putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Accessible and engrossing.” —Publishers Weekly
“A compelling and eminently readable portrait.” —Library Journal
“The Great Mortality is a chilling account of a global siege: public pits, death carts, silent villages, and empty streets.” —Charleston Post and Courier
“Written with a keen eye for the details of the past, it might also be a warning about our future.” —Jack Weatherford, DeWitt Wallace Professor of Anthropology at Macalester College and author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
“Rich and evocative . . . written in the tradition of Barbara Tuchman.” —Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone
The Great Mortality
An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
John Kelly
Copyright
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE GREAT MORTALITY. Copyright © 2005 by John Kelly. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2006.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Kelly, John.
The great mortality : an intimate history of the Black Death, the most devastating plague of all time / John Kelly—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-06-000692-7
1. Black Death—History. I. Title.
RC172.K445 2005
614.5'732—dc22
2004054213
ISBN-10: 0-06-000693-5 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-000693-8 (pbk.)
ePub Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780062243218
06 07 08 09 10 ❖/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedication
FOR SUZANNE, JONATHAN, AND SOFIYA—
TO A FUTURE WITHOUT PLAGUE
Contents
PRAISE FOR - The Great Mortality
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter One - Oimmeddam
Chapter Two - “They Are Monsters, Not Men”
Chapter Three - The Day Before the Day of the Dead
Chapter Four - Sicilian Autumn
Chapter Five - Villani’s Last Sentence
Chapter Six - The Curse of the Grand Master
Chapter Seven - The New Galenism
Chapter Eight - “Days of Death Without Sorrow”
Chapter Nine - Heads to the West, Feet to the East
Chapter Ten - God’s First Love
Chapter Eleven - “O Ye of Little Faith”
Chapter Twelve - “Only the End of the Beginning”
Afterword - The Plague Deniers
Index
Acknowledgments
P.S. - Insights, Interviews & More . . .
About the author
About the book
Read on
Notes
Credits
About the Publisher
Introduction
THIS BOOK BEGAN AS AN INQUIRY INTO THE FUTURE AND ENDED as an investigation of the past.
Five years ago, when I first began thinking about writing a book on the plague, I had in mind plague in the generic sense of a major outbreak of epidemic disease, and I was looking ahead to the twenty-first century, not backward toward the fourteenth. From an earlier book on experimental medicine, Three on the Edge: The Story of Ordinary Families in Search of a Medical Miracle, I had gotten a glimpse of the power of unfettered pandemic disease. One of the people I wrote about was an AIDS patient. During the two years I followed him in the early 1990s—a time when effective HIV treatments were rare—the man lost a former lover, three friends, and a colleague at work. A hallmark of pandemic disease is its ability to destroy worlds, not just individuals, but it was one thing to know that, quite another to witness it.
In 1995, the year I finished the book, Jonathan Mann, a professor at the Harvard University School of Public Health, warned that AIDS was the beginning of a frightening new era. “The history of our time will be marked by recurrent eruptions of newly discovered diseases,” he predicted. Two years later, 1997, the New England Journal of Medicine issued a similar warning when a virulent new strain of bubonic plague was identified. “The finding of multi-drug-resistant [strain of plague] reinforces the concern . . . that the threat from emerging infectious diseases is not to be taken lightly,” declared the Journal. Scarcely twenty years after the eradication of smallpox in 1979, an accomplishment widely described in the media as humanity’s ultimate triumph over infectious disease, we seemed to be slipping back into the world of our ancestors, a world of sudden, swift, and uncontrollable outbreaks of epidemic illness. The book I was thinking about would explore the nature of this threat, and in particular the danger posed by newly emerging illnesses such as Ebola fever, Marburg disease, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, SARS, and avian flu.
The book I ended up writing is quite different, though, indirectly, it rehearses many of the same themes. Its subject is an outbreak of a particular infectious disease in a particular time and place. Seven hundred years after the fact, what we call the Black Death—and what medieval Europeans called the Great Mortality, and medieval Muslims, the Year of Annihilation—remains the greatest natural disaster in human history.
Apocalyptic in scale, the Black Death affected every part of Eurasia, from the bustling ports along the China Sea to the sleepy fishing villages of coastal Portugal, and it produced suffering and death on a scale that, even after two world wars and twenty-seven million AIDS deaths worldwide, remains astonishing. In Europe, where the most complete figures are available, in many places the plague claimed a third of the population; in others, half the population; and in a few regions, 60 percent.
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