. Beginning in late 1347, most of western Europe was attacked by a pandemic that overshadows both the earlier outbreaks in 6th- and 7th-century eastern Gaul and the recurrent epidemics from the 14th through the 16th centuries. The plague later acquired the labels “bubonic” and “black,” for the swellings and hematomas it caused, but it was called the “Great Pestilence” by contemporaries. It originated in the Far East and was spread by the rat-flea as carrier of the pasteurella pestis. Landing in Marseille in December 1347, the disease swept along the coast and up the Rhône, entering Avignon within the next month. By August 1348, it had ravaged Languedoc and reached Bordeaux, overran Provence and Burgundy, and entered Paris. Before year’s end, it raged through Normandy and the northern counties.
Populous, weakened by famines, and distressed by war, France suffered the highest mortality. Fatalities ran between one-fifth of the pontifical courtiers to over half of the population in many rural parishes from Anjou to Savoy. In Paris, Jean de Venette recalled, over 500 dead were buried each day. Religious communities were afflicted disproportionately, with several monasteries in the south decimated or exterminated. The poor were defenseless, but even the noble were not exempt: Philip VI’s queen, Jeanne of Burgundy, and her daughter-in-law Bonne de Luxembourg succumbed in the last weeks of the pandemic. Many fell ill but lived, and some of these left poignant testimonies, notably the mystic friar Jean de Roquetaillade and the papal physician Gui de Chauliac.
Distinguishing between pneumonic and bubonic plague, Chauliac reported that in the former, more contagious and prevalent in winter, people died within three days after running a high fever and spitting blood; in the latter, the victims often survived after developing abscesses, particularly in the armpits and groin. The vast medical literature generated by the pestilence, including an official report by the University of Paris made at the request of Philip VI, was largely sterile. Scientific attempts to determine the causes, while more rational than the popular explanations, hinged on humoral theories and astrological beliefs. Prescriptions offered, at best, commonsensical precautions and palliation; at worst, they recommended such dangerous procedures as bleeding and the lancing of buboes. Many physicians evidently labored heroically, for the profession suffered more from a severe decline in numbers than from a crisis of credibility.
The socioeconomic and cultural consequences of the Black Death, ranging from inflation and class changes to mass psychoses and a preoccupation with mortality, cannot always be isolated from the impact of the Hundred Years’ War and of subsequent epidemics. Among the immediate effects, however, may be counted an extension of the Truce of 1347, a setback for constitutional reforms, and the outbreak of the flagellant movement, which, though banned from the realm, raged in the fringe regions of Flanders, Hainaut, and Lorraine.
Gui de Chauliac. Ars chirurgicalis II.ii.5, trans. and annotated by Michael McVaugh. In A Source Book in Medieval Science, ed. Edward Grant. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974, pp. 773–74.
Biraben, Jean-Noel. Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens. 2 vols. Paris: Moulton, 1975–76. [Exhaustive bibliography in Vol. 2, pp. 186–413.]
Emery, Richard W. “The Black Death of 1348 in Perpignan.” Speculum 42(1967):611–23.
Henneman, John Bell. “The Black Death and Royal Taxation in France, 1347–1351.” Speculum 43(1968):405–28.
Lucenet, Monique. Les grandes pestes en France. Paris: Aubier, 1985.
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