Yet no one has speculated that the
very opposite relationship may have been at work, at least for the post-Black Death period, as
Langland’s verse and the changes in late medieval testaments suggest: plague and high levels of
mortality caused parents to spoil their children with excessive affection.
42. These figures come from the incunabula database compiled by the British Museum. It is the
largest database for early printing anywhere and contains not only the Brtitish Museum’s vast
holdings of incunabula but all known survivals. I wish to thank Martin Davies, curator of the
incunabula section of the British Library, for his assistance. On the population trends of the late
fifteenth century, see Herlihy, “Deaths, Marriages, Births, and the Tuscan Economy (ca. 1300–
1550),” in Population Patterns in the Past, ed. by Ronald Demos Lee (New York: Academic
Press, 1977), pp. 135–164; Herlihy, “The Population of Verona in the First Century of Venetian
Rule,” in Renaissance Venice, ed. by J. R Hale (London: Faber, 1973), pp. 91–120; and David
Sabean, “German Agrarian Institutions at the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century: Upper Swabia as
an Example,” in The German Peasant War of 1525, ed. by Janos M. Bak (London: Cass, 1976),
pp. 78–79.
43. See Alfred Doren, Studien in der Florentiner Wirtschaftgeschichte, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: J. G.
Cotta’sche Nachfolger, 1901–1908); Bruno Dini, “L’industria serica in Italia. Secc. XIII-XV,” in La
seta in Europa. Secc. XIII-XX, Atti della 24a settimana di studi “F. Datini” di Prato, ed. by S.
Cavaiciocchi (Florence: Olschki, 1983); Walter Endrei, L’évolution des techniques du filage et du
tissage de moyen âge à la revolution industrielle, trans. by Joseph Takacs (Paris: Mouton, 1968),
pp. 91–123; Eleanora M. Carus-Wilson, “An Industrial Revolution of the Thirteenth Century” and
“The English Cloth Industry in the Late Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries,” in Medieval
Merchant Venturers: Collected Studies (London: Methuen, 1954); and John H. Munro, “Textile
Technology,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph Strayer (New York: Scribner, 1988),
vol. 11, pp. 693–711: “The textile technology of the early modern era differed from the medieval
only in the improvement and spread of the Saxony spinning wheel, and of fulling and gig mills, and
the adoption of waterpowered calendaring machines. None of these changes can compare in their
impact on textiles with the medieval innovations in carding, spinning, weaving, and fulling” (p. 709).
44. B. H. Slicher Van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500–1850 (London:
Edward Arnold, 1963), pp. 170–194: “After the important inventions and improvements in the first
half of the Middle Ages, the innovations of the latter half seem comparatively modest.” (p. 185)
Van Bath finds just the opposite relationship between technological advance and population: it was
periods of agricultural booms that stimulated technological change. The classic statement equating
periods of technological innovation with demographic decline and scarcity of manpower is Marc
Bloch’s. He accounts for the diffusion of the water mill during the seventh century in “Avenement
et conquètes du moulin à eau,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, 7 (1935); for a critical
overview of this demographic explanation for technological advancement, see Carlo M. Cipolla,
“Per una storia della produttività nei secoli del medioevo e del rinascimento,” in Produttività e
technologie nei secoli XII-XVII, ed. by S. Mariotti (Florence: Le Monnier, 1981), pp. 3–7.
45. The date of invention or first appearance in the documents of a technology may not be the same as
the diffusion of a new agricultural practice. Herlihy, “Santa Maria Impruneta: A Rural Commune in
the Late Middle Ages,” in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence, ed.
by Nicolai Rubinstein (London: Faber, 1968), pp. 242–276, argues that despite earlier anticipations, it
 was well after the Black Death that the mezzadria system and new forms of capital investments in
the land became diffused in the countryside surrounding Florence.
46. Van Bath, The Agrarian History, p. 186.
47. Bruce M. S. Campbell and Mark Overton, “A New Perspective on Medieval and Early Modern
Agriculture: Six Centuries of Norfolk Farming c. 1250-C.1850,” Past & Present, 141 (1993): 38–
105, esp. p. 41.
48. Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion 1400–1700
(London: Collins, 1965).
49. The term was coined by Michael Roberts, “The Military Revolution, 1560–1660,” An Inaugural
Lecture delivered before Queen’s University of Belfast (Belfast, 1956). Geoffrey Parker, “The
‘Military Revolution’—a Myth?” Journal of Modern History, 48 (1976): 195–214; and The
Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), challenged Roberts’s thesis but kept its essential lines of
argument, only extending the dates of the Military Revolution to 1530–1730. See Michael Duffy,
“Introduction: The Military Revolution and the State 1500–1800,” in The Military Revolution and
the State 1500–1800 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1980), pp. 1–10.
50. “The Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: Tuscan Names, 1200–1530,” Renaissance Quarterly 41,
4 (1988): 561–583.
51. See especially C. M. de la Roncière, “L’influence des franciscains dans la campagne de Florence au
XIVe siècle (1280–1360),” Mélanges de l’école française de Rome—Moyen Age 87, 1 (1975):
27–103; and his “Aspects de la religiosité populaire en Toscane: Le contado florentin des années
1300,” in La Toscana nel secolo XIV: Caratteri di una civiltà regionale, ed. by Sergio Gensini
(Pisa: Pacini, 1988), vol. I, pp. 337–384. Similarly, Robert Brentano, A New World in a Small
Place: Church and Religion in the Diocese of Rieti, 1188–1378 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), p. 310, finds that these saints’ names are already popular by the end of the
thirteenth century.
52. La Roncière, “L’influence des franciscains,” p. 33: “Le succès de Francesco est éphémère. Le
déclin s’amorce peut-être dès avant la peste: la faiblesse du pourcentage des Francesco à S.
Appiano chez les survivants de 1348 fait supposer que la flambée allumée en 1315 a cessé avant
1350. La césure de 1348 est en tout cas incontestable dans les quatre cantons cités.”
53. Herlihy, “Tuscan Names,” p. 579. Curiously, Herlihy makes no mention of la Roncière’s earlier
arguments, especially in “L’influence des franciscains.”
54. Herlihy, “Tuscan Names,” p. 576.
55. For a comparative treatment of the religious and psychological effects of the Black Death in
Tuscany and Umbria, see Cohn, The Cult of Remembrance.
56. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial
Europe, ed. by T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
For differences between Sicily and Tuscany see Stephan Epstein, “Cities, Regions and the Late
Medieval Crisis: Sicily and Tuscany Compared,” Past & Present, 130 (1991): 3–50.
57. See Michael W. Dois, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1977).
58. Ibid., p. 271.
59. For the beginnings of an explanation, see ibid., 293–294, and Dols, “The Comparative Communal
Responses to the Black Death in Muslim and Christian Societies,” Viator, 5 (1974): 269–287.
60. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. by Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1954 [Paris: Colin, 1949]), p. 195: “Historical facts are, in essence, psychological facts. …
The virus of the Black Death was the prime cause of the depopulation of Europe. But the epidemic
spread so rapidly only by virtue of certain social—and, therefore, in their underlying nature, mental
 —conditions, and its moral effects are to be explained only by the peculiar propensities of collective
sensibility.”
61. See John Vidal, “HIV and Risks of Ebola,” The Guardian, May 13, 1995, p. 2, and “Science and
Technology: The Hobbled Horseman,” The Economist, May 20, 1995, pp. 79–81.
62. On Herlihy’s historiography see Cohn, “David Herlihy: A Student’s View,” The History Teacher,
27,1 (1993): 53–61; the introduction to Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living: Essays in
Memory of David Herlihy, ed. by Cohn and Steven Epstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1996), pp. 1–5; and Molho, “Introduction,” to Herlihy, Women, Family and Society in
Medieval Europe: Historical Essays, 1978–1991 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995).
63. Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University
Press, 1994), p. 2.

1. Bubonic Plague: Historical Epidemiology and the Medical

Problems
1. The bibliography on the Black Death is now huge. A basic examination of medical and
epidemiological character is provided by J. -N. Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et
dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, 2 vols. (Paris: Mouton, 1975–76), with a large
bibliography. See also Monique Lucenet, Les grandes pestes en France (Paris: Aubier, 1985);
Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New
York: Free Press, 1983).
2. The total population, city and countryside, of San Gimignano in Tuscany fell from an estimated
13,000 persons in 1332 to 3,138 in 1427—a loss of 75.9%. See David Herlihy and Christiane
Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles: Une étude du Catasto (Paris: Foundation
Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1978), pp. 177–178 (translated as Tuscans and Their Families:
A Study of the Florentine Castato of 1427 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985]; they rely
on Enrico Fiumi, Storia economica e sociale di San Gimignano (Florence: Olschki, 1961). In the
countryside of Pistoia, the population declined from an estimated 37,598 persons in c. 1244 to only
8,969 in 1404—a fall of 76%. See ibid., p. 71.Bruce M. S. Campbell, “Population Pressure,
Inheritance and the Land Market in a Fourteenth-Century Peasant Community,” in Land, Kinship
and the Life Cycle, ed. by Richard M. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp.
87–134, concludes “that in the space of just two decades this manor’s [Coltishall in Norfolk]
population appears to have been reduced by 80 percent.”
3. Cited in Edward O. Otis, M.D., The Great White Plague: Tuberculosis (New York: Crowell,
1909), p. 3.
4. Quoted in the Boston Globe, August 1, 1985, p. 15.
5. Isidori Hispalensis episcopi etymologiarum sive originum libri xx, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), IV.6.17. “Pestilentia est contagium, quod dum unum adprehenederit,
celeriter ad plures transit… Idem et contagium a contingendo, quia quemquem tetigerit, polluit. Ipsa
et inquina, ab inquinum percussione.”
6. Oxford English Dictionary, ed. by J. A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon,
1989), vol. IV (under “Black Death”), p. 303, cols. 2–3.
7. Der schwarze Tod im vierzehnten Jahrhundert. Nach den Quellen für Aerzte und gebildete
Nichtarzte bearbeitet (Berlin: Herbig, 1832).
8. The Black Death in the Fourteenth Century, trans. by B. G. Bagington, M.D. (London: A.
Schloss, J. Wertheimer, 1833). Other editions were published in 1835, 1859, and 1885 (in New
 York).
9. A History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans to the Present (London: John
Murray, 1859): “Edward’s successes in France were suspended for the next six years by a
pestilence, so terrible as to be called the Black Death.”
10. N. H. Molaret, Alexandre Yersin: Le vainqueur de la peste (Paris: Fayard, 1985).
11. Indeed, contemporary chronicles commented on the possibility that animal populations may have
been dislodged by earthquakes on the eve of the Black Death. See Manchester Medieval Source
Series: The Black Death, transl. and ed. by Rosemary Horrox (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1994), pp. 5, 25, 34, 59, 68, 76, 83, 99, 101, 129, 161, 162, 177–182: Chronicle of
Gabriele de’ Mussis; Chronicle of Padua; Chronicle of the Monastery of Neuberg; Chronicle of
southern Austria; Chronicle of the Abbey of Meaux; Chronicle of Henry Knighton; Chronicle of
Ireland; Chronicle of Heinrich von Herford in Westphalia; Report of the Paris Medical Faculty,
October 1348; and Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, 1977), p.
39.
12. Biraben, Les hommes et la peste, offers the best available summary of the medical characteristics
of plague.
13. The earliest chronicle of these events is Gabriele de’ Mussis, Ystoria de morbo sive mortalitate
quae fuit anno Domini 1348, in A. W. Henschel, “Document zur Geschichte des schwarzen
Todes,” in Archiv für die gesammte Medicin, ed. Heinrich Haeser (Jena, 1841), vol. II, pp. 45–57.
14. Nicephorus Gregoras, Ecclesiasticae Historiae in Pathologia Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne
(Paris: Migne, 1865), vols. 148–149.
15. Francis Aidan Gasquet, The Black Death of 1348 and 1349, 2nd ed. (London: George Bell, 1908),
in which the author surveys the plague in England, is still a useful book.
16. Cronica di Matteo Villani (Florence: Magheri, 1825) I, 5 (bk. I, chap. 2): “Cominciossi nelle parti
d’Oriente, nel detto anno, inverso il Cattai e l’India superior, e nelle altre provincie circustanti a
quelle marine dell’oceano, una pestilenzia tra gli uomini d’ogni condizione di catuna età e sesso, che
cominciavane a sputare sangue, e morivano chi di subito, chi in due o in tre dì, e alquanti
sostenevano più al morire. E avveniva, che chi era a servire questi malati, appicandosi quella
malattia, o infetti, de quella mesesima corruzione incontanente inalavano, e morivano per somigliante
modo; e a’ più ingrossava l’anguinaia, e a molti sotto le ditella delle bracia a destra e a sinistra, e
altri in altre parti del corpo, che quasi generalmente alcuna enfiatura singulare nel corpo infetto si
dimostrava.”
17. See Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (London: Batsford, 1984), pp.
19–22.
18. Cited in Patrick Manson, Tropical Diseases: A Manual of the Diseases of Warm Climates, rev.
ed. (London: Cassell, 1903; first published in 1898), p. 242. The most recent edition, ed. by G. C.
Cook, is Manson’s Tropical Diseases, 20th ed. (London: W. B. Sanders, 1996).
19. Manson, Tropical Diseases.
20. Albert Camus, La peste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947) p. 16.After the prologue, the novel opens thus: “Le
matin du 16 avril, le docteur Bernard Rieux sortit de son cabinet et buta sur un rat mort, au milieu du
palier.” (On the morning of April 16 Dr. Bernard Rieux walked out of his office and bumped into a
dead rat in the middle of the landing.)
21. On the improbabilities of pneumonic plague, see Twigg, The Black Death, pp. 113ff; and Ole Jorgen
Benedictow, Plague in the Late Medieval Nordic Countries: Epidemiological Studies (Oslo,
1992), pp. 266–267. The arguments put forward in these recent works call into question earlier
claims for pneumonic plague (see for instance Christopher Morris, “The Plague in Britain,” The
Historical Journal, 14, 1 (1971), pp. 205–224).
22. Monique Lucenet, Les grandes pestes, p. 16.
23. Guy de Chauliac, La grande chirurgie de Guy de Chauliac … composée en l’an 1363 (Paris:
Alcan, 1890), vol. II, chap. 5, p. 520: “Des maladies de la poitrine et des mammelles.”
24. To my reading [Cohn] it is not clear that Guy de Chauliac claimed that the second sort or wave of
pestilence in 1348 was any less contagious or deadly than the first, only that in the first the victims
died in three days, and in the second it took five days: “The aforesaid death began with us [in
Avignon] in January [1348] and lasted seven months. It was of two sorts. The first lasted two
months and was marked by continuous fever and the spitting of blood. Those afflicted died within
three days. The second sort lasted for the remaining months and was also marked by continual
fever and skin sores and ulcers in the intimate parts and especially in the armpits … And these
victims died within five days. And it was greatly contagious, especially given the spitting of blood.
One took the disease from another, not only through touch or breath but also through sight. As a
consequence, people died without servants and were buried without priests.” The Cyrugie of Guy
de Chauliac, ed. by Margaret S. Ogden, The Early English Text Society, no. 265 (London: Oxford
University Press, 1971), p. 155 (my translation).
25. De peste libri tres, opera Jocobi Dalechampii (Leiden, 1552); and R. Heoniger, Der schwarze
Tod in Deutschland (Berlin: Eugen Grosser, 1882), pp. 157–177, esp. p. 171. On Raymond, see
Ernst Wickersheirmer, Dictionnaire biographique des Médecins en France au Moyen Age
(Paris: Droz, 1936), vol. II, p. 674.] “Pestilentis morbi gravissum symptoma est, quod zonam vulgo
nuncupant. Ea sic fit: Pustulae nonumquam per febres pestilentias fuscae, nigrae, lividae existunt.”
26. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles, pp. 260–262.
27. André Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Age, d’après les
procès de canonisation et les documents hagio-graphiques (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome,
1981).
28. Acta sanctorum quotquot toto urbe coluntur [hereafter AS] (Paris, V. Palme, 1863).
29. AS, 2 September, p. 453.
30. Ibid. p. 456; “amorbatus eo morbo, que anguinalia dicitur.”
31. Ibid. p. 453. “Anno Domini MCDLII mulier quaedam nuncupata Caterina Pauli Vannelli de Viterbo
pestilentiali morbo seu fistula vexabatur in tibia, in tantum quod quasi ad mortem videbatur reducta,
nec recta ulterius stare poterit … Mulier quaedam, Filippa Jacoba nomine, filia Angilelli, per octo
annos continuos fistulas in tibia.” See also further on, “Antonia … habens fistulam in tibia.”
32. Ibid. p. 453. “Itaque omnia signa in ea mortem sibi initiari vide-bantur; praesertim cum per totum
ejus corpus signa, quae vulgariter lenticulae cognominantur, apparuissent, in tantum, quod de ejus
vita desperatum erat unicuique.”
33. Ibid. p. 455. “Cum jam signa mortis in ea apparerent, quae vulgariter lenticulae cognominantur.” For
Petrus Dominus, see ibid., p. 456.
34. Ibid. p. 455. “Anno Domini MCLIV, cum puer quidam, annorum quatuordecim, … graviter
infirmaretur ex pestilientiali punctura.”
35. Some authorities, such as Doctor Chalmel de Viviers, who practiced in Avignon, did mention the
“bubo” in 1348, but as Twigg, The Black Death, p. 19, argues, buboes were not unique to Yersinia
pestis.
36. Manson, Tropical Diseases, p. 250. Ecchymotic spots or patches were “few and trifling” among
those infected at Hong Kong.
37. Graham Twigg, The Black Death. Also see his “The Black Death in England: An Epidemiological
Dilemma,” in Maladies et société (Xlle-XVIIIe siècles), pp. 75–98.
38. Discussed in Biraben, Les hommes et la peste, vol. I, pp. 18–21; Lucenet, Les grandes pestes, p.
22, cites a source which attributes the discovery of the Yersinia pseudotuberculosis to Malassez
and Vignai in 1893.
39. An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. by Antony Flew (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970)
40. See especially Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “L’histoire immobile,” inaugural lecture given at the
Collège de France, November 30, 1973, translated as “History That Stands Still,” in his The Mind
and Method of the Historian, trans, by Siân and Ben Reynolds (London: Harvester, 1981), pp. 1–
27. Le Roy Ladurie interprets the entire history of Europe in terms of “long-term agrarian cycles,”
which are fundamentally Malthusian in character. See also his Les paysans de Languedoc, 2 vols.
(Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1966).
41. Enrico Fiumi, Storia economica, pp. 154, 171, 174. Cited in Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance
Pistoia: The Social History of an Italian Town (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p.
115.
42. Campbell, “Population Pressure”, p. 118.
43. Cited in Lucenet, Les grandes pestes, p. 35.
44. Ricordi, ed. by V. Branca, (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1956), p. 291.
45. Cited in Lucenet, Les grandes pestes, pp. 35–36.
46. Campbell, “Population Pressure,” p. 128.
47. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 14,2 (1983): 199–534: “Hunger and History: The Impact of
Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns on Society”; Massimo Livi-Bacci,
Population and Nutrition: An Essay on European Demographic History, trans, by Tania Croft-
Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
48. See Livi-Bacci, Population and Nutrition.
49. Campbell, “Population Pressure,” p. 127.
50. Malthus’s analysis was not so crude, especially in the second and later editions of An Essay on the
Principle of Population (1798, 1803, 1806, 1807, 1817, 1826). See the recent edition and
selections made by Patricia James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and the
discussion of Pier Paolo Viazzo, Upland Communities: Environment, Population and Social
Structure in the Alps since the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), pp. 7, 42–46. See also Herlihy’s own discussion of Malthus and his distinction between
“positive” and “preventive” checks, below in Chapter 2.
51. “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past & Present,
70 (1976):30–75. Many rejoinders from many scholars are printed in the issues following this one.
See The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-
Industrial Europe, ed. by T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985).
52. Guy Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism: Economy and Society in Eastern Normandy c. 1300–1550
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
53. But warfare among the city-states of northern and central Italy did increase dramatically after the
Black Death, and it changed fundamentally city-state finances as well as the political geography of
Italy. For the wars between Florence and Milan and their fiscal consequences, see Anthony Molho,
Florentine Public Finances in the Early Renaissance, 1400–1433 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1971).

2.The New Economic and Demographic System

1. Tutte le opere de Giovanni Boccaccio IV: Decameron, ed. by Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondador,
1976), “Giornata I, Introduzione,” p. 13.
2. Ibid. p. 18.
3. Jugement du Roi de Navarre, cited in Lucenet, Les grandes pestes, p. 45.
4. Decameron, “Giornata I, Introduzione,” p. 16.
 5. Ibid. p. 11.
6. Cited in Gasquet, The Black Death of 1348 and 1349, 2nd ed. (London: George Bell, 1908), pp.
81–82. [The original comes from D. Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, 4 vols.
(London: R. Gosling, 1737), vol. II, p. 738, which Herlihy appears to have consulted for his
translation; it differs markedly from Gasquet’s.]
7. See Mario Ascheri, Diritto e peste: Dalla crisi del Trecento all’età moderna (Siena, 1974); and
Paolo Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales (Leipzig [lipsiae], 1630).
8. Herlihy, “The Generation in European History,” in The Social History of Italy and Western
Europe (London: Variorum reprints, 1978), no. 12, p. 351, puts the results of J. C. Russell’s
examination of the longevity of members of the English royal family together with data about the
lives of contemporary Florentine merchants.
9. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs families pp. 370–389.
10. See Herlihy, “Generation,” p. 355. The figures are based on the years between profession and death
passed by the Dominicans of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.
11. Archivio di Stato de Firenze (henceforth, ASF), Manoscritti, reg. 943, a compilation made in the
seventeenth century.
12. On the contemporary life of the Florentine reformer Fra Giovanni Dominici, see Acta Sanctorum, 2
June (Antwerp, 1698), p. 407. On di Caroli, see Salvatore Camporeale, “Giovanni Caroli e la ‘Vitae
fratrum S. M. Novellai’: Umanesimo e crisi religiosa (1460–1480),” Memorie Domenicane, n.s., 16
(1985): 199–233; his “Humanism and the Religious Crisis of the late Quattrocento: Giovanni Caroli
O.P., and the ‘Liber dierum lucensium,” in Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and
Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, ed. by Timothy Verdon and John Henderson
(Syracuse, N.Y., 1990), pp. 445–66; and his “Giovanni Caroli, 1460–1480: Death, Memory and
Transformation,” in Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, ed. by M. Tetel, R. Witt and
R. Goffen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 16–27.
13. Cronica di Matteo Villani, ed. I. Moutier (Florence: Magheri, 1825), p. 11 (bk. I, chap. 5):
“Stimossi per il mancamento della gente dovere essere dovizia di tutte le cose che la terra produce,
e in contradio per l’ingratitudine degli uomini ogni cosa venne in disusata carestia, e continovò lungo
tempo: ma in certi paesi, come nararemo, furono gravi e disusate fami. E ancora si pensò essere
dovizia e abbondanza di vestimenti, e di tutte l’altre cose che al corpo umano sono di bisogno oltre
alla vita, e il contrario apparve in fatto lungamente; che due cotanti o più volsono le maggior parte
delle cose che valere non soleano innanzi alla detta mortalità. E il lavorio, e le manifatture d’ogni
arte a mestiero montò oltre al doppio consueto disordinatamente.”
14. Literature cited in Charles M. de la Roncière, Florence: Centre economique regional au XIVe
siècle (Aix-en-Provence: S.O.D.E.B., 1976), vol. II, p. 772.
15. Richard Goldthwaite, “I prezzi del grano a Firenze dal XIV al XVI secolo,” Quaderni Storici, 28
(1975): 5–36.
16. Cronica di Matteo Villani, I, 10 (bk. I, chap. 4).
17. Ibid., I, 93.Cited from the original matriculation lists.
18. On Gutenberg and the technology of early printing see Victor Scholderer, Johann Gutenberg: The
Inventor of Printing (London,1963); D. C. McMurtrie, The Invention of Printing (Chicago,
1942); and Janet T. Ing, Johann Gutenberg and His Bible: A Historical Study (New York: The
Typophile, 1988).
19. Ibn Khaldun, The Mugaddimah: An Introduction to History, 3 vols., transl. by Franz Rosenthal,
2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967); Quinti Septimii Florentis Tertullianim
Opera omnia in Patrilogia latina, vols. 1–2, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: Migne, 1978–79);
Niccolò Machiavelli, Opere, ed. by Mario Bonfantini (Milan: Ricciardi, 1954).
20. See Donald Winch’s introduction to Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. xiv-xv. In the second and subsequent editions,
as Malthus gathered more empirical data from places such as Norway and the mountains of
Switzerland, he also began to view these “preventive checks” as better than simple vices,
classifying delayed marriage and celibacy as “moral constraints.”
21. E. A. Wrigley and R. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: A
Reconstruction (London: Edward Arnold, 1981). See also E. A. Wrigley, “The Growth of
Population in Eighteenth-Century England: A Conundrum Resolved,” Past & Present, 98 (1983):
121–150.
22. Polyptyque de l’abbaye de Saint-Germain des Près, ed. by Auguste Longnon (Paris: H.
Champion, 1886).
23. In calculating the following averages, we do not specify the different units by which plowlands and
vineyards and meadows are measured. They are simply added together. Undifferentiated groups of
persons in a household not otherwise identified by number or sex (chiefly children) are counted as
two persons. The treatment of the data is admittedly robust, but even if attempts at refinement are
made, the association between land size and household size remains very strong.
24. On the poor in medieval society, see Michel Mollat, Les pauvres au Moyen Age, étude sociale,
2nd ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1978).
25. For a criticism of this analysis, see Diane O. Hughes, “From Brideprice to Dowry in Mediterranean
Europe,” Journal of Family History, 3 (1978): 262–296, especially p. 285. Herlihy first suggested
this interpretation in “The Generation in Medieval History,” Viator, 5 (1974): 347–364.
26. See Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 67–
68.
27. Giovanni Villani, Cronica (Florence, 1833), V, 212, (bk. 10, chap. 162): “A tutti i poveri di Firenze, i
quali andassone per limonsine, fossono dati denari sei per uno.”
28. Cronica di Matteo Villani, I, 7 (p. 13): “E i mendichi poveri erano quasi tutti morti, e ogni
femminella era piena e abbondevole delle cose.”
29. Ibid. p. 14: “E non essendo in quel tempo poveri bisognosi.”
30. Alessandro Righi, Historia contagiosi morbi, qui Florentiam populatus fuit anno 1630
(Florence: Typis Francisci Honufrii, 1633), 26–27, rub. 7. “Super pauperes et egenos tantum.
Quoniam autem paupcres, et egeni sunt totius Civitatis pars ignobilior, et debilior, nec possunt
molestias ad alios transmictere, ideo necessario, siquid mali in Civitate est, ipsi recipiunt, & retinent,
cum sint glandulae Civitatis, sicut glandulae sunt pauperes corporis, sed animi etiam magis,
faciliusque quam alii homines recipiunt; sunt autem animi morbi ipsa vitia.” Cited in Giulia Calvi,
Storia di un anno di peste: Comportamenti sociali e immaginario nella Firenze barocca
(Milan: Bompiani, 1984), p. 76.
31. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles, pp. 476–479.

3. Modes of Thought and Feeling

1. Decameron, “Giornata I, Introduzione,” p. 15.On psychological reactions to the plague, see the
extensive discussion by Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident (XIVe-XVIIIe siècles): Une cité
assiegée (Paris: Fayard, 1978), pp. 98–142, on “Typologie de comportements collectifs en temps de
peste.” On funerals during the Renaissance, see Sharon T. Strocchia, Death and Ritual in
Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
2. Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la
region d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Age (vers 1320-vers 1480). Collection de l’Ecole Française
 de Rome, 47 (Rome: Ecole Française, 1980), pp. 126–149.
3. Jean de Venette, Chronique Latine de Guillaume de Nangis, avec les continuations de cette
chronique, ed. by H. Geraud (Paris: J. Renouard, 1843), vol. II, pp. 210–216, cited in Manchester
Medieval Source Series: The Black Death, transl, and ed. by Rosemary Horrox (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 55.
4. Decameron, “Giornata I, Introduzione,” pp. 15–16.
5. Letter of Louis Sanctus de Beeringen, ed. de Smet, Recueil des Chroniques de Flandre (Brusells,
1956), vol. III, p. 17, cited in Chiffoleau, Comptabilité, pp. 203–204.
6. Giulia Calvi, Storia di un anno di peste. Comportamenti sociali e immaginario nella Firenze
barocca (Milan: Bompiani, 1984), makes much use of the records of the Florentine Sanità during
the plague of 1630 and gives many examples of prosecutions arising out of the failure to report
family members sick of the plague.
7. See Alberto Tenenti, Il senso della morte e l’amore della via nel Rinascimento (Francia e Italia)
(Turin: Einaudi, 1957); Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle
Ages to the Present, transl. by P. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) and
his The Hour of Our Death, transl. by Helen Weaver (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). Also see
the comments of Salvatore Camporeale, “Senso della morte e amore della vita nel Rinascimento:
Susone, Valla, Erasmo, e il ‘problema della salvezza,’ ” Memorie Domenicane, n.s. 8–9 (1977–78):
439–450.
8. A. McGee Morganstern, “The La Grange Tomb and Choir; A Monument of the Great Schism in the
West,” Speculum, 48 (1973): 52–69.
9. Cited in Chiffoleau, Comptabilité, frontispiece.
10. See Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death, ch. 1.
11. Decameron, “Giornata I, Introduzione,” p. 16.
12. On the cemeteries of Avignon and the acts perpetrated in them, see Chiffoleau, Comptabilité, pp.
154–165.
13. Decameron, “Giornata I, Introduzione,” p. 13.
14. Cronica di Matteo Villani, I, chap. 4 (I, pp. 10–11).
15. Ibid., I, chap. 56 (I, pp. 90–91).
16. The Canterbury Tales, modern English by Frank E. Hill (New York, 1960), pp. 11, 17–18.
17. Herlihy does not make clear the source for these numbers. Instead of a decline, William J.
Courtenay, “The Effect of the Black Death on English Higher Education,” Speculum, 55, 4 (1980):
696–714, finds a rise in the numbers enrolled at Oxford after the Black Death; from 1,086 (1340–
1359) to 1,547 (1380–1399). Courtenay’s source is The Biographical Register of the University
of Oxford computerized under the direction of T. H. Aston. See also Aston, “Oxford’s Medieval
Alumni,” Past & Present, 74 (1977): 3–40.
18. While Herlihy’s reading of Galen would have been the standard one still by the mid-1980s, medical
historians have since shown that a theory of contagion was neither foreign to Galen nor to those
who had been trained in the Galenic traditions of the Middle Ages, that is, doctors such as Guy de
Chauliac; see Jon Arrizabalaga, “Facing the Black Death: Perceptions and Reactions of University
Medical Practitioners,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. by L.
García-Ballester, R French, J. Arrizabalaga, and A. Cunningham (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), pp. 237–288; and Vivian Nutton, “The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion
and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance,” Medical History, 27 (1983), 1–34.
19. Medical historians have recently attributed less significance to Fracastoro’s theories of contagion
and do not consider them a radical departure from the supposed miasmic theories of Galen and his
late medieval scholastic followers; see previous note.
20. J. Delumeau, Le catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1971).
21. “La chretienté vers 1500 c’est, presque, un pays du mission,” cited in John Van Engen, “The
Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review, 91 (1986):
519–552. See Jacques Le Goff, La civilisation de l’occident médiéval (Paris: Arthaud, 1964), pp.
18–19.
22. Polyptyque de I’abbaye de Saint-Germain des Près, ed. by Auguste Longnon, 2 vols. (Paris: H.
Champion, 1886).
23. Olof Brattö, Studi di antroponimia fiorentina: Il libro de Montaperti (Goteborg, 1953); and his
Nuovi studi di antroponimia fiorentina: I nomi meno frequenti del Libro di Montaperti (An.
MCCLX) in Act a Universitatis Gothoburgensis, vol. 61 (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1955).
24. See ranking of names for the city and contado of Florence, 1260, by Brattö, Antroponimia, p. 34.
25. In the countryside, Iacobus and Iohannes trade position. See the distribution given in ibid.
26. Stefano Orlandi, O.P., “Necrologio” di S. Maria Novella, 2 vols. (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1955).
27. Among officials elected at Florence between 1451 and 1500, Francesco appears 4,105 times, and
Giovanni 4,090. After 1500, it scores 724 as compared to 692 for Giovanni.
28. On saints as defenders against disease, see the recent comprehensive survey by C. L. Trub, Heilige
und Krankheit, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Bochumer Historische Studien, 19 (Stuttgart: Klett-
Cotta, 1978), pp. 48–53 and Table 4, pp. 252–253, in which he names 60 saints, 50 men and ten
women (11 percent of 547 medical saints he identifies) as patrons against the plague.
29. S. Bernadino da Siena: Opera omnia, ed. PP. Collegii S. Bonaventurae (Florence: Colegii S.
Bonaventurae, 1950): “Nam quibusdam sanctis divinitus datus est in alicuibus causis praecipue
patrocinati, sicut sancto Antonio de Padua ordinis Minorum quotidie eius petrociniis gratias et
miracula impetrara.”
30. Among Florentine officials the name appears 97 times. (This evidence comes from Herlihy’s work
on the Tratte and his last major research project, which was cut short by his death. It was the
prosopography of the Florentine ruling class from the Black Death to the fall of the Republic in
1530. Herlihy completed two pilot studies for this project: “Age, Property and Career in Medieval
Society,” in Aging and the Aged in Medieval Europe, ed. by M. M. Sheehan, CSB Papers in
Medieval Studies, 11 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1990), pp. 143–158; and
“The Rulers of Florence, 1282–1530,” in Athens and Rome, Florence and Venice: City-States in
Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. by Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub, and Julia Emlen
(Stuttgart: Steiner, 1991), pp. 197–221 (both reprinted in Women, Family and Society in Medieval
Europe: Historical Essays, 1978–1991, ed. by Anthony Molho [Providence: Berghahn Books,
1995]).
31. See Francesco Diedo’s legend of St. Rosa da Viterbo in Acta Sanctorum [hereafter AS],
September 2 (Antwerp, 1748); and Fausta Casolini, “Rosa da Viterbo,” in Bibliotheca Sanctorum:
Istituto Giovanni XXIII della Pontifica Università Lateranense [hereafter BS] (Rome, Istituto
Giovanni XXIII, 1968), vol. XI, pp. 414–425.
32. See Agostino Amore, “Rosalia di Palermo, santa,” 1160 BS, XI, pp. 427–433; AS (Venice, 1756),
pp. 278–414.
33. On Domenica da Paradiso, venerabile (1473–1553), see Sadoc M. Bertucci, BS, IV, pp. 678–680
(1964); and S. Razzi, Vite dei Santi e Beati Toscani (Florence, 1601), vol. II, p. 100.
34. André Vauchez, “Rocco, santo,” BS, XI, pp. 264–73; and AS (Anversa, 1737), pp. 407–410; F.
Diedo, Vita Sancti Rochi (1479), ibid., pp. 400–407.
35. Chiffoleau, Comptabilité.
36. In view of the history of anti-Semitism and other racist ideologies, some may wish to question
Herlihy’s optimistic conclusion. Of course, the debate among modern and contemporary historians
and political scientists is still open on whether the rebirth of these sentiments in the nineteenth
century can be linked with the post-Black Death spree of Jewish pogroms and attacks on
foreigners.
Index

adultery, 64
agriculture, 11–12, 39; history of, 1; see also technology, prices
AIDS, 4–6, 18, 62, 69, 87n
Alsace, 47; see also Strasbourg
America, 19, 21, 89n
Amore, Agostino, 110n
ancients, 19, 71
Angiolieri, Cecco, 9, 93n
animals, 47
Anthony of Padua, St., 78
anthrax, 7, 30, 91n
anti-Semitism, 5, 14, 65–66, 88n, 89n, 110n
Aquinas, Thomas, 72
Arabs, 71
Ariès, Philippe, 8, 92n, 93n, 107n, 108n
Avignon, 7, 27, 108n
Arrizabalaga, Jon, 87n, 92n, 108n
Avignon, 7, 27, 108n
Ascheri Mario, 104n
Asia, 23
Aston, T. H., 108n
Avignon, 7, 27, 61–65, 100n
bacillus, see plague
Baltic Sea, 25
barbers, 71
Barcelona, 24
Bartolomeo, S., 78
beggars, 55–56, 59, 64–67
Benedictov, Ole Jorgen, 86n, 90n, 100n
Bergen, 25
Bernardino of Siena, St., 78, 109n
Bianchi movement (the Whites), 68
Binion, Rudolf, 92n
Biraben, J.-N., 97n, 99n, 102n
birth rates, see fertility
Black Death, descriptions, 19, 25, 27, 32; historiography, 1–2, 18; name of, 19–20; references to, 85n;
see also plague
Black Sea, 23–24
Bloch, Marc, 14, 95n, 97n
blood, 21, 27, 27, 32, 34, 100n
boards of health, see government
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 9, 24, 40–41, 60–62, 64, 93n, 103n, 107n, 108n
body, 56, 61
Bois, Guy, 35–36, 103n
Bologna (University of), 70
Bolton, Jim, 84n
Bombay, 21
Bordeaux, 25
Brattö, Olof, 75, 109n
Brenner, Robert, 35, 96n, 103n
Brentano, Robert, 96n
Brescia, 80
British Library, 85n, 93n
Bulst, Neithard, 85n, 86n, 89n
bureaucracy, see government
burial, 60–62; see also cemeteries, funerals, tombs
Bynum, Caroline, 90n

Cairo, 24
Calais, 25
Calvi, Giulia, 107n
Cambridge (University), 69–70
Campbell, Bruce, 4, 12, 14, 33–34, 85n, 95n, 98n, 102n
Camporeale, Salvatore, 92n, 104n, 108n
Camus, Albert, 26, 100n
Canterbury Tales, see Chaucer
Canton, 26
capital, 49
Carmichael, Ann, 86n, 89n, 90n
Carolingian capitularies, 55
Carus-Wilson, Eleanora, 94n
Catasto of 1427, see Florence
celestial conjunctures, 3
cemeteries, 23, 64, 66; see also burials
Chalmel de Viviers (doctor), 101n
Chambéry (France), 65
charity, 55; see also piety
Charles IV, Emperor, 70
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 67, 108n
Chiffoleau, Jacques, 107n, 108n
children, 9–10, 34, 43–44, 47, 69, 73
China, 20–23, 52
Chinon (Lake Geneva), 65
cholera, 4–5, 19, 87n, 88n, 89n
Christianity, 8, 73–74; see also names, theology
Christopher, St., 78
church, 60
Cipolla, Carlo, 95n
class (social), 4–5, 35, 27; middle class, 56
Clement VI, Pope, 7, 65, 67–68
clergy, 45–46, 69; see also mendicants, priests
climate, 26–27, 30
clothing, 48; see also technology: textiles
Cohn, Samuel, 93n, 96n, 97n
Cologna, 25
Coltishall (Norfolk), 4, 33, 98n
Colyton (Devon), 92n
commerce, trade, 23
comparative history, 13
Constantinople, 24
contagion, 10
Copenhagen, 25
corpse, see body
Cosmas and Damian, Saints, 79
Council of Constance, 80
Courtenay, William, 88n, 108n
Cracow, 70
craftsmen, 44; see also professions
Crosby, Alfred, 87n

Danish chroniclers, 19
Dauphiné, Province of (France), 68
death, 60; image of 63–64; see also plague: mortality figures; population
Decameron, see Boccaccio
de Chauliac, Guy, 7, 27, 65, 91n, 100n, 108n
Delumeau, Jean, 73, 109n
demography, see population, systems of behavior
de Mussis, Gabrielle, 9, 99n
dependency ratios, 44
de Venette, Jean, 107n
Diedo, Francesco, 80, 110n
Dini, Bruno, 94n
doctors (medicine), see physicians
Dohar, William, 88n
Dols, Michael, 96n
Domenica da Paridiso, S., 79, 110n
Dominicans, 77; see also mendicants, Santa Maria Novella
Dominic, St., 77
Dominici, Giovanni, fra, 104n
Doren, Alfred, 94n
dowry, 54
Duffy, Michael, 95n

earthquakes, 23, 51, 98n–99n

ecology, ecological systems, 18
education, 69; see also universities
Egypt, 24
elites, 64
Endrei, Walter, 94n
England, 8, 20, 25, 33, 47, 52–53, 57, 88n, 91n
Epstein, Stephan, 96n
Epstein, Steven, 97n
Europe, 23, 34–35, 37–39, 69, 81
Evans, Richard, 88n
expert opinion, 69; see also education, professions

factor substitution, 49–50

family, 10; see also children
famines, 31–32, 34, 38–39, 51–53, 55–56 of 1314–1317, 4, 32–33
fashion, 48
fear, 87n
fertility, 2, 52
feudalism, 36–37
fevers, 30
firearms, see war
Fiumi, Enrico, 31, 84n, 98n, 102n
flagellants, 67–68
Flanders, 47
fleas, 6, 21–23, 91n
floods, 51
Florence, 24–25, 32, 37–38, 45–46, 74–76, 79; Catasto of 1427, 12, 43, 55–56, 67, 77; officials of, 109n,
110n; University of, 70
Foa, Anna, 87n, 89n
food, 30, 39, 48
Fracastoro, Giovanni, 72, 108n–109n
France, 32, 65
Francis, St., 77
Franciscans, 77; see also mendicants
František, Graus, 86n, 89n
French, Roger, 87n
funerals, 48, 60–62
Fünfkirchen (Hungary), 70

Galen, Galenic system, 71–72, 108n

Gasquet, Francis, 99n, 104n
Gattai, Giorgio, 88n
Geneviève, St., 74
Genicot, Léopold, 91n
Genoa, Genoese, 24
Germain, St., 74
Germany, 66
Giovanni di Carlo, fra, 45
Glasgow, 21
Golden Horde, 23–24
Goldthwaite, Richard, 105n
Gottfried, Robert, 90n, 92n, 97n
government, 49, boards of health, 62–63; bureaucracy, 13; see also Florence: officials of
gravediggers, 41, 62
“Great Alleluia,” 67
Great Hunger of 1314–1317, see famine
Greece, 24
Greek, 70
Gregoras, Nicephorus, 99n
guilds, 44–45
Guillaume, Pierre, 87, 89n
Guillaume de Machant, 41
Gutenberg, Johann, 10, 50, 105n

hagiography, see saints

Hamburg, 88n
Harper-Bill, Christopher, 88n
Harvey, Barbara, 84n–85n
Hecker, J. F. K., 19–20
Henderson, John, 87n
Hereford, 88n
Herlihy, David, 1–15, 83n–84n, 87n, 92n–97n, 101n, 103n, 104n, 106n–109n; historiography of, 1–2
Hong Kong, 20–21
Horrox, Rosemary, 86n, 90n, 92n, 93n, 99n
hospitals, 62
households, 53–54, 56
Hughes, Diane, 106n
Huizinga, Johan, 8, 92n

Iacopo di Campostella, St., 75

Ibn Khaldun, 105n
Ile-de-France, 47
incunabula, 11, 93n
India, 21–22, 26
industrial revolution, 10–11, 53
inflation, see prices
influenza, 90n
Ing, Janet, 105n
inheritance, 65
Ireland, 25; potato blight (1847), 33, 53
Isidore of Seville, 98n
Issyk Kul, 23
Italy, 10, 20, 24, 67–68, 89n

Jenks, Stuart, 90n

Jews, 59, 64–66; see also anti-Semitism
John, St., 75
Judea, 24

Kaffa, 24–25
Khvolson (Soviet archeologist), 23
Kiev, 25
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, 92n, 97n, 101n, 104n, 107n

labor, 48–50, 52, 57

la Grange, Cardinal of Avignon, 63
land, 49, 54
Langland, William, 9, 88n, 93n
languages, 71
Languedoc, 32
la Roncière, Charles Marie de, 12, 96n, 105n
Latin, 71
law, 42; canon, 64; sumptuary, 48; Roman, 54, 64
Le Goff, Jacques, 73, 109n
Leoni, Francesco, 89n
lepers, 59, 64
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 2, 31, 102n
Libri dei morti (Florence), 27
Libro di Montaperti, 12, 75
life expectancies, 43
Livi-Bacci, Massimo, 4, 85n, 102n
Lonni, Ada, 87n–88n
Lorenzo, S., 78
Lübeck, 25
Lucenet, Monique, 97n, 100n, 102n, 103n
lust, 65
Lybia, 24

Macedonia, 24
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 105n
Mainz, 50
malnutrition, 4, 33–34, 52; see also famine
Malthus, Thomas; Malthusian approach, 2–4, 8, 31–35, 37–39, 46, 51–53, 102n, 103n
Mamluks, 13
Manson, Patrick, 99n–100n, 102n
Marco Polo, 23
marginals, 59, 66
marriage, 52, 54–55, 57
Marseilles, 24
Martin of Tours, St., 74
Marx, Karl; Marxist analysis, 4, 31, 34–35
Mary, the Virgin, 80
mass, 80
McMurtrie, D. C., 105n
Medici (family), 79
medicine: folk, 71, 80; theory, 10, 71–72; surgery, 71–72; see also barbers, physicians
Mediterranean, 13, 24
Meiss, Millard, 8, 92n
Melcombe Regis (Weymouth), 24
mendicant orders, 12; see also Dominicans, Franciscans, Santa Maria Novella
mercenaries, see war
merchants, 37; see also commerce
Messina (Sicily), 24
Messina, Anna Lucia Forti, 86n, 87n
metallurgy, see technology
mezzadria system, 96n
Michelangelo, 78
Milan, 103n
miracles, 28; see also saints
Molaret, N. H., 98n
Molho, Anthony, 15, 97n, 103n
Mollat, Michel, 106n
Montpellier, 80
Morelli, Giovanni, 32
Morganstern, A. McGee, 108n
Morris, Christopher, 100n
mortality, see death, population, plague: mortality figures
Moscow, 25
Moslems, 13–14
mountains, 62
Munro, John, 94n

names, naming: Christian or saints, 8, 12, 73, 75–78, 96n; in countryside, 13

nationalism, 8, 71
Nicholas of Tolentino, St., 78
nobility, 54
nominalists, 72–73
Norfolk, 12, 32
Normandy, 35–38, 47
Norris, John, 90n
Novgorod, 25
nurses, 80
Nutton, Vivian, 108n

Ober, William, 86n

old age, 43
Oporto, Portugal, 21
Orlandi, Stefano, 109n
Otis, Edward, 98n
Ott, Katherine, 89n
Overton, Mark, 12, 95n
Oxford (University), 69–70, 108n

Palermo, 79
Paris, 50, 54; University of, 70
parish registers, 53
Park, Katherine, 88n
Parker, Geoffrey, 95n
Pasteur, Louis, 18
peasants, peasantry, 36, 40, 49
Penrose, Elizabeth Cartwright, 20
philosophy, 72
physicians, 5, 41, 59, 71–72, 88n
Piacenza, 80
piety, pious bequests, causes, 10, 69
pilgrims, pilgrimage, 66–67, 75
Pisa, 1
Pistoia, 3
plague: bacillus, 21, bubonic, 6–7, 21–22; Yersina pestis, 6, 21, 25; epidemiology of, 26, 30; diffusion of,
24–26, mortality figures, 17, 23; pneumonic, 7, 21–22, 26–27, 50, 90n; septicemic, 21–22; signs of,
28–29; symptoms, 22, 29, 100n; buboes, 7, 19, 21, 26–28, 30, 91n; freckles (lenticulae), 7, 29; see
also Black Death
Poland, 66
polyptych of St. Germain de Près, 54, 74, 106n, 109n
Poos, Lawrence, 86n
population, 31–35, 38–39, 43; mortality, 2, 45, 69; see also Malthus, plague: mortality figures
Por Santa Maria, see guilds
Postan, M. M., 2, 31, 84n
potato blight (1847), see Ireland
poverty, the poor, 55–56
Prague (University of), 70
Preti, Domenico, 87n
prices, price series, 40, 46–49; see also labor
priests, 41, 59–62, 64
printing, see technology
professions, 5, 41–47, 59
prostitutes, 66
Provence, 62
public health, 18
Pullan, Brian, 89n

quantitative methods, 14
quarantine, 71–72

Ragusa (Dubrovnik), 71
Ralph of Shrewsbury, 42
rats, see rodents
Raymond Chalin de Viviers, 27, 91n, 101n
Reformation, 71, 81
Renaissance, 71
rents, 36, 48–49
revelry, 64
Righi, Alessandro, 56, 106n
Rites of passage, 60
ritual, 60; see also funerals
Roberts, Michael, 95n
Rock, St., 80
rodents, 6–7, 21–22, 26, 91n, 100n
Rome, 67
Rosalia of Palermo, St., 79
Rose of Viterbo, St., 7, 28–29, 79, 110n
Rosenberg, Charles, 86n, 89n
Russell, J. C., 104n
Russia, 25

Sabean, David, 94n

saints: canonization, 28, 31, 79; cult of, 73–74, 77, 81; lives, 7, 28, 80; plague patrons, 7, 78–81, 109n
San Francisco, 21
San Gimignano, 97n
Santa Maria Novella, 12, 45, 76–78; see also Dominicans
Saporiti, Chiara Borro, 87n
Sarai, 23
Schama, Simon, 93n
Schmölzer, Helde, 86n
Schofield, Roger, 52, 57, 92n, 105n
Scholderer, Victor, 105n
Scotland, 25
scribes, 42, 50
Sebastian, St., 79
ships, shipping, see technology
Shrewsbury, J. F. D., 90n
sickness, 63–64
Sidney, Australia, 21
Siena, 75
silk, 48; see also technology: textiles
Simon de Couvin, 32
Sistine Chapel, 78
Slicher Van Bath, B. H., 94n, 95n
smallpox, 90n
Sorcinelli, Paolo, 87n
Spain, 65, 75
spectral analysis, 2
Stone, Lawrence, 93n
Strasbourg, 66
syphilis, 5, 72
Syria, 24
systems analysis, 50
systems of behavior, 1, 7–8; economic, 8, 39–40, 52, 56–57

taxation, 3, 37
technology, 8, 10, 32, 49–51, 12, 94n; agricultural, 12, 36, 94n; metallurgy, 50; printing, 10–11, 49–50;
shipping, 50, textiles, 11, 23; see also war, windmills
Tenenti, Alberto, 8, 92n, 107n
Tertullian, 105n
testaments, 9–10, 61
theologians, 69; see also clergy, mendicants, priests
theology, 70, 73
thieves, 66
tombs, 63; see also burials, cemeteries
trade, see commerce
travel, 69
Trexler, Richard, 93n
Trub, C. L., 109n
trust, 88n
Tuscany, 10, 31, 34, 37, 43–45, 49, 75; see also Florence
Twigg, Graham, 6–7, 30, 90n, 91n, 99n, 100n, 101n–102n
tuberculosis, 5, 29–30, 89n
Turkestan, 23
typhoid, 30
typhus, 5, 30, 90n
Umbria, 10
universities, 49, 69–71

Vauchez, André, 101n, 110n

Venice, 24, 72
vernacular, see languages
Viazzo, Pier Paolo, 84n, 103n
Vidal, John, 97n
Vienna, 70
Villani, Giovanni, 3, 55, 65, 106n
Villani, Matteo, 25, 46–49, 67, 99n, 104n, 106n, 108n
viruses, 5, 14
visions, 68; see also miracles

wages, see labor

Walter, John, 85n
war, 12, 31, 37, 51, 103n; firearms, 51; mercenaries, 36–37
weather, see climate
Wilkins, D., 104n
Winch, Donald, 105n
windmills, 12
women, 34, 42, 48, 54–55; women saints, 76, 79–80
wool manufacture, see technology: textiles
Wrigley, E. A., 52, 57, 92n, 105n
Wycliffe (Wyclif), John, 69

Yanibeg, 24
Yersin, Alexandre, 20–21
youth, see children

Zacchia, Paolo, 104n

Ziegler, Philip, 92n
Zinn, Karl Georg, 86n