The Black Death

I remain impenitent. Provided an author explains what he is doing and makes no attempt to confuse fiction with fact, surmise with certainty, then I believe he has the right to use any device at his disposal if it will help to make his point more forcibly. In the case of the Black Death, I did not feel that it was possible fully to capture the consequences of the plague on a small, credulous, rural society without inventing a village and examining it under the microscope of the imagination. Statistics and facts alone, however striking, could not convey the horror that afflicted Europe in the mid fourteenth century.

Although I dealt with the Black Death in England more thoroughly than elsewhere, I tried also to give some indication of its origins and to sketch in the outline of its progress across Europe. The result was untidy but to have confined myself to England or the British Isles would have been to sacrifice all perspective in favour of a neat but narrow pattern. To deal with the plague’s progress country by country is in a sense misleading – the Black Death knew no frontiers – but no other division would have made better sense and a seamless flow of narrative would have inconvenienced those who like to lay down a book at the end of a chapter and take it up again without having to remember how far they have got.

There were other problems of construction, too. It would in some ways have been more logical to treat in isolation such subjects as the persecution of the Jews or the state of medical knowledge. On reflection, however, I concluded that the book was little more lucid and considerably easier to read if such topics were dealt with as they seemed naturally to arise in the course of the narrative.

Considering the fearful march of AIDS, particularly in Africa, and the failure of medical science to find a quick solution, one inevitably wonders whether a second Black Death could one day ravage Europe. On the whole it seems unlikely; enough is now known about the workings of disease to ensure that, though doctors and scientists will not always be one step ahead, they will never lag fatally behind. It is more likely that humanity will find other ways to bring about its own destruction. But if another plague, inexplicable, uncheckable, were to sweep across the world, people would not react so very differently. There would be the same mixtures of cowardice and heroism, panic and resignation, selfishness and self-sacrifice. An immeasurable chasm stretches between the fourteenth century and today, but the more that one studies the medieval chronicles, the more convinced one is that human nature remains substantially the same.

Mr Richard Ollard, the late Mr Handasyde Buchanan and my brother, Mr Oliver Ziegler, read my manuscript with fortitude and made many suggestions of great value. Dr Keele of the Wellcome Institute of Medical History was kind enough to read and criticize those sections relating to the nature and history of bubonic plague. Miss Barbara Dodwell, Reader in Medieval History at the University of Reading, corrected many of my blunders and pointed out a variety of ways by which the book might be improved. I have already paid tribute to the signal contribution of Professor Platt.

Any writer who has leant as I did on the work of other people must stagger under an almost intolerable burden of gratitude. I acknowledge with pleasure and admiration my debt to all those whose publications I have made use of in this book. Two names, above all, I would like to single out: Professor Hamilton Thompson, whose pioneer work in this field has exercised so great an influence on the labours of all subsequent historians, and Dr Elizabeth Carpentier, whose wit and scholarship illuminated the subject in later years.

Philip Ziegler

London, 1998

1. ORIGINS AND NATURE

IT must have been at some time during 1346 that word first reached Europe of strange and tragic happenings far away in the East. Even in this age of easy travel and rapid spread of news, calamities in China tend to be accepted in the Occident with the polite but detached regret reserved for something infinitely remote. In the fourteenth century, Cathay was a never-never-land; unheard of except by the more sophisticated and, even to them, a place of mystery which only a few merchants had visited and about which little was known. No story, however horrific, would seem altogether implausible if it came from such a source; but equally no medieval savant or merchant would have conceived that what happened so far away could have any possible relevance to his own existence. The travellers’ tales were received with awed credulity but gave rise to no alarm.