Then the black spots on the skin would appear. Burning, with wounds all over his body, the condemned man felt as if he were in the anteroom of hell. It was the black plague or bubonic plague. The bastard’s appearance made him repellent. The swollen eyes from the infections and the limbs covered by the pustules made it clear that his time had come and nothing in the world would save him. In this moment of agony, in the throes of an endless trembling, no one else approached him. Not a father, not a mother, not a brother or friend who took pity. Everyone disbanded, fearing contamination. About a week after the first symptoms, the victim was dead. With few variations, this was how 25 million people died from the plague from 1347 to 1351. 

DIRTY AND OVERPOPULATED EUROPE

Even faster than the disease, stories about her ran. The first news of the plague came from Asia, where it was already making victims. The reports of travelers on the silk route – which connected Europe to China – reported deaths from the disease around 1330, in the Gobi desert. Apparently, the plague lived in the burrows of wild rodents in the region between China and India. It remained there for thousands of years, moving from rodent to rodent, carried by fleas, isolated in that immensity. It could not go very far, as its hosts do not usually make long trips and even people who were occasionally infected do not go far from home. However, the world was never as small as it was in the 13th century.

A troop of Mongol nomads may have camped next to a rat hole, or one of them may have joined a caravan, or a tiny flea may have gone from the back of a rodent to the clothes of a messenger crossing the steppes. We will never know. What is certain is that it reached the Crimean peninsula, in the Black Sea. There, in the port of Kaffa, the disease appeared after an attack by Mongols from the Golden Horde. The place was frequented by Genoese and Venetian merchants, who docked their ships waiting for good deals. Unaware that they might be infected, the sailors raised their sails to return to Europe. They passed through Constantinople and then, already shaken by the epidemic effect, headed for the port of Messina, in Sicily.

In addition to the sick men, the ship carried rats. Thousands of them. And, of course, hidden in the hair of the rodents, an impressive load of fleas. There, all were vectors of contamination, since once it reaches the host, the plague develops two types of epidemic: bubonic and pneumonic. The first expands through the blood, generating buboes in the tongues and ulcerations throughout the body. But, by remaining in the bloodstream, it can only be transmitted by the bite of the flea or by the bite of the rat. The other way, however, invades the lungs, destroying them, causing expectoration. This form can also be transmitted by humans, since each time they cough they throw thousands of bacilli into the air.

The black plague was not completely unknown in European lands. In 541, an epidemic had hit the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. This time, however, she found a different environment, much more appealing to her appetite. Europe’s population had grown a lot in previous centuries, and more people than food were available. In the years leading up to the 1340s, harsh winters decimated crops, increasing the number of hungry people.

Poor harvests and hunger concentrated even more people in cities that were already overcrowded, where poor housing conditions and poor hygiene and cleanliness would contribute to the spread of the plague. Descendants of the barbarian peoples, the Goths, the Lombards, the Alamans, the Borguinhão, the Franks and Saxons, who invaded the ancient Roman provinces, the Europeans lived in a very unhealthy way. The entire old Roman health system, including the latrines, had been destroyed. During the whole day, from the doors, from the top of the balconies or from the windows, he was constantly throwing buckets and bowls full of everything imaginable right in the middle of the street. The aqueducts, sewage channels and thermal baths for public baths were squandered by the invaders who, with the stones already carved, erected forts or castles to protect themselves against enemies.

In the cities, there was no prophylaxis that could prevent the inhabitants against epidemics or some kind of effective public cleaning, so much so that it was up to the pigs – and their voracious appetite – to clean up everything. When eating remains touched or used by men, they too died en masse.

DEATH HAS COME

Southern Spain was devastated: from Cordoba, Andalusia, to Barcelona, ​​everything was turned upside down: 290,000 people died in the kingdom of Catalonia. In Europe, the disease reached Rome and Florence. From Marseille, in the south of France (which had let the pestiferous boats anchor at its pier, on November 1, 1347, ironically dedicated to the feast of the dead), he headed for the interior of the continent’s most populated country. On the British Isles, the plague landed at Weymouth on 7 July 1348. Insatiable, also by sea it reached Bristol, then the second largest city in the kingdom, killing 10,000 inhabitants. In Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the disease would not subside until 1350.

The poor died by the thousands. On the streets, without assistance. Many believed that pestilence was a noble’s plot for commoners to go to hell – while the rich escaped, taking refuge in their properties in the countryside, where they could protect themselves from strangers or newcomers. But the truth is that the black plague was an equal catastrophe in its own way. Powerful people also succumbed.

The king of Castile, Alfonso XI and the future queen of France, Bonne de Luxembourg, mother of Jean II’s ten children, the Good, died with their bodies ulcerated, dying like any other. English chancellors and three archbishops of Canterbury also made the list. The plague devastated monasteries and convents. In Montpellier, France, only seven friars, out of a total of 140, escaped death. In Marseille, all 150 Franciscans went to heaven at once, as did 27 monks from Westminster Abbey in England. In the Perpignon region, in France, of the 125 notaries that existed, only 45 remained, of the ten doctors, only one remained alive and 16 of the 18 barber-surgeons died. All the professionals who had to deal with the public were exposed. To the dismay of King Philip of France,

Not even the top leader of the Catholic Church, Clement VI was safe and had to leave Avignon, in the south of France (then the seat of the papacy), when the death toll reached 400 people a day, between 1348 and 1349. He waited almost a year in an isolated and mountainous place the evil weaken. Death by the thousands worsened the already precarious health conditions of the time. Corpses swelled, decomposing in homes or thrown in front of houses. The coffins of the big shots, once a solemn event, with the relatives and the great ones of the city accompanying the coffin to the family mausoleum, to the sound of a funeral bass drum and a sad flute, ended up becoming a grotesque ceremony.

A pair of humble unknown paddlers, hired by weight of gold, carried the deceased almost on the run to hurry and throw him in the first open pit they found. In the chapels and churches, the dead were piled up as if they were cargo from a ship. Brought in wagons, like logs of rotten firewood, they put them, without prayer or blessing, three or more, in a single hole opened in the ground.

Even the animals died in droves. Walking through the streets was a risk and a sacrifice. Soon, the daring few brought aromatic plants to their nostrils to attenuate the stink of unburied remains and garbage that accumulated everywhere. Florence was almost deserted by the flight of those who could still walk. But the situation in the countryside, which in the beginning was the best place to escape the plague, was no longer very different. The disease seemed to haunt men, wherever they went.

HORROR AND GUILT

In October 1348, the doctors of the Sorbonne de Paris finally diagnosed the problem: the bad confluence of the stars was causing the damage. The alignment of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, they asserted, was responsible for the deaths.

Whoever was to blame, prayers, prayers, promises and penances, prayers to São Roque, the protector of the lazarents, nothing cooled the relentless fate that was reserved for the populations attacked by the disease. On the contrary, any intended gathering, the slightest formation of a handful of the faithful to claim the rigors of God’s rod from heaven, killed even more people. It is estimated that of the 1.2 million pilgrims who went to Rome to celebrate the Holy Year of 1350, only one hundred thousand of them remained alive. The papacy tried to forbid the great processions of holy days and to free the dying from extreme unction.

O desespero crescente levou aos atos radicais e ao fanatismo religioso. A doença era a marca do pecado e se alguém sofria no leito era porque boa coisa não fizera antes. Na Alemanha, começou um movimento que procurava aplacar a ira de Deus, por meio da mortificação coletiva e era chamado de Irmandade dos Flagelantes. Prática desconhecida na Europa até o século 11, o hábito das disciplinas, como designavam a autoflagelação, virou rotina durante aqueles anos. Vestindo-se com uma bata ou um saco branco, com uma cruz vermelha no peito, eles peregrinavam de aldeia a aldeia, repetindo ladainhas, chicoteando- se nas costas com tiras de relho com pontas de ferro. No início eram apenas inocentes aberrações, mas com o tempo os fervorosos flagelantes se tornariam perigosos para as outras pessoas.

In search of a reason for the plague, Europeans turned against foreigners, accusing them of bringing the disease. In Spain, for example, Arabs were the preferred target, in Portugal, religious pilgrims. Across northern Europe, Jews were accused of poisoning water from wells and cisterns. It was the most violent wave of anti-Semitism so far, more intense than in the past.

Times of the First Crusade, in the 11th century, and only surpassed by the one unleashed by the Nazis in the 20th century. In the Iberian peninsula, incited by apoplectic priests, the aljamas or juderias – communities that brought together the Jews – were invaded by mad mobs that destroyed everything along the way , arresting residents to be subsequently burned or drowned. In Basel, Switzerland, all Jews in the city were gathered together, arrested on wooden stakes and burned alive. In Strasbourg, at the time belonging to Germany, two thousand Jews were killed in collective bonfires. Nor did the action of Pope Clement VI, who issued the bulls of July 4 and September 26, 1348, officially exempting Jews from any responsibility for the contagion of the plague, prevented the mass killings.

When the plague finally cooled, at the end of 1351, sated by so many people that it killed in five years of horror, Europe would no longer be the same. Medieval elites, with their faith shaken by devastation, became increasingly darker, leaning towards morbid and mystical themes. Trade relations would take dozens of years to regain the strength it had before the crisis. The streets and cities, the fields and the roads were empty, the authorities were gone. The gates of the fiefdoms were closed to visitors who came to be seen as enemies.

The isolation between the kingdoms became even greater and there was a growing feeling of xenophobia. No one was welcome and everyone was suspected of carrying the plague. The years that followed, Europeans were plagued by fear and a single question: when will she return?